I’m Burying My Goldfish
tuxedomoon desire
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Lids Of Fury
| Kung fu fan blows out candles with eyes |
A Chinese martial arts enthusiast says he can blow out candles with only his eyes.
Wearing specially made goggles, Ling Chunjiang, 35, of Kaifeng, blows air from his eyes through a hose and can put out 12 candles in one minute.
Lin, who started to practice kung fu with his grandfather when he was eight years old, found he could blow air out of his eyes if he pinned his nose.
Another one of Lin’s stunts is to hit off the bottom of a beer bottle while keeping the rest of it intact, reports the China News Network.
“I used to have a small restaurant. In my free time I would fill the empty bottles and strike the tops for fun. Once I was surprised to find I could hit off the bottom without damaging the rest,” he said.
Kiwi Bizarre
“Sensual, yet suitably loud, music to drown out sexy noises.”
Sex advice from Bloc Party
Today, 10:27 AM
Dear Kele,
I am living in a shared house at university with very thin walls, so all my housemates know exactly when it’s sexy-time for me and the boyfriend, which is rather off-putting for all concerned. Once, one of them burst in, drunk, knowing that it was a fairly pivotal moment, and shouted ‘THIS IS SPARTA!!!” for a “hilarious” joke. Could you recommend some sensual, yet suitably loud, music I can play to drown out sexy noises and avoid further embarrassment for all concerned?
Love and hugs, ZaraWho the hell is your flatmate? He/she sounds like a total riot. Can we take this person on tour? Please? I’ve just spoken to Russell, our guitarist, and he’s quite happy to come round and noodle about on his guitar in your room while you get down to it. A live soundtrack tailor-made for your sexploits? I may be on to something here. Kele Okereke Ltd – The Bespoke Sex Soundtrack Experience. We could set up meetings. I’d show up with a clipboard and make diagrams of the space where the activity takes place. You tell me what you and your boyfriend like to do and in what order, and then I choose someone best suited to the job from my large list of musician chums. When the urge kicks in, you page me, and half an hour later, some feckless rock dude shows up on a scooter with a Squire Strat and Peavey practice amp strapped to the back.
Read and comment. From guardian.co.uk. Read more…
Pablo’s Muse
Picasso in Lust and Ambition
Librado Romero/The New York Times
Picasso’s ‘Marie-Thérèse,’ featuring work like “Nude on a Black Armchair” (1932) and other portraits of his muse Marie-Thérèse Walter, is at Acquavella Galleries.
Picasso was one of 20th-century art’s major makers and shapers. He was also one of its most prolific purveyors of kitsch. I would place a high percentage of his output in the kitsch category. That would include some of the dozen closely related paintings in the exhibition “Picasso’s ‘Marie-Thérèse’ ” at Acquavella Galleries.
The paintings at Acquavella, all done in or around 1932, have several narratives going for them; the first and most familiar, and the one people seem to love best, is called “Picasso in Love,” subtitled “Love (or Lust) as the Wellspring of Art.” The erotic muse in this case was Marie-Thérèse Walter, a French teenager whom Picasso met and sweet-talked on a Paris street in 1927, when he was 45 and married. Soon they were lovers. He found himself rejuvenated, walking on air. He painted many pictures using her as a model. Some are in the show.
The rest of the story is not so happy. In 1935 Marie-Thérèse had his child, but Picasso’s attention wandered. He found other mistresses and new wives, though he kept in affectionate touch with Ms. Walter through the years. Four years after he died, she committed suicide.
Then there’s another tale, less about love, more about art. In Paris in 1931 Picasso saw a retrospective of his rival Henri Matisse and instantly decided that he, too, had to have a retrospective, a big one in Paris, within a year. And it would not freeze him in the past but project him into the present as the vital, fertile, better-than-ever artist he considered himself to be.
Hot Fictional Strangers
Hot drinks encourage warmer feelings
A steaming hot drink may be all it takes to see the world through rose-tinted glasses, psychologists have found.
