Gossip Central

Campaigning at the Museum of the City of New York

Buttons proclaiming “Bloomberg in 2008” will not go to waste. They are part of a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, focused on the city's role in the outcome of presidential elections. The buttons, collected by the late Jordan Wright from the time he was a 10-year old, sparked the idea for this historic and timely show. At the display's center sits a lectern in a plexi-glass case lent by the Great Hall at Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln had delivered a key speech. Standing in his place, one has a view of cardboard life sized figures of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain seeming to listen. “I Like Ike” socks, a stars and stripes Robert Kennedy for president paper mini dress, and Richard Nixon Good Humor bar wrappers all remind visitors of the whimsy behind the serious business of the elections. At the opening on Monday, Mayor Bloomberg assured the crowd that he did not attend this celebration of presidential memorabilia to endorse a candidate for the upcoming election of the 44th U.S. president, but for the 45th. And then he introduced Ed Koch who took the podium to say, of course it is better to win than to lose, but the people who worked on Hillary Clinton's efforts to become president will never forget the experience. His message: get involved. Get out and work for your candidate.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Chuck Connelly Rediscovered

Charming, disarming, with a tendency to profanity and cynicism, Chuck Connelly strolled around the National Arts Club last Tuesday delighted so many showed up to see his art, and celebrate a new HBO documentary about him. He invited well-wishers like Mark Kostabi to a show at DFN Gallery in Chelsea on the weekend, and then he waited for the bubble to burst. Who is Chuck Connelly, you ask. Connelly was a darling of the '80's art scene, compared to Van Gogh, collected at the MetropolitanMuseum, emerging alongside Basquiat and Schnabel. In the first of the film trilogy Love Stories, scripted by Richard Price, who is now enjoying acclaim for his recent novel “Lush Life,” and directed by Martin Scorsese, Nick Nolte plays a Connelly type painting in his downtown loft. The much-admired oils were Connelly's. Clearly on a path toward major superstardom, Connelly nevertheless could not curb his dark side. Drunk, he trashed Scorsese famously in Page Six, as reported by George Rush. The rest is history in opposition: obscurity and exile to Philadelphia. The documentary, “The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not for Sale,” directed by Jeff Stimmel to air on July 7, attempts to explain the artist's contempt for the art market and consequent demise. A belligerent alcoholic, he is one of a dying breed, modeled on the image of the rebellious artist. Yet he also considers the highly sellable Warhol his hero, and in a contrary mood rails against commercialism. While it hurts him to see “crappy” art emerging, to see his peers Basquiat and Schnabel get the attention, he exclaims, “Now it's my turn,” and then, “I'd like to see this film make people get tired of the bullshit.”?

