Arts

Pollock-Krasner House

Receives Grant

    The Helen and Claus Hoie Charitable Foundation of East Hampton has given the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center a $14,700 grant, which the center will use for educational purposes.

    The grant will allow the center to purchase 20 mini digital audio units to offer tours in several languages to visitors to the house and site. The same system is used in museums and historic sites all over the globe.

   Can theater survive in a world of tweeting and Facebook, iPads and PlayStations, and films in 3D that cost more to make than some nations’ gross domestic product? If it is as simple, good, and devastatingly truthful as “What Rhymes with America,” the brilliant new play at Manhattan's Atlantic Theater Company by Melissa James Gibson, theater will not only survive, it will thrive.

Paris in Song

    “Dreams of Paris,” a concert of works for clarinet and piano by French composers, will be given on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Montauk Library. The composers include Debussy, Saint-Saens, Ravel, Widor, and Poulenc. The works will be performed by Maksim Shtrykov on clarinet and Alina Kiryayeva on piano.

Art Basel week in Miami, which ended on Sunday, brought the usual international crowds and galleries, satellite fairs, and installations everywhere. In addition to the galleries that did show, a number of East End dealers and artists participated even if they weren’t showing.

    John Messinger, an East Hampton artist who teaches photography at the Ross School, is now in residence at the Watermill Center and will show his work there on Saturday from 3 to 6 p.m.

    The work will be on view in the studios and is from the series “#nofilter,” which examines the “evolving nature of photography amidst the ubiquity and proliferation of the digital image.” The show will include the artist’s large-scale, site-specific photographic tapestries that he began last year. The pieces consist of hundreds of smaller instant photographs taken using a Polaroid camera.

   Created in a burger joint on the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike in the spring of 2009, the Jazz Jam Session will celebrate its accomplishments and internationally renowned musical guests at its first CD release party at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor next Thursday. A success by all accounts, Claes Brondal and his core Thursday Night Live Band brought not only business to a roadhouse-style restaurant, but an experience that led to more live music throughout Sag Harbor.

Here I sit beside you

As we watch each other age

You in your comfy chair,

I in mine,

Shifting the pillows behind me —

They never will feel right again.

Each of us secretly hoping

The other will stoop

And fetch the paper

Dropped to the floor.

Mornings now, we measure

Tablets and capsules

To prevent or to encourage:

Stool softeners in glossy orange tubes,

Baby aspirin to help the heart.

I order shoes online in 4s and 5s

And send them all back,

“A Change in the Wind”

    Sara Nightingale will present “Kia Pedersen: A Change in the Wind” beginning Saturday with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Ms. Pedersen employs her training as a printmaker, sculptor, painter, and architect in subverting traditional methods of printmaking, leaving out or changing the usual steps involved.

   “Westerly,” a collection of poems by Will Schutt of Wainscott, is the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for 2012. Since 1919 the prize has been awarded to “the most promising new American poets.” Past winners include John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich. The award means that Yale University Press will publish Mr. Schutt’s collection in April. And new this year, the winner receives a writing fellowship at the James Merrill House in Stonginton, Conn.

   Anne Chaisson, a longtime adviser to the Hamptons International Film Festival, will take over as its executive director, the festival has announced.

    She will replace Karen Arikian, the director for the past five years, who is leaving to pursue new opportunities, according to a press release. Ms. Arikian will continue as a United States/East Coast delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival and a U.S. consultant for European film promotion.

   Igor Lovchinsky will play at the Southampton Cultural Center on Saturday as part of the Rising Stars Piano series at 8 p.m.

    Mr. Lovchinsky was born in Russia and now lives in the United States. He last played with the series three years ago, and also at Pianofest and the Rogers Memorial Library. He will perform works by Chopin, Prokofiev, and Liszt-Horowitz.

    Tickets are $15 and free for students under age 21. They can be purchased at scc-arts.org or at the door 40 minutes prior to the performance.

   While every presentation of East End Stories on Film at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill offers compelling reasons to see it, last Thursday’s version was particularly rewarding, coming primarily from Genie Henderson and the LTV archive, which dates back to the station’s beginnings in 1984.

   The five-year old Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Festival has fully come into its own. Each year, the festival has grown in size and prestige, and its main event at Bay Street Theatre Saturday night brought some of the most respected names in documentary filmmaking to Sag Harbor.

    Jacqui  Lofaro, the founder and director of the festival and a Bridgehampton resident, said Saturday that the films that began the day before had been well received and attended, particularly films about Shelter Island and the North Fork, which brought in residents from all over the East End.

Weber’s People Paintings

    “Eighteen Years of Painting People,” a retrospective exhibition of work by Nick Weber, is on view at QF Gallery in East Hampton through Dec. 30.

Cather’s Life and Loves

    “Call Me William: The Lives and Loves of Willa Cather” will be presented at the Montauk Library on Sunday at 3:30 p.m.

