No Bareback! No Peace!
Porn industry may boogie out of L.A. over condom law
Producers weigh taking legal action or moving out of town when a Los Angeles measure requiring performers to wear condoms takes effect March 5.
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation demonstrates last February near the L.A. site of an adult film awards show.(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
By Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times – February 21, 2012
For decades, the nation’s pornographic film industry found a happy, largely accepting home in Los Angeles.
Producers operated lucrative businesses in anonymous office parks in the San Fernando Valley. Available in the city were a steady supply of actors and film production talent as well as opulent mansions that often served as theatrical backdrops. By one estimate, at least 5% of on-location shoots were for adult films.
But this coexistence has been suddenly shaken by sweeping health regulations that, starting March 5, will require porn performers to wear condoms while on location.
It’s a debate that pits the desire to protect the health of porn actors against the freedom to make films that audiences want to see.
Berkeley Loses 22-foot Long Redwood Carving From The Harlem Renaissance – Michael Jackson’s Chimp Bubbles Involved
Berkeley’s Artwork Loss Is a Museum’s Gain
Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
By CAROL POGASH
BERKELEY, Calif. — Everybody misplaces something sometime. But it is not easy for the University of California, Berkeley, to explain how it lost a 22-foot-long carved panel by a celebrated African-American sculptor, or how, three years ago, it mistakenly sold this work, valued at more than a million dollars, for $150 plus tax.
The university’s embarrassing loss eventually enabled the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, a large museum and research center in San Marino, Calif., to acquire its first major work by an African-American artist.
The circuitous tale of Sargent Johnson’s huge redwood relief involves error, chance and a partnership of unlikely art-world figures, including an art and furniture dealer who stumbled upon the panels at the university’s surplus store; an antiques dealer who was on a first-name basis with Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles; and a lawyer whose hobby is buying lighthouses and who convinced the government that even though the art was commissioned bythe Works Progress Administration, it could still be sold publicly.
Mouthwatering Roach Coaches
Yuma taco trucks: Mouthwatering specialties, from carne asada to seafood
by Roger Naylor
The idea sounded a little crazy when I explained it to my wife. I spent a weekend doing a taco-truck crawl through the streets of Yuma, and it proved to be a movable, memorable feast.
Though Yuma has plenty of excellent traditional restaurants, a whole other dining scene has emerged on the roadside. A fleet of food trucks serves delicious, authentic foods at bargain prices. Most of the trucks, like mobile homes, are only technically vehicles. Many have rested in the same spots for years, some morphing into skeletons of restaurants with makeshift walls and roofs. Others are set up in parking lots and on vacant corners near sprawling farm fields to cater to the thousands of seasonal workers.
While “taco truck” is convenient shorthand for these restaurants on wheels, the menus often are much more far-ranging, running the gamut from ceviche to stingray soup to juicy burgers to bacon-wrapped hot dogs.
“There’s an authenticity to this food. For the farmworkers, this is a little taste of home,” says Ed from Yuma, who works at Arizona Western College. “And for the rest of us, these trucks are like crossing the border without actually crossing the border.”
Several borders, in fact. Not only are various regions of Mexico represented, but some trucks specialize in dishes from Guatemala and El Salvador as well. Before my visit to Yuma, I had never heard of a pupusa. Now I want to eat one every day for the rest of my life.
Stonehenge Built By Shroomheads Presaging Pink Floyd
Sound illusions inspired Stonehenge
by Kerry Sheridan – Agence France-Presse
VANCOUVER: Ancient legends of thunder gods can be explained today with the modern science of sound waves, say scientist who believes an auditory illusion inspired the creation of Stonehenge.
The famous, 5,000 year-old stone circle in Britain is one of the best-known world heritage sites and many have guessed at the reasons for its existence, from a prehistoric observatory to sun temple to sacred healing ground.
Steven Waller, an independent scientist who has studied cave art for 20 years and cultivates a particular interest in the sounds of ancient sites, thinks that a sound wave effect was so mysterious back then that it compelled people to erect Stonehenge.
The phenomenon Waller referred to is known as acoustic interference. It happens when two sources of sound, such as two bagpipers, are playing the same note at the same time from different places in a field.
