from The Guardian UK

These days an adjective recognised in the OED, Mills & Boon has become a genre unto itself over its 100-year history. To mark its centenary, The Art of Romance tells the publisher’s story with a century’s worth of covers. Here is a selection, offering fascinating insights into the changing meaning of ‘romance’.

At the end of the gallery, there’s a chance for you to win your own copy of the complete book, with a competition to come up with the most accurate, or funny, or simply darling alternative title for the cover with its name blanked out. Here’s looking at you.

[ click to view slideshow and enter contest to win Grace Before Meat & more! ]

from CBC News

Slaves to the rhythm

Kanye West is the latest to pay tribute to a classic drum machine

Last Updated: Friday, November 28, 2008 | 10:57 AM ET Comments21Recommend20

By Jason Anderson, CBC News

The Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer, a programmable drum machine introduced in 1980. The machine has been used by musicians from Marvin Gaye to the Beastie Boys to Beyonce to Kanye West. (Roland/Drum Machine Museum)

It helped Marvin Gaye get some sexual healing. Beyonce and the Beastie Boys have sung (and rapped) its praises. The most revered makers of hip hop, techno and industrial rock couldn’t live without it. And now the most popular MC of our day pays tribute to it in the name of his new album.

Some may see the title of Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak (out this week) and assume those digits are just another of those cryptic numbers that musicians like to throw around (see also: Prince’s 3121, Nena’s 99 Luftballoons, Rush’s 2112). But the reference couldn’t be more specific — West has taken this opportunity to declare his loyalty to the Roland TR-808.

Soul singer Marvin Gaye used the Roland TR-808 for his 1982 hit Sexual Healing.(Pictorial Parade/Getty Images)

Introduced in the early ’80s as one of the first programmable drum machines, the 808 was surpassed long ago by more high-tech musical tools. And yet musicians of all stripes and styles have deemed it indispensable for its stark percussion sound. With its metronomic precision, it may have none of the swing of a human drummer, but the 808 can still provide a futuristic kind of funkiness, especially when it’s in the right hands. This special timeline reveals how this once-lowly machine attained its iconic status.

1932: Developed by Leon Theremin at the behest of composer Henry Cowell, the Rhythmicon makes its public debut. The most sophisticated of the early electronic drum machines, it can play 16 different rhythms with no need for hands or sticks. Despite its enormous promise, it is soon sidelined by Cowell; Theremin’s innovations are ignored for decades.

1959: Wurlitzer introduces the first commercially available drum machine, the Sideman. The company builds it into many of their organs. Manufacturers like the Italian company Bontempi gradually follow suit with their own versions, thereby ensuring that future generations of kids fooling around with dusty organs in their grandparents’ homes will have formative encounters with the bossa nova beat.

1967: Use of the drum machine begins to proliferate after the Hammond Organ Company incorporates a fully transistored rhythm machine by the Ace Tone company (later renamed Roland) into its products. Sly Stone is an early adopter of the technology in the rock world, using a drum machine on the loping hit Family Affair and throughout his 1971 album There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Jimi Hendrix can also be heard using a drum machine on a demo version of the posthumously released Angel. Luckily, the Beatles’ breakup spares Ringo Starr the indignity of being replaced by a mechanical model.

1980: The Roland Corporation introduces the Roland TR-808, a programmable drum machine. According to Greg Rule’s book Future Shock, five percussion sounds characterize the 808: “the hum kick, the ticky snare, the tishy hi-hats (open and closed) and the spacey cowbell.” A Roland representative later credits the machine’s design to a Mr. Nakamura (responsible for the analog voice circuits) and a Mr. Matsuoka (who developed the software).

A 1980s advertisement for the 808. (Roland/Drum Machine Museum)

The 808 receives many poor reviews in the gearhead press of the day, generally being deemed inferior to the Linn LM-1, the first drum machine to use digital samples (i.e., prerecorded rather than machine-generated sounds). Nevertheless, it gains some popularity due to its relatively low cost of $1,195 US. Yellow Magic Orchestra, the pioneering Japanese synth-pop band, is the first band to put the 808 to use.