Regina Weinreich 

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

The Doctor is In: Three on a Couch, Caroline's, 21, Gonzo 7

“3 on a Couch,” Carl Djerassi's comedy now in production at SoHo Playhouse, could be presented heavily philosophical, or light and slapstick. At a recent pre play dinner at Ama, Djerassi-who is Viennese and who in a previous life as a chemist invented the pill, (yes, that pill)-- told me, his theatrical work is influenced by Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter, so he would have liked to see his play of ideas performed with a pinch of gravitas. He finds it mildly irksome that the director went more for the funny bone. As a result of Elena Araoz's efforts, though, sight gags and pratfalls convey the hilarious illogic of a man who fakes his own suicide, the brilliance of a woman who insists upon the uses of the mango fork, and the elastic Bill Irwin-type body of the doctor who treats them. I hope Dr. Djerassi won't mind my critique: his play best brings to mind Beckett's tragicomedy, “Waiting for Godot.”
     And speaking of laughs there were quite a few at Caroline's Comedy Club for the annual benefit for Autism Research when Audrey Flack and her Art Officials took the stage singing and strumming an original composition on the lives of Jackson Pollock and Caravaggio accompanied by banjos. Flack, a New York artist famous for her painting and sculpture knows from whence she speaks and it helped that she had a straight man (as in foil), a suit from the Smithsonian, Charles Duncan, to play off her smart lyrics.
    21 hosted a breakfast in celebration of a new book on the subject of men's aging. How timely! The early diners, many of them over sixty, definitely sexy, smartly dressed, and decidedly successful feasted on superb scrambled eggs and bacon-although some cautiously opted for granola-- while Dr. Robert Schwalbe explained his reasons for writing “Sixty, Sexy, and Successful: A Guide for Aging Male Baby Boomers.” He was noticing certain trends in men coming into his psychoanalytic practice. A handsome 64, he was also seeing some signs in himself. The smart crowd did not miss the nuance, as the doctor limned symptoms reminiscent of the bewildering case of our former governor Eliot Spitzer. The diagnosis: He could have used this book.
    And finally, in this election frenzy, a documentary on the life and times of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson will be released on the 4th of July. “Gonzo,” directed by Alex Gibney, this year's Oscar winner for “Taxi to the Dark Side,” arrives just in time to remind us what real American patriotism is all about. The provocative film, narrated by Johnny Depp who starred in the movie of Thompson's “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” on the writer and inventor of Gonzo journalism who committed suicide in 2005, will inspire some thought about how Dr. Thompson might now be kicking butt with his in your face writing, that is, if he were in

Dr.Regina Weinreich 

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Picture Books

In case you missed the Walter Reade Theatre tribute to photographer/filmmaker Robert Frank last week, you can catch up with his extraordinary career with new editions of his legendary “The Americans” (Steidl). First published in 1959, the photos reveal the flip side of Ozzie-and-Harriet America with an introduction by Frank's friend Jack Kerouac. These artists also collaborated on the movie “Pull My Daisy,” new in DVD, with performances by Larry Rivers, David Amram, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Delphine Seyrig, Alice Neel, Milo O'Shea, and Pablo Frank.
               

Photographer Mellon Tytell's My Lucky Dog (HarperCollins) is a documentary style picture book of the last days of Hunter, her beloved dog. Combining resonant photos of Vermont with text, Tytell's book is an unsentimental meditation on the subject of loss.

In tandem with a show at Staley-Wise Gallery till June 7, notorious paparazzo Ron Galella's “That's Great!” (Monacello Press) features Andy Warhol in the world of glitz and glamour he loved: alongside Lauren Hutton, Sylvia Miles, Bob Colacello, Bianca Jagger, Marisa Berenson, Baryshnikov.
Christine Ebersole may have brought the Edie Beales mother and daughter to life on Broadway last year, based on “Grey Gardens,” the non-fiction film by The Maysles Brothers, but a new scrapbook, “Memorabealeia” is Walter Newkirk's clever collage-like compilation of Little Edie's stuff: clips, letters, etc. that should bring a smile to Edie's legion of fans.
            And “Perpenilsis,” a compilation of “psychopts,” collaborative drawings and prints by Christopher Wool and rocker Richard Hell to accompany an exhibition at Glenn Horowitz Booksellers on East 64th Street till June 4. Here's the inscription: “Mountaineering entails many great penis.” Need I say more?

