By all accounts, the exhaustive and redefining Willem de Kooning retrospective on the Museum of Modern Art’s entire sixth floor is a blockbuster, and an opportunity to come to terms with the artist’s unique contribution to 20th-century art.

    MoMA’s interpretive scholarship is exhaustively informative on its own. Yet, it was a treat to explore the show on more intimate terms with someone who was as acquainted with the artist’s working methods as anyone could be. In this respect and others, Athos Zacharias, an artist who has lived in Springs for several decades and became friends with de Kooning in the early 1950s, was an excellent tour guide for the show, which closes on Monday.

    In a 1965 letter of recommendation for Mr. Zacharias for a teaching position, de Kooning wrote: “I have known Zacharias for more than 12 years personally. During those years he was, I can say, ‘one of us.’ ”

    “He was, of course, much younger than most of the artist[s] who were then so very much involved with one another. But since that period, there was little self-consciousness about who was younger or older. Zacharias was as much in the middle of it as anyone.”

    By “middle of it,” de Kooning meant the intellectual and critical scene surrounding the Eighth Street artists’ club (known familiarly as “The Club”) and the attendant socializing and posturing that centered around the Cedar Bar just down the street. But Mr. Zacharias, as a young artist recently arrived from the Rhode Island Institute of Design, also became close to a number of artists, as an assistant first to Elaine de Kooning, then to de Kooning himself, and ultimately to Lee Krasner, who kept him around as a workmate but also as a friend and companion. In between, he helped other artists and they, in turn, helped him.

    On Dec. 14, Mr. Zacharias agreed to serve as a chaperone for the retrospective and offered some insights into what he saw in de Kooning’s paintings and his development as an artist as well as some anecdotes about what kind of person he was and what he chose to share about his art.

    Mr. Zacharias recalled first meeting de Kooning at the Cedar Bar, having a discussion with him as others tried to get him to go to a table. De Kooning waved them off for the better part of an hour as the two talked about various things. Then, de Kooning said at last that he had enjoyed speaking to him. “Now, I will go join my friends,” Mr. Zacharias recalled him saying.

    He moved slowly through the exhibit, passing through the early academic works and heading straight to the surrealist explorations and early figurative dissections that would become the “Woman” series, a theme he would return to repeatedly throughout his career. There was a lot of Joan Miro in those early works, he observed.

    A few paintings from the mid-1930s had a similar composition and paint application to that of Stuart Davis. Mr. Zacharias said he remembered Davis visiting de Kooning’s studio. Of the oil paintings on view at the time, “Bill said that Stuart Davis called them the biggest watercolors he had ever seen,” a quip, “because Davis himself painted so thickly.” For de Kooning, whose early life as a painter was often a struggle, using more fluid and thinner paints was a way to save money, just as many used house paints as well.

    During this period, Mr. Zacharias said, “You have to know he’s painting with his mind, exploring, but always painting the figure” in these early abstractions. “The straight lines, curved lines, and angled lines of his work would reveal an arm or a breast,” but he took them out of context in some of the first “Women” paintings, and that would become a recurrent theme throughout his career.

    Of those works, Mr. Zacharias said, “In my mind, it’s all figurative painting. It’s the human form, but he’s giving it to you as a number of pieces, like a list: Here’s a breast, here’s a mouth, there’s an arm. Otherwise, why bother to tell us what it is.” The balance of the simultaneous flatness and three-dimensionality of the works were one of the powerful elements of his art, said Mr. Zacharias. In a later painting of two women he said “it’s wonderful to see how flat he gets the two figures. A teacher can’t show you how to do that. It must come from an understanding of other work, beginning with Cezanne.”

    The later “Women” paintings, he thought, included elements of the comics in them. The extreme expressions and sometimes frenzied style and exaggerated lines, could have been early forebears of the more literal translations of comics used by Roy Lichtenstein. While the series continues to inspire controversy, Mr. Zacharias said “he was not a violent person, he was just having some fun with it.”

    Although he served as de Kooning’s assistant in New York and was then his friend     “I rarely talked to Bill about his art. I once asked him a question and his answer was three words. He had all these books about his paintings, works I had never seen. I asked him, ‘Bill, did you mean to paint these faces?’ He said ‘yes and no’ and walked away. It was the only question I ever asked him.”

    On approaching “Excavation,” from 1950, Mr. Zacharias remarked on its airiness. “It looks a bit like Pollock. Bill would usually give you flatness, but here it’s like those aspects of space that Pollock would look at.” It reminded him of a “whole obsession with the flatness of the picture plane, the idea not to make too many holes in the plane, otherwise it would just be illustration” that dominated American art at midcentury.

    Channeling influences and cross-pollination from other artists’ work was an issue when the community of artists was so tight and there was such a demand on breakthrough creativity. Mr. Zacharias said he stopped painting for a time, because he felt his work was becoming too derivative of de Kooning’s paintings.

