The Bike Maker
LGBTur
Famed LA Helicopter Reporter Bob Tur Becoming A Woman
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Los Angeles helicopter pilot-reporter Bob Tur, who famously covered the L.A. riots and the O.J. Simpson slow-speed freeway
chase, said she suffers from gender dysphoria and is in the process of becoming a woman.
Tur told KNX 1070’s Chris Sedens and Diane Thompson that she is in the early stages of aggressive hormone replacement therapy to fully transform from male to female.
The 53-year-old, who worked for a number of L.A. news outlets, including CBS, said she was born with a female brain and a male body.
“It’s a genetic disorder that happens in utero. Nobody knows exactly why, but you’re born with a female or feminized brain. The corpus callosum is the main structure that joins the left and right hemispheres and it’s a nightmare if you don’t really know who you are. You think you’re a woman, but you’re a man,” she said.
Tur said she chose to come out publicly about her life-altering decision because she’s “done hiding.”
“I’m done trying to deal with this. It’s gotten very bad in the last five years. It’s been a very easy process once I made the decision to go forward. Now that my brain is getting the right hormones…I had no idea that life was like this. I just had no idea. It’s amazing. The dysmorphic OCD thoughts are gone. For the first time, I’m truly happy,” she said.
The journalist said friends and family have been supportive of the change.
“I have not had a single negative response,” she said. “I didn’t realize I had that many friends. A few people knew. A few people figured it out. For the most part, people didn’t know. They were in a state of shock initially. My kids were in a state of shock. And they have been going through this mourning process. Bob Tur has got to die. And that’s going to happen within the next three or four months. There’s a mourning process, but they’ve been very, very supportive.”
[ click to read full article at CBS LA ]
and check out this sweet piece at The Daily Beast on Tur and how she invented essentially the helicopter News Report
Into The Pixel
Pixels Floating on the Art World’s Margins
John Sweeney
By HAROLD GOLDBERG
LOS ANGELES — The annual E3 convention here is known for the glitzy premiere of video games with huge budgets, and for its boisterous hustle and bustle. But tucked between the two rowdy convention halls is a quieter area resembling a Chelsea art gallery.
This is the site of the “Into the Pixel” exhibition, a juried collection of 16 digital artworks printed on canvas and plucked from the kinds of video games being marketed nearby. Those who stumble upon these works can take a few minutes or more to muse upon the artists’ intent and inspiration — and perhaps glean some untold secrets, since the images are from games yet to be released.
Now in its 10th year, “Into the Pixel” is still somewhat overlooked during the convention, although perhaps less so than in years past. Recent exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum have considered such art in a different light, focusing on each video game as a whole.
“The thing is, these people are not computer geeks — they’re real artists,” said Martin Rae, the president of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, which jointly produces the show with the Entertainment Software Association. “And this is some of the top-tier art on the planet.”
Indiana Jones And The Industry of Doom
Steven Spielberg Predicts ‘Implosion’ of Film Industry
by Paul Bond
George Lucas echoed Spielberg’s sentiments at an event touting the opening of a new USC School of Cinematic Arts building, saying big changes are in store.
Steven Spielberg on Wednesday predicted an “implosion” in the film industry is inevitable, whereby a half dozen or so $250 million movies flop at the box office and alter the industry forever. What comes next — or even before then — will be price variances at movie theaters, where “you’re gonna have to pay $25 for the next Iron Man, you’re probably only going to have to pay $7 to see Lincoln.” He also said that Lincoln came “this close” to being an HBO movie instead of a theatrical release.
George Lucas agreed that massive changes are afoot, including film exhibition morphing somewhat into a Broadway play model, whereby fewer movies are released, they stay in theaters for a year and ticket prices are much higher. His prediction prompted Spielberg to recall that his 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrialstayed in theaters for a year and four months.
Lucas and Spielberg told USC students that they are learning about the industry at an extraordinary time of upheaval, where even proven talents find it difficult to get movies into theaters. Some ideas from young filmmakers “are too fringe-y for the movies,” Spielberg said. “That’s the big danger, and there’s eventually going to be an implosion — or a big meltdown. There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm.”
Lucas lamented the high cost of marketing movies and the urge to make them for the masses while ignoring niche audiences. He called cable television “much more adventurous” than film nowadays.
“I think eventually the Lincolns will go away and they’re going to be on television,” Lucas said. “As mine almost was,” Spielberg interjected. “This close — ask HBO — this close.”
“We’re talking Lincoln and Red Tails — we barely got them into theaters. You’re talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can’t get their movie into a theater,” Lucas said. “I got more people intoLincoln than you got into Red Tails,” Spielberg joked.
Spielberg added that he had to co-own his own studio in order to get Lincoln into theaters.
The History of Art in GIFs
The Temptation of St Anthony – Salvador Dalí
Orwellian Rule Anew
It’s 1984 All Over Again: Orwell’s Book Sales Spike
Daily disclosures about America’s surveillance apparatus have sparked renewed interest in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Wall Street Journal reported that by early yesterday, sales of the dystopian classic had jumped noticeably, with one edition rising more than 7,000% in its Amazon rankings, moving from #13,074 on Monday to the top 200.
The paperback edition Plume published on the centennial of Orwell’s birth in 2003 was ranked #80 on Amazon this morning, and the 60th anniversary edition #149. Elizabeth Keenan, a spokeswoman for the publisher, told the Journal that the sales jump is “symptomatic of all the surveillance coverage,” adding that while sales typically increase this time of year because of high school summer reading lists, this spike was unusual and “Plume wasn’t ruling out a relaunch of the book to capitalize on the interest.”
Hamburger Hamlet Founder Harry Lewis Gone
Harry Lewis, founder of Hamburger Hamlet, dies
The Los Angeles Times (http://lat.ms/1bqkpkA ) reports Lewis died Sunday at a convalescent home in Beverly Hills. His son, Adam, tells the newspaper that his father was compulsively driven by attention to detail and would cook 30 hamburgers at once.
Lewis was an actor who appeared in the 1948 movie “Key Largo” before founding Hamburger Hamlet chain in 1950 with his future wife, Marilyn.
The restaurants were decorated with movie memorabilia and offered customized hamburgers long before the idea became trendy.
click to read about the Hamlet at the deliciously cool OldLARestaurants.com
The Sizlacks
40 Years of Art History in 65 Boxes of Transparencies
He Captured Modern Art, and Now Is Letting It Go
Help yourself to D. James Dee’s luscious, sprawling photographic archive of the modern New York art scene. He has about 250,000 color transparencies and slides, ranging in size from 35 millimeter to 8 by 10 inches, documenting the work of almost every important artist of the last 40 years and installations at some of the most influential galleries. And, yes, he’s giving them away.
All you’ll need is a truck large enough to hold 65 cardboard file boxes. It would help if you represent a nonprofit organization, because Mr. Dee hopes to receive a tax deduction for donating his life’s work. But that’s not a deal breaker. You should, however, be conversant with modern American art history. Really conversant.
Almost none of the transparencies and slides are labeled.
Mr. Dee, 68, has retired after a 39-year career as the SoHo Photographer, documenting work for artists, galleries, exhibitions, books and portfolios. He is leasing his space at 12 Wooster Street, just north of Canal Street, and moving with his wife, Sarala, to Miami. The moving vans will arrive on July 24. The photo collection will not come with him.
“It has value to someone,” Mr. Dee said last week. “Not to me.” The absence of captions and a lack of storage space have discouraged several institutions from accepting the archive. The National Gallery of Art, Getty Images, and the Fales Library and Special Collections of New York University have declined his offer, Mr. Dee said.
With that, he illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of an unlabeled archive by pulling stacks of 4-inch-by-5-inch transparencies from a box marked “1984-85 Trans.” and dealing them like playing cards onto a light table, identifying each one as best he could:
“Basquiat. Julian Schnabel. Don’t know. There was an artist, Mierle Ukeles; this was an installation she had at the sanitation transfer station. Joel Shapiro. Basquiat. I remember doing this shoot, but I don’t remember the artist. This is a Frank Gehry. Joel Shapiro. Nam June Paik. This was for the Chase Bank; it’s 45 feet long. Oh, who’s the artist? Vincent Arcilesi. This, I have no idea. I like it, though. I like it. This is probably an installation; it’s subversive enough, it could be Ronald Feldman.”
Itch A Skitch
Maxwell’s (Hoboken) Gone
End for Bar That Altered Music Scene, and Hoboken
Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
By ANDY NEWMAN
HOBOKEN, N.J. — The bar seemed like a ripe candidate for a makeover. Grimy and decrepit, it was open only for the hours around shift change at the local coffee factory, whose workers it catered to with limited success.
The new owners kept the name in honor of the coffee plant. But they changed everything else.
“We were going to have a little hip jukebox,” said one of them, Steve Fallon. “A little restaurant, clean, where you’re not afraid to get something to eat.”
Soon the bar’s tiny back room was bouncing with live, angular music that built on sounds from the CBGB scene across the Hudson River. The shaped-up restaurant in the front, meanwhile, dished out Hoboken’s first brunch.
Thus did Maxwell’s become the incubator, proving ground and showcase for bands that would change the face of rock in ways large (R.E.M., Nirvana) and small (the Feelies), and, in the way of so many first-wave gentrifiers, the harbinger of its own demise.
Dog’s Best Bird
HENRY MILLER MADE ME DO IT by James Frey
On Writing: Henry Miller Made Me Do It
by JAMES FREY
I became a writer after I read Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller when I was 22. I couldn’t believe somebody wrote that book. I couldn’t believe somebody said what he said and lived how he lived and wrote this book. I was just blown away by it.
And after I had finished it, I said to myself, “I want to do what he did. I want to make some punk kid somewhere feel what that book made me feel.” And from then, that’s all I tried to do. I moved to Paris. I read a lot of books. I sat along in rooms for hours and hours and hours, just trying to write. I came to be a writer because I looked over the course of literary history, very few sort of writers who made it into the canon went to school to be taught to write. You know, before 1970, that idea didn’t really even exist. So I wanted to do it sort of the old fashioned way. Sit in a room; try to figure out how to get what was in my head on to paper.
And then it’s just a long process of building confidence. For years, I couldn’t do it. And then I started to be able to do it. And when I started to be able to do it, I did it more. And you know, it took me about 10 years from the time I wanted to write a book to publish a book. And it was hard. It wasn’t easy. I think you have to devote a lot of time and energy and dedication to doing it, to learn how to sit in a room by yourself without ever losing faith in being able to do it at some point.
I think that’s one of the big traps young writers get into as well is they’ll work for a month of two months or three months. And they’ll say, “I’m never, I can’t do what I want to do. I’m never going to be able to do it.” So they give up. I just never gave up.
When I decided to become a writer, I wanted to do things in very specific ways. I wanted to write in a way that nobody had ever done before, I wanted to use my own system of grammar; my own system of punctuation. I wanted to lay words out on a page in very specific ways. I wanted to sort of obliterate the ideas of fact or fiction and whether they mattered and sort of do things in some ways that come out of the art world, where genres don’t really exist and where you can do a self-portrait and make it look however you want or you can take something and call it whatever you want. You can appropriate something from whatever source you want.
It took a long time. Just me sitting in a room by myself working. I always say to people, “If I can do it, anybody can do it.” I didn’t have any special gift or any special talent; I just wanted to do it and was willing to sit there until I could.
In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Richard Pryor: OMIT THE LOGIC
Review: ‘Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic’ a keen look at gifted comic
By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times Television Critic
Richard Pryor died in 2005 at the age of 65 from a heart attack related to multiple sclerosis. The unexpected thing, given his life and habits and health, was not that he died so young but that he lived so long.
