from The Coolhunter

Murdock Barbershop – London

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from The New York Times

Soon You Can Hail an Artist as You Hail a Cab

By CAROL VOGEL

Those moving advertisements atop taxis generally deliver not-so-subtle messages, like which airlines to fly or movies to see, who makes the sexiest blue jeans or the coolest sunglasses.

But for the month of January, Show Media, a Las Vegas company that owns about half the cones adorning New York City’s taxis, has decided to give commerce a rest. Instead, roughly 500 cabs will display a different kind of message: artworks by Shirin Neshat, Alex Katz and Yoko Ono.

The project is costing Show Media about $100,000 in lost revenue, but John Amato, one of Show’s owners and a contemporary-art fan, said: “I thought it was time to take a step back. January’s a slow month. I could have cut my rates but instead I decided to hit the mute button and give something back to the city.”

He contacted the Art Production Fund, a nonprofit New York organization that presents art around the city, and asked its co-founders, Yvonne Force Villareal and Doreen Remen, to select artists. They in turn sought out Ms. Neshat, Mr. Katz and Ms. Ono, three New Yorkers known for work that can read both conceptually and physically in a confined space. (The ads measure just 14 by 48 inches.)

The project is called “Art Adds,” not just as a play on its advertising origins but also, Ms. Villareal said, because “art adds to the public’s vision.”

[ click to continue reading at the NY Times ]

from The Arizona Republic

1 box red velvet cake mix, with ingredients specified on the box
1/2 cup flour
8 ounces cream cheese (room temperature)
8 tablespoons butter (room temperature)
2 cups powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Prepare mix as instructed, blending in an additional  1/2 cup flour. Pour mixture into zip-top bag and cut off one corner of the bag to create a small hole. Squeeze dough onto greased cookie sheets in tablespoon-size portions. They should be shaped slightly like Hershey’s Kisses. Allow 2 inches between each one. Bake 6-8 minutes. Do not over-bake; you want a cakelike texture. Remove from oven and transfer to a cooling rack.

Cream-cheese filling:
Mix cream cheese and butter until smooth, gradually add powder sugar  1/2 cup at a time. Add vanilla after the first cup of sugar is blended.

[ click to continue adding sugar at The Arizona Republic ]

from The Washington Post

George Michael, famed D.C. sportscaster, dies of cancer
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 25, 2009; A01

George Michael, 70, a high-rated and hyperanimated Washington sportscaster whose extensive use of game highlights from across the country on his nationally syndicated show has now become the norm in the industry, died Thursday at Sibley Memorial Hospital. He had chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

Mr. Michael was a popular rock-and-roll DJ in Philadelphia and New York before making a successful transition to television, where his boisterous style and unremitting hustle made him one of the dominant personalities in Washington for years. He represented sports as entertainment, with what some regarded as a team-friendly approach, especially to the hometown Redskins.

Starting in 1980, Mr. Michael oversaw a trendsetting show that made liberal use of action highlights from games in addition to interviews and other reports. “The George Michael Sports Machine,” as it was eventually called, was syndicated to almost 200 stations at its peak.

[ click to continue reading at WashingtonPost.com ]

from The Arizona Republic

Beef Wellington impresses at the holiday dinner table

by Karen Fernau 

Not all Christmas gifts come wrapped in paper and tied with fancy bows.

Beef Wellington, luxury beef tenderloin coated with pate and duxelles, then wrapped in puff pastry and baked, is a traditional gift to give family and friends at any holiday table.

The dish named for Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, is a show-stopping alternative to prime rib, goose, turkey or ham.

“The best way to make a holiday meal special is to use special foods, and present them beautifully. Wellington is both. It’s traditional and elegant at the same time,” said chef Jacques Qualin at J&G Steakhouse in Phoenix.

For more impact, Qualin suggests molding the puff pastry to create flowers or other holiday decorations. Simply use a knife and your hands to mold the pastry into art just prior to baking.

[ click to continue reading at AZCentral.com ]

from the New York Times

A Legend as Muse: Patti Smith Fills Role

By EDWARD WYATT

LOS ANGELES — There was a time, a decade ago, Patti Smith said, that she did not want to make a film about herself.

