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Do The Right Thing Now 20 (That’s buggin’.)
Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing’ turns 20
Universal Home Entertainment
“People actually thought that young black Americans would riot across the country because of this film,” writer-director Spike Lee says. “That’s how crazy it was.”
The 1989 film about racial tensions in a New York neighborhood got people talking. They still are.
On Christmas Day, 1987, the 30-year-old Brooklyn-based filmmaker Spike Lee started working on the script for his third feature. His first, the 1986 surprise hit “She’s Gotta Have It,” was a trailblazing romantic comedy about young upscale African Americans, and his sophomore effort, “School Daze,” a musical look at black college life, was in the can and set to be released two months later. In this new project, Lee wanted to examine the racial tension that enveloped New York City at the time, most of which was due to an incident that occurred in the predominantly white Howard Beach section of Queens a year earlier: A group of white youths attacked three black men outside a pizza place for simply being the wrong color in the wrong neighborhood. One of the black men, 23-year-old Michael Griffith, was chased onto the Belt Parkway and was struck and killed by a car.
The new film, which Lee titled “Do the Right Thing,” wound up detailing how a single block in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant — one with the white-owned Sal’s Famous Pizzeria at its heart — erupted in racial violence on the hottest day of the year. It featured a striking visual style, an idiosyncratic blend of comedy and tragedy, and an extraordinary ensemble cast including Danny Aiello as Sal, the pizzeria owner; Lee as Mookie, an unambitious deliveryman; and Ossie Davis as Da Mayor, the local drunk. It also instantly established Lee as a major talent who couldn’t be ignored or dismissed.
Before The Light in China
All Eyes Inward
Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop
NEWSWEEK
Until recently, the way Chinese artists got famous was to talk politics. The generation that grew up during the Cultural Revolution and the difficult years that followed was highly politicized and gained global recognition for its tongue-in-cheek images of Mao Zedong and Tiananmen Square, often rendered in eye-popping color. Wang Guangyi’s kitschy communist-style propaganda posters incorporated iconic consumer logos, such as Coca-Cola and Porsche, and Yue Minjun mocked the fast-changing world with his paintings of large-mouthed men grinning relentlessly.
Though still hot, those new-wave artists are giving way to a very different group: the “me-first” generation, whose members talk about each other and themselves. Born in the 1980s under China’s one-child policy, they were still children during Tiananmen and are much less interested in politics and far more concerned with individuality. Unlike their elders, who use art to criticize the growing commercialism and inequality of post-Mao China, the younger generation is a product of that rapid economic transformation. Their parents doted on them. They’ve been exposed to a broader range of media, including the Internet, videogames, Japanese manga and Korean soap operas. Coffee rather than tea drinkers, they are as comfortable listening to American rock and hip-hop as to Cantonese pop.
AFTER DARK in Hong Kong
| HK museum gets wrapped | ||
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| [top photo: The HK museum is wrapped with a mesh veil featuring images from Richard Prince’s ‘After Dark’ series.]
Hong Kong’s Museum of Art has been turned into one of the territory’s first-ever public art installations.
Prince wrapped almost the entire building overlooking Victoria Harbour with enlarged replicas of pulp fiction novel covers. The installation, which takes its theme from Prince’s After Dark series, trumpets the start of a new exhibition called Louis Vuitton: A Passion For Creation, which will be held in the museum from next Friday to Aug 9. The exhibition pays tribute to the creative process and will feature a number of large-scale works – paintings, photographs and video installations – by European, American and Chinese artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paul Chan, Stephen Sprouse and Prince himself. It took approximately seven days and more than 20 people to put up the installation which will remain on display until the end of the exhibition. |
Sam Maloof Gone
Sam Maloof dies at 93; designer and builder of simple, beautiful furniture
His work was initially prized for practicality by Southern Californian homeowners in the 1950s. Later collectors and museum curators valued its elegance and timelessness.
Sam Maloof, a designer and woodworker whose furniture was initially prized for its simplicity and practicality by Southern Californian homeowners in the 1950s and later valued for its beauty and timelessness by collectors, museum curators and U.S. presidents, has died. He was 93.
Maloof died Thursday at his home in the Alta Loma section of Rancho Cucamonga, his longtime business manager Roz Bock confirmed. No further details were given.
