Posts tagged “art shay”
-
Art Shay on photographing Simone de Beauvoir
January 26, 2010
From the article “Good Nudes From My Naughty World” by Art Shay, at Swans Commentary:
“It’s quite a rear,” The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik gushed. “The picture was taken in 1950 by, of all people, an American — the photographer Art Shay — in, of all places, Chicago, where Beauvoir was canoodling bilingually with Nelson Algren.”
To be singled out by The New Yorker as one “of all people, an American” who shot the picture in “of all places, Chicago” makes me feel like Ingrid Bergman stumbling upon Humphrey Bogart who as Rick says, “of all the gin joints in all the towns of the world, she walks into mine” while Dooley Wilson tinkles out “As Time Goes By” on the pleasantly off-key piano.
Tags: art shay, articles, nelson algren, photography, simone de beauvoir
-
Art Shay reviews Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”
September 8, 2009
Some big Swans fans don’t like the past joy I’ve taken in killing Nazi fliers in the real war. Next month I’ll be at the head table of a reunion of 9 survivors of the infamous Kassel mission — 35 B-24s went out, 4 of us returned. . . Ira goes back to Germany every two years and has dinner with the German Luftwaffe crews who shot him down that fatal day. (Farmers forced him to bury five of his crew members who couldn’t get out of their burning Lib fast enough.) I could never bring myself to break bread with these people, even though they vas obeying orders, as was I. My play, Where Have You Gone, Jimmy Stewart? (Jimmy was my Squadron commander), which ran in Chicago three years ago, made that point to great applause. As somebody on Swans has reminded me, all war is immoral. — from Art Shay’s review, “Sick Glourious Basterds”, at Swans.com
Tags: art shay, chicago's nelson algren, quentin tarantino, reviews, swans.com
-
An Art Shay eulogy in verse for Robert McNamara
August 25, 2009
“He was shaving when the president called,” Margaret McNamara said, letting me and
my Times photo gear into their Birmingham, Michigan, livingroom.
“We were drinking Martinis. Do you want one while you’re setting up?
I know you met him at Ford in 1953. He loves the book you did and your
picture of him in Fortune. That’s why he took your call. You said the magic
word — Ford.” Sitting next to the warm fluttering lady whose life was about
to transfer to Washington forever (to do much for needy children, as it turned out) I
sweated cold for no discernible reason. I mindlessly thought the arcane word: doom.I would be right, eventually, because this precise moment in this precise man’s precise
life, far from anything I’d precisely learned going to war instead of college
would be the infant step leading to McNamara’s ultimate march of 56,000 kids like yours and
mine to death. So much for taking violent evasive action based on prescient knowledge. . .
— from Art Shay’s Snapshot of a Strange (Love?) Before His Time, at swans.com
Tags: art shay, art/photography, Authors, chicago's nelson algren, poetry, swans.com
-
The LA Times on the legacy of Nelson Algren
April 28, 2009
Art Shay… took the most iconic shots of the author, black-and-whites of him playing poker or peering through barroom windows, pictures so gritty you can almost feel the dirt rise off the frame. These photos, as much as anything, are responsible for Algren’s image as “the poet of the Chicago slums,” yet they also cast him in amber: a midcentury figure, smoking a cigar, eyebrows raised behind round glasses, turning over another card. Sixty years after winning the first National Book Award, for his 1949 novel of addiction, “The Man With the Golden Arm,” Algren has become vestigial enough that discussions of a national celebration were scaled back after, as [executive director of the National Book Foundation Harold] Augenbraum notes in an e-mail, “we concluded that though his writing continued to resonate, the number of his readers and his currency among the general reading public had diminished.”
So what, exactly, is Algren’s legacy? That’s the question the Steppenwolf event means to raise. —David Ulin at the LA Times
Tags: art shay, articles, barry gifford, Dan Simon, david ulin, don delillo, man with the golden arm, nelson algren, nelson algren live, neon wilderness, never come morning, russell banks, steppenwolf
-
Nelson Algren Live: 100th Birthday Celebration at the Steppenwolf Theatre
April 6, 2009
April 6 at 7:00 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St., Chicago, IL 60614. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased from the Steppenwolf Theatre web site, or by calling the box office at 312-335-1650.
Nelson Algren Live will feature readings from…
Tags: art shay, Authors, barry gifford, Dan Simon, entrapment, nelson algren, readings, russell banks, steppenwolf theatre
-
Willem Dafoe at Nelson Algren Live
April 1, 2009
What’s the most exciting event taking place in Chicago on April 6th? According to Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune, Barbara Vitello of the Daily Herald, and Rob Christopher of the Chicagoist, there’s only one answer: Nelson Algren Live at the Steppenwolf Theatre. And, as Chris Jones mentions, Willem Dafoe is now among the performers reading selections from Algren’s work, along with Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon and authors Barry Gifford, Don DeLillo and Russell Banks.
Tags: art shay, barry gifford, chicago, Dan Simon, don delillo, nelson algren, nelson algren live, readings, russell banks, steppenwolf, willem dafoe
-
Art Shay on George Bernard Shaw, amateur photographers
March 24, 2009
Once a month it is my fate to receive in the mail at least one 11×14-inch envelope crammed full of some amateur photographer’s black and white prints. Now that digital is here, color has been added. Typical letter: “I don’t know if you remember me. I was at your recent gallery opening — you posed for my Leica and the print is enclosed — I can Photoshop your chin if you want me to…I recently have returned from a trip to my mother-in-law, who lives in Washington, DC. As you can see from my pictures, I spent a lot of time trying to get the Washington Monument into the same picture as the Lincoln statue. Do you think I have what it takes to go on and become a photographer for National Geographic, where I could combine my love for traveling with my newly discovered interest in photography? … ” The main trouble with his pictures was that Martin Luther King and 200,000 others were absent from the frames. Also, for a buck you could have bought better postcards.
Tags: art shay, articles, chicago's nelson algren, george bernard shaw, swans
-
Art Shay interviewed on Chicago Public Radio
March 17, 2009
Art Shay, author and photographer of Chicago’s Nelson Algren, was interviewed Monday on Chicago public radio’s Eight Forty-Eight program.
Tags: art shay, chicago, interviews, nelson algren, radio, video
