Upside Downward Dog
Defiance of gravity
We know it takes toil to get fit, and yet the idea of upside-down yoga just seems too good to miss
Upside-down yoga is sweeping America, soon to set the gyms of the UK afire with the defiance of gravity. I was just scanning the internet for what, exactly, was good about it. On the website it says: “The AntiGravity Hammock acts as a soft trapeze, supporting you as you master simple suspension techniques leading to advanced inverted poses.” So being upside down, in other words, leads to you getting better and better at being upside down. You can also get better at upside-down pilates, and the rather ominous-sounding upside-down dance.
On the one hand, I can’t believe it will take off in Britain, because it is so extravagantly pointless, but on the other hand, for the same reason, I can’t believe it won’t. Faddy exercises are reason-proof, recession-proof and science-proof, insulated against any consideration of consequence that might otherwise ever stop anyone doing anything.
The year before last there was a fad for heated pilates. It was just like the regular kind, only you did it in a heated kennel, while someone outside it enjoined you to “Lose! Tone!” It was more soothing than it sounds. Perspex has a muffling effect. I had a go. “This,” I thought, with a clarity that might have stopped my heart were it not for the lovely warm environment, “is the end of civilisation.”
BLACK TIDE – Winner Best International Newcomer 2008 Kerrang! Awards
Field Stripping While She Can
Unclaimed By Next of Kin
Library of Dust photographed by David Maisel (Chronicle Books, $80, 9780811863339/0811863336, September 2008)
This is definitely a big gift book, measuring almost 18″ x 14″, which is a display challenge, but worth it. In 1913, Oregon State Hospital in Salem, a psychiatric hospital, began cremating the remains of deceased patients not claimed by next of kin. This practice remained until 1971, and David Maisel received permission to photograph the copper canisters containing the ashes of these patients. He also documented the building: paint peeling off the walls in Room 3, Hallway 2, Ward 66, J Building; a fragile sepia-toned letter from Ward 66; a 16-point star cut from a newspaper; tubs and plumbing pipes, cold and grim; a gurney with wide hanging straps. The canisters are extraordinary, having undergone chemical reactions with the ashes and the atmosphere, resulting in a harsh beauty. Burnished copper with green-blue corrosion and white rime. Malachite greens with a lichen-like patina on bent, dented and numbered containers. There are Rorschachs in mineral salts–a bed, an island, a Munchian scream. Or the world from an astronaut’s vantage, frost-like against vibrant blue. They form geographies of the soul, of lives lost to madness and neglect limned in magenta and rose. The urns were available to be photographed only because they were unclaimed–what dramatic or commonplace stories are held in these cans? “The minerals did form . . . rather quickly–is if forsaken souls could hardly wait to pass into another realm.”
Some Sweet Gymkhana Drift
from The Duke
“I do not want to subject our students to those fluids”
from the Youngstown Vindicator
Piercings keep husband of student out of dances
HUBBARD — Five pieces of facial jewelry may be all that is stopping a high school senior from attending any school dances with the 19-year-old man she recently married.
Casey Engstrom, 19, graduated from Hubbard High School in 2007. He has since married Brittany, 17, who is still a senior at the high school. The young couple now lives a stone’s throw away from the high school with Casey Engstrom’s grandmother, but Casey Engstrom will not be permitted to attend any school dances with his new wife. Casey Engstrom has been informed that he is banned from such school functions because of skin-stretching jewelry in his lip and ears.
Though Casey Engstrom, who also is his wife’s guardian because she is still a minor, discussed the couple’s feelings about the school’s decision, Brittany Engstrom chose not to speak to The Vindicator and deferred comment to her husband.
Casey Engstrom said the recent ban from school dances is not the first time his appearance has been called into question by school officials. He said he was forced to remove red streaks and highlights from his hair before attending his own graduation in 2007.
The dress code in the student handbook states that “wearing pierced jewelry on any other body part than the ear, such as nose, eyebrows, lips and tongue are not permitted.”
Casey Engstrom, though no longer bound by the student dress code, spoke to school officials to see if an understanding could be reached on the jewelry that would allow him to escort his wife to the school dances. He offered to remove the jewelry.
Buchenic said the school will stand firm on its decision not to allow Casey Engstrom to attend any school dances because of health reasons.
