from AP via Breitbart.com via Drudge

Sep 30 03:54 PM US/Eastern By MALIN RISING and HILLEL ITALIE Associated Press Writers

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) – Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.  Counters the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation: “Put him in touch with me, and I’ll send him a reading list.”    As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year’s award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it’s no coincidence that most winners are European.” Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States,” he told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Tuesday. He said the 16-member award jury has not selected this year’s winner, and dropped no hints about who was on the short list. Americans Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates usually figure in speculation, but Engdahl wouldn’t comment on any names. Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” dragging down the quality of their work.” The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “ That ignorance is restraining.”His comments were met with fierce reactions from literary officials across the Atlantic.” You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.

 [ click to read full bit of nonsense at Breitbart.com ]

from the Los Angeles Times

 Paintings could be by Jackson Pollock, or not

Joe Doane / Azusa Pacific University

OWNER: Erich Gabor Neumeth, 89, says he obtained the paintings in the 1960s as payment of a debt.

If the paintings are genuine, Azusa Pacific University stands to gain a windfall. However, that’s quite an ‘if.’

By Suzanne Muchnic, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 30, 2008

AS EXECUTIVE vice president of Azusa Pacific University, David Bixby fields lots of calls. But one that came through last March was a stunner. Howard Kazanjian, a film producer and university trustee, had come across a trove of paintings by a giant of 20th century art that might be donated to the evangelical Christian university.

The good news was that the works were said to have been made by Jackson Pollock, the Abstract Expressionist known for his “drip and splash” style. The bad news: This was yet another batch of undocumented paintings attributed to the artist.

[ click to read full article at LA Times ]

from CBCNews

Kate Moss’s self-portrait in lipstick finds buyer

Last Updated: Sunday, September 28, 2008 | 2:22 PM ET Comments7Recommend3

CBC News

A self-portrait drawn in lipstick by model Kate Moss has been scooped up by a private buyer for £33,600 ($63,900).

London auction house Lyon & Turnbull revealed late Saturday that the canvas, a side-angle view of the supermodel, did not sell at auction at its reserve price of £40,000 ($76,000)

The 34-year-old had created the work while in a troubled past relationship with musician Pete Doherty.

The portrait also features stains of blood belonging to rocker Doherty, who in addition has inscribed the words: “Who needs blood when you’ve got lipstick?”

The frontman for Babyshambles is a recovering heroin addict and had sold the lipstick self-portrait to an anonymous buyer, who put it up for auction.

A self-portrait by Doherty, signed in blood, was also put up for sale in the auction, but no one wanted to buy it.

It was inscribed with the words: “Look what they have done to the boy” and had a reserve price of £10,000 ($19,000).

[ click to read at cbc.ca ]

from Art Market Monitor

And What About Pamela?

How perfectly Princian? Colin Gleadell unearths this catalogue gem from the upcoming photography sales in which it is revealed that Pamela Anderson is selling a Richard Prince photograph. From the story it would appear Anderson is selling in distress but Gleadell is more curious how Anderson came to be a collector in the first place:

How Anderson came to acquire the photograph is not known. “Pamela is a girl friend,” Prince tells me. In 1998, he made a series of works in which he appropriated 8in x 10in publicity photographs of celebrities, Anderson among them, on which he wrote dedications and signed their names.

Why she is selling is also unknown. Her manager [ . . . ] describes her as “a small-scale art collector” and says that she is selling for “complicated reasons”. “I am having to sell this photo and it kills me,” she says.

Pamela Anderson: Art Collector (Daily Telegraph) 

[ click to read at Art Market Monitor ]

from the SJ Mercury News

Bulgarian poet Konstantin Pavlov dies at 75

The Associated Press

Article Launched: 09/29/2008 09:17:26 AM PDT

SOFIA, Bulgaria—Poet and screenwriter Konstantin Pavlov, who became one of Bulgaria’s most prominent intellectuals with his rare defiance of the country’s communist regime, has died, a filmmakers union said. He was 75.

Pavlov died Sunday after a long illness, the Union of Bulgarian Film Makers announced.

