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.
Philip Seymour Hoffman Gone
Rene Ricard Gone
Rene Ricard Has Died
BY ZOË LESCAZE
Ricard. (Courtesy Bill Troop)
Rene Ricard, the Massachussets-born artist and poet who was a fixture of New York’s art world since he arrived in 1965, has died. He passed away early this morning in Bellevue Hospital, said the artist Brice Marden, who had known Ricard since the 1960s. He died of cancer.
“This is an irreplaceable person,” Mr. Marden told The Observer. “He was really something, just on all ends of the spectrum.”
A member of Andy Warhol’s Factory, Ricard appeared in iconic films, includingKitchen (1965) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and even played Warhol in The Andy Warhol Story (1967) alongside Edie Sedgwick. He is perhaps best remembered for his influential essay “The Radiant Child,” which appeared in Artforum in 1981 and effectively launched the careers of painters Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and for his collections of poetry. The Tiffany-turquoise volume Rene Ricard 1979-1980 was the Dia Art Foundation’s debut publication. Toward the end of his life, Ricard was represented by Vito Schnabel.
I Ate Turtles
Man washes up in Marshall Islands ‘after 16 months adrift’
(AFP) Majuro (Marshall Islands) — An emaciated man whose boat washed up on a remote Pacific atoll this week claims he survived 16 months adrift on the Pacific, floating more than 12,500 kilometres (8,000 miles) from Mexico, a researcher said Friday.
The man, with long hair and beard, was discovered Thursday when his 24-foot fibreglass boat with propellerless engines floated onto the reef at Ebon Atoll and he was spotted by two locals.
“His condition isn’t good, but he’s getting better,” Ola Fjeldstad, a Norwegian anthropology student doing research on Ebon, the southern most outpost of the Marshalls, told AFP by telephone.
Fjeldstad said the man, dressed only in a pair of ragged underpants, claims he left Mexico for El Salvador in September 2012 with a companion who died at sea several months ago.
Ivan indicated to Fjeldstad that he survived by eating turtles, birds and fish and drinking turtle blood when there was no rain.
No fishing gear was on the boat and Ivan suggested he caught turtles and birds with his bare hands. There was a turtle on the boat when it landed at Ebon.
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
Let’s Read Physical
‘Wearable’ book allows reader to feel emotions of characters
Students have created a “wearable” book that enables you to feel the characters’ feelings as you read the story
By Lucy Kinder
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a “wearable” book which allows the reader to experience the protagonist’s emotions.
Using a combination of sensors, the book senses which page the reader is on and triggers vibration patterns through a special vest.
“Changes in the protagonist’s emotional or physical state trigger discrete feedback in the wearable [vest], whether by changing the heartbeat rate, creating constriction through air pressure bags, or causing localised temperature fluctuations” the researchers said.
The vest contains a personal heating device to change skin temperature and a compression system to convey tightness or loosening through airbags.
The vest also changes vibrations to match the mood of the book.
AOS by Yoji Kuri
Gillette Encourages Men With Facial Hair to Shave Balls Instead
Growing beard popularity shaves P&G sales
By John Biers
New York (AFP) – Procter & Gamble Friday revealed its latest challenge to earnings glory. This time it’s a facial issue.
The US consumer giant, fresh off a recent corner office shakeup and already facing a battle for market share in shampoo, said second-quarter earnings were marred by the growing preference of men for moustaches and beards, which hit sales in its “grooming” segment.
But the company said that increasingly popular body-shaving by men had the potential to offset the loss of the facial-hair business.
Flat sales in grooming and a two-percent decline in the beauty segment were drags on P&G’s earnings, which fell 15.5 percent from the year-ago level.
Forgotify
Join New Canaan Resident & Author James Frey for Lunch
Join New Canaan Resident & Author James Frey for Lunch
Join worldwide bestselling author and New Canaan resident James Frey at The Bedford Post ‘Literary Lunch Series’ on Thursday February 27 from 11.30am – 2.00pm.