The skin-stretching pieces would leave an open hole in the lip if removed, and removing the jewelry “was not acceptable because fluids could still come out, and I do not want to subject our students to those fluids,” he said.
Rothko Loses Out To Phallicism Once Again
| Abstract art ‘hung wrong way round’ by Tate |
Two abstract paintings may have been hung the wrong way round by curators at the Tate Modern in London.
The paintings by Mark Rothko, from the Black on Maroon series, have been hung vertically with bold stripes running from top to bottom.
However, Rothko is thought to have wanted the works – which he donated to the Tate – to be hung with the stripes running horizontally and the location of his signature on the back of the paintings is believed to reflect this wish.
Despite the artist’s signature, the correct way to display the works have never been agreed because there are no photographs available to indicate for certain how Rothko wished the works to be hung.
Further complicating the issue is which of the two possible horizontal displays is the correct one, creating a risk of hanging the paintings upside-down.
Although the Tate hung them horizontally for nine years, they were changed to vertical by the then director, the late Sir Norman Reid, on the advice of a colleague, according to reports.
In 1987, the works were returned to their horizontal hang for a special Rothko exhibition. The catalogue at the time stated that the artist’s signature on the back of the canvasses indicated that this was the correct position.
However, when the paintings were moved to the Rothko Room at the Tate Modern in 2000, they were once again shown on a vertical axis.
Happy Filthy Mondays
When Burroughs And Kerouac Killed
When a Real-Life Killing Sent Two Future Beats in Search of Their Voices
Courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Trust
William S. Burroughs, left, and Jack Kerouac in 1953.
The best thing about this collaboration between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs is its gruesomely comic title: “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” a phrase the two writers said they once heard on a radio broadcast about a circus fire.
The novel itself, a sort of murder mystery written in 1945 when the authors were unpublished and unknown, is a flimsy piece of work — repetitious, flat-footed and quite devoid of any of the distinctive gifts each writer would go on to develop on his own.
The two authors take turns telling their story in alternating chapters. Kerouac, writing in the persona of Mike Ryko, tends to sound like ersatz Henry Miller without the sex or fake Hemingway without a war (“There was a long orange slant in the street and Central Park was all fragrant and cool and green-dark”); his chapters possess none of the electric spontaneity of “On the Road,” none of the stream-of-consciousness immediacy of his later work.
Burroughs, writing as Will Dennison, serves up passages that feel more like imitation Cain or Spillane: semi-hardboiled prose with flashes of Burroughs’s famous nihilism but none of the experimental discontinuities and jump-cuts of “Naked Lunch.” In fact, both writers lean toward a plodding, highly linear, blow-by-blow style here that reads like elaborate stage directions: they describe every tiny little thing their characters do, from pouring a drink to walking out of a room to climbing some stairs, from ordering eggs in a restaurant to sending them back for being underdone to eating the new ones delivered by the waitress.
The plot of “Hippos” stems from a much discussed real-life killing involving two men who were friends of both Burroughs and Kerouac. As James W. Grauerholz, Burroughs’s literary executor, explains in an afterword: “The enmeshed relationship between Lucien Carr IV and David Eames Kammerer began in St. Louis, Mo., in 1936, when Lucien was 11 and Dave was 25. Eight years, five states, four prep schools and two colleges later, that connection was grown too intense, those emotions too feverish.”
Yakuza Ninjas Tempura Sushi Chainsaws Flying Guillotine Drill Bra Revenge
Soul Power 74 On Film
The Art Handlers
I Like to Move It, Move It
November 14th, 2008
Who would have thought that the art handlers would have such leverage in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy? But here’s Bloomberg on the orphaned art collection:
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. said it plans to sell about $8 million of artworks warehoused in New York and Paris to help pay creditors. It asked the court to let it pay $20,000 in overdue bills to art-handlers who would move artworks to and from the warehouses and display them to prospective purchasers.
If Lehman doesn’t pay the art handlers’ bills, they have the right under New York state law and French law to seize all the artworks to satisfy their claims, according to the filing
There’s an art to handling art. It’s not just about picking up a painting and moving it, or hammering a nail into a wall. It’s a lot more challenging than most people think. You have to know what you’re looking at, and you learn by experience. We become artists to figure out how we are going to hang something that weighs 300 pounds. There is engineering involved, and carpentry skills. [ . . . ] Getting big things into New York buildings is another challenge. Sometimes you have to hoist the piece up through a window, or fold it in half. I’ve even put stuff on the top of elevator cars.
