Meredith Bryan

Today while you’re using an old toothbrush to try to clean the nooks and crannies on your stove, people wearing linen and “face powder” will be beating the heat at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton’s Midsummer Party, gorging on Glorious Food in lavishly decorated tents (it all starts to feel like Groundhog Day after a while, doesn’t it?), while waving silent hellos to folks like artist Chuck Close, gagillionaires Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, designer Nicole Miller, scribe Tom Wolfe and Dorothy Lichtenstein (widow of pop artist Roy, whose art hangs in the museum.) Wait—there, by the back burners, you missed a spot.

[Parrish Art Museum, 25 Job’s Lane, Southampton, 7 p.m., 631-283-2118, ext. 40 or 41 for further information or to purchase tickets]

mbryan@observer.com

Feist—the women your boyfriend keeps comparing you to silently in his head while you’re asleep—performs at the Prospect Park Bandshell to flocks of nubile female fans and the occasional dude, and Jennifer Aniston’s unlikely lover, musician and failed comedian John Mayer, plays too-far-away Jones Beach, for ladies who didn’t meet that special someone at Dune nightclub in the Hamptons last weekend. Meanwhile, feeling down about your closet-size apartment or cheating boyfriend? An Iraq war documentary should put things in perspective! Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber’s Full Battle Rattle hits Film Forum, chronicling the training of American soldiers in a billion-dollar simulated Iraqi village in California’s Mojave Desert.  read more »

High-schoolers from Long Island sneak out of second-floor suburban bedrooms—ker-PLUNK!—and buy 40s with fake IDs before heading to Radio City Music Hall on the LIRR to see the Steve Miller Band (we know this because we were once a high-schooler from Long Island). Once there, they run into their dads. Meanwhile, Manhattan’s helicopter fleet heads East, shuttling freshly plumped lips and designer dresses to the gala for the
ArtHamptons International Fine Art Fair (can’t we be left alone with our beach reads in the summer instead of having to pretend to care about art?), featuring art from the 1880s to the present.  read more »

Lacking a married older man with whom to retire to the Hamptons for long weekends? Take a “guyatus” (their word, not ours; rhymes with hiatus) and head to NoLita literature mecca (an oxymoron, you’d think!) McNally Robinson to fete The DailyCandy Lexicon: Words That Don’t Exist but Should, a useful contribution to the Western canon by the women who send us those cute little e-mails we use to procrastinate at work. (Bonus dirty excerpt! “Drimming” = drunk text messaging.) A publicist assured us that there will be “at least one hot/young/straight/unattached guy in the media” in attendance. (Uh-oh—sounds like Tom Beller, no?) Either way, sounds like the kind of party that might require unwinding over country crooner Shelby Lynne, appearing possibly-ironically at the Music Hall of Williamsburg to perform hits such as “Things Are Tough All Over” and “I Won’t Die Alone” (indie rock doesn’t get us like this).  read more »

We’re going out on a limb and predicting a Wimbledon men’s final between Anna Wintour pet Roger Federer and Mallorcan conquistador punk Rafael Nadal (who’s pretty hot from certain camera angles, albeit a bit young for us.) Machinelike Federer may finally be showing signs of age. (Or is it fatigue from all those fashion shoots?) Either way, major televised sporting events are always a convenient excuse to stay home folding laundry and reading InStyle in a mud mask.

[Wimbledon men’s final, 9 a.m., NBC]

mbryan@observer.com

Don’t you have a fancy benefit or ball to attend tonight? No? Then drag your ambiguously gay boyfriend to Williamsburg for the re-launch of Monday Night Burlesque at the Art Space Formerly Known as Galapagos (unpronounceable symbol forthcoming), which has decamped down the river to Dumbo, a Brooklyn neighborhood known for its strollers. “Most of our audience is 50-50, and more often, it’s the girl that drags the guy there,” said Doc Wasabassco (nee William Morton), the man responsible for helping to ensure rococo-looking tattooed chicks continue stripping naked all over New York. “Burlesque, when done right, is really very couples friendly,” he continued.  read more »

