Gossip Central

The Mother of All Lies/ Down in Dallas Town: Truth in Documentaries

As the DOCNYC festival illustrated, the genre of non-fiction films remains a vibrant frontier. Asmae El Moudir’s THE MOTHER OF ALL LIES, awarded Best Documentary in Cannes and Morocco’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar, tells a hidden history through clay figurines. The “Bread Wars” in Morocco in the early 1980’s garnered little attention internationally, but locally, in Casablanca and other cities, riots were brutally suppressed, and silence about the horror was enforced.

In filmmaker Asmae El Moudir’s home, where she lived with her parents and grandmother, a photograph of King Hassan II hung prominently, her grandmother’s favorite. Her father made clay figures that she used to dramatize—or speak of—the violence in her country’s past. Dividing her time between Rabat and Paris, but preferring home in Morocco, Asmae El Moudir attended a special screening of her film at the Quad cinema recently, navigating the enthusiastic crowd’s amazement at the subtle revelations of truth about an untoward political history.

On the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the mysteries linger in the memories constructed of photographs, music, and the site itself. That is the subject of Alan Govenar’s latest documentary, DOWN IN DALLAS TOWN: FROM JFK TO K2. Govenar’s style segues on the slimmest of transitions from a famous Polaroid by Mary Ann Moorman, interviewed for the very first time, to American blues, to the homeless who house themselves in cardboard dwellings at Dealey Plaza, where JFK died in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Tangled Up in Tulsa: Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine

Everyone remembers their first Dylan concert. Mine was historic: When Dylan switched guitars, from acoustic to electric, when crowds stormed the stage in protest. No, this was not the more famous concert in Newport. This was a few days later, in Forest Hills. A friend and I, two immigrant teens took the subway from Brooklyn to Queens to find America. Up until that day, Dylan was to me an anti-war poet/ a scratchy singer in the manner of Phil Ochs. But that day the Dylan fans were waging their own war against HIM, booing, unseating, moving forward as a mob.

It was clear: Dylan mattered. But the question was, did the rage matter to him? If it did, he took the advice of The Beatles, who advised, ‘Don’t worry about the fans, they will come back.’ And, of course, the rest is, as they say, history.

Cut to Tulsa, May 2022. The opening of The Bob Dylan Center. Why Tulsa, everyone asked. Because his archive could be housed right next door to his hero’s Woody Guthrie. Parties, music, academic meetings marked the occasion. Visiting, I could see a photograph from the concert of my youth amid the incredible collection of guitars, vinyl, notebooks, artwork—memorabilia of a creative life. And now readers of Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, edited by Mark Davidson and Fishel, can revel in their own nostalgia and more in this elegant, meaty tome—a chronology of the archival Tulsa haul, a backstory for a great biography. The publishers at Callaway took the step of creating a lengthy and helpful index.

To the photos with EVERYONE: Joan Baez, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Robbie Robertson, Allen Ginsberg, Barack Obama, footage from D. A. Pennebaker, torn ticket stubs, song lists, lyrics, stuff, add smart essays by Greil Marcus, Lucy Sante, Raymond Foye, Richard Hell limning Dylan’s writing process from foundational tapes to recordings and artifacts. Read a facsimile of Dylan’s essay on Jimi Hendrix. Peter Carey’s grim look at Tulsa’s racial divide, how the famed riots serve up classic Dylan material. A section on Dylan and the Beats illuminates the formative literature and influence that would lead to song themes and his novel Tarantula. Michael McClure, Peter Orlovsky, as well as Ginsberg were certainly on his road, but Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was a main attraction when he first arrived in the Village for the free-wheeling character based on Neal Cassady, whose amorality he would later reject.

