Governon Cuomo. Photo by azipaybarah, via Flickr Creative Commons.

Following the completion of a Department of Environmental Conservation environmental impact study, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is expected to decide this week whether or not to allow natural gas companies to extract gas by hydro-fracking, a drilling technique that blasts a high-pressure mix of water, chemicals and other materials deep underground to crack open rocks.

New York is sharply divided over the issue. Many towns have enacted temporary moratoriums on fracking, while many others have passed resolutions supporting it, the Wall Street Journal reports. Cuomo is anticipated to allow drilling to begin on a limited basis in the latter towns along the Marcellus Shale, a gas-rich underground rock formation in southern New York that extends out to Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

Proponents of hydro-fracking argue that the technique would help to bolster the state’s economically depressed region by generating tax income for local governments and creating 15,000 of jobs, according to NPR. Pennsylvania, for instance, has experienced a natural gas boom in the past decade by allowing high-volume fracking.

Opponents worry about the practice’s environmental costs. They argue that blasting chemicals deep into the earth threatens small town groundwater supplies. Celebrities including Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney and Alec Baldwin have banned together to fight fracking in the state, and over 1,000 demonstators marched to the Capitol on Monday to make their voices heard.

Check back for updates as Cuomo prepares to announce his decision.

Alec Baldwin. Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.

Manhattan

Despite the holiday, the Espaillat-Rangel race is still in full-tilt.

The dispute at the Board of Elections harkens back to a past race.

State Senate

How competitive will this year’s state Senate elections really be?

2013 Mayoral Race

Billy Baldwin says Alec Baldwin’s prospects of running for mayor are real.

Eva Moskowitz (who’s not running for mayor) panned Bill de Blasio (who is).

To read more from City & State click here.

Penelope Cruz, Woody Allen and Greta Gerwig.

Last night The Cinema Society, along with The Hollywood Reporter and Piaget, hosted a screening of Woody Allen’s newest flick, To Rome with Love. The A-list came out in full force for the screening held at Manhattan’s Paris Theater—including the film’s writer/director and star Woody Allen; stars Alec Baldwin, Penélope Cruz, Greta Gerwig, Allessandra Mastronardi who donned a Piaget timepiece, Italian import Fabio Armiliato and Carol Alt; producers Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum and Helen Robin.

Cinema Society founder, Andrew Saffir welcomed the movie’s stars in front of a boisterous audience that was littered with VIPs including: Jon Hamm & Jennifer Westfeldt, Chris Rock—who could be heard cheering and laughing throughout, Woody Harrelson, Mariska Hargitay, Regis & Joy Philbin, Ralph & Ricky Lauren, Cynthia Rowley, Kate Flannery, Hilaria Thomas, Rachel Dratch, Soon-yi Previn, Nicole Miller, James Mischka & Mark Badgley, Scott Adsit, Julianna Marguiles & Keith Lieberthal, Dylan McDermott, Calvin Klein and many more.

After the movie—which seemed to delight all in attendance, in that way that only Woody Allen can—all mentioned above, along with yours truly, moved over to Italian favorite and celebrity haunt Casa Lever for an after-party. Though the venue boasts a fantastic outdoor section, at the risk of melting in the NYC heat wave, most ventured indoors. Chris Rock parked himself in a banquette booth that quickly filled around him–hey, live comedy show. Alec Baldwin worked the room, with one arm around fiancé (suspiciously soon-to-be-wife) Hilaria Thomas, who STUNNED in Dolce & Gabbana. “They really know how to design for a woman,” she told me. That they do. The funny kids–The Office’s Kate Flannery, 30 Rock’s Scott Adsit and SNL’s Rachel Dratch kept each other in a protracted laughing fit, while gathered around a high top table for the whole night.

To read the full article at AVENUE Insider click here.

Ralph & Ricky Lauren

Mariska Hargitay

Chris Rock

Alec Baldwin and Hilaria Thomas

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

Alec Baldwin went to City Hall yesterday with fiancée Hilaria Thomas to obtain a marriage license, when an altercation broke out that provoked a witness to tell the Daily News something is “wrong” with the star.

