Category Archives: Art

I get why he LIKED it; I don’t get why he BOUGHT it

No, this is not Fitsnews. The nekkid woman at right is a work of art — a very valuable work of art.

An ex-cab driver who is now a billionaire in China bought the above Modigiliani, titled “Nu Couché,” for — maybe you should sit down first — $170,405,000.

Unlike with some extremely expensive works of art, I totally get why he liked it. It’s appeal is rather straightforward and visceral. But so is the kind of picture that will no longer appear in Playboy. I would not pay $1.70 for a picture in Playboy (which is why Playboy is struggling), much less $170 million for any picture that has ever been put on the market. If I had $170 billion, I wouldn’t spend that much for a picture. I wouldn’t want to be such a sap for one thing, and there are far better ways to spend the money.

Besides, to see that very same picture, all I had to do was Google it. I don’t care how nice the brushstrokes are, a picture is a picture.

Which means that even if I were a billionaire, you probably wouldn’t find me at Christie’s. Although I did have a pint in a pub across the street from Christie’s when I was in London. In the pub were a number of guys who apparently worked there, but I didn’t talk to them while enjoying my bitter.

However, I’m not entirely lacking in the sensibilities necessary to see marketability in art. Check out this interactive feature from The New York Times, which asks you which works of art brought the highest price. I got the first three right and thought I was really savvy, but I missed on the rest of them.

Another good reason for me not to spend millions on a painting even if I had billions. I’d be a lousy judge of resale value.

But I thought you might have fun taking the quiz, too…

Life, clinging…

See this photo I took of scraggly trees desperately clinging to a clump of fertile soil on a bleak, muddy, flood-swept landscape?

Actually, it was a tiny weed, about four inches high, in the driveway next to the ADCO building on Pickens.

I was amazed that none of us had run over it. I thought I’d immortalize it before that happened. The very essence of fragile life, clinging on against the odds.

That’s all. No political message…

Take it easy, y’all — Atticus is still Atticus

Over the weekend, there was a national (and international) cry of pain as folks heard that, in the long-lost Harper Lee novel Go Set A Watchman, Atticus Finch turned out to be a cranky old segregationist.

Don’t worry. Atticus is still Atticus.

I’m an editor, and as an editor — although not a book editor, I’ll allow — I understand why a book, or a column, or a news story, doesn’t get published: Because it wasn’t good enough.

Here’s what happened: A wannabe novelist submitted a manuscript, and an editor took a look at it, and said, essentially, This is not the novel you want to publish. The novel you want to publish is in these flashback passages. Dig into those, make those into your novel, and then you’ll have something.

He saw the truth in those passages, when Scout was just a girl. So, the editor did what I did when a piece just needed way more change than I had time to give it in the editing process — he kicked it back, gave her the chance to redeem herself as a writer, to write the great book that the editor saw in her.

No one has said this, but I strongly suspect that the editor had had his fill of novels by young folks who had come to New York, donned a mantle of self-conscious sophistication, gone home to visit their small-town homes, and then thought they were being terribly original by coming back to Manhattan and writing about how small, provincial, narrow and stultifying their home towns were. When really, they were being painfully trite.

He wanted Nelle to dig into the true story that she had in her, the one before all that, when she and Scout were unspoiled by the world, and yes, her Daddy was a hero.

And of course, being the editor, he was right. What he directed her to write was perhaps the best-loved American novel, one that was true, that spoke to people, that hit them where they lived, that said something about the American experience and its central conflict that needed to be said, and needed to be said in precisely that voice. (Interesting, isn’t it, that the two great, profound American novels that examine the narrative of race in this country — this and Huck Finn — are both told from the perspective of a child…)

I plan to read Go Set A Watchman, and I expect I’ll enjoy parts of it, here and there — it will be nice to hear that voice again. But I’m not going to get upset thinking something happened to Atticus. I know the real Atticus. This isn’t some sequel revealing some new, shocking side to him; this is just an imperfect, throwaway, first draft of him. And I know how little first drafts may be worth, before an editor gets ahold of them.

At Pearl Harbor, a vision out of South Carolina

Burl Burlingame is still posting pictures of fantastic sunsets over Pearl Harbor and tagging me with them, making me wish I could still be there — as if I needed such prompting. There’s nothing like a Pacific sunset.

Anyway, this morning I was looking for something unrelated among my pictures from my recent trip, and ran across this one that I had failed to share when I wrote about visiting Burl’s aviation museum on Ford Island.

It was a touch of home, one rivaling those sunsets in pulchritude.

