Do Not Watch While Hallucinating
Top Hat of Couture
John Mahdessian prefers not to be called a dry cleaner.
“That’s a fuckin’ insult,” he said, between pulls off a Marlboro Light on a recently Sunday morning. “That’s like calling a world-renowned surgeon a doctor.”
We were outside the nail salon next door to the Madame Paulette flagship, first opened by Mr. Mahdessian’s great-uncle Andy as a mom-and-pop dry cleaner in 1958, when it was named for Andy’s wife, a French gal who worked as the seamstress. It recently underwent a massive $500,000 renovation and now occupies half the block.
Mr. Mahdessian, 43, is president of what is now called the Madame Paulette Organization, “the world’s leading custom couture cleaner.” The jovial, self-described “eligible bachelor with a spotless reputation” has been married to his business since taking the reins from his father, Noubar, 20 years ago. (“He thinks girls are like shirts: You have to change them every two weeks,” Noubar said wryly.)
John works six days a week. Sundays he treats himself to a mani-pedi and a massage.
Interview In The Break Room
A Million Little Mashups
from Coudal Partners via MediaBistro
A QUICK CONTEST FROM WHERE WE DO OUR BEST THINKING
Booking Bands
The walls in the washroom at our studio are all chalkboards. It was Susan’s idea and after she spent a weekend painting them up, not much happened. An occasional drawing or joke was added, a visiting courier might leave a crude message or one of Jim’s kids would draw a puppy or write something unintelligible. Lately, however, we’ve taken to using that forum for a series of wordplay games and the current one is pretty fun. The idea is to mash up the name of a book with the name of a band.
Here’s a few of our examples to get you started:
The Things They Might Be Giants Carried*
The Who Moved My Cheese*
The Old Man and The Sea and Cake*
Charlie Daniels and the Chocolate Factory*
Catch 182*
Horton Hears a Hoobastank*
Of Mice and Men at Work*
Bare Naked Lunch Ladies*
The Agony and the XTC*
JAMES FREY? WASN’T HE IN THE EAGLES?
A Million Little Pixies (Aaron Kelly)
A Million Little Feat Pieces (Jim Sheeran)
A Million Little Richards (Brian Braiker)
A Million Little Peaches and Herb (Robert Hofheimer)
My Friend Lynrd Skynrd (Daniel Pink)
My Friend Leonard Cohen (Jamie Stolarski)
(I am TOTALLY dismayed that no one got “A Marillion Little Pieces*” or “My Friend Len”)
Charles Dickens’ not-so-slim pickens
The Pickwick pAperchAse (Cy Culpin)
Nickolas Nickelback (Joshua Johnson)
Oliver Twisted Sister (Joshua Johnson)
Nicholas Nickelbee Gees (Jim Sheeran)
A Christmas Carole King (Tracie Bedell)
A Christmas Carole King Lear (John Upchurch)
A Christmas Carol Channing (Meredith Payne)
David Gray Copperfield (Troy Kukes)
Bleak Housemartins (Tom Ward)
A Tale of Two Bay City Rollers (Tim Carvell)
A Tale of U2 Cities (Jessica Sheeran)
Great White Expectations (John Boeckmann)
“Because then the actresses used to be dressed to the gills.”
Susan Farley / For The Times
COLUMN ONE
The typist’s tale of ‘Last Tycoon’
Years after ‘Gatsby,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald’s secretary got to witness the second act of an author who didn’t believe in them.
By David L. Ulin
June 8, 2009
All these years later, Frances Kroll Ring can still see it, the afternoon she filled out an application at Rusty’s Employment Agency on Hollywood Boulevard and drove to Encino to meet a writer who was looking for a secretary.
It was April 1939, and she was 22, a Bronx transplant with typing and dictation skills. She’d been in Southern California for a little more than a year, coming west to help her father, a New York furrier, set up shop on Wilshire Boulevard. “Everybody said, ‘You’re a furrier? What are you doing in Southern California?’ ” Ring remembers. “But he knew the studios used furs. Because then the actresses used to be dressed to the gills.”
Wiki Wiki Huh? Wiki
The Wars of Words on Wikipedia’s Outskirts
IT is an interesting twist about Wikipedia that the most controversial, most heavily trafficked articles — on abortion, politics, virgin birth — are often the most accurate and vandalism-free. Not that people aren’t trying to cause mayhem.
It’s just that the frequent visits ensure that vandalism is quickly removed, aided by automated tools that can recognize crude writing before it ever appears.
