Leave My Monkey Alone
A Kentucky man claims surgeon removed his penis without consent during circumcision
Thursday, September 25th 2008, 3:01 PM
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky – A man who claims his penis was removed without his consent during what was supposed to be a circumcision has sued the doctor who performed the surgery.
Phillip Seaton, 61, and his wife are seeking unspecified compensation from Dr. John M. Patterson and the medical practice that performed the circumcision for “loss of service, love and affection.”
A woman who answered the phone at Commonwealth Urology would not take a message for the doctor Thursday. But the Seaton’s attorney said the doctor’s post-surgical notes show the doctor thought he detected cancer and removed the penis. Attorney Kevin George said a later test did detect cancer.
“It was not an emergency,” George told The Associated Press on Thursday. “It didn’t have to happen that way.”
The lawsuit filed earlier this month in state court claims Patterson removed Seaton’s penis without consulting either Phillip or Deborah Seaton, or giving them an opportunity to seek a second opinion.
The Seatons’ suit is similar to one in which an Indianapolis man was awarded more than $2.3 million in damages after he claimed his penis and left testicle were removed without his consent during surgery for an infection in 1997.
Andy On ‘roids
The Polaroid production line
Everyone who was anyone posed for a Warhol snapshot. Jonathan Jones on a compelling show of celebrities in the raw
Polaroid pictures taken by Andy Warhol. Clockwise from top left: Sean Lennon, Truman Capote, Evelyn Kuhn, William Burroughs, Martha Graham, Jimmy Carter. Photographs: Founding Collection, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh © 2008 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc
Mark Rothko was once at a party in New York when Andy Warhol walked in, with his entourage of superstars. Warhol heard Rothko complain bitterly to the host: “How could you let them in?” The two great American artists were not exactly drinking buddies – so it’s a strange twist that a Warhol exhibition should open in London this week, coinciding with a retrospective of his antithesis, Rothko.
Rothko thought Warhol represented the worst things about America: consumerism, celebrity, superficiality, you name it. But the two artists may have had more in common than you might think. In the early 1990s, New York’s MoMA put on a great display of abstract paintings from the 1940s and 50s. At the end, some curator put Warhol’s Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963). It was totally right. Warhol’s tragic subject matter, held in a saturated field of colour, shared the pathos and power of the abstract expressionists, but with less introspection, and more interest in others.
This was abstract reportage, and its compassion, its determination to bear witness, was almost unbearable.
Other Voices, Other Rooms was a novel by Warhol’s favourite writer, Truman Capote. The Hayward’s Warhol retrospective has adopted this as its title, as if to underline the artist’s readiness to listen to, and look at, other people. It features Warhol’s films, screen-tests, videos – and his Polaroids, which it rightly hails as works of art in their own right, even though they were actually used by Warhol as aids for painting portraits. They are strangely compelling images: one of the great humanising threads running through his factory-like output is his fascination with portraiture. The Polaroids provide a fascinating insight into this man who wanted to capture the world like a camera.
At Least The Remains Didn’t End Up On eBay
| Who will smoke the ashes of Kurt Cobain? | 24/09/08 | |||||||||||||||||||||
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| Natascha Stellmach will smoke the singer’s ashes as part of her five-part installation in Berlin.
Australian-born Natascha Stellmach claims to have acquired the ashes of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. Now she’s transformed the grunge star’s remains into an installation titled Set Me Free, that investigates suicide and the power of desecration. The complete burning away ritual will take place with a small group of people in a private location. For further details please contact the gallery. Read more: http://artworldmagazine.com.au/ (22 September 2008, Artist sets Kurt Cobain free) |
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N+1=T
N+1, Now in T-Shirt Form
via nplusonemag.com The Sartorial Situation
Just in time for fall semester, n+1, the Brooklyn-based journal of prose combat, has a new line of T-shirts. (Hey, The New York Review of Books sells Illuminated Pocket Magnifiers, okay?)
