Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 145

Saturday, August 22nd, 2020

This is another one of those days when I don’t have a real theme, so I hope you enjoy some things that amused me.

First up: Salvador Dali appears on “What’s My Line?” You’ve got to like the way he signs in.

Bonus: Orson Welles talks about Ernest Hemingway. That story about Welles and Hemingway attempting to trade punches and ultimately opening a bottle and toasting each other is also recounted in a neat little book, To Have and Have Another, about Hemingway and Hemingway’s cocktails. (Affiliate link.)

Last one, because this is a little longer.

“A Conversation with Igor Stravinsky” from 1957.

Airing on NBC from 1957 to 1965, the Wisdom series featured interviews with luminaries in science, the arts, and politics. These interviews were often conducted by a journalist or colleague well-known to the guest and usually took place in familiar surroundings such as the subject’s home or workplace. While each program forms a picturesque snapshot of the cultural conventions of the day, it frequently transcends its mid-20th-century broadcast style as it presents challenging and in-depth perspectives from a great mind. Guests include Igor Stravinsky, Robert Frost, Somerset Maugham, Eamon de Valera, Alfred P. Sloan, Robert Moses, Edward Steichen, Margaret Mead, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pearl Buck, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marcel Duchamp, Arnold Toynbee, and Carl Sandburg. 14-part series, 29 minutes each.

Posted in Art, History, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 29, 2020.

Monday, June 29th, 2020

Charles Webb. He wrote The Graduate.

“He had a very odd relationship with money,” said Caroline Dawnay, who was briefly Mr. Webb’s agent in the early 2000s when his novel “New Cardiff” was made into the 2003 movie “Hope Springs,” starring Colin Firth. “He never wanted any. He had an anarchist view of the relationship between humanity and money.”
He gave away homes, paintings, his inheritance, even his royalties from “The Graduate,” which became a million-seller after the movie’s success, to the benefit of the Anti-Defamation League. He awarded his 10,000-pound payout from “Hope Springs” as a prize to a performance artist named Dan Shelton, who had mailed himself to the Tate Modern in a cardboard box.
At his second wedding to Ms. Rudd — they married in 1962, then divorced in 1981 to protest the institution of marriage, then remarried around 2001 for immigration purposes — he did not give his bride a ring, because he disapproved of jewelry. Ms. Dawnay, the only witness save two strangers pulled in off the street, recalled that the couple walked nine miles to the registry office for the ceremony, wearing the only clothes they owned.

…

Fred, Mr. Webb’s wife, died in 2019, Mr. Malvern said, leaving him quite alone, although he is survived by his sons — David, a performance artist who once cooked a copy of “The Graduate” and ate it with cranberry sauce, and John, a director at the consulting and research firm IHS Markit — and his brother. Mr. Malvern said he did not know whether Mr. Webb had still been writing.

This one is for FotB of the blog Dave: Linda Cristal. She most famously played “Victoria Cannon” on “The High Chaparral”, and did a lot of bit parts on other series during the 1960s through to the 1980s. (Including “T.H.E. Cat“, “Search“, and “General Hospital”.)

Thomas Blanton. He was the last survivor of the three men convicted in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing.

The bombing occurred on Sept. 15, 1963, a Sunday, at the 16th Street Baptist Church, which had been a center of civil rights activity in Birmingham. Three 14-year-olds — Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley — and an 11-year-old, Denise McNair, were killed in the blast, and many others were injured. The attack heightened national outrage over segregationist policies and racial oppression in the South.
“The Birmingham bombing holds a special place in civil rights history because of the randomness of its violence, the sacredness of its target and the innocence of its victims,” Kevin Sack wrote in The New York Times in 2000, when Mr. Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry were finally indicted in the case.
Mr. Cherry, tried separately, was convicted in 2002 and died in prison at 74 in 2004. A third man, Robert Chambliss, was convicted in 1977 and died in prison eight years later at 81. The last suspect, Herman Cash, died in 1994 at 75 without being tried.
All four were Klan members in the early 1960s.

Posted in Art, Books, Law, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: June 18, 2020.

Thursday, June 18th, 2020

Vera Lynn, singer and rallying point for the troops in WWII.

Long after the war ended, the melodies lingered on: “We’ll Meet Again,” “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover,” “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”
In those wartime years, she became known as the “Forces’ Sweetheart,” and to the end of her life the veterans were her “boys,” still misty-eyed when she sang, “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.”

