2009 Best Actor Acceptance Speech
Until Next Year
Most Bananas Oscars Ever?
Getty Images
Okay, yeaaah, the Oscars! It’s going to take us at least a few more days to really be able to digest all the absolute batsh*t craziness that went down during Sunday night’s telecast. Can we all just start by agreeing that that show was truly bonkersville? We know there will be plenty of ink shed on the big winners: Kate, Sean, Penélope, Heath, Slumdog, etc., so we’ll just stick to the show itself for now.
Let’s start with the stage, with the 92,000-Swarovski-crystal curtain which looked like something that got thrown up straight from Moonstruck-era Cher’s brain – razzle dazle doesn’t begin to describe it. And then there’s Hugh Jackman. We’ve already heard a lot of dissenting chatter about the Aussie’s hosting duties, but we’re just going to come out and say it: nailed it! Because listen, that man committed. He went out there for his debut Oscar-hosting night and put on an opening number that we still actually can’t believe happened. He started, gracefully, with a self deprecating joke about his giant bomb of a film Australia and led into a song and dance number – including inspired bits encompassing the big five plus a much needed shout out to snubbed Dark Knight – that had that jaded crowd at the Kodak on their feet. Props to Anne Hathaway for a shockingly good faux impromptu assist (who knew she could sing?). But our favorite moment (not including Mr. Jackman pausing in front of Brad and Angelina and admitting, “I don’t have a joke for them, I’m just contractually obligated to mention them five times”)
Botany Bay Slab
Don’t watch to the end if you don’t like gore.
Because It’s There
Pingchuck Pong
To Tame The Warring Soul
A New Role for Iraqi Militants: Patrons of the Arts
Stephen Farrell/The New York Times
An art exhibition in Baghdad was sponsored by the movement of an anti-American cleric.
BAGHDAD — Two years ago the American authorities arrested Sheik Mazin al-Saedi, a senior aide to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, accusing him of organizing kidnappings and killings.
This week in Baghdad, the city once terrorized by those killings, Sheik Mazin mingled in a white-walled art gallery as the patron of an exhibition of paintings and sculptures that would not, exactly, be out of place in Chelsea or SoHo: abstract art, expressionist paintings and conceptual works larded with symbols of Iraq’s ancient history and today’s reality.
The goal was “to show the entire world that we are not as the media portrays us, a movement that believes only in bearing arms and knows no culture other than that of violence,” Sheik Mazin said of Mr. Sadr’s movement, which is widely blamed for its part in the violence that followed the American invasion in 2003.
“The Sadr movement,” he said, “is also one that believes in ideas and encourages and patronizes the arts.”
I Like To Ping And Pong It…
New York’s Priapic Prince of Ping-Pong
Franck Raharinosy is ready to paddle Manhattan’s smart set.
Danny Kim
Hands off, ladies! Mr. Raharinosy is engaged!
The Prince of Madagascar lives in a penthouse apartment at the National Arts Club, overlooking the barren trees and locked gates of Gramercy Park. The Prince loves Ping-Pong. His mission is to properly introduce Ping-Pong to Manhattan; he’s plotting Ping-Pong establishments all over the city.
So went the tale around a recent party at the National Arts Club for Argentine artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose works include a $40,000 Ping-Pong table made of mirrored glass. “Have you heard about the Prince who lives in the Penthouse? He’s about to open an exclusive Ping-Pong club.” The party featured an exhibition match between a pair of 14-year-old Nigerian-born twins and 78-year-old U.S. singles champion Marty Reisman.
The Prince is Franck Raharinosy, a 33-year-old fledgling filmmaker and Ping-Pong impresario who last week signed a 15-year lease for the 13,000-square-foot basement of 304 Park Avenue. In the past six months, Mr. Raharinosy says, he and three business partners have raised close to $1.5 million to build Spin, a 14-table Ping-Pong social club, which will include a natty members-only lounge designed by Todd Oldham and sponsored by sportswear designer Fred Perry. They hope to open in May.
Until last spring Messrs. Raharinosy, Jonathon Bricklin and Bill Mack lived together in a Tribeca loft, which also served as offices for their film production company, Ridiculous Inc., which produces movies, music videos, celebrity events and documentaries such as The Entrepreneur, which tells the story of Mr. Bricklin’s father, Malcolm Bricklin, who founded Subaru of America when he was 28; the movie will be showing in New York later in the year. In the loft, of course, was a Ping-Pong table. The sporting fellows started throwing twice-weekly “Naked Ping-Pong” parties, sometimes featuring pro players and always featuring attractive women. There was no nudity but, according to Mr. Mack, “there was a steady flow of women in and out of Franck’s room. … He’s definitely had sex on the Ping-Pong table. His numbers are really high.”
Art Collection On Uptick
The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens
ACQUISITION: U.S. artist Reginald Marsh’s “ Red Buttons” (1936) is among works picked up by the Huntington.
ART
L.A. museums’ collections grow despite poor economy
Philanthropists’ generosity and the hard work of museum staffs and support groups turn 2008 into a surprisingly good year for acquisitions.
As Los Angeles art museums face the future in a down economy, building their collections may not be the highest priority, but it’s a big worry.
Will art acquisition funds dwindle to nothing? Will once-dependable patrons stop writing checks when curators pass the hat for art purchases? Will potential art gifts go to market? Will more museums pool resources to make joint purchases, as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Fowler Museum at UCLA recently did to buy a huge tapestry-like construction made by African artist El Anatsui using metal castoffs?
No one knows, and not only because it’s impossible to predict the length and force of the ongoing financial storm. Cash donations for acquisitions can be expected to plummet, but gifts of art are less predictable. In good times and bad, artworks come to museums in various ways — from friends and complete strangers.
The Next Temptation Of Marty
| Scorsese plans film on Christian persecution | |
| AFP | |
TOKYO — Oscar-winning filmmaker Martin Scorsese plans to adapt for the screen a novel on Japan’s brutal persecution of Christians during the 17th century, according to a museum.
The 1966 novel “Chinmoku” (“Silence”) by Shusaku Endo tells the story of a young idealistic Jesuit priest from Portugal who lands on the shores of Nagasaki in southern Japan — then the only region open to foreigners.
The novel depicts the severe persecution Japan then inflicted on converts to Christianity, many of whom were impoverished villagers and went into hiding.
Academy Award-winning art director Dante Ferretti, who is close to Scorsese, and producer E. Bennett Walsh this week visited the Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture to research the film.
“They are going to make a movie and so they visited to research Japanese Christian history,” museum spokesman Koichiro Nishijima said.
He said that the pair carefully studied a “fumie,” a metal plaque depicting Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary that authorities would make people step on in order to weed out Christians.
Harder Better Faster Groovier
Happy Valentine’s Day
Good For Gabriel
Gabriel pulls out of Oscars over 65-second limit
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Peter Gabriel’s minute in the Oscars spotlight will lack one important element: Peter Gabriel.
The Academy Award-nominated singer won’t perform at the Feb. 22 ceremony to protest an apparently revamped presentation of best original song contenders. Gabriel says in a video on his Web site that he objects to the songs being shortened to 65 seconds apiece and made part of a medley.
Gabriel is nominated alongside Thomas Newman for “Down To Earth” from “WALL-E.”
The British musician says he’ll still attend the Oscars, but is hoping a gospel choir will stand in for him onstage.
The Real Top Schmeer
Nutty for Nutella: spreadable joy
Robert Gauthier, Los Angeles Times
SLATHER IT ON: Homemade hazelnut-chocolate spread.
The Italian chocolate and hazelnut spread has its devoted fans.
By Amy Scattergood
February 11, 2009
Do a Google search for “Nutella,” the Italian hazelnut-chocolate spread that comes in a squat jar like peanut butter and is often found right next to it in grocery aisles, and you’ll get about 5 million results. Which is about twice what you get when you Google “chocolate chip cookies” — and several times as many as the phrase “Valentine’s Day chocolates.” You might want to remember that this weekend.
Because Nutella isn’t just junk food with a European pedigree. It can be an obsession, a habit, even a cult. If you think this is foodie hyperbole, you’re just not among the initiated.
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
Gandhi’s eyeglasses to be auctioned in NYC
NEW YORK – Mahatma Gandhi’s (Ma-hot-ma Gand-hee’s) distinctive wire-frame eyeglasses, a pair of worn leather sandals and an inexpensive pocket watch are going on the auction block in New York City.
Antiquorum Auctioneers says the auction of Gandhi’s belongings is historic because the leader of India’s independence movement didn’t have many possessions.