El Bestilla Loco
The Female Prince and Shameless
Rare Leather
In the book world, the rarest of the rare
Would you pay $25 million for a Bible?
By Philipp Harper
Every passion has its Holy Grail, and rare-book collecting is no exception.
Ask a group of bibliophiles to identify the rarest of all rare books, and a majority probably would cite the Gutenberg Bible of 1456, the first book ever printed.
Assuming a collector could find a complete first-edition Bible, which had a run of several hundred copies, he could expect to pay anywhere from $25 million to $35 million, says rare-book expert Kenneth Gloss, proprietor of Brattle Book Shop in Boston.
Gloss, a well-known appraiser who has appeared on PBS’ “Antiques Roadshow,” bases his estimate on the fact that a single volume of the two-volume Gutenberg set sold for $5.5 million about 25 years ago. Today, single pages from first-edition Bibles fetch $25,000 each.
Anyone who can afford to invest in the top end of the antiquarian market generally will do very well. Consider, for example:
- A first edition of the collected works of Shakespeare published in 1623 sold not long ago for more than $6 million, a record price for the Bard’s works.
- The collection of Leonardo Da Vinci manuscripts that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates paid $30 million for more than 25 years ago now may be worth as much as $100 million, Gloss estimates.
Old books from the New World
While anything printed in the United States is of comparatively recent vintage, that hasn’t prevented demand for rare American works from going through the roof, too.
The most precious of the lot is a first-edition copy of the Declaration of Independence, several hundred of which were printed in Philadelphia for distribution throughout the Colonies after the original handwritten document was signed by the Founding Fathers. Though the copies did not bear signatures, the last one to come to market sold to television mogul Norman Lear for a cool $8 million.
Other items have seen their value build slowly through the years. Edgar Allen Poe’s first published poem, “Tamerlane,” is a case in point. Originally printed in 1827, the poem’s byline read “By a Bostonian.” It didn’t fare well with the reading public in large part, Gloss says, because “actually it was pretty horrible.”
The fact that its affiliation with Poe is obscured by its vague byline has given the poem a certain cachet as a hidden treasure to be bought cheap from unwitting sellers and then sold high to knowledgeable buyers. The latest instance of this occurred about a decade ago when a sharp-eyed collector bought the volume off a dealer’s $15 table and then turned around and sold it for $198,000.
Lightning Bolt – The Power Of Salad And Milkshakes
The Best Freakin’ Noise Band Ever
Owls As Art
Heavy Metal Happenin’
David Fincher, Zach Synder And Gore Verbinski Officially Named Directors For ‘Heavy Metal’
David Fincher’s controversial project, the adaptation of the 80’s semi-skin sci-fi themed mag “Heavy Metal” has officially announced the acquisition of three directors who will each be directing a vignette in the film. Zach Sydner, Gore Verbinski and David Fincher, who is also a producer on the project were all directors we named back in September as being possible candidates, but they have just now officially signed on.
The magazine from which the movie is being based off was notable for featuring extremely erotic and violent science fiction stories, and the adaptation is expected to do the same. During the production of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” Paramount suddenly dropped the film from its production schedule for at first was assumed to be the dark and sexy nature of the project. But it later came out to be an attempt by Paramount to strong arm Fincher into cutting the running time of ‘Button,’ which resulted in Fincher taking “Heavy Metal” to Sony. The producers promise more director announcements soon.
Just Stick It In The Hole, Lady!
Application To Become An Accessory To $700 billion Highway Robbery
Ballet Dancers Needed
Ballet dancers on UK’s most-wanted list
By Andrew Taylor, Employment Correspondent
Published: November 11 2008 13:17 | Last updated: November 12 2008 00:12
Sheep shearers, ballet dancers, maths teachers, geologists, chemical engineers, racehorse exercisers, physicists and biologists have been placed on Britain’s most wanted list under a new immigration points system, the Home Office announced on Tuesday.
The scheme is designed to stem the inflow of low- skilled workers from outside the European Union and give preference to entrepreneurs, financial high-flyers and professionals such as scientists and engineers.
The first stage, for highly skilled workers, was introduced at the end of February. The next stage for tier II levels skills is due to be launched on November 27. Only workers in industries with skill shortages will be allowed in under the rules.