Holding a warm cup of coffee was enough to make people think strangers were more welcoming and trustworthy, while a cold drink had the opposite effect, a study found.
The warmth of a drink also influenced whether people were more likely to be selfish or give to others, researchers report in the journal Science. A team led by John Bargh at the University of Colorado set about testing whether hot and iced drinks influenced perceptions of others after noting how frequently “warm” and “cold” are used to describe personalities.
In one test, 41 volunteers were asked to hold a cup of coffee while they took an escalator to a fourth-floor lab. Once there, they were asked to read about a fictional character and give their impression of them. The test was then repeated using an iced coffee drink.
The psychologists found the volunteers perceived the fictional strangers as significantly warmer characters after holding the hot drink. When ranked on a scale from one to seven, with one being cold and seven being warm, they rated people on average 11% warmer after holding the hot drink.
Punky Be@rbrick
Daft Punk Bearbrick 400% 2-Pack Set by Medicom Toy
Posted by: Eugene Kan
In never before seen move, Medicom Toys will release a twin 400% pack featuring the electro musical duo known as Daft Punk. The group’s members are both decked out in their trademark attire with little suit details as well as the group’s name on the rear. This is set to release in March of 2009.
Hong Kong
9 / 12
Hong Kong, China: An aerial view of residential apartment blocks
Photograph: Paul Hilton /EPA
The Butterfly Kid Shoots The Moon
See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.
Skeleton Man
PreJac
Bastard vs. Bots
Vikings battle robots is the first of 5 exclusive behind the scenes vids for one of the bestest freshest new bands around – BLACK TIDE – click to view more at UGO.com.
Click here to visit the BLACK TIDE website
Angry Granny
Woman, 89, arrested for keeping football
By Steve Kemme and Jennifer Baker
skemme@enquirer.com, jbaker@enquirer.com
BLUE ASH – An 89-year-old woman arrested for not giving neighborhood children their football back after it landed repeatedly in her yard said today she’ll return the ball.
But not right away.
“That’s my only way of getting through to these children,” Edna Jester said. “I’ll give it back to them later, but not right now.”
Jester was arrested and charged with petty theft after she took the ball and refused to give it back, Blue Ash police said. Word of her arrest has touched off national news interest in the case.
When police asked Jester to return the ball to the children, she refused. They warned her twice she would be charged if she did not cooperate, Schaffer said. They tried to give her a citation, but she refused to sign for it, he said.
Left with no other choice, he said, officers placed her in the back of a cruiser, took her to the police station and booked her, he said. Schaffer said Jester told police to handcuff her but they refused.
The football, valued at $15, is being held for evidence, Schaffer said.
The potential maximum penalty for a petty theft conviction in Ohio is six months in jail and a fine of up to $1,000. Schaffer said he suspects the mayor or presiding magistrate will take into account her age and lack of criminal record when the case comes up.
The Associated Press contributed.
“Oh no, dear, it’s okay – you lead.”
Thank God I Stocked Up On The Willy Spread Before This Went Down
Ann Summers pulls chocolate sex toy spread
Ann Summers, the sex shop chain, has pulled thousands of novelty chocolate products from its shelves and website after tests revealed they were contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine.
The Food Standards Agency issued an alert over chocolate willy spread, a related nipple spread and a novelty pen set, which contains a chocolate-flavoured body pen, all of which were imported from a Chinese manufacturer called Le Bang.
Food safety experts detected levels of melamine were up to 100 times greater than limits set by the European commission.
Milk products contaminated with melamine have been at the centre of a health scare in China, after a number of children died from baby formula laced with the chemical. European food safety officials have imposed strict checks on food products arriving from China that contain milk products. Any found to have more than 2.5 milligrams a kilo must be destroyed. Tests on the Ann Summers products found levels up to 259 milligrams a kilo.
The FSA said the withdrawal was precautionary and the risk was low. “This is a first. We’ve never had to put out an alert before on willy spread, chocolate-flavoured or otherwise,” it added.
