For Charles Bukowski’s 100th birthday, coronavirus or not, attention must be paid. Famous in movies portrayed by Mickey Rourke (Barfly) and Matt Dillon (Factotum), the subject of a 1973 documentary by Taylor Hackford, Bukowski was a one-of-a-kind, sexy despite huge facial crevices left by acne, crude: he once described writing a poem was like taking a big bear shit. Now there’s a new documentary assembled from a rare, rediscovered 1981 interview by Silvia Bizio, an Italian journalist, You Never Had It-An Evening with Bukowski, directed by Matteo Borgardt, and whether or not you agree with Bukowski’s view of poetry composition, it is a must-see for a glimpse of this boozing, chain-smoker who fascinates with every word.
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- Marisa Tomei and Matthew Broderick at Guild Hall: The Plight of an Upper West Side Arts Space Gives A-List Actors The Big Chill
- Raul Esparza and Lily Rabe in The Winter’s Tale: Wet in Central Park
- Authors Night in East Hampton: If it’s Not One Thing It’s Your Mother
- Documentaries: Jocelyn Wildenstein The Lion Queen/ Tovah: How Jewish is It?
- Hamptons Journal: John Waters at Guild Hall: “Gay is not Enough” / “Cagney” at Bay Street/ “Signs” at the Bridgehampton Museum Tractor Barn
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The season would not be eh, the season without all-star comedy from Eugene Pack. He was back virtually on Sunday premiering a program of 3 short works to benefit Guild Hall, starring Matthew Broderick and John Leguizamo performing together for the first time, Blair Underwood and Sherri Shepherd, and Rachel Dratch, Cecily Strong, Andrea Martin, Santino Fontana and Maulik Pancholy. The talented Dayle Reyfel, Pack’s partner and frequent ensemble player, appeared in an unusual way. The playlets inaugurated the final leg of a series that will include some live, distanced, performances in the Guild Hall garden, all sold out. Reached by phone in LA, playwright/ performer, Eugene Pack said he is busy bringing actors together, but he wants everyone to know The Pack owes more to film, although it sounds more like an innovative hybrid, reflecting our current states of creativity. -
Dr. Ruth Westheimer, now 92, gets hot and heavy talking about sex. This year’s Author’s Night being different from all others, her talk was on Zoom, no touching allowed. Which does not mean it was phone sex, or phoned in. One of the joys of listening to the pint-sized therapist who loves to boast that her grandkids are taller than she is, is hearing her say the words vagina and penis with aplomb, whether or not the discussion calls for it. That’s part of her schtick, getting people used to the vocabulary, and the action. This year she is celebrating a reissue of her Heavenly Sex, dispensing the wisdom of the sages on her subject. “In the Jewish tradition,” she says, “sex is an obligation between husband and wife,” especially on Friday night, the beginning of the Sabbath. The sages were the best at sex therapy, she opines, because they suggested the man say to his wife, you are the best, an effective aphrodisiac. A husband can enter the vagina from behind, leaving the clitoris for stimulation. Good to know. -
From the look of Charlize Theron throughout her new Netflix movie, The Old Guard, immortality is not what it’s cracked up to be. Grimacing while engaging in the most athletic combat against warriors, scientists and opportunists who want to package her “gift,” she’s not having it. Called “Andy,” short for Andromache, so you know she goes back to Greek myth, she has already endured the fall of Troy and murder of her son. But through the ages, with medieval torture repeated endlessly, she’s the embodiment of the Myth of Sisyphus. Loneliness, watching loved ones die, may be worse, or facing drowning over decades as she does, having committed the sin of witchcraft alongside fellow immortal Quynh (Van Veronica Ngo), encased in an Iron Maiden. And yes, a legend Andy is, all fierce, her body finely tuned, not a gussied-up Wonder Woman. Watching Andy go through her paces is thrilling. -
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 17th century dress, from 1966. Born Pinchas Burstein, Maryan survived Auschwitz and lived for a time in New York, famed among artists.
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In case you were wondering what A-list actors were up to sequestered in the time of COVID-19, Bob Balaban works hard as ever from his home in Sagaponack, developing content for when “the gates are lifted,” and looking to help the community. With an idea for supporting Guild Hall, he got Alec Baldwin who got Julianne Moore, the result: a benefit staged reading of Bernard Slade’s two-hander, Same Time, Next Year opening on July 12 on Zoom.Said Josh Gladstone, GH artistic director, confronting the challenge of keeping its virtual doors open, “this is our third Zoomed show. “Balaban brought the idea to us.” Alec Baldwin supports so many cultural projects out east, and Julie wants to, but usually has scheduling difficulties; now she is out in Montauk, and everyone is free.
