Out this week in paperback, Helen Schulman’s “This Beautiful Life” is a highly contemporary tale of woe. The novel looks at how a family manages and fails to manage in the grip of a thoroughly distressing sticky wicket brought on by the ills of the exponential Internet and exacerbated by the ills of the family in question. The book is a peek at how individuals operate in society and within a family given ills all around — given life in this novel being something of a mess, it turns out, in spite of the luck, privilege, and striving of the characters.

    The novel centers around the Bergamots, who have moved from a comfortable life in a college town to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in order for Richard Bergamot, the husband and dad, to pursue an important leadership role at a university. He is handsome, tall, in control of his image, his strategy, and himself. He makes the money, he’s proud of his mastery. He’s the golden boy turned golden man, but not from a privileged background: His is a bootstraps story.

    Richard has his family in tow, including Jake, the cute, complex sophomore in high school, and Coco, the sassy, exuberant kindergartner. Both children are attending Wildwood, a super-fancy private school. And then there’s Liz, Richard’s wife, the children’s mother. Liz is warm, emotive, neurotic, smart, pretty, self-conscious. She’s ambivalent about her choice, perhaps not seeing it entirely as a choice, to be a full-time stay-at-home mother rather than seriously pursue a career in art history, the subject in which she holds a Ph.D. She’s a native New Yorker, but not from the privileged, private-school world she finds herself plunged into with the move to Manhattan.

    Played out with these personalities along with a host of other deftly drawn contemporary characters, the scenario of the book is this: Jake, the 15-year-old sophomore, attends an unchaperoned party and makes out with the hostess, Daisy, who is an eighth grader at his school, but he rejects her in a tide of emotion, and the experience goes no further. The next day Jake opens an e-mail message from Daisy that contains a sexually explicit video she made of herself for him using the camera on her computer. (The video is described in full in the first two pages of the book; it’s unbelievable but plausible, if that makes sense.)

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“This Beautiful Life”

Helen Schulman

Harper Perennial, $13.99

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    “Was this pornography? Was it even sexy? He thought it was sexy, but he wasn’t sure. He felt hard and he felt soft. It was like a hot potato. He had to fling it to someone else.”

    Jake forwards the video to his best friend. He thinks better of it almost immediately, but almost immediately is too late in a digital world. His friend forwards the video, and so on and so on. The video goes viral and the Bergamot family is engulfed in scandal.

    For some readers, the scenario of “This Beautiful Life” might seem forced, more a closed container for the issues it raises than a platform to support issues of human nature and human struggle as they develop within the narrative; the scenario might seem too much of a hook, too transparent a vehicle for issue-raising. Yet still the novel is engaging for the questions it poses: Who is to blame for the video Daisy makes? Her wealthy, neglectful parents? A society that sexualizes girls? Is Jake a cad for forwarding the e-mail? Or just a 15-year-old with poor impulse control? What about all the people who hit “forward” after him? Who is accountable? Where did Jake’s parents go wrong? Did they go wrong? Who, in such a situation, should be apologizing to whom?

    As the book unfolds, Jake becomes crippled with confusion about his role as a boy and future man; his relationship to power and gender dynamics is on the line. There are hints of his not landing on his feet. Ms. Schulman writes of Jake seeing Daisy for the first time at school following the scandal:

    “He was the creator of her torment and he knew it. At that moment, inside him the twin ruling deities of the rest of his life, a giddy recognition of his own powers and a crushing sense of shame, were born. Both paled before the desire to save himself.”

    Meanwhile, Jake’s mother, essentially, can’t deal. She gets sucked into the constant on switch of the Internet as she monitors the scandal, then branches off into the darker regions of the Web trying to formulate a context for the video made for and sent to her son. She begins to lose sight of how to play her role as a mother; she begins to neglect her duties.

    Jake’s father proceeds to do damage control and attempts to manage the course of the scandal while becoming increasingly frustrated with his wife’s incapacity to take charge of family affairs. Life in the Bergamot family is looking bad, permeated by neglect and isolation. Unsalvageable? Ms. Schulman writes of Richard arriving home to the apartment late from having drinks:

    “From the sound of things, sometime in the evening, like worn-out boxers, Lizzie and the kids had each retreated to their various corners of the apartment — Coco to the TV in her room, Jake most likely stretched out on the floor by his bed listening to his iPod, and here in their bedroom, once again, Lizzie heedlessly entering her laptop’s dark Oz. Since when do they each need a media highball? Richard thinks. Since when do they need something to take the edge off?”

