from the LA Times CULTURE MONSTER

Is Portland’s Hindu statue a looted antiquity?

10:00 AM, January 4, 2009

The often abstract debate over how strict museums should be about shunning ancient artworks of questionable origins — lest they wind up owning pieces that have been looted and illegally smuggled — now wears the familiar face of the Hindu elephant god, Ganesha. 

A 1,000-year-old stone stele of the god is scheduled to be unveiled at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon on Valentine’s Day. Having already drawn criticism from the anti-looting advocacy group SAFE –Saving Antiquities for Everyone — the Ganesha could soon be exhibit A in the back-and-forth between those who favor a hard line against collecting ancient works whose paths since before 1970 are murky, and those who think it makes more sense to give museums some leeway when hard proof is lacking.

Guidelines adopted in June by the Assn. of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) call for museums to research carefully whether an object they want left its country of origin before November 1970. That’s when the United Nations adopted rules to stem cultural looting.

But when the facts nevertheless remain hazy, the AAMD permits museums to make a judgment call on whether to acquire a piece.

[ click to continue reading at the LAT ]

from the Financial Times

[ click to continue reading at FT.com ]

from The Guardian UK

Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton dies

The lead guitarist with the legendary rock band has been found dead at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was 60

• Tim Jonze
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 6 January 2009 16.12 GMT
• Article history

The Stooges … Ron Asheton is pictured on the left. Photograph: /PR

The Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton has been found dead at his home in Michigan. He was 60.

Police told Ann Arbor News that the musician may have been dead for several days before he was found. Although unconfirmed, initial signs indicate that Asheton died of a heart attack.

Asheton was one of the founding members of the Stooges, along with his brother Scott, bassist Dave Alexander and their charismatic frontman Iggy Pop. With Pop, Asheton helped write songs that would set the template for punk rock, including No Fun and I Wanna Be Your Dog. As befits a band from Ann Arbor, their music distilled the experience of being a bored suburban teen and bottled it as a furious and snarling sonic assault. Their feral take on rock’n'roll, full of feedback and clatter, was the perfect backdrop for Pop’s wild stage antics, another big influence for punk performers.

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]

from the New York Times

Willoughby Sharp, 72, Versatile Avant-Gardist, Is Dead

By MARGALIT FOX 

Even by conceptual-art standards, Willoughby Sharp’s work stood out. There was his gestational spin in a clothes dryer. There was the curious affair of the talcum powder, the teddy bear and the tab of LSD. And there was the Oklahoma Gun Incident, which members of the art world still discuss, with a mixture of horror and awe, more than 30 years later.

Mr. Sharp, the Ivy League-educated scion of one of New York’s most socially prominent families, who in the 1960s and afterward was on the cutting edge of the American avant-garde as a performer, producer, writer, publisher, curator, video artist and much else, died on Dec. 17 in Manhattan. He was 72 and lived in Brooklyn. The cause was cancer, his wife, Pamela Seymour Smith Sharp, said.

A central figure in conceptual and performance art back when those forms were new and daring, Mr. Sharp was concerned with making art that was as much for the mind as it was for the eye. Along with artists like Chris Burden and Nam June Paik, Mr. Sharp helped expand the very idea of what constituted a work of art.

Mr. Sharp was also known as the publisher of Avalanche, a widely respected, handsomely produced art magazine he founded with the writer and filmmaker Liza Béar. Published for just 13 issues between 1970 and 1976, Avalanche featured in-depth interviews with many rising contemporary artists of the day, among them Mr. Burden, William Wegman and Joseph Beuys, the charismatic German artist of whom Mr. Sharp was an early champion. 

As a curator, Mr. Sharp attracted international attention with “Earth Art,” a 1969 exhibition at Cornell University. Groundbreaking in every sense of the term, the exhibition featured site-specific installations — by Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Hans Haacke and others — that were hewn, molded or otherwise created from the land itself. Mr. Sharp also ran the Willoughby Sharp Gallery, on Spring Street in SoHo, from 1988 to 2004.

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from the LA Times

Robert Graham, L.A.’s masterful sculptor

Graham, who died last Saturday, was the city’s premier public artist and a sculptor whose works reflected the subtle spirit of Los Angeles itself.