On a display next to a C-47 — something that fills me with nostalgia, since it’s the first aircraft I ever flew on (in South America, over the Andes, when I was about 9 or 10) — there it was: The most popular pinup of South Carolina model Jewel Flowers Evans, whose face and figure was made famous by artist Rolf Armstrong.

Her obituary in The State in 2006 called her “probably the number one pin-up girl of all time.” Whether she was or not, she gets my vote. Here are some other images of her, including this photo that is apparently from the same session in 1941 that produced the one on the nose of that plane.

Anyway, that very same image ran on The State‘s obit page when she died, something that startled me sufficiently that I wrote about it on my then-young blog.

It was a nice surprise to see her again while visiting old haunts in Hawaii…

We very much enjoyed Phillip’s performance Wednesday night

The wife and I had a treat Wednesday evening. At the last minute, one of our daughters obtained tickets for chamber music at the Columbia Museum of Art.

And one of the featured performers was our own Phillip Bush!

It was the first time I’ve actually heard Phillip in concert, and it was awesome. (I’m not counting this impromptu performance in Kathryn’s salon.) Although he would have been even more entertaining had he given us some of the extremely intense facial expressions offered by the lovely visiting violinist. That was worth paying extra for.

But seriously, folks, Phillip is an amazing talent.

My favorite part of the program was the Haydn piece. The Brahms was wonderful as well, but I’m more of a classical-period guy, I guess.

I apologize for the low quality of the photo below. I shot it as the musicians were taking their positions as the intermission ended. I wanted a shot of Phillip and also of the violinist, so we could tell the Twins that if they really practice hard on their cellos, they, too, will be able to wear such a shiny dress.

That’s Phillip behind the grand. The guy whose head you can see, not the guy in the khaki pants — that’s his page turner. Talk about having a great seat! I was pretty envious of that guy…

What?!? You don’t think people got THIRSTY in 1924?

ADCO‘s clients sometimes wonder why we want to make sure to have our own Brian Murrell present on photo or video shoots to direct the proceedings.

This is why. Even the best photographers and videographers, sticklers for detail, can make a mistake. It helps to have an independent (and skilled) eye overseeing the proceedings.

This mistake is painful. You know that everybody concerned strained to get every tiny detail exactly right — the costumes, the hairstyles, the fireplace, the vases, the clock.

And they almost succeeded. But then later had to remove this photo, taken with such loving care to promote the upcoming fifth season, from “Downton Abbey’s” Facebook page.

All because somebody involved was thirsty…

Life is just one of these, or so I’ve heard

Found this bowl of, you know, sitting on a table, and took them outside into the sunlight.

I liked the result.

That classic Ariail cartoon I couldn’t find the other day

On Wednesday, I had wanted to use the above cartoon with my post about remembering The State‘s coverage of Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

It’s one of Robert Ariail’s most popular ever, and it served a good cause — it was turned into a poster, copies of which were sold, and the proceeds donated to disaster relief.

Unfortunately, it’s from the pre-digital days, so I couldn’t find it online.

Robert was kind enough to email this to me, so I share it now.

The original that ran in the paper was black-and-white, although color was added for the posters. After scanning the original to share it with us, Robert photoshopped in some color to recreate the poster effect…

Does ‘quality’ television really have to be so morally arid?

Does “quality” really have to be so dark, so morally arid?

This is by way of following up on a brief exchange Kathryn and I had yesterday about the dearth of appealing characters in the TV shows that currently compel our attention.

Bryan sent me a link to this piece, headlined “The Moral Relativism Of Serial Television.” It’s actually several years behind the curve, with this observation:

The sweet spot for serial television drama right now exists on non-premium cable channels. After decades of dominance by the broadcast networks, followed by a period in which the premium cable channels broke the mold with hits that reached mainstream culture like Oz, The Sopranos, and Dexter, non-premium channels like the Fox property FX, BBC America and AMC have rushed in to, at least temporarily, hold a lock on the highest volume of compelling drama on the small screen today.

That’s something I might have said two or three years ago (think “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” “The Walking Dead”). What I sense happening now, or about to happen now, is a shift beyond non-premium cable TV, and on to series made for streaming and bingeing, such as “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black.”

But the general observation of the piece is that there is a seemingly deliberate lack of characters to root for, or even care about, in the most compelling recent dramatic series.

