Arts

The publication of “Soft Targets,” Joseph Giannini’s collection of nonfiction stories about surfing, war, and fate, will be celebrated at LTV Studios in Wainscott with a book signing and reception tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. Mr. Giannini, an attorney who lives in East Hampton, served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968 with the First Battalion, Third Marines.

The Biercuk-Luckey garden in Wainscott will be open to the public Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. as part of the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days program.

The four-season woodland garden shelters a collection of rhododendrons, azaleas, kalmia, pieris, understory trees, perennials, bulbs, and tropicals in season. Winding paths and stone walls enhance a sense of depth and elevation change on a mostly flat acre.

A small composition of perennials in saturated reds and purple-blue with a dash of yellow drew my attention throughout August and into September.

New at Drawing Room

Concurrent solo exhibitions of work by Costantino Nivola and Rolph Scarlett will open at the Drawing Room in East Hampton tomorrow and remain on view through Oct. 13.

Nivola, who lived in Springs from 1948 until his death in 1988, developed a lexicon of sculptural form ranging from monumental public commissions to intimately scaled figures and abstractions in relief, bronze, clay, marble, concrete, and sand casts. This exhibition focuses on works in clay of figures at leisure on Louse Point.

Susan Schrott, a textile artist, psychotherapist, and actress, will present a free exhibition-performance at the Amagansett Library on Saturday at 6 p.m. Ms. Schrott’s artwork, much of which celebrates women and individuality, will be on view, while the artist will present “Triple Threat,” a narrative of her path from Brooklyn to the New York stage to the artist’s studio to her private practice. The audience has been advised to expect comedic flair and a song or two.

The Montauk Library will present a free concert by the Zigzag Quartet on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. The musicians — Alexander Wu (piano), Francisco Roldan (guitar), Hilliard Greene (double bass), and Danny Mallon (percussion) — cross musical boundaries from flamenco to jazz to contemporary works composed exclusively for them. The program will include pieces by R. Gnattali, David Tcimpidas, Astor Piazzolla, Leonard Bernstein, Binelli, and Dave Brubeck.

Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center will hold open auditions for Kander and Ebb’s “The World Goes ’Round” at 6 p.m. on Sept. 8 and 9 at the center’s Levitas Center for the Arts. Rehearsals will begin immediately after the auditions.

The play will run from Oct. 23 through Nov. 9. More information is available from Michael Disher, the director, at [email protected].

The irreverent humor and mordant social commentary of Fran Lebowitz will kick off a star-studded Labor Day weekend at Guild Hall tonight at 8. Ms. Lebowitz, who began her career as a columnist for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, is the author of two best-selling collections of essays, “Metropolitan Life” and “Social Studies.”

While some of us were basking in the sun or sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic to get to the next much-hyped event, Enoc Perez was hard at work in his East Hampton studio on the pieces presented in “Summer Job” at Harper’s Books in East Hampton.

    The frothy riff touches on social media, appropriation, modern art, and, if you’re feeling academic in these lazy dog days, Lacanian notions and related theories of the subject and object of the gaze in art.

Sitting in his Springs studio last week, Joe Zucker recalled an art history class in which the professor showed a slide of a certain artist’s late work, a painting of stylized horses.

The gallerist Larry Gagosian has a long-running lawsuit against him brought by Ronald Perelman, a former friend and client.

Hope and fear, tolerance and suspicion, open hearts and wrenching secrets — the human experience plays out in ways both predictable and unforeseen. In tomorrow night’s screening of “The Overnighters,” the final film in the SummerDocs series presented by the Hamptons International Film Festival and Guild Hall, an epic story is told through unemployed, often desperate men, and through the words and deeds of a man who struggles mightily to help them.

The Shelter Island Friends of Music’s free concert series will present Intersection, a music trio based in New York City, on Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Shelter Island Presbyterian Church.

Intersection features Laura Frautschi on violin, Kristina Reiko Cooper on cello, and John Novacek on piano. Its repertoire ranges from the classic, multiple-instrument concerti of Beethoven, Brahms, and Mendelssohn to new works written by such young composers as Patrick Zimmerli, Kenji Bunch, Dan Coleman, and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Deborah Feingold, a New York photographer known for her portraits of actors, musicians, designers, and other public figures, many of which have graced book covers, will sign copies of hew new book, “Music,” on Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. at John Varvatos on Newtown Lane.

Parrish on the Road

Parrish Road Show, the Parrish Art Museum’s off-site creative summer series, is featuring work by Michael Combs and Evan Desmond Yee. Mr. Combs’s project, “Outhouse 2014,” will be on view from today, with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m., through Sept. 28, at the Hallockville Museum Farm in Riverhead.

“The App Store,” Mr. Yee’s installation, will be presented at GeekHampton in Sag Harbor from Saturday through Sept. 28. A public reception will take place Saturday evening from 6 to 8.

“The Homesman,” a western starring Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones and directed and co-written by Mr. Jones, will be the Centerpiece Film at the 22nd annual Hamptons International Film Festival, taking place from Oct. 9 through Oct. 13. Hilary Swank, the film’s star, will be in East Hampton for the film’s East Coast premiere.