Leave these high-traffic thoroughfares, however, and things can get a bit sketchier. A few wrong turns and you may find yourself deep in Hatfield-and-McCoy territory. Entrenched enemies engage in combat over the wording of topics so obscure — Armenian historians from the first millennium, for example, or breakfast cereals — that you may wonder: so much fighting over this?
But it is exactly the obscurity that makes these Wikipedia articles ripe for feuding, fighting and vandalism. A basic tenet of the online encyclopedia is that articles be written from a neutral point of view.
“Tech has taken us / For a ride.”
Billy Elliot Fan Kicks Tony’s Ass
‘Billy Elliot’ wins 10 Tonys; best play is ‘Carnage’
By Michael Kuchwara
Associated Press
Updated: 06/08/2009 10:28:26 AM CDT
From left, David Alvarez, Kiril Kulish, and Trent Kowalik accept the award for Best Performance by a leading Actor in a Musical, for their shared role in the show “Billy Elliot the Musical”, at the 63rd annual Tony Awards in New York, Sunday, June 7, 2009. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) (AP)
NEW YORK — “Billy Elliot,” the big British musical about a coal miner’s son who dreams to dance, bowled over Broadway on Sunday, winning 10 Tonys, including best musical and a unique best actor prize for the three young performers who share the title character.
The trio — David Alvarez, Trent Kowalik and Kiril Kulish — traded off on the “thank you” part of their acceptance speech, shyly thanking people associated with the show only by their first names. They also acknowledged siblings and parents. Finally, Kulish told the cheering crowd at Radio City Music Hall, “We want to say to all the kids out there who might want to dance: Never give up.”
“Billy Elliot” collected eight other awards, including director of a musical, book of a musical and choreography, but its composer, Elton John, was upset for best score.
“Sui generis in its imagined depiction of the world.”
Raqib Shaw – conjuror of magical worlds
Fantastical finishes showcase the work of Raqib Shawa – a vibrant artist destined for greatness.
By Norman Rosenthal
Intense: Raqib Shaw’s ‘Absence of God’
If you are involved in the business of constantly looking at contemporary art, as I am, it is rare to come across an artist’s work so different, in the best sense of the word, that it seems almost sui generis in its imagined depiction of the world.
Such is the case of the work of the Kashmiri artist Raqib Shaw, born in Calcutta in 1974, and who came to the UK in 1998. He studied at Central St Martins School of Art, and now lives and works in his north London studio, which he hardly ever leaves.
[H]e has had shows of his work at Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, so there must be some kind of buzz around him, even if he is still relatively little known by the general art public. Hopefully his new spectacular show, about to open at White Cube in Hoxton Square, will change that, at least here in London.
The Death Of Thumbing It
A guide to hitchhiking’s decline
It’s not driver selfishness that’s done for thumbing a lift but technological and economic change
Joe Moran, Friday 5 June 2009 23.30 BS
The decline of hitching is a lesson in how significant historical changes happen invisibly. I own a secondhand copy of the Hitch-hiker’s Manual: Britain, published in 1979 by a young travel journalist, Simon Calder. This uninviting-looking book, with its grainy pages and ugly typeface, conjures up an exotic roadside world that is now vanished.
It provides a record of the rich hitchhiking subculture that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s: the long line of hitchers at hotspots like Staples Corner at the foot of the M1, with their own imperfectly executed queueing etiquette; the attention-grabbing gimmicks used by the more enterprising hitchers, such as wearing ties, dinner suits and even gorilla costumes; and the dirty tricks employed by the unscrupulous, like leaning on crutches or wearing soldiers’ uniforms to encourage drivers to stop.
Why is this tribe of people virtually extinct? Drivers did not suddenly become less altruistic and, while risk is often cited as a factor, the number of machete-wielding psychopaths on the roads has presumably remained stable.
There are two schools of thought about the decline of hitching…. The second school of thought focuses on a more nebulous cultural shift. Hitching began its long decline at the end of the 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher came to power. Is it possible that, in a less equal society that is more sceptical about the value of public goods, there has been a gradual waning of the civic-minded impulse? Certainly the Thatcher years saw a general reaction against anyone perceived as a hippyish freeloader, epitomised by the attitudes towards new age travellers at Stonehenge. In a society where everything has a price, it becomes harder to sustain what the social policy expert Richard Titmuss called the gift relationship: the kinds of exchanges based on trust and goodwill that bring intangible benefits to everyone but are the hardest to retrieve when they are gone. Just as you need a well-populated tribe of hitchers to create the perception that it is a respectable activity, so any gift economy needs a self-sustaining momentum for it to work.