As a listener passes, the sound waves, rather than aligning to make the noise louder as one might expect, actually bounce off each other to create a wavering, muffling effect. “You hear the sound modulating between and loud and quiet,” Waller said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Vancouver.
“That would have been a very mysterious phenomenon, totally inexplicable.
Pam Houston’s ‘CONTENTS MAY HAVE SHIFTED’
Pam Houston, the author of the new novel ‘Contents May Have Shifted’ brazenly challenges the lines between fiction and non-fiction
By WALLACE BAINE
You might think that the name a novelist gives her protagonist is no big deal. Sure it would be nice if it were memorable and evoked the character’s personality in some tangible way, like “Ebenezer Scrooge.”
But the names a writer chooses aren’t going to call into question the basic assumptions of her work … or are they?
Novelist Pam Houston is now at the center of a debate about the very essence of literature thanks to her book “Contents May Have Shifted” and, specifically, about its heroine’s first name.
That name? Pam … as in Pam Houston.
“I could have just called her Melinda,’ which is what I was planning to do, and not have gotten into so much trouble,” said Houston, the author of the best-selling “Cowboys Are My Weakness.” “But I was driving over a mountain pass in the snow, Wilco playing loud on the radio and I just thought, What am I afraid of?’ ”
But by naming her main character after herself, Houston is picking a fight with those in the literary world to whom the distinctions between fiction and memoir are very important.
“I’ve been meeting people on this current book tour,” said the author, who heads up the creative writing program at UC Davis, “and some of them are saying, I was so disappointed. I wanted to settle in with you.'”
Houston is challenging the notion that there are these two distinct worlds — fiction and nonfiction — that don’t touch or overlap, and that a writer belongs comfortably in one or the other, but not both. She said that “Contents” is largely autobiographical, but that she took liberties with the factual truth. She playfully even suggests a number as a percentage of what in her book is “true.” It’s 82.
“I can certainly see how it’s very important in some contexts to stand up and say, Hey, I’m a real person and this thing really happened to me,’ if you’re a survivor of the genocide in Rwanda, for example. But most of us are relying on what our subjective idea of what we believe to be true is. Most of us are in the middle.”
Ironically, James Frey, the author of the memoir “A Million Little Pieces” who found himself in the middle of a huge Oprah-fueled literary scandal when it was revealed that some parts of the book were fictionalized, was once a student of Houston’s. She remembered being in Sydney, Australia, when the Frey story, the touchstone of the whole memoir/fiction debate, broke and was shocked to see the controversy reported in the local newspaper. “My God, why was the whole world so interested in this?” she said.
[ click to read full article at the SantaCruzSentinel.com ]
[ click to purchase Pam Houston’s ‘Contents May Have Shifted’ ]
Truffle-Infused Prime Sirloin Served With Fareki, Shallot Confit and Red Wine Sauce
Happy Valentine’s Day
Hanksy
An Interview with Hanksy
Hanksy is a street artist who puts Tom Hanks’ face on copies of Banksy’s art. His first show, which just closed at the Krause Gallery on the Lower East Side, and where the menu offered boxes of chocolates and Dr. Pepper, nearly sold out completely, according to the dealer. “I think what made it such a success is the genuine honesty in it,” gallery owner Ben Krause told me. “Hanksy really is a huge Tom Hanks fan and a huge Banksy fan.”
Images of Hanksy’s pieces, pasted and sprayed over walls in both New York and Chicago, gained momentum over corners of the internet, not just those dedicated to documenting the pursuits of street artists and taggers alike, but also fans of a really great, really simple joke. After some sleuthing and one of the more awkward cold e-mails I’ve ever written, I tracked the man down and spoke with him.
EA: How are you known and what are you known for?
Die Antwoord’s of Wisdom
Die Antwoord’s Totally Insane Words of Wisdom
Ninja: The response to Die Antwoord was a total mind-fuck. It was like being on an acid trip. I’d been rapping for 20 years and all of a sudden there was overload. It made no sense. You can make your confusion work for you. You have to drive into it. When you see that people are paying attention, then you have to push that motherfucker into the red.
