Drawn To A Larger Scale

By Alex Williams
Published April 14, 2010

HOW did a 32-year-old college dropout from the bayou of Louisiana, with no formal training in art — well, to be frank, no training at all — end up with a one-man show in a New York gallery and a client list that includes Robert Downey Jr. and Orlando Bloom?

For Scott Campbell, it all started at a tattoo studio in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco. “I’m just the dirty kid who snuck in the back door,” said Mr. Campbell, who said that he got the bulk of his art education tattooing teenage gang members in San Francisco in the 1990s. ...

... Last April, Mr. Campbell’s solo show at OHWOW, a gallery in Miami, sold out, said Al Moran, its director. It was evidence that Mr. Campbell had the stature needed to carry a solo show on April 29 at the gallery’s new space in Manhattan, on Crosby Street — its first since moving to the city. “All sorts of people were coming” to the Miami show, Mr. Moran said. “Tattoo kids were coming in, and museums were coming in.”

Mr. Campbell said he is nervous to show in New York. But added, philosophically, “If the art world shuns me, I can still do tattoos.”

Scott Campbell's show in New York.

Click on the post's title to read the entire article at The New York Times.

Richard Wagner's cycle has made its mark on comic books

David Ng, writing in the LA Times, says,

... Los Angeles Opera is producing the complete "Ring" for the first time beginning in May. Although this avant-garde staging isn't for neophytes, its emphasis on spectacle and visual effects (light sabers play an important role) could make it the ideal "Ring" for superhero geeks. ...

... Richard Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelung" is regarded by many as an important genetic mother ship for today's fleet of action heroes. ...

... Even those who have never experienced Wagner's epic should have little trouble recognizing the names of some of its chief protagonists such as Wotan and Brünnhilde and her fellow Valkyries. That's partly because Wagner himself borrowed from a number of well-known myths and legends -- the 12th century Germanic poem the "Nibelungenlied" was his primary source. But it's also because pop culture has taken Wagner's creations over the years and liberally repurposed them into a multitude of hit incarnations.

Perhaps the most popular of the "Ring" characters are the Valkyries -- the airborne female warriors of the cycle's second opera, "Die Walküre," who carry slain soldiers from the battlefields to their final resting places in Valhalla. ...

... On TV, the most recognizable offspring of Wagner's Valkyries was the title character in the cult series "Xena: Warrior Princess." In the sixth and final season, which aired in 2000-2001, viewers learned that Xena ( Lucy Lawless) was once an evil Valkyrie who presided over a reign of terror in the show's pan-mythological universe. ...

Click on the post's title to read the entire article.

A promotion for LA Opera's production -- with audio and photos -- is here.

Alas, poor Shakespeare

Conspiracy theories about the authorship of his plays has gone mainstream.

By James Shapiro
April 11, 2010

Film director Roland Emmerich, whose last effort was the apocalyptic "2012," has begun shooting "Anonymous." It won't be another disaster movie -- except perhaps for English professors. According to Emmerich, the film is "about how it came to be that William Shakespeare was not the author of his plays," which, he says, turn out to have been written by the "Earl of Oxford." ...

... In a literary culture swamped by memoirs, many now take it for granted that most writing -- of the past no less than the present -- is confessional or at least experiential, and that you had to live it to describe it. (The Elizabethans would have found such notions bizarre.) By that logic, the Earl of Oxford, who in reality was captured by pirates and had three daughters, has a stronger claim to have written "Hamlet" and "King Lear" than a professional playwright from Stratford who never set sail and only had two daughters.

Since no external documents link the Earl of Oxford to the plays (in contrast to Shakespeare himself, for whom there is plenty of contemporary linking evidence), those convinced that he wrote them are stuck arguing, in circular fashion, that circumstantial evidence is to be found in the works, and that these works are necessarily autobiographical, a portrait of an aristocratic author's life, loves and thwarted political ambitions.

