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.
-78
What To Wear At -78 Degrees
Courtesy Aliza Sherman Risdahl via Bunny Boots
–Heather Murphy
On the show this morning, we interview a woman who lives in Tok, Alaska where the thermometer recently dropped to -78 degrees. Because here in southern California, we snuggle up next to heat lamps at 50 degrees, we are quite fascinated by this woman and how she gets by in such extreme cold. One characteristic Aliza Sherman Risdahl shares with many Los Angelenos, however, is that she has a Chihuahua. He can’t go out in air that resembles dry ice, but his brother the Lab can. After a certain point outside, he just stops moving and lays down, she says. Apparently they don’t sell bunny boots — the human shoe wear of choice in Tok (above ) — for dogs. She blogs about her experiences here.
The Old Woman And The D
Have Dildo, Will Write
A lively anthology takes the temperature of the female libido
Getty Images
Behind The Bedroom Door:Getting It, Giving It, Loving It, Missing It
Edited by Paula Derrow Delacorte, 334 pages, $25
In her introduction to Behind the Bedroom Door, Paula Derrow bemoans “how little the women I know [talk] about the awkward couplings and surprising urges, the long dry spells or messy, mind-blowing encounters that make up a person’s sexual history.”
Hmmm. Ms. Derrow must know some women I don’t know.
But she may have a point when she goes on to assert that the media, post–Sex and the City, has given us a warped view of what others are up to, making us insecure about our own “less than HBO-worthy experiences.” Hence the need for this latest feisty collection of essays from women writers, which, in the vein of other catchily titled tomes like The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage, and Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, and Themselves, aims to unleash the voices of the day on a provocative personal topic, providing a more “honest” view of things.
Belated Christmas Gift
Inheritance Planning 101
Strike two for the day from the lovely M-C!
Dan was a single guy living at home with his father and working in the Family business. When he found out he was going to inherit a fortune when his sickly father died, he decided he needed a wife with which to share his Fortune.
One evening at an investment meeting he spotted the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her natural beauty took his breath away. “I may look like just an ordinary man,” he said to her, but in just a few years, my father will die, and I’ll inherit $200 million.”
Impressed, the woman obtained his business card and three days later, she became his stepmother.
Pulled Pork On A Fancy Bun
Fantastic
Everyone Should Know About Manu Chao
Out of their heads
Guerrillas outside, stowaways inside and hash cake for Christmas … Duncan Campbell on what happened when musician Manu Chao took his own train through Colombia
Anyone seen dad? … Manu Chao and the train; his journalist father came along to chronicle the trip. Photograph: Youri Lenquette
Few musicians would allow a journalist to accompany their band through one of the world’s most dangerous countries. Even fewer, one suspects, would be happy about that journalist being their father. But Manu Chao is not just any musician, and his father, Ramón, a critic for le Monde Diplomatique, is not just any journalist – so perhaps it should surprise no one that they ended up together on a legendary 1993 tour of Colombia by train, carrying not just musicians, acrobats and tattooists, but a fire-breathing dragon and an ice museum as well.
Ramón’s account of that journey, The Train of Ice and Fire, is published in English next month. For Manu’s growing army of admirers, the book provides a magical-realist insight into how his music has developed.
La Vuelta del Marielito
Every day someone would say, ‘weren’t you in the movies?’
By SIMON ROTHSTEIN
FOR the best part of 20 years MICKEY ROURKE has been a washed-up has-been — an alphabet away from the Hollywood A-lister he used to be.
Then along came a no-budget indie flick about professional wrestling, now Mickey is a movie star again and has Oscar hopes.
And not just any star, but the one he promised to be in the Eighties when he was making such great movies as Angel Heart and Nine 1/2 Weeks — before bad behaviour and a career-break to try and become a boxer all but ruined his career.
His portrayal of Randy “The Ram” Robinson in The Wrestler has seen Mickey nominated for a Golden Globe and installed as the bookies’ second favourite for the Best Actor Oscar.
I See The Future And It Will Be
Running Advertisements in Novels
What if Madame Bovary sold readers her favorite fabric softener?
Last year editor Tom Engelhardt wondered why books never utilized advertising, writing: “The ad, after all, has colonized everything in our world from gas pumps to urinals, bars to doctor’s offices, taxis to your sneakers and cell phone, not to speak of every imaginable printed form, including the cereal box and the back of your supermarket receipt, and yet, strangely enough, it never successfully colonized the book.”
Now DailyLit, the book-serialization website with 150,000 subscribers, has brought ads to books. According to an AdAge article…
Id Engager
Boy With Gun
Ohio boy, 4, blasts baby sitter with shotgun
Tuesday, January 6th 2009, 12:14 PM
JACKSON, Ohio – Police say an angry 4-year-old Ohio boy grabbed a gun from a closet and shot his baby sitter.
Eighteen-year-old Nathan Beavers was hospitalized Sunday with minor wounds to his arm and side after the shotgun attack.
Police say another teen was also injured.
Witnesses told police the child was angry because Beavers accidentally stepped on his foot.