Frey is the author of controversial bestsellers “A Million Little Pieces”, “My Friend Leonard”, “Bright Shiny Morning” and “The Final Testament of the Holy Bible”. Frey is also the Founder and CEO of Full Fathom Five, a transmedia production company responsible for the New York Times–bestselling young adult series “The Lorien Legacies”. The first book of which “I Am Number Four” (2010) was made into a hit feature film by DreamWorks Studios. His next book, “Endgame”, will be released in October 2014 in partnership with Harper Collins, Google and 20th Century Fox.
This forthcoming event has caused a great deal of excitement in our household. My husband and I are avid readers of Frey’s.
A couple of month’s ago I attended the Anjelica Huston literary lunch at the Bedford Post, which was excellent. The informal style enables you to relax, chat, eat good food then listen to the author speak freely.
Return of the The 808
UNBOXING THE 808: SHOULD WE BE EXCITED ABOUT ITS RETURN?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock this week, you’ll have witnessed the nerdier corners of the web aflutter at the news that Roland is launching the “Aira TR08,” a product indebted to the TR-808 drum machine.
Aside from a YouTube teaser — which features Roland engineers poking and prodding a jealousy-inducing room full of mint TR-808s — a full announcement has yet to be made. On second hand sites, the machines tend to retail upwards of £2400, suggesting that they are more in-demand than ever and that analog synth aficionados have been praying for a moment like this one for many years. But will reality match up with the feverish expectations? Time to take a look at the 808: the history of the machine, how it came to prominence, the hits that defined it, and whether the prospect of a true reissue is at all likely.
In historical terms, the release of the original TR-808 in 1980 was a footnote in an otherwise unremarkable year for Roland. The tail-end of the ’70s had provided a wealth of new innovations from Ikutaro Kakehashi’s design team. Their behemoth modular synth, the Roland System 100, had baffled and dazzled those who could find enough money and space in their house for it, whilst the glorious effects of the VP300 Vocoder Plus had paved the way for the “singing robot” and new forms of futuristic, funky music.
He didn’t show an ounce of self-doubt
You Remember James Frey?
Is he an example of a writer who completely outgrew his addiction?
by Stanton Peele in Addiction in Society
Recovery manual, or what?
It’s hard to summarize the James Frey story. He wrote a wildly best-selling memoir about his drug and alcohol addiction, A Million Little Pieces, in which it turned out he exaggerated the extremity of his behavior and for which Oprah famously confronted him on her show.One thing that was ignored about Pieces was that it was anti-12-step and that Frey opposed the disease theory of addiction throughout his book, including his stay at Hazelden (the name of the rehab was disguised).
“I’d rather have that (relapse and death) than spend my life in Church basements listening to people whine and bitch and complain. That’s not productivity to me, nor is it progress. It is the replacement of one addiction with another.”
“I know I won’t ever believe in the Twelve Steps. People like you keep saying it’s the only way, so I’m thinking that I might as well just put myself out of my misery now and save myself and my family the pain.”
“Addiction is not a disease…Diseases are destructive medical conditions that human beings do not control…I don’t think it does me any good to accept anything other than myself and my own weakness as a root cause.”
Everyone just assumed Frey was a 12-stepper, and that his book was a recovery manual—in his earlier appearances on Oprah he seemed to play to this assumption, without declaring himself one way or the other.
Flash forward. Frey took a hit from Oprah and his publisher, but he recovered to write several more adult best sellers and then started his own production company. In subsequent Oprah shows he and the host kissed and made up. Frey has emerged from the entire experience fundamentally unapologetic about it.
He was thrilling, condescending, rude, empowering, and haughty. “He didn’t show an ounce of self-doubt,” says Philip Eil, then a first-year nonfiction student. “Not a second of wavering. He was 110 percent that there was no truth, that he would live forever through his books.”
Meanwhile, Frey turned himself into a highly profitable industry (now called Big Jim Industries!) and wrote the best-selling young-adult series “The Lorien Legacies,” of which the first book, I Am Number Four, was made into a hit film by DreamWorks.