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

George Lois at MOMA/ Jeff Koons Rooftop at the MET

A bald bear of a guy in his '70's, art director George Lois can tell you a story for every cover of Esquire he did in the '60's. He doesn't have to. As exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art: Sonny Liston in a Santa hat, Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell's tomato soup, Mohammed Ali with arrows in his body a la St. Sebastian, Roy Cohn with a halo over his head, a cemetery with John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. photos collaged over gravestones, writers Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern and John Sack in Chicago--each one informs the historic moment, be it about race, anti-war, pop art, the McCarthy era of the 1950's. Overwhelming is the realization that we don't see magazine covers like these any more. We have instead, the top few movie icons that force us to pay attention to things that don't matter. What mattered in George Lois' time were ideas. And people bought Esquire simply to collect the excellent cover art. When did that stop? He says in his heavy Bronx brawl: “Ideas work and have worked from the time of the caveman.”
Three pieces from Jeff Koons' Celebration series compete with the Manhattan skyline rooftop at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In stainless steel to withstand the elements, Balloon Dog (Yellow) and Sacred Heart (Red/Gold) in primary color, and Coloring Book in vivid pastel rival the pale buds of spring in Central Park below. Last Monday, Jeff Koons, an artworld giant, fielded questions from foreign journalists in a gray, very smart, sharkskin suit from Gucci, finding it ironic that as an American he mostly shows in Europe and Asia. How fitting that he now is here high up at the MET where Sacred Heart with its resemblance to a giant candy engages in a dialogue with religious themes in medieval and early Catholic painting and sculpture housed below. And Balloon Dog resembling that done by a clown entertaining at children's parties can be seen to reference Greek and Roman myth. Eeyore of Coloring Book rises to meet the challenges posed by Pop where Roy Lichtenstein's sculpture was exhibited just a few seasons before. “The journey of art is acceptance,” said Koons addressing questions related to the seeming simplicity of his subject matter, “first of oneself and then others.”

Regina Weinreich            

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Happy Art

How to say this without sounding sappy? In fashion, the trend is away from black, that thinning and existential hue that has dominated the New York hip look for decades. Color works on people for spring, as the style meisters tell us pushing kelly green, canary yellow, and Barbie pink. And so too in museums and galleries where vivid color now holds sway: in “Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today” at MoMA, featuring work by Ellsworth Kelly, John Chamberlain, Jim Dine, Frank Stella, and others, a show  guaranteed to swing your mood upward. Color even works in absentia, as in the Metropolitan Museum's exhilarating Jasper Johns's Grays. But nowhere does it pick up the inner child with Disney-esque cutesy characters, the spirit of round-faced Hello Kitty, the uplift of effective retail therapy-the possibility of unloading a month's wages on a Louis Vuitton wallet, the subversive thrill of adult themes-pastel figures spouting jism from sexual organs, and the sheer pleasure of ecstatic flower-lined environments as in the Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. Much has been made of Murakami's reputation as the Japanese Warhol-and, by the way, for a view of this master's commercial portraiture of prominent Jewish art and political figures like Golda Meir and Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein and Sarah Bernhardt, catch the exhibition, “Warhol's Jews: 10 Portraits Reconsidered” at the Jewish Museum. The extensive Takashi Murakami show with his signature DOB's, Super Novas, variations on Chaos, ko2s, and Jellyfish Eyes, finally explained to me those bewildering and kitsch dancing cherries on brown that distinguished the Vuitton luggage and bags in luxury shops and street vendor fakes in 2002, as in “Life is just a bowl of . . . .”

Regina Weinreich            

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Art in Chelsea

Alex Katz cruised the galleries on West 25th Street on Thursday night looking boyish in a leather bomber jacket. Chuck Close, the subject of a fine documentary at Film Forum was already working the room at PaceWildenstein in his wheelchair that cranks up on its hind wheels so he can talk at eye level. The occasion was a new show of Robert Rauschenberg's “Runts,” 2007 collages in his now signature mode, pigment transfer on polylaminate, fresh as ever. The catalogue text from various writings includes a reprint from “Pop Art Redefined” (1969), hand written notes taken in 1963 on a road trip with Merce Cunningham in the Southwest: “The outcome of a work is based icy ice on amount of intensity concentration and joy that is pursued roadcrossing in the act of work.” Words inter-cut with scenes along the road read like William Burroughs's cut-up experiments of the early '60's, and exude the power of collage-like juxtapositions in language. Check out the totemic motifs of “Holy Moly” with archaic statuary set against graffiti.

