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 In the holiday spirit
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| Christmas trees for sale on Broadway and 80th Street. 11:00 PM. Photo: JH. |
Thursday, December 15, 2011. Another sunny and mild day, yesterday in New York.
Last night at Christie’s, the second night of the Elizabeth Taylor Collection auction, the Burton-Taylor Wedding bands fetched $1 million bringing the total for the jewelry portion of the collection to $137,235,675. The haute couture and accessories portion last night brought an additional $2,600,750 and was completely/100% sold. |
| From last night's sale: THE BURTON WEDDING BANDS TWO DIAMOND AND GOLD ETERNITY BANDS. Price Realized: $1,022,500. |
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Wednesday at Michael’s which was looking extra splendid in the holiday spirit with it pine swags, ribbons and poinsettia blossoms. Big crowd; a thorough cross-section of NewYorkNewYork (if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere) from society to Wall Street, to film and television, to press and publishing; diplomats, bankers, philanthropists, PR mavens, writers, editors, politicos and bling-masters.
The social/philanthropy/arts ladies – Muffie Potter Aston, CeCe Cord, Becca Thrash at one table. Kim (Mrs. Michael) McCarty at Table One in the bay throwing a holiday lunch for Amy Fine Collins, Pat Shea, Desiree Gruber, Janet Goldsmith, Pamela Hansen.
Right next door: Emily Smith, Ms. Page Six. Nearby, Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson. Next door, Glamour Magazine’s Cindi Leive. Next door to me: Charles Stevenson with his eldest daughter Josie who runs the marketing department of a major hedge fund. Next to them: Paige Peterson (former daughter-in-law of the aforementioned Pete) with her son Peter Cary Peterson and Susan Calhoun Moss.
Moving around the room MediaBistro’s own Brenda Starr Diane Clehane with uber-television producer Joan Gelman; Steve Rattner; Harold Ford Jr.; Robert Verdi with Cindy Lewis, Judy Licht, Nancy Hodin; Tony Hoyt; Star Jones and Donny Deutsch and Nancy Snyderman with Marc Victor of the Today Show; Ina Garten the one and only Barefoot Contessa with ICM agent Helen Shavason; Conde Nast PR guru Dan Scheffey with Steven Yee of AOL; vintage maven and PR guru to the music industry Susan Blond; David Sanford of the WSJ with Lewis Stein; Ambassador Carl Spielvogel; Martin Puris; Francine LeFrak, Tom Goodman, Michael Braun; David Adler, Mr. BizBash with Chris Kelly; Richard Descherer, Kevin Ryan, founder of GiltGroupe; Scott Singer with Laura Hendricks of USA Today; Catherine Saxton, the PR guide who quietly turns her clients into household names; Nick Rubinstein; Mitch Kanner; David Kirkpatrick, Wayne Kabak; producer Beverly Camhe with Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson, co-directors of Beverly’s One Big Lie docu about the Bernie Madoff affair I was with a longtime friend of mine Emilia Saint Amand.
Last night I went over to the Park Avenue Armory, newly refurbished (with parts still in the process), for the opening of Streb Extreme Action’s “Kiss the Air” with Streb’s “action heroes,” taking over the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. It is part of the Park Avenue Armory’s dance series and the performance is one of new large scale works that stretch the limitations of the human body. Director/creator Elizabeth Streb’s work defies the natural laws of motion and gravity, creating an often breath-taking (and I’m not kidding) visual and auditory tour de force.
Firstly, the “new” Park Avenue Armory, as you might know is New York’s most dynamic new art center “dedicated to visual and performing art that cannot be mounted in traditional museums and performance halls. The Wade Thompson Drill Hall is vast, filling almost an entire city block.
Last night’s performance – the show runs through next Thursday, December 22nd – was viewed from comfortable amphitheatre-like bleachers and comfortable ground floor seating.
The “stage” for Ms. Streb’s creation is an enormous structure of metal towers, platforms and revolving ladders surrounded by two foot-thick cushion-like pads onto which the company members flip (backwards, sidewards and forwards) and dive, as if it were a great pool of water.
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| Scenes from Streb Extreme Action’s “Kiss the Air” with Streb’s “action heroes." |
You’ll hold your breath the first time you see a dive, although after that you’ll just be amazed (and thinking about what it feels like – I asked one of the performers afterwards if it didn’t hurt. Answer: No, it feels great!).
