Sidney Lumet Gone
Sidney Lumet, film director, dead at 86: A second opinion
By
When Howard Beale signs off, he says: “I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.’ ”
Filmmaker Sidney Lumet, who died Saturday after a half-century of era-defining movies full of American urban grit, didn’t say those words. They were spoken by actor Peter Finch as a self-made-for-TV prophet in 1976’s “Network.”
Nor did Lumet write them. They came from the pen of Paddy Chayefsky, whose masterpiece screenplay better than any work of art before or since portrays the corporate venality that still fuels television’s dumbing-down of America.
But director Lumet made those and other famous movie lines live forever in films stretching from 1957’s “Twelve Angry Men,” through “The Pawnbroker,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “The Verdict,” all the way up his last critically acclaimed effort, 2007’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.”
Those 50 years worth of cinematic moments cum cultural icons live on. But the man who created them is gone, dead of lymphoma, in his beloved Manhattan, the down-and-dirty setting for so many of his greatest works.
Mark Lawson hails James Frey’s new Messiah
The Final Testament of the Holy Bible by James Frey – review
Mark Lawson hails James Frey’s new Messiah
Christian worshippers recite the Nicene Creed, which includes the promise that Jesus Christ will “come again”. This article of faith provides the epigraph to a novel in which James Frey imagines the Anglican and Roman Catholic faithful of modern New York being confronted with the apparent answer to their prayer.
The fate that would await a contemporary messiah has long been a standard essay topic in religious education classes and is also regularly attempted in fiction. These comeback narratives divide between stories in which the status of the saviour figure remains ambiguous, such as John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, and fiction in which someone directly claims to be Christ for present times. Frey’s book extends the second genre – his hero has the beard of conventional iconography and a gaze said to resemble “being stared down by a statue” – although it surely represents a first in the dust-jacket’s startling affirmation of an overlap between protagonist and author.
Pay To Cum
Brand X
Unearthing a Celluloid Artifact of the ’60s
Camilla McGrath
By RACHEL WOLFF
In the 1960s, the Pop artist Wynn Chamberlain often toyed with making a movie and spent time visiting various avant-garde filmmakers on their sets. In 1963 he bought 10 rolls of 16-millimeter film, only to come across Andy Warhol using them, on a visit to Mr. Chamberlain’s country house, to shoot the poet John Giorno sleeping for the early “anti-film” “Sleep.”
When Mr. Chamberlain finally did make a film, “Brand X,” in 1969, it did not turn out to be the sort of hard-to-penetrate work that friends like Mr. Warhol had been creating.
“We thought we were making an art film,” Mr. Chamberlain, now 83 and based in Morocco, said in an interview recently. But eventually “we realized that it was a populist film.” A satirical take on television, with fake programs and commercials, “Brand X” anticipated TV and movie comedies of the next decade like “Saturday Night Live,” “SCTV” and “The Kentucky Fried Movie,” though in a more absurdist vein and with a more political view.
The film, which featured Abbie Hoffman, Sam Shepard, Sally Kirkland and the Warhol superstars Ultra Violet, Candy Darling and Taylor Mead, was released in 1970 in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. Vincent Canby endorsed it in The New York Times as “a tacky, vulgar, dirty, sometimes dull, often hilarious movie” with the tone of “a liberated college humor magazine.”
James Frey Reading @ Lutyens & Rubinstein, Sunday 10th April 6:00pm
Sunday 10th April 6.00 for 6.30pm (please note unusual time)
THE FINAL TESTAMENT OF THE HOLY BIBLE
JAMES FREY in conversation with KATE MUIR
James Frey is not like other writers.
This book is not like other books.
This event will not be like other events.
Frey’s new book, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, is the story of Ben Zion Avrohom, also known as the Messiah. Told by his friends and family, in the manner of the gospels, the book asks: How would a man like Jesus be perceived if he appeared today? What would he preach and believe? And how would society react? The book, which is embargoed until April 12th, is already being denounced as blasphemous and obscene. Come and meet James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, talking about his highly controversial new book for the first time anywhere in the world.
Kate Muir is arts critic for The Times and the author of LEFT BANK and WEST COAST.
Rogue Cop Pepper Sprays Deranged Baby Squirrel
“I feel that Gauguin is evil. He has nudity and is bad for the children. I am from the American CIA and I have a radio in my head. I am going to kill you.”
