It may be obvious to Cheyenne Jackson what he will do at his performance at Guild Hall on Sunday, but anyone else might be left a bit perplexed. Without a description, a ticket buyer could not be blamed for thinking the versatile actor of stage, film, and television with several musicals to his credit and a cabaret act could be doing just about anything.

     He said last Thursday that he would be doing a bit of this and that and would aim to keep things flexible. "I'm always hesitant to give out a set list. I have a great three-piece band and a music director. The show runs the gamut. I'll do some musical theater, tipping my hat to different shows I've been in."

     Those shows have included "Damn Yankees," "Xanadu," "All Shook Up," and "Altar Boyz" since 2004.

     He will add in some Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell and for those who have been disappointed he has not yet sung on the television show "Glee," on which he plays Dustin Goolsby, the new coach of Vocal Adrenaline, he may do a mash up or two, or some other "Glee"-inspired things.

     As in a true cabaret performance, he will include some comedy and observational bits and could add some spoken word pieces as well. "It will be morphed just as I have been" through all of these different genres.

     Mr. Jackson actually auditioned for the lead role in "Glee," played by Matthew Morrison. "He's a good friend of mine from the Broadway years. The producers were looking to fit me in and decided to write this part for me." He has been promised that they will include a song for him next season.

     Next week's 10-year anniversary of the incidents of Sept. 11 have some personal meaning to the performer. It was a catalyst for his career and a role in the movie "United 93," became one of his first film appearances.

"Up until nine years ago, I was a salesman in Seattle. After 9/11, I decided to move to New York and give it a shot as a professional actor. I was relatively old, about 26 or 27, when I moved to the city, but I was open to everything." He said the event forced him to face down his fears and go after his dream. "That was my first big film, and I don't think it was a coincidence."

     In addition to "Glee," Mr. Jackson has taken up residence on another television show many A-list actors consider a must-do cameo, "30 Rock" on NBC, which stars the Amagansett resident Alec Baldwin. Mr. Jackson plays Danny Baker, the Canadian, a role that makes the most of his well-scrubbed and sincere look.

     The gig came from "blipping on" Tina Fey's radar when he starred in "Damn Yankees," which also starred Jane Krakowski, who is in the cast of Ms. Fey's show. After she saw him again in "Xanadu," she "decided to write this part for me and if Tina Fey writes you a part, you jump at it."

     Working with Ms. Fey and Mr. Baldwin has helped him both with comedic timing as well as some improvisation. It's a scripted show, but "if a scene gets in the can early, Alec and Tina will improvise and you have to just go with it."

In an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" that aired on Sunday, Mr. Jackson played Larry David's trainer. That show is improvised. "There's no script, just a kind of outline to get from A to B. When you see the flop sweat and stammering, that's real."

     According to Mr. Jackson, he likes the challenge of improvisation and plans to work on it more. Some of it may even creep into Sunday night's performance. The show is at 8 p.m. Tickets start at $40, $38 for members, and are as much as $100 for prime orchestra seats. They can be purchased through guildhall.org or at the box office.

Art for Animals

    The Richard Demato Gallery in Sag Harbor will open “Creatures Real and Imaginative” to benefit the Southampton Animal Shelter on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. The works are by the gallery’s regular artists, such as Harriet Sawyer, Kevin Sloan, and Devorah Jacoby, and some were created specifically for this exhibit. Ten percent of gross sales will benefit the Southampton Animal Shelter Foundation.

    At 8 that night, the foundation will screen a film, “Madonna of the Mills,” at the Bay Street Theatre, with a reception before and a panel discussion afterward. More information is available by calling the shelter.

Photography at Depot

    The Depot Art Gallery in Montauk will present its second photography group show of the season with work by Joanne Knight, Lynn Koch, Joanna McCarthy, Paul Monte-Bovi, Rosa Hanna Scott, and Anne Weissman. “The East End Seen Through Six Lenses” has a focus on outdoor scenes, pleasures, and pastimes, with subjects such as stormy seas, rural landscapes, surfcasters, and cygnets sleeping by the pond.

    The photographers are a mix of professionals and more novice newcomers to the gallery. The show will begin tomorrow and run through Sept. 19. A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

Tripoli Shows Weber

    Nicholas Weber’s exhibit “Unpainting” will be at the Tripoli Gallery of Contemporary Art beginning Saturday with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. Mr. Weber, who is known for his figurative painting and somewhat infamous for a display of his “Porno Paintings” at the Orchard Street Art Gallery in Manhattan this past spring, has recently been undoing his laboriously figurative style into something more flowing and abstracted.

    According to Mr. Weber, “I read a quote by Picasso that said it took him 10 years to paint like an adult and the rest of his life to paint like a child. Well, it took me a bit longer than Picasso to learn to paint like an adult, but with Trip’s encouragement I’ve embarked on a journey to forget what I’ve learned, and begin to play again.” He said he has found the transition unnerving but also liberating. The show will remain on view at the Southampton gallery through Oct. 3.

New Juried Show

    The Southampton Cultural Center will have its first juried art exhibit beginning Wednesday at the Levitas Center for the Arts on Pond Lane. A reception for the artists will take place on Sept. 18 from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Christina Mossaides Strassfield, the director and chief curator at Guild Hall, selected 40 artists to participate. Sheila Isham won best in show and Beryl Bernay, Fulvio Massi, and Jeanette Martone were given honorable mentions.

    Ms. Isham’s work has been shown in national and international galleries and museums. Mr. Massi is one of the artists featured in the Parrish Art Museum’s “Artists Choose Artists” exhibit. Ms. Bernay has had numerous shows nationally and internationally, as has Ms. Martone.

    Ms. Isham will have a solo show at the Levitas Center in 2012 as part of her award. The juried exhibit will remain on view through Oct. 24.

East Enders in the City

    The Spanierman Gallery is showing “Artists of the East End” beginning today on 58th Street in Manhattan. The exhibit features works from the mid-20th century to the present by artists who have lived and worked on eastern Long Island.

    The show will include work by artists past and present, including John Little, John Ferren, Theodore Stamos, Betty Parsons, Charlotte Park, David Budd, Frank Wimberley, Carol Hunt, Dan Christensen, and Elaine Grove. It will remain on view through Oct. 1.

Hoffmann Sale’s New Date

    An estate sale of Arnold Hoffmann Jr.’s paintings, prints, and silk screens, which was scheduled for late August, was postponed because of Tropical Storm Irene to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The address is 16 Todd Drive in East Hampton.

“Lobster Roll” at Fireplace

    The Fireplace Project in Springs has a solo exhibit by Hanna Liden called “Lobster Roll” through Oct. 3. Although the artist is known more for her photographic works, which have been shown in Paris and at the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial and published in many magazines and newspapers, she exhibits mostly sculptural works in this show.

    Ms. Liden was born in Stockholm in 1974 and graduated from the Parsons School of Design in 2002. She lives and works in New York City.

Williams Shows Kelley

    The Pamela Williams Gallery in Amagansett will open an exhibit of paintings by Scott Kelley on Saturday. “No Maps for These Territories” is Mr. Kelley’s fifth solo show at the gallery. The artist is known for his work in watercolor and gouache. The latest group will have trompe l’oeil paintings of the collection of objects he found on the beach, often in Montauk.

    He will include a number of egg tempera on panel paintings as well. His “Warp” series is composed of five tempera paintings of variously coiled and colored fishing rope. The show runs through Oct. 9.

    As familiar as John Jonas Gruen’s scenes from the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, seem on the walls of the education center at Guild Hall, there is something Old World and alien about them.

    Part of it, no doubt, is the black-and-white film he uses. Yet, there is more, something odd and shadowy that makes it seem as though you are looking at photos taken in Europe during World War II. It is the sense of domestic war in them: the bombed-out ruins and grim tokens of hundreds of lives lost. There are not many people in the images of rubble, flags, shrines, and “missing person” posters. What people are shown are mostly in photographs of the known and soon-to-be-known dead. One of the eeriest images is of national guardsmen marching single file down a Manhattan block.

    It looks as if in this country, on our soil, we were at war. But we were not then, at least not officially. What the show points out indirectly is that the decade of war that followed did not start right away. There was a pause and a reckoning.

    We know this because the photos remind us so. There may be a Dunkin’ Donuts billboard with a flag and the slogan “United We Stand,” but those photographed participating in peace vigils in the park were speaking different words at the time, and definitely not vowing revenge.

    A decade after the sights of those days, what is there to learn from them? Plenty, it would appear, but we might need even more time for the emotion to separate enough from the images in order to come to an understanding different from that immediate gut response that still arises when we see them.

    At the time most of the photos were taken, the ruins of the World Trade Center were still smoking and standing, lacy shells of what was once deceptively impervious concrete and steel.

    Mr. Gruen has said his instinct was to get down there as soon as he could and as close as he could, but even soon after the tragedy it was difficult to get near the site. Nonetheless, he did find some vantage points that provided a telling glimpse of the aftermath near Ground Zero.