[ click to continue reading at CBCNews.ca ]

from The Guardian UK

Photographer Hans-Peter Feldmann: Life for sale

Liz Jobey looks at German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann, whose latest book collates a myriad of images - beauty queens, horses, cigarette cards - into a bittersweet reflection on consumerism

• Liz Jobey
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday November 27 2008 16.16 GMT
• Article history

Striking a pose … a page from Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Album

In the late 1960s, the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann produced a series of small books titled Bild (Picture) or Bilder (Pictures). Each book contained a number of black-and-white photographs of a particular subject - 14 mountains, 12 views of aircraft in the sky, 11 sets of women’s knees, six pictures of football players - and was titled accordingly. Each had “Feldmann” printed on the front cover in capitals, and though the women’s knees were credited to photographer Wolfgang Breurs, there was little else to identify the meaning of the pictures or the “author” of the books. In 1971 a portfolio of 10 books was published by the Galerie Paul Maenz in Cologne.

In their bland depiction of ordinary objects, and in their serial groupings, they were reminiscent of the small books made a few years earlier by Ed Ruscha. In 1962 Ruscha had experimented with paintings and collages based on photographs he had taken on a road trip through Europe the year before. His subjects were ordinary scenes and objects from his travels, but once photographed, they took on a more significant role as specimens of everyday culture – apartment buildings, shop fronts, restaurants, signs, posters, a car, a motorbike, a pair of shoes.

Soon after he returned to California he made a set of photographs of household products, which he called Product Still Lifes. Ruscha recognised that photographs were inherently indexical: they allowed him to compare and contrast similar structures or objects when placed side to side. They also had a flat, deadpan quality that reflected the banality and standardisation of post-war American life. Soon Ruscha was laying out his pictures serially in what would become the first of his now famous set of books, Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, published in 1963. This small white paperback marked the advent of the contemporary artist’s book: it was cheaply produced, cheap to buy ($3 [£2] a copy) and, most importantly, it used photographs not as illustrations but as the visual expression of an idea.

In Düsseldorf, around the same time, Gerhard Richter began to use photographs as an aid to his paintings. “Do you know what was great?” he wrote in 1964, “Finding out that a stupid, ridiculous thing like copying a postcard could lead to a picture.”

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]

from the NY Daily News

Legendary American folk singer Odetta, whose powerful voice influced so many musicians, has died of heart disease at Lennox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77. She was long-associated with the civil rights movement. Odetta called on her fellow blacks to “take pride in the history of the American Negro.”.

Credits: Davis, Clarence Published: 12/03/2008 10:48:37

[ click to view full slideshow at NYDailyNews.com ]

from the LA Times Pop & Hiss music blog

Barney’s Beanery: Jim Morrison peed here (on the bar)

02:05 PM PT, Nov 27 2008

You have to be really, really famous — no, legendary — to make a restaurant want to put up a memorial plaque marking the exact spot on its bar where you peed in the 1960s. You’d have to be the kind of guy who Val Kilmer played in a movie, the kind of guy who needs guards stationed to this very day – at your grave – to protect it from being completely covered in joints, urine and whiskey. The kind of guy whose filthy leather pants (that you never took off and probably wore without underwear) are enshrined at the Hard Rock Cafe.

In short, you’d have to be Jim Morrison, and the place that wants to make a shrine to something arguably really uncool that you did (like peeing on its bar) would have to be West Hollywood’s equally legendary (well, sort of) Barney’s Beanery.

Consider Barney’s the ultimate L.A. roadhouse (with a menu of greasy offerings so lengthy that it shames “War and Peace”) and consider this forthcoming plaque a birthday present to Morrison, who would have turned 65 on Dec. 8.

To mark the event Barney’s is throwing a birthday bash for the Lizard King.

[ click to read at Pop & Hiss ]

from 9 News Australia (via T. Carney’s Facebook feed)

Man tries to pay bill with spider drawing

Friday, November 14, 2008

By ninemsn staff

Below is the complete email conversation that Adelaide man David Thorne claims he had with a utility company chasing payment of an overdue bill.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.19pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Overdue account

Dear David,
Our records indicate that your account is overdue by the amount of $233.95. If you have already made this payment please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.37pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,
I do not have any money so am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead. I value the drawing at $233.95 so trust that this settles the matter.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 10.07am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Overdue account

Dear David,
Thankyou for contacting us. Unfortunately we are unable to accept drawings as payment and your account remains in arrears of $233.95. Please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 10.32am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,
Can I have my drawing of a spider back then please.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 11.42am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Overdue account

Dear David,
You emailed the drawing to me. Do you want me to email it back to you?