Yoshiki at Carnegie Hall: The Unexpected Pleasures of Loss

The international superstar, Yoshiki, celebrated a 10^th anniversary “World Tour with Orchestra 2023 ‘Requiem,’” its final leg at Carnegie Hall this week. Displaying awesome musical chops at piano and drums in the separate genres of classical and rock, Yoshiki, clad in red lame coat, dedicated the tour to the passing of his beloved mother who raised him after his father’s suicide when he was 10. The drums, he explained to his many fans—some clad in full kimono and obi bearing flowers to throw onstage--, allowed him to express the extremes of his despair. Even after he performed for Japan’s emperor, his mother would ask whether or not he had slept the night before, had he eaten breakfast. He missed these nurturing flourishes even when his hands were imprinted in cement at L. A.’s Chinese Theater. Launching a clothing line in Paris and a new champagne with Pommery, he misses her mothering more.

He also dedicated some songs to two bandmates who committed suicide, and for much of the concert he admonished the audience to cherish every day. “We are here,” he kept saying, also acknowledging the pain and suffering in our world. Conductor Ward Stare led the full orchestra featuring many strings, underscoring a sorrowful tone even when the sounds soared. Singers Beverly and Ai Ichihara added to the emotional experience. After Intermission, Yoshiki, now in silver lame, performed Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake accompanied by dancers from the American Ballet Theater. Three screens projected family photos and clips from his film debut as director, YOSHIKI: Under the Sky. The next day the film, to be released this month, was screened in full at the Roxy Hotel, followed by a performance at Django.

Paul Simon Comes Home to the Hamptons International Film Festival

Interviewed for Purist Magazine, the Oscar winning documentarian Alex Gibney was asked, how significant was it that his epic film on Paul Simon, IN RESTLESS DREAMS: THE MUSIC OF PAUL SIMON, would screen at this year’s HIFF. “Very, he’s coming home.” At a “Conversation With Paul Simon,” Simon spoke about his inspirations in music—doo wop and folk—his breakup with Art Garfunkel, Aretha Franklin’s cover of Bridge , his dislike of the song “Feeling Groovy,” Mike Nichols, Hugh Masekela, and strummed a bit on acoustic guitar. While he now lives outside of Austin, Texas with his wife Edie Brickell, the erstwhile resident of Montauk who had helped save the lighthouse in the late 1990’s inaugurating a series of yearly benefit concerts featuring such legendary stars as James Brown, Don Henley, the Allman Brothers, and Carly Simon, at 80, with a new album, he seems unstoppable, and though he had a plane to catch, did not want to leave the stage.

Seems like the Hamptons was a homecoming for many: Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi brought their film about champion swimmer Diana Nyad for the festival’s opening night. A first feature for the Oscar winning documentarians who specialize in harrowing true life adventure stories, NYAD, starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster was particularly challenging, keeping its star in water eight hours a day.

Local film notables came to screenings: Julianne Moore, Bruce Weber, Bob Balaban and others supported by attending, despite strikes. Alec Baldwin with Hilaria and seven kids in tow attended the yearly party. Others such as Griffin Dunne and Celia Weston were present with their latest films, EX-HUSBANDS and A LITTLE PRAYER respectively. The funniest line in any movie comes from the hugely entertaining AMERICAN FICTION, when a character talks about the kind of literature—ghetto-- white folks in the Hamptons would love.

Hamptons Journal: Bob Colacello at The Peter Marino Foundation/ Hanzhi Wang at LongHouse

Writer Bob Colacello is the best kind of gossip; he observes people with a big heart and humor. In his latest book, an art volume of vintage New York photos by David Jimenez, accompanied by his text—a forgetting, as Colacello told a packed house at the Peter Marino Foundation in a conversation with Ivorypress publisher Elena Ochoa Foster, who flew in from Madrid for this occasion. He was inspired by the poet Joe Brainard who wrote a memoir listing his remembrances. For his own take, titled New York Memories, Colacello lists all that he had forgotten about New York in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when, as he was “forgetting,” downtown and uptown arts met at happy studios, galleries, discotheques, especially Studio 54, Steve Rubell’s place in midtown, and Eric Goode’s more artsy Area in Tribeca.

