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The Allen Room, the scene of Jazz at Lincoln Center's 2008 Spring Gala. |
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| Jazz at Lincoln Center held its 7th Annual Spring Gala last Wednesday night beginning with a 7:30 pm concert Spring Swing!, an evening with Patti Austin performing selections from Avant-Gerswhin, her 2008 Best Jazz Vocal Grammy Award-winning album, with special guest Wynton Marsalis. The evening raised $1.4 million to benefit the nearly 3000 performance education and broadcast events it produces each year. In attendance showing their support for Jazz at Lincoln Center were board chairs, Lisa and David Schiff, board members John Arnhold, Alan D. Cohn, Diane Coffey, Gordon Davis, Gail May Engelberg, Hughlyn Fierce, Michael Fricklas, Jonathan Rose, Mark Rosenthal, Ashley Schiff, Paul Schorr, Melanie Shorin. Also among the night’s guests were Patricia Blanchet, Glenn Close, Mica Ertegun, Fernanda Kellogg, Debra Lee, Tonya Lewis Lee and Spike Lee, Bill and Phyllis Mack, Andre Leon Talley, Michelle Williams, Phoebe Jacobs and many others. Corporate sponsors for the evening were Efraim Grinberg, Movado; Tim Murphy, Mastercard Worldwide; Tony Ponturo, Anheuser-Busch; Karen Rafferty, Cadillac. Participating sponsor was Czechvar. |
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| “Sex and the City” – the movie, finally opened last week in New York after opening first in London and then Berlin creating a mild (who cares?) brouhaha (why there? And there?). Whatever. Everybody loves it; the girls do at least and so who cares/whatever. These pictures were from the New York opening with the After Party at MoMA. Good news all around. |
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| Just four months after their Super Bowl XLII victory, the New York Giants received their championship rings in a private ceremony at Tiffany. More than 80 of the diamond studded rings each with an appraised value of $25,000 ($2 million total) were awarded. |
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| Eli Manning said “it’s been a great couple of months but this makes it official.” Michael Strahan said, “after four months of waiting, it’s everything I expected it to be.” He wanted the rings to be “ten table-stunners,” meaning that you could see it from ten tables away in a restaurant. The ceremony included words by team owners John Mara and Steve Tisch. |
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| Looking back at The Seventh Annual 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. If one of your ideas of Heaven includes sitting on a cloud while watching an infinity of inspirational films – interspersed with scintillating conversation and dark chocolate (as in the new Zone Perfect Dark Chocolate Nutrition Bars distributed in the whimsically designed Target Filmakers Lounge), the eleven day Tribeca Film Festival is for you. Founded in the wake of 911 by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal to bring vitality back to downtown NYC, this year the Rubensteins succeeded in making a complex event featuring hundreds of films, panels & roundtable chats, as well as a hierarchy of celebrity splashed parties, significantly more people-friendly.
Premiering at Tribeca was” A Powerful Noise,” one of the most important documentaries Directed by Tom Capello and produced by Emmy-Award winning Scott Thigpen as part of CARE’s new empowerment Program for women. Women now represent 70% of the world’s population living in abject poverty. The film focuses on three women who have dedicated themselves to significantly improving the quality of life in their respectively challenged communities - Nada Markovic, working against the war-ravished background of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bui My Hanh, an HIV Positive Vietnamese woman, who after losing both her daughter and husband to AIDS, focuses on developing a self-help group bringing relief and acceptance to those living with AIDS, and the incomparable " Madame Urbane," a larger-than-life woman from Mali, who successfully dedicates herself to standing up for the rights of young girls - bringing education and dignity to this sorely abused and neglected population. The most exhilarating film for me was undoubtedly “90 Miles” (referring to the distance between South Florida and Cuba), a docu produced by Grammy-award winning, Gloria Estefan and Producer husband, Emilio Estefan. The film records the journey of their last album in which celebrated Latin Musicians including Johnny Pacheco, Jose Feliciano, Chocolatti, Nelson Gonzalez, sat in and jammed. The music is sheer joy, though it is juxtaposed against the sad (sometimes tragic) story of an “exiled” people, the Cubans, striving to maintain their musical heritage and traditions. Also deserving of applause in this genre, “Old Man Bebo”, the story of the fabulous 89-year-old Cuban musician Bebo Valdes. After living in low-profile exile, he returns to the spotlight in 2000, winning seven Grammy Awards. The music is so fabulous one is tempted to break out in salsa. |
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Composer Ira Gasman stays during construction, Hotel Gramercy Park. |
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Photographer Lee Black Childers, Hotel Gramercy Park. |
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| Being a New Yorker, I gravitate to films about our fabulous Apple. “Hotel Gramercy Park" documents an interesting piece of the city’s history. Focusing on the hotel’s long-term owners and inhabitants, the Weissberg family, as they prepare to turn over the hotel to Ian Schrager, the Father of the Boutique-Hotel movement. Of special interest are the cavalcade of music legends that parade past and the three fabulously obstinate occupants who refuse to move, including Photographer Lee Childers of Andy Warhol fame. “Savage Grace,” my favorite feature, focuses on the true story of the very social New Yorker, Barbara Baekland and her incestuous relationship with her son Tony. The Grandfather is credited with creating Bakelite, and the family fortune. Starring New Yorker, Julianne Moore, and brilliantly directed by Tom Kalin, this shocking story of international proportions, promises to be the talk of our town. |
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Jose Feliciano, Gloria Estefan, Emilio Estefan, Johnny Pacheco, and Nelson Gonzalez |
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| The Festival concluded with the premiere of “Celebrating Berlin,” based on the 1973 Rock-opera-like Lou Reed performance. In 2006, the concert is restaged in Brooklyn with a full orchestra and chorus. Beautifully art directed by Julian Schnabel, the dreamy visuals are reminiscent of his Academy-Award-Nominated “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly,” and includes film segments by his gifted daughter, Lola. Additional films that buzzed include “Celia The Queen” (based on the life of the extraordinary Cuban singer Celia Cruz), “Run For Your Life” (the docu about the late, great Fred Lebow who founded and dedicated his life to the New York City Marathon), “Pray The Devil Back To Hell” (wherein courageous women instill peace on shattered Liberia and propel the first female to head of state, in Africa), “Idiots and Angels,” an animation by NYC’s favorite social cartoonist, Bill Plympton and the feature “Finding Amanda,” with New York’s Matthew Broderick. — Jill Lynne |
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| Filmamkers in the Target Lounge. |
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| Photographs by Julie Skarratt (J@LC); ©PatrickMcMullan.com (Sex & City); Jill Lynne (Tribeca). | Click here [6] for NYSD Contents |