In The Wall Street Journal this week, I interviewed actress Bryce Dallas Howard for my "House Call" column in the Mansion section (go here). The oldest daughter of director of Ron Howard talked about growing up in Greenwich, Conn., and taking long walks in the woods behind her house as a child. She plays young Elton John's mother in the new biopic, Rocketman. [Photo above of Bryce Dallas Howard courtesy of Bryce Dallas Howard]
Here's Bryce in Rocketman...
And here's the movie trailer...
Let's do things a little different this weekend.
Here's an excellent documentary on abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock...
Here's a documentary on the Farnsworth House (1951) in Plano, Ill. The house is architect Mies van der Rohe's residential masterpiece. In 2011, I was one of only a handful of people who have been allowed to spend the night in the glass house for a Wall Street Journal essay (go here). It was an amazing night and a blissful sleep...
Here's Part 2...
And here's Part 3...
And here's a BBC documentary on cool jazz...
All three of the movements above—cool jazz, modern architecture and abstract expressionism—had a common bond. All came out of the same ethos—a postwar desire to detach and create a distinctly American esthetic free from the stuffiness of European formality. The early 1950s in America, particularly in New York, was a period of artistic individualism and poetic minimalism. The result was music, architecture and design that was daring and sexy in its simplicity. By mid-decade, cool would give way to conformity as prefabrication, large-circulation magazines and advertising promoted an American norm that was driven by consumerism status, and stifled the next generation. They'd exact their revenge in the 1960s.