Maloof, whose career began six decades ago just as the American modernism movement was becoming popular, put usefulness before artistry and turned down multimillion-dollar offers to mass-produce his original designs. He worked out of his home workshop, shaping hardwood, one part at a time, into rocking chairs, cradles and hutches that were shorn of unnecessary adornments.
His hi-fi cabinets, cork-top coffee tables and other modern pieces were instantly praised by home magazine editors and trend-setting interior designers. His walnut chairs and bar stools were installed in several of the so-called Case Study Houses — the modernist, experimental homes in the Los Angeles area built between 1945 and 1966 by Richard Neutra, Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen and other progressive architects.
All about aebleskivers
Mommy, Mommy – Look at my new digger!
Toddler accidentally buys $15,600 digger on auction site
Juliet McGhie
May 21, 2009 – 11:58AM
Three-year-old Pipi Quinlan bought a $NZ20,000 ($A15,600) Kobelco digger on auction website TradeMe, prompting immediate damage control by her mum when her purchase was revealed.
Most parents are used to little ones sneaking treats into the supermarket trolley, but Pipi’s deal must take the cake.
Parents Sarah and Reid Quinlan, of Stanmore Bay north of Auckland, were astonished to wake one morning to find Pipi had bought the huge excavating digger in a TradeMe auction.
The technically savvy kid had woken early and, with the rest of her family sound asleep, decided to play with the computer. With a few clicks of the mouse she entered Internet Explorer and the Trade Me site her mother had already logged on to.
After a few more timely clicks, she had won the most recent auction listed on the site’s homepage. It was for a Kobelco digger, and she had it for $NZ20,000 – money she didn’t have in her piggy bank.
“The first I knew about it was when I came down and opened up the computer,” says mum Sarah. “I saw an email from TradeMe saying I had won an auction and another email from the seller saying something like ‘I think you’ll love this digger’.”
“Well, I had a few Duplo Lego play kits on my watch-list, so just assumed I’d won a digger toy-set,” she says.
James Frey Reading Tonight @ Vroman’s in Pasadena 7pm
James Frey discusses and signs Bright Shiny Morning
Thu, 05/21/2009 – 7:00pm
Location:
Vroman’s Bookstore
695 E. Colorado Blvd
Pasadena, California 91101
In his first novel, a sweeping narrative that encompasses the history of Los Angeles, the #1 NY Times bestselling author Frey focuses on a handful of lost souls and spins the gripping narrative of their lives.
WHY WOMEN CAN’T SLEEP
Have you ever wondered how a woman’s brain works?
Well…..it’s finally explained here in one, easy to understand illustration:
Every one of those little blue balls is a thought about something that needs to be done, a decision or a problem that needs to be solved.
A man only has only 2 balls and they consume all his thoughts.
Grazie! to Mano Husain for the mirth
James Frey Reading Tonight @ Book Soup in Los Angeles
World’s Greatest Mom
from the San Jose Mercury News
California mom tells cops she had sex with boys to keep them away from her daughter
Associated Press
Deborah Towe faces 11 felony counts, including unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, oral copulation of a person under the age of 16,
committing lewd acts upon a child and arranging a meeting with a minor for a lewd purpose.
A 30-year-old Northern California woman has pleaded not guilty to charges that she had sex with three teenage boys.The boys were 15 and 16 years old.
Police in Anderson, about 150 miles north of Sacramento, began investigating in April after two girls from a local middle school reported that a friend’s mother was having sex with boys.
In a 48-page report released this week, Towe told police she was protecting her daughter by diverting the boys’ attention to herself.
Will Maureen Dowd’s bony, lying plagiarising butt be kicked out of the Kingdom of the New York Times for the greatest journalistic sin there is?
UPDATE: Maureen Dowd in Hot Water, Did Not ‘Attribute” — ‘NYT’ Corrects
By Greg Mitchell
Published: May 17, 2009 7:55 PM ET
NEW YORK It was a wild Sunday for New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. It opened with her latest column in the newspaper, which closed by declaring that she had once opposed a wide-ranging probe of the uses of torture, and who authorized and knew about it, during the Bush administration but now favored it. This brought some praise from liberal news sites and bloggers often critical of Dowd.
But by mid-afternoon she was on the hot seat for using a paragraph almost word-for-word from one of the most prominent liberal bloggers, Jost Marshall of Talking Points Memo, without attribution. Charges of “plagiarism” ensued.
“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”
The only words changed from Marshall paragraph: “we were” to “the Bush crowd was.”
Talking Fox Offends
Lars von Trier film “Antichrist” shocks Cannes
CANNES, France (Reuters) – Danish director Lars von Trier elicited derisive laughter, gasps of disbelief, a smattering of applause and loud boos on Sunday as the credits rolled on his drama “Antichrist” at the Cannes film festival.
The film, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple seeking to overcome the grief of losing their only child, has quickly become the most talked-about at this year’s festival, which ends on May 24.
Cannes’ notoriously picky critics and press often react audibly to films during screenings, but Sunday evening’s viewing was unusually demonstrative.
Jeers and laughter broke out during scenes ranging from a talking fox to graphically-portrayed sexual mutilation.
Many viewers in the large Debussy cinema also appeared to take objection to von Trier’s decision to dedicate his film to the revered Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky. Applause from a handful of viewers was drowned out by booing at the end.
“This is the illest shit I’ve ever seen. Instant classic!
20/20 Hip-Hop Special From 1981
Pt. 2. So what you gonna do? Click to go view –
Made By Generation Why
Younger Than Jesus’: Made by Generation Why
BY BLAKE GOPNIK
NEW YORK — It’s said that new art reflects new times. If that’s true, what could be a better mirror on our troubled days than a huge survey of the latest art by the latest crop of artists? You couldn’t ask for a more thorough pulse-taking than you get in “Younger Than Jesus,” the show now filling all four floors of the New Museum’s stylish home on the Bowery. It presents 124 works by 50 artists, all 33 or younger, from 25 countries, selected from a 500-name shortlist submitted by an international panel of experts. It’s the first in a planned series of triennials the museum calls “The Generational.”
Members of the generation in “Younger Than Jesus” are often known as the millennials, and there’s something truly end-of-days about the art that represents them in this show. The survey’s title is clearly tongue-in-cheek, but it also feels like it’s getting at something: There is a sense of waiting, of stasis, of breath-holding that reminds me of the way things are supposed to have felt in Judea in A.D. 27 — in the moment, that is, just before a new Messiah came in view to sort things out.
Scorched Earth Erotica
On The Pitch
Another Side of Kerouac: The Dharma Bum as Sports Nut
New York Public Library, Berg Collection, Jack Kerouac Archive
Jack Kerouac’s fantasy baseball team cards, circa 1953-56. More Photos >
Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow Beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs never knew about. He obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars (the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example) or for colors (the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks).
He collected their stats, analyzed their performances and, as a teenager, when he played most ardently, wrote about them in homemade newsletters and broadsides. He even covered financial news and imaginary contract disputes. During those same teenage years, he also ran a fantasy horse-racing circuit, complete with illustrated tout sheets and racing reports. He created imaginary owners, imaginary jockeys, imaginary track conditions.
Torture As Art
Torture devices seeking righteous buyer
Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times
Iron masks are among the items in a collection of torture devices that is up for auction.
The Tongue Tearer and other terrifying contraptions from the 16th century land on an auctioneer’s lap. His solution: ‘Turn something terrible into something good.’
Reporting from New York — It slices! It dices! It pierces and pokes! It pulls stubborn flesh from bone with the flick of a wrist!
And if that doesn’t get your prisoner talking, perhaps the ornate chair with its spiked seat, back and arm rests will do the trick.
The ghoulish throne and tiny flesh ripper, part of a bounty of iron torture implements dating to the 16th century, soon will be up for sale, but on one condition: The buyer must have morals as well as money — more than $3 million, by some estimates.
His wooden desk and a nearby table were covered with items like the Small Iron Spider, a flesh-tearing device. “This sweet little thing could grasp any part of one’s body and do pain,” Ettinger said, squeezing the small handle to make the eight claw-like legs with needle-sharp tips open and close.
There were spiked collars, a large ax and a perforated spoon or sieve “through which boiling water, oil or molten lead was poured onto various portions of the body,” according to a catalog accompanying the items.
Iron leg weights were displayed beside the torture chair as a pair of shoes might be shown with a dress: to highlight how well they go together. The weights were designed to add pounds to the person in the torture chair, driving the spikes deeper into the skin.
