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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Books

  • Hamptons Journal: Robert Wilson’s Very Merry Un-Birthday

    The parties are planned for the fall, at least 4 of them in Milan, Berlin, New York, and Paris, for the internationally famous artist Robert Wilson's 70th birthday. But on Saturday night, he presided over the 18th annual summer benefit for the Byrd Hoffman Watermill Center. Celebrating collaboration in the arts, the extravaganza featured an…

  • Allen Ginsberg at the Oscars, at MoMA, at Large .

    When James Franco co-hosts the Oscars this weekend, it won't be as the bespectacled poet Allen Ginsberg he so lovingly portrayed in the movie Howl. Of course, Franco may win the Best Actor Oscar for his work in 127 Hours, but his Ginsberg is spot on.  The multi- talented Franco has good taste in poets,…

  • Words and Pictures: at Tibor de Nagy and Condo’s Subversive Art at The New Museum

    On a random Friday afternoon between snowstorms, visitors to Tibor de Nagy's midtown gallery for the “Painters & Poets” exhibit marveled at the small press editions in vitrines (with work by Joe Brainard, Kenward Elmslie, Charles Henri Ford, and Allen Ginsberg) and whimsical black & white films by Rudy Burkhardt starring his artworld buddies: Larry…

  • Remembering Paul Bowles

    The American writer and composer Paul Bowles-born in Queens, New York– would be 100 years old tomorrow. In our age of instant fame, it is useful to think about an artist who was famous for not being in the limelight. In his time, the cult of personality was taking hold, and would worsen in the…

  • Dream Team Documentarians Make Freakonomics

    It takes a wild leap of the imagination to think Freakonomics, the best selling book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner could be made into a film. Incredibly, several offers were made and finally the right concept presented itself: a dream team of documentary filmmakers Morgan Spurlock, Alex Gibney, Eugene Jarecki, Rachel Grady…

  • Howl for Peter Orlovsky: A Clash of Aesthetics

    A scheduling glitch created the following conundrum: Best Generation poet and Allen Ginsberg's longtime mate, Peter Orlovsky, who died in June, was remembered on Wednesday at St. Mark's Church. Meanwhile the New York premiere of “Howl,” the new movie starring James Franco with Peter (Aaron Tveit) in a small role took place a few blocks…

  • Blythe Danner in My Brilliant Divorce at Guild Hall

    The actress Blythe Danner can do anything, and in the one-woman play, My Brilliant Divorce by Geraldine Aron, she does: pirouetting, leaping, laughing, singing, sashaying across a bare stage fitted with one large stuffed chair in which she is engulfed like Eloise. Accompanied only by a stuffed dog in a wheeling cart, she recounts the…

  • Andy Warhol’s Last Decade at the Brooklyn Museum and Remembered at the New York Public Library: Please Sign My Banana

    Andy Warhol more than exceeded his famous dictum about fame. Now an excellent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum focuses on his last decade, meaning, work of this art-world genius in late mid-career. The bewigged Warhol predicted he would not survive the hospital when he went in for a routine operation, and he was right. By…

  • Howl Has New York Premiere at NewFest/ In Memorium Peter Orlovsky

    The actor James Franco channels poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl, the part animation, part courtroom drama, part period piece about the creation of the iconic beat poem and the censorship trial for obscenity that followed its 1956 City Lights publication. Having filled the prestigious slot of opening night film at this year's Sundance Film Festival,…

  • Sex and the City II: The Morocco Connection

    The Carrie & Co. actors of Sex and the City may have enjoyed a premiere party in Moroccan style splendor at Lincoln Center's Damroch Park, a tagine in the tent theme based on the romance of desert dunes so comically played out in their new movie, the sequel to their 2008 hit and the HBO…

  • PEN/ Academy of American Poets / Burroughs in Sartasota

    The annual PEN World Voices Festival gears up in New York, with visiting literati arriving despite volcanic ash and house arrests from repressive governments that fear how their most creative minds will represent them. A Burmese blogger will receive top honor at the gala scheduled for this coming Tuesday, at the Museum of Natural History.…

  • Triumph Over Hitler: Holocaust Remembrance

     “I will protect you,” sings Father in the opera The Lost Childhood to comfort his son Julek, the tragic irony being that shortly thereafter he, emblematic of so many Jewish fathers, will be marched out of his Lvov, Poland home and murdered by the Nazis. Last Thursday, young Julek, now Dr. Yehuda Nir, a prominent Park…

  • The Real Estate of Happiness

    That sexy gap-toothed self-help guru of the Middle Ages, Chaucer's Wife of Bath, in her own quest discovered that what women want most is self-rule. Now in the Age of Autonomy for women, a new book The Nine Rooms of Happiness suggests desire has shifted.  As written by Self Magazine editor-in-chief Lucy Danziger informed by the clinical expertise of Dr.…

  • Love, Loss, for the next generation

    When I was a little girl, my mother used to make my clothes; all I wanted was store-bought dresses. Today, I am convinced I can do anything, as long as I am wearing the right outfit. When my daughter was a little girl, I shopped for her at Bendel's. Today, no matter what occasion, she…

  • Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Genes

    Opening his 1955 novel Lolita, Nabokov's narrator Humbert Humbert describes himself as “a salad of racial genes.” In hindsight, and based upon Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s new PBS series, Faces in America–to air on Wednesdays, February 10 through March 3–perhaps the novelist was being less metaphoric and more real than he imagined.  At…

  • Poets Supreme

    The National Arts Club was jammed with poets on Tuesday evening, and those were on the walls: images of Auden and Berryman, Ashbery and   Ginsberg and Gertrude Stein for the Portraits of Poets 1910-2010 exhibition. What about off the wall, the 3 hundred or so filling this historic Gramercy Park institution's homey Christmas sitting rooms? A who's who of poets and their photographers: Jill Krementz, Nancy Crampton,Chris…

  • Gloria Steinem’s Salon: Honoring Jane Campion

    The talent sipping cocktails at Gloria Steinem's brownstone duplex last Tuesday was through the roof. Without emphasizing the evening's feminist thrust, the gathering, to celebrate Bright Star director Jane Campion, evoked the tradition of Gertrude Stein's early 20th century Paris salons: novelists Erica Jong, Meg Wolitzer, Caryn James, and Susannah Moore whose book In the…

  • Villains in The Lovely Bones

    In case you don't already know, the subject of The Lovely Bones as well as Alice Sebold's best-selling book on which the new movie is based is that most horrendous of nightmares: the murder of a 14-year old. Imagining the challenge of making such an event watch-worthy, even enjoyable, I marvel at the ingenuity of…

  • Chelsea on the Rocks/ Naked Lunch at 50

    Beat era poet Ira Cohen eloquently sets the mood for Abel Ferrara's new movie, Chelsea on the Rocks about the legendary hotel on 23rd Street, reciting his own verse. Ferrara, the downtown filmmaker who recently made Go Go Tales, one of the hits of last year's New York Film Festival, seems to want to mark…

  • Robert Frank Has Eyes

    In his introduction to the iconic book of photographs, The Americans, Jack Kerouac wrote, You Got Eyes, honoring photographer Robert Frank as if he were a jazzman, You Can Play.  Now these words are writ large at the Metropolitan Museum's fine show, Looking In, exhibiting the 83 photos that were published in the original book…

  • Surf and Turf

    Montauk's Ditch Beach is a natural for surfers. That's why the auction held at the Surf Lodge last weekend sponsored by Cavi, and with proceeds going to a needy local family, featured specially crafted boards and artwork depicting this beach's bluffs and beauty. Now refurbished from its local Irish pub flavor, the interior of this…

  • Richard P. Rogers and Harold Norse Remembered

    If you had asked documentary filmmaker, Harvard professor Richard P. Rogers what he was working on in the 1980's or '90's, he would have told you, a movie about the place where he grew up, Wainscott. When he died of cancer in July 2001, that decades-old project remained in an attic in numerous boxes marked…

  • The Hunger at the Waverly Inn

    Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter with his ski slope sculpted white hair and Ecco Press's Daviel Halperrn in a halo of white frizz hosted a party for chef John De Lucie's “The Hunger,” at The Waverly Inn on Monday night. This book records his rise from low management head hunter, to cooking school, working through the…

  • PEN World Voices/ Daphne’s Depression

    What an international mecca New York was last week, with Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda arriving for the premiere of “Still Walking,” for example, or the Irish playwright Conor McPherson in town-(his play “the Seafarer was all the rage on Broadway last season)– showing “The Eclipse,” both films part of the Tribeca Film Festival. Dovetailing with…