    “Soon after that, I went to his studio and he asked me ‘Why aren’t you painting?’ I had told Elaine that I found I was painting a lot like him and felt funny about it.” De Kooning brought out a book of his work and stood over Mr. Zacharias, pointing out his paintings. “Here you see I’m influenced by Picasso, here I am influenced by Soutine, here I am influenced by Miro. You are influenced by me and I am influenced by you,” de Kooning told him.

    “That’s a great teacher,” Mr. Zacharias said. “It didn’t sink in at the time, but he was saying ‘It’s okay kid, you have talent, too. Learn from us.’ ” What Mr. Zacharias took away from de Kooning’s paintings was their variety, spontaneity, and dynamism. He also adopted one of the artist’s primary tools, a liner brush, typically used by sign painters, which he used in many of his paintings. “The long hairs hold a lot of paint. It’s the control of the hand that determines whether the lines are thick or thin.” Mr. Zacharias said de Kooning gave Arshile Gorky a liner brush and it was how he developed the long oil lines that characterized his later work.

    The exhibit is difficult on some levels. There are so many knockouts that those works that would normally attract interest seem diminished in comparison. “Some hit you right away, others he’s just giving people a laundry list of objects and effects.” A painting like “Police Gazette” with its varied lines and forms in color prompted Mr. Zacharias to say “What more could you ask for?” But “Interchanged” nearby did not impress him so much. “I don’t think with this one he quite nailed it.”

    De Kooning was an artist who “worked so hard, over and over the canvas,” Mr. Zacharias said. At a certain point a painting becomes a puzzle, “interlocked so that you can’t change one thing without affecting the other. He said he never knew when it was done. He would just walk away.”

New Year, New Art

    “Art in the New Year” is the next show at Ashawagh Hall this weekend. The show will feature work by Cynthia Loewen, Mary Milne, Stephanie Reit, and Lewis Zacks. Ms. Loewen has a long résumé of exhibits and memberships in numerous South Fork arts groups. A painting of hers was featured in the short film “The Sea Is All I Know,” which was shown at the Hamptons International Film Festival. She is also a curator.

    Mr. Zacks has stated that “my love of history has inspired me to focus on the disappearing landscape of Eastern Long Island — old farm buildings, fishing boats, colonial cottages; mid-century movie theaters, ice cream parlors, luncheonettes, and the remnants of their signs.” He is also known for his portraits of fading icons of earlier eras in Manhattan.

    According to Ms. Reit, “I grew up on Long Island, where I played in the woods, summered at the shore and visited the many family farms that were still thriving. . . . The barns of the Hamptons inspired my early paintings. Their massive forms monopolized the canvas, producing feelings of solidity, density, and weight.” Eventually those forms became abstracted, although she has kept enough identifying information.

    Ms. Milne, a glass artist who has worked in stained and fused glass, has exhibited in many East End shows. She uses the “tranquil beauty and intense colors” of the natural environment of the South Fork as her inspiration. Mr. McDowell’s landscapes can evoke dreams and even Renaissance painting. Lynn Martell’s work will also be on view.

    The reception on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. will feature wines of South America from Domaine Franey. The show will be on view Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Tonic Takin’ Over

    The Tonic Artspace on Main Street in Bridgehampton is the temporary home base for the Bonac Tonic art collective and friends. The group has taken over the Kathryn Markel Gallery space in January and February and the space will be open Friday through Monday.

    According to Grant Haffner, the space will showcase “a fun and vigorous program of emerging artists from the East End. The artists now on view there include Bruce Milne, Carly Haffner, Scott Gibbons, Grant Haffner, Justin Smith, Maeve D’Arcy, Ingrid Silva, and Oliver Peterson. The gallery will have a reception on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. Its Web site is haffnervision.com.

    Three performance groups, the Choral Society of the Hamptons, the Studio Playhouse Community Theatre, and Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center, will hold auditions in the coming weeks, both musical and theatrical.

    The Choral Society of the Hamptons is beginning rehearsals for its spring concert, to be held at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church on March 18, and is seeking experienced singers. The spring concert will be conducted by Jesse Peckham and feature John Rutter’s Requiem, among other works.

    Rehearsals began on Monday and will continue weekly from 7:30 to 10 p.m. at the church. Auditions will begin this week after the rehearsals and can be scheduled through the Veronika Semsakova, the society’s executive director, at execdir@ choralsocietyofthehamptons.org.

    The Studio Playhouse Community Theatre is producing a new variety show for the winter, “Valiant Vanities,” on Feb. 10 and 11 and is looking for acts featuring comedy skits, singing, dancing, stand-up, quartets, bagpipes, and more. “Anything goes, if it is good” is the guiding principle, according to the theater’s directors. Auditions will take place on Jan. 23 and 24 from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at LTV Studios in Wainscott. Slots can be reserved by calling 324-4067.