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 11.56am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,

Yes please.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 12.14pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Overdue account

Attached

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 09.22am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Whose spider is that?

Dear Jane, Are you sure this drawing of a spider is the one I sent you? This spider only has seven legs and I do not feel I would have made such an elementary mistake when I drew it.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.03am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Whose spider is that?

Dear David, Yes it is the same drawing. I copied and pasted it from the email you sent me on the 8th. David your account is still overdue by the amount of $233.95. Please make this payment as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.05am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Automated Out of Office Response

Thankyou for contacting me. I am currently away on leave, traveling through time and will be returning last week.

Regards, David.

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.08am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Hello, I am back and have read through your emails and accept that despite missing a leg, that drawing of a spider may indeed be the one I sent you. I realise with hindsight that it is possible you rejected the drawing of a spider due to this obvious limb ommission but did not point it out in an effort to avoid hurting my feelings. As such, I am sending you a revised drawing with the correct number of legs as full payment for any amount outstanding. I trust this will bring the matter to a conclusion.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Monday 13 Oct 2008 2.51pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Dear David, As I have stated, we do not accept drawings in lei of money for accounts outstanding. We accept cheque, bank cheque, money order or cash. Please make a payment this week to avoid incurring any additional fees.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 13 Oct 2008 3.17pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

I understand and will definately make a payment this week if I remember. As you have not accepted my second drawing as payment, please return the drawing to me as soon as possible. It was silly of me to assume I could provide you with something of completely no value whatsoever, waste your time and then attach such a large amount to it.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Tuesday 14 Oct 2008 11.18am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Attached

[ click to read at 9 News ]

from the NY Times

Melena Ryzik writes:

Vivienne Westwood bondage pants, photographs of Lou Reed and Blondie, badges for the Buzzcocks and concert flyers from clubs like Max’s Kansas City went up for bid at the decidedly nonpunk hour of 10 a.m.

Photo: Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

[ click to view full slideshow at NYTimes.com ]

from The Irish Times

The shining stars who burned out too soon

AIDAN DUNNE

Thu, Nov 27, 2008

VISUAL ART:A NUMBER OF ARTISTS who died fairly recently and prematurely but whose influence is still very much alive are featured in Now’s the Timeat the Hugh Lane Gallery.

It’s an interesting idea for a show, because there is, sadly, no shortage of potential participants. The reasons for early demise vary, but the usual suspects, including drugs and drink, certainly feature, though not as prominently as cruel illnesses and misadventure - the gifted Helen Chadwick, for example, was killed by heart failure induced by a rare virus. But there was much speculation that her infection with the virus may have been related to the micro-organisms she was using in her work.

Chadwick remains a highly significant artist, not least for the way she pioneered the idea of the body as the site of art rather than something to be depicted. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the graffiti artist turned art world superstar, and protégé of Andy Warhol, succumbed to his insatiable appetite for a mixture of heroin and cocaine. A victim of his own success and prone to depression, he was still in his 20s when he died in 1988.

[ click to continue reading at The Irish Times ]

from Prospect Magazine

Roget’s Thesaurus is more than just a book about words—and the story of its author’s often unhappy life provides a suggestive counterpoint to its complexities
Lesley Chamberlain  

Peter Mark Roget, the future Linnaus of the English word, began compiling word-lists at the age of eight. Why was he not playing with other children, honing his social skills? The problem was his mother, a widow at 28, who drained her son of sympathy. Catherine Romilly gave birth to a wonderful, handsome, talented boy , but couldn’t let him be himself.Independence, he would write in his Thesaurus under list 744, equals freedom of action, unilaterality; freedom of choice, initiative. But for freedom see also non-liability, disobedience, seclusion and liberation: the way one insists on freedom in the face of opposition.

Catherine Roget née Romilly came from a well-regarded and successful London Huguenot family blighted by mental illness. After the early death of her Swiss-born husband, Catherine never recovered her capacity for normal life. Her own mother had been mentally incapable and Catherine slipped inexorably into a lesser version of her mother’s state. Shlepping with his sister backwards and forwards between London and the country on the wheels of maternal restlessness, Peter never felt he had a home, except in his wordlists. He worked on them in solitude, while qualifying as a doctor. 