Woman charged in attack on ‘evil’ Gauguin painting
By BEN NUCKOLS
WASHINGTON — A woman accused of pounding on a painting by Paul Gauguin and trying to rip it from a wall at the National Gallery of Art told police the post-Impressionist artist was evil and the painting should be burned, court documents show.
Susan Burns, 53, of Arlington, Va., has been charged with attempted second-degree theft and destruction of property following the attack Friday. She was being held without bail pending a mental health hearing Tuesday.
The Gauguin painting, “Two Tahitian Women,” valued at an estimated $80 million, was not damaged and will go back on view Tuesday, the National Gallery said in a statement. The picture is on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for an exhibit titled “Gauguin: Maker of Myth.”
The painting depicts two women standing next to each other, one with both breasts exposed and the other with one breast showing.
According to charging documents, an investigator told Burns her rights and asked why she had tried to remove the painting.
“I feel that Gauguin is evil. He has nudity and is bad for the children. He has two women in the painting and it’s very homosexual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned,” according to the documents.
Burns also said: “I am from the American CIA and I have a radio in my head. I am going to kill you.”
Don’t Panic
JAMES FREY: THE FINAL TESTAMENT OF THE HOLY BIBLE
The controversial new book by the American author takes on religion in all forms and questions how people base their opinions and beliefs
- TEXT BY FLORA YIN-WONG
As seen in this film by Don’t Panic, James Frey’s new book ‘The Final Testament of the Holy Bible’ strives to scrutinize how people have formed opinions and beliefs without having read anything that provides the basis for those judgments.
First Ever Headshot Of Jesus Christ Found
Is this the first ever portrait of Jesus? The incredible story of 70 ancient books hidden in a cave for nearly 2,000 years
By NICK PRYER
The image is eerily familiar: a bearded young man with flowing curly hair. After lying for nearly 2,000 years hidden in a cave in the Holy Land, the fine detail is difficult to determine. But in a certain light it is not difficult to interpret the marks around the figure’s brow as a crown of thorns.
The extraordinary picture of one of the recently discovered hoard of up to 70 lead codices – booklets – found in a cave in the hills overlooking the Sea of Galilee is one reason Bible historians are clamouring to get their hands on the ancient artefacts.
If genuine, this could be the first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ, possibly even created in the lifetime of those who knew him.
JT: Sojourner Of The Mystical Realm
Sojourner of the mystical realm
By STEVE FINBOW
THE PASSING SUMMERS, The Japanese Mystique: Charm and Consequence, by Ivy C. Machida. Printed Matter Press, 2010, 280 pp., $20 (paper)
The 21st century has seen a proliferation of memoirs entering the book market — from James Frey’s memoir-fiction “A Million Little Pieces” to the slew of ghosted celebrity autobiographies that take up valuable space on bookshelves and in Kindle and iPad memories.
The personal histories of expatriates are commonplace, not only in the literary world but also on the blogosphere. So, how does a new edition to the genre add to our view of Japan?
After studying law at the University of Singapore, Ivy C. Machida moved to the United States to take postgraduate courses at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and then at Yale. Entranced by Japanese culture and history after a fleeting visit to Tokyo and Kyoto, she became obsessed with the “mystical realm” of Nippon.
Interested in international law and human rights during the Vietnam War and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution during the late 1960s, Ivy was offered a position at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. While in Washington, she met her husband-to-be Jay, and her infatuation with all things Japanese intensified.
God loves non-native species, too, you Haters
Mother Nature’s Melting Pot
Souther Salazar
By HUGH RAFFLES
THE anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping the country, from draconian laws in Arizona to armed militias along the Mexican border, has taken many Americans by surprise. It shouldn’t — nativism runs deep in the United States. Just ask our non-native animals and plants: they too are commonly labeled as aliens, even though they also provide significant benefits to their new home.
While the vanguard of the anti-immigrant crusade is found among the likes of the Minutemen and the Tea Party, the native species movement is led by environmentalists, conservationists and gardeners. Despite cultural and political differences, both are motivated — in Margaret Thatcher’s infamous phrase — by the fear of being swamped by aliens.
But just as America is a nation built by waves of immigrants, our natural landscape is a shifting mosaic of plant and animal life. Like humans, plants and animals travel, often in ways beyond our knowledge and control. They arrive unannounced, encounter unfamiliar conditions and proceed to remake each other and their surroundings.
Designating some as native and others as alien denies this ecological and genetic dynamism. It draws an arbitrary historical line based as much on aesthetics, morality and politics as on science, a line that creates a mythic time of purity before places were polluted by interlopers.