    Center Stage will hold open auditions for performances of Christopher Hampton’s “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” on Jan. 23 and 24 at 6 p.m. in the Levitas Center on Pond Lane in Southampton Village. Auditions will begin promptly at these times. Late arrivals will be seen at the discretion of the director. Performances will begin on March 15 and run through April 1. Michael Disher will direct.

    The play is adapted from the 1782 novel of the same title by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and focuses on rivals who use sex as a weapon of humiliation and degradation. Their targets are the virtuous, and they pretend to help them with their secret lovers so they can use them later in their own seductions and betrayals.

    The roles include La Marquise de Merteuil, who is manipulative, cunning, seductive, and in her 30s, and the Vicomte de Valmont, her male counterpart, who is equally manipulative and seductive and also in his 30s. There are roles for younger and older actors, too, including Cecile Volanges, a cloistered young woman, and Chevalier de Darceny, both of whom are around college age, and two older women in their 40s and 50s.

Almost as often as his last name is mispronounced, Joe Delia (Da-lee-ah), leader of the band Joe Delia and Thieves, is mistaken for Mick Jagger by fans who follow him around the East End trying to take his picture. The resemblance is uncanny, from facial features to body type, and his overall cool, rock-star vibe. Those who have experienced firsthand his style and talent, those of a true rock ’n’ roll artist, understand the case of mistaken identity completely.

    But Mr. Delia does not try to be anyone but himself. His music career is one of celebrity caliber in its own right, having composed scores for over 30 feature films, and with two gold and one platinum record under his belt . . . “so far,” added P.J. Delia, his wife of 15 years, who is his publicist, booking manager, and background singer. Mr. Delia, who sings and plays piano/organ and bass with his new band, does as bang-up a job on a classic rock ’n’ roll cover as on his original songs, delivering it all with a charisma that seems to mesmerize many in his audiences.

    Music always was, and always will be, the sole career for Mr. Delia. He says so in his song “Fire in My Belly”: “I’m gonna rock and roll to the day I die.”

    Raised in the town of Pearl River in Rockland County, one of 14 children, he learned to play piano as a child. The piano teacher was sometimes paid with eggs from the family’s chickens, he said.

    He and his wife, and their son, Jake, 14, spend half their time in Rockland County, and he still records music there.

    In the 1960s, when he was about 12, Mr. Delia co-wrote and sang for the Muppets’ first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He played with some of his brothers in the fuzzy green rock band, and shortly thereafter, the boys started a band of their own, the Bruthers, that was signed to RCA Records. The boys’ manager, Sid Bernstein, also promoted the Beatles’ New York City concerts at that time. While Mr. Delia’s music-making brothers moved on to other careers, he began to enjoy composing success with jingles for major advertising campaigns.

    Making his way to the New York studio scene, he played and wrote for many well-known artists. He began frequenting Montauk in the 1970s and often shared places with Abel Ferrara, a film director. Eventually, he built a house with his second wife, Sylvia Muller, now a co-owner of the Mill House Inn in East Hampton.

    Mr. Delia also co-produced and wrote music with the singer David Johansen, which resulted in an international tour, live television via “The Buster Poindexter Show,” two albums, and a hit song, “Hot Hot Hot.”

    In addition to composing for film, television shows, and documentaries, Mr. Delia also formed a band, Killer Joe, in the early 1990s with Max Weinberg, the drummer for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. The collaboration resulted in a critically acclaimed album, “Scene of the Crime.”

    He met his current wife in Montauk. “We fell in love one summer when we ran into each other at the Memory Motel,” she recalled. She said she was always surrounding herself with music. “Paul Sydney used to put me on the air on WLNG back in the ’70s and we’d talk about the Beatles and such.” She was a radio disc jockey on WSBH and WHFM back in the ’80s, and later had a career on Wall Street, working in the World Trade Center. After the events of Sept. 11, 2001, she spent months helping grieving families from all over the world get death certificates for their missing loved ones.

    About a year and a half ago, when the economy brought a slowdown in the film business, Mr. Delia said he began to feel like he needed a “brand-new start,” something he sings about in a new song, “Fire in My Belly.” Joe Delia and Thieves was the result, with a musical style influenced by early Rolling Stones, as well as Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, and Mr. Delia’s old friend Bruce Springsteen, with whom he occasionally shares the stage.

    Many talented musicians were auditioned to be Thieves, with tryouts taking place while performing at mostly small, upstate gigs. Those that made the grade, and fulfilled Mr. Delia’s time and travel requirements, were Steve (Muddy) Roues on harmonica and upright bass, Billy Roues and Klyph Black on guitar, and James Benard on drums, with his wife onstage as a background singer and managing behind the scenes.

    The band often takes advantage of the abundance of local talent on the East End, by inviting “guest Thieves” on the stage, including Randolph Hudson III, Brendan Connolly, andMick Hargreaves, with whom Mr. Delia has recently written a song.