…

At 22, in 1939, she won The Daily Express newspaper’s “Forces’ Sweetheart” poll in a landslide. In 1940, she began her own BBC radio show, “Sincerely Yours,” which was beamed to troops around the world on Sunday nights right after the news.
“Winston Churchill was my opening act,” Ms. Lynn once said.
She read letters from the girlfriends, wives and mothers the troops left behind. She sang her sentimental songs, “We’ll Meet Again” being the most popular. In the blitz that sent the Luftwaffe on nightly raids over London in 1940, she sometimes slept in the theater until the all-clear sounded, then drove home through the rubble left by the bombings.
“The shows didn’t stop if a raid started,” she said. “We just used to carry on.”
Often, it seemed, Luftwaffe bombers droned over London just as Ms. Lynn sang “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” which became the theme song of the blitz.

…

In 1944, Ms. Lynn toured Burma (now Myanmar) for three months, earning the enduring affection of the so-called Forgotten Army, which battled the Japanese Army in jungle combat there. She started her journey with chiffon ball gowns, and when they fell apart, she finished in shorts that wound up as an exhibit in the Imperial War Museum in London.

…

Ms. Lynn’s popularity endured well into the 21st century. In August 2009, she became the oldest living artist to reach the British Top 20 album chart when her collection “We’ll Meet Again” was reissued to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany. A month later, the album reached No. 1.

…

Though the decades passed and she drifted out of the entertainment mainstream, she remained the Forces’ Sweetheart, evoking nostalgia with her old hits, appearing at reunions of veterans’ organizations, rallying support for soldiers’ widows and charities that helped Britain’s wartime generation. (Oddly enough, one of her greatest hits, “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover,” was written by Americans: Walter Kent, who admitted he had never seen the cliffs, and Nat Burton.)

She was 103.

From the legal beat: Ronald Tackmann, artist. And by “artist” I mean in both the visual sense and the escape sense.

At the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on Sept. 30, 2009, Mr. Tackmann, a neophyte artist and professional prisoner, put on a light-gray three-piece suit and covered his orange inmates’ slippers with black socks to try to pass as his own lawyer. (At the time, inmates were allowed to change into court clothes before facing a judge.) Briefly uncuffed and unchained and momentarily out of the view of guards, he fled down a back staircase, sauntered outside and vanished into the streets.
It wasn’t his first escape attempt. Twice before he had tried to hijack Correction Department vans that were transporting him and other convicts to court or to prisons upstate, using fake guns he had fashioned out of bars of soap and remnants of eyeglasses and aluminum cans.

…

His escape attempts made him an obvious security risk, and he was confined in solitary for about 20 years. There, improvising where he had to, art became his life.He substituted food coloring for paint, used his own hair to create brushes, and molded papier mâche out of white bread and toilet paper. Among his Dalí-like drawings, he depicted a child gleefully clinging to a supermarket-ride rocket, a jet outracing an eagle, and a skeletal inmate serving a 210-year sentence. A carving of a buffalo, made out of prison soap, shows an intricate touch.

There’s a picture of that buffalo carving in the obit, and I have to give the man credit: it’s well done. I wanted to post this obit so I could work this in:

During his last robbery spree, in Manhattan a little more than a decade ago, he netted $100 or so from a Dunkin’ Donuts on the Upper East Side; a similar amount, along with a cup of pistachio ice cream, from a Sedutto’s store; and a beating at a World of Nuts & Ice Cream outlet.

Delbert Africa, one of the MOVE members. He wasn’t present at the 1985 MOVE headquarters bombing: he was serving time in prison after being convicted of third-degree murder (along with eight other MOVE members) for killing police officer James Ramp in 1978.

Posted in Art, History, Law, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Quick random notes.

Friday, June 5th, 2020

Two by way of Hacker News:

Akira Kurosawa’s storyboards. Oh, wait, I’m sorry: Akira Kurosawa’s painted storyboards.

(They keep saying “hand-painted storyboards”. As opposed to what: machine painted? Foot painted?)

The early history of computer chess, including the first national computer chess tournament.

I’m fascinated by computer chess, so I would probably have posted this anyway. Interestingly, though, this article also features (and quotes) an unexpected appearance by a now very prominent science fiction and fantasy writer, who at the time had recently graduated from Northwestern University and was interested in both computers and chess.

Posted in Art, Chess, Geek, Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 3, 2020.

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020

Wes Unseld, NBA center.

Over 13 seasons with the Baltimore, Capital and Washington Bullets (now the Washington Wizards), Unseld’s teams went to the N.B.A. finals four times and won the league’s title in 1978 over the Seattle SuperSonics. Unseld was named the series’ M.V.P.

