L: The video in question, R: "Striped Face"

The photographer David LaChapelle recently won a pre-trial hearing that will allow his lawsuit against Rihanna to proceed, Photo District News reports. The two superstars will go head-to-head, through their lawyers, in New York City District Court on August 10

Mr. LaChapelle argues that the video for Rihanna’s “S&M” lifts elements from his more sadomastichistic photographs, arguing that she told directors she wanted a “LaChapelle-esque video.” Though Rihanna argued fair use, the judge in the case wrote that the video and the LaChapelle images cited "share the frantic and surreal mood of women dominating men in a hypersaturated, claustrophobic domestic space.” So on it goes!

The Observer wrote about Janine Gordon’s copyright lawsuit against Ryan McGinley two weeks ago and learned from copyright lawyers that it’s pretty tricky to compare photos and video. Hopefully they can just work out a plea deal where Mr. LaChapelle takes pictures of the singer dressed as Nefertiti, or something.

David LaChapelle by Robert Wright.

Warhol protégée David LaChapelle has officially sold his New York digs. The artist’s Lower East Side pied-à-terre at 170 Second Avenue has traded after at least two years on the market to an unnamed buyer for $1.68 million, according to city records.

The 1,350-square-foot apartment has two bedrooms and two bathrooms.  Newly renovated by Mr. La Chapelle, it also features dark wood floors and crystal doorknobs.

Famed for his surrealist portraiture, Mr. LaChapelle has worked with a host of celebrities and currently has an exhibition, “From Darkness to Light,” at Aby Rosen’s Lever House.

According to a 2009 property listing by Jason Walker of Douglas Elliman, the apartment is a “CELEBRITY lair was beautifully restored to accentuate breathtaking VIEWS (including the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building) and classic pre-war CHARM” [emphasis credited to the enthusiastic Mr. Walker].

“Man,” said Alberto Mugrabi as he approached Aby Rosen. “This came out great, huh?”
Mr. Rosen nodded and gestured at a collection of nude men in crucified positions on the wall. “Lots of dicks,” he said.

It was Thursday and the two were feting a collection of work by David LaChapelle. Lever House was packed with swarms of people who, for whatever reason, weren’t at the Venice Biennale. The bar was so crowded even Mr. Rosen couldn’t get a drink.

“Transvestites should always be around,” Mr. Mugrabi continued. “Warhol was a great fan of the drag queens and it’s great to see them back ‘in.’”

Among the guests was Amanda Lepore, a favorite subject and friend of Mr. La Chapelle’s. Ms. Lepore recounted a Courtney Love shoot. “I remember they made her up, like, so beautiful, she was sort of like Madonna.” she said. “She was four hours late, and she wanted a boatload of glitter and she passed out in the glitter like this”—Ms. Leopore threw her arms out and fell forward into an invisible pile of glitter—“and the makeup artists were going out of their minds.”

As for the art itself, it was meager. A raft-themed collage greeted visitors at the entrance, there were the aforementioned male anatomy pics, and kindergartenlike paper chains of nude bodies hung from the ceiling. That was mostly it. In aviators and shorts, the gallery owner and Work of Art judge Bill Powers decided to “go crazy with the deconstructionist readings,” as he put it.

“I think this raft is based on Raft of the Medusa, right?” he said. “So if you think of that as Raft of the Medusa, you could almost think of that”—the chains—“as netting.”

He let the sentence hang. And then shrugged. The penises were self-evident. —Dan Duray

For years, David LaChapelle made his living and his reputation as a fashion photographer known for outlandish images of celebrities (and later, friends) like Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson. Rising to the top of the magazine heap-he photographed everyone from Madonna and Eminem to Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Taylor-he went on to direct surreal music videos, winning both VH1 awards and an A-list lifestyle. Not bad for a kid from Connecticut who got hooked on photography at age 6, he said, when he took a picture of his mother in a bikini and holding a martini glass on a balcony in Puerto Rico.

Then, five years ago, the artist, now 47, stepped back from commercial work, bought a farm in Hawaii and decided to focus on making art for galleries and museums. (A move that met with skepticism, snobbery-and a spate of sales and museum shows from Tel Aviv to Taipei.) Fresh off a worldwide tour of galleries, Mr. LaChapelle is back in town, opening "American Jesus" next week at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York-and courting trouble.

Wildly ambitious, the new show offers monumental works about greed, war and corruption in the African gold trade, starring Naomi Campbell as Venus. Reviews in London and Los Angeles have been mixed, with the Financial Times writing, "These new political pictures don't bear examination." But other critics have applauded that Mr. LaChapelle is one of the few contemporary artists consistently tackling issues of religion and spirituality-even if that means turning Michael Jackson into a saint.

The New York Observer's Paul Laster recently caught up with the photographer to discuss the exhibition, his first New York solo outing in two years.

The Observer: The Kasmin show premieres The Rape of Africa, an artwork a year in the making, to a New York audience. The epic photograph riffs on Botticelli's masterpiece to tell a contemporary political tale about the gold trade in Africa. Why tackle this?

Mr. LaChapelle: I was interested in making a work about gold mining in Africa, which enslaves workers, and the false notion of security [gold generates]. By trying to insure our security by stockpiling gold, we're really bringing about our own demise. Africa is the cradle of civilization-Mother Africa. We're degrading our mother-raping our mother, in a sense. That's what the title references, while playing on the title of another well-known painting, The Rape of Europa.