    We read for the possibility of redemption and we read for the painful allure of witnessing, in slow motion, a train derail and threaten to totally wreck. Can this family survive the pressure of this experience? Would the marriage have been headed for trouble sometime down the line anyway?

    Ms. Schulman’s writing is clear, full of facility, often it sings with a sort of joy in using the English language. “This Beautiful Life” is fun to read for its accurate, stylish rendering of the Bergamots’ particular brand of educated privilege and the currents within it. Although the contemporary, realistic mode mainly dwells in accuracy and attention to detail — the construction of a mirror — Ms. Schulman’s writing is also infused with a smart, sly humor and an understanding of her characters’ interiors that lends compassion and perspective at times.

    Gender, sexuality, character, and the construction of family in contemporary life get a workout with Ms. Schulman’s tap tap tapping on the keys.

—

    Helen Schulman’s previous novels include “A Day at the Beach.” She is a regular visitor to Amagansett, where her mother has a house.

    Evan Harris, the author of “The Quit,” lives in East Hampton with her husband and two sons.

  Unlike the rest of us, when asked for advice Philip Galanes doesn’t have to wonder if it’s flattering or if an honest response would touch the third rail of social intercourse. As the “Social Q’s” columnist for The New York Times, it’s his job, and he’ll take on all supplicants and entertain all embarrassments.

    Beyond the professional veneer, the hell of other people is further mitigated because he writes, largely, from the comfort of his East Hampton home.

    “The column lets me be out here a lot,” he said the other day. “The best way to sort out other people’s problems is by walking a dog on the beach.”

    Writing an advice column isn’t work you apply for. An editor of the Sunday Styles section turned out to be “one of the 17 people” who bought Mr. Galanes’s 2004 novel, “Father’s Day.”

    “She said, ‘This is the voice I want.’ Smart-alecky but with a heart behind it. It’s nice that it came out of what I thought was the biggest failure ever.”

    That editor, by the way, “transferred out to another section. That seems to be how it works at The Times — you never leave the building, you just move to a different desk.”

    “Starting out, the column was clearly entertainment, with a little bit of service. But I quickly saw that people needed help. When it’s your problem, common sense goes out the window. People get hamstrung by their own annoyance.”

    “We receive several hundred questions a week,” he said, “and it doubles from November to January.” (That was no royal “we” — the volume alone has cost him “more than one assistant.”) “We’re all so spread out from our families,” managing them at a distance. “At the holidays we come together, and it creates a massive amount of stress.”

    “We see people and it makes us nervous. E-mail and Twitter keep people at an arm’s length. The digital revolution took away a lot of stuff; we’ve lost a muscle when it comes to dealing with people face to face.”

    Mr. Galanes’s experience with face time comes in part from his work as an entertainment lawyer. He said he has a dozen or so clients in the fine arts and theater. “The column is a silent process, and it can be lonely,” whereas in his practice, “clients always have problems and want to talk.”

    “I do,” he said when asked if he thought an expertise in etiquette related to lawyering, its minding of Ps and Qs, as it were, its, uh, empathy? “I try to imagine what the lawyer on the other side would say. . . . The job is to bring people together and see how to make things work. When you say you’re totally wrong or totally right, it never works.”

    “Hold your hollandaise, Benjy!” Mr. Galanes wrote to Ben from Florida, who earlier this month asked him about the wisdom of proposing marriage in front of his girlfriend’s parents at a big family brunch. “I took a sensible approach,” in effect splitting the difference: Why not proceed with the proposal without a parental surprise that could ruin their first party of the new year?

    “The guy 100 percent disregarded my advice.” (Mr. Galanes wondered if such an impulse to self-display resulted from too much reality TV.)

    He called on his lawyerly diplomacy regarding a far touchier subject when a Latina with a fair-complected white husband wrote in to relay how, say, on an elevator she would be mistaken for her child’s maid or nanny. His advice? Extend a hand and introduce yourself.

    “People were furious. They wanted her to shout, ‘You racist!’ But it was an honest mistake. We all make assumptions. . . . Why make it a war?”