There are only two players who have been named MVP and rookie of the year in the same season. The other one is Wilt Chamberlain.

Pat Dye, Auburn football coach.

Elsa Dorfman, photographer. She specialized in taking portraits with the giant 20×24 Polaroid camera, about which I have written previously.

By way of Hacker News (and I don’t think the WSJ link is going to work for many people): Irene Triplett. Ms. Triplett was 90 years old, and was the last person still receiving a Civil War pension.

According to the WallyJ, which I can read but can’t link here, her father (Moses Triplett) started out fighting for the Confederacy, then defected to the Union side in 1863. He married a woman named Elda Hall in 1924, had Irene Triplett in 1930 (he was 83, his wife was 34), and died in 1938 at 92.

Her pension was apparently $73.13 a month, though she received other benefits as a ward of the state. In addition, “…a pair of Civil War buffs visited and sent her money to spend on Dr. Pepper and chewing tobacco, a habit she picked up in the first grade.”

Posted in Art, History, Obits, Photography, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 1, 2020.

Monday, June 1st, 2020

Yesterday was a big day, but I wanted to give the news time to shake out.

Christo.

For “Valley Curtain” he strung orange nylon fabric along steel cables over a narrow pass in Rifle, Colo.; a large semicircular opening allowed cars on the state highway below to pass through.
Fierce winds ripped the curtain to shreds two days later, a setback that Christo shrugged off. “I as an artist have done what I set out to do,” he said. “That the curtain no longer exists only makes it more interesting.”
Then came “Running Fence,” a series of white nylon fabric panels that snaked their way over ranchland in Sonoma and Marin counties in Northern California and crossed Highway 101 on their way to the ocean in Bodega Bay.
For “Valley Curtain,” Christo and his lawyer devised the system that made all of his subsequent works possible. For each project a corporation was created, with Jeanne-Claude as director and Christo as a salaried employee. Financing came from the sale of drawings and small models to collectors and museums; Christo never accepted grants or public money. When the art work was taken down, the corporation dissolved itself, having earned zero profit.

…

Even more difficult, politically, was Christo’s plan to wrap the Reichstag in Berlin. The first drawing was made in 1971. For decades thereafter he encountered nothing but resistance from West German officials. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, momentum shifted his way, and in 1995 the work was completed.
In between the Pont Neuf and Reichstag Projects, Christo and Jeanne-Claude simultaneously placed 1,760 yellow umbrellas in the Tejon Pass, just north of Los Angeles, and 1,340 blue umbrellas on a hillside near Ibaraki, Japan.
“The Umbrellas, Japan-U.S.A.” came to grief when one of the 485-pound umbrellas in California came unmoored in high winds and killed a woman and injured several other people. The two artists ordered the umbrellas in both countries to be taken down immediately. As a Japanese crane operator prepared to remove one of the umbrellas, his crane made contact with a power line, electrocuting him.

Herb Stempel, of quiz show scandal fame, has passed at 93. I’ve written about the quiz show scandal previously, so I won’t recap the whole story here.

On the day before each show, he was given the questions and answers and coached on lip-biting, brow-mopping, stammering, sighing and other theatrical gestures. “Remembering the questions was quite easy,” he told investigators, “but the actual stage directions were the most difficult thing, because everything had to be done exactly.”

Mr. Stempel apparently passed on April 7th, but his death was not confirmed until yesterday. It’s mildly interesting that he passed almost exactly a year after Charles Van Doren.

Posted in Art, Christo, History, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 28, 2020.

Tuesday, January 28th, 2020

Heavy on the art today.

Jason Polan. I hadn’t heard of him, but this is an interesting obit. The paper of record describes him as “one of the quirkiest and most prolific denizens of the New York art scene”.

Mr. Polan’s signature project for the last decade or so was “Every Person in New York,” in which he set himself the admittedly impossible task of drawing everyone in New York City. He kept a robust blog of those sketches, and by the time he published a book of that title in 2015 — which he envisioned as Vol. 1 — he had drawn more than 30,000 people.

…

Mr. Polan’s other creations included the Taco Bell Drawing Club, a loose group that initially consisted of anyone who joined Mr. Polan, who lived in Manhattan, at a Taco Bell outlet off Union Square and drew something. As the group expanded, any Taco Bell would do for club gatherings.
“If I am out of town,” he told The New York Times in 2014, “I will try to have meetings wherever I am. Luckily, there are a lot of Taco Bells.”

He was 37. The NYT quotes his family as saying cancer got him.

Lawrence sent me a couple over the weekend that I’ve been holding:

Wes Wilson, noted San Francisco poster artist.