Wham BAM, thank you, Ma’am! Indefatigable Brooklyn cultural mecca BAM fills the intellectual void that is July 4th weekend with an Afro-Punk Film Festival—so named for a documentary on black punk rock music by James Spooner—which aims to broaden people’s ideas about black music and “black revolution,” said co-curator Jake Perlin, who added that the festival will include much more than just movies—“music and outdoor events, things like that.” Notable among celluloid offerings will be The Federation of Black Cowboys (2003), about “a group of black cowboys in Brooklyn called the Federation of Black Cowboys,” said Mr. Perlin (this can only be a positive thing for Williamsburg), and Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (2006), about the disproportionate number of African-Americans among cult leader Jim Jones’ 900 suicidal brainwashees in 1970s Guyana, who sped themselves off this mortal coil with poisoned Kool-Aid.  read more »

While the gin-soaked golfers at the Maidstone formally abandon their wives, mistresses and kids for the rest of the summer, in the city it’s a hot-dog-and-potato-salad-binge day—although last time we checked, we definitely don’t have a backyard, so we’re inexplicably forced to endure the heartburn-inducing Nathan’s International July Fourth Hotdog Eating Contest in Coney Island, featuring people who engage in gluttony for a living and not just for shameful late-night stress relief. (Last year’s winner ate 66 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes. Why are we celebrating this?) Later, helping to alleviate the general feeling of nausea will be Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth, who are hot in that ageless sort of way, performing at Battery Park, thereby allowing us to relive our six months of grungy rebellion in middle school, when we wore ripped jeans and smelled pot (before deciding against it).  read more »

No sugarcoating, suckers! We give you the cold, hard truth: You live in the center of the universe, and nothing is happening today! So pony up for the oversize bag of Twizzlers and a line of tourists at the movie theater, where Sundance Audience Award winner The Wackness opens, starring Olivia Thirlby of Juno, oddity Mary-Kate Olsen, and the great Sir Ben Kingsley as a shrink, all navigating the vaporous, early Giuliani-era waters of New York in 1994. Why does this movie sound like it’s going to obnoxiously demand a lot of very specific reactions from us, that there will be “right” and “wrong” responses and that we’re going to have to listen to self-styled cinéastes yammer about it on Smith Street for weeks?

[The Wackness, www.fandango.com]

mbryan@observer.com

Jitney give you the jitters? Helicopter gas getting too expensive? Then why not stay in town this summer! Looking around at the women dressed in denim skirts that barely graze the crotch, and men in Capri pants and flip-flops, the city looks like a beach anyway! (Note to aforementioned women and men: Please, please don’t trust your instincts.) And by the way: Were wedding presents for people you barely like always this expensive? The artists at Chelsea’s Atlantic Gallery capture our emotional state in an exhibition, Catastrophe. Tonight a group of experts—i.e., “The Four Panelists of the Apocalypse”—convene to address the topic, among them Colin Beavan, that blogger doofus best known for writing about his year without toilet paper in The Times and getting a book deal out of it.  read more »

SAVE THE MALES: WHY MEN MATTER
AND WOMEN SHOULD CARE
By Kathleen Parker
Random House, 215 pages, $26

In Save the Males, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker defends that least likely of underdogs: the American Man. Parodied in pop culture, disenfranchised by the family courts, emasculated by Lamaze class and forced to endure crazy, empowered women "rhapsodizing about their vaginas and swooning over their inner goddesses," men today are raised in a culture that has turned against them, claims Ms. Parker.

Of course, she’s not the first to ride to the rescue: Susan Faludi’s Stiffed (2000) covered much of the same terrain—men’s broken psyches—without blaming it all on feminism.  read more »

In addition to shlong-waving Harry Potter, a.k.a. Daniel Radcliffe, on the New York stage, we now have the National Theatre of Scotland production of Bacchae—a play first performed in 405 B.C.—starring wee sprite Alan Cumming as Dionysius, and a “Greek Chorus” of R&B soul divas. Theater is looking up.

