Mo’ Fixie Fixie
Look Ma, No Brakes!
Stripped-Down Fixies Have Long Been The Bike of Choice Among Couriers. Now, Hip Urbanites Have Gotten the Message.
By David Montgomery
What a profile they cut, slicing through the city: gorgeous, exotic, dangerous. You see them parked like emaciated steeds outside the coolest clubs.
They don’t make much sense, yet for one more fleeting season at least, they are the rage in certain circles. Sort of dumb and super hip: the twin characteristics of many things in life.
We are talking about a bicycle. A very special kind of road bicycle, called a fixed-gear bike, or fixie for short.
A fixie has one speed, which makes it difficult to pedal uphill. A classic fixie has no brakes, which makes it difficult to slow on the downhill. A fixie has no freewheel, the part that makes coasting possible. Instead, the chain directly drives the rotation of the rear wheel, which means the pedals always turn while the bike moves.
What else do they have going for them?
Well, fixies are impractical, perverse throwbacks to a time more than a century ago, before the invention of the derailleur and the Tour de France, when the bicycle chain and the pneumatic tube were novelties, and the high-wheel penny-farthing “ordinary” bicycle had just been eclipsed by the chain-driven “safety” bike.
And yet despite all that — or is it because of all that? — a fixie manages the neat trick of simultaneously communicating taste and rebellion.
To each his own bicycle, in a town where bicycling is an ever-expanding religion, with many rival sects. But a fixie? Speak to us, pilgrims.
Jason Stevenson was one of Washington’s earliest fixie converts. He remembers the first time he saw one. It was the leanest machine he had ever seen, a contraption almost completely unknown in Washington. He was spellbound.
“So clean, so fluid. I just had to have one,” he says. “I was like, whatever bike that is, I want to ride something like that.”
The year was 1993, and Stevenson was a bike messenger, as he is now.
He knew of only three messengers riding fixies then. Washington was a little behind the curve. Some date the dawn of fixie chic to the 1986 movie “Quicksilver,” starring Kevin Bacon, which glorified fixie-riding messengers in New York.
A Red Stripe In The Coolibah Tree
Tossing Beer Up Trees in Dolores Park
Something I am amazed worked out: this guy climbed nearly to the top of a tree in Dolores Park, had his friend toss him up a glass bottle of Red Stripe, caught it, and proceeded to drink it. Bad ass.
Auto-Tune on iPhone
I am T-Pain iPhone App Is Auto-Tuning Genius
By Jason Chen
Smule, the guys who made Leaf Trombone and Ocarina, just ported Auto-Tune—the software T-Pain and Auto-Tune the news uses to make music gold—onto the iPhone. Holy crap is it awesome.
Pot Of Bulbous Bile Found At End Of Reading Rainbow
My Living Nightmare Of Encouraging Kids To Read Is Over
BY LEVAR BURTON
Thank god.
After 26 long years, I can finally rest easy. Twenty-six years I spent standing in front of a camera, gritting my teeth, and shilling the latest works of every hack children’s book author imaginable. For 26 years, I’ve told kids they could open a magical door to another world just by reading a book, when the only door it ever opened for me led to a soul-sucking career in the horrifying abyss of public television.
But now, at last, it is over. I don’t have to lie anymore. I don’t have to live that nightmare.
When the news came that Reading Rainbow would be canceled due to a lack of funding, I felt—well, to use a cliché like you’d find in one of the hundreds of books I pimped endlessly—like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Every day I went to work hoping that maybe the studio had burned down, that maybe the program had been cut, that maybe PBS would finally stop squeezing the life from me drop by drop. Now that it’s over, I feel the relief a bruised and broken soldier must feel when he is rescued after rotting away for decades in some dank, forgotten POW camp.
May that godforsaken show burn in hell.
“Incest, bestiality and physical violence is still shocking readers more than 80 years after it was banned in the United States”
Subject line from the Abilene Reporter News, Story from TEXAS READS
TEXAS READS: SOMETHING OF A SOLUTION TO TEXAS TO LITERARY MYSTERY
By Glenn Dromgoole
The Texas literary mystery “Whatever Happened to Gertrude Beasley?” has been solved. Sort of.
Edna Gertrude Beasley — who graduated from Simmons College in Abilene in 1914, taught school in West Texas and Chicago, and traveled the world as a journalist — wrote a provocative autobiography published in Paris in 1925, “My First Thirty Years.”
The graphic language and content of the book resulted in it being banned in England despite a positive review by one of America’s best-known critics, H. L. Mencken, who called it “the first genuinely realistic picture of the Southern poor white trash.”
“Thirty years ago,” the book began, “I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied ”
She went on to tell how one of her first memories was her 16-year-old brother pressing down on top of her trying to rape her when she was 4, among other gruesome, explicit and lurid details.
In early 1928, at age 35, Gertrude Beasley vanished, as far as anyone knew. No one had been able to trace her whereabouts since.
Many have tried, including novelist Larry McMurtry, Texas literature authority Don Graham and author Bert Almon, all of whom have written about Beasley over the years. Actress Veronica Russell performed a 90-minute one-woman off-Broadway show in New York four years ago based on Beasley’s book.
Surrealist biomorphism: “Capricious Forms”
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
Surrealist biomorphism: “Capricious Forms” (1937), a work from Kandinsky’s Paris period, is part of a retrospective at the Guggenheim.
More 4
Local man’s novel hits the big time
By: Lisa Hlavinka
The movie rights were sold before a Spencer Township native’s novel even hit store shelves.
Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay picked up the rights to Black River High School graduate Jobie Hughes’ young adult novel, “I Am Number Four,” on June 26. The novel does not come out until September 2010.
Spielberg and Bay were not the only ones interested in the novel. Represented by Beverly Hills-based Endeavor Talent Agency, Hughes said there was a bidding war between Spielberg and Bay and producer J.J. Abrams for rights to the story.“They bought the rights to an unpublished book … before we had interest in the book, the movie rights were done and sold,” said Hughes, 29, who grew up in the township and now resides in New York City. “Usually it’s always done the other way around.”
Now, DreamWorks LLC, a film studio co-founded by Spielberg, anticipates the film to be out in July 2011.
“It’s pretty surreal,” Hughes said via phone Sunday.
Before the Hollywood glamour, however, came the task of writing “I Am Number Four.”
Hughes has a co-author, James Frey, who wrote the memoir, “A Million Little Pieces.”
Hughes Hughes did not name Frey specifically, he said, because the partnership was originally supposed to be secret. However, other media have named Frey as the co-author of the book.
Blind Cricket
The Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator
Watch Out For That Girl Scout
“Millas’s surgery did not go well. His penis became gangrenous.”
Dude, Where’s My Schlong?
A Coral Gables man loses his penis and fights back in court
By Gus Garcia-Roberts
Medical malpractice litigation tends to put a price on human body parts. Got your spleen punctured during a messy surgery? Here’s a few thousand for your pain and suffering. Lost a big toe? That’s six-figure territory. A recklessly amputated arm might net you a million bucks.
We may soon find out what a penis is worth.
Behold the plight of 62-year-old Coral Gables resident Enrique Millas. All the poor guy ever wanted to do was have sex with his wife of 25 years, Gloria. But he couldn’t. So he went to local penis guru Paul E. Perito, a urologist who touts himself as a national leader in penile implant surgery. And here our story swerves into Saw-caliber horror territory.
Even when everything goes right, Perito’s surgery is not for the faint of heart. The penile implant is a bendable silicone rod that looks something like an orchestra conductor’s baton. After the operation, which involves stitches, “swelling,” and “bruising,” according to the doctor’s website, patients “should keep their penis against the abdomen for three days with the supplied scrotal support.” The patient will never be flaccid again — even at Thanksgiving dinner: “The implant leaves the penis in the erect state at all times, and the patient positions the penis for his comfort or activity.”
Anybody else having flashbacks to eighth-grade history class?
Millas’s surgery did not go well. His penis became gangrenous, and after thwarted surgeries to save it, Perito removed the battered organ.
Yeah Yeah Yeah Go Tell It To The Glass-pack
Hog days of summer
Forget ‘Born to Be Wild.’ All those overaged ‘Easy Rider’ types need to put the mufflers back on their bikes.
By John Johnson Jr.
Summer is ending, and not a moment too soon.
In my seaside Long Beach neighborhood, the warm months used to be a time when residents threw open windows to let in the sound of surf and the fragrance of suntan lotion from the roller-bladers on the bike path. But open windows are no longer an option.
Summer has become the season of the cacophonous roar, a time when phalanxes of motorcycles head for the beach cities, piloted by black-helmeted, big-bellied men who think “Easy Rider” was about them. During the week, they may be accountants or car dealers. On the weekend, they are Captain America and Billy, setting out on their own private spiritual — and noisy — journeys.
Visit any coastal community or travel mountain roads on a summer weekend and you will see them: desktop rebels rumbling along in vast, growling herds. Not satisfied with the feel of the wind on their faces, these guys aren’t happy unless heads are turning and ears are bleeding. In my building, neighbors have to stop talking with guests when one roars by.
As I researched this topic, I discovered I was not alone in my outrage. Indignation abounds on the Internet — along with alarming information. One website reported that 45% of motorcycles have been illegally modified to make them louder. The California Air Resources Board puts the number even higher, at about 85%, while a biking industry group says it’s closer to 40%. Whatever, it’s a huge number of people who have deliberately made their bikes more annoying.
US Poetry Goes Abroad
US poetry greats to reach Arabic audience
New Arabic anthology from Abu Dhabi-based project, Kalima, to include poems from 15 US poets, including Anne Sexton, Charles Bukowski and Sylvia Plath
by Alison Flood
Sylvia Plath is one of 15 US poets due to appear in a new Arabic anthology.
The cream of modern American poetry, from Sylvia Plath to Charles Simic, is to be translated into Arabic as part of a project to widen the Arabic world’s access to foreign literature.
Fifteen American poets, also including Charles Bukowski, Robert Bly, Anne Sexton, Ted Kooser and Langston Hughes, have been selected by the Abu Dhabi-based project, Kalima – “word” in Arabic – to be included in a new Arabic anthology. “There is a real shortage of American poetry translated into Arabic, which is why we decided to do this,” said a spokesperson for the project.
Over 1000 poems are being translated for the anthology, including Bukowski’s “Love is a Dog from Hell”, Dorianne Laux’s “In a Room with a Rag in My Hand”, Simic’s “Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk” and Hughes’s “I, Too, Sing America”. “I am the darker brother,” writes Hughes. “They send me to eat in the kitchen / When company comes, / But I laugh, / And eat well, / And grow strong.”
The Infuriating Françoise Nielly
Françoise Nielly’s massive, colorful portraits are delicious to look at. Even more wonderful – and particularly infuriating to those of us who have timidly dabbled in painting – is to watch her create them. In a beautiful video posted on her site, she, in her confident, strong hand, wields her painting knife shaped like a miniature garden trowel, and makes painting look easy like cake frosting. She paints her vivid, passionate canvases — some as large as 78 x 25 inches (195 x 62 centimeters) — from black-and-white photos, further proof of her unfailing ability to interpret light, shadow, hue and tone by applying brilliant colors and daring strokes.
Bad Seed Reads
Nick Cave Shaves! Rock Snob Reads Raunchy Passage From New Novel
By Joe Pompeo
If there is one man in the rock-snob canon who can rattle off a series of filthy expletives without sounding anything less than utterly eloquent and polite, it is Nick Cave.
On the evening of Monday, Sept. 14, the 51-year-old Mr. Cave, best known for his role as the sinister singer-songwriter of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, was sitting crossed-legged on a small stage on the fourth floor of the Union Square Barnes & Noble, doing an interview with the journalist Katherine Lanpher—former sidekick to Al Franken on Air America Radio. He had come to read from his new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro ($25, Faber and Faber), which tells the dark and deranged tale of an insatiably horny traveling cosmetics salesman in the south of England who, following his wife’s suicide, takes his 9-year-old son out on the road.
The Hideout On The Block
Chicago Mobster Al Capone’s Wis. Hideout For Sale
Auction Set For Chicago Mobster Al Capone’s Sprawling Wis. Hideout, Stone House, Guard Towers
(AP) The buyer of a scenic property in northern Wisconsin will get more than just its bar and restaurant: They’ll have a former hideout of Chicago mobster Al Capone.
The 407-acre wooded site, complete with guard towers and a stone house with 18-inch-thick walls, will soon go on the auction block at a starting bid of $2.6 million.
The bank that foreclosed on the land near Couderay, about 140 miles northeast of Minneapolis, said Capone owned it in the late 1920s and early 1930s during Prohibition. Local legend claims that shipments of bootlegged alcohol were flown in on planes that landed on the property’s 37-acre lake, then loaded onto trucks bound for Chicago.
“He spent a lot of time there,” Chippewa Valley Bank Vice President Joe Kinnear said. “Whether it was for getting whiskey out of Canada or whoever knows. It is an incredible property.”
