For Those Who Like It Fleshy
Recipe: Monday meatballs
Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times
DELICIOUS: Monday meatballs elevates the simple to the extraordinary
Monday meatballs
Total time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Servings: 6
Note: Adapted from “A16: Food + Wine,” by Nate Appleman and Shelley Lindgren with Kate Leahy. Grana is an Italian cow’s milk cheese similar to but less expensive than Parmigiano-
Reggiano; it’s available at many cheese shops, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods markets. You can substitute Parmigiano. A meat grinder or food processor is needed for this recipe.
10 ounces boneless pork shoulder, about 1 1/3 cups ground
10 ounces beef chuck, about 1 1/3 cups ground
6 ounces day-old country bread
2 ounces pork fat, finely chopped
2 ounces prosciutto (4 to 5 slices), chilled in the freezer for 15 minutes and then finely chopped
Pee Wee Mariachi
from the San Jose Mercury News
Foot-stomping pee wee mariachi takes center stage at annual San Jose festival
ANNUAL MUSIC FESTIVAL OPENS WITH CRASH COURSE FOR THE 5-AND-UNDER SET
How do you teach traditional Mexican music, a complex and unique sound ever since the first Aztec and Spaniard put their flute and guitar together five centuries ago, to the modern American pee wee set?
“You start with the songs, use lots of language and engage their parents,” says Maria Luis Colmenarez, director of the Pee Wee Mariachi program.
The refashioned San Jose Mariachi and Latin Music Festival threw a fiesta Sunday at the city’s Children’s Discovery Museum, kicking off the big week of events for the annual mariachi celebration. The big hit appeared to be the 45-minute crash courses in musica y danza folklorica for children 5 and younger.
Midway into the morning’s first session, 3-year-old Rocco Marron had his zapateado, or footwork, down pat. The band was playing, “La Iguana,” a tune from Veracruz that asks dancers, young or old, to get down on all fours and mimic a dancing reptile. His little brother, 1-year-old Nico, liked that part better than the fancy footwork.
Nevermind that “Iguana” is not a mariachi tune or that the band members were wearing tropical, white guayabera shirts and not huge sombreros. The band, El Mosquito, played jarocho music from coastal Mexico, but when you’re 3 years old and having a good time, who’s going to split musical hairs?
Pee Wee Mariachi is a new, ongoing program run by Mexican Heritage Corp., the festival sponsor which lately has added modern Latino music to the event and moved it downtown from its former base in East San Jose. Wishing to reach very young children, the organization found a natural venue and host at the children’s museum and a financial sponsor in “First 5,” Santa Clara County’s health education program focused on families with youngsters 5 and younger.
Daft Theremin
Crumley and Milo and C.W. Gone
James Crumley dies at 68; author of gritty but poetic crime novels
Bill Wittliff / Texas State University-San Marcos
James Crumley, seen in 1989, wrote seven poetic but hard-boiled detective tales, including “The Last Good Kiss.” “There was something about the beauty, the elegance of the prose that I think is the most important thing about Crumley,” says Otto Penzler, founder of Mysterious Press.
James Crumley, a revered and influential crime novelist whose hard-boiled detective tales set in Montana and other Western locales were praised for both their grittiness and the lyrical quality of their prose, has died. He was 68.
Crumley died of complications from kidney and pulmonary diseases Wednesday at a hospital in Missoula, Mont., said his wife, writer and artist Martha Elizabeth.
A self-described “bastard child of Raymond Chandler,” Crumley wrote seven crime novels featuring two detectives who were set not in the mean streets of L.A. but in what he called “my twisted highways in the mountain West.”
Crumley’s private eyes, C.W. Sughrue and Milo Milodragovitch, were, as Dallas Morning News writer Jerome Weeks wrote in 2001, “sullen, violent men whose drug use and carnal antics would stagger a rhino.”
To tell his two detectives apart, Crumley suggested remembering that “Milo’s first impulse is to help you; Sughrue’s is to shoot you in the foot.”
The opening line to his 1978 Sughrue novel “The Last Good Kiss,” which many consider his masterpiece, is considered classic — and fans would often recite it to him at book signings:
“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
VvG’s Nocturnal Emissions
Nocturnal van Gogh, Illuminating the Darkness
Devoting an exhibition to Vincent van Gogh, among the world’s most beloved artists, may not seem like much of a reach for the Museum of Modern Art. On paper, at least, “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night” reads like an obvious play for big box office and increased membership.
But this exhibition largely dodges such charges. Small and quirky, it is an anti-blockbuster. Instead of the usual are-we-done-yet marathon followed with ordeal by gift shop, it quietly displays 23 paintings, 9 drawings and several letters by van Gogh in six intimate galleries. The final gallery features a dense display of books that he read, most open to poems about the night.
Organized with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, this show has been overseen by Joachim Pissarro, adjunct curator in the Modern’s department of painting and sculpture and a professor of art history at Hunter College; Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections at the Van Gogh Museum; and Jennifer Field, curatorial assistant in painting and sculpture at the Modern.
