Latest news with #TheSwimmer
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Playwright Noel Coward's $10.3 Million Former Connecticut Estate Overlooks the Long Island Sound
A Connecticut estate with ties to film and theater royalty has just hit the market for $10.3 million. Dubbed Pebbles, the Fairfield property was designed in 1927 by the architect Francis Hamilton. Later on, the English playwright Noël Coward and his partner John C. Wilson, a Broadway producer, owned the stately spread, and over the years, several stars of screen and stage used Pebbles as a summer getaway, including Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, and Richard Rodgers. Wendy Ryan and Andrew Whiteley at Brown Harris Stevens hold the listing. More from Robb Report BMW Just Unveiled the Most Powerful Rear-Wheel Drive M Car Yet An L.A. Home With Ties to Leonardo DiCaprio and Adrian Grenier Can Now Be Yours for $25 Million Here's How You Can Attend the Premiere of Brad Pitt's 'F1' Movie The six-bedroom, nine-bath Georgian Revival mansion sits on almost three acres with views of the Long Island Sound and Manhattan skyline. Over the years, it's been both carefully maintained and updated by a lineage of owners, meaning that classic details are paired with modern-day features. Off the foyer are both a formal living room and a more casual family room, both with wood-burning fireplaces. The large eat-in kitchen is done up with stark white cabinetry, while the adjacent dining area is surrounded by picture windows that look out toward the water. The bedrooms are all located upstairs, with yet another fireplace found in the primary suite. Here, you can also relax in the bathroom's soaking tub or kick back in the private lounge. The home's basement level, meanwhile, has been turned into a rec room, offering plenty of space for children or adults to play. Out back, ample green space surrounds the pool, which can be seen in the 1968 film The Swimmer, starring Burt Lancaster. A couple of garden plots are scattered around. One is centered around a fountain, while another has more of a southwestern, desert vibe. Manicured hedges line the walkways and the perimeter of the lot. A little more than 50 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, Fairfield has long been a favored commuter suburb of New York City. With easy access to both nature and the beach, it offers the best of the city and country. The town is also known for some pretty spectacular homes. To wit: a $7 million mansion inspired by the Vanderbilt family's Shelburne Farms estate in Vermont and built by architect Jack Franzen for the late businessman Mickey of Robb Report The 10 Priciest Neighborhoods in America (And How They Got to Be That Way) In Pictures: Most Expensive Properties Click here to read the full article.
Los Angeles Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
My father photographed David Hockney and his mother in the ‘80s. It's an image I haven't stopped thinking about
I ask my students: What would an essay be like if it were structured like a grid? What would it be like to structure it as a lopsided, organic shape? I am teaching a class called 'On Collage.' Every time I do, we make a new center of gravity for the course together. One or two students will explain collage each week, introducing a collage or an artist, but first I offer my own version: a slideshow I have no notes for. Depending on the way I've prepared for class that week, I'll compose a narrative about the slides in a way that articulates what collage might offer us. The slideshow begins with a black-and-white photograph of a man with light hair, a cap and glasses standing behind a tall rattan chair where an older woman is seated. She smiles broadly, her chest puffed out like a robin in early spring. His face is a bit more fluid, untraceable, tucked into itself, echoed by the arm he holds across his body, drawing his striped tie askew. His glasses hold a reflection that must include the photographer, but when I zoom in, the shadow and light become a bunch of shapes, and I get distracted by an unsettling look in the man's eyes, which have an air of surprise or warning. His ears are quotation marks. His mouth is as close as a mouth can come to a sideways question mark, punctuated by a cautious smile line. I've watched enough documentaries to know that this is as likely a response to the photographer as it is to the woman whose shoulder he is grasping with his other hand. David Hockney and his mother. In the 1980s, my father, Lester Sloan, was a photojournalist for Newsweek magazine assigned to photograph Hockney for a story about artists designing posters for the 1984 Olympics. Hockney made a poster of a swimmer underwater, captured through 12 Polaroid photographs arranged in a grid. Swimming figures ripple through Hockney's early paintings as if swimming from one frame to another. When I read from an essay that I wrote on Hockney's swimming pools once, two scholars wondered aloud about John Cheever's 'The Swimmer,' and I am often haunted by this moment, as if I should have known better than to write about swimming pools without reading more things great men had said about them. But what I notice now, looking literally over my shoulder as if I'll see the memory, is that the essay as a genre favors the unique thread of one person's associations. As Hockney puts it, 'We always see with memory. Seeing each person's memory is a bit different. We can't be looking at the same things, can we?' Art offers or asks us to sketch a thing that has moved through us too quickly to capture it completely. It should throw a shadow of chemical memory across our faces like the smell of chlorine. On the day he took this photograph, my father went to Hockney's California home, tucked into the Hollywood Hills. The artist wanted to show him the Polaroid collages — what he coined 'joiners' — he had begun to make. My father has recalled Hockney's sense of wonder at this new approach to artmaking so many times over the course of my life that I can see it — the sun-lit table on which Hockney laid those pieces. Hockney has said that he was so distracted by the joiners that he couldn't sleep at night. 