Dominick Dunne

Dominick Dunne

Too Much Money, Too Many Secrets
Random Thoughts on Dominick Dunne and Truman Capote

Dominick Dunne’s last novel Too Much Money probably deserves a brief mention on my Facebook page. Something like, “If you follow the lives of Brooke Astor, Lily Safra, Barbara Walters, Liz Smith, Conrad Black, Gary Condit, and the von Bulows, and need an airplane or beach novel, this quick read will do the trick.”

But I kept thinking about Dunne, even though this wafer of a novel probably doesn’t bear too much examination. I read about similarities between Dominick Dunne and Truman Capote, one of my favorite writers, when I was young. (At 14, I stole a book of Capote’s short stories from the school library. They never missed it.) Both writers covered low acts in high society and craved celebrity. Capote went on about the nonfiction novel, and Dunne just called his books novels. Capote spent his last years doing very little writing, addicted to drugs and alcohol and appearing incoherent in public. Although Dunne was sober, clear, and productive, he was in the closet. Dunne probably wanted the literary attention that Capote received early in his career. And while Dunne outsold his writer family, brother John Gregory Dunne and sister-in-law Joan Didion, he never entered the pantheon of literature. At the same time, he didn’t seem bitter. He was inside the fish bowl and yet always remained an outsider. His residences, full of traditional expensive fabrics, make a nod to his society connections, but are like miniature replicas.


Dunne's terrace on Manhattan's Upper East Side


The study where he wrote

Capote’s swans rejected him after Answered Prayers, but Dunne kept moving in the world he wrote about despite the occasional snub. Not that he didn’t have enemies, like the Kennedys, the Safras, and most famously Congressman Condit. And while he got careless with facts, as Capote did from time to time, most folks knew he was telling a larger truth. When you get to the top, there ain’t much there. This is the deeper secret Capote didn’t see.

A few months ago, we rented the documentary After the Party, which chronicled Dunne’s story. Listen to him talk—he was so obviously gay. Earlier in his career, he was a television and film producer and was the executive producer of the film Boys in the Band. Maybe all those campy queens spoke a truth to him but also frightened him deeper into the closet. The documentary and his nonfiction writings make it clear that he cared deeply about his children and his former wife. These days it’s easy to dismiss a man torn like that—“Oh, he just got married to cover up,” etc. But I don’t think it is so simple. Sexuality is not so simple. In a clever move, Dunne used his last novel to come out when his main character/alter ego Gus Bailey reveals he is gay.


The living room where he entertained very little


An old photo of Dunne at his country house in Connecticut


The living room in Connecticut

Little is known publically about Dunne and his sexuality. In his interview with George Stephanopolous, Dominick’s son, Griffin Dunne, uses the words gay and bisexual to describe his father. A few months before his death, Dominick told the London Times that he was a “celibate closeted bisexual.” As I have written before, I think the term bisexual honestly expresses the human condition. I think you are born with an orientation and as you grow up and meet people, you move back and forth along the continuum. What is tragic is when somebody has to deceive and experience shame for most of their life. We all deceive, and the truth is slippery. But to live in constant deception and shame distorts your life. And yet Capote, who was out of the closet most of his life, seemed full of self-loathing and led, at least for his last years, a miserable existence. Dunne, who speaks about his father mistreating him as a child for being a sissy, stayed in the closet his entire adult life. After success in Hollywood, he too became addicted to drugs and alcohol, but then found sobriety. He lived a life that he was drawn to and repelled by at the same time. In both cases, the shame of sexuality, revealed or not, propelled the men into a furious chase for recognition.

If their families and society in general had been accepting of unorthodox sexuality, might these two have never become successful writers? Was it the outsiderness that made them? I am betting on a life with too little money and fewer secrets.