Yo-Landi: People are flying you places in business class. Everyone wants to take pictures of you and find out information about you. It’s a freak-out. But the more you push boundaries, the more you get ahead.
Ninja: It doesn’t matter why people like you. It just matters that you do something with it.
Yo-Landi: It’s weird how people were always asking us, “Are you real? Are you joking?” That seems like something Americans care about a lot. You can’t answer the question “Are you real?” If we’re anything, we’re documentary fiction.
Ninja: The fucking God-given gift of artists is to create stuff from nothing. Die Antwoord makes hyperreality. We create exaggerated experience. This American reporter was telling us that reality TV makes Americans care about if things are real or not. But you watch reality TV and you get a dull feeling in your balls. You watch us and it’s thrilling. There’s a sweet analogy for how musicians can think about this: People are unconscious and you have to use your art as a shock machine to wake them up. Some people are too far gone. They’ll just keep asking, “Is it real? Is it real?” That’s dwanky. That’s a word we have in South Africa, “dwanky.” It’s like lame. “Is it real?” Dwanky. You have to be futuristic and carry on. You gotta be a good guide to help people get away from dull experience. Don’t be rude to the people who don’t get it. It’s better to be nice to those retards.
Whitney Gone
Still the greatest Star Spangled Banner ever sung…
Sad to see you go, Ms. Houston….
TG&M: Fiction or non-fiction: Does it matter any more?
RUSSELL SMITH
Fiction or non-fiction: Does it matter any more?
Published Wednesday, Feb. 01, 2012 3:46PM EST
The biggest topic in literature these days – aside from the endless e-book debate – is, once again, the difference between fiction and non-fiction.
We dissected this issue in 2006, after James Frey’s bestselling memoir of addiction turned out to be untrue. At the time, many people – particularly artists – argued that there was no reason to dismiss a powerful narrative simply because it was labelled non-fiction. They thought we would have enjoyed it just as much if we had known we were reading a novel.
The Frey incident actually caused a backlash, I think, against journalistic accuracy among creative writers. It is so cool to say now that story is all and truth is irrelevant. I have heard of a university teacher of “non-fiction” encouraging students to make stuff up in their memoirs. (The fact that memoir-writing is now a common graduate-level university course is also evidence of the rise of this issue.)
Now, the focus of the discussion has turned the other way, not to things that claim to be true, but to things that claim to be art.
Flipping The Bird
Cluck You – Why do we call giving someone the finger “flipping the bird”?
By Brian Palmer
Photo by Christopher Polk.
Madonna was upstaged at her own Super Bowl halftime show Sunday when guest performer M.I.A. extended her middle finger at the camera. When did we start calling this gesture “flipping the bird?”
The obscene gesture itself is far older than that, though. As many writers have pointed out, the middle finger became a symbol of the penis at least 2,500 years ago. In Aristophanes’ 423 B.C.E. play The Clouds, the character Strepsiades jokes that when he was a boy he kept time by tapping his phallus rather than his middle finger. If showing someone the middle finger wasn’t already a common insult at that time, it became one within the next century. The Greek philosopher Diogenes showed his middle finger as a sign of disrespect to the orator Demosthenes in the fourth century B.C.E. (The ancient Greeks also associated the penis with birds, although there’s no evidence that they ever referred to the middle finger itself as a bird or showing it to someone as “flipping the bird.”) The ancient Romans called the middle finger digitus impudicus, or the impudent finger. In a show of superiority, eccentric Roman Emperor Caligula made senators kneel and kiss his middle finger, which was understood to represent his phallus. The middle finger gesture fell out of favor during the Middle Ages, likely because the Catholic Church disapproved of its sexual suggestiveness. The earliest known use of the bird in the New World didn’t come until 1886, when a pitcher for the Boston Beaneaters flashed his middle finger in a team photo.’
In the 1960s. Birds have a long association with taunting. English audiences have expressed their dissatisfaction by hooting like owls or hissing like threatened geese for more than 700 years. In the final speech of Troilus and Cressida, Pandarus confesses that “my fear is this, some galled goose of Winchester would hiss.” The practice was so common by the early 19thcentury that Englishmen were using goose as a verb. By the middle of that century, goose generalized to bird, but it was still limited to vocal jeering. The phrase “flip the bird,” referring specifically to the one-fingered salute, arose in the 1960s.