Why cast Naomi Campbell as Botticelli's Venus?

I wanted a black woman to represent Africa. Botticelli painted Simonetta Vespucci, an aristocratic beauty of her day, as Venus, and when I considered who was the most famous black beauty of our time, Naomi immediately came to mind.

It's a glamorous image, given the political subject matter. What would you say to critics who might fault it as "style over substance"?

Beauty and glamour in art photography can sometimes be polarizing to people, but I use these things to attract viewers to the subject matter. Makeup and adornment have been around since civilization began. I don't see anything wrong with using them to draw people in to look at something that I want to say. There was one person who was offended by the glamorous depiction of Africa, and I asked him if he would have liked it better if she had a distended belly and blisters on her face. He said, 'I see your point.' If you present something ugly, people just turn their heads.

You're also exhibiting pictures of Michael Jackson, and you knew him. Did he contribute ideas for the pictures?

In everything I do, there is a collaborative process, but I [was the one who] wanted to depict him as a saint.

Why the biblical poses?

I really believe he was persecuted and a modern-day martyr. Now that the smoke is clearing, everyone is saying, 'Oh, wow, that was treated badly.' He loved children and spoke about seeing the face of God in them. For some reason, people took a lot of pleasure in watching his demise. These pictures represent the real Michael Jackson to me. He was pure and innocent.

Over the past decade, you've shown regularly in galleries and museums, and now you're said to have completely stopped making work for publications in favor of fine art. How did that happen?

I started out showing in galleries in the 1980s in New York, which led to me working for Interview and then other magazines. I just wanted to get paid for photography in order to live. Working with publications for more than 20 years, I learned how to communicate. I played with imagery and commented on issues with a sense of humor. After I made Rize, a documentary film about inner-city kids in L.A., and my third book came out on fashion and celebrity, I felt that I was on top of my game, but that my life was out of balance. I bought a run-down farm in Maui and just walked away. Soon after, I got a call from a gallery in Berlin asking me to show new work-whatever I wanted to make. I made the pictures of people suspended in water, which led to more gallery and museum shows.

But, if anything, your commercial and editorial work was more offbeat and surreal than your fine-art work. Do you consider your present-day pursuits more serious?

Many of my previous pictures were just funny or about surreal situations, but as I got older, I wanted to talk about more serious things, while still making them beautiful. When you're given a chance to show in a gallery, you should have something to say. Today I make pictures for galleries, and they wind up in magazines. It's a reversal of what used to happen.

David LaChapelle's "American Jesus" opens July 13 at the Paul Kasmin Gallery, 293 10th Avenue, and runs through Sept. 18. 

A protégé of Andy Warhol, Mr. LaChapelle gained renown as a celebrity photographer. His sleek and porno-wise pictures have appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair and Interview, and have featured, among others, Naomi Campbell, Britney Spears and Jocelyne Wildenstein. Garish display is Mr. LaChapelle’s specialty, and it’s there to see in his expansive vistas of wounded soldiers, Jesus Christ, pigs fucking, swipes at imperialism, and beautiful young people in various states of undress.

Photography is put in the service of three-dimensional dioramas—oversize pop-up books. The craft is shoddy: Mr. LaChapelle’s pictures adhere to poorly cut silhouettes of cardboard—no, they’re not “so bad they’re good”—and the moving carousel in Holy War was out of service the day I attended. The sheep present in the same work did bleat, which is something, I suppose. The assembled photos of crumpled cars made me pine for Green Car Crash (1963)—at least Warhol’s deadpan whimsy had a point.

Mr. LaChapelle is a purposefully mainstream enfant terrible. Andres Serrano, whose exhibition at Yvon Lambert Gallery closed last week, had notoriety thrust upon him, though he certainly had a hand in engineering it. Piss Christ (1987) famously earned the ire of Congressman Jesse Helms, and brought scandal to the National Endowment for the Arts, which had awarded the artist a $15,000 grant. The controversy surrounding the photo of a crucifix submerged in urine guaranteed Mr. Serrano a place in the history books.

But outrage has a short shelf life. Almost 20 years after the fact, Mr. Serrano’s recent series, Shit, is a has-been’s attempt to rekindle his status as a champion of artistic freedom. With subjects hoarded from animals, the artist himself and his mother, these large-scale photographs of squishy, craggy and dried-out turds aren’t particularly provocative—they’re high-priced and oh-so-tired novelties. I mean, the New York Post wrote a puff piece on Mr. Serrano and his shit. How shocking can it be?

CATHERINE OPIE'S PHOTOS of mustachioed lesbians, transsexuals, S&M practitioners, piercings and tattoos—her self-described “royal family”—are the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim. They offer yet another study of how in-your-face reputation inevitably turns into play-it-safe art. Ms. Opie appears in two self-portraits: one, with a childlike drawing sliced into her back; in another, she’s pierced with a daunting number of what look to be hypodermic needles. The 16th-century painter Hans Holbein is listed as an influence, but Robert Mapplethorpe is closer to the truth.

