"Iconic Finds: Holland" -- M2L curates a timeline exhibit highlighting iconic masterworks from the Netherlands spanning from the '20s to today.  Cocktail reception: Sunday, May 18 from 6 to 9 p.m.; exhibition: Saturday, May 17, noon to 6 p.m.; Sunday, May 18, noon to 9 p.m.; Monday, May 19, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eye Studio, 410 West 14th St., Floor 2.

"Equilateral 08:01" -- Three creative forces intersect--product design, fashion and lighting--in the first in a series of collaborative events between IDSA.NYC, Rubin Chapelle, and J. F. Ahlin. Cocktail Reception: Sunday, May 18, 7 to 9 p.m.; exhibition: Sunday, May 18 from noon to 6 p.m.; Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Rubin Chapelle, 410 W. 14th St.

"Jeff Miller at Carlos Miele" -- Rising star Jeff Miller will exhibit his most recent designs for Baleri Italia and present his first monograph. Cocktail reception: Sunday, May 18 from 5 to 7 p.m.; exhibition: Friday, May 16 and Saturday, May 17 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Sunday, May 18 from noon to 6 p.m. Carlos Miele, 408 W. 14th St.

For more information, go to www.meatpacking-district.com

CITY: What was your inspiration for Hotel Gramercy Park?
Douglas Keeve: Well, I've lived in New York for 20 years. A lot of people have just been kvetching to me about how New York was losing its soul, and I've been kvetching internally about the same thing, and I think that was a big reason for doing this film -- to just witness the changes taking place and, from a journalistic point of view, to tackle whether it was good or bad and whether it was happening and whether it was right or wrong. And as is usual with these films, I wind up with more questions than answers. I think I've always had a love-hate relationship with Ian [Schrager]'s hotels because maybe I felt like I was never cool enough to go to them. And I think [I've always had] just a fascination with the man himself.

So has New York lost its soul?
It's very hard to look at anything in the world and not think that it's changed for the worse. It's impossible not to feel that [New York is losing its soul] but whether it is or not, I don't know. Like it says in the movie, New York is always changing, and I want to believe some of the voices in the movie that say that New York will always be the best city in the world, which is kind of how I feel, even though Paris is more beautiful and the food is better in Milan or in Italy. But I love New York -- it is the best city in the world. Whenever I've gone on a trip and I'm coming across the bridge I get this overwhelming kind of giddy, nostalgic glee, sort of like I'm a kid. It's really hard to find that in a lot of places in my life. I think it really lives inside of one and so the answer to the question is yes and the answer to the question is no.

I feel the same way every time I come home from a trip. I wave hello to the Chrysler Building from the Williamsburg Bridge, which I always felt was a little strange, but now I guess maybe it's not so bizarre.
Yeah, it's funny because you forget all of these things in your life, you know? We forget most of our lives, most of our memories, most of why we became filmmakers or writers or whatever, and it's so easy to be jaded and coy and hardened by life and by the city, but New York doesn't let you forget that. It kind of makes you remember. It makes you remember your roots. It makes you remember why you're here.

Above: Long-time residents of the Gramercy Park Hotel
discuss the history of the New York landmark in Hotel Gramercy Park.

How cooperative was Schrager with your filming? Was he happy that this was going on?
Was he happy? I don't think Ian is ever happy to be in front of a camera. He's actually a shy person, and he, I believe, says in the movie, which is true, that Steve [Rubell, his late, longtime business partner] was the front man and Ian is the mad scientist, the master builder. One of the things I had a hard time with was capturing him because I never felt like he came off on camera the way he really was. I had a hard time capturing his giddiness and, in spite of all the hardships and the difficulties, he loved doing it. He was extremely generous with his time and he's never done this before with anyone. I doubt if he'll do it again with anyone because it was hard for him. He doesn't like to be the front man even though he is. The one thing that I just couldn't believe about Ian is what a perfectionist he is and how involved he is in every single detail. I'd be in the hotel at two in the morning shooting details or something, and Ian would show up for a lighting test or something and I would just say, "Don't you work hard enough in your 18-, 20-hour days? Do you really have to be here at two in the morning, three in the morning?" And he'd be like, "No, it's great. We're doing the lighting, we're doing the lighting! It's going to be great. I've been waiting to see this." But it was shocking in a good way how much he cared. He doesn't leave it up to other people. He worries about every detail. [It was] incredibly impressive.

