When a clan of artists, agents, gallery owners and models gather to celebrate their matriarch’s birthday the possibilities are endless. Love affairs, lusty engagements and family conflict over the state of art are the order of the day.
For figural artist Nick Casura it is truly the best and worst of times. His latest show, “Tribecca Nudes” is a critical smash and an opening night sellout. The women in town are divided into equal camps; wanting his body, his work or his child. Everything’s coming up roses—complete with thorns.
The bad news is that he has a terminal case of “how do I top this.” Everything he’s painting looks to him like the inside wall of a Port-a-San. To add to his problems, his family is having a reunion for his mother’s fiftieth birthday, which wouldn’t be too terrible—if it weren’t at his father’s country studio.
Nick’s father is Victor Casura, icon of the American School of Abstract Expressionism, a universally acclaimed modern master and a vitriolic critic of anything even vaguely resembling figural painting.
It’s a battle they’ve conducted since Nick’s childhood, one that he does not look forward to repeating because he instinctively knows it will never end.
Nick will go, of course, accompanied by his sister Kate, a brilliant photographer whose light has been seriously obscured by the glittering careers of the men in the family.
When they arrive the expected presence of old friends is more than balanced by the unexpected arrival of Victor’s second wife, Broadway musical star, Lily Colton, as well as their mother’s current swain, German billionaire Gunter Stock. It’s apparent that Gunter’s prime reason for attendance is to guard Anita from what he perceives to be Victor’s romantic intentions.
The family circle enlarges as oldest sibling Bobby arrives—without his bitter ex-wife but with their two daughters. Lily has brought Paul, a handsome publisher who immediately gravitates toward Kate.
Complimenting this group are Erin, Victor’s beautiful protégée, Lily’s daughter Daisy and her friend Meret who have been in attendance for a couple of weeks and don’t seem eager to say why.
The party progresses, battles are fought over fidelity, familial ties and the state of art. Romances are started, thwarted or consummated while old relationships falter and new ones emerge from the tangled web of family and friends.
By Lazlo Szabo
Every musician says he’d do it, but who would actually kill a man just to make a record? Ronnie Collins would, over and over and over.
Paris based, American sax player, Ronnie Collins exists on the edge. The edge of success, the edge of failure, the edge of oblivion.
His group is red hot, appearing nightly at Le Sunset, a jazz joint near St. Germain-des-Pres but Collins, edgy, hard drinking and fast with his fists is constantly pushing the envelope, challenging the fates.
It starts with a besotted ramble through the Paris night anda drunken brawl that leads to a chance encounter withCharlie, a street tough vixen who follows him to his bed from where they embark on a love/hate relationship that is doomed to end in heartbreak.
His drinking and his mouth lead him into further trouble when his anger at the addition of a rock guitar player leads to an argument with the American businessman who was about to finance the group’s recording session. The argument ends in a fight after which the financing is yanked.
Crushed and in a state of despair Collins embarks on a monumental binge which ends in a chance encounter with Dixie a mercenary war buddy and an offer that will allow him to finance the record session himself.
Desperate to make the record and prove that he is not a failure, Collins accepts Dixie’s offer to act as a contract killer and successfully carries out his assignment not realizing that this Faustian bargain has now changed his life forever.
Once in, never out is the rule of the game and by threatening Charlie’s life his mysterious employers force Collins to carry out murder after murder.
Charlie is crazed by jealousy, mistakenly assuming that Collins new found wealth comes from another woman and she is finally driven away by a mixture of that jealousy and fear generated by the employer’s threats.
The story comes full cycle when Collins music becomes a success without him and he and Dixie are set against each other and then ambushed by their employer. Dixie is killed and a mortally wounded Collins retreats to a small park where he is found by Charlie, only to die in her arms.
By Deidre Warren
A beautiful young woman is dead. Her body, naked except for a pair of thigh-high black boots, hangs from the ceiling of her Greenwich Village apartment. In life she was drawn to celebrity artists, dark thrills, and forbidden pleasures, a hunger that NYPD detectives believe led to her self-imposed, possibly accidental demise.
But reporter Cass McCray is not willing to accept that her former friend’s death was a suicide or the tragic result of a sex game that went too far—and her investigation is leading the determined journalist deep into a secret world nestled in the shadows of the downtown New York City art scene. Here, where sexual submission is graphically celebrated and pain is fine art that sells for millions, Cass will discover a side of herself she never knew existed. Fearing the need yet unable to resist it, she gives herself willingly to photographer Mike Chernak, who will be her guide through a sexual playground of the creative and powerful. But surrendering to her curiosity—and to something far greater—could prove to be a most dangerous game for Cass McCray, as it pushes her to the erotic edge … and over it.