    “The sad questions I get are the ones I feel really need help, more than the Styles section can give them.” When kids write him, for instance.

    “This one girl, 13 or 14, was told by her boyfriend that if she drank balsamic vinaigrette she wouldn’t get pregnant. And she writes me? Something’s going wrong here. We like to assume kids are so sophisticated today, but they’re still kids, not fully developed.”

    “Besides, everybody knows it’s ranch dressing.”

    The success of the column led to a book of the same name, out from Simon and Schuster not long ago and subtitled “How to Survive the Quirks, Quandaries, and Quagmires of Today.”

    “After publishing novels” — “Emma’s Table,” a comedy of manners, appropriately enough, was his most recent — “and nonfiction, it’s been like a walk in the park. . . . The book keeps going and going. People really want to talk about stuff we don’t deal with day to day.”

    One recent question broached the subject of payment for private tutoring when the matter hadn’t been brought up beforehand. Mr. Galanes elucidated the faux pas: “But what if you were thinking $500 an hour, and Miss Mortarboard’s parents were leaning toward a thank-you lunch at the Olive Garden?” That column went online a couple of days ahead of its Sunday publication and within hours of its posting he’d “already received 40 letters on either side of the issue.”

    “It may be a sad thing to say about the world, but yes, it’s one of the most popular parts of the paper. Take that, Maureen Dowd.”

    Now in its 36th year, the annual Pushcart Prize anthology, “Best of the Small Presses,” has become a standard title for anyone interested in a sampling of who or what is happening in contemporary American literature.

    The anthology has reached a point that the reviews from year to year are probably rather much the same: Each assessment pronounces a respectable selection of older and younger writers with pieces that range from outstanding to good to not so good to simply boring. From year to year the critical consensus may change as to which genre is better represented in that particular volume: Is the selected poetry better than the chosen fiction, or do the essays or memoirs eclipse both?

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“Pushcart Prize XXXVI”

Edited by Bill Henderson

Pushcart Press, $18.95

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    The Pushcart Prize has also been around long enough for there to be an ongoing irate reaction to its annual appearance. The grousers will assert that the selections are too safe or too predictable, lamenting that the authors are not one’s friends, one’s wife, or one’s self. The represented presses may also be bemoaned as being too safe, too predictable, or not owned by one’s friends, one’s wife, or one’s self. The fairness and objectivity of the selection process will be argued as those not selected, and the friends and mothers of those not selected, rail against the innocuous, pedestrian choices once again made by the minions of the conservative literary establishment. (This year there are 52 presses represented, 15 of which appear for the first time, out of more than 650 small presses.)

    Any compilation of any kind with “best” in its title is open to this type of disdain and quibbling. But truth be told, the annual appearance of the Pushcart Prize is, as always, an ideal opportunity to enjoy, discover (or rediscover), and, yes, quibble about a considerable array of poetry, fiction, memoir, and essays, whether they be the year’s best (whatever that may mean) or not. The current volume is no exception. It is difficult to think that anyone picking up this book and even cursorily thumbing through it would not find at least a few pieces to enjoy and appreciate.

    For example, there are several exceptional stories this year; among them are Elizabeth Tallent’s arresting “Never Come Back,” the haunting “Girls, at Play” by Celeste Ng, Sandra Leong’s “We Don’t Deserve This,” and Frederic Tuten’s elegant “The Veranda.” Poetry is well represented by selections from Alice Friman, Joy Katz, and Stephen Dobyns. John Murillo’s “Song,” Douglas Goetsch’s “Black People Can’t Swim,” and Mark Halliday’s “Meditation After an Excellent Dinner” are first among equals here.

     The selection of nonfiction is particularly outstanding. Among the very best essays are Anis Shivani’s necessarily scathing “The MFA/Creative Writing System Is a Closed, Undemocratic, Medieval Guild System That Represses Good Writing” (the title really says it all), “Never Give an Inch” by Gerald Howard, which considers the scarcity and importance of the working-class author, and Lisa Couturier’s “Dark Horse,” a disturbing depiction of horse auctions and the fate of those horses that fall to the “kill buyers.”

    Mark Richard’s selection from his memoir, “House of Prayer No. 2,” is one of the exceptional pieces of any genre. Using the second person singular, he draws the reader into his bizarre Dickensian childhood world of pain, misunderstanding, and spirituality as a “special child,” one who suffers from hip defects as well as the perception that he is “slow.”