So, there is a lot of good news about Frey, and many people find Frey is an extremely good story teller and writer.
Vice Dotcom
The Great Mae Young Gone
Mae Young, Unladylike Wrestler Who Loved to Be Hated, Dies at 90
Mae Young — make that the Great Mae Young — who pulled hair and took cheap shots, who preferred actually fighting to pretending, who was, by her own account and that of many other female wrestlers, the greatest and dirtiest of them all, died on Tuesday in Columbia, S.C. She was 90, and her last round in the ring was in 2010.
“She just was a rough, tough broad,” Ella Waldek, another early wrestler, who died last year, once put it.
Stories of her fierceness followed Ms. Young into her first professional match, in 1939. She had learned to wrestle with boys on her high school team in Oklahoma, and played football with them, too.
In professional wrestling, there are baby faces and heels, and she never doubted which one she would be.
“Anybody can be a baby face, what we call a clean wrestler,” she said in“Lipstick & Dynamite: The First Ladies of Wrestling,” a 2004 documentary. “They don’t have to do nothing. It’s the heel that carries the whole show. I’ve always been a heel, and I wouldn’t be anything else but.”
A MONSTER FOR TEA by Walter Williams
The Metrics Of The Beast
How Iron Maiden turned piracy into paying customers
Iron Maiden has done a great job of going where its fans were, even if those fans were pirates. The band has focused extensively on South American tours in recent years, one of which was filmed for the documentary “Flight 666.” After all, fans can’t download a concert or t-shirts. The result was massive sellouts. The São Paolo show alone grossed £1.58 million (US$2.58 million) alone.
And in a positive cycle, Maiden’s online fanbase grew. According to Musicmetric, in the 12 months ending May 31, 2012, the band attracted more than 3.1 million social media fans. After its Maiden England world tour, which ran from June 2012 to October 2013, Maiden’s fan base grew by five million online fans, with a significant increase in popularity in South America.
While the band did not use Musicmetric’s analysis directly, Mead notes, “Maiden have been rather successful in turning free file-sharing into fee-paying fans.” Other bands could take a lesson from the heavy metal band’s success.
Chryssa Gone
Chryssa, Artist Who Saw Neon’s Potential as a Medium, Dies at 79
By MARGALIT FOX
Chryssa, a Greek-born American sculptor who in the 1960s was one of the first people to transform neon lighting from an advertising vehicle into a fine art medium, died on Dec. 23. She was 79.
Her death, which was reported in the Greek press, was not widely publicized outside the country. Perhaps fittingly for an artist whose work centered on enigma, the place of her death could not be confirmed; the Greek news media reported that she was buried in Athens.
Chryssa, who used only her first name professionally, had lived variously in New York and Athens over the years.
A builder of large-scale assemblages in a wide range of materials — bronze, aluminum, plaster, wood, canvas, paint, found objects and, in the case of neon, light itself — Chryssa, whose work prefigured Minimalism and Pop Art, was considered a significant presence on the American art scene in the ’60s and ’70s.
Exhibited widely in the United States in those years, her art is in the collections of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington.
Reviewing an exhibition of Chryssa’s neon sculptures at the Pace Gallery in Manhattan in 1968, The New York Times called one work, “Study for the Gates No. 15,” “a pure, lyrical form,” adding, “It transcends ‘neon-ness’ to become a sculpture of light devoid of pop or Broadway associations.”
Christ The Redeemer Gives Us The Finger
Lightning breaks finger off Rio’s Christ statue
By News.com.au
Lightning has broken a finger off the right hand of Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro.
Father Omar, rector of the shrine that holds the statue, told the Globo radio station that lightning frequently strikes the nearly 100-foot tall statue, a symbol of Rio that overlooks the Brazilian city from the peak of the Corcovado mountain.
Its right hand had been damaged sometime ago, but the finger finally broke off in a storm late Thursday.