The End of The End
“Crazed and broke and very much alone.”
Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Peter Ackroyd Briefly Resurrects Edgar Allan Poe, Birthday Boy
2:59 PM JANUARY 19, 2009
Grim is the only way to begin the story of Edgar Allan Poe, who was born 200 years ago this week; grim is the only way to end it. In between there’s poverty, drunken sprees, illness, dashed hopes, more drunkenness and a messy heap of bad behavior (Hemingway, operating on the two-birds-one-stone principle, once remarked that Faulkner was “almost as much of a prick as Poe”). And yet Poe managed to produce a body of work that’s frankly amazing and heroically perverse (the painter Robert Motherwell once called him “a one-man modernist”). The gothic tales and the poems (especially “The Raven”) made him briefly semi-famous, but never eased his financial misery. Born poor and swiftly orphaned, Poe died at the age of 40, crazed and broke and very much alone.
Right on time for his bicentennial comes Peter Ackroyd’s biography, Poe: A Life Cut Short(Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $21.95).
Jose ‘Cheguí’ Torres Gone
Puerto Rican boxer Jose ‘Cheguí’ Torres dies at 72
Updated Monday, January 19th 2009, 5:55 PM
Garrett, Jim
Jose “Cheguí” Torres sparing with Cleo Daniels in a training session before a fight in 1969
Hall of Fame boxer Jose “Chegui” Torres, the former light heavyweight champion and Olympic Silver Medalist who went on to become a newspaper columnist, author, boxing official and revered representative of the Puerto Rican community, died at his home in Puerto Rico early this morning of a massive heart attack. He was 72.
On March 30, 1965, Torres electrified the Latin American world when he defeated Willie Pastrano by a technical knockout at Madison Square Garden to become the first Hispanic light heavyweight champion.
Before the match, Torres exhibited his fierce pride in his Puerto Rican heritage when insisted he would not get in the ring unless Madison Square Garden officials agreed to play the island’s national anthem as well as the Star Spangled Banner. Garden officials agreed.
Pissed Off Catholic Mother
from TCarney’s FB feed
More Emo Belittlement (because it’s there)
How Many Pollacks Does It Take To Break The Ice
Cerny Riles Again
Art Hoax Unites Europe in Displeasure
By SARAH LYALL
Published: January 14, 2009
LONDON — Why didn’t anyone realize right away that there was something seriously weird about the new piece of art in Brussels?
The piece, an enormous mosaic installed in the European Council building over the weekend, was meant to symbolize the glory of a unified Europe by reflecting something special about each country in the European Union.
But wait. Here is Bulgaria, represented as a series of crude, hole-in-the-floor toilets. Here is the Netherlands, subsumed by floods, with only a few minarets peeping out from the water. Luxembourg is depicted as a tiny lump of gold marked by a “for sale” sign, while five Lithuanian soldiers are apparently urinating on Russia.
The 172-square-foot, eight-ton installation, titled “Entropa,” consists of a sort of puzzle formed by the geographical shapes of European countries. It was proudly commissioned by the Czech Republic to mark the start of its six-month presidency of the European Union. But the Czechs made the mistake of hiring the artist David Cerny to put together the project.
[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]
[ click to view slideshow of David Cerny’s ‘Entropa’ ]
Get It On
Dandelion Greens & Goat Cheese Empanadas
Daniel Nagrin Gone
Dancer’s choreography defied gravity
When he was a teenager, Daniel Nagrin learned to cope with the burden of homework. He’d plug away for hours, but before long, he couldn’t stand it anymore.
He’d jump from his seat, flip on the radio and dance. Dance. Dance. Dance.
In telling the tale, he described such outbursts as intoxicating, happy with the “sheer act of flying over furniture.” He should have known then that his plan to become a psychiatrist was headed down a new path.
Nagrin eventually followed the beat he couldn’t ignore, becoming an eminent professional dancer and choreographer known for his frenetic, passionate style. A private man who often couched his emotions in public, he let his guard down on stage, leaving audiences rocking from poignant and raw techniques.
He never garnered the fame of a Mikhail Baryshnikov but ironically, it was Baryshnikov who once told a reporter that Nagrin was one of his heroes.
Nagrin, who defied the laws of physics with leaps that seemed to hang in midair, had a career that spanned New York City’s Broadway to the academic halls as a dance professor at Arizona State University in Tempe. He danced for decades, until just a few years ago. Illness finally sidelined him, and he died Dec. 29. The Tempe resident was 91.
“Hey, Look – here comes that cute little Paulie-boy.”
The Rumpus Beta Gone
from Stephen Elliot’s TheRumpus.net
THE EDITOR’S DESK: What’s Been Going On
Well, we’re getting ready to launch this bad boy. I know for a lot of regular readers the site is already launched, but things are going to be different around here once Obama is sworn in as president. For example, after Obama is sworn in there will be design on every page, not just the front page. When you click through to Rick Moody’s blog, for example, you’ll see other recent blog posts on the right. The site’s going to be more colorful and easier to navigate. Rumpy, The Rumpus mascot, will be wearing nicer clothes. 
We’re also going to have a neat new easily accesible feature called “The River.” That’s basically for hard-core Rumpus readers, people who are seriously over-educated and under-employed, checking this site three or four times a day, who want to read The Rumpus in a continual stream of updated content right down the center of the page. The choice will be yours.
In addition to tons of new content (like Josh Mohr’s review of America America or Scott Hutchins interview with Steven Soderbergh, both coming this week) we’re going to republish a lot of our original content from this beta period. So don’t freak out when you see our interview with James Frey or Malcolm Gladwell in the feature box; this is not a rerun, it’s a starting over. The Morning Coffee will still be fresh every day at 6a.m.
Andrew Wyeth Gone
American painter Andrew Wyeth dies at 91
Artist gained fame for his ‘Christina’s World’ collection, Helga portraits
Andrew Wyeth / AP
“Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth is the artist’s best-known painting.
PHILADELPHIA – Artist Andrew Wyeth, who portrayed the hidden melancholy of the people and landscapes of Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley and coastal Maine in works such as “Christina’s World,” died early Friday. He was 91.
Wyeth died in his sleep at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Chadds Ford, according to Jim Duff, director of the Brandywine River Museum.
The son of famed painter and book illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth gained wealth, acclaim and tremendous popularity on his own. But he chafed under criticism from some experts who regarded him as a facile realist, not an artist but merely an illustrator.
Wyeth was a secretive man who spent hours tramping the countryside alone. He painted many portraits, working several times with favorite subjects, but said he disliked having someone else watching him paint.
Much of Wyeth’s work had a melancholy feel — aging people and brown, dead plants — but he chose to describe his work as “thoughtful.”
“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future — the timelessness of the rocks and the hills — all the people who have existed there,” he once said. “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape — the loneliness of it — the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.
“I think anything like that — which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone — people always feel is sad. Is it because we’ve lost the art of being alone?”
Stephen Lynch’s “Craig Christ”
George Tooker Slideshow
Spoonbridge Sculptress Gone
Coosje van Bruggen dies at 66; art historian made sculptures with husband Claes Oldenburg
Vera Isler
Coosje van Bruggen was a respected art historian, writer and curator known for her almost scientific approach to looking at an artist’s oeuvre. She collaborated with her husband, artist Claes Oldenburg, to build startlingly large sculptures of ordinary objects.
Works include a dropped ice cream cone in Germany; a bow and arrow in San Francisco; a broom and dustpan in Denver, ‘Toppling Ladder with Spilling Paint’ in downtown L.A. and binoculars in Venice.
By Suzanne Muchnic, January 13, 2009
Coosje van Bruggen — an art historian, writer and curator whose professional partnership with her husband, artist Claes Oldenburg, turned ordinary objects into startling monuments around the world — died Saturday at her Los Angeles residence. She was 66 and was battling metastatic breast cancer.
