Live on the Vine, a six-week music festival held in tasting rooms, hotels, and restaurants from Riverhead to Southold, offers an escape from winter’s chill now through March 16. Jazz, rock, blues, country, and bluegrass are on the menu, along with wines from 19 wineries.
The best way to find detailed information about the more than 100 programs is to visit liwinterfest.com.
The Russian Trio, an award-winning chamber ensemble from the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, will perform on Saturday at 4 p.m. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton as part of the Music at St. Luke’s concert series.
Featuring Nikita Borisevich on violin, Dmitry Volkov on cello, and Katherine Rick on piano, the group will perform works by Haydn, Ravel, Saint-Saens, Paganini, and Shostakovich. The Russian Trio has won prizes at several chamber music competitions and recently performed at the Kennedy Center.
Tickets are $20, free for those under 18.
Kate Mueth and the Neo-Political Cowgirls are partnering with the Retreat and Bay Street Theatre to participate in “V-Day, One Billion Rising” this evening at 7. V-Day is a global activist movement, founded by Eve Ensler, to end violence against women and girls.
One Billion Rising is an annual event during which women around the world and the men who support them are invited to tell their stories, speak out, and dance as an expression of their demand for justice.
Prospective participants in the Bay Street event have been invited to meet in the theater at 5 p.m. for an hourlong dance rehearsal. Non-dancers are invited to join the audience at 7. A donation of $20, which will benefit the Retreat, is suggested.
Not every artist manages to continue refreshing his work into his 70s, but Keith Sonnier, through the aid of a new studio space in Bridgehampton, has managed to do just that. The evidence is on view at Pace Gallery in Chelsea through Feb. 22.
The artist chose his most regular medium quite early in his career. Graduating from Rutgers University with an M.F.A. in 1966, it was only two years later that he began working in the neon gas lighting that has defined his sculpture ever since.
There are eight works from the past year in the front two rooms of the gallery, along with a few pieces from his earliest series in the back for context. The juxtaposition shows an artist who has gained lyricism and grace in his later years. It also shows a return to some of the earliest visual explorations of his career for a re-evaluation and reinvigoration of those themes.
The earliest sculptures were no doubt breakthroughs in their time and still look fresh, if a little stilted and even crude. That is really only a byproduct of their relation to the newer works.
The two “Neon Wrapping Neon” works from 1969 play with both the light and geometry of the bent tubing to create illusions of perception as they draw in space with the colored gas, both in three dimensions and suggestive of it. They imply depth where none exists in bold primary colors that may also include green.
“Neon Wrapping Incandescent,” also from 1969, offers early evidence of a more joyful and playful side of the artist and a willingness to explore his ability to bend the glass tubes into curvaceous as well as hard angular shapes. The prettier colors, a pale pink and blue, are reminiscent of a baby shower decoration, offered as a description not to diminish the work’s appeal as an art object, but more to highlight its happy optimism.
“Ba-O-Ba V” from 1970 is representative of the series that arguably begins the artist’s maturity. This is the work that epitomizes his breakthrough years and a way of organizing light, wire, and glass that he would return to regularly. It also has the most to say in comparison to his contemporary work.
As long as critics and art historians have written about Mr. Sonnier, they have been defining “Ba-O-Ba.” In Sabine Vogel’s 2004 catalogue essay for a show in Germany, she concisely stated that the expression, derived from the French Creole dialect in Mamou, La., where he grew up, means an effect of light on skin and the body that exercises a physical and suggestive power of attraction. It can come from both natural and artificial light.
Here, three straight lines of neon lights are offset by two large glass disks, one with a green tube bisecting it, the other with a red tube spanning a shorter distance. A smaller blue tube acts like a lifeline between the two, joining them up like train cars or a rudimentary biological form. There is no overt resemblance to actual physical objects. As Donald Kuspit noted in a 1989 essay, these are examples of absolute art, non-objective, yet still with “ghosts of language and the figure.” With their curves, undulation, and colorful light, they breathe with a theatricality and expressiveness that draws one in the way a flower’s bright colors invite bees to pollinate.