Décolletage Opening for Emin
Vital Signs
LONDON
06.01.09
Left: Artist Tracey Emin. Right: A view of Tracey Emin’s show at White Cube. (All photos: Lynne Gentle)
MASON’S YARD IN SAINT JAMES’S was the place to be in London on Thursday night for Tracey Emin’s “Those Who Suffer Love” at White Cube, and Abraham Cruzvillegas around the corner at Thomas Dane Gallery.
The weather was superb, the designer shades were big, the heels were death-defying, and there were mountains of décolletage as far as the eye could see—coincidence, perhaps, but I suspected homage to endowed and proud Ms. T. Emin. A steady succession of glossy, purring motors dispatched oiled and dapper Euro-men sporting size 0 arm candy. Everyone was groomed and dressed to the nines—a rare spectacle in London, where the drizzle often defeats even the most determined sartorial efforts.
Where Emin’s work was once shocking and self-consciously “obscene,” it now seems almost quaint; its poetry has outshone its shock value. The exhibition, comprising neon, animation, sculpture, and works on paper, was beautifully hung, and even the animation of a woman (certainly the artist) masturbating felt almost PG-13.
Darby Crash in The Decline Of Western Civilization
Smokey Finally Beats The Bandit
Inexhaustible Icon
GM Has Left Its Brand on the Cultural Landscape
By Paul Farhi, Washington Post Staff Writer
No company — or at least no company’s products — has been as celebrated in American popular culture as General Motors. For generations, GM vehicles have inspired artistic metaphors of freedom, speed, 
youth, romance, power, sex. As a billboard in Chevrolet’s home town of Warren, Mich., once succinctly put it, “No one writes songs about Volvos.”
Heroes (and admirable anti-heroes), for example, tend to drive muscle cars. Burt Reynolds telegraphed his good ol’ boy bona fides by driving a hell-raisin’ black Pontiac Trans Am (with gold firebird hood decal) in the “Smokey and the Bandit” movies. A few years later, a high-tech version of the same muscle car conveyed crusading crime-fighter Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff) to the scene in “Knight Rider.” The Trans Am’s cousin, the Chevrolet Camaro, got the nod in the 2007 blockbuster “Transformers.” In the 1960s TV series “Route 66” — about the romantic and adventurous possibilities of the open road — the two young protagonists took to the highway in an iconic Corvette convertible.
Rock music has been inseparable from cars since rock-and-roll’s embryonic days. Some pop historians credit “Rocket 88” — written by Ike Turner in 1951 as an ode to GM’s powerful Oldsmobile Model 88 — as the first recording of the rock era.
Caine Gone
David Carradine: Life and career
Here he’s in an iconic shot from the 1970s show “Kung Fu” during which he became a household name as the character Kwai Chang Caine, a Shaolin priest traveling the 1800s American frontier.
Darling Nikki Now 25y.o.
Let’s Go Crazy: Celebrating 25 Years of Purple Rain
By PopMatters Staff
Edited by Evan Sawdey and Produced by Sarah Zupko
Introduction
*cue church organ*
”Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today 2 get through this thing called life …”
… and thus begins one of the greatest pop culture phenomena of our time.
Back in the summer of 1984,Purple Rain was more than just a movie: it was a genuineexperience, a transcendent multi-media event that celebrated commercialism and creativity in equal measure, turning a mid-level R&B singer into an overnight superstar and international sex symbol. At one point during that year, Prince had not only the Number One movie in America, but also the Number One album and the Number One single. In fact, when Purple Rain entered the album chart at peak position on August 4th of 1984 (displacing Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., of all things), it wouldn’t vacate that spot until January 19th of the following year.
Yet all these accomplishments wind up leading us to one very simple question: why?
Kade out.
Ulysses In Erotica
First edition of Ulysses sells for record £275,000
Well-preserved copy of James Joyce’s 1922 classic had been unread, except for the racy bits
A first edition copy of the book Ulysees by James Joyce, on sale at Antiquarian Book Fair, Olympia, London. Photograph: Martin Argles/Guardian
If you’re going to read any of Ulysses then it might as well be the racy bits at the end. And so it was with a fabulously rare first edition of theJames Joyce novel which today sold for £275,000, the highest price recorded for a 20th-century first edition.
The astonishingly well-preserved and previously lost edition of the book, bought surreptitiously in a Manhattan bookshop despite it being banned in the US, was sold to a private buyer in London on the opening day of one of the world’s biggest antiquarian book fairs.