It ends, as do so many episodes of these popular series, on a dark note:

It is at least marginally troublesome that as a society, our most compelling entertainment increasingly eschews the concept or even the ideal that good exists in the world and ultimately should prevail. An artistic criticism of this view can legitimately point out that life is rarely so neat as to allow for the inevitable victory of the white knight. However, the rejoinder to this point is that we are not considering real life but rather television, which exists because we would rather watch it than real life. The entire raison d’etre of the medium is to idealize real life interactions into conclusions that are satisfying on at least some visceral level. If our television tastes are any guide, America increasingly takes satisfaction from a muddled mess of emotional responses which are provoked by disorderly and sometimes directly contradictory stimuli. Perhaps, if a society can be judged by its entertainment, what we are witnessing is the leading edge of the end of America’s desire to collectively be the good guy, or even to support the good guy in his efforts to be good. Or perhaps we don’t need television to tell us this; perhaps we need look no further than the ballot box.

Do we really not want to find good in characters and root for it? I don’t think that’s the case, although there’s no doubt we are living in a more cynical world than the one I grew up in.

I think we are still human, and there is still good in us, and within us lives a desire to perceive good, and embrace it — however many times we’ve been disappointed. I think the dark, moral emptiness of these recent entertainments is a function of writers and directors who are trying to produce high-quality material, and who buy into the insidious notion that moral clarity is lowbrow and insufficiently “artistic.” So they steer clear of it.

But does “quality” really have to be so dark, so morally arid?

I think if someone would come along and produce similar series, but with the humanity-affirming characteristics that marked “The West Wing,” the world would joyfully cheer, and reward the effort with their loyal patronage.

Think of that — a new series with the cinematic quality of “Breaking Bad,” but with characters like Jed Bartlet and Leo McGarry and Josh Lyman — characters you want to see succeed. As I watch the series for the first time, each night as I work out, I simply don’t see any characters who are utterly lacking in appealing characteristics. Even the adversarial figures who try to thwart our heroes have understandable, sympathetic reasons for taking the positions they do. While there are occasional digressions from this approach (one of the weakest scenes I’ve encountered was the one in which Jed Bartlet humiliates a character based on Dr. Laura with what he seems to imagine is a clever manner, but which is painfully trite — by asking her whether she literally supports all of the strictures in the Old Testament), by and large there is an appealing understanding of everyone’s motives.

Which is the way we should all live our lives. We should take strong stands based on what our discernment has taught us to believe is right, but strive to appreciate the convictions of those with whom we disagree. It could serve as an antidote to the default mode of today’s partisans, which is to demonize opponents, and scoff at their motives.

Imagine that — television that not only gives us heroes to root for, but which shows us ways to be a better society.

Now that would be television worth watching.

On the somewhat retro topic of Tebowing

I almost never read Cal Thomas’ columns. I find they tend to have a certain sourness about them, whatever the point. Or maybe the expression on his mugshot just inclines me to perceive a sourness.

Whatever the case, I was drawn in to his column in The State this morning by the image of Tim Tebow kneeling.

The main point of the column didn’t interest me much — it was of a certain type, which we see written from the perspective of an ideologue complaining that ideologues of the opposite camp have a double standard, and criticize people of the writer’s camp for doing a certain thing, but don’t criticize people of their camp when they do the same thing. You know what I mean. You’ve read this one a million times.

In this case, he was angry that people who vehemently defend a guy named Michael Sam — apparently someone who people who follow football know all about — did not equally defend Tim Tebow when he was playing the game and taking a lot of flak.

The part of that that interested me was the Tim Tebow part.

And here, I’m going to have to ask you to bear with me as I propose an anachronistic topic. I realize that everybody who follows football, or is really into Culture War stuff, thoroughly hashed and rehashed everything there is to say about Tebow years ago. Well, I didn’t. I get interested in stuff when I get interested in it. Like “The West Wing,” which I will continue trying to interest y’all in discussing until I run out of episodes to watch on Netflix… and probably far beyond.

The advantage to you of a topic like this is that y’all have already thought it out and have wonderfully well-honed, nuanced positions on it. So you’re ahead of me. Assuming you can still remember your positions after all this time.

While everyone who followed football was really, really into taking strong stances on Tebow, I was peripherally aware of him. And what I was aware of was the kneeling thing. The “Tebowing.” Because it was kind of hard to miss, permeating visual media the way it did.

And each time I saw the image, as this morning, I wondered what to think of it. And I was always of two minds, at least.

On the one hand, it’s great that a guy isn’t embarrassed about his faith, and willing to witness to it in public — and in his case, in a considerable spotlight. On the other hand, it was awfully showy and “look at me,” seemingly a textbook example of what Jesus spoke against in Matthew 6:5.