ROCKET MAN, the novel of the New American Dream
It Had to Happen: The Shortsale Novel
Posted for Sterling and Ross by vijay on April 1st 2011 and filled under Media & entertainment
Rocket Man Novel brings to light the plight of the underwater homeowner and an American Dream in Reverse.
New York, NY, April 01, 2011 — Novelist James Frey called Rocket Man the novel of the New American Dream. And certainly our times have brought to light that the American Dream might well be undergoing a retrofit. Sterling and Ross is publishing a novel that depicts one mans fight to find happiness in a world gone mad. Dale Hammer is looking for some sign of sanity with a house that is worth less than he owes, an unstable job, a dismal marriage, and a son who is looking to his father to be the Rocket Man for his Scout Troop. The American Dream in Dales world is under attack from every side.
We can relate. There is no bailout for the American Middleclass and with foreclosures increasing every month, Rocket Man is paticularly resonant as a morality play of what the American Dream has become. Dale’s quest to find happiness in this suburban landscape is a comedy with many hilarious moments. This is the novel about the people that Jonathan Franzen left out of FREEDOM. This is about the middleclass under seige with diminishing expectations, diminishing economic power, and still having to deal with kids and deferreed dreams with only a shortsale as salvation.
“I didnt set out to write a novel about the recession, but my character’s main problems are economically based,” novelist Wiliam Hazelgrove said from his office in the Hemingway House. “The American Dream had become the big car, the big house, the vacations, the whole ball of wax and then it all just crashed and left everyone wondering what the hell happened.”
The $600,000 Gurgling Toad
Pentagon Art: $600,000 Gurgling Toad Sculpture
By PAUL BEDARD
A $600,000 frog sculpture that lights up, gurgles “sounds of nature” and carries a 10-foot fairy girl on its back could soon be greeting Defense Department employees who plan to start working at the $700 million Mark Center in Alexandria, Va. this fall. That is unless a new controversy over the price tag of the public art doesn’t torpedo the idea.
[See a gallery of monuments and art around Washington, D.C.]
Decried as wasteful spending that will be seen by just a couple thousand of daily workers who arrive on bus shuttles, foes have tried to delay the decision, expected tomorrow, April 1. But in an E-mail, an Army Corps of Engineers official said that the decision can’t be held up because it would impact completion of the huge project.
[David] says he’s not opposed to art, just high-priced works that won’t be seen by many. He estimates that only 2,500 will see the artwork every day as they use the bus transfer station at the Mark Center. “Who the heck is going to see it,” he asked. “To spend six hundred grand to amuse the same people every day is nuts.”
The Art of The Prank
The art of surprise
Brett Gundlock / National Post
Does it look like they’re joking? From left: Don McKellar, director Andrew Burashko and Nicholas Campbell restage Orson Welles’ 1938 aliens attack radio drama/elaborate hoax, War of the Worlds.
Mar 30, 2011 – 6:30 PM ET
With April Fool’s Day just around the corner, it’s as good a time as any to remember that we all need a startling jolt every now and then. With that in mind, Ben Kaplan looks at the history of hoaxes.
Pranks in the entertainment world have a long and storied history, but the biggest and best was probably Orson Welles’ aliens attack radio drama, War of the Worlds. “He was pissed off that people believed everything they heard on the radio and said, ‘If they’ll believe everything, I’m going to give them something unbelievable to believe,’ ” says Andrew Burashko, artistic director of Toronto’s Art of Time Ensemble, currently resurrecting a theatrical account of Welles’ 1938 hoax heard around the world.
According to Burashko, Welles was the entertainment world’s original prank provocateur, a tradition that spans from Andy Kaufman to Joaquin Phoenix, who all follow a time-honoured method of keeping audiences on their toes.
Since we’re seeing so much of everyday people in the documentaries of Morgan Spurlock, memoirs by James Frey and reality-TV shows such as American Idol andThe Real Housewives franchise, it makes sense that the art world plays with reality — all the better if it can send a message like Welles did.“
Performance and reality are merging — you see this a lot in modern fiction — and that’s always been interesting, but I think it’s real fruitful right now,” adds McKellar, who is also at work on a new fall sitcom for CBC. “People today are hyper-aware of the conventions of media, and it’s fun to play with them where you can.”
FINAL TESTAMENT: James Frey Judge For Yourself
Professor James Franco
Academia: James Franco’s Best Work of Performance Art
by Kia Makarechi – Editor, AOL
No one can call James Franco unambitious. From attending six schools to continuing to film movies and TV, to working sporadically as a performance-artist, to teaching one course on film and collaborating on another class on himself (yes, himself), Franco is a man of many, many parts.