Some of Dunne's subjects

Utopian Cities at SPUR

Photo by Colleen McHugh

Through May 28

When urban planners think big, the resulting plans are often labeled “utopian.” Does this mean “head in the clouds” or “impossible to achieve”? Or does it mean “planning with more concern for the occupants than for profit”? The current exhibit at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association’s year-old SPUR Urban Center sparks all these questions and more. It is the perfect kind of show for SPUR’s modest exhibition space. The view from the street draws you into the simple high space. There are no gimmicks here, just a broad sampling of city plans pasted on the wall. You can skim the surface or really look at them. The catalog is modest for its $35 price tag, but useful for further study.

The exhibit didn’t require huge crates or expense. They are decals pasted on the wall. SPUR matched the paint color and the cities seem to blend into the wall. Of course, Dan Wood and Amale Andraos, the architects (of the NYC firm WorkAC) who curated and produced the show, taught a seminar on utopian urbanism at Princeton, and had some help from their students.

It’s like a crash course in urban design.




Photos by Colleen McHugh

Architects will want to know what scale everything is at. The scales are beneath the plans. Due to the limited wall space, some of the plans don’t have quite enough space around them. You have to get down on your knees to see everything. But that’s kind of the way cities are.

While it is common wisdom that we need to densify our settlements, some cities, like Port-au-Prince, are going to try and dedensify because the population puts more demand on the infrastructure than it can take. A lot of new urbanism became an excuse for denser and more lucrative suburbs for developers. It’s time to think boldly, but now we can’t make as many mistakes as we did in the past.

Of the 49 city plans shown in the exhibition, very few were ever realized. But it’s time to be rethinking how we live together as we are forced to change the way we use precious resources like oil and water and to rethink the nature of free market capitalism. This show is a good reference point.

Check it out before the end of the month!




Photos by Colleen McHugh

Art Surrounds You: An Interview with Kota Ezawa

Kota, 2006
Color Aquatint Etching
19.5 x 23 inches
Edition of 35
Courtesy of the artist and Paulson Bott Press

Recently I interviewed Kota Ezawa at Paulson Bott Press about some new prints that he was making. (You can read that interview at www.paulsonbottpress.com) Our conversation went off in several directions, including the animated videos and light boxes he is known for, as well as his recent project of disassembling and reordering Eisenstein’s montage step sequence in Battleship Potemkin. This is an edited version of the conversation.

Interviewer: Do you still see video and animations as your primary modes of expression?

Kota Ezawa: It is changing because of what's happening to video. I would say that animation is still the backbone of a lot of these projects. But the Battleship Potemkin project is not even turning into a film anymore, it's more an image sequence. Of course, an image sequence is also animation. There is a static quality to the prints that is not so true in the light boxes, because the light boxes are illuminated.

Interviewer: You are playing with a sense of time and with a familiar image. Familiar to you personally, or familiar to the culture, like the Polaroid, the moon, the film Potemkin. I think you are playing with time in a way.

Kota Ezawa: But I am also trying to get rid of that. There are the 19th century photographs that I remade. That was about updating them, bringing them to the present. But with the Potemkin, it’s not really doing that. I am using an old technique on old material. I like to mix it up.

Staircase, 2009
Ink on paper
Frame 11 x 13.25 inches/image 6.75 x 9 inches
HG10370
Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco

Staircase, 2009
Ink on paper
Frame 11 x 13.25 inches/image 6.75 x 9 inches
HG10363
Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco

Interviewer: Is it about some kind of dialog?

Kota Ezawa: Yes.

Interviewer: Let's talk about the imagery itself and selecting images that may not be necessarily photographs. I am interested in your borrowing from the IKEA catalog. That is not an iconic photograph in the sense of so much of your previous work.

Kota Ezawa: The IKEA catalog was a predecessor to the Potemkin project. I wanted to work with each page, but that idea died because the catalog was too thick. It has something like 372 pages.