Van Gogh discovered new colors everywhere, especially at night. Peripatetically, briefly yet fulsomely, this show explores his special relationship with darkness. It provides a view of the tenderness, urgency and brilliance at the core of his art, as well as the openness to nature that set it aflame.
Van Gogh accepted the night as a distorting condition, almost the way later modernists like Marcel Duchamp and Jean Arp would use chance to experiment and to break habits. Unable to see clearly, he painted what he saw, ultimately pitting his colors against one another as if they were antagonists in a visual drama. He egged on their clashes with exaggerated daubs of paint, bringing backgrounds forward and giving each inch of canvas its own sense of life. In Western art before him, only the semi-Western mosaics of Ravenna achieved such complete articulation.
“Tell the waitress I’ll come back to Zanzibar”
Here are some proverbs dealing with books and reading from As They Say in Zanzibar: Proverbial Wisdom from Around the World – a compilation of more than 2,000 proverbs gathered by David Crystal:
Books
- A book holds a house of gold (China)
- It is better to be entirely without a book than to believe it entirely (China)
- Many books do not use up words; many words do not use up thoughts(China)
- Scholars talk books; butchers talk pigs (China)
Reading and Writing
- After three days without reading, talk becomes flavourless (China)
- The wise read a letter backwards (Germany)
- Learn to handle a writing-brush, and you’ll never handle a begging-bowl(China)
- A love-letter sometimes costs more than a three-cent stamp (U.S.)
Literature
- Life without literature is death (Latin)
- Poets are fathers of lies (Latin)
- Poets and pigs are appreciated only after their death (Italy)
- Those that begin the play must continue it (Turkey)
Angel Laid To Rest
from the San Francisco Chronicle
Hells Angels touched by a mentor
(09-15) 18:41 PDT — Papa’s final ride was a Viking funeral, his body borne to his final resting place by a river of chrome and thunder.
Mark “Papa” Guardado, 46, was killed Sept. 2 outside a Mission District bar. At the time, he was president of the Frisco Hells Angels, royalty of the outlaw biker realm. He was shot to death, police say, by Christopher Ablett, 37, of Modesto, a member of the rival Mongols Motorcycle Club, whose bad blood with the Hells Angels goes back in history. Ablett is still being sought.
But there was little talk of the Mongols as the Hells Angels gathered to remember Guardado at a vigil Sunday night and funeral Monday morning; little more than a passing, irritated reference to a Sonoma County prosecutor who had charges pending against Guardado stemming from a bar fight and who called him a dangerous gang member with an assault conviction on his record.
Instead, those gathered remembered their Guardado, the friend or surrogate father, the man who many said bought them their first Harley-Davidson – or helped them get the job they needed to buy their own.
“To me, and everyone that knew him, he was the epitome of Hells Angels,” said Richard Goldammer, who rode from his home in British Columbia to honor the man he called his mentor.
“He set an example for a lot of people, being straight up, honest and respectful to everyone,” he said. “People form their own opinion about our club … we are who we are. We stand in our own social circle.”
It is a circle with many intersecting rings that pulled together in Daly City for what many hailed as an event of unprecedented scale.
Mongols At War
from the San Jose Mercury News
San Jose pipe bombing linked to rival biker gangs
Mongols-Hells Angels feud blamed; no injuries reported
Article Launched: 09/18/2008 08:36:02 AM PDT
A cluster of pipe-bomb blasts shook a small San Jose neighborhood from its sleep early Thursday, turning a tiny cul-de-sac a few miles from downtown into what police fear is the latest battleground between two bitterly feuding biker gangs: the Mongols Motorcycle Club and the Hells Angels.
San Jose police identified the target in the 3:38 a.m. blasts as Robert Rios, an upper-echelon member of the Mongols’ San Jose chapter, and confirmed that suspicion is falling heavily on their often bloody rivals, the notorious Hells Angels. Mark “Papa” Guardado, 46, president of the Frisco Hells Angels chapter, was gunned down Sept. 2; the suspect, a Mongol from Modesto, remains at large.
“It’s either the Hells Angels are sending a message, or this is a calculated, but ill-advised move,” said Sgt. Larry Day, the San Jose Police Department’s in-house expert on outlaw motorcycle gangs.
Federal law enforcement officials are assisting San Jose’s investigation into Thursday’s attack, described by shaken neighbors as a series of blasts that roused them from their beds. Officials are probing for any links between the two incidents and how they might fit into the wider, ongoing clash between the Mongols, primarily based in Southern California, and the Hells Angels, long an iconic group in Northern California.
Another Crazy Cheerleader Mom
Mom, that’s my cheerleading outfit! Wisconsin woman steals daughter’s identity to join pom-pom squad
|
AP Wendy Brown couldn’t just be content with a Halloween costume once a year. She stole her own daughter’s identity to attend high school and become a cheerleader. |
GREEN BAY, Wis. – A 33-year-old woman is charged with stealing her daughter’s identity to attend high school and join the cheerleading team.
Wendy Brown, of Green Bay, faces a felony identity theft charge after enrolling in Ashwaubenon High School as her 15-year-old daughter, who lives in Nevada with Brown’s mother.
“The defendant stated she wanted to get her high school degree and be a cheerleader because she had no childhood and was trying to regain a part of her life she missed,” according to the complaint.
She allegedly attended cheerleading practices before school started, received a cheerleader’s locker and went to a pool party at the cheerleading coach’s house.
A high school employee, Kim Demeny, told authorities that the woman, posing at the teen, seemed very timid, told her she was not good in math and even cried when she talked about moving from Pahrump Valley High School in Pahrump, Nev. Although she looked older than a student, Demeny said she believed her demeanor was consistent with that of a high school girl.
A school liaison officer started investigating Monday after Brown only showed up for the first day of classes last week, the complaint said.
Lime Pie with Blueberry Compote
Kate Shepherd: Stack Shack @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
from Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
Kate Shepherd: Stack Shack
September 20 to November 10, 2008
Please join us at a reception for the artist
Saturday, September 20th from 6 to 8 pm
Walk into an art gallery and it goes without saying that a “Don’t Touch” rule will be rigidly enforced. Stores are a more hands-on experience – browse, and paw the merchandise a bit as you make up your mind. Kate Shepherd had the looser rules of a retail environment in mind as she went about making work to exhibit amidst the first editions, artist’s books and other wares available at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. She has made a group of works that come with an open invitation to violate the don’t touch rule: stackable painted block toys, wooden jigsaw puzzles, and a group of utilitarian-looking boxes that even have built-in hand holds. Alongside these are more traditional paintings, prints, and drawings that, though not designed to be handled, nonetheless have a definite tactile dimension. Visit our website for more information.
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
Brisbane Fest Boss Welcomes Frey Controversy
Writers festival boss welcomes Frey controversy
A Million Little Pieces author James Frey admits taking liberties to make the story better. (Getty Images: Andrew H Walker, file photo)
The organiser of this year’s Brisbane Writers Festival has defended his decision to include controversial author James Frey in the line-up.
Frey is best known for his 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces. Promoted as a true tale of his time in drug and alcohol rehabilitation, it rocketed up bestseller lists the world over after Oprah Winfrey selected it for her bookclub.
But in 2005, The Smoking Gun website outed Frey for having highly embellished and partially made up large parts of the book.
The scandal raised questions about whether memoirs have to be factually true; artistic director Michael Campbell says these questions can and should be discussed at writers’ festivals.
“First and foremost, he [Frey] is a terrific writer … Even just prior to Oprah getting upset with him live on air, she commended his writing,” Campbell said.
“And I think one of the most interesting areas of writing at the moment is this, sort of, line between fact and fiction. We’ve seen it here in Australia over a number of years through the ‘history wars’. In that sort of context it’s been about the making of history; the story of history. It’s been about how you bring about the ‘facts’ or ‘accounts’ and how you give them a certain amount of weight or not, how you draw connections between different facts and how you bring that together to get a story of history.
“Then once you come to memoir, there’s an awful lot of quite innovative writing about revealing yourself; about what you chose to say and reveal and what you chose to keep hidden. How you do that, how you present that.”
Frey doesn’t deny he took artistic liberties with A Million Little Pieces, but the author also doesn’t feel he did anything wrong.
“I wrote a book that I said for years should be considered literature; should be considered art. Frankly, I’m the first and really the only memoirist to be held to this standard,” Frey told ABC News Online.
“The presidential candidates in America who have both written memoirs that have been proven to have the same issues in them as mine had are not being held to the standard that I’ve been held to.
“The media seems to have some sort of double standard – where it’s ok for some people to do things, but it’s not ok for others … It’s a book, it’s a work of art and it’s a piece of literature. I took liberties in making the story better. There are many things in the book that are toned down, but again the media isn’t interested in that. They’re interested in frankly holding me to a standard that they don’t hold themselves to.
“If you look in the average newspaper on the average day, there’s as many lies in it as there are in any of my books. There’s as many embellishments and fabrications, and I think people who aren’t seeing that are very naive.”
Frey rebukes suggestions that readers of A Million Little Pieces may have felt betrayed or duped by him, and says he’s expecting a warm reception at the Brisbane Writers Festival.
“I know I get a lot of letters from Australian readers who have been very, very supportive of me. And I think it’ll probably, hopefully be like it is in most places – people have been moved by the words that I write and they understand that I create art, that I create literature and that I have taken liberties along the way to do that,” he said.
New work
As well as discussing the genres of memoir and biography at the festival, Frey will be promoting his third novel – Bright Shiny Morning, the story of four lost souls living in Los Angeles.
So far, it has not been received well by the critics. David L Ulin, a reviewer for the LA Times, says it’s one of the worst books he’s ever read.
Frey takes the criticism on the chin, saying his only concern is how his readers receive the book.
“The reviews tend to be either really great reviews or really, really terrible reviews. And frankly, if they [the critics] are judging me based on the past they’re not doing their jobs, because journalists are supposedly objective. You know, this is just another indication that they’re not,” he said.
“If they want to shred the book, so be it.
“What matters to me is how my readers feel about the book, how the people who spend their money and their time with the book feel about it – and so far that response has been great.”
And despite his very public dressing down, it seems Frey hasn’t lost his sense of humour – yet.
Bright Shiny Morning starts with the declaration nothing in the novel should be considered as “accurate or reliable”.
“It’s meant to be a joke. It’s meant to be a statement of defiance,” Frey said.
“It’s meant to say that I make the rules and that you can get mad at me for doing something but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing it, and it doesn’t mean I’m going to follow your rules.
“I don’t think that rules should be imposed on works of art or works of literature, you know. Artists should be allowed to do whatever they want, however they want and call it whatever they want.”
The Brisbane Writers Festival starts tomorrow and runs till September 21.
Lehman Bros. Responsible For Collapse of Art in America
Arts Groups Fret the Woes Of Big Donors
By David Segal and Jacqueline Trescott
Washington Post Staff Writers and Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 18, 2008; Page C01
Katy Clark knows that this is a deeply awkward moment to ask Lehman Brothers for $50,000 — a bit like showing up in the smoldering aftermath of a Road Runner explosion and asking for a match.
But two years ago, the then-flush investment bank gave Manhattan’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s 50 grand for a music education program, and as the organization’s vice president of operations, Clark is hoping that in its death throes, the company just might cut one last check. She has traded a few e-mails with her Lehman contacts in recent days, but she hasn’t raised the subject.
“Timing is everything,” she said. “They need time to figure what’s coming next.”
With Wall Street in a shame spiral, “What’s coming next?” is a question that has everyone in the arts community taking big, anxious gulps. Lehman may never hand out another charitable dime; the immediate future of the firm’s philanthropic foundation, like everything else about it, is now a matter of bankruptcy law. But the fear isn’t limited to those groups that were getting money from corporate America’s recently deceased and badly wounded. There’s agita all around.
The Greatest Pitch Ever Thrown
Untitled Books
James Frey
Friday, September 05, 2008
 |
James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, My Friend Leonard, and the new Bright Shiny Morning, tells us how he writes.
Where are you right now?
Amagansett, NY. At my desk.
Where do you write?
Sometimes here, sometimes New York City. Have desks in both places. Sometimes I sit on a couch in front of the TV.
How do you write?
Just sit down and work. Focus on one sentence at a time. Never self-edit, never go back. I don’t use outlines figure everything out as I go.
What keeps you writing?
I love it, and it’s my job.
Who do you write for?
For myself, and for the readers who support me.
Do you discuss your work with anyone?
Not really. At least not while I’m writing something. I end up discussing it when it’s finished because that’s part of the job.
How do you know if your work is good?
I just believe it is.
Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?
Hundreds.
Which book do you wish you’d written?
A Season in Hell, by Arthur Rimbaud
What is your literary guilty pleasure?
Detective books. I love detective books. Chandler, Hammett, Spillane, Simenon.
Which writer made you want to write?
Many, but Henry Miller probably had the most influence. He lit me up. Still does.
Who’s the most exciting author writing today?
Most are pretty boring. I’d probably say Michel Houellebecq. One of the few who invites controversy, instead of hiding from it.
If you weren’t writing you’d be…?
No idea. Can’t imagine another life.
What next?
The Final Testament of the Holy Bible. And I’m not joking.
Poetry a-Twitter
Poetry’s popularity soars online
By Stephen Adams
|
Poetry, long thought of as an art form in terminal decline, is taking off on the internet according to new figures.
The British-based Poetry Archive has released statistics that visitors to its website are now viewing a total of more than one million pages a month. More than 125,000 individuals – or unique users – have visited the site, which hosts poems and audio readings by the poets themselves. Andrew Motion, the British Poet Laureate, who co-founded the Poetry Archive in 2005, said of the figures: “It’s giving the lie to the idea that nobody reads poems any more.” He thought the internet was providing a better medium for poetry than books. “Either books have not been doing the job or they are being outmanoeuvred by the internet.” Emily Warn, editor of the Poetry Foundation, added: “Andrew Motion was one of the first to recognise that the internet is allowing millions of people to experience poetry in its oldest form — as an oral art form. |
James Frey Interview in the Sydney Morning Herald
from the Sydney Morning Herald
James Frey is back to merge fact with fiction
Itchy fingers … James Frey in Sydney this week. Photo: Peter Rae
September 18, 2008
It is disorienting to learn, for example, that Howard Caughy, who bought LA’s first automobile and died in a crash three weeks later, is a confection named after a friend of Frey. And that three of the four gangs in the city’s first gang war in 1906 are made up.
This mixing of fact, fiction and faction is a clever joke on readers and, even more, on the media. “I did it very deliberately to give the finger,” says Frey, drinking a double cappuccino during a brief stop in Sydney on his way to the Brisbane Writers’ Festival.
Fifteen years after his last drink, he still has the intense, obsessive energy of the ex-addict.
Not everyone gets the joke. His US publisher, HarperCollins, made him sign a 40-page document detailing exactly which parts of the book were true and which weren’t. They have reason to be anxious.
Three years ago, Oprah Winfrey devoted her television book club to A Million Little Pieces, Frey’s 2003 memoir about a gruelling two months he spent in a rehab clinic recovering from a youth of alcoholism, drug addiction, violence and near-death. The book – already a bestseller – went on to sales of 6 million in the US, 8 million around the world and almost 100,000 in Australia. In the sequel, My Friend Leonard, he wrote about his return to “normal” life under protection from a Mafia boss.
Months after Winfrey’s tearful promotion, an investigative website exposed parts of Frey’s books as being fabricated to make him look tougher than he was. He had not spent three months in jail, it was a matter of hours. His role in a woman’s death was invented. Excruciating dentistry was not, as graphically described, done without drugs.
Winfrey demanded another appearance by Frey to confess and apologise. Labelled a liar, he was hounded by the media, dumped by his publisher, and hit with a class-action suit by “cheated” readers.
He retorted that he had tried to sell the book as fiction but Nan Talese, the respected Random House publisher, insisted memoir would sell better.
The books now appear with remorseful notes to readers, who continue to buy them in large numbers. A Million Little Pieces is “90 per cent true”, he says now; My Friend Leonard somewhat less.
To his credit, Frey has lifted his life out of chaos and kept on writing. He lives in New York’s SoHo with his wife, Maya, and their three-year-old daughter. His friends are artists, bankers and just a few writers. After a stint writing and directing in Hollywood, he prefers art essays and his own compelling brand of literature.
‘ “I had no intention of writing a book that would sell 100 copies and get a write-up in the local paper,” he says. “My goal was to be one of the most influential and most important writers of my time. I wanted my writing to be unlike anything that preceded it, devoid of influence, unique, new, fresh and reflective of the time we live in. I wasn’t a guy burning to tell my story of recovery; that was just the best story I had.”
Frey’s writing is instantly recognisable for its minute detail, repetitive sentences, minimal punctuation and incantatory rhythms, which he writes while listening to music. He dislikes labels such as “memoir” and “novel”, and rather sees his books as “art”. His literary heroes are rule-breakers such as Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski and Arthur Rimbaud. They blurred fact and fiction, he says, and all got “massacred”.
Frey admits he made mistakes. Still, he has emerged with his confidence intact. In the US he does stage appearances with rock bands and video screens. Young readers flock to his Facebook and MySpace pages.
“I’m just one of those punk kids on a skateboard trying to get into trouble,” he says. So, for his next trick, he is writing a book about a New Yorker who believes he is the Messiah. He calls it “the third book of the Bible”.
Is it all true? He gives me a challenging look and replies: “Were the first two?”
Baba-Booey Nipple Rape Airs On CNN
HOWARD STERN REGULARS STAGE GAY KISS OUTSIDE LEHMAN BROTHERS
Sal “the Stockbroker” Governale and Richard Christy, two Howard Stern regulars, staged a gay kiss and nipple-biting session in front of Lehman Brothers while CNN’s Allan Chernoff reported on the firm’s bankruptcy in the foreground.
I’m not quite sure what message of consolation their stunt brings, though it’s hard to imagine anyone walking their desks out of Lehman was laughing.
“You know – I just write books.”
Enter the Frey
Michael Lallo
September 17, 2008
James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning proves his career is not in a million little pieces.
ON THE first page of Bright Shiny Morning is what appears to be a standard disclaimer: “Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.”
But the author of this novel is James Frey, the drug addict turned “recovery super boy” who made Oprah very, very mad. Who was vilified by The New York Times. Who was hounded by reporters and denounced as a literary fraud for fictionalising parts of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Which is why those first 10 words are no ordinary disclaimer.
“That sentence is really just me raising my two middle fingers and saying ‘I’m going to do what I want and I’ll do it how I want’,” Frey says from his hotel room in Sydney. “And I don’t care what the people who believe it’s their job to decide what is and is not literature think.”
In any other writer, this couldn’t-give-a-damn attitude might seem contrived. But with Frey, it’s real — you don’t recover from a media crucifixion to write a critically acclaimed novel without a tough skin.
And Bright Shiny Morning is as bold as it is big. The sprawling, 500-page epic features dozens of characters, from a closeted film star to an alcoholic tramp. The central character, however, is the city of Los Angeles.
“Tolstoy did it with St Petersburg, Dickens did it with London and Hugo did it with Paris,” Frey says. “But nobody had even attempted it with LA. I think the film and entertainment industry looms very large over that place. Writers and artists from LA often struggle with it — how can you be serious but also be from the place where they made Iron Man?”
LA’s ritzy veneer is just one of its many facets explored by Frey, with the immigrant underclass, homeless drifters and suburban homemakers all fleshing out this portrait of a city.
Not surprisingly, it’s also the most heavily vetted book HarperCollins has ever published. Before it was released, Frey was ordered to verify every piece of historical trivia scattered throughout its pages. About three-quarters is factual and the rest he made up, leaving the reader to guess what’s real.