“To me the idea seems sort of conceited,” she said in an interview. “I felt, even though I was 50 years old at the time, too young to do a documentary. I hadn’t done enough work yet to merit a documentary.”

It turns out that being followed around by a camera for more than a decade can help one overcome shyness. On Dec. 30, Ms. Smith’s 63rd birthday,PBS will broadcast “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” a documentary filmed over 11 years by the fashion photographer and film neophyte Steven Sebring.

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from The LA Times

‘Free for All’ by Kenneth Turan and Joseph Papp

Joe Papp brought theater to the masses, earning people’s awe and fury.

By Wendy Smith

The apt title of this juicy oral history, based on more than 160 interviews, simultaneously expresses a principle that guided producer-provocateur Joe Papp and the theatrical ruckus that ensued.

“Free for All” is how Papp presented Shakespeare in Central Park and in mobile units that toured some of New York City’s poorest, toughest neighborhoods. A free-for-all was the kind of battle he engaged in with anyone he thought stood in the way of making theater accessible to everyone.

And a free-for-all, the voices skillfully assembled in Kenneth Turan’s text reveal, was frequently the atmosphere created by Papp’s burning sense of mission and his intensely personal relationships with the artists he nurtured and infuriated during such groundbreaking productions as “Hair,” “No Place to Be Somebody,” “Short Eyes,” “A Chorus Line,” “for colored girls . . .” and “Runaways.”

[ click to read in The LA Times ]

from The Los Angeles Times

‘Out West’ at the Autry examines the history of homosexuals and transgender people in the Old West

Museum officials say the series may be the first of its kind.

One-Eyed Charlie was a driver for the California Stage Co. After his death, he was discovered to be a woman. (Wells Fargo / December 14, 2009)

Say the words “gay cowboy” and chances are the conversation will turn to “Brokeback Mountain,” the 2005 film starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, and based on the Annie Proulx short story.

The Oscar-winning drama, which is set in the 1960s to ’80s, highlighted a long-submerged facet of frontier culture. But as a new series at the Autry National Center shows, the presence of homosexuals and transgender individuals in the American West is much older than the movie might lead you to think. It is, in fact, almost as old as the West itself.

Take for instance the tale of One-Eyed Charlie.

A stagecoach driver known for his hard drinking and itchy trigger finger, Charlie worked for the California Stage Co., where he earned his reputation as one of the best drivers in the wild West. He traveled between Oregon and California and, the story goes, got his nickname when he lost an eye while attempting to shoe a horse.

But Charlie kept a secret that was revealed only after his death in 1879. When his body was being prepared, a coroner discovered that One-Eyed Charlie was actually a woman.

It turns out that Charlie, nee Charlotte Darkey Parkhurst, had passed much of her adult life as a man. The discovery of her true gender became a local sensation. And her story still fascinates U.S. historians, some of whom believe that she was the first woman to have voted in a presidential election, long before the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

[ click to continue reading at The LA Times ]

from The LA Times

Dan O’Bannon dies at 63; screenwriter of ‘Alien’

By Dennis McLellan

Dan O’Bannon, the acclaimed science fiction/horror film screenwriter who was best known for writing the blockbuster hit “Alien” and who also directed and wrote the zombie fest “The Return of the Living Dead,” has died. He was 63.

O’Bannon, whose credits include co-writing “Blue Thunder” and “Total Recall,” died Thursday at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica after losing his 30-year battle with Crohn’s disease, said his wife, Diane.

His career began with the low-budget 1974 sci-fi film “Dark Star,” a dark comedy directed by John Carpenter that began as a USC student project and was co-written by O’Bannon and Carpenter from their original story. (O’Bannon played what has been described as a “reluctant, flunky astronaut.”)

“Dan was enormously talented. He was acerbically funny and, I think, quite underappreciated,” Carpenter, who first met O’Bannon in film school at USC, told The Times on Friday. “I think Dan had more talent than he was allowed to show in the movie business. He was multitalented: a production designer, editor, director, writer.

“One of the things that endeared him to me was his rebellion against all authority, including myself, the studios, anybody who was above him. He said he kicks up, not down.”

[ click to continue reading at the Los Angeles Times ]

from the Arizona Republic

Squash Noodles With Bacon and Parmesan

by Meghan Pembleton
Special for The Republic

1 1/2 pounds spaghetti squash
8 slices bacon
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Cut squash in half across the middle, then in half lengthwise. Remove and discard seeds. Place squash pieces cut side down in a microwave-safe pan and loosely cover with plastic wrap. Microwave on high power until tender, 5 to 9 minutes. Meanwhile, cook bacon in a skillet over medium-high heat until crisp. Drain on paper towels and set aside. (Do not drain bacon grease.)

[ click to continue reading at AZCentral.com ]

from the New York Times

Akira Kurosawa in a Box, Including Early Rareties

Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

Kenichi Enomoto, left, and Denjiro Okochi in “The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail,” one of the films from the beginning of Kurosawa’s career, previously unavailable in the United States.

THE most imposing DVD gift set of this holiday season is “AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa,” which, in commemoration of Kurosawa’s coming centennial, the Criterion Collection has released at the equally imposing retail price of $399.

Elegantly packaged in a shoebox-size container covered in red and black linen, it contains 25 of the 30-odd features directed by Kurosawa, the Japanese filmmaker most famous for “Rashomon” (1950) and “Seven Samurai” (1954). For the most part these are titles that have already been issued by Criterion in stand-alone editions; they’ve been remastered here with a new menu design but without the extensive supplementary features for which Criterion has become justly famous. This time around it’s just the movies, though the set comes with an abundantly illustrated 96-page book with an introductory essay and notes on each film by the Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince, as well as a personal reminiscence by Donald Richie, who was among the first critics to present Kurosawa to Western audiences.

With surprisingly few exceptions Japanese movies were virtually unknown outside of Japan until “Rashomon” won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, touching off a vogue for Japanese cinema that lasted through the decade. Kurosawa, who died in 1998, was never forgiven for his early success by the Western critics who came to prefer the more stylistically refined films of Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu and other directors whose work was discovered in Kurosawa’s wake, or by the Japanese critics who considered Kurosawa too Western in his cultural references and aesthetic choices.

Today these debates seem provincial and pointless. As the great French critic André Bazin wrote in a letter to his pupil François Truffaut, “Unquestionably anyone who prefers Kurosawa must be incurably blind, but anyone who loves only Mizoguchi is one-eyed.” There is no denying the surging vitality of a “Seven Samurai” or a “Yojimbo” (1961), just as there is no denying the blunt thematic statements and stylistic jumble of films like “Ikiru” (1952) and “I Live in Fear” (1955). And we now know that Mizoguchi and Ozu were influenced just as much by Western films as by Kurosawa, if not more so, with no apparent cost to their Japaneseness, itself a concept rendered suspicious by our postmodern distrust of essentialism.

[ click to continue reading in the NY Times ]

from the LA Times

Opinion

All the lonely people

Researchers argue that far from being a personal issue, mass loneliness threatens our public health.

Gregory Rodriguez

What’s a good way to keep from getting lonely in this high holy season of togetherness? Stay away from lonely people.

It’s brutal but true, and it’s the cutting-edge finding of researchers whose mission it is to discover the causes of loneliness so that we can combat it with full force.

Think this is just a scholarly version of a “Dr. Phil” episode? Think again.

The lead researcher on this project — with UC San Diego’s James H. Fowler and Harvard’s Nicholas A. Christakis — is University of Chicago neuroscientist John T. Cacioppo, who last year co-wrote a groundbreaking book arguing that far from being a personal issue, mass loneliness threatens our public health. This new study, published in the latest issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, seeks to map the geography of loneliness. Who feels it? And what is the connection of these Eleanor Rigbys to the rest of us?

What the authors find is that, like a virus, loneliness is contagious. People become lonely because of who they know as much as who they don’t know. It makes sense, really. When people are lonely, they tend to be less trusting and even irritable toward others. This type of behavior can easily make those on the receiving end feel a sense of isolation and loneliness themselves. In other words, lonely people pass on their loneliness. Before alienated people check into a cave, they alienate others, thereby continuing the chain. As the researchers put it, this means that loneliness is “both a cause and consequence of becoming disconnected.”

[ click to continue reading at the LA Times ]