    Joe Delia and Thieves have already filled venues around New York and in New Jersey, and are planning a regional tour. The band will play with Max Weinberg on Jan. 20 at the Stone Pony, a favorite Springsteen venue, and will appear in March at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett. The band recently celebrated the release there of its debut CD, “Smoke and Mirrors,” which was co-produced and mixed by Cynthia Daniels at her MonkMusic Studios in East Hampton. She joins the band with background vocals on some of the tracks, as does Larry Alexander, another Grammy winner.

    “Smoke and Mirrors” also includes a collaboration with Philip Cody, who wrote Neil Sedaka’s “Laughter in the Rain.” “Getting Over Jane” is the darkest song on the album, a fact masked by its danceability and clever lyrics, such as “I buried her remains in the muddy ruts of Memory Lane.”

    The track “Under the Montauk Moon” was co-written with Ms. Delia, and based on her stories of growing up on the South Fork, “aimless and immortal by the sea.” Mr. Delia is joined in vocals on the song, appropriately, by Nancy Atlas, another local singer-songwriter with a big following.

    The CD also includes songs written by the Roues Brothers, and one “swinging single” sung by Steven Roues, titled “Good Thing.” Other treats include cameos by Tony Garnier, Bob Dylan’s bassist, and Max Weinberg.

    Mr. Delia has been teaching himself video editing, and is now working on local footage filmed by his son, Jake, and Frank Vespe for a new video for “Under the Montauk Moon.”

    There’s little Mr. Delia doesn’t love about the music world, but his favorite part, he said, is when he’s onstage performing songs like “Under the Montauk Moon,” with the crowd singing along. “That’s an amazing feeling.”

    Elizabeth Taylor’s diamonds weren’t the only items attracting interest at New York City auction houses last week. On Dec. 13, many well-heeled city and East End art aficionados gathered on the top floor of Sotheby’s Upper East Side auction house to view a small but strong collection of Jackson Pollock works rarely seen outside of the houses of the private collectors who own them.

    A red carpet with skeins of dripped white and black paint greeted the guests in the lobby and at the entrance to the exhibit. Appetizers had a graphic and abstract quality, brought out even more by the dripped painted design on their trays. A jazz combo played a selection of music one can only hope would have satisfied Pollock, a very opinionated music connoisseur.

    The event was a preview to a number of programs to mark the centennial birthday of the artist on Jan. 28. He died on Aug. 11, 1956.

    In the coming year, the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs is hoping to raise an endowment to ensure its operation and programs will continue in perpetuity. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation has pledged $1 million in a matching challenge grant to jump-start the process. The house is owned and operated by the Stony Brook Foundation, which is a nonprofit affiliate of Stony Brook University.

    Laurie Anderson, Chuck Close, Eric Fischl, April Gornik, Marcia Gay Harden, Ed Harris, Dorothy Lichtenstein, Lisa Perry, Ellen Phelan, Lou Reed, Joel Shapiro, and Patti Smith served as honorary hosts of the Dec. 13 event. Ms. Smith, who has a son named Jackson and referred to Pollock in one of her earlier songs, read passages in which the artist described his painting process and others by Lee Krasner discussing how the couple decided to move to Springs.

    The artworks themselves were a small but often striking group. One early painting was composed of wild roses that Pollock painted on Martha’s Vineyard while visiting Thomas Hart Benton in 1937. The small oil on canvas was given to a young folk singer Pollock fancied as a remembrance after she broke off their relationship.

    Rick Friedman, a collector and the organizer of the ArtHamptons art fair, lent another early work. The pencil drawing on paper of a hybrid creature may have been inspired by Picasso’s “Guernica,” which was on view in New York around 1940, when the work was executed.

    Also on view was the drip painting “Number 22” from 1949, a rather dense configuration of red, yellow, black, and white with a hint of teal and green. Eugene V. Thaw, who with Francis V. O’Connor compiled the Pollock catalogue raisonné, contributed with his wife a restrained composition of oil and enamel on just a strip of canvas, somehow cool and hot at the same time with its lively yet graceful markings. The latest work was a drawing of colored inks on Japanese paper from 1951. It was known as a productive year for the artist as a draftsman, according to Mr. O’Connor and Mr. Thaw. The support gives the painting a shimmery and watery effect.

    An example of one of the Pollock and Krasner household’s New Year’s cards was also included. The screen print card has an inscription by Pollock and was made in 1949. Ms. Harrison said Pollock was typically the one who designed the cards for the couple.

    Other events next year will include a Stony Brook Foundation gala on April 25 at Chelsea Piers at which Ed Harris, who directed and starred in the film “Pollock,” will be honored. “Ed Harris really took on Pollock as a project. He acted, directed, contributed to the script and the film with his own money,” Ms. Harrison said. “It was really a labor of love.” She added that his simulation of Pollock’s creative act was plausible. “He pulled it off.”

    There will also be two exhibits at the house and study center. The first one, “The Persistence of Pollock,” will feature works that reflect Pollock’s powerful impact and attest to his continued influence on contemporary artists, according to its organizers Ms. Harrison and Bobbi Coller, the chairwoman of the Pollock-Krasner House advisory board. Artists will include Janine Antoni, Robert Arneson, Mike Bidlo, James Brooks, Arnold Chang, Joe Fig, Red Grooms, Ray Johnson, and Norman Rockwell. It will run from May 3 to July 28.

    The next exhibit, “Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock,” will be presented in conjunction with the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., where Orozco, a Mexican muralist, painted a fresco cycle from 1932 to 1934. Some significant museums and art collections will lend works to the show, which will run from Aug. 2 to Oct. 27, after a showing at the Hood Museum in the early summer.

    Ms. Harrison said in addition to Orozco, the exhibits will show how Pollock was influenced by the American regionalism of Benton and Alfonso Ossorio’s more cosmopolitan European sources and contemporaries as well as his own exposure to international modernism at the Museum of Non-Objective Art. The museum, started by Hilla Rebay, became the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1943, while Pollock was employed there doing odd jobs, he saw works by Wassily Kandinsky and others that shaped his own art.

    Pollock’s own influence on artists will be explored through works that range from outright homage to more indirect references. Mr. Fig recreates artist studios in smaller-scale sculptures that include painstaking evocations of the subject’s art. Rockwell caught the spirit of Pollock in a cover for The Saturday Evening Post called “Connoisseur” that included Rockwell’s own version of a drip painting. Mr. Arneson, who created some 80 pieces related to Pollock in ceramics as well as drawings, will be represented with a piece from that series. Ms. Antoni, using hair dye on the floor, co-opted the idea of action painting with her own head and hair as the brush.

Ashawagh’s Illuminators

    “East End Illuminations,” a group show at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, curated by Cynthia Sobel, will feature landscapes, abstract watercolors, prints, mixed-media works, and photographs.

    Ms. Sobel has brought members of the Wednesday Group of plein-air artists and the Crazy Monkey Gallery artists cooperative together for the exhibit. They include Ms. Sobel, Frank Sofo, Daniel Schoenheimer, Andrea McCafferty, Alyce Peifer, Anna Frank­lin, Deborah Palmer, Gene Samuelson, Lynn Martell, Jim Hayden, and Jana Hayden.

    The exhibit will be on view tomorrow through Sunday. A reception will be held tomorrow from 5 to 8 pm.

Shimmer for the New Year

    The Drawing Room gallery in East Hampton will open a new show of shiny objects with the exhibit “Shimmer” on Saturday.

    The exhibit will include painting, sculpture, drawings, and prints by Steph­en Antonakos, Christopher French, Robert Harms, Sue Heatley, Christopher Hewat, Christine Hiebert, Ibram Lassaw, and Rex Lau. It is on view through Feb. 26.

    The gallery is open Fridays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Those who like their Shakespeare productions out in the cool summer night air will be heartened to hear that a new festival is taking root through the Hamptons Independent Theatre Festival, more familiarly known as HITFest.

    Shakespeare@HITFest is the initiative of Joshua Perl, who started HITFest in a black-box theater space at the Bridgehampton Community House two years ago. He is taking his next endeavor not too far afield to the grounds behind the Bridgehampton School, where he will mount a three-week run of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in August.

    He is aided in this endeavor by Peter Zablotsky, the co-founder and executive director of HITFest, and Shashi Balooja, an actor and producer, as director of marketing and communications. Richard Horwich, an adjunct professor of English at New York University and a theater critic for The East Hampton Star, will serve as dramaturg, a position he held at the Hamptons Shakespeare Festival and on three productions at Guild Hall, to adapt plays for the company’s performances. Peter-Tolin Baker will serve as production designer.

    Mr. Perl said recently that staging Shakespeare productions had always been a long-term goal. “I have been thinking for quite a while about doing different plays in different scenarios.”

    This particular idea came to him while he was helping to teach an introduction to drama class at the Bridgehampton School. “I was at the school, waiting for the class to begin and noticed the field. I said to myself, ‘Self, there should be a theater festival there.’ ”

    He chose “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” because “I love this play. I played Demetrius in my late 20s and had such a good time. So much of it takes place out of doors. It made sense. There’s also the element of magic in it: the love potion, Puck turning Bottom into a donkey. I love when Shakespeare goes supernatural.”

    Bottom himself is kind of an every actor, he said, full of himself and utterly convinced of his ability to play every role in the play. “I really enjoy watching who plays Bottom.”

    Mr. Perl is stepping into a vacuum of sorts left by the Hamptons Shakespeare Festival in 2004. According to David Brandenberg, the artistic director of that festival, there are no firm plans for next summer aside from the festival’s regular workshop for children and teens. “Over the last couple of years, we’ve been ramping up our programming with, for example, theater-for-young-audiences productions touring to schools, like ‘The Taming of the Shrew,’ which is coming this spring. We hope to have exciting news about additional summer programming for 2012.”