Hard-wired Swearing
Swearing and the Brain
Your brain is a very complex organ, but there are only a few things you need to know about it to understand how it approaches swear words differently from other language:
— In most people, the left hemisphere is in charge of language. The right hemisphere creates the emotional content of language.
— Language processing is a “higher” brain function and takes place in the cerebral cortex.
— Emotion and instinct are “lower” brain functions and take place deep inside the brain.
Many studies suggest that the brain processes swearing in the lower regions, along with emotion and instinct. Scientists theorize that instead of processing a swearword as a series of phonemes, or units of sound that must be combined to form a word, the brain stores swear words as whole units [ref]. So, the brain doesn’t need the left hemisphere’s help to process them. Swearing specifically involves:
Sweet Potato Soup With Bacon
AMERICA: Stuck In The Teeth
Stuck In The Teeth
POSTED AT: FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2012 07:25:58 PM
AUTHOR: JIM KEANE, S.J.
In his memoir/novel A Million Little Pieces (first pitched as the latter, then sold and made famous as the former, then eventually exposed as largely the latter), author James Frey tells the harrowing tale of undergoing a double root canal without any anesthetic. It’s one of the most cringe-worthy moments in the book, because anyone who has had a root canal even withanesthetic can testify it’s an uncomfortable experience, to say the least. To have two at once without painkillers seems beyond the realm of the possible.
In Frey’s case, it was—he later admitted the details of the root canal story (among many other stories) were somewhat fudged. In terms of the structure of Frey’s book, however, the scene accomplished several tasks: it showed the reader just how serious his addictions were, that he could not have even novocaine; it provided a benchmark for physical pain that many readers could relate to in some fashion; and, perhaps most importantly, it established the author as a tough guy nonpareil. Not a bad haul for a story about one’s teeth, yes?
I am teaching a class on Religious Memoir this semester, and our first text is Augustine’s Confessions. It includes of course the famous story of his theft of the pears; there are the years spent in dissipation; one finds the tales of his mother’s stubborn refusal to give up on her son. Then, right there in Chapter 4 of Book 9, nary 500 words from his account of his own baptism: a toothache! Here is Augustine’s account, addressed to God:
Hepworth Purloined
Hepworth sculpture latest target of ‘scrap metal’ thieves
By Helen Warless
‘Two Forms (Divided Circle)’ by Barbara Hepworth, taken from Dulwich Park, London
An enormous bronze sculpture by Barbara Hepworth which was wrenched from its plinth in a south London park is thought to be the latest in a string of artworks to have been targeted by the country’s metal thieves.
The 2m-high sculpture, “Two Forms (Divided Circle)” had been on display in Dulwich Park for more than 40 years and is insured for £500,000. It was removed on Monday night by criminals who broke through the park gates, drove up to the artwork, hacked through the base and took it away.
Police forces around the UK have admitted they are struggling to contain the rise in metal thefts spurred by soaring copper, lead and bronze prices. Railway lines, phone and electricity cables and even bus stops have been hauled off by criminals cashing in on the high demand for scrap metal. MPs concerned that thieves have turned their attention to war memorials, commemorative plaques and valuable sculptures have called on the government to give the police more powers to crack down on scrap dealers who ultimately buy the stolen metal.
Angelo Dundee Gone
from AP via The Arizona Republic
Muhammad Ali’s boxing trainer Angelo Dundee dead at 90
Feb. 1, 2012 11:42 PM – Associated Press
There was no way Angelo Dundee was going to miss Muhammad Ali’s 70th birthday party.
The genial trainer got to see his old friend, and reminisce about good times. It was almost as if they were together in their prime again, and what a time that was.
Dundee died in his apartment in Tampa, Fla., Wednesday night at the age of 90, and with him a part of boxing died, too.
Dundee was the brilliant motivator who worked the corner for Ali in his greatest fights, willed Sugar Ray Leonard to victory in his biggest bout, and coached hundreds of young men in the art of a left jab and an overhand right.
More than that, he was a figure of integrity in a sport that often lacked it.
