Ivories Tinkling

    On Sunday at 3:30 p.m., Anne Tedesco will return to the Montauk Library to perform a concert of classical works for the piano by Bach, Gliere, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Schumann, and Chopin. 

    Ms. Tedesco has taught music history, theory, classical piano, and fine arts since 1982 at St. John’s University in Queens. She and her husband own a house in Montauk.

    The pianist was praised by The New York Times when she made her professional debut at Carnegie Hall in 1981 for her “intelligent articulation in Bach’s ‘Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue,’ ” and her “languid phrasing in Ravel’s ‘Miroirs.’ ”

Catch a Rising Star

    The 10th anniversary season of the Rising Stars Piano series at the Southampton Cultural Center will open on Saturday at 7 p.m. with Tanya Gabrelian performing Bach, Haydn, Rachmaninov, and the Mephisto waltz from “Faust.”

    Ms. Gabrielian, who is Armenian-born, was described by The London Times as “a pianist of powerful physical and imaginative muscle.” Her 50-minute performance will have no intermissions.

    A reception to meet the artist will follow. Tickets are $15; no charge for students with ID. Tickets can be purchased in advance at scc-arts.org or at the door 40 minutes prior to the performance.

    Other artists participating in the series include Margarita Schevchenko on Nov. 10, and Igor Lovchinsky on Dec. 8. In 2013, Michelle and Kimberly Cann will perform on April 6, Konstantin Soukhovetski on April 27, Awadagin Pratt on May 18, Orion Weiss and Anna Polonski on June 8, Anthony Molinaro on Sept. 28, Qi Xu on Nov. 9, and Di Wu on Dec. 14.

New Play Reading

    Guild Hall and the Naked Stage will present a staged reading of “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” by Rajiv Joseph on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. Josh Perl will be the lead artist.

    The plot centers on two American Marines and an Iraqi translator who meet up with a tiger that roams war-torn Baghdad to find meaning, forgiveness, and redemption amid the city’s ruins. The play explores both the power and the perils of human nature.

    The Naked Stage’s productions are free.

   An abundant harvest of South Fork food, beer, wine, history, art, music, and other entertainment will fill Southampton this weekend during the village’s SeptemberFest, which will kick off with a concert by New Life Crisis under a tent in Agawam Park tomorrow night.

    Music can be heard on Saturday from noon through the early evening, when the festival’s headliner, Rhett Miller, the former front man of Old 97s, will perform with his Serial Lady Killers at 6. A wide range of musical and culinary tastes can be savored before and after the main act and throughout the day on the streets of the village.

    Described by organizers as a traditional harvest festival with a modern spin, the event has grown since last year, its first, when it was the Southampton Historical Museum’s Harvest Day. With the help of the Southampton Chamber of Commerce and Southampton Village, the Parrish Art Museum, Rogers Memorial Library, and the Southampton Cultural Center, it is now a two-day event with activities for every age and interest.

    Tomorrow night’s delicacies will include local wine, craft beer, and gourmet food. New Life Crisis, an independent mash-up band with a Bono-look-alike front man, Paul Mahos, will play covers from U2 to Elvis Presley as well as original songs. Ticket sales to the 6:30 p.m. show will benefit charities supported by Southampton Rotary Club and are available at the Southampton Chamber of Commerce and on the Southampton Cultural Center’s Web site.

    On Saturday, Project Vibe will set the afternoon’s tone with reggae at noon, followed by the alternative and classic rock of the Montauk Project. Big names will come from outside town, with spicy indie rock by Goldspot and folk rock and funk courtesy of Miles to Dayton.

    South Fork musical flavor will be represented by Jim Turner, who will showcase his guitar and harmonica skills at the Golden Pear Cafe, and there will be street music all day on the steps of Village Hall by Nick Kerzner, Leah Laurenti, the Prelude String Ensemble, Charles Certain, Sara Hartman, and the Watson Collective. After the Rhett Miller show in the park, a Rising Stars piano series performance by Tanya Gabrielian at 7 p.m. will end the festivities.

    Aside from music, other events will take place throughout the village on Saturday from 10 a.m. through 4 p.m., with treats to include a free ride on a horse-drawn stagecoach and fun, historical theatrics from the Southampton Historical Museum, such as a 19th-century wedding re-enactment. Costumed Civil War-era patriots will also be on hand, as will trade and craftsmen demonstrating decoy carving, blacksmithing, and basketry.

    Among the strolling street performers will be Keith Leaf, a stilt-walker, and Jester Jim and his comedic juggling and magic acts. The Maniac Pumpkin Carvers will expand upon the age-old art on the steps of Village Hall, and face painting, airbrush tattoos, and pumpkin painting will take place there, too. A traditional hayride will be offered at 1:30 p.m. in front of the chamber of commerce building on Main Street, where donations will be welcomed.