Van Bruggen was the author of scholarly books and essays on the work of major contemporary artists including John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman and Gerhard Richter. She also wrote a monograph on architect Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. But she is best known for collaborations with Oldenburg, which have placed giant trowels, shuttlecocks, bowling pins and typewriter erasers on parklands, civic squares and museum grounds in Europe, Asia and the United States. Cologne, Germany, has its upside-down ice cream cone; San Francisco, its bow and arrow; Denver, its dustpan and broom.
In Los Angeles, “Collar and Bow” — a 65-foot metal and fiberglass sculpture in the shape of a man’s dress shirt collar and bow tie, designed for a spot outside Walt Disney Concert Hall — was stalled and eventually canceled because of technical problems and escalating costs. But Van Bruggen and Oldenburg are represented by other public works including “Toppling Ladder With Spilling Paint” at Loyola Law School in downtown L.A. and “Binoculars,” the central component of a commercial building in Venice designed by Gehry.
“Don’t fµck with me fellas!”
Happy Birthday Faye Dunaway (68 yesterday)
Your Daughter For a Few Burgers and Some Beer
from the San Jose Mercury News
Deal to sell daughter for beer, cash part of Mexican culture
Posted: 01/13/2009 06:55:33 PM PST
The story of the Greenfield man who allegedly sold his 14-year-old daughter to a young suitor for cash and beer went worldwide, and the police chief who ordered the arrest said Tuesday the incident arose from a clash of cultures.
The social mores in parts of rural Mexico, where arranged marriages are common for young girls, ran head-on into California law designed to protect juveniles from sexual predators.
“It’s kind of a clash of two different cultures, but I have to uphold the local law,” Greenfield Police Chief Joe Grebmeier said.
The case involves a father, Marcelino DeJesus Martinez, 36, a young male neighbor, Margarito DeJesus Galindo, 18, and Martinez’s 14-year-old daughter who Galindo sought to marry.
Police said the young man and girl spent a week together in Soledad, the girl having gone along willingly, after a marriage deal was brokered that called for Martinez to receive $16,000, 150 cases of beer, 150 cases of soda and Gatorade, and several cases of wine and meat.
Police said Martinez first reported the girl as a runaway in an apparent effort to get their help in having her returned because the young man hadn’t paid.
The Informers
Injecting a Taste of the Flush and Flashy ’80s Into Sundance
Van Redin/Senator Entertainment
Mickey Rourke in “The Informers,” a film showing at Sundance that was adapted from a book of Bret Easton Ellis stories.
LOS ANGELES — From a glass-walled penthouse above the Sunset Strip it is impossible not to observe that times have changed.
Just down the street, the original Spago restaurant, that emblem of the flush 1980s, is an empty shell. And here in the penthouse offices of Senator Entertainment, Bret Easton Ellis, another symbol of those super-slick times, is sprawled in a soft chair, wearing decidedly unslick running shoes and sweats.
Mr. Ellis, now 44, was 21 when he chronicled this city’s high life in “Less Than Zero” (1985), his debut novel.
Asked last week whether he missed any of it — the heat, the flash, the coke-blurred frenzy of Los Angeles past — he shuddered. “Oh, no,” he said, and appeared to mean it. “I don’t miss it at all.”
Still, Mr. Ellis and Senator are bringing a bit of that lost world to the Sundance Film Festival next week.
On Jan. 22 they are planning a premiere screening of “The Informers,” directed by Gregor Jordan and based on Mr. Ellis’s collection of stories of the same title. Written during his college years, the stories describe the beautiful wreckage of lives in and around the expensive part of Los Angeles, about 1983.
The film has sex. “I think Amber Heard wears a dress once in the entire movie,” Mark Urman, Senator’s president of distribution, said. He was speaking of a young actress, last seen in “Pineapple Express,” who spends much of “The Informers” undressed, and in bed.