Since I redraw each image by hand, that wasn’t doable. With IKEA, I don’t have the same relationship as with many of these images. I don’t hate IKEA, so it's not an Adbusters-type project. But I don’t love IKEA, so it's also not a glorifying project. I have a lot of these mixed relationships. But IKEA played a role in my recent life. I bought an apartment in Berlin two years ago, so I went to IKEA to get a few things to get started, to get the bare minimum for the apartment. And then just two months later, I moved from my apartment in North Beach to a place near Polk Street, and again I started with nothing, without furniture.

I did two very extensive IKEA shopping trips within a few months for two apartments, and I became very conscious of the phenomenon. At the same time, I read a book by the French theorist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the System of Object. And it's a fascinating book he wrote in the 1960s. He talks about how objects of desire disappear in the palm of your hand. That is what’s happening now, but he predicted it in the 1960s. He said that furniture doesn’t really exist anymore. In the 19th century, when you bought a dresser, it was a sculptural object. In the 1960s, he said, you don’t try to buy furniture, you try to find the solution to one of your life problems. The solution has to be 70 inches long and 35 inches tall, and two boxes of books have to fit into it. You go to IKEA to solve some problem of your life. I find it very philosophical to hang out at IKEA.

$150, 2008
Duratrans transparency & lightbox
40 x 30 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


$2.99/ea (NEW!), 2007
Duratrans transparency & lightbox
36 x 60 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco

Interviewer: What is some other imagery that you've been drawn to recently, that you've been working with?

Kota Ezawa: This last year was really taken up by the Potemkin project. Just before the presidential election, the New School had a big exhibition called Ours: Democracy in the Age of Branding. They showed some of the IKEA light boxes, but they also wanted me to do a new piece for the exhibition. I made a wood sculpture, which I called Hand Vote. It shows a crowd of people raising their hands.

Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco

Interivewer: Does it refer to a specific election?

Kota Ezawa: No. It's just an image of people raising their hands, which to me is fundamental to the idea of democracy. People either raise their hand or they leave it down. It's how it works.

Interviewer: Is this related to other recent work?

Kota Ezawa: Yes, I think it is related to the Flowers print. It is a basic image without strong reference to a specific event. I also did a commission for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC. They asked a number of artists to do images based on their slogan, "Art surrounds you. Art surrounds us." I made a drawing of a studded choker. It's punk rock paraphernalia. I was very happy that they made a big billboard panel and put it on the outside of the museum, with this image of a studded choker, and it says, "Art surrounds you."

FLOWERS, 2009
Color Aquatint Etching
20 ½” x 27
Edition of 50
Courtesy the artist and Paulson Bott Press

Art Surrounds You
Courtesy of the artist

Interviewer: What kind of drawing was it?

Kota Ezawa: It was a digital drawing. It’s like Flowers or Hand Vote.

Interviewer: There is a sense of erasure in your work, or a leveling. You are erasing a line between the iconic and the personal, and with the photographs, between the amateur and the professional. Could you expand a little on this concept of erasing? Are you erasing in new ways?

Kota Ezawa: I wouldn’t call it erasing, more like translating or simulating. I don’t think my images are only just simplifications of the images. I hope that the images also gain something by the process.

Interviewer: By the reduction?

Kota Ezawa: Yes.

Interviewer: That they become something else?

Kota Ezawa: It’s a reduction, but in some ways it's also not a reduction. For example, look at the film frame of Last Year in Marienbad. I had a VHS tape, and I digitized it, and then I took one frame, and what's visible in one frame of VHS is very little. And so, a lot of what you see there is invented.

Interviewer: So, you're actually adding?

Kota Ezawa: Yes. I get rid of shadows or nuances that the original images have, but I also add something. For example, I add sharpness and dimension and color and depth to some of these images. And I think they become more impactful through the process.

Interviewer: Through their reinterpretation?

Kota Ezawa: Yes.

LYAM 3D, 2008
DVD, Color, Silent
4 minutes

Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco

Interviewer: What are you going to work on next?