[Bacchae, the Rose Theater, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Broadway at 60th Street, 8 p.m., www.lincolncenter.org]

mbryan@observer.com

Dare to be fat! New York officially bans trans fats in restaurants today, and we can’t help but feel the city is being unfairly targeted, given that most women walk around looking like they could use immediate intravenous sustenance, while Chicago O’Hare Airport—well, have you been lately?

[New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygeine, www.nyc.gov]

mbryan@observer.com

Men ... in uniforms! If you’re tired of the squishy, slippery, chatty (hell: truly pyscho!) men you’re meeting on Match.com and J Date, the New York City Marine Corps is here to blow your bugle with an inaugural black-tie affair named “Mess Night”—after a marine feasting tradition dating from the 1500s, explained Lt. Col. Jeff Carusone—at the New York Athletic Club, to benefit the Bob Woodruff Family Foundation, a charity for wounded soldiers that Mr. Woodruff started after he was injured. Civilians are invited, even though non-Marines are not usually present at Mess Night: “To tell you the truth, this is the first mess in mixed company, and it will be interesting to see how it pans out,” said Mr.  read more »

Cinchy? Batali protégé and Iron Chef co-star Anne Burrell fetes her new Food Network show, Secrets of a Restaurant Chef, at her tasty little West Village watering hole Centro Vinoteca with a viewing for friends and foodies. Ms. Burrell said her show will teach you how to make food that is “showstopper but still cinchy. It’s thrilling and it’s exciting and it’s scary and nerve-wracking and fabulous and all kinds of crazy stuff! I’m hoping that the food network will say ‘O.K., great, let’s make more shows!’” Meanwhile, drat, we’ve been meaning to go to Shakespeare in the Park: It’s the last day to catch Sam Waterston and Lauren Ambrose in Hamlet before it disappears to make way for Hair, one of the Bard’s lesser-known nudie rock musicals.  read more »

On vast private estates further East, the good works continue! The Beach Ball, to benefit the Bellport Boys and Girls Club, draws a financially above-average (or at least over-leveraged) crowd including aging Lancome model Isabella Rossellini and daughter, Elettra Rossellini Wiedermann—who inherited her mother’s looks and Lancome contract—talk show pooh-bah Charlie Rose, designer (and Eva Mendes appendage) Francisco Costa, British artist Hugo (Pint of) Guinness, and former Massachusetts governor William Weld. Later, it’s the Beaches and Bays Gala at the swell East Hampton home of Robert Lion Gardiner—heir to Gardiner’s Island, that five-mile patch of pricey real estate off the shore—benefiting the Nature Conservancy’s quest to save our natural resources from waterfront estates.  read more »

Shaggy hipster heads explode as indie rockers the Cold War Kids play with Elvis Perkins and Sam Champion, and the best news is, we’ve heard of at least one of these people! This concert is part of an outdoor festival, Celebrate Brooklyn! (Haven’t we been doing that for five years straight now?) Best part of all this, hipsters? It’s sponsored by Starbucks, where you’re all going to end up as barristas once you discover the family trust fund has already been spent by Uncle Floyd...

[Cold War Kids and Elvis Perkins, Prospect Park Bandshell, 7 p.m., www.briconline.org/celebrate]

mbryan@observer.com

Well Hello, Dali! Olafur Eliasson is the latest to use the whole big stinkin city as backdrop for installation art, erecting four waterfalls in the East River in an attempt to wake us from our collective stupor. Meanwhile, the William Bennett Gallery hosts an opening for “100 Rare Works From the Great Salvador Dali.” But will there be pulchritudinous art stars in attendance? “Frank Hunter, director of the Salvador Dali Archives, is expected to be in attendance,” emailed a rep. “Beyond that, while a number of our clients are highly recognizable public figures, we would rather not call attention ahead of time to the fact that they may be at the reception.  read more »