The shift to a more complex examination of similar compositions in his 2013 works belies decades of the artist’s work in more complex forms. These involved expressive sculpting of the neon tubing, additions of steel, mirrors, and found detritus such as old detergent bottles. Although discussed in the catalogue, none of it appears to matter to the aims of the current exhibition, which is a wise decision. The newer works are so much more related to these earlier defining moments than what has come between the years, even as they borrow some of the maximalism of that interim creative period.
“Mirrored Slant” and “Lunar Slice,” which are hard-edged in their primary hues and more industrial in configuration, seem to stand apart in the shared space of the front gallery rooms. Their more Euclidian purity begins to blow up quickly in the wake of “Lobbed Shape,” an amoeba-like form that breaks apart the neon into smaller discrete pieces of softer-hued blends of purple, green, and salmon.
On and on the pieces go in their dissolution, creating odd and almost anthropomorphic shapes and drawing on the expressiveness not only of the tubes but more than ever before of the electrical wire that unites them, providing a solid connective tissue and structure for the swathes of gaseous color, much the way a pounced cartoon would have done for a fresco in the Renaissance.
The installation is so pure in its dialogue between past and present, it is almost too much to see works that do not completely fit into this model. These include the earlier sculptures that provide context for “Ba-O-Ba V” as well as last year’s “Zig Zig Square” that, while engaging because of its difference, breaks the spell of the more amorphous compositions on display.
In the essay for this exhibition, Richard Shiff pointed out that the play of neon on the initially glass but now acrylic pieces that Mr. Sonnier uses alludes to the definition of that initial title. He calls them skins and describes their function as mediating the refraction and perception of the light that is placed behind or outside them, which, in turn, creates beautiful effects on that skin. The effect is mesmerizing and just as described.
There is a poem in Philip Schultz’s book “Failure,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2008, called “The Reasonable Houses of Osborne Lane.” Shifting from “cottages slowly blooming into mansions” to “neighbors carried in and out of ambulances” to “long azure afternoons dragging shadows toward twilight,” its acute observations of the everyday are infused with grace and a hint of the elegiac.
The sunlit, book-lined study of Mr. Schultz’s own house on Osborne Lane is a comfortable place to discuss “The Wherewithal,” his novel in verse that has just been published by W.W. Norton & Co. Mr. Schultz admits it is a “very dark book.”
The way into “The Wherewithal” is through Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski, a young man working in the basement of a San Francisco welfare building in the late 1960s, hiding from the draft and translating his mother’s diaries, which concern the 1941 pogrom in Jedwabne, Poland, where 1,600 Jews were butchered, tortured, and burned alive by their 1,600 non-Jewish neighbors.
In 2002 Mr. Schultz read Jan Gross’s book “Neighbors,” which revealed the details of the massacre and the heroism of Antonina Wyrzykowski, a Catholic who hid seven Jews in a pit under a barn on her property for almost three years, until the end of the war in 1945, despite the ongoing suspicions and hostility of her neighbors.
“I was fascinated by the book,” the poet recalled, “but then I started wondering about this woman. What enabled her, against everybody’s wishes, to put her family and herself in danger? Her neighbors thought she was hiding the Jews in exchange for their money. The only way this woman could tell me how she was able to do what she did would be if she left a diary. So I made up Henryk, and I made up her diary.”
Mr. Schultz spent eight years reading books about the Holocaust. “I started making notes for this book in 2002, but I didn’t really know what I was doing and I hadn’t read enough until 2006 or 2007. As a poet, you don’t really have to do research. But for this book I had to know about Poland, which was really the nexus of the entire story of the Holocaust. I’m dyslexic, so to read a normal-sized book, let alone a history book, is an ordeal. But I did, and one book led to another.”
Among the 15 narrative lines are the story of Rossy, a childhood friend of Henryk’s and son of a survivor, whom Henryk accidentally shot and killed in a game of chicken; the Zodiac killings that terrorized the Bay Area in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the Vietnam War and its opposition, and Swigge, Henryk’s predecessor, who died in the welfare building of a heroin overdose but functions posthumously as a voice of both compassion and pain.
