Gossip Central

Tres Brooklyn: Jean-Paul Gaultier at the Brooklyn Museum and Tres Chic: Grace Kelly Celebrated

Only some of the crowd greeting French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier at the Brooklyn Museum, wore his clothes, easily identified by the tab on the back. But many chose the occasion of the opening of a lavish exhibition, “The Fashion World of Jean-Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk,” to pay tribute, riffing on his most camp and louche looks without actually wearing HIS designs. That’s to be expected for the man who gave Madonna the pointy cone bra! But upstairs on the museum’s fifth floor, rooms fitted with mannequins whose facial expressions move in delight or dismay display his art in a spectacular show to rival the splendid Alexander McQueen at the Metropolitan Museum a few seasons back.

In Memorium: Lou Reed (1942-2013)

Rock icon and beat poet, Lou Reed had an edgy downtown presence. My Lou Reed stories: so engrossed in his music, head stuck to the ground under a table at the Bottom Line to get a better shot. I swear never to become a photographer. At St. Mark’s Church: Lou Reed and Allen Ginsberg mix it up. Allen sings accompanied by his harmonium. Lou reads his poems. At White’s in Montauk: Lou waits in line like everyone else, a skinny guy in grubs. As visual artist: His high gloss photos at the Hermes boutique on Madison. Scapes looking like those drawings we made with crayolas covered in greasy black. Scratching the squiggles. The self-portraits look down to earth enough to have been done by Lou Reed. Well, they are his after all. His voice on Doc Pomus’ diaries in the documentary about the famed songwriter. When last we ran into him, at the stellar Chuck Close exhibition at Guild Hall, near Chuck’s giant portrait of him, he was happy to say that he would celebrate William Burroughs’ centennial this coming year. Ahhhhh! We will miss him.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

 

 

Dressed to Die For: Mary-Louise Parker in The Snow Geese, Trudie Styler in an Anglo-Irish The Seagull, Marin Ireland in Marie Antoinette

In Sharr White’s new play The Snow Geese at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Mary-Louise Parker as Elizabeth wears black, in mourning for her dead husband, but really she is attired in Jane Greenwood’s circa 1917 period detail, eh weeds, for a lost way of life. Under Daniel Sullivan’s direction, a family who thinks it has money, now doesn’t. Two brothers (Evan Jongkeit and Brian Cross, both very fine) vie in Oedipal conflict. Max Hohmann (Danny Burstein), a doctor put out of business because he is German, administers laudanum while his wife and Elizabeth’s sister Clarissa (Victoria Clark) keeps everyone in line. The pretty Ukrainian maid Victoria (Jessica Love) learns to make coffee, now that she’s a refugee from former upper class wealth. A gun brandished, fires off. Wild geese fly afrenzy as if in Hitchcock’s The Birds. As soon as you know the house will go, you are in Chekhov country, even though the setting is rural New York.

Kenny Barron’s Piano, Sharon Clark’s Vocals and James Carter’s Horn at the 22ndAnnual Jazz Foundation of America’s Loft Party

The Jazz Foundation of America’s loft party, an annual concert to benefit a vital organization that helps players with medical expenses, housing, recording, you name it, is wall to wall music occupying three large spaces simultaneously. It is hard to know which room to occupy,--choices must be made-- but when we heard that Kenny Barron would be playing in the Jazz Loft, we simply had to be there. We caught the tail end of Sharon Clark who scats like Ella, singing “Moonlight in Vermont” and “You’d be So Nice (To Come Home To).” And then Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers introduced Kenny Barron’s trio featuring David “Happy” Williams on bass and Victor Lewis on drums performing “Blue Monk,” “Dialogues in Blue,” Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You,” and “Autumn Leaves.” Kenny Barron asked if anyone noticed he forgot the bridge on the Eubie Blake. No one complained.

Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg: Kill Your Darlings Opens the Hamptons International Film Festival

After much buzz on the festival circuit, including Sundance, Venice, Toronto, to name a few, Kill Your Darlings opens the Hamptons International Film Festival tonight.

Before there was Neal Cassady to whom the writer Jack Kerouac was in thrall, there was Lucien Carr. A St. Louis friend of William Burroughs, Carr was a fast and scary driver, catalyst for acts of rebellion, and key player in perhaps the first bit of beat scandal, the murder of Dave Kammerer, his former boy scout leader and stalker, with a boy scout knife. “Kill” co-screenwriters, director John Krokidas and Austin Bunn, play fast and loose with beat lore, favoring a point of view from Allen Ginsberg’s journals, fashioning a gay coming of age tale featuring a deflowering when they could have sought out the more fully formed fictions in Kerouac’s ample telling and retelling. They clearly wanted to tell a gay story, and in skewing events this way, describing a period when heterosexual yearnings too had a subversive edge, they come closer to a beat vibe than any other movie fictionalization thus far. They even make leering Dave Kammerer (Michael C. Hall) seem sympathetic.

AKA Doc Pomus: Documenting the “Save the Last Dance” Songwriter

The songwriter of rock & roll classics like “This Magic Moment,” “Teenager in Love,” “Viva Las Vegas,”—yes, Elvis Presley’s hit-- and “Save the Last Dance for Me,” Jerome Felder,  AKA Doc Pomus, was an American original. A Brooklyn boy, crippled by polio as a child, he was big hearted enough to charm the girl he loved as well as just about everyone in the music industry of his time. You may not remember his name now as much as the music he sang and wrote, but the documentary directed by Peter Miller and Will Hecter, and co-produced by his daughter Sharyn Felder, AKA Doc Pomus, will keep you humming tunes you know and love.

Cate Blanchett Feted at the New York Film Festival

She may have been jet lagged and slightly tipsy from a drink or two at a pre-Tribute dinner at the New York Film Festival evening in her honor, but that did not make Cate Blanchett babble like Jasmine, her character in the latest Woody Allen movie. Quite the contrary, articulate, generous, and funny, Blanchett fielded questions from the Film Society’s Kent Jones, speaking about her astounding wide-ranging career and the directors she has worked with at the tribute Q&A at Alice Tully Hall. Of Woody, she spoke of the rigors of getting it right as there’s no post-production. Surprise for Cate: Woody Allen taped a congratulatory message to her. Her reply: He must have been thinking of Winslet.

Sandra Bullock and George Clooney: Spaced Out in Gravity

A buoyant crowd settled into lunch at The Explorers’ Club to celebrate Gravity. Producer David Heyman exulted about the beauty of the film, about two astronauts stranded in the weightless ether. Wow, “You should see the sun on the Ganges! It’s amazing!”

This movie does what CGI, 3D, all the bells and whistles of movie technology were meant to do, put audiences literally there, in this case, outer space. Under the superb direction of Alfonso Cuaron, with whom Heyman had worked before on the most critically successful of the Harry Potter franchises, “Prisoner of Azkaban,” the director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki and visual effects supervisor Tim Webber even invented a trick or two. But Heyman could not say enough about the two actors who suffered the rigors of those heavy space suits for the 62 day shoot with nary a complaint. All you see is part of their faces, eyes and breath registering joy, fear, relief, humor, whatever is required, creating, in fact, an old school narrative.

Robert Reich Stands Tall: Inequality for All

Just as the news seems bleak, a government shut down translating to national parks closing their gates to tourists, and workers home without pay, Google’s celebration of Yosemite’s anniversary seems especially ironic. The documentary Inequality for All turns its penetrating gaze onto another piece of evidence of meltdown: the vast gap between the 1% and 99%. The film delves into how we got to this economic chasm, which while not necessarily a new question, is interesting to look at spelled out, graphs and all. What’s new is the focus on former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and his optimism.