from the LA Times

Torture devices seeking righteous buyer

Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

Iron masks are among the items in a collection of torture devices that is up for auction.

The Tongue Tearer and other terrifying contraptions from the 16th century land on an auctioneer’s lap. His solution: ‘Turn something terrible into something good.’

By Tina Susman
May 16, 2009

Reporting from New York — It slices! It dices! It pierces and pokes! It pulls stubborn flesh from bone with the flick of a wrist!

And if that doesn’t get your prisoner talking, perhaps the ornate chair with its spiked seat, back and arm rests will do the trick.

The ghoulish throne and tiny flesh ripper, part of a bounty of iron torture implements dating to the 16th century, soon will be up for sale, but on one condition: The buyer must have morals as well as money — more than $3 million, by some estimates.

His wooden desk and a nearby table were covered with items like the Small Iron Spider, a flesh-tearing device. “This sweet little thing could grasp any part of one’s body and do pain,” Ettinger said, squeezing the small handle to make the eight claw-like legs with needle-sharp tips open and close.

There were spiked collars, a large ax and a perforated spoon or sieve “through which boiling water, oil or molten lead was poured onto various portions of the body,” according to a catalog accompanying the items.

Iron leg weights were displayed beside the torture chair as a pair of shoes might be shown with a dress: to highlight how well they go together. The weights were designed to add pounds to the person in the torture chair, driving the spikes deeper into the skin.

As well-coiffed women walked dogs past the auction house on a leafy, sun-dappled Manhattan street one recent afternoon, little could they imagine that inside were an iron implement meant to be “affixed to the ears before they were cut off” and “a powerful iron foot breaker.” Such were the descriptions in the catalog that accompanied the collection when it went on display in the 1890s.

[ click to read full article at the LA Times ]

from PerezHilton.com

Shock! Oprah Apologizes

Filed under: Oprah Winfrey

Private jet-loving Oprah Winfrey has had a change of heart and apologized to author James Frey.

If you recall, momma O named his 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces as one of her book club choices in 2005, which propelled his book to the bestseller list. But after some stories in the supposedly autobiographical book were discovered to have been exaggerated, Oprah had Frey back on her show to bash him publicly.

Many, including the book’s publisher, believe Oprah did that due to the backlash she received from her fans for supporting a book that wasn’t all true.

You don’t say?!

A month after Oprah called him a liar, his publishers dropped him.

But, now, years later, Winfrey has finally apologized to Frey for publicly slamming him and his book.

Winfrey’s rep has also confirmed that the talk show host called the author and offered him a mea culpa.

According to Frey, Oprah called him last fall to say “I felt I owe you an apology.” She went on to explain her lashing came from a sense of feeling betrayed.

Frey added, “It was a nice surprise to hear from her, and I really appreciated the call and the sentiment.”

Wonder what took O so long to apologize? And why even do it? And if she publicly bashed him, shouldn’t she have publicly apologized?

[Image via WENN.]

[ click to read at PerezHilton.com ]

from WIRED

Pentagon Preps Soldier Telepathy Push

• By Katie Drummond

Forget the battlefield radios, the combat PDAs or even infantry hand signals. When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, they’ll read each other’s minds.

At least, that’s the hope of researchers at the Pentagon’s mad-science division Darpa. The agency’s budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.” That’s on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy

[ click to read full article at wired.com - or just concentrate really hard and maybe it will just come to you ]

from Vanity Fair

James Frey Gets a Bright, Shiny Apology from Oprah

by Evgenia Peretz

May 11, 2009, 2:40 pm

James Frey photographed by Terry Richardson for Evgenia Peretz’s June 2008 article, “James Frey’s Morning After.”

It’s been a year since James Frey’s re-entrance into the book world with Bright, Shiny Morning, which comes out in paperback May 12 (and contains new material, including a bit originally deemed inappropriate for election season). For as many painful events as he has been through in his life—like going from the top of book world to national punch line—last year was an emotional crucible. Frey got his identity back, suffered unimaginable heartbreak, and received an astonishing, self-reflective call from Oprah Winfrey, the woman who helped make him a superstar and then publicly turned him into road-kill.

Still feeling like a pariah when the new book came out, Frey was hugely relieved that reviewers put the scandal aside. “I was expecting to get killed everywhere,” he says. Though he was, as he puts it, “slaughtered” in the Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly called it both a “train wreck” and “a real page-turner,” The New York Times,Time, and Washington Post raved. He’s now in talks with Ilene Landress, executive producer of The Sopranos, to turn it into a television show.

Just as his career was getting back on track, his personal life became horrifically derailed last July, when his newborn son, Leo, died 11 days after birth from spinal muscular atrophy, a rare disease that was, at the time, undetectable by prenatal testing and is untreatable and incurable. “I’ve been through some difficult things in my life,” Frey says.  “Nothing comes close to this.”

Having built another bedroom in their apartment—which would now be empty—the Freys (who also have a four-year-old daughter, Maren) couldn’t face the thought of living there and decided to move to Amagansett. But two months later, their hearts still set on having another child, they decided to stay put and adopt. After a seven-month-long endeavor, they adopted a 22-month-old boy named Ellis from a Russian orphanage. “A healthy, awesome, sweet little boy,” says Frey. In the fall, Ellis will begin going to the preschool where Frey volunteers as a tour guide and Class Dad.

In spite of the personal tragedy, Frey’s life is approaching something he’s not quite used to: happy and normal. Even the scandal over A Million Little Pieces might be finding closure, as they say. Last spring, Oprah executive producer Sheri Salata called him to talk about coming back on the show—which for various reasons didn’t work out—and in the fall he got a call from Winfrey herself.

She’d had an epiphany of sorts while meditating that morning. It was time to apologize for what she put him through on that fateful day. She explained that her uncharacteristically harsh evisceration of him was coming, unfairly, from her own ego and sense of having been personally betrayed—a redemptive moment fitting, you might say, of The Oprah Winfrey Show. “It was a nice surprise to hear from her, and I really appreciated the call and the sentiment,” says Frey. “When I heard her say, ‘I felt I owe you an apology,’ I was very grateful. As far as I’m concerned, that part of my career is over and behind me and I’m looking forward to writing more books.”

Up next is Illumination, a theoretical third book of the Bible, written from the perspective of people surrounding a guy who may be the Messiah. “It’s my idea of what it would be like if the Messiah were walking the streets of New York City right now.”

[ read at VanityFair.com ]

from The New Bankrupt Times

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

“Banking should not be exciting. If banking is exciting there is something wrong with it.” CLAY EWING, president of German American Bancorp., a community bank in Jasper, Ind.

from SANS ARTIFICE

TARRED & FEATHERED

By Sans

TAR is not a fashion magazine – its editor, Evan Schindler will tell you as much. Sure a few fashion personalities make special guest appearances and there is a smattering of editorial content but ultimately these are amusing post scripts on an altogether charming love letter to the art world. The second issue’s cover of Kate Moss ala Damien Hirst is only there to grab your attention – the real nitty gritty of the magazine’s second issue lies in exploring the ways in which art is becoming honest. The issue’s theme of transparency is almost a misnomer – the content presented isn’t transparent as much as it is seditious – a pointed middle finger in the air to the status quo and its lies.

Which brings us back to Kate. There is no actual Kate Moss content in the issue. Sorry Moss fans. There is however a particularly amusing short story by James Frey about a character who bears some resemblance to the Moss we’ve come to know but this particular incarnation is more focused on cheating death and her time is spent at the Institute of Molecular Manufacturing rather than on the catwalk. While this may sound completely nutty, Frey is most adept at pulling “facts” out of thin air and it all blends together to form a rather odd tale. It is not the sort of thing that would run in any other magazine but its this commitment to doing things differently that makes TAR worthwhile.

[ click to read full piece at SANS ARTIFICE ]

click to visit TAR online

from Shelf-Awareness

Birth of the Cool: Minnesota

I know, Miles,
you didn’t have rural southern Minnesota
in mind when you
blew your classic mute
on your Birth of the Cool
sessions in New York, circa 1949.
But it’s the way the paper-thin
ice forms on the edge of the lake
today in late October:
meeting at the cold, dark water’s edge
–still open and free
though not for long–
with the ripples of these short, choppy
muted notes of yours
blown just out of reach
this cool windy autumn morning.

excerpted from Stompin’ at the Grand Terrace: A Jazz Memoir in Verse by Philip Bryant

[ click to read at Shelf-Awareness.com - about 2/3 scroll down the page ]

from Foreign Policy

Temple boys: Young South Korean Buddhist devotees pray under rows of lotus lanterns at the Chogye Temple in Seoul on May 1 (one day ahead of when Buddha’s birthday is celebrated in that country this year). Buddha was born approximately 2,553 years ago, and the day, or days, on which Vesak is celebrated varies from country to country. About 23 percent of South Korea’s population is Buddhist, the second-largest religion after Christianity, which is followed by 26 percent of the population. Just under half the population expresses no religious preference.