Tim Rutten
January 3, 2009

Though every artist’s death diminishes us, Robert Graham’s loss impoverishes Los Angeles in a deep and particular way.

Graham, who died last Saturday at the age of 70 after a serious illness, was not simply the city’s premier public artist, he was a sculptor whose works reflected the subtle spirit of Los Angeles itself. Washington may have his magnificent contributions to the Roosevelt Memorial, New York his towering tribute to Duke Ellington, Detroit his starkly powerful Joe Louis fist and Kansas City its massive bust of Charlie Parker — but Graham and his art belong in an intimate and specific way to Los Angeles.

Here, generations will contemplate his monumental bronze doors and exquisite Madonna at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, his “Olympic Gateway” outside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, his “dancers” at Wells Fargo Plaza, the “Source Figure” and fountain atop the downtown library steps and his heroic torsos in Venice and Beverly Hills.

Graham’s work is of this city in a way only those who are themselves fully at home here can read. If you’re attuned to the moods of this place, you know that there are four seasons for those who can see them: You know the wildflowers that follow the winter rains and signal the spring that comes early and passes quickly into summer. You understand how autumn piles the sycamore leaves in dusty briers and burnishes the afternoon light into butterscotch tones.

[ click to continue reading this excellent piece by Tim Rutten ]

from the Washington Post

No Bailout for the Arts?
By Michael Kaiser
Monday, December 29, 2008; A15

While government bailouts are being offered or considered for financial institutions, the auto industry, homeowners, and so many other needy and worthy sectors, one group is quickly and rather quietly falling apart: our nation’s arts organizations. In the past few months, dozens of opera companies, theater companies, dance organizations, museums and symphonies have either closed or suffered major cash crises.

As someone who has made a career out of fixing troubled organizations, I know that the problems faced by arts groups are often related to poor management and governance. I also know that the difficulty in improving productivity in the arts is a central cause of our financial challenges: It takes as much time to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony today as it did when the piece was composed, and the same number of actors are required for “Hamlet” as when Shakespeare wrote the play more than 400 years ago. Unlike other industries, the arts cannot cover the cost of inflation by improving worker productivity.

[ click to continue reading ]

from Shelf-Awareness

Shelf Sample: Beat the Reaper

This is the way to start the new year–read an outrageous, shocking, darkly humorous thriller, with footnotes, no less. Ever so much better than starting a diet and workout program. AndBeat the Reaper by Josh Bazell (Little, Brown, $24.99, 9780316032223/ 0316032220, January 7, 2009) is just the book. Peter Brown is an ER doctor at Manhattan Catholic Hospital, perhaps not the situation one would expect for a guy in the Witness Protection Program. However, hiding out in plain sight from the New Jersey mob, where he used to be a hit man (aka “the Bearclaw”), has worked until the day his past and his present meet in a terminally ill patient. His morning starts like this:

So I’m on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some f***head tries to mug me! Naturally there’s a gun. He comes up behind me and sticks it into the base of my skull. It’s cold, and it actually feels sort of good, in an acupressure kind of way. “Take it easy, Doc,” he says.

Which explains that, at least. Even at five in the morning, I’m not the kind of guy you mug. I look like an Easter Island sculpture of a longshoreman. But the f***head can see the blue scrub pants under my overcoat, and the ventilated plastic green clogs, so he thinks I’ve got drugs and money on me. And maybe that I’ve taken some kind of oath not to kick his f***head ass for trying to mug me.

I barely have enough drugs and money to get me through the day. And the only oath I took, as I recall, was to first do no harm. I’m thinking we’re way past that point.

“Okay,” I say, raising my hands.

The rat and the pigeon run away. Chickenshits.

I turn around. It rolls the gun off my skull and leaves my raised right hand above the f***head’s arm. I wrap his elbow and jerk upward, causing the ligaments to pop like champagne corks. 

[ click to continue reading Marilyn Dahl’s review at Shelf-Awareness.com ]

from the Times South Africa

ATHENS — A Greek appeal court has declared void a deal under which an alcoholic traded his apartment to a bar owner in return for free drink for the rest of his life, a newspaper reports.

