Andy’s Michael
Rising interest, pricetag for Warhol portrait of Jackson
NEW YORK — A portrait of a beaming Michael Jackson by pop art legend Andy Warhol, purchased just weeks ago for less than 300,000 dollars, could fetch as much as 10 million dollars at auction next month, art connoisseurs said Thursday.
Since Jackson’s June 25 death, anything related to the King of Pop has soared in value — as has the 30-inch by 26-inch (76-centimeter by 66-centimeter) Warhol silkscreen and synthetic polymer paint portrait.
The 1984 head-and-shoulders painting shows a “Thriller”-vintage Jackson: tawny skin and cascading curls, smiling broadly and wearing red and gold-tinged military garb.
“We had an overwhelming response,” said Janet Lehr, owner of the East Hampton, New York gallery.
Beck interviews Waits
Tom Waits x Beck Hansen : Pt. 1
Irrelevant Topics in a new section featuring conversations between musicians, artists, writers, etc. on various subjects, without promotional pretext or editorial direction. For the first in this series of conversations, the legendary musician and performer, Tom Waits agreed lend an hour of his time to talk about anything and nothing in particular.
Here is Pt. 1 of that conversation.
Tom Waits: How you doin’?
BH: Good, I’m good.
TW: Are we up and runnin’?
BH: Yeah I think so. Hey, I wanted to ask you about being from Los Angeles. You grew up there…
TW: Yeah, Whittier, La Habra, Downey, that whole area. Yeah, Los Lobos, they’re from Whittier. So is Nixon. I remember Nixon’s market. He had his own family market.
BH: He was? For some reason I thought he was from the Midwest.
TW: No, California, and we used to get a visit every year from the Oscar Meyer wiener mobile, which was an enormous vehicle shaped like a hot dog. The driver was a Dwarf, and the wiener mobile would broadcast music while he sang the song “I wish I was an Oscar Meyer wiener.” He drew quite a crowd. Pretty exciting for a shopping center.
BH: That car is still driving around. I see it from time to time.
TW: You see the Oscar Meyer wiener mobile?
BH: I’ve seen it parked.
TW: They used to pass out little whistles that were about two inches long and it had three notes available. (Laughs.) Whittier lore.
BH: I was born in the McArthur park area.
TW: You remember when they drained McArthur Park, the lake?
BH: I do, yeah…
TW: They found unbelievable things: Cars, human bones, weaponry.
BH: They should have done an exhibit.
TW: I don’t know why they didn’t. I thought that’s why they drained it.
BH: I’d always heard that when they drained the Echo Park Lake they found an amateur submarine.
TW: Oh, my God.
BH: I don’t know if that was lore.
TW: You mean a homemade submarine?
BH: Yeah, I think it was older too, from the early days of “home submarine building.” I don’t know if that subculture still exists?
TW: That was the East Kids.
BH: There’s so many different versions of the city.
TW: It is pretty international. Drive over here and you’re in Russia. Here, Indonesia, the Philippines, Central America. It’s pretty wild that way.
BH: I think of the city as a sort of mirage. If you look at pictures of the city a hundred years ago it’s just a bunch of weeds and desert dust. Its not really supposed to be here. I was always fascinated by the city it was meant to be. I guess it was a place created by developers. It’s not really like a city where some people roam around and then they find a good piece of land, and then they test it out for a while and make sure there is water so they don’t die, and then they decide to make a city. I started looking at some pictures…Beverly Hills was originally supposed to be called Morocco Junction. I started thinking, if they’d gone with that name we’d be in a whole other situation. I was wondering if there were any things that you remember? It seems like it’s shed its skin so many times.
TW: Well, cars choked everything. I know originally there was a red line that ran from San Bernardino all the way to the ocean and for 35 Cents you could ride a streetcar you know from…
[ click to continue reading a fascinating interview with these two geniuses ]
Cali Baked
courtesy of KF
Send Your Name To Mars For Free
Send your name to Mars for free
Ever wanted to go to Mars but lack the time/money/proper training? Well, you can send your name instead. NASA offers you the opportunity to include your name on a microchip on the Mars Science Laboratory rover heading to Mars in 2011 for free. Just provide your name and location on the registration page. You’ll also be able to print out a certificate of participation after you register.
Julius Shulman Gone
Why exactly are they deviled?
