Willie On His Willy On His 75th
from who knows where?
When Art Stills The Restless Hand
Los Angeles thwarts family in fight over graffiti
Jacob Antonio Jr.
Highland Park owners had a mural painted to deter taggers. But the city painted it over and the taggers are back.
In today’s installment of Read It and Weep: Your Tax Dollars at Work, we visit a besieged Highland Park mom-and-pop grocery store owned by the Antonio family.
The Antonios can only guess at the number of times they’ve begun their day with a can of paint brushing over fresh graffiti left on the side of their store by taggers.
“Maybe 70 times,” said Jacob Antonio Jr., 27. His father, Jacob, begged to differ “More than 100 times,” he said with exasperation.
They learned that if you hired the right muralist, the taggers would respect the work and not mess with the mural. So they shelled out $3,000 to hire a team that included a guy known as Playboy Eddie and Israel “Ezra” Cervantes.
In no time at all, Los Paisanos market had a praying Virgin Mother on a front corner along with “Jesus Saves.” On the side of the bright yellow building was a colorful but edgier painting that looked like a two-headed 
serpent slithering through a junk yard. Just above that was a more traditional rural scene, with a couple of paisanos in sombreros.
All in all, it wasn’t quite the mural the Antonios had in mind, and they weren’t sure what the snakes represented. But after years of torment, they were in a compromising mood. To the relief of the entire Antonio family, the taggers didn’t come near the mural. But three months into the respite, an even more menacing monster reared its ugly head.
City Hall bureaucracy.
The Future of Dog
The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth
BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog’s legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight.
BigDog runs at 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, and carries a 340 lb load. BigDog is being developed by Boston Dynamics with the goal of creating robots that have rough-terrain mobility that can take them anywhere on Earth that people and animals can go. The program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).
The Dark Side of Books
from the The Times South Africa
| Henrietta Rose-Innes on the dark side of books |
Writers on reading
Reading is, of course, a good and precious thing, and my career — and the existence of this column — is based on the understanding that people love to read, need to read, should, indeed, be reading more.
But literacy has a dark side too, doesn’t it? Bookish people drolly claim to be addicted. I think, in some cases, this is literally true. I’d like to know the brain chemistry involved — what pleasure centres ignite when you part the pages of a new book and sniff the ink. It seems those neural pathways are laid down young: you’re hooked early or not at all. And from that point on, you need to keep feeding the habit with progressively larger doses of word, no matter how cut and contaminated.
Highs and lows, altered states… in my life, books have often played a pharmaceutical role, either sedative or stimulant. I’ve read to forget, as well as to remember. Worse: hardcore, compulsive reading can sometimes feel like secret drinking or binge eating, like going on a bender. I can’t say I’ve ever had a crack cocaine book experience — although a couple of authors come quite close — but I’ve sure read Valium. And who among the readers of these pages hasn’t had a literature jones? Fortunately, it’s a benevolent dependency, most of the time. Expensive, though. (The library fines alone can drive a woman to crime.) And sometimes, you just want to go clean.
I suppose this makes me a small-time pusher, holding a couple of capsules of a novel compound, looking for vulnerable readers for whom it might turn out to be habit-forming. There’s enough of them. When I walk into a bookshop — one of the big ones, a vast dispensary stacked with complex uppers and downers — I can’t help thinking, my God, what army of junkies is all this feeding?
So when someone asks what the purpose of literature is, as people occasionally do, I can’t give a very high- minded answer. It feels physiological. I read to self-medicate. And because I get antsy if I can’t and because, well, it’s a trip. Which is as good a way as any of describing the transports of a really good book.
Henrietta Rose-Innes is the author of Shark’s Egg and The Rock Alphabet. Her short story Poison won this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing.
“We’re going to make a Mentos and Coke rocket, using a condom.”
Sh!t Flies At Swiss Art Museum
Flying piece of art causes museum chaos in Switzerland
GENEVA (AFP) – A giant inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a greenhouse window before it landed again, the museum said Monday.
The art work, titled “Complex S(expletive..)”, is the size of a house. The wind carried it 200 metres(yards) from the Paul Klee Centre in Berne before it fell back to Earth in the grounds of a children’s home, said museum director Juri Steiner.
The inflatable turd broke the window at the children’s home when it blew away on the night of July 31, Steiner said. The art work has a safety system which normally makes it deflate when there is a storm, but this did not work when it blew away.
Steiner said McCarthy had not yet been contacted and the museum was not sure if the piece would be put back on display.
The Beauty Queen & The Mormon In The Mink Handcuffs
from AP via Commercial Appeal Memphis
Cloned pups expose 31-year mystery woman
SALT LAKE CITY — A woman who made news around the world when she had five pups cloned from her beloved pit bull Booger looked very familiar to some who saw her picture.