"Anonymous" capitalizes on the desire for a more exciting story than one in which a young man from the provinces moves to the big city and fashions out of old stories and a powerful imagination great plays and poems. And the democratization of knowledge on the Internet, a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, has been a boon for those who believe that Shakespeare didn't write the plays. It certainly hasn't helped that literary scholars have mostly dodged this fight, even as they've lost their cultural authority. ...

Click on the post's title to read the complete article at The Los Angeles Times.

Cowboys of the Silver Screen

On April 17, 2010, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the Postal Service™ will issue a 44–cent, Cowboys of the Silver Screen commemorative stamp in four designs in a pane of 20 stamps and a booklet of 20 stamped postal cards, both designed by Carl T. Herrman of North Las Vegas, Nevada.

With the issuance of the Cowboys of the Silver Screen stamps, the U.S. Postal Service® honors four extraordinary performers who helped make the American Western a popular form of entertainment. Film stars from the silent era through the singing era are featured on the stamps: William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers.


Images and text courtesy of the USPS.


Hat tip to The Los Angeles Times, which made mention of The Autry National Center.

When Half a V-8 Is Enough

By RICHARD S. CHANG
Published: April 8, 2010

SCARSDALE, N.Y.


JACKIE SARIL’S nickname is Marisa Tomei, not that the two look much alike. For starters, Ms. Saril, who co-owns a public relations firm, has red hair. But her broad knowledge of vintage American cars reminds her friends of Mona Lisa Vito, Ms. Tomei’s caricature of a fast-talking, gum-chewing, surprisingly car-smart New Yorker in the 1992 film “My Cousin Vinny.” [more ...]

Henri Cartier-Bresson - The Modern Century

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: April 8, 2010

Rarely has the phrase “man of the world” been more aptly applied than to the protean photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, the subject of a handsome and large — though surely not anywhere near large enough — retrospective opening at the Museum of Modern Art on Sunday. ...

... “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century” runs from Sunday through June 28 at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org. It travels to the Art Institute of Chicago (July 24 to Oct. 3); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Oct. 30 to Jan. 30); and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (Feb. 19 to May 15).

Click on the post's title to read the entire article at The NY Times.

The exhibit will also appear in Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta.

Call of the Small

From a New York Times report: CHRISTINE FERRARA, a 39-year-old public affairs director for the Institute for Advanced Study, a research center in Princeton, N.J., has a passion for modern architecture and design. It began in 2008, when her husband, Steven Birnbaum, a technology consultant, bought her an airy modern home with floor-to-ceiling windows. [more ...]

Ms. Ferrara's blog is Call of the Small.

Glenn Beck Doesn't 'Give a flying crap'

Forbes magazine has posted an article, "Glenn Beck Inc," which quotes Beck: "I could give a flying crap about the political process." Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. "We're an entertainment company."

Yes, he's an entertainer, but he's doing incredible damage to the country because many in his audience take him seriously.

Hat tips to Immoral Minority and Think Progress.

Digging up a piece of Hollywood history

Guadalupe is the Zelig of the Central Coast -- a speck on California Highway 1 that has had more than its share of brushes with history. Portola's expedition passed through in the 1700s. Father Junipero Serra brought the first cattle. Lt. Col. John Fremont and his troops camped in town in the mid-1800s and accidentally torched its oldest adobe.

In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille came to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes on California's Central Coast and built a movie set that still captures the imagination -- a colossal Egyptian dreamscape for the silent movie version of "The Ten Commandments."

"If 1,000 years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe," DeMille wrote, "I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization . . . extended all the way to the Pacific coast of North America." ...

Slideshow

... Peter Brosnan was a 30-year-old New York University film school graduate when he first heard the story in 1982. ...

... Captivated, Brosnan embarked on a journey that has yet to end -- a quest to find DeMille's set, exhume it and produce a documentary about this unusual piece of Hollywood history. ...

... Brosnan also collected stories from locals about the dozens of films shot outside Guadalupe from the silent era to the 1940s -- a time when the dunes were Hollywood's backlot for desert movies and ranch hands had fleeting encounters with Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich.