    A gaping hole where two 100-plus-story towers once stood left downtown denizens directionless and left skyline viewers to refill the horizon with the tentative memory of the buildings’ outlines. At the base of the F.D.R. Drive, entire lanes and exits were restricted to emergency vehicles, with improvised signs and traffic patterns making downtown New York seem like downtown Beirut in the 1980s.

    Thankfully, no one can recreate the stench of burned flesh, fuel, and office supplies or the odd greasy dust left behind. Close to the site, it was like what one might imagine the mouth of hell to smell like. Farther uptown it became dispersed, but when the wind was right, the smell was back in your face, always a reminder. Residents south of Canal Street reported keeping their air-conditioners running through October just to filter it out. Many said they never got used to it.

    As a soundtrack, there were bagpipes. For weeks, it seemed, somewhere at all times there was a fallen police officer or fireman being honored, as if whole departments had left us. In the park, cops were uneasy heroes, hesitantly returning overwarm greetings from a public they were hired to serve, protect, or subdue, if need be.

    Mr. Gruen’s images of makeshift shrines of candles outside firehouses and police stations and in surrounding neighborhoods call up some of these sense memories. The flags depicted everywhere were, in fact, everywhere, sprung up overnight on every building in New York, the bigger or biggest representing the better or best.

    Seeing, out of context and a decade later, the immaculate glass cube of the Chase Bank on 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue festooned with a flag almost as large as its facade seems surreal and even kitschy. But back then, it was highly appropriate, a tribute to lives lost and a symbol of a city’s and country’s resilience.

    Mr. Gruen takes his photos in a street photographer’s style: casual, but not too detached. There is something disjointed about them, a bit of dissonance. They are photos taken in the pause of the half-beat. The sense is one of loss and of being lost, vertigo that did not go away for weeks or months, and which came not just from the events but from the radical alteration of all that was familiar around us.

    The exhibit, one man’s take on the scene, may well serve as a mantel on which we can each hang our own experiences as they gradually fade from our grasp. Given Mr. Gruen’s ability to capture thoroughly the spirit of the time with just a few of these images, and his prescience in choosing subjects that can now surprise us with things we might not recall, I see nothing wrong with that.

    The show is on view through Oct. 10.

    Midday and lovely, the 26th of August, well before the eve of the storm, a day and more before its brunt. Fell Irene, Irene most foul, Irene so lovely a name to be so affixed and hence besmirched. All of the other “I”s I can rummage up are equally fine, save, I suppose, Irma, which doesn’t sound like a name at all: Ivy, Ilene, Iphegenia, Ilsa, Ida, Ilka, Imogen. It would be a shame to abuse them by attaching them to a weather event brooding with the direct of consequences.

All Irenes ought to rise and protest. I didn’t, some years back, when my name was similarly taken. “Bob Threatens Coast” ran the headline. As if I knew how to. As if I had such a thought. As if estuaries, basins, harbors, millraces, and bays cringed at the sight of me. Domesticating fierce storms by giving them neighborly monikers does not render them tame or fun or in any way diminish their fury.

What about bad sorts instead? Nero, Amin, Peron, Mussolini, Stalin, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan (his father), Nixon, Qaddafi, Lucrezia Borgia, Satan, the anti-Christ. Vlad the Impaler and Dracula and Clytemnestra represented bad weather when they were alive and left the earth considerably wrecked when they were gone.

The descriptives. Adjectives and adverbs. “Awful” would be a very good tag for a wrecker of a storm. So too horrible, ghastly, bad, hellish, madness, doom, louse, and lousy and I think you get my drift.

And then there are all of those one wouldn’t want to serve or break a bit of bread with. The boor, for example, as well as the bore. The mockup, mess, nutcase, mass murderer, assassin, chatterbox, rumormonger, plug-ugly, pig, ass, dastard, prig, bogeyman, perpetrator, sneak, tattletale, liar. . . .

Hurricanes, however, represent weather gone wrong, an affliction of the elements, if you wish, disease incarnate, plague and pestilence, all suitable mantras. And damn the alphabet, although there would be an initial surfeit: asthma, acne, aeromegaly, ague, astigmatism, and so forth. “E. Coli Slams Connecticut,” “Acne Spares Far Rockaway,” “Astoria Hardest Hit by Asthma.” And then there is bronchitis, boredom, chlamydia, catarrh and colds and coughs. And let us have good old scurvy, bring back leprosy, pellagra, and porphyria, affliction of kings. Pericarditis. Boils and pimples. My, we are afflicted.

The epic ’38 Hurricane, later dubbed the Long Island Express, was not called Charley, George, or Jane, but certainly left its mark.