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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.
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Abel Ferrara makes movies the way Jack Kerouac writes fiction, in controlled spontaneity. The idea for Tommaso, about a filmmaker living in Rome, came to Ferrara as he was making another film, Siberia, a more challenging work demanding a greater budget for mountaintop scenes in five feet of snow, and forest exteriors. Tommaso is shot in Rome, where both he and his star Willem Dafoe reside in the same neighborhood; with interiors in Ferrara’s home, Tommaso is a take on his own domestic scene. His wife Cristina Chiriac stars as Tommaso’s wife, their daughter Anna Ferrara stars as their daughter. What a daring set up! Your friend playing an aspect of you making love to your wife!As Dafoe explained the process in an interview on this past week, the actors know the start point of a given scene, but don’t know where they will end up. Dafoe, a great theater actor, handles the improvisation, especially well, partnering with cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, but, he says, he finds more freedom in more structured filmmaking. Still, their close relationship helps with an improvisational strategy: Ferrara could tell Dafoe a story, and he, says Dafoe, “tries to inhabit what he’s talking about.”
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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.
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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.” -
Virtual premieres are new to me, and definitely to Kristin Scott Thomas who attended for her latest film Military Wives this week. After explaining that the film opened in the UK for five minutes before being shut down in the pandemic, the director of this feel good movie, Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty), introduced his stars, Sharon Horgan and Kristin Scott Thomas, while Thomas groused about the bleating of sheep being shorn. Isn’t that the way with Zoom? You may overhear the chit chat as you wait to be admitted. One advantage of a virtual premiere, she said getting into the novelty, “You can wear your own dress.”In Military Wives, a movie about a women’s chorus of military wives based on a true story, she plays Kate, a mother who has lost her teenage son in war. A control freak, and Kristin Scott Thomas is a master of contained rage, (her next role as Mrs. Danvers in Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of Rebecca should confirm), her bossy character commands the women’s group to sing. And sing they do, getting as far as London’s Royal Albert Hall. Sharon Horgan plays Lisa, another commanding leader of this group, orchestrating the music and writing lyrics. As she describes this character, her reaction to her husband going off to Afghanistan is red wine. Who can’t relate to that? “This is the right film for isolation and anxiety. You will reach for tissues and laugh out loud.”
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The works of Tennessee Williams are a goldmine for veteran actors, and Guild Hall has a rich history of producing his plays. At one such event, here’s how it went for a reporter and Eli Wallach. How old am I? asked Eli Wallach playfully. The occasion was a staged reading of works by Tennessee Williams in 2011, his words from memoirs, letters, and scenes from his work, most memorably The Glass Menagerie, in honor of the playwright’s centennial year. 91, averred a reporter. With a smile, his finger gestured up. Meeting the challenge, the reporter counted to 95. His face glowed. That’s it. That great evening at Guild Hall, directed by Harris Yulin who also performed, featured Mercedes Ruehl as Amanda Winfield, and on May 16, just nine years and, in the time of COVID-19, a world later, that evening will be revived at a staged reading of “Portrait of Tennessee: The Words of Tennessee Williams,” this time on Zoom. -
Of course, everyone remembers Jerry Stiller as George Costanza’s father on Seinfeld. Festivus? Remember the holiday of Festivus famously celebrated by George’s dad? Way before that he was the Stiller of Stiller & Meara, one of the greatest comedy teams ever, with his wife Ann Meara. And, as if I were paying a shiva call to his son Ben Stiller and family from my sequestered perch, I will recount a tale or two from this beloved curmudgeon comedian who died yesterday at age 92.March 15, 2008 at Judith Crist’s “Survivor’s Party.” I am the guest of Sylvia Miles, and Jerry Stiller installs himself between us on Judith’s couch. Jerry Stiller tells the story about his Versace suit—he had had some sort of attack and went to the hospital—came out feeling incredible, thrilled with life. He goes by Versace where he had purchased a suit for $900 just a year before, and the salesman remembers him. He tries on this suit for $1200, a gorgeous blue silk with subtle dots woven in. Jerry says, but I bought one last year for only $900. Can’t you do something about this? Come on man, says the salesman. Don’t do this, but Jerry persists. Who can you call? Well Gianni is dead and Donatella is in Milan. Call her in Milan, and he gets the suit for $900.