'I used to get up in the middle of the night and sit and look at them to find out what I was doing,' he told Paul Joyce. He bought thousands of dollars' worth of film and roamed his own house in search of compositions. 'Time was appearing in the picture. And because of it, space, a bigger illusion of space.' Some of the photographs are arranged in a grid, though the dissonance between them — one square depicting a table from inches away, another from across the room — creates an ethereality, a wind within the frame. Some of the photographs are arranged freely, as if to follow the line of sight as it traces figures in a space — wind-scattered. Overlapping, stuttering, arcing upward. When I first asked my father about this day, he recalled the degree to which Hockney oriented toward his mother when he came to take this portrait. The painter was orbiting her, asking her thoughts on the conversation, nodding toward her with his body. At this point in the slide show, I show some frames from the film 'Blow-Up,' wherein a London photographer snaps some pictures of a couple kissing in the park. As he develops the film later, he tries to zoom in more and more on a particular frame. He realizes that there is a man with a gun in the bushes. There is, perhaps, at the heart of every composition, the door to a great mystery you might not even have realized you were bracketing. The Hockney joiner that most haunts me is called 'My Mother, Bolton Abbey.' This is not a grid but a scatter. The same woman my father met that afternoon is seated in a cemetery, and the Polaroids of her begin to spill downward, giving the whole frame a gravitational pull. Hockney's sister describes their mother in the documentary 'David Hockney: A Bigger Picture': 'She was a very great power. She had a very great emotional power that's a bit hard to describe. That pulled you in.' When I recently ask my father about the portrait he shot of Hockney and his mother, he begins to reminisce about his own late mother sitting on the porch of the house where he grew up. He recalls a man who would visit: 'I asked him once, 'What's the deal with you coming around here, hanging around my mother?' He said, 'You know, when I was in jail, my mother died, and they wouldn't let me out to come and see her. So I picked somebody to be a mother to me, and it was your mother.'' The image he took of Hockney has become a hall of mirrors, an entrance into the very notion of what a mother means. What it means to lose her. The next slide is a quotation by Roland Barthes about his own mother in 'Camera Lucida': 'I dream about her, I do not dream her. And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again.' In the first essay I wrote about collage, I talked about how they have an air of mistake. Like spilling something. Capturing the weird way that one moment is every moment, which is also death. Or as Hockney puts it in the 'The Bigger Picture,' 'It's now that's eternal, actually.' I am writing this while visiting Santa Monica, which exists through the collage of memory since I left years ago. The first thing I do when I get here is drive through my old neighborhood, hungry to see the way time and distance have warped the familiar contours of buildings and trees and streets that served as the entirety of my early childhood world. I enter into my old neighborhood with a fluttering in my periphery where new construction or paint camouflages lines and angles and patches of scenery until the unmistakability of my childhood street reveals itself. I look for the jade plant in front of our apartment building, whose leaves I would press with my thumbnail while waiting for my parents to come downstairs. I look for the grate that would make a cha-choonk sound as the car passed over it on the way into the garage, signaling home when I was a child asleep in the backseat. I weep my ugliest, snottiest cry at an awkward intersection, looking for the place where Blockbuster used to be, happy that the library is still there. Parsing which businesses remain. Which left turns are the way I left them, framed by the corner of a blue-gray building I can only see when I'm dreaming. Even though many of Hockney's joiners were taken in his own California home, they blur with our own family photographs. They are the slippage of places and people, the grief you can feel for the way someone's face was held by a particular slant of light only moments ago. If you tear yourself away from a place too quickly, the maw of memory will ask you to re-leave it over years and years. My students and I end the semester by reading a book where poems and essays and operas arrange themselves across the page like children on a preschool floor. Some cup, some rove, some cascade. Aisha Sabatini Sloan is an essayist and the author of four books, including 'Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit' and 'Captioning the Archives,' which she co-authored with her father, photographer Lester Sloan.