    The lack of major funding for Mr. Perl’s vision and the economic slump have not deterred him. “When I began talking about it, people said, ‘You must be dreaming’ or ‘Are you rich?’ People must look at my life and think I must have a trust fund or not buy food. The truth is I live very economically.”

    He is counting on that same frugality to make the festival viable. “My short-term goal is to bring this to the community and make some money to keep it going.” He has already won community support, he said, in the form of the school district’s permission to use the field. “It was a unanimous yes.”

    Having the school as a partner has allure beyond just its central location and generous parking. Mr. Perl plans to present a version of the play targeted to young audiences in which students could be lead artists under adult supervision. “We want to get kids involved and have some say in what happens in the abridged version.” There will also be two successive one-week day camps during the final two weeks of the production with scholarships available. The play itself is well suited­ for younger audiences, he added.

   Wolffer has been an early financial supporter and Mr. Perl said other corporate entities familiar with the offerings at HITFest have had positive reactions. “The response has been very encouraging.” In order to ensure that he can realize his vision, he is keeping the production to a bare-bones $40,000 cost.

    Such a budget means being creative with things like lighting, using solar power, and recycled 12-volt lighting. “It’s about being green and repurposing, but it’s also cheap.” There will also be no special effects. “It’s fine in a way. It matches our aesthetic about text and actors, the elements of design that support that, and less about the magic of theater that Guild Hall, Bay Street, and other places do so well.” He hopes to draw actors from the community and from New York, if they can find their own housing. Mr. Baker, who has done work for retailers such as Tiffany & Co. and Nicole Miller in addition to production design and Guild Hall’s “Art of Fashion” exhibit, has a full portfolio of creative design solutions.

    Mr. Perl credits Mr. Zablotsky for developing a model that allows HITFest to survive even if they don’t fill the house every night. Because the summer production will have profit sharing, the actors or anyone else in the production who sell tickets or advertising will receive a portion of those sales. Actors will also receive a stipend. “It’s not a living wage, but something.” Tickets will be sold as a suggested donation. “If you have $20 you can come, if you have nothing you can come too,” Mr. Perl said. The festival will keep its books open to public scrutiny so that backers can see how their money is spent.

    While Bridgehampton is known as a bottleneck for summer traffic, Mr. Perl said the 200 people the play might attract per performance, if they’re lucky, would add only a negligible amount of traffic, particularly after 7 p.m. for an 8 p.m. curtain. “Looking at it the other way around, the residents, restaurants, bars, and businesses will benefit from Bridgehampton being thought of as a cultural center, instead of a shopping destination for Staples and Kmart.” To that end, Mr. Perl hopes to develop partnerships with other cultural organizations based in the hamlet to enhance the experience.

    Those who wish to become involved in the production can contact Mr. Perl at [email protected].

    Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” created a gangster in Jean-Paul Belmondo who was an existential hero. Jean Seberg, your friendly local Francophile, represented America’s ambivalent infatuation with a culture that itself has a love-hate relationship with all things American, including cinema. But it’s one thing to debate “Breathless” or, say, Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket,” another New Wave classic, while walking past the Cinematheque Francaise, now a formidable institution in its own right occupying a Frank Gehry-designed structure in the 12th arrondissement on the Rue de Bercy, and another to actually be a victim of a real Parisian gangster.

    The French outlaw or rebellious character may be a beloved creature, like Jean-Pierre Leaud in Truffaut’s “400 Blows,” but when you confront the reality of a French gangster, he or she conforms more to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” than to cinematic incarnations themselves modeled on American films. Was Camus thinking about James Cagney’s explosive response to his mother’s death in “White Heat” when he wrote the famed beginning lines of “The Stranger,” “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday: I can’t be sure”?

    Pickpocketing is the crime of choice for Parisian criminals, and it’s far more surgical, unremarkable, and uncinematic than anything Godard or Truffaut could have conjured. It’s painful when it happens, as it did to my wife on a recent trip to Paris, but painless in the expert way it attacks the unsuspecting tourist, removing his or her offending affluence and peace of mind like the microbe of a virus that creates havoc invisibly and so quickly as to wipe out the possibility of memory. But here is what happened to us.

    We were on our way to a restaurant called La Cordonnerie on the Rue St.-Roch in the 1st arrondissement. Even though it was near the tourist area of the Louvre and not on the Left Bank, where vaguely artistic criminals like the Belmondo character tend to congregate, it was just the kind of charming traditional place advertising six tables, a chef owner, and top ratings on Trip Advisor that Americans like us, whose Grail is authenticity, seek out in droves. The name might have been a cause for concern, with its association to noose, but we were feeling triumphant, despite the heavy rain that had begun to fall, in having gained any reservation at all.

    Our stop on the Metro was Tuileries, and by the time we were drying out in the restaurant and arguing about how to deal with a petulant waiter who didn’t appreciate being asked for bread, bread, and more delicious bread every time our bread basket was emptied, unbeknownst to us, the crime had already taken place. It was only when my wife received a call on her cell from her bank saying that someone was making lots of charges on her Visa card that she reached into her purse and realized that her wallet was gone. Our bread basket was filled in time for both of us to lose our appetites, on our first night in Paris.