Breadth of talent is certainly impressive, but doing a million things is not the same as doing a million things well. This is like calling someone who knows just a few words in many languages “multilingual.” And for this, there are no better examples than James Franco’s careers.
It all started with the Green Goblin’s return to UCLA.
Sasha Grey’s “Neu Sex”
Porn As Performance Art?: Sasha Grey Releases “Neu Sex,” Her First Book of Art Photography
Courtesy of the artist and VICE Books
NEW YORK—Pornography has long been an au courant subject for contemporary art — see John Currin, Marilyn Minter, or Richard Prince — but it’s rare to find a working porn star who’s making art. (Ron Jeremy’s media empire isn’t exactly the Warhol Factory.) Enter Sasha Grey, the 23-year old adult film actress who has, like an open-minded and highly flexible comet, streaked across the mainstream media radar over these past few years. Suddenly there Grey was, in American Apparel ads. In Steven Soderbergh movies. On “Entourage,” dating Vince. And, as of today, promoting the release of her first book of art photography, “Neu Sex,” published by VICE Books.
Last night Grey was joined by friend and occasional collaboratorBrandon Stosuy for a standing-room only conversation at Housing Works Café. Dressed rather demurely, Grey shared her love for Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin, and explained how she’s been able to recast her career in pornographic films as performance art.
The Era of Classic Citrus Carton Art
L.A. THEN AND NOW
Southern California’s great citrus had its crate advertising
For decades, citrus growers labeled their wooden crates with colorful brand names and images, letting consumers know that the oranges, lemons and grapefruit were something special.
 The Three Star brand logo, designed in 1934 by the Carton Label Co. for the Murphy Ranch in East Whittier, reflects the “Commercial Art” era in label design. (Gordon McClelland / March 27, 2011) |
By Alison Bell, Special to the Los Angeles Times
They’re bright. They’re bold. They’re eye-catching.
California orange crate labels are viewed as quaint kitchen decor today, but there was a time when the colorful logos were cutting-edge innovations in national marketing.
Packinghouses often created three different labels: one for high-grade fruit, one for mid-grade and one for the bottom of the barrel — citrus that was small, poorly textured or off-color. The fruit in this last category didn’t necessarily taste bad, but it looked bad. Growers sometimes chose scruffy dogs or ugly old ladies to represent these grades. One Villa Park brand, “Camouflage,” carried the slogan: “The Quality is Inside.” Another brand, “Mutt,” proclaimed: “Not much for looks, but ripe, sweet & juicy.”
Love Wins In The Afterlife
What Happened to Heaven and Is Gandhi There?
A new book stirs debate about the afterlife.
By JOHN WILSON
Something strange has happened in evangelical churches over the past generation. Not in every congregation, but in the main, sermons devoted to the grim prospect of hell have become rare, and even talk of heaven is muted.
Many have noted this development without making much impact. Along comes Rob Bell, founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Michigan. His “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived” is now ranked No. 8 on Amazon.com, and it has been generating controversy since before its release earlier this week.
“There are a growing number of us,” Mr. Bell writes on the first page—”millions”—”who have become acutely aware that Jesus’s story has been hijacked by a number of other stories, stories Jesus isn’t interested in telling. . . . A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell.” Presumably this disquiet accounts for the reticence of many evangelicals when it comes to the afterlife.
Damon Johnson “The Beautiful Chaos: A Style Installation” at Gallery Bar
Last week Gallery Bar, the Lower East Side hangout and art venue that is part-owned by Miami collector scion Darren Rubell, was shut down in a dramatic police raid after alleged underage-drinking and overcrowding violations. Now, however, the bar is back in business, and will be hosting a closing party tonight for “The Beautiful Chaos: A Style Installation,” a show of comic-book-inspired collages and installations by Damon Johnson (the step-son of art PR guru Nadine Johnson). Working in a self-proclaimed “urban surrealist” style, Johnson has done murals at the U.S. Open and at the Montauk Surf Lodge, and appeared in a Half Gallery show curated by Jesus author James Frey.