Art Without The Wall
Art in Two Germanys Often Spoke the Same Tongue
Hans Grundig Estate and Vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society
“To the Victims of Fascism (Second Version),” a work from the late 1940s by Hans Grundig. More Photos>
BERLIN — East German art, like much of what used to be East Germany itself, hasn’t fared altogether well here since the Wall fell. Twenty years on, victorious Westerners, at least those old enough to remember the country divided, still tend to look with contempt on what passed for culture under Communism, as if the two, culture and Communism, were mutually exclusive. A curious hint of revenge sometimes creeps into their voices.
Call it communal myopia. A recent article in Die Zeit, a German newsweekly, lamented how the new Moritzburg Museum in Halle shortchanges its own collection of East German paintings, one of the best in the country, “in a way that is almost shameful.” The article wondered whether the curators there weren’t maybe being a little parochial and spiteful, and afraid “to revise overly quick judgments made in the years after the reunification of Germany.” That meant above all the verdict that East German art, like the whole Communist era, would be best forgotten.
Why Some Women Hate Football
“Masturbatory Hack” in a Headline
The 20th Century’s Vermeer, or a Masturbatory Hack?
Ignored by the academy, scorned by knife-wielding critics, Pierre Bonnard gets the last laugh
BY MARIO NAVES
The old man faces us, naked from the waist up. His bald head, covered in shadow but sharply defined, tilts forward at a niggling angle—as if its weight were increasingly untenable. His skin is translucent and seems barely capable of holding together. Propped within an almost impossibly compressed space, the man gazes intently at nothing in particular. He is, it is clear, distracted by his own mortality.
You’d have to go to Rembrandt or Goya to find as pitiless a depiction of the human animal as Pierre Bonnard’s Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror (Self-Portrait) (1939-46), on display in “Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” at the Met. Is there a modern or contemporary artist who dedicated himself to flesh and bone with as much terrifying candor? German Expressionists are stylistic show-boaters in comparison; Lucian Freud, a cackhanded academician. Alice Neel? Cartoon angst. Jenny Saville? Oh, please.
Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror (Self-Portrait) and the less scabrous if equally intenseSelf-Portrait (1938-40) are, literally speaking, the odd men out at the Met. Nowhere else in the exhibition does Bonnard plumb psyche or physiognomy with as much daunting specificity.
Lizzy In A Tizzy Over Bonnie
Hilary Duff Keeps Faye Dunaway Feud Going
AP Photo/Shea Walsh; Tony Barson/Getty Images
Making fun of Faye Dunaway‘s looks wasn’t enough for Hilary Duff—she’s still peeved at the aging actress.
Quick feud recap (because there are too many to keep track of anymore): Hilary is starring in a Bonnie and Clyde remake. This caused Dunaway to allegedly cackle, ”Couldn’t they at least cast a real actress?” which got the Duffster in such a huff, she lashed out to E!’s Daily 10, “I might be mad if I looked like that now, too.”
This Heat Makes Me Want To Dehydrate Myself To Death
Climate change takes a mental toll
By Emily Anthes Globe Correspondent / February 9, 2009
Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to climate change, the young man was convinced that if he drank, millions of people would die. The Australian doctors wrote the case up as the first known instance of “climate change delusion.”
Robert Salo, the psychiatrist who runs the inpatient unit where the boy was treated, has now seen several more patients with psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change, as well as children who are having nightmares about global-warming-related natural disasters.”
Climate change could have a real impact on our psyches,” says Paul Epstein, the associate director for the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
Climate change is expected to create about 200 million environmental refugees by 2050, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international body established within the United Nations to evaluate causes and consequences of global warming.
Of course, no one can predict what effect warming will have on our psyches. The links between mental illness and the weather can be tenuous or even downright contradictory. Depending on which studies you read, suicide is more common, less common, or equally common in hot weather. Ditto dry weather.Continued…
GalleyCat Covers The Rumpus Launch Party
Exclusive: The Rumpus Launch Party
A number of literary figures performed at the party, including James Frey,Andrew Sean Greer, Jonathan Ames, and Starlee Kine. Comedy was provided by Kristen Schaal from the Flight of the Conchords and Michael Showalter. Music was provided by Will Sheff from Okkervill River and Timothy Bracy of The Mendoza Line.