    Perhaps in any other year Mr. Richard’s piece would be the hands-down best selection of the anthology, but here it is rivaled by the memoir of another Southern writer, John Jeremiah Sullivan, although his is far different in tone. His funny and affectionate (as well as poignant and a bit creepy) “Mr. Lytle: An Essay” deals with his time as a “kind of apprentice” or aide to the 92-year-old Andrew Lytle, the longtime editor of The Sewanee Review and the last of the Southern Agrarians, a group of writers and philosophers that included Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate, during the last year of his life. Mr. Richards and Mr. Sullivan share a talent for keen observation, and they each write with a seeming effortlessness and grace about offbeat situations made very real. Both of these remarkable writers touch the reader’s heart as well as mind.

    Mr. Sullivan’s essay is also among a number of pieces that give this volume, intentionally or not, a lingering thematic sense of death and bereavement. It begins with Bill Henderson’s introduction and his remembrance of Reynolds Price, a founding editor of the Pushcart Press, and continues with such pieces as Mr. Dobyns’s fine poem for Hayden Carruth, “Laugh,” Leon Stokesbury’s “Watching My Mother Take Her Last Breath,” Deborah Thompson’s moving “Mishti Kukur,” in which she recounts her trip to India six years after her husband’s death to visit his relatives, Gerald Stern’s brief poetic remembrance of Pablo Casals, Eve Becker’s touching memoir concerning her father, “Final Concert,” and stories by Susan Steinberg and Anna Solomon.

    A word or two regarding Mr. Henderson, whose yearly introductions to these anthologies should not go unnoticed but often do. Not that he has been necessarily overlooked, having been recognized by the National Book Critics Circle and Poets & Writers, among others, but it is good to be reminded of the chance he took 36 years ago and the service he has provided to readers since then. It is an almost impossible task for the general reader to keep up with the small presses, but over the years Mr. Henderson and the Pushcart Press have provided a convenient means of entrance into at least part of this vital literary world.

    Neither he nor the Pushcart Press is perfect — from year to year some of the volumes’ inclusions as well as exclusions are head-scratchers. And Mr. Henderson needs to curb his rants against online writing and e-readers and concede that good writing can be and is found on the Internet. But these caveats do not lessen the reader’s debt to him for taking a long ago leap of faith and for continuing to produce an always generous and varied view into one corner of the ever-evolving American literary scene.

—

    Bill Henderson is the author of, most recently, “All My Dogs: A Life.” He lives in Springs.

    After 30 years of teaching literature at Southampton College, William Roberson now works at Long Island University’s Brentwood campus. He lives in Mastic.

Madoo Benefit Photo Show

    Diana Frank will share her photography at Pierre’s restaurant in Bridgehampton beginning with a reception on Saturday afternoon from 3 to 6 p.m.

    Ms. Frank, a former model, is a mostly self-taught photographer, although she has taken classes at the International Center for Photography. She has a business photographing children in New York City, but will be showing her fine art photography at Pierre’s, a series called “Study in Water.” It will be on view through Feb. 29.

    She will give 20 percent of the proceeds to the Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack, to support the garden and structures there.

    In other Madoo news, Robert Dash, the creator of the conservancy, has sold his poetry archives and a portion of the garden archives to the Beinecke Library at Yale University and donated the proceeds to Madoo. At Madoo’s library, a volunteer is now cataloging all of Mr. Dash’s gardening books, some 900 volumes in all. In addition, she is making note of his annotations, condition of the books, and has donated the cataloging software to Madoo. When complete, it will be available for online reference. A project to catalog Mr. Dash’s poetry and fine art books is also in the works.

Audrey Flack at Rutgers

    Audrey Flack, a realist painter and sculptor who lives in East Hampton, has a major show up at Rutgers University in New Jersey through June. Ms. Flack is the Estelle Lebowitz visiting artist in residence at the university.

    The show is of works on paper — prints, drawings, and photographs — curated by Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin. It is part of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists series at the university, organized by the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art. Ms. Flack will speak about her work in an April 3 lecture at the new Brunswick, N.J., campus.

