Archive for the ‘Christo’ Category

Obit watch: March 31, 2023.

Friday, March 31st, 2023

Mark Russell. THR.

Presidents from Eisenhower to Trump caught the flak. He sang “Bail to the Chief” for Richard M. Nixon, urged George H.W. Bush to retire “to a home for the chronically preppy,” likened Jimmy Carter’s plan to streamline government to “putting racing stripes on an arthritic camel,” and recalled first seeing Ronald Reagan “in the picture-frame department at Woolworth’s, between Gale Storm and Walter Pidgeon.”
Did he have any writers? “Oh, yes — 100 in the Senate and 435 in the House of Representatives.” The true meaning of the Cold War? “In communism, man exploits man. But with capitalism, it’s the other way around.” Gun control? “I will defend my Second Amendment right to use my musket to defend my Third Amendment right to never, ever allow a British soldier to live in my house.”

I was a big Mark Russell fan when I was in high school, but I lost touch with his work after I went to college the first time.

Critics said that the political satire of Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer had more cutting edge, but Mr. Russell thrived on subtler material that went over with students, politicians and public television audiences. He exploited popular presidential images: Gerald R. Ford’s stumbling, Bill Clinton’s sexual foibles, Reagan’s jelly beans. But he also struck a balance between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, with humor that required a certain familiarity with national and international affairs, if not political sophistication.

Michael Blackwood, filmmaker. He wasn’t someone I’ve heard of before, but I want to find some of his work.

He followed the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk on tour in Europe. He tagged along as the minimalist composer Philip Glass prepared for the 1984 premieres of his opera, “Akhnaten,” in Houston and Stuttgart, Germany.
He observed the creative process of the Bulgarian-born conceptual artist Christo during his creation of epic environmental projects like “Running Fence” and “Wrapped Walkways.” And he let Isamu Noguchi explain his approach to his art as they walked among his sculptures.

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His fascination with architecture led him to make films about some of its stars, including Louis Kahn, Richard Meier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry.
In his review of “Frank Gehry: The Formative Years” (1988) in The New York Times, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that Mr. Blackwood “has built up an admirable oeuvre of films about architects and architecture,” and that Mr. Blackwood has Mr. Gehry “ramble though his work in a way that is both inviting and informative.”

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In a 1993 film, “The Sensual Nature of Sound,” Mr. Blackwood examined four distinctive performers and composers — Laurie Anderson, Tania León, Meredith Monk and Pauline Oliveros — devoting significant time to their discussions of their own work.

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Mr. Blackwood also made films about subjects who were not artists, like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe and the diplomat George F. Kennan, and several about Germany and German Americans.

Posted in Art, Christo, Gehry, Movies, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

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

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 12, 2016.

Thursday, May 12th, 2016

Jok Church, creator of the “You Can With Beakman & Jax” comic and the “Beakman’s World” television show.

I know a lot of people who loved “Beakman’s World” and anybody who teaches science to children is doing the lords work, as far as I’m concerned. Thing I didn’t know: Church was also Christo’s webmaster.

Mark Lane, noted JFK assassination conspiracy theorist.

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

TMQ Watch: August 12, 2014.

Thursday, August 14th, 2014

And so is TMQ. And so is TMQ Watch. The first column of the NFL season is always kind of strange; there’s a lot of short items, basketball coverage, and other things that throw us for a loop. We’re probably not going to hit every one of TMQ’s throwaway quips. And yes, we’re aware that TMQ did a couple of draft columns; we looked at those and frankly didn’t find anything noteworthy in them. One was his usual silly mock draft, the other was his draft analysis, and both contained the recommended US daily allowance of TMQ tropes.

Anyway, back to this week’s TMQ, after the jump…

(more…)

Posted in Apple, Art, Books, Christo, Clippings, NFL, Politics, Sports, TMQ watch, TV | Comments Closed

Random notes: November 8, 2011.

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

Obit watch: Smokin’ Joe Frazier, 32-4-1. (And two of those losses were to Ali.) NYT obit.

Christo has obtained Federal approval for his latest project, “Over the River”.

…will include eight suspended panel segments totaling 5.9 miles along a 42-mile stretch of the river, about three hours southwest of Denver.

(Artists conception in the linked article.)

Attorney General Eric Holder says an investigation of arms traffickers called Operation Fast and Furious was flawed in concept as well as in execution, never should have happened and “it must never happen again.”

Yeah. At least, it must never happen again until the next time the NYT and the current administration want to drum up support for a ban on modern sporting rifles.

Posted in Art, Christo, Clippings, Guns | Comments Closed

Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na…

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

Bat Fest!

This is one of those “only in Austin” stories. The mayor is proposing an event to celebrate Austin’s bat population, even though we’ve had an event for the past five years. However, the existing event has shut down the Congress Avenue bridge, which is a major artery, for anywhere from a day to a weekend: the mayor’s proposal would only shut down the bridge for a couple of hours on Sunday night. Plus, the mayor’s plan doesn’t involve charging admission; the existing festival does charge, although the promoter has said he plans for it to be free this year.

As part of the “Night of the Bat” celebration, Adam West , star of the 1960s “Batman” TV series, will attend a June 6 Paramount Theatre screening of the 1966 film “Batman”; RunTex plans to hold a bat-themed run/walk June 6 ; and the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau will host a private “Batini” contest for local hotel bartenders.

Obit watch: Jaime Escalante.

I’ve been neglecting the Nets. Sadly, they’re now 10-64, and out of record contention.

The WP has an article about the new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, devoted to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1976 “Running Fence”.

Posted in Art, Christo, Clippings, Loser, Obits | Comments Closed

Random notes: November 19, 2009.

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

The artist Jeanne-Claude, wife of Christo and his collaborator on “The Gates“, has died.  (NYT obit here.)

In other news, the Oakland Raiders have benched JaMarcus Russell, their number one draft pick in 2007. Per NFL.com, the Honorable Mr. Russell has a quarterback rating of 47.7 (at the time of this writing) which places him 30th. The only player he outranks at the moment is Derek Anderson of Cleveland, with a 36.2. To quote Gregg Easterbrook, “If every attempt by a quarterback falls to the ground incomplete, his rating is 39.6.”

“On Wednesday, the LPGA released its 2010 schedule, and despite the loss of 13 tournaments from two years ago, 17 open weeks in the season and a few TBDs (to be determineds), there is optimism among tour officials and players.”

Fine. Just as long as it stays off my television. (Since I don’t have cable, the Golf Channel is perfectly okay.) The only televised sport I hate more than golf is women’s golf. (I have nothing against playing golf; though I’ve never done it myself, I’m sure it is a fine sport. But watching golf – men’s or women’s – is about as exciting as reading transcripts of Roman Hruska speeches.)

Posted in Art, Christo, Clippings, Loser, NFL, Obits | Comments Closed