Postcards From America’s Edge
Nothing comes from nowhere, least of all art. Every body of work has its points of origin, its logic of personal urgency and cultural impetus, the coordinates of which are often found in an artist’s childhood.
Sometimes the logic eludes us. Sometimes we can piece it together through intuition, scholarship or the clues an artist leaves behind. Occasionally a skeleton key is passed down that explains more than was ever thought possible. Such was the case with van Gogh’s letters, and in its own way, with “Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Trampboarder
Chocolate Elsewhere
Chocolate (2008)
Magnet Releasing
“Jija” Yanin Vismistananda in the 2008 film “Chocolate,” directed by Prachya Pinkaew.
Portrait of a Martial Artist
By NATHAN LEE
“Chocolate” is dedicated to “the unconditional love given to all the special children in the world,” which is a cheeky way to kick off a movie about a little girl with a gift, very special indeed, for kicking grown men in the face.
It’s true that Zen (Jija Yanin Vismitananda), born to a humble Thai woman and a Japanese gangster, exhibits behaviors that suggest autism, or at least some poorly acted simulation of it: abnormal shyness, primitive syntax, rocking back and forth, an extreme aversion to houseflies.
Fortunately, she has been endowed with a natural mastery of the martial arts, much of which she appears to absorb by watching “Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior” on television.
Kate Moss Secretly Has An IQ of 195
- OK, it’s been a long time since we’ve asked you to submit these (and it’s not like you were ever flooding HQ with material), so we’ve decided to get the ball rolling and post one of our own from last night’s launch party for The Rumpus at Crash Mansion. To set the scene for you, founder Stephen Elliot (who we interviewed here) was on stage giving a rundown of his site, and said something along the lines of, “We’re like a literary magazine that plays by the Internet’s rules, meaning we update at least 15 times a day — like a Gawker, or a Huffington Post, but we’re not mean.”
Girl #1: Omigod, I love Gawker!Girl #2: [Breathlessly] Omigod, I love Gawker too!
They proceeded to chat about their mutual love for the site — Gawker, not The Rumpus — as James Frey took the stage and read a hilarious unpublished piece that he claimed was going to be part of a new Damien Hirst project about Kate Moss. It was all about how she secretly has an IQ of 195 and is working in a secret lab on a formula that will allow her to live forever. But it’s way better than we’re making it sound.
Got a good Heard in the Crowd to share with us? Send it along to tips [at] flavorwire [dot] com and if we decide to run it, we’ll reward you with something cool that’s sitting around our office. Like a CD or a fancy art book.
24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot
Murder Lives In Los Feliz
On a Los Feliz hill, murder — then mystery
Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times
The hilltop Los Feliz mansion where Dr. Harold Perelson killed his wife and then himself in 1959. It has sat vacant ever since.
Inside a mansion, it’s as if time stopped in 1959 when a doctor killed his wife and then himself. Gifts still sit, unopened. Why?
By Bob Pool, February 6, 2009
It’s a murder mystery that has puzzled a Los Feliz neighborhood since 1959. The criminal-case part was solved quickly enough. Homicide investigators found that Dr. Harold Perelson bludgeoned his wife to death with a ball-peen hammer, savagely beat their 18-year-old daughter and then fatally poisoned himself by gulping a glass of acid.
Authorities removed two other children from the sprawling hillside estate that overlooks downtown Los Angeles, locked the front door to the 5,050-square-foot mansion, and left.
Fifty years later, the Glendower Place home remains empty. On the outside, the mansion itself appears to be slowly decaying.
The estate’s terraced grounds are pockmarked by gopher holes and overgrown with grass that sprouted after recent rains — growth that neighbors know will turn brown when summer returns. A pond is partly filled with rainwater. Weeds poke through cracks in a curving asphalt driveway. Through grimy, cracked windows, one can see dust-covered furniture, including a 1950s-style television set, seemingly frozen in time. What appear to be gaily wrapped Christmas gifts sit on a table.
The Global Economic Crisis Is Proving Good For Business
Ideological debate in China
The Little Red Bookshop
Feb 5th 2009 | BEIJING | The Economist print edition
Whose little-read leftist texts may be coming back into vogue
Illustration by Claudio Munoz
IN A small bookshop on the ninth floor of an office and residential building in Beijing’s university district, the staff wear Mao badges. Works extolling the late Chinese leader, damning capitalism and attacking globalisation are laid out on shelves. Scour the “non-mainstream economists” section for some of the most popular ones. Staples of most bookshops—volumes on how to succeed in business, play the stockmarket or get into an American university—are not on sale.