And I find myself wondering whether Jesus’ judgment on this topic was culture-specific. He was speaking in a time and place when public prayer was a way of raising yourself in public esteem. Whereas, as Tebow himself can attest, doing so now subjects you to considerable abuse and ridicule. Especially when you play for a New York team.

Finally, on the third hand (yes, I know this metaphor is no longer working), I like the Tebowing gesture totally apart from theological questions. I’m a big fan of Arthurian legend — I may have mentioned that before — and Tebow’s gesture evokes the kneeling knight, his sword held before him like a cross. Which, to a geek like me who thinks pre-Raphaelite paintings are cool and not at all trite or corny, is appealing.

Thoughts? Or is this just too anachronistic for y’all? If so, I won’t try yet again to get a thread going on the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars…

Back when my two youngest were ‘the little girls’

My youngest daughter, the one who’s in Thailand now, adopted the above image as her new profile picture on Facebook. As I said in response, this is one of my favorite pictures I ever shot — perhaps one of my favorites that I ever saw.

It shows my two youngest. This was back when they were known in the family as “the little girls.” We had the three “big kids” who were close together in age, then a five-year gap, then the little girls.

Now they’re grown, like the big kids.

This was also back when I was still using my Nikon 8008, an awesome camera that now sits in a drawer because dealing with film is such an expensive hassle. I used to shoot black-and-white all the time — this was probably shot either on Tri-X or T-Max — which I would develop at home, and make my own prints. I would close off a bathroom that had no windows, set up my enlarger, put towels down at the crack under the door, and spend a whole Saturday printing.

This is one of those prints. The resolution is a little soft (actually, we would have referred to focus and grain rather than “resolution”), but that’s the way it was with 400 ASA film with ambient light indoors. But that’s one of the things that makes the picture work.

Tempus fugit.

Another realer-than-real photo, this one in black and white

Remember the photos of protests in the Ukraine that I noted seemed more intensely real than a photograph could be? (Burl said they probably looked like that because of the HDR process, and I think he’s probably right.)

This photo of LIndsey Graham meeting and greeting had a similar quality, I thought.

Graham aide Kevin Bishop — that’s him in the center of the photo — tweeted it out earlier this week with the comment, “Proud member of #TeamGraham! pic.twitter.com/x1RnKRb8MR.”

I wrote to him to say, “Nice picture. I like the lighting. Is it staged, or candid?”

“Candid,” he replied.

And I suppose it would be. I don’t think they would have struck those particular poses and expressions in a staged shot.

But there’s something about the light that makes it look staged, and professionally so, as though a movie director were involved. And the black-and-white adds to the effect.

It seems like a Dewar’s profile kind of print ad, or something like that.

See what I mean? Or is it just me?

A site to make your eyes sore: Oregon state capitol

A site to make eyes sore.

I clicked on a headline offered by Slate, “Anti-Gay Segregation May Soon Be Coming to Oregon,” because I was curious what in the world that could be.

But I didn’t find out because I got totally sidetracked by the photograph of something like a cross between a mausoleum — one erected by someone who detested the deceased — and the ventilation tower of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (which we saw in the movie as the entrance to the secret headquarters of the “Men in Black”).

But the cutline said, “A 2007 rally for gay rights at the Oregon State Capital in Salem, Ore.” And I thought, That’s the actual state capitol of a state in the United States? Wow. They sure do go for some ugly out in Oregon.

Wikipedia describes it this way:

Chosen from 123 entries in a countrywide competition, the design of the new building deviated from the normal design of state capitol buildings. The design was labeled a combination of Egyptian simplicity and Greek refinement.^[18] Overall it is Art Deco in style, and is one of only three state capitols in the United States constructed in that architectural style.^[20]

Yeah, I’m glad there are no more than three in that style. I can barely take this one.

And I thought I kinda liked Art Deco, until now.

It’s like the architect thought, “I’ll start with something that vaguely suggests a dome, but make it cylindrical — only not smoothly cylindrical; I’ll add this ridge thingies. It’ll look kinda like the chamber of a revolver, or the edgy interior of an oil filter. And I’ll make the whole thing out of something that looks like cheap concrete.”

Man, I’m glad I don’t have to drive by that every day. I can think of a lot of bad things to say about that generation of SC lawmakers who built our present State House, but at least they had some taste. Or maybe, as a native South Carolinian, I’m just genetically predisposed toward neo-classical.

Ahhhh… It’s just so soothing to look at this after contemplating that monstrosity out West.

A foggy outlook for the State House

At the Capital City Club this morning, I happened to glance toward a window on the South Side, and saw nothing but gray.