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As of the beginning of March, Film at Lincoln Center was abuzz with plans for the annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema, with On a Magical Night to screen, and filmmaker Christophe Honore, and his star Chiara Mastroianni to attend. The festival kaboshed, like much of everything, the film is now available: strandreleasing.com. The director and star, distanced in Paris apartments with their respective cats, talked about their film on Zoom.The French do have a way of making infidelity, especially a beautiful, feisty older woman with younger men, seem a rite of passage. Mastroainni plays Maria, married to Richard (Benjamin Biolay) who catches on by reading her student’s sexually charged texts on her phone. She leaves for a hotel across the street and the apparition of Richard’s younger self (Vincent Lacoste) comes calling. That’s the movie’s set up, and even when it is charming and funny, disloyalty carries its own weight.
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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.
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The writer/ editor Gordon Lish used to say, riffing off a groaner of a joke, “Everyone has to be somewhere.” For characters in isolation in a new play inspired by the moment, Felt Sad, Posted a Frog (and other streams of global quarantine), the location is all over the place. That, of course, is the point. We are all there, be it Belgrade, Buenos Aires, Bucharest or Berlin. An interweaving of streams by six playwrights—Iva Brdar, Jorgelina Cerritos, Rebekka Kricheldorf, Santiago Loza, Saviana Stanescu, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon—this work glimpses others in their sequestered locales, their loneliness, creativity, frustration, fear presented up close the way we are experiencing others these days—only, this is a work of theater, and like it or not, we’re in it. -
Remember when the big news was the rampant sexual predation in our culture? Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, men who preyed on women seem like proverbial spuds compared to the current threat on all our systems. The movie The Assistant, about Jane, an aspiring film producer in her entry level job at a movie studio goes through her routine, making coffee, copies, reservations, and observes some unsavory activity between a new hire and the much older unnamed, unseen boss. When she attempts to report her employer’s impropriety, the film takes on a timely edge, and made many who saw it at early screenings think of Harvey Weinstein in the Miramax years and beyond, just as the movie mogul was then the big news of the day, convicted after 87 women accused him of sexual misdeeds. Now, The Assistant is available on DVD, AppleTV, and Amazon Prime Video, and, while it has lost that hot topic punch as far as #MeToo, it gains in being emblematic of a bygone world in severe disrepair. If we ever go back to the office, it’s got to be better than this. -
To fete beloved Stephen Sondheim at 90 in song for two and a half hours, an A-list of Broadway stars zoomed in. Sure, you don’t get the wow production, the pageantry, the costumes and sets of a live musical, but what you do get is that up close emotion that the internet allows, as if you were seated a foot away from say Meryl Streep’s face as she carouses with Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald for a drunken rendition of “Ladies Who Lunch.” This is what the split screen was meant to do, just as Beanie Feldstein and Ben Platt’s duet from Into the Woods and Annaleigh Ashford and Jake Gyllenhaal from Sunday in the Park with George keeps them in the same frame, even as they, and we are, well, apart and elsewhere. -
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.
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Back in the early 1980’s, Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs grinned across the screen on Saturday Night Live, having just been introduced as the greatest living writer in America by supermodel Lauren Hutton. Usually writers don’t read from their work on television, but behind the scenes, Hal Willner made it happen. Willner, beloved music producer is best known for his work with musicians, but he was always literary, and he loved the Beat writers, and made recordings with Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Robert Wilson, who had collaborated with Burroughs and Tom Waits on The Black Rider. When his longtime friend Lou Reed died, he produced the memorial event for him at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Now it is Hal we will have to mourn: he died on April 7 at age 64.Here is a glimpse of Hal Willner at work on one of his productions:
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Among the many joys of New York night life, and jazz performances in particular was hearing Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar alongside his son John’s quartet at the Café Carlyle. This week the elder Pizzarelli (94) succumbed to the coronavirus. Through the years, John was a regular at the Carlyle, and seven years ago, his father was still out there performing and trading one-liners with his son. Here is my review from April 10, 2013, entitled “John Pizzarelli Quartet (Plus One) at the Café Carlyle:”This entertaining show may be billed as a jazz quartet, but as aficionados know, John Pizzarelli has a secret weapon: his dad. As he tells you, Bucky Pizzarelli, now 87 and seated beside him, has a long and distinguished career on guitar performing with Vaughn Monroe and other big bands of that era, but with his son John—and another son, Martin on bass—(that must be the family rebellion), the show at the Carlyle features smooth standards sprinkled with patter, as if son John, front man on guitar who also sings, needs to tell Bucky just where to come in.