Ulysses, hailed by some as a modernist masterpiece, follows the events of one day and is one of those novels that people often never quite get round to finishing, or in many cases starting.
Joyce’s vast novel was met with bafflement and anger when it was first published in 1922 with one reviewer complaining that it “appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine”.
The more salacious bits are in the last episode, where Molly Bloom’s long stream-of-consciousness soliloquy ends in her orgasmic “yes I said yes I will Yes”.
This first edition is unopened – apart from that last episode. The copy is number 45 of the first 100 and is printed on fine Dutch handmade paper.
Grilled Flat-Iron Steaks With Melted Onions, Fingerling Potatoes and Arugula
Jill Richards/The Arizona Republic
Grilled Flat-Iron Steaks With Melted Onions, Fingerling Potatoes and Arugula.
[ click for recipe ]
Koko Taylor Wang Dang Gone
Read “Queen of the Blues dies.” Write in her guest book.
Koko Taylor in the ’70s
(Tribune archive photo / February 22, 2008)
In the early 1970s, robust blues belter Koko Taylor brought new life to the local scene.
California’s Using The Chicken To Measure It
Lawsuit targets ‘rip-off’ of ‘Catcher in the Rye’
By Doug Gross, CNN
(CNN) — Reclusive author J.D. Salinger has emerged, at least in the pages of court documents, to try to stop a novel that presents Holden Caulfield, the disaffected teen hero of his classic “The Catcher in the Rye,” as an old man.
J.D. Salinger has stayed out of the public eye for most of the past half century.
Lawyers for Salinger filed suit in federal court this week to stop the publication, sale and advertisement of “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” a novel written by an author calling himself J.D. California and published by a Swedish company that advertises joke books and a “sexual dictionary” on its Web site.
“The Sequel infringes Salinger’s copyright rights in both his novel and the character Holden Caulfield, who is the narrator and essence of that novel,” said the suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in New York.
Published in 1951, “The Catcher in the Rye” is an iconic take on teen alienation that is consistently listed among the greatest English-language novels ever written.
Salinger, 90, who has famously lived the life of a recluse in New Hampshire for most of the past half-century, last published in 1965. With the exception of a 1949 movie based on one of his early short stories, he has never authorized adaptations of any of his work, even turning down an overture from director Steven Spielberg to make “Catcher” into a movie.
“There’s no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It’s all there,” the court filing quotes Salinger as saying in 1980. “Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.”
The filing refers to the new book’s author as “John Doe,” saying that the name John David California probably is made up.
It’s Just The Way Women Are Born
James Frey Reads Tonight 6pm @ Barnes & Noble Philadelphia
James Frey
Thursday, June 4th, 6pm
JAMES FREY will be speaking about and signing his new novel, Bright, Shiny Morning.
PHILADELPHIA
Thursday, June 4, 6:00 PM
BARNES & NOBLE
1805 Walnut ST
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Literal Eclipse Of The Heart
James Frey Reads Tonight 7pm @ Book Revue on Long Island (and in Philadelphia Tomorrow)
|
James Frey Wednesday, June 3rd, 7pm Bestselling author JAMES FREY will be speaking about and signing his new novel, Bright, Shiny Morning.
From one of the most celebrated and controversial authors in America comes this sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles. Dozens of characters pass through the reader’s sight lines-some never to be seen again-but James Frey lingers on a handful of LA’s lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives, illuminating the joy, horrors and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles. James Frey is the author of the New York Times bestselling books A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard. James will be in Philly the next day, reading at Barnes & Noble – PHILADELPHIA |
Cargo Bikes
May 27 2009
Whether your cargo is kids, laundry, groceries or beach gear, the coolest way to haul it is the Madsen Cargo bike. These handy urban transporters from Salt Lake City, Utah, can carry 271 kg (nearly 600 pounds) either in a bucket or on a rack. The bikes and the buckets come in three colors: dramatic black, yummy cream and sweet baby blue. Accessories for the bucket include seat belts and a seat for your progeny, pet or bride. The creative heads at Madsen are constantly tinkering with the bike and accessories, and according to their blog, a lid for the bucket is in the works. With their long tails, these bikes command attention. – Tuija Seipell
Please Vote Now For Beatnik, Jr. in Hard Rock Cafe’s Battle of the Bands
MY COUSIN’S BAND IS ONE STEP AWAY FROM WINNING A NATIONAL BATTLE OF THE BANDS COMPETITION !
