Travel around Miami

Fart jokes and phallic innuendo might be a strange way to celebrate the 19th birthday of an animated film festival but, if you decide to open it with ‘South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut’, that’s what you get. Despite that, the festival will prove that there’s far more to animation than Homer Simpson’s furrowed brow, providing an ideal forum for wannabe cartoonists to learn the tricks of the trade, with numerous workshops and guests speakers including ‘Star Wars’ animation director Rob Coleman. A competition for Belgian shorts (films, not trousers) will also be launched.

George Gershwin and his older brother Ira are the quintessential New York composers, presaging hip hop by eight decades in their liberal sampling of the city’s different sounds. Mark Lamos’s musical review, Fascinating Rhythm, captures the vitality with which the brothers fused Eastern European Jewish traditions with the African-American sounds all around them in Harlem, to create such memorable classics as ‘Porgy and Bess’. This may be a light Broadway review rather than an ethnomusicological exploration, but it’s a perfect tribute to two composers as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in a gritty uptown pool hall.

A tray of toenails, a drawer full of knickers and 12 bars of soap encrusted with human hair are part of a new installation by Korean artist Zhu Jinshi. The work is one of dozens commissioned for ‘HeimatKunst’, an exhibition devoted to artists of foreign, that is non-German, extraction who live and work in Germany. One of the ideas behind the display is to show how ‘foreign’ cultures have become inextricably intertwined with ‘German’ culture, enriching a country that sometimes perceives itself as homogenous.

Terminal illness may be a traditional dramatic theme, but its black-comic treatment in ‘Wit’ is as audacious as it is compelling. The play’s protagonist conquers the pain of cancer therapy via the poetry of John Donne, in a powerful literary comedy by Margaret Edson. Derek Anson Jones directs an impressive and ironic performance by Kathleen Chalfant as the cancer-stricken Dr Vivian Bearing. It may be heartbreakingly funny, but it doesn’t compromise in its gripping portrayal of intense pain and human endurance.

200 Eastern Pkwy., at Washington Ave. Subway: 2, 3 to Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum. 718-638-5000; www.brooklynart.org. Open W-F 10am-5pm, Sa-Su 11am-6pm. Open first Sa of the month 11am-11pm. Suggested donation $6 students and seniors $3 under 12 free. Free on first Sa of each month after 5pm.

The Brooklyn Museum is home to a fine collection of art from all over the world. Its enormous Oceanic and New World art collection takes up the central two-story space on the first floor—the towering totem poles covered with human/animal hybrids could fit nowhere else—and the impressive African art collection was the first of its kind in an American museum when it opened in 1923.

You’ll find outstanding Ancient Greek, Roman, Middle Eastern, and Egyptian galleries on the third floor; only London’s British Museum and Cairo’s Egyptian Museum have larger Egyptian collections. Crafts, textiles, and period rooms on the fourth floor tell the story of American upper class interiors from the 17th to the 19th centuries, including the Moorish Room, a lush bit of exotica from John D. Rockefeller’s Manhattan townhouse. John Singer Sargent and the Hudson River School grace the American Collection on the fifth floor. Nearby, the contemporary gallery contains noteworthy work by Alfredo Jaar and Francis Bacon. European art from the early Renaissance to Post-Impressionism, including works by Renoir and Monet also appear on the floor. Galleries downstairs host temporary exhibits and weekend talks.