He was among the few Bulgarian intellectuals who dared to assert their professional independence during the 1945-89 communist regime. Pavlov gained popularity despite censors imposing a decade-long publishing ban against him in 1966, with Bulgarians clandestinely copying and reading his poems.

His poems have been translated into many European languages and he has been recognized with a number of national awards for poetry and literature.

Some of his most popular volumes of poetry are “Sweet Agony” (1991), “The Murder of the Sleeping Man” (1992) and “A Long Time Ago…” (1998).

In 1980, he was granted the Grand Prix at the Karlovy Vary film festival for his screenplay of the film “Illusion”.

Pavlov was born on April 2, 1933, in a small village near the capital, Sofia.

He is survived by his wife Maria and his daughter Donka. The funeral will be held Tuesday in Sofia.

[ click to read at mercurynews.com ]

from Bloomberg

Watch Those Elbows: Wynn’s $139 Million Picasso Joins N.Y. Show 

By Lindsay Pollock

Sept. 26 (Bloomberg) — A $139 million Picasso painting damaged by billionaire owner Stephen Wynn when he somehow poked his elbow through it will be publicly shown for the first time since the 2006 mishap.

The patched-up “Le Reve,” or “The Dream,” owned by the Las Vegas casino operator, is part of a Picasso exhibit opening Oct. 15 at Acquavella Galleries on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Other lenders to “Picasso’s Marie-Therese” include the Metropolitan Museum of Art and collector Steven Cohen, founder of hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors LLC.

Dealers estimated the show includes more than $500 million in artwork, though most isn’t for sale — including “Le Reve.”

“He has no intention of selling it,” said Nick Acquavella, a gallery director.

Wynn, who has an eye impairment, accidentally put a silver- dollar-sized hole in the 1932 portrait of Picasso’s sexy blonde mistress Marie-Therese Walter while showing it to friends, who included the writer Nora Ephron. The 2006 incident occurred less than 24 hours after he agreed to sell “Le Reve” to Cohen for $139 million. The sale was eventually canceled.

The tear was repaired and the erotic painting of Picasso’s dozing lover, with her left breast exposed, usually hangs in Wynn’s Las Vegas office.

“To the naked eye, you can’t really see anything,” Acquavella sai

[ click to continue reading at bloomberg.com ]

from the Washington Post 

Power Shifts From N.Y. to D.C.
After Wall Street’s Quake, Manhattan Braces for Financial Tsunami
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writer

There are signs that the sagging fortunes of the Wall Street titans are already being felt in myriad ways in the city.

Renowned defense lawyer Edward W. Hayes, a self-described night owl, long ago developed two measurements for gauging the ups and downs of Wall Street: the HEGI and the HESI, which stand for High End Girlfriend Index and High End Stripper Index. When the financial sector’s business is good, he said, the traders and bankers spend huge sums on high-end girlfriends and in the VIP rooms of Manhattan’s pricey strip joints.

Now, said Hayes, who represents many of the woman in the business, he is seeing evidence of the downturn.

“The strippers are getting killed — it’s terrible,” he said. “It really started in the last month. What they really need are the guys who go in and spend $500.”

In fact, while New York City has for years enjoyed the fruits of Wall Street’s decade of dizzying success — an estimated 10 percent of all tax revenue comes from the Street — the highflying traders and financiers are far from loved in this city. For many, who didn’t share in the spoils, there is a certain sense of schadenfreude — enjoying the new misery of the formerly wealthy.

“I do have a vengeful streak in me,” said Rachelle Pachtman, a public relations consultant who lives in an Upper West Side building heavily populated by some of the rich and privileged financial titans.

“I know that there’s going to be a glut of apartments that are going to be dumped in the multimillion-dollar range,” Pachtman said. “They pay a lot for their mortgages. They’ve all got their children in . . . private schools. They all have a lifestyle. How are they going to keep this up?

“It’s going to take their breath away, because they’re going to have to deal with the reality that all the rest of us do,” she added. “I think there’s going to be a lot of people on the therapist’s couch — a very typical New York thing. People are going to start drinking a lot.”