Not least because Ms. Opie, after her initial splash, became expert in creating handsome pictures that Alfred Stieglitz would’ve smiled upon. Architecture is the new leitmotif, as is black and white, a palette whose silvery tonalities shows up her previous coloristic sumptuousness as cloying and decorative. Freeway overpasses, Beverly Hills mansions, strip malls, “Bar. B. Q. Pit—100% Natural Juice” and a prophetically deserted Wall Street—they don’t quite live up to the catalog’s claim of embodying “the utopian notion of difference,” but they are fairly adept exercises in abstraction. As such, they’re good to look at. But don’t kid yourself: Were the photos by anyone else, they’d be dismissed as bland and derivative.

GRACEFULLY SLIPPING UNDER the radar is Alessandra Sanguinetti, whose photos are on display at Yossi Milo Gallery. Collectively titled The Life That Came, the pictures continue an earlier series devoted to Guillermina and Belinda, cousins growing up in rural Argentina. Ms. Sanguinetti established a strong bond with the girls: The photos capture preadolescence with tender insight. Belinda is thin and pretty; Guillermina is chubby—and the camera loves her. Their relationship is suffused with uncanny clarity and magic.

In the new work, the advent of womanhood seems as forlorn as the farmhouse’s crumbling environs and surrounding landscape. Mindful of Ms. Sanguinetti’s presence, the teenagers, already self-conscious, are guarded. The artist is a gentle voyeur rather than a participant. Diffuse natural light bathes Belinda as she kisses her newborn baby; Guillermina lies on her bed with an awkward sense of budding sexuality. Intimacy gives way to narrative, and this diminishment dulls Ms. Sanguinetti’s novelistic vignettes. Still, this is a remarkable achievement—dreamlike, sure and deeply humane.

“David LaChapelle: Auguries of Innocence” is at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 544 West 26th Street, until Oct. 24; “Catherine Opie: American Photographer” is at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, until Jan. 7; and “Alessandra Sanguinetti: The Life That Came” is at Yossi Milo Gallery, 525 West 25th Street, until Oct. 18.

mnaves@observer.com.

Jazzy is dead; long live Jazzy Jr. As Off the Record's Sridhar Pappu reported last month, New York Post columnist Cindy Adams' beloved Yorkshire terrier, Jazzy, died this past summer. But his memory persists, both in a new Saks Fifth Avenue boutique and in the name of Ms. Adams' replacement dog, Jazzy Jr.

"He meant everything to me. So that's why I am continuing his name-in his memory," Ms. Adams told The Transom.

On Nov. 9, from 1 to 5 p.m., Saks Fifth Avenue will celebrate the opening of its eight-floor Jazzy Couture boutique with "Jazzy on Fifth," a street fair for pet owners and their pets. According to the press release announcing the shindig, it "will mark the first time a city block was closed for a dog-related event"-including the lane of traffic on Fifth Avenue closest to the department store. And if you wonder how Ms. Adams pulled off such a feat, you've never seen Mayor Bloomberg cowering in her presence.

But that's beside the point. Open to the public, the street fair will feature hot dogs, cotton candy and artists sketching portraits of people with their pets. On sale will be select items from the Jazzy Couture line of upscale pet apparel, carrier bags, ceramics and accessories. Among the items that will be featured in the Jazzy boutique (though not necessarily at the street fair) are doggie sparkle tees with removable marabou collars, a leather doggie trench coat and a leopard faux-fur jacket. (A part of the proceeds will benefit the ASPCA.)

The center of attention at the street fair will no doubt be Ms. Adams and Jazzy Jr., the Yorkshire who replaced the original. Although the press release makes no mention of the fate of Jazzy, Ms. Adams told The Transom that Jazzy, who would have been four in September, "was with his trainer in the country" near Albany "when he suddenly started to lose everything. He was throwing up, bleeding, everything." He died on Aug. 17. Ms. Adams declined to name the trainer because "I don't want to put this heavily on her"-but, she said, she did have an autopsy performed, and the results showed that Jazzy "had E. coli in his system." However, Ms. Adams added, the medical examiner's reports offered no answer as to how or where Jazzy might have ingested the bacteria. "It's something that does not give me any closure," she said.

Ms. Adams said that not only was she devastated-"I was sucking my thumb for two months"-but so was Juicy, the Yorkshire terrier pup she had obtained as a playmate for the original Jazzy. "After I lost Jazzy, Juicy was upset," Ms. Adams said. "She went under." Ms. Adams didn't explain what this meant, but she did say that "I had to get another puppy to annoy Juicy," who is now 14 months old.

Enter Jazzy Jr., who, according to Ms. Adams, comes from the same bloodline as Jazzy and Juicy.

When The Transom asked Ms. Adams if the procurement of Jazzy Jr. had anything to do with the business venture behind Saks' Jazzy Couture line, she replied: "No, no. The logo is there-Jazzy Couture. It's like Lassie: There were 400 different Lassies. We have Dior, and Dior is gone a long time," Ms. Adams continued. "This is doggie Dior: He's going to have a couture line. And then there's going to be Jazzy Cruise. I mean, have a little respect here."

The original Jazzy entered Ms. Adams' life unannounced, as a bereavement present from New Millennium Press co-president Michael Viner following the death of her husband, comedian Joey Adams. The Evian-lapping Yorkshire later became the subject of Ms. Adams' 2003 book, The Gift of Jazzy.

