Pooh On The Flu
Le Bande de Picasso - The Wild Men Of Paris
The story behind theft of the Mona Lisa
Picasso and poet Appollinaire were prime suspects when Leonardo da Vinci’s best known painting was stolen from the Louvre
On a mundane morning in late summer in Paris, the impossible happened. The Mona Lisa vanished. On Sunday evening, August 20, 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s best-known painting was hanging in her usual place on the wall of the Salon Carré, between Correggio’s Mystical Marriage and Titian’s Allegory of Alfonso d’Avalos. On Tuesday morning, when the Louvre reopened to the public, she was gone.
In the seven years from 1905 to 1911, the genesis story of modern art was being written. Pablo Picasso was its genius; Guillaume Apollinaire was its impresario. A flamboyant poet and cultural provocateur, Apollinaire enunciated the modernist creed, adopting the Marquis de Sade’s maxim, “In art, one has to kill one’s father”. Urging the destruction of all museums “because they paralyse the imagination”, he championed Picasso “as a young god who wants to remake the world”.
Apollinaire and the artist were leaders of a group loosely known as la bande de Picasso. Familiar from Montmartre to Manhattan as the “Wild Men of Paris”, Picasso’s gang of painters and poets were the outlaws of traditional art. Young, brilliant and ruthlessly ambitious, they strutted through the cobblestone streets of Montmartre and filled the cheap cafes, defining themselves as well as a new creative idiom, breaking the rules to free art from art history.
After two frustrating weeks [following the Mona Lisa’s theft, police prefect Louis] Lépine believed he had cracked the case. In la bande de Picasso, he had found the international ring of art thieves he had been hunting.
“Middling” Metal Machine My Inharmonious Ass
All Those Sounds From the Stage: Processed, and Not Always Pretty
Chad Batka for The New York Times
Lou Reed performed with his group, Metal Machine Trio, at the Blender Theater at Gramercy.
It was good to have this Lou Reed back: not an American Master nor a Legend of Rock, but a barking, brooding, beneficial irritant. On Thursday night at the Blender Theater at Gramercy, onstage between Sarth Calhoun and Ulrich Krieger, two much younger musicians, he was making noise — improvised, loud, heavily processed, and some of it ugly enough to make people leave.
Not many, though. There were extra-musical reasons to stay put. An emotional reason: he’s Lou Reed, poet of New York City, et cetera. And a big intellectual reason: Mr. Reed calls this group Metal Machine Trio, which refers to a notorious double-LP he made in 1975. “Metal Machine Music” is a kind of personality test. Many average listeners, even average Lou Reed fans, heard it as long-winded, discordant feedback.
You couldn’t really rely on Mr. Reed to tell you how to feel about it, either. He’d had a hit record the year before — “Sally Can’t Dance” — which he didn’t seem to love. He seemed to propose “Metal Machine Music” as corrective honesty, almost clinical, as if he’d hooked up a mixing board directly to his neurons. “No one I know has listened to it all the way through including myself,” he wrote in the record’s liner notes. “I’m sorry, but not especially, if it turns you off.”
Orchards In Decline
Orchards may vanish by the end of the century, conservationists warn
Natural England and National Trust project launched to preserve rare varieties of apples, pears and plums, bring communities together and protect biodiverse habitats
Steven Morris
Friday 24 April 2009 00.05 BST
An apple crop being harvested in Somerset. Their price is set to rise this year. Photograph: Mark Bolton/Corbis
Small traditional orchards could vanish from the British landscape by the end of the century unless action is taken to save them, environmental experts and campaigners warned yesterday.
Natural England and the National Trust claimed 60% of England’s orchards had isappeared since the 1950s as they launched a £500,000 project aimed at halting the decline. The crisis has been even worse in some areas, such as Devon, which has lost almost 90% of its orchards.
The organisations argued that if nothing was done, a focal point for communities across the country and a crucial habitat for flora and fauna could be wiped out forever.
The loss of orchards would be accompanied by a huge loss of apple varieties, some unique to just a few square miles, and many of them with wonderfully eccentric names such as the Hangy Down, the Oaken Pin and Polly White Hair.
“Shoot your lawmaker in the face.”
from Agence France-Presse via Yahoo
Czech art: shoot your lawmaker in the face
PRAGUE (AFP) – Two artists have offered Czechs angered by politics the chance to take revenge on their lawmakers by shooting them literally in the face, by turning their photos into air gun targets.
Tomas Cap and Michal Kraus have displayed the portraits of 200 lower-house deputies in plastic boxes on the wall of a Prague alternative gallery, in front of an air gun and a boxful of ammunition.
“We have seen lawmakers breach the promises they gave to voters so many times. The visitors of the gallery have a unique opportunity to show these politicians what they think,” the artists said in a statement.
Two weeks after opening, the exhibition was a sad sight as most of the faces had been heavily damaged by airgun slugs, with some destroyed beyond recognition.
He said he only hoped the crumbling photos would last till the end of the exhibition on Sunday as “the artists want to send them to the lawmakers afterwards.”
Canine Torture
Beautiful bulldogs!
It’s the annual Beautiful Bulldog pageant and this year’s entrants were as fetching as as Miss USA contender. See their lovely jowls …
Daisy Bear, owned by Carl and Kim Steil, of Eagle Grove, Iowa, walks across the stage during the 30th Drake Relays Beautiful Bulldog Contest, Monday, April 20, 2009, in Des Moines, Iowa.
Credits: Neibergall/AP
F«ck Planet Earth
Fuck Planet Earth - watch more funny videos
Fighting
‘Fighting’
Phillip V. Caruso / Universal
Star brawler Shawn MacArthur takes out his latest opponent in the action movie “Fighting.”
Starring Channing Tatum and Terrence Howard, Dito Montiel’s tale of an underground fighting scene is vivid and loaded with detail.
It’s called “Fighting,” and its unpolished, messy fracases are among the film’s highlights. But there’s much more to it than that: more than the easily sold idea of Channing Tatum as Shawn, a down-on-his-luck drifter, drawn by two-bit hustler Harvey (Terrence Howard) into New York’s underground fighting scene; more than Shawn’s romance with struggling single mother Zulay (Zulay Henao).
The word that best expresses the film is “vivid.”
It feels like a guided tour of the city’s in-your-face underbelly, loaded with detail that only a native with an artist’s eye could reveal. Director and co-writer Dito Montiel’s previous effort, Sundance sensation “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints” (also starring Tatum), similarly depicted an unglamorous New York so real you could smell it — for better or worse. The casting of extras, location scouting and production design all display care not common to the genre.
As to the fighting in “Fighting” — it continues the exciting trend of realistic combat that helped make “Taken” a surprise hit, but it goes much further. Some throwdowns look and feel like street brawls, choreographed to look unchoreographed: ugly, rough and thrillingly unpredictable.
Mexico Losing Its Ass
Sanctuary rescues Mexico’s vanishing icons
Small sanctuary rescuing fast-vanishing icons
OTUMBA, Mexico - You can hear the Burroland donkey shelter long before you see it, as the braying of jacks and jennies mixes with the mournful whistles of freight trains in this small town outside Mexico City.
Here, 20 donkeys wander behind a wire fence, munching carrots and leftover tortillas and waiting for pats on the head from the occasional tourist.
This shelter for unwanted donkeys would have once seemed a laughable idea in Mexico, where the hard-working burro is practically a national symbol. These beasts of burden carried settlers over the Sierra Madre, hauled gold from mines and pulled plows through Mexican fields for centuries.
The donkeys that were once sold here pulled carts of silver and gold from Mexico’s mines, bringing fabulous wealth to the Spanish empire.
They carried silks and spices from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean as part of the trade route to Asia. And donkeys accompanied pioneers pushing west and north through the Americas.
“These are animals that basically built the continent,” Patton said.
Really Every Day is Earth Day - but Happy Earth Day Anyway
EARTH DAY by Roy Thomas (Bearclaw Gallery)
The First Truly American Writer
‘Who Is Mark Twain?’
Previous uncollected stories and essays drawn mostly from his papers and correspondence show why he is so beloved.
When he died 99 years ago this week, Mark Twain was this country’s most beloved writer, yet his status as both an author and protean example of the now-familiar pop cultural celebrity seems to grow with each passing decade.
Twain’s death of heart disease at the age of 74 came as such a blow to the country that it evoked an expression of official White House regret from President William Howard Taft: “Mark Twain gave pleasure — real intellectual enjoyment — to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come. . . . His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature.”
Ernest Hemingway famously argued that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ ” though even he conceded that the great novel’s disastrous final section is “just cheating.” (To this critic’s mind, a canonical case also can be made for Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “The Confidence-Man.” Still, what other 19th century American novel so controversial in its own time — though for different reasons — remains so today?)
William Faulkner, to whom praise of other novelists did not come easily, called Twain the “first truly American writer” and said he “wrote the first American sentences.”
Screw Branding Brando
The Brando Brand
Perhaps one day movie stars and celebrities will leave their names and likenesses to the public domain. That would clear up what might be called the Brando problem — the case of a major public figure who dies and leaves behind a potent if 
contradictory image and no clear commercial legacy. The effort to create a Brando brand out of the Marlon Brando trust is in the hands of his rather oddly assorted trustees: a producer, an accountant and his former personal assistant. So far, their major activity has been suing companies for infringing upon Brando’s name, which is trademarked.
