from New York Press

Haim On You, Dr. Drew

Posted By: Tony O’Neill

They say there are certain inevitabilities in life. As the old cliché goes taxes and death are two of them, and here’s another: As soon as a celebrity dies of a drug overdose, Dr. Drew Pinsky will appear on my television screen before the body has even had time to cool, trying to sell whatever reality show crap he’s hustling this week.

Corey Haim died this morning of an overdose. If Dr Drew hasn’t already booked himself on The View before I am even done typing this, I’m taking bets on how long it is before he appears, like a grave robber relieving the corpse of gold teeth, to give his usual sales pitch, all dressed up as a faux-concerned “Although Corey Haim wasn’t a patient of mine, blah blah blah” speech. I have many problems with Dr. Drew. The first is that he is rather indiscriminate about who he decides is an addict. Anybody who has ever smoked pot, drank booze or even had sex is apparently an addict, so long as they are desperate enough to debase themselves on one of his reality shows. This season on Celebrity Rehab, as well as having real addicts like Mike Starr from Alice in Chains, and Tom Sizemore, we also had people like Kari Ann Peniche (best known for, uh, being in Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew) who was there because she knew how to play the role of the reality show villain really well, and Lisa D’Amato who was apparently a contestant on America’s Next Top Model, who liked to have a drink now and then. She wasn’t as hilariously pouty or dramatic as Ms. Peniche, so I guess they needed D’Amato to make up numbers.

This dearth of actual addicts is not just because it’s season three and Drew is running out of fresh meat. In season one he had Jaimee Foxworth from Family Matters, in rehab supposedly because she was “addicted” to marijuana. (Her appearance on this reality show was nothing to do with her porno career tanking, I’ll bet.) When she came in Drew warned her—with a straight face, no less—that she might expect some “heroin-like” withdrawal effects when she stopped smoking. Which might have played in the 1930s when all most people knew about pot came from the insane fantasies of Harry J. Anslinger and movies like Reefer Madness, but in 2010 a statement like that just serves to totally undermine whatever credibility the doctor has. Remember this is a man who appeared in Wild Hogs with Tim Allen, so he doesn’t have a whole lot to start off with.

But no, instead of getting into all of that—which is a whole article in and of itself—lets just sit back in wonder at the shamelessness of a man who thinks that news of another untimely celebrity death is the perfect opportunity to boost his ratings. If anyone has actually gone though rehab (full disclosure: I have, for a monstrous heroin/crack/meth rampage which took up most of my late teens and twenties) they will know that the rehab in Celebrity Rehab bears no more resemblance to a real rehab than the set of Rock of Love: Charm School did to a Swedish finishing school for young ladies. Instead what we see on Celebrity Rehab is more like a drug den for people whose addiction is to being on TV. And Dr. Drew, for all of his empathetic looks, nods and pseudo-wisdom on the subject of addiction is not the dispassionate clinician he likes to portray, but the instead the dealer, doling out another hit of public exposure and kinda-sorta fame to his jonseing clients.

I would love to see what Dr Drew thinks of prohibition itself, and whether he thinks that lives could be saved be decriminalizing drug use and moving to a more progressive position on the whole matter. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that prescribing heroin to heroin addicts leads to much better success rates than either methadone or prison, and that criminalizing a huge segment of our population for smoking an herb as benign as marijuana is costly, counterproductive and ineffective. But just like the drug cartels and the politicians, the Dr. Drews of this world need the status quo to be preserved. After all, in a post-prohibition society Dr. Drew couldn’t build his empire by pathologizing and exploiting drug users. Maybe then he could get back to what he was best at: sitting around with Adam Corolla and telling us whether we really can catch crabs from toilet seats.

Tony O’Neill is the author of the novels Down and Out in Murder Mile and the forthcoming Sick City.

[ click to read at NYPress.com ]

from The New York Times

An Italian Antihero’s Time to Shine

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

ROME — By at least one amusing new metric, Michelangelo’s unofficial 500-year run at the top of the Italian art charts has ended. Caravaggio, who somehow found time to paint when he wasn’t brawling, scandalizing pooh-bahs, chasing women (and men), murdering a tennis opponent with a dagger to the groin, fleeing police assassins or getting his face mutilated by one of his many enemies, has bumped him from his perch.

That’s according to an art historian at the University of Toronto, Philip Sohm. He has studied the number of writings (books, catalogs and scholarly papers) on both of them during the last 50 years. Mr. Sohm has found that Caravaggio has gradually, if unevenly, overtaken Michelangelo.

He has charts to prove it.

The change, most obvious since the mid-1980s, doesn’t exactly mean Michelangelo has dropped down the memory hole. To judge from the throngs still jamming the Sistine Chapel and lining up outside the Accademia in Florence to check out “David,” his popularity hasn’t dwindled much.

But, charts or no charts, Mr. Sohm has touched on something. Caravaggiomania, as he calls it, implies not just that art history doctoral students may finally be struggling to think up anything fresh to say about Michelangelo. It suggests that the whole classical tradition in which Michelangelo was steeped is becoming ever more foreign and therefore seemingly less germane, even to many educated people. His otherworldly muscle men, casting the damned into hell or straining to emerge from thick blocks of veined marble, aspired to an abstract and bygone ideal of the sublime, grounded in Renaissance rhetoric, which, for postwar generations, now belongs with the poetry of Alexander Pope or plays by Corneille as admirable but culturally remote splendors.

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from ABC News & Chef Nobu

[ click to continue recipe at ABC News ]

[ click to play the CodeOrgan ]

from The Wrap

Variety Drops Chief Film and Theater Critics

Updated: Todd McCarthy and David Rooney are cut as the trade moves to trim costs

By Daniel Frankel and Sharon Waxman

The evisceration of Variety continues.

On Monday, the trade let go chief film critic Todd McCarthy and chief theater critic David Rooney. Longtime film critic Derek Elley also was cut, as was features editor/indie film reporter Sharon Swart, along with several copy and design desk employees.

In a memo to Variety staff, the trade’s group editor, Tim Gray, said all three critics have been asked to work as freelancers for the moribund trade.

However, McCarthy told TheWrap he has made no such arrangement, at least not yet.

“It’s sad,” McCarthy said. “It’s the end of something. You can say it’s the end, or you can say it’s the end of the way it’s always been done.”

Reaction from the film community was characterized by shock and dismay, with Roger Ebert tweeting, “Variety fires Todd McCarthy and I cancel my subscription. He was my reason to read the paper. RIP, schmucks.”

Still, in his memo, Gray insisted, “Today’s changes won’t be noticed by readers. Our goal is the same: To maintain, or improve, our quality coverage.

[ click to continue reading at The Wrap ]

from The Coolhunter

[ click to continue reading at TheCoolhunter.net ]

from Papermag

“Your History Is Not Our History” Opens at Haunch of Venison

By Elizabeth Thompson

Installing “Your History is Not Our History: New York in the 1980s” at Haunch of Venison gallery felt like Christmas morning for artist Richard Phillips, who organized the show with artist David Salle. “The crates came and it was was like opening present after present after present,” Phillips said at the show’s opening Friday night, as guests including Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, Jeffrey Deitch, Jerry Saltz, Cynthia Rowley, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and James Frey, took in Prince’s and Salle’s re-telling of the ’80s art world in New York City, a time period during which they believe artists’ work is often mis-remembered as being oppositional of one another and representative of exclusive critical positions.

Instead, via pieces by Salle, Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sherrie Levine, Jeff Koons, and Eric Fischl among other luminaries from the ’80s, “Your History is Not Our History,” highlights the shared attributes of works from the time period, in this case, the sound rejection of authority and a sense of radicalism Phillips said was palpable at gallery shows.

[ click to continue reading at Papermag.com ]

from The LA Times

Andreas Gursky makes a long-distance connection

The German artist’s large-scale satellite images make up ‘Oceans’ in the newly expanded Gagosian Gallery.

Andreas Gursky, above, is “original and innovative,” gallery owner Larry Gagosian says. (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)

By Suzanne Muchnic

If your knowledge of Andreas Gursky’s enormous photographs is limited to meticulously detailed, vividly colored long shots of offices, factories and a 99 Cents Only store, you are in for a surprise.

And if you think Larry Gagosian’s elegant Beverly Hills gallery is a showcase with relatively little floor space, you’d better look again.

The German artist is inaugurating a major enlargement of the gallery with “Oceans,” a new body of work based on satellite images. In his exhibition that opened Thursday night with an invitational preview, six photographs of deep blue water fringed by continents and dotted with islands hang in the new 3,030-square-foot space. Nine earlier works fill the original main gallery and a smaller room upstairs.

“Andreas Gursky is a new relationship for our gallery,” Gagosian says. “He’s one of the most original and innovative living artists, and the timing seemed right with the expansion of our gallery in Beverly Hills.”

[ click to continue reading at LATimes.com ]

from The Wall Street Journal

A Game of Tag Breaks Out Between London’s Graffiti Elite

Slight Brings Robbo Out of Retirement; Cobbler Won’t Let Rival Tread on Him

By GABRIELE STEINHAUSER

LONDON—In the predawn hours of Christmas morning, a 40-year-old shoe repairman who goes by the name Robbo squeezed his 6-foot-8-inch frame into a wet suit, tossed some spray cans into a plastic bag, and crossed Regent’s Canal on a red-and-blue air mattress.

Robbo, one of the lost pioneers of London’s 1980s graffiti scene, was emerging from a long retirement. He had a mission: to settle a score with the world-famous street artist Banksy, who, Robbo believes, had attacked his legacy.

The battle centers on a wall under a bridge on the canal in London’s Camden district. In the fall of 1985—just 15 years old but already a major player in London’s graffiti scene—Robbo announced his presence on that wall with eight tall block letters: ROBBO INC.

The work, written in orange, red and black on a yellow background, had been in good shape for nearly 25 years and was considered a local icon, surviving long after Robbo himself vanished from the scene 16 years ago.

But recently, Robbo’s work was dramatically altered by an unlikely rival: Banksy, the stealthy Bristol-born artist who has made a lucrative art of graffiti. The work of Banksy—who, like Robbo, doesn’t disclose his name—sells for big money and is widely merchandised. His first film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is due out in U.K. theaters this month.

In early December, Banksy did a series of four pieces along the Regent’s Canal’s walls. Inexplicably, one of them incorporated Robbo’s piece into Banksy’s own work, painting over half the Robbo original in the process. The resulting work, in Banksy’s typical stencil technique, shows a black-and-white workman applying colorful wallpaper that is, in essence, the remnants of Robbo’s piece.

[ click to continue reading at WSJ.com ]

from USA Today via AZCentral

Free porn on ‘tube sites’ puts dent in industry

by Jon Swartz - Mar. 2, 2010 08:45 AM
USA Today

SAN FRANCISCO — The adult-entertainment industry is in a tailspin, shattering the notion that it is one of the few recession-proof industries.

The slump is especially stinging because technology — which helped adult-entertainment enterprises reap riches through innovations such as video streaming, webcameras and online payments — is contributing to the misery.

DVDs and online pay sites, which make up the majority of porn-related sales, are in a free fall largely because of the rise of so-called tube sites.

Knockoffs of video-sharing site YouTube, the sites serve up snippets of free porn that is often pirated. (Google’s YouTube has done its best to bar explicit content.)

[ click to continue reading at AZCentral.com

from LA Weekly

Kill Bill’s Schoolgirl Assassin Launches Singing Career

By Liz Ohanesian

Japanese Actress Chiaki Kuriyama, perhaps best known to the U.S. audience as killer schoolgirl Gogo Yubari in Kill Bill, is preparing to launch a new career as a pop singer. She will make her debut in Japan next week, word on upcoming releases in the States is still pending.

Kuriyama’s first single, “Ryusei No Namida” will be the theme song for the forthcoming anime Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn. As fans of the genre know, an anime theme credit can bolster an artist’s reputation both in Japan and throughout the international community. Add that to the wild popularity of the Gundam franchise and it seems like Kuriyama, who also appeared in the cult hit Battle Royale, has made a wise career move.