Ann Summers said: “As a responsible retailer we have tested all of our chocolates and even before the FSA alert was issued had taken all relevant steps to remove the chocolate willy spread product that could be affected by this issue.”
Woman With Sickle Wins
Indian woman beheads alleged attacker; parades severed head in market
Friday, October 17th 2008, 10:39 AM
LUCKNOW, India – A woman chopped the head off a man who allegedly tried to attack her and then paraded the head through a market in northern India, police said Friday.
Police arrested the woman late Thursday after receiving calls from frightened witnesses who reported a blood-soaked woman holding a severed head was walking through the village, said police officer Ram Bharose.
The woman, 35, told police she had gone to a nearby forest to cut grass for fodder for her cattle when a man attacked her from behind.
“In a bid to save her dignity she beheaded him with a sickle,” Bharose said, adding that the woman had bite marks on her neck and cheek.
Zonis On Madison
Artist of Rich Shoppers Has Madison Ave. as a Storefront
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Peter Zonis with potential customers outside Barneys New York on Madison near 61st Street, where Mr. Zonis sells his oil pastels.
Along a stretch of Madison Avenue filled with stores specializing in items with hefty price tags, Peter Zonis is a familiar face. For the last seven years, Mr. Zonis, an artist who works in oil pastel, has sold whimsical, vibrantly colored New York City street scenes outside Barneys. His subjects are familiar to his Chanel- and Prada-clad clientele: scenes of Barneys New York, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, Harry Winston, Hermès and Tiffany.
Inspired by certain Manhattan precincts where money and shopping are paramount, Mr. Zonis depicts men in tailored Italian suits cradling cellphones, and curvaceous women teetering on high heels and toting shopping bags while walking their lap dogs. He renders restaurants where people go not only to eat but also to be seen, like Nello, La Goulue and Balthazar.
In one canvas, a lone blond woman clutching a designer handbag stares forlornly into a Christmas window display at Barneys. In another, the spires of the Plaza Hotel appear as if in a fairy tale.
Though Mr. Zonis sees his work as high art, likening his style to the Fauvist movement, he is not represented by a gallery. Instead, Madison Avenue is his storefront, where art, fashion and commerce collide as they do in his artwork. The boldface names that he says have bought his work are printed on a postcard he hands out: Robert De Niro, Joe Namath and Harvey Weinstein, among others.
Dude Ranch Nurse #2
Christie’s Home Safe Too
October 19th, 2008
Christie’s Contemporary Art Evening sale brings in £31,978,500 ($55,642,590) with 26 of the 42 lots sold or 62% sell-through. Many works sold below the low estimates as Christie’s and their consignors adapted to the new price structure. Richard Prince’s Dude Ranch Nurse #2 went for $5.5 million. Not bad considering it changed hands for $2.5 million last May. The Freud portrait of Bacon sold; the Bacon portrait of Henrietta Moraes did not. The Fontana sold for $9 million but it was announced that a bidder with a financial interest in the picture would be participating. There was only one bid.
Fontana, Freud Pictures Sell in UK Art Market Test (Bloomberg)
Brigid Berlin NEEDLEPOINT @ 64th Street Gallery
Brigid Berlin
Needlepoint
Featuring a selection of Berlin’s needlepoint
work of the last ten years
October 21st to November 22nd 2008
Please join us at a reception for the artist
Tuesday, October 21st from 6 to 8p.m.
It is not uncharacteristic that Berlin in later years has turned to the traditionally ladylike craft of needlepoint to create work that continues to challenge the social status quo, defy convention, and pose questions about taste and society. An avid consumer of tabloid newspapers, the “popular press” as it’s referred to in Britain, she translates front page headline broadsheets into genteel features of interior décor. Plush and tactile as the finished works might be they defy any but the hardiest to cozy up to them. Sweetheart cushions they are not.
Visit our website for more information.
50 1/2 East 64th Street
New York, New York 10065
P: 212.754.5626
www.johnmcwhinnie.com
Gallery Hours
Tues thru Fri: 10am to 6pm
Saturday: 10am to 5pm
Closed Sundays and Mondays
What’s black and white and REM all over?