Kota Ezawa: I want to do a wood sculpture similar to the Hand Vote sculpture, based on this image of flowers. I like putting images through the mill and exhausting them. This image exists as a light box, and now as a print, and then hopefully as a wood sculpture. I'm interested in doing an animation project that deals with my hometown, the town where I grew up. I was born in Cologne, but I grew up in the small town in the German countryside called Mössingen.

Interviewer: Is it near Cologne?

Kota Ezawa: No, it's near Stuttgart, near the Black Forest in southwest Germany. And it's a town Germans have never heard of. But it's a remarkable place. In 1933, the day after Hitler came to power, there was a worker uprising against the Nazi regime in this town, and it was tragic because it didn’t change the course of history. It was a naïve uprising because they thought all of the workers would go on a strike and protest the new government. All of the workers left their factories and made banners, which said, for example, "Hitler die." They thought this was happening all over Germany, but it was just happening in this little town. And then police from all the surrounding towns came in and squashed it. About a hundred workers were arrested, and some fled. Some went as far as Spain to join the civil war there. It is the kind of story that's not being told, because this town is now West Germany. So, after World War II, when there was a first opportunity to commemorate these events, it wasn’t a popular story, because the people driving this uprising were members of the communist party. And the communist party belonged to the east block. So, everybody was like, "Let's not talk about this." It wasn’t until the 1980s that they were texts written about this worker uprising.

Interviewer: There are a lot of twists with an event like that, a lot of ways to examine it. It’s taking some of your insight into imagery and applying it directly to a specific social phenomena. Sometimes with your imagery, I don’t know if you are commenting on, say, the film Potemkin, or the story of this film. Or whether you are commenting on the instantaneous nature of the Polaroid camera or the camera as a corporate symbol.

A lot of your work has been more about how we perceive subjects or events. But here the subject becomes more important.

Kota Ezawa: It does. But then on the other hand, of course, I'm also looking at how this can be done formally. And I'm not sure, because it hasn’t even really started yet, but I have a hope that it will somehow connect to this ink exploration that started with the Battleship Potemkin.

There was a film by the American cartoonist, Winsor McCay. He made this cartoon, Little Nemo. It was popular in the early 20th century. And he also made an animated film called The Sinking of Lusitania, the sinking of a passenger ship that's hit by a torpedo.

It is a really remarkable film, and to me that’s the model for this project. To make a documentary film, yet in the absence of real footage, to do it as an ink animation.

Interviewer: Will Little Nemo be the basis for your film?

Kota Ezawa: No, I have an archive of photos of the Mössingen uprising that I am going to use.

Interviewer: Are you relying on your memory as well as the historic material?

Kota Ezawa: I have a book that I'm working with right now, but I haven’t decided. There was one film about it that was made for a local TV station, but the filmmaker doesn’t even have a copy anymore.

Interviewer: How do the Germans respond to your work?

Kota Ezawa: I just had my first exhibition in Germany this year in a gallery in Frankfurt. It was not a huge success, but success is a strange word. But the fact that it was not a huge sales success could be because it is a very depressing economic time. I live here in the US most of the time, and people here are much more exposed to what I do. I'm just starting the conversation in Germany. But then I wonder , if Germans have access to my work like people here do, what will their response be? You alluded to that when we spoke about creating surfaces. I think America is a country that's obsessed with surface in a good way and in a bad way. And I'm somewhat obsessed with surfaces. And the Germans…well, yesterday I did a conversation with Rudolf Frieling, the curator of media arts for SFMOMA, and he is clearly not interested in surface. He's interested in the why and the reasonings. That's very German.

Interviewer: But your work isn’t about making a pretty picture.

Kota Ezawa: Yes, but that's why the flowers are so important. I really want to make beautiful things.

Interviewer: But there's also quite a lot of reasoning and philosophy and thinking in your work. I mean, in the whole analysis of photography and what is reality and how it gets translated. I would think that would appeal to the Germans.