As a result, the number of jobs available to non-EU workers would fall from 1m to just under 800,000, said Phil Woolas, the immigration minister.
Bring On The Dancing Doubleheads
Shortage brings call to let sperm donors father more children
The government should consider increasing the number of children that sperm donors can legally father to tackle the critical shortage of donated sperm in the UK, according to an expert report from the British Fertility Society.
The report calls for a national strategy to tackle the shortage of donated sperm, which is preventing numerous patients at fertility clinics from getting pregnant.
The government’s decision in 2005 to remove the right to anonymity for sperm donors led to an immediate drop in the number of women treated using donor sperm, from 2,727 in 2005 to 2,107 in 2006. The demand for donor insemination is about 4,000 women a year, which would need about 500 donors to register each year. In 2006 there were 307 donors.
One way to make better use of existing donors would be to ease the limit on the number of children they can sire. Currently, this stands at 10 families. The limit is intended to lower the chance that offspring from the same sperm donor will have children together themselves without knowing they are closely related.
Under The Unfigurative Bridge
See more funny videos at Funny or Die
China Goes To War With Fashion Dynasty Over Bronze Animal Heads
Chinese fury at Yves Saint-Laurent art sale
China’s art historians have launched a fierce attack on a sale of relics from the collection of Yves Saint-Laurent, claiming that the country’s treasures are being plundered for the second time.
By Richard Spencer in Beijing
Last Updated: 8:18AM GMT 04 Nov 2008
The two controversial sculptures from the private art collection of the late Yves Saint-Laurent Photo: CHRISTIE’S
Two pieces of work in particular from Saint-Laurent’s collection have provoked Chinese anger: bronze animal heads from the “Zodiac Clock” at the imperial Summer Palace in Beijing.
All 12 heads disappeared during or after the sacking of the palace by French and British troops during the Second Opium War in 1860.
A number before now have come up at auction in the west and Hong Kong. All five of those have been bought by Chinese benefactors or a government art fund and returned to the country in the last eight years, but as their historical importance to China has become clear, the price has risen.
Saint-Laurent’s pair – the rabbit and the rat – have had estimates of pounds 6-8 million each put on their value by Christie’s, which has put them up for auction with much of the rest of the late designer’s collection in Paris in February.
The fashion designer died in June, and his companion, Pierre Berge, is selling their substantial art collection to raise funds for HIV-Aids research.
Although the circumstances under which relics from the Summer Palace, including the zodiac heads, left the country have never been clear, officials say they were looted by French or British troops.
Popular opinion in China, where the Opium Wars are taught by history books to be the start of a century-long decline in national fortunes only revived by Communist victory in the civil war in 1949, is unequivocal.
The whereabouts of the remaining five heads – the dragon, the snake, the sheep, the cock and the dog – remains unknown.
The State of Rock Poster Art (per PopMatters.com)
Hung Up: The State of Rock Poster Art
[10 November 2008]
With major labels fading and promotional budgets cut to the bone, can rock-concert poster art survive? Can it even thrive?
by Stacey Brook
In the paper-and-ink universe of Brooklyn poster artists Kayrock and Wolfy, of Kayrock Screenprinting, the indie rock band Oneida sounds like two yellow chickens pecking their way through a hypnotic funhouse background. Or like double monkey gargoyle heads floating against a honeycomb pattern of primary colors. Or serpentine dragons and medieval beasts worthy of fairy tales, slinking through a sea of blood red around a light-blue Care Bear. Basically, the band sounds like anything Kayrock and Wolfy’s prolific imaginations squeeze through their aluminum screens.
Oneida’s lead singer, Bobby Matador, who describes his band as “loud, fast, and repetitive,” says, “One of my favorite posters that Kayrock and Wolfy ever made for us was just a bunch of shit that Kayrock took from Tin Tin comics and a Hawkwind album cover. You really don’t ever know where it’s gonna come from.”