Ms. Adams said she has recovered enough from her loss to write about Jazzy, Juicy and Jazzy Jr. in a Post column that will probably appear on Friday, Nov. 7. She also said that she wouldn't be seeking any kind of legal redress over Jazzy's untimely death-an interesting decision for someone who announced at her husband's memorial service that she would "never forget" those who had not done right by her Joey.

As the gossip columnist explained, however, proving any kind of negligence regarding Jazzy's demise would be near-impossible. For another: "What you can get back only is the price of your dog. I don't want that. I want my dog," Ms. Adams said. "So there's no litigation. There's just my tears."

-Frank DiGiacomo

De Niro Shuts Hudson

Robert De Niro has closed the olive curtains for good on Hudson Lounge, his Tribeca bar at 116 Hudson Street. "All I can say is that we are no longer open for business," said one of the lounge's operators, Ken Jowdy. The nightspot, which opened in the summer of 2001, closed sometime during the last week in October, not long after press reports that Mr. De Niro had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Although it's unclear what will become of the space, Mr. De Niro-who recently tried to purchase a townhouse on the Upper East Side-doesn't seem to have abandoned Tribeca. He owns the two buildings next-door, 112 and 114 Hudson Street, and is involved in opening a luxury hotel around the corner. Representatives for Mr. De Niro declined to comment on the closing.

-Alexandra Wolfe

It's a Ghoul Thing

At the Oct. 31 Halloween Party at the Four Seasons, the most unexpected costume belonged to Martha Stewart: She came as Martha Stewart. Wearing a long black dress and a scraggly black wig, the crafty broad cunningly sported a paper-cutout mask of her face. In fact, she had two such masks-one on a stick and one with an elastic band-and the real chills came when she held up both. It was as if, like The Matrix's Agent Smith, Ms. Stewart had replicated herself in triplicate.

"I addressed her as Martha because she was dressed as Martha, and then from behind the mask she said, 'Bonsoir, mon ami,' and I realized it really was her! Ingenious!" said restaurant owner Alex Von Bidder, who was in negotiations with union representatives for his staff up until five minutes before the party began. Indeed, he was fielding money-related questions from his staff throughout the evening; their contract was to expire at midnight, and there'd been talk of an impending strike.

But most guests were too busy comparing costumes to notice the management's strife.

Partygoers included fashion designer Patricia Field, who was dressed as a large red-haired clown with pointy shoulder pads; Page Six's Richard Johnson, wearing a polyester gangster-style pinstriped suit; and Kim Cattrall, who was dressed as something that involved pink hot pants and driving gloves. When Ms. Stewart, there with her publicist Susan Magrino, was introduced to The Transom, she wanted to know if we were a waiter. When she learned that we were something less helpful-the spooky media-she suddenly grew mute. We asked if she'd made the mask herself and a pantomime ensued, with a lot of nodding and pointing and a two-fingered motion that we think was supposed to represent scissors.

Then she held the mask so that we could see the top of it. It read: "Happy Halloween From Forbes.com."

The mask, it turns out, was one of five downloadable ones that Forbes posted on its Web site last year. The others were of former WorldCom chief executive Bernard Ebbers, former Enron chief executive Ken Lay, the frighteningly freckly former Tyco chief executive L. Dennis Kozlowski and former ImClone Systems chief executive Sam Waksal, whose biotech company is currently at the center of the investigation into Ms. Stewart's alleged insider trading.

"This Halloween, Dracula and Frankenstein's monster seem positively cuddly," the site proclaimed. "To inspire some real fear, try dressing up as one of these current and former chief executives …. Now that's scary."

-Anna Jane Grossman

Quentin, Crisp?

Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino sounds a little nostalgic for the wild 1980's. At least that's the impression The Transom got on Oct. 30, while watching Mr. Tarantino frighten the usual crowd of beer-bellied sports fans or theater-going cheapskates in the dark and musty back room of McHale's Pub on Eighth Avenue. Dressed in a red sports jersey, Mr. Tarantino was seated at a corner booth with two stringy-haired brunettes who were a shade below middle age. From 6:30 to 8 p.m. he held court, looking at the bar's extensive-American, Italian and Mexican!-menu, flailing his arms wildly throughout dinner, reminiscing loudly about drugs in the 80's and not letting his two companions get a word in edgewise. "Those were the days, man!" he belted with an ear-to-ear smile and a grand, open-armed gesture. "All the coke people did back then, and heroin-that was the height of it!"

-A.W.

Slip-Slidin' Away

At playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman's 35th birthday on Oct. 10 at the Slipper Room, actor Ethan Hawke wanted no room to slip. Mr. Hawke, who starred in Mr. Sherman's 1993 Off Broadway play Sophistry and also co-founded the now-defunct theater company Malaparte with him, recently split with his wife, Uma Thurman, after reportedly cheating on her with a 22-year-old Canadian model while filming north of the border.

Nervous about being associated with any more lithe young things so soon after the break-up, Mr. Hawke ducked out of all photos at the party-even ones being taken by Mr. Sherman's friends. One partygoer who was in a crowd that included Edward Norton and Sam Rockwell reported that Mr. Hawke could be heard saying: "Oh, man, I can't get my picture taken with girls! I'll get in trouble with the press!"

-A.J.G.