[ click to continue reading at LA Weekly ]

from The NY Times

Depression’s Upside

Ben Weeks

By JONAH LEHRER

The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all. There were his “fits” brought on by “excitements,” “flurries” leading to an “uncomfortable palpitation of the heart” and “air fatigues” that triggered his “head symptoms.” In one particularly pitiful letter, written to a specialist in “psychological medicine,” he confessed to “extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence” and “hysterical crying” whenever Emma, his devoted wife, left him alone.

For Darwin, depression was a clarifying force, focusing the mind on its most essential problems. In his autobiography, he speculated on the purpose of such misery; his evolutionary theory was shadowed by his own life story. “Pain or suffering of any kind,” he wrote, “if long continued, causes depression and lessens the power of action, yet it is well adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil.” And so sorrow was explained away, because pleasure was not enough. Sometimes, Darwin wrote, it is the sadness that informs as it “leads an animal to pursue that course of action which is most beneficial.” The darkness was a kind of light.

[ click to read full article at NYTimes.com ]

from The Los Angeles Times

Roast pork tenderloin and asparagus with mustard vinaigrette. (Chicago Tribune/Bill Hogan)

Ingredients:
1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 pork tenderloin, about 1 1/4 pounds
1/2 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground pepper
1 pound asparagus
3 shallots, cut in wedges
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
1 tablespoon whole-grain mustard

[ click for rest of recipe ]

from The Los Angeles Times

Art is the message on these billboards

The works by several visual artists will appear in an area bounded by the 405 freeway and downtown L.A.

James Welling, the creator of the blue diagonal piece billboard is a professor at UCLA. His art will appear in as part of a project by 22 visual artists.

By Scarlet Cheng, February 20, 2010

A grid of blue diagonals, the profiles of two men confronting each other, a series of colorful vertical stripes with an embedded phrase — these will be some of the enigmatic images flashing through our peripheral vision while driving in L.A. over the next six weeks.

They are three of the 21 visual artists’ billboards that have been going up in some of the most trafficked corridors of Los Angeles, part of a long percolating idea of Kimberli Meyer, director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House.

“How Many Billboards?” will be sited in the central part of the city, bounded on the west by the 405 freeway and on the east by downtown. (Maps are available at the Schindler House as well as posted on www.howmanybill boards.org.)

They were designed by 22 artists — one is a collaboration between the mother-son team of Martha Rosler and Josh Neufeld — most of them based in the Los Angeles area. Only a handful had done billboards before, but all were chosen by Meyer and co-curators Lisa Henry, Nizan Shaked and Gloria Sutton on their potential to realize outsized presentations.

The artists include James Welling, creator of the blue diagonal piece and a professor at UCLA; Jennifer Bornstein, subject of a MOCA Focus show in 2005; and Kori Newkirk, who was in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

Several are known for their work in experimental film — Kenneth Anger, David Lamelas, Kerry Tribe and Yvonne Rainer, who is also a dancer-choreographer.

[ click to continue reading at the LA Times ]

from The New York Times’ UrbanEye

ART

Shaq in the Paint

Apparently being an NBA superstar, actor, author, Ph.D. student, platinum-selling rapper, reserve police officer and U.S. Deputy Marshal was not enough for Shaquille O’Neal. Now the 7-foot-1-inch Cleveland Cavalier is venturing into the art world as a gallery curator. His first exhibition, “Size Does Matter,” opens today at the Flag Art Foundation in Chelsea. The show, which runs through May 27, explores “the myriad ways that scale affects the perception of contemporary art” and includes works by Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Kehinde Wiley, Lisa Yuskavage and others. And if that wasn’t enough to get your attention, a catalog with an essay by Cleveland native James Frey will accompany the exhibition.

[ click to read at NYTimes.com ]

from MediaBistro’s Fishbowl LA

‘Father of Rock Criticism’ Paul Williams Stricken with Early Onset Dementia

By Matthew Fleischer on Feb 16, 2010 09:20 AM

An interesting story in the San Diego CityBeat profiles legendary rock critic Paul Williams, who, after a serious bike accident in 1995, suffers from dementia. His condition has degraded in recent years, to the point where he now needs round-the-clock care.

Williams founded the legendary music magazine “Crawdaddy” in 1966, when he was only 17. CityBeat writer Sarah Nardi credits Crawdaddy as “the first publication to treat rock as a serious subject (paving the way for future mags like Rolling Stone), and Williams was the first to realize that the music was less a generational byproduct than a cultural catalyst.”