Sultan Guest Juror

    Terrie Sultan, the director of the Parrish Art Musuem in Southampton, will judge entries in a Riverhead gallery’s upcoming, juried all-media show. East End Arts Gallery has issued a call for work influenced by music for an exhibit to open March 2. The winner of the competition will be invited to have additional work appear in a show at the gallery in 2013.

    Details about sizes and entry requirements can be downloaded at eastend arts.org. Submissions will be accepted Feb. 23 to 25 at the gallery, at 113 East Main Street in Riverhead.

Expression Session

    A group show with paintings and sculpture by seven South Fork resident artists will be up this weekend at Ashawagh Hall in Springs. A reception for the show, called Expression, will be Saturday from 6 to 10 p.m. Ashawagh Hall, at 780 Springs-Fireplace Road, will be open for visitors who would like a more sedate look at the work on Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.

    Breahna Arnold, Josh Dayton, Madelon Chapman, Billy Martin, Robert Nasatka, Kate Petrone, and Hailey Elisabeth Kohlus are featured. Music at the Saturday reception is by Julian Pascal.

   Songs from Brazil will warm Bridgehampton at a concert tomorrow in the Bridgehampton Historical Society’s archive building at 2539-A Montauk Highway at 7 p.m. Ludmilla and Marcello, a Brazilian duo, will perform music made popular by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Elis Regina, Joao Gilberto, and Caetano Veloso. Jane Hastay and Peter Martin Weiss, who are the hosts of the society’s Parlor Jazz series, will accompany them on piano and bass. The archive is at the eastern end of Bridgehampton Main Street and has plenty of parking. Tickets are $25 and can be ordered online at bridgehampton historicalsociety.org.

Members can attend for $10.

   Hugh W. Wyatt, a black Cherokee Indian and Sag Harbor resident, is preparing to “put the beauty and creativity of the world on display” at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater. The shows on Saturday and Sunday are in honor of Black History Month, and Mr. Wyatt feels that all of America’s musical genres have roots in gospel. Also celebrated will be the idea that “different cultures make beautiful music,” the producer and manager said.

    His goal is a new sound, blending world genres and cultural backgrounds, he explained at a rehearsal on Saturday. Mr. Wyatt believes that every country has its own art, music, and food that should be appreciated without dilution. “This is what the world is about,” he said, adding that racial prejudices would be reduced if people had a better understanding of other cultures.

    Claes Brondal, who with his Groove Gumbo Trio is part of the concerts, called music an international language, a common thread that is also a way of keeping the spirit going in difficult times.

    The singing “stars,” as selected by Mr. Wyatt for his Hamptons Gospel Sextet, include blacks, whites, Latinos, and Native Americans. He promised that Sunday’s 1 p.m. show would be “a stew” — “Amazing Grace,” for example, sung simultaneously in English and Spanish by Diane Westbrook and Raphael Blandon.

    The newly formed sextet includes the singers John Lewis, Lorraine Allston, and Ethel Riddick, and Barbara Person on piano. The group has come together from churches across the East End: Calvary Baptist Church in East Hampton, the First Baptist Churches of Southampton and Bridgehampton, the Shinnecock Presbyterian Church, and Vida Abundante of Wainscott. (The Rev. Cornelius Fulford of the Baptist Church in Cutchogue is also a member but will not be performing.) Mr. Wyatt has extended a hand to all churches, of all colors, that wish to be involved.

    Also performing Sunday will be the duo Good Sense, with Willie Fuentes and Mr. Blandon. Mr. Brondal, a drummer, will open the show as a duo with Bill Smith, a keyboardist. They will put a new spin on old-fashioned gospel favorites and provide backup for other acts as well. Mr. Brondal, originally from Denmark, has been in many international bands and teaches percussion.

    Paying tribute to traditional black music, Mr. Wyatt has booked the Persuasions, a well-known a cappella group, for Saturday at 7 and 9 p.m. They will split the show with Ray, Goodman, and Brown, known for their classic soul hits. Bryan Wilson, a gospel singer, will guest-star. At noon and 2 p.m. that day there will be something for children and the young at heart — a magic show featuring the clowns BeetleBum and Henry.

     As the first person of color to be a reporter at The New York Daily News, Mr. Wyatt had a distinguished career as an investigative journalist and music columnist. Formerly a musician himself, he played bass guitar for Gladys Knight and the Pips as a teenager and later in life shared a Grammy Award for his liner notes for an Art Blakey album, “New York Scene.”