Beavers was watching the child at a mobile home in Jackson with several other teenagers and several other children
Portland’s Stolen Stele
from the LA Times CULTURE MONSTER
Is Portland’s Hindu statue a looted antiquity?
10:00 AM, January 4, 2009
The often abstract debate over how strict museums should be about shunning ancient artworks of questionable origins — lest they wind up owning pieces that have been looted and illegally smuggled — now wears the familiar face of the Hindu elephant god, Ganesha.
A 1,000-year-old stone stele of the god is scheduled to be unveiled at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon on Valentine’s Day. Having already drawn criticism from the anti-looting advocacy group SAFE –Saving Antiquities for Everyone — the Ganesha could soon be exhibit A in the back-and-forth between those who favor a hard line against collecting ancient works whose paths since before 1970 are murky, and those who think it makes more sense to give museums some leeway when hard proof is lacking.
Guidelines adopted in June by the Assn. of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) call for museums to research carefully whether an object they want left its country of origin before November 1970. That’s when the United Nations adopted rules to stem cultural looting.
But when the facts nevertheless remain hazy, the AAMD permits museums to make a judgment call on whether to acquire a piece.
Behind The Gavel
Stooge Asheton Gone
Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton dies
The lead guitarist with the legendary rock band has been found dead at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was 60
The Stooges … Ron Asheton is pictured on the left. Photograph: /PR
The Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton has been found dead at his home in Michigan. He was 60.
Police told Ann Arbor News that the musician may have been dead for several days before he was found. Although unconfirmed, initial signs indicate that Asheton died of a heart attack.
Asheton was one of the founding members of the Stooges, along with his brother Scott, bassist Dave Alexander and their charismatic frontman Iggy Pop. With Pop, Asheton helped write songs that would set the template for punk rock, including No Fun and I Wanna Be Your Dog. As befits a band from Ann Arbor, their music distilled the experience of being a bored suburban teen and bottled it as a furious and snarling sonic assault. Their feral take on rock’n’roll, full of feedback and clatter, was the perfect backdrop for Pop’s wild stage antics, another big influence for punk performers.
Willoughby Sharp Gone
Willoughby Sharp, 72, Versatile Avant-Gardist, Is Dead
Even by conceptual-art standards, Willoughby Sharp’s work stood out. There was his gestational spin in a clothes dryer. There was the curious affair of the talcum powder, 
the teddy bear and the tab of LSD. And there was the Oklahoma Gun Incident, which members of the art world still discuss, with a mixture of horror and awe, more than 30 years later.
Mr. Sharp, the Ivy League-educated scion of one of New York’s most socially prominent families, who in the 1960s and afterward was on the cutting edge of the American avant-garde as a performer, producer, writer, publisher, curator, video artist and much else, died on Dec. 17 in Manhattan. He was 72 and lived in Brooklyn. The cause was cancer, his wife, Pamela Seymour Smith Sharp, said.
A central figure in conceptual and performance art back when those forms were new and daring, Mr. Sharp was concerned with making art that was as much for the mind as it was for the eye. Along with artists like Chris Burden and Nam June Paik, Mr. Sharp helped expand the very idea of what constituted a work of art.
Mr. Sharp was also known as the publisher of Avalanche, a widely respected, handsomely produced art magazine he founded with the writer and filmmaker Liza Béar. Published for just 13 issues between 1970 and 1976, Avalanche featured in-depth interviews with many rising contemporary artists of the day, among them Mr. Burden, William Wegman and Joseph Beuys, the charismatic German artist of whom Mr. Sharp was an early champion.
As a curator, Mr. Sharp attracted international attention with “Earth Art,” a 1969 exhibition at Cornell University. Groundbreaking in every sense of the term, the exhibition featured site-specific installations — by Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Hans Haacke and others — that were hewn, molded or otherwise created from the land itself. Mr. Sharp also ran the Willoughby Sharp Gallery, on Spring Street in SoHo, from 1988 to 2004.
Robert Graham Gone
Robert Graham, L.A.’s masterful sculptor
Graham, who died last Saturday, was the city’s premier public artist and a sculptor whose works reflected the subtle spirit of Los Angeles itself.
Though every artist’s death diminishes us, Robert Graham’s loss impoverishes Los Angeles in a deep and particular way.
Graham, who died last Saturday at the age of 70 after a serious illness, was not simply the city’s premier public artist, he was a sculptor whose works reflected the subtle spirit of Los Angeles itself. Washington may have his magnificent contributions to the Roosevelt Memorial, New York his towering tribute to Duke Ellington, Detroit his starkly powerful Joe Louis fist and Kansas City its massive bust of Charlie Parker — but Graham and his art belong in an intimate and specific way to Los Angeles.
Here, generations will contemplate his monumental bronze doors and exquisite Madonna at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, his “Olympic Gateway” outside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, his “dancers” at Wells Fargo Plaza, the “Source Figure” and fountain atop the downtown library steps and his heroic torsos in Venice and Beverly Hills.
Graham’s work is of this city in a way only those who are themselves fully at home here can read. If you’re attuned to the moods of this place, you know that there are four seasons for those who can see them: You know the wildflowers that follow the winter rains and signal the spring that comes early and passes quickly into summer. You understand how autumn piles the sycamore leaves in dusty briers and burnishes the afternoon light into butterscotch tones.