Baldwin is now at the center of a criminal investigation after allegedly assaulting a photographer on scene. According to the alleged victim, Marcus Santos, Baldwin “look[ed] mad” and urged the paparazzi to get out of his way, Fox News reports. Santos says Baldwin went after him unprovoked, while Baldwin claims he acted in response to aggression. The Daily News reports Baldwin threw punches. Witnesses may back up the photographer’s account, but they might be a little biased.

Baldwin tweeted about the incident later and even alluded to the controversial Trayvon Martin case: “I suppose if the offending paparazzi was wearing a hoodie and I shot him, it would all blow over…” Unfortunately his remark will probably only escalate matters.

The next day Baldwin was seen around town wearing a sheet over his head, likely a response to General Counsel for the National Press Photographers Association Mickey Osterreicher’s comments that Baldwin should wear something over his head if he does not want to be recognized, Fox reported.

It sounds like a classic case of finger-pointing.

—Alissa Fleck

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

Clearly no one was in a rockin’ mood this weekend. “Rock of Ages,” the musical adaptation starring Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin and Catherine Zeta-Jones, earned just $15 million over its opening weekend, the Huffington Post reports. It ranked behind “Prometheus” and even “Madagascar 3,” proving a star-studded cast can lose out to aliens and cuddly, animated lions no matter how sexy Cruise’s locks.

“Rock of Ages” is the story of a small town girl and city boy who meet on the Sunset Strip while pursuing their Hollywood dreams, says the movie’s official writeup. This is Cruise’s worst wide release opening since “Lions for Lambs” in 2007, the Post also reports.

—Alissa Fleck

By Leonora Desar

Alec Baldwin is on top of the world, perched high above the deserted city on the rooftop of an exclusive nightclub just before the break of dawn. “Hand that back,” he says to Mary-Kate Olsen—or is it Ashley?—who snatches Baldwin’s cell phone away before sinking into a designer red velvet couch flush with fallen change and lost cigarette lighters.

Past them, supermodels like skyscrapers in summer blues and lilacs glide past one another like ships. “Leo, have you seen Leo?” they implore tipsily, backlit against the city as Tupac’s hologram slips out from some dark corner. Wispy and iridescent, it circles the bar like a fine thread of cigarette smoke before retreating behind the folds of a tightly drawn curtain.

Or so I imagined, along with all other sorts of outlandish, fictitious stories about Downtown celebrities. After all, in our star-obsessed culture, the rich and famous are seductive, mythical beings who flirt and play against only the most lavish of backdrops (which, for some reason or other, always seem to sit high up on rooftops).

To get past the velvet ropes, I asked New York’s servers to give me their dish on some Downtown superstars—the scandals! the tantrums! the intrigue! But what they served up was even harder to believe than what I had originally envisioned.

OK, so I didn’t expect to hear that Baldwin flirted with the Olsen twins. But I had hoped that digging around about the Greenwich Village actor, famed for his Twitter tirades as much as for his talent, would be a good way to go about researching this story. I must be in for some juicy revelations, right?

“He’s very friendly and polite,” declared a source at Nolita restaurant Emporio.

“He was a super nice guy, a good tipper,” gushed a former server at Popover Cafe. “He would always talk to some of the waiters who were also actors and see what they were doing, encourage them.”

“Alec’s awesome, he makes you feel like you’re at the table with him,” echoed an insider at Pure Food and Wine, where the 54-year-old star first met his 28-year-old fiancée, yoga teacher Hilaria Thomas. “When you walk by, he says, ‘Hey, good to see you.’ He’ll ask you how you’ve been and introduce you to someone. He’s not wanting you to go away. It’s almost hard to pull away from the table because he’s engaging you in this really fun, playful, sweet, witty way.”

But this was practically criticism compared to what people had to say about West Village star Sarah Jessica Parker, of Sex and the City fame.

