Word: daly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Shameful Life of Salvador Dali--such was the title given to the 1997 book by Dali's most formidable biographer, Ian Gibson. It's a perfect title, because it drives home two nails at once. First, lovers of modernism have long regarded Dali (1904-1989), the obsessive and boasting narcissist from Catalonia, as a sort of mock-deranged but authentically disgraceful relative. Few could doubt the power and originality of his early work--up to, say, the Spanish Civil War. Equally, few would give the least credence to the recycling of old themes that he did, mainly for the American...
...Second, Dali was disgraceful because he was so confessional--and so untrustworthy. Perhaps no artist in history has told his viewers more about his secret life; certainly none invented more about it. It still seems pretty weird, that inventory of impotence and aggression, of bizarre terrors and fetishes. But in the '20s and '30s it was beyond mere weirdness. Dali must have enjoyed the worst relations with his father of anyone else since little Oedipus. In 1930 his parent wrote a frantic letter to Dali's friend, film director Luis Bunuel, begging him to prevent the artist's coming anywhere...
...Symphony; Dvorak's Ninth; even Beethoven's Ninth. Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini had a nifty concept (a nightmare and a dream struggling for a sleeping child's soul), but it fell through, as did the revival of a segment prepared in the '40s by Salvador Dali; a few clips from it are shown...
...various heads came together to show how an animated feature could be hip, visually fecund and (remember?) psychedelic. Four writers, including Love Story's Erich Segal, invented bizarre universes for the Beatles to stroll through, and designer Heinz Edelmann dreamed up creatures whose beguiling oddness suggests a collision of Dali and Dr. Seuss. Seen now, in a long-overdue video release, the film registers as an obvious inspiration for Sesame Street, Monty Python and MTV, and is a delight on its own. Thirty-one years on, nothing in feature animation has matched its endless, exhausting inventiveness...
...later, in the gallery, that I found out what he meant. I had mistakenly thought, after seeing a de Kooning, a Dali and a Pollock in the greeting room, that the gallery would be a small museum. It turns out it's an endless hallway filled with pictures of Hef and his Playboy guests. Many of the recent shots were of young stars making the pilgrimage: Leo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Jim Carrey, Courtney Love. But in most of the new pictures, Hef is flanked by a pair of twins, Mandy and Sandy Bentley, who, I was told, "are his girlfriend...