I was downtown Monday doing downtown things, when I happened upon this amazing twenty-story billboard on the face of the Bank of America Plaza celebrating the coming All Star Game coming to Dallas soon
However, I was wrong ... its really THIRTY EIGHT stories tall. That's pretty amazing.
Andrew Wyeth, the famous American painter from a family of famous painters died today. He was 91.
Aside from his famous name and iconic images, I don't know much about him, but I plan to learn.
His subject matter was the American landscape, inner and outer, just like Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton and others painted and what I try and capture in my photos.
His most famous painting, his Mona Lisa, was "Christina's World".
It inspired a photo I took in 1979, "Barbara's World":
It's just kinda cool how things can inspire you. They are very different pictures in a way, but very alike in others, and I think they make you feel similarly.
I got the email on Tuesday that Mr. B passed away. He was 87.
Professor Kenneth Ballenger, graduate of Hardin-Simmons University, Masters in Music from the Eastman School of Music, was the director and guiding light of "Those Fabulous Uarkettes" at the University of Arkansas, a group which this writer was a member of, off and on, over the course of five years in the late 20th Century.
Despite the improbable name, the Uarkettes were quite well-known in the State of Arkansas in the late 1970s. Basically it was a performance and music workshop. it was a group of about twenty university students, and it toured church and civic groups and rotary clubs and town festivals over four states and across Europe and Mexico. It was through Uarkettes that I was exposed to Mexico in the first place.
I think it was fair to say that many professors in the Music Department were jealous of the attention and the glamor that a supposedly musically unrigorous pop group had, but frankly, Mr. Ballenger worked for it. He gave some of the best years of his life to it.
From this remove, there has not been one experience in the music business which I wasn't first exposed to through the Uarkettes, from being on television to touring to recording albums to you-name-it. And getting twenty kids to do anything cooperatively wasn't easy.
Many, many people in that group went on to professions from being career musicians to music marketers and producers (smile) to Miss America. His legacy is huge.
Members auditioned at the first of the year in front of the other members and were voted upon, yay or nay, by the other members. Because I skipped a year, I got to do that twice. If you could please that audience, you could please any audience. I was not great, let's be frank, but I made up for it with enthusiasm. In my company were talents and voices I would put up against anybody.
The structure of a show was a loose sort of vaudeville. We covered every genre of music from crunchy harmonied Modern Jazz to Disco to Motown to Gospel to Country to ... on and on. Whatever we could sell, went. Ken liked to have a show with solid production numbers filled with plenty of acts he could change on the fly depending on the audience. I wish I had more tapes of all of it, but I do have a lot.
Just during my time, I can remember filming the annual Christmas Special wearing a World War II uniform, the group in front of a white mansion, period cars in the street, the girls in thick makeup and shoulder pads, and aside from the TV crew, you had no clue that it wasn't the early 1940s.
Then in Mexico City running the gauntlet of a police line as crowds pressed from all sides, then a live camera zeroing in on me as we broadcast a show live from a soundstage before a live audience in Churrobusco studios; Taxco performing in the plaza before the Cathedral while streetwalkers paraded back and forth advertising their wares, then later in an Acapulco high school being besieiged by thousands of screaming kids for autographs.
The night we promoted a show by hitting every Sorority House singing "Surfer Girl" in close harmony, then emboldened, crashed the local rock station and sang live on the air. That led indirectly to my career in radio.
Long exhausting nights on buses between venues group singing "Midnight Train to Georgia" while our one African American member sang the Gladys Knight part.
Loading and unloading those damned buses!
Skinny dipping in Lake Wedington on the way back from a concert one night (my lips are sealed).
Finally, and perhaps the best part was taking voice lessons from Ken with my grandmother on the piano, as she was for many others in the group. He essentially taught me to sing.
For all of these things and more, Thank you , Ken!
I don't know, between the election and these pics, I may be addled for the rest of the day.
These were done for an Asian version of "In Style" magazine and for more, check out the unofficial Zhang Ziyi website.
You know, while hanging with friends and their dogs across the street at the school yesterday, the pretty afternoon reminded me of a painting I grew up with.
When I was nine, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and at the time I was dazzled by cathedrals. Who knows why, but my nascent interest in Architecture had been aroused. Upon seeing this painting, I think Mom told me we could get a copy in the gift shop, and we did, and we framed it in an old warped gilt frame that eventually cracked the glass it held ... but the painting always mesmerized me.
And why not? We thought it was a pretty picture, but it was an incredibly famous painting of Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds by John Constable, a renowned painter for, amongst other things, his interpretation of clouds. It had been commissioned around 1825 by the Bishop of Salisbury, who is depicted with his wife at the corner of the painting.