“She’s a real doll, really nice and down to earth, just a regular girl,” Prime Burger owner Michael DiMiceli revealed. “I’ll never forget it, she was sitting one day by herself, trying to be inconspicuous, and there were a bunch of school kids here on a trip. They recognized her and went over to her one by one. She didn’t just sign an autograph, she asked each of them their name. I was very impressed by that.”

He was equally impressed when she chatted up his wife and daughter for half an hour. “She was having a regular conversation with them like she was nobody special. That’s what I really like about her—she’s always nice. She always pays her check, never expects things for free or anything like that.”

But if you want to hear someone really sing her praises, ask how the actress behaves on a bad night. Parker was dining at Café Luxembourg with husband Matthew Broderick when, according to her server, another patron mistakenly took her jacket. Inside were her lines for the Broadway show Once Upon a Mattress, which she was supposed to have learned for rehearsal the following day.

“She was gracious, didn’t lose her temper at all,” said the server. “She was also very personable and real with me. She acknowledged me as a person, not just someone waiting on her.”

You can imagine how, after all of this, I wasn’t exactly shocked when others started raving about Tribeca couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z. “So nice!” “So gracious!” “Super normal!” “Not at all high maintenance!”

“Jay-Z and Beyoncé are a casual, sweet couple,” praised one server. “They treat the staff very well, tip very well. They have a normal dinner and don’t ask for special treatment, even though they get it. They’re not picky or particular. You can tell they’re a regular couple enjoying each other’s company more than anything.”

Is there anyone who’s not so sweet and down to earth? I asked my sources.

“Katie Holmes was kind of standoffish,” confessed a Downtown waitress. “She was quiet, looked down a lot.”

Oh?

“It was hard for her to eat in the restaurant because the paparazzi kept trying to take photos of her through the windows. She wasn’t nasty or anything—she was respectful.”

The wind had finally left my sails. Where were the scandals? The tantrums? The intrigue? Celebrities were just about as exciting as your average New Yorker (though obviously with more glamorous clothes and high-powered friends). I was starting to see how the gossip rags might get desperate enough to embellish or even fabricate their material. At this point, I’d rather write a tell-all column about Mother Theresa.

“Well, what did you expect?” asked a friend and former server as we wove through Greenwich Village avenues, eyes peeled for familiar, front-page faces. “This is New York, not L.A. Even the most famous people are just living their lives here like everyone else. They get their takeout at the same place every day, go to Starbucks. It’s not an issue of who they are.”

But by now, all I see are celebrities. Celebrities standing beneath the eerie neon of a street lamp, silhouetted. Celebrities just beyond the glass pane of every taxi passing by. In the corner, by the DJ booth, on the red velvet sofas of another supposedly star-saturated lounge we’re about to leave behind.

But wouldn’t you know it? All the superstars and legends are really at home watching TV. The bar’s emptied out, and in the light, the designer couches are not truly red at all—just a deep, dull pink.

Photo courtesy Ken Howard

There’s nothing definitive about the new Desire revival

It’s hard to breathe new life into a classic work. With performers ranging from the iconic Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh to Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, Jessica Lange, Frances McDormand, and Treat Williams breathing life and resuscitating it into the immortal roles of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, is there any insight that hasn’t been gained when putting Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire under a microscope?

Emily Mann’s current version, adorning the Broadhurst Theatre, tries a new tact by adopting a cosmetic approach, featuring a non-white cast in the principal roles. This decision on its own doesn’t really dilute the work (aside from stripping away Stanley’s working-class Polish heritage), and yet the end result, despite a disciplined performance by Nicole Ari Parker as Blanche, remains a distinctly neutered affair.

One of the key elements to Streetcar is passion. It’s what drives Stella (Daphne Rubin-Vega) back to Stanley (Blair Underwood) every time his abusive temper causes her to run; it’s what has caused a great many of Blanche’s ruinous past indiscretions; and it’s what ignites what is at first an emotional and then eventually a physical battle royale between Stella’s older sister and her husband. The stakes should be huge in this battle of old school gentility and new school animal instinct; everybody, somehow, loses in the end. This Streetcar faithfully follows the battle but never engages us in the war.