While we’re somewhat surprised they’re not referred to as “Cotton Monuments,” the shirts do come in two colors: socialist red and existentialist black. The Times A.O. Scott might say these unisex American Apparel shirts, “sometimes display a certain pained 21st-century ambivalence about the culture they inhabit.” They’re also limited edition and come in five sizes. (“Note: women may want to buy a size down.”)
In case you’re wondering, the shirts are modeled by writer Wesley Yang and managing editor Kate Perkins.
For brekkie tomorrow…
James On James
Cultural Life: James Blunt, singer
Interview by Charlotte Cripps
Friday, 3 October 2008
Books
I recently read ‘A Million Little Pieces’ by James Frey. I have mixed feelings towards rehab – one side of me thinks it’s a gap year for the privileged, and another side has seen its benefits for very dear friends. The book itself has been accused of being made up of lies – but then that’s what addicts do.
Music
I’ve just had three weeks in Ibiza, so I’ve been in the clubs. The track I remember hearing most this summer was the Mark Knight & Funkagenda mix of ‘Man with the Red Face’. Another track that has been fun to hear is Pete Tong’s mix of my song ‘1973’.
Visual arts
When our tour hit Bilbao in northern Spain earlier this year, I dropped into the Guggenheim. I think it’s one of the best modern-art museums in the world. Louise Bourgeois’ spiders are amazing, and the big dog outside made of flowers is enough to keep anyone confused.
Television
We’ve been on the ‘All the Lost Souls’ World Tour since January, so I haven’t had a chance to watch any TV. We sleep in bunks on the bus, but maybe once a week we check in to a hotel. Then we can watch CNN for what’s going on in the world.
James Blunt plays at the O2 arena, London SE10 (0844 856 0202) on 14 October
The Polygamist Pompadour
Fashion Magazines Promote Polygamist Hairstyles for Fall!
W, above, with close-up, and Vogue below
Back in April, when the raid on a Texan polygamist compound dominated the news (weren’t those the days!), those aggrieved Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints wives’ prominent hairdos became a subject of much fascination. Were they meant to indicate closeness to God? To wash one’s husband’s feet in the afterlife? To distract from those hideous dresses?
Now they reemerge in October issues of Vogue and W, which interpret the mega-bouffants for the stylish luxury consumer (i.e. pair them with Dior). We’re not sure what the W model has been doing with that shirtless guy in the background, but we’re guessing she wasn’t washing his feet …
Cholesterol Balls On The Half-White
At the Strip Club in St. Paul, chile oil, curry and beet juice update the deviled eggs. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)
“Well, the front fell off by all means – but that’s very unusual.”
Ed Ruscha’s PUBLIC STONING
A Novel Approach
Published: October 1, 2008
Writer James Frey may have taken a beating in the literary world for his partly fictionalized memoir A Million Little Pieces— for which Oprah Winfrey famously took him to task—but he’s a growing force on the art scene. Pal Richard Prince designed the cover for Frey’s recent novel, Bright Shiny Morning, and the author has boldly commemorated his Oprah humiliation by commissioning a painting, Public Stoning, above, from Ed Ruscha.
What did Ruscha make of the request? “He laughed and then said ‘absolutely,’” says Frey. The painting is on view this month in New York—not at the Half Gallery, which Frey owns with designer Andy Spade and former Black Book magazine editor Bill Powers, but at the Flag Art Foundation, in the show “Wall Rockets”, for which Frey has written a catalogue essay. And that’s the truth.
“A Novel Approach” originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction‘s October 2008 Table of Contents
Americans Stink, No Nobels For You
from AP via Breitbart.com via Drudge
| Nobel literature head: US too insular to compete |
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| Sep 30 03:54 PM US/Eastern By MALIN RISING and HILLEL ITALIE Associated Press Writers |
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STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) – Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.
Counters the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation: “Put him in touch with me, and I’ll send him a reading list.” As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year’s award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it’s no coincidence that most winners are European.” Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States,” he told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Tuesday. He said the 16-member award jury has not selected this year’s winner, and dropped no hints about who was on the short list. Americans Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates usually figure in speculation, but Engdahl wouldn’t comment on any names. Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” dragging down the quality of their work.” The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “ That ignorance is restraining.”His comments were met with fierce reactions from literary officials across the Atlantic.” You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. |
Pollack Yea or Pollack Nay
Paintings could be by Jackson Pollock, or not
Joe Doane / Azusa Pacific University
OWNER: Erich Gabor Neumeth, 89, says he obtained the paintings in the 1960s as payment of a debt.