The conceit works well to dispel the impulse toward nostalgia, as Elena Ochoa Foster noted, even as Colacello records a bygone world. Going back to his childhood, he told the crowd that included Francesco Clemente, Vito Schnabel, his mother Jacqueline, Zac Posen, Vincent Fremont, and an artworld elite, in the upstairs space where the Israeli artist Michal Rovner’s brush strokes migrated against austere backdrops, it all started out when he came into “the city” as a boy:

“I forgot the awe and wonder I felt as a child arriving at the old Penn Station, which had been designed by McKim, Mead, and White in 1910, and was torn down to make way for the new Madison Square Garden in 1963.

“I forgot Woody Allen always sat at the most visible table at Elaine’s, pretending to be invisible.

“I forgot Malcom Forbes told me his old money friends like Doris Duke and the Mellons asked to be taken off the [Forbes 400] list, claiming they were worth much less than Forbes thought, and the only friend who insisted he was worth a lot more was Donald Trump.

“I forgot going to Andy Warhol’s Memorial at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on April Fool’s Day, 1987 with Sao Schlumberger, and thinking the huge crowd was testament to his greatness.

“I forgot that no matter what happens New York goes on, feet on the ground, head held high, heart and mind open.

Rufus Wainwright Celebrates 50 at Montauk's Historic Lighthouse

On the brink of 50, legendary Rufus Wainwright’s music genre is hard to pin down. But one thing’s certain: he’s got lots of friends, family, and fans, all in full display at his birthday concert bash to benefit Montauk’s historic lighthouse, now turned 227 years old. Maintaining this edifice takes more than a village, and from the looks of the slopy grounds outside, everyone was pitching in. The same could be said of the performances, featuring Tig Notaro, Katie Couric, Jimmy Fallon, Jenni Muldaur, Laurie Anderson, Chris Stills, Chaim Tannenbaum, G. E. Smith, Rufus’ sisters Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright-Roche, daughter Viva Wainwright, and more. Hosting or just hanging around for the first-rate music were Liev Schreiber, Ross Blechner, Bruce Weber and Nan Bush, Christy Brinkley and Cynthia Nixon. Many spirits hung around too: many of Rufus’ mom Kate McGarrigle’s songs were sung, Laurie Anderson performed a song by Lou Reed about how to see in the dark.

Wainwright started off the generous three-hour concert with Irving Berlin’s “How Much Do I Love You?” Who knew that Berlin actually spent time in Montauk? Wainwright does the American songbook, folk, jazz, rock with ease. Everyone waits to hear Rufus’ cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluliah,” which he dedicated to the artist Eric Freeman who recently died and who is scheduled to have an exhibition at Guild Hall in the coming year. After a duet on Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” Rufus congratulated Chris Stills on his marriage to Stacy. They had just flown in from the Vineyard for the occasion. I am still not over G. E. Smith’s guitar solo on “Memory Motel.” And Amber Martin led everyone in a rousing “Higher.”

Patricia Field Inspires Happy Clothes at Tribeca

Invited to a party to celebrate designer/ costumer Patricia Field and the fine documentary about her life and career premiering at Tribeca, one ponders the question: what to wear? After the Tribeca screening of Happy Clothes: A Film About Patricia Field directed by Michael Selditch, a colorful romp through her decades-long career in the business of fashion: the 8^th Street retail shop, her genius pattern combinations (plaids with florals that work) and accessories for the cultural icons starring in Sex & the City and The Devil Wore Prada, the better question is, is my outfit happy enough?

We all accepted Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw in a tutu, making it New York street attire no less, awkwardly avoiding a splashing puddle; that image adorned the sides of buses for years, and the tasteful matching of Anne Hathaway’s dressy shirts with giant cuffs and mini-pleated skirts, curated by Stanley Tucci for the pleasure of a white haired Miranda Priestly—that is, Meryl Streep styled to look like the supermodel Carmen dell Orifice, not Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Even the detail-oriented Darren Star capitulated to Field’s eye, her unique combos and stylings—for the diva and Everywoman, trans or not.

