Gossip Central

Memorable Books of 2011

Languishing on a beach chair in my winter outpost by a turquoise sea, I have only books on my mind, for me the most portable item from before the age of kindle or even a recent dinosaur, the ipod nano. So here are a few that have pleased and provoked:

Jack Kerouac Dissed in Seminar on Broadway

Alan Rickman warned me about this: In his new play at the Golden Theater on Broadway, Seminar by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Sam Gold, Rickman plays a well-established teacher of a private writers’ workshop. He cajoles and humiliates his students, sleeps with them, getting his point across.

Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Depp, and Me: A Healthy Dose of Disrespect

The fans outlying MoMA for the New York premiere of The Rum Diary were quadruple deep, awaiting the arrival of the star, Johnny Depp. Too bad the Titus I screening room was three quarters filled. Apparently the star did not want a full house. Why? Let's call it the vagaries of stardom. I had met Depp before, before his turn as Jack Sparrow turned him quirky. At the premiere of an earlier film we talked about his double roles in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls (brilliant), and his passion for beat literature. With Hunter S. Thompson, it's guilt by association.

Drive: Nicolas Winding Refn's Fetish Film

In Robert Creeley's poem, I Know A Man, an unnamed narrator urges his friend John, which is not his name, to buy a goddamn big car/ “drive, he sd for christ's sake, look out where yr going,” predating the spirit of a current slick and stylish movie, Drive, directed by Copenhagen-based Nicolas Winding Refn, who won Best Director in Cannes. On a recent afternoon over an iced cappuccino at Gemma in The Bowery Hotel, I talked to Refn about the making of Drive, his casting of Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Christina Hendricks, Albert Brooks, and his “vision.”

Remembering 9/11: Portraits of Resilience

You could feel the weight of the occasion at the Milk Gallery in the Meatpacking on Thursday night, the site of a portrait exhibition and screening of a documentary marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Not that NYC was lacking in remembrance, but these photographs of key players in the event and after by Marco Grob for Time Magazine's tribute volume, Portraits of Resilience embody ennobling gravitas, the kind of historic moment captured in oils by the great masters.

Hamptons Journal: Enter Laughing and Stay Laughing at Bay Street/ Seriously Bookish to Benefit the East Hampton Library

The revival of Enter Laughing that opened Saturday night at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor had me howling so hard I nearly needed my own reviving. That's because Richard Kind is impossibly funny, and Josh Grisetti matches him zany move for move in the role of David Kolowitz. A cross between PeeWee Herman and Alan Cumming, he's hilarious when he enters laughing, trying out every guffaw, hiccup, chuckle, snort, belly-wrenching hoot in his repertoire.

Page One Inside The New York Times a new documentary: The Medium as Message

Bitching and moaning about the immensity of the newspaper of record, the way its cornucopia of offerings chewed into his writerly workday, the essayist Seymour Krim (who died in 1989) used to say, The New York Times made me. 

How would he now navigate its terrain, both in gritty print and boundless cyberspace, had he lived to see our journalistic no man's land? How do many of us do it, fellow “near sighted cannoneers,” a term Krim took from cosmic Walt Whitman to describe the newspapers' and reporters' mid-century identity forged in that time's new media, taking aim, as it were, living up to a “majestic ideal” in truth-telling? 

Allen Ginsberg at the Oscars, at MoMA, at Large .

When James Franco co-hosts the Oscars this weekend, it won't be as the bespectacled poet Allen Ginsberg he so lovingly portrayed in the movie Howl. Of course, Franco may win the Best Actor Oscar for his work in 127 Hours, but his Ginsberg is spot on. 

The multi- talented Franco has good taste in poets, currently immersed in projects involving American literary giants Harte Crane (the Bridge) and William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury). And Allen Ginsberg had good vision: even before Warhol made fame famous, the poet understood fame's power as a marketing tool.  He may remain the most famous poet of the Beat Generation literati, but even till the time of his death in 1997, he worked diligently, championing his close associates, Kerouac, Burroughs, Corso, Micheline, Huncke, Whalen, etc. so that they too would be known. Who wants to be the sole famed figure in his coterie, he would say.

Now Allen Ginsberg seems to be everywhere: Witness his moving (literally in motion) portrait on the 6th floor of MoMA, in a fine show featuring Andy Warhol's screen tests. In perfect synergy, his face looms large with those of Dennis Hopper, Edie Sedgwick, and others. James Franco's excellent performance is freshly available on the Howl DVD, along with an audio feature, Franco reading Howl. 

And, an exhibition of Ginsberg's photography-yes he was a visual artist too-- is displayed at the Howard Greenberg Gallery. A handsome book, Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg, accompanies the show. While it is not the first collection of the poet's photos, the book includes many well-known pictures-i.e. Kerouac smoking on a fire escape-as well as lesser known Robert Frank, Peter Orlovsky, and New York back alley takes. A distinct feature of Ginsberg's work is the hand scrawled caption situating those he shot in the historic moment. 