     Activism and diversity have been important to Mr. Wyatt since his days as a reporter in the 1960s, which included covering the civil rights movement and antiwar protests. Among the civil rights organizations he is involved with is Clergy and Providers for Racial Healthcare Equality, of which he is chairman.

    Mr. Wyatt’s company, Hampton Venues, is a subsidiary of The Spiritual Herald, a national urban newspaper he edits and publishes. The paper is designed to address the needs and concerns of people across America’s religious spectrum through ministers, priests, rabbis, and other spiritual leaders.

    Tickets cost $42 each for Saturday’s shows, $25  for Sunday’s show, and $12 each for the magic shows. They are available online at hamptonsvenues. com or by calling 725-1780.

   On a day in early January, a crew of five dedicated technicians worked painstakingly in a large, unheated, vacant church building to dismantle and save a historic pipe organ and, they hope, eventually find a new location for it.

    The former Sag Harbor Methodist Church on Madison Street was the home of a pipe organ built in 1902. The instrument had served well for nearly a century, but perhaps about 10 years ago fell into disrepair.

    The building was bought in November by Elizabeth Dow, a textile designer and the owner of Amagansett Applied Arts, a school that also houses a textiles and wall coverings studio. Ms. Dow’s background includes work on historic preservation and restoration projects, among them the City Opera House in Traverse City, Mich., and the Honolulu House in Marshall, Mich., and it is apparently this interest that led her to contact Elsener Organ Works in Deer Park about the instrument.

    The organ, which was in the front center of the venerable and beautiful sanctuary, stands about 17 feet high, 15 feet wide, and 10 feet deep. It was built by the M.P. Moller Pipe Organ Company of Hagerstown, Md., which built about 11,000 organs between 1875 and 1992.

    It has 17 sets of pipes, each with its own distinctive tone color, with a total of about 1,000 individual pipes played by two keyboards and a pedal board. They range from the size of a small pencil to perhaps 12 feet in length. Most of the pipes are made of an alloy of tin and lead, and some of them are wooden. Each pipe is actually a musical instrument in itself, working roughly on the principle of a whistle, and they are the heart of the organ sound. As is typical of the period, the facade pipes are decorated with hand-painted scrollwork.

    The next day, Jan. 10, in the bare, almost eerie sanctuary, as crew members handed the pipes one by one down from the high organ loft to a table, where they were cataloged and then carefully wrapped and boxed, there was a combination of attention to detail, melancholy, and tender, loving care.

    Large plastic drop cloths had been placed above the organ case to prevent the dust and debris of the surrounding reconstruction work from settling in the instrument.

    JoEllen Elsener, the president of Elsener Organ Works, has led her team in dismantling, restoring, and relocating a number of similar instruments, and there are a few warehoused and waiting to find new homes, perhaps in a church, music school, or private residence.

    The firm regularly tunes and maintains about 75 pipe organs of all vintages in the tristate area. It also builds, rebuilds, and restores organs, with some projects as far afield as Florida and Arizona.

    “It breaks my heart,” Bill Stimpson, the firm’s shop supervisor, said. “We see it so often.” But he also spoke fondly of other similar organs that have been successfully relocated and are making music again. Sometimes such instruments are simply destroyed, but thanks to Ms. Dow this one has a good chance of being revived.

    The pipes are in quite good condition and with minor repairs will be usable, as are the wind chests and the structural support. On the other hand, some of the smaller parts made of more perishable materials or that have had more wear and tear, especially those that connect the keys to the valves under the pipes, would need to be replaced. These include components made of leather, felt, and thin strips of wood.

    By Jan. 11, a similar dismantling process had begun with the beautifully crafted casework made of quarter-sawn oak, and detailed photos were taken to help with the hoped-for reassembly.

    Originally, the air pressure to make the pipes’ sound was provided by volunteers who hand-pumped the bellows. On the front of the casework is a water valve, indicating that the instrument was later powered by a water motor, somewhat similar to a steam engine. According to Mr. Stimpson, at that time water companies donated water to churches to power the organs.

    There is, of course, a somewhat anachronistic electric switch above the keyboards, since sometime later an electric motor replaced the earlier methods of powering the bellows.