Kota Ezawa: I don’t try to invade any kind of cultural context. It's surprising. I've had some recent interaction with Spanish museums, and I have never even been to Spain. I don’t know why my work has some kind of resonance there, but it does. It remains to be seen what will happen.

For more information about Kota and his work please see:
www.textslidesandvideotapes.org/
www.hainesgallery.com
www.paulsonbottpress.com

Just Kids: Reaching for the Divine

Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids is a love story that could take place only in New York in the 1970s. A love story about a woman that links poetry, prayer, God, and love in surprising ways. A love story about a man fighting to get out from under a Catholic childhood.

Smith’s plain language captures the time when she and her young lover and soul mate Robert Mapplethorpe were not yet famous. Except for a few pages about his last days, the memoir mostly covers the period before she made records, before he got a good camera from Sam Wagstaff . Walking down Eighth Street in 1978, Mapplethorpe says, “Patti, you got famous before me.” There are several lessons in this memoir. If you want to be famous, be sure you pick a good lobby to hang out in. Back then it was the Chelsea Hotel’s.


Patti Smith
ROBERT CHELSEA HOTEL 1970, 2009
Platinum print, ed. 1/3
10 x 8 inches, 25.4 x 20.3 cm (SMIH-0798 - A)
courtesy Robert Miller Gallery

More important are the lessons about fluid sexuality and the artists’ practice. Both Mapplethorpe and Smith became famous for art forms that were not their first endeavors. Smith was drawing and writing private poetry while Mapplethorpe was creating collages in the manner if not spirit of Joseph Cornell and Joe Brainard. On the cover of the memoir and within its pages, there are lots of photos of the gentle hippie Mapplethorpe. Long wispy air, a sly grin, and huarache sandals. A sweet man in the afterglow of the 1960s.

In that era, it was easier for a person to have relationships with both men and women. Even in the last year of high school, I remember chanting to my friends, “bisexual in the Bicentennial.” Moving along the continuum of sexuality grows more difficult as you get older and have an identity to project and later protect.

Before he became really famous, I heard Mapplethorpe lecture (if you could call it at that) at the San Francisco Art Institute. It was the only time I ever saw him in person. I remember he wore a khaki shirt and had his hair coiffed, not flowing the way it did in the photos with Patti Smith. He resembled a brownshirt from 1930s Germany, which I found more than a little disturbing. His photos of flowers were knife sharp, still new. If I remember correctly, he interspersed them with his sexual imagery. He showed some images that were even more brazen that the ones that later toured the country and caused all the outrage from the right wing. One of them was so daring that at first I didn’t know what I was looking at. The black and white image had the same perfect arrangement of forms as all his other still lifes. Then there was audible gasp in the audience as it dawned on them what they were looking at. With perfect timing, the image moved forward to that of an innocent child. A few people laughed, not because the next image was humorous, but because of the tension. Afterwards I think people challenged him, but he was imperturbable, untouchable.

After I finished Patti Smith’s memoir, I found Mapplethorpe’s exhibition catalog, The Perfect Moment, on the bookshelf. I think he used that phrase in his lecture. As if that search for some pure aesthetic moment gave all the images an equally emotional content of heightened experience. When I think of Mapplethorpe, I think of lost innocence racing towards the light.

On the one side, Armistead Maupin’s serialized Tales of the City captured the camp hilarity of the era, and on the other, people told tales of dumpster divers, dark dens South of Market, and three days running high. Mapplethorpe’s kinkier photos were like beautifully framed flashes into that underworld, photos that happened to end up in art school auditoriums and art galleries. The flowers, celebrity and fashion portraits, and kinks were all connected, but not in any obvious way. Despite his perfectionism, Mapplethorpe was an intuitive artist. He was following a search for the divine moment.

Perhaps Just Kids reminds us of an era when two artists were struggling with ambition and talent but without money or food, without strong sexual identities or images; when they were more like dancers, plotting, drawing, writing, and moving freely.