          On Saturday, the night belonged to Israeli painter Yigal Ozeri at the Mike Weiss Gallery on 24th Street. His new work, “Genesis,” now featured on the cover of “Gallery Guide,” portrays in sensual realism a young woman caught in vines, evoking the pre-Raphaelite imagery of Ophelia floating among the water lilies. Ozeri's model, Priscilla Bills, was there for the festivities, her dredlocks woven into twin buns. Her wide blue-eyed innocence makes her ideal for the emblematic female sexuality Ozeri wishes to encapsulate. This is a stunning show of new work by an always exciting artist

Regina Weinreich             

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Martin Puryear at MOMA, Water at the American Museum of Natural History: Featuring the Elements

MOMA's second floor atrium now exhibits five large scale wooden objects: one, a wheelbarrow carrying a Sisyphus-sized boulder with a tree limb coming out of it leads your gaze upward to the top floor. Seen from the sixth floor where another 40 sculptures grace several galleries, the work's base is miniscule, from below monumental, yet intimate. Another, a sinewy ladder (“Ladder for Booker T. Washington”) that could have emerged from a Chagall painting is dramatic against a gray-blue wall. Working with wood in every conceivable way, dark, light, shaved thin, thick, woven like a basket, thatched becoming hair, each piece redefines this material, suggesting it as a new element. Unlike the sculpture of Richard Serra, large rusted assemblies that divvy up space and provide a spiritual vibe, Martin Puryear's work in various species of wood, or wire mesh coated in tar, is mythic, suggesting narrative, an unidentifiable familiarity. The sculptor, now having an exhibition of his work from the '70's to the present at MOMA told the curator that he was inspired less by art museums than by natural history. What might he say about the water exhibit now at the American Museum of Natural History? Comprehensive in scope, exploring every use and possibility, the show is a culmination of much research. Scientists study water in asteroids, water surrounding a remote island 1200 miles south of Hawaii, the Congo River to keep us abreast of water's flow and the life it supports amidst the current fear that this is a diminishing resource. Non-renewable, what we have is what we will always have, and that idea makes this exhibition reach far beyond the museum's fascinating and eminently educational displays of water's uses to the global environmental debate.

Regina Weinreich

Last Licks: Summer 2007

Billy Sullivan's knockout show of paintings and photographs at Guild Hall featured portraits of '70's downtown art world denizen: Cookie Mueller, famous for acting in the early gross out now classic films Pink Flamingos and Desperate Living, two of John Waters's works before Hairspray “normalized” him for Broadway and Hollywood. Waters never lost that pencil thin mustache though, a sure sign that his subversive side remains, however dormant. Who knew he would become so conventional? Before she died of AIDS, Cookie wrote a memoir describing the making of Pink Flamingos-which also starred Mink Stole and other underground stars, of how Divine's shit-eating ending was shot-yes that was real dog do do. An excerpt appears in “The Outlaw Bible of American Literature” (Thunder's Mouth). Meantime, Sullivan is doing the poster for this year's Hamptons International Film Festival.
John Waters is, I'm sure, a big fan of Charles Busch as am I. His over the top performance in Bay Street's revival of “The Lady in Question,” a play he wrote in 1989, was surprisingly nuanced and funny. Charles Busch as actor is all gesture: his face in false lashes registers split-second reactions; his body propelled by the swing of an arm, his slender hips in slight swivel, he sashays with grace in heels that would give most women pause. As writer, Busch cleverly reinvents a camp vehicle channeling Charles Ludlum, the brilliant playwright lost to AIDS in the early '80's, who was unforgettable in his send up of Maria Callas in his Theater of the Ridiculous production..

Vered Gallery exhibited some work from Michelle Marie: paintings of trees with geometric shaped leaves and a sculpture using the same mathematical motif. Sounds brainy over arty, right? Turns out Michelle Marie created her own algorithm for the series. You would never guess from looking at her, slight and big haired like a beauty queen, she'd be so into science. Raised in Atlanta she is in fact the child of a beauty queen and scientist and has three sisters-growing up was sort of Little Women, she told me-and she's also cut a hit record and had her work adorn Tiffany's windows. At dinner at Le Flirt, over filet mignon, French fries, grilled chicken, pasta, potato, rice--not a bad dish in the house--Patrick McMullen snapped away and R. Couri Hay vamped outrageously. But it is not called Le Flirt for nothing. Michelle Marie was making eyes with a gorgeous guy across the table, her husband it turns out, who courted her by buying her art.