Cannabis Plants As High As Christmas Trees
In Brooklyn, Cannabis Plants Once Grew As High As Christmas Trees
 Photo: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images |
Ben Gocker, a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library, recently uncovered an intriguing chapter in the borough’s not-too-distant past. In the early fifties, Cannabis sativa plants apparently grew tall enough to hang ornaments on for the holidays. They grew in empty lots from Avenue X to the banks of the Newton Creek as well as around the Gowanus Canal. Of course, the fifties was a more innocent time. Many residents didn’t realize what was growing in their own backyards. In their attempt to wipe out the native green, officials warned residents, “If you spot these leaves in your back yard, growing in a tall, erect stalk, you have a budding marijuana crop on tap and the Sanitation Department would like to know about it.” In the summer of 1951, sanitation workers dug up and incinerated 41,000 pounds of marijuana from 274 lots around New York.
Rodrigo Corral to FSG
Rodrigo Corral Appointed Creative Director of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
This just in: star graphic designer Rodrigo Corral has been appointed creative director of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), according to a statement issued today by president and publisherJonathan Galassi. Corral is no stranger to FSG, having worked in the company’s art department from 1996 to 2000 after graduating from the School of Visual Arts. He begins in his new post early next month and will continue to run Rodrigo Corral Design, the nine-year-old studio behind such memorable book covers as those for James FreyA Million Little Pieces, a shelf of Chuck Palahniuk novels, Debbie Millman‘s smashing How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer, and Jay-Z‘s recent memoir-cum-lyrical codex, Decoded, for which Corral dispensed with the glamour shot and featured one of Andy Warhol‘s Rorschach paintings.
King James Bible Near Death?
Will the King James Bible Survive?
by Timothy Beal
Author, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Bible‘
Four hundred years since the King’s Printer published the first edition in 1611, the King James Version Bible continues to reign supreme. Not only is it by far the bestselling translation of all time, with more than 5 billion copies sold, it is the very icon of Bibleness, the Book of books, the premier image of the printed and bound Word. Indeed, many assume it’s the only Bible. “I’ve never read the Bible,” people tell me. “I just can’t stand all those thees and thous,” despite the fact that no modern translations have them. And whether anyone ever seriously said, “If it was good enough for St. Paul, it’s good enough for me,” many think so. No wonder those behind the evangelical New International Version and the Catholic New American Bible translations decided to launch their highly publicized major revisions this year: They’re hoping to catch a draft off the seeming timelessness of the King of Bibles.
The King James Bible’s 400th may well be its biggest birthday ever, but also its most poignant. For its end draws nigh. Sure, it’ll hang around for a while, mostly in hotels and old folks homes. But it’s not long for this world, at least in any form we’d recognize from the bookish years of its youth.
REDCAT INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S FILM FESTIVAL
OHWOW
from The NY Times Asked & Answered
Asked & Answered | OHWOW
photo by Curtis Buchanan – From left: Al Moran and Aaron Bondaroff.
Downtown is a state of mind for the art impresarios Aaron Bondaroff and Al Moran, whether they’re selling Statue of Liberty figurines by Kembra Pfahler at a pop-up shop in Athens, Greece, or recreating the Ludlow Street watering hole Max Fish at a bar in Miami (bar staff included). After descending upon Los Angeles last year with a one-night-only Halloween Neckface show that drew 5,000 people, this weekend the two introduced the new L.A. home of their OHWOW gallery. Opening Saturday in a 4,000-square-foot, ivy-covered former Laundromat on La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood, OHWOW presented “Noblesse Oblige,” the first L.A. exhibition from Scott Campbell, who is as well known for the work he’s inked into the flesh of Marc Jacobs, Terry Richardson and others as he is for the intricate 3-D pieces he cuts into sheets of United States currency. “Noblesse Oblige” — an ironic battle cry for Campbell’s backwoods Louisiana kin and a phrase he has tattooed on his neck — also finds the artist working with neon, etching onto 24-karat gold plates, and drawing on the insides of ostrich eggs. We caught up with Bondaroff and Moran in the Rafael de Cardenas-designed space to discuss the bigger picture.
TRAILER: The Final Testament Of The Holy Bible
Owsley “Bear” Stanley Gone
What Makes A Legend?: Owsley Stanley AKA Bear
Classic Track: “Alice D. Millionaire”
Early band benefactor, sound system designer, supplier of psychedelic substances, and co-designer of good ol’ Stealie (at right), the Grateful Dead wrote “Alice D. Millionaire,” when 1967 newspaper headlines screamed the “LSD Millionaire” had been busted in his East Bay lab. Born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, grandson of a Kentucky senator and known to all as Bear, “The Artisan of Acid” died last Sunday in Queensland, Australia. He’d been living as a naturalized citizen there since 1996 as part of an effort to escape the ill effects of global warming on the Northern Hemisphere.