    Standing there in the stark, unadorned former sanctuary, with all of its pews shoved to the rear, and watching the organ being dismantled, and the colorful murals on the walls on either side as reminders of its brighter days, one couldn’t help but wonder about a hundred years of services, happy celebrations, and sad commemorations in that space, with the beautiful, rich-toned music from that instrument, and hope that in the hands of these skilled and dedicated workers, this essentially well-built organ will sing once more. (This writer had the opportunity to play the instrument some time ago when it was in more or less playable condition.)

    The remaining large parts of the wind supply, the two large wind chests and the bellows, were removed on Monday.

    Soon the building will have a new incarnation. Ms. Dow, who, among her credentials, developed four wall coverings for rooms in the White House in 2009, plans to use the building for an apartment, studio, internship program, and retail space. She was recently quoted as saying, “I can’t wait to get started on this project.”

   Necessity breeds invention and eventually, the disparate but common threads of the East Hampton artistic community were bound to find a way to reknit themselves into a haphazard whole.

    Cynthia Loewen, an artist who found herself longing for the company of her colleagues between too infrequent events, said last week that she decided that what was missing was a place to regularly gather and share ideas and problems, that they could truly call their own.

    Despite the frequency of art shows at Ashawagh Hall, the lottery system for the building leaves many out of the loop who would otherwise like a place to exhibit or meet. The Artists Alliance of East Hampton, she said, has only one show a year for its regular members and its membership has dwindled recently. “I got tired of seeing 4,000 artists in East Hampton with nothing to do, no communications, only seeing each other at Ashawagh Hall once or twice a year.”

    Ms. Loewen saw a facility being underused, the Springs Presbyterian Church parish hall, and imagined a new purpose for it, the Community Art Project, which will have its introduction this weekend with a silent art auction during the church’s annual pork supper on Saturday night. Later in the month, on Feb. 25, Phyllis Braff will discuss the early artistic community in Springs.

    Ms. Loewen said the group she hopes will participate would include writers, dancers, actors, singers, potters, jewelers, and others, in addition to visual artists. “It’s in its infancy right now. We’re trying to get the word out to the public now and we’re grateful for help, any suggestions, any ideas.”

    According to Ms. Loewen, the Community Art Proj­ect will be based at the church, which will provide its facilities to every artist and person no matter their religious affiliation. The church’s hall has a stage, small film screen, commercial kitchen, and dance floor, which she said would provide ample space for classes, shows, lectures, demonstrations, variety shows, and art history classes. She would like to use the kitchen for English-style teas in conjunction with events. In summer, she said the project plans to offer art classes to schoolchildren on the church’s grounds overlooking a creek.

    “We, the artists, have become distant from the community and as such become less relevant to the public,” she said. “There seems to be little interaction with student artists, free public exhibitions, and/or inexpensive classes or lectures, discussions, or advice. Nearly all we do is directed to selling our work.” Her goal is to offer programs at minimal cost to the public and free exhibition space to artists.

     Rather than a formal organization, this will be a loose affiliation. “The founding committee will be the guiding body to assure each event moves forward for the mutual benefit of artist and community,” she said.

    There will be some restrictions because of the setting, such as no alcohol, nudity in art, or promoting religious or social controversies, but Ms. Loewen said that most of the programs the group has envisioned would be acceptable.

    The founding committee includes Ms. Loewen and Tony Larson, the pastor of the church, as well as Alice Peifer, Frank Sofo, and Dru Raley. They will collect fees as deemed appropriate for each event to defray costs and will give some money back to the church for the maintenance of the building, whether in admission fees or a percentage of sales from art exhibits.

     According to Ms. Loewen, everyone she has spoken to has been receptive so far, with a number of other community organizations indicating potential interest in collaborating with the new group. More programs will be announced soon.

Love Inspired’

    On Saturday at 7 p.m., Soo Bae, a cellist, and Tania Bannister, a pianist, will perform romantic classical works at the Southampton Cultural Center on Pond Lane in Southampton. The program “Love Inspired,” will include the Saint Saëns Concerto, Fauré Elegy, and other romantic selections.