I am now going to take this bit of civic rant to the offices of this paper lest this dear old storm blow out my lights and render Madoo pure gazpacho. Carlos now putting 10 pieces of plywood on the studio’s windows.

Despite the jaded ho-hum reaction many bad boys and girls of appropriation garner these days, it appears to be one of the most consistently marketable veins of contemporary art. Collectors snapping up the work might like the familiarity of the images that are being regenerated while patting themselves on the back for buying something still considered subversive.

    Richard Prince remains one of the darlings of this genre, possibly because he is represented by the powerhouse dealer Larry Gagosian, but just as likely because he still manages to push the limits of appropriated images past areas expected and on to the less predictable. He also still gets into trouble — a recent cache of his works was ordered to be destroyed by a federal court in March because they infringed upon the copyright of the images’ original creator. Mr. Prince has challenged the decision and the works have since had a reprieve of sorts, with a judge ruling recently instead that the owners of the images cannot display them.

    While the artist still shifts creatively in and out of old and new series of subjects, one of his latest efforts has been focused on the imagery of Jackson Pollock, the product of which has taken over the exhibit space at Guild Hall. These are not the reproductions of the paintings produced by the artist, although they play a part in the background. Instead, he has used familiar photographs of the artist painting or with his wife or mistress, reproducing them digitally and then painting and applying collage to them.

    There is something irresistibly naughty in the work, which feels doubly iconic given the art world’s fetishistic obsession with all things Pollock as well as the more localized legend of the hard-living, fast-driving, but inevitably short-lived artist.

    That the mass market has also embraced the lore of this outsider, recalled almost as much for his inebriated antisocial behavior like pissing in a fireplace at a soirée hosted by Peggy Guggenheim, has to be irresistible for an artist such as Mr. Prince, who first became known for the images of cowboys he lifted off Marlboro advertisements.

    Mr. Prince said in an interview with Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum in New York City and the curator of his first solo museum show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992, that he was very “attracted to the idea of someone who was by himself, fairly antisocial, kind of a loner, someone who was non-collaborative.” The artist lived in a remote town in upstate New York for two decades beginning in 1986, creating a compound of various living, work, and display buildings for himself before he returned to the city and a more social scene on the South Fork.

    Now 62, his own early work was informed by Pollock, whose images he grew up with, along with later conceptual practitioners he followed in art school. Repurposing images from magazines and other publications is something that came to him during a day job of clipping articles for Time magazine in the 1970s. More recently he has been inspired by Abstract Expressionists such as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, whose “Women” series he has literally drawn upon for inspiration. The resulting works, which had their genesis in catalogs of de Kooning’s paintings, were digitally reproduced and enlarged so that he could add more collage and drawing to them on a grander scale. They were recently displayed in Paris.

     What he has brought to Guild Hall is a dizzying blend of vintage black-and-white images of Pollock alone or with his wife, Lee Krasner, or his mistress Ruth Kligman, who survived the car crash that killed him, with superimposed imagery in checkbook-size blocks, much of it recycled from earlier works, but that functions here just as well. Sid Vicious, mop-topped Velvet Underground members, Kate Moss, and Gene Simmons are some of the well-known appliqués. He rounds out the imagery with erotica and pornography that has a grainy, midcentury aesthetic to it.

    “Covering Pollock,” the title of the show and title of the series, is quite accurately descriptive. In very few instances can the viewer actually see the subject. While Krasner and Kligman might be left alone, other times they are covered too. In a very few works, he actually covers the larger images of Pollock with check-size blocks of pictures of Pollock, with and without Krasner, that he has covered up in the larger format elsewhere. It’s all a bit dizzying.

    Mr. Prince said the series was inspired by what Pollock might be looking at and listening to if he were alive today. Yet, for a noted jazz aficionado and reputed loud-mouthed critic of anything he did not find to his liking, the idea that he might have taken up the bad-boy music of Punk and the Velvets is more likely fanciful parallelism than predictive.

    What is instinctively more resonant is that these bands were somewhat non-organic creations, merged from strong Svengali-like figures who gave them an identity or brand and helped mold their sound. The Sex Pistols, which was Vicious’s band, were mostly brought together from an early precursor in England by Malcolm McLaren, a music impresario and boutique owner. The Velvets’ success was largely attributable to their being the house band for Andy Warhol’s Factory, where he found them a record label and decided that they should include a German singer named Nico in some of their songs. In both cases, their managers thought the look of the band was as important as the sound.

     While neither band was commercially successful, both have had an influence on future music that is still vibrant and relevant several decades later, much as Pollock’s work is to generations of painters, including Mr. Prince. The images that use the band members as the overlay have this kind of Roman ruin effect, in which viewers might find themselves excavating the visual information to dig down to some obscured cultural antecedent, an activity that is both captivating and involving.

