There are two versions of this story, both told by Terry Southern, screenwriter for Dr. Strangelove.

In the first version, Peter Sellers is hired to play four (4) roles, including “Major King Kong,” the Texan bomber pilot. Giving it due consideration, Peter refuses because he can’t do a Texas accent. So Terry Southern records some lines in his Texas accent, and Peter practices and finally relents…ostensibly.

Later Sellers claims to have suffered a hairline fracture in his ankle while stepping out of a taxi in the King’s Road. Then he seriously messes up his leg further when he falls while negotiating the 8-foot ladders he’s supposed to climb in the B-52. Was this all faked/intentional? Yeah, probably. Regardless, the insurance company won’t post the completion bond unless Peter Sellers is pulled out of the Maj. King Kong role.

Terry Southern suggests getting a real cowboy-type, say, Dan Blocker (of Bonanza!) instead. Dan Blocker’s agent declines, saying Dan finds the role too pinko. Now Terry remembers Slim Pickens, a sometime rodeo clown whom Marlon (“Bud”) Brando discovered while making One-Eyed Jacks.

Slim arrives at Shepperton Studios, west London, “in costume”—that is, his usual Justin boots and Stetson. Terry Southern and Slim Pickens are formally introduced. Southern relates:

I went straight to our little makeshift bar, where I had stashed a quart of Wild Turkey specifically for the occasion, which I was ballpark certain would meet his requirements.

“Do you reckon it’s too early for a drink, Slim?” I asked. He guffawed, then shook his head and crinkled his nose, as he always did when about to put someone on. “Wal, you know ah think it was just this mornin’ that I was tryin’ to figure out if and when ah ever think it was too early fer a drink, an’ damned if ah didn’t come up bone dry! Hee-hee-hee!”

In the second version, Kubrick calls in Southern to break the ice and serve as interpreter.

When [Slim] got to the studio, Stanley, who was in the middle of directing a scene, broke off, and called me over. “Listen,” he said, “Slim Pickens is here, and nobody can understand him. You’re from Texas, you go and talk to him. Ask him if his hotel room is okay, and all that.”

….Slim was wearing his boots and his Stetson hat. He grinned and lumbered towards me. “Mighty glad to know ya!” We shook hands and I fished out a bottle of Wild Turkey I had stashed for the occasion. “Wal, Slim,” I said, reverting to the drawl of my youth, “you don’t reckon it’s too early for a drink, do you?” It was about ten A.M. “Well, hell no,” he said with conviction, “ah can’t recall it ever being too early for a drink of Turkey!” So I poured us out a few fingers each in two water glasses, and then I asked him about his room. He had a big swig of Turkey, swishing it around like mouthwash. “Ah, hell yeah,” he said, wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve, “it’s like this Okie friend of mine says, ‘Ah don’t need much,—jest a pair of loose-fittin’ shoes, some tight pussy, an’ a warm place to shit, an’ ah’ll be all right!’ Hee-hee-hee!”

(Both versions recounted in Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950-1995. ©2001, Grove Press.)

I think I was late to the party where dryer brushes were concerned. If I noticed them at all, they were just another electronic hair-styling gimmick, lost in a thicket of hairdryers and straightening irons and curling wands.

I bought a great big wand-thing, like a light saber, about 5 years ago; never used it. My only go-to electrical device was a very reliable (and cheap, like $20) Conair dryer, every bit as good as what you get at the gym or salon.

For years I never had to think much about these things because it was easy for me to drop a couple hundred with my hair stylist every month, and no one could cut, color, or blowout like her. But now she’s gone, and I’m poor.

As seen at the gym.

Moving on, though, I have now acquired a dryer brush. This happened inadvertently. I was potted one night around New Year’s, and while I was trying to make sense of some news blog, there it was in front of me, in some interstitial ad from Amazon. It was a good-looking device and was apparently on sale.