    Rather than playing itself across an imaginary screen the way some painful events do, the violation in question required a retrospectroscope. We thought back to a moment when the exit door at the Metro stop wouldn’t open. Yes, that was it, we both agreed. A man had been standing in front of my wife, seemingly unable to budge the door. I’d felt an almost imperceptible panic, the involuntary response that one has to the feeling of being trapped. We were late for our coveted reservation, which we would lose if we couldn’t get out of the Metro.

    Another man had been standing between my wife and me, and I remembered thinking he was a crazy. He had looked at me and said something about “la porte,” and I’d thought I’d done a good job in shooing him off. My wife had been sandwiched between two con men who had expertly “cordoned” her off from me, using the classic concept of distraction that is employed by all magicians who engineer a sleight of hand.

    I’d thought we’d be spending the whole night arguing about my unwillingness to shut my mouth with the waiter — who’d also told me I could go to the local “magasin” if I wanted ketchup with my entrecote — but instead we found ourselves on the phone with credit card companies that reported robust activity on my wife’s accounts.

    At midnight we ended up at the police station on the Rue Bonaparte, one block from our charming hotel, filing a report and discussing Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” with one of the local gendarmes. He was less baffled by what had happened to us, which was “ordinaire,” than by his own as yet futile attempts to find the street and the chink in time where Owen Wilson accomplished what we all dream of doing, returning to La Belle Epoque, in both the literal and figurative senses of the words. For the rest of our stay we unsuccessfully tried to take a philosophic attitude toward what had happened. If a whole generation had been lost, was it so bad to lose just a wallet?

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    Francis Levy is the author of the novels "Erotomania: A Romance" and "Seven Days in Rio." He lives in New York and Wainscott and blogs at TheScreamingPope.com.

New Shows at Vered

    Vered Gallery in East Hampton has two shows on view in January. The gallery will continue the “Landscape/ Seascape” theme with works by Robert Dash, Wolf Kahn, Thomas Hart Benton, Balcomb Greene, Thomas Moran, and Milton Avery, among others. Mr. Kahn’s “Mammoth Vista,” a massive autumnal water view from 1992, is the centerpiece of that exhibit.

    The gallery also has an installation of modern and contemporary art and vintage photographs. The artists include Larry Rivers, Frank Stella, Milton Avery, Dan Christensen, Hunt Slonem, and Tony Smith.

    The photography includes early salt prints from the Crimean War of 1855. Roger Fenton’s images of sailing ships, a tented encampment, cattle, and a dizzying array of wharf buildings and commerce in the Balaclava Harbor is a prime example of early photography. Other photographers include Gustave le Gray, Eugene Atget, Lewis Hine, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Man Ray, and Irving Penn. The exhibit is on view through Jan. 25.

Nudes Warm Up the Monkey

    The Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett will open its third annual “Salon des Refuses” show tomorrow. The exhibit will feature nude figures, particularly edgy and provocative subjects.

    The title refers to the exhibit that Napoleon III called for in 1863 as an alternate to the Paris Salon, which rejected paintings such as Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,” as being too scandalous.

    Artists have been invited to contribute works to the exhibit, so the content is not known in advance, however, the past two exhibits have included revealing and sexually charged works that, although not crude, might be inappropriate for general audiences.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

New Year, New Art

    Richard Demato Gallery in Sag Harbor will celebrate the new year with an exhibit opening on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    For those still in the holiday spirit, the gallery will offer champagne and other surprises. One such surprise will be a raffle for patrons who have previously purchased at the gallery, in which the winner will receive a work by one of the gallery artists.

    The artists on view will be Xiaolu, Joe Concra, Michael Carson, and Ben Hengst. Xiaolu combines abstract expressionism and figurative style with unnatural color. Mr. Concra paints a world of illusion, fantasy, and possibility, in his words. Mr. Carson’s work is primarily figurative with some abstracted elements. He is inspired by architectural interiors and fashion. Mr. Hengst grew up in the theater and is influenced by it in his compositions. “There is always an element of playfulness that runs throughout my work,” according to the artist.

Janet Culbertson

In New York City

    Accola Grieffen Gallery will show the work of Janet Culbertson, a Shelter Island artist, in an exhibit titled “Possible Peril,” beginning next Thursday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. It will remain on view through Feb. 18.

    Ms. Culbertson’s paintings and drawings are often imbued with a concern for ecology. By mixing mica and iridescent pigments with her paints, the artist simulates the appearance of broken glass, mine tailings, and oil spills. Primates often appear amid these threatening landscapes as poignant reminders of the many species we have threatened in striving for a rich future with little mind to sustainability, according to a press release.

    Another year . . . and another totally subjective list of my favorite books of the year. As ever, it is a personal list, and one that totally leans toward my own sensibilities. And yet I can’t imagine a reader picking up any one of these books and not being challenged, stimulated, or wildly entertained — or all three at once. I hope you find one you enjoy.

