Gossip Central

South Etna: A Pop-Up Provides Food for Thought in Montauk

If it is true, you are what you eat, at South Etna’s inaugural show in Montauk, “Painting is Painting’s Favorite Food: Art History as Muse,” art was most nourishing. At this week’s official gallery opening, a masked affair of course, scenesters and artists alike gathered in the outdoor space beside the exhibition space to talk art, to see each other, and queue up to view the work, only four at a time in the two-room faux Tudor space. Over Pimm’s and iced tea, a lively group including Cynthia Rowley, Ugo Rondinone, Stella Schnabel and many others congratulated Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann on this tasteful pop-up gallery. As joyful as the art is colorful and fresh, curated by Alison M. Gingeras, the event was a nostalgic nod to our pre-pandemic celebrations.

As you enter the gallery on the right, a post-expressionist painting, “The Seated Painter (After Vermeer),” illustrates at once the quality of work in the exhibition, and its theme, the way in which art inspires art. A figure seated at an easel has his back to us, perhaps the artist known as Maryan himself in 17^th century dress, from 1966. Born Pinchas Burstein, Maryan survived Auschwitz and lived for a time in New York, famed among artists.

Remembering Milton Glaser in Tangier

By the summer of 1983 when I met him, designer/ illustrator Milton Glaser, who died this week at age 91, was already famous. The founder of Push Pin Studios, a founder of New York Magazine, had already created the iconic sign, I [heart] New York, as well as so many other memorable designs, you knew his work before you knew who made it. Glaser was a friend of Silas Rhodes,  the founder of The School of Visual Arts, and taught graphic design at the school, participating in a summer program in Tangier, Morocco.

Silas liked to surround himself with talented people, and knowing that the writer Paul Bowles resided there, added creative writing to the program that already offered photography, fine arts, and graphic design. Paul, however, did not teach. That’s where I came in, with a freshly minted Ph.D. in American literature, having written a dissertation on Jack Kerouac, who Paul knew in the New York literary circles he occupied when he visited New York. More often, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, all came to see Paul. That summer, our group included, aside from Milton, Brice Marden, Mary Ellen Mark, Louise Bourgeois, Marshall Arisman, Ed Benguiat, Duane Michals, and guests passing through, Pete Hamill, and Francine du Plessix Gray.

Remembering Photographer Elsa Dorfman

A longtime collaborator with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and other literary figures, photographer Elsa Dorfman was a true American original. A portrait artist often associated with her main instrument, the large format 20" x 24" inch Polaroid camera, Dorfman, an influence to poets, and, from all reports, a great friend, died this week at 83.

In 2017, I met her when her pal Errol Morris made a film about her, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, his most intimate documentary. Usually working with out-sized personalities, McNamara to Rumsfeld, the murderous gasman of Zyklon B, to name a few, documentarian Errol Morris has the further distinction with his 1985 The Thin Blue Line, of having changed the course of one man’s destiny with his investigative work, unearthing evidence that showed he was innocent of murder.

Elsa Dorfman, a neighborhood friend seems a smaller portrait indeed, but the filmmaker caught up with this mild-mannered photographer just as the Gentle Giant movers were removing some large-scale Polaroids for storage, so his picture of her surprises as it covers the technical aspect of Polaroid photography, and perhaps, the end of an era. This conversation from that time, as the film was about to open after a distinguished festival run including the New York Film Festival, reveals something of Dorfman’s charm. Errol and Elsa complete one another’s sentences.

John Waters Cajoles Graduates at SVA Commencement: Become Covid-19 Commandoes!

Superstars Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey may be grabbing headlines offering online encouragement to college graduates this season, but John Waters did the job this week, dispensing discordant wisdom to designers and other artists graduating from The School of Visual Arts. The ceremony, usually held at Radio City Music Hall, featured far flung speakers, Waters himself at a podium with curtain backdrop from his home in Baltimore, setting of his most famous satiric films including his underground homage to filth, Pink Flamingos, and his breakout commercial hit, Hairspray. A dapper dresser in brocade jackets, Waters wore a traditional gown, cap, and latex gloves, all in black, his signature pencil thin ‘stache under an artsy mask. Pulling it off, he consoled the graduates who’d been robbed of a “normal” graduation: “If you do die tomorrow, at least you’ll have a college degree.”

Remembering Michael McClure

A West Coast beat, Michael McClure was less of a presence in New York than the seminal figures: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, but he was no less of a master poet, combining his love of nature with traditional forms such as villanelles, sonnets and sestinas. One of the last beat poets, Michael McClure (87) died this week.

Back in 1956, at the pivotal Six Gallery reading, where Ginsberg read Howl for an audience for the first time, and a shy Kerouac passed around a jug of red wine, as legend has it, McClure performed his 1954 poem, “For the Death of a Hundred Whales,” breaking down its ballad meter to A-B-C-B rhymes, to form a “cubist poem,” as he explained in his “The Beat Journey: An Interview.” He combined a love of theater, poetry, and art with his ecological concerns, and, among his credits, performed with Ray Manzarek of The Doors.

Mystery in Montauk: The Untoward End of Peter Beard’s Wild Ride

The story of Peter Beard has a grim end: some 19 days after he disappeared, after search parties including helicopters had given up their trawling the rocky coast, the erstwhile adventurer has just turned up. Some thought he went into the sea, lunch meat for sharks, if there are such fish at these shores, but no: maybe he’d gone into some secret corner of the woods, and like beat poetry catalyst Neal Cassady, another legend, died of exposure. No body, no news. But now all that may change.

The Times retold an anecdote about Beard, that while working in the city, when he was told his house had gone up in flames, he just continued his work. What the Times failed to say, and what might merely be Montauk rumor, was that the house had been burnt down by workers, locals disgruntled that they had not been paid. Legends abound about such adventurers: some saw the house lifted off the nearest cliff by Sikorsky helicopter, moved to the most remote point, a piece of property jutting farther into the sea than the lighthouse. Montauk residents gathered outside the church in the early ‘80’s, when Beard married Cheryl Tiegs.

Salman Rushdie Commands The Rainbow Room at the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Awards

Even against a gloomy sky, The Rainbow Room with its magnificent city views defied yesterday’s weather, an impending pandemic, democrats duking it out. At Guild Hall’s most festive winter celebration, honoring achievement in the arts and philanthropy, serenity reigned, although most honorees greeted guests and neighbors with fist bumps and elbows over the usual bear hugs and double cheek air kisses. Among those cheering on Dorothea Rockburne in the Visual Arts, Barry Sonnenfeld for Performing Arts, Ted Hartley for Philanthropy and “a life well lived,” and Salman Rushdie for the Literary Arts, were Philippe Petit, Ralph  Gibson and Mary Jane Marcasiano, Tovah Feldshuh, Blythe Danner, Jordan Roth, Toni Ross, Patti Kenner, and many more representing the vibrant community, many attendees former awardees. April Gornik promised that the long-awaited Sag Harbor Arts complex will open this spring. And Eric Fishl raised a glass to the memory of Michael Lynne.

Remembering Rip Torn: R. I. P. Rip

At the Greenwich House Theater for a memorial for Rip Torn, awesome clips revealed the evolution of this legendary actor’s astonishing film career from Baby Doll (1956) to Bible epics through roles as a good guy and then menacing bad ass, onto his Emmy winning television work on “The Larry Shandling Show” and “30 Rock” with a hilarious scene with Alec Baldwin. A bit from his 1969 The Bearding of the President showed him with his “Nixon” nose, his own invention, and at least one friend opined that he would have been an even bigger presence in film and stage but for his politics.

But among the ample work that was not screened, was a bit of voice over in the Oscar winning documentary Harlan County USA. Filmmaker Barbara Kopple needed someone to say, “We’ve got our guns now,” and asked him to say the line so it could be heard. “I’ve never told anyone, but now I am telling you,” Kopple confessed to a crowd of New York friends and family, among them David Amram who led the speakers off and concluded with a special song for Rip, and accompanied Rip’s twin sons with Geraldine Page, Jon and Tony Torn, in a reading of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig Mix It Up at the Gotham Awards

 Traditionally, the IFP Gotham Awards kicks off the film awards season. As celebrations go, this decidedly downtown dinner, sponsored by Robert Hall Winery, brings together New York’s movie making elite while honoring lower budget fare in Oscar-like categories. This year, I wanted to coin a category of my own, Best Speech, to be given to Olivia Wilde for her encomium to her "Richard Jewell" co-star Sam Rockwell, awarded one of Gotham’s four Lifetime Tributes. Wilde referred to the Academy Award winner for last year’s “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri” as “Sammy.” Yes, he’s definitely a Sammy she said later, lifting the train of her flowing white gown to prevent tripping as guests exited Cipriani Wall Street for the night.

Jules Feiffer at 90: Guild Hall Celebrates with an All-Star Reading of A Bad Friend

Starring Oscar awarded F. Murray Abraham and Mercedes Ruehl, the reading of Jules Feiffer’s 2003 play A Bad Friend at Guild Hall, could not have featured more good friends. Under the expert direction of Harris Yulin who also read, along with the outstanding Tedra Millan, Dave Quay, and Josh Gladstone, one of the East End’s finest character actors, the reading thrilled an audience of Feiffer’s friends (Monte Farber and Amy Zerner, Audrey Flack, Susan Lacy, Celia Weston, among them), his wife Joan Holden, and the author himself.