If the paintings are genuine, Azusa Pacific University stands to gain a windfall. However, that’s quite an ‘if.’
AS EXECUTIVE vice president of Azusa Pacific University, David Bixby fields lots of calls. But one that came through last March was a stunner. Howard Kazanjian, a film producer and university trustee, had come across a trove of paintings by a giant of 20th century art that might be donated to the evangelical Christian university.
The good news was that the works were said to have been made by Jackson Pollock, the Abstract Expressionist known for his “drip and splash” style. The bad news: This was yet another batch of undocumented paintings attributed to the artist.
Kate Moss Self-Portrait In Lipstick
Kate Moss’s self-portrait in lipstick finds buyer
Last Updated: Sunday, September 28, 2008 | 2:22 PM ET
CBC News
A self-portrait drawn in lipstick by model Kate Moss has been scooped up by a private buyer for £33,600 ($63,900).
London auction house Lyon & Turnbull revealed late Saturday that the canvas, a side-angle view of the supermodel, did not sell at auction at its reserve price of £40,000 ($76,000)
The 34-year-old had created the work while in a troubled past relationship with musician Pete Doherty.
The portrait also features stains of blood belonging to rocker Doherty, who in addition has inscribed the words: “Who needs blood when you’ve got lipstick?”
The frontman for Babyshambles is a recovering heroin addict and had sold the lipstick self-portrait to an anonymous buyer, who put it up for auction.
A self-portrait by Doherty, signed in blood, was also put up for sale in the auction, but no one wanted to buy it.
It was inscribed with the words: “Look what they have done to the boy” and had a reserve price of £10,000 ($19,000).
Prince Does Pamela
And What About Pamela?
How perfectly Princian? Colin Gleadell unearths this catalogue gem from the upcoming photography sales in which it is revealed that Pamela Anderson is selling a Richard Prince photograph. From the story it would appear Anderson is selling in distress but Gleadell is more curious how Anderson came to be a collector in the first place:
How Anderson came to acquire the photograph is not known. “Pamela is a girl friend,” Prince tells me. In 1998, he made a series of works in which he appropriated 8in x 10in publicity photographs of celebrities, Anderson among them, on which he wrote dedications and signed their names.
Why she is selling is also unknown. Her manager [ . . . ] describes her as “a small-scale art collector” and says that she is selling for “complicated reasons”. “I am having to sell this photo and it kills me,” she says.
Pamela Anderson: Art Collector (Daily Telegraph)
Konstantin Pavlov Gone
Bulgarian poet Konstantin Pavlov dies at 75
Article Launched: 09/29/2008 09:17:26 AM PDT
SOFIA, Bulgaria—Poet and screenwriter Konstantin Pavlov, who became one of Bulgaria’s most prominent intellectuals with his rare defiance of the country’s communist regime, has died, a filmmakers union said. He was 75.
Pavlov died Sunday after a long illness, the Union of Bulgarian Film Makers announced.
He was among the few Bulgarian intellectuals who dared to assert their professional independence during the 1945-89 communist regime. Pavlov gained popularity despite censors imposing a decade-long publishing ban against him in 1966, with Bulgarians clandestinely copying and reading his poems.
His poems have been translated into many European languages and he has been recognized with a number of national awards for poetry and literature.
Some of his most popular volumes of poetry are “Sweet Agony” (1991), “The Murder of the Sleeping Man” (1992) and “A Long Time Ago…” (1998).
In 1980, he was granted the Grand Prix at the Karlovy Vary film festival for his screenplay of the film “Illusion”.
Pavlov was born on April 2, 1933, in a small village near the capital, Sofia.
He is survived by his wife Maria and his daughter Donka. The funeral will be held Tuesday in Sofia.
Wynn Is Forgiven
Watch Those Elbows: Wynn’s $139 Million Picasso Joins N.Y. Show
By Lindsay Pollock
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Sept. 26 (Bloomberg) — A $139 million Picasso painting damaged by billionaire owner Stephen Wynn when he somehow poked his elbow through it will be publicly shown for the first time since the 2006 mishap.
The patched-up “Le Reve,” or “The Dream,” owned by the Las Vegas casino operator, is part of a Picasso exhibit opening Oct. 15 at Acquavella Galleries on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Other lenders to “Picasso’s Marie-Therese” include the Metropolitan Museum of Art and collector Steven Cohen, founder of hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors LLC.
Dealers estimated the show includes more than $500 million in artwork, though most isn’t for sale — including “Le Reve.”
“He has no intention of selling it,” said Nick Acquavella, a gallery director.
Wynn, who has an eye impairment, accidentally put a silver- dollar-sized hole in the 1932 portrait of Picasso’s sexy blonde mistress Marie-Therese Walter while showing it to friends, who included the writer Nora Ephron. The 2006 incident occurred less than 24 hours after he agreed to sell “Le Reve” to Cohen for $139 million. The sale was eventually canceled.
The tear was repaired and the erotic painting of Picasso’s dozing lover, with her left breast exposed, usually hangs in Wynn’s Las Vegas office.
“To the naked eye, you can’t really see anything,” Acquavella sai
High End Girlfriends No Longer Feeling Wall Street Pinch
Power Shifts From N.Y. to D.C.
After Wall Street’s Quake, Manhattan Braces for Financial Tsunami
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
There are signs that the sagging fortunes of the Wall Street titans are already being felt in myriad ways in the city.
Renowned defense lawyer Edward W. Hayes, a self-described night owl, long ago developed two measurements for gauging the ups and downs of Wall Street: the HEGI and the HESI, which stand for High End Girlfriend Index and High End Stripper Index. When the financial sector’s business is good, he said, the traders and bankers spend huge sums on high-end girlfriends and in the VIP rooms of Manhattan’s pricey strip joints.
Now, said Hayes, who represents many of the woman in the business, he is seeing evidence of the downturn.
“The strippers are getting killed — it’s terrible,” he said. “It really started in the last month. What they really need are the guys who go in and spend $500.”
In fact, while New York City has for years enjoyed the fruits of Wall Street’s decade of dizzying success — an estimated 10 percent of all tax revenue comes from the Street — the highflying traders and financiers are far from loved in this city. For many, who didn’t share in the spoils, there is a certain sense of schadenfreude — enjoying the new misery of the formerly wealthy.
“I do have a vengeful streak in me,” said Rachelle Pachtman, a public relations consultant who lives in an Upper West Side building heavily populated by some of the rich and privileged financial titans.
“I know that there’s going to be a glut of apartments that are going to be dumped in the multimillion-dollar range,” Pachtman said. “They pay a lot for their mortgages. They’ve all got their children in . . . private schools. They all have a lifestyle. How are they going to keep this up?
“It’s going to take their breath away, because they’re going to have to deal with the reality that all the rest of us do,” she added. “I think there’s going to be a lot of people on the therapist’s couch — a very typical New York thing. People are going to start drinking a lot.”
Russian Government Steps Up to Protect Jews From Being Called Stupid
from Agence France-Presse The Times South Africa
| Simpsons and friends face ban | |
| AFP | |
MOSCOW — Pornographic, extremist and immoral — that’s how Russian prosecutors are describing popular US cartoons like The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park.
The channel that carries them has been forced to suspend broadcasts of the offending programmes pending legal action and throngs of teenagers have taken to the streets to demand their favourite cartoons back.
Fans of the cartoons say critics just don’t get the joke and are engaging in Soviet-style moral censorship, while opponents say the cartoons are poisoning the minds of Russia’s young.
“I’ve got no problem with my sense of humour but any satire has its limits,” said Konstantin Bendas, a Pentecostal pastor and father of three who is heading the campaign and has written a formal complaint to prosecutors.