The Utopia bookshop is a refuge for China’s leftists, the term used to describe those nostalgic for Mao Zedong’s rule and worried that the country is abandoning its communist principles. This is the place to buy the selected writings of Mao’s late widow, Jiang Qing, and other members of the Gang of Four who were imprisoned after the chairman’s death. A three-volume critique of China’s property law, enacted in 2007 and much disliked by leftists because of its supposed bias in favour of private-property ownership, goes for 200 yuan ($30).
A bookshop manager says the global economic crisis is proving good for business.
Ars Recapture Artis
Capturing History With Video of the TV
A number of years ago, the critic Amy Taubin, in a hilarious review of a misbegotten movie from Abel Ferrara, wrote that it “inspires the ontological question ‘What are films, and why is this not one of them?’ ”
The same question buzzed through my mind while watching the weirdly compelling if almost unclassifiable “Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR,” the latest work from the filmmaker, poet, archivist and cinematic avenging angel Jonas Mekas. “Lithuania,” I hasten to add, is certainly not misbegotten — but given that this nearly five-hour work consists almost entirely of bits and pieces of news programs shot off a color television with a video camera, it does inspire some aesthetic rumination.
The question of what constitutes a movie in the digital age is far too large to tackle here, though it is worth noting that “Lithuania” was shot in video and will be shown in video. (A different version is being presented as a four-monitor video installation at the Maya Stendhal Gallery in Chelsea, through Feb. 21, as part of an exhibition of Mr. Mekas’s latest work.) Increasing numbers of movies are actually videos or are digitally created — there is not a single film frame involved — crucial information that often goes unmentioned and even unnoticed in reviews. For artists like Mr. Mekas, who has been shooting in video for years, such distinctions seem irrelevant. The work counts, whatever the format.
BILF
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NEW YORK – She doesn’t have a streak of grey hair, her breasts remain unnaturally perky, and she has endless outfits – but Barbie is feeling miserable ahead of her 50th birthday.
Not only is she accused of promoting anorexia among young girls, but her sales plunged 21 percent in the last quarter of 2008, and for seven years she has had to deal with Bratz, a sassy rival hot on her high heels.
Born Barbara Millicent Robert on March 9, 1959 in Willows, Wisconsin, the 29-centimetre (11.4-inch) beauty wowed the world when she made her debut at a New York toy fair, leading to sales of 300,000 that same year.
With her long legs, love of pink-tinged glamour, and hair made for combing, she was a world away from the baby-like creatures cradled by girls of previous generations.
Today she is at the centre of the Mattel company empire. She has inspired dozens of fashion designers, become a presence on Facebook and MySpace, revolutionised playtime for young children – and forced untold numbers of reluctant parents to reach for their wallets.
New York Fashion Week this month will fete her 50th with real-life leggy models.
Jonesy’s Jukebox Gone
POP MUSIC
‘Jonesy’s Jukebox’ runs out of nickels
The demise of Indie 103.1 leaves Sex Pistol Steve Jones, host of the unorthodox but beloved show, without a day job.
By Geoff Boucher, February 4, 2009
It’s come to this — a Sex Pistol drives a Prius. On a recent crisp afternoon, Steve Jones, the guitar architect of London punk in its primacy, zipped down Hollywood Boulevard in his shiny white hybrid Toyota, which is customized with a rooftop image of her majesty Queen Elizabeth, a safety pin jutting from her lip. And you thought punk rock was dead.
Even with the distraction of nubile young tourists strolling up the Walk of Fame, Jones was in a melancholy mood. You see, like so many people in America these days, the 53-year-old rock star turned radio DJ is looking for a job.
“It’s weird not to have somewhere to go,” Jones said. “And wherever I do go next won’t be the same, I know that.”
Jones joined the ranks of the unemployed on Jan. 17, when Indie 103.1, the scruffy but revered L.A. rock station, became a victim of a vicious downturn in advertising revenue. For five years, the Sex Pistol had been the gloriously unpolished voice of “Jonesy’s Jukebox,” an eccentric and unpredictable two-hour lunchtime show on which he played any obscure record he wanted, chatted up famous guests or just, well, whistled.