[ click to view full slideshow at ForeignPolicy.com ]

from the Irish Times

Student’s Wikipedia hoax quote used worldwide in newspaper obituaries

GENEVIEVE CARBERY

A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.

The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died at the end of March.

It was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after his death and later appeared in obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers.

“One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear,” Jarre was quoted as saying.

However, these words were not uttered by the Oscar-winning composer but written by Shane Fitzgerald, a final-year undergraduate student studying sociology and economics at University College Dublin.

Fitzgerald was shocked by the result of his experiment.

“I didn’t expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised about,” he said.

However, the hoax remained undiscovered for weeks until Fitzgerald e-mailed offending newspapers to tell them that they had published an inaccurate quote.

[ click to read full story at The Irish Times ]

Cow gets stuck…

Cow gets…

from the San Jose Mercury News

Girl, 17, run over by her own SUV during ‘ghost ride’ stunt

By Robert Salonga

Bay Area News Group 

BRENTWOOD — A 17-year-old girl had to be airlifted to a local hospital Tuesday evening after she was run over by her own car while trying to “ghost ride,” a car stunt popularized in the East Bay, police said.

“Ghost riding” typically entails a car owner walking or dancing alongside or on top of a vehicle that is idling forward without a driver. The stunt has local origins, particularly in the Bay Area rap scene radiating from Oakland and Vallejo.

The injured girl was “performing a horseplay maneuver” as her 1980s-model Chevrolet Blazer idled along about 6 p.m. near San Jose Avenue and Stonewood Drive, said Brentwood police Sgt. Mark Misquez.

With music blaring from the vehicle, the girl apparently was standing on a footstep on the driver’s side while the SUV crept forward, Misquez said. At some point she slipped, lost her grip and fell to the ground, and shortly after the vehicle ran over her upper legs, he said.

The girl appeared to be performing the stunt alone and was not as a part of an impromptu sideshow, a sort of street corner exhibition where the ghost riding the maneuver is done along with other car stunts such as “doughnuts”— quickly driving in a circle.

[ click to continue reading at mercurynews.com ]

from The Herald-Times & WSBT Bloomington

Lawmaker Shocked By Nude Spray-On Tan Case

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) — A state lawmaker says he plans to sponsor a bill next session that would bar adult males from applying spray-on tans to female juveniles at tanning salons.

State Rep. Bruce Borders, R-Jasonville, said he was shocked by a recent case where an adult man who works at a tanning salon applied a spray-on tan on a nude 15-year-old girl.

Borders said he, along with State Rep. Sandy Blanton, D-Orleans, will seek to introduce legislation next session putting restrictions on spray-on tanning. He said he isn’t sure what form the proposed law will take.

A Greene County woman, Brandy Holtsclaw, said she was furious when she learned her 15-year-old daughter got a spray-on tan while nude from a grown man at a Linton tanning salon.

Her daughter had forged a note from her mother. The tanning salon’s owner said that when he entered the booth to apply the tan last month, the girl had taken off all her clothes. He proceeded to apply the tan and then left her to dry.

[ click to read full article at WSBT ]

from The Guardian UK

Art historians claim Van Gogh’s ear ‘cut off by Gauguin’

• Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 May 2009 21.55 BST
• Article history

‘Self-portrait with cut ear’ by Vincent Van Gogh. Photograph: Roger-Viollet/Rex Features

Vincent van Gogh’s fame may owe as much to a legendary act of self-harm, as it does to his self-portraits. But, 119 years after his death, the tortured post-Impressionist’s bloody ear is at the centre of a new controversy, after two historians suggested that the painter did not hack off his own lobe but was attacked by his friend, the French artist Paul Gauguin

According to official versions, the disturbed Dutch painter cut off his ear with a razor after a row with Gauguin in 1888. Bleeding heavily, Van Gogh then walked to a brothel and presented the severed ear to an astonished prostitute called Rachel before going home to sleep in a blood-drenched bed.

But two German art historians, who have spent 10 years reviewing the police investigations, witness accounts and the artists’ letters, argue that Gauguin, a fencing ace, most likely sliced off the ear with his sword during a fight, and the two artists agreed to hush up the truth.