“If a character in a cartoon says ’All Jews are stupid’ is that funny? If Christian communion is compared to eating faeces, is that funny?,” he asked, referring to some of the 20 episodes of South Park he has watched.
Following Bendas’s complaint, channel 2×2 now also faces a criminal investigation under strict new Russian legislation against extremism for broadcasting the notoriously foul-mouthed South Park.
“The cartoons broadcast by 2×2 propagandise violence, cruelty, pornography and anti-social behaviour,” the statement said.
“They are full of scenes of mutilation and infliction of physical and moral suffering that evoke fear, panic and terror in children.
“This media product is of low moral and ethical content and has an extremely negative effect on children, it perverts their moral orientation and increases the danger of panic and neurotic ailments.”
Prosecutors also said the channel was in breach of legislation for the protection of children and rules against “the proliferation through the media of material propagandising pornography, a cult of violence and cruelty.”
Monkey v. Dog
Shifty Eyes Fool
Shifty eye movements behind famous optical illusion
- 12:12 23 September 2008
- NewScientist.com news service
- David Robson
The cause of an optical illusion, made famous by a 1981 painting, has finally been solved.
Neuroscientists have shown that the way our eyes constantly make tiny movements is responsible for the way concentric circles in Isia Leviant’s painting ‘Enigma’ (see image, right) seem to flow before onlookers’ eyes.
Susana Martinez-Conde and her team from the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, tested whether the effect was down to tiny, involuntary jerks of the eyes, known as microsaccades. Their purpose is not fully understood, but the rate of these movements is known to vary naturally.
In the team’s experiment, while three subjects viewed Enigma, cameras recorded their eye movements 500 times every second. The subjects were asked to press a button when the speed of the optical “trickle” of the illusion appeared to slow down or stop, and release it when the trickle seemed faster.
“We can now rule out the idea that the illusion originates solely in the brain,” she told New Scientist.
Martinez-Conde adds that their research may also explain other similar illusions, such as Bridget Riley’s Fall, or the Ouchi illusion. “It would be unexpected if Enigma is the only illusion affected by eye movements,” she says.
My Perfect Son The Doctor and Some Cheap Two-Bit Tramp
Conditioning Bikini Emotional Association –> Beer + Girl
American Psycho On The Great White Way
‘American Psycho’ heads to stage
Musical adaptation in development
By GORDON COX
“American Psycho” has begun the development process and is aiming for Broadway.
Legit version of the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel, about a 1980s Wall Street banker who is also a serial killer, will come from the Johnson-Roessler Co., management-production company the Collective and XYZ Films. The three shingles have partnered to acquire the rights to develop and produce the stage incarnation.
“Psycho” was previously adapted into a 2000 Lionsgate pic that starred Christian Bale.
Development team has just begun the selection process for creatives to pen the score and the book. No timeline has been set for what is envisioned as a large-scale musical.
Graphically bloody novel, which juxtaposes Reagan-era decadence and gruesome killings, includes prominent references to bands of the era, a fact that contributed to the idea of musicalizing the story. Sounds of the time will influence the new show’s score.
Dixie Chicken It’s Not
Academia Killed David Foster Wallace
America’s universities sheltered David Foster Wallace—and almost ruined his writing
Julian Gough
Like James Joyce, David Foster Wallace will be remembered—and, by some, fiercely loved—for a book which 99.999 per cent of the world’s population will never read to its end.
Wallace hung himself in his home in California on 12th September 2008, aged 46. So Infinite Jest (1996), his second novel, turns out to be his final one, and lines and paragraphs throughout its 1,079 pages now flash in neon: “Help me, I’m depressed.” The neon will fade. It will be a magnificently ambitious book again. But right now it reads like a suicide note.
Crucially, he was unplugged from electric, living America, by a life spent in the university system. His father was a professor of philosophy, his mother a professor of English. He majored in English and philosophy at Amherst, did an MFA in creative writing in Arizona, turned his English thesis into his first novel, studied philosophy at Harvard, got a job in the English department of Illinois State University, which he left to teach creative writing at Pomona College in California, where he died.