    More than a dozen clam chowders from restaurants and cafes in Southampton will be judged by residents beginning at noon in Agawam Park, with the winners to be announced at 3 p.m. At a farmers market at 25 Job’s Lane on Saturday, there will be food, wine, and craft beer from top local caterers, restaurants, vineyards, and brewers, as well as homemade wares.

    Southampton’s rich cultural heritage will be celebrated with a juried art show of paintings, prints, mixed-media works, photography, and sculpture at the Southampton Cultural Center at 25 Pond Lane until 6 p.m. Just up the road, treasures can be found in the form of books at a Rogers Memorial Library sale.

Montauk Music’s Back

    Music for Montauk will return for its 21st season with a concert at the Montauk Library on Saturday at 7 p.m. Orion Weiss and Anna Polonsky, who are pianists, will present a program of works by Schubert, Ravel, Schumann, and others.

    Mr. Weiss has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and several other major orchestras and has received several awards for his work. Locally, he has performed at Pianofest and the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival.

    Ms. Polonsky has worked with the Guarneri, Shanghai, and Orion String Quartets and performed at festivals such as Marlboro, Chamber Music Northwest, Seattle, and Bard. Her concerts have taken place at sites such as Alice Tully Hall and Carnegie Hall’s Stern, Weill, and Zankel Halls, and she has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.

    The concert is free to the public. Reservations are required by e-mail at [email protected], or by phone at 668-4607.

‘Carmen’ at Guild Hall

    The Long Island Opera will perform Bizet’s “Carmen” at Guild Hall on Saturday at 8 p.m., marking a return of the company after a decade-long absence. The production is fully staged and costumed and led by Fabio Bezuti, with Kara Cornell, a mezzo-soprano who is from Smithtown, in the title role.

    Ms. Cornell has performed with the Union Avenue Opera in St. Louis, the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, the St. Petersburg Opera in Florida, the Center City Opera in Philadelphia, and many others. “Not only am I looking forward to finally getting to perform back on my own turf, but ‘Carmen’ is one of my favorites,” she said in a release.

    Among a full cast, David Guzman, a tenor, will play Don Jose, and Eric McKeever, a baritone, will be Escamillo. Long Island Opera’s singers are from around the country and the globe and have performed with national and international opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera, the Houston Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, and the New York City Opera, as well as at festivals throughout the United States.

    The opera company’s 2012-13 season will also include performances of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” on Oct. 6 and Puccini’s “La Boheme,” featuring the Children’s Orchestra Society, on April 7 of next year at Molloy College’s Madison Theatre in Rockville Centre.

    Tickets for “Carmen” cost $75 for limited V.I.P. reserved seating and a pre-show wine reception, $35 for orchestra, $25 for balcony, and $10 to $15 for students. Tickets can be purchased at LongIslandOpera.org.

Naked Stage Returns

    Guild Hall and the Naked Stage will present a new series of free play readings beginning Tuesday with “God of Carnage” by Yasmina Reza. The play opened in London in 2008 with Ralph Fiennes and recently was performed on Broadway.

    The readings will continue through next spring. The plays to be performed until the end of the year include “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” by Rajiv Joseph, “Porter’s Will” by Monica Bauer, “The Prince of Denmark: A New Musical” by Chris Dieman, “The Best Play Ever . . . Seriously!” By Mike Anderson, and “Eurydice” by Sarah Ruhl.

    The full schedule with dates is on the Guild Hall Web site. The plays are read on Tuesdays beginning at 7:30 p.m.

Parrish PechaKucha

    Next Thursday evening at 6, the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton will present a “PechaKucha,” or lightning round of quick, illustrated talks by artists and other creative professionals who live or work on the East End. Most will talk about themselves and what they do.

    Although the roster was still being finalized, according to Andrea Grover, the museum’s curator of programs, confirmed presenters are Hiroyuki Hamada, who is a sculptor with a studio in East Hampton, Sabina Streeter, a Sag Harbor-based painter, Toni Ross, a ceramicist and the Toni behind Nick and Toni’s restaurant in East Hampton, the playwright Joe Pintauro, Theo Coulombe, a Brooklyn photographer and frequent Sag Harbor visitor, and Silas Marder of the Bridgehampton gallery.

    The pecha kucha form originated in Japan and consists of 20 slides, each shown for 20 seconds. This gives each presenter about 6 minutes and 40 seconds to get his or her message across and only a minute or two before the next person’s slides begin. Music with D.J. Lama will follow the talks. Refreshments will be served. Admission is $10, $5 for Parrish members.

Hammond Headlines

    John Hammond will play at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor on Sept. 28 to kick off the Sag Harbor American Music Festival at 8 p.m. Mr. Hammond is a Blues Hall of Fame inductee and has performed with Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, and Howlin’ Wolf in a career spanning four decades. He is also known in this area for his regular performances at the Stephen Talkhouse in the 1980s and 1990s.