What it was, was football. No, seriously, it was the basic Revlon model dryer-brush. But I didn’t even notice the brand or type. I just ordered it on impulse and then forgot about it for two weeks, till a huge box arrived. I mean, big enough for shipping a piece of stereo equipment in the olden days.

The device is huge, twice the size I expected. Think of a big round styling brush, and now double that and give it a big thick handle and the heft of a small Louisville Slugger.

I finally tried it out in front of the mirrors at the gym today. I am very impressed, and may never go back to the old blow-out dryers again. These doohickeys completely eliminate the need to section-part with a brush held in one hand, while you awkwardly hold the hair dryer with the other.

This one has four settings: Off, Low, High, and Cold. The Low is what’s usually called Warm on standard dryers. The Low was quite sufficient for most drying. I chopped off six inches a few weeks ago because I can’t deal with unruly below-shoulder-length hair. But I’m old, y’know.

Now I’m noticing that, like Barbie, these drying brushes have all sorts of accessories. The main one is a rigid rectangular case with zipper and pockets, big enough for your regular comb and brush and hair clips and other implements of destruction. In online reviews I see people are storing makeup in there, too. Goodbye, soft makeup cases!

I find the whole idea irresistible and will probably order one this week.

Sotheby’s sales for 2021 surpass $7.3bn, the highest total in company history, reports theartnewspaper.com.

Proving once again that Art is Bigger Than Ever!

In part, the eBay syndrome seems to be at work: people will gladly bid twice as much online for a piece they’d scarcely look at in real life. Nevertheless, only a piddling $800 million in sales were done online.

Why pay more online? Who knows?

Quoth the article:

As the tail end of a second year governed by a global pandemic turns the corner and a new year hopefully less constricted by Covid-19 approaches, Sotheby’s total sales for 2021 have reached $7.3bn, the highest in the company’s 277-year history, and more than 68% higher than last year’s total sales for the same period, which topped out at $5bn. And the auction house has 20-odd sales still to go.

Like many people, Bruce Chatwin worked for Sotheby’s in his early life.

The landmark year shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. The Covid-19 pandemic upended nearly every tradition and convention in the art market, from the art fair calendar to how galleries sell art online. The auction houses were no exception. The inability to travel combined with a younger generation of well-heeled collectors who are new to the market, have a fondness for viewing things digitally and are keen to speculate meant the auction house was able to capitalise on the digital infrastructure they built out in 2020.

Read the whole thing, if you dare.

From The Art Newspaper:

Rembrandt’s preliminary sketch for The Night Watch (1642) has been discovered beneath the surface of the paint, using the latest scientific techniques. Conservators at the Rijksmuseum have also determined the worrying extent of a rippling deformation of the canvas, which was caused when the picture was moved during building work in 2003-13. This will now require urgent treatment.

Deems Taylor

The Night Watch, the most important painting from the Netherlands, has been investigated by a 30-strong team at the Amsterdam museum during the past two and a half years.

The discovery of Rembrandt’s original painted sketch was announced this morning at the Rijksmuseum.

Read the rest.

In Qatar, of all places.

“The exhibition title is borrowed from a 1985 American satirical comedy film of the same name directed by Albert Brooks, about a 1980s yuppie couple in Los Angeles who are disgruntled by their bourgeois lifestyle. Koons wants viewers to draw their own interpretations of that title, as well as the intention or meaning of the works.”

As seen in Forbes.

ASK THE DOCTOR

with Ferenc Molmar, MD

Q. Dear Dr. Molmar, We have neighbors who often punish or discipline their children by chaining them up in a dark basement with dishes of dog food and water. It’s canned dog food, I believe, though sometimes they also get kibble. I’ve heard of old people taking a fancy to cat food, which is understandable since that’s often a sort of low-grade tunafish (to judge by the smell), but dog food has me wondering. We were always told not to feed dogs chocolate or garlic because it might kill them, but I’m wondering if perhaps the reverse is also true: don’t feed people Gravy Train because it will make them sick?