I can’t fault the soldiers, at least not completely. Underwood’s good looks have always been this actor’s stock-in-trade, and his physicality makes him a magnetic Stanley (as evidenced by the distracting whooping going on in the audience), but not a brutish one. This cuts down on the contrast with Blanche. Stanley may be an animal, but you know what you’re going to get with him. On the other hand, Blanche, fading into a world of mental instability, is all images and mendacity. From the moment she steps off the titular trolley and crashes her sister and brother-in-law’s squalid apartment (realistically designed By Eugene Lee, although lit a bit too brightly by Edward Pierce), nothing she puts forward is steeped in truth or reliability. Her delicate act belies a selfish cruelty that should threaten to detonate everything in her path.

But Mann’s production hits the notes without sounding any tune. The scenes don’t escalate to the point where the audience must worry that this powder keg is going to explode. Parker, onstage throughout almost the entirety of this nearly three-hour show, plays Blanche as smart but a loose cannon, haunted by shame, wrecked by guilt and willing to use her wiles to get whatever. This works until the second act, starting with a climactic scene opposite Wood Harris’s Mitch. Suddenly, characters’ reactions in this heretofore naturalistic production seem inorganic. We’re improperly prepared for the unassertive Mitch to lambast Blanche, and Blanche’s ultimate submission to Stanley’s victimization is jarring but only in a sensational way. Furthermore, Rubin-Vega’s Stella lacks some of the carnal conviction required to ensure loyalty to her husband over her sister. (Amelia Campbell makes the most of a small role as upstairs neighbor Eunice).

Mann’s Streetcar isn’t ablaze, but it isn’t a total wash either. How could it be? Williams’ work is too potent to completely lack effect. Like a streetcar trip itself, sometimes a slow, rocky journey can still be justified by the destination.

A Streetcar Named Desire

Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St. www.Telecharge.com. Through July 22.

From the moment I sat down at the bar in Sag Harbor’s American Hotel, I felt exactly like orphan Oliver Twist in Dickens’ novel when he asks for a little more gruel. Instead of getting hit on the back of my head with a ladle, the bartender offered me a glass of Chardonnay. I would have preferred a whole chilled bottle rather than one glass of wine but with only a hundred bucks left in my bank account until the next paycheck, $10was as much as I could afford. Draining the glass, despite my limited cash flow I felt better immediately.

I was in the Hamptons on the cheap. My wallet was empty but it was OK—I was crashing with a friend who rents the first floor of a house in Sag Harbor. I rode the Long Island Railroad for $14.50 each way , the cheaper but perfectly acceptable mode of transport, instead of taking a helicopter or riding the Jitney, the bus for the elite. Too broke to take a real vacation all summer, here was my chance to get away from it all, if only for the weekend. A mere few hours away from the city, it was the perfect place to lay on the beach by day, tune out at a yoga workshop, and socialize by night. If I had to impose on the largesse of the rich and the powerful, so be it. My friend drives a Jag, her boyfriend owns a 40-foot sailboat, and they both had plenty of leisure time. If I were lucky, they’d take me out for dinner and there’d be some parties to attend, none of which would cost a cent.

Just like in Manhattan, the middle-class—that is, me—can no longer afford the Hamptons, a mecca for celebrities and ostentatious yuppies to show off their expensive toys. Making a big splash into the pools of the Hamptons ain’t easy. If your last name is Hilton, it’s a swan dive but if it’s Grubman, it’ll be a big fat belly flop. “Did I miss Sean “Puffy” Combs’ White Party?” I asked my friend about one of the area’s major power brokers. But it seems P. Diddy’s 8th annual White Party, one of the events of the summer, would be held in St. Tropez this year. What a shame. Loser that I am, I’d already missed the seven previous galas. Nor did I run into residents like Martha Stewart, Alec Baldwin, Billy Joel or Howard Stern.