    The cheekier overlays of Kate Moss or other topless females touch on culture’s lower forms and regions, not to critique, but to embrace. For all of Pollock’s rumored alcohol-induced impotence, he still ranks in reputation as a prime skirt-chaser and stud. Add in the use of and references to heroin by the musicians depicted and the “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” flag is flying high here. Other references to Led Zeppelin and Jean-Michel Basquiat have that same effect, underlying a loudness or brashness that evinces a similar mind-set or spirit.

    Sometimes the forced transgressiveness can seem juvenile, but then the exhibit breaks up the monotony of boobs and bush with different concoctions, including the artist’s own version of drip imagery and pictures of Pollock with collaged and painted blips, dots, and stars scattered about the composition. These have an oddly cheerful demeanor that belies the subject’s taciturn expression, which makes them quirky and delightful. It is also instructive to see in the images of the applied photographs how the tangle of limbs and bodies of those subjects begins to take on the appearance of the drip compositions Pollock is working on in the studio or has propped up nearby on the walls.

    Like most of Prince’s work, this show will leave viewers awash in imagery and left to sift through what works for them and what does not. The starkness of the black-and-white reproductions with mere monochromes of red or flesh tones added here and there, with an occasional colorful outbreak of actual painting by the artist, makes for an overall somber presentation, but one that is enlivened by the imagery itself, given a new life and meaning by the artist. The exhibit is on view through Oct. 17.

Refunds for people who bought tickets to the Music to Know concert, an August festival that was canceled a week before performers such as Vampire Weekend and Bright Eyes were to take a temporary stage at East Hampton Airport, have largely been completed, Chris Jones, an organizer of the event, reported last week.

A minimum of 5,500 tickets would have had to have been sold for the event to break even. Of the 2,706 that were purchased, he said, only a handful of refunds remain outstanding.

The festival’s Web site, musictoknow.com, had briefly been down because of a server switch and power outages in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene, but it is now up again and has detailed information about how to go about seeking refunds.

The concert organizers have made refunds a priority, Mr. Jones said. In the case of tickets bought locally, he has worked personally with Bridgehampton National Bank managers to issue checks to reimburse purchasers who used cash, he said. One batch of refunds for tickets bought through the festival’s Web site was held up because of a processing error that has since been resolved.

Tracy Davis at the Eagle

    The Golden Eagle art supply shop in East Hampton is showing work by Tracy Davis this month. Ms. Davis is a writer as well as an artist; her novel “My Husband Ran Off With the Nanny and God Do I Miss Her” was published in 2009.

    She has spent time in East Hampton since her childhood and moved here full time eight years ago. The landscape inspired her, and, as the daughter of a painter, she too began to paint. She uses a variety of mediums, from paints, pastels, oil pens, and oil crayons to digital prints. She depicts scenes from East Hampton’s surroundings — sailboats in the harbor, brilliant color over water and dunes, cottages, and tree-lined lanes in bright Fauvist hues.

    The prints are on display at the store through Sept. 30.

Call for Photo Show Entries

    The Suffolk County Historical Society has issued a call for entries for a juried photography competition called “Favorite Places, Suffolk County.” It will open with a reception on Oct. 7 and remain on view until Nov. 19.

    The entries should depict the places that the photographers particularly enjoy in Suffolk, such as beaches, parks, and villages, or historic and iconic sites that evoke meaningful memories. The competition’s winners will be announced at the opening reception. Neil Scholl, an award-winning photographer and the society’s Hal B. Fullerton archivist, is the guest juror. The photographs will hang with a selection of historic photos from the society’s collection.

    All work must be framed, wired, and ready to hang. Framed photos cannot exceed 16 by 24 inches. Entries without wire will not be accepted. There is a limit of three works per artist and a $5 nonrefundable fee for each work submitted. Work will be accepted at the society, which is on West Main Street in Riverhead, from Monday through Sept. 24 from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. More rules and other information are available by e-mailing Kathryn Curran at [email protected].

Material Experiments

At Halsey Mckay

    Works on paper by Glen Baldridge and new photo-based work by Bryan Graf are in the Halsey Mckay Gallery’s fifth show of the season in East Hampton.

    The exhibit includes a window installation by Mr. Baldridge showing a sunset in vinyl that has a stained-glass effect. Other pieces invoke the Rose Window at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Mr. Graf is showing Polaroids, C-prints, and assemblage. He uses found objects, low-tech processes, and an experimental approach to materials.

