Gossip Central

Meeting Chef Mauro Colagreco: Reinventing Mirazur

Among the many pleasures of the documentary-rich Tribeca Film Festival, Reinventing Mirazur is particularly yummy, the best word for a film about food. Or rather, the transformation of a multi-star Michelin restaurant in Menton, France during Covid. At center is a brilliant chef, the Argentinian Mauro Colagreco, named best in the world, who expected to be studying cooking in Paris for a few months—as one does— that stretched into twenty years, ending up in the most gorgeous setting, on the French Riviera—actually the perfect place for a restaurant that went from just great and innovative food to a more planet-conscious culinary experience. Mauro is a teddy bear of a man in the film, beyond friendly and loving to family and to his restaurant staff. Not that life was easy. During Covid, he could not fly back to Argentina when his beloved mother died. He went through great growing pains as a restaurateur. 

Cut to this film premiere at Tribeca, and an after party at Carbone where he would be the guest of honor. Intrigued and thoroughly seduced by the film, I was pleased to be invited to meet this world-class chef, fueled by the fantasy that he would be dishing out tiny slivers of lamb layered with leaves, as he does in Reinventing Mirazur. When I arrived at Carbone, no one could say he would be there. I had a glass of chardonnay in a corner, and ample samples of Carbone’s signature meatballs and veal parmigiana as the small venue filled with scenesters. The food was delicious.

Remembering Brice Marden in Tangier

You know the old adage: I would have paid more attention had I realized how important it was. In 1983 when I taught a summer writing workshop in Tangier with Paul Bowles at the American School of Tangier, the School of Visual Arts, under the leadership of founder Silas Rhodes invited a distinguished faculty that included Brice Marden. With reverence for the history of Tangier as an artists’ mecca, Marden and his family, his wife Helen Marden, their two girls, Mirabelle  and Melia (5 and 3), and an au pair, were given the room Henri Matisse occupied when he resided at the Villa de France Hotel. I lived in the room next door. The view was over the sumptuous gardens which Matisse painted in his modernist style. Marden’s abstract style, lyrical blocks of color and sinewy lines did not seem suited to palm foliage and flora, nor to the colors but he surely absorbed the vibe. At breakfast on the terrace, the girls seemed extraordinarily well behaved. Having already met the man I would marry, my fears about life as a wife and mother were allayed by seeing this family living free to travel and explore. Helen, an artist who had waitressed at Max’s Kansas City, would say, to acclimate to a culture, eat their yogurt and onions, and drink their wine.

At times, Brice and Helen, and whoever was teaching—that could be photographer Mary Ellen Mark, or graphic designer Milton Glaser, or type designer Ed Benguiat, or journalist Pete Hamill, would meet at the hotel bar. Because Brice was a fan of the beat writers, we had a connection through the poetry—I had written on Jack Kerouac and knew William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, all of whom spent time in Tangier. And, we smoked kif together. Later, after our time in Tangier, he did a series (1989-91), an homage to the Chinese poet Han Shan named for his “Cold Mountain” poems. Han Shan, famously a reclusive drunk, was the inspiration for Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and poems by Gary Snyder. On a random evening Brice and I had dinner at the Claridge, a classy joint on the main boulevard, Louis Pasteur. Visiting Tangier in July, I had Brice on my mind as I passed the former restaurant now a bar and a bit run down. Sadly, Brice Marden died on August 9.

Unscripted: The 76th TONY Awards

The Writers’ strike was on everyone’s mind at the 76^th annual TONY awards on Sunday night. Opening with a gorgeous dance number on the expansive United Palace Theater stage, the TONY show was its own Broadway show on upper Broadway that is, in the heights, Washington Heights. We do know that Lin-Manuel Miranda has enormous influence in the theater community, and he also has some inspiring ideas. Ubering in, guests missed Radio City Hall for a moment but took in the glamor and glitz of this spectacular venue. TONY host Ariana DeBose welcomed everyone in her own language of movement, with that exuberant dance opening, breathless as she welcomed everyone, acknowledging writers— the lack thereof, --and saluting Puerto Rican day. This was the quintessential New York night.

Pre-televised, some awards for lighting and sound design were given out, with a wonderful tribute to John Kander whose New York, New York is now wowing audiences. Beowulf Borritt won Best Scenic Design of a Musical for that show, explaining how the sets were hand-painted, not video screened in his acceptance speech. Both Kander (96) and Joel Grey (91) were celebrated with Lifetime Achievement Awards—Grey receiving his from his daughter, Jennifer Grey. A star from the very start of his career, winning his first TONY for Cabaret (and an Oscar for the movie), Grey was the son of a Yiddish actor which goes far to explain his pre-pandemic production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish. He said, you never know when something you are offered that you don’t think is right for you, is actually right, such as Anything Goes in which he starred with Sutton Foster.