Patti Smith
ROBERT CHELSEA HOTEL 1970, 2009
Platinum print, ed. 1/3
10 x 8 inches, 25.4 x 20.3 cm (SMIH-0798 - B)
courtesy Robert Miller Gallery


Patti Smith
STRANGE MESSENGER, 2004
Oil, pencil and gauze on canvas mounted on board
91 1/2 x 92 1/4 inches, 232.4 x 234.3 cm (SMIH-0790)
courtesy Robert Miller Gallery

Note: You can see some of Patti Smith’s photo and drawings at www.robertmillergallery.com. She also has her own website at www.pattismith.net

You can hear a recent interview with Patti Smith at www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122722618

Robert Mapplethorpe’s images can be seen at his foundation’s site, www.mapplethorpe.org and at the Sean Kelly Gallery, www.skny.com

Interview with Kristina Hagman

Kristina Hagman grew up in New York and Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco to attend college in the late 1970s. Since then, she has lived in New York, Southern California, Tokyo, Santa Fe, and most recently Seattle. Her paintings and prints have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. For the last several years, she has focused on a single project: “36 Views of Mount Rainier.” These woodblock prints are an homage to Hokusai’s “36 views of Mount Fuji.” The prints can be seen at the Cullom Gallery in Seattle (www.cullomgallery.com) and on www.kristinahagman.com.


Kristina working

Q: When did you first call yourself an artist?

I spent my young childhood in New York. When I was still small, we moved to the West Coast—away from everything that was familiar. I had terrible dyslexia and failed an important test. I was chubby and unhappy. In the second grade, I won an art competition with some stitchery and the work traveled around the state. Then I knew art was good for me and good to me. But I don’t think I had the presence then to say I was an artist.

Later as an adult, when I studied painting and printmaking, I found it so comfortable that I didn’t think to name myself in that way. After I had children, making art became much more difficult. That’s probably when I really thought of myself as an artist—when it got hard.


Predawn Silver

Q: Whose works were you drawn to? What were some of your early experiences with art?

In Manhattan, I had a nanny who took me to the Museum of Modern Art. I spent a lot of time with Henri Rousseau. I remember the sleeping gypsy with the lion and water lilies. I loved MoMA, especially the courtyard with the modernist chairs and the oversized female nude sculptures.

We had a big coffee table book at home, and I copied Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings. As a romantic teenager, I was in love with Whistler and the Impressionists. Then when we were in college, I remember seeing abstract Rothkos and Diebenkorns in San Francisco. At John Berggruen’s gallery, I was drawn to Wayne Thiebaud and Nathan Oliveira. Living in Santa Fe, O’Keeffe’s influence, not to mention her subjects, her colors, were all around . Santa Fe drew everybody, and I was able to study with three of those influences, Diebenkorn, Thiebaud, and Oliveira. I also got to know Agnes Martin, who had a great quirky sense of humor.


Rainier from Seward Park

Q: These prints are rooted in the Japanese artist Hokusai and his “36 Views of Mount Fuji.” How did that come to you?

When you live in Seattle, you see Mount Rainier almost every day, in and out of the mist. You know it’s there. Like O’Keeffe and the mountains in New Mexico. In preparation for doing this project, I went to the National Gallery to see Cezanne’s paintings of Mt. St. Victoire. And I studied every book I could get on Hokusai. They have some beautiful prints of his at the Portland Art Museum. I also studied the work of Gustave Baumann, who, interestingly enough, lived and worked in Santa Fe.


View from the South

Q: Santa Fe is known to be hospitable to artists, other than the high cost of living. Which places have been important to you?

I get something from every town I live in. Santa Fe was great because of the beauty, but also because you could apprentice with older artists. You could get a sense of the life of an artist. For an urban center, Seattle has proximity to spectacular open spaces. It is also a city that is a very nurturing town in that all kinds of people buy art. There is not a fixed scene like in New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco. A lot of people who never bought art before are comfortable with what I am doing. My neighbors buy my work. Local businesses have been supportive. Friends help me photograph the work and build a website. People here want to help each other. Being off the well-trod art path has been good for my work.