    Tickets cost $20 and can be purchased online at SagHarborMusic.org. A full list of festival concerts and venues is in development and will be available soon on that Web site.

   Poets House, a national archive in Manhattan of 50,000 volumes of poetry, will host a celebration next Thursday evening of the life of Siv Cedering, a Swedish-born poet who spent much of her adult life on the East End.

    Poems by Ms. Cedering, who died five years ago at her farm in Sagaponack, appear in more than 200 anthologies, textbooks, and magazines. She wrote fiction as well — her first novel won the Best Book of the Year award in Sweden — and was also an accomplished artist and sculptor. Her books are part of the Poets House permanent library.

    The event will begin with a reading of Ms. Cedering’s short stories, directed by her daughter Cedering Fox. Readings of her poetry by the poets Philip Appleman, Janice Bishop, Fran Castan, Lucas Hunt, Daniel Thomas Moran, and Harris Yulin will follow. The presentation of her sculpture “Blueprint for an Ascension,” to be dedicated by her husband, Hans Van de ­Bovenkamp, and placed on permanent display at Poets House, will conclude the ceremonies.

    The free event, from 6 to 8 p.m., will be followed by a reception. Poets House is at 10 River Terrace, which is on the Hudson River near Battery Park City, with a view toward the Statue of Liberty.

   Caroline Rob Zaleski will speak at the Amagansett Library on Saturday at 6 p.m. about her book “Long Island Modernism: 1930-1980.” Released by W.W. Norton on Monday, the book has been described as the “first illustrated history of Long Island’s modern architecture.”

    Based on a survey by the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, the 336-page coffee-table book has essays on 25 architects and a comprehensive list of others, architects as well as designers, who have worked on the Island. It has 300 archival photographs, mainly in black and white.

    Ms. Zaleski has spent summers in unwinterized houses on Napeague or along Gardiner’s Bay for the last 35 years. It was on Napeague that she “wrote much of the book in a writer’s shed,” she said recently. Ms. Zaleski received a master’s degree in architectural preservation from Columbia University. She has been the chairwoman of the Preservation League of New York State’s Seven to Save endangered sites program since 2006.

    As an “informed preservation advocate,” Ms. Zaleski documents how Long Island provided an ideal landscape to follow the modern aesthetic on display at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens. Despite the Depression and World War II, Ms. Zaleski writes, architects engaged with those seeking a haven away from the city and with Long Island’s civic, cultural, and business leaders, breaking modernist ground. Her book explains why, and how, modernism was embraced on the Island.

    On the South Fork, residences from Sagaponack to Montauk are cited. The architects who contributed to the architecture here include Richard Meier, Philip Johnson, Marcel Breuer, Gordon Chadwick and his business partner George Nelson, and Paul Rudolph, among others. The dates of construction range from Antonin Raymond’s house on a Montauk bluff, which was built in 1941 and ’42, to Percival Goodman’s additions to a prefabricated house in Springs in 1974.

    The book also mentions two notable buildings in East Hampton that were torn down — the Robert Motherwell house, designed by Pierre Chareau, and the house Gordon Bunshaft built for himself and his wife in 1962.

“Yossarian Slept Here”
Erica Heller
Simon and Schuster, $25

“Just One Catch”
Tracy Daugherty
St. Martin’s Press, $35

   In Tracy Daugherty’s recent biography of Joseph Heller, “Just One Catch,” he repeats a statement Heller made in 1975 during an interview for Playboy. Asked about the damaging effects of success and failure on a writer, Heller said, in part, “Along with success comes drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis, and suicide.” With the exception of suicide, Heller pretty much experienced each of these consequences in the aftermath of the publication of his masterwork, “Catch-22.”

    While Mr. Daugherty does an admirable job in chronicling Heller’s successes and failures, the full sense of the weight of this litany of success’s aftereffects is felt in Erica Heller’s “Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, the Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22.”

    Appearing within a few weeks of each other last year, the two works overlap at times (Erica Heller is a primary source for “Just One Catch”), but there are distinct differences between Ms. Heller’s book and Mr. Daugherty’s. Mr. Daugherty has written a traditional biography exploring Joseph Heller’s life and work. Ms. Heller’s book is a memoir, and her account of life with her father is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. She does not follow a close year-by-year, chronological account of life with the “Famous Author” (her term).

    Instead she focuses on a number of notable episodes in the family’s lives, such as moving to different apartments within the Apthorp; a trip to Corsica and Italy that becomes an extended Heller family European adventure with an uninterested, unhappy, and unappreciative teenage daughter; a summer in Beverly Hills; her parents’ separation and divorce, and her father’s bout with and recovery from Guillain-Barre syndrome. She uses these episodes to reveal aspects of her father’s personality, his relationships with his family and friends, as well as her own prejudices and failures.

