Gossip Central

Who Shot Rock & Roll at the Brooklyn Museum

The iconic and infamous cover the walls at the Brooklyn Museum's fine exhibition (on view till January 31, 2010), “Who Shot Rock & Roll.” Yes you will see many old favorites, like John Lennon wearing a New York City sleeveless tee in Bob Gruen's contact sheet from the familiar 1974 shoot. You will see him again in Richard Avedon's 1967 formal portraits of the Beatles, their mop hair newly coiffed. And again in Allan Tannenbaum's shot of John and Yoko in bed, NYC, 1980 just two weeks before he died. The text explains that Lennon liked Tannenbaum's work: “You really capture Yoko's beauty.” And that sums up the essence of this show's raison d'etre as curated by Gail Buckland who also edited the excellent catalogue, to focus on the photographers, how the subject inspired them and the photographic arts . What fascinates is remembering the B-52's as in George DuBose's 1978 photograph, or Ike and Tina in Memphis in 1962, as in Ernest C. Withers' photo that shows Ike's eagle eye trained on her wailing at the mike, or Amy Arbus' 1983 black & white Madonna in a boxy coat before Kabbalah and before she was buff juxtaposed with the dizzying 2001 “Madonna I” by Andreas Gursky emphasizing the pop star in the marketplace, that is, 15 combined exposures taken over a period of days from the same vantage point at the same moment in a concert with a tiny well-lit  singer to the bottom left, when lights flash, confetti falls, and people hang upside down from scaffolding mechanically lowered from the stage. Epic-scale, monumental, the celestial shot overwhelms.  Buddy Holly on the bus in a 1958 Lew Allen photo, Dennis Hopper's James Brown in 1964, a wistful Elvis at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis by Lloyd Shearer in 1956, David Gahr's 1968 Janis Joplin, Jill Furmanovsky's Joy Division in 1979 and her 1977 Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, Ray Stevenson's Sex Pistols on Carnaby Street in 1976, William “Popsie” Randolph's shot of the Brooklyn Paramount where Alan Freed staged his rock and roll shows in 1955, Godlis' 1976 Patti Smith outside CBGB and Stephanie Chernikowski's 1978 “Debbie Harry CBGB NYC” take you down Memory Lane.  On opening night last Thursday, the museum featured photographer Josh Cheuse DJing, while many of the photographers-Godlis, Marcia Resnick, Bob Gruen, Allan Tannenbaum among them-- milled about with a film crew in tow. Bob Gruen had a birthday party a few nights  before where Bebe Buell performed songs from her new CD “Sugar” with Ronnie Spektor in attendance. On this night, with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame celebrating across the river, the Brooklyn Museum rocked with Blondie:  Debbie Harry in black wig and black satin suit with red glitter, performing her hits: “Call Me,” “Heart of Glass,” and “One Way or Another;” her cover of Michael Jackson's “Don't Stop” was evocative, like the rest of this show, of a rich, remarkable, and resonant music history.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Robert Frank Has Eyes

In his introduction to the iconic book of photographs, The Americans, Jack Kerouac wrote, You Got Eyes, honoring photographer Robert Frank as if he were a jazzman, You Can Play.  Now these words are writ large at the Metropolitan Museum's fine show, Looking In, exhibiting the 83 photos that were published in the original book from the mid-1950's, some contact sheets that reveal much about how this artist made his choices and cropped his work, as well as earlier photo sequences and related essays and correspondence. The result is a thrilling glimpse into the development of Frank's unique sensibility, and a prophetic time capsule. There aren't many works that changed the way people see: this book is one of them.
     The Americans, like Kerouac's On the Road, reflects a cross-country car trip. Its vision is a sad America of individuals caught in a wide expanse of highways, connecting, but not, disenfranchised from the American Dream. Robert Frank, having recently arrived from Switzerland, made the trip on a Guggenheim scholarship in 1955-6, and its look at America is one that you could argue can only be seen by an outsider: An empty chair in a barbershop seen through a screen door in McClellanville, South Carolina. U.S. 285 in New Mexico, the line dividing the road leading to a hazy horizon. Drugstore in Detroit, the black counter woman serving whites with large posters advertising “Orange Whip 10 cents” looming overhead. A movie premiere in Hollywood shows a glamorous blond with a far off gaze, background animated onlookers in focus. Robert Frank's family huddled in the back seat of a car, its headlight beaming.
     The catalogue accompanying the exhibition features excellent essays providing the backstory to Frank's road trip as well as the history of the book's critical reception. Luc Sante relates the vision in The Americans to another Frank/Kerouac collaboration, the film Pull My Daisy. “The intersection of the two men may have lasted less than two years, finally, but it was momentous, with echoes that have persisted ever since. The road they separately traveled and chronicled has done nothing but expand in the popular imagination, becoming the site for a paradigmatic rite of passage.”
     Interestingly enough, the opening of the Met's exhibition coincides with the release of Michael Moore's new satiric opus, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” and the timing could not be more apt, as each reveals an underbelly of America, beatific citizens somehow left behind. With respect to Obama-bashers and their ilk, these are “real Americans,” for anyone with eyes.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

 

The Hunger at the Waverly Inn

Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter with his ski slope sculpted white hair and Ecco Press's Daviel Halperrn in a halo of white frizz hosted a party for chef John De Lucie's “The Hunger,” at The Waverly Inn on Monday night. This book records his rise from low management head hunter, to cooking school, working through the kitchens and women of New York-with a detour to Nick & Toni's and Oceans in the Hamptons-- to become co-owner of the hottest restaurant in the city. Adding to its allure, The Waverly Inn operates through a secret system of reservations. Packed every night, the restaurant has no phone, a fact that astonishes De Lucie even as he tries to explain this phenomenon. His rake's progress takes the reader into the behind the scenes grit of resto life as he finds his passion, with De Lucie's surprising self effacing humor, his bewilderment at diners like “Jenny from the block” and the “taxi driver” lauding his signature dishes like the mac and cheese with truffles and chicken pot pie. On Monday night, the diverse crowd chomping on hors d'oeuvres of filet mignon, jumbo shrimp cocktail, tuna tartare, and truffled pizza included Marty Richards, Harvey Weinstein, Jill Hennessey, and John Scotto of Fresco in a moment of one happy restaurateur celebrating another. A number of leggy celebrity models made it past the invisible velvet ropes. The real secret of The Waverly Inn is like the appeal of “The Hunger.” What it offers, you cannot put down. 

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