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.”
Nothing Finer Than A Nice Tight Shave
Murdock Barbershop – London
The Star Wars Holiday Special: “To this day, parts of George Lucas sizzle and fall off if you mention it near him.”
by seanbaby
The Star Wars Holiday Special was broadcast on TV in 1978 as a fine-print stipulation to the fiddle contest that George Lucas lost to the devil. It was terrible in every possible direction. If Hitler forced aliens to put on a variety show at gunpoint, you’d feel more comfortable watching it. To this day, parts of George Lucas sizzle and fall off if you mention it near him. Famous little person Warwick Davis actually started as a section of George Lucas that screamed and detached itself when the special first aired. And since that day, it has never been shown or legally distributed.
Art For Hacks
Soon You Can Hail an Artist as You Hail a Cab
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.”
Mini Red Velvet Whoopie Pies
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.
The Man With The Sports Machine Gone
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.
Eagle Wins, Deer Loses
Beef Wellington For Christ
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.
Because the night, belongs to lovers…
A Legend as Muse: Patti Smith Fills Role
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.
Iris’s Pin Up Paradise
Face Cream v. Beer
I tried to talk my wife into buying a case of Molson Canadian for $24.95.
Instead, she bought a jar of face cream for $17.95.
I told her the beer would make her look better at night than the face
cream..
And that’s when the fight started.