The actor, writer, and director Bob Balaban, who has a house in Bridgehampton, has been named this year’s honorary chairman of the festival.

Guild Hall is steaming toward Labor Day weekend with a jam-packed schedule of programs ranging from comedy to new music to rock ’n’ roll to film. A staged reading of “Night With Oscar,” a new comedy by the Emmy-nominated writer Eugene Pack, will start things off tonight at 8. The play, set in a Long Island town on Oscar night, stars Tony Danza, Anita Gillette, Tate Donovan, Gina Gershon, Dayle Reyfel, Lucy DeVito, and John Mangaro. Tickets are $30, $28 for members. Prime orchestra seats and a V.I.P. reception are available for $75 and $70.

As if the cause itself wasn’t worthy enough, the fact that the legendary Lou Reed played at the first fund-raiser for the landscape designer Edwina von Gal’s Azuero Earth Project in 2012 definitely made people stand up and take notice of the tiny organization working predominantly in rural Panama.

Susie Essman, a stand-up comedian for 25 years who rocketed to fame as the profane Susie Greene during seven seasons of Larry David’s comedy series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” will take the stage at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor Monday at 8 p.m.

The late Robert Giard, a photographer and longtime Amagansett resident, began making portraits of gay and lesbian writers in 1985 after seeing “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s play about the AIDS crisis. By the end of the evening, he wrote in the introduction to a 1997 book in which a number of the photos were collected, he had decided that his work “should be of use to other gay people by recording something of note about our experience, our history, and our culture.”

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill is presenting “Surf Movie Night, Vol. 2,” an outdoor screening of noncommercial surf films, tomorrow at 8 p.m. The short films were selected by Michael Halsband, a photographer and filmmaker, Mike Solomon, an artist, and Tyler Breuer, a producer and promoter of surf films. Tickets are $10, free for members, students, and children. Attendees have been advised to bring chairs and blankets. In the event of rain, the event will take place on the museum’s covered terrace.

Why, you might reasonably ask, should you give space in your garden to a plant that is found all around us?

Fragrance, that is why, and summersweet, or sweet pepperbush, Clethra alnifolia, has it in abundance. It is spicy, somewhat reminiscent of cloves and cinnamon, and a light breeze casts its perfume over a large area.

Clethra would deserve space in the garden even if we spent our August days chasing its scent walking, biking, or tooling in an open car in Northwest, Springs, and Napeague, where it grows along the roadside, mostly on the damp, shady side.

Late summer on the South Fork can sometimes seem like a mostly deflated balloon: paunchy, flaccid, and spent. A sense of scraping bottom often takes hold, and any new endeavor, show, or exhibition is met with suspicion or derision, often borne of the same contagious exhaustion.

Sciulli at Duck Creek Farm

“Quiet Riot,” a site-specific installation by Christine Sciulli, will open today with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. in the John Little Barn at Duck Creek Farm in Springs and remain on view through Sept. 20.

Ms. Sciulli, who lives in Amagansett and New York, uses projected light to explore the potential of simple geometry. The exhibition, which has been organized by the John Little Society and Jess Frost, will be open Fridays and Saturdays from 4 to 7 p.m. and by appointment.

Images of Accabonac

The Box Art Auction benefit for East End Hospice will present a preview of the cigar box creations of area artists beloved locally and internationally on Wednesday from 5 to 7 p.m. at Hoie Hall of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton Village. The boxes will remain on view next Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The auction itself will be held Sept. 6 at the Ross School.

For more than a half century, a group of writers and artists have met in East Hampton to duke it out for supremacy on a softball diamond. Some of the most vaunted names in American arts and letters have participated, making it an almost sacred ritual in some circles.

Athos Zacharias’s house on Copeces Lane in Springs is unlike any other in the neighborhood. It is a two-story rectangular solid, constructed of whitewashed concrete block, flat-roofed, with large windows, an outdoor circular staircase, and an exterior block wall painted to resemble a Mondrian. The entrance is through the kitchen.

If a viewer did not know that Alisa Baremboym and Gregory Edwards were newlyweds, it would soon become obvious in seeing their show at the Fireplace Project in Springs. “Contact” is a dialogue between two artists whose lives and vision have become entwined, not literally but with enough feeling to create circuits and sparks throughout the gallery space.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will kick off the weekend tomorrow at 7 p.m. with its Maritime Film Festival, consisting of 14 short films, all under five minutes, that reflect filmmakers’ and artists’ appreciation of the sea.

Founded by Andrew Poneros, a sailor and artist, and Timothy Regan, it aims to explore the human legacy of life and expedition on the water and to create an arena for artists and filmmakers to share a deeper understanding of our relationship with the sea. Tickets are $10, free for members, students, and children.

 “Weimar Cabaret: When All the World Lost Its Reason,” a tribute to the songs and songwriters who flourished in Germany between World War I and the rise of Nazism, will take place at the Montauk Library Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.