“To me, he was the greatest ambassador for boxing, the greatest goodwill ambassador in a sport where there’s so much animosity and enemies,” said Bruce Trampler, the longtime matchmaker who first went to work for Dundee in 1971. “The guy didn’t have an enemy in the world.”
How could he, when his favorite line was, “It doesn’t cost anything more to be nice.”
Mike Kelley Gone
Pioneering Artist Mike Kelley Has Died at 58
By Dan Duray, Andrew Russeth and Michael H. Miller
Mike Kelley, one of the most critically acclaimed artists of his generation, has died at the age of 58. According to several sources close to the artist that The Observerhas spoken with the cause of death was suicide.
The artist had recently been selected for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, an exhibition that he has participated in seven times in the past. He has had major one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Louvre, MUMOK, Vienna, and numerous other museums.
Mr. Kelley’s work spanned across numerous mediums and source materials, encompassing sculptures made of knitted stuffed animals (which provided the cover art for Sonic Youth’s 1992Dirty album) to banners emblazoned with various phrases (“PANTS SHITTER & PROUD PS JERK-OFF TOO,” memorably) to large-scale installations inspired by the city of Kandor, the birthplace of Superman.
Mr. Kelley was born in 1954 in Detroit (he described himself as a “blue-collar anarchist”), and his childhood there provided material for many of his works. In 1974, he founded the band Destroy All Monsters with Cary Loren, Niagara (Loren’s then-girlfriend) and Jim Shaw. They made noisy, feedback drenched-music that was influenced by the other local bands at the time, The Stooges and the MC5. Destroy All Monsters was recently the subject of two retrospectives, at the Prism Gallery in Los Angeles and at the Boston University Art Gallery. Mr. Kelley left the band in 1976, to attend graduate school at CalArts.
Mr. Kelley showed at New York’s Metro Pictures Gallery for two decades, from the early 1980s until the early 2000s, when he began showing with Gagosian. Reviewing his 1988 show at Metro Pictures, critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “He’s an artist’s artist for those artists–now in the making–who will matter to us in the ’90s.”
Juan Luis Pedro Philippo DeHuevos Epstein Gone
from Associated Press via Pioneer Press
Robert Hegyes, who played Epstein on ‘Welcome Back Kotter,’ dies
Associated Press
METUCHEN, N.J. – Robert Hegyes, the actor best known for playing Jewish Puerto Rican student Juan Epstein on the 1970s TV show “Welcome Back Kotter” has died. He was 60.
The Flynn & Son Funeral Home in Fords, N.J., said it was informed of Hegyes’ death Thursday by the actor’s family.
A spokesman at JFK Medical Center in Edison, N.J., told the Star-Ledger newspaper that Hegyes, of Metuchen, arrived at the hospital Thursday morning in full cardiac arrest and died.
Hegyes was appearing on Broadway in 1975 when he auditioned for “Kotter,” a TV series about a teacher who returns to the inner-city New York school of his youth to teach a group of irreverent remedial students nicknamed the “Sweathogs.” They included the character Vinnie Barbarino, played by John Travolta.
A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR by Leo Fitzpatrick
Currently featured in a two-person show at Max Fish, Leo Fitzpatrick is perhaps best known in the art world for his title page poetry series. As an actor, Leo is familiar to the public at large for films like Larry Clark’s KIDS and notable turns in HBO’s The Wire, Sons of Anarchy, The Shoe and Kalup Linzy’s shorts. Leo Fitzpatrick’s mixed media work is in the private collections of Terry Richardson, Daphne Guinness, Richard Kern, James Frey and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. His bookF#*k Friends was published by OHWOW in 2009. He can be found most Saturday nights DJ-ing at Lit.
Today Exhibition A presents A Man Walks Into A Bar by Leo Fitzpatrick. This archival pigment print on canvas is available in 2 sizes, each a signed limited edition of 50.
