Gossip Central

Chef Flynn: “Don’t Hold the Salt:” The Hamptons International Film Festival Celebrates Summerdocs in its Tenth Year

Under a makeshift tent, a staging spot for plating his culinary creations at the Brock residence in East Hampton, Flynn McGarry, a phenomenon as a young chef with his own Lower East Side restaurant, Gem, and a new documentary about him, Chef Flynn, shook hands, his fingers coated in egg yolk. “That’s how you want your chef,” smiled Flynn, at the party celebrating him, the movie about him, and the Hamptons International Film Festival’s Summerdocs 10th Anniversary: “Enjoy my food, and my life,” he told the crowd. He is 19. His Beef Tartare on a grilled lettuce cup, beautifully situated on trays, was a delight to look at, fleurettes with a sprinkle of sesame seed, and even better to eat.

Patricia Clarkson’s Grand Hauteur in The Bookshop

Patricia Clarkson is getting used to playing villains. If you’ve been watching Sharp Objects, the HBO thriller in 8-parts that will have its final episode this coming Sunday, you’ve seen this actress from New Orleans at her sinister best, a matriarch called Adora who is anything but adorable; her name alone exudes irony. Clarkson wears her bad side with high hauteur, an elegance and beauty that goes icy as human emotions draw near: it is impossible to turn away from her. In a new movie, The Bookshop, a lovely take by Isabel Coixet on Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, starring Emily Mortimer, Clarkson continues in craven glamor. Bill Nighy’s character calls her behavior regarding the takeover of a bookstore repulsive. Clarkson says her acting strategy for playing hideous is to channel Glinda, the Good Witch.

Carla Hall Bucks Food Trends: Stirring the Pot with Florence Fabricant

Carla Hall is all about cooking with love. Sharing her food notes and anecdotes with Florence Fabricant at Guild Hall’s popular series, “Stirring the Pot,” the two foodies could not agree more about the limiting nature of food trends. For example, who says that beets must always be served with goat cheese? Duh. Well someone decades ago made that combo a standard and now diners expect that. Cooking with love is way more intuitive about what can go with what, and what is fresh and available.

Aretha Franklin: Accessorizing the Queen

As the tributes to Aretha Franklin’s extraordinary career and legacy attest to the number of people she touched, and her incredible song list awakens our memories of decades of indelible music, it is good to remember her as a natural woman. Not only because she sang the song Carole King and Gerry Goffin wrote for her, but because she was a stealth warrior as a feminist, whether or not she cared about that term. Old school, no nonsense. No #MeToo for her, and you know she had stories.

Authors Night’s Brainfood: Shucked Oysters and Real Books

  

This Authors Night featured its signature mix of celebrity and well established authors, such as Jules Feiffer, Geraldo Rivera, Robert Caro, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Patricia Bosworth, A. M. Holmes, Lee Child, with first time authors such as Elizabeth Flock who researched five marriages in Mumbai for her novel, The Heart is a Shifting Sea. Hilaria Baldwin sat beside her husband with her book, The Living Clearly Method, claiming it had already made the popular benefit last year, but Alec Baldwin insisted. Of course you could not get near their table. His new book provocatively titled, You Can’t Spell America Without Me, with a photograph of him as Donald Trump gracing the cover, was selling like proverbial hotcakes, huge piles set before him dwindling down rapidly. He gamely brought Michael Lally this year, and had him sit cattycorner to them, at every chance hawking the poet’s book, Another Way to Play: Poems 1960-2017.

Guild Hall’s Quiet Revolution: Alec Baldwin, What are you doing tonight?

 

Stealth operations are hardly associated with Guild Hall, the premiere arts institution of East Hampton, but as artistic director Andrea Grover announced at the summer gala this week, on a horse farm in Amagansett, more and more, Guild Hall is commissioning the work of emerging artists, “a quiet revolution,” as it were.

Established artists are not overlooked, of course. The evening was a celebration of a new exhibition of Ellsworth Kelly’s art and the political career of Judith Hope Twomey. Alec Baldwin introduced Twomey noting that much is said about the lack of women in politics, and that is true, but “I wish there were more like her.” Twomey spoke about first coming to East Hampton from Arkansas, and notables such as Chuck Close and Saul Steinberg assisting with her campaign. When Baldwin offered to help, he went to speak in towns in upstate NY and the women turned out in droves to hear him. “They are still talking about it,” said Twomey amusing the crowd. Politically speaking, let’s hope for a bigger revolution.

Evita at Bay Street: Don’t Cry for Me

“I think it’s a masterpiece,” exulted Will Pomerantz after a performance of Evita at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. True, he is the director of this lively production with its mainly Latino cast, and he should have bragging rights for his fine work, but he was thinking larger on opening weekend. This very special production made many rethink the well-worn Andrew Lloyd Webber/ Tim Rice musical most associated with songs so familiar you can sing along, Patti LuPone as Evita (or Madonna in the movie), maybe Ricky Martin as Che, stars who made it famous in its Broadway debut and revivals. Bay Street’s production refocuses its epic, historic, sweeping themes: celebrity, revolution, romance and love, and makes them intimate.

Glenn Close Gets Her Closeup: The Wife

When best-selling author Meg Wolitzer wrote her novel, The Wife (2003), she could not have imagined its current feminist resonance, nor the movie of the book, The Wife, soon to be released starring Glenn Close. The wife of a celebrated novelist as he is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Close's Joan Castleman is demure, even restrained as she seethes with resentment at her husband's narcissism. Some men, it seems, believe their lies--mostly, the ones about themselves and their own powers. And Close as the wife, takes it, her affect perfect explosion-under-composure, like her Norma Desmond, until the façade cracks, unlike Desmond's deluded Sunset Boulevard soul. Ever the wife, she reels it back.