Outside Natches

Q: Were you trying to show the modern condition while using this ancient form of woodblock?

With painting, you are often stuck in a critical debate about content. Craft becomes far less important than the comment on contemporary society. In printmaking, craft frames some of those questions. You have to know how to work the block before you utter a visual sentence. I like the discipline it imposes.

In the Pacific Northwest, there is a lot of wood. It has been used for commerce, and, of course, the trees are all around us. It has history, a resonance. There is also a lot of water, which can impede travel, but also gives the city so much of its character. And wood grain looks like water.

Georgetown Autumn

Q: Were you drawn to Japanese culture?

When I started dating my husband, he lived there, and I spent time with him in Tokyo. I couldn’t speak the language, but I could see how western culture influenced Japan and vice versa. This project came about in part because a friend of mine who lived in Tokyo wanted to organize a show planned at the American Club. Naively, I thought it could be done in a year. Three years later, my friend has moved away from Tokyo, the idea of that exhibit has passed, but the prints are done. I have discovered a process and a medium that feels right.


Dianne's View


Chinook Pass

Q: Now that the “36 Views” are done, what you going to do next?

I have been traveling a lot to Los Angeles recently as my parents are aging. I think I am going to do a series of prints based on Highway One. The windshield is a good frame to start with.

Postcard from New York

Our home away from home. West 86th Street.

I’ve been to New York twice in two months for industry events. Christmas is always a magical time because of the lights, ice skating, and window displays. My favorite windows are Bergdorf’s; one of those rare moments where creativity and commerce come together to create delight.






Windows at Bergdorf's

It often rains at that time of year, and we did get drenched after the Interior Design Hall of Fame gala. Because of this event, I associate the Waldorf with Christmas. The food isn’t very good, but the work of the Hall of Fame designers is always interesting, and it’s good to see old friends. Annie Block was in Norma Kamali (her high school prom dress, natch), and we spied Edie Cohen the next night at the Guggenheim Best of Year Awards event in an exquisite Balenciaga. We never made it into the round auditorium, because we were too busy catching up with writer Raul Barreneche, who we haven’t seen in a few years. He has branched out into design. (Nothing to see on his website just yet.)

Back in late January for the other big event, the Contract Interiors Breakfast at Cipriani. A lot of the same people attend both events, but the two always feel different. Perhaps people are less guarded at 7:30 in the morning. The good schmoozing takes place early, so it’s not a good idea to be late. Despite the wretched economy, over 500 folks showed up. Contract Editor in Chief Jennifer Busch looked great in her custom outfit by Jean Lin (www.dressedinyellow.com). This year’s Designer of the Year was Graft from Los Angeles, which provided an excellent contrast to the legacy award recipient, Art Gensler. Old Global and New Global. Thankfully, Art knows how to be brief. The award-winning design projects were fantastic, but the music on the video was just weird. One commentator said it reminded him of high holy days. Former Designers of the Year showing their SF roots included Mark Harbick and last year’s recipients, John Peterson and John Cary of Public Architecture.


Ms Busch at the Contract Breakfast


Industry Leaders gather at the Contract Breakfast including (l to r) Cheryl Durst, ED of IIDA, Katie Weeks, Editor in Chief of EcoStructure and former Designer of the Year and Man About Town Mark Harbick


Primo Orpilla and Verda Alexander gossiping with Katie Weeks at 8:00 am!


What does Diana Mosher have in that handbag?


Steven Betts Art Director Extraordinare, Katie Weeks, and Yosh Asato

Favored restaurants are still packed. We tried Danny Meyer’s new place in the Gramercy Park Hotel, Maialino.


