“Here’s to the Crazy Ones… The Ones who see things differently.”
ESQUIRE: “There Is No Truth,” He Said.
“There Is No Truth,” He Said.
By John H. Richardson
Illustrations by Nathan Fox
Published in the November 2011 issue
Things start to get weird when Frey locks the door to his office and pulls down the blinds. That’s James Frey, author of the famously fraudulent memoir A Million Little Pieces, a big lug with a shaved head who could pass for a member of the Russian mob — small forehead, big jaw, small pursed mouth constantly chewing gum. I figured he was going to punch me out.
Rule number one in journalism: Don’t call the person you are interviewing a fucking asshole.
What happened is, I was interviewing Frey at his offices in SoHo. The subject was his unusual new publishing business, Full Fathom Five, which was about to release the world’s first e-book with a soundtrack. The soundtrack actually syncs up with how fast you’re reading — music, gunshots, the ardent moans of young lovers. Amazing. Frey made me a cup of cappuccino, asked about my family. But then I had to ask about the three-part Oprah controversy and he started talking about postmodernism and Andy Warhol with the strong suggestion that A Million Little Pieces wasn’t really a giant fraud but some kind of sophisticated performance art. “Anyway, there is no truth,” he said. “It’s all fiction. In my experience, 80 percent of reporters just tell flat-out lies.”
So I said, “A guy who has an affair and his wife asks him if it’s really true and he says, ‘No, but what is reality anyway’ isn’t a sophisticated postmodernist, he’s a motherfucking asshole.”
Frey asked me to step outside.
I stood in the hall talking to his staff and my smartphone started going nuts. He’s about to pull the plug! What the hell is going on? Are you really swearing at him? Step outside and call me! Calm down!
Which, of course, just pisses me off even more. Micromanaging panties-in-a-bunch editors, bane of my existence.
Some time passes. I find that I like Frey’s bright young crew, doubtless brutally exploited. Then Frey opens the door looking even more nauseous than he did when Oprah was carving him a new outlet for his writing. He barks at the staff to clear out and motions me in, locks the door, and pulls down the blinds.
I say, “Look, maybe we got off on the wrong foot. Or in your case, the wrong cloven hoof.”
I’m kidding.
He ignores me. “You want the truth? I’ll show you the fucking truth. See that laptop?”
An ordinary MacBook Pro on the desk, a futuristic matte silver shell.
“Open it.”
I hesitate.
“Trust me.”
Hollywood Pioneer Sue Mengers Gone
Sue Mengers
With a client list that included Ali MacGraw, Gene Hackman, and Barbra Streisand, Sue Mengers, the first superagent, ruled 1970s Hollywood with her brash, no-nonsense style. Herewith, the expert deal-maker dishes on insects, Paris Hilton, and sleeping.
Which living person do you most admire?
My plumber.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
There’s not enough paper …
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Lack of humor.
What is your greatest extravagance?
Grass.
What is the quality you most like in a man?
That he breathes.
What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Forgiveness.
What do you most value in your friends?
Utter devotion.
Who are your heroes in real life?
Doctors.
How would you like to die?
I think I already have.
What is your motto?
“Tomorrow may not be another day.”
The Oldest Art Studio
Artifacts indicate a 100,000-year-old art studio
In South Africa, abalone shells covered with pigment and tools for making paints are found in a cave, suggesting humans began thinking symbolically much earlier than previously recognized.
Archeologists found evidence of a prehistoric art studio in Blombos Cave in South Africa. (Magnus Haaland / October 5, 2011)
By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times / October 14, 2011
In a tiny South African cave, archaeologists have unearthed a 100,000-year-old art studio that contains tools for mixing powder from red and yellow rocks with animal fat and marrow to make vibrant paints as well as abalone shells full of dried-out red pigment, the oldest paint containers ever found.
The discovery, described in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, suggests that humans may have been thinking symbolically — more like modern-day humans think — much earlier than previously recognized, experts said. Symbolic thinking could have been a key evolutionary step in the development of other quintessentially human abilities, such as language, art and complex ritual.
[ click to continue reading at LATimes.com ]
Steal Your Culture
The Grateful Dead’s Great Big Carbon Footprint
By Ben Marks
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I loved the music of the Grateful Dead. I guess you could say I was a fan, and to this day I still give the guys a listen.
But this year’s release of “Europe ’72: The Complete Recordings” sort of sickened me. For those who don’t know, the Dead’s spring tour of the continent is considered by many to have been their finest.
This music was important, if rock ‘n’ roll can ever be described as such, so it was a natural for the surviving band members and their managers to bundle up the entire tour of 22 performances, some 70 hours of music, into a package that fans could purchase. So far, so good.
But why in this digital age was it necessary to create so much packaging? Instead of making the remastered files available via download, the powers that be decided it would be a better idea to burn 73 compact discs, publish a book, and stuff the whole thing into a replica of a steamer trunk, which was then shipped in even more paper (cardboard). A total of 7,200 numbered copies of this environmental nightmare sold out in less than a week at $450 a pop (bids at eBay routinely range from $600 to $900)….
Why A Lot Of People Think Detroit Has Seen Its Better Days
Detroit Police Impound Suspected Mobile Strip Club
Updated: Wednesday, 12 Oct 2011, 10:18 AM EDT
DETROIT – Detroit police have impounded a party bus they say operated illegally as a strip club for reveling football fans at a popular tailgating spot.
The Detroit News and WDIV-TV report that the “Booty Lounge” bus was parked Monday near Ford Field, where the Lions played the Chicago Bears. Police say it was cited for not having a state safety inspection and because the driver didn’t have a commercial license.
An email seeking comment from a “Booty Lounge” representative was sent Wednesday.
Pork Tenderloin With Dr Pepper Barbecue Sauce
“She was a strait-laced English typist. He was a sexually incontinent rock innovator.”
Frank Zappa, his groupies and me
She was a strait-laced English typist. He was a sexually incontinent rock innovator. So why on earth did Pauline Butcher become Frank Zappa’s secretary?
Deborah Orr
Monday 3 October 2011 14.59 EDT
Pauline Butcher with Frank Zappa backstage in Anaheim in 1968 Photograph: Plexus Books
One single incident serves as a perfect illustration of just what an extraordinarily unusual and charismatic person the US musician Frank Zappa, who died in 1993, must have been. In 1968, a year that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, a man turned up on the doorstep at the Log Cabin, the ramshackle, open-all-hours-to-all-comers crash pad in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, that Zappa and numerous other weird people called home. “My name is Raven. I brought you a present,” this stranger announced, handing to Zappa a transparent bag, apparently filled with blood, before pointing a revolver at his chest.
Calmly, Zappa cajoled and manipulated Raven into walking with him, and numerous spectators, including Zappa’s 24-year-old English secretary, to a nearby lake. He then persuaded everyone present to start throwing things into the water, including Raven, who threw in his gun. The secretary, Pauline Butcher, threw in a twig, which “floated on the algae” causing her to look round “apologetically”. After that, Zappa, shoved the bag of blood back into Raven’s hand, saying: “You must leave now.” Raven did. Immediately exhorted by the many witnesses to call the police, Zappa refused. Why? “Because if I call the police, the police will arrest him and he’ll go to jail and no one deserves to go to jail.”
Outside The Met
ANDY SPADE AND JAMES FREY OUTSIDE THE MET ON 5TH AVE
340-ton, 21-foot-high solid granite boulder crawls 120 miles to Los Angeles
How Do You Move a 340-Ton Artwork? Very Carefully
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: October 7, 2011
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — It is just under 60 miles from the Stone Valley Quarry here — an expanse of dust, boulders, roaring bulldozers and cut granite hillsides — to the lush campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Museum Mile. Behind a pile of rocks the other afternoon, out of sight from the road, workers scurried around a 340-ton, 21-foot-high solid granite boulder, trussed with red steel girders, gleaming under the desert sun. If all goes well, this boulder will be hovering over a cut in the earth on the grounds of the museum, and be open for viewing, by the end of November.
The piece, known as “Levitated Mass,” by Michael Heizer, a California-born sculptor known for huge outdoor installations that make extensive use of earth and rock, is by any measure an ambitious and brash use of outdoor space. But more ambitious might be the logistics of moving Mr. Heizer’s rock, which was dynamited out of a hillside, from here to there. It is a trip that will take the boulder through the heart of one of the most congested urban centers in the country: nine nights at six miles an hour, through 120 miles of roads, highways, bridges, overpasses, overhead wires, alarmingly low-hanging traffic lights and sharp turns.
The effort, nearly five years in the planning (though Mr. Heizer has been making sketches of it as far back as the late 1960s), feels nothing short of a military movement: an incursion through a bewildering thicket of state, city and county regulations and a region with a notoriously difficult street grid. Even the matter of where to pull over each day is a challenge; this is not a Motel 6 kind of trip.
National Geographic captures rare shot of cougar sleeping in a tree
from Facebook
Mystery Man Donates Stools To School
Man who pooped 5 times outside classroom sought
WTLV and WJXX-TV, Jacksonville, Fla.
OCALA, Fla. — A man who defecated five times outside a portable classroom at a middle school here was finally caught on camera, and police are on the hunt for him.
In early September, someone who showed up at the entrance to the classroom at Fort King Middle School discovered the human feces. The mess was cleaned up, but the incidents kept happening.
So after the fourth time Sept. 27, detectives set up a surveillance camera. Friday morning, the perpetrator struck again, and the image is clear.