Incidentally, these kids do look pretty sick much of the time, all hollow-eyed and tired-looking, at least on those few occasions I’ve seen them out and about. What’s your take on all this?
“CONCERNED NEIGHBOR”

Dr Molmar

A. My dear CONCERNED, I am not a veterinarian but I suspect this is a common question. Dog food and cat food are sort of like paint chips: sooner or later stupid kids will try to eat the stuff. If it were truly toxic, we’d have all these accounts of three-year-olds rushed to Emergency after finishing off the doggie dish. In the old days they put all kinds of offal into dog food (you’ve heard of “meat by-products”), like horse intestines and pig brain, but my guess is the stuff is pretty safe now.

I suppose if the kids are getting fresh water in the water dish they should make it through. But a dank basement will breed mildew and lots of pathogens. If the parents are like neglectful dog owners I’ve seen, the water dish is probably a rusty old pie pan and they only change it every two or three days. So that’s something I’d watch out for. If you’re wondering whether you should get involved and “report them to the authorities” then I recommend holding off. Tales of child abuse are pitiable and unfortunate, but so long as there’s no sex perversion involved you might not want to stir up trouble.

Ever since they removed the British Library from the British Museum, the Museum’s two biggest attractions are the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles. Maybe the Stone and Marbles have always been the biggest attractions these past hundred, two hundred, whatever years. I mean apart from traveling exhibitions of King Tut’s knickknacks and terra-cotta Chinese soldiers, and such like.

Dickens in the Room

Though personally I favored the old Library’s main Reading Room, with its raised circular daïs (famously helmed by Angus Wilson in the 1940s and 50s) and its ghosts of scribblers past (Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Colin Wilson). I don’t know where I’m going with this, except I want to say it always gets my goat when I see people whining about how London shouldn’t have the Marbles because they really belong to “Greece.” Yeah, right! The Greece of 2500 years ago, maybe. Not the hybridized Balkan-Turk polity that exists today.

If Lord Elgin or whoever it was hadn’t carted them off to England, they’d have gone the way of most ancient Greek treasures, with their heads and arms cut off, or full of bullet holes.

Racy Marbles?

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about (a common problem once I  get going), the Elgin Marbles are these sculptures that once decorated the cornice, or pediment or whatever it’s called, of the Parthenon. You know, the triangular part that sits on top of the pillars. I’ll try to find a picture. They’re not particularly astounding as sculptures, mind you, but the fact that they really are part of the Parthenon makes them interesting, and accounts for all the tiswas that people get into when they imagine they should be shipped back to Athens, because . . . well, just because.

Here’s a typical miseryguts article along those lines in the Grauniad. How pathetic. “As a Briton I hang my head in shame,” oh boo hoo.

Here we are. Why modern Greeks can’t have nice things. If you want to see what the Parthenon should look like, you have to go to Nashville.

The obvious solution, it seems to me, would be to ship the Parthenon, maybe complete with Acropolis, to London.  I wouldn’t be adverse to moving it stateside, maybe Lake Havasu. You know, like London Bridge. But then we have the problem of getting the British Museum to give up the Elgin Marbles, and so we’re back to where we started. Perhaps we could compromise on someplace in between. Legoland maybe.

Another interesting thing about the Marbles is that originally they were painted. Still a little paint left on the Marbles, if you look closely. The Greeks painted their statues, you know. All these modern sculptors—Saint-Gaudens, Rodin, Epstein, Moore—think they’re being really classical with all-white or all-bronze figures. But if they really wanted to do the Praxiteles thing they should splash a nice coat of paint on their work. Then again, maybe they can’t paint, and maybe that’s the real issue.

Anyhow, that’s your art history lesson for the day. For extra credit you can read this really nice detailed history of the Marbles that was recently “published” in ArtNews.

Sotheby’s, the auction house formerly known as Sotheby Parke Bernet, and before that as Sotheby’s, is testing out art sales with cryptocurrency. Just to see how it goes, they’re starting off with some Banksy crap.

Bitcoin and Ethereum seem to be the Coins of the Realm at the moment, but no doubt Dogecoin and Monero will get a look-in if all works out properly.

