Karl Taro Greenfield’s TRIBURBIA
Karl Taro Greenfeld’s novel ‘Triburbia’ tells how artistic Tribeca fell prey to wealthy Wall Street types
Story centers on a group of fathers who meet for coffee, and some of them seem to resemble real Tribeca denizens
BY SHERRYL CONNELLY / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
BRYAN SMITH/FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
The new novel “Triburbia” maps an intersection in time in Tribeca. It’s 2008, and the creative types who’d claimed the nabe from actual artists watch as the hedge fund millionaires invade. In a shaky economy, the holdouts from an earlier era have only their cultural pretensions to protect them.
“The bankers and lawyers here now don’t even pretend to care about theater and literature,” says author Karl Taro Greenfeld, who lives at Warren St. and West Broadway. “The people they’re replacing at least fancied themselves as being part of the creative class.”
Greenfeld’s story centers on a group of fathers who form a coffee klatsch that meets mornings at Socrates, the now-shuttered Greek diner on Hudson St. The cast includes a sound engineer with his own business, a sculptor supported by his wife, a one-hit playwright, a film producer seemingly always between projects, a best-selling memoirist exposed as a fraud and, oh, a gangster.
It’s hardly an affectionate portrait of the neighbors, though it is funny. Does Greenfeld expect any blowback from, say, the actual coffee klatsch of fathers he meets with many mornings? Or chef David Bouley or memoirist James Frey, both of whom are figures in the neighborhood?
“No, no,” he says hastily.
“These aren’t their stories. Though Frey does live in Tribeca.”
The Guardian Tracks Down Lore
Oprah’s Smell of Awesomeness
Robot Food
I’m Sick of Robot Food
3:00 PM AUGUST 1, 2012 by Jason Kessler
(Credit: Erik S. Peterson)
HEY! Have you seen the mashed potato dispenser from that 7-11 in Singapore ??? OH. MY. GOSH. It’s incredible! It’s innovative! It’s… disgusting. Seriously. Mashed potatoes from what’s essentially a modified espresso machine? To borrow a colorful Valley Girl phrase from the 80s, “gag me with a spoon.” Actually, gag me with anything–as long as it’s not 7-11’s mashed potatoes. Are we so desperate for food that’s convenient that we’re willing to ignore the fact that mashed potatoes should not dribble out of a nozzle? Apparently so.
Gore Vidal Gone
Remembering Gore Vidal
Jon Wiener on August 1, 2012 – 1:36 AM ET
Gore Vidal. (AP Photo/file)
Victor Navasky tells one of the most revealing stories about Gore Vidal, who died July 31 in Los Angeles at age 86. In 1986, Gore wrote an essay for the magazine’s 120th anniversary issue. Shortly after it was published, Victor was invited to lunch by the publisher of Penthouse magazine, Bob Guccione, at his East Side townhouse, famous for its $200 million art collection. “We had barely consumed the amuse gueules when Bob asked me how much it cost to get Gore Vidal to write his essay,” Victor recalled. “When I told him we had paid each contributor to that issue $25 and Gore got the same $25 that everyone else got, he almost choked on his Chateau Margaux and told me he had offered Vidal $50,000 to write an article forPenthouse and Vidal declined.”
Gore, who had accepted Victor’s invitation to join the magazine in 1981 as a contributing editor, published forty-one articles in The Nation at those rates. Some of his most memorable quotes appeared in The Nation: “We are the United States of Amnesia,” he wrote in 2004. “We learn nothing because we remember nothing.” In that same essay he called the US a place where “the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.”
Koons on Colbert and Art as Transponder
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Jeff Koons | ||||
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A low end so corrosive that it could only be the sound of pop eating itself…
The 30 Greatest Dubstep Songs of All Time
5. Skrillex – “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” (2010)
At 92 million YouTube plays and counting, dubstep’s Godzilla stomp doesn’t get any bigger than this yowling chainsaw rocker from former emocore-scene kid Sonny Moore turned EDM “it” boy Skrillex. Sampling a silly YouTube clip for the tune’s trademark “Oh my gosh!” ejaculation, he pushed dubstep viral, combining candy-colored carnival synths with a low end so corrosive that it could only be the sound of pop eating itself. P.S.
Dr. Quantum and The Double Slit
Fearless Felix
SKYDIVER FEARLESS FELIX JUMPS FROM 18 MILES UP
BY MARCIA DUNN
AP AEROSPACE WRITER
Skydiver “Fearless Felix” Baumgartner has done it again.
On Wednesday, Baumgartner took another stratospheric leap, this time from an altitude of more than 18 miles – an estimated 96,640 feet, nearly three times higher than cruising jetliners. He landed safely near Roswell, N.M. His top speed was an estimated 536 mph, said Brian Utley, an official observer on site.
It’s the second test jump for Baumgartner from such extreme heights and a personal best. He’s aiming for a record-breaking jump from 125,000 feet, or 23 miles, in another month. He hopes to go supersonic then, breaking the speed of sound with just his body.
“It has always been a dream of mine,” Baumgartner said….
Post-It Arcade
Franz West Gone
Franz West, Austrian Sculptor Who Embraced Participation, Play and Design, Dies at 65
By Andrew Russeth – 7/26 10:15am
Franz West, the Austrian artist whose sculptures opened the medium to both bizarre and quotidian forms of participation and pushed it into the realm of design, becoming one of his era’s most influential artists, died in Vienna at the Vienna General Hospital. He was 65, and had been ill for some time.
Entering the art world in Vienna in the mid-1960s, Mr. West quickly moved from the dominant avant-garde mode of the time, performance-heavy Actionism, to a focus on sculpture that was playful and often nonsensical. It was open to play and hands-on manipulation, rather than standing apart as an object of contemplation.
His Passstücke sculptures, or Adaptives, which debuted in the early 1970s, were modestly sized pieces of plaster, often with metal handles that people could hold and swing, their unusual shape and weight distribution causing their operators to move in odd ways. Their break from the violent seriousness of Viennese Actionism was dramatic. As Dan Fox put it in Frieze in 2001.”West’s work can be read as a kind of anti-Aktionism—quiet performance freed from the Sturm und Drang of your Mühls and Nitschs.”
Ooh la la Laurent!
A City Farmer, A Chef & A Host
About the Event
Event Details
Date: Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Number of Dinner Locations: 11
Number of Dinner Guests: 12-25 per location
Dinner Locations: Private homes and meaningful food spaces
Dinner Preferences: Guests choose their top three preferences when purchasing a ticket. Event organizers will do their best to match guests to their top dinner choice.
Tickets: $500 per person
Dinner 1:
City Farmer: Maggie Cheney, EcoStation:NY
Chef: Jeremy Bearman, Rouge Tomate
Host: The home of Amy and Curt Middleton on the Upper West Side
Co-host: James Frey, Author
Ridiculously, irredeemably bad.
Truly Priceless Rauschenberg Valued At $29 Million
Art’s Sale Value? Zero. The Tax Bill? $29 Million.
What is the fair market value of an object that cannot be sold?
The question may sound like a Zen koan, but it is one that lawyers for the heirs of the New York art dealer Ileana Sonnabend and the Internal Revenue Service are set to debate when they meet in Washington next month.
The object under discussion is “Canyon,” a masterwork of 20th-century art created by Robert Rauschenberg that Mrs. Sonnabend’s children inherited when she died in 2007.
Because the work, a sculptural combine, includes a stuffed bald eagle, a bird under federal protection, the heirs would be committing a felony if they ever tried to sell it. So their appraisers have valued the work at zero.
But the Internal Revenue Service takes a different view. It has appraised “Canyon” at $65 million and is demanding that the owners pay $29.2 million in taxes.
Pecan-Wood Smoked Pork Loin Sandwich With Sweet Peaches and Barbecue Sauce
Pecan-Wood Smoked Pork Loin Sandwich With Sweet Peaches and Barbecue Sauce
from Bryan’s Black Mountain Barbecue
For pork:
3 pounds boneless pork loin roast
2 tablespoons Bryan’s Black Mountain, or favorite, spice rub
For peaches:
4 tablespoons butter
6 tablespoons brown sugar
3 tablespoons spiced rum
2 fresh peaches, peeled and sliced
For sandwich:
4 rolls, sliced in half
4 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup Bryan’s Black Mountain, or favorite, barbecue sauce
To smoke pork, season loin with spice rub. Cook at 225 degrees in a smoker over pecan wood for about 3 hours or until pork reaches an internal temperature of 150 degrees. Remove and allow to rest about 5 minutes before slicing into thin pieces. Cover and keep warm.