... A steady trickle of film buffs find their way to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center, where chunks of DeMille's set are on display, including a bas-relief of a pharaoh's head reassembled by Brosnan's team.

The center recently put out a news release announcing that Brosnan's documentary would be released this summer. This made Brosnan nervous, since he is still talking to Paramount about getting permission to use clips from "The Ten Commandments." ...

Digging up a piece of Hollywood history, by Mike Anton of The Los Angeles Times.

Talk Deeply, Be Happy?

By RONI CARYN RABIN

Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather?

It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject. ...

... “It’s not that easy, like taking a pill once a day,” Dr. Mehl said. “But this has always intrigued me. Can we make people happier by asking them, for the next five days, to have one extra substantive conversation every day?” [more ...]

The Ides of March

Today! March 15.

From The New York Times' "Et Tu, British Museum? Coin Commemorating Caesar's Murder Goes on Display"

... On Monday — the Ides of March, naturally — the British Museum put on display a gold coin given to one of Caesar’s assassins, which may have been worn as a memento by the boastful killer, The Guardian reported. ...

NY Times' Photo

The Guardian's article uses a photo of a different coin, also attributed to the British Museum, which makes it clear how the coin could have been "worn":

The Guardian's Photo

The Times' story indicates that the coin they have depicted is believed by experts to be a fake. The Guardian's story makes clear that such coins existed:

The swaggering imagery displayed on the coin was already famous in antiquity. In the second century AD, the Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote: "Brutus stamped upon the coins which were being minted in his own likeness and a cap and two daggers, indicating by this and by the inscription that he and Cassius had liberated the fatherland."

The Times' story does state: "The Guardian said that some 60 silver versions of the coin have survived, but only two were believed to exist in gold — one of which is now believed by experts to be a fake." So, we have photos of all the gold versions, if the experts are correct.

Interestingly, in The Guardian's photo, the coin's image is cropped. Was that to make it difficult for counterfeiters?

COINLINK's "Possibly Unique 'Ides Of March' Gold Coin to be Displayed at British Museum" has another interesting story.

Driving Dioramas -- Redo

Car & House

The Set

Michael Paul Smith builds scale models. His collection of 1/24 scale scenes from mid-20th century America can be seen at his Flickr, where he wrote:

Our past is a powerful draw and in so many ways we try to capture it in order to explain it to ourselves.

What started out as an exercise in model building and photography, ended up as a dream-like reconstruction of the town I grew up in. It's not an exact recreation, but it does capture the mood of my memories.

And like a dream, many of the buildings show up in different configurations throughout the photos. Or sometimes, the buildings stay put and the backgrounds change.

There is also a New York Times' story, "Lots of Web Traffic in such a Tiny Town," about his work.

A Jackson Pollack for 44 cents?

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On March 11, 2010, in Buffalo, New York, the Postal Service™ issued a 44–cent, Abstract Expressionists commemorative stamp in ten designs, designed by Ethel Kessler of Bethesda, Maryland

In celebration of the abstract expressionist artists of the 20th Century, Art Director Ethel Kessler and noted Art Historian Jonathan Fineberg (Gutgsell Professor Art History, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign) selected ten paintings to feature on this colorful pane of self–adhesive stamps. Kessler used elements from Barnett Newman’s Achilles (1952) to frame the stamps. The arrangement of the stamps suggests paintings hanging on a gallery wall. For design purposes, the sizes of the stamp are not in relative proportion to the paintings. The pane also features selvage text and a quotation by Robert Motherwell. Each stamp includes the artist’s name and verso text that identifies the painting and briefly tells something about the artist.

List of Stamp Artwork

• The Golden Wall (1961) — Hans Hofmann (1880–1966)
• Romanesque Façade (1949) — Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974)
• Orange and Yellow (1956) — Mark Rothko (1903–1970)
• The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (1944) — Arshile Gorky (1904–1948)
• 1948–C (1948) — Clyfford Still (1904–1980)
• Asheville (1948) — Willem de Kooning (1904–1997)
• Achilles (1952) — Barnett Newman (1905–1970)
• Convergence (1952) — Jackson Pollock (1912–1956)
• Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 34 (1953–1954) — Robert Motherwell (1915–1991)
• La Grande Vallée 0 (1983) — Joan Mitchell (1925–1992)

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A Jackson Pollack for 44 Cents?