When Physics Is Your Friend
Kate & Mr. Cowell
KATE MOSS Model Business empire with Simon Cowell
Kate Moss is set to launch a £1 billion business empire with Simon Cowell. The supermodel has joined forces with the music mogul and British businessman Sir Philip Green to form a global entertainment super-company which the trio hope will be able to compete with Disney.
The 35-year-old beauty will be directing the style and image of the brand, as well as giving fashion advice, and experts say if it is a success, she could double her fortune to £100 million. Kate’s friend said:”She has been signed as a figurehead and style setter for the fashion end of the business. She will bring her expertise to the table, advising on all branding and style for clothes, hair and accessories.”
A importância dos amigos
I don’t know about you, but I still always root for the bull.
Museums Without The Meat
Museums on the internet? Get real
Excited talk about digital museums is just futuristic babble – museums are all about the physical artefacts
‘Museums, where every encounter is solid’ … Robert Therrien’s table and chairs installation at Tate Modern. Photograph courtesy of Anthony d’Offay Ltd
Neil MacGregor and Nick Serota, the two leading museum directors in Britain – and some would say in the world – shared a platform the other night at the London School of Economics and apparently they were getting very excited about the internet. They seem to have competed to say the most apocalyptically futuristic things they could think of. Museums in the future will be totally transformed by the online utopia! The ones who don’t adapt will go to the wall! It’s virtuality or nothing for the modern museum.
I, for one, don’t like the sound of this cyber-museum of the future at all. It sounds like a place where nothing is real and beauty becomes just a word.
New Living Colour Coming
Original members Vernon Reid, Corey Glover, Will Calhoun and (since 1993) Doug Wimbish gathered at Sono Studios outside of Prague in the Czech Republic during the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009 to write and record what would become “The Chair In The Doorway”. The results stretch from the modern soul anthem “Behind The Sun” to the politically-charged, heavy rock of “DecaDance” to the sacred steel blues of “Bless Those”. The artwork for “The Chair In The Doorway” was compiled from thousands of contest entries by fans from around the world.
“We feel like this is the best record we’ve made yet and we couldn’t be more excited to be releasing it with the legendary Megaforce Records,” says guitarist Vernon Reid. “Some of our favorite bands were or areMegaforce artists — METALLICA, BAD BRAINS, ANTHRAX, BLACK CROWES — so it’s an honor to be part of a label with a great legacy.”
Lockdown On Nabokov by Knopf
If You Want to Read Nabokov’s Laura Early, You’ll Have to Make a House Call to Knopf
By Leon Neyfakh
On Friday afternoon we ran through some of the most exciting galleys hitting the streets this summer. One we didn’t include was The Original of Laura, the final, unfinished novella from the late Vladimir Nabokov, which Knopf will be publishing on November 17. The reason Laura didn’t make it on our list was that we couldn’t find anyone who had actually seen a galley of it. Today, Knopf’s executive director of publicity, Paul Bogaards, provided an explanation via email.
“They are not available (and will not be available),” Mr. Bogaards said in his note. “We have instead printed two sets of page proofs and are inviting media colleagues to preview them at our offices. They are not leaving the building.”
Lucy And The Teenage Monster
Bloody Golf
Psychiatric nurse jailed for golf rage attack
Amateur golfer sent to prison for nine months after beating a fellow player around the head with a club
A golfer who beat a fellow player around the head with an eight iron after an outbreak of “golf rage” was today jailed for nine months.
Harold Stafford, a psychiatric nurse, launched the attack on Barry Barnes after he accused him of playing his ball at a golf course in Luton.
During his trial at Luton crown court, Stafford claimed he acted in self-defence after Barnes had racially abused him.
The court heard that he began shouting at Barnes, accusing him of playing his ball. The argument intensified, and as Barnes turned his back to walk away, Stafford took an eight iron and began beating the golfer about the head.
The father-of-two knocked Barnes to the ground and continued his assault, hitting and kicking him, leaving him with bruising to his eyes, cuts and bruises to his chest, and bruising to his back and arms.
Stafford was convicted of actual bodily harm with the judge praising his previous good character and service to the community as he passed sentence.
Claudette Elliott, prosecuting, said: “This is a golf rage incident that occurred on 19 September 2008.
“The defendant was there with two of his friends and there was a misunderstanding about a ball that had gone astray.
“He felt that Mr Barnes had played his ball and he hit Mr Barnes with a golf club, causing it to break.
“Mr Barnes suffered quite serious injuries. He had two black eyes, his right eye puffed up to the size of a golf ball and his left eye was almost closed.
“The defendant has made it clear that golf is his passion. He said: ‘I love to play golf and I would play every day if I could. I also understand that golf is a game of integrity and honour.'”
“And after the great and terrible clash, the victors dined upon the dead….”
Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies
It could be a combination of 19th-century mechanics, 21st-century technology — and a 20th-century horror movie.
A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.Robotic Technology Inc.’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that’s right, “EATR” — “can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable,” reads the company’s Web site.That “biomass” and “other organically-based energy sources” wouldn’t necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they’d be plentiful in a war zone.[ click to continue reading at Fox News ]
Youth, Speed, Trouble, Cigarettes, Gummo
Dash Snow Gone
Dash Snow, Downtown Artist, Said to Be Dead of Overdose
Multiple sources tell us that Dash Snow— photographer, semen artist, graffiti writer, and embodiment of the downtown NYC scene—has apparently died of a heroin overdose, two years shy of his 30th birthday.
We got a tip this morning that Dash had overdosed last night. Earsnot, a.k.a. Kunle Irak, a fellow downtown artist and one of Dash’s best friends
A separate source close to Dash confirmed to us this morning through an intermediary that Dash has died. It’s already popping up on Twitter, as well. We’ll let you know more details as we learn them. (Snow’s gallery, Peres Projects in Berlin, isn’t releasing a comment).
Dash Snow was most memorably profiled by Ariel Levy in New York magazine two years ago. He and his friends came up in the downtown graffiti scene, and branched out to find success in the art world, without ever losing their bizarre, drug-addled edge.
What makes the legend richer is that Dash Snow could very easily have lived a different kind of life, been a different kind of artist. Snow’s maternal grandmother is a De Menil, which is to say art-world royalty, the closest thing to the Medicis in the United States. His mother made headlines a few years ago for charging what was then the highest rent ever asked on a house in the Hamptons: $750,000 a season. And his brother, Maxwell Snow, is a budding member of New York society who has dated Mary-Kate Olsen. But Snow has concocted something else for himself. He has been living as hard as a person can-in and out of jail, doing drugs, running from the police-for a decade. He’s unschooled, self-taught.
The Irak crew, which Dash helped found, is now world famous. You can still see his “SACER” tags around the city.
Arturo Gatti Gone
Le Big Mac Gourmet
The website that turns your Big Mac into a gourmet dinner
A Big Mac hamburger and french fries in a McDonald’s fast food restaurant. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images
Want a junk food fix, but fear losing your sophisticated edge? Erik Trinidad’s blog fancyfastfood.com has the answer. With the honest tag line, “Yeah, it’s still bad for you – but see how good it can look!”, Trinidad transforms convenience food into gourmet creations.
Inspired by childhood games with his brother, when the pair competed to restyle dishes at Chinese buffets, the blog showcases his makeovers with Domino’s pizza turned into Dao Mi Noh Chow Mein (with soy sauce produced by reducing cola), a sushi platter constructed from chicken shop purchases, and a Big Mac given a new life as steak and chips.
Simon Le Bon’s Spawn Named Hottest Celebrity Daughter
Amber Le Bon world’s hottest celebrity daughter
BANG Showbiz
Amber Le Bon is the world’s Hottest Celebrity Daughter.
The 19-year-old model – the daughter of Duran Duran singer Simon Le Bon and his supermodel wife Yasmin – was bestowed the accolade by readers of website www.zootoday.com, who gave her an overall score of 8.2 out of 10.
Deputy editor of Zoo magazine Damien McSorley said: “Despite being one of the lesser-known celebrity daughters, the Zoo web users have been swung by the beauty of Simon and Yasmin Le Bon’s daughter Amber. The worthy winner, she has clearly taken after her mother – no offence Simon!”
One user Robert Beaulieu commented: “The best thing to come out of Duran Duran ever.”
Mickey Rourke’s Best Friend
Mickey Rourke’s best friend
Rourke’s Chihuahua Loki stayed by his side through highs and lows for more than a decade. Here, check out the actor and his best friend through the years.
There are together here, poolside, at the Sunglass Hut Swim Shows in Miami in July 2006.
Loki passed away on Feb. 17, 2008. Read the story here.”
When actor Mickey Rourke won the best actor Golden Globe for his role in “The Wrestler,” he thanked some of the usual folks – but the most heartfelt acknowledgement went out to his dogs.