“The Wherewithal” had its genesis in the late ’60s. “I was avoiding the draft,” Mr. Schultz said, “doing part-time jobs, living on food stamps, and when in the welfare building, I saw this basement that brought to mind Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes From Underground.’ I knew I wanted to write about it, and in 1969 or 1970 I started a novel about the welfare building. I had the ’60s, I had the protagonist hiding in the basement, I had his girlfriends, but I didn’t have a story or a reason he would stay there for so long.”
Asked if he considered himself knowledgeable about the Holocaust before undertaking the book, Mr. Schultz said, “I grew up on a street in Rochester that in the 1950s was inundated by displaced persons from the war. They never integrated into the neighborhood, but I spoke Yiddish, and I was hired by my grandmother’s friend’s brother to translate his letters in return for music lessons. Yiddish was the language all the D.P.s spoke, and I translated a number of letters. In one case — Mr. Schwartzman’s — all the family members I was writing to were dead.”
“Zdena Berger, a teacher of mine in college, wrote a beautiful book called ‘Tell Me Another Morning,’ an autobiographical novel about her years in Nazi concentration camps as a teenager. So if you asked me before starting on ‘The Wherewithal,’ I would have said, ‘Yes, I’m knowledgeable.’ But now I realize I knew nothing. The people I read have spent entire lives looking for the pieces to the puzzle. The story keeps changing, as new documents are discovered. My guess is the puzzle is maybe half-finished.”
Mr. Schultz knew he was going to be a writer from the age of 16. Two years later, an excerpt from a novel earned him a scholarship to the University of Louisville. In 1965 he transferred to San Francisco State, which at the time had the most fully developed writing program in the country. He eventually earned an M.F.A. from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, after which he wrote stories, poems, and novels. “The poems I sent out would get published,” he said, “but not the novels. However, if I hadn’t kept writing fiction all those years, from which I learned narrative structure, I never could have written ‘The Wherewithal.’ ”
The poet first came to the East End in 1977 when a friend invited him to share in a house on Miankoma Lane in Amagansett. “I had spent a lot of time on the West Coast, and it was gorgeous, but I never felt I could live there permanently. When I got off the train in Amagansett, I just knew this was the place I wanted to live.” His next book of poems will be about East Hampton.
In 1987 Mr. Schultz founded the Writers Studio in Manhattan, which now offers four 10-week sessions a year in the city and in Tucson, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and online. He maintains a one-bedroom apartment in New York, but spends more of his time in East Hampton, where he lives with his wife, Monica Banks, a sculptor; his sons, Augie and Eli, and Penelope, the family dog, in a house he purchased in 1990. “Living here helped when writing this book. Having a family and being in a place like this and taking my dog to the beach offered a respite from the nightmarish world I was immersed in.”
Like many other young Vietnam War protesters, “I had no doubt I was leaving the country,” he remembered. “I slept with a suitcase under my bed. I was going to Mexico.” But he made it to age 26, the cutoff for draft eligibility, without being called. “At one point, I had been accepted into graduate programs at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Columbia. But I was in Paris, had fallen in love with a Swedish girl, and we were getting established there. I figured Hemingway didn’t go to graduate school, he fought bulls. Faulkner didn’t have an M.F.A., but he did okay.”
One day he received a letter from his draft board saying he had three days to prove he was enrolled in graduate school or face five years in prison. The next day he was riding the Metro to the airport with $15 to his name. He landed in New York but couldn’t face it. “I decided I could handle the wheat fields of Iowa better than New York.” He called the Writers’ Workshop from Kennedy Airport and was not only reaccepted, but the school sent him money for a plane ticket.
Mr. Schultz made it clear that while every story has to be personal on some important level, “Henryk is not me. I worked in a welfare building, but not in the basement. I’m not Catholic. And I never killed my best friend. Henryk had to have a personal tragedy.”
Another character in the book is Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher. “I knew I didn’t want Henryk to be a writing student. He had to be something intellectual, and philosophy has always worked for me. I knew I needed another perspective, larger than mine.”