The Herald Scotland
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Yardworks Festival 2025: Where is it and what is on?
Yardworks is now one of Europe's leading festivals of street art and graffiti and is a vibrant, family-friendly celebration of colour, culture and collaboration with artists flying in from all over the world to take park. Visitors to the festival can expect to see plenty of well-known street artists take part with people such as Bacon from Canada who is known for his wildlife murals. Zurki, from Colombia and Spain as well as Portugal's Nuno Viegas, American Jeks and Belgium's Kitsune will also be involved. Glasgow's own Smug, who has produced murals such as Saint Mungo and The Swimmer, will also take part while Peachzz, who was recently voted the second best street artist in the world by StreetArt Cities will also be taking part. Read More Yardworks is part of Glasgow 850 this year and there will be work exploring Glasgow's street art heritage while the city's radical past is also spotlighted by College Workshops, inspired by suffragettes and protest art. Festival goers can also enjoy street food from some of Glasgow's top vendors including Nomad, Fries Guys, Dirty Bird, Loop & Scoop and more. Tickets for the event cost £16 for the weekend if you are an adult, £8 for a child and a family ticket for two adults and two kids over five is £35 while under fives go free.
Los Angeles Times
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘Your Friends & Neighbors,' Jon Hamm is back in Don Draper territory
In 'Your Friends and Neighbors,' premiering Friday on Apple TV+, Jon Hamm plays Andrew Cooper, called Coop, a well-paid, well-placed hedge fund trader who is fired from his job, ostensibly for violating a company policy about fraternization in the ranks. He has already lost his wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), whom he discovered in bed with his best friend, Nick (Mark Tallman), a three-time NBA champ. And he's not doing so well with his kids — Princeton-bound Tori (Isabel Gravitt), who plays tennis, and high school sophomore Hunter (Donovan Colan), who plays the drums. What they have in common is a failure to communicate. Coop and Mel and all their wealthy friends and neighbors live in an exclusive community somewhere in the commutable vicinity of New York City. To keep this entangled universe in balance, Coop is sleeping with Sam (Olivia Munn), whose husband has left her for a much younger model. One imagines that similar business goes on just beyond the bounds of this series. Though removed from the family — he's moved out of his big fancy house into an unfancy rental ('It's small, but don't worry, it's also depressing') — Coop is still supporting them in the style to which he worked for years to accustom them. ('When is it enough?' he wonders of their material advantages.) It doesn't help that he's keeping his firing a secret, that he can't find other work in his field and that his old boss Jack (Corbin Bernson) is sitting on money Coop regards as his (one would say rightly). But lying, its complications and consequences, is, after all, central to drama and comedy, which could not get along without characters who are reluctant to tell the truth. There is something old-fashioned about these folks and their power relations, including Coop's decision that he'd rather steal than admit he's out of work — toxic male insecurity. Mel gets a scene or two to show that she has a job, as a teen therapist, and one minor character is described as the best defense lawyer in New York, but the female characters — wives and ex-wives — come across for the most part as subordinate to and dependent upon men. Still, everybody, male and female, mostly just hangs out, at the horribly expensive country club, by the pool, on the links, on the tennis court, at the gym (Nick owns one), at yoga, at self-defense class and at numerous parties — which is not to say they're having any fun. At one of these parties, with the guests outside, Coop goes rooting around his host's house. He