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]

from the Dracula Feed at Blogspot

Dracula Begins

Experience Bram Stoker’s Dracula in a new way — in real time. Dracula is an epistolary novel (a novel written as a series of letters or diary entries,) and this blog will publish each diary entry on the day that it was written by the narrator so that the audience may experience the drama as the characters would have. Please subscribe to the RSS feed so that you don’t miss any installments!

[ click to sign up for the Dracula feed ]

from The LA Times

Marilyn French dies at 79; author of feminist classic ‘The Women’s Room’

The 1977 novel, which captured the frustration and fury of a generation of women fed up with society’s traditional conceptions of their role, sold 20 million copies.

By Elaine Woo
May 5, 2009

Marilyn French, a writer and feminist scholar whose provocative 1977 novel “The Women’s Room” captured the frustration and fury of a generation of women fed up with society’s traditional conceptions of their roles, died Saturday at a hospital in New York City. She was 79.

Although it received mixed reviews, “The Women’s Room” became a feminist classic, selling more than 20 million copies in two dozen languages with a story that spoke powerfully to women seeking liberation from societal norms in the latter quarter of the 20th century. It traced the evolution of Mira, a repressed suburban housewife in the 1950s who divorces her brutish husband in the 1960s, goes to Harvard and finds friendship with other women seeking to redefine their lives in the midst of sweeping social change.

“It came at the right moment,” said Feminist Press founder Florence Howe, who knew French for 30 years. “It said to women you just have to stop being oppressed, you have to stand up and fight for yourself. Women heard that. Women recognized themselves.”

The novel’s most-quoted line — “All men are rapists, and that’s all they are,” spoken by the protagonist after the near-rape of her daughter — was often erroneously attributed to French herself, giving critics what they thought was proof of the author’s man-hating rage. The accusation infuriated French. “What I am opposed to,” she told the London Times a few years ago, “is the notion that men are superior to me.”

[ click to read full piece at LATimes.com ]

from E! Online

Nicolas Cage Movie Stunt Goes Awry; Injures Two

Today 8:10 AM PDT by JOSH GROSSBERG

Chan Kam Chuen/Lionsgate

Nicolas Cage’s latest movie is already a smash hit in New York. And that’s bad news.

A car chase stunt sequence for the Oscar winner’s new flick, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, went awry last night in Times Square, with a vehicle careening into a pizza parlor and injuring two bystanders.

The accident occurred around 1 a.m. as a Ferrari darted down Seventh Avenue to keep pace with a Mercedes, whose stunt driver apparently lost control and ended up plowing into the entrance of a Sbarro.

Although the street had been closed for filming, plenty of pedestrians were watching the action unfold—some too close for comfort…

“The Ferrarri took a sharp right to the left and lost it, swerving across the lanes, taking out a lamppost and a newsstand,” British tourist Mark Watkins, who was stationed atop bleachers at the new TKTS booth, told the New York Post,. “One lady was knocked to the ground and a lamppost landed directly on top of a chap.”

[ click to continue reading at E! Online ]

Amazing this has not happened yet in all of British history. Amazing. -Editor

from the UK Guardian

Carol Ann Duffy becomes first female poet laureate

Duffy takes poetry’s most prestigious job, succeeding Andrew Motion, as a standard-bearer for women poets

• Alison Flood
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 May 2009 10.02 BST
• Article history

‘I look on it as recognition of the great women poets we now have writing’ … Carol Ann Duffy. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Four hundred years of male domination came to an end today with the election of Carol Ann Duffy as poet laureate. Duffy, the widely-tipped favourite for the post, only agreed to accept the post ahead of poets Simon Armitage and Roger McGough because “they hadn’t had a woman”.

Speaking on Woman’s Hour this morning on Radio 4, she revealed that she had thought “long and hard” about accepting the offer.

“The decision was purely because they hadn’t had a woman,” she said. “I look on it as recognition of the great women poets we now have writing, like Alice Oswald.”

