New York Takes L.A. in ‘Our City Dreams’

Try as I may, I can't seem to escape New York. I left a little over a year ago, and there I was Friday night, in a theater, watching a movie, written and directed by a New Yorker (Chiara Clemente, the daughter of a famous painter Francesco Clemente) which was about five female New York-based artists. The documentary, Our City Dreams, gives an entrancing slice of the life each woman and their art. I liked watching these women work with their hands, and hearing them explain how they came to produce their art and explain the ideas behind it. They ranged from the very young Swoon (age 30) to the very old Nancy Spero (age 80), and included Egyptian artist Ghada Amer, performance artist Marina Abramovic, and New York artist royalty, sculptor Kiki Smith. New York City itself is, in some ways, the sixth character; Clemente, who grew up there, moved away, and went back, seeks to document how New York influences the artists, as much as she does to document the art they make.

I was at the flick because my old friend Tanya Selvaratnam (also a New Yorker) was one of the producers and had invited me. I came alone and was wedged in at the end of a row of very fabulous-looking girls wearing their best glittery party dresses. During the segment about Abramovic, a Serbian transplant whose performance art incorporates nudity and self-mutilation, I got a perverse joy from watching these dainty girls stare at the powerful woman onscreen, open-mouthed. It had probably never occurred to them there was another way to be a woman than being oh-so-pretty; it does now.

The very New York afterparty in the cozy, classy Bond Street Lounge at Thompson Beverly Hills (to which the crowd largely walked to in anti-L.A. fashion), was cramped and filled with people grappling for Moet like textile designer; Lulu deKwiatkowski and Alfredo Gilardini; and skater Tony Alva. (The New York premiere was even more glittery and drew Diane Von Furstenberg, Waris Ahluwhalla, and Chiara’s parents Francesco and Alba Clemente).

At the Bond Street Lounge, I was besieged by more former inhabitants of my old city. There was Angeleno editor-in-chief Degen Pener, whose mag was sponsoring the party and Rolling Stone/New York mag writer extraordinaire Vanessa Grigoriadis, who introduced me to ex-New Yorker, renowned club guru Amanda Scheer Demme. Upon overhearing that I had lived on Ave C and Fifth Street, Demme piped up and said that back in the 80s she had worked at the notorious club, The World.

“So,” I said, “you must know Steve Lewis,” BlackBook’s very own columnist. Of course she did; everyone who worked in nightlife in the 80s knew Steve Lewis, and he was a fixture at the door of The World. We spent the next half hour or so batting back and forth New Yorkers we knew, and it turned out there were quite a few—like Mario Diaz, another ex-New Yorker now living in L.A.—proving that no matter how hard you try, you can never really leave New York.

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