Fear of Fattening

"I'm huge!" author Molly Jong-Fast told The Transom on the evening of Nov. 1, as she plopped down in a plush chair at the New York Palace. Ms. Jong-Fast, the 25-year-old daughter of Fear of Flying author Erica Jong, had just exchanged vows with Matthew Greenfield, 39, an assistant professor of English at the College of Staten Island, and she did indeed look rather large and a little uncomfortable in her white lace strapless gown. But there was a good reason: The bride is expecting her first child-a boy who will be named either Max or Elijah-on Jan. 15, which may have had something to do with her vehement refusal to be lifted in a chair during the traditional horrah dance, and with her decision to go barefoot during the wedding ceremony. But she slipped on green Puma athletic shoes during the reception. "My foot is now a size 12," she said, pausing for effect. "These are all I can fit into! These, and Ferragamo's. Uck!" Ms. Jong-Fast put her finger in her mouth and mimed gagging.

The wedding, which was planned by Claudia Hanlin of the Wedding Library, featured D.J.s playing klezmer music, black and white M&M's (Matt and Molly, get it?) at each table and a Ron Ben-Israel–designed wedding cake created in the shape of a stack of great books, including As You Like It and The Odyssey. Another unintentional part of the cake's appearance were a number of tiny indentations that resulted from numerous wedding guests poking their fingers into the eight-tiered wonder to determine whether it was really made of just frosting and cake (it was).

Ms. Jong-Fast, a freelance writer whose novel Normal Girl (Villard, 2000) is currently being adapted for film by Bret Easton Ellis, is the only child of Ms. Jong. Her father, divorced from Ms. Jong since 1983, is science-fiction novelist Jonathan Fast and the son of the late, renowned author Howard Fast, writer of Spartacus. As might be expected, a bevy of writer types were among the wedding's 330 guests, including Naomi Wolf, Daphne Merkin, Anne Roiphe and Joan Collins, who looked like her taut author photo come to life. Singer Judy Collins, a family friend, wore what appeared to be pink silk Chinese pajamas and serenaded the couple during the ceremony.

Talking to The Transom via cell phone two days after the event, Ms. Jong-Fast discussed the evening. She and Mr. Greenfield had taken an early honeymoon-with their parents-over the summer, and she was spending her first weekday as a wife doing grand-jury duty downtown.

"Someone asked Joan Collins if she was Judy Collins' sister!" she said. "She didn't think that was funny."

She then mentioned another wedding guest, doe-eyed actress Sophie Dahl. Ms. Dahl and Ms. Jong-Fast attended Trevor Day School together-the same Upper West Side school whose principal was arrested last week after being charged with pedophilia.

"I was just so shocked," Ms. Jong-Fast said, "by how bad he looked in his mug shot! I mean, in comparison, Lizzie Grubman looked gorgeous!"

Ms. Jong-Fast is currently at work on a memoir called Sex Doctors in the Basement, which is more or less about growing up as the daughter of the woman who invented the term "zipless fuck." If Ma Jong had had her way, her strawberry-blond daughter would have done the vow-exchanging between contractions.

"She thought it was so adorable that I got pregnant-she was two and a half months pregnant when she married my dad," Ms. Jong-Fast said. "But she wanted me to be even more pregnant at the time of the wedding. She thought it would've been even cuter."

-A.J.G.

Pretty in Pink Onesies

Molly Ringwald, the Titian-tressed 35-year-old actress best known for being a Titian-tressed 16-year-old actress, is now a mom. On Oct. 22, Ms. Ringwald gave birth to a girl, according to her agent, who reports that both mother and baby are healthy and resting at home. Although the baby's hair color was not disclosed, her name is Mathilda Ereni Ringwald Gianopoulos, which is about one syllable for every year since Mama Ringwald has had a hit film. Last year she starred with Christopher Lloyd in The Big Time, a TNT made-for-TV movie, and in Broadway's Cabaret.

The baby's father is Panagiotis (Panio) Gianopoulos, a swarthy, handsome editor at Bloomsbury U.S.A., where he edits J.T. LeRoy, among others. Mr. Gianopoulos is also an aspiring novelist and has written both fiction and nonfiction about sex for Nerve.com. Earlier this year, his nonfiction work earned him a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In the late 90's, he was an editorial assistant at Talk. "He was extremely outgoing and smart, very outgoing and popular," said his former boss there, Jonathan Burnham, now president of Talk Miramax Books.

The star of many of the 1980's iconic John Hughes films, including Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, Ms. Ringwald spent most of the 90's living in France and was married from 1999 to 2002 to French novelist Valery Lameignere.

Ms. Ringwald and Mr. Gianopoulos declined to comment, but earlier this year Ms. Ringwald announced to the press that she and Mr. Gianopoulos have dated since 2001 and have no immediate plans to marry.

"I think I'll go the Susan Sarandon– Tim Robbins route," she said.

-A.J.G.