Pop 2012
The A-Z of pop in 2012
From the Guardian Guide: Don’t know your Afrobeats from your Cloud rap? Find your way through the changing pop landscape with our handy A-Z guide
by Clare Considine, Harriet Gibsone, Louis Pattison, Sam Richards, Sian Rowe
Pop. Indie. Electronica. Soul. Do these words mean anything any more? Switch on the radio and you could be mistaken for thinking that genres have blurred into one. But dig deeper and you’ll find that there are more than ever. Here, we present a glossary of 2012’s essential musical movements (and only a few are made up by us). Plus, a chance to sample tracks from 25 of the 26 genres mentioned in Spotify (Tumblrwave is just too damn new).
Listen to our Spotify playlist or watch on YouTube
Deconstructing Dad
An Artist and Inventor Whose Medium Was Sound
‘Deconstructing Dad’ Recalls Raymond Scott, Musical Inventor
“Deconstructing Dad: The Music, Machines and Mystery of Raymond Scott” is Stan Warnow’s heartfelt documentary about the life and legacy of his emotionally remote father, an eccentric techno-music pioneer. In Scott’s single-minded pursuit of an offbeat musical vision, he has been compared to Frank Zappa; one talking head describes him as “an audio version of Andy Warhol.” Like “My Architect,” Nathaniel Kahn’s film about his father, Louis I. Kahn, this documentary is a son’s attempt to forge a posthumous bond with an elusive parent.
Scott, who died in 1994, belonged to that breed of obsessed genius-inventors who focus so intensely on their work that fame and riches are almost incidental. Shy and secretive, he preferred to remain in the background even after achieving some renown. When shown in front of the camera, he is visibly uncomfortable.
Born in Brooklyn in 1908 (he legally changed his name from Harry Warnow), Scott enjoyed hits in the late 1930s as the leader, composer and arranger of the Raymond Scott Quintette, a progressive swing ensemble whose peppy, hyper-agitated instrumentals included “Twilight in Turkey” and “The Toy Trumpet.” The music sounded like jazz but wasn’t, because no element was left to chance.
Before Number Four
Moby Moby Michael Stipe Micheal Stipe Bruce Willis Moby Moby Michael Chiklis Bruce Willis Moby Moby Michael Stipe Johnny Malkovich
Unmentionable Soup
from AP via The San Jose Mercury News
Cannibal cult ate brains and made unmentionable soup, Papua New Guinea police say
By Rod McGuirk
Associated Press
CANBERRA, Australia — Authorities have arrested 29 people accused of being part of a cannibal cult in Papua New Guinea’s jungle interior and charged them with the murders of seven suspected witch doctors, police said Friday.
Madang Police Commander Anthony Wagambie confirmed a report in The National newspaper that said the cult members allegedly ate their victims’ brains raw and made soup from their penises.
“They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong; they admit what they’ve done openly,” Wagambie told The Associated Press by telephone.
He said the killers believed that their victims practiced “sanguma,” or sorcery, and that they had been extorting money as well as demanding sex from poor villagers for their supernatural services.
By eating witch doctors’ organs, the cult members believed they would attain supernatural powers and literally become bullet-proof, he said.
Encyclopedia Brown Author Donald Sobol Gone
Encyclopedia Brown Author Donald J. Sobol Has Died
By Jason Boog on July 16, 2012 7:00 PM
This GalleyCat editor will never forget the hours and hours he spent devouring this Edgar Award-winning mystery series. In addition to these books, Sobol also wrote the Two Minute Mystery series from 1959 until 1968.
He launched Encyclopedia Brown in 1963, and the books are still available today from Penguin.
Nuff Respect?
Reggae respect
Bob Marley, who brought reggae music from its native Jamaica to the world in the 1970s, is being recognized with an unusual distinction: A newly discovered species of fish is named for him.