[ click to read full article at WaPo.com ]

from Agence France-Presse The Times South Africa

MOSCOW — Pornographic, extremist and immoral — that’s how Russian prosecutors are describing popular US cartoons like The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park.

The channel that carries them has been forced to suspend broadcasts of the offending programmes pending legal action and throngs of teenagers have taken to the streets to demand their favourite cartoons back.

Fans of the cartoons say critics just don’t get the joke and are engaging in Soviet-style moral censorship, while opponents say the cartoons are poisoning the minds of Russia’s young.

“I’ve got no problem with my sense of humour but any satire has its limits,” said Konstantin Bendas, a Pentecostal pastor and father of three who is heading the campaign and has written a formal complaint to prosecutors.

“If a character in a cartoon says ’All Jews are stupid’ is that funny? If Christian communion is compared to eating faeces, is that funny?,” he asked, referring to some of the 20 episodes of South Park he has watched.

Following Bendas’s complaint, channel 2×2 now also faces a criminal investigation under strict new Russian legislation against extremism for broadcasting the notoriously foul-mouthed South Park.

“The cartoons broadcast by 2×2 propagandise violence, cruelty, pornography and anti-social behaviour,” the statement said.

“They are full of scenes of mutilation and infliction of physical and moral suffering that evoke fear, panic and terror in children.

“This media product is of low moral and ethical content and has an extremely negative effect on children, it perverts their moral orientation and increases the danger of panic and neurotic ailments.”

Prosecutors also said the channel was in breach of legislation for the protection of children and rules against “the proliferation through the media of material propagandising pornography, a cult of violence and cruelty.”

[ click to read full article at The Times SA ]

from New Scientist

Shifty eye movements behind famous optical illusion

• 12:12 23 September 2008
• NewScientist.com news service
• David Robson

The cause of an optical illusion, made famous by a 1981 painting, has finally been solved.

Neuroscientists have shown that the way our eyes constantly make tiny movements is responsible for the way concentric circles in Isia Leviant’s painting ‘Enigma’ (see image, right) seem to flow before onlookers’ eyes.

Susana Martinez-Conde and her team from the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, tested whether the effect was down to tiny, involuntary jerks of the eyes, known as microsaccades. Their purpose is not fully understood, but the rate of these movements is known to vary naturally.

In the team’s experiment, while three subjects viewed Enigma, cameras recorded their eye movements 500 times every second. The subjects were asked to press a button when the speed of the optical “trickle” of the illusion appeared to slow down or stop, and release it when the trickle seemed faster.

“We can now rule out the idea that the illusion originates solely in the brain,” she told New Scientist.

Martinez-Conde adds that their research may also explain other similar illusions, such as Bridget Riley’s Fall, or the Ouchi illusion. “It would be unexpected if Enigma is the only illusion affected by eye movements,” she says.

See a slideshow of that illusion and others. 

[ click to read full article at New Scientist ]

from Variety

‘American Psycho’ heads to stage

Musical adaptation in development 

By GORDON COX

“American Psycho” has begun the development process and is aiming for Broadway.

Legit version of the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel, about a 1980s Wall Street banker who is also a serial killer, will come from the Johnson-Roessler Co., management-production company the Collective and XYZ Films. The three shingles have partnered to acquire the rights to develop and produce the stage incarnation.

“Psycho” was previously adapted into a 2000 Lionsgate pic that starred Christian Bale.

Development team has just begun the selection process for creatives to pen the score and the book. No timeline has been set for what is envisioned as a large-scale musical.

Graphically bloody novel, which juxtaposes Reagan-era decadence and gruesome killings, includes prominent references to bands of the era, a fact that contributed to the idea of musicalizing the story. Sounds of the time will influence the new show’s score.

[ click to read full article at Variety.com ]

from Prospect Magazine

America’s universities sheltered David Foster Wallace—and almost ruined his writing
Julian Gough

Like James Joyce, David Foster Wallace will be remembered—and, by some, fiercely loved—for a book which 99.999 per cent of the world’s population will never read to its end.

Wallace hung himself in his home in California on 12th September 2008, aged 46. So Infinite Jest (1996), his second novel, turns out to be his final one, and lines and paragraphs throughout its 1,079 pages now flash in neon: “Help me, I’m depressed.” The neon will fade. It will be a magnificently ambitious book again. But right now it reads like a suicide note.

Crucially, he was unplugged from electric, living America, by a life spent in the university system. His father was a professor of philosophy, his mother a professor of English. He majored in English and philosophy at Amherst, did an MFA in creative writing in Arizona, turned his English thesis into his first novel, studied philosophy at Harvard, got a job in the English department of Illinois State University, which he left to teach creative writing at Pomona College in California, where he died.

He was an immensely gifted and original writer, with a brilliant, hyper-analytical mind. The two things such people should avoid are marijuana and universities. He was aware of the dangers of the former (which was not just a threat to his prose—after his first novel he checked into rehab and asked to be put on suicide watch). But he couldn’t escape the warm, welcoming trap of the latter. Only universities will give a job for life and full health insurance to a novelist with heavy-metal hair and a history of depression. He was, as ever, aware of the risk to his fiction. In a brilliant, painful television interview with Charlie Rose in 1997, he said, “Oh boy, don’t even get me started on teaching… The more time and energy spent on teaching, which is extraordinarily hard to do well, the less time spent on your own work… I find myself saying this year the same thing I said last year, and it’s a little bit horrifying.” He looked like a trapped animal. He’d been teaching for four years. Eleven years later, still teaching creative writing, never having written another novel, he killed himself.

[ click to read full piece at Prospect Magazine ]

from the Washington Post

The Beaux-Arts Indians of George Brush
By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post, Wednesday, September 24, 2008; C01

In 1882, when young George de Forest Brush — who was born in 1854 or ’55 (the records disagree) and died in 1941 — rode into the West, he wasn’t an ethnographer or a champion of the underdog or a traveling reporter or any kind of cowboy. He was a painter with a purpose, a Paris-trained professional seeking subjects for his art.

He knew what he was looking for. The figures he was seeking would be thrillingly exotic, distinctively American, conveniently unclothed. Indians would do fine. Those in Brush’s paintings have all the right accessories (beadwork on their moccasins, silver-studded belts, stone arrowheads, canoes), but they aren’t convincing Indians. That’s because they’re stand-ins. Brush looked on them as “actors.” They are stand-ins for the youths he meant to show us all along, the figures of the Renaissance, the gods of Greece and Rome.

This is the painting the impressionists warned us against: French academic art.

[ click to read full review at WaPo.com ]

from the NY Daily News

US mom admits helping son build weapons cache

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tuesday, September 23rd 2008, 3:12 PM

Bower/AP

Michele Cossey arrives at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa., in 2007.

NORRISTOWN, Pennsylvania – A woman admitted she helped her troubled, bullied 14-year-old son build a cache of weapons by buying him a rifle and gunpowder, but investigators still don’t know if she was aware her son was planning a deadly school attack.

Michele Cossey, 46, pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of child endangerment. She admitted that she bought him a rifle with a laser scope and gunpowder, which investigators said he was using to build grenades.

Prosecutors said her son, Dillon, came to idolize the Columbine High School shooters, who killed 12 classmates and a teacher before committing suicide in 1999 in Colorado, and was planning an attack last year on Plymouth Whitemarsh High School, which some former schoolmates attended.

Cossey, bullied over his weight, had left public school half way through middle school and was being home-schooled. Over time, violent Internet sites fueled his revenge fantasies, his defense lawyer said after his juvenile court plea.

Assistant District Attorney Christopher Parisi said he thought purchasing the weapons was “an attempt to boost his self-esteem, and in some way help the child, as misplaced as those thoughts may have been.”

Michelle Cossey’s sentencing hearing won’t happen until after she undergoes a psychiatric evaluation.