The agreement concerned an apartment worth 33,000 euros (R423,791) which the 62-year old drinker sold to the bar owner for 6,500 euros (R83,474) with the right to live in it rent-free until he died, according to Eleftherotypia.

A tab of 900 euros (R11,500) was written off and the vendor undertook to provide free drinks for the rest of the drinker’s life.

Four years after signing the deal the toper died and his brother took the case to court.

The court said the terms of the deal had been disproportionate and contrary to decent behaviour as they exploited an individual’s dependence.

[ click to read at The Times SA ]

from the NY Daily News

[ click to read full raunch at NYDailyNews.com ]

from the San Jose Mercury News

Herhold: If Facebook can ban breast-feeding, time we cover up statues

By Scott Herhold, Mercury News

I’ve always been grateful my mother took the time to breast-feed me. It’s a reason why I’ve escaped the worst of my family’s allergies.

Until the flap at Facebook, I never realized how dangerous an environment breast-feeding created, a threat only a little less formidable than the bubonic plague.

Silly me: I didn’t understand that pictures of a mother’s nipple or areola in an infant’s mouth could threaten children. I labored under the false idea it was about food.

You may know the story. A cadre of breast-feeding mothers, backed by legions of online followers, is protesting Facebook’s removal of breast-feeding photos that reveal the nipple or areola.

[ click to continue reading at SiliconValley.com ]

from The Guardian UK

[ click to take the whole damn bloody hard quiz at Guardian UK ]

from New Scientist

Why mountains are bad for the ozone layer

• 31 December 2008
• Magazine issue 2689. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

“MOUNTAIN waves” in the atmosphere above Antarctica create rare clouds that are helping destroy the ozone layer.

Over the last two decades, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) released by human activity have opened a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Key chemical reactions that lead to ozone depletion happen on the surface of rare polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs), which form high up in the atmosphere. Here, sunlight breaks down the CFCs into products that react to produce chlorine, which in turn decomposes ozone. 

This implicates so-called mountain waves, which are created when an airstream flows over high relief. The waves churn up the air high in the atmosphere and appear to create the temperature variations (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2008GL036629).

[ click to read full article in NewScientist.com ]

from The AP

Indian painter Manjit Bawa dies at age 67

4 days ago

NEW DELHI (AP) — Manjit Bawa, a leading Indian artist whose work highlighted peaceful coexistence, has died. He was 67.

Bawa died at his New Delhi home on Monday after three years in a coma following a stroke, said Ashok Bajpai, a family friend and chairman of India’s National Academy of Art.

Bawa studied at the School of Art in New Delhi and worked as a silkscreen painter in Britain, where he also studied between 1964 and 1971.

Often using animal imagery — tigers and lambs sharing the same space — Bawa sought to convey the message that people could coexist with animals in nature, said art critic Ena Puri, who wrote a biography of Bawa.

His canvases were distinguished by their colors — the ochre of sunflowers, the green of paddy fields, the red of the sun and the blue of the mountain sky, she said.

“He was an icon, a person who was completely head and shoulders above his contemporaries,” Puri said.

[ click to read at GoogleNews.com ]

New Year by CONAL FLAHERTY (visit)

from Pop + Politics

Village Voice Fires Three in Editorial, including Nat Hentoff

This just in: Adding to the media meltdown, my former alma mater, the Village Voice, just laid off three more in editorial. [Full disclosure, I was laid off myself for “matters of taste” in 2007]. Among those laid off is Nat Hentoff, who’s been at the paper since 1958, writing about jazz, and later, civil liberties in his weekly long-running column. Fashion writer, Lynn Yaeger, who has worked with the paper over 15 30 years, starting in classifieds, before moving into editorial, was laid off, along with staff writerChloe Hilliard, who was hired under the current editor, Tony Ortega in 2007. We know, we keep saying this, but we continue to be amazed that there is anyone left to lay off.

Nat Hentoff’s Greatest Hits Compilation.

[ click to read at Pop + Politics ]

from the Los Angeles Times

Fitzgerald on film and television

Merrick Morton / Paramount Pictures

LONGING: Brad Pitt plays Benjamin Button, and Cate Blanchett is Daisy. Fitzgerald made a rare foray into fantasy with the short story

Before ‘Benjamin Button,’ there were ‘Gatsby, ‘Tycoon’ and more.