“…to do something like that requires super human strength.”
Italian Worshiper Tears Both Eyes Out at Mass
Tells doctors he heard voices
An Italian man tore both of his eyes out in the middle of the priest’s homily at a church near Pisa, according to reports.
Fellow parishioners watched in horror as Aldo Bianchini, 46, used his bare hands to pull out both eyeballs. Bianchini later told surgeons, who were unable to save his vision, he heard voices that told him to do it.
“He was in a great deal of agony and he was covered in blood,” Dr. Gino Barbacci told the Daily Mail. “He said that he had used his bare hands to gouge out his eye balls after hearing voices telling him to do so – to do something like that requires super human strength.”
Steve Jobs Gone – Goodbye and Thank You to the World’s Greatest Modern Genius
Always Yield To The Passing Car
Man uses bow and arrow in road rage incident
HOME TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WZZM) – One man was arrested over the weekend for threatening another man with a bow and arrow during an apparent road rage incident in Montcalm County.
Sheriff’s deputies say that the incident began Saturday evening on Vickeryville Road near Tamarack Road. A 24-year-old Vestaburg man attempted to pass a 23-year-old Shepherrd man, but the Shepherd man swerved toward the passing driver causing him to run off the road. At the corner of Vickeryville and Tamarack Road, both drivers left their vehicles and began arguing.
During the argument, the Shepherd man retrieved a bow from his pickup truck, loaded it with a mechanical broadhead (hunting tip) arrow, pulled the bow back at full draw and came back at the Vestaburg man.
Forty-Two American Marriages by JAMES FREY
JAMES FREY
Forty-Two American Marriages
3” x 4” ZINK Paper
Dimensions: 40” x 31.75”
Artwork created for the Made In Polaroid 50|50|50 art exhibit & benefit auction.
Source polaroid.com
DANIEL MACIVOR: “It’s classic Frey, provocative yet heartbreaking.” (Thx, Mr. MacIvor)
MY BOOKS, MY PLACE
Daniel MacIvor, the distracted reader
DANIEL MACIVOR
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
Published
I’ve never been a curl-up-in-a-quiet-place-with-a-good-book kind of person. Mostly, I like to read in places where I have to fight distractions; in airports, in restaurants, in noisy parks. The distraction helps me create a greater focus. I do read in bed as well, because I’m constantly fighting the distraction of sleep.
The book I’m reading now is The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, by James Frey. It’s the story of the return of the Christ in the guise of a contemporary bisexual, recovering alcoholic who moves into an inner-city housing project.
It’s classic Frey, provocative yet heartbreaking. I’ve been a fan of Frey’s since A Million Little Pieces. When that book first came out, I read the review in The Globe and Mail and bought the book that day – well before Oprah blessed and then later damned it.
It remains one of the truest feeling books I’ve ever read on addiction, and his Bright Shiny Morning is probably the best book written on modern life in Los Angeles. I love his work because it feels authentic to the brutality of modern life without dismissing the light in all of us that fights to shine.
Daniel MacIvor is a Canadian actor, playwright, theatre director and film director. His play His Greatness is currently onstage at Factory Theatre in Toronto.
Picasso’s Casas
John Waters’ Novel Views On Abstinence
from the net via H. Beadleston
Tragic Example of the Evils of Incest Among Pure-breed Dogs
from Chrissy Whale’s blog via Facebook
In BREAD Dog
I Posted this photo on my FaceBook Page
on 9-23-2011 @ 4:06 PM
& O-M-G!
Exactly 4 Days into being posted!!!
To the Second…
10, 092 = Likes
8,913 = Shares
4,751 = Comments!
Top 10 Decimations Of The English Language
Refute
“Refute” means to “disprove with evidence” and yet it’s commonly used, even by professional writers, to mean “rebut” which carries a similar meaning but isn’t quite so strong, as it can also mean “argue against.” The example here (“Simon Cowell refutes ‘scandalous’ claims he helped billionaire hide assets from wife he was divorcing”) is from a recent Daily Mail article. For those outside the UK, the Daily Mail is a newspaper which regularly rages against falling educational standards. A special mention to Sarah Palin who invented a new word “refudiate”; the usage suggests she meant repudiate.
Egressing Confessing
The Last Bullfight
The last Ole! Bullfighting comes to an end in Catalonia
Almost seven hundred years of Catalan bullfighting history ended on Sunday night with the final death blow dealt by its hometown hero.
By Fiona Govan, Barcelona
While Jose Tomas, Spain’s finest matador, was the undisputed star of the evening, the honour of killing the last bull on Catalan soil fell to torero Serafin Marin, a native of Barcelona.
When Marin delivered the estocada, a half tonne bull dropped to the sand, just as reflections of the sun faded in the matador’s suit of light.