[ click to read full article at NYDailyNews.com ]

from the NY Daily News

US tries to extradict Russian ‘Merchant of Death’

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Monday, September 22nd 2008, 11:56 AM

BANGKOK, Thailand – A Russian man whose extradition is being sought by the United States is one of the world’s biggest arms dealers, a U.S. agent testified Monday in Thai court.

Alleged arms trafficker Viktor Bout has been indicted in the U.S. on four terrorism-related charges. He was arrested in Thailand on March 6.

The 41-year-old Russian has been dubbed “The Merchant of Death,” by the media, but he denies any involvement in illicit activities. He was purportedly the model for the arms dealer portrayed by Nicolas Cage in the 2005 movie “Lord of War.”

[ click to continue reading at NYDailyNews.com ]

from the Los Angeles Times 

Recipe: Monday meatballs

Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times

DELICIOUS: Monday meatballs elevates the simple to the extraordinary

Monday meatballs

Total time: 2 hours, 15 minutes

Servings: 6

Note: Adapted from “A16: Food + Wine,” by Nate Appleman and Shelley Lindgren with Kate Leahy. Grana is an Italian cow’s milk cheese similar to but less expensive than Parmigiano-

Reggiano; it’s available at many cheese shops, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods markets. You can substitute Parmigiano. A meat grinder or food processor is needed for this recipe.

10 ounces boneless pork shoulder, about 1 1/3 cups ground

10 ounces beef chuck, about 1 1/3 cups ground

6 ounces day-old country bread

2 ounces pork fat, finely chopped

2 ounces prosciutto (4 to 5 slices), chilled in the freezer for 15 minutes and then finely chopped

[ click to see if there are any vegetables in this recipe ]

from the San Jose Mercury News

Foot-stomping pee wee mariachi takes center stage at annual San Jose festival

ANNUAL MUSIC FESTIVAL OPENS WITH CRASH COURSE FOR THE 5-AND-UNDER SET

By Joe Rodriguez Mercury News 

How do you teach traditional Mexican music, a complex and unique sound ever since the first Aztec and Spaniard put their flute and guitar together five centuries ago, to the modern American pee wee set?

“You start with the songs, use lots of language and engage their parents,” says Maria Luis Colmenarez, director of the Pee Wee Mariachi program.

The refashioned San Jose Mariachi and Latin Music Festival threw a fiesta Sunday at the city’s Children’s Discovery Museum, kicking off the big week of events for the annual mariachi celebration. The big hit appeared to be the 45-minute crash courses in musica y danza folklorica for children 5 and younger.

Midway into the morning’s first session, 3-year-old Rocco Marron had his zapateado, or footwork, down pat. The band was playing, “La Iguana,” a tune from Veracruz that asks dancers, young or old, to get down on all fours and mimic a dancing reptile. His little brother, 1-year-old Nico, liked that part better than the fancy footwork.

Nevermind that “Iguana” is not a mariachi tune or that the band members were wearing tropical, white guayabera shirts and not huge sombreros. The band, El Mosquito, played jarocho music from coastal Mexico, but when you’re 3 years old and having a good time, who’s going to split musical hairs?

Pee Wee Mariachi is a new, ongoing program run by Mexican Heritage Corp., the festival sponsor which lately has added modern Latino music to the event and moved it downtown from its former base in East San Jose. Wishing to reach very young children, the organization found a natural venue and host at the children’s museum and a financial sponsor in “First 5,” Santa Clara County’s health education program focused on families with youngsters 5 and younger.

[ click to continue reading at the SJ Mercury News ]

from the Los Angeles Times

James Crumley dies at 68; author of gritty but poetic crime novels

Bill Wittliff / Texas State University-San Marcos

James Crumley, seen in 1989, wrote seven poetic but hard-boiled detective tales, including “The Last Good Kiss.” “There was something about the beauty, the elegance of the prose that I think is the most important thing about Crumley,” says Otto Penzler, founder of Mysterious Press.

By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 20, 2008

James Crumley, a revered and influential crime novelist whose hard-boiled detective tales set in Montana and other Western locales were praised for both their grittiness and the lyrical quality of their prose, has died. He was 68.

Crumley died of complications from kidney and pulmonary diseases Wednesday at a hospital in Missoula, Mont., said his wife, writer and artist Martha Elizabeth.

A self-described “bastard child of Raymond Chandler,” Crumley wrote seven crime novels featuring two detectives who were set not in the mean streets of L.A. but in what he called “my twisted highways in the mountain West.”

Crumley’s private eyes, C.W. Sughrue and Milo Milodragovitch, were, as Dallas Morning News writer Jerome Weeks wrote in 2001, “sullen, violent men whose drug use and carnal antics would stagger a rhino.”

To tell his two detectives apart, Crumley suggested remembering that “Milo’s first impulse is to help you; Sughrue’s is to shoot you in the foot.”

The opening line to his 1978 Sughrue novel “The Last Good Kiss,” which many consider his masterpiece, is considered classic — and fans would often recite it to him at book signings:

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

[ click to continue reading at the LA Times ]

from the New York Times

ART REVIEW | VAN GOGH

Nocturnal van Gogh, Illuminating the Darkness

By ROBERTA SMITH

Devoting an exhibition to Vincent van Gogh, among the world’s most beloved artists, may not seem like much of a reach for the Museum of Modern Art. On paper, at least, “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night” reads like an obvious play for big box office and increased membership.

But this exhibition largely dodges such charges. Small and quirky, it is an anti-blockbuster. Instead of the usual are-we-done-yet marathon followed with ordeal by gift shop, it quietly displays 23 paintings, 9 drawings and several letters by van Gogh in six intimate galleries. The final gallery features a dense display of books that he read, most open to poems about the night.

Organized with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, this show has been overseen by Joachim Pissarro, adjunct curator in the Modern’s department of painting and sculpture and a professor of art history at Hunter College; Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections at the Van Gogh Museum; and Jennifer Field, curatorial assistant in painting and sculpture at the Modern.

Van Gogh discovered new colors everywhere, especially at night. Peripatetically, briefly yet fulsomely, this show explores his special relationship with darkness. It provides a view of the tenderness, urgency and brilliance at the core of his art, as well as the openness to nature that set it aflame.

Van Gogh accepted the night as a distorting condition, almost the way later modernists like Marcel Duchamp and Jean Arp would use chance to experiment and to break habits. Unable to see clearly, he painted what he saw, ultimately pitting his colors against one another as if they were antagonists in a visual drama. He egged on their clashes with exaggerated daubs of paint, bringing backgrounds forward and giving each inch of canvas its own sense of life. In Western art before him, only the semi-Western mosaics of Ravenna achieved such complete articulation.

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from Shelf-Awareness

Here are some proverbs dealing with books and reading from As They Say in Zanzibar: Proverbial Wisdom from Around the World – a compilation of more than 2,000 proverbs gathered by David Crystal:

Books

• A book holds a house of gold (China)
• It is better to be entirely without a book than to believe it entirely (China)
• Many books do not use up words; many words do not use up thoughts(China)
• Scholars talk books; butchers talk pigs (China)

Reading and Writing

• After three days without reading, talk becomes flavourless (China)
• The wise read a letter backwards (Germany)
• Learn to handle a writing-brush, and you’ll never handle a begging-bowl(China)
• A love-letter sometimes costs more than a three-cent stamp (U.S.)

Literature

• Life without literature is death (Latin)
• Poets are fathers of lies (Latin)
• Poets and pigs are appreciated only after their death (Italy)
• Those that begin the play must continue it (Turkey)

—Marilyn Dahl

[ click to read at Shelf-Awareness.com ]

from the San Francisco Chronicle

Hells Angels touched by a mentor

Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer 

    More…

(09-15) 18:41 PDT — Papa’s final ride was a Viking funeral, his body borne to his final resting place by a river of chrome and thunder.

Mark “Papa” Guardado, 46, was killed Sept. 2 outside a Mission District bar. At the time, he was president of the Frisco Hells Angels, royalty of the outlaw biker realm. He was shot to death, police say, by Christopher Ablett, 37, of Modesto, a member of the rival Mongols Motorcycle Club, whose bad blood with the Hells Angels goes back in history. Ablett is still being sought.

But there was little talk of the Mongols as the Hells Angels gathered to remember Guardado at a vigil Sunday night and funeral Monday morning; little more than a passing, irritated reference to a Sonoma County prosecutor who had charges pending against Guardado stemming from a bar fight and who called him a dangerous gang member with an assault conviction on his record.

Instead, those gathered remembered their Guardado, the friend or surrogate father, the man who many said bought them their first Harley-Davidson – or helped them get the job they needed to buy their own.

“To me, and everyone that knew him, he was the epitome of Hells Angels,” said Richard Goldammer, who rode from his home in British Columbia to honor the man he called his mentor.

“He set an example for a lot of people, being straight up, honest and respectful to everyone,” he said. “People form their own opinion about our club … we are who we are. We stand in our own social circle.”

It is a circle with many intersecting rings that pulled together in Daly City for what many hailed as an event of unprecedented scale.

[ click to read full article at the Chronicle ]

from the San Jose Mercury News

San Jose pipe bombing linked to rival biker gangs

Mongols-Hells Angels feud blamed; no injuries reported

By Denis C. Theriault, Sean Webby and Lisa Fernandez
Mercury News

Article Launched: 09/18/2008 08:36:02 AM PDT 

A cluster of pipe-bomb blasts shook a small San Jose neighborhood from its sleep early Thursday, turning a tiny cul-de-sac a few miles from downtown into what police fear is the latest battleground between two bitterly feuding biker gangs: the Mongols Motorcycle Club and the Hells Angels.

San Jose police identified the target in the 3:38 a.m. blasts as Robert Rios, an upper-echelon member of the Mongols’ San Jose chapter, and confirmed that suspicion is falling heavily on their often bloody rivals, the notorious Hells Angels. Mark “Papa” Guardado, 46, president of the Frisco Hells Angels chapter, was gunned down Sept. 2; the suspect, a Mongol from Modesto, remains at large.

“It’s either the Hells Angels are sending a message, or this is a calculated, but ill-advised move,” said Sgt. Larry Day, the San Jose Police Department’s in-house expert on outlaw motorcycle gangs.

Federal law enforcement officials are assisting San Jose’s investigation into Thursday’s attack, described by shaken neighbors as a series of blasts that roused them from their beds. Officials are probing for any links between the two incidents and how they might fit into the wider, ongoing clash between the Mongols, primarily based in Southern California, and the Hells Angels, long an iconic group in Northern California.

[ click to continue reading at the SJ Merc ]

from the NY Daily News

Mom, that’s my cheerleading outfit! Wisconsin woman steals daughter’s identity to join pom-pom squad

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 

GREEN BAY, Wis. – A 33-year-old woman is charged with stealing her daughter’s identity to attend high school and join the cheerleading team.

Wendy Brown, of Green Bay, faces a felony identity theft charge after enrolling in Ashwaubenon High School as her 15-year-old daughter, who lives in Nevada with Brown’s mother.

“The defendant stated she wanted to get her high school degree and be a cheerleader because she had no childhood and was trying to regain a part of her life she missed,” according to the complaint.

She allegedly attended cheerleading practices before school started, received a cheerleader’s locker and went to a pool party at the cheerleading coach’s house.

A high school employee, Kim Demeny, told authorities that the woman, posing at the teen, seemed very timid, told her she was not good in math and even cried when she talked about moving from Pahrump Valley High School in Pahrump, Nev. Although she looked older than a student, Demeny said she believed her demeanor was consistent with that of a high school girl.

A school liaison officer started investigating Monday after Brown only showed up for the first day of classes last week, the complaint said.

[ click to read full article at NYDailyNews.com ]

from the Chicago Tribune 

from Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

Kate Shepherd: Stack Shack
September 20 to November 10, 2008

Please join us at a reception for the artist
Saturday, September 20th from 6 to 8 pm

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from ABC News

Writers festival boss welcomes Frey controversy

By Rebekah van Druten

A Million Little Pieces author James Frey admits taking liberties to make the story better. (Getty Images: Andrew H Walker, file photo)

• Map: Brisbane 4000

The organiser of this year’s Brisbane Writers Festival has defended his decision to include controversial author James Frey in the line-up.