    “Yossarian Slept Here” is a clear-eyed, fair-minded work of familial remembrance and, ultimately, understanding. Ms. Heller is less interested in Joseph Heller the celebrated writer than she is in the Heller family’s domestic and social lives and the effect her father’s becoming the Famous Author had on the familial relationships. (Such was the impact of “Catch-22” that the family referred to the time before its publication as B.C. — Before “Catch.”)

    Mother, father, and grandparents, especially her feisty maternal grandmother, Dottie Held, all have featured roles in the story (less so her brother, Ted). In fact, the book is as much about her mother as it is about Joseph Heller, and in many ways Shirley, Heller’s wife for 38 years, emerges as one of the more admirable of the featured players. She was an attractive, warm, strong, and lively woman who was an admiring, devoted, and protective but ultimately unforgiving companion once the true extent of her husband’s betrayal of her was apparent. She refuses to concede her anger toward him even as she lies dying of lung cancer, denying her former husband any sense of reparation — as well as the recipe for her mother’s pot roast, much beloved and sought after by him.

    Erica Heller has an appealing humility and sense of humor as she relates her family stories. One is more prepared to accept the unflattering things she writes about her gifted but flawed father because she is so willing to hold herself up to the same damning mirror. There is disappointment, exasperation, and anger toward her father — “He only let anyone in so far. He was mercurial and it was easy to get on his nerves” — but she also displays some qualities toward him that he appears to have not had in sufficient supply with his family — empathy and generosity: “I loved even if I didn’t always understand him.”

    Although she relates how her father could seem distant and was “snarling” and “brutish,” especially as she grew older, she does not portray him as fundamentally unloving or uncaring. She recounts attending a new school in seventh grade that required her to travel farther and take several buses each way. While riding the bus on her third day of school she realizes that the man sitting in the back with his face behind a newspaper is her father, stealthily attempting to make sure she gets to school safely.

    From her memoir one can understand how Ms. Heller might be disappointed dealing with the excesses of her father's personality and his overbearing self-absorption and self-aggrandizement, but one can also see that she has an abiding love for him -- and ultimately, despite his personal failures and stubbornness, that he maintained an abiding if not always acknowledged love for his family.

    There are a number of wonderfully presented cameos of some of Heller’s friends, such as Mario Puzo and Irving (Speed) Vogel. Ms. Heller relates a few of their experiences together, notably the Gourmet Club, the weekly “food orgies” in Chinatown that included Zero Mostel, Mel Brooks, and George Mandel, among others. (She describes her father as being a “distinguished eater.”) Her comments on these friends often provide a means to characterize her father further: “Speed was eloquent, debonair, and diplomatic: all the things Dad was not.”

   Another interesting character to emerge from the book is the Apthorp, the historic apartment building built by William Astor on the West Side of Manhattan. The Hellers first moved there in 1952. Ms. Heller presents a social history in miniature as she describes the evolution of the neighborhood and the assorted tenants and neighbors — George Balanchine, Nora Ephron, and Al Pacino, among others — through the years. The passage of time and the family’s lives are marked in part by the various apartments they occupied.

    Both Ms. Heller’s and Mr. Daugherty’s books are sympathetic works. If one is interested in an analysis of Heller’s literary work, Mr. Daugherty’s “Just One Catch” is an excellent source. That he is also an accomplished fiction writer helps make his literary assessments and critical insights particularly thoughtful. Because she is concerned with Joseph Heller as paterfamilias rather than author, famous or otherwise, Ms. Heller offers little if any scrutiny concerning his works. She does not even mention some of them, and there is her rather incredible final confession that of all of her father’s works the only one she still has not read is “Catch-22”; she holds that book as her last remaining unearthed treasure.

    “Just One Catch” is by far the more complete record of Joseph Heller’s life and works, but “Yossarian Slept Here” is the more heartfelt. Ms. Heller’s book better captures the immediate lives that existed around those works and that were irreversibly touched by them for both good and bad. She offers up to the reader herself and her family to portray honestly and boldly — with humor and sadness, amid failures and successes — a story of family love and dysfunction as well as one of human frailty and perplexity.

    William Roberson taught literature at Southampton College for 30 years.

    Joseph Heller lived in East Hampton for many years.

   The year 2012 has brought record-setting temperatures, deadly heat waves, freak storms, devastating wildfires, and prolonged droughts. While the scientific community has heretofore been reluctant to tie individual events to global climate change, a consensus is building that these phenomena are in fact manifestations of a warming planet, and harbingers of even more extreme weather events.

    Scientists also say the world is entering a sixth “mass-extinction” event, in which species loss will occur at a rate and magnitude on par with the Cretaceous-Tertiary period, in which dinosaurs disappeared.