Along with Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin and Stanley Mouse, Wilson designed many of the posters and handbills commissioned by promoter Bill Graham for concerts staged at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium and Fillmore West. He also supplied poster art for promoter Chet Helms’ concerts at the city’s Avalon Ballroom.

Barbara Remington. She illustrated the Ballantine Books first paperback editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

In an interview about her association with Tolkien’s works, Remington mentions that she had not been able to get hold of the books before making the illustration, and had only a sketchy idea from friends what they were about. Tolkien, the author, could not understand why her illustration included what he thought were pumpkins in a tree, or why a lion appeared at all (the lions were removed from the cover of later editions). Remington became a huge Tolkien fan, and would have “definitely drawn different pictures” had she read the books first.

Finally (and breaking with the theme): Bob Shane, last surviving original member of the Kingston Trio.

Mr. Shane, whose whiskey baritone was the group’s most identifiable voice on hits like “Tom Dooley” and “Scotch and Soda,” sang lead on more than 80 percent of Kingston Trio songs.
He didn’t just outlast the other original members: Dave Guard, who died in 1991, and Nick Reynolds, who died in 2008; he also eventually took ownership of the group’s name and devoted his life to various incarnations of the trio, from its founding in 1957 to 2004, when a heart attack forced him to stop touring.

…

The Kingston Trio’s critical reception did not match its popular success. To many folk purists, the trio was selling a watered-down mix of folk and pop that commercialized the authentic folk music of countless unknown Appalachian pickers. And mindful of the way that folk musicians like Pete Seeger had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era, others complained that the trio’s upbeat, anodyne brand of folk betrayed the leftist, populist music of pioneers like Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston.
Members of the trio said they had consciously steered clear of political material as a way to maintain mainstream acceptance. Besides, Mr. Shane said, the folk purists were using the wrong yardstick.
“To call the Kingston Trio folk singers was kind of stupid in the first place,” he said. “We never called ourselves folk singers.” He added, “We did folk-oriented material, but we did it amid all kinds of other stuff.”

I would link to “M.T.A” as a hattip to Borepatch and Weer’d Beard, but that’s already in the NYT obit. So instead I’ll embed this, which I’ve liked ever since it was used on the soundtrack for “Thank You For Smoking“.

Posted in Art, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 10, 2020.

Friday, January 10th, 2020

Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, noted for “77 Sunset Strip”. NYT.

Broadcast on ABC from 1958 to 1964, “77 Sunset Strip” starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Roger Smith as a pair of suave Los Angeles private eyes and Mr. Byrnes as the parking-lot attendant at the restaurant next door to their office.
As he ministered tenderly to the Thunderbird convertible driven by Mr. Zimbalist in the show, Kookie (né Gerald Lloyd Kookson III) ran his omnipresent pocket comb through his lush ducktailed pompadour, cracked his devil-may-care grin and spouted aphorisms that even at midcentury had all the gnomic obscurity of Zen koans:
“A dark seven” (a depressing week); “piling up the Z’s” (getting some sleep); “headache grapplers” (aspirin); “buzzed by germsville” (to become ill); and, most emblematically, “Baby, you’re the ginchiest!” — a phrase of the highest Kookian approbation.

His character evolved from parking attendant to junior partner in the detective agency, but he was pretty much typecast after that. Deadline suggests that he partially inspired the Rick Dalton character in “Once Upon a Time In Hollywood”. He did go on to play the dance host in “Grease” and did a fair number of guest shots on TV shows…

…yes, including “Mannix”. (“A Penny for the Peep Show”, season 3, episode 6.)

Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, Texas sculptor of giant objects.

Iggy wound up at the Lone Star, a Texas-themed honky-tonk, in the 1970s after Mr. Wade had shown it at an exhibition in western New York, near Niagara Falls. Impetuously picking up the phone one day at 2 a.m., he called Mort Cooperman, the club’s owner, and asked him if he would like to install the sculpture on the roof of the Lone Star building, at Fifth Avenue and 13th Street. Mr. Cooperman said yes, agreeing to pay Mr. Wade $1,000 a year for Iggy — the deal was originally for five years — and $1,000 a year for his bar tab.

…

The iguana was Mr. Wade’s opening act. There would be many more gigantic, kitschy installations: A sextet of 10-foot-tall dancing frogs and an alligator made of Altoid tins. A New Orleans Saints helmet made largely out of an old Volkswagen. A hog-shaped motorcycle made from salvaged Harley-Davidson parts. A colossal pair of simulated ostrich-skin boots. (They’d fit a cowboy with size 500 feet, he estimated.)