2012 Virgin Banksy
First Banksy of 2012 Spotted in What Might be the Artist’s Most Prolific Year
You may have considered either 2010 or 2011 to have been the year(s) that popular street artist Banksy possibly hit his career high, becoming a near-household name with his documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop and then, later, its Oscar nomination. However, with the 2012 Olympics soon arriving in his native England, some are speculating that this could be Banksy’s most prolific year. As such, spotters are on the lookout and they have recently found perhaps the first piece by the artist this year:
It appears to have all of the hallmarks of a real painting by the artist and would be the first new year offering by Banksy. 2012 the Olympic year is expected to be a big year for the artist as all eyes are now focused on the capital.. The stencil turned up on the corner of an office building on Oval Street in Kentish Town (near Camden Town) and many followers of the street artist have already identified the painting as a Banksy. It possesses all of the his irreverent stencil features including a distinctly political statement.
Matt Strauss’ White Flag Projects Hits NYC
St. Louis gallerist curates his first show at a significant New York gallery
MATT AT BAT: Local art gallery operator and curator, Matt Strauss, who has become bi-coastal in the past couple years, had his first curated show at a NYC gallery open on Friday.
Although it was a frigid night, there were some ex-pat St. Louisans mingling among the Right Coasters at the opening at the Renwick Gallery, 45 Renwick Street in Soho.
Cole Root, director of St. Louis’ Los Caminos gallery who moved to New York last year was at the opening, as was artist Erik Spehn, who also left the STL for NY over the past couple years, curator Marie Heilich and artist Megan Marrin. Notable New Yorker’s in attendance included artists Tommy Hartung and Tony Matelli, author James Frey, and gallerists Michelle Maccarone, Lisa Cooley and Tyler Dobson.
Strauss said the artists whose work is in the exhibition are mostly high-level artists he’s shown at his White Flag Projects gallery, 4568 Manchester Avenue.
A Clockwork Box-Office
How Stanley Kubrick Invented the Modern Box-Office Report (By Accident)
by Mike Kaplan
Stanley Kubrick believed that “filmmaking is an exercise in problem solving.” He meant that to include the distribution and marketing of his films as well as their production, and he devoted more time and effort to managing the release of his films than any other director. In my view, it’s one of the reasons he made only 13 films in 46 years. He relished the problem-solving.
I spent two years overseeing the marketing of Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, devising its successful 70-mm. relaunch strategy, before joining him in England to handle the release of A Clockwork Orange. Our collaboration began shortly after Clockwork wrapped and lasted through its December 1971 premiere, its official U.S. release date of February 2, 1972, and throughout its extended rollout. With Stanley’s rare combination of meticulousness and creativity, we achieved what we set out to accomplish — but the most influential result of our collaboration was unexpected.
Stanley had a computerized system to track theaters and grosses based on technical information he had acquired while developing HAL 9000, the all-knowing computer in 2001. For months these stories persisted in the trades as the roster of Clockwork cinemas was refined. They were neither confirmed nor denied.
In March 1972, after the first 25 Clockwork engagements had established new house records, I was in my Burbank office at Warner Bros. when Stanley called, sounding serious.
“Mike, I just got a call from Abel Green.”
Abel Green was the legendary editor of Variety and the most respected and important figure in the trade press.
“What did he want?,” I asked, nervously.
“He asked about the computer system because he wants to adapt it for Variety.” Trade stories of Stanley hoodwinking the studio raced through my mind.
“What did you say?,” I replied, already planning damage control.
His tone changed; there was a twinkle in his voice. “I told him how we had done it, how necessary the information was for the business and what computers could do the job. He was very appreciative.”
Stanley was in top form.
Marlborough’s All-Star Group Show
See Cindy Sherman and Others Celebrate the Art of Fiction in Marlborough’s All-Star Group Show
WHAT: “Blind Cut,” curated by Jonah Freeman and Vera Neykov
WHEN: Opening Jan. 19 – Feb. 18, Tuesday-Saturday 10am – 5:30pm
WHERE: Marlborough Gallery Chelsea, 545 West 25th St., New York
WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: As news of art forgeries is scattered across the web and legal questions arise with regards to the use appropriation in art, Marlborough Chelsea stages the appropriately timed exhibition “Blind Cut.” The ambitious group show brings together an impressive guest-list of contributing artists and borrowed works that delve into varying forms of fiction. From renderings by the Italian radical architectural firm Superstudio to French faux artist collective Claire Fontaine and surrealist film master Luis Buñuel, “Blind Cut” embraces work that focuses on invention, persona, utopia, and authorship.