    But even as climatologists issue ever more dire warnings, there is some heartening news. In her new book, “The Spine of the Continent,” just published by Lyons Press, Mary Ellen Hannibal describes “the most ambitious wildlife conservation project ever undertaken.”

    A conversation with Ms. Hannibal, who was born in East Hampton and now lives in San Francisco, may cover topics from pesticides to evolution, species distribution to science class at East Hampton High School, grizzly bears to transnational corporations engaged in the extraction of oil, gas, and coal. But the word “connectivity” — an essential component not just of wildlife habitat but to nature in its entirety — is sure to be sprinkled liberally throughout, as it is in the book.

    The project, the Spine of the Continent, involves the coordinated efforts of some 30 nonprofit organizations to reconstruct a 5,000-mile-long network of connected landscapes stretching from Alaska and the Yukon down along the Rocky Mountains and associated ranges, including basins, plateaus, and deserts, all the way to the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range in Mexico. The goal is to let wildlife roam free, even as climate change alters their habitat.

    Ms. Hannibal became interested in the project as she researched her 2009 book, “Evidence of Evolution,” which included interviews with members of the California Academy of Sciences. “They’re taxonomists. They’re putting new species on the tree of life, and they do this by examining the morphology, or body form, of different species,” she said. “I was interviewing mostly men in their 50s and 60s, and while I was interviewing them, three of them cried. Their study subjects are disappearing, and the places where they study them are changing too fast.”

    Change is a constant in nature, she continued, “but human impacts are accelerating environmental changes so that species cannot adapt, and that’s changing biological relationships. On one hand, it’s creating this extinction crisis that we’re in, but another reverberation is that it’s affecting all of these species’ relationships. That’s between pollinators and flowers, and it really has the potential to very negatively impact very basic services that we depend on from nature, like feeding us. Connectivity goes all the way down to the soil, the vegetation, and the waterways, and keeping the processes that nature depends on functional.”

    Dr. Healy Hamilton of the California academy does species-distribution modeling, mapping habitat and areas where species are likely to live. “She showed me that she was doing this on behalf of this long-term conservation initiative to create linked landscapes and preserve connectivity between wild areas, so that plants and animals can find new habitat as the climate is changing,” said Ms. Hannibal.

    The connectivity concept also represents an important evolution in how we think about conservation. The “national parks” approach, Ms. Hannibal said, is outdated: “It turns out that this not only doesn’t work but is in some ways negative, because plants and animals need to move in order to renew their genetic viability.”

    Fortunately, she said, there is still adequate wilderness to realize the goals of the Spine of the Continent. “It is not only possible, it’s really necessary, because these places won’t persist without a full complement of species on them. And we need nature doing its thing. Just think about sequestering carbon, creating oxygen, providing habitat for pollinators and birds as they’re passing through. We really need some part of the earth to be sustained as wild.”

    Awareness of the importance of connectivity is greater in the Western states where the Spine of the Continent initiative is based, she said, but everyone can do something to help. “You don’t really have wilderness in East Hampton, but you do need to think about connectivity in terms of waterways and keeping the health of the water. When there’s zoning board meetings or any kind of land-use decision, go to the meeting and have connectivity in mind. Become environmentally aware: Try not to buy plastic water bottles, use recyclable containers, don’t idle your car.”

    “We have to view ourselves as co-inhabitants on this earth,” Ms. Hannibal said. “It’s not going to matter how rich anybody is, or how many jobs there are, if all of these systems collapse. I wrote my book hoping to help people understand what nature is up against and how we can help.”

Collectively, the effect of “Holy Crap!” – a group show now on view at the Fireplace project – is like meeting a hellion on the day that he’s finally decided to reform. Indeed, the artists Nate Lowman, Dan Colen, Rob Pruitt, and Piotr Uklanski have carved out blazing, independent paths in pop, transforming images, materials, and ideas into the aesthetic equivalent of thumbing your nose. Typically, their works issue a dare to the idea of art itself, not to mention our market culture and political norms. “Holy Crap!” promised a combustible moment – not a tidy show of works that, with a few exceptions, might largely go unnoticed in your living room walls.

A collaboration of these four artists – who in various permutations have worked together in the past – is a no-brainer, given their affinities on so many levels. Indeed, Michele Maccarone, the curator, saw this group show as something like an “Ocean’s Eleven.” Their combined star power would create an irresistible force of its own, particularly interesting against the backdrop of muscular East End artists such as de Kooning and Pollock (the Pollock-Krasner House is across the road from the Fireplace project).