…

A few years after the boots were disassembled and moved to a mall in San Antonio on three flatbed trucks in 1980, Mr. Wade got a phone call from the mall’s manager. A homeless man had found his way into one of the boots and cooked his lunch there. The boot was on fire.
“It was the size of a small apartment, kind of a nice spot, and he was cooking lunch with cans of Sterno, and smoke was emerging from the top of the boots,” Mr. Wade said in “Too High, Too Wide and Too Long.”

Posted in 1970s, Art, Mannix, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 22, 2019.

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019

Scotty Bowers, alleged pimp to the stars.

If “pimp to the stars” seems harsh, well, that’s what he called himself:

Mr. Bowers’s raunchy best seller, “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars,” written with Lionel Friedberg, left out few details as it told of his metamorphosis from gas-station employee to hookup-provider and sex partner to the rich and famous.
Men he knew from his military service during World War II began socializing at the gas station where he worked, and he paired those who were willing with the Hollywood people who found their way to him by word of mouth. Although he described catering to all sorts of sexual combinations, he said he had often surreptitiously provided willing men to male Hollywood figures and willing women to female ones in an era when being gay could ruin a career.
He wrote of funneling women to Katharine Hepburn, of having a sexual encounter himself with Spencer Tracy, of arranging same-sex partners for the duke and duchess of Windsor.

I’m not linking to his book for the same reason I use the term “alleged” above: Mr. Bowers was, most probably, a damn liar. (Speak no ill of the dead? Mr. Bowers had no problem telling stories about people who were dead and couldn’t defend themselves, so I see no reason not to give him the same treatment.)

Larry Harnisch at the “Daily Mirror” blog did a 26 part series on the book back in 2012. Here’s his obit for Mr. Bowers, which contains links to all 26 parts.

Matthew Wong. I had not heard of him, but the NYT calls him a “painter on the cusp of fame”. Some of the pictured artwork is, to me, striking: I really like “Winter’s End”, to take one example.

He was 35 years old.

The New York gallery Karma, which represented him, said the cause was suicide. His mother, Monita (Cheng) Wong, said Mr. Wong was on the autism spectrum, had Tourette’s syndrome and had grappled with depression since childhood.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Posted in Art, Books, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 17, 2019.

Friday, May 17th, 2019

I.M. Pei. He was 102, and it sounds like he led a full rich life right up to the very end.

In retirement, Mr. Pei remained eager for news of both architecture and art and, until his last year, continued to make the occasional trip downtown to lunch with friends and consume his share of red Bordeaux.

Grumpy Cat.

Posted in Art, Mammals, Museums, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 26, 2018.

Wednesday, December 26th, 2018

Sister Wendy Beckett, nun, art historian and critic, and BBC television personality.

By 1997, as she marked 50 years as a nun, the Oxford-educated Sister Wendy had made three television series, the most successful BBC arts programs since “Civilisation,” the art historian Kenneth Clark’s landmark 1969 documentaries. She had also written 15 books on art and religion, and was a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic, featured in articles and mobbed by fans.
…
For all her success, she remained a nun with commitments to prayer, solitude (when possible) and vows of poverty. She assigned all her earnings to a Carmelite order that had sheltered her for decades, and she attended Mass daily, even when traveling.

Technically, not an obit, but: the NYT summary of obits for 2018. (Even though we have close to a week left in the year.)

Spoiler: the five most read obits this year, according to the paper of record, were those for: Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, Tyrone Gayle (“a 30-year-old press secretary to Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, and a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign”), John McCain, and…Zombie Boy.

Posted in Art, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Art, damn it, art! watch (#55 in a series)

Tuesday, June 19th, 2018

I haven’t done one of these in a while. But there’s news!

Christo has a new project! Actual NYT headline:

Christo’s Latest Work Weighs 650 Tons. And It Floats.

“The London Mastaba,” Christo’s first major outdoor work in Britain, is now floating (through Sept. 23) in the middle of the lake in Hyde Park. A trapezoidal pyramid of 7,506 painted and horizontally stacked barrels, it’s 66 feet tall — as tall as the Sphinx in Egypt — and weighs roughly 650 tons. Named after a flat-roofed structure with sloping sides that originated some 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (the word “mastaba” means “bench” in Arabic), it’s a test for a mastaba roughly eight times as high that Christo hopes to put up in the desert in Abu Dhabi.

Photos at the link. As is usual for Christo projects, this was entirely self-funded at an estimated cost of three million pounds.

Posted in Art, Christo | Comments Closed

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