All-American Trannie

On Oct. 30, Montblanc North America's dapper chief executive, Jan-Patrick Schmitz, stood on the promenade of Rockefeller Center, at the unveiling of the public art exhibit commemorating the opening of the company's flagship store on Madison Avenue and 57th Street. "Montblanc pens have been used for decades to sign contracts, make laws, hire people, fire people," he said in his refined European accent, before popping the cork on a bottle of Krug champagne. "They're used by world-renowned writers, famous politicians …. "

At the opening that day, however, there were no heads of state extolling the virtues of Montblanc penmanship, no Richard Holbrookes or Norman Mailers signing autographs with snow-capped pens. Instead, crawling on all fours in front of the row of six larger-than-life shopping-bag displays was transsexual Amanda Lepore, the "muse" for David LaChapelle, one of the exhibit's artists.

Mr. LaChapelle's shopping bag, All American, was one of six 10-foot-tall, 882-pound bags that Montblanc had commissioned for its Rockefeller Center exhibit, The Art of Shopping in New York. On the front of the bag was Ms. Lepore's face, made to resemble Marilyn Monroe's in Andy Warhol's famous silkscreen. On the other side was an enormous cheeseburger crushing her, leaving only her flailing legs peeking out from underneath. "My dream was always to work for Andy Warhol," Mr. LaChapelle said, standing near the platform where his bag was displayed. "This bag is a tribute to him." Ms. Lepore, in a snug black mini-dress, climbed down from the side of the bag, where she'd been posing for photographers. "Amanda has always wanted to be Marilyn Monroe," Mr. LaChapelle continued. "She's the Marilyn Monroe of transsexuals. She never wanted to be a woman in the traditional sense."

As the artist stared admiringly at Ms. Lepore, she covered her exploding bosom with her black stole and tossed her platinum blond curls out of her face. "I was more into the idea of a woman, the drawing of a woman," Ms. Lepore said through lips as big as bananas. Then, in a voice even deeper than Mr. LaChapelle's, she added: "I'm the ultimate fantasy of a girl."

Ms. Lepore pranced past the isolated clump of Montblanc execs, who looked like they had just walked out of Sulka to the other side of the promenade. Mr. LaChapelle considered the picture of the cheeseburger flattening his companion. "It's actually anti-food," he said.

Anti-food? The Transom asked him.

"I'm a vegetarian, and the idea is that we spend so much time shopping and consuming that it's a never-ending cycle." Asked what the meaning was, he said: "It could mean different things for different people. You can have it your way." For example? "Well, if you like the idea of a giant hamburger crushing you, then it can be a good thing for you. But I don't want to define it. That's too literal."

-A.W.

Fudge Does Film!

The turtle-swallowing 5-year-old on whom author Judy Blume based her character Fudge Hatcher has grown up. Lawrence Blume, Ms. Blume's son, now in his late 30's, has gone from digging up worms to an even grittier enterprise: directing his first feature film, Martin and Orloff, a comedy about a marketing man recovering from a suicide attempt, whose shrink leads him into a series of misadventures.

The low-budget movie, which will premiere at the Sunshine Theater on Houston Street on Nov. 7, stars Upright Citizens Brigade members Matt Walsh and Ian Roberts, who co-wrote the script. And the two told The Transom that Mr. Blume's pedigree had something to do with his hiring. "Ian's a big fan of Judy Blume novels," said Mr. Walsh. "He has written The Annotated Fudge, Fudge Cliff's Notes," and "has those Web sites where you ask questions and Fudge provides the answer."

Well, not really, but then Mr. Roberts said something we did believe: "I've read all her adult-erotica books. They make great Sunday-afternoon reading."

Mr. Blume characterized his mother's influence a little differently. "She was very helpful for me, to see somebody who could be an artist on her own terms and succeed," he said. "You see a lot of artists' kids being artists-part of it is, you see that you can make a living out of it."

And though Martin and Orloff is his first directing gig, Mr. Blume is no stranger to the movie business. He first made a living editing films and writing scripts, and he directed the film adaptation of his mother's novel, Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great. He also co-owned Post Works, a post-production house. "I don't think I've accomplished anything particularly incredible," he said of his directing job on Martin and Orloff. "So I just treat it as blue-collar work." Blue-collar work that may soon involve co-producing (with Mariah Carey) a film adaptation of Wifey, his mother's novel about a bored suburban housewife in the late 60's who lets her freak flag fly.

And Mr. Blume did a little of that in Martin and Orloff. "I like being a little risky, a little bit politically incorrect," he said. "It's like the killing of little girls on a bridge." He was referring to a scene in which three Girl Scouts dressed in a spareribs costume may or may not fall off a bridge into a vat of barbecue sauce. "People think, 'You can't kill little girls!'" he said. "There's something kind of risk-taking in that scene."

Mr. Blume's expectations for Martin and Orloff are decidedly more modest. He said he hopes the movie will draw viewers by word of mouth and will ultimately expand to more theaters throughout the city. In the meantime, he said, "I'm just a single guy looking for a job."

-A.W.

The Transom Also Hears ….

That lobbyist Sid Davidoff placed a winning $2,100 bid on a 166-gram white Tuscan truffle at an international auction for the fragrant fungus on Nov. 1. The New York portion of the auction took place beneath distractingly hot klieg lights at Le Cirque, where those in attendance included author Jay McInerney, Martha Stewart, gourmand financier Roger Yassin, Joan Collins, Four Seasons co-owner Julian Niccolini, Gourmet publicist Karen Danick and Moët and Chandon's international on-trade manager, Charles de Pontevés. When restaurateur Drew Nieporent learned that Mr. Davidoff doesn't cook, he offered to have his chefs at Tribeca Grill cook up a dinner for eight using the truffle.