Marina Zenovich’s enlightening biographical documentary, “Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic,” which premieres Friday on Showtime, opens in the aftermath of Pryor’s famous 1980 self-immolation — a suicide attempt, the film argues, and not an accident related to freebasing cocaine, as was speculated. Not that Pryor didn’t freebase cocaine, which was certainly, if not directly, related to the suicide attempt. “I don’t like cocaine,” he tells an interviewer here. “I love it.”
Lorien Legacies: RISE OF NINE Trailer (by Julian Nisenboim)
This is kind of awesome. – PITTACUS LORE
Lorien Legacies: FALL OF FIVE Character Prophecies
Fall of Five Character Prophecies: Part I
This week on the official I AM NUMBER FOUR Facebook page, we revealed a few sneak peeks at the fate of some of our favorite characters in THE FALL OF FIVE. Here’s a roundup of the first three posts, with more to come throughout the month of June!
Read on for some choice quotes from THE FALL OF FIVE. The battle is heating up, and some of the Garde and their friends may not survive….
After being held prisoner by the Mogadorians for weeks, Sam is finally free. But without any Legacies of his own, will he have what it takes to get his revenge?
Now that John has become responsible for the group, his number one priority is keeping them safe—no matter what the cost.
Otherworld Chronicles: THE SEVEN SWORDS
The Greatest Innovation In Fast-food Since Special Sauce
Hands-free Whopper
By LUKE FUNK, Senior Web Producer
Burger King has introduced a burger holder for people on-the-go. It’s called the Hands Free Whopper Holder and it’s been introduced in Puerto Rico.
The contraption looks similar to the harmonica holder you might see Bob Dylan wearing but this one is designed to hold a hamburger.
The device is apparently part of the celebration for the company’s 50th anniversary in Puerto Rico.
Burger King has its own site for the holder, complete with a video showing how the holder it made.
Taco Trucks To Return To Montreal After 60-year Exile
Montreal unveils new locations for food trucks
Street eats to be available at downtown hotspots including Mount Royal Park
For the first time in over 60 years, food trucks will be popping up in downtown Montreal this summer.
On Tuesday, Mayor Michael Applebaum unveiled the nine locations where pre-approved food trucks will be able to set up shop as a part of a pilot project.
The food trucks will rotate between the nine different downtown locations and will be open seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Gaelle Cerf, co-owner of the popular Grumman 78 taco truck, said the locations were chosen in order to avoid competing with restaurants.
“We wanted to make sure there [weren’t] any bricks and mortar restaurants nearby because we wanted to make sure it wasn’t in their faces,” said Cerf, who is also the vice-president of the Association of Street Restaurateurs of Quebec.
For the time being, the vendors will be required to have an established restaurant or catering business in order to qualify for one of the 35 permits available.
But at least one Montrealer thinks that’s not fair.
“It’s a disappointment because it would have been good for people who are great cooks,” said Lillian Boctor.
The Sanitation Gestapo
Court Also Thinks $2,000 Fine for Plucking a Used TV Antenna From the Trash is Ridiculous
One man’s simple search for the perfect art project turned into a battle with New York City Courts.
This week, a Manhattan appeals court overturned a $2,000 fine issued in 2011 to a Brooklyn carpenter, Albert Prince, for taking a TV antenna from the side of a curb. Yes, you read that right.
The legal battle began when Mr. Prince, 56, saw the discarded trash and thought the antenna would make a great addition to an art project he was working on. He pulled his van over to the side of the road and began to sift through the trash.
Moments later, he was confronted by two sanitation cops who issued him a fine for “unauthorized removal of residential recyclable material using a motor vehicle,” a violation under title 48 of the New York City Code. The cops also impounded Mr. Prince’s car, requiring him to pay $500 to get it back.