The entire program is accompanied by symphonic music.
Elizabeth Streb was once called the “Evel Knievel of Dance (and Evel Knievel came to mind more than once for me during the hour and a half performance last night). She calls it “POPACTION” and that means an intertwining of the disciplines of dance, athletics, boxing, rodeo, the circus, Hollywood stunt work and Cirque de Soleil (but most definitely not to be confused with it).
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The performers, as you can see, are obviously in incredible shape and clearly require all the discipline imaginable to execute an unimaginable program of daring and strict precision. It’s a wowser to say the least, and from the moment it begins to the moment it ends you are captivated, enthralled, amazed and sometimes terrified by the death-defying “actions” of the company. Think: video game action come to life right before your very eyes.
As it is with much contemporary art, the “understanding” part is the “booby prize” (to borrow from Werner Ehrhard). The kids in audience of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall last night didn’t require any of that: they just “got it” the way kids get any kind of extraordinary acrobatic and dance movement. You just hope they won’t try much of it anytime soon. Because the “discipline” required to pull off this astounding performance is the kind of discipline that dancers spend a lifetime developing.
For ticket and performance information, click here.
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Last night was the opening and a Holiday Party hosted by Olivia and Adam Flatto. The performance was followed by a cocktail reception and buffet in the Louis Comfort Tiffany rooms which have been refurbished brilliantly, followed by dancing until midnight.
Among those attending: Thomas and Marean Pompidou, Jane and Andy Saidenberg (Jane and Andy Marvel), Antoinette and Josh Steiner, Barbara and Keith Gollust, Caroline and Paul Cronson, Christine and Renaud Dutreil, Dana Cowin and Barclay Palmer, Elizabeth and David Saltzman, Felicia Taylor, Gina and James de Givenchy, Kinga and Eddie Lampert, Laura and Will Zeckendorf, Laurie and John Sykes, Susan and John Gutfreud, Leila and Michael Weinstein, Marjorie and Jeffrey Rosen, Shirin and Frederick Fekkai, Susan and Elihu Rose (who with the late Wade Thompson was the force behind the entire refurbishment and renaissance of the Armory), and Patricia and Tom Shiah. |
| Holiday decorations in the lobby of the Park Avenue Armory last night. |
| Entrance to the Park Avenue Armory. |
| Looking south from 66th Street. |
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Catching up. This past Monday I missed the dinner Jim Mitchell hosted at Primola for Frank Bowling, one of the world’s most popular hoteliers, formerly of the Carlyle, the Bel Air and now an executive with the Montage in Beverly Hills. The guests had all come from the cocktail party at Verdura in their 745 Fifth Avenue salon where they introduced their Hollywoodland Collection, I’ll bet you didn’t know that the original name of the famous Hollywood sign was “Hollywoodland,” placed there during the Depression as an advertisement for a real estate development in Beachwood Canyon in Los Angeles.
Jim’s guests: Joan Benny (daughter of the late great Jack Benny and Mary Livingston), Judith and Ward Landrigan who owns Verdura -- and our friend and supplier of those great Eizabeth Taylor jewelry stories from last week’s NYSD; Gloria Sidnam, Rodolfo Monaco, Ian Mohr and Verdura’s Colleen Caslin. Guests dined on Primola’s Pasta, Endive Salad, Veal Picatta and a special White Chocolate Mousse with a holiday red and green decoration and red wine and champagne.
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| Frank Bowling's place at the dinner in his honor at Primola. |
| Gloria Sidnam meeting Ward Landrigan. |
| Gloria Sidnam and Joan Benny. |
| Gloria with host Jim Mitchell. |
| Rudolpho Monaco with Judith Landrigan and the honored guest, Frank Bowling. |
| Colleen Caslin, Rudolpho Monaco, and Judith Landrigan. |
| Also this past Monday, the Frick Collection opened a new gallery, the first in nearly 35 years, converted from the north portico of the museum which runs along 71st Street to the corner of Fifth Avenue; a very sympathetic addition to this classically elegant house of one of the great personal art collections of the world. |
| The new gallery created from the north portico of the Frick Collection. |
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Comments? Contact DPC here. |
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