Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

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

Obit watch: May 23, 2018.

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2018

Philip Roth, noted American novelist.

I wish I had more to say about this, but: I just found out about his death, I’ve never read a Roth novel, and I don’t much like liver.

Clint Walker, actor. He was the star of “Cheyenne”, and appeared in “The Dirty Dozen” (among other credits).

As shooting of the show’s first season began, Mr. Walker confessed to the crew that he did not have a great deal of experience on horseback. He later recalled the response: “You’ll either be a good rider, or a dead one.”

Robert Indiana, visual artist, passed away on Saturday. He was most famous for his rendering of “L-O-V-E”:

I’m not sure I ordinarily would have noted this, but:

Mr. Indiana believed the piracy of the image harmed his reputation in the New York art world, and he retreated to Maine in 1978.

More:

Mr. Indiana, whose career was made, and nearly consumed, by his creation of the sculpture “LOVE,” had sought refuge here four decades ago, an exile from a New York art world he had come to resent, and settled into a rambling Victorian lodge hall overlooking Penobscot Bay, where he was, more or less, left alone to create his art.

He had become increasingly reclusive over the years, and his friends and associates wondered why. Turns out that, on Friday, the day before Mr. Indiana died:

…a company that says it has long held the rights to several of Mr. Indiana’s best-known works proposed an answer, arguing in court papers that the caretaker and a New York art publisher had tucked the artist away while they churned out unauthorized or adulterated versions of his work.

“They have isolated Indiana from his friends and supporters, forged some of Indiana’s most recognizable works, exhibited the fraudulent works in museums, and sold the fraudulent works to unsuspecting collectors,” said the lawsuit filed last week by Morgan Art Foundation Ltd. in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

They filed the lawsuit on Friday. Mr. Indiana’s death was announced on Saturday. Very interesting.

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

TMQ Watch: December 5, 2017.

Wednesday, December 6th, 2017

The headline tells you all you need to know, in this week’s TMQ…

(more…)

Posted in Art, Christmas, Explosives, Food, Gehry, History, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | 3 Comments »

Art, damn it, art! watch (#54 in a series)

Saturday, October 28th, 2017

The National Park Service is denying a permit to a group wanting to place a 45-foot statue of a naked woman on the Mall near the Washington Monument.

…

The massive artwork would have been the main attraction at the annual “Catharsis on the Mall” in November – a festival in the nation’s capital dubbed a “Burning Man” in Washington. Burning Man, the annual desert festival outside Reno, Nev., is known for building a hippie-like community that promotes art, self-expression, inclusiveness and civic engagement.
The festival will run Nov. 10-12, the third year for the event in Washington. Each year, the event has revolved around a different theme, with the first two years focusing on healing from the drug war and recovering from trauma. This year’s theme is “nurturing the heart” and equal rights.

Posted in Art | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 24, 2017.

Thursday, August 24th, 2017

Still no NYT obit for Brian Aldiss.

But the paper did run one for outsider artist M. T. Liggett.

He built a sculpture of Hillary Clinton, with a swastika for a torso, that he called “Our Jack-Booted Eva Braun.”

But before you jump to the conclusion that he was a Republican (he actually ran for local office several times as one, but was never elected):

One of Mr. Liggett’s signs links former President George W. Bush to Big Oil and asks for the return of his predecessor, Bill Clinton: “Bring Back Slick Willie.” But he also depicted Mr. Clinton as a bright red hog; he called that work “Razorback Draft Dodger.”

Apparently, he pretty much hated every politician:

Mr. Liggett could sound as angry as Howard Beale, the unhinged anchorman of the movie “Network.” He hated political stupidity, was suspicious of government intrusion into people’s lives and held “turkey politicians,” as he called them, responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

…

“I got this thing about me,” he said in “Moon Tosser of the Prairie” (2010), a documentary about him that was produced by Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kan. “If you walk up to me and say you’re a Democrat, I’m a Republican. If you’re a Buddhist, I’m a Shinto. If you’re a Catholic, I’m a Protestant.”

Posted in Art, Obits | Comments Closed

Now I’m only falling apart…

Monday, August 21st, 2017

Posted in Art, Geek, History, Hysteria, Music | Comments Closed

Hello, Dali.

Saturday, July 22nd, 2017

Headline of the day:

Exhumation of Dali's remains finds his mustache still intact

Posted in Art, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#53 in a series)

Friday, July 7th, 2017

Been a while since I did one of these, but there hasn’t been that much noteworthy art news (in my opinion).

This is odd and significant, though:

Cirque du Soleil, the global performance juggernaut best known for its acrobatic circus displays, on Thursday announced that it had acquired Blue Man Productions, with the mutual aim of expanding Blue Man’s reach beyond its five permanent United States shows (in New York, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas and Orlando, Fla.), a world tour and one permanent international show (Berlin).

…

“We saw the potential for a marketing and distributing powerhouse like Cirque du Soleil to be able to distribute Blue Man Group and make their brand better known internationally,” said Daniel Lamarre, Cirque’s chief executive, in an interview. Cirque currently has 18 live shows worldwide.

Specifically, Cirque (and Blue Man Group) are looking at expanding into China.

I don’t think this is a bad idea, but I do wonder: are we on the verge of a Cirque/Blue Man over saturation?

Posted in Art | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »