Keith Richards’ “Gus & Me”
Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards is Writing a Book for Kids
It looks like Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards is back to writing, but not lyrics to songs. He’s penning a children’s book called Gus & Me: The Story of My Granddad and My First Guitar. The book is about Richards’ grandfather Theodore Augustus Dupree, who was in a jazz band and introduced the renowned talent to music at a young age.
“The bond, the special bond, between kids and grandparents is unique and should be treasured,” Richards said in an interview with the Guardian.
World’s Most Stunning Libraries
BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE, SITE RICHELIEU
Where: Paris
Originally built in the 18th century, French architect Henri Labrouste renovated the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Richelieu site from 1854 to 1875, after he completed the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. The Labrouste reading room now bears his name. The library’s collection includes rare books, illuminated manuscripts, prints, photographs, musical scores, and coins and medals that once belonged to French kings. Since the construction of the Bibliothèque Nationale François-Mitterand, the Richelieu library—undergoing a massive renovation through 2017—now hosts temporary exhibits, often culled from its impressive collections.
Pops’ Sissy Pop
The Scawy Web
The Deep Web you don’t know about
NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
What we commonly call the Web is really just the surface. Beneath that is a vast, mostly uncharted ocean called the Deep Web.
By its very nature, the size of the Deep Web is difficult to calculate. But top university researchers say the Web you know — Facebook (FB, Fortune 500), Wikipedia, news — makes up less than 1% of the entire World Wide Web.
When you surf the Web, you really are just floating at the surface. Dive below and there are tens of trillions of pages — an unfathomable number — that most people have never seen. They include everything from boring statistics to human body parts for sale (illegally).
Related story: Shodan, the scariest search engine on the Internet
Though the Deep Web is little understood, the concept is quite simple. Think about it in terms of search engines. To give you results, Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) and Microsoft’s (MSFT, Fortune 500) Bing constantly index pages. They do that by following the links between sites, crawling the Web’s threads like a spider. But that only lets them gather static pages, like the one you’re on right now.
What they don’t capture are dynamic pages, like the ones that get generated when you ask an online database a question. Consider the results from a query on the Census Bureau site.
“A frenzied mustang stampede”
Rebirth of Jackson Pollock’s ‘Mural’
The landmark painting stands magnificently, no less so after the debunking of a myth regarding its creation
Jackson Pollock’s “Mural,” regarded by some as the most important modern American painting ever made, is the focus of a Getty exhibition opening Tuesday. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times / March 7, 2014)
By Christopher Knight
Myths die hard. Especially creation myths. Messing with the symbolic origins of a world isn’t something to be undertaken lightly.
Jackson Pollock‘s mammoth 1943 painting “Mural” — nearly 8 feet high, 20 feet wide and covered edge-to-edge with rhythmic, Matisse-like linear arabesques, muscular abstract shapes and piercing voids, all of which he likened to a frenzied mustang stampede — was something entirely new for American art. The great painting represents an early, galvanizing leap toward the emergence of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist art in the aftermath of World War II.
The pivotal painting, owned by the University of Iowa’s Museum of Art, goes on public view at the J. Paul Getty Museum on Tuesday — minus a chunk of its myth. It has been undone by science.
Dum Dum Girls – “Are You Okay” (By Bret Easton Ellis)
Exodus Hollywood
Hollywood Continues to Flee California at Alarming Rate
Dave McNary / Film Reporter / @Variety_DMcNary
When Paul Audley took the job as president of FilmL.A. in late 2008, he was astounded to discover that physical production on the $70 million pic “Battle: Los Angeles” wasn’t being done in Los Angeles.
“It stunned me that the movie was shooting in Louisiana, and that the state of California was letting this happen,” he recalls.
In the subsequent five years, the situation has only worsened, despite the film production incentive program California enacted in 2009, which provides for $100 million a year in tax credits for what’s usually 20% of production costs. That’s significantly smaller than programs offered by other states such as New York, which offers $420 million a year in credits for 30% of production costs.
The trend has been mounting for high-profile films set in the Golden State to be filmed almost entirely outside California, due to lucrative tax breaks elsewhere that producers can’t turn down. One key component of new legislation to strengthen California’s incentive program, introduced Feb. 19, would raise to $100 million the current budget cap of $75 million on eligible productions. To drive home the need for state support, attendees at a Feb. 22 rally in Burbank held by Hollywood unionists were handed petitions to send to Sacramento citing that only one of 41 big-budget feature films shot in 2012 and 2013 was shot entirely in California.
The latest example of a locally set runaway is New Line’s upcoming earthquake thriller “San Andreas,” in which a helicopter pilot played by Dwayne Johnson rescues his daughter in San Francisco after a 10.0 quake. Except for six planned days of shooting in San Francisco, the entire $100 million movie will be made in Australia at the Village Roadshow Studios in Gold Coast, Queensland.
Suck On This NASCAR
“The first high-art electronic pop record.”
Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans Europe Express’ started the musical revolution
Critic’s Notebook: Those relentless thumps in electronic dance music and works by Jay Z, Timbaland and even Katy Perry trace to ‘Tran Europe Express’ by Kraftwerk.
By Randall Roberts, Los Angeles Times Pop Music Critic
Ralf Hütter, left, Henning Schmitz, Fritz Hilpert and Stefan Pfaffe of Kraftwerk at the Museum of Modern Art on April 10, 2012, in New York City. (Mike Coppola / Getty Images)
Kraftwerk’s “Trans Europe Express” is the most important pop album of the last 40 years, though it may not be obvious
The first high-art electronic pop record, “Trans Europe Express” set the tone for the coming revolution, became one of the central texts of hip-hop, pop and electronic dance music. Recorded in the same few months of mid-1976 when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak incorporated Apple Computers in Cupertino, “Trans Europe Express” and its predecessors, “Radio-Activity” and “Autobahn,” sparked a similarly massive upheaval with sound.
That it was built by a couple of Germans searching for new ideas in a postwar land longing for a modern reboot makes it even more astonishing and its span of influence more notable.
Ice Virus
Giant virus revived from ancient permafrost
Melting permafrost could unleash new human pathogens
The giant virus obtained from Siberian permafrost was frozen for 30,000 years, but was able to infect an amoeba when it was revived. (Image courtesy of Julia Bartoli and Chantal Abergel, IGS and CNRS-AMU.)
Scientists have discovered a new type of virus in 30,000-year-old permafrost and managed to revive it, producing an infection.
Fortunately, the new virus, named Pithovirus sibericum, infects amoebas and is not harmful to humans.
But its ability to become infectious again after so many millenniums is a warning, writes Jean-Michel Claverie at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at Aix-Marseille University and his colleagues in a new study published Monday.
“The revival of such an ancestral amoeba infecting virus … suggests that the thawing of permafrost either from global warming or industrial exploitation of circumpolar regions might not be exempt from future threats to human or animal health,” they wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Giant DNA viruses, first discovered just 10 years ago, are so big compared with most other viruses that they are visible under a visible light microscope. Before the new virus was discovered, just two families were known.
Play This All Day Long Today At Work
Hackademia
How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia
More and more academic papers that are essentially gobbledegook are being written by computer programs – and accepted at conferences
‘I’ve written five PhDs on Heidegger just this afternoon. What next?’ Photograph: Blutgruppe
Like all the best hoaxes, there was a serious point to be made. Three MIT graduate students wanted to expose how dodgy scientific conferences pestered researchers for papers, and accepted any old rubbish sent in, knowing that academics would stump up the hefty, till-ringing registration fees.
It took only a handful of days. The students wrote a simple computer program that churned out gobbledegook and presented it as an academic paper. They put their names on one of the papers, sent it to a conference, and promptly had it accepted. The sting, in 2005, revealed a farce that lay at the heart of science.
But this is the hoax that keeps on giving. The creators of the automatic nonsense generator, Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn, have made the SCIgen program free to download. And scientists have been using it in their droves. This week, Nature reported, French researcher Cyril Labbé revealed that 16 gobbledegook papers created by SCIgen had been used by German academic publisher Springer. More than 100 more fake SCIgen papers were published by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Both organisations have now taken steps to remove the papers.
Famous Movies as Children’s Books by Josh Cooley
Wild Beavers
Wild beavers seen in England for first time in centuries
Footage of a family of beavers filmed in a Devon river is believed to be the first sighting of its kind in up to 500 years
by Jessica Aldred
Two beavers were caught on camera playing at night while a third one (in background) is gnawing a tree on the banks of the River Otter, Devon. Tom Buckley got the footage with a hidden infrared motion sensor camera. Photograph: Tom Buckley/Apex
A family of wild beavers has been seen in the England countryside in what is believed to be the first sighting of its kind in up to 500 years.
Three European beavers (Castor fiber), believed to be adults, have been filmed together on the River Otter in east Devon and can be seen gnawing at the base of trees, grooming themselves and playing together.
Experts said the sighting was “highly significant” as it strongly suggested a small breeding population of beavers now existed outside captivity.
European beavers were once widespread in the UK but were hunted to extinction by the 16th century in England and Wales for their fur, medicinal value and meat.
Bret Zombie Manson
Bret Easton Ellis, Rob Zombie Team on Manson Murders Project for Fox (Exclusive)
Cynthia Littleton / Editor-in-chief: TV / @Variety_Cynthia
Writer Bret Easton Ellis and director Rob Zombie have teamed with Alcon Television to develop a project for Fox that will revisit the people and events connected to the Manson Family murder spree in August 1969.
The project is envisioned as a limited series, but it is in the very early stages of development with Fox. Ellis is set to write the script and some additional materials. Zombie is on board to direct.
Zombie has long been fascinated by the Manson Family slayings, which left seven people dead in the Los Angeles area. Among the victims were actress Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant at the time with the child of director Roman Polanski, and prominent Hollywood hairstylist Jay Sebring.
The killings were so gruesome, and the stories of Charles Manson’s level of control of his drug-addled young followers so disturbing, that Manson was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy charges even though he was never found to have committed a homicide himself.
Manson’s clutch of cult followers have been suspected of many other murders during that era. But it was sheer brutality and psychopathic theatricality of the killings (complete with messages written in blood at the crime scenes) unleashed on Aug. 8-9, 1969, that jolted the nation’s psyche.
Paco de Lucia Gone
Death of flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia an ‘irreparable loss’ to world of culture
Paco de Lucia, who has been described as “one of history’s greatest guitarists”, has died aged 66.
The son of a flamenco guitarist he was born Francisco Sanchez Gomez in Algeciras in south east Spain.
The mayor of Algeciras has decreed two days of official mourning in memory of the musician who took the genre of flamenco – the traditional gypsy music of Spain beyond the borders of his homeland.
He was introduced to the guitar at an early age by his father who imposed a strict regime on his son forcing him to practice up to 12 hours a day every day to ensure he would find success as a professional musician.
It paid off and de Lucia became a world renowned figure not just for his genius playing flamenco but he was also influential in classical and jazz circles while he gained recognition as a producer and composer as well.
Eric Clapton referred to de Lucia as “a titanic figure in the world of flamenco guitar”.
De Lucia himself said: “With the guitar I’ve suffered a great deal, but when I’ve had a good time, the suffering seemed worthwhile.”
The Grapes Of Google
John Steinbeck Gets Google Doodle For His Birthday
Google has created a Doodle to celebrate John Steinbeck’s 112th birthday. Throughout his writing career, Steinbeck penned many beloved works including East of Eden, Of Mice & Men, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning title, The Grapes of Wrath.
In the past, Google has crafted doodles to honor many writers and illustrators including Mr. Men andLittle Miss series creator Roger Hargreaves, Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak, and Pride & Prejudice author Jane Austen. Here’s a video from Google headquarters spotlighting the artists behind the doodles.
Harold Ramis Gone
Harold Ramis put ‘Caddyshack’ in the bag
By Chris Erskine
There are only a few true masterpieces that debuted in my lifetime: the ’64 Mustang; Sandra Bullock‘s perfect chin; and “Caddyshack,” whose director, Harold Ramis, passed the other day at age 69, too damn soon, as if only on life’s 14th hole.
And yet 1,000 laughs over par.
From the snickering hiss of the fairway sprinklers to Rodney Dangerfield’s bug-eyed dancing, “Caddyshack” mixed all that was right about sports and movies into one great comedy overture. Though panned by critics at the time, the 1980 movie remains a classic by any measure, and the funniest sports movie of all time, hands down.
“I like to say we were struck by comedy lightning,” says Cindy Morgan, who played Lacey Underall, the leggy blond who roamed the course like she owned it.
“It was kamikaze filmmaking at its best,” she says from her home, 30 miles from the course where the movie was filmed.
She remembers tanker trucks pumping gasoline into the fairways without knowledge of the course owners, and the three-story fireballs that followed.
“Then they painted it green and blew it up again the next day,” she says.
Most of all, she remembers Ramis’ gentle genius, and the collaborative atmosphere he created.
“I walk out one day and there’s Billy swinging at the mums,” she says of one of the film’s most memorable scenes. “It was like making home movies of my family behaving badly.”
DJ Horrible
It’s Coming
New Technology Allows For TV Ads to Target Specific Individuals, Families
WASHINGTON — The days when political campaigns would try to make inroads with demographic groups such as soccer moms or white working-class voters are gone. Now, the operatives are targeting specific individuals.
And, in some places, they can reach those individuals directly through their televisions.
Welcome to Addressable TV, an emerging technology that allows advertisers — Senate hopefuls and insurance companies alike — to pay some broadcasters to pinpoint specific homes.
Advertisers have long bought ads knowing that only a fraction of the audience was likely to respond to them. Allowing campaigns — political or not — to finely hone their TV pitches to individuals could let them more efficiently spend their advertising dollars.
“With a traditional TV buy you can end up paying for a lot of eyeballs you don’t care about,” said Chauncey McLean, chief operating officer of the Analytics Media Group, an ad and data firm. “Addressable TV is a powerful tool for those that are equipped to use it. If you know who you want to talk to and what you want to say, you can be much more precise.”
Data geeks look at everything from voting histories to demographics, magazine subscriptions to credit scores, all in the hopes of identifying their target audience. The advertiser then hands over a list of targets and, without the viewer necessarily realizing it, the ads pop on when viewers sit down to watch a program if their broadcaster has the technology.
St. Vincent Rainbow Kick in Leather Flats
Hanksy
A Parodist Who Calls Himself Hanksy
By JOHN LELAND
This is a story about art in the age of social media — about anonymity and self-promotion, about feral cats and viral cat videos.
In April 2011, a law school dropout in Bushwick, Brooklyn, newly arrived from the Midwest, had an idea that he thought might make a splash. He admired the street artist Banksy; he grew up on the movies of Tom Hanks. Why not mash up the two? Using simple computer software, he downloaded a Banksy painting of a rat holding a paint roller, then added an image of Mr. Hanks’s face. The whole thing took 10 or 15 minutes to create. He printed a cutout and pasted it on a wall at Mulberry and Kenmare Streets in Little Italy, signing it Hanksy. It was a stupid pun, he knew, but he was a sucker for stupid puns. Isn’t everybody?
He photographed the wall for his Instagram and Twitter accounts, and emailed it to the Wooster Collective, a popular street art website. Then he went to sleep.
Sweet Child O’ N’Orleans
Pussy Angry In St. Petersburg
Snow Blind
When Americans look at Russia, they see what they want to see. And that’s dangerous.
Two of Russia’s most famous dissidents are visiting the United States. I speak, of course, of Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, members of the feminist conceptual art group known as Pussy Riot who were recently released from jail by President Vladimir Putin. The U.S. media have been raving. “Pussy Riot gals stun Brooklyn crowd with powerful speech,” blared the New York Post about the duo’s appearance at a charity concert in New York this week. “Pussy Riot stole the show from Madonna” was the verdict from Time. They put in a bravado performance on The Colbert Report and even had the New Yorker gushing about their presumed artistic achievements. Pretty impressive.
In fact, though, there is little evidence that they have any sort of influence on Russian public opinion at all. Most Russians regard Pussy Riot with outright hostility. As one recent public opinion survey revealed, the number of Russians who view the prison sentence the two women received as either fair or too soft has actually grown in the two years since they went to jail: The figure is now 66 percent. (A reminder: Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were convicted on charges of “hooliganism” after performing an impromptu anti-Putin concert in a Moscow cathedral in 2012.)
Doctor Harry
CLINT EASTWOOD SAVES GOLF DIRECTOR FROM CHOKING
BY DOUG FERGUSON
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. (AP) — Clint Eastwood added another starring role at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am – life saver.
Eastwood attended a volunteer party on the eve of the PGA Tour event when he noticed tournament director Steve John choking on a piece of cheese. The 83-year-old actor quickly performed the Heimlich maneuver Wednesday night at the Monterey Conference Center.
“I was drinking water and eating these little appetizers, threw down a piece of cheese and it just didn’t work,” John said Friday. “I was looking at him and couldn’t breathe. He recognized it immediately and saved my life.”
Eastwood is a prominent figure at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, formerly as an amateur contestant and now as chairman of the Monterey Peninsula Foundation. It has raised over $100 million for charity as the host of the PGA Tour event.
He’s often in the CBS tower on the weekend and presents the trophy to the winner, a list that includes Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and Brandt Snedeker in recent years.
The Hollywood star wasn’t expecting an additional duty this week.
“I looked in his eyes and saw that look of panic people have when they see their life passing before their eyes,” Eastwood told The Carmel Pine Cone. “It looked bad.”
He said it was the first time he had used the Heimlich maneuver.
“I can’t believe I’m 202 pounds and he threw me up in the air three times,” John said.
Dead Ducks Kill Commissioner’s Career
Police Commissioner Resigns After State Lawmaker Kills Several Ducks
NASHUA, N.H. (CBS Hartford) – A police commissioner resigned from his position after he assisted a New Hampshire state representative who ran over and killed several ducks in December.
Nashua Police Commissioner Tom Pappas wrote a letter to Gov. Maggie Hassan citing that he regrets his role in the incident, WMUR reported.
“I deeply regret my part in the events of December 23, 2013, and apologize to you, the Nashua Police Department and the public for the disruption that has occurred as a consequence of them,” Pappas wrote in the letter, according to WMUR.
State Rep. David Campbell ran over and killed several ducks outside of the Crowne Plaza Hotel in December and left the scene before police arrived. Pappas called the police department asking if it was alright if Campbell came in for questioning the next day because they were friends and the police agreed.
The Moon Is A Hip Mistress
US ready to return to moon
The moon is back in fashion triggering a new space race among countries keen to exploit its commercial opportunities
By David Millward, US Correspondent
America is preparing to land a robot on the moon for the first time in four decades.
Nasa is looking for private partners to participate in the project that will see a new generation of rovers wandering across the moon’s surface.
The American space agency has set up a programme called Catalyst to exploit commercial opportunities offered by the moon.
It believes that eventually there will be a market for commercial cargo trips to the lunar surface.
“As Nasa pursues an ambitious plan for humans to explore an asteroid and Mars, US industry will create opportunities for Nasa to advance new technologies on the moon,” said Greg Williams, Nasa’s deputy associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate.
But America is not alone.
Last month China sent its Jade Rabbit rover to the moon, making it the first country to make a soft lunar landing since 1976, when the Soviet Union sent the Luna 24 mission to collect rock samples.
Other countries including Japan and India are also looking to become major players in lunar exploration.
Killing Monster Frost
The Road Back: Frost’s Letters Could Soften a Battered Image
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Few figures in American literature have suffered as strangely divided an afterlife as Robert Frost.
Even before his death in 1963, he was canonized as a rural sage, beloved by a public raised on poems of his like “Birches” and “The Road Not Taken.” But that image soon became shadowed by a darker one, stemming from a three-volume biography by his handpicked chronicler, Lawrance Thompson, who emerged from decades of assiduous note-taking with a portrait of the poet as a cruel, jealous megalomaniac — “a monster of egotism” who left behind “a wake of destroyed human lives,” as the critic Helen Vendler memorably put it on the cover of The New York Times Book Review in 1970.
Ever since, more sympathetic scholars have tried, with limited success, to counter Mr. Thompson’s portrait, which was echoed most recently in a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, published by Harper’s Magazine last fall, depicting Frost as repellent old man angrily rebutting a female interviewer’s charges of arrogance, racism and psychological brutality to his children.
But now, a new scholarly work may put an end to the “monster myth,” as Frost scholars call it, once and for all. Later this month, Harvard University Press will begin publishing “The Letters of Robert Frost,” a projected four-volume edition of all the poet’s known correspondence that promises to offer the most rounded, complete portrait to date.
The Author Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin’s only novel to be released
Rome (AFP) – A virtually unknown novel by Charlie Chaplin — the only book the silent film comic ever wrote — is being made public for the first time.
“Footlights”, which will be unveiled in London later Tuesday, was written by Chaplin in 1948 and later transformed into his film “Limelight”, in which a washed-out clown saves a dancer from suicide.
The book is being published in English by the Cineteca di Bologna, an Italian film restoration institute which has been working with Chaplin biographer David Robinson on reconstructing drafts found in the Chaplin archives.
Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in London in 1889 to poor parents, who struggled to make a living as music hall entertainers. As an adolescent, he began working in music halls in Soho, before eventually becoming an actor with a theatre troupe.
According to Robinson, the relationship between drunken clown and desperate ballerina in the much later “Footlights” was likely inspired by his meeting with legendary Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in 1916.
Web Provenance
from The San Jose Mercury News
Fine art moves from gallery to the Web
By Heather Somerville
If you’re in the mood to browse a collection of post-modern art or throw down a few thousand on an original painting, simply power up your iPad and go no farther than your couch.
Startups and tech giants are launching fine art galleries and marketplaces online for discovering, browsing and buying art as the Internet transforms the art world much as it has the music industry. But while musicians have largely suffered financially in the digital revolution, emerging visual artists are embracing online galleries as a way to launch their careers, and seasoned artists have turned to the Web to show their work without having to secure gallery space and traveling across the country.
Sheila Finch, a landscape painter in Belmont who has been painting for about 45 years, began selling online in 2012 with San Francisco-based UGallery.
“Up until that point I had just discounted online galleries,” she said. “I had always shown in brick-and-mortar galleries.”
Finch, 59, spent years traveling to show her work, and struggled to produce enough paintings to fill the galleries she was in, until a few years ago when she broke her leg and had to take time off. She moved most of her work online, and continues to sell to collectors across the country, but gets to spend more time doing what she loves — painting.
The online art world also gives art collectors and others access to more artists than ever before with a click of a mouse.