More on Williams from Nardi:

“He smoked his first joint with Brian Wilson while listening to the masters of what would become SMILE; he counseled a struggling Springsteen on musical direction (just before The Boss finally broke through with Born To Run); he and pal Timothy Leary spent a night with John and Yoko during the Toronto Bed-In-For-Peace, and Williams later rejoined the couple to sing on “Give Peace a Chance.” He bitched out Jim Morrison for leaving a book Williams lent him behind on a plane; he hitched a ride to Woodstock in a limo with The Grateful Dead; and all the while, Williams was writing–refracting the pure creative energy around him through a powerful critical lens.

Image credit, via CityBeat: “A portrait of Paul Williams painted by Drew Snyder, rendered from a photo taken by R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe.”

[ click to continue reading at MediaBistro ]

from NBC New York

Shaq, Art Curator?

The Size DOES Matter exhibit features 66 pieces picked by O’Neal

By ELIZABETH BOUGEROL 

insEyedout /Flickr Creative Commons 2.0

Kicking off Friday at Chelsea’s FLAG Art Foundation is Size DOES Matter, a collection of 66 works of art across different media, aimed at highlighting how scale affects perception. So who better to tap for curating the show than 7-foot-1 Cleveland Cavalier center and art collector Shaquille O’Neal, who wears a size 22 shoe?

Included in the show, according to the Post, are pieces like “Robert Therrien’s colossal sculpture of a table and six chairs” and “Ron Mueck’s ‘Untitled (Big Man),’ a nearly 7-foot-tall sculpture of a naked, bald man curled up awkwardly, elbows resting on his knees” (pictured). There are also a few works that take O’Neal himself as the subject, such as Willard Wigan’s portrait of the player that’s so tiny, it fits in the eye of a needle.

The exhibition – whose catalogue includes an essay by Cleveland native/author/Oprah whipping boy James Frey – runs February 19 through May 27, 2010.

Details
Size DOES Matter
February 17-May 22, open Wednesday to Saturday, 12-5PM
FLAG Art Foundation; 545 West 25th Street; 212-206-0220
Free
More information at flagartfoundation.org/upcoming

[ click to read at NBC New York ]

from The Cool Hunterixed Media Girl

We have a hunch we will be seeing much more of the work by the young, London-based graphic designer and illustrator, Nikki Farquharson

[ click to continue reading at The CoolHunter.net ]

from the LA Times

This dish delivers deliciousness on the cheap. (Chicago Tribune/Bonnie Trafelet)

By Renee Enna, Chicago Tribune 

Ingredients:
1/4 cup red or white wine vinegar
2 tablespoons cranberry juice
1 tablespoon honey or sugar or to taste
1/4 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground pepper
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 bag (10 ounces) mixed salad greens
1/4 cup chopped walnuts
Cherry tomatoes, radishes, chopped red bell pepper
8 canned beet slices, cut into heart shapes, if desired

[ click to continue recipe at LA Times.com ]

from The LA Times

New York Fashion Week: BCBG Max Azria, Cynthia Rowley explore the urban jungle [UPDATED]

February 12, 2010

The urban tribal aesthetic we saw last season at Proenza Schouler and Balenciaga is starting to turn up in the fall collections in New York this week.

First, it was at BCBG Max Azria on Thursday morning, where neutral-colored, draped silk dresses in geometric cuts were shot through with blocks of vibrant blue and yellow.

And it continued at Cynthia Rowley, where models had bright color woven into their hair and the band Preacher and the Knife struck a tribal beat.

On the runway, galactic-storm print minidresses mixed it up with color blocked jackets and motocross puffer gloves. While marled, multicolored lace tops and silk tops dangling rainbow fringe made for a fun, DIY-inspired look.

Beyond showing her collection, Rowley is doing something interesting with the Gagosian Gallery this season. The designer, who runs with an artsy crowd (her husband, Bill Powers, opened the Half Gallery in New York with James Frey and Andy Spade), got into a chat about art and appropriation with the Gagosian’s store manager, and a collaboration was born.

[ click to continue reading at the LA Times ]