Posts Tagged ‘reputation’
“Cleveland Rocks”*…
How can a city change its image? Vince Guerrieri unspools the complete account of one city’s infamous attempt…
No city fits a punchline quite like Cleveland. “In every country, they make fun of city,” comedian Yakov Smirnoff once said. “In U.S., you make fun of Cleveland. In Russia, we make fun of Cleveland.”
It goes back even longer. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In once claimed that Velveeta can be found in the gourmet section of Cleveland supermarkets. “What’s the difference between Cleveland and the Titanic?” Johnny Carson asked on The Tonight Show. “Cleveland has a better orchestra.”
Unfair? Cleveland can be a target-rich environment. The city’s sports teams vacillate between hilarious ineptitude (there’s a reason Major League was set there) and being just good enough to get fans’ hopes up. Fans got drunk and rioted on Ten-Cent Beer Night. In a ceremonial “ribbon-cutting” involving an acetylene torch and a bar of metal, Mayor Ralph Perk accidentally lit his hair on fire. His wife Lucille once declined an invitation to the White House, saying it was her bowling night. The city nearly defaulted on its loans in the late 1970s.
Cleveland became known as an industrial wasteland for frequent fires on the Cuyahoga River. That was a little unfair: In an 18-month span from 1968–69, the Rouge River in Detroit and the Buffalo River in New York also caught fire. But it was the Cuyahoga that Randy Newman wrote a song about.
In 1986, the Cleveland United Way, for its annual fundraiser, wanted to garner some positive publicity for the city, and planned a balloon launch on Public Square. Not just any balloon launch, either, but the biggest balloon launch in human history—they were shooting for a Guinness World Record.
If you’ve heard of Balloonfest ‘86, you’ve heard all about how terrible it was. A cold front blew in, keeping balloons from reaching their intended heights and destination, instead littering the city’s highways and lakefront. Some accounts even call it fatal for two boaters on Lake Erie. Neil Zurcher, a Cleveland journalist, included the balloon launch in his book Ten Ohio Disasters, right up there with the Who concert stampede in Cincinnati, the Xenia tornadoes, and the Silver Bridge collapse. Among the wares sold by Cleveland’s T-shirt–industrial complex is a shirt that boasts, “I survived Balloonfest.”
But has history done Balloonfest dirty? Was it really as bad as everyone says?…
Fascinating: “Balloonfest Made Cleveland A Laughingstock. Did It Deserve It?” from @vinceguerrieri in the always illuminating @DefectorMedia.
* Ian Hunter (on his 1979 album You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic); also well-known via the cover by The Presidents of the United States of America that was the theme song of The Drew Carey Show.
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As we study stunts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that what had been a series of shorts running in The Tracey Ullman Show debuted on Fox as a 30-minute animated comedy– The Simpsons.
Now in its 35th season, the show has won dozens of awards, including 35 Primetime Emmy Awards, 34 Annie Awards, and 2 Peabody Awards. Homer’s exclamatory catchphrase of “D’oh!” has been adopted into the English language, and The Simpsons has had a powerful influence on many other later adult-oriented animated– and live-action– sitcoms.
“I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space… that was the earliest Cubist painting – the quest for space.”*…
Between 1907 and 1914, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso painted side-by-side– often literally, in the same studio– as they created the form we now know as Cubism, the most influential art movement of the 20th century.
Picasso has become the avatar of the Modern turn in the first half of 20th century. Braque… not so much…
Why is this show by Georges Braque such a quiet, hole-in-corner sort of affair? I find myself wondering as I wander around The Poetry of Things, a new exhibition at Bernard Jacobson Gallery of 14 magnificent still life paintings (and a single collage) by the man who is best known as the co-creator, with Picasso, of Cubism.
They span 30 years of his steady output, from the middle 1920s to the middle 1950s, enabling us to root out at least a partially satisfactory answer to a question that seems to be on so many lips: Whatever happened to Braque after Cubism had had its moment in the sun?…
There is no one else in the gallery during my visit barring the director, who is leaning too deeply into his reading matter even, it seems, to notice that another human being is currently sharing this basement gallery space with him.
Is it not a little odd that the first significant show by Braque in London for decades should be so lightly attended at 1:30 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, in such a well-placed West End Gallery as this one, at the top of Duke Street St James, London’s oldest dealing street?
…
The fact is that Braque’s afterlife has been rather neglected. Henri Laurens inherited the estate, but has enough really been done to keep him in the public eye? And if not, why not? The fact is that his reputation has not been nurtured, massaged, and noised abroad — not when compared, for example, with the afterlife of Picasso. Was Picasso lucky? He had luck and skillful management, you could say. He was certainly a tremendous self-publicist in a way that Braque was not. Think of the Catalogues Raisonnés that he created with Christian Zervos, for example, and how early all that started. The first volume was published in 1932. Picasso knew what it was to be looked at. He also had the advantage of being perpetually, eye-catchingly restless. What transformations he underwent! And the Picasso story has been so effectively told and retold under the careful custodianship of the Picasso Foundation…
Braque looks and feels like a quietist by comparison, a swimmer against the currents. He did not have that lubricious Catalan stare. He did not rise up in indignation against any eye-catching war. He merely got on with it, year after year, making still life paintings of such restraint and subtlety, and much else too. None of the paintings on these walls shouts at us. They speak of self-containment, of a quietly impassioned, ongoing dedication to the task at hand. If anything, they seem to live and breathe, and even be in defiance of any easy notion of modernity…
“The Neglected Afterlife of the Great Georges Braque,” by Michael Glover, in @hyperallergic.
* Georges Braque
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As we reflect on reputations, we might recall that it was on this date in 2007 that Picasso’s Portrait of Suzanne Bloch was stolen from the São Paulo Museum of Art (along with Portinari‘s O lavrador de café). One of the final paintings of Picasso’s Blue Period (valued in 2007 at roughly $50 million), it was recovered and returned undamaged to the museum the following January.
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