What do you think about Julian Schnabel's design? Was this his masterpiece?
Well, now that he has a hit movie, you better like it. . . . [He laughs.] I will say that to this day, and I don't know why, but I love going to the hotel. I love sitting in the lobby in front of the fire. It's probably partially because I practically lived there at the time Ian was redoing the hotel. But part of it is that I can go into the lobby and sit in a chair and be in front of the fire and just look at the Cy Twombly painting, which is incredible [Ed.: though recently rotated out], and, since I don't have one in my home, I love that. I used to send Ian emails saying, "I'm sitting here staring at the Cy Twombly and it's just my favorite thing to do." And I meant it.

How does it feel to be a returning filmmaker to Tribeca this year rather than as a first-timer?
It's a great festival. I was like, "We're not ready! We're not ready! We're not going to be ready!" And everybody's like, "You've got to be in Tribeca. That's the hometown festival. It's the Gramercy Park Hotel." And I was like, "I'm sorry. We're not ready. I am finishing this film. The film is finished when it's finished and it's not finished." So we did finish and Jane Rosenthal [co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival] was incredible to me. I've known her for years, and when we screened Seamless, she was really incredible and I was a nervous wreck. I'm not fond of public speaking and she was just brilliant. She calmed me down brilliantly and took care of me. And she was wonderful. So I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled to be there and really looking forward to it being over because it's the most wonderfully nerve-wracking thing a director can do.

CITY: Where did you get the idea for Empire II?
AMOS POE: I was moving into this apartment and, of course, the view was the whole thing, so the first thing I moved in was the camera with no idea of what I was doing, really. But I just kept filming and capturing imagery over the course of a year, which is what I like about it: It's not premeditated in some way. There's no script, and you don't have to go out and raise money and all the usual stuff that you do when you make a new movie. It was really just experiential. So as things were going and I would fool around with the camera, it started to dawn on me that what I was doing was kind of a remake of Andy Warhol's Empire, which is such a classic of conceptual filmmaking.

So Warhol wasn't the original inspiration?
No. It became one of the reference points, but I realized that I was doing it so differently than what Andy did. It's not black and white. I kept thinking that I was going to add sound or spoken word or music or something and then it just kind of grew out of that. I shot time lapse, so a lot of it was one-and-a-half seconds every 30 seconds. And I never looked at [the footage] the whole year I was shooting it. I just said, "Okay, it's either going to work or not work but I'm not going to look at it until it's done." I gave myself exactly a year, so I moved in on November 1, 2005, and the film was finished shooting October 31, which of course would be Halloween.

And you had the perfect vantage point for the Village Halloween parade, which ends the film. Is it chronological, the way it's edited?
It's chronological but there's no editing involved at all. I realized that I did not want to edit one frame [even though] I ended up with 60 hours. So, how do I end up with three hours if I have 60 hours without cutting anything? That's where the whole digital thing comes in. I just told the computer to make it 2,000 percent faster or 20 times as fast. So, what you're seeing is not only time captured intermittently but then ultimately compressed 20 times as fast, which is what gives you the whole energy of New York.

So you just sporadically turned the camera on and off throughout the year?
Yeah, I would turn it on for a few hours, and then turn it off when I got bored. Then I would turn it on for another few hours or a day or 10 minutes or whatever felt like the right thing, so it was completely like how you feel during the day. So, whenever I would look out the window and I would see something and go, "Oh, hey, that looks cool; I wonder what that's going to look like in the camera," I would turn the camera on and make it out of focus or high-contrast or make it really dark, whatever. So, basically what you're seeing is a chronological year but totally edited in the camera and there's no editing involved in the picture at all. So what I realized when I tried to lay music on there was that any music worked with it because the visual has a rhythm of its own because of the time lapse and the compression.

Along with your own spoken words, the soundtrack features everyone from Lucinda Williams to The Ramones. How did you pick the music?
I knew that for three hours, or even if they watch three minutes of it, I needed to take the audience on an emotional journey. So, the journey that they were on was going to be done through music, so sometimes the music will pick you up and sometimes the music will soothe you.

And all of the natural sounds, the rain and thunder and sirens and wind, were added in post-production?
Yeah, so while the imagery is completely accidental, the sound is actually completely manufactured -- the contrast between those two ideas.

Do you think that viewers around the world have responded to it the way that viewers at Tribeca will?
I think they have a different point of view because for them it's also something slightly exotic. New York has a fascination outside that's different than for us who live in New York and kind of take it for granted. It's like we don't look at the Empire State Building in the same way. Warhol's thing was that he recognized that the Empire State Building is like a "star," he called it: "Empire State Building is a star," or "a movie star," and it's there all the time in the skyline. We just don't get it that much. But people other places are like, "Whoa, Empire State, ah, fabuloso!"