The property was more recently used as a tourist attraction. It includes Capone’s two-story stone home with a massive fireplace, two guard towers _ reportedly manned with machine guns whenever Capone visited _ a caretakers residence and other outbuildings.
Kinnear said the bar on the property was built from what was originally Capone’s eight-stall garage and still includes some portholes built to shoot through.
“It’s pretty neat,” he said.
What Daisy Lowe’s Mum Made Her Read
My secret life Daisy Lowe, model, 20
Interview by Charlotte Philby
My parents were … My mother was incredibly creative and absolutely mental. She nurtured me to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it.
The house I grew up in … There were loads, we moved around all the time. Our houses were always well designed with amazing antiques, white floorboards, big drapes and 1920s erotic paintings.
When I was a child I wanted to be … a lawyer. That didn’t quite work out. I left school just after my GCSEs, but I got good results so I proved to myself that I could do it.
The first time I got drunk … I had just turned 14, and was at a birthday party of a girl in the year above me. Her dad had put on a free bar and I spent most of the night kissing my best friend. It was ridiculous.
If I could change one thing about myself …I would make the tube that runs from my kidney to my bladder a normal shape, so that I didn’t have to have an operation soon.
You wouldn’t know it but I’m very good at … cleaning. It’s my de-stress if I’m in a bad mood.
You may not know it but I’m no good at …being patient.
Last night I dreamt … my best friend was given a new suit and I had an infestation of spiders living in my body. It was really scary.
What I see when I look in the mirror … Lots and lots of freckles.
My favourite item of clothing is … a pair of black Chanel boots, which I bought on eBay a few years ago and haven’t taken off since.
I wish I’d never worn … orange corduroy flares, which I wore as a child.
It’s not fashionable but I like … sports bras – they’re just so comfortable.
I drive/ride … I have a Nissan Figaro, which I love – but I can’t drive yet. So I walk everywhere with my dog Monty. He’s a Maltese and he’s awesome.
My home is … a big loft in New York with lots of 1970s furniture, which I share with my boyfriend Will. A lot of my friends have painted murals on the wall. It smells of my cooking and is usually rammed with people.
My favourite building … is Gaudi’s Batllo House in Barcelona. It’s a piece of art.
My favourite work of art is … ‘Gaia’ by Alex Grey. You can just get lost in it.
A book that changed me … There were two: ‘Prozac Nation’ by Elizabeth Wurtzel and ‘A Million Little Pieces’ by James Frey. My mum made me read them in order to help me understand addiction.
Banned Books Week
Banned Books Week:
Celebrating the Freedom to Read!
Banned Books Week is the only national celebration of the freedom to read. It was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. More than a thousand books have been challenged since 1982. The challenges have occurred in every state and in hundreds of communities. Click here to see a map of book bans and challenges in the US from 2007 to 2009. People challenge books that they say are too sexual or too violent. They object to profanity and slang, and protest against offensive portrayals of racial or religious groups–or positive portrayals of homosexuals. Their targets range from books that explore the latest problems to classic and beloved works of American literature.
Happy Rosh Hashanah
To All The Duffers I’ve Loved Before
Golfer accused of tossing 3,000 balls into Joshua Tree park
Joshua Tree National Park, in the California desert not far from Palm Springs, is known for its strange trees and bare rocks. But not golf.
That’s why the discovery of nearly 3,000 golf balls on the alien landscape caused the National Park Service to cry something other than “Fore!”, the Los Angeles Times tells us.
Seems the bevy of balls, tossed from a passing car, was just one golf lover’s tribute to dead duffers.
But the park service is calling Douglas Jones, a 57-year-old golf course worker, a litterer.
Park spokesman Joe Zarki explains:
“Sometime around 2007 our rangers began discovering large quantities of golf balls in some turnout areas of the park. We were wondering what was going on here. There were also some tennis balls involved.“He said he did it because he wanted to honor all the golfers who had died.”
Haiku Finder
JAMES FREY Tonight in Cologne – 8pm
Hamburg:
HARBOURFRONT LITERATURE FESTIVAL
Date: Monday, 14 September, 9 pm
Tickets: € 12,-
Location: uebel & gefaehrlich, Feldstr. 66
Link: click for website
Stuttgart:
LiTERATURHAUS
Date: Tuesday, 15 September, 8 pm
Location: Stuttgarter Literaturhaus,
Breitscheidstr. 4
Tickets: € 8,-/6,-/4,-
Link: click for website
Cologne:
LiTERATURHAUS
Date: Wednesday, 16 September, 8 pm
Location: Koelner Literaturhaus, Schoenhauser Str. 8
Tickets: € 7,-/5,-/4,-
Link: click for website
Bad Brains Flip Flops
One week left to enter our Bad Brains Flip Flop contest!
| Last week we told you about our Bad Brains flip flop giveaway… Just a reminder that our contest ends next Tuesday. Made especially for the Fuji Rock Festival by our friends in Japan, these are not available in stores… so this is your only chance to get ’em!
Enter to win a pair of Bad Brains Flip Flops here. Bad Brains on Tour: HR Solo Dates |
We Don’t Need No Janko-cation
Beyond Sad – But At Least He’s Now At Peace
Mister ArtSee @ Half Gallery
Artist Elliott Arkin’s Highly-Anticipated Mobile Art Laboratory at Half Gallery
New York, NY – The Art-Z group, founded by artist Elliott Arkin, announced today the exhibition of a scale-model Mister ArtSee, a vintage ice-cream truck completely transformed into a wondrous mobile arts laboratory that can travel city streets and will host a wide array of engaging projects including installations, sound-pieces, performances, presentations, visual art and videos. The exhibition debuts on September 10th at Half Gallery during the New York Fall art preview and runs through September 17th.
A first-of-its-kind experimental platform in both form and content, Mister ArtSee was conceived by Elliott Arkin, and designed by Atelier DNA, a New York City architecture and technology studio headed by architect Dario Nunez-Ameni. A work of art as well as a space for art, Mister ArtSee has been developed to maximize versatility, accessibility and expandability as a self-sufficient, multipurpose art-mobile, whose possibilities are limited only by the imagination of its participants.
“Like a Swiss-army knife, Mister ArtSee will be equipped with numerous extensions—a platform stage, video projectors, a podium—with the ability to fold out and open up to facilitate such projects,” said artist Elliott Arkin. “The design seeks to achieve maximum versatility and world class artistry to fulfill our mission of bringing
In addition to Half Gallery founders James Frey, Bill Powers and Andy Spade, who represent Arkin, Mister ArtSee’s Board of Advisors include: the prominent Dutch art collectors Ben and Coco Van Meerondonk; Museum Magazine’s creator Larry Warsh; New York Cares founder Noah Gotbaum; architect Dario Nunez-Ameni and artists Marc Lafia, Kiki Seror and Renee Cox. The group has received several grants including $50,000 from the Annenberg Foundation, as well as a The Brooklyn Arts Council re-grant from the New York State Council on the Arts
Jim Carroll Gone
Larry Gelbart Gone
‘M-A-S-H,”Tootsie’ writer Larry Gelbart dies
By BOB THOMAS
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Larry Gelbart, the award-winning writer whose sly, sardonic wit helped create such hits as Broadway’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” the films “Tootsie” and “Oh, God!” and television’s “M-A-S-H,” is dead.
Gelbart died at his Beverly Hills home Friday morning after a long battle with cancer, said Creative Artists Agency, which represented him. He was 81.
His wife of 53 years, Pat Gelbart, told The Associated Press Friday that after being married for so long, “we finished each other’s sentences.” She declined to specify the type of cancer he had.
Gelbart, who won a Tony for “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” an Emmy for “M-A-S-H” and was nominated for two Oscars, is most likely best remembered for the long-running TV show about Army doctors during the Korean War.
Carl Reiner, his longtime friend and colleague, called Gelbart “the Jonathan Swift of our day.”
A Golden Lion for Lebanon
Frey in “The Wilde Years”
SVA Presents “The Wilde Years”
11 Sep 2009
School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “The Wilde Years: Four Decades of Shaping Visual Culture,” an exhibition that celebrates designers, art directors and other creative professionals who have graduated from the BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department at SVA.
Designed by Kevin O’Callaghan, chair of 3D Design at SVA, the multi-media exhibition space of “The Wilde Years” will place familiar advertisements, book covers, CD packaging and posters within everyday settings. A comfortable reading nook will highlight book jacket design and feature covers for James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Hilary Rodham Clinton’s Living History and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, among other best sellers. Subway advertisements, including theatrical posters for Broadway hits like Rent, Chicago and John Leguizamo’s Freak, will be on view within a mock subway platform. A life-size bus shelter will include advertising campaigns for Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi and Showtime, while a mini-screening room will project television commercials and music videos.