Since they began working together in 2000, the Kayrock duo have spent their days designing and hand-pulling promotional posters in a two-story, graffiti-ensconced warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, precisely saturating archival paper with ink from plastic quart containers, swapping out screens while aligning print registers, and tweaking last-minute designs. On machines cobbled together from old printer parts, Kayrock Screenprinting gives hundreds of bands identity on paper, churning out designs for such groups as Tall Firs, Les Savy Fav, Deerhoof, and Tiger Mountain. This isn’t a matter of glossy, label-sanctioned photos slapped with crass and impersonal “Fill in the Date” footers. Kayrock and Wolfy create original posters for tours and know the bands they are hired to represent on paper, often intimately. The work is always informed by the music, and lovers of both music and art are drawn to them. Their creations are a far cry from the flimsy promotional one-sheets that propagate modern-day music venues and construction site walls. In a world of pummeling advertising, they are rare promotional artifacts that make you slow down and stare.
Master Morandi At The Met
Taking Stock of a Reticent and Reclusive Master
It is nearly 30 years since the Guggenheim Museum mounted its retrospective of Giorgio Morandi, and in that time this reticent and reclusive Italian master (1890-1964) has become a name to conjure with in America and abroad. Though his fealty to modernism and to the avant-garde was always somewhat ambiguous, Morandi is an artist who rivals Rothko and Cézanne in the radical reduction of his subject matter (mostly bottles arrayed across a table top) and in his priestly devotion to the cause of painting.
A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, billed as the first in America to assess the artist’s entire career, largely confirms the exalted regard in which Morandi continues to be held. That, in itself, is remarkable. For a kind of mythology now encrusts Morandi’s reputation — so thickly that it almost conceals his art. It consists in the notion that he was a perfect, indeed infallible, painter. That is not the case, as this exhibition unintentionally reveals. But far more important is that, even when his weaknesses are admitted, there is still an enduring core of artistic intelligence and vision to the man.
In its barest outlines, the story of Morandi’s life could scarcely be simpler. Born in Bologna, where he lived and where he died, Morandi painted and taught painting for many years in the local academy. Aside from summer jaunts to the nearby town of Grizzana and sightseeing excursions to Venice and Florence, Morandi, who never married, rarely ventured from his hometown. And he left Italy on only three occasions, crossing the border into the Italian part of Switzerland. Contrary to a widely held belief, however, he was not a loner. Rather, he associated with some of the leading Italian luminaries of his day. Nor was he unappreciated or ignored by his contemporaries: From relatively early on, he was written about, exhibited and duly honored even beyond his native country.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
The Making Of A Posthumous Best-Seller
by Martha Woodroof
NPR.org, November 11, 2008 ·The Girl with the Dragon Tattoois an unlikely best-seller — it’s the first book in a trilogy of thrillers written by Stieg Larsson, a previously unknown Swedish journalist who died of a heart attack in 2004.
“It’s a multigeneration family saga. It’s a story of corporate corruption, of religious fanaticism. It’s about the darker elements in contemporary society,” says [Knopf Editor-in-Chief “Sonny”] Mehta. “And then, at its basic level, it’s a kind of a classic locked-room mystery.”
Larsson’s day job was as a crusading anti-fascist journalist who was passionate in his support of anyone being victimized. He co-founded a magazine in Sweden called Expo. Daniel Poohl, a colleague at the magazine, calls Larsson “idealistic.”
“[I] never met anyone like him,” says Poohl. “I read the book after he died … it was … a way to hear Stieg’s voice again.”
The American edition of the novel sports enthusiastic blurbs from such best-selling authors as Michael Connelly, Lee Child and Harlan Coben. And there’s also one from Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient.
“Michael Ondaatje was in the office some months ago and saw it lying around, took a copy with him to a holiday in Hawaii or something, and then phoned me and said, ‘Who is this guy? What an absolutely wonderful read!’ ” Mehta says.
O where O where have my synapses gone…
“We’ve dealt with this man before….”
Jersey City Councilman Steven Lipski is No. 1 threat at Washington club
Sunday, November 9th 2008, 12:06 AM
A drunken Jersey City councilman was arrested for urinating on a crowd of concertgoers from the balcony of a Washington nightclub, police and club sources said Saturday.
Councilman Steven Lipski was caught relieving himself onto several revelers at the 9:30 Club during a concert by a Grateful Dead tribute band Friday night, club sources said.
“He was very drunk,” the source said, noting that it wasn’t the first time Lipski had caused a ruckus at the popular concert venue.
“We’ve dealt with this man before,” the source added. “He’s never peed on anybody, but he gets really belligerent and drunk.”