To benefit the East Hampton Library, Alec Baldwin showed up at a private dinner party honoring Gail Levin, noted art historian and biographer of Edward Hopper and Judy Chicago. Seems that he's writing a book of his own, about his messy divorce and the legal system.

                                                                                  Regina Weinreich

The Whitney Goes Psychedelic/ Monterey Pop

Riffing on the old saying, “If you remember the '60's, you weren't there,” guest curator, Christoph Grunenberg of the Tate Liverpool where the show originated, introduced the new exhibit at the Whitney, revealing that he, being both young and German, in fact was not there. For the rest of us, the Whitney's “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era” revives the images and sensations, providing a context that we never knew was there. This fact illustrates an important lesson: once an event is codified as history, history can be, in fact, unrecognizable. I remember the '60's and it didn't look quite like this--everyone's trip being somewhat individual--but it is fascinating to see it in the fruitful conjuring of someone else's fantasy. 
       Never mind that the art was so bad, or that so much personally resonant stuff, like the iconic Robert Crumb's  Cheap Thrills album cover, is absent. (It is however included in the show's fine catalogue.) Or that the political context is minimized to, say, samples of the East Village Other, Mao images, much in this fun anyway exhibit is evocative of that heady time: lounging environments with boundaries blurred (enter without imbibing contraband); sheer color makes you think of  “marmalade skies” (Translucent orange and mushy?)!
The catalogue features Dave Hickey's excellent essay “Freaks,” a sophisticated stoner/critic's view of the aesthetics; Chrissie Iles' “Liquid Dreams” makes the connection to Brion Gysin's important contribution of the “Dream Machine” and the work in poetry, photography and film of Ira Cohen, and an essay by Barry Miles limns the parallel development of the London Psychedelic School. The Summer of Love is now contained and codified.
     For sound and feel, see Monterey Pop, the 1968 concert film by D.A. Pennebaker, the real '60's, now out in a 40th anniversary DVD. Big Brother & the Holding Company, The Mamas & the Papas, Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, Hugh Masekela, Janis Joplin doing Ball & Chain . . . . . Inhaling optional.

                                                                                               Regina Weinreich

Jim Dine's Pinocchios at PaceWildenstein

The sculptures show a larger than life wooden boy, his nose elongated, his arms in match stick square, his groin with folds resembling a codpiece. Charmed by the Carlo Collodi classic since he was six, Jim Dine crafted 17 sculptures in charred wood and enamel so that the viewer can see just how the puppet was put together. In one structure, he stands before a table of tools, signature Dine image from a previous series. In another, his arms are raised, priestlike. In another he appears with the sly Fox and Cat in black, the animals that tricked him out of the gold coins meant for Geppetto. You wouldn't think from the subject that we would be viewing something this substantial, this painterly with Pinocchios in traditional “history of art” poses.
Chuck Close was there at yesterday's opening in the large Pace space on 25 Street, in his special chair that rises up on its hind wheels like a palomino pony on its hind legs, so that the artist who loves parties can talk at eyelevel.
Alex Katz conversed animatedly with Ada, his muse. I wanted to ask them, what each thought of the recent show at the Jewish Museum, a knockout in my opinion. Katz worships his wife it seems, but others tell me otherwise. It is a marriage after all. Poet Bob Holman in an embroidered hat tells me the ups and downs of his wife Elizabeth Murray with a brain tumor and cancer. He says the doctors tell him they would like to predict what may happen from here but no one with her condition has ever lived this long. I say, seeing her paintings at MOMA, they are so joyful. He agrees and says that they are funny too, adding, poets cannot be funny and be taken seriously. Do you want to hear one of mine? Yes, I say. “If you see something, say something. Banana.” Now there's a word you seldom see in a poem. Judith Solodkin of Solo Press was there, wearing a pink cowboy hat in felt; she made it herself.  And poet Anne Waldman in flowy long skirt, to match her disposition, was en route to Naropa in Boulder, for the summer session of the school she founded with Allen Ginsberg, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. We had shared a cab recently following a reading by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the 92 Street Y. She said then she had just returned from speaking at a scholarly seminar on Bob Dylan.
                                                                                                                     Regina Weinreich