He was an immensely gifted and original writer, with a brilliant, hyper-analytical mind. The two things such people should avoid are marijuana and universities. He was aware of the dangers of the former (which was not just a threat to his prose—after his first novel he checked into rehab and asked to be put on suicide watch). But he couldn’t escape the warm, welcoming trap of the latter. Only universities will give a job for life and full health insurance to a novelist with heavy-metal hair and a history of depression. He was, as ever, aware of the risk to his fiction. In a brilliant, painful television interview with Charlie Rose in 1997, he said, “Oh boy, don’t even get me started on teaching… The more time and energy spent on teaching, which is extraordinarily hard to do well, the less time spent on your own work… I find myself saying this year the same thing I said last year, and it’s a little bit horrifying.” He looked like a trapped animal. He’d been teaching for four years. Eleven years later, still teaching creative writing, never having written another novel, he killed himself.
‘This is the painting the impressionists warned us against…’
The Beaux-Arts Indians of George Brush
By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post, Wednesday, September 24, 2008; C01
In 1882, when young George de Forest Brush — who was born in 1854 or ’55 (the records disagree) and died in 1941 — rode into the West, he wasn’t an ethnographer or a champion of the underdog or a traveling reporter or any kind of cowboy. He was a painter with a purpose, a Paris-trained professional seeking subjects for his art.
He knew what he was looking for. The figures he was seeking would be thrillingly exotic, distinctively American, conveniently unclothed. Indians would do fine. Those in Brush’s paintings have all the right accessories (beadwork on their moccasins, silver-studded belts, stone arrowheads, canoes), but they aren’t convincing Indians. That’s because they’re stand-ins. Brush looked on them as “actors.” They are stand-ins for the youths he meant to show us all along, the figures of the Renaissance, the gods of Greece and Rome.
This is the painting the impressionists warned us against: French academic art.
Why Should The Wedding Ring Be Worn On The Fourth Finger
Mommy Columbine
US mom admits helping son build weapons cache
Tuesday, September 23rd 2008, 3:12 PM
Bower/AP
Michele Cossey arrives at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa., in 2007.
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Dillon Cossey, 14, is lead in shackles into the same courtroom. |
NORRISTOWN, Pennsylvania – A woman admitted she helped her troubled, bullied 14-year-old son build a cache of weapons by buying him a rifle and gunpowder, but investigators still don’t know if she was aware her son was planning a deadly school attack.
Michele Cossey, 46, pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of child endangerment. She admitted that she bought him a rifle with a laser scope and gunpowder, which investigators said he was using to build grenades.
Prosecutors said her son, Dillon, came to idolize the Columbine High School shooters, who killed 12 classmates and a teacher before committing suicide in 1999 in Colorado, and was planning an attack last year on Plymouth Whitemarsh High School, which some former schoolmates attended.
Cossey, bullied over his weight, had left public school half way through middle school and was being home-schooled. Over time, violent Internet sites fueled his revenge fantasies, his defense lawyer said after his juvenile court plea.
Assistant District Attorney Christopher Parisi said he thought purchasing the weapons was “an attempt to boost his self-esteem, and in some way help the child, as misplaced as those thoughts may have been.”
Michelle Cossey’s sentencing hearing won’t happen until after she undergoes a psychiatric evaluation.
Merchant Of Death Soon To Become National Treasure
US tries to extradict Russian ‘Merchant of Death’
Monday, September 22nd 2008, 11:56 AM
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Alleged Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout looks at photographers while sitting in custody at criminal court in Bangkok, Thailand, Monday. |
BANGKOK, Thailand – A Russian man whose extradition is being sought by the United States is one of the world’s biggest arms dealers, a U.S. agent testified Monday in Thai court.
Alleged arms trafficker Viktor Bout has been indicted in the U.S. on four terrorism-related charges. He was arrested in Thailand on March 6.
The 41-year-old Russian has been dubbed “The Merchant of Death,” by the media, but he denies any involvement in illicit activities. He was purportedly the model for the arms dealer portrayed by Nicolas Cage in the 2005 movie “Lord of War.”