Many such legendary figures were on hand. When Leopoldstadt won for Best New Play, writer Tom Stoppard joined the cast and crew onstage; similarly, when Parade won for Best Musical Revival, writer Alfred Uhry spoke, followed by the “In Memoriam” reel accompanied by Juaquina Kalukango, last year’s winner for Paradise Square, singing “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” from Phantom of the Opera. Without saying so, the performance was a nod to Andrew Lloyd Weber who would not have a Broadway show in production for the first time in decades. Even though Funny Girl was not eligible this year, Lea Michele’s “Don’t Rain on my Parade,” was irresistible. And Will Swenson, starring as Neil Diamond in A Beautiful Noise, led a sing-along to “Sweet Caroline.”

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.

Julie Benko at Birdland: No Rain on her Parade

Photo: Kevin Alvey

Birdland became Preservation Hall North as Julie Benko marched her band on stage for a set called Euphonic Gumbo. The performance, inspired by the French Quarter of New Orleans, was hardly a random soup, but more of a well thought out, scenic visit to the Crescent City, beloved by Benko and her husband, jazz pianist Jason Yeager who makes her arrangements of classic tunes entirely fresh for her.

It helps that the seven-piece band includes first rate players: including Michael O’Brian on bass, drummer Jay Sawyer, Andy Warren on trumpet, Evan Christopher on clarinet and Ron Wilkins on trombone. Mixing up the music and her story-telling, Benko created a quiz with prizes that include Café du Monde chicory infused coffee, her CDs, and a return to her next Birdland gig—all great because, as she demonstrates amply, she is a master at the cabaret genre, her theme enabling her to provide a history of the beloved Louisiana city, as well as lovely renditions of the tunes.

Remembering Aline Kominsky-Crumb

The Crumb documentary is ruining my life, complained Aline Kominsky-Crumb in 1993, as Terry Zwigoff’s biopic about Robert Crumb, her husband, gained acclaim, becoming a darling on the festival circuit. “Next thing you know, we’ll be invited to the Jerusalem Film Festival.” All of this drama was played out in a comic strip that appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Festival director Leah von Leer saw an opportunity and wrote to the Crumbs. “Your nightmare has come true. You are officially invited.”

Nominated for an academy award for best documentary feature, Crumb was a revealing look not only of this famous cartooning couple but Robert’s unusual family, capturing his highly eccentric and artistic brothers just before one committed suicide. Passionate for jazz, Robert had a huge record collection. Vinyl filled a room. Fearing an atmosphere of violence in their area of California, where gun ownership was de rigeuer, the Crumbs left for the south of France and lived in a multistoried house carved out of the rock on the banks of the Vidourle.

This much I knew when I encountered Robert and Aline in the lobby of our hotel in Jerusalem; I too came with a film, a documentary about the writer/composer Paul Bowles who lived in Tangier. “Did your records make it across the Atlantic?” I asked him as a way of saying hello. The Crumbs and my family—my husband Bob Salpeter, our two daughters, and my mother aged 73 and a survivor of Auschwitz --hung out. While Aline and I gabbed away getting to know one another—we had grown up in the New York City boroughs, finding our escape to Manhattan; we had ties to the Soho Weekly News-- Robert was helping my mother navigate the streets, gentle as could be. Aline dubbed her own mother Blabette, but genuinely liked mine grasping her spirituality.

White Noise Opens the New York Film Festival with a Bang

The 60^th New York Film Festival opens with a lot of noise, White Noise, that is. Noah Baumbach’s movie, adapted from Don DeLillo’s classic American 1985 novel, features the kind of ambient sound that barely registers, punctuated by the boom of train/freighter collisions in combustible flames exuding plumes of smoke. It’s a canvas of the senses, in grays and vivid crayon color—all the distractible elements necessary for survival in the face of definite death. In Samuel Beckett’s hands, this dilemma is sparely etched. But guided by DeLillo’s images of American detritus, Noah Baumbach succeeds in answering the question of how can anyone make a movie out of the satiric cacophony/ harmony of White Noise? Or, perhaps even more relatable, how would you respond to a “toxic airborne event?”

He succeeds well, utilizing station wagons and the A&P supermarket to full luster. Not since Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” have the aisles popped with shoppers and products strategically placed in happy familiarity. Mountains of everything a consumer would want to hoard.

His first adaptation, Baumbach claims to have been thinking about this project ever since as a teen his father put the novel in his hands. It helps that his father, novelist Jonathan Baumbach, was a professor at Brooklyn College and a writer wracked with his own existential dread, all familiar territory for the young Baumbach to mine. On a college campus setting, Jack Gladney (the excellent Adam Driver) is a celebrity academic, a specialist in Hitler studies. His colleague, Murray Suskind, (wonderful Don Cheadle) teaches Elvis. A beautifully choreographed lecture shows how enthusiasm for each of these idolized “superstars” flattens any moral, ethical consideration. Jack’s wife Babette (Greta Gerwig with big hair reminiscent of Melanie Griffith’s in Working Girl--no doubt costume designer Ann Roth’s touch), tries to cure her affliction: fear of death, much to the alarm of their three eldest children who chatter from beginning to end. Baumbach directed them to do that, as if they were an ongoing radio--back-sound being the point—punctuated by Danny Elfman’s music and a surprise joyful ending from LCD Soundsystem: to “new body rhumba.”