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One of the last great New York nights was the opening of The Girl from North Country on Broadway, nearly a month ago. Among the guests crowding into the Belasco was Jesse Eisenberg. By coincidence I had just that afternoon seen his latest film Resistance, and still recovering from the power of this Holocaust survival drama based on the true story of the world’s most famous mime, Marcel Marceau, I stopped him to applaud his performance as a rescuer of orphans during that brutal time. “Oh, was it okay?” he asked, having not yet seen it. “It meant a lot for me. My family came from Lublin.”Because the movie is set in the South of France in Strasbourg, the chief Nazi villain is Klaus Barbie, known for outrageous cruelty, that is, the torture of his captives for pleasure. Dubbed “the Butcher of Lyons,” the movie’s merciless Barbie (Matthias Schweighofer), a handsome Aryan, descends upon a corps of homosexual Nazis on a night out. But that is just a taste of this true-life character, whose outsized violence escalates to barbaric heights in yet another scene, all the more horrible left to the imagination as Barbie describes what he will do to a captured young Resistance fighter. The memory of the terrified woman strapped into a doctor’s chair, her sister forced to watch, leaves a profound chill. It’s a moment of thrilling movie-making from writer/director Jonathan Jakubovicz.
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Back in the day, I knew a journalist who had a crush on Woody Allen, and joined a club with others similarly besotted. Witty and smart, this bespectacled nerd made them laugh, and that was sexy. Cut to Woody Allen today, a man in his ‘80’s trying to clear his name. His new book, Apropos of Nothing, is already a scandal because one publishing house coup caused a cancellation, to another’s gain. Hachette employees walked out in protest, leaving the publication to Arcade/ Skyhorse. Chalk it up to a knee jerk conclusion of guilt in the #metoo moment: a relapse of Woody Allen’s continued battle in courts of public opinion on the case of his having abused his daughter Dylan. You know the story. It’s complicated. A family rift. A woman’s revenge. In Apropos of Nothing, he tells his side: logical, clear, bewildered that his reputation remains besmirched after much investigation, his work boycotted in the America that gave it birth. If that were all, you might not want to read Apropos of Nothing. On the other hand, one of our most unique filmmakers also tells tales of his life, loves, craft and Manhattan real estate, offering a laugh-out-loud penthouse perspective: Brooklyn boy rises to the top. -
Inevitable that the current virus would claim the life of someone up close and personal. The pleasures of Terrence McNally’s work in theater have been a staple of New York’s Broadway and off experience for decades. In June 2019, I saw a revival of his Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, his writing a glorious vehicle for the talents of the actors Michael Shannon and Audra McDonald.A bed sits center stage at the Broadhurst Theater, in a Hell’s Kitchen apartment from the 1980’s. As Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune opens, Michael Shannon as Johnny and Audra McDonald, Frankie, make passionate love. From the grunts and groans, it’s pretty good sex we are witnessing, and when Johnny turns over, applause breaks out at the sight of his bare rump. Bodies are not all that’s naked in this intimate two-hander: as these co-workers in a diner have this night together, they talk and peel back histories of hurt.
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On December 27, 2016, I posted a story about returning to the Gotham Book Mart site, reconfigured after the legendary literary hangout lost its lease. Its proprietor, Andreas Brown, a man wise to books, theater, and the theater of books, died this week at age 86. Among many discoveries, he was onto Jimmy Kimmel, telling me, he’s going to be a big star. With some tweaking, I am remembering here Andreas Brown and his place among diamonds.“That’s our trouble,” said my friend Roger Friedman, “everything used to be something else.” I had just told him about meeting my brothers and their families for the third Chanukah candle, 13 relatives in all, at a glatt kosher restaurant called Taam Tov in the Diamond District, on the very site of the legendary Gotham Book Mart. On November 17, 1986, my book, Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics, one of the first full-scale studies on the iconic beat poet and novelist, was celebrated here. A sign, “Wise Men Fish Here,” marked the spot, a literary emporium on a bejeweled street. The James Joyce Society met here. Among many other book parties, a reissue of Junkie was feted here too, in 1977. Carl Solomon and Patti Smith attended, honoring William S. Burroughs’ work. Poet Allen Ginsberg, who had clerked here back in the day, snapped my picture.
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