    According to the gallery, both artists use the natural environment as a starting point to subvert expectations of what a landscape looks like. Mr. Baldridge lives in Brooklyn and Mr. Graf lives in Portland, Me. The exhibit will be on view through Oct. 3.

Reflections of 9/11

    The Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett is showing paintings by Lance Corey that reflect his feelings about the Sept. 11, 2011, terrorist attacks. The paintings are raw and emotional in an abstracted style. His heritage is Irish, Iroquois, and French Canadian, and his background, politics, love of history, and willingness to speak truth to power influence his art, he has said.

    Work by Andrea McCafferty, Daniel and Clare Schoenheimer, Jana and Jim Hayden, Mark E. Zimmerman, Bob and Ellyn Tucker, Wilhelmina Howe, June Kaplan, Ruth Rogers-Altmann, Cynthia Sobel, Barbara Bilotta, Catherine Silver, Anna Franklin, Sheila Rotner, and Eileen Hickey-Hulme are also on view. The show will be up through Sept. 25.

It’s one of those endings, sad but understandable, that have become all too familiar among older artists and writers in East Hampton. After several decades of active involvement in the arts community of Springs, Jean Hoffmann is leaving East Hampton for Manhattan.

    She may be packing up most of her belongings, but she hopes to leave something precious behind. On Saturday, Ms. Hoffmann, the widow of the painter and printmaker Arnold Hoffmann Jr., will hold a studio sale of a large part of his work.

    Not all of it will fit in the apartment she is moving to near Lincoln Center this fall, to be closer to her family and the activities in the city. Ms. Hoffmann, who is also a poet, has been taking various classes there, but she said last week that driving back and forth was taking a toll, and nighttime driving here as well. Her companion, Eric Kruh, died in March and she has found it too remote to live alone in the woods.

    Although she is looking forward to the future, it is not without regret that she leaves. “We fell in love with the place in 1949 when we rented a little summer house on Three Mile Harbor with two little babies,” she said last week. Mr. Hoffmann worked for The New York Times for 30 years, retiring as the art director of the Sunday magazine in 1972, when the couple moved to their house on Fireplace Road in Springs full time. They built the house based on his designs, and Ms. Hoffmann still has a panorama of their stunning view over her doorway in the house she rents now in Northwest Woods.

    Mr. Hoffmann founded the Screen Print Workshop here that same year, and became a master printer of his own work and others’, including James Brooks, Esteban Vicente, and Robert Gwathmey. He printed the annual Springs Invitational exhibit poster for many years in his Springs workshop.

    After his death Ms. Hoffmann remained in the house for two years, but she found the upkeep of two acres too much and sold it. She has lived in a series of places ever since, but always in East Hampton. “I hate to leave East Hampton,” she said, adding that one of her grandsons recently took a walk in the village with her. “He came back home and said to his parents, ‘Grandma knows everybody.’ ”

    The couple was part of the artistic community and a community of New York Times staffers who gathered at dinner parties at Craig Claiborne’s house in East Hampton. Ms. Hoffmann also fondly recalled the annual Thanksgiving dinners thrown by Jimmy and Dallas Ernst before he died in 1984.

    Little remains of that life or those times, she said, although this generation’s artists still meet regularly at Ashawagh Hall, where Ms. Hoffmann was honored this month for her contributions to the Springs Improvement Society and the annual exhibits.

    Ms. Hoffmann will hold the sale with a friend, Jacqueline Myers, who, with the aid of some galleries and auction houses, is helping her organize and value the works.

    Mr. Hoffmann died in 1991, leaving a number of canvases and silk screens. The sale will occur at 16 Todd Drive, East Hampton, on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Some 30 paintings and a large group of prints will be available for purchase from $900 to several thousand dollars.

It’s not every actor who has over 100,000 fans on his Facebook page. Or, come to think of it, a Facebook fan page dedicated solely to his eyebrows. 

            Zachary Quinto — best known for his work as the uber-villain (though possibly redeemed) Sylar on “Heroes” and for his role as Spock in 2009’s “Star Trek” — will play Clifford Glimmer at Guild Hall in Warren Leight’s Tony Award-winning play, “Side Man,” on Sunday at 7 p.m.

    The production, which also stars Frank Cook, reprising his original role as the troubled jazz musician Gene, and Melissa Leo as Terry, Gene’s wife, is being hosted at Guild Hall as a fund-raiser for Naked Angels, an Off Broadway theater company that is celebrating its 25th anniversary.

The story is narrated by Clifford, a part Mr. Quinto played in Pittsburgh, his hometown, about 10 years ago, “when I was way too young,” he said with a laugh. “I think I can bring more to it now.”

Portraying Louis Ironson in the most recent incarnation of “Angels in America” in New York City, Mr. Quinto received high marks from critics for his work.

He has worked with Naked Angels before. For this staged reading, he said, “They reached out to me, and I said yes with no hesitation.” He is happy also to be working with Geoffrey Nauffts, a longtime Naked Angels writer, actor, and director who is directing the evening at Guild Hall.

    Mr. Quinto gives a fair amount of his time to causes he believes in, not limited to theater. He received kudos from both the industry and the public for his involvement in the Trevor Project, a national organization focused on suicide prevention among gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered youth.

    His fairly recent name recognition offers “a kind of freedom, but also a kind of responsibility,” said the actor, who is 34. While others who have had fame thrust upon them can be seen in blaring headlines featuring jail time and rehabs, Mr. Quinto feels his fame “is a great gift. I’m very grateful, and I try to incorporate it into my journey in the industry. If I can help, my life’s just more rewarding that way.”    Mr. Quinto is the co-founder of Before The Door Pictures, a media production company formed in 2008 with his good friends and partners Neal Dodson and Corey Moosa. The first feature film the company released was “Margin Call,” which premiered at this year’s Sundance Festival. The movie stars Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Mr. Quinto, Demi Moore, and Stanley Tucci, and tracks eight people at a prominent investment bank in a tumultuous 24-hour period during the early stages of the financial crisis.

    Despite the confluence of big Hollywood names, Mr. Quinto is most pleased about the director and screenwriter of the project, J.C. Chandor, a newcomer to the industry.

    “Our tendency is to develop new voices,” Mr. Quinto said of Before The Door, which has two other feature films in different stages of completion. “All three films have first-time directors. We like to give opportunities to people who are enormously talented and innovative in some way.”

    Other projects include graphic novels and television shows.

    Zachary Quinto’s foray into space (the final frontier) as unarguably America’s most-beloved pointy-eared alien, while also portraying superhero-slash-villain Sylar on NBC’s “Heroes,” has sparked a bevy of Quintocentric Web sites and forums, including one called “Sylar’s Army,” with thousands of members who know every single scene from “Star Trek” and “Heroes.”

    Not only does Mr. Quinto have fanzines and forums, but so do the characters he has portrayed, which could be seen as a great compliment, or possibly a little creepy.

    “I have worked to cultivate a healthy exposure, with really clear boundaries,” the actor said. “I like to share my interests with people who are interested in my life, but it’s something outside of my vocation and my craft as an actor.”

    He has seen for himself how fame can take over someone’s life. “It can infiltrate,” he said. “I feel pretty lucky that it hasn’t happened to me.”

    Between his work, both in front of the camera and with nonprofits, Mr. Quinto finds time to enjoy life and keep his machine running well. “I practice yoga,” he said. “I try to take care of how I eat, and the relationship between my body and spirit.”

    “I try to get out of L.A. whenever I can, even out of the U.S., and try to expose myself to other cultures, to learn from them,” he said.

    For now, Mr. Quinto will be part of the culture in East Hampton, when “Side Man” is presented at Guild Hall on Sunday. Tickets run from $30 ($28 for members) to $100 for V.I.P. seating.

    “The rising seas, the sinking lawn: none of that bothered me tonight. Laura’s health and mind, shifting like water. Mister Greasy, Son of Unabomber. Far away. Yay. I walked from the bay. I could not see. But I might have been given a fresh brain, inspired and outwardly turned, and as soon as I spoke those words to the deep, I swear creatures started coming toward me. Squirrels, raccoons, deer, herons, catbirds, footfalls on fallen leaves. I was like someone out of a freaking folktale, who knew not death or the churned-up stomach but moved through the night with the lightest tread, changing it with the benevolence of his passing.”

_____

“The Burning House”

Paul Lisicky

Etruscan Press, $14.95

_____

    Thus begins “The Burning House,” a poetic, enigmatic, and slender novel (novella?) by Paul Lisicky, the author of two previous works of fiction. The story is narrated by Isidore Mirsky, who with his wife and her sister lives in a house that the sisters inherited from their mother. They live in a town on a bay that is being threatened by developers who want to build something big. It is going to affect the ecology as well as the nature of the town.

    If I sound vague or tentative, it is because much of the detail in the book is never specified. Several towns or locales are mentioned in a way that makes one think that they are the location of the story, and yet is it Dunbarton Township? Ocean Ridge? Lumina? Aberdeen? Toms River? All these places are mentioned. I didn’t know any of them. Isidore’s wife, Laura, has an illness; though it is darkly hinted at and eventually even more darkly shown, we are left uninformed as to what her actual malady might be.