It’s black and white: TV influences your dreams
- 10:52 17 October 2008
- NewScientist.com news service
- David Robson
The moment when Dorothy passes out in monochrome Kansas and awakes in Technicolor Oz may have been more significant than you’d ever imagined. A new study reveals that children exposed to black-and-white film and TV are more likely to dream in greyscale throughout their life.
Opinions have been divided on the colour of dreams for almost a century. Studies from 1915 through to the 1950s suggested that the vast majority of dreams are in black and white. But the tides turned in the 60s, and later results suggested that up to 83% of dreams contain some colour.
Since this period also marked the transition between black-and-white film and TV and widespread Technicolor, an obvious explanation was that the media had been
The Rigid Boundaries That Divide Science
The Age Of Wonder
The romance of science
Richard Holmes
HarperPress, 380pp, £25,
BEN WILSON
WEDNESDAY, 15TH OCTOBER 2008
The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes
Just what some- one who studied science should be called was mooted at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘Formerly the “learned” embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as well as antiquarian speculators,’ reported the geologist William Whewell. ‘But these days are past.’
The meeting was chaired by Coleridge, who vetoed the use of ‘philosopher’; ‘savants’ was instantly rejected as too French. But ‘some ingenious gentlemen’ (including Whewell himself) proposed ‘that, by analogy with “artist”, they might form “scientist” ’. Natural philosophers did not, with their new designation, become in the mind of the public another kind of artist, but a breed apart, divorced from the wider culture. This, according to Richard Holmes, is a tragedy. We should repudiate the rigid boundaries that divide science from literature, art, ethics and religion.
We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all … we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe.
Freud’s Bacon
Freud’s Bacon Portrait Recalls Bohemian Soho: Martin Gayford
Preview by Martin Gayford
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Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) — Great British artists, it seems, are like buses. None comes along for ages, then two arrive together.
In the early 19th century there were Constable and Turner, then — with the arguable exception of Sickert — no painter of truly international stature until Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon appeared in the 1940s.
On Oct. 19, one of only two painted portraits of Bacon by Freud will go under the hammer at Christie’s International in London, with an estimate range of 5 million pounds ($8.6 million) to 7 million pounds. The other picture of Bacon by Freud was stolen from a Berlin show 20 years ago and has never been recovered. Bacon also painted Freud on numerous occasions, but for reasons that can only be guessed at never with such intensity.
In the past few years those two have come to bestride the contemporary art world like twin colossi. This year, Freud took the title of the world’s most expensive living artist at auction, with the sale of “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” (1995) for $33.6 million at Christie’s in New York on May 13.
A mere 24 hours later Bacon, who died in 1992, achieved the title of the most expensive contemporary artist when “Triptych” (1976) sold for $86.3 million at Sotheby’s in New York.
Bacon, born in 1909, was 13 years Freud’s senior, but was only just emerging as a major talent when Freud first encountered him. They met through a common friend, Graham Sutherland.
Sorta Nuts
Drowning in debt, Titanic survivor sells mementos to pay for nursing home care
Friday, October 17th 2008, 7:24 AM
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Millvina Dean |
LONDON – Millvina Dean was only 2 months old when she was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat from the doomed Titanic. Now 96, the last survivor of the tragic sinking is selling mementos of the disaster to help pay her nursing home fees.
Rescued from the bitterly cold Atlantic on that April 1912 night, Dean, her 2-year-old brother and her mother were taken to New York with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Before returning home to England, they were given a small wicker suitcase of donated clothing, a gift from New Yorkers to help them rebuild their lives.
Now, Dean is selling the suitcase and other Titanic mementos to help pay her nursing home fees. They are expected to go for $5,200 at an auction of Titanic memorabilia Saturday in Devizes in western England.
Among the items are rare prints of the Titanic and letters from the Titanic Relief Fund offering her mother one pound, seven shillings and sixpence a week in compensation.
TIME WARP on Discovery Channel
Hi All!