Pollination Just Never Gets Old
Snooki v. Christie (posted for the photo alone)
Snooki on awkward meeting with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie: ‘He just doesn’t like us’
BY MARGARET EBY AND STEPHEN REX BROWN / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Snooki (center) posted this picture on Twitter, with the message, ‘Getting told why we are bad for jersey. Amazing.’ The photo was taken during her first-ever meeting with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
“Jersey Shore’ star Snooki came face to gut with one of her largest critics Friday: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
The awkward encounter occurred — where else? — on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, where the Jersey icons were filming separate segments for NBC’s “Today” show.
“I just wanted to meet you and just hope you start to like us,” said Snooki, ice-grilling the governor.
“Well, we’ll do our best,” Christie responded in a moment captured on video by the Asbury Park Press.
The loud-mouthed diva also asked the girthy gov, “Why are you standing so close to me?”
The Hollywood Safety Dance Mash
Irony Abandoned In Latest Go-round For GIRLS
‘Girls’ creator Lena Dunham unamused by porn parody
By Patrick Kevin Day
“Girls,” HBO’s critically acclaimed and controversial comedy series about the lives of twentysomethings in Brooklyn, tackles a number of issues with brutal frankness and sometimes uncomfortable realism. Sex is one of those issues, and the show has raised eyebrows with a number of graphic sex scenes. So it’s not really surprising that “Girls” is the latest show to get a XXX pornographic parody. And series creator and star Lena Dunham isn’t amused by it.
“This Ain’t Girls XXX,” produced by Hustler, is part of a recent trend of pornographic parodies that seek to replicate their less dirty inspirations. Other recent porn parodies include “The Office,” “30 Rock” and several superhero movies.
But Dunham isn’t thrilled or excited by the prospect of seeing her show join the ranks of the porn-parodied.
Girl With A Guitar Is 12 Times Better
Katie Couric Almost Strips For Howard Stern But Doesn’t Really Though That Would Have Been Crazy-Cool and Maybe Even Subscription-worthy
Howard Stern does legwork for Katie Couric’s show, but she doesn’t take the bait
BY MARIANNE GARVEY, BRIAN NIEMIETZ AND LACHLAN CARTWRIGHT
DONNA SVENNEVIK/ABC/GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES
Take your pants off!
That’s all Howard Stern wanted of host Katie Couric when he was a guest on her talk show “Katie” Wednesday.
“You’re not the CBS anchorwoman anymore. In this format you take your pants off,” the shock jock told the former host of the “CBS Evening News.”
He then demanded to know how she keeps those legs looking so good. He’d raised that topic earlier on his Sirius XM radio show, saying he wanted to know why they looked so greasy and good.
“Basically I just put lotion on them,” Couric told Stern. “That’s my secret.”
But Howard wasn’t finished with the inquiry. He wanted to know why she was wearing leather pants, when her usual talk-show outfit is a skin-baring skirt.
Couric explained that she just did it to match Stern’s leather jacket and to be edgy.
“Taking those pants off would be edgy,” he quipped. Couric replied, “Maybe during the commercial break.”
Nutella Goes Nuts
Nutella Thanks Its Biggest Fan, Founder of World Nutella Day, by Sending Her a Cease and Desist That’s nuts!
By David Griner
Most brand marketers can only dream of having a superfan who organizes a global holiday dedicated to their product. And then there’s Nutella. The chocolate-hazelnut spread’s parent company, Italy-based Ferrero has sent a cease-and-desist letter to World Nutella Day founder and organizer Sara Rosso. This Saturday, she plans to deactivate NutellaDay.com and the 7-year-old event’s social-media channels in response to the legal notice from the company. “I’ve seen the event grow from a few hundred food bloggers posting recipes to thousands of people tweeting about it, pinning recipes on Pinterest, and posting their own contributions on Facebook,” Rosso writes in a blog post about the cease and desist. “There have been songs sung about it, short films created for it, poems written for it, recipes tested for it, and photos taken for it. The cease-and-desist letter was a bit of a surprise and a disappointment, as over the years I’ve had contact and positive experiences with several employees of Ferrero, SpA, and with their public relations and brand strategy consultants.”