Recently, the yearly reading of Howl at Columbia University with music by David Amram attracted crowds to that institution's Philosophy Hall. An irony was not missed: in his days at Columbia he represented rebellious youth, and now more than a decade dead, he is revered as the poet of our time.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

 

 

Fearless Arianna Acknowledged at the Inaugural Athena Film Festival

Is there a “celluloid ceiling?” In this take on the “glass” ceiling, women in the film and entertainment industry can only go so far. That last year's Best Director Oscar went to Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman ever to receive it, says much. So it was with great fanfare on Thursday night in Diana Hall of Barnard College that the brand new Athena Film Festival was launched, founded by Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein, focusing on work by and about women and awarding women a newly minted prize for their achievements: Delia Ephron, Chris Hegedus, Tanya Hamilton, Abby Disney, Gini Reticker, Debra Zimmerman, Anne Thompson, Nancy Schreiber, Debra Martin Chase, Leslie Bennetts took the stage. One impressive, talented woman followed the one before, taking home a gorgeous crystal statue. 

As master of ceremonies Lynn Sherr pointed out: Athena is, after all, a Greek goddess, known for wisdom, intelligence, beauty, and eh, chastity.

Honorees were asked to speak about women who inspired them. While the names of mothers, mentors, and Hilary Clinton were invoked, Leslie Bennetts, Vanity Fair writer spoke about another Greek goddess, Arianna Huffington who that week had sold her unpaid blogger empire to AOL. Huffington had written a book about fearlessness, a necessary component of her personal reinvention. But, Bennetts also said that she did not admire Huffington's “business model.” True, as reported, nearly $300 million cash goes to her for this merger--a staggering fortune by anyone's estimation. One has to wonder at the moral imperative: why not throw some to the writers who write for nothing? That was on the tip of Bill Maher's lips when he had Arianna's face looming large on his show the following night. That question is on the tip of everyone's lips but no one wants to ask it; no one wants to burn that bridge, not even the fearless Maher! 
Where is the fearless soul who will acknowledge the elephant in the room?

Blogging -like much on the Internet --remains an enterprise like the wild, wild west, a frontier with few parameters. Leaving the stage, Bennetts told me that she has posted on Huffington, but only as a marketing tool, when she has needed to bring attention to a new book: “Why should I write for nothing when I can get paid?” she asked. 

At least this ceiling is gender-blind.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

 

Tennessee Williams Remembered at the 92nd Street Y

In the midst of the Oscar season tumult, it is reassuring to think of our most poetic and prolific American playwright Tennessee Williams as the author of scripts that became celebrated films. Case in point, Baby Doll (1956), directed by Elia Kazan with gorgeous performances, controversial in their time by Caroll Baker, her brutish husband played by Karl Malden, and introducing a young and suave Eli Wallach. Yes, Baker is a virginal, kittenish coquette on the verge of losing her innocence. The script like much of Williams' work features fragile women, women like Glass Menagerie's Amanda and Streetcar's Blanche, maddened. You imagine them productive and happy under other circumstances, while the men in their lives, sub-conscious, unreflective, with the sensitivity of gnats buzz about noisily doing what they do.

This week the 92nd Street Y hosted a Williams celebration co-curated by David Kaplan and Thomas Keith with a sampling of readings and historic performances, a special event much like the tribute at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 2009, when Williams was inducted into the Poet's Corner. The casting was brilliant, bringing onto the Y's stage actresses closely associated with Tennessee Williams' work. Olympia Dukakis currently starring in the Roundabout Theater's production of Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore on Broadway performed the famous speech from that 1964 play about her fourth husband whose demise she occasioned by giving him a car. 

Jessica Lange had starred as Amanda in a recent production of Glass Menagerie, but at the Y performed from Night of the Iguana. Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of the famed director, performed a scene from Mister Paradise. Alec Baldwin had starred on Broadway as Stanley, but kissed Angelica Torn long and hard as Mitch to her Blanche. Torn, the daughter of longtime actors associated with Williams, Geraldine Page and Rip Torn, had known the playwright as a young girl. In a particularly poignant moment, Marian Seldes read from a 1947 letter to Elia Kazan.

Another exceptional moment was the legendary Sylvia Miles performing the role of the Princess from Sweet Bird of Youth. Miles originated the character of Mrs. Ware in Vieux Carre. Williams had written a variation of Milk Train just for her, and she performed as Maxine in the 1963 Broadway revival of Night of the Iguana. At the Y, Miles exhibited her famed comic timing, especially intoning the name of her character, the actress  Alexandra Del Lago. “I am Alexandra del Lago,” she later said, identifying utterly with the playwright's sensiblity. “Everything that happens to her has happened to me.”

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura