The Olympic Events That Were Censored (A Shameless Pansy-ass Repost)
…of a Classic Steve Martin Short
The Tortoise Always Wins
from The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Wheelie-popping motorcyclist tops 150 mph, pauses to use cell phone
A speeding teenage motorcyclist who popped a wheelie on a North Dakota interstate and then opened up the throttle to more than 150 miles per hour took enough care to pull over before using his cell phone.
By the time authorities caught up with the suspect and his 1000cc Honda CBR, he was sitting in a ditch in Minnesota talking on his cell phone and promptly was arrested, according to the North Dakota Highway Patrol.
The motorcyclist, from Fargo, N.D., waived extradition and was returned to North Dakota to face charges of reckless driving and fleeing police.
According to the patrol:
The wild and woolly 35-minute scene began shortly before 4 p.m. Sunday, when a state trooper spotted the motorcyclist on Interstate Hwy. 29 in Fargo “riding a wheelie past several other motorists.”
Big Serra on The Big Screen
MOVIE REVIEW
Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet
Lorenz Kienzle
Richard Serra’s sculpture “Sequence,” on display in Germany.
Watching as Richard Serra Thinks Big and Does Big
Listening to Richard Serra talk about sculpture is like listening to Russell Crowe talk about acting: after a while you feel you’re either in the presence of genius or the victim of an elaborate con.
Fortunately for both, their work speaks for itself. “Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet” follows the construction and 2005 installation of “The Matter of Time,” the sculptor’s gigantic, eight-piece commission for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain. (No rush: it’s guaranteed to be there for at least another 22 years.) As static and unadorned as the sculptures themselves, the movie gazes with rapt attention as Mr. Serra expounds on his love of steel mills (“Like bakeries that have gone into alchemy”) and as he maps the complex layout of each piece with tape measure and paper templates. Perhaps he distrusts 3-D computer software?
Operating at the intersection of art and industrial engineering, Mr. Serra — whose father worked in shipyards and whose sculptures can suggest the inverted hulls of tankers — is an informative if unanimated guide. Leading us through the massive metal spirals and gracefully curved rectangles that seem to defy gravity, he explains the spatial philosophy behind each mind-boggling piece (“We start with the void”), but all I could think was how the Lilliputians must have felt when confronted by one of Gulliver’s discarded apple peels. The style may be minimalist, but the vision is gargantuan.
Audio Interview with James Frey by Lindesay Irvine
Celebrating Good Friday In The Philippines
East End Art Scene
ART IN THE HAMPTONS, by Judy Rey Wasserman
Long Island’s East End, known as the Hamptons, has long served as a summer retreat for New York City’s elite, but the region possesses an even more impressive history as home to some of the greatest American artists. In recent years, art dealers and collectors have followed suit, bringing with them galleries, art fairs and high-profile events.
According the Parrish Art Museum, over 600 artists have lived, worked or vacationed on the East End of Long Island since the 1870’s. When asked about local artists she’s befriended over the years, Janet Lehr–who opened Vered Gallery with Vered thirty years ago–recites a veritable who’s-who of modern and contemporary American artists who have lived and worked in the Hamptons, including Krasner, Flavin, DeKooning, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Avery, Porter, Chamberlain, Bleckner and Fischl.
“If you are going to be in the art world, then you have to be out [in the Hamptons] in the summertime. It’s where events, shows and networking are happening–the place to be seen,” says Christina Mossaides Strassfield, curator of the Guild Hall Museum, showing a retrospective of Larry Rivers‘ early works through October.
Although artists began flocking to the area in the mid-1800’s, the gallery scene emerged much more recently–most visibly heating up in the past decade. While speculation about a potential market downturn persists, the burgeoning Hamptons scene shows no signs of slowing down.
At the Fireplace Project in East Hampton, Edsel Williams’ recent curators have included Whitney Museum Board Member Beth Rudin DeWoody, Whitney Biennial curator Klaus Kertess and Creative Time President Anne Pasternak. According to Williams, whose gallery shows James Nares and Joe Zucker alongside heavyweights Damien Hirst and Dana Schutz, “We’re [in the Hamptons] because people really have a genuine interest in contemporary art and artists in all levels of their careers.” Sag Harbor’s Grenning Gallery recently celebrated their tenth anniversary with Ten Years , a retrospective exhibition featuring paintings from artists represented over the past decade.
Over the past year, the Hamptons’ gallery presence has continued to expand both locally and regionally. Hamptons mainstay Glenn Horowitz capitalized on his homegrown success and expanded his art and design bookshop with partner John McWhinnie by opening a Manhattan branch, John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller . McWhinnie and Horowitz most recently founded a publishing imprint to issue works by Richard Prince, Terry Richardson and Matthew Barney . According to Jeremy Sanders, Director of the original Hamptons space, Long Island’s East End is an ideal location for motivated new talents on both the art-making and dealing sides, providing “a more open playing field for people to make a splash in the art world.”
Chinaski’s In Chicago
from Time Out Chicago via Shelf-Awareness
Time Out Chicago / Issue 182 : Aug 21–27, 2008
Just opened
Chinaski’s
Photo: Matt Taplinger
A GOOD PLACE TO GET LIT It’s not the bookstore the neighborhood badly needs, but Chinaski’s is nevertheless doing its part to bring a little literary culture to its strip of Damen Avenue. Having taken over the Whiskey Road space a few weeks ago, the owners refashioned the bar to be a haven for people who like beer and words in equal amounts. (To wit, the name of the bar is taken from an autobiographical Charles Bukowski character.) The stage in the back room will now be put to use at a weekly Wednesday-night literary open mike, a comedy open mike on Thursdays and other bookish events, and the sandwiches on the menu are named for maverick authors and poets. But fans of Whiskey Road need not go into mourning yet—one thing Chinaski’s has kept around is the Monday-night baskets of unlimited bacon. 1935 N Damen Ave at Homer St (773-252-8531).
— David Tamarkin
The WeeWee Fireman & The Whiskey Sandwich
Win a signed copy of the first original, unedited manuscript of BRIGHT SHINY MORNING
Bright Shiny Morning is the stunning debut novel by James Frey – author of the controversial but universally adored memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and its follow up, My Friend Leonard.
It generally takes something pretty special to provoke so enthusiastic a response from our Fiction Editor: “Bright Shiny Morning is sure to resonate for many years to come as the first great LA novel… a modern masterpiece of American fiction.” Greg Eden, Waterstone’s Head Office.
Bright Shiny Morning has already been met by similar controversy to its predecessors, and to celebrate its arrival we’re offering a fantastic opportunity to win a signed copy of the first original, unedited manuscript, which is huge and has loads of extra sections that didn’t make the final edit. A runner-up will also win a signed first edition.
No purchase necessary. To be in with a chance of winning this truly unique prize, answer the question below and then enter your details.
Where does most of A Million Little Pieces take place?
INTERVIEW Elongated
Interview to Unveil Redesign
Magazine says it is first to use ‘foil-and-ink’ cover treatment.
FolioMag.com
08/19/2008
Interview, the Andy Warhol-founded magazine that has seen a number of editorial and staffing changes since its longtime editor-in-chief, Ingrid Sischy, left the magazine, is set to unveil a redesign next week.
The new-look Interview—hitting newsstands August 26—is bigger (13” X 10” from the current 12” X 10”) perfect bound and uses a heavier stock. Most notably, the September issue features a striking foil-and-ink cover—the first North American magazine to do so, the company says. It will carry 140 ad pages, a 10.8 percent increase over the September 2007 issue, which carried 128.
In June, Brant Publications laid off four employees[0] as part of a restructuring effort. Brant, which also publishes Magazine Antiques and Art in America, employs about 85 people.
Sischy, who had served as Interview editor-in-chief since 1990, left the magazine in late January after former Brant Publications co-owner Sandra Brant decided to sell her stake in the company.
Read the Story and Comment Now Online:
Top 10 Lit Sex
Eli Gottlieb’s top 10 scenes from the battle of the sexes
Wedded bliss … Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Photograph: Kobal
Eli Gottlieb’s debut novel, The Boy Who Went Away, won the Rome prize and the McKitterick prize. He began his career as a poet in New York, worked for US Elle magazine, then lived in Italy for six years.
Now You See Him is his second novel, published after a 10-year gap. It is published by Serpent’s Tail, priced £9.99
Buy Now You See Him from the Guardian bookshop
1. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber by Ernest Hemingway
From the last great phase of his writing life, and fully in command of his resources, the old boy here draws the clearest lines he ever has between the genders, and makes it all explicit: love is combat. The gorgeous descriptive prose doesn’t conceal the preposterous archness with which the main characters – a middle-aged couple at war while on safari in Africa – assault one another. But if their dialogue grates on our modern ears, we should remember that people, in Hemingway’s thrall, were actually – incredibly – talking to each other like this for a brief few years.
2. Herzog by Saul Bellow
Arguably his most perfectly achieved book (Auden told him it’s only fault was it was too well-written) it’s also a novel of paybacks for real-world slights. That may account for the prussic acid nastiness with which the adulterous lovers at the heart of the book are depicted. Bellow stands quite justly accused of writing somewhat one-dimensional female characters, but the dialogues between the power-mad bluestocking wife and the thwarted professor-husband, are fabulously, irresistibly mean-spirited.
3. Sylvia by Leonard Michaels
Michaels is finally getting his posthumous due as one of the prose masters of the 20th century. This thinly novelized memoir of living with a batty, argumentative, hyperneurotic and compulsively sexual Jewish coed in 1960s Manhattan has some of the great inter-gender firefights in contemporary literature. The book mesmerises like a bad accident. Not until you’re done, shaken and exhausted, do you realise how much art went into its making.
4. A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
The characters natter on like Bloomsbury mannequins, but the scrupulousness with which Murdoch records every jot and tittle of a cuckold’s (and adulterer’s) inner life is astonishing. The narrator struggles for the length of the book in the coils of his ultra-understanding wife and her American shrink lover (and his sister, the significantly named Honor Klein), and Murdoch’s touch is light but scalpel-keen throughout.
Daily Mail Take On BRIGHT SHINY MORNING
Bright Shiny Morning
By James Frey (John Murray, £11.99)
By ROSS GILFILLAN
Last updated at 6:30 PM on 19th August 2008
Following his controversial memoir, A Million Little Pieces, James Frey takes as his subject nothing less than the city of Los Angeles.
Central to his story is a small band of differently circumstanced characters. Esperanza is a Mexican maid who pretends to be an illegal immigrant to get work as a cleaner. Amberton Parker is a movie mega-star turned stalker; while Old Man Joe is a Chablis-drinking bum living on Venice Beach and dreaming of performing a heroic deed.
A huge supporting cast includes romantic golf caddies and would-be film actors, murderous bikers and down-at-heel denizens of trailer parks. Their stories, which can be touching, tragic and occasionally repellent, are interrupted by frequent digressions about the history and development of the city, its highway system, epidemic gang culture and the birth of its film industry.
Facts, both accurate and questionable, come thick and fast. Surprisingly, these don’t disturb the relentless rhythm of a sparkling narrative, which doesn’t shrink from exposing the city’s seamier side but ultimately is a huge celebration — Frey’s ode to L.A. Never mind that Little Pieces was said to be fiction posing as fact. With Bright Shiny Morning, Frey confirms that fiction – the real McCoy – is indeed his metier.
CULTURE by Ari Gold
Purple Portfolio, Purple Anthology at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
from Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
Please join us at a reception for the release of Purple Portfolio, Purple Anthology
Saturday, August 23rd from 6 to 8 pm
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce the publication of Rizzoli’s Purple Anthology, a book celebrating the 15th anniversary of Purple Magazine, and an accompanying limited edition portfolio of photographs by five artists whose work has appeared in Purple Magazine: Juergen Teller, Richard Kern, Jack Pierson, Terry Richardson, and Richard Prince. The portfolio is comprised of five signed and numbered 16” x 20” photographic prints housed in a purple cloth clamshell box. The Purple Portfolio is a publication of JMc & GHB Editions and has been made in an edition of ten, each priced at $25,000.
Visit our website for more information
Click here for JMc & GHB Editions – Purple Portfolio
87 Newtown Lane
East Hampton, NY 11937
P: 631.324.5511
www.ghbookseller.com
Art Gallery & Bookshop
Mon thru Sat: 10am to 5pm
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Art Deco L.A.
from The SpyGlass Blog at LA Magazine
From Josefa Corpuz:
Like the Los Angeles of our dreams, the art deco movement from the ’20s and ’30s is elegant, eclectic, glamorous, and forward-looking. The L.A. Conservancy (a nonprofit organization that works to preserve historic architecture in Los Angeles County – or, more succinctly, “We preserve history in the age of McMansions”) gives walking tours of downtown’s Art Deco gems.
Our docent, David Peake, has been a Conservancy member for 12 years and a tour guide for six. He was converted to the cause one hot, smoggy day back in 1992, when the chords of a pipe organ and the “shabby glamour” of the unrestored Orpheum Theatre combined to produce a historical headrush. “I’m not a particularly religious man,” Peake said, “but I thought – this is my cathedral.”
Many art deco buildings downtown can inspire similar awe. The Title Guarantee & Trust Building has a stylized Gothic tower, complete with gargoyle-like waterspouts; the Eastern Columbia Building on Broadway is a blue-and-green “peacock” of a building that glints, gemlike, in the sun.
Two blocks down on Olive Street is the Oviatt Building, once a high-class haberdashery and the home of storeowner James Oviatt. Inspired by the 1925 Paris Exposition, where art deco began, Oviatt decorated his building with French textiles, French marble, French glass (over 30 tons of it), and even French sand for the “beach” on his penthouse sunbathing deck.
Anonymous Family Footage Meets John Wayne Gacy
a short film by Claire Carré
The Perils of Possession
6 Books To Make You Think Twice
Reading other people’s stories of drug smuggling and drug use can teach us valuable lessons the easy way, preventing us from making the same mistakes as them.
Foreign Cells / Photo by Stephen Chapman
Britons are notorious for their alcohol fuelled trips abroad. Not content with binge drinking their way through the working week at home, they take their business abroad, patronising local tavernas, bars, clubs and often jail cells in the name of ‘having a good time’.
Alcohol abuse may be a monstrous problem amongst Britons abroad but so too are drugs. Countless heartbreaking stories tell of young travellers caught smuggling drugs, using drugs, or possessing drugs. The dangers and consequences involved for anyone partaking in such activities cannot be more heavily emphasised. These six books all tell harrowing tales of how one bad choice can impact your entire lifetime.
- Forget You Had A Daughter by Sandra Gregory – Sandra Gregory agreed to smuggle an addict’s personal supply of heroin out of Thailand. She didn’t make it onto the plane and was imprisoned in Bangkok’s Lard Yao prison. She was eventually pardoned by the King of Thailand and released in 2000.
- The Damage Done by Warren Fellows – This book frequently appears in second-hand bookshops throughout Thailand. Warren Fellows was convicted of heroin trafficking in Thailand in 1978 and sentenced to life imprisonment, Thai style.
- Midnight Express by Billy Hayes – In 1970 Billy Hayes tried to smuggle four pounds of hashish from Istanbul to the U.S.. He was arrested at Istanbul airport and sentenced to thirty years in a Turkish jail.
- Mr. Nice by Howard Marks – At the height of his career Howard Marks was smuggling consignments of up to thirty tons of marijuana. Following a worldwide operation by the Drug Enforcement Agency, he was busted and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison at Terre Haute Penitentiary, Indiana. He was released in April 1995.
- Grass by Phil Sparrowhawk – Phil became involved in many large-scale cannabis deals in Thailand. He spent four years in two of Thailand’s most notorius jails before being extradited to the U.S., where he spent further time in a series of penitentiaries.
- A Million Little Pieces by James Frey – James Frey destroyed his body and mind almost beyond repair through drug use before entering a rehabilitation centre to try and reclaim his life.
The growing popularity of Colombia amongst backpackers will undoubtedly bring us more stories from those who fail to learn by other peoples’ mistakes. Tourism has the ability to help transform Colombia, but with ‘the rise of the cocaine tourist‘ change may still be a long way off, and tourism may not be the vehicle to lift its cocaine curse.
Some Moosebrain says “F#ck” and Canucks Cut Arts Funding
from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Don’t blame us for Tory arts cuts says Toronto band
Last Updated: Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | 4:25 PM ET CBC News
The bass player with Toronto indie group Holy F— says it’s not right that his band has been held up by the Conservative government as an example of misplaced arts funding.
The Tories cut the PromArt funding stream, which subsidizes international promotional tours of Canadian artists, with one spokesman saying the groups getting the money were not ones the government believes should be representing Canada.
Among the examples cited by Anne Howland, a spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister David Emerson — the Toronto indie band Holy F—, which got money in 2007 to help with a tour of the U.K.
“I guess more than anything it’s a little bit annoying that we’ve been made the scapegoat when you consider how much money we receive relative to the budget for the entire program,” Bass player Matt McQuaid said.
The program costs about $4.7 million a year and supports hundreds of different arts groups, from ballet and theatre companies performing overseas to author readings out of country.
“I think our funding comes in at something less than 0.1 per cent of the whole program,” McQuaid told the Q cultural affairs show on Tuesday.
“So all of these other larger groups who need money more than we do to travel abroad — like ballet and symphonies — we become the scapegoat for the cutting in their funding.”
“We’ve been nominated for a Juno award — that’s as mainstream as you get for popular music in Canada,” he said, pointing out that the band’s videos appear on MTV and MuchMusic. “That argument falls flat in our case and from what I’ve read … for a lot of other people as well.”
Nontheless, Holy F— is on a tour of Germany right now, paying their own way as they have been able to all year — because their growing popularity and an album deal with a record label in the U.K.
Serial Offender Peter Saul @ Seventy-four
Provocateur: The Peter Saul Manifesto
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — Peter Saul, who turns 74 on Saturday, is a classic artist’s artist, one of our few important practicing history painters and a serial 
offender in violations of good taste. His career, while long, steady and admired, has never exceeded cult status. It’s an example of can’t-see-the-tree-for-the-forest visibility.
The influence of Mr. Saul’s paintings, with their cartoony figures, lurid-lush colors, splatter-film expressionism and contrarian take on topical subjects, pervades recent art. It has contributed mightily to major careers, like those of Carroll Dunham and Elizabeth Murray. And it has paved the way for the neo-Surrealist noodlings of countless student painters spilling out of art schools and straight into the arms of a ravenous market.
Mr. Saul’s art is not pretty, though it has many eye-catching pleasures. Nor is it polite. Indeed, the artist makes zealous efforts to ensure the opposite. In America today, he says in a catalog interview, “there’s a tremendous need to not be seen as racist, not seen as sexist. So I want to make sure I am seen as those things.”
He succeeds. What museum would be the right one for a painting of a knife-wielding O. J. Simpson strapped down for execution as a buxom blond angel points to a blood-stained glove and intones, “This is why you have to die”? Or for a picture of Christopher Columbus slaughtering New World natives who themselves hold platters of chopped human limbs in their arms?
What is the appropriate place for art that stirs together John Wayne Gacy and Angela Davis, Mickey Mouse and Ethel Rosenberg, Stalin and Willem de Kooning, Basil Wolverton and George W. Bush, then spikes the broth with prickly references to capitalism, Communism, homophobia, feminism, Black Power, racism, pedophilia and art-world politics and — last but not least — to the aging, decaying, self-lacerating artist himself?
Financial Times Q&A with James Frey
James Frey
By Anna Metcalfe
Published: August 16 2008 03:00 | Last updated: August 16 2008 03:00
James Frey is notorious for having embellished parts of his 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Promoted as a true tale of his time at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic, the book became a New York Times bestseller. Frey published a second memoir, My Friend Leonard, in 2005. Born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio, he now lives in New York with his wife and daughter.
What book changed your life?
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. The first time I read it I couldn’t believe someone had written it. It’s offensive and pure and clear.
Who are your literary heroes?
Baudelaire, Céline, Kerouac, Brett Easton Ellis, Henry Miller.
What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?
Something written by Perez Hilton, an American blogger.
At what hour of the day does inspiration strike?
I work from 9am until 5pm. “Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work,” said Chuck Close. I have a blue-collar, working-class approach to what I do.
Where do you write best? My office in my apartment in New York. I close the door but I’m interrupted a lot by my wife, my kid and phone calls. There are three things that writers love: praise, money and interruptions.
How many words do you write a day?
Two to three pages of finished, polished, publishable work.
How many rejections did your first book receive?
17 publishers said no before one said yes.
What book would you give to someone from another era, to paint a picture of the 21st century?
My book Bright Shiny Morning . I think Los Angeles is a city that embodies contemporary US society. It’s segmented and divided, rich and poor. It’s the American dream in its purest form, whether you’re there searching for a roof over your head or for international stardom.
What do you do to celebrate finishing a book?
Nothing. Recently I finished late at night, by myself. I took a deep breath, had a good laugh and went to sleep.
When do you feel most free?
When I hear my daughter say something she’s never said before.
Who would you choose to play you in a film about your life?
I don’t ever want one to be made.
What would you go back and change?
Nothing. I’m okay with everything that’s happened in my life.
What would a novel about your life be called?
It Was a Big F***ing Mess but He Tried Really Hard and He Loved His Family .
Interview by Anna Metcalfe.
James Frey’s latest novel is ‘Bright Shiny Morning’ (HarperCollins)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Louis Owens and John Steinbeck
Louis Owens and John Steinbeck’s Ghosts
A mystery solved with the help of a professor and a mobster’s musician
By Tony Ortega
Six years ago this summer, the Native American novelist Louis Owens drove his pickup truck to Albuquerque’s airport and parked.
It had been some years since I’d spent much time with him. We’d stopped sending letters and e-mails. I don’t know how long he’d been depressed or why. Recognition for his novels was growing—he won the American Book Award in 1997—but he never seemed entirely satisfied with them. He was also somewhat restless about the universities where he taught, and had moved away from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I’d met him, after amassing a following of fanatically admiring students. In 2002, he was splitting time between his job at UC Davis and a home in New Mexico, where he had once taught and where his wife and daughters lived. Was that it? Was it loneliness? Or the sense of failure that seemed to dog him, even as his fame was growing? One of his oldest friends has written that Louis was suffering from the effects of antidepressants at the same time that 
he was taking painkillers for a knee injury that had seriously curtailed his ability to enjoy the outdoors, which had been central to his life. A drug cocktail exacerbating a growing depression over advancing age and inevitable decrepitude? Perhaps that was it.
I really don’t know what was in his mind as Louis pulled out a pistol there in his pickup truck, aimed it at his chest, and pulled the trigger.
He died at a hospital the next day. He had just turned 54.
I was shocked and angry when I heard about it from another former student…. Louis had challenged me to investigate a question that he’d wondered about for a long time. Why, he asked, had Steinbeck turned the mostly Mexican workers of the Great Cotton Strike of 1933 into a bunch of white Okies in his strike novel, In Dubious Battle?
James Frey at THE BRISBANE WRITERS FESTIVAL
Language is the defining feature of our humanity. It separates us from all other life on the planet. Language allows us to communicate the complex experience of our existence with deftness and subtlety. The written form allows communication to transcend time, so we can reach backwards into history and forward into the future. A writers’ festival not only celebrates our common humanity but defines us as a society in time and place.
The Brisbane Writers Festival is more than a Festival for writers, it’s for everyone who reads. From the world’s headlines, climate change, China or the US Elections, BWF is an event that has meaning and relevance to every single one of us, in every aspect of our lives. This year, there are strong personal voices emanating from the pages of the Festival’s books.
The 2008 festival will bring together approximately 220 writers from around the world including some of the world’s leading authors including the winners of some of the world’s most prestigious literary awards including the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize as well as the winners of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
We welcome many fine writers including, for the first time to Australia,Yann Martel (Life of Pi), the winner of the Reuters Foundation Best Environmental Reporter in the World, Alanna Mitchell, Lloyd Jones(Mister Pip) Kate Grenville with the world exclusive release of her new novel The Lieutenant, Robert Drewe, Simon Winchester, biographerRichard Holmes, Chris Abani, Lawrence Hill, Gwynne Dyer, the controversial James Frey, Mahvish Khan – an interpreter at Guantanamo Bay, and many more to excite, challenge and entertain you.
Righting The Pit Bull’s Bad Rap
Oakland couple rescues pit bulls and works to redeem breed’s image
The pair tackle their biggest job yet: finding homes for Michael Vick’s battle-scarred animals.
By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 15, 2008
OAKLAND —
For Tim Racer and Donna Reynolds, the dog rescues started with an open-door policy.
Cruising around Chicago on winter nights, they pulled up beside bedraggled strays and swung open the car door. If the animal didn’t skitter away, if it wasn’t too beaten down to contemplate jumping inside, they figured, there was a chance to save it.
Often, their hearts got the best of them. They bolted from the car and chased down dogs of all shapes and sizes. Once they found a home for one animal, they’d soon spot another needy outcast.
“There was this satisfying sense of justice,” Racer recalled. “We knew those dogs should not be allowed to die.”
Moving west, the two commercial artists focused their rescue efforts on American pit bull terriers, which they consider the nation’s most misunderstood breed. In 1999, they formed Bay Area Doglovers Responsible About Pit Bulls, or BAD RAP, to help reverse the dogs’ criminal image.
Now they’ve set their sights on the most vilified outcasts of all: fighting pit bulls taken from disgraced football star Michael Vick’s Bad Newz Kennels.
NY Bohemia at Burning Man
Art Bound for the Black Rock Desert
Members of several New York-area groups headed to Burning Man loaded their equipment and art onto container trucks in Jersey City.
Nothing is for sale at Burning Man except ice and coffee. Campers are responsible for everything they need for survival and comfort, and that can pose difficulties for East Coasters. Many transcontinental participants ship their supplies or buy them in Reno on the way to the site. Last weekend the New Yorkers filled three tractor-trailer containers with makeshift kitchens, bicycles and desert art sculptures.
Photo: Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
An LCD Projector For This English Teacher
Greetings!
Since I only know about five people in Hood’s Little-Black-Book-of-a-contact-list, the polite thing to do would be to introduce myself before asking for your money: I’m Stephen, I graduated in 2000, and I teach English at a high school in New York City. I won’t be teaching Ulysses, or Dalloway, or anything remotely Hoodian this year, but I am following his example by asking you to donate to a good cause, namely, my classroom. And I’m not 
asking for much: a large number of $5-$10 donations would help me to reach my goal of getting an LCD projector for my class (although larger donations by those able to make them are perfectly welcome, too!).
Here’s the deal. A few months back I submitted a proposal to DonorsChoose, which is a site that links teachers with private donors. The way it works, in a nutshell, is that a teacher writes a grant proposal, then philanthropic souls peruse the proposals and donate money to those projects they deem most worthy. I tried this out last year and an anonymous donor funded my start-up library for my remedial reading class within 48 hours. This year I decided to try for something bigger — an LCD projector — that I’ll use to deliver lessons, have students give powerpoint presentations and generally impress with their technological savvy, etc. As I describe in the proposal, it’s an instrument that I have used often in the past, but my school only has one projector per academic department, so quite often there’s a battle to get your hands on it. I’m hoping to acquire one that will remain in my classroom to be used almost daily. When I wrote the grant in April, I thought it would be funded quickly and anonymously like the last one, but — probably due to the larger cost — anonymous donors have gravitated towards the smaller projects that they can fund in one donation. So this time around I’m turning to my nearest and dearest folks (and strangers with whom I share a steadfast bond to a remarkable professor) with the hope that several smaller donations will get this thing funded before school begins next month.
With that said, all donations are tax deductible. For donations of $100 or more you’ll get a packet of photographs and handmade thank you notes from my students (via DonorsChoose), 
perfect for that company newsletter or just your dusty old scrapbook….but donations of all sizes are welcome — like I say, I imagine this getting funded through many small donations rather than a few large ones.
So please take a look at the website, read the proposal, and if you’re feeling inclined, donate. It won’t feed any people living in the third world, and it won’t help your candidate-of-choice air pugilistic ads during the Olympics, but it will help a classroom in Chinatown get creative with technology — and that’s gotta count for something, right? Also, whether you make a donation or not, please forward this to anyone you might know whom you think would be interested.
The link:
http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/proposal.html?id=181980
Many thanks! And my apologies for the lack of anything even remotely salacious in this email, as promised in the subject line. If I had only promised to be solicitous then you never would have read it…would you?
best,
Stephen
“Hey, what’s going on with the Red Wings game? I just want to make sure I’m not having some sort of hallucination.”
July Mysteries
Independent Mystery Stores: Top Sellers in July
The following were the bestselling titles at member stores of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association during July:
Hardcover
1. Chasing Darkness by Robert Crais (S&S)
2. A Royal Pain by Rhys Bowen (Berkley)
3. Swan Peak by James Lee Burke (S&S)
4. Illegal Action by Stella Rimington (Knopf)
5. Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich (St. Martin’s)
6. Murder at the Bad Girl’s Bar & Grill by N.M. Kelby (Shaye Areheart)
7. Moscow Rules by Daniel Silva (Putnam)
7. Uneasy Relations by Aaron Elkins (Berkley)
7. Cockatiels at Seven by Donna Andrews (St. Martin’s)
7. The Last Patriot by Brad Thor (Atria)
7. Master of the Delta by Thomas H. Cook (Harcourt)
Ask Tom Wolfe A Question. Or Ten.
SPACED OUT with John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz
from Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
Come celebrate the publication of
Alastair Gordon’s new book:
Spaced Out
Radical Environments of
the Psychedelic Sixties
(Rizzoli International)
Friday, August 15th, 2008
3pm to 6pm
The Bridge
1180 Millstone Road, Bridgehampton
For directions call 1 631 537 8902 x 1
Rsvp to Fran Reres
Co hosted by Robert Rubin
Stéphane Samuel
John McWhinnie
Glenn Horowitz
87 Newtown Lane
East Hampton, NY 11937
P: 631.324.5511
www.ghbookseller.com
Art Gallery & Bookshop
Mon thru Sat: 10am to 5pm
Sun: 12pm to 4pm
Closed Wed & Thurs, Oct thru April