Gossip Central

Guild Hall Celebrates Laurie Anderson, Bruce Weber, Jon Robin Baitz, and Dina Merrill

If you want to ensure a successful awards dinner, have Marshall Brickman as your M.C. A creator of the musical Jersey Boys, he has a wealth of mob related anecdotes, and with the aplomb of a seasoned comic, he delivers. At Guild Hall’s annual gala, rooftop at the St. Regis on Monday night, he told a story about an inmate who wanted him to do a sequel called, “Has Anybody Seen Frankie?” Declining, he now fears for his life.

Given the decidedly downtown edge to the awardees, the speeches were rather formal. Lou Reed presented to Laurie Anderson for Performing Arts. A “woman who can do anything,” Anderson thanked two people, one who taught her how to say no, the other yes. When she asked the famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon for the rights to make an opera of his Gravity’s Rainbow, he wrote back, fine, with one restriction, it must be for one instrument, the banjo. The other was Buddhist Trungpa Rinpoche advising, “You need to learn the skill of feeling sad without being sad. We all have to find the way ourselves.”

Harvey Weinstein’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema Gets Political

It’s a great year for Harvey Weinstein. The Weinstein Company co-chairman is  the 2012 recipient of the Legion d’ Honneur awarded by France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy. The distinction was conferred last July but Weinstein wisely requested, according to a press release, “to keep the honor private to avoid a conflict of interest with Academy Award Best Picture winner The Artist.”

Barney Rosset, Richard Seaver, and William Burroughs in Midcentury Paris

Woody Allen may have won this year’s Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for his whimsical movie, Midnight in Paris, with its time tripping to the 1920’s when Gertrude Stein held court in her salon. But Paris had another literary heyday in the mid-century when another round of Americans, among them George Plimpton, James Baldwin, Peter Stone, Irwin Shaw, Barney Rosset, Richard Seaver, and the beats hung out. Rosset died last week at age 89, and for those who valued his contribution to upholding first amendment rights in this country, his championing the works of artists, transgressive in subject and language (Beckett, Burroughs, Miller, Lawrence, Genet, Ionesco) the event truly marks the end of an era. People said the same when Dick Seaver died in 2009, but this time we really, really mean it.