Creating a meaningful brand out of Brando — as opposed to merely warning off those who use his name without permission — will be no easy task. The search for the truly marketable Brando is likely to take some interesting twists.
Will it be the young man who starred in the drama “The Wild One”? The sullen but brilliant stage actor? Will it evoke thoughts of Don Corleone or Jor-El or Maria Schneider? Or will it be the figure who retreated to a private atoll in the South Pacific, where the trustees are planning to build a Brando-themed, ecologically minded resort?
Pulitzer Who?
And The Pulitzer For Forgotten Fiction Goes To…
Here’s a list of Pulitzer novels we’ve forgotten. Add your own forgotten fiction in the comment field below — or tell us what we’ve missed.
Our Unscientific List Of Least-Known Fiction Winners
- His Family by Ernest Poole, 1918
- Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield, 1927
- Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin, 1929
- Laughing Boy by Oliver Lafarge, 1930
- Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes, 1931
- The Store by T.S. Stribling, 1933
- Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller, 1934
- Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson, 1935
- Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis, 1936
- In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow, 1942
- Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin, 1944
- Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens, 1949
- The Way West by A.B. Guthrie, 1950
- The Town by Conrad Richter, 1951
- The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor, 1959
- The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor, 1962
- Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson, 1978
Gehry on L.A
Gehry on L.A., art (and Gehry)
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao,1997. Photo by ©David Heald, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
NOT THE MET: Gehry calls his Guggenheim Bilbao “an antidote to the Metropolitan Museum syndrome.”
The book ‘Conversations With Frank Gehry’ serves as a blueprint for his mind-set, philosophies and the making of many of his major works.
In “Conversations With Frank Gehry,” Los Angeles writer Barbara Isenberg talks with the Pritzker Prize-winning architect, who’s behind such iconic buildings as Walt Disney Concert Hall and Guggenheim Bilbao. They cover his life, pivotal career moments, including the competition for Bilbao, and influences. Following are exclusive excerpts from the book, published by Alfred A. Knopf, which goes on sale Tuesday.
Is there a Los Angeles style of architecture?
Los Angeles has an incredible light and a forgiving climate. You don’t have to use double glazing, and you don’t have to think about snow loads and snow conditions. The further south you go, the more open you can get. But the generation after me is working all over the world, like I am, so we’ve had to adapt to other climates. I had to adapt to a northern climate in Bilbao.
Do you take a Los Angeles sensibility with you?
It’s not so contrived. You just go for the bigger picture, I think. At least I do.
Rowley & Powers On Phillips de Pury
from Fashion Week Daily Dispatch
Cynthia’s Artsy Fix
Thursday, April 16, 2009
(NEW YORK) Cynthia Rowley may be known more for her quirky sense of style than for her passion for art collecting, but all that may be about to change. Rowley and her husband Bill Powers have been featured on the cover of Phillips de Pury & Company’s latest“Saturday@Phillips” auction catalogue, as part of its “Tastemaker” series. Powers’ artistic penchant is hardly surprising; in addition to being the man behind Ms. Rowley, he’s also co-owner of Half Gallery on the Lower East Side (along with Andy Spade and James Frey), editor at large for Purple magazine and artistic director at Tarmagazine and Tar Siz publishing.
The catalog has just gone on sale (aligning with Phillips’ April 25 auction of contemporary and urban art, photographs, design and toy art) and features Dean Kaufman’s photos of Rowley and Powers–with a sneaky appearance on the cover of their 9-year-old daughter Kit’s hand. As for their collection? The couple shows off drawings, photographs, paintings, and sculpture by the likes of Richard Prince, Marc Newson, Andy Warhol and more. Rowley says the variety is what makes it special.
“He’s always got about a 10 ideas going, but it works for him, let’s say 8 times out of 10…”
Andy Spade Is a Giant in New York
The Spades started out just outside Detroit. It was the 1960s and Sam Spade was an ad man for the Big Three automakers while his beautiful wife, Judy, cared for their three boys. Sam liked to 
disappear. One day he didn’t come home for six months, so Judy put the house on the market. The day the house sold, Sam reappeared and begged for another chance. He’d found a job in Phoenix, he said.
“I said, ‘O.K., one more shot,’” Judy told me. “When we finally got out to Phoenix, that turned out to be a lie—he didn’t actually have a job there.”
It didn’t take long for Sam to disappear for good. It was 1968 and Judy and the boys—8-year-old Bryan, 6-year-old Andy and 4-year-old David—were pretty much stranded in the desert. Judy told them, “No use sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves!” She moved the brood to Scottsdale and over the next decade often worked three jobs.
“The boys took care of themselves,” said Judy, now 71 and retired, speaking from the mountain town of Show Low, Ariz., where she lives with her third husband. “But they were very good at keeping themselves entertained.”
