Very Short Story
Very Short Story
Man driving down road.
Woman driving up same road.
They pass each other.
The woman yells out the window, PIG!
Man yells out window, BITCH!
Man rounds next curve.
Man crashes into a HUGE PIG in middle of road and dies.
Thought For the Day:
If men would just listen
Fug You Mike Love
“The disco beat was created so that white people could dance.”
Donna Summer sizzles in sequins on Halloween in Boston, 1978. By Ron Galella; opposite, Grace Jones performs at Studio 54 on New Year’s Eve, 1978. By Waring Abbott/Getty Images.
Boogie Nights
It became known, and ultimately reviled, as Disco. But the music that surged out of gay underground New York clubs such as the Loft and 12 West in the early 70s was the sound of those who wanted to dance, dance, dance—blotting out everything but their bodies and the beat. The author hears from Donna Summer, Ian Schrager, Gloria Gaynor, and others who helped create the strobe-lit, sex-driven, amyl-nitrite-fueled scene, the phenomena of Studio 54 and Saturday Night Fever, and the songs that reverberated into a new millennium.
When we made “Love to Love You Baby,” we knew it was somewhat innovative, but nobody knew people would jump on that bandwagon and all of a sudden the whole world would be going disco.—Donna Summer
After Saturday Night Fever, we wanted to do a poster, with the three of us in Rambo’s bodies, with machine guns, and in the background there’d be a body in a white suit, bullet-ridden, and the mirror ball all shot to pieces. —Maurice Gibb, 1987.
The disco beat was created so that white people could dance. —Bethann Hardison.
“‘m a big fan of action and violence in cinema. That’s why Thomas Edison created the motion picture camera — because violence is so good.”
“Super Elete Hacky”
Skip to 1:48 if you’re impatient.
Bodhi Tree Gone
Bodhi Tree Bookstore Is Closing: Bad News for Buddhists
By Gendy Alimurung
Bad news for Buddhists and others seeking enlightenment: the Bodhi Tree Bookstore is closing. Owners Phil Thompson and Stan Madson informed their staff last Wednesday that the cozy Melrose Avenue shop, a nationally renowned and much beloved spiritual center, will be shutting its doors in a year’s time.
After some eight months of discussion, Thompson and Madson decided to sell the property to a local business owner who leases space to several other nearby retailers. The Bodhi Tree opened in 1970. Land values in the area have risen dramatically since then. Meanwhile, the business of selling print books has been on a steady decline. For years, real estate agents had been circling the Bodhi Tree like vultures. In the end, selling the property became a much more profitable option than continuing to sell books.
Thompson and Madson started the bookstore when they were in their 30’s. They are now both in their early 70’s. They were aerospace engineers who left a life of science for one of contemplation and meditation.
“Twenty years ago we felt like it was an expanding situation,” says Madson. “We were concerned the store was getting too big. We had a staff of 100. Publishing was expanding. Spirituality was expanding. But what changed was that the market became widely dispersed.”
Books on Wicca and Astrology and Native American shamanism used to be tough to find. But now every Borders and Barnes & Noble carries a significant selection of religious, spiritual and New Age literature. And what can’t be bought at a bricks and mortar shop can undoubtedly be found online at Amazon. For cheap.
French Onion Tart
French onion tart
From the book, “Five Ingredient Fix.” (Chicago Tribune)
Prep: 15 minutes
Total time: 40 minutes
Servings: 6
Ingredients:
1 sheet frozen puff pastry, thawed in refrigerator
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
3 large sweet onions, thinly sliced
4 thyme sprigs, plus more for garnish
1/4 teaspoon coarse salt
Freshly cracked black pepper
Pulp Cinema
There’s an art to translating books into movies
By MAGGIE GALEHOUSE STAFF WRITER
The Lovely Bones arrives in movie theaters Friday. Fans of Alice Sebold’s book will see it in a new light: as part of an old Hollywood tradition that turns beloved books into major motion pictures.
It’s a tradition with mixed results.
“When we deal with adaptation movies, we always compare the movie to the book,” says Karen Fang, who teaches film studies and literature at the University of Houston. “But that’s not the way the film industry thinks about the issue. The industry is only interested in what’s going to make money.”
To studios, adaptations are presold commodities.
“That’s the pitch,” Fang says. “A filmmaker says, ‘I want to makeLord of the Rings. It will be expensive, but there are millions of Tolkienites out there.’ ”
We all know how that turned out. And that example brings up a good point.
“The movie business today is being transformed by Computer Generated Imagery,” or CGI, Fang says. “The big arena for adaptation isn’t adult movies but movies based on children’s books.”
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Coraline and the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis.
Visitor From Space
Mystery object to whizz by Earth Wednesday
Tue Jan 12, 1:52 pm ET
WASHINGTON – A mystery object from space is about to whizz close by Earth on Wednesday. It won’t hit our planet, but scientists are stumped by what exactly it is.
Astronomers say it may be space junk or it could be a tiny asteroid, too small to cause damage even if it hit. It’s 33 to 50 feet wide at most.
NASA says that on Wednesday at 7:47 a.m. EST, it will streak by, missing Earth by about 80,000 miles. In the western United States it may be bright enough to be seen with a good amateur telescope.
Gene Gene The Dancing Machine
In the great green room / There was a telephone / And a dead Keith Moon
We thought it was time that people heard something about us other than that we were eating women and throwing the bones out the window.
Led Zeppelin, Gods of Rock on the Celestial Staircase
Neal Preston/Corbis
Young rock enthusiasts of the 21st century, those of you who listen to your music on a little shiny thing with earphones and who read only on an LCD screen, come near and we your grandparents shall tell you of a long-ago time when men with Gibsons were the knights errant of the land, striding across stages shrouded in mist, soloing at great length! What’s that? You don’t really know what Led Zeppelin is or was? And you’ve never read that salacious earlier biography, Stephen Davis’s “Hammer of the Gods”? Well, do I have a story for you. Or at least this Mick Wall does, this fellow from England who has also written or co-written definitive biographies of Ozzy, Bono and Iron Maiden.
[I]ncluded herein is the famous story of the groupie and the shark, which has been dealt with elsewhere at some length. This bit of lore is now so upsetting and so repellent that it makes you never want to listen to the band again.
Kirkus Reviews Lives
Book Magazine Kirkus Reviews Lives to Write Another Day
Late last year, Nielsen Business Media announced it would shut down two venerable trade magazines: newspaper industry-centric Editor & Publisher and book industry publication Kirkus Reviews. Just a few days into 2010, the news for both magazines is much more positive. The staffers of E&P have launched an exile blog while awaiting a possible sale, and Kirkus Reviews will continue publication for the foreseeable future.
The Birth Of Sidney Poitier’s Son
John Guare: ‘Writing is a blood sport’
John Guare, author of Six Degrees of Separation, on why drama is a brutal business – and why Amanda Knox is his new muse
by Emma Brockes
Made in Manhattan … John Guare nearby his New York apartment on fifth Avenue. Photograph: Frederic Lafargue/Rapport
The mysterious process through which life is turned into drama isn’t something John Guare cares to analyse. It happens spontaneously, he says, sometimes over the course of a weekend, sometimes six years after the inspiring event. For example, the 71-year-old playwright was transfixed by the Amanda Knox trial. “She’s a complete blank,” he says. “You can project anything on to her. Is she Henry James’s Daisy Miller, an innocent young girl who goes to Europe for experience? Or is she Louise Brooks, the woman who takes what she wants and destroys everything? Or is she Nancy Drew caught up in Kafka?” He looks through the window at a snow-bound New York. “It’s fascinating, but you can’t guarantee . . . will it be a play? I have no idea.”
It is more than 25 years since Guare, while dining with friends, heard the story that would become his most successful play. Six Degrees of Separation, which opens this week at the Old Vic in London, started out as an anecdote breathlessly conveyed with the opener, “Do we have a story for you!” A con man had charmed his way into his friends’ New York apartment and convinced them he was the son of Sidney Poitier. At the time, says Guare, it was “an incomprehensible event” and he forgot about it. “Then about six years later I was writing and I realised I was writing this play. I didn’t know whether Sidney Poitier did have a son, so I ran up the street to the bookstore and got his biography – no: four daughters, no son – and I put that in the play, too. It was a gift. It dictated itself. It told me what it was.”
Nic Cage As Everyone
Nic Cage as Pope Benedict XVI
Jennifer Villavert lives in the Rad-ican City.
Nic Cage as Marilyn Monroe
Submitted by Tom Burns as Andy Warhol.
Nic Cage as Nick Sarkozy
Jennifer Villavert is so cozy with Sarkozy.
Wikipedia Making Children Stupid
Schoolchildren told to avoid Wikipedia
Children should use Google and Yahoo to improve their essays, according to the official exams watchdog.
[G]uidance sent out to schoolchildren in England warns pupils to be extremely wary when using other websites such as Wikipedia.
The on-line encyclopaedia – created using contributions from readers – was not “authoritative or accurate” and in some cases “may be completely untrue”, said Ofqual.
Children can also be easily tripped up by copying passages from websites containing American phrases and spellings – a clear sign of plagiarism.
The comments were made in a series of documents sent to pupils, parents and teachers warning against cheating at school.
“OK, Cunt – let’s see what you can do now.”
LA Times Lauds James Frey’s Best Work
James Frey’s best work?
January 6, 2010 | 11:20 am
— Carolyn Kellogg
“Turn the bus off! You’re backing into the freaking ditch; you’re making the little kids cry. Stop!”
Drunk Bus Driver Takes N.Y. Students On Wild Ride
Surveillance Video Shows 3 Dozen Terrified Kids Begging 55-Year-Old Martha Thompson To Stop The Bus
Woman Eventually Pleads Guilty To 37 Counts Of Child Endangerment
A driver is heading to jail after she was drunk behind the wheel with more than three dozen kids aboard.
And as a surveillance video shows, the children were screaming for her to stop.
The video shows the dangerous school bus ride last May in the Alfred-Almond school district in Allegany County. Martha Thompson, 55, had a blood alcohol content of .15. At the time, she thought the children were over-reacting.
Students can be heard screaming, “Put on the break!”
Driver: “Will you guys stop?”
Student: “Well you’re not okay, and I know it.”
The bus hit high speeds, ran over a mailbox and started rolling backwards downhill.
Student: “Turn the bus off!”
Driver: “No.”
Student: “You’re backing into the freaking ditch; you’re making the little kids cry. Stop!”
Finally, the children opened the emergency door in the back of the bus to get out, despite Thompson pleading against it.
Driver: “You can’t get off the bus!”
Who said public art can’t be fun?
When the Low Went Very High
Who said public art can’t be fun?
By Jerry Saltz
[Jeff] Koons’s work has always stood apart for its one-at-a-time perfection, epic theatricality, a corrupted, almost sick drive for purification, and an obsession with traditional artistic values. His work embodies our time and our America: It’s big, bright, shiny, colorful, crowd-pleasing, heat-seeking, impeccably produced, polished, popular, expensive, and extroverted—while also being abrasive, creepily sexualized, fussy, twisted, and, let’s face it, ditzy. He doesn’t go in for the savvy art-about-art gestures that occupy so many current artists. And his work retains the essential ingredient that, to my mind, is necessary to all great art: strangeness.
You can see this in his glorious phantasmagorical masterpiece, the large-scale topiary sculpture Puppy. This 40-foot visitor from another aesthetic dimension appeared in New York in the first year of the new millennium. It assumed the form of a West Highland white terrier constructed of stainless steel and 23 tons of soil, swathed in more than 70,000 flowers that were kept alive by an internal irrigation system.
No mas.
Catalonia votes to ban bullfighting
Bloodthirsty ‘sport’ is dying a slow death across Spain, as younger audiences turn away
By Alasdair Fotheringham in Madrid
Already faced with a rapidly ageing fanbase at home and widespread incomprehension and rejection abroad, Spanish bullfighting has suffered another major setback after the Catalan parliament voted to outlaw it completely across the region.
The decision was so controversial that some deputies hunched over their desks to hide their fingers from photographers as they punched in their votes. After a narrow initial victory for the abolitionists – 67 in favour and 59 against – the law could become effective as soon as May.
Spain’s right-wing press was quick to attribute the result to Catalan separatists’ desire to dissociate themselves from an activity often considered as typically Spanish as tapas, siestas and flamenco. Unofficially, though, even before Friday’s decision, it seems bullfighting circles in the rest of Spain had given Catalonia up as a lost cause.
Over the past three decades, bullring after bullring has closed in major Catalan towns such as Gerona, Lloret de Mar and Tarragona, and in Barcelona only one of the original three rings remains. As far back as 1909, Barcelona hosted Spain’s first anti-bullfighting protest, and by 2004 more than 80 per cent of Catalans were opposed to the practice. “Banning the bulls in Catalonia would be like drawing up a death certificate for a long-dead corpse,” said Juan Ilian, a leading Spanish bullfighting correspondent for nearly five decades. “And even if they don’t, it’ll remain on its deathbed.”
The Most Useless Machine Ever
Top 100 Gayest Albums Of All Time
from Out Magazine via The Daily Swarm
OUT MAGAZINE’S 100 OF THE GREATEST, GAYEST RECORDS OF ALL TIME…
1. David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, 1972
2. The Smiths, The Smiths, 1984
3. Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman, 1988
4. Indigo Girls, Indigo Girls, 1989
5. Judy Garland, Judy at Carnegie Hall, 1961
6. The Smiths, The Queen is Dead, 1986
7. Elton John, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, 1973
8. Madonna, The Immaculate Collection, 1990
9. Cyndi Lauper, She’s So Unusual, 1983
10. Antony and the Johnsons, I Am A Bird Now, 2005
I’m Going Swimming
JETTISON YOUR LOVED ONES by Ray Tintori
Happy New Year, Dude
“[The Big Lebowski] doesn’t stand for what everybody thinks he should stand for, but he has his values. He just does it. He lives in a very disjointed society, but he’s gonna take things as they come, he’s gonna care about his friends, he’s gonna go to somebody’s recital, and that’s it. That’s how you respond.”
Happy New Year, Dude.
Happy New Year
Suzan Pitt’s ‘ASPARAGUS’ finally on YouTube
One of the greatest animated shorts ever.
Part 1
Part 2
Zsa Zsa & The Eunuchs
Sweatin’ with the stars! Celebrity workout videos
Merry Belated Christmas from Al & Old School Ministry
“To grasp the total picture would make you wish you could go back to 1960 when things were a bit slower, almost like the Dark Ages.”
Making art in the now world
By John Lopez
“What it means to be an artist today — where do we start on that one?” muses Ed Ruscha, almost nonplused. Finally, the soft-spoken art veteran decides : “It means facing a lot of information that’s going to be very difficult to take in and swallow because there’s so much of it.”
Once the ramifications settle in, he slyly drawls, “to grasp the total picture would make you wish you could go back to 1960 when things were a bit slower, almost like the Dark Ages.”
That dizziness finds a counterpoint with fledgling film director Michael Mohan on a cold December night in Westwood. His youthful exuberance contrasts with Ruscha’s measured bemusement: “It’s not like it’s going to be crazy; it is crazy, right now.”
Mohan has reason to be excited. His first feature, “One Too Many Mornings,” about two twentysomething guys who reignite their high school friendship, which he shot over two years’ worth of nights and weekends with a budget well under $50,000, will play the 2010 Sundance Film Festival in a new category dedicated to low-to-no-budget filmmakers.
Where Ruscha recoils at the opened floodgates of the Information Age, Mohan gushes: “There’s an audience for everything . . . if you say I want to express myself and people will see it, yes, that’s what in 2010 you can do.”