Chicago in New York

              Artist Judy Chicago is having a New York comeback. You can tell by her blast of curls, red-rimmed eyeglasses and sequined sweaters, the petite and feisty artist has an eye for the decorative. This week she is feted at The Brooklyn Museum; her historically resonant work, “The Dinner Party” (1974-79), first exhibited here in 2002 will now have a permanent home. The conceit of this landmark epic-scale installation is that 39 women in history from all periods—ie. fertility goddesses to Hatshtepsut, a 15^th century B.C. pharaoh, to the lyric poet Sappho, to Georgia O’Keeffe have a place at the table of high culture, each setting hand-worked with plates cast in ceramics for that figure. Victorian era poet Emily Dickinson would dine on pink lace; for Virginia Woolf the plate sprouts odd dimensional forms. Beneath the table another 999 women are named in gold on a ceramic tiled floor. For a view of the work’s evolution, studies for “The Dinner Party” are exhibited at the ACA Gallery in Chelsea. An excellent, state-of-the-art biography, Becoming Judy Chicago by Gail Levin (Harmony Books), deftly limns the story of this artist nee Judy Cohen.

               

              For women of a certain age who know the before and after of the ‘70’s era of feminism, “The Dinner Party” still thrills. What fascinates is the response of the young, who, while admiring the conception and execution, find the work dated. Hard to fathom, this frustrating view can only come after the hard-won toils of an earlier generation; harder to explain is how in our culture of privilege the victories for women remain vulnerable. More edgy is the work in “Global Feminisms;” each of the 50 artists exhibited is born after 1960, displaying work from countries where the plight of women is not so fortunate. Identity issues abound. A woman seated in a pin-up girl pose wears a Musim prayer hat. A tattooed figure nurses a baby a la traditional mother and child. A photo commemorates Sylvia Plath’s suicide; sprawled face down in a ‘50’s kitchen, she lies beside the open oven. A video of an opera from Poland, “Il Castrato,” has drag queens witness the dismembering of another’s latex codpiece. In another, looped clips from familiar Hollywood movies illustrate an arc in male/female relations, moving from romance to physical abuse to murder. You simply cannot contest the entertainment value.

                                                                                                                          Regina Weinreich

Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party

Vintage Hamptons at Guild Hall

The Hamptons are sometimes evoked in distain: snarled traffic on the LIE, McMansions by the shore, Mom'n Pop shops morphed to Gaps and Starbucks, Main Street cloned to Rodeo Drive. Those privileged enough to frequent Long Island's East End know that much has changed in the name of progress. And yet, much remains of the beauty and charm that originally lured writers and artists to the lush landscape and potato fields. Last night at the annual awards dinner, honorees and presenters alike remarked at one last bastion of old Hamptons: Guild Hall. A premiere arts institution, Guild Hall honored sculptor John Chamberlain for the visual arts, architecture critic for The New Yorker Paul Goldberger for literary arts, actor Mercedes Ruehl for performing arts and Roy Furman for lifetime achievement in philanthropy. Emceed by writer Marshall Brickman, the event at the Rainbow Room was its usual love fest attended by Arne and Milly Glimcher, Marc Glimcher and Andrea Bundonis, Michael and Ninah Lynne, Patti Kenner and her 95 year old dad, Gail Sheehy, Jill Furman, a producer of the hit musical The Drowsy Chaperone, now producing In the Heights. As always her mother Frieda kvelled as Hannah Pakula chatted with Chuck Close whose wheel chair stood up on its hind wheels so he could converse at eye level.