No! The whole pane of stamps has to be purchased for $4.40 at a post office or online.


The image of the Jackson Pollack stamp was obtained from The Los Angeles Times.

A New York Times article, with an enlargement of Adolph Gottlieb’s “Romanesque Facade.”

An ARTINFO article, with an enlargement of Hans Hofmann's "The Golden Wall."

The image of the pane and the text was obtained from USPS.

The USPS press release

A New York magazine article

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Photos from Paris - Outside and Inside a Restaurant

Nomiya is a temporary installation atop the Palais de Tokyo contemporary-art museum. Like an exhibition, the restaurant has a corporate sponsor and a limited run, ending in December.

Photo: Laurent Grasso

Floor-to-ceiling windows display a view of the Eiffel Tower.
Photo: Ed Alcock for The New York Times

From The New York Times' "Where Art and Haute Cuisine Meet in Paris"

Ansel Adams Photos at the Interior Department

The Los Angeles Times informs us, in Ansel Adams, from the wilderness to the corridors of power, that the Interior Department has installed an exhibit of photos by Ansel Adams in its halls, in Washingtion, D.C. The photos were taken as part of a project commissioned in 1941 by then-Interior Secretary Harold Ickes.

The article states, "Adams was paid $22 per day to work on the project, and he only charged the government for the days when he actually shot. He took more than 200 photos over about a month, but with the onset of World War II, the project stalled."

"Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has since revived the project and -- at a cost of $17,000 -- had 26 of the images permanently installed in the halls of the Interior building at 1849 C St., NW."

The exhibit at the Interior Department is the first time the photos have been viewable by the public.

A slideshow of twenty-six images, with a high-resolution of each available, can be seen at the Interior Department's website, here.

The photo included with this post is of Canyon de Chelly, a national monument, in northeast Arizona.

Zamboni Machines

Zamboni Off The Ice

An article in this yesterday's New York Times, Zamboni Driving Lessons, reminded me of the earlier article about Zamboni machines, from which the photo, above, was taken, and which contains a nine-photo slideshow.

From parts of some of the slideshow captions:

The Zamboni machine's hypnotic mission and captivating name have made it a cultural icon, something the Zamboni family finds both gratifying and a bit puzzling. The first ice-resurfacing machine was built in 1949 and its form, function and sales output have remained consistent for decades. ...

... Richard Zamboni, who now runs the company, says it consistently sells 200 to 250 machines a year, 30 years after his father [Frank Zamboni] began worrying that the market was nearly saturated. ...

... The second and third machines built by Zamboni were bought by the Olympic star Sonja Henie for use in her ice shows. ...

... The original Zamboni machine is parked in the skating rink that the family still owns, just down the street from the factory. ...

... Frank Zamboni spent most of a decade building his first machine. These days it takes about six months to produce a machine, each of which is still made to order. ...

Cool.

Book Deals: Washington Lawyer Bob Barnett

By David Montgomery
Sunday, March 7, 2010

In "I, Alex Cross," the new bestseller set in Washington by James Patterson, fictional detective Alex Cross scans the ego wall in the office of a senator he's investigating:

The senator has hung photos of himself "with the president . . . the vice president. Tiger Woods. Bono. Arnold and Maria. Bob Woodward. Robert Barnett."

Robert Barnett?

"The senator," muses Cross, "was obviously a well-connected man, and he wanted everyone who walked into his office to know it right away." ...

... Barnett's rate of $975 an hour is a lot of money, but his transformational insight was to apply a lawyer's fee structure to the work of an agent. Then it's not necessarily so much money

A traditional literary agent charges 15 percent of an advance. Barnett helped Bill Clinton sell "My Life" for a record $15 million. Clinton would have paid an agent $2.25 million; Barnett says he put in far fewer hours than the 2,308 he would have needed to work to bill $2.25 million. (more ...)