Not only is the list of featured artists full of super-stars, like Cindy Sherman, Ed Ruscha, Sherrie Levine, Ryan Gander, and Francis Picabia (among others), but the contributor list for the accompanying publication is full of heavy-hitters as well. Prolific science-fiction writer and the creator of numerous literary fictitious worlds J.G. Ballard and exaggerative memoirist James Frey write complimentary essays and interviews.
The Second Coolest Shower Curtain Ever
The Dave Eggers shower curtain
The Thing, the quarterly that issues objects that are art-ish or connected to literature, will publish a short story shower curtain by Dave Eggers later this month. It is The Thing Issue 16. Previous issues of The Thing include a cutting board seared with a short story by Starlee Kine, a Miranda July window shade, and a pair of glasses to go with Jonathan Lethem’s novel “Chronic City” — all of which have sold out.
Eight year-old Hardcore
Finch on McWhinnie
John McWhinnie
BOOKWORLD
by Charlie Finch
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The loss of book dealer, promoter, collector and champion John McWhinnie in a water accident last weekend at a young age is a devastating one to those who love books, especially old books, which, these days, is just about every book. The smell of the paper, the design of the cover, the tattered pages and convenient cocktail napkin employed as a bookmark, all experiences before the reading, remain the hallmarks of John, as presentable and gracious a fellow as ever walked Park Avenue.
His exhibitions were first rate; John Waters, Brigid Berlin, James Frey. I went to Jack Hanley’s amazing “Diggers” show at his Watts Street gallery last Friday and was again reminded that the literary collectibles from the 1960s that I have in my library are now as old as the Civil War, turning to dust at McWhinnie’s untimely death. McWhinnie’s emporiums, on East 64th Street and in East Hampton, their stock supplemented by the great bent bibliophile Richard Prince, were the Elaine’s or the Mortimer’s of fading bookland.
McWhinnie Gone
John McWhinnie, Rare Book Dealer, Dies
At a friend’s wedding in 2005, John McWhinnie once distilled some love letters that Orson Welles had written to Rita Hayworth in the 1940s and read the short passage to the assembled guests.
McWhinnie, a New York dealer, scholar and collector of rare 20th century books, letters and ephemera, died on Friday.
“He figured out a way to make 60-year old mail feel completely contemporary,” said the friend, Bill Powers, a New York gallery owner.
McWhinnie, who was 43 years old, drowned during a snorkeling accident while on vacation in the British Virgin Islands with his wife Maria Beaulieu, a jewelry designer, said an aide to his business partner, Glenn Horowitz. Beaulieu survived.
McWhinnie served as adviser and dealer to artists and executives on their art and book buying, including contemporary artist Richard Prince, novelist James Frey and Daniel Loeb, a hedge fund manager.
“He has been one of the primary forces to bridge the gap between the art world and the establishment rare book world,” said Sheelagh Bevan, assistant curator of printed books at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. “He was usually two years ahead of everyone else in elevating an overlooked group of artists or writers–Mary Beach comes to mind, but there are many others–to the point where institutions and private collectors took notice.”
“When he died he took with him so much specialized knowledge that will be lost to the dustbin of history,” Frey said.
Stuffed Veal Rolls With Mushrooms and Onions
Police Say She Was Drunk
Woman Scratches, Rubs Butt Over $30M Painting
Police say she was drunk
by Greg Wilson
AP
This work by Clyfford Still, titled “D No. 1,” was not damaged by a drunken woman.
A Colorado woman dropped her pants at a museum and rubbed her rear end all over a painting valued at $30 million, according to police.
Carmen Tisch, 36, was arrested after scratching, punching and, well, rubbing her butt against Clyfford Still’s “1957-J no.2” and causing an estimated $10,000 damage to the artwork at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. Police believe she was drunk during the late December incident.
The oil-on-canvas abstract expressionist painting was spared additional damage when the woman tried to urinate on it but apparently missed. “It doesn’t appear she urinated on the painting or that the urine damaged it, so she’s not being charged with that,” Kimbrough said according to the Denver Post.