Word: walrusness
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Died. Chester Conklin, 85, silent-screen zany known to a generation of filmgoers as the Keystone Kop with the walrus mustache; of emphysema; in Hollywood. He went to work for Mack Sennett in 1913 and was soon thriving on pratfalls and pies in the face. While at the top, he earned $3,500 a week appearing in scores of films, including Tillie's Punctured Romance, The Pullman Bride and Modern Times. "Moviemaking was great fun then," recalled Conklin. "A picture consisted of a lot of chases and a plot that was tacked on when we finished shooting...
Newman's whole bearing suggested a seignioral poise-the big square head thrust forward, the snowy walrus mustache, the steel-rimmed monocle dangling on a black ribbon that neatly bisected his shirt front, vertical black on white, like a detail from one of his own pictures. This was fitting; when he died last year at 65, he left a body of work that seemed the epitome of aristocratic breadth and daring. Newman's canvases, with their engulfing fields of color traversed by vertical "zips," had become intrinsic to the look of American painting. Artists as diverse...
Final Tragedy. Over the whole story broods Houston's larger protagonist: nature in the Arctic, the violent rhythm of storms and seasons. There is an almost Homeric hunt for walrus, and a winter dance of exquisite magic and sexuality. Eventually a moment comes in the long winter when the whalers, ugly but not serious, threaten an Eskimo with knives. In his code, it is a disastrous challenge: he must either kill the kalunait or exile himself. "But killing men was not our custom," says Avinga, "and it had not been done in living memory." With no reasonable solution possible...
...Manhattan art gathering really got off the ground until the courtly figure with the walrus mustache and steel-rimmed monocle appeared and someone announced, as someone always did, "Barney's here." Barney was Barnett Newman, abstract painter, self-proclaimed anarchist, celebrated raconteur, the compleat iconoclast. Before his death in Manhattan this month at the age of 65, he provided the most obvious visual link between the generation that produced Abstract Expressionism and the generation that turned to minimal and color-field painting...
...shirted, slightly flabby guy with shoulder-length blond hair and a floppy walrus mustache stood up from the group and stepped to the podium. After a couple of words of non-introduction, he began to read poems from a sheath of white paper. I assumed he was Richard Brautigan. He ranks very high on the list of characters that least remind me of Robert Lowell...