[ click to continue reading this excellent piece by Tim Rutten ]
Bankers Still More Important Than The Bard
No Bailout for the Arts?
By Michael Kaiser
Monday, December 29, 2008; A15
While government bailouts are being offered or considered for financial institutions, the auto industry, homeowners, and so many other 
needy and worthy sectors, one group is quickly and rather quietly falling apart: our nation’s arts organizations. In the past few months, dozens of opera companies, theater companies, dance organizations, museums and symphonies have either closed or suffered major cash crises.
As someone who has made a career out of fixing troubled organizations, I know that the problems faced by arts groups are often related to poor management and governance. I also know that the difficulty in improving productivity in the arts is a central cause of our financial challenges: It takes as much time to play Beethoven‘s Fifth Symphony today as it did when the piece was composed, and the same number of actors are required for “Hamlet” as when Shakespeare wrote the play more than 400 years ago. Unlike other industries, the arts cannot cover the cost of inflation by improving worker productivity.
Beat The Reaper
Shelf Sample: Beat the Reaper
This is the way to start the new year–read an outrageous, shocking, darkly humorous thriller, with footnotes, no less. Ever so much better than starting a diet and workout program. AndBeat the Reaper by Josh Bazell (Little, Brown, $24.99, 9780316032223/ 0316032220, January 7, 2009) is just the book. Peter Brown is an ER doctor at Manhattan Catholic Hospital, perhaps not the situation one would expect for a guy in the Witness Protection Program. However, hiding out in plain sight from the New Jersey mob, where he used to be a hit man (aka “the Bearclaw”), has worked until the day his past and his present meet in a terminally ill patient. His morning starts like this:
So I’m on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some f***head tries to mug me! Naturally there’s a gun. He comes up behind me and sticks it into the base of my skull. It’s cold, and it actually feels sort of good, in an acupressure kind of way. “Take it easy, Doc,” he says.
Which explains that, at least. Even at five in the morning, I’m not the kind of guy you mug. I look like an Easter Island sculpture of a longshoreman. But the f***head can see the blue scrub pants under my overcoat, and the ventilated plastic green clogs, so he thinks I’ve got drugs and money on me. And maybe that I’ve taken some kind of oath not to kick his f***head ass for trying to mug me.
I barely have enough drugs and money to get me through the day. And the only oath I took, as I recall, was to first do no harm. I’m thinking we’re way past that point.
“Okay,” I say, raising my hands.
The rat and the pigeon run away. Chickenshits.
I turn around. It rolls the gun off my skull and leaves my raised right hand above the f***head’s arm. I wrap his elbow and jerk upward, causing the ligaments to pop like champagne corks.
[ click to continue reading Marilyn Dahl’s review at Shelf-Awareness.com ]
From The Barry Bonds Institute of Reproduction
Another Shady Real Estate Deal
| Alcoholic sells flat to barman | |
| AFP | |
ATHENS — A Greek appeal court has declared void a deal under which an alcoholic traded his apartment to a bar owner in return for free drink for the rest of his life, a newspaper reports.
The agreement concerned an apartment worth 33,000 euros (R423,791) which the 62-year old drinker sold to the bar owner for 6,500 euros (R83,474) with the right to live in it rent-free until he died, according to Eleftherotypia.
A tab of 900 euros (R11,500) was written off and the vendor undertook to provide free drinks for the rest of the drinker’s life.
Four years after signing the deal the toper died and his brother took the case to court.
The court said the terms of the deal had been disproportionate and contrary to decent behaviour as they exploited an individual’s dependence.
The Episcop†ssy Priest
Detroit Live Gonzo
The Ultimate Act of Motherly Love Shunned By Boy Billionaire
from the San Jose Mercury News
Herhold: If Facebook can ban breast-feeding, time we cover up statues
I’ve always been grateful my mother took the time to breast-feed me. It’s a reason why I’ve escaped the worst of my family’s allergies.
Until the flap at Facebook, I never realized how dangerous an environment breast-feeding created, a threat only a little less formidable than the bubonic plague.
Silly me: I didn’t understand that pictures of a mother’s nipple or areola in an infant’s mouth could threaten children. I labored under the false idea it was about food.
You may know the story. A cadre of breast-feeding mothers, backed by legions of online followers, is protesting Facebook’s removal of breast-feeding photos that reveal the nipple or areola.
Last Pop Quiz of ’08
Move to Ban Mountains and Hills Gathers Steam, As New Study Shows High Peaks Cause Global Warming
Why mountains are bad for the ozone layer
“MOUNTAIN waves” in the atmosphere above Antarctica create rare clouds that are helping destroy the ozone layer.
Over the last two decades, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) released by human activity have opened a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Key chemical reactions that lead to ozone depletion happen on the surface of rare polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs), which form high up in the atmosphere. Here, sunlight breaks down the CFCs into products that react to produce chlorine, which in turn decomposes ozone.
This implicates so-called mountain waves, which are created when an airstream flows over high relief. The waves churn up the air high in the atmosphere and appear to create the temperature variations (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2008GL036629).