As its name might suggest, “Holy Crap!” highlights the artists’ practice of using scrap, detritus, and trash in works, which can mean anything from drop cloths and Chinese pencil shavings to dental floss and Styrofoam. For this intimate space – the made-over former Talmage Garage – Ms. Maccarone focused on smaller works that are non-labor intensive, i.e. rapidly made. At her eponymous gallery in the West Village of New York, Maccarone has presented all of these artists in ambitious shows.

“Holy Crap!” opened in mid-August with one of Mr. Pruitt’s yard sales, though he was selling his own belongings this time. Apparently, a few mistook the sale for what it looked like – wondering, no doubt, at empty paints cans that were going for 50 bucks. Mr. Pruitt is an interesting case. The dean of the group at the age of 48, he was cast out of the art world for a 1992 show with Jack Early at Leo Castelli Gallery. Their show’s perceived comment on the marketing of African American culture did not go down in a climate where acute political correctness was becoming a gathering storm.

Mr. Pruitt made his way back in a lonely decade later, since offering works such as “Cocaine Buffet,” in which viewers were invited partake of minimalist lines stretched across 16 feet of mirror on the floor. He is best known for his trash culture paintings of Panda bears, which he began in 2000. Mr. Pruitt’s 2010 “Pattern and Degradation,” at Gavin Brown Gallery and Maccarone, riffed on Rumspringa, a sanctioned period of wild-oat sewing among the Amish. To a 13,000-square-foot space, Mr. Pruitt brought paintings based on Amish quilts, monumental self-portraits, a photo-based painting of Cinnabon buns, cast-off tire sculptures, and wallpaper made pictures of Mr. Pruitt’s Facebook friends and “kitlers,” photos of kittens resembling Hitler that were viral on the Web.

In Mr. Pruitt’s yard sale, there is a hilarious humility and arrogance in offering up art in three upended water bottles, a marker wedged in the top, all held together by packing tape embossed with Mr. Pruitt’s signature. Or a “wreath” made of old athletic shoes. It harks back to his 1999 “101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself,” which was reportedly more Martha Stewart than ironic conceit. “You don’t need to look at my work, you can do it yourself,” Mr. Pruitt told the actor James Franco in an Interview Q & A, in a campaign to make art and its rarified world more accessible. And, indeed, you could do it yourself if you’d thought of it first and had the brazen confidence (and sense of humor) to pull it off. The artist who assigns value has all the control. In the adjoining gallery of the Fireplace Project, Pruitt offers up “Holy Crap, 2012” – that is, Styrofoam “dinosaur dung” varnished in cosmi-chrome.

Through his own showy brand of passive aggression, Mr. Pruitt takes center stage, though Mr. Lowman, whom Ms. Maccarone represents, appears to be the featured player in the show’s press release. In the decade he has shown his work, Mr. Lowman has become an art darling. His paintings, sculpture, and bricolage communicate an alienation – meditations, often, on a culture of violence and political atrocity. Mr. Lowman’s appropriated images of a topless Nicole Brown Simpson, the Iran contra conspirator Oliver North, de Kooning’s “Marilyn Monroe,” and smiley faces propose, in his words, “second, third, and fourth” meanings to familiar pop culture iconography and obsessions. By all reports, his disaster paintings of an Iceland volcano or a flood in Brazil – executed in an automotive spray paint gun and layered alkyd – show a hauntingly eerie detachment to disaster on an epic scale.

To “Holy Crap!,” Mr. Lowman brings five works – his own unaltered canvas drop cloths that are speckled, sprayed, and smeared with paint, oil, and dirt, and stretched across wooden frames. “Dirt Snuggler, 2012” and “Dirt Devil, 2012” are the kind of abstract pieces that might, in other circumstances, tie together outlying pastel fabrics in home décor. That these accidental canvases are so blandly attractive proposes perhaps an interesting irony. The frame of “I’m Loving It, 2012” has been fashioned into an enlarged Magic Tree (the noxious deodorizers that dangle over car dashboards); canvas pieces in “The Awesome One, 2012” are sewn together with dental floss. It’s in these kinds of interventions that Lowman’s work on this show begins to show a little backbone.

The original impetus for “Holy Crap!” was a proposed collaboration between Mr. Lowman and Mr. Uklanski, who has two signature pieces in the show of pencil shavings under Plexiglas in 36-by-26 inch gilded frames. But you’ve got to wonder if in this context of new pieces that are purposely off the cuff, works that were created in 2007 are phoning it in. Or even whether they could truly be called collaborative. Or does Mr. Uklanski consider “Untitled (Cleopatra)” and “Untitled (Lashinda)” in keeping with the theme of objects now relegated to a discard pile? As serenely lovely as she is, “Untitled (Cleopatra)” – an expanse of fine pale yellow pencil shavings – has the look of exotic curry with an expiring shelf life.

