Whipped Cream Difficulties

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“.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 28th, 2020 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Art, Music, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.