Both Wittgenstein and Hitler were born in Austria, six days apart, and both attended the same secondary school, though it is not clear if they knew each other. Wittgenstein was a Jew whose father converted to Catholicism. He became part of the intellectual elite at Cambridge University, where he studied with Bertrand Russell. “The use of Wittgenstein was one of a number of distancing techniques. I had to arm myself in the book against taking on the pain of the subject. Wittgenstein gave me authority. He was the perfect armament to put between me and an ugliness so profound it’s unnamable.”
Now that the book has been published, Mr. Schultz has readings and appearances lined up around the country, including one on Feb. 26 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park. When asked how he felt about going on the road, he laughed and said, “I wouldn’t like not being asked.”
Reflecting on what he had gained from writing “The Wherewithal,” he said, “It’s interesting that, having grown up around all these D.P.s, listening to their stories in Yiddish, translating their letters, I had to wait all these years to even begin to understand them. I think the biggest thing I got out of this is all the reading I did that I wouldn’t have done otherwise.”
Some of Mr. Schultz’s friends have commented on the darkness of the book’s final pages. “I knew I had to conclude, and Henryk had to have a final thought about everything. I had no clue what it was going to be. When it was time to write it, I went back to my favorite novels for conclusions, and none of them helped me. In the end I sat down and it came out automatically, and I was shocked to see that I had such a grim view. And I was speaking of what ‘we,’ not ‘them,’ are capable of.”
The John Drew Theater at Guild Hall has a busy week ahead. The Met: Live in HD returns Saturday with a 1 p.m. screening of Dvorak’s opera “Rusalka.” Renée Fleming, fresh from her Super Bowl rendition of the National Anthem, plays the title role in the fairy-tale opera. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students.
The free winter film series, presented in partnership with the East Hampton Library, is screening “Aliyah,” a French film about a young Parisian drug dealer who wants to make a fresh start by emigrating to Israel, on Sunday at 4:30 p.m.
Tuesday evening at 7:30 the John Drew Theater Lab will present a staged reading of “The Family Room,” a new play by John J. Mullen, who lives in East Hampton. The play focuses on three estranged siblings who try to repair their relationships in a hospital waiting room while their mother is dying in the intensive care unit. The program is free.
Suzanne Ruggles, a naturalist, native plant specialist, and author, will give an illustrated talk on “The Tyranny of Landscaping” Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Community House, as part of the Horticultural Society of the Hamptons’ lecture series.
Known professionally as the Barefoot Gardener, Ms. Ruggles, who lives in Westhampton, promotes the creation of naturally balanced landscapes using native plants, and cautions homeowners about the environmental harm caused by lawns that require nonnative grasses and the use of chemicals.
Tickets are $10, free for members.
Tierney Ryan, a jazz vocalist who grew up on Long Island, will present an hourlong program of jazz standards and original compositions Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton.
Ms. Tierney, a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music who has performed with such jazz greats at Peter Eldridge, Bucky Pizzarelli, and Robert Lepley, will be accompanied by Nils Weinhold on guitar and Raviv Markovitz on bass. The program is free.
The Southampton Historical Museum has reopened, with “Downton Abbey Style in Southampton: 1900 to 1920,” on view through April 26, and several special programs. Today at 6:30 p.m. Deborah O’Shaughnessy will conduct a Linzer tart baking workshop, co-sponsored by the Rogers Memorial Library. Space is limited to eight participants, and reservations, which are required, may be made by calling 283-2494. The cost is $35, $25 for members.
“Conversations with Local Residents” will feature the reminiscences of three couples about their relationships, from courtship through decades of marriage. Soup and cookies will follow the free program, which will take place next Thursday at 11 a.m.
Every Wednesday at 2 p.m. Mimi Finger leads a knitting circle, for both beginning and advanced knitters, which features the sharing of techniques as well as local gossip. The program is $5 per session, free for members.
All programs take place at the Rogers Mansion.
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, age-defying former Beatles, performed together at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on Jan. 26. Mr. McCartney picked up five Grammys, and Mr. Starr accepted the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of his former band mates. He and Mr. McCartney, the latter a familiar face to many in Amagansett and surrounding hamlets, have maintained active touring and recording schedules into their 70s.
Along with Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison, the two living Beatles continue, through their words and deeds, to promote the utopian ideals that flourished with their former band’s stratospheric artistic and commercial success — peace and universal love — and disciplines, like meditation and vegetarianism, that engender that dream.