Fully fledged at 20, five years too young to practise, he was exceptionally able and also peculiar and solitary. He hated disorder and dirt. When he took a job accompanying two rich teenagers on their European Grand Tour, their notebooks revealed his crabbed and pernickety mind. He taught them to count the windows in cathedrals, and visitor numbers, and tally how many paintings were in a collection. He taught them to structure the world prosaically and reliably; at all costs to avoid emotional surrender. His response to both human and natural life was to classify it, the foundation of his great work to come.

[ click to continue reading at The Prospect ]

from The Guardian UK

9 / 14

Wayne Smith in Jammy’s Yard. In 1985 he released the revolutionary track Under Mi Sleng Teng - the first fully-computerised hit

Beth Lesser

[ click to view full slideshow at The Guardian ]

from the Arizona Republic

China executes man for ant-breeding scheme

Nov. 27, 2008 08:25 AM
Associated Press

BEIJING - China has executed a businessman convicted of bilking thousands of investors out of $416 million in a bogus ant-breeding scheme, state media reported Thursday.

The official Xinhua News Agency said Wang Zhendong, who was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to death in February last year, was executed in north China’s Liaoning province on Wednesday.

The death penalty is used broadly in China. Though usually reserved for violent crimes, it is also applied for nonviolent offenses that involve large sums of money or if they are seen to threaten social order.

Wang, chairman of Yingkou Donghua Trading Group Co., had promised returns of up to 60 percent for investors who purchased ant-breeding kits from two companies he ran. Ants are used in some traditional Chinese medicinal remedies, which can fetch a high price. Wang sold the kits, which cost $25, for $1,300, local media reported earlier.

Wang attracted more than 10,000 investors between 2002 and June 2005, when investigators shut down his companies. The closure of his business set off a panic among small-time players who saw their life savings disappear overnight.

[ click to read full article at AZCentral.com ]

from Stark Bro’s Nurseries and Orchards

from MSNBC

Federal agents recover ‘Hitler’ bookmark

Romanian man arrested trying to sell item to undercover officers 

updated 3:45 p.m. MT, Wed., Nov. 26, 2008

SEATTLE - Authorities have recovered a stolen 18-carat gold bookmark that reportedly was given to Adolf Hitler by his longtime mistress, Eva Braun.

Christian Popescu, a Romanian national, was arrested Tuesday outside a suburban Starbucks after trying to sell the bookmark to an undercover agent for $100,000, according to papers filed in U.S. District Court.

Federal prosecutors said the bookmark was among several items taken in an auction-house heist in Madrid six years ago. At the time, some antiquities experts questioned its authenticity.

[ click to read at MSNBC.com ]

from The Chicago Tribune

A feasible feast
 Savvy use of supermarket products keeps your Thanksgiving fuss-free

By Bill Daley, Chicago Tribune Staff Writer

Thanksgiving dinner conjures up Currier & Ives memories of rosy-cheeked grannies, aided by a phalanx of aunties, sisters and assorted female cousins mustering up a veritable groaning board of goodies while the menfolk chaw away the hours in the front parlor.

But in this 24/7 workaday world, T-Day reality can be quite different.

Don’t despair.

You don’t have to splurge on a fancy dinner to evoke the true spirit and foods of Thanksgiving past. You can still gather the family, however nuclear, around the table and give thanks for what you have and for being together and for pulling a wonderful meal together without getting crazed.

Just be prepared to cheat. A little.

Supermarkets, delis, caterers and restaurants all sell a variety of precooked, ready-to-cook and assemble-X-Y-Z-and-cook dishes you can place on your holiday table. That can lighten the load so you can concentrate on the Thanksgiving dish that really matters to you, be it the roast turkey, the mashed potatoes, the pumpkin pie or the chili-cheese nacho pie you serve up with the football game on TV.

My mother cooked like this for years. She would jazz up packets of frozen onions in white sauce, add her own vegetables to commercially prepared stuffing mixes and pour a can of chicken broth into pan juices to make a quick gravy.

[ click to continue reading ]

from ABC News (Australia)

Whiteley’s Balmoral nets $990k for Cezanne fund

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has sold two paintings to help fund its purchase of a $16.2 million work by French artist Paul Cezanne.

Brett Whiteley’s Balmoral fetched $990,000 at the Sotheby’s auction in Melbourne.