comes upon a cache of expensive watches and pockets an extremely valuable one, a practice he'll repeat in other houses, with their 'piles of forgotten wealth lying around in drawers doing no one any good.' (He is developing a jaundiced view of luxury items.) At this point the series feels as if it might be heading into John Cheever territory — something like his short story 'The Swimmer,' about a man crossing Westchester County by way of his neighbors' pools, but with robbery. A habit becomes a sort of livelihood, as Coop turns his loot into cash. This brings him into contact with some dangerous characters, at which point 'Breaking Bad' seems the relevant comparison. There's a sense in which the situation is out of his control, but, he admits to the viewer, 'Maybe I was just liking it.' Ensuring that you won't have to work out any of the series' themes for yourself, narrator Coop sounds a little like Joan Didion. 'Out here, scotch was like a f—ing religion; every time someone poured you a drink they'd have to give a f—ing Ted Talk about the scotch, and then someone would inevitably chime in about some bottle they once had you couldn't get anymore and blah blah. I think at some point it just started to dawn on everyone that this was it; these houses, these wives, these jobs, this would be the sum total of their lives. Their futures were already written, and so the quest to stave off the emptiness began; scotch, cigars, smoked meats, custom golf clubs, high-end escorts, entire industries built to cash in on the quiet desperation of rich middle-aged men.' As has become too common practice, 'Your Friends and Neighbors' opens with an exciting scene of crisis before shifting back in time to show how we get there. Like a little show called 'The White Lotus,' there is an unidentified dead body, promising violence to come, and quite possibly the police. Well, you might expect them anyway in a show about stealing things. There is no really desirable outcome, from a sympathetic viewer's standpoint, other than Coop and Mel reuniting, because everything that points toward that end is satisfying and most everything that points away from it is … annoying. (At the same time, I never felt emotionally invested in the result, just, you know, intellectually.) The series' multiple threads — including one focused on Barney (Hoon Lee), Coop's financial advisor, who is dealing with his wife's renovation plans and his disapproving old-world Korean in-laws (Barney is Korean but doesn't speak the language) — take energy away from the plotline we're meant to care most about. But they do fill up space in a story stretched to nine hours. As a supposedly successful man undergoing a spiritual crisis, Hamm is back in Don Draper territory. ('I realized how far you could drift away from your own life without actually going anywhere.') But Don was never the most interesting person in 'Mad Men,' and Coop is less compelling than Mel, and his sister, Ali (Tony winner Lena Hall), who has mental health issues, and whom we meet on the lawn of her former fiancé, strumming a guitar and singing Radiohead's 'Fake Plastic Trees.' (Hunter's band performs Matthew Sweet's 'Sick of Myself' — 'In a world that's ugly and a lie / It's hard to even want to try' — to further underscore the suburban anomie in song.) As Elena, a young Dominican housekeeper who falls in with Coop in his misadventures, Aimee Carrero provides needed class and cultural variation. Only seven episodes were made available for review, so I really don't know what fate creator Jonathan Tropper ('Banshee') has in store for his folks. I suppose the characters may be thrown into a hole they need to crawl out of, or left hanging from a cliff at the season's end, but to the extent that this is a story, with a shape, rather than merely a series of events, it isn't screaming for another nine (or multiple of nine) episodes to conclude its business, to make its points. I could certainly stand to see more of Ali/Hall, it's true. Still, I'd like these people to get it together sooner than later.