            Brickman, a former owner of a Stanford White "Association" house on de Forest in Montauk conjured the memory of an emcee of yore, Peter Stone, famous for his "7-minute Louvre," a fly-through glimpse of Mona Lisa, Winged Victory and Venus de Milo, as well as inventively choreographed routes to the Hamptons involving signposts akin to driving through someone's living room in Manorville. Overhead, images of previous honorees flashed: Wendy Wasserstein, George Plimpton among them. Overcome by nostalgia, I dove into my lobster salad, filet mignon, and flourless chocolate soufflé so warm it was runny. Josh Gladstone, Artistic Director, told me that he is making the EH/New York City run twice a week: his 6½ year old son August is performing in Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia (2^nd part) at Lincoln Center. Josh also told me that the Hamptons Shakespeare Festival so sorely missed last summer is renegotiating its Montauk site. Mercedes Ruehl, Academy Award winner for "The Fisher King" was also lauded for her work in "Married to the Mob." Last summer she brilliantly evoked Frida Kahlo at Bay Street Theatre in a play that was first staged as a reading at Guild Hall. A Sag Harbor resident, she is currently looking at a play about Louise Nevelson the playwright Edward Albee gave her. Taking the stage, she spoke about the "ghosts" at Guild Hall, legendary figures on the John Drew Theater stage (i.e. Helen Hayes, Bert Lahr, Thornton Wilder) whose spirits yearn for fewer commercial cabaret and circus acts to fill the seats, and a return to its origins as a playhouse. As Mercedes put it, for drama to return as the main course instead of a side dish.

            Let's hope someone is listening.

                                                                                                                      Regina Weinreich

Aline Crumb Wears Vivienne Tam

             

Before this odd couple took their seats at the New York Public Library on Valentine’s Day in front of a packed house for a public tete a tete, Robert Crumb explained his wife’s delayed entrance: she was applying lipstick. The conceit had its punch line: Clad in a lovely hot pink and white empire dress by Tam, Aline Crumb asked her husband, how do I look? Famously insecure, the Long Island girl then turned so that Robert could climb aboard her back demonstrating one of the keys to their marital success: he likes to ride piggy back.

               

          Aside from the romance of the evening, celebrating love after all (even with Aline’s live-in lover, a second husband so to speak, in attendance), the occasion marked a show of her art at the uptown Adam Baumgold Gallery and the publication of Aline Crumb’s new book, Need More Love (MQ Publications), a graphic tell-all memoir in text and cartoons documenting her life and career over three decades. Featuring tales of her dad’s shady deals and early death, her mother affectionately dubbed Blabette’s many travels, her artistic growth and development, daughter Sophie in the womb, life in their village in the south of France, this ample volume should put to rest forever what some detractors have said about Aline’s drawing and story technique, that she is not equal to her more famous husband. Need More Love? Crumb is already contemplating the sequel to be called, Enough Already.

A loving couple, the Crumbs remain uniquely collaborative in life and work. And having modeled for Robert’s drawings in the New York Times, Aline Crumb offers fashion tips in the book’s final chapter, mainly juxtaposing designer ensembles with yard sale finds. A photo of Crumb in a Narcisco Rodriguez suit has her commenting, I look obnoxious. Indeed that auspicious night, the Vivienne Tam dress was accessorized with hot pink tights and clunky lace up motorcycle boots giving the frock’s femininity a comic, decidedly downtown turn. You know she wasn’t going to take it straight, in sheer stockings and pumps. One thing is clear: with his knees dug into her torso as he is draped on her rear, Robert Crumb is Aline’s best accessory

                                                                                                     Regina Weinreich