Although he spent two years writing it, Frey didn’t find a publisher until it was finished. His previous publisher dropped him after the A Million Little Pieces scandal erupted in 2006.
That scandal was briefly reported around the world, but in the United States it took on a life of its own. Even Dick Cheney shooting his pal in the face failed to knock Frey off the front pages. His crime, as revealed by The Smoking Gun website, was to have exaggerated or made up parts of his best-selling book about his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. The three months he spent in prison turned out to be three hours. He falsely presented himself as a victim of a real train crash that killed two girls. And there was no run-in with the Ohio police.
Frey isn’t the first memoirist to take creative liberties — but he is one of the few to have his work become an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Initially, the talk show queen stood by him, dismissing the furore as “much ado about nothing”. But when Oprah’s fans turned on her, she turned on Frey, hauling him onto her show to explain himself. Relentlessly, she interrogated and admonished him while the audience jeered. And now that Oprah was part of the story, every newspaper and television station in the country was covering it.
Does Frey suspect her about-face was actually motivated by a desire to save her own hide?
“You’d have to ask Oprah that,” he says. “I’m not going to speak for her.”
But he does believe the whole affair was little more than a beat-up. “It was totally media-driven,” he says. “The statistics of the (reader lawsuit) bear that out. Only 1700 of 4.5 million eligible people asked for their money back. If that’s my customer satisfaction ratio, I’m fine with that.”
And although the book was printed in more than 30 languages, not one of his international publishers dropped him. Still, the ordeal took its toll, forcing Frey to seek refuge in France for two months.
But judging by his next novel about a New York man who believes he is the messiah, he has no intention to play it safe.
“I want to explore how religion has been used and distorted in nasty ways,” he says. “Under Bush, we’ve seen the gradual erosion of the separation of church and state. I’m not going to let somebody who believes in a god that I don’t believe in tell me that I have to live my life in a certain way. The book is going to be a statement on religion and belief, and tolerance and intolerance.”
It’s easy to imagine that writing fiction must be liberating for Frey — although he’s not so sure.
“You know, I just write books. I didn’t approach Bright Shiny Morning any differently to any other book. My goal, every time I sit down, is to create a work of literary art. And whatever the publisher calls it — whatever they stick on the side — is irrelevant.”
James Frey will speak at 6.30pm tonight at Readings Hawthorn, 701 Glenferrie Road. Bookings: 9819 1917
Russian Ratmansky Invades American Ballet
New Home for an Artist, New Hope for American Ballet Theater
Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times
Alexei Ratmansky’s “Bright Stream,” with Anastasia Yatsenko, center, at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Wednesday’s news that Alexei Ratmansky, the departing artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, has been appointed artist in residence at American Ballet Theater came as a major surprise. These are glad tidings.
Ballet Theater is a major company that needs a resident choreographer. For years it has been churning out its gifted but varied dancers across a range of largely stale productions; Mr. Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon are the two most able and remarkable choreographers working in international ballet. Since Mr. Ratmansky announced earlier this year that he was leaving his job as artistic director of the Bolshoi, anyone who has admired his work must have been hoping he would soon find a company worthy of his talents.
In the context of Russian ballet over the last 80 years, Mr. Ratmansky looked like a mold-breaker. The Soviet Union certainly produced some very popular choreographers, notably Leonid Lavrovsky (whose “Romeo and Juliet,” though short on real dancing, was the Bolshoi’s great sensation in the 1940s and ’50s) and Yuri Grigorovich (whose “Spartacus,” though trashy in its repetitious slam-bam emphasis, packed an irresistible punch from the late ’60s to the late ’80s). The late Soviet period produced Boris Eifman, whose often ludicrous choreography managed to stir audiences and win some degree of international acclaim even in this decade.
“Romeo” and “Spartacus” did much to define everyone’s idea of the Bolshoi in those decades. Mr. Ratmansky has not yet choreographed any hit remotely as big. Perhaps he never will. Still, he seems the finest Russian choreographer — in terms of dance poetry — since George Balanchine, who left Russia in 1924.
Warhol and the Sri Lankan Tsunami
Andy Warhol and artist ‘who never existed’
An auction of paintings by an artist believed to have worked alongside Andy Warhol has been postponed over claims he may not have existed
By Lucy Cockcroft
Last Updated: 9:11AM BST 16 Sep 2008
Works by Pietro Psaier have appeared at sales all over the world, including several held by Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams, attracting prices of up to £14,000.
They were given added kudos by the claim that Psaier worked in Warhol’s studio, the Factory, and that the pair were friends who collaborated on several pieces.
However, officials at the Andy Warhol Foundation have come forward to say they have never heard of Psaier, and suggested that the whole relationship may have been a hoax.
The auctioneer John Nicholson, of Fernhurst, Surrey, the leading Psaier dealer, is trying to prove his existence and has even hired a researcher. In the meantime, he has been forced to delay the latest sale of Psaier’s work, which had been scheduled for tomorrow.
The artist is said to have been born in Italy and lived a nomadic life before he was killed by the tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004, although his body has never been recovered. There are also few official documents and witnesses to help prove the story.
The Guilt Was Plastered All Over Her Face
“This Much I Know” interview with James Frey
This much I know
James Frey, writer, 38, London
American author James Frey now lives in London. Photograph: Antonio Olmos
Since I was 24 or so, my goal has always been to be a great writer,to be one of the most influential, most controversial, most widely read literary figures of my time. The only ambition I have is to write great books or fail absolutely trying.
I’ve been in conflict with everything for my whole life. That’s the rule, not the exception. Conflict with myself over ideas of how to live and think, what to think, what to believe. My wife laughs and says I’m only comfortable when there’s a fight.
I’ve been sober for 15 years, so I’m pretty used to it. There are days I wish I could drink. You drink so you don’t have to feel something, and when you feel something deeply it can be difficult. Every day going through the Oprah scandal [Frey admitted fabricating sections of his memoir A Million Little Pieces on Oprah] I just wanted to make it go away, but if I started drinking or using again I would lose a whole lot else.
A Million Little Pieces is the most investigated book in American history. No other work of literature has been put under the microscope in the way that was – it was shocking.
I don’t believe in God or a higher power. I believe that you shouldn’t be allowed to impose morality on people because a book written several thousand years ago says so. My next book is about a secular Jew in New York who comes to believe he’s the Messiah. It’s my idea of what
the Messiah would be like if he were alive today. It’s a very serious, very heavy book.
During the Oprah stuff I called Brett Easton Ellis and said: ‘Dude, what do I do?’, and he laughed and said: ‘You have so far exceeded any of the messes I made that I can no longer give you advice.’
I don’t have any real interest in drinking in moderation.
I don’t think of Bright Shiny Morning as my starting out as a novelist. I would be naive to think that the past will be forgotten, but I hope it will eventually be seen as part of a larger body of work that explores questions of fact and fiction and do they matter.
I walk down the street in America and I get stopped all the time; I get recognised a lot. I talk to readers on the street, and I’ve never had one say anything bad to me or attack me.
I think the problem is with the genre. Memoir is a corrupt genre – there are no rules, there’s no definition. People want great readable literary experiences, and it can be difficult to provide that and stay focused on perfect factual truth.
I’m definitely more humble now than I have been at other times in my life. I think success can humble you as much as failure, because success is as empty as failure.
That life I lived: people end up dying young. There’s no happy ending to a life of addiction.
If my daughter is going to drink when she’s older, I’m just going to say: ‘Look, Daddy had a lot of problems with it. Be very careful: if you ever have any questions, come talk to me.’ But the idea that my children are going to go through life without ever drinking is incredibly naive and ridiculous. But I don’t sit and worry about things that haven’t happened yet.
My intentions were always literary and artistic. I never intended A Million Little Pieces to be a self-help book – if anything, it was intended to be an insult to the self-help industry, but at some point it became part of it.
If I’m the guy who destroyed the memoir genre, I’m not unhappy about that.
· Bright Shiny Morning is published by John Murray at £12.99
Project Birds
Birds keep man’s life from tumbling out of control
Bobby Wilson made some bad decisions growing up in Watts. His hobby pigeons and their freewheeling somersaults helped straighten his life out, and now he’s passing on his expertise.
By Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Bobby Wilson, a.k.a. Kill Kill, is a roller pigeon fancier — has been since he was a little boy in the projects in Watts.
He was walking his dog down Holmes Avenue when he first spotted the birds flying above Eddie Scott’s house. He watched in wonder as they whirled and somersaulted through the sky. Bobby was 9 years old and a serial collector of animals — spiders, red ants, hamsters, lizards. But he’d never seen this.
“You better not come in my yard!” Mr. Scott barked. Someone had just stolen a few of his top rollers and he was not happy.
The year was 1981. Mr. Scott drove a city trash truck, owned one of the nicest houses in Watts and had no tolerance for wayward children. He’d raised pigeons since his own childhood in the early 1960s, and some of his rollers came right down the line from the world’s great prophet of roller pigeoning, William H. Pensom, the late English master who lived over the hill in Canoga Park.
Bobby wasn’t going into Mr. Scott’s yard, but he sure as heck was coming back. Day after day he sat under the big shade tree across the street and watched those birds do their acrobatics, spiraling up and then wheeling down like falling angels.
“Come here,” Mr. Scott finally said one day.
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.
Does anyone have Kylie Minogue’s Phone Number?
AUSSIE POPSTAR CAN’T FIND LOVE WITH A MANKylie Minogue might become a lesbian
It’s hard to believe, but sexy Australian singer Kylie Minogue has apparently had so much trouble finding a man that she is considering becoming a lesbian.
In an interview with ‘The Sun’, the popstar expressed her admiration for late film star Tallulah Bankhead, who was a celebrated bisexual icon in the 40s and 50s.
Kylie said: “I’d go gay for her. She was a fascinating and exotic woman. There was so much to admire about her.”