Kirkus Star for Bennett Madison’s SEPTEMBER GIRLS
KIRKUS REVIEW
A meditation on manhood takes a turn into magical realism in this mesmerizing novel.
Sam, his father and his older brother are all coping—with varying degrees of success; Sam’s coping includes whiskey and frozen pizza—with Sam’s mother’s departure for Women’s Land. In an attempt to pull things together, his dad decides they will spend the summer on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Prickly yet lethargic, 17-year-old Sam gradually becomes intrigued by the mysterious, beautiful blonde girls who work at the hotels and restaurants there. Interspersed throughout Sam’s slightly sarcastic first-person narration are short, haunting prose poems from these sisters, who can’t swim though they come from the ocean and whose mother is the Deepness and whose father is the Endlessness. The girls seem to reinvent themselves as needed, much as they reinvent the island where they live, adding to the air of mystery. The brothers’ parents are vividly portrayed, particularly the once-frumpy mother who left their father in a “swamp of discontent”—which turns into a complete abandonment of his job and their usual life. The heart of the story centers on Sam’s gradual unfurling into a less brittle, kinder and more thoughtful youth. The writing, though realistically laced with the F-word and references to smoking and drinking, has a curiously appealing distance from the ordinary but doesn’t abandon it altogether.
A not-mermaid story for boys. (Magical realism. 14 & up)
“Giving the Finger” to Ronald Reagan
from The LA Times Hero Complex
John Carpenter: ‘They Live’ was about ‘giving the finger to Reagan’
The Hero Complex Film Festival kicked off Friday evening with a 25th anniversary screening of “They Live,” a 35th anniversary screening of “Halloween” and an onstage conversation with the filmmaker behind both movies, John Carpenter.
Carpenter discussed his motivation in making “They Live,” a campy but subversive sci-fi flick that starred professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper as the film’s blue-collar hero Nada, who discovers an alien conspiracy to mind-control the people of Earth using invisible messages. Carpenter called “They Live” his most political film and said it was his response to consumerism and class disparity in the 1980s.
“By the end of the ’70s there was a backlash against everything in the ’60s, and that’s what the ’80s were, and Ronald Reagan became president, and Reagonomics came in,” Carpenter told the sold-out theater at the Chinese 6 Theatres in Hollywood. “So a lot of the ideals that I grew up with were under assault, and something called a yuppie came into existence, and they just wanted money. And so by the late ’80s, I’d had enough, and I decided I had to make a statement, as stupid and banal as it is, but I made one, and that’s ‘They Live.’ … I just love that it was giving the finger to Reagan when nobody else would.”
“Who the f†ck’s Lenny?”
Tricky of the trade
Tricky was trip hop’s anti-poster boy, first making his mark with his moody sprechgesang on Massive Attack’s “Blue Lines” (Virgin) in 1991.
You must still run into celebrity a lot.
I’ve been next to Kanye West – I stood next to him in a club and I looked at him and he looked at me and he thought I was going to talk to him. That’s never going to happen. You know, I was in a club once in New York and a guy I know came up to me and said, “Hey, Lenny wants to meet you.” And I said, “Who the fuck’s Lenny?” And he goes “Lenny Kravitz.” So I said, ‘What, Lenny Kravitz wants to meet me and he thinks I’m going to get up and go over to him?” I’m not a fan of Lenny Kravitz. I don’t want to work with him. So he comes over, says to me “I love your music.” Then there’s a silence, because he’s expecting me to say something nice back to him. Then he says to me “You should come to Miami, I have a studio there.” “Why would I come to Miami? I live in New York, I have a studio here.” He’s like, ‘We could do some recording together.” I say to him “Why? Why would we record together?” He’s got no logical answer. So if he thinks I’m going to do it just because he’s a massive artist, and it would help me with my record sales – never going to happen.
[ click to read complete hilarious interview at EXBERLINER.com ]