from The Arizona Republic

[ click to continue recipe at AZCentral.com ]

from MediaBistro

After a 14 Year “Ban” Terry Richardson Back to Shooting for W

By Steve Delahoyde on Jun 22, 2010 07:00 AM

This writer figures that we’re all adults here and you can make up your own minds about regularly-controversial photographer Terry Richardson.

So feel free to take it as either the turning of a new leaf or the disintegration of principles with the news that, after a ban of nearly a decade and a half, Richardson is shooting again for W. With a big batch of job shifting going on at the magazine recently (mostly out the door) due to new editor Stefano Tonchi running the ship, the photographer has a bulky spread in their July issue, called ” Lunch Break.”

As New York‘s fashion blog reports, this follows the magazine refusing to hire him since 1996 when then-art director Dennis Freeman“reportedly banned Richardson from his pages after taking offense to a photo the photographer took of a model with her head in the oven.”

[ click to read full post at MediaBistro.com ]

from The New York Times

America, Illustrated

By DEBORAH SOLOMON

IN an age when Democrats and Republicans are barely on speaking terms, you might not think that decades-old paintings of freckled schoolboys and their loyal mutts could help revive the conversation about what we value as a nation. Yet Norman Rockwell’s cheerful America has lately acquired a startling relevance both inside and outside the art world, in part because it symbolizes an era when connectivity did not require a USB cable.

Rockwell’s paintings are easy to recognize. In the years surrounding World War II his covers for The Saturday Evening Post depicted America as a small-town utopia where people are consistently decent and possess great reserves of fellow-feeling. Doctors spend time with patients whether or not they have health insurance. Students cherish their teachers and remember their birthdays. Citizens at town hall meetings stand up and speak their mind without getting booed or shouted down by gun-toting rageaholics.

This is America before the fall, or at least before searing divisions in our government and general population shattered any semblance of national solidarity. Rockwell’s scenes of the small and the local speak to us in the age of the global because they offer a fantasy of civic togetherness that today seems increasingly remote. “To me the most important part of Rockwell’s work is that it illustrates compassion and caring about other people,” the filmmaker George Lucas, who lives in Marin County, Calif., said recently. “You could almost say he was a Buddhist painter.”

Steven Spielberg, speaking from Los Angeles, had similar praise. “Anything for Norman,” he said, when asked to discuss his work. “He was always on my mind because I had a great deal of respect for how he could tell stories in a single frozen image. Entire stories.”

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from the NY Times

Pianos as Public Art, and the Public’s Playthings

By JAMES BARRON

Photographs by Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times 

Jerome Ware Jr. pressed his palm into a tray of orange paint. Then he found exactly the right spot for a handprint on the top of an upright piano he had just painted gold.

“Contrasts, that’s what I’m going for,” he said.

Jerome, 16, was painting one of 60 pianos that will hit the city’s streets next Monday as part of a public art project called “Play Me, I’m Yours” (see map below). On corners, in parks, the pianos will be an eyeful as well as an earful, with attention-getting cases and living-color keys — green or blue, or all black instead of the usual allotment of 52 white and 36 black.

So before the whole city finds out who needs to brush up on the “Minuet in G,” volunteers have been putting brushes to the pianos.

The nonprofit arts group behind the project, Sing for Hope, is betting that transforming the pianos into something to see as well as something to hear will make the installation as captivating as art installations like “the Gates,” the orange gates and matching draperies that stretched across Central Park in 2005, or the four-waterfall exhibit on the East River in 2008. Painting the pianos also brought back memories of the fiberglass cows that took up residence here in the summer of 2000.

[ click to continue reading at the NY Times ]

from The New York Observer

Punch Drunk Love 

By Rex Reed

I don’t pretend to understand movie audiences under 30 with an ever-growing lust for blood, bowels, vomit and torture. But they’ll get plenty of it all in an apocalyptic view of toxic humanity called The Killer Inside Me, another sweaty, feverish adaptation of visceral pulp fiction by the nihilistic gonzo writer Jim Thompson, who was not labeled “the dime-store Dostoevsky” for nothing. This movie is so staggeringly violent and stomach-souring disgusting that when it screens, it is occasionally greeted with boos and almost always accompanied by massive audience walkouts. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

[ click to continue reading at The Observer ]

(Now check out Whitney’s Anthem from Super Bowl 25 – still the best ever)

from The LA Times

Quick Dish

Goat cheese frittata

By Bill Daley
Chicago Tribune

It took Julia’s influential editor, Judith Jones, and her thoughtful book, “The Pleasures of Cooking for One,” to get me to slow down and let the eggs do their thing unmolested, as in the frittata, the Italian omelet.Simply mix into the eggs the ingredients you want, pour into a hot skillet and cook over low heat until set. Jones’ recipe was for one, of course; here I’ve expanded her frittata proportion to serve four.

[ click for recipe ]