    Happy holidays.

“The Pale King”

    Admittedly, a novel about a bunch of I.R.S. agents doesn’t exactly sound like a rip-roaring good time, and there are long stretches of crushing, nearly unendurable boredom. But if you can hang with it, you’ll find any number of riffs — about loneliness, for example, or the indignity of living a bureaucratic nightmare — that are as exhilarating as anything in contemporary fiction.

    This may be the saddest part of David Foster Wallace’s tragic suicide (in 2008): He was getting better.

“Townie: A Memoir”

    Andre Dubus III, who was the son of the great short-story writer Andre Dubus, is himself a well-respected novelist (“House of Sand and Fog”). Here he perfectly captures the Trans Am era of the 1970s in this affecting memoir about a teen living in his father’s shadow, dealing with divorce, and, most of all, fighting. It’s about expiating anger through violence. Young Andre loses fights, wins fights, and keeps on fighting until the drawn blood can drown out loss. Or does it? Either way, it’s a harrowing experience.

“Thinking, Fast and Slow”

    Daniel Kahneman’s book tells us nothing less than why we think the way we do. The conclusions are not always uplifting, but they are fascinating. We learn how fickle and easily persuaded minds are, and why we choose the things we do, and why we’re so often wrong. Mr. Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winner in economic sciences, has written a book that will keep you humble about your own cognitive intelligence while at the same time stimulating it.

“Those Guys Have All the Fun:

Inside the World of ESPN”

    James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales use the same technique they employed in their 2003 “S.N.L.” tell-all — of stringing together a series of interviews to tell their story — and the results here are just as seamless and effective. It is the tale of how a fired hockey announcer used a $9,000 cash advance on his credit card to form a television empire and change American culture for good. There’s also fun dirt on the ESPN broadcasters, who with 24-hour exposure have become more familiar to many of us than Cronkite was a generation ago.

“Blue Nights”

    How ironic is it that a writer once notorious for her “emotional coolness” is now America’s foremost chronicler of loss? While Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” dealt with the death of her husband, “Blue Nights” covers the death of her adopted daughter, Quintana, and is even more lucid and self-lacerating. Was she a good mother? Did she give enough? They’re questions all parents ask themselves, but rarely with the honesty of Ms. Didion.

“Feast Day of Fools”

    The third book in James Lee Burke’s new Sheriff Hack Holland series, and clearly influenced by Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” — so much so, in fact, that a writer of less talent could be accused of theft. Most readers know Mr. Burke from his Dave Robicheaux series, which many consider the best crime fiction published in America. But the Holland books — full of crackling violence and dust bowl existentialism — just might top it.

“The Devil All the Time”

    Set in the same white-trash Ohio milieu as “Knockemstiff,” the author’s stunning fictional debut of a few years ago, Donald Ray Pollock’s work continues to read like a mash of William Faulkner and 1970s American exploitation cinema. This one is billed as a “thriller,” and though you’ll get plenty of “evil,” don’t expect “good” to show up anytime soon. This is noir fiction so thick you can barely see through it, and while it is thoroughly apolitical, it tells us more about the spiritual annihilation caused by poverty than a hundred sociologists.

“Steve Jobs”

    There will never be a need for another Jobs bio after this doorstopper, which includes Walter Isaacson’s unprecedented access to the man himself (more than 40 interviews). It says a lot about what a compelling read this is that the drama of Jobs’s personal life often supersedes that of his business life. (Jobs frequents a restaurant in Northern California where, unknowingly, his estranged father is the owner, and the inventor’s long-lost sister turns out to be the novelist Mona Simpson.)

    The flaw is Mr. Isaacson’s uncritical devotion to Jobs’s achievement: There’s no doubt that Jobs is the main architect of our technological future, but with a whole new generation who can barely take a moment to look up from their iPhones to have a conversation, the author never questions whether that inheritance is a blessing or a nightmare.

“The Paris Wife: A Novel”

    The story of Ernest Hemingway’s marriage to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, told from the wife’s perspective. The novel gets it all in: Paris in the 1920s, Scott and Zelda, and a portrayal of the characters later to be met in “The Sun Also Rises.” It’s a great concept, and Paula McLain does a credible job embodying the thoughts and feeling of her heroine.

    Things end badly for Hadley in the short term, of course — or was she “lucky” to have been spared a lifetime of torment? Ms. McLain hints at an answer.

“Go the F**k to Sleep”

    A children’s book for adults by Adam Mansbach, and a great guilt reliever: You’ve thought these very words — now someone has the guts to write them down. Almost as funny as this book are the reviews of it, on Amazon.com, for example, by “outraged” (and apparently perfect) parents. As for the rest of us who have a sense of humor, it is f**king hilarious.

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    Kurt Wenzel is the author of the novels “Lit Life,” “Gotham Tragic,” and “Exposure.” He lives in Springs.