Whipped Cream Difficulties

Gerald D. Hines, prominent developer.

At his death, Mr. Hines’s company had built 907 projects around the world, including more than 100 skyscrapers, many of them designed by architects like I.M. Pei, Harry Cobb, Philip Johnson and John Burgee, Cesar Pelli, Kevin Roche, Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Robert A.M. Stern and the firm Kohn Pedersen Fox.
Hines built the Lipstick Building (officially 885 Third Avenue) in Manhattan and Pennzoil Place, Williams Tower and Bank of America Plaza in Houston, all designed by Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee. It was behind the Salesforce Tower, designed by Mr. Pelli, which is the tallest building in San Francisco; the DZ Bank in Berlin, designed by Mr. Gehry; the sprawling Porta Nuova complex in Milan; the Diagonal Mar project in Barcelona; and the Aspen Highlands ski area in Colorado, a favorite project of Mr. Hines’s. (He had a home in Aspen and continued to ski into his 90s.)
Architecture was his passion, although it would probably be more accurate to say that what he cared about most was fusing a point of intersection between serious design and profit-making real estate development. He took issue with colleagues who saw creative architects as dangerous to the bottom line. Spending a little more to create a better building would pay off in the end, he believed, because tenants would spend more to be in a better building that had a distinctive identity, and that would benefit both his tenants’ businesses and his own.

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Ada Louise Huxtable, then the senior architecture critic of The New York Times, hailed Pennzoil in 1976 as a “rarity among large commercial structures: a dramatic and beautiful and important building.”
“It successfully marries art and architecture and the business of investment construction,” she added.Pennzoil was internationally acclaimed, and it led other developers to attempt the Hines formula of hiring celebrated architects and commissioning them to design one-of-a-kind towers that could be marketed as defining points of downtown skylines. (Not all of his peers were as good as Hines, however, in simultaneously encouraging creativity and controlling construction costs.)
The success of Pennzoil Place marked the beginning of a close and long relationship between Mr. Hines and the partners Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee. It would transform Mr. Johnson’s practice from a boutique firm designing mainly expensive civic and institutional projects into a major player in commercial architecture — one that would reshape skylines around the country. Hines also commissioned the Johnson firm to design Comerica Tower in Detroit, the Wells Fargo Center in Denver, 550 Boylston Street in Boston and 101 California Street and 580 California Street in San Francisco, among many others.
Mr. Johnson and Mr. Hines made an unlikely pair: the intellectual architect who rarely stopped talking and loved gossip and controversy, and the buttoned-up developer so averse to grandstanding that he would keep a slide rule in his pocket and take it out and pretend to use it during a meeting to avoid having to speak. But before his death in 2005, Mr. Johnson told the writer Hilary Lewis that he considered Mr. Hines his “first and greatest client.”

Walter Lure. Interesting story: Mr. Lure was the rhythm guitarist for the Hearbreakers (also known as Johnny Thunders and the Hearbreakers, as opposed to Tom Petty’s Hearbreakers) one of those legendary NYC punk bands.

The Heartbreakers were together for a brief three years and recorded only one studio album, “L.A.M.F.,” released in 1977 on the British label Track Records. But among the bands that clustered around downtown clubs like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB during the early punk years, the Heartbreakers had an outsize reputation.
“They were probably the best band besides the Ramones and the Dictators,” Legs McNeil, a co-founder of Punk magazine and the co-author of “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk” (1996), said in a phone interview. “But they’re kind of like mythical, you know, because no one ever saw them. And when they did, Johnny was usually too drugged out to perform.”

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Mr. Lure had played mostly in cover bands before he joined the Heartbreakers in 1975, but he quickly bonded with the other members musically and otherwise. In his memoir, “To Hell and Back,” published in March, Mr. Lure wrote of his initiation into the band in Mr. Hell’s East Village apartment. His bandmates cut off his long hair, and Mr. Nolan cooked him up a shot of heroin.

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He had strong opinions about how a rock band should sound. In his book he disparaged artier contemporaries like the Talking Heads and Television, writing: “It was as if everybody was so concerned about somehow sounding ‘unique’ that they forgot that, sometimes, the kids just wanna rock. That was the niche that the Heartbreakers slipped into, and that was why they’d excited me so.”

After the Hearbreakers, he went into product testing for the FDA (he had an English major and a chemistry minor from Fordham) and from there went into Wall Street.

It led to a position at a brokerage firm overseeing a team of 125 and a long career in finance that lasted until he retired, in 2015.

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Mr. Lure remained a drug addict until sobering up in 1988. He continued to moonlight as a rock musician, playing reunions with the Heartbreakers throughout the 1980s and then touring and recording with the Waldos.

He was also the last surviving member of the Heartbrakers (with the exception of Richard Hell, who was briefly the Heartbreakers bass player. Hell left/was fired from the band and formed Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Heartbreakers entry from Wikipedia.)

After he heard the news of Mr. Lure’s death, Glen Matlock, the bassist of the Sex Pistols, who toured with the Heartbreakers in the 1970s, noted the end of an era, tweeting, “And then there were none.”

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.

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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.

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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“.