Mr. Davidoff's truffle ended up being a trifle, however, compared to the pungent load-weighing close to a pound-that brought $35,000 from a trio of Left Coast bidders: Michael McCarty of Michael's, Barbara Lazaroff of Spago and Piero Selvaggio of Valentino. According to a spokesman for the auction, the sum tied the world's record for the most expensive truffle purchase.

-F.D.

· Actor Steve Schirripa, who plays Bobby (Bacala) Baccalieri on HBO's The Sopranos, gave The Transom a brief lesson in how to spot a goomba on Oct. 30. Mr. Schirripa, who has just published A Goomba's Book of Love, the follow-up to his 2002 A Goomba's Guide to Life, joined Knicks Keith Van Horn and Antonio McDyess at Madison Square Garden for the Read to Achieve organization's Halloween party, and-out of the earshot of the 50 third-graders who also attended-he told us, "One thing you will never hear a goomba say: 'Two tickets to The Vagina Monologues, please.'"

-John Gallagher

Leroy immersed himself in the tradition of Western painting-so deeply, in fact, that he seems often to have gone in over his head. His canvases, with their clotted, crusty and sculptural surfaces, reveal a painter who could be drowning in irresolution.

The basis of Leroy's art was the reconciliation of observed phenomenon-usually the female form-and material fact. This wasn't a revolutionary tack; one can trace it back to our forebears daubing the likeness of a bison on a cave wall. But Leroy brought to this fundamental dichotomy a muffled and not inelegant force. He didn't "make it new" so much as remind us of why some things never get old. His pictures recall those of Alberto Giacometti, another artist with doubts about realizing "the nearest possible sensation to that felt at the sight of the subject." Giacometti considered this goal unattainable, yet his paintings are marked by a clarity of purpose. The same can't be said of Leroy. What his paintings leave us with is a muddle-a heroic muddle, but a muddle all the same. Whatever his limitations, Leroy was on the side of the angels. He may not elicit our passion, but he deserves our respect.

Eugène Leroy: Nudes is at Michael Werner, 4 East 77th Street, until Sept. 7.

Yellow, in Abundance

There's a charming painting near the beginning of Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow , an exhibition currently at the Studio Museum in Harlem. It's a 1949 picture of Washington Square, an idyllic portrayal of rambunctious dogs, playing children and the ubiquitous flock of pigeons. A picturesque compromise between folksy sentimentality and Modernist sophistication, Delaney's sweet canvas is toughened by an abrupt, if somewhat ham-handed, authority. Despite some threatening portents-a couple of gnarled trees that could have been the handiwork of Clyfford Still-Delaney's tableau is suffused with contentment, a world of creamy pinks, ashy purples and impermeable blues.

Unfortunately, nothing else in The Color Yellow comes close to matching Washington Square in terms of aesthetic delight. If anything, the exhibition demonstrates Delaney's reliance on painterly cliché. The majority of the paintings can be separated into two camps, portraits and abstractions, ruled by one style, Expressionism. Working in the abstract, Delaney (1901-1979) was an unexceptional talent. His all-over fields of scrubby brushwork fail to distinguish between painting as purposeful accretion and painting as meandering busywork. The portraits aren't much better. Delaney's forays into primitivism are hapless, and his insight into the personality of his subjects minimal-quite a feat if you're painting Marian Anderson or James Baldwin. All of which leads me to believe that there are better role models for painters than Jackson Pollock and Vincent van Gogh. As for the color yellow, it's here in abundance-right out of the tube and of no great distinction.

Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow is at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, until Sept. 22.

Lurid and Slick

In a recent essay, the painter and art critic Peter Plagens wrote that the "seamless continuum" between the worlds of art and fashion is "the most unsalutary development I've seen as a critic." Those who agree with Mr. Plagens are advised to steer clear of the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, which is hosting an exhibition of photographs by David LaChapelle. To say that Mr. LaChapelleisa celebrity photographer is to shortchange the intensity of his vision. His elaborately contrived pictures of superstars, megastars, wannabes and has-beens are relentlessly superficial, lurid and slick. Mr. LaChapelle has made a successful career out of underscoring the vacuity of celebrity culture even as he revels in it. He's an artist who gets to have his cake-or, in this case, giant inflatable hamburger-and eat it, too.

There's nothing at risk in Mr. LaChapelle's photographs. That Leonardo DiCaprio, Jocelyn Wildenstein, Britney Spears and Sylvester Stallone are eager to participate in his hyperstylized undertakings only proves how banal disaffection has become. One can't step into a subway train, walk down a city street or enter an art gallery without being subjected to imagery that is equal parts artifice, glamour, nihilism and sex. Or should I say cheap sex: Mr. LaChapelle's reliance on the conventions of pornography-the garish presentation, the clinical lighting-makes perfect sense. Like pornography, celebrity is characterized by infinite promise and ultimate distance. What this equals, in Mr. LaChapelle's case, is an art stunningly devoid of humanity. When he makes a fashion statement out of a seedy room where an unspeakable tragedy has taken place, a lot of things are mocked, but mostly life itself. It's hard not to be a moralist when faced by what Mr. LaChapelle does. It's even harder to escape it.