My friend from high school Matt Kearney is hosting a show on the Discovery Channel called Time Warp. There are some youtube clips already posted. He’s been doing slow-motion photography for a long time now and I’m trying to boost his ratings with this shameless plug.
Hope all are well!
Drew
Shindiggin’ With The Elders
Art Of The Game
The Frieze Fair Normally Provokes a Lot of Excitement;
But This Year It Takes Place in the Midst of a Panic
- Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, “Midnight In Bamako” (2008)
The art world seems to be holding its breath to see what happens this weekend. As the VIPs make their way through the fair, we bring you a round up of all the Frieze-related press, including a look at what’s on offer from the ArtInfo slide show. And The Master, Judd Tully’s Overvalued/Undervalued list.
“I know very little about contemporary art but have £1,000 to invest. Any advice?” When Charles Saatchi was asked this in an interview in ‘The Independent’, he responded: “Premium bonds. Art is no investment unless you get very, very lucky, and can beat the professionals at their game. Buy something you really like that will give you a thousand pounds’ worth of pleasure over the years. And take your time looking for something special, because looking is half the fun.”
This is how Alice Jones answers How to Buy Art in the Independent. Among their other tidbits is How to Survive Frieze (as an Artist) and How to Survive Frieze (as a Gallerist)
My 32nd Note Face
William Claxton Gone
from the Los Angeles Times and the NY Daily News
William Claxton dies at 80; photographer helped make Chet Baker famous
By Jon Thurber
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 13, 2008
William Claxton, the master photographer whose images of Chet Baker helped fuel the jazz trumpeter’s stardom in the 1950s and whose fashion photographs of his wife modeling a topless swim suit were groundbreaking years later, has died. He was 80.
Steve McQueen in his XK-SS Jaguar on Mullholand Drive in Los Angeles in 1962.
Credits: Claxton, William
Published: 10/13/2008 18:43:17 in the NY Daily News
Claxton died from complications of congestive heart failure Saturday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his wife, actress and model Peggy Moffitt Claxton, told The Times.
In a career spanning more than a half century, Claxton also became well known for his work with celebrities including Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen, who became a close personal friend; but he gained his foremost public recognition for his photographs of jazz performers including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Mel Torme, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Stan Getz. But it was his photographs of Baker that helped teach him the true meaning of the word photogenic.
[ click to read full article in the LA Times and the NY Daily News ]
Gidget Gein Gone
RIP GIDGET GEIN- LOCAL ARTIST & FORMER MARILYN MANSON BASSIST FOUND DEAD
by Lina Lecaro
October 10, 2008 12:11 PM
The details are still sketchy, but close friends of musician and artist Gidget Gein (aka Brad Stewart) tell us he was found dead yesterday of an apparent OD in his home in Burbank. Considering his macabre sensibilities, we’d hoped this was some kind of goth stunt, but calls to the LA Coroner today confirmed the passing.
Best known for his tumultuous time in Marilyn Manson (he was kicked out due to drug problems just as the band was breaking through, and replaced by Twiggy Ramirez, who many say copped his style and look), Gein went on to form art gothster faves The Dali Gaggers in New York in the late ’90’s. Taking a break from performing, he returned to his Florida hometown to work as a ” bag boy” for the Florida Coroner’s office in 2000. He moved to LA about 5 years ago to pursue his art, and his dark and beguiling works were often the most talked about at the city’s wildest openings and parties including BlueGirl Events and World of Wonder exhibits.
Recently out of rehab for what was apparently not the first time, Gein -whose name is a mesh of serial killer Ed Gein and Sally Field’s 60’s TV character “Gidget”-had a lot to look forward to. He had just emailed us a couple of weeks ago about a new band he was playing with called People (supporting Semi Precious Weapons and Gram Rabbit at House of Blues last week). Good pal Lenora Claire tells us, “He had just got a book deal, was recording a record with the guy who produced the first Janes Addiction record and just landed a solo show at La Luz de Jesus that he had wanted for years.” She says she plans to make sure the show, set for February of next year, still happens no matter what.