The glamour piece in “Holy Crap!” is Mr. Colen’s voluptuous “Hard Day’s Night, 2012,” his single entry in the show. Rubberneckers to Mr. Colen’s exciting (and incredibly accomplished) career will remember NEST in which he and friends rolled naked like caged rodents through shredded telephone books or the photo of himself from the neck down with a Jewish prayer shawl over his erect penis, offered at a Berlin show. Mr. Colen has also turned out meticulous photo realistic riffs on Disney imagery, a “Birdshit” series of paintings, and recreated chewing gum packaging, ultimately using the gum as a medium.

“Hard Day’s Night, 2012” – a 49-by-38-by-12 inch bricolage – incorporates objects such as an empty Coke can, an overturned basket, a work boot, a coffee cup, an electric plug, and beach detritus into a kind of shipwrecked Rauschenberg. Layers of splattered paint that look as though they are still wet give the piece its lusciousness. The work lives up not only to the title “Holy Crap!” but injects a kind of joyous, anarchistic spirit into the show that is largely missing elsewhere.

National Theatre Live

    Guild Hall will have its first fall presentation of the National Theatre Live series with “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” on Saturday at 8 p.m. The play, which was recorded recently in London, is based on a novel by Mark Haddon and stars Sophie Duval, Nicola Walker, Rhiannon Harper Rafferty, Nick Sidi, and Howard Ward.

    Who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog Wellington? It is not clear, but Christopher, who was found near the body, is under suspicion. The 15-year old decides to take on the detective work to clear his name and solve the mystery. Tickets are $18 and $16 for members.

New Legends

    Joe Lauro will present the latest in his “Legends of American Music” series tomorrow at the Bay Street Theatre at 8 p.m.

    Mr. Lauro scours his Historic Films Archive to find unseen or under-appreciated performance clips that he then assembles into compilations. This grouping will include Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Bill Monroe, Ruth Brown, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and others.

    The screening will be followed by a live concert by Mamalee Rose. A portion of the $15 admission charge will go toward the Sag Harbor Music Festival.

Choral Auditions

    The Choral Society of the Hamptons will hold auditions for interested singers and instrumentalists to participate in its holiday concert on Dec. 9.

    Rehearsals began last week, but will continue on Monday evenings from 7:30 to 10 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church.

    The holiday program will consist of Magnificats by Vivaldi and Pergolesi, Buxtehude’s “In Dulci Jubilo,” and Charpentier’s Christmas Cantata. Those interested in joining the chorus may contact the society’s executive director Veronika Semsakova at [email protected].

    Those auditioning will be asked to prepare a short song and to demonstrate some sight-reading ability.

‘Fearless Fusions’

    This weekend, Montauk Library and Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton will host the ZigZag Quartet in a presentation titled “Fearless Fusions.”

    The quartet features Alexander Wu on piano, Francisco Roldan on guitar, Hilliard Greene on bass, and Danny Mallon on drums. They will perform Latin jazz and classical works by Almeida, Brubeck, Tcimpidis, Addison, Lord, Binelli, and others.

    The group will be in Montauk on Saturday at 7 p.m. and in Southampton on Sunday at 3 p.m. The concerts are free and open to the public.

   The Sag Harbor American Music Festival is now officially an annual event, after the resounding success of the inaugural event last year. Live music will again fill the streets, restaurants, galleries, shops, and historic spots throughout the village beginning on Friday, Sept. 28, and continuing with free shows the next day. The number and variety of musicians and venues have taken a huge jump, with more than 20 musical acts scheduled to perform outside, all with contingency plans should rain overcome shine.

    Kicking off the festival on Friday, Sept. 28 will be an 8 p.m. concert by John Hammond, a legendary bluesman, at the Old Whalers Church. It has a $20 ticket price. After the daylong festivities on Sept. 29, the finale will be an after-party at the theater from 9 to 11 p.m. featuring Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks and Mary McBride. Ms. McBride’s performance will coincide with a return to her East Hampton home after a world tour that took her to Afghanistan. Tickets to the roots and rockabilly show cost $10, available on that day only. Kelly Connaughton, the founder of the festival, has suggested getting to the box office early that day, as only 300 tickets will be sold.

    “I am cheered the festival is including local music, reflecting a healthy little scene many artists have worked hard to keep alive,” said Mr. Casey, who is no stranger to the Bay Street Theatre, and a big fan of it. He formed the Lone Sharks when he moved to Sag Harbor in 1988, and looks forward to seeing some familiar faces. Having traveled the East Coast’s roots-rock circuit since 1990, the rockabilly and rhythm and blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist now plays from Manhattan to Montauk and has several original CDs to his credit.

    Escola de Samba Boom will hit it on Sept. 29 at 11 a.m. and wake the village from Windmill Beach. Boom, a 32-piece Brazilian percussion ensemble, is led by Richie Siegler, who will also perform a few sets at 1 p.m. with “a really interesting group of musicians from New York” on the Main Street lawn of the Life Style boutique.