I didn’t know whether it was high fog or low clouds, but I find it interesting to watch the outlines of the State House sort of come and go with the drift of the mist.

It seemed to me this could be a metaphor for the legislative session that was starting today, but I was stumped as to how that worked. It’s not like the future is murky. This session will be like all the others — a lot of huffing and puffing, but little attention paid to the state’s real needs.

Or not. Maybe it was an omen. Maybe this year, they’ll get some good stuff done. One can hope.

Oh, and in case you think I can’t ever take a decent picture from atop SC’s tallest building, I share with you this sunset from one evening last week. So there…

Lou Reed as a young man, as seen by Warhol

Reacting to this news…

Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today on Long Island. The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May
.
With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example. “One chord is fine,” he once said, alluding to his bare-bones guitar style. “Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.”…

… I happened to remember the above video. It’s one of Andy Warhol’s “screen tests” that he did of various people who hung around The Factory back in the mid-’60s.

Basically, Warhol would turn a camera loaded with a short bit of film (about four minutes worth) onto one of his subjects, and just let that person be for that length of time.

Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips put 13 of those clips to music, and I saw their show at Spoleto in Charleston a couple of years back.

Somehow, their lyrics seem appropriate to express just how old we’ve gotten since Reed sat there drinking that Coke.

For some of Reed’s own music, I include the clip below…

Uninformed observations about unrelated pieces of music

Of all the things I like to write about in spite of knowing nothing about them, music is one of my favorites.

Lately, I’ve been boring members of my family by making them listen to the opening of Leon Russell’s “I Put a Spell on You” from his eponymous album (the one before the Shelter People one). No, not a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins cover. Totally different song.

It has one of those “you are in the studio” false starts at the beginning. Actually, two or three of them. I’ve always thought those things were a little obnoxious, because they seem to play on fans thinking it’s cool to hear their rock ‘n’ roll heroes being informal, making mistakes, and it seems self-conscious, as in “We know y’all will enjoying feeling like you’re rubbing shoulders with wonderful us in the studio, so we’ll throw you a bone.”

Or maybe I read too much into it.

Anyway, I like this one because of what Leon does with it. There’s one false start. Then another. Then he, and a guitarist, play a sort of winding, downward pattern. And then suddenly, Leon does that thing where you run your finger down the keys in one long flow, from right to left (what’s that called?), and then the rollicking song actually begins.

It feels, to me, like the musical version of jump-starting a car with manual transmission by letting it roll down the hill and letting out the clutch with the gearshift in first. If you’ve ever done that (I’ve had to do it a couple of times with my Ford Ranger), see if listening to this kind of feels that way to you.

Or maybe I’m just crazy.

Here’s the other musical thing I wanted to bring up. This is probably a question for Phillip Bush, like when I asked why awesome songs such as Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” are so awesome. What musical tricks make the endorphins flow?

I’m thinking that about the theme song to “Orange is the New Black,” which we’ve touched on here previously.

The magic seems to occur in two places. One is when Regina Spektor gets to the line, “And you’ve… got… ti-i-IME!” What is she doing there? It’s unusual, and very appealing. The other cool part is the bridge (I think), where she shifts gears and goes:

Think of all the roads.
Think of all their crossings…

Anyway, it’s very appealing, whatever she’s doing. I wish I could put it into words. But if I could, I guess we wouldn’t need music, which would be a shame…

How’d you like to own an original Ariail?

Well, here’s your chance. Your last chance.

Robert’s having a show Thursday from 5-8 p.m. at City Art Gallery, and his originals are on sale. After that, he’s donating what’s left to the Hollings Library at USC.

Come on out, and bring your checkbook.

Which is Rothko, and which is ADCO?

Three years ago, the staff of ADCO had our annual Christmas party at Hobby Lobby. After refreshments, each us was given a canvas and paints, and challenged to create something for the walls of our offices.

We were encouraged to paint in the style of Mark Rothko, and most of us cooperated. We were generally pleased with the results, which you can still see today adorning the walls of 1220 Pickens St.

Fast-forward to this year…

Last Thursday, our office Christmas party consisted of lunch at Hampton Street Vineyard, followed by a tour of the Rothko exhibit at Columbia Museum of Art.

Now, here’s a test of your artistic perspicacity: Above and below are images of two paintings. Can you tell which is by ADCO, and which is by Rothko himself?

No cheating! To check yourself, you may look it up on Google Images after you share your answer. You’re all on the honor system, and sure, you are all honorable men. And women.

bradwarthen.com

All The News That Gives You Fits