John Perceval’s Pleasure Craft sold for $198,000.

Cezanne’s Bords De La Marne is the most expensive artwork ever bought by an Australian public gallery.

[ click to read at abc.net.au ]

from exclaim.ca 

Justice A Cross the Universe By Cam Lindsay     There are tour documentaries and then there’s Justice’s tour documentary. There is a difference. In documenting their 2008 North American tour, the Parisian production/DJ team (aka Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay) wanted everything caught on film — warts, arrests, drunken weddings, sexual romps and all. Using a blend of raw footage and nicely arranged jump cuts of their extraordinary life on the road, those expecting a concert film will be sorely disappointed, for the music is secondary to the hedonism off stage. Hiring their friends/video directors Romain Gavras and So-Me to shoot them, A Cross the Universe is a one-hour-long recap (accompanied by a CD recording of their live set) that plays out like a “greatest hits,” which from beginning to end becomes a lesson in shock and awe cinema. Since there’s no privacy, viewers are invited into their world to meet the duo’s gun-toting tour manager Bouchon (who’s arrested twice) and their Guinness-record-attempting cowboy bus driver, as well as witness them setting a drunk girl’s hair on fire, feeding aspirin to a squirrel, singing a piss-poor “Under the Bridge” to Anthony Kiedis, smashing a bottle over an overzealous fan’s head (and then getting arrested) and of course, getting married while drunk in Vegas. Anyone who’s waiting for the adaptation of Mötley Crüe’s The Dirtshould try seeking Justice, who’ve made the most decadent music doc ever. (Ed Banger/Warner)  [ click to read full article at exclaim.ca ]

Mike Solomon
Meteorological Watercolors

On view from October 18th to November 29th
Preview viewing Saturday, October 18th, 12 to 5 p.m.

36 Newtown Lane
East Hampton, NY 11937
P: 631.324.5561
www.johnmcwhinnie.com

Gallery Hours
Fri to Sat: 10am to 5pm
Sunday: 11am to 4pm
Closed Monday thru Thursday

forward to a friend

© 2008 John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. All Rights Reserved.

from the NY Daily News

Mystery piano, abandoned deep in the woods, baffles Cape Cod police

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Monday, November 24th 2008, 8:48 AM

HARWICH, Mass. - Harwich police have a musical mystery on their hands: Who left a piano in the middle of the woods? And why?

The Baldwin piano discovered in the Bells Neck woods appears to be in perfect working condition and had a matching bench as if it had recently been played.

The piano was discovered Saturday by a woman walking along a path inside a conservation area at the woods.

Another question police would like to answer is how the piano got to such a remote location. The piano is heavy and it took more than a half dozen men to load it onto a truck to remove it.

Police said they’ve notified other police departments in the area to see if anyone has reported a missing piano.

[ click to read at NYDailyNews.com ]

from the Los Angeles Times

For collectors Don and Mera Rubell, a bond with Palm Springs

Robert Gauthier, Los Angeles Times

PARTNERS: Don and Mera Rubell have collected contemporary art for more than four decades, beginning with a $25-a-week budget, and now travel the globe looking for more pieces.

Keith Haring works from their Miami collection furnish a Palm Springs Art Museum exhibition.

By Suzanne Muchnic
November 23, 2008

Reporting from Palm Springs — “The advantage of not being able to produce art is that you can spend all your energy looking at art,” said Don Rubell, whose family of self-confessed contemporary art fanatics is perpetually in search of the next addition to its 5,000-piece collection. Pleased to have uttered a complete sentence without being interrupted by Mera, his wife and collecting partner of nearly 45 years, he eased into a knowing smile as she jumped in to explain how their collecting obsession works.

“To do what we do, we have to go everywhere, with rolling suitcases that we never check and wash-and-wear clothes, usually black,” she said. “Here’s our schedule for about two months: Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, London, Paris, New York, Washington, Los Angeles and here, then New York again and Abu Dhabi. We need to see what’s going on in the world.”

Miami is home to the globe-trotting Rubells, who are on ARTnews magazine’s international list of the top 200 collectors. “Here” is Palm Springs, where they traveled for a special occasion — the launching of a relationship between the Florida-based collection and the Palm Springs Art Museum with the recently opened exhibition, “Against All Odds: Keith Haring in the Rubell Family Collection.”

[ click to continue reading at LATimes.com ]