David LaChapelle: All American is at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 119 Wooster Street, until Sept. 21.

Mr. Dickstein does not consider himself an art collector, but he purchased a large apartment on East End Avenue for $5.8 million–formerly occupied by arbitrageur Asher Edelman–and he has a lot of wall space to contend with.

In January, Mr. Dickstein received a call from Leila Hill Buckjune, an expert in Christie's photography department. She informed him that the Mapplethorpe prints have flaws in them–faint shadows in the margins. He was told the defect would lower the sale price of the prints. Mr. Dickstein took them back from Christie's and contacted Howard Read, who had been the photography specialist at Miller when he purchased the prints. Mr. Read is a co-owner of the Cheim & Read gallery, which now represents the Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Mr. Read gave Mr. Dickstein the name of the man who printed the photographs, Sal Lopes in Boston, and reassured him that the problem would be rectified. "I was told by Howard Read that there was a problem in the development process. The image kept exposing after it was printed. Why that happened I have no idea, but Howard informed me that it clearly had nothing to do with the way the pictures were stored," said Mr. Dickstein.

He wants the foundation to either return his initial investment of $50,000 or give him two comparable prints without flaws. As the president of Dickstein Partners, he is used to taking action quickly and has grown tired of waiting for the foundation to respond. On June 3, Mr. Dickstein wrote to Mr. Read, threatened to hire a lawyer and accused the foundation of selling him flawed merchandise. "I can assure you that once I have been forced to go through the hassle of hiring an attorney … it will be far more difficult to amicably resolve this situation," he wrote.

On June 4, Michael Ward Stout, the attorney for the Mapplethorpe Foundation, wrote to Mr. Dickstein to say that the Mapplethorpe Estate has been conducting an investigation into all of its platinum prints to determine the source of the problem. They have concluded that none of the other platinum prints owned by the foundation have the same problem as Mr. Dickstein's. Still, they are going to investigate the situation further. "While we are currently having these prints examined by one of New York's leading experts in works on paper, we have not ruled out the conclusion that these prints were damaged either by the way in which they were exhibited or by the facility at which they were kept," Mr. Stout wrote. He also suggested that Mr. Dickstein contact an attorney to ascertain the legality of the threats he made in his letter to Mr. Read.

Mr. Stout concluded by assuring Mr. Dickstein that "the Mapplethorpe organization will accept whatever responsibility, if any, it has in this matter." But Mr. Dickstein was not reassured by Mr. Stout's letter. He was angered by it. He feels that since the printer has admitted that the problem was caused in the printing, the matter should be closed and settled.

When contacted by The Observer , the printer, Mr. Lopes, said that Mapplethorpe himself had supplied him with the paper for the platinum prints. He had warned the artist that the type of paper he wanted him to use for the prints might be problematic in the future. "It was paper that Robert brought to me," said Mr. Lopes. "I usually supply the paper, but he insisted on having me use that kind of paper. I told him that the paper had too much tooth–it was too porous, and the chemicals would not wash off altogether, which could cause later problems."

Marisa Cardinale, a consultant to the Mapplethorpe Foundation, pointed out that in determining the cause of the imperfection, the foundation was not relying on Mr. Lopes. "He is hardly a disinterested party," said Ms. Cardinale. "He has his reputation at stake, and what does he do? He blames the dead man, who is not around to defend himself." (Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989.) "We have had two experts look at them who have nonconclusive opinions. They don't know what it is. Now we are going to use an expert that we use regularly to give us a third opinion.

"You have to be careful when you use the word flaw," Ms. Cardinale counseled. "Flaw implies something made, not created. A possibility is that there is something in the environment they were in.

"What we have here," concluded Ms. Cardinale, "is someone who wants an immediate solution to a complicated, time-involved problem."

David LaChapelle at Shafrazi

During the early 1980's, when David LaChapelle was working as a busboy at Studio 54, he used to sneak into openings at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in SoHo to see his idols: Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat. On June 4, Mr. LaChapelle, who is one of the most successful photographers in the world, had his dream come true when the first show of his work opened at the Shafrazi Gallery on Wooster Street. ThroughSept.15,hisphotographs of Madonna, Leonardo DiCaprio, Uma Thurman, Elton John and Cher, in surreal settings that would have pleased Magritte and Fellini, his two other idols, are on view in the gallery.

"How it happened is pretty amazing," said Mr. LaChapelle. "We were shooting Naomi Campbell for Playboy and she called up Tony and said, if you want to see me naked come over now, and he came over and we just started talking about pictures and the reasons I do them and stuff," said Mr. LaChapelle, 35, who still has the wide-eyed quality that led Andy Warhol to hire him to photograph for Interview when he was 18. "We talked for hours and hours and then he called me a few days later and said, I want to give you a show."

For the June 4 opening, Mr. LaChapelle created a spectacle that he thought would have amused Warhol. He convinced Amanda Lepore, a transsexual model he has used in his photographs, to come to the gallery naked. "She came with a suntan," Mr. LaChapelle explained. "She was wearing a tan line. That was her outfit. She had her body painted and where the bikini would have been was all white," said Mr. LaChapelle, who has a book coming out in October, Hotel LaChapelle , from Bulfinch Press-Callaway. "I love spectacle and outrageousness," he said.