Carl Reiner 1922-2020

Milton Glaser 1929-2020

The great designer, illustrator, artist has passed. When I was a late teen and looking for job in advertising and graphic design. I brazenly left my portfolio with Push Pin. I got a call to come up and meet with Milton and Seymour Chawst. Both were very nice and encouraging to this hungry ambitious teen, but of course they didn't hire me. My portfolio which I still have is an 8" x 5" sketchbook that I filled with collage, photos and ads. It always got me in for interviews and a few jobs.

Joel Schumacher 1939-2020

Rear Window 1954

This thriller by the great movie maker Alfred Hitchcock is everybody’s urban nightmare,  being trapped alone in a tiny apartment during a summer heat wave with a broken leg and no ac or have I got an apartment for you. James Stewart in middle age mode plays the entire movie in a wheel chair nursing a broken leg received in a racing car accident. No he wasn’t driving he was photographing it and we can imagine how bad it was by his smashed camera and his leg in a cast. We see  personal details that Hitchcock introduces us to as clues to his career and life. This is done in a long opening pan of his apartment and beautifully tells us who Stewart is without any dialog just images of his belongs. A pile of Life Magazine’s with a photo of his on the cover, the original negative sits nearby in a frame, that busted camera, and other personal items that let us know that Stewart is a well established photo journalist who is caught napping by us in the hot 94 degree heat of a New York City summer.


The cramped cluttered apartment’s bamboo curtains are raised as if they were theatre curtains (this metaphor is also used in the opening credits) and we are about to see a play. The first act begins and the movie audience and Stewart can see into the various windows of his neighbors across the courtyard from his apartment, which is located in Greenwich Village. At first its just casual voyeurism he’s bored, but soon it develops into more serious peeping with Stewart using high powered binoculars to spy on a group of various typical and ordinary big city dwellers as they go about their everyday lives. A composer sweats over a composition as Hitchcock in his cameo winds a clock in the musician’s studio, a female dancer stretches and moves, a lonely women fantasizes about a gentleman caller, a husband and wife argue, young newlyweds move in and Stewart stares through his binoculars at these stereotypical New Yorkers sharing what he sees with us.  African Americans and Gays are nowhere to be seen even though it’s the village, but it is also America in the early 50’s so they are invisible. Popular songs of the day are heard, and played from radios and record players along with music waffling out from the composers studio amid the usual busy noises of a big city.

The main focus of the film and Stewart’s attention will be on the arguing husband and wife as he gets massages and wisecracks from his visiting nurse played with her usual comedic flair by the great Thelma Ritter We also meet his lady love in a remarkable dreamlike close up as she slowly comes in focus and plants a kiss on her sleeping prince. This may be one of the most sexually charged moments in American film, at least for the conservative 50’s besides being one of the most breathtaking. The lady is also breathtakingly beautiful. Grace Kelly who in her third film of the year and on her way to an Oscar plays a top notch high society fashion executive consultant who is herself a one woman fashion show decked out in beautiful Edith Head clothes and is a nice sidebar to the film.

Her relationship with Stewart is rocky, she wants to marry him, but he is hesitant and even distant with her, and their relationship mirrors a few of the relationships seen and heard floating over the courtyard and through his window and binoculars.  The other star of the film is the set, a remarkable fake exterior of what Hollywood thought a Greenwich Village dwelling would look like. It’s like a big slice of cake, with all its layers exposed for us to look into. We get a little glimpse of the street but everything important takes place in Stewart’s apartment and what he sees from his rear window. From inside his cramped apartment to the outside and back inside it’s a remarkable achievement of art direction, cinematography and of course direction. The crux of the film is a murder that Stewart believes was committed by one of his rear window neighbors and at first he has trouble convincing us, Kelly, Ritter and most of all his old war time buddy now a detective played by the dependable but dull Wendell Corey of his theory that a murder may have happened.  Needless to say they eventually come around to his theory and his convincing them is also part of the fun of this marvelous movie. There is plenty of cat and mouse especially during the last part of the movie along with the murder of a pet, a lit cigarette glowing in the interior of a dark apartment, a scream and a crash,  some welcomed humor mostly supplied by Thelma, and beautiful camera dissolves from a soaking fast summer rain storm to a sleeping Stewart in his chair who misses an important clue that is known to us.   The screenplay by John Michael Hayes is based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich that I recall from my reading of it years ago is sparse and not as rich and full as his screenplay and the film is. Pivotal characters are missing. The movie can also be seen as a horror film especially in last minutes of the final act, when the villain can also be seen as a monster, especially to a 7 year old which was how old I was when I first saw it a my neighborhood Loew’s.  So in the end the heat wave breaks, a killer is caught and life with some changes in the apartments across the courtyard goes on. Nominated for only four Oscars, director, screenplay, cinematography,  and sound recording it should have been nominated for many more. One of the ten best films of the year.

Ian Holm 1931-2020

The great actor Ian Holm has passed, but Donald Trump still walks this earth. Unfair

Work on paper June 2020

New work. Clay and mixed on paper June 2020

Perfect viewing for hot summer nights. Queer Eye and Hoarders.

Believe it or not both shows have a lot in common, and I've been watching one episode of each show per night on Netflix. I've known many queer eyes and a few hoarders and I haven't decided yet which are the scariest. As a book dealer I've been to a few hoarder nests and what they have in common is a lack of electricity or the ability to cook for themselves since the kitchens are long gone. I visited one mail artist some years ago because he wanted to sell me some stuff. Never mind it was pitch black in his creepy joint and I got out of there real fast when things on the floor started to move towards me.When I got home and looked at what I bought most had water damage. A common thing I've noticed with hoarders in NY is they collect the Sunday Times which they never read, and they just pile up and they usually have a bicycle somewhere in their mess that they never ride. The bathrooms are bio hazard sites and no doubt a cure for corona can be found by scraping their toilets or bathtubs. Most of the hoarders I knew were borderline cases, on the border of planet debbie and no man's land. I'm not talking about messy artist studios here, all artists are pigs under the canvas, can't be helped but the ones who are dangerous and this show presents them in all their misery. The most famous hoarders from our city were of course the adorable Collier Brothers who were actually buried under their trash in their uptown brownstone in the 1940's. My upstairs neighbor a nice old Irish lady was a hoarder she lived in the apartment without lights no stove and clutter everywhere. I was worried about a fire. They finally put her in a home and her nephew asked me if I wanted anything, well sure, except it was pitch dark in her place and they were cleaning everything out the next day so I passed. I have enough of my own stuff. I'm not a hoarder and after watching an episode I frantically jump up off the couch and start cleaning. There isn't much I can throw out. Well I guess I can dump all my art. Hoarders are not collectors they just hoard without an eye for collecting the good from the bad. I mean the few shows I've seen have been beyond shocking, you can almost smell the rot. Each show is basically the same, they seem to take place in the mid west or out in washington state and they follow a certain style and formula, including a shrink always on call and family members who look like refugees from a worn torn country. They look shell shocked. I always watch with my queer eye hoping to see something I would like, or that Linda, or Mary or Hal should save for what I don't know. I would love to see a show or two focusing on urban hoarders.

New work on paper June 2020

Oddball Magazine June 2020

https://oddballmagazine.com/poem-by-jordyn-king/

Bruce Jay Friedman 1930-2020

Anthony James 1942-2020