As well-coiffed women walked dogs past the auction house on a leafy, sun-dappled Manhattan street one recent afternoon, little could they imagine that inside were an iron implement meant to be “affixed to the ears before they were cut off” and “a powerful iron foot breaker.” Such were the descriptions in the catalog that accompanied the collection when it went on display in the 1890s.
Perez On the O
Shock! Oprah Apologizes
Filed under: Oprah Winfrey
Private jet-loving 
If you recall, momma O named his 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces as one of her book club choices in 2005, which propelled his book to the bestseller list. But after some stories in the supposedly autobiographical book were discovered to have been exaggerated, Oprah had Frey back on her show to bash him publicly.
Many, including the book’s publisher, believe Oprah did that due to the backlash she received from her fans for supporting a book that wasn’t all true.
You don’t say?!
A month after Oprah called him a liar, his publishers dropped him.
But, now, years later, Winfrey has finally apologized to Frey for publicly slamming him and his book.
Winfrey’s rep has also confirmed that the talk show host called the author and offered him a mea culpa.
According to Frey, Oprah called him last fall to say “I felt I owe you an apology.” She went on to explain her lashing came from a sense of feeling betrayed.
Frey added, “It was a nice surprise to hear from her, and I really appreciated the call and the sentiment.”
Wonder what took O so long to apologize? And why even do it? And if she publicly bashed him, shouldn’t she have publicly apologized?
[Image via WENN.]
“Dude, I said “Where’s my boot?” not “There he is, shoot!”
Pentagon Preps Soldier Telepathy Push
- By Katie Drummond
Forget the battlefield radios, the combat PDAs or even infantry hand signals. When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, they’ll read each other’s minds.
At least, that’s the hope of researchers at the Pentagon’s mad-science division Darpa. The agency’s budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.” That’s on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy
Illumination
James Frey Gets a Bright, Shiny Apology from Oprah
May 11, 2009, 2:40 pm
James Frey photographed by Terry Richardson for Evgenia Peretz’s June 2008 article, “James Frey’s Morning After.”
It’s been a year since James Frey’s re-entrance into the book world with Bright, Shiny Morning, which comes out in paperback May 12 (and contains new material, including a bit originally deemed inappropriate for election season). For as many painful events as he has been through in his life—like going from the top of book world to national punch line—last year was an emotional crucible. Frey got his identity back, suffered unimaginable heartbreak, and received an astonishing, self-reflective call from Oprah Winfrey, the woman who helped make him a superstar and then publicly turned him into road-kill.
Still feeling like a pariah when the new book came out, Frey was hugely relieved that reviewers put the scandal aside. “I was expecting to get killed everywhere,” he says. Though he was, as he puts it, “slaughtered” in the Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly called it both a “train wreck” and “a real page-turner,” The New York Times,Time, and Washington Post raved. He’s now in talks with Ilene Landress, executive producer of The Sopranos, to turn it into a television show.
Just as his career was getting back on track, his personal life became horrifically derailed last July, when his newborn son, Leo, died 11 days after birth from spinal muscular atrophy, a rare disease that was, at the time, undetectable by prenatal testing and is untreatable and incurable. “I’ve been through some difficult things in my life,” Frey says. “Nothing comes close to this.”
Having built another bedroom in their apartment—which would now be empty—the Freys (who also have a four-year-old daughter, Maren) couldn’t face the thought of living there and decided to move to Amagansett. But two months later, their hearts still set on having another child, they decided to stay put and adopt. After a seven-month-long endeavor, they adopted a 22-month-old boy named Ellis from a Russian orphanage. “A healthy, awesome, sweet little boy,” says Frey. In the fall, Ellis will begin going to the preschool where Frey volunteers as a tour guide and Class Dad.
In spite of the personal tragedy, Frey’s life is approaching something he’s not quite used to: happy and normal. Even the scandal over A Million Little Pieces might be finding closure, as they say. Last spring, Oprah executive producer Sheri Salata called him to talk about coming back on the show—which for various reasons didn’t work out—and in the fall he got a call from Winfrey herself.
She’d had an epiphany of sorts while meditating that morning. It was time to apologize for what she put him through on that fateful day. She explained that her uncharacteristically harsh evisceration of him was coming, unfairly, from her own ego and sense of having been personally betrayed—a redemptive moment fitting, you might say, of The Oprah Winfrey Show. “It was a nice surprise to hear from her, and I really appreciated the call and the sentiment,” says Frey. “When I heard her say, ‘I felt I owe you an apology,’ I was very grateful. As far as I’m concerned, that part of my career is over and behind me and I’m looking forward to writing more books.”