By Susan King
December 29, 2008

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magical short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was a hard sell during the early days of the Roaring ’20s, when magazines were hungering for one of the author’s more down-to-earth flapper stories. “Benjamin Button” was a rare foray for Fitzgerald into the fantasy genre — a quixotic tale of a man who was born with the body of an old man and grew younger as the years passed. “Button” finally found a home at Collier’s, which published it on May 27, 1922.

According to Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, Fitzgerald was “probably attracted to this form by its tension between romanticism and realism, for the challenge of fantasy is to make events convincing.”

Fitzgerald became a member of the “lost generation” of novelists and playwrights who came to Hollywood in the 1930s to try their luck — and help their dwindling coffers — at screenwriting. But Fitzgerald’s stint at MGM was short-lived and disappointing. His only screen credit was for co-writing the post-World War I love story “Three Comrades.”

When Fitzgerald collected “Button” in his classic 1922 “Tales of the Jazz Age” anthology, he noted that “the story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial.”

Fitzgerald, who long battled alcoholism, died on Dec. 21, 1940, at the age of 44 at the Hollywood apartment of his lover, Sheilah Graham. Just as Twain had said, the worst part of his life came at the end.

[ click to continue reading at the LA Times ]

[ click to visit the World Superhero Registry ]

from the Washington Post

Twice-Sold Tales

Used-Book Business Gets a Brisk, if Fragile, New Life Via Internet 

“That’s about a million books on those shelves,” Chuck Roberts says proudly.

The owner of Wonder Book and Video is standing in a 54,000-square-foot warehouse in Frederick, waving an arm toward what looks like a combination of the world’s biggest bookstore and a grungy aircraft hangar.

Eight-foot metal and wooden shelves, housing the used books Roberts sells on the Internet, stretch as far as a dust-filled eye can see. Taller, Costco-scale units hold massive, book-filled boxes not yet unpacked. More such boxes, in jumbled heaps, spill into the floor space that remains.

In 1980, when Roberts opened his first used bookstore, he built his own shelves.

“I was my only employee,” he recalls. “So I’d be back there with an apron on, sawing, hammering nails — they didn’t even have screw guns back then — and when the front door would open, I’d take the apron off and go wait on the customer.”

[ click to continue reading at WaPo.com ]

from the NY Times

Skaters Jump In as Foreclosures Drain the Pool

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

A group of friends skating the pool of a foreclosed home this month in Fresno, Calif. Skaters are coming to places like Fresno from as far as Germany and Australia. More Photos>

By JESSE McKINLEY and MALIA WOLLAN

On a recent morning, a 27-year-old skateboarder who goes by the name Josh Peacock peered into a swimming pool in Fresno, Calif., emptied by his own hands — and the foreclosure crisis — and flashed a smile as wide as a half-pipe.

“We have more pools than we know what to do with,” said Mr. Peacock, who lives in Fresno, the Central Valley city where thousands of homes, many with pools behind them, are in foreclosure. “I can’t even keep track of them all anymore.”

In these boom times for skaters, Mr. Peacock travels with a gas-powered pump, five-gallon buckets, shovels and a push broom, risking trespassing charges in the pursuit of emptying forlorn pools and turning them into de facto skate parks. Skaters are coming to places like Fresno from as far as Germany and Australia. Mr. Peacock said his floor and couch were covered by sleeping bags of visiting skateboarders each weekend.

Some skateboarders use realty tracking sites like realquest.com and realtor.com to find foreclosed houses with pools, while others trawl through satellite images from Google Earth. On the Web site skateandannoy.com, where skaters trade tips about how to find and drain abandoned pools, one poster wrote about the current economic malaise. “God bless Greenspan,” the post read, “patron saint of pool skatin’.

“There are more pools right now than I could possibly skate,” Mr. Morgan said. “It’s pretty exciting.” Mr. Peacock travels around town in his pickup searching for the addresses of homes he has learned have been foreclosed on, either via the Internet or from a friend who works in real estate. He has also learned to spot a foreclosed house, he said, by looking for “dead grass on the lawn and lockboxes on the front door.”

[ click to read full article at the NY Times ]