    Prudence Wright Holmes is both writer and performer of this one-woman play about Cather, who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Her books include “My Antonia” and “Death Comes for the Archbishop.”

   The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival will return to Sag Harbor this weekend with three days of programming and a gala honoring Susan Lacy, the creator of the “American Masters” series on PBS.

   How do you get to Nashville’s famous Music Row? Practice, practice, practice.                 

   But if you really want to succeed in the country music capital of the world, pick up a copy of “Making the Scene: Nashville,” a new book that details — as its subtitle states — how to live, network, and succeed in Music City.

   Organizacion Latino-Americana of Eastern Long Island will bring its ninth annual OLA Latino Film Festival to the Parrish Art Museum on Saturday from 6 to 10 p.m. and Sunday from 3 to 7 p.m.

    The festival will present films from recent Latino cinema, such as “Locas Mujeres,” a documentary by Maria Elena Wood about the inner world of the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. The film, which opens the festival on Saturday at 6 p.m., won the Audience Choice Award at the Santiago International Film Festival.

Pollock Programs on LTV

    LTV’s Channel 20 will air a number of programs through December addressing Jackson Pollock, produced by Tim Sullivan and Patrice Jacobsen. Those outside the LTV viewing area may access them online at the ltveh.org video-on-demand feature. Air dates and times can be found on the Web site as well.

    The Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church will hold the choral refrains of Christmases past with the Choral Society of the Hamptons concert “A Baroque Christmas” on Dec. 9, with performances at 3 and 5:30 p.m. A benefit brunch at Pierre’s in Bridgehampton will precede the concerts and a silent auction will follow.

Best Play Ever

    The Naked Stage will give a free staged reading of “The Best Play Ever . . . Seriously!” by Mike Anderson on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at Guild Hall. It tells the story of Harris Fynneman, the local mailman and fool, who finds himself the writer of the greatest play ever after a night of debauchery. In disbelief, he retraces his steps to discover how he stumbled upon his genius. Isaac Klein is the lead performer, joined by Meghan O’Neill and Ted Schneider.

   After eight childhood summers at her famous parents’ house in East Hampton, the Broadway lyricist Amanda Green went off to Camp Chimney Corners in Massachusetts, where she was homesick every single day.

    “I would write home and say, ‘Come get me!’ ” she said. “But after I was cast as Maria [in ‘West Side Story’], that was the last time they heard from me.”

While the new, state-of-the-art Parrish Art Museum building designed by an international architectural powerhouse firm is attracting much of the attention, what really stands out in the Water Mill museum is the art.

    Galleries across the South Fork will participate in a Thanksgiving Saturday Art Walk, a free self-guided tour of galleries from Amagansett to Southampton Village during the hours of 1 to 4 p.m. Guided tours led by South Fork artists will be available as well.

Handmade for Neoteric

    Neoteric Fine Art in Amagansett will open “Handmade” on Saturday. The show, which runs through Dec. 20, will be a holiday-themed exhibit of handmade artisan crafts and small works by local artists. The show emphasizes the personal human touch, according to Scott Bluedorn, the gallery director. Items will include jewelry, furniture, surfboards, home goods, designer objects, toys, trinkets, clothes, and other things small and large.

Marders Happenings

There is little if any dispute that the 1960s were a high-water mark for popular music. With the arrival of Bob Dylan and, in quick succession, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to American ears, creativity exploded within the genre. No longer a collection of singles, the LP format became a sprawling canvas on which musical ideas within a song expanded dramatically, and individual songs could collectively form a larger theme.

PechaKucha Night

    Tomorrow at 6 p.m., the Parrish Art Museum will hold its first PechaKucha Hamptons event at the new location in Water Mill. The evening consists of presentations by 10 members of the East End creative community. They may be artists, musicians, writers, designers, architects, vintners, or other professionals.

    This year’s Black Film Festival, from the African American Museum of the East End, will take place on Saturday at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill from 12:30 p.m. until the evening.

    Five films will be screened. “Raising Izzie” is about two young girls who struggle to stay together on their own without their parents, and a couple who long for children. Directed by Roger M. Bobb, it will be shown at 12:30 p.m.

   Many people have been wondering what is going to happen to the space vacated by the Parrish Art Museum. A better question may be, what isn’t?

To the split mimosa, still standing, pink-tan bark fleshy in the odd after-shine.

To the man who answered the storm info number at 4 a.m.: Miss, you can sleep now.

To the women and men who lift branches from the roadside in dark, wave cars to detour

in fluorescent jackets, and those who leaning out of cranes — tap, pull, bend — work wires.

To the people who can’t get to jobs and to the King Kullen cashier who stowed a towel

in the car to shower at her friend’s. To postal workers sorting mail by kerosene lamp