She’s the same woman who 31 years earlier was accused of abducting a Mormon missionary in England, handcuffing him to a bed and making him her sex slave.
The story of Joyce McKinney is the stuff of pulp fiction: a North Carolina-born beauty queen who moved west, won the title Miss Wyoming USA and went on to college at Brigham Young University, where she became obsessed with a Mormon fellow student.
When that young Mormon took a missionary trip to England, authorities say McKinney hired a private detective so she could locate and follow him.
She and a male accomplice were accused of abducting the 21-year-old missionary as he went door to door, taking him to a rented 17th-century “honeymoon cottage” in Devon and chaining him spread-eagle to a bed with several pairs of mink-lined handcuffs.
There, investigators say, he was repeatedly forced to have sex with McKinney before he was able to escape and notify police.
In a 1977 court hearing mobbed by the British press, Joyce McKinney said she’d fallen head-over-heels in love with the Mormon man and acknowledged tracking him to England. “I loved him so much,” she told a judge, “that I would ski naked down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to.”
But she denied a sexual assault, saying the young man was a willing partner.
In her call to the AP on Saturday, McKinney repeated the same argument her lawyer made all those years ago: There’s no way she could have overpowered the young Mormon because he was much bigger and stronger.
“I didn’t rape no 300-pound man,” she said. “He was built like a Green Bay Packer.”
Joyce McKinney surfaced again in Utah in May 1984 and was arrested for allegedly stalking the workplace of the same Mormon man she was accused of imprisoning in England. Other charges include passing bad checks, an assault on a public officials and an 2004 animal cruelty charge alleging she failed to take proper care of a horse. That charge was dismissed.
Isaac Hayes Gone
from CNN
— Soul singer Isaac Hayes, who won Grammy awards and an Oscar, has died at his home in Tennessee, police say.
Bright Shiny Blair
Who Owns This Booty? August 9, 2008
It’s Selma Blair! She is on set of her new t.v. show for NBC entitled, Kath and Kim. She is holding a copy of James Frey’s book, “[Bright Shiny Morning].”
Signing and Exhibit of WIVES, WHEELS WEAPONS w/James Frey, Terry Richardson & Richard Prince
Sunday, August 10th, from 5-7pm
Book release party for Wives, Wheels, Weapons
On Sunday August 10th, from 5-7 pm, join Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in celebrating the latest release of JMc & GHB Editions: James Frey’s Wives, Wheels, Weapons. Published as a companion volume to Frey’s latest novel, Bright, Shiny Morning(Harper Collins, 2008), Wives, Wheels, Weapons is an artists’ book made in collaboration with Terry Richardson and Richard Prince. The book excerpts three vignettes, “Wives”, “Wheels”, and “Weapons,” from Frey’s novel and presents them alongside a photo essay by photographer Terry Richardson. The hardcover edition features dust-jacket images by Richard Prince. Frey, Richardson and Prince will attend and copies of the book will be available for signing.
The book contains historical vignettes of LA, tracing its corruption and its foibles, until – as always happens in the best novels – the city itself becomes a character; a wild and volatile multi-tentacled beast capable of bestowing great hurt (and the odd chunk of real love) on those who are enmeshed in it.–Irvine Welsh, The Guardian.
Wives, Wheels, Weapons is an edition of 2,000, of which 1,000 hardcover and 1,000 softcover copies have been released simultaneously. Hardcover: $75; softcover: $45.
[ click to read details at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller ]
Donatelli’s Storage Unit Workout
French Criminals Invade West Village
French Crime Wave: Film Noirs and Thrillers, 1937–2000
Date/Time:Daily from Sun., August 10 until Thu., September 11
Price: $10.50
CRIMINAL MINDS
France’s most hardened outlaws come to Film Forum
ANGELA ASHMAN
Lock your doors—crime is on the rise this month in the West Village (and we can’t say we mind), thanks to Film Forum’s five-week series 
French Crime Wave: Film Noirs and Thrillers, 1937–2000, where you’ll come face to face with some of France’s most hardened tough guys (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Gabin, Alain Delon) and calculating femme fatales (Catherine Deneuve, Simone Signoret, Jeanne Moreau). With an emphasis on the filmmakers of the ’50s and ’60s, the program of 38 noir films and thrillers includes works by Louis Malle (Elevator to the Gallows, The Thief of Paris), François Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player, Mississippi Mermaid), Henri-Georges Clouzot (La Vérité, starring Brigitte Bardot in her best performance ever), and Jean-Luc Godard (Pierrot Le Fou, Breathless). Tonight, see Rififi (1955), which J. Hoberman said “more or less invented the idea of French film noir” and won Jules Dassin a Cannes Best Director prize. Later in the series, catchLa Cérémonie (1995), a psychological thriller about a bourgeois couple in search of a housekeeper, andMurderous Maids (2000), based on the true story of two fiendish sisters who kill their employer and her daughter.