Guild Hall Celebrates Peter Marino: Renaissance Man

“I hate it,” architect Peter Marino exclaimed surprising even himself, as he noted Gotham Hall, a cavernous former bank on Broadway, decorated for the 350 guests arriving for a tribute to him, and to art collectors Tom Roush and LaVon Kellner. This was Guild Hall’s winter gala, celebrating too the venerated East Hampton art institution’s emergence from a long renovation. Can it be that Peter Marino, clad in his hard-to-miss signature head-to-toe leathers and silver rings, all his own designs, is oddly demure? A video featured his many achievements and talents: architect, painter, sculptor, potter, gardener, collector with an impeccable eye. It finally took the Israeli artist Michal Rovner, a longtime friend, to underscore his bold innovations with a telling anecdote: In Tokyo, at the opening of a Chanel store he designed, he found the perfect use for the building’s façade, projecting her art on it.

This was not a boast. An internationally renowned multimedia artist, Rovner will be featured at Peter Marino’s art foundation housed in Southampton, as part of a series, “Brunches with Bob,” the Bob being writer Bob Colacello who was part of Marino’s entourage, with his daughter Isabelle Trapnell Marino, who, despite her valuable input quips, she’s the “Vanna White” of the conversation series. The culture-packed room also included Michael Halsband, just back from his opening of his iconic sparring Basquiat/ Warhol photos at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, April Gornik, Blythe Danner, Lisa Perry, Iris Smyles, Alice Aycock, and many more to honor their East End neighbors, Tom Roush and LaVon Kellner. A retired doctor, he used to treat many artists when they occupied lofts in Soho, before they became big names.

George Condo at The Morgan Library: Looney is a State of Consciousness

At the Morgan Library last week, in celebration of a show of his drawings, painter George Condo spoke about knowing he was an artist at age 4. It took a while before language kicked in; enrolled in school, he said, he responded to lessons with artwork. As he matured, so did his influences: French writers: Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Celine. Jack Kerouac’s “automatic writing,” the spontaneous writing Kerouac used in composing his Book of Sketches made a big impression. Among Condo’s many credits, he wrote the introduction to the Viking Penguin publication in 2006. Beguiled by Picasso when he lived in Paris, Condo made several portraits in a cubist mode. Music brought Condo to Jean-Michel Basquiat—when they met, they talked about electronic music—but Basquiat was most inspiring in insisting Condo move to New York.

At a dinner in Watermill, at the home of agent Andrew Wylie, Condo met novelist Salman Rushdie, who wrote about a Condo painting in his 2001 novel Fury. Titled “Psychological Puppeteer Losing His Mind,” (1994), Condo’s painting of Akasz Kronos, as Rushdie describes it, features “the puppet … broken free of the puppeteer’s control.” Rushdie’s writing here seemed most prescient as we think about Rushdie today, with a new novel, Victory City, even as the long-forgotten fatwa returned most unexpectedly, in all its horror this past summer, when a young man jumped the stage at a famed writers’ colony, badly knifing Rushdie.

Charlie Mackesy’s Journey: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse

Jet-lagged as you might expect for a British writer/illustrator just arriving from L.A., having promoted his film, and looking as you might imagine a mad scientist crossed with Gene Wilder, Charlie Mackesy held forth at a luncheon at the Whitby Hotel, signing cupcake boxes, posters, copies of his book, and telling a story about how his teaching drawing to a Holocaust survivor helped the man, now 100, unleash painful memories. His energy seemed remarkable, but the occasion, a celebration of the film adapted from his beloved book, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, was nominated for a Best Animated Short Film Oscar. Then you realize he’s fueled by the film, a fable with a fresh message. Starting with an encounter between a boy and a mole who is looking for cake in a snowy landscape—(well, isn’t everyone?)—the film addresses a fundamental question: the mole asks, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The boy answers: “Kind.”

Okay. Simple enough. The mole voiced by Tom Hollander thinks he sees a cake, and even when he discovers it is a tree, there’s no disappointment, well, not really, because the tree is the most perfect tree, just as the boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse they encounter on their journey are drawn with a romantic perfection, becoming kind together, and yes, a family. The fox—gently voiced by Idris Elba—bares his teeth. He could just as easily have eaten the mole who saved him from a trap—but he doesn’t and saves him right back from drowning in fast-moving icy waters.