As I look at this painting now, I realize I came to draw trees in exactly the same way.
After visiting the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, my grandfather was beguiled by Sierra Nevada Morning by Alfred Bierstadt, so he acquired a print which hung in the corner of the den over the television set.
Equally as mesmerizing as Constable, Bierstadt was famous not only for his views of the American West, but for his mastery of light. There is a painting of his at the Amon Carter Museum of a valley in Yosemite, dramatically lit by a sunset, only in real life the sun never sets in that valley from that angle, ever. He also created pseudo-landscapes inspired by the real thing, but maybe with a mountain over here, or a waterfall over there which might have improved the composition.
This is a preview of some stuff I am working on. I just love it.
I finally made it to the museum, and so did everybody else!
If anyone had any doubts about the artiness of Dallas, let me testify that on a Thursday night the place was packed and I about did not get a parking space!
Here are a few pics:
This is Seti. It's my favorite sculpture in the place. It really reaches out over time.
A jazz band was playing "I Can't Make You Love Me (If You Don't)" and it instantly felt like a jazz standard.
Mesoamerica sculpture in front of the Museum of the Americas.
This is me in front of two Chinese porcelain sculptures over 1000 years old and looking like they were made yesterday. How is that possible?
Anyway, it was time VERY well spent, and reassuring that SO MANY people were there. The days of an empty museum are probably past.
Of course, there were those who insisted on getting uncomfortably close to the art, some nearly touching it, so the security people were constantly having to intervene, and the people would be OH so offended. It was great watching a woman get all snippy with a security woman and demand her name, etc., then walk off all-smug saying, "That's OK, you can't let them push you around like that."
Where the hell do they think they are, the Mall?
This one woman who seemed as if she would know better, was giving an art lecture on pointilism to her daughter and pointing to near-touching a Van Gogh and a Monet, and then the daughter would follow up and do the same thing!!!!! Ping! Ping! Ping! Point! Point! I wanted to wrestle them to the ground and put them under restraints!!! What's she going to do next, massage the Houdin sculpture of George Washington? Test the Empire bed in the furniture gallery for mattress firmness? Pick up a Roman bust and look under it for the price?
Pictured above is/was today's lunch. Now, I am not necessarily a big fan of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Yeah, its okay, but it never was a childhood thing. Mom never fed us anything she herself didn't like, and she really never forced us to eat anything. Luckily that didn't matter with me because I ate everything except that which is obviously repulsive to a kid. But, I was adventurous. I would at least try something. If I didn't like it, there were no questions asked and it was never served again. Luckily my tastes were much more catholic than my sister's, who's verboten list was not only long, but had subcategories.
Peanut Butter and Jelly was a sandwich kids named Butchie in striped shirts and scabby elbows ate at school. Not that my fare was any better, but it did include meat. However, no one wanted to trade sandwiches with me if that's what you're thinking. Hard to get romantic about tuna fish or deviled ham. It's just that I never had Peanut Butter and Jelly.
No, I made a PB&J today because I was going to the museum in order to do whatever museums are supposed to do for you. In my case, I needed to get out and see people and pick up some aesthetic inspiration to boot.
BUT ... the plates needed to be changed on the car. I had been a minor scofflaw in letting my plates expire for a month and a half and I needed to get them updated.
"Why did you let your plates lapse?" the woman at the DMV queried.
"I was just plain BROKE!" I answered.
"Well I'm sorry, in order to waive the late fee, that's not listed here as a legitimate excuse."
Well, it ought to be.
This is why I oppose mandates.
If it's so damn important to the government for me to have something, then they should at least help me to pay for it.
Ironically I had a three-cruiser police escort the whole 12 miles back to work. Maybe it was a coincidence.
Maybe it was thinly veiled intimidation. "Watch those sticker renewals, white boy!"
At least it wasn't Arkansas. There you have to have all of your stickers current in order to give birth.
So, I needed to replace my plates before inflicting my unsightly apparent lapsedness in public again, and thus avoid diverting a wary-eyed copper in hot pursuit of a murderer or terrorist because I needed comeuppance. PB&J under my belt, I went outside to change the plates.
After 30 minutes I was so dirty, I cannot even describe it to you. You wouldn't believe me. If I tried to photograph it, which I considered, the camera would be black. On top of this, as I was screwing in the final plate by achieving a contortion under the back bumper not listed in the kama sutra, I was suddenly seized with the immediate and unmistakable need to ... evacuate.
After I took my shower, it was too late to hit the museum, so here I sit, the exotic interior of the laundry room awaiting me.
So, I'm a little grumpy.