With the kind of vitality these septuagenarian hippies possess, it may be difficult to believe that a half century stands between tomorrow and Feb. 7, 1964, when a British pop quartet landed on American shores to change everything forever.
But it really was 50 years ago today — or it soon will be — and humanity, the fortunate recipient of the Beatles’ unparalleled body of work, will mark the anniversary in ways befitting royalty, if not deities.
On the South Fork, the Beatles’ historic first visit to America will be celebrated with three nights of music and film at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. Corresponding with HarborFrost, Sag Harbor’s fourth annual winter celebration, “It Was 50 Years Ago Today . . .” starts tomorrow at 8 p.m. with “Legends: The Beatles,” a film compilation by Joe Lauro. Mr. Lauro is the president of Historic Films Archive, a Greenport library of musical performance and other entertainment footage spanning a century.
“Legends” includes the first known film of the Beatles, in a 1962 performance at the Cavern Club in the Beatles’ hometown of Liverpool, England, as well as their final public performance, an unannounced January 1969 lunchtime gig on the roof of their offices in London. The film also features some of the oddball “cover” recordings inspired by — and to cash in on — the Beatles’ explosive success in America and around the world, including performances by Frank Sinatra and Eartha Kitt.
Mr. Lauro called the presentation “part theatrical, mainly film.” The film, he said, will include “other people from the period covering their tunes, as well as some footage I like to think people haven’t seen, from press conferences, fans, and promos that never got re-released to barbers wanting to get them in the chair to cut their hair off!”
On Saturday at 8 p.m., local artists will pay tribute to the Fab Four in “Celebrating the Beatles.” Corky Laing, a Greenport resident who was the drummer of the band Mountain, is on the bill, along with Nancy Atlas, Gene Casey, MamaLee Rose and Friends, Caroline Doctorow, Jim Turner, Inda Eaton, Joe Delia, Dawnette Darden, and Mr. Lauro. Ms. Darden and Mr. Lauro are in the band the HooDoo Loungers.
A house band will perform between acts that, Mr. Lauro said, will include performances as diverse as a choir performing a capella to a solo piano medley. “The house band is going to keep it real pure,” he said. “We’re trying to do the stuff as close as guys in our middle age trying to imitate people in their early 20s can.”
On Sunday at 7 p.m., the entire Feb. 9, 1964, broadcast of “The Ed Sullivan Show” will be shown following a screening of rare film of the Beatles’ first visit to New York City. The “Ed Sullivan” broadcast started at 8 p.m., and this anniversary showing will coincide with that storied broadcast, 50 years to the minute later.
“I’ll never forget it,” Mr. Lauro said of the original broadcast. “My sister and her friend Mary were out of their minds. They were about 12; I was 6 or 7. I was caught up in the whole thing.”
To make the weekend even more fab, a variety of Beatles memorabilia will be on view throughout the theater, Mr. Lauro said.
Tickets for “Legends: The Beatles” are $15. For Saturday night’s concert, tickets are $25 in advance and $35 on the day of the show and include a glass of house wine for adults. Admission for “The Beatles on Ed Sullivan” is $5. The theater is also offering a Fab 4 Fan pass for $40, granting admission to all three nights.
Fifty years on, people around the world continue to feel the Beatles’ influence — music, film, visual art, poetry, fashion, and attitudes were profoundly shaped by the 1960s, with the Beatles always at the forefront. Innumerable teen idols and “next big things” have come and, thankfully, gone since that long-ago Sunday evening broadcast. But while the music industry and the spectacle of celebrity have grown by orders of magnitude since, and largely because of, the Beatles, no artist has generated the same degree of mania, inspiration, adulation, or flat-out joy.
Like Shakespeare before them, a phenomenon such as the Beatles surely cannot arise more than once in a millennium. Or can it? “Tomorrow never knows,” as Mr. Starr once said, but it doesn’t matter anyway. The Beatles’ mind-bendingly brilliant artistic achievements are ageless and timeless. Fifty years on, the world remains riveted, enchanted, and grateful.