When Politicians Debate Fictional Characters, It's Time for a Reality Check

Sarah Palin's recent problem with "Family Guy" is not without historical precedent. It was in the early 1990s that politicians began having problems distinguishing between reality and fiction: they began attacking fictional television characters. In Michiko Kakutani's Fiction and Reality, Blurring the Edges, we're reminded:

... Vice President Dan Quayle attacks Murphy Brown, the fictional anchorwoman played by Candice Bergen, for undermining traditional family values by deciding to become a single mother, and in this week's season premier of the show [week of September 25, 1992], Murphy Brown strikes back, having already elicited even further condemnations from Mr. Quayle.

President Bush [The Elder] speaks of wanting to see an America that looks a lot more "like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons," and in a subsequent episode of the popular television show, Bart Simpson retorts, "We're just like the Waltons. We're praying for the Depression to end, too."

Even Ross Perot, who mocked Mr. Quayle's remarks about Murphy Brown, has gone on the record as condemning the television character Doogie Howser for having sex with his girlfriend ...

And Ms. Kakutani concludes:

In the end, it's dangerous to mistake fictional representations for the real thing. To do so is to ignore one of the most basic impulses behind art -- the impulse to order the chaos of regular life, to transform it into something more perfect, more shapely and more satisfying, to turn it into something with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Worse, to erase the boundaries between reality and fiction means forsaking our ability to make distinctions. It means living in a dimly lit world of shadows, mirrors and self-delusions, content with approximations and soothing mispresentations, instead of continuing to try to discern the truth. One ends up like Don Quixote, Cervantes's would-be knight whose sense of reality was shaped by popular chivalric romances -- a hapless, if well-meaning fellow who believed he could model his own life on that of his favorite literary heroes and who ended up tilting at windmills.

The New York Times has published three articles about Sarah Palin's dust-up with "Family Guy," here, here, and here. Sarah Palin, of course, took confusing reality with fiction to a whole new level.

Michiko Kakutani is a Pulitzer Prize winning critic for the New York Times.

Hartland: A Las Vegas Mansion, Glue-Gunned to Perfection

A HOUSE with 32 chandeliers, twin spiral staircases and so much rococo plasterwork that Marie Antoinette, were she planning a weekend in Vegas, would say, “The heck with the Bellagio, I want to stay with the Hart family in that rundown neighborhood where Liberace used to live,” may not be for you. ...

... The entrance hall has a dramatic black-and-white checkerboard floor and a 35-foot dome. Stair rails are swagged with stiffly wired gold lamé, white silk roses and ivory velvet. The living room measures 33 by 57 feet — so big, they were able to shoot a scene for the film “Casino” there. Ms. Hart’s bedroom has a velvet bedspread, made by her son Larry, which is ornamented with cabochon pearls and weighs 34 pounds. The house itself takes up some 25,500 square feet. ...

... The only family member who still lives at Hartland full time is Garry, in a suite off limits to reporters and reportedly utterly free of pearls.

A Las Vegas Mansion, Glue-Gunned to Perfection, from the New York Times.

Why 'Samson' Runs: Jerusalem Fever

By CLYDE HABERMAN,
Published: May 13, 1992

JERUSALEM, May 12— The sturdy young Canadian thought he was Samson, and went on to prove it by smashing through a wall to escape the other week from Kfar Shaul, the Government psychiatric hospital on Jerusalem's western reaches. ...

... A few years ago, Kfar Shaul had at the same time two patients convinced that they were the Messiah. He put them together, the hospital director recalls, but it didn't work out.

"They spoke, and they discussed," he said. "And finally, each decided that the other was an imposter."

Note: In print, the article's title was the same as this post's title. The printed article has a photo of Dr. Yair Bar-El.


Clippings from The New York Times appear at a new blog: New York Clippings