Stirring the Pot: Mixing It Up for 2022

 

Not so long ago from a kitchen set made on the stage of the John Drew Theater, New York Times food writer Florence Fabricant asked chef Anthony Bourdain what he likes to cook most at leisure with family and friends. “Flipping burgers in my backyard,” he replied, a good answer in a room full of Hamptonites accustomed to the informal dining associated with East End life. This episode of Stirring the Pot, Fabricant’s yearly series at Guild Hall came during a period when the famous culinary adventurer had logged a gazillion frequent flyer miles for his famous CNN Parts Unknown program. Having sampled a wide array of the world’s most exotic cuisine, he responded simply, a great punchline to a great interview, and with a sense of fullness, an audience got up satisfied as if following a great meal.

Similarly, interviews with other celebrity foodies were a fixture of the Guild Hall summer season: Marcus Samuelson, Jacques Pepin, Mario Batali, Carla Hall, Sam Sifton, and Eric Ripert, --Bourdain’s buddy who will return offering a demo in preparing ratatouille-- were a highpoint of Sunday mornings in August, but this year as Guild Hall undergoes its renovation, he will be cooking eggplant and veggies at Hayground School.

Celebrating Guild Hall at Cipriani 42 Street

Many revelers at this week’s Guild Hall winter gala remembered that before Covid locked everyone down, they were celebrating the premiere East Hampton cultural institution at its 2020 annual gala. And while much has changed in these two years—the venue was now the cavernous Cipriani 42^nd Street—and, the 2022 honorees were Board Chair Marty Cohen and Michele Cohen without the customary Academy of the Arts recipients—the mood was exuberant, as this huge, yet intimate event of East End neighbors chatting, catching up has not lost any of its warmth. Academy president Eric Fishl recalled that in that pre-pandemic limbo, no one knew whether to fist or elbow bump but preferred to kick one another in the ankles. All these dressed up people kicking the s__t out of each other, he laughed.

Alessandro Nivola’s Breakthrough in The Many Saints of Newark

How was Tony Soprano “made?” That’s the through line for the long-awaited prequel to HBO’s Sopranos series, The Many Saints of Newark. At a stellar premiere this week at the Beacon Theater, Robert DeNiro, who knows a thing or two about mobsters, along with Tribeca Film Festival partner Jane Rosenthal—greeted a packed, masked house of the show’s creators, veteran actors, as well as devotees dressed to kill. As creator David Chase introduced the superb cast, much hooting and shouting, I love you, rang out--well, this was a celebration. With no room for this feature to tank—instead, it radiated excellence intertwining the Soprano’s trademark violence with values of the family kind.

Tony (a wonderful Michael Gandolfini trying on his late, great father’s shoes) is just a kid here, troubled but smart, a born leader, taking notes from a variety of paternal figures, especially his uncle Dickie Moltisanti played with psychotic charm and menace by Alessandro Nivola. You have never seen this actor this good, turning from lover to murderer on a proverbial dime. At the Tavern on the Green afterparty, Vera Farmiga, Tony’s mother Livia in the film, could not stop talking about Sandro, how she could not take her eyes off his every gesture. She, in turn, transformed to play the Soprano matriarch, brings the mob wives’ domineering submissiveness to new levels of humor and delight. John Magaro as Silvio Dante gets a big laugh as we see him walk that walk. Billy Magnusson as Paulie Walnuts frets over the blood stains on a new jacket as he tortures, making a mess using a drill. They almost got Corey Stoll as Uncle Junior to sing. With its sly humor and nod to the popular, game changing series, the movie creates its own universe—this is not Philip Roth’s Newark.

Remembering Anthony Bourdain in Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner

The Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville assembled much evocative footage of his latest subject, Anthony Bourdain for his movie Roadrunner, even controversially putting words in the celebrity chef’s mouth—literally using A. I. While the film’s critics are abuzz over this technique, Anthony Bourdain’s life and work are overall well served in Neville’s treatment as he tries to untangle Bourdain’s sad demise. Bourdain was first a writer, and sadly, a suicide. If the viewer had not read the 2018 headlines, that news comes at the movie’s start. This is not going to end well, he says, and by the documentary’s end, there’s not a dry eye on the screen.

Bourdain’s taste for artistic bad boys--Burroughs, Genet,--- was not merely literary. You get a sense of his lust for extreme states of consciousness. He disparaged Kerouac, by the way, who might have been a forebear for a man on the road. Beyond his work in Les Halles’ kitchen, his distinct writerly voice, and penchant for drugs, Bourdain played a role as a subversive food ambassador. What I liked best about his sensibility was his sly political slant. In 2014, at Guild Hall, when NYT food writer Florence Fabricant asked CNN’s Anthony Bourdain, which country was most surprising, he quickly answered Iran. Most Americans had not been there, and he seized a moment of opportunity. Now, he said ruefully, would not be the time. That was the Anthony Bourdain everyone fell in love with, the celebrity food maven who sniffed out countries for his “Parts Unknown” series, favoring smelly dysfunction over orderly functionality. Iran surprised him with a people that had the attitude, “Are you American? We don’t care what the government is doing; welcome, we want to know you. In a Teheran restaurant where they put flags on diners’ tables, they apologized, Sorry, all our American flags were burnt.”