    “Jazz is my passion,” said Mr. Siegler, who has kept busy all summer with trios and quartets playing primarily private parties. “Young hipsters are digging the jazz now” too, he said Sunday. He promised the afternoon performance would have Latin, Brazilian, and Cuban influences.

    Another returning and crowd-pleasing performance will be a 12:30 p.m. show on the steps of the Old Whalers Church. Joe Lauro’s Who Dat Loungers, a New Orleans party band, brings lighthearted fun and welcomes dancing and all things Mardi Gras. Last year’s show inspired this year’s official festival painting, “Musicians at Old Whalers Church” by Maryann Lucas, a local artist. On display at the Romany Kramoris Gallery on Main Street, it will be raffled for $10 per ticket to support the festival.

    At the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum, the folk and roots music of Caroline Doctorow and the Steamrollers can be heard at 2 p.m. Jim Campagnola, a sought-after saxophonist, keyboardist, guitarist, composer, arranger, and bandleader from New York City, will play outside Suffolk County National Bank at 2:30. Also coming east for the day will be Rocket and the Ghost, a modern acoustic rock duo that has been compared to the White Stripes. That show will be at 3 p.m. at BookHampton.

     With its decades of practice in giving classic Americana concerts, the Sag Harbor Community Band will once again be outside the American Legion Hall on Bay Street, this time at 3 p.m. Down the street, in front of the Sag Harbor Florist and Made, its neighbor, Robert Bruey, a singer and songwriter from the North Fork, will perform at 4 p.m.

    Among the festival’s new venues this year is GeekHampton, also on Bay Street, where the folk, alternative country, and blues of Cassandra House can be heard at 2 p.m. LT Burger on Main Street will host the Buzzards, a bluesy rock band, at 3:30, and another burger joint and longtime supporter of local music, Bay Burger, just a short trip south on the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, will have the country, folk, and rock of Hopefully Forgiven at 5 p.m. Muse in the Harbor has invited Joe Delia and Thieves to rock the restaurant at 6 p.m.

    As part of the festival’s Twilight Lounge from 6:30 to 8:30, light refreshments alongside fire pits will be within the sculpture garden at Dodds and Eder, behind the west side of the Main Street shops. Another returning crowd pleaser from last year, the Dan Bailey Tribe, will perform reggae and African music there.

    Art lovers can take in three gallery performances: Sara Hartman at 4:30 p.m. at the Grenning Gallery, Mariann Megna at 6 at the Hamptons Studio of Fine Art, and cabaret with Nancy Stearns at the Romany Kramoris Gallery at 7.

    The off-season festivities help not only musicians who often struggle to make a living, but also local businesses. Ken O’Donnell of La Superica said he was “truly amazed at the wide range of people it drew last year.” He said he was impressed by the variety of musical genres and pleased with the extra business it brought in. The Montauk Project, a Sag Harbor-born band that plays rock ’n’ roll, will be back at the restaurant this year at 8 p.m.

    “I think Sag Harbor is doing it right again musically,” said Alfredo Merat, a veteran Latin-fusion musician who will perform at the Sag Harbor Florist at 1:30 p.m. “A florist!” he said excitedly. “Last year’s turnout in the streets, shops, and restaurants showed that people care about live music.” Phao restaurant, which Mr. Merat manages, will sponsor Astrograss, an eclectic bluegrass band from New York City, at 5:30 p.m.

    The singer and songwriter added that he hopes the festival results in an amendment to village law, which currently prohibits plugged-in music in village restaurants.

    “Children love it too,” Mr. Merat said. It “truly is important that they get exposed to live music.” A new addition for the young ones this year is a musical puppet show by Liz Joyce of the Goat on a Boat Puppet Theatre at 1 p.m.

    Music fans can come by land or sea, what with public transportation from the North Fork available by water this year thanks to the Peconic Jitney, which will run its normal schedule. The Sag Harbor Chamber of Commerce’s Web site offers ideas for dining and lodging at hotels and bed and breakfasts. Restaurant reservations have been suggested.

     Ms. Connaughton, whose idea in 2009 became the impetus for the nonprofit festival, has been keeping very busy with promotion, fund-raising, marketing, and bookings, with help from Laura Grenning, John Landes, and Kerry Farrell, as well as the many local donors and sponsors. With “no large capital,” she has worked diligently to bring music to the village without going into the red.

    “The community support is the reason it has grown,” she said on Sunday, and she could use some volunteer ambassadors to help welcome visitors and hand out programs. She recommended volunteering by way of a Facebook message.

    The festival, Mr. Siegler said, is “a way to celebrate live music, and it is good for business, attracting people to the village in the off-season — that’s what it’s about.”

    The full schedule is available at sagharbormusic.org.