So you've screened it in Turkish baths and various other locales. Do you have an intended venue for this film?
Well, I thought that the best venue for it would be in very large piazzas, you know, very large scale, but it turns out that it's also working in theaters. I think we're still trying to figure out where we're going to show it in New York. One idea is to show it in Grand Central Station in the evenings and the other one is to show it in a movie theater.

Many of your films seem to draw considerable inspiration from older, landmark movies -- Empire, of course, but also Breathless, Taxi Driver, and films like those. What draws you to them and inspires you to reinterpret them?
I'm self-taught. I didn't go to film school. So what happens is that every once in a while you see a film and you go, "Wow, that's what I want to do," and you try it in your own way. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. With Unmade Beds, I was really trying to not even make a film. I was uneducated in filmmaking but I was so ambitious and so obsessive that I just wanted to make a film movement and that's how the New York, the indie, whatever you want to call it, underground thing got started. [It was] from that and my film, The Foreigner.

New York seems to be the one constant in your films, from The Blank Generation in the 1970s through Alphabet City in the '80s to this year's Empire II. How do you think New York has changed over the years?
I think in many ways New York has gotten a lot better. I know a lot of people don't believe that, but I think New York back then was so drug-infested, crime-infested. It was depressing. It was depressed. Okay, it was creatively energizing, but in many, many, many ways it was much worse than it is now. I mean, yes, the architecture of those yuppie apartment buildings on the Bowery are awful on some level, but they're much better than what it was before. So, I'm definitely not one of those people who thinks the past was better. I definitely think even filmmaking is more fun now in a way because you can do it in digital, you can put it on YouTube, and a lot of other stuff. So, I'm not a nostalgist for nostalgia's sake -- "It was better." I'm more like, listen, there are still problems. But, you know, if you really remember what it was like, it was horrible. I mean everybody was on heroin, you know? Crazy. So that doesn't mean it can't be crazy now, but I definitely prefer it now than then.

Lower Manhattan, and Tribeca in particular, have played a large part in that evolution. How do you feel going into the festival?
I'm supremely excited because it's the best venue for my work ever. And this may be one of the best things I've ever done, too, one of the most fun movies I've ever done, so I'm really excited about it. I'm really excited about the venue. I'm excited about the festival. It's the most interesting film festival in the United States at the moment. It's definitely got the most energy. Some of the older ones, like Sundance, have a certain cachet and business and all that kind of stuff, but I think in terms of excitement, to have a film festival in New York, that's riveting, that's great.

Spinning turntables, electric guitars, and old stereo receivers join fine tailored suits and leather jackets at John Varvatos's new store in the old locale of legendary New York rock club CBGB, which closed its doors in 2006. CITY met up with the designer Tuesday before the store opened to check out the preserved graffiti walls and rock memorabilia, and to talk to this rock 'n' roll fan in the place where he feels most at home.

"If it wasn't a labor of love, it would have been too commercial," Varvatos says of the new location, which is more a celebration of music than a store. The retail element is there "to pay the rent," he says, but he was careful not to bombard customers with apparel right as they walk through the door. When Varvatos learned that a bank and a drug store were bidding on the site, he decided he couldn't let the site be desecrated, and bought the space. After all, he'd spent many nights in the club watching The Ramones, The Damned, and The Psychedelic Furs, among others. Hundreds of vinyl records from Varvatos's personal collection are for sale as well, and share shelf space with shoes and denim, while the label's watches and sunglasses are positioned in cases with headphones, music books, and concert posters. Varvatos kept much of the space untouched, and added his own elements like signed copies of each of Alice Cooper's gold and platinum records, which now hang above where the stage used to be. And just so the music never dies, he's already thinking of ways to host concerts in the space.

"It's very emotional. It's so much fun to watch people's faces," Varvatos says. "People are coming in to celebrate. They are able to enjoy it on a bunch of different levels." Still, the designer understands that some CBGB fans will have a hard time dealing with change: Someone has already spat on the window--but hey, that's rock 'n' roll. --RENEE LUCAS

315 Bowery, New York. Go to www.johnvarvatos.com

Postscript: That photo above of Varvatos on the stage at CBGB isn't exactly new. CITY photographed the designer at the club back in 2005 for an interview in our spring fashion issue. Click here to view the story.