On a day when bloodthirsty spectacle was staged for the last time, Spain’s leading exponent of the sport took a triumphant bow in his favourite arena.
The final Ole! at La Monumental arena in central Barcelona marked the end of an era and cast the uneasy relationship between the Catalans and Spain into thick swirl of emotion.
The 18,000 seats for the region’s last ever bullfight sold out within hours and tickets traded on the blackmarket commanding more than ten times their face value. A few were touted on the internet for as much as 1,500 euros each.
Even the posters that advertised the event became an instant collector’s item.
The limited editions prints, commissioned especially from Spanish artist Miquel Barcelo, have been disappearing from hoardings across the Catalan capital.
Doritos Inventor Gone
from AP via The Arizona Republic
Man credited with creating Doritos dies in Dallas
Sept. 26, 2011 11:18 AM
Associated Press
DALLAS – Arch West, a retired Frito-Lay marketing executive credited with creating Doritos as the first national tortilla chip brand, has died in Dallas at age 97.
A statement issued by the West family says he died Tuesday at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. A graveside service is scheduled for Oct. 1. Daughter Jana Hacker of Allen tells The Dallas Morning News (http://dallasne.ws/qzPm9E) the family plans on “tossing Doritos chips in before they put the dirt over the urn.”
Legacy
Legal Drama About Ex-U.S. President Lands At CBS With Penalty
| Sunday September 25, 2011 @ 6:00pm PDT
Tags: CBS, CBS TV Studios, DreamWorks TV, James Frey, Jonathan E. Steinberg, Legacy
CBS has bought Legacy, a drama project from Jericho co-creator Jonathan E. Steinberg, DreamWorks TV and author James Frey’s book-packaging company Full Fathom Five. The project has received a script commitment plus penalty from the network and has been laid off at CBS TV Studios. It centers on a one-term president who goes back to work at his hometown law firm where he hand-picks the cases that really matter to him. Steinberg, who will write the script, is executive producing with Frey, Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank.
The idea for the project was generated by A Million Little Pieces author Frey’s IP company, which focuses mostly on young-adult fiction. Six months ago, Frey came to Los Angeles to pitch the company’s catalog, and WME — which reps him, DreamWorks TV and Steinberg — got them together to develop Legacy. The project was pitched directly to the networks, landing at CBS.
Data As Art
Data as Art, as Science, as a Reason for Being
Michael Appleton for The New York Times
I.B.M.’s “Think” exhibition features interactive panels about information collection and analysis.
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: September 23, 2011
Anyone walking past Lincoln Center during the last few days, and glancing downward at its new access road, Jaffe Drive, would have seen what seemed to be a slightly eccentric art installation. A long band of animated colored lights would snake across a 123-foot-long wall of LEDs as a digital clock counted backward. Then that band might suddenly twist and wind around itself, erupt into curves, contort into waves, and, just as unexpectedly, subside again into temporary linear calm.
Or else, if you watched long enough, the wall might go blank, and when lighted again, would resemble a kind of elongated container. Bluish lights would pour inside it, mounting and sloshing about like some kind of luminous liquid, until the entire wall’s array would be filled to overflowing. And then the “liquid” would seem to spill from the sides, dripping down in cascades as the container emptied.
The Past And Future of Famous Logos
LG’s Lavish Dinners
Gagosian’s deuce
Last Updated: 12:09 AM, September 21, 2011
Art dealer and gallery owner Larry Gagosian threw lavish dinners to celebrate two big openings. He took over the entire restaurant at new Upper East Side eatery Crown last Thursday to celebrate the opening of Jenny Saville’s show at his Madison Avenue Gallery.
The following night, Gagosian took over The Lion to toast the Andy Warhol exhibition at his West 21st Street location. Guests included Owen Wilson, Peter Brant, Stavros Niarchos, Bob Colacello, James Frey, Jane Holzer, Peter Marino, Alberto Mugrabi and Lou Reed.
That’s Gatsby With A Small “j”
The $175,000 Dust Jacket Comes to Auction
by Stephen J. Gertz
 |
| Sotheby’s Oct. 10, 2011. Est. $150,000-$180,000. |
The incredibly rare and desirable dust jacket to the first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is coming to auction via Sotheby’s-New York Library of an English Bibliophile Sale Part II on October 20, 2011. It is estimated to sell for $150,000-$180,000. An excellent copy of the first edition, first printing of The Great Gatsby, a book that in near-fine/fine condition sells for $7,000-$10,000, is included with the dust jacket.
The dust jacket is in the corrected first state, i.e. the “j” in Jay Gatsby on the rear panel was printed in lower case and carefully hand-corrected in ink to upper-case by the publisher. No uncorrected copies of the first state dust jacket are known to exist. In the second state of the dust jacket the “J” was corrected by the printer.