Career Highs: Monterey Purple, White Lightening, Blue Cheer were just some of what the underground chemist served up to the world’s biggest rock stars. Jimi Hendrix was said to have taken the Owsley Purple on the night of his fiery appearance at Monterey Pop; Brian Jones and Pete Townshend also famously turned on that weekend. Present at the Acid Tests in late 1965 and early 1966, Bear was forever aligned with the Grateful Dead. Not only did he and his friend Bob Thomas design their lightening bolt skull logo, he was the architect of their sound system, a musician-friendly, superior set-up that revolutionized rock music.
The 10 Best American Poems
The 10 best American poems
The list could go on and on, but these are the poems that seem to me to have left the deepest mark on US literature – and me
For whatever reason, I woke up today with a list of the 10 greatest American poems in my head that had been accumulating through the night. Every list is subjective, and of course the use of “greatest” even more so – but these are not just “favorite” poems. I’ve been thinking about American poetry – and teaching it to university students – for nearly 40 years, and these are the 10 poems that, in my own reading life, have seemed the most durable; poems that shifted the course of poetry in the United States, as well as poems that I look forward to teaching every year because they represent something indelible. The list could go on and on, of course. I deeply regret leaving off Roethke’s “The Lost Son”, Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” and “The Asphodel, that Greeny Flower” by William Carlos Williams. But I guess I just sneaked them onto the list, didn’t I?
1. “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
Whitman reinvents American poetry in this peerless self-performance, finding cadences that seem utterly his own yet somehow keyed to the energy and rhythms of a young nation waking to its own voice and vision. He calls to every poet after him, such as Ezra Pound, who notes in “A Pact” that Whitman “broke the new wood.”
2. “The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens
Stevens’s sumptuous, glittering language takes blank verse and reinvents it. This poem raises to a sublime level what Stevens once called a war “between the mind and sky.” The poem celebrates the “blessed rage for order” at the heart of all creative work.
3. “Because I could not stop for death” by Emily Dickinson
A perfect poem, and one of Dickinson’s most compressed and chilling attempts to come to terms with mortality. Once read, it stays in the head forever, in part because of the ballad stanza, so weirdly fresh in her capable hands.
4. “Directive” by Robert Frost
This surprising late poem concentrates Frost’s lifetime of thinking and working as a poet. “Drink and be whole beyond confusion,” he says at the end, mapping out the inner life of any reader. It is blank verse cast in Frost’s trademark craggy voice, and it might be considered a local response to Eliot’s more cosmopolitan “The Waste Land.”
SALON: James Frey Does Jesus
James Frey does Jesus
If the faux-memoirist thinks he’ll offend anyone by depicting Christ as a whoring drunk, he’ll be disappointed
BY LAURA MILLER
Salon
Apparently James Frey has a tiny man in his head, like some kind of internalized boss, who barks, “You haven’t enraged anyone lately!” and starts cracking the whip whenever things slow down. This week, we learned that Frey will deliver a book he discussed in an interview with the Rumpus back in 2008, “The Final Testament of the Holy Bible,” which will depict the return of Jesus Christ as a drunk who consorts with hookers and canoodles with other men. The book will be published in a limited edition by an art gallery and self-published by Frey “online,” which presumably means in e-book format. This event will take place on April 22, Good Friday.
I know! Shocking, right? Frey says that he expects to “get blasted” for this. The press has happily joined him in rubbing its hands together over the prospect, deploying words like “controversial” and “firestorm” in stories that Frey promptly posts to his website. “I tried to write a radical book. I’m releasing it in a radical way,” Frey told the New York Post. So it’s possible his Christ might be a skateboarder, too.
ATTN: God Does Not Hate Women
New Bible Draws Critics Of Gender-Neutral Language
by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
In the old translation of the world’s most popular Bible, John the Evangelist declares: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar.” Make that “brother or sister” in a new translation that includes more gender-neutral language and is drawing criticism from some conservatives who argue the changes can alter the theological message.
The 2011 translation of the New International Version Bible, or NIV, does not change pronouns referring to God, who remains “He” and “the Father.” But it does aim to avoid using “he” or “him” as the default reference to an unspecified person.
The NIV Bible is used by many of the largest Protestant faiths. The translation comes from an independent group of biblical scholars that has been meeting yearly since 1965 to discuss advances in biblical scholarship and changes in English usage.
Before the new translation even hit stores, it drew opposition from the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, an organization that believes women should submit to their husbands in the home and only men can hold some leadership roles in the church.