Gnathia marleyi, according to the National Science Foundation, was named after Mr. Marley by a scientist who discovered the fish in Caribbean coral reefs. He explained the name by calling the fish “as uniquely Caribbean as was Marley.”
Latest Release from Full Fathom Five: SO CLOSE TO YOU by Rachel Carter
Punk Economics
Richard Zanuck Gone
Producer Richard Zanuck dies at 77
Oscar winner behind ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ also shaped ‘Jaws’ and six Tim Burton films
Richard Zanuck, the son of legendary 20th Century Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck who carved out his own career as the Oscar-winning producer of “Driving Miss Daisy,” the blockbuster “Jaws” and several Tim Burton films, including “Alice in Wonderland,” died Friday in Los Angeles from a heart attack. He was 77.
Wife-Carrying
Wife carrying championships in Finland won for fourth time by couple
Finnish lawyer, Taisto Miettinen, completed the 250m track, tackling a pool and several hurdles with his wife Kristiina Haapanen on his back, in just over a minute.
The winner of Finland’s Wife Carrying World Championship Competition in Sonkajarvi won the weight of their wife in beer.
Winners Taisto Miettinen and Kristiina Haapanen have now won the competition four times.
The contest is rooted in the legend of Ronkainen the Robber, said in the 19th century to have tested aspiring members of his gang by forcing them to lug sacks of grain or live swine over a similar course.
It also purportedly stems from an even earlier tribal practice of wife-stealing, in honour of which many contestants now take up the challenge with someone else’s wife.
One of the goals is to have people dancing in the museum.
Hot Stuff! Jeffrey Deitch on James Murphy’s ‘Fire in the Disco’ Show at L.A. MOCA
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has scheduled an exhibition called “Fire in the Disco,” which will look at the history of disco and its impact on art, fashion and music. It will be co-curated by former LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy and the museum hopes for it to open in time for the next programming season. Word of the show was first hinted at in a New York Times profile of Mr. Murphy last week that said he had been talking with MOCA’s director Jeffrey Deitch. Mr. Deitch confirmed the news on the phone with us Monday evening.
“There aren’t that many of these cultural movements that within a few years spread all around the world,” Mr. Deitch said of the exhibition’s subject. “Like Cubism, within a few years of its invention in Paris, it’s everywhere. And disco is sort of this unlikely candidate for this. It emerges in subcultures in lofts in downtown New York and basements in Paris, but it sweeps the world very quickly and encompasses fashion, film, art, and has great social impact in addition to its musical impact. It has a tremendous impact on gay liberation, on the connection between black, white, Hispanic. It became a universal language.”
Woman Who Begat Centipede Recounts Birth Experience
from AP via The San Jose Mercury News
Woman behind ‘Centipede’ recalls iconic video game’s birth
By Barbara Ortutay – Associated Press
NEW YORK — Dona Bailey was working as a computer programmer at General Motors when she heard the Pretenders song “Space Invader” and fell in love with it. The year was 1980. She had no clue about video games.
A friend heard her say that she liked the song, and he got really excited. He told her there was a “Space Invaders” game at a bar nearby. They went to lunch so she could see what that song was about.
“He gave me a quarter and I lost all my lives before I could even figure out what I was supposed to do on the screen,” she says. “But I got really intrigued.”
That’s how she came to join Atari, the company that cemented the video game industry in the 1970s and early 1980s with “Pong,” and thanks in part to Bailey, “Centipede.”
Special K
Special K For Depression Renews Hope In Hallucinogens
By Jason Gale, Makiko Kitamura and Allison Connolly – Jul 9, 2012 6:43 AM MT
Donald says he thought he’d died minutes after ketamine, a popular club drug known as Special K, was infused into his vein at a Sydney hospital in March.
“I couldn’t see anything except pure white,” recalled the 63-year-old depression sufferer, who declined to be identified by his last name. “I thought, ‘oh well, I must have died.’”
His vision normalized within a couple of hours, he said. So did his mood, giving Donald respite from the debilitating depression that had defied a dozen antidepressants he’d taken over decades.
The former academic’s experience is part of broader tests to determine whether ketamine, a hallucinogen commonly used to anesthetize horses, can offer a new avenue for relieving the low mood and self-esteem and feelings of hopelessness that plague as many as 121 million people worldwide.