Frey is best known for his 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces. Promoted as a true tale of his time in drug and alcohol rehabilitation, it rocketed up bestseller lists the world over after Oprah Winfrey selected it for her bookclub.

But in 2005, The Smoking Gun website outed Frey for having highly embellished and partially made up large parts of the book.

The scandal raised questions about whether memoirs have to be factually true; artistic director Michael Campbell says these questions can and should be discussed at writers’ festivals.

“First and foremost, he [Frey] is a terrific writer … Even just prior to Oprah getting upset with him live on air, she commended his writing,” Campbell said.

“And I think one of the most interesting areas of writing at the moment is this, sort of, line between fact and fiction. We’ve seen it here in Australia over a number of years through the ‘history wars’. In that sort of context it’s been about the making of history; the story of history. It’s been about how you bring about the ‘facts’ or ‘accounts’ and how you give them a certain amount of weight or not, how you draw connections between different facts and how you bring that together to get a story of history.

“Then once you come to memoir, there’s an awful lot of quite innovative writing about revealing yourself; about what you chose to say and reveal and what you chose to keep hidden. How you do that, how you present that.”

Frey doesn’t deny he took artistic liberties with A Million Little Pieces, but the author also doesn’t feel he did anything wrong.

“I wrote a book that I said for years should be considered literature; should be considered art. Frankly, I’m the first and really the only memoirist to be held to this standard,” Frey told ABC News Online.

“The presidential candidates in America who have both written memoirs that have been proven to have the same issues in them as mine had are not being held to the standard that I’ve been held to.

“The media seems to have some sort of double standard – where it’s ok for some people to do things, but it’s not ok for others … It’s a book, it’s a work of art and it’s a piece of literature. I took liberties in making the story better. There are many things in the book that are toned down, but again the media isn’t interested in that. They’re interested in frankly holding me to a standard that they don’t hold themselves to.

“If you look in the average newspaper on the average day, there’s as many lies in it as there are in any of my books. There’s as many embellishments and fabrications, and I think people who aren’t seeing that are very naive.”

Frey rebukes suggestions that readers of A Million Little Pieces may have felt betrayed or duped by him, and says he’s expecting a warm reception at the Brisbane Writers Festival.

“I know I get a lot of letters from Australian readers who have been very, very supportive of me. And I think it’ll probably, hopefully be like it is in most places – people have been moved by the words that I write and they understand that I create art, that I create literature and that I have taken liberties along the way to do that,” he said.

New work

As well as discussing the genres of memoir and biography at the festival, Frey will be promoting his third novel – Bright Shiny Morning, the story of four lost souls living in Los Angeles.

So far, it has not been received well by the critics. David L Ulin, a reviewer for the LA Times, says it’s one of the worst books he’s ever read.

Frey takes the criticism on the chin, saying his only concern is how his readers receive the book.

“The reviews tend to be either really great reviews or really, really terrible reviews. And frankly, if they [the critics] are judging me based on the past they’re not doing their jobs, because journalists are supposedly objective. You know, this is just another indication that they’re not,” he said.

“If they want to shred the book, so be it.

“What matters to me is how my readers feel about the book, how the people who spend their money and their time with the book feel about it – and so far that response has been great.”

And despite his very public dressing down, it seems Frey hasn’t lost his sense of humour – yet.

Bright Shiny Morning starts with the declaration nothing in the novel should be considered as “accurate or reliable”.

“It’s meant to be a joke. It’s meant to be a statement of defiance,” Frey said.

“It’s meant to say that I make the rules and that you can get mad at me for doing something but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing it, and it doesn’t mean I’m going to follow your rules.

“I don’t think that rules should be imposed on works of art or works of literature, you know. Artists should be allowed to do whatever they want, however they want and call it whatever they want.”

The Brisbane Writers Festival starts tomorrow and runs till September 21.

[ click to read at ABC.net.au ]