    Ms. Bae was the winner of the 2005 Concert Artists Guild International Competition and was praised by The New Yorker as superb. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, but moved to Canada soon after taking up the cello at the age of 6. By age 8, she was enrolled at the Royal Conservatory of Music. She eventually received her Master of Music degree and Artist Diploma from the Juilliard School and currently teaches at the Gordon College in Boston and runs the Angelos Mission Ensemble Chamber music program in New Jersey, of which she is founder and director.

    Ms. Bannister recently achieved victories at the Concert Artists Guild International Competition and the New Orleans International Piano Competition and praise from The Washington Post. She has performed all over the world and at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. She was born in Hong Kong and holds degrees from the Royal Academy of Music in London, Yale University, and the Mannes School of Music.

    Tickets are $20 and $10 for students and can be purchased at the door or online at southamptonculturalcenter.org.  

Watermill Goings-On

    The Watermill Center will present the second in a series of conversations marking the publication of “The Watermill Center — A Laboratory For Performance: Robert Wilson’s Legacy” tonight at 6:30. The discussion will focus­ on the center’s structure and its unique history as a research facility for Western Union.

    José Enrique Macian, the editor of the book, and Ann Lombardo, the president of the board of the nearby Water Mill Museum, will discuss the history of the site and center and share images of the Western Union building and an 18-minute film “Watermill 1993” by Stefan Kurt with new footage of the Watermill Center in the summer of 1993.

    In New York City on Sunday at 8:45 p.m. and Monday at 3:30 p.m, “The Space in Back of You” will be screened at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. The film’s subject is Suzushi Hanayagi, a major influence on Robert Wilson. Mr. Wilson’s discussion of her contributions to dance and choreography are featured prominently in the documentary, which includes images of many of her performances and the recollections of other colleagues.

    When he discovered the artist was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, Mr. Wilson resolved to work with her once again. They communicated through a shared language of gesture and stage movement, resulting in an homage that was performed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The film was directed by Richard Rutkowski, who grew up on the South Fork and will speak after the screening. Tickets are $13 and can be purchased through filmlinc.com.

Opera Goes HD

    The latest offering in the Parrish Art Museum’s Opera and Ballet in Cinema series will be presented with the museum’s new HD projection system on Sunday at 2 p.m.

    The Royal Opera’s new production of Jules Massenet’s “Cendrillon” is a four-act opera based on Charles Perrault’s 1698 version of the Cinderella fairy tale. It premiered in Paris in 1899. This production, praised by London’s Telegraph newspaper, was directed by Laurent Pelly. Joyce DiDonato sings the title role. The running time is 170 minutes, including intermission. Tickets are $17, $14 for Parrish members.

A rare, tall-case alarm clock made in East Hampton in 1798 by the Dominy family was sold at auction at Sotheby’s in New York on Saturday to an unidentified bidder. With a buyer’s premium — the surcharge an auction house attaches to sales — the final price was $110,500. The clock’s pre-sale estimate was $50,000 to $100,000.

The interior clockwork was made by Nathaniel Dominy IV, its 85.5-inch-tall case by his son Nathaniel Dominy V. Four generations of Dominys made clocks, furniture, windmills, and utilitarian objects in East Hampton from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s.

Glenn Purcell, a collector of Dominy furniture who was in the room during the sale, saidhe had not bought the clock and did not know who had. On Monday, Sotheby’s would only disclose that a dealer in American furniture had purchased it. The winning bid was $90,000, before the surcharge.

    The mood in the room during the early part of the sale appeared to be subdued. A few paintings that sold before the clock well exceeded their highest estimates, while one of the featured items in the sale, a rare goose tureen up for bid after the clock, failed to sell. Another very important piece, a Queen Anne high chest of drawers made in 1756 by John Townsend of Newport, R.I., one of the most sought-after cabinetmakers in colonial America, sold for just over its high estimate, for $3.6 million with the buyer’s premium. The piece was even more significant for being sold by a direct descendant of its original owner, Lt. Colonel Oliver Arnold of East Greenwich, R.I.

    Other clocks in the morning sale were not estimated as high as the Dominy clock. One, a rare Queen Anne tall-case clock by Anthony Ward of New York from 1730 with an estimate of $20,000 to $30,000, failed to sell. A clock from Philadelphia with works by Solomon Parke with restorations sold at its high estimate of $8,000, with a final cost of $10,000 with the buyer’s premium.

    The sale picked up some steam toward the end and later lots fared much better with many items of interest well exceeding their estimates.