Up next is Illumination, a theoretical third book of the Bible, written from the perspective of people surrounding a guy who may be the Messiah. “It’s my idea of what it would be like if the Messiah were walking the streets of New York City right now.”
James Frey Reading Tonight @ Barnes & Noble Union Square NYC
| NEW YORK Wednesday, May 13 7:00 PM BARNES & NOBLE Union Square 33 E 17th ST New York, NY 10003 LOS ANGELES LOS ANGELES |
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| NEW YORK Thursday, May 28 7:00 PM BOOK COURT 163 Court St. Brooklyn, NY 11201 NEW YORK |
PHILADELPHIA Thursday, June 4, 6:00 PM BARNES & NOBLE 1805 Walnut ST Philadelphia, PA 19103 NEW JERSEY |
Am I Right Or Am I Right or Am I Right or Am I Right Or Am I Right or Am I Right
Some Truer Words of Wisdom
| QUOTATION OF THE DAY | |
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| “Banking should not be exciting. If banking is exciting there is something wrong with it.” CLAY EWING, president of German American Bancorp., |
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Kate Moss is going to live forever.
TARRED & FEATHERED
By Sans
TAR is not a fashion magazine – its editor, Evan Schindler will tell you as much. Sure a few fashion personalities make special guest appearances and there is a smattering of editorial content but ultimately these are amusing post scripts on an altogether charming love letter to the art world. The second issue’s cover of Kate Moss ala Damien Hirst is only there to grab your attention – the real nitty gritty of the magazine’s second issue lies in exploring the ways in which art is becoming honest. The issue’s theme of transparency is almost a misnomer – the content presented isn’t transparent as much as it is seditious – a pointed middle finger in the air to the status quo and its lies.
Which brings us back to Kate. There is no actual Kate Moss content in the issue. Sorry Moss fans. There is however a particularly amusing short story by James Frey about a character who bears some resemblance to the Moss we’ve come to know but this particular incarnation is more focused on cheating death and her time is spent at the Institute of Molecular Manufacturing rather than on the catwalk. While this may sound completely nutty, Frey is most adept at pulling “facts” out of thin air and it all blends together to form a rather odd tale. It is not the sort of thing that would run in any other magazine but its this commitment to doing things differently that makes TAR worthwhile.
A Jazz Memoir in Verse
Birth of the Cool: Minnesota
I know, Miles,
you didn’t have rural southern Minnesota
in mind when you
blew your classic mute
on your Birth of the Cool
sessions in New York, circa 1949.
But it’s the way the paper-thin
ice forms on the edge of the lake
today in late October:
meeting at the cold, dark water’s edge
–still open and free
though not for long–
with the ripples of these short, choppy
muted notes of yours
blown just out of reach
this cool windy autumn morning.
excerpted from Stompin’ at the Grand Terrace: A Jazz Memoir in Verse by Philip Bryant
[ click to read at Shelf-Awareness.com – about 2/3 scroll down the page ]
Start Wearing Purple
Happy Birthday, Buddha
Temple boys: Young South Korean Buddhist devotees pray under rows of lotus lanterns at the Chogye Temple in Seoul on May 1 (one day ahead of when Buddha’s birthday is celebrated in that country this year). Buddha was born approximately 2,553 years ago, and the day, or days, on which Vesak is celebrated varies from country to country. About 23 percent of South Korea’s population is Buddhist, the second-largest religion after Christianity, which is followed by 26 percent of the population. Just under half the population expresses no religious preference.
It’s All Wiki’s Fault
Student’s Wikipedia hoax quote used worldwide in newspaper obituaries
GENEVIEVE CARBERY
A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.
The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died at the end of March.
It was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after his death and later appeared in obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers.
“One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear,” Jarre was quoted as saying.
However, these words were not uttered by the Oscar-winning composer but written by Shane Fitzgerald, a final-year undergraduate student studying sociology and economics at University College Dublin.
Fitzgerald was shocked by the result of his experiment.
“I didn’t expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised about,” he said.
However, the hoax remained undiscovered for weeks until Fitzgerald e-mailed offending newspapers to tell them that they had published an inaccurate quote.