[ click to read complete article at The Guardian ]

March 28 through June 28, 2009
Fred Beans Gallery, Doylestown

Lead Sponsor, Judith and Bud Newman
Additional support from Silverman Family Partnerships and The Doylestown Bookshop

For decades, innovative artists manipulated paper products as a means of creative expression. This process is rooted in older traditions that are often culturally unique such as origami in Japan or Scherenschnitte in Germany. Contemporary artists, especially since the 1970s, have pushed the possibilities of this malleable material even further. Pulp Function surveys a wide variety of artistic expressions using handmade paper pulp, recycled paper, paper cuts, cardboard, papier-mâché, and folded paper. Tactile and familiar paper innovatively used include industrial strapping, paperback books, egg crates, trading cards, US dollar bills, diapers, NYC transit maps, photographs, Tyvek—and much more! The 3-D objects in this exhibition range from jewelry and clothing, furniture and lighting, to vessels and purely whimsical sculptural pieces and everything imaginable in between! Organized by the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, and curated by Lloyd Herman, founding director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery, this exhibit includes more than 70 works and is accompanied by a full color publication.

for more information visit The Michener Museum website

from the AP via Yahoo! News

2 upstate NY men accused of stealing, eating calf

PALMYRA, N.Y. – Two unemployed, hungry men stole a calf from a neighbor’s barn, shot it with an arrow and slit its throat before roasting its meat, police said.

David Lochner, 21, and Timothy Welch, 18, were camping outsidePalmyra, 20 miles southeast of Rochester, several weeks ago when a dairy farmer reported his calf missing, said State Police Investigator John Stubbe.

Authorities found a bloody bow and remains near the barn and in a river.

Stubbe said the two “decided they wanted something to eat,” led the calf out of the barn, shot it with arrows and cut its throat.

The two gutted the animal and sliced off steaks, leaving the carcass behind, the investigator said. “I’ve seen farm animals stolen, but I don’t recall anything like this, where two kids were out camping and they thought they needed a meal,” Stubbe said.

[ click to read full article at Yahoo! News ]

from the UK Telegraph

Joe Tilson: the forgotten king of British Pop art

On the eve of this year’s London Original Print Fair, the Alan Cristea Gallery is mounting a retrospective of neglected Sixties artist Joe Tilson, who found fame before the Beatles and David Hockney.

By Colin Gleadell

Affordable: a detail from Joe Tilson’s Stones of Venice, Pomegranate, which was inspired by San Marco in Venice and costs £1,500 Photo: COURTESY ALAN CRISTEA GALLERY, LONDON

Who is the best-known living British artist in Italy? Is it Lucian Freud, David Hockney or Damien Hirst? Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. The answer, according to Cork Street dealer Alan Cristea, is Joe Tilson, a first-generation British Pop artist, for whom Italy has been a second home for decades.

Tilson had been spotted for Marlborough in 1961 by John Kasmin, the dealer who later gave Hockney his first solo exhibition, and was the first of a group of young art stars to launch the gallery into the Swinging Sixties with a highly successful first show in 1962. “I was famous before the Beatles and Hockney,” Tilson says. However, fame, money and the machinations of the art market have never much interested him.

After he started making prints in 1963, similar objections were raised. When some were hung in the gallery window, the Printmakers Council objected on the grounds that they were not “original” prints because they had incorporated reproductions of images from magazines and newspapers.

“In the Sixties, I thought the question, ‘What is an original print?’ was totally irrelevant,” Tilson recalls. “My aim was to make things that corresponded to my feelings and thoughts – not to pre-established categories.” He made a list of things you were not supposed to do in printmaking: “Make each print different; paint on prints; tear the paper; crumple and fold the paper; make holes in the print; make three-dimensional prints; glue objects to the print…”, and so on. One by one, he broke each rule.

[ click to read full piece at the Telegraph ]

from The Guardian UK

Banksy artwork painted over in graffiti clean-up drive

£5,000 Paddington Bear mural covered up by Glastonbury council volunteers

• Matthew Taylor
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 30 April 2009 14.07 BST
• Article history

A group of volunteers clearing graffiti from the walls and bus stops in their home town have inadvertently painted over a modern masterpiece – and cost its owner £5,000.

The work, attributed to street artist Banksy, depicted Paddington Bear with the caption “Migration is not a crime” and was painted on to a wall owned by Julian Chatt in Glastonbury, Somerset. But well-meaning volunteers painted over the artwork as part of the council’s drive to rid the area of graffiti.

Chatt said he had struck a deal to sell the piece for about £5,000 and had agreed with the council that it would not be removed. “I’d spoken to the town council in the past and asked them not to paint over the artwork,” Chatt told the Western Daily Press.

“Sure enough, the last few times the council have been out they didn’t paint it over. But on Saturday morning, I came out of my house and there was this chemical smell, and when I turned the corner Paddington was gone.”

He said no one had asked him for permission to paint the wall, adding that his insurance provider would examine whether the painting was covered. Chatt said he had also reported it to the police.

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian UK ]

from The LA Times