Rourke’s Chihuahua Loki stayed by his side through highs and lows for more than a decade. Here, check out the actor and his best friend through the years.
There are together here, poolside, at the Sunglass Hut Swim Shows in Miami in July 2006.
Loki passed away on Feb. 17, 2008. Read the story here.
Oldest Version Of Bible In Book Form Found On The Internet
Codex Sinaiticus: the virtual edition
In fragments for centuries, one of the oldest books in the world is now available to flick through in one place – online
Even if it was not the oldest Bible text in book form, the online publication today of the Codex Sinaiticus would be an extraordinary achievement.
The book itself is well worth the extravagant description of Dr Scot McKendrick, head of western manuscripts at the British Library: that it is one of the world’s greatest written treasures. There are older Biblical texts and fragments, but the codex, originally bound together rather than compiled as scrolls, may be the oldest surviving book in the world, dating back to the very earliest years of that particular new technology.
But now so sophisticated is modern technology that scholars will not only be able to read the document on their screens using a standard light setting, but also separately by a raking illumination that highlights the texture and features of the very parchment on which the 800 surviving pages of text were written.
The original book is thought to have been 1,460 pages long but much of the early part of the Old Testament, Genesis for example, is missing. It is possible other bits may yet be found – 40 pages turned up at the Monastery of St Catherine on the Sinai peninsula, where the codex may have been written, as recently as 1975.
The experts will be able to decipher the distinct handwriting of the three original scribes and, perhaps even more excitingly, trace the extensive corrections made to the text – letters, words, whole sentences – over the 600 years after it was first compiled in the mid-fourth century. And, for the first time, they will be able to do so for free, without leaving their desks, let alone shuffling between London, Leningrad, Leipzig and Sinai where the four parts of the original still remain.
The Downward Nanny
Yoga Faces Regulation, and Firmly Pushes Back
Ruby Washington/The New York Times
Alison West, head of a yoga teachers’ coalition in New York.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Ten years ago, with yoga transforming into a ubiquitous pop culture phenomenon from a niche pursuit, yoga teachers banded together to create a voluntary online registry of schools meeting new standards for training instructors.
But that list — which now includes nearly 1,000 yoga schools nationwide, many of them tiny — is being put to a use for which it was never intended. It is the key document in a crackdown that pits free-spirited yogis against lumbering state governments, which, unlike those they are trying to regulate, are not always known for their flexibility.
Citing laws that govern vocational schools, like those for hairdressers and truck drivers, regulators have begun to require licenses for yoga schools that train instructors, with all the fees, inspections and paperwork that entails. While confrontations have played out differently in different states, threats of shutdowns and fines have, in some cases, been met with accusations of power grabs and religious infringement — disputes that seem far removed from the meditative world yoga calls to mind.
In April, New York State sent letters to about 80 schools warning them to suspend teacher training programs immediately or risk fines of up to $50,000. But yogis around the state joined in opposition, and the state has, for now, backed down.
In other states, regulators were not moved. In March, Michigan gave schools a week to be certified by the state or cease operations. Virginia’s cumbersome licensing rules include a $2,500 fee — a big hit for modest studios that are often little more than one-room storefronts.
Lisa Rapp, who owns My Yoga Spirit in Norfolk, Va., said she was closing her seven-year-old business this summer. “This caused us to shut down the studio altogether,” Ms. Rapp said. “It’s too bad, because this community really needs yoga.”
Construction Worker On A Chain Rescues Woman From Drowning
Five Feet Of Compost
from Google News via AP via The New York Post
Wallet stolen in 1982 found in NYC tree; $20 gone
NEW YORK (AP) — Money doesn’t grow on trees, but a tree-care supervisor in New York City’s Central Park found an old wallet inside a dead one.
The blue leather wallet had been stolen by a pickpocket 27 years ago. It was found in the hollow of a dying cherry tree. It was near where Ruth Bendik had hers swiped while she watched the New York City Marathon in 1982.
The 69-year-old Upper East Side resident says the only thing missing was $20 in cash. Her credit cards were still there. So were her student ID from Columbia University Teachers College and an employee ID from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
The park worker says he found the wallet last week under five feet of compost. Police tracked down Bendik the next day.
Reggie Fleming Gone
Ex-Blackhawk Reggie Fleming dead at 73
July 11, 2009 2:00 PM
Reggie Fleming, a member of the Chicago Blackhawks 1961 Stanley Cup champions, passed away this morning at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights, his son Chris said today. He was 73.
Check back for more details.
Fleming’s biography on Wikipedia and on Legends of Hockey; Fleming’s career stats
Soul Power ’74 Out Of Africa At Last
Zaire’s Moment of the Soul
Antidote Films/Sony Pictures
The Zaire ’74 music festival included African musicians like Miriam Makeba, center, as well as top American soul acts like the Spinners, left, and and James Brown, right. The festival is the subject of the film “Soul Power.”
LEFTOVERS can be tasty.
Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, the director of the new documentary “Soul Power,” was a film editor in 1995 for “When We Were Kings,” the Oscar-winning documentary directed by Leon Gast about the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 heavyweight world championship bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire (now Congo).
That fight had a huge sideshow: Zaire ’74, a three-day music festival of American soul alongside African music, headlined by James Brown and filmed by the same crew that was in Zaire for the fight. “Soul Power” presents that festival from its precarious beginnings to the finale of a shirtless, sweating James Brown singing to an African audience, “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.”
The festival was a striking sociocultural moment. African-American and Latin musicians were being introduced to Africa and African musicians amid Mr. Ali’s black-power politics and a hodgepodge of visiting music, sports and literary figures. “There was a lot of deeper meaning about why people went there and what it evoked for them,” Mr. Levy-Hinte said.
Hemingway Exposed As Failure
Hemingway revealed as failed KGB spy
Notes from Stalin-era intelligence archives show ‘agent Argo’ as a willing recruit in 1941
Useful in battle? Ernest Hemingway in 1944. Photograph: George Karger/Time Life Pictures
Up till now, this has been a notably cheerful year for admirers of Ernest Hemingway – a surprisingly diverse set of people who range from Michael Palin to Elmore Leonard. Almost every month has brought good news: a planned Hemingway biopic; a new, improved version of his memoir, A Moveable Feast; the opening of a digital archive of papers found in his Cuban home; progress on a movie of Islands in the Stream.
Last week, however, saw the publication of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press), which reveals the Nobel prize-winning novelist was for a while on the KGB’s list of its agents in America. Co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, the book is based on notes that Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, made when he was given access in the 90s to Stalin-era intelligence archives in Moscow.
Its section on the author’s secret life as a “dilettante spy” draws on his KGB file in saying he was recruited in 1941 before making a trip to China, given the cover name “Argo”, and “repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help us” when he met Soviet agents in Havana and London in the 40s. However, he failed to “give us any political information” and was never “verified in practical work”, so contacts with Argo had ceased by the end of the decade. Was he only ever a pseudo-spook, possibly seeing his clandestine dealings as potential literary material, or a genuine but hopelessly ineffective one?
The latter reading would chime with his attempts to assist the US during the second world war in his fishing boat El Pilar, patrolling waters north of Cuba in search of U-Boats, making coded notes but only one sighting.
Tortoise @ Amoeba
From Crack Houses To Evil Aliens
from The Guardian’s Books Blog
James Frey targets a million little readers
Controversial writer James Frey has been outed as the co-author of a hot new children’s book, as yet unpublished. But why all the mystery?
From crack houses to evil aliens … James Frey. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty
Not content with penning the third book of the Bible, James Frey, who wrote of his struggle with drug addiction in a controversial memoir, is turning to children’s books.
As ever with Frey, who was found to have fabricated parts of his autobiography, A Million Little Pieces, there are layers within layers to this latest book deal. Last week it emerged in the New York Times that a young adult novel was being hawked to publishers as a collaboration between a bestselling writer and an emerging new author. The book, called I Am Number Four, is about a group of alien teenagers who take refuge on Earth when their planet is attacked.
The New York Times outed Frey as the author, and yesterday reported that HarperCollins Children’s Books had acquired North American rightsin the first four books in what is being billed as a series, starting with I Am Number Four.
Film rights have also been acquired by Dreamworks for a high six-figure sum, added the Hollywood Reporter, with Michael Bay (director of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) lined up to produce and possibly direct.
As yet Frey himself has not commented on the deal, telling website Gawker – where he interned for a day – that he could “neither confirm nor deny that I had anything to do with that book”. However, he has posted a link to the New York Times piece revealing him as the author on his official website, also linking to a story revealing more of the plot details. The evil aliens are from the planet Mogadore, who destroyed the planet Lorien in order to take its natural resources; they follow the planet’s teenagers, who develop special powers aged 15, to Earth to complete the job.