My cousin Andy has been a struggling musician in L.A. for the past 3 1/2 years. Last month his band won the L. A. Hard Rock Cafe Ambassador’s of Rock battle of the bands competition. They have now played at the Sunset Blvd House of Blues and The Viper Room. Next they competed against 20 other Hard Rock Cafe winners from around the country and they are now in the finals with 4 other bands. The winner of this competition will be sent to London later this month to play in a music festival that features Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Eric Clapton and others.
The final winner will be decided based upon internet voting. As of right now Beatnik Jr. is in 2nd place.
Please, please, please, click on the link above and vote for Beatnik Jr. and if you really want to help. It only takes a few seconds. If they become famous you can say that you helped them get there!
FYI – if you view the video, Andy is the drummer.
Rock on!
Suzi
This Ain’t No Landscape In A Bottle!
Pass The Hookah ‘pon The Left-hand Side
Living and breathing the hookah culture
Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times
Alfonso “Abou Salim” Ramirez prepares a hookah for customers at Phoenicia restaurant in Glendale. His fiercely loyal clients say he’s “the best” at preparing the traditional Middle Eastern pipe filled with fruit-flavored tobacco.
Alfonso ‘Abou Salim’ Ramirez has mastered the art of preparing Middle Eastern tobacco pipes, even carving trendy bowls out of fruit. The Mexican immigrant dreams of visiting Lebanon someday.
Standing outside his hookah station at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Glendale, Alfonso “Abou Salim” Ramirez grabbed a red apple and, using a sharp knife, sliced off the top. He flipped the apple over and made four quick incisions, creating a small square.
“This is my secret,” Ramirez said, jabbing a finger into the square to pop out the core. He then stuffed red, apple-flavored tobacco into the hole and covered it with a piece of tin foil.
“I love when I’m doing this,” he said as he carefully poked holes in the foil with a toothpick. “I forget my problems. I forget everything.”
Graffiti et Le Tag
Where Louis XIV Meets Crash and Blade
The French call it le graf or le tag: the style of urban artwork that was born nearly four decades ago on New York City subways and brick walls, influencing a generation of artists, self-taught and otherwise, across the world.
Now twin sisters, gallery owners in France, have organized an exhibition to celebrate the international stamp and cultural heft of what they prefer to call le street art, a genre that may have more establishment appeal abroad than it does in the United States. The show, “Whole in the Wall,” is billed as the largest exhibition of American and European street art from 1970 to today, and includes paintings, sculpture and photography.
“It’s youth, it’s movement, it’s lively,” said Chantal Helenbeck, who with her twin, Brigitte, runs the Helenbeck Gallery in Paris, which held a similar show in November.
Trailing parfum on a high-heeled tour of the installation before it opened on Thursday in a multistory studio space on Manhattan’s far West Side, the sisters explained what drew them to street artists. “They’ve changed my vision of my work,” Chantal Helenbeck said, speaking in French, “because they haven’t gone to school. They are taught by life, and you can see that in their work.”
Brigitte added, “They bring a joie de vivre to the gallery.” With works by pioneering Bronx graffiti writers like Crash and Blade and their descendants, including Blek le Rat, a Parisian known for his stencil work, and the anonymous British artist Banksy, the show offers a diaspora that many Americans may not know existed. It’s evolved far beyond early tagging (abstractly writing a name or word in spray paint or marker, usually illegally) to more painterly and figurative forms.
Roadie Says Jimi Hendrix Was Murdered By His Manager
Jimmy Hendrix ‘was murdered’ by his manager, claims roadie
By JAMES TAPPER
Last updated at 5:32 PM on 31st May 2009
Rock legend Jimi Hendrix was murdered by his manager as part of an insurance scam, a new book by one of his former aides claims.
Hendrix choked to death on his own vomit when he was 27 – but the exact circumstances of his death have always been a mystery.
Now James ‘Tappy’ Wright, one of the rock star’s roadies, claims that Hendrix’s manager, Michael Jeffery, confessed to killing him. Jeffery is said to have made a drunken confession a year after the star’s death in September 1970.
Rock and roll: Jimi Hendrix’s death was murder, claims former roadie
An ambulance crew found Hendrix’s body in the Samarkand Hotel in West London, in the room of Monika Dannemann, a girl he had known for just a few days.
Wright claims Jeffery was worried that Hendrix was preparing to find a new manager when their deal was due to end in December 1970. According to Wright, Jeffery said he went to the hotel room and stuffed Hendrix full of pills and wine.