You can read about it all here:

You Can Buy a Banksy With Bitcoin or Ethereum From Sotheby’s

The street art icon’s “Love is in the Air” will be the first physical artwork sold by an auction house with the option to pay in cryptocurrency.

In the meantime, have you considered buying art from Gallery News? We also take Bitcoin and Ethereum. Right now have secured a supply of Diego Rivera prints, specifically his renowned “Glorious Victory,” complete with lascivious caricatures of the Dulles brothers, anti-communist guerrillas and Ike Eisenhower drawn on a bomb. It all has something to do with Guatemala in 1954. Look at this beautiful work of art:

And now, if you send us $20 or more in crypto or PayPal cash (see right rail) we can send you one of these stunning reproductions, postpaid! Our copies measure 11″ x 6″ which makes them suitable for framing. We trimmed a little off the edges, but nothing essential.

Be sure to send us your physical mailing address, since these will not fit in our ethernet cable. You can include that when you send us your crypto or (PayPal) cash. For more information, contact our shipping clerk, P J Collins: pjcollins@gallerynews.com.

A list of the 101 most important painters of the history of Western Painting, from 13th century to 21st century

Havin’ me on again, eh?

In my life I think I’ve enjoyed exactly two exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, and both were traveling shows for Grant Wood. Otherwise the Whitney was enjoyable mainly for its Permanent Collection, full of familiar figurative paintings by the likes of George Tooker and Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton. Also one or two Gerald Murphy collages, which don’t seem to be on display anymore, according to the website.

Looking through the list of Events and Exhibitions, I gather that the Whitney currently specializes in a) chaotic smudges, and b) photographs of negroes.

It should be recalled that the primary purpose of the Whitney was never to display or warehouse art, in the manner of the Metropolitan Museum or the Musée d’Orsay. No, the Whitney functioned primarily as a meeting point. Kids would come home from prep school or college for the holidays, and the Whitney Museum at Madison Avenue and 74th Street was a convenient, centrally located venue.

The Met wasn’t any good for that because it was too damn big. With the Whitney, you could just say, we’ll meet at the Calder Circus in the lobby at noon, and nobody got lost.

But that was then. For some reason the Whitney organization decided it had to move to a vast, brutalist-modern box in the Meat Market neighborhood. Because the Meat Market was now Artsy-hip Central, and the new Whitney would be hard by the High Line, the pedestrian promenade that used to be an elevated freight railroad. Perfectly understandable, but as a result the museum is no longer a meeting point. It’s a destination that’s rather difficult to get to even if you’re coming from Chelsea or the Village. (The old Whitney is now a annex of the Met.)

As a colossal mistake, the new Whitney resembles that other showy development on the West Side, the Hudson Yards. A couple of years ago we saw the opening of the world’s biggest and glitziest shopping mall (“The Shops at Hudson Yards”), 7 storeys of upscale chain stores and overpriced restaurants and gin joints. The trouble was, it was difficult to get to, mainly dependent on a new subway terminus that had just opened at 34th Street and 11th Avenue. The neighborhood was historically a dismal spread of warehouses and stables, slaughterhouses and trolley barns. Not a residential neighborhood at all. So even though the Hudson Yards developers were erecting thousands of new apartments and multi-million-dollar condos, the area wouldn’t be an established, stable residential neighborhood for another five or ten years.

And then, before the shopping mall had been open for a year, the Covid-19 lockdown began, and the public had even more reasons to stay away. Retail tenants closed and canceled leases right and left. “Eerily deserted,” said the New York Times. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

There is an upside to all this, but it’s going to be a long time coming. At the end of a era of overdevelopment and senseless expansion, the weakest members of the herd get sick and die off. Projects go bankrupt, while investors and residents refocus their attention on safe investments in tried-and-true localities. Exactly how this can benefit the Whitney is puzzle, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the directors attempt to buy their old building back from Met, and unload their crazy Big Box on a Greater Fool. Why not The New School?