    Isidore has been injured in an accident and his broken hand is keeping him from his normal occupation, fixing cars. He spends a lot of time taking care of the house, in part because he feels less than entitled to be living there, as it belongs to Laura and Joan. Also perhaps because he did not feel completely accepted by their mother.

    Isidore narrates the book and is relaxed about setting the scene. He is a bit ahistorical in his approach and sometimes switches tense or person, once in a while even becoming an omniscient narrator, which lends the book a dreamlike quality. You sometimes don’t know until halfway through a scene if it is past or present, in one location or another. The narration is, in fact, a great deal like his sexual but emotionally isolated affair with Janet.

    “. . . I tried my best not to take it all in, as I was afraid we might get ourselves into trouble if we started talking. All that mattered was that she had a body completely different from my wife’s. . . . We’d figured out a way to do what we’d needed to do without being entered by our history, the world, and that was no small thing.”

    Despite a sentiment of no history, Isidore tells us that he grew up in a house of men — father, uncle, and cousin — and it shaped him in ways that make it difficult now for him to live in a house with two sisters and the ghostly presence of their mother.

    “When did you last go into a household where you were expected to lift the toilet seat on leaving the bathroom? I’d thought that was common until Sherri Blatt, my first girlfriend, admonished me for such carelessness in her house. How could I not feel bewildered and ashamed for not knowing the most obvious thing?”

    Sexually, Isidore is not completely at ease. He loves his wife — she has been his love since he saw her sing in high school — but that doesn’t stop him from having his sexual liaison, nor from lusting mightily (albeit ambivalently) after his wife’s sister. “Joan sat beside me. I felt as I felt when she first moved in, and I couldn’t figure out how to arrange my eyes and arms whenever she talked to me.” They end up lying together on the bed . . . innocently? And Laura walks in on them and her eyes fill with tears. “For some reason it came to me that I was losing her.”

    Isidore asks himself if it was ever possible “to love two people, wholly, equally, at once?” At one point he says, “A part of me wanted to pull [Joan] into the next room. Another part would have been happy never to see her face again.” He is in denial about whether his feelings for Joan are merely sexual or more romantic, although the other woman with whom he is actually having sex holds no emotional connection for him at all.

    Joan is active in the antidevelopment movement and intends to speak at the next town planning board meeting. The expectation, at least from Isidore, is that she is going to be terrifically persuasive and win the day, stopping the greedy developers who are going to ruin the town. But when the time comes, she bombs excruciatingly.

    “She kept reaching for the right word (and I was reaching there along with her), but the harder she tried, the more elusive it was, so just as she almost touched it (beautiful, generous thing), it swam away: a sunfish she’d been trying to grip with her bare hands. Of all the pains in the world, the worst has got to be watching the humiliation of someone you care about.”

    Laura doesn’t make it to the meeting because of her illness. “Her skin smelled hot and unfamiliar, like a barnyard or dirtied feet. . . . ‘But I’m just worried about . . . Why couldn’t he put a name to it? Stupid doctor.’ ” And then a page or so later: “Mystery disease. It did not belong in our house.”

    The writing in “The Burning House” is often gorgeous and lyrical. At one point Isidore tells us that “rage drew its claws across my back.” Raindrops fall on leaves “with a curious sound of frying,” and “Glarey clouds ragged in from the bay.” There is a kind of trancelike quality to the writing and to the book that can be disconcerting and fascinating, sometimes at the same moment. Mr. Lisicky’s poetic and minute scrutiny of the details and nuances of moments and thoughts and images sometimes seems so microscopic that one feels as though one isn’t seeing the entire picture, but then again, perhaps that is his intention.

    “I walked forward, concentrating into the cedar shake shingles on the roof: the mold, the pale green threads of lichen furring up the wood. I didn’t want to give them what they wanted. There, the supermarket manager with the unbalanced glasses; there, a man with a clean ace bandage wrapped ten times round his arm. There, Chick Keatley; there, Betty Bridges; there, Kevin Honeysett in an expensive satin tie, pink as a rhododendron. They didn’t yell or even talk among themselves. Something shuffled, something scraped. They’d become their own thing now, a single force with a single unalterable face, fatigued and defiant. We’ve waited too long for what we want; we’ve been duped, and time’s running out faster than you think.”

—

    Paul Lisicky teaches writing at New York University and is at present a visiting professor in the M.F.A. program at Rutgers University at Camden. He lives part time in Springs.

    Michael Z. Jody is a psychoanalyst and couples counselor with a practice in Amagansett and New York City. He has a house in East Hampton.