DAN'S PAPERS, July 4, 2008 Page 107 www.danshamptons.com (continued from page 93)
who took me into his office, heard me out, opened the drawer to his desk, pulled out a checkbook, filled it out and handed it to me. “‘You want me to sign anything?’ I had asked.’” “‘No. You gave me your word of honor,’ he said.’” As I read, I occasionally looked up. The man who had read the book was smiling and nodding as I read the funny parts he had already read. The woman seemed a bit like, “Here’s what he has dragged me into,” at first, but she soon warmed to the story. In the end, I thanked them for coming, we shook hands and they left. Then I bought a grande decaf cappuccino with whole milk and one Equal, and the management said it was on them, and I left, too. There were other readings this weekend. I read “Esther and Sarah and the Rolling Stones” at the Memory Motel in Montauk on Saturday. And I read a chapter called “Jackson Pollock” at the home of Jackson Pollack and his wife Lee Krasner, which is now a museum and study center, on Sunday. I had more adventures there. But I’ll write about those some other time. Next Saturday morning at 11 a.m., I will read “Bobby Van” in Bobby Van’s restaurant in Bridgehampton. In the Hamptons: My Fifty Years with Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires and Celebrities is available wherever books or sold. To read more, go to the book’s website, which is danrattiner.com. * * * Since I wrote the above, The New York Times reviewed In the Hamptons. The review was written by Liesl Schillinger, it was in the Style section, and it is a knockout. Here it is. IN THE HAMPTONS: My Fifty Years with Farmers, Fishermen, Artist, Billionaires, and Celebrities DAN RATTINER loves to invent preposterous tales. In Dan’s Papers, the free newspaper he founded in Montauk in 1960, he occasionally runs a bogus story to see if anyone notices. In 1966, he reported on a sea serpent sighting in Bridgehampton (WCBS fell for it and sent out a helicopter). And in 1991, he made up a festival called Flight to Portugal, in which contestants raced cars off a cliff into the ocean by the Montauk Point Lighthouse: “The one who gets the farthest toward Portugal wins.” But nothing he’s ever written seems more far-fetched than one scene he describes in his memoir, In the Hamptons. Driving on a sunny June weekend through the “sleepy little villages of Westhampton, Hampton Bays, Southampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton, and Amagansett,” he doesn’t get stuck in a single all-Range-Rover traffic jam or spot one herd of Calypso-clad weekenders grazing at overpriced brunch cafes. Each town he passes is “quiet as a mouse,” all the stores closed. This neutron-bomb tableau is not one of his hoaxes: it is 1956, on the day the author, then 16, first set foot in Montauk, before the philistines approached the hedgerow, before the Hamptons were “The Hamptons.” Mr. Rattiner pays tribute to the local figures, famous and obscure, who have weaved them-
selves into his personal mythology over the last 50 years. Each portrait is written in unassuming language, with emotional punch, telling detail and impressive recall. There’s the flawless young heiress who captivated Mr. Rattiner at 20, tearfully inviting him to a midnight tryst on the beach after her parents made her cancel a date (German shepherds barred the way to the mansion). There’s the artist Willem de Kooning, in his cups and off his chair at a restaurant, ranting in slurred words, “I’m the greatest living painter in the world.” (Mr. Rattiner helped drag him away from public scrutiny and into the back seat of his car.)
Less glamorous but no less compelling are the middle-aged hoteliers Esther and Sarah, who basked daily on aluminum lawn chairs in front of their Memory Motel, “tanned, heavily oiled,” and wearing “nearly identical jaguar bikinis”; and the smooth, good-natured Bing Crosby look-alike, Frank Tuma Jr., vice president of the Montauk Improvement Company, who let Dan’s Papers occupy the mezzanine of his building for free. Mr. Rattiner is a great appreciator of other people. To find as many memorable New York characters gathered between two covers, you’d have to look back to Joseph Mitchell’s “Up in the Old Hotel.” •
Richard Misrach (American, born 1949), Untitled #704-03, 2003, Chromogenic print mounted on plexiglass, 74 ¾ x 115 ¼ inches, Courtesy of the Artist, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, and Pace/MacGill Gallery, NY
Starbucks
Sand: Memory, Meaning, and Metaphor June 29–September 14 In a dazzling array of artwork, from 19th-century folk art to cutting-edge artists of today, this exhibition traces the ways in which artists have used the physical and metaphysical properties of sand in their creative process and includes work by: Anonymous French, 18th century Anonymous American, 19th century James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) Winslow Homer (1836–1910) William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) Andrew Clemens (1857–1894) Arthur Dove (1880–1946) Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Gino Severini (1883–1966) Milton Avery (1885–1965) Man Ray (1890–1976) André Masson (1896–1987) Dorothy Dehner (1901–1994) Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) Doris Emrick Lee (1905–1983) Julien Levy (1906–1981) David Smith (1906–1965) Fairfield Porter (1907–1975)
Perle Fine (1908–1988) Costantino Nivola (1911–1988) Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990) Maya Deren (1917–1961) Gonzalo Fonseca (1922–1997) Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) Alex Katz (b. 1927) Jasper Johns (b. 1930) Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) Vija Celmins (b. 1938) Richard Ehrlich (b. 1938) Dennis Oppenheim (b. 1938) Lynda Benglis (b. 1941) Alice Aycock (b. 1946) Billy Sullivan (b. 1946) Donald Lipski (b. 1947) Ana Mendieta (1948–1985)
Richard Misrach (b. 1949) Matt Mullican (b. 1951) Mike Solomon (b. 1956) Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996) Ashley Bickerton (b. 1959) Jochem Hendricks (b. 1959) Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962) Johan Creten (b. 1963) Mariko Mori (b. 1964) Ernesto Neto (b. 1964) Spencer Tunick (b. 1967) Jim Denevan (b. 1968) Manfredi Beninati (b. 1970) Alison Cornyn (b. 1970) Eric Wesley (b. 1973) Liset Castillo (b. 1974) Agathe Snow (b. 1976)
The Parrish Art Museum 25 Job’s Lane, Southampton, NY | 631-283-2118 | parrishart.org The presentation of Sand: Memory, Meaning, and Metaphor is made possible, in part, through generous support from Robert Lehman Foundation, The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, Norman and Liliane Peck, Suffolk County, under the auspices of the Office of Cultural Affairs, Steve Levy, County Executive, Martha B. McLanahan, Jack and Helen Nash, Lisa and Ciaran O’Kelly, Jerome and Ellen Stern, James and Katherine Goodman, Galerie Lelong, James Cohan Gallery, and Nancy and Stanley Singer. Additional support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. 1141977