Who Shot Emiliano Zapata
Zapata photo shrouded in mystery
For years it was thought that German-born Hugo Brehme took the famous shot of the Mexican revolutionary with crisscrossed bandoleers. But technology has pointed historians in another direction.
By Ken Ellingwood
“It’s an emblematic image in the history of Mexico,” says Mayra Mendoza, deputy director of the government’s photographic collection in the central state of Hidalgo. “Who gave us this photo?” (Associated Press) |
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Reporting from Pachuca, Mexico – The famous rebel poses in full regalia, his right hand gripping an Old West carbine, his left steadying a sword that dangles from the waist. You recognize the bushy mustache, broad sombrero, crisscrossed bandoleers.
It’s an icon of Mexican history: a black-and-white photograph of Emiliano Zapata believed taken in 1911, a year after the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution.
Published in a Mexican newspaper two years later and reproduced since then in history textbooks and on postcards, T-shirts and shopping bags, the Zapata image is almost as famous as that of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
With so much exposure, you’d think the photograph had little left to reveal to the world. Yet an intriguing question hovers: Who took the picture?
Michael’s Secret
Japan’s Island of Art
Exploring Naoshima, Japan’s island of art
By Glenn Kessler
The easiest way to make our three children groan has always been suggesting a visit to an art museum.
So it was with some trepidation that on a recent family vacation to Japan, my wife and I decided to schedule a two-day visit to an island that’s almost entirely devoted to contemporary art. The stopover would be a splurge, since the cost of rooms and meals on this arty isle is over-the-top even by Japan’s inflated standards. But we hoped the total-immersion tactic might finally put an end to the griping about touring art museums.
Naoshima, in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, is barely 10 square miles in area, but it has become one of the world’s leading centers of modern art. In 1992 the Benesse Corp., a Japanese publishing and educational company that owns Berlitz, established the first museum, Benesse House, to display artworks it had acquired. Now, internationally renowned artists compete to display their work all over the island. There is also a second museum, featuring Claude Monet’s water lily paintings; a series of striking art installations amid the houses of one village; outdoor art scattered along the coast; and a third museum under construction.
Not only that, but the main museum is also the hotel. After the day-trippers have left the island, a handful of guests have free rein at Benesse House, able to wander the halls at their leisure examining pieces by Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and other greats in a strikingly modern space designed by Tadao Ando, one of Japan’s most famous architects. The museum is completely integrated with the sea and the sky, so a vivid Jean-Michel Basquiat canvas looms over you as you eat breakfast in the morning while gazing at the horizon.
Riski
James Frey and His Son Leo Siddhartha Frey
James Frey shares his devastation over losing his son
This World Aids Day, author James Frey shares his devastation over losing his son and asks us to help all of the chidren who still have a chance.
On July 3rd, 2008, as my wife held him in her arms and I held his hand, my son, Leo Siddhartha Frey, died. We were in a small room in a hospital in New York, a room that was, and is, part of the NICU, a room where families who knew their children were going to die went to spend their last moments together privately and in some kind of peace, though I would never describe the time as peaceful. As we watched him, and told him we loved him, and cried, Leo took a final breath and his heart stopped beating and he passed, and part of me passed with him.
It was, and still is, an unimaginably horrific experience. Whatever loss or pain or sorrow I have ever felt or known pales in comparison. I wept, literally, for weeks. To this day I cannot look at pictures of Leo, and cannot talk about him without breaking down. I have never written about him, never spoken publicly about him, and after this, may never do so again. He was my son. I wanted the world for him. I would have given him anything and had so many dreams for him, though I truly wanted him to have the opportunity to find his own. Every day he was in the hospital I got down on my knees and begged God to save him, to spare him, to let him live, to let him grow up and know love and happiness and find his way. I said take me, take me and grant him what I have known. Take whatever time I have left and give to him. I begged and pleaded and cried. It made no difference. Leo got sicker, and weaker, and he died. In many ways, I will never recover from it.
When I think of (RED), I think of Leo, and I think of the children who are dying. I think of the pain and misery their families will feel when they are gone. I think of what my wife and I have felt and lived with and experienced and I never want anyone else to have to experience the same things. I think of the fact, and it is a fact, that many of these children could be helped and saved and given life. They can find their dreams and pursue them. They can know joy and beauty and love. They can take their first steps and learn their first words and go to school and have their first dates. My son never got to do any of those things. Nothing we, or any doctor on earth, could have changed it. But we, you and I and our families and our friends and our coworkers, can change it for the children in Africa who are living with AIDS. We can give them the gift that we have been given, and that so many of us take for granted.
They need our help. They need money to purchase drugs. They need doctors who can help them learn to live with their disease. They need hope and to believe that they will see tomorrow. Give them that chance. As someone who knows the pain of losing child, knows the personal apocalypse of losing a child, knows the emotional devastation that I felt and will always feel because my child is gone, I beg you to help. Anything you can afford will make a difference. For them, their parents, their families. It will make a difference. For our world, which is so full of violence and horror and poverty and hopelessness and despair, it will make difference. – James Frey
(RED) saves lives. So please choose (RED), get involved and make a difference in this world. In celebration of World Aids Day, James Frey created a one of a kind hand painted Bugaboo Cameleon stroller – inspired by his children and love of letters. The auction commences today and runs for ten days. Please visit ebay.com to place a bid and help save lives.
For those pre-dawn runs to the mailbox when you’re just not sure it’s really safe out there.
Borders UK Gone
Administrators begin ‘closing down’ sales at Borders UK
30.11.09 Benedicte Page
Borders UK launched a closing down sale this weekend, with all 45 branded Borders and Books Etc stores across the UK affected. The news will fuel concern among both publishers and rivals that the chain could be set to launch a fire-sale of stock.
It also came as a shock to staff who had not been told before the news emerged late on Friday (27th). According to one insider, stores were delivered the new POS on Saturday morning, which included huge ‘Store closing!’ banners, and discount POS up to 90%. Stores are currently selling stock with between 20% and 50% discounts.
Largest Finger Painting Ever
Giant Finger Painting Sets World Record
HONG KONG — As American children were celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday, around 3,300 students were setting a Guinness World Record in China. The children created a giant finger painting carrying the anti-drug slogan, “Not Now, Not Ever, Say No to Drugs.”
Measuring nearly 23,000 square feet, the oversized painting is part of a series of large-scale anti-drug publicity and education activities launched by theWestern Police District, the Narcotics Division and the Action Committee Against Narcotics (ACAN).
The kids received a Guinness World Record Certificate and made a pledge to continue their commitment to fighting drug abuse.
Jeanne-Claude Gone
from the San Jose Mercury News
Jeanne-Claude, artist, dies at 74
Jeanne-Claude — whose collaboration with her husband, Christo, in creating massive environmental works of art, such as the 24-mile-long “Running Fence” in California in the 1970s, attracted worldwide attention for decades — has died. She was 74.
Jeanne-Claude, who, like her more famous husband, used only her first name, died Wednesday night in a New York hospital of complications from a brain aneurysm, her family said in a statement.
The husband-and-wife team had been involved in creating large-scale, temporary environmental art projects since 1961, including wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin in more than a million square feet of silvery polypropylene fabric in 1995.
In 1976, they installed “Running Fence,” which consisted of 2,050 white fabric panels extending across 241/2 miles in California’s Sonoma and Marin counties.
Returning to California in 1991, they installed 1,760 gigantic, custom-made yellow umbrellas along an 18-mile stretch of the Tejon Pass, about 60 miles north of Los Angeles. A bi-continental project known as “The Umbrellas,” it included the installation of 1,340 blue umbrellas in Ibaraki, Japan.
“The Umbrellas” had a tragic twist when heavy winds tore one of the 485-pound umbrellas from its stand and killed Lori Keevil-Mathews, a Camarillo insurance agent who was viewing the art project with her husband, Michael Mathews.
In 2005 came “The Gates,” in which more than 7,503, 16-foot-tall vinyl gates with free-flowing saffron-colored fabric panels were set up along 23 miles of walkways in New York City’s Central Park — at a self-financed cost of $21 million.
La présentation du fromage pour vendredi noir
Bacon’s Eye
Demons and beefcake – the other side of Francis Bacon
Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer
Francis Bacon had his right eye sewn back in place after he was thrown through a window by lover Peter Lacy. Photograph: Jane Bown
The territories of Francis Bacon‘s soul have been explored widely; they have been the subject of a film, books and endless speculation. But the senior art historian John Richardson – who, at 85, is working on the last volume of his acclaimed biography of Picasso, and who knew Bacon from his 20s – has now laid down his views and recollections of Bacon, amounting to a reappraisal of his life and work.
Writing in the forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books, Richardson argues that Bacon’s sado-masochistic relationships lay at the heart of his best work, but with terrible consequences for his lover George Dyer, whose fragile mental state Richardson attributes to Bacon’s endless “goading”.
Having provoked Dyer into “a state of psychic meltdown” he “would exorcise his guilt and rage and remorse in images of Dyer aimed, as he said, at the nervous system”. This “goading” resulted in Dyer’s suicide, writes Richardson.
An earlier relationship, with Peter Lacy, was violent to the extent that “he hurled Bacon through a plate glass window. His face was so damaged that his right eye had to be sewn back into place”.
Bacon’s art went rapidly downhill when sado-masochism ceased to be a part of his life, argues Richardson, who describes the “angst-free, soft-porn glow” of his later work.
Richardson, who has hitherto held back from revealing his full memories of Bacon since the artist’s death in 1992, also pours scorn on critics, such as the late David Sylvester, who attempted to defend the self-taught Bacon’s “inability to draw”. He calls the celebrated Screaming Popes series “either magnificent flukes or near-total disasters….”
Happy Thanksgiving
And just imagine the larceny one could wreak in the produce section!
Really Awful Library Books
from the Awful Library Books blog
How to Really Love Your Teenager
Campbell
1982
Thanks to anonymous submitter for this title. This title creeped me out when I first read it. Emphasis on “really” made me do a double take. Maybe I watch too much television and assume the worst.
Tomato Pudding
“Luffa! Luffa! Luffa!”
The First Modern Woman
Madame de Staël: The First Modern Woman
Madame de Staël has been made available for free through January 2010 thanks to the sponsorship of Diane von Furstenberg. Diane read the book recently and liked it so much that she wanted to share it with readers everywhere. If you’d like to get the paperback—for yourself or for a gift—click here to buy it from Amazon.
Few women, indeed few people, have had a greater hand in shaping their culture than the 18th century aristocrat Germaine de Staël. And few have done so in more spectacular fashion. For twenty years the Swiss-born Parisienne, the daughter of Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s finance minister, held sway over French society. Her reign spanned both the final days of Louis and the Napoleonic period. A prolific writer and notorious séductrice, she enjoyed whirlwind affairs with some of the most influential men of her time. Always attracting controversy, a staunch defender of constitutional rule, she was demonized by Napoleon for her forthrightness, her powerful intellect, and her prestigious salon, a hothouse of subversive ideas and sexual intrigue. The Emperor exiled her, on and off, for the last two decades of her life. To the end she was a force to reckon with: Lord Byron was among those who attended her in her final years.
J. Edgar Hoover Obsessed With Studs
File shows FBI watched writer Terkel for decades
CHICAGO — An FBI file released to a New York media outlet shows the agency kept watch on the late Chicago author Studs Terkel for decades.
It also shows that Terkel once applied for a job with the FBI but was turned down.
The file was obtained by the NYCity News Service under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on its Web site over the weekend. The news service says the FBI refused to release the entire file.
Terkel was an avowed liberal who supported the civil rights movement and opposed the Vietman War. He also was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, when studios refused to hire actors, writers, directors and others suspected of having pro-communist sentiments.
Darwin Rescued From 40 Years In The Toilet
Rare Charles Darwin book in toilet in Britain
LONDON — A first edition of Charles Darwin’s seminal “On the Origin of Species” will be sold this week after it was found in a family’s toilet in southern Britain, an auction house said Sunday.
The book, which was first printed in 1859, was bought by a family for just a few shillings in a shop about 40 years ago, Christie’s auction house said.
The family has since kept the work on a bookcase in the guest lavatory at their home in the Oxford area, it said.
The book will go under the hammer in London on Tuesday, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the publication of the father of the theory of evolution’s famous work.
The book, about 1,250 copies of which were first printed, is expected to fetch 60,000 pounds (66,000 euros, 99,000 dollars).
He realised the book in the toilet was something special, matching the binding of the work in the picture.
Make Her Row
America’s Abundant Treasure
Gang ‘killed victims to extract their fat’
Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent
Peruvian police have arrested a gang which allegedly killed scores of peasants, drained their bodies of fat and sold the liquid abroad as an anti-wrinkle cosmetic.
Three suspects have confessed to killing five people for their fat, said Colonel Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru‘s anti-kidnapping police, but the number of victims was believed to be much higher and to date back decades.
Two of the suspects were arrested at a bus station in the capital, Lima, carrying bottles of liquid fat which they claimed were worth up to £36,000 a gallon.
Police named the band the “Pishtacos” after a myth dating to pre-Columbian times of killers who slaughtered victims with machetes to extract fat. The gang allegedly operated in Huanuco, a rural province dotted with Inca temples between the jungle and Andean peaks.
Six members remained at large including the alleged leader, Hilario Cudena, who has been killing to extract fluid for more than three decades, said police.
“Getting Shaq, one of the largest people in the world, to curate a show about scale is really fun.”
Shaq Takes Shot at Art as Curator of Show ’Size DOES Matter’
Interview by Lindsay Pollock
Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) — Shaquille O’Neal, the 7’1” all-star center with the National Basketball Association’s Cleveland Cavaliers, has discovered that art is no slam dunk.
Moonlighting for the first time as a curator, O’Neal is overseeing “Size DOES Matter,’’ an exhibition on the theme of scale in contemporary art coming in February to New York’s nonprofit Flag Art Foundation
The writer James Frey, a collector of art by Damien Hirst and others, and a partner in a contemporary New York gallery, is writing an essay for the exhibition catalog.
“This won’t be like another nice show at MoMA or the Met,’’ Frey said, referring to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Getting Shaq, one of the largest people in the world, to curate a show about scale is really fun. He does a lot of things that are unconventional for a guy of his stature.’’
Miami Heat for Real
5-Second Belt Change By The VW Man
Tree Wins – Crane Destroys House
Crane smashes through Santa Rosa house
Efforts got underway early Tuesday to ready for the removal of a toppled crane that smashed through the top of a northwest Santa Rosa home Monday afternoon.
The problem began Monday when a crane weighing more than 100,000 pounds toppled backward and sliced a Santa Rosa home nearly in half as workers attempted to remove a 150-year-old tree.
Kyle Dales was in the front yard cutting firewood from removed sections of the tree when the crane began to topple.
“I just started running with the chain saw and screaming at my girlfriend and sister,” he said. “The shaft of the crane ended up in the living room.”
Kevin and Michelle McCarthy stood in quiet shock as they looked at their destroyed home. Tears rolled down her face. A neighbor offered Kevin McCarthy a beer, which he declined.
Earlier in the day, Michelle McCarthy had been in a car accident. The couple were in Marin County dealing with that crash when one of their neighbors called to tell them that their house had been destroyed.
If you can’t find that book you really want, you’re probably just at the…
42.5s to 1000mph
Strapped into a custom built seat, Andy Green prepares for the ride of his life. The pancake-flat desert stretches out for miles ahead. The computer indicates all systems are normal. He eases off the brakes and puts his foot down on the throttle. The jet engine roars into life. In precisely 42.5 seconds he’ll be travelling 1000 mph. In a car.
“It’s almost impossible to tell the difference between going supersonic in a car and in an aircraft,” says Green. He is the only person on Earth who can say that from personal experience. Green was a fighter pilot for the UK Royal Air Force for 20 years, and he is also the fastest man on wheels. In 1997, driving a vehicle called ThrustSSC, he set the world land speed record of 763 miles per hour, becoming the first and only person to break the sound barrier in a car (761 mph under standard conditions).
Kubert’s Gallery of Heroes
A Gallery of Heroes, Up for Sale
Joe Kubert, a comic book artist since 1938, has little interest in the accumulated work of his last seven decades; his focus is on new projects, he said recently.
But comic book fans who feel differently about this celebrated illustrator will have a chance to peruse and even own some of that older work this week, when 18 covers and interior pages, published from the 1940s to 1990, are put up for sale.
Mr. Kubert, 83, has turned over a large trove of his original work to Heritage Auctions in Dallas, which will hold the first of several auctions, live and online, on Friday.
“Joe’s obviously one of the very small handful of great artists that has worked in comics over the last 50-plus years,” said Todd Hignite, a consignment director for Heritage who specializes in original comic art. Mr. Hignite searched through Mr. Kubert’s home, business office and storage space in northern New Jersey to amass the selection.
Sushi For The Ballsy
Recovering
AAP: September Sales Jump 12.3%, Up 3.6% for the Year
In September, net book sales rose 12.3% to $1.26 billion, as reported by 91 publishers to the Association of American Publishers. For the year to date, net book sales are up 3.6% to $8.1 billion.Results by category:
- E-books soared 170.7% to $15.9 million.
- Adult hardcover rose 74.1% to $302.4 million.
- Adult mass market was up 33.3% to $89.9 million.
- Children’s/YA paperback increased 8.6% to $54.2 million.
- Higher education jumped 5.8% to $408.3 million.
- University press paperback rose 5% to $6.4 million.
- Audiobook climbed 2.9% to $22 million.
- El-Hi was up 1% to $335.6 million.
- Children’s/YA hardcover fell 24.3% to $92.7 million.
- Religion declined 18.4% to $67.4 million.
- Professional and scholarly dropped 3.7% to $58.7 million.
- University press hardcover fell 3.6% to $5.7 million.
- Adult paperback decreased 1.7% to $132.4 million.