You can find the Hamptons at its worst with all the trappings of super-materialism and Page Six mentality at its most popular nightclub, the Pink Elephant in Southampton. The place calls itself the “top celebrity and bottle service VIP club in New York catering to socialites, jet setters and Europeans…” Of course, we didn’t get in. The delusional doormen thought the joint was Studio 54, forcing rejects like us to languish at the velvet ropes while “elite” trailer trash like Jessica Simpson, whose bodyguards recently beat up a paparazzo, are welcomed with open arms. “I’m wearing Prada and I still can’t even get in,” a woman at the ropes wailed.

So we switched gears and hung out at the bar in the American Hotel, a yuppie stronghold crammed with WASPs nicknamed Muffy and Biff with rotund dudes wearing Brooks Brothers shirts and suspenders, smoking cigars. Maybe I’d finally meet a real man instead of those guys I’ve been dating from the Internet who want to go all the way an hour after we’ve met. Or who ask to borrow money from me a few weeks later and who, when the bill arrives, tell me they forgot to go to the cash machine.

I knew the lay of the land since back in the early ’90s, my friend and I shared a quaint carriage house in Bridgehampton when rents were low enough for a single girl’s budget. We competed for the cute guys in all the bars that summer, hanging out on employee’s night with the waiters, chefs and sailors who knew how to have fun. We were slumming it up at Murph’s Tavern in Sag Harbor one night when a bipolar carpenter claiming he was a sculptor scribbled his number for me on a damp bar napkin. That’s how I wound up marrying (and divorcing) the only poor man in the Hamptons.

My girlfriend had better sense: one of her trick questions to potential suitors was, “What does your roommate do?” Renters weren’t owners, which meant their bank balances were too low. “If they have to work on Fridays or be back in the office by Monday morning, they’re not successful,” she used to say. And she’d move on to the next one. And here she was now, with a dashing boyfriend who spent the whole damn week with her sailing on his yacht.

The troubles of the world seemed far way in the land of Mercedes and potato fields but if you scratch below the surface, there are lots of people out in the Hamptons who aren’t just sitting around drinking Dom Perignon. For example, this past April a teenage neo-Nazi sympathizer chased three Latino classmates in East Hampton with a machete and a revving chain saw. And police in East Hampton Village expelled day laborers last fall from the train station because of complaints. Lest we forget, Indians were driven off their land on the South Fork by the Puritans years back.

Despite the love-hate relationship, the needs of the rich and the beautiful are met by the service people and laborers in town. The townies, mostly scrappy Irish and Italians, call the summer people “cidiots.” Don’t forget the recent brouhaha over America’s favorite supermodel and longtime Hamptons mainstay Christie Brinkley whose fourth husband, Peter Cooke, was caught fooling around with a Long Island Lolita, a Southampton townie who was a sales clerk in a local toy store. Although Cooke tried to entice his girlfriend with a Nissan Maxima, she left town. That’s what you get when a local tangles with a transplant.

We ended our night at a party held at a tastefully decorated house on Hedgerow Lane thrown by a gay couple. “We sell pretty pictures to rich people,” one of the men confided about their business. Gays flock to the Hamptons since they’ve got the disposable income you need there. A friend of mine—personal assistant to a wealthy gay twosome in Southampton—told me about a hot Latino hustler who serviced men at parties while his dad double-parked out in the front yard, waiting for his son to do his thing. Then there was the party in Southampton with a midget holding a mirror over his head with lines of cocaine, ready to be snorted by the guests. We didn’t notice anything amusing like that, but the drinks were served by “eye candy,” breathtakingly hunky, bare-chested waiters and poolboys chosen for their ability to look pretty wearing tight white cargo pants toting trays with their biceps bulging and chests rippling. The eye candy was the most popular dish of the night. Looking was free and we wanted to sample the sweets, but it was getting late. In the end, everyone who’s anyone knows the Hamptons has become a cliche except maybe the high tax bracket yupsters who continue to summer there, no matter how high the real estate becomes. As Yogi Berra would’ve said, “Nobody goes anymore. It’s too crowded.” n