Gramercy Park


The breads at Maialino


Inside Maialino

The first venture in the renovated hotel failed, but this one seems likely to succeed. The understated design (Rockwell has taken a more minimal turn!) is the right backdrop for excellent fresh Italian cuisine. The servings are not large, but the quality of the ingredients is fantastic. The bar looks out to the park and is a great spot if you want to dine solo or don’t have a reservation. Danny Meyer was walking around greeting guests and keeping an eye on things, including adjusting our curtain when the sun got too bright. See ArchNewsNow (www.ArchNewsNow.com) editor Kristen Richards in sunglasses.


Kristen before the shades went down

Of course, everybody is asking about Architectural Record and the AIA contract, which was transferred to Architect (and its publisher Hanley Wood). We chatted with Record editor Bob Ivy, who feels genuinely confident that the magazine’s circulation numbers will stay up. Given what I’ve heard about declining membership at the AIA, this makes sense. I actually think the change means that we may have two stronger architecture-oriented magazines. On top of this, of course, The Architect’s Newspaper has just started a Midwest edition, in addition to its East Coast and West Coast ones.

Everybody seems to agree that the future depends on how print publications embrace the Web, but I’m not sure anybody’s got it figured out. Young freelancer (and former I.D. staffer) William Bostwick has been recruited to begin writing for a regular online design publication for Fast Company. Former Metropolis Web Maven Randi Greenberg is writing about design for AOL and Anne Guiney, alumnus of Metropolis, Architecture, and The Architect’s Newspaper, has taken over the Institute for Urban Design. And of course Katie Weeks moved to Washington to take over eco-structure. A lot of changes!

We stopped by the relatively new Ace Hotel, which has a NY funk attitude, but unlike most hotels, it has loads of room to hang out in the lobby, which feels a bit like an old library with bar service. There’s the requisite photo booth. The hotel’s restaurant, Breslin, is popular because it’s dark and serves the best French fries. (Since the vibe is faux English, they call them chips.)


The Ace Hotel


The Ace Hotel


The library table in the lobby of the Ace Hotel

Ralph Pucci had an opening for most of the design commune (www.ralphpucci.net) at his enormous gallery. In the penthouse were the blue chippers with the Jens Risom furniture and the Deborah Turbeville prints. But down on the ninth floor, furniture designer and architect Rob Bristow and his wife Pilar Proffitt held forth. Their custom pieces aren’t cheap, but you won’t ever want to replace them—they are timeless. They have branched out beyond wood and made some exquisite metal pieces. They even got covered in the New York Times last week. We ran into Susan Victoria, formerly of Metropolitan Home, Fred Bernstein, PR maven Liz Kubany, and the young gallery duo Jay Horowitz and Sally Oberbeck of Morgan Lehman (www.morganlehmangallery.com). (Rob and Pilar designed their gallery in Chelsea.) The designers responsible for Facebook’s new offices, Primo Orpilla and Verda Alexander (www.o-plus-a.com), found their way to East 18th Street all the way from San Francisco. Pucci’s old-fashioned PR lady kept telling everybody there were no photos allowed, and all the bloggers looked at her like she was mad and went on taking pictures. It was a great party.


Jay Horowitz and Sally Oberbeck at Ralph Pucci


Rob Bristow and Pilar Proffitt being interviewed at their Ralph Pucci opening

After the opening, we ventured out to Brooklyn to see Andrew Blum. Seems like nobody lives in Manhattan anymore. Most of the writers, editors, and architects live in Brooklyn these days! Andrew is writing a book about the actual bricks and mortar of the Internet (advance and everything!) and is making a film with his wife Davina based on the Princeton Architectural Press book entitled Minka. Check out the trailer at www.vimeo.com/5394397.

Snow began falling on Thursday. Children were mesmerized. They refused to ride in their strollers and stood up on the backs instead, sticking their tongues out trying to catch snowflakes. The garbage at the curb was covered in an even pale frosting. Despite the traffic, the city seemed much quieter, as if a moment of reflection fell over the metropolis. Like another chance.


Snow makes even the garbage look better


One of my favorite subway murals (Roy Lichtenstein)