The movie — “a guilty pleasure,” Mr. Urman calls it — also has drugs, alienation and enough glam-rock to set it apart from other work at this year’s festival, which begins on Thursday in Park City, Utah, and runs through Jan. 25.
Sociological Storytelling
Novels help to uphold social order
WHY does storytelling endure across time and cultures? Perhaps the answer lies in our evolutionary roots. A study of the way that people respond to Victorian literature hints that novels act as a social glue, reinforcing the types of behaviour that benefit society.
Literature “could continually condition society so that we fight against base impulses and work in a cooperative way”, says Jonathan Gottschall of Washington and Jefferson College, Pennsylvania.
Gottschall and co-author Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri, St Louis, study how Darwin’s theories of evolution apply to literature. Along with John Johnson, an evolutionary psychologist at Pennsylvania State University in DuBois, the researchers asked 500 people to fill in a questionnaire about 200 classic Victorian novels. The respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, and then to describe their personality and motives, such as whether they were conscientious or power-hungry.
The team found that the characters fell into groups that mirrored the egalitarian dynamics of hunter-gather society, in which individual dominance is suppressed for the greater good (Evolutionary Psychology, vol 4, p 716). Protagonists, such as Elizabeth Bennett in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for example, scored highly on conscientiousness and nurturing, while antagonists like Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula scored highly on status-seeking and social dominance.
Johnny The Horse
Yeah Right.
Fiction Reading Increases for Adults
After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed.
The report, “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,” being released Monday, is based on data from “The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts” conducted by the United States Census Bureau in 2008. Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.
The proportion of adults reading some kind of so-called literary work — just over half — is still not as high as it was in 1982 or 1992, and the proportion of adults reading poetry and drama continued to decline. Nevertheless the proportion of overall literary reading increased among virtually all age groups, ethnic and demographic categories since 2002. It increased most dramatically among 18-to-24-year-olds, who had previously shown the most significant declines.
“There has been a measurable cultural change in society’s commitment to literary reading,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “In a cultural moment when we are hearing nothing but bad news, we have reassuring evidence that the dumbing down of our culture is not inevitable.”
Regis and the Mad Cow
My wife and I were watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire while we were in bed. I turned to her and said, ‘Do you want to have sex?’
‘No,’ she answered.
I then said, ‘Is that your final answer?’
She didn’t even look at me this time, simply saying ‘Yes.’
So I said, ‘Then I’d like to phone a friend.’
And then the fight started….
———————————————
I took my wife to a restaurant. The waiter, for some reason, took my order first. ‘I’ll have the strip steak, medium rare, please.’
He said, ‘Aren’t you worried about the mad cow?’
‘Nah, she can order for herself.’
And then the fight started…
The Film That Should Have Won A GG for Best Picture
Hey, Mickey, you’re so fine…
Mickey Rourke wins Best Actor Golden Globe. Fantastic.
The Numbers Game
Father Of The Brat Pack Gone
Ned Tanen, Movie Executive With a Taste for Youth Films, Dies at 77
Ned Tanen, a studio executive who seemed to have a Midas touch in bringing youth-oriented films like “American Graffiti” and “Animal House” to the screen, died at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., on Monday. He was 77.
[Mr. Tanen] compiled an enviable record of box-office hits and critical successes, based in no small part on his talent for identifying films that would appeal to young ticket-buyers, including “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.” After his studio career, he independently produced films by John Hughes, including “Sixteen Candles” and “The Breakfast Club.”
In 1980 he helped Universal set a Hollywood record of $290 million for a single studio’s box-office receipts with films like “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “The Blues Brothers” and “Smokey and the Bandit II,” then broke it two years later. At Paramount, films like “Pretty in Pink,” “Top Gun” and “Crocodile Dundee,”all released in 1986, earned $600 million, giving Paramount more than double the gross revenues of its nearest competitor. The studio finished first the next year as well.
In the early 1970s, after working as a production supervisor on Milos Forman’s film “Taking Off,” he went into film production full time, helping to develop projects like “American Graffiti,” “The Deer Hunter,” “Smokey and the Bandit” and “Jaws” for Universal, MCA’s film subsidiary.
In 1976 he became president of Universal’s film-producing division, and two years later he was named president of Universal Pictures, its distribution arm. In December 1982, riding a wave of hits, as well as critical successes like “Melvin and Howard” and “Missing,” he resigned from Universal, saying he was exhausted and, he told The Wall Street Journal, tired of playing “the Hollywood game.”
Sunday Morning Melodica
“We knew she was a gonif….”
Troubled Pacific Heights art dealers still in business
By Matt Smith
published: January 07, 2009
February 2007 was a tough month for Nancy Wandlass, an international art dealer known for her Louis Vuitton handbags, $30,000 Escada wardrobe, and constant presence at the Marina District’s tony Rose Cafe. Two months earlier she’d been arrested with her husband, Thomas, on charges of fraud, grand theft, and conspiracy for allegedly stealing two 19th-century French paintings valued at $300,000. 
Adding further stress, Wandlass was attempting to crawl out from under millions of dollars’ worth of past-due bills in bankruptcy court. The Wandlasses had run Pacific Heights Gallery from a condominium they owned on Jackson Street, but it was now buried in liens and heading irreversibly toward bankruptcy sale.
Perhaps worst of all, her long-held reputation as the stylish rogue of the tight-knit, handshake-based S.F. art world was wearing parchment-thin. More and more dealers had come to view her as a cheat. “None of us would ever deal with her. We knew she was a gonif — that’s Yiddish for thief,” said Ed Russell, who for 35 years ran the Graystone gallery on Geary Boulevard downtown, and now sells paintings by appointment.
But Wandlass had escaped tight spots before, and as she awaited trial for allegedly stealing the 19th-century French artworks, she told a bankruptcy judge that she was about to hit a home run that would make things right 
again. “With the additional paintings I am negotiating on to have for resale, the commissions from those paintings will pay off the remaining balance due to the secured creditors and also payoff the unsecured creditors,” she wrote.
A Los Angeles lawsuit and a New York federal forfeiture case suggest that Wandlass really did bat one over the fence. In early 2007 she was serving as middleman for the sale of two modern paintings — “Hannibal” by Jean-Michel Basquiat, valued at $8 million, and “Modern Painting with Yellow Interweave” by Roy Lichtenstein, appraised at $3.5 million.
But, as seems to sometimes be the case with the Wandlasses, their business dealings were accompanied by a troubling backstory: The Basquiat and Lichtenstein paintings were contraband. They’d been smuggled into the U.S. with the help of falsified Customs documents after disappearing from the collection of a Brazilian banker convicted of fraud. The U.S. is now seeking to repatriate the paintings on behalf of the Brazilian government.
“I feel you will have to deal with this matter in the harshest possible way, Mr. Torrance.”
Stephen King fan publishes Shining’s Jack Torrance’s novel
Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance in The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Photograph: Ronald Grant
A Stephen King fan has published an 80-page version of the book which novelist Jack Torrance obsessively writes during King’s The Shining, where his descent into madness is revealed when his wife discovers that his work consists of just one phrase, endlessly repeated.
Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in terrifying form in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, is a frustrated writer who goes with his wife and son to spend the winter in the isolated Overlook Hotel in an attempt to get the novel he has always wanted to write started. But the hotel’s grisly past and unquiet ghosts have their way with him, and his wife Wendy eventually finds that the manuscript he has been working on actually only contains the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, typed over and over again.
Now New York artist Phil Buehler, who describes himself as “a big fan of Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King”, has self-published a book credited to Torrance, repeating the phrase throughout but formatting each page differently, using the words to create different shapes from zigzags to spirals.