The singer also expressed her admiration for the late movie star’s free-spirited lifestyle: “She lived life to the full, maybe a little too fully. I want to release the inner Tallulah in me.”
And finally, the big shock: “God knows I can’t get a man — so maybe I should cross over.”
David Foster Wallace Reading
Unbelievable
David Foster Wallace is gone.
David Foster Wallace, 46, Writer, Dies
Marion Ettlinger
David Foster Wallace
Wallace’s wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m. Friday, said Jackie Morales, a records clerk with the Claremont Police Department.
Wallace taught creative writing and English at nearby Pomona College.
”He cared deeply for his students and transformed the lives of many young people,” said Dean Gary Kates. ”It’s a great loss to our teaching faculty.”
Wallace’s first novel, ”The Broom of the System,” gained national attention in 1987 for its ambition and offbeat humor. The New York Times said the 24-year-old author ”attempts to give us a portrait, through a combination of Joycean word games, literary parody and zany picaresque adventure, of a contemporary America run amok.”
Published in 1996, ”Infinite Jest” cemented Wallace’s reputation as a major American literary figure. The 1,000-plus-page tome, praised for its complexity and dark wit, topped many best-of lists. Time Magazine named ”Infinite Jest” in its issue of the ”100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.”
Wallace received a ”genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 1997.
In 2002, Wallace was hired to teach at Pomona in a tenured English Department position endowed by Roy E. Disney. Kates said when the school began searching for the ideal candidate, Wallace was the first person considered.
”The committee said, ‘we need a person like David Foster Wallace.’ They said that in the abstract,” Kates said. ”When he was approached and accepted, they were heads over heels. He was really the ideal person for the position.”
Wallace’s short fiction was published in Esquire, GQ, Harper’s, The New Yorker and the Paris Review. Collections of his short stories were published as ”Girl With Curious Hair” and ”Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.”
He wrote nonfiction for several publications, including an essay on the U.S. Open for Tennis magazine and a profile of the director David Lynch for Premiere.
Born in Ithaca, N.Y., Wallace attended Amherst College and the University of Arizona
Balloon Dog at Versailles
At the Court of the Sun King, Some All-American Art
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
“Balloon Dog” by Jeff Koons at the Château de Versailles exhibition. More Photos>
At the Court of the Sun King, Some All-American Art
VERSAILLES, France — An aluminum red lobster hangs from the ceiling alongside a crystal chandelier in the Mars Salon. A plexiglass-encased display of vacuum cleaners and floor polishers sits in front of the official portrait of Marie Antoinette. And an open-mouthed, bare-breasted blonde holding a pink panther seems to be laughing at a 1729 painting of Louis XV conferring peace upon Europe.
America has invaded the gilded chambers and sculptured gardens of the Château de Versailles in the form of a much-debated exhibition by the American superstar artist Jeff Koons.
Versailles in recent years has displayed only a few select works of contemporary artists, and even then they were shown ever so briefly. The exhibition of 17 Koons sculptures marks the first time that the chateau built by Louis XIV has organized so ambitious a retrospective of one contemporary artist. “Jeff Koons Versailles,” which opened on Wednesday, will continue until Dec. 14.
Mr. Koons expressed delight that the first retrospective ever of his work in France is at Versailles. After all, nearly 5 million people visit the chateau, and 8 to 10 million stroll the gardens every year, according to official Versailles figures.
“I’m thrilled with the totality of the whole experience,” he said Wednesday as he posed for photographers in the palace gardens in front of “Split-Rocker,” his 11-ton stainless-steel sculpture covered in 90,000 live flowers and plants. “It’s so profound — the high point of my artistic life.”
Not everyone here was as pleased by the installation. Several dozen people demonstrated outside the palace gates early Wednesday, a protest organized by the National Union of Writers of France, a little-known, right-wing group dedicated to artistic purity in France.
The exhibition “strikes at the heart of a civilization” and “is an outrage to Marie Antoinette,” said Arnaud-Aaron Upinsky, the group’s chairman.
Take a look ahead…
Now if you’re feelin’ kinda low ’bout the dues you’ve been paying
Future’s coming much too slow
And you wanna run but somehow you just keep on stayin’
Can’t decide on which way to go
Yeah, yeah, yeah
I understand about indecision
But I don’t care if I get behind
People livin’ in competition
All I want is to have my peace of mind.
Now you’re climbin’ to the top of the company ladder
Hope it doesn’t take too long
Can’tcha see there’ll come a day when it won’t matter
Come a day when you’ll be gone
I understand about indecision
But I don’t care if I get behind
People livin’ in competition
All I want is to have my peace of mind.
Take a look ahead, take a look ahead!
Now everybody’s got advice they just keep on givin’
Doesn’t mean too much to me
Lot’s of people out to make-believe they’re livin’
Can’t decide who they should be.
I understand about indecision
But I don’t care if I get behind
People livin’ in competition
All I want is to have my peace of mind.
Take a look ahead, take a look ahead. Look ahead.
(Scholz)