Adam McEwen: Chicken or Beef? – Exhibiting @ Glenn Horowitz
from Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
Adam McEwen: Chicken or Beef?
August 9 to September 15, 2008
Please join us at a reception for the artist
Saturday, August 9th from 6 to 8 pm
Adam McEwen’s work is concerned with revitalizing our senses by drawing attention to the pervasive dullness of our usual visual experience. He works in a peripatetic variety of media, but the sense of déja vu is his consistent throughout. The more familiar the object the better it serves as a handy trope for re-awakening perception. The work combines a Pop sensibility with a wry sense of humor. His series of obituaries celebrating the lives of (still living) individuals like Kate Moss and Richard Prince brought him wide recognition and scrutiny at the 2006 Whitney Biennial. These darkly humorous works play off of celebrity culture and call attention to the usually overlooked codes that are embedded within conventional mass media, while invoking tragic mortality and its attendant glamour in a context disassociated from actual reality.
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
Classic Clash At Shea At Last
The Clash’s Shea Stadium Gig Heading To CD
Long bootlegged and sought after by collectors, the Clash‘s Oct. 13, 1982, performance at New York’s Shea Stadium will finally see official release Oct. 7 via Legacy.
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Alan Kaufman is The Outlaw
Recent News |
The OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN POETRY (Basic Books) has just gone into its 11th printing.
SPECIAL OUTLAW BULLETIN!!!!JUST IN!!!!
A SPECIAL Welcome to Dominique Lowell who joinedOUTLAW today. Not only is she featured in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry but in her performing days she was internationally regarded as the Janis Joplin of Spoken Word–an incindiary poet who torched stages from San Francisco to Berlin. To have been priviledged as I was to perform and tour with her was just an incomparable experience! BIG LOVE TO YOU DOMINIQUE!
JOIN UNMUZZLED OX TODAY!!! Back in the mid-late 20th Century anyone with a substantive inclination to become a kulture superstar knew that Michael Andre’s lit&art mag THE UNMUZZLED OX was the Sexus, Nexus and Plexus of the scene. Now it’s back on Facebook, stampeding into the 21st Century under the stewardship of Andre, today a distinguished writer and art critic and you can join the mad charge by joining the Group UNMUZZLED OX today!
Congratulations to James Frey on his novel ‘Bright Shining Morning’ which is a work of superbly avant garde narrative innovation and compelling interest.
Teen Talia On Discovering The Meaning Of Life
from The Democrat and Chronicle
Discover the meaning of life
Talia Gonzalez
Teen Council member
Living in this day and age brings more than just awareness. It brings almost an involuntary knowledge of the world around us.
Even at the age of 10, my friends and I were aware of the politics around us.
How could you not in 2001? The Sept. 11 tragedy left this country reeling. And we knew it.
Our parents couldn’t hide the look in their eyes.
There aren’t many ways to react to war. And I am including not only America’s war, but other wars all over the world as well. Holy and unholy. Racial and civil.
And why people fight is in direct relation to what they believe in. And what you believe in is where you find personal meaning. What your purpose on earth is.
And of course this varies from person to person.
The meaning of life according to my favorite author James Frey is “Whatever you want it to be.”
I agree completely. I’m still young and already I have learned so much about life. I have learned when to let go and when to hang on. I have seen and experienced true beauty. And the best part is that I am nowhere near being finished yet.
When I was in 11th grade, a very good friend told me that she thought the meaning of life was to simply experience.
We were sitting in our Human Relations class and that was the topic of discussion. And as Mr. Ruggeri gripped his podium he asked the class, “What is your meaning of life?” And that was when she told me — experience.
I have adopted that same ideal in everything I do.
I try to incorporate that philosophy in all my decisions. Whether it is to experience religion, different lifestyles or points of view.
And experiencing branches off into so many other things. It is such a blanket word.
Anything can be experienced. Being poor or wealthy. The choice of whether to live life on the edge.
In one lifetime one will experience so much.
It is in itself a religion because everyone is devoted to it in one way or another. Without it, there wouldn’t be any insight or purity.
Teen Council members advise the editorial board and write occasional columns.
The Day California Kicked Côtes du Rhône’s Rear
Movie ‘Bottle Shock’ recounts the historic 1976 Paris wine-tasting contest
Robert Durell / Los Angeles Times
A film based on the historic event that put California wine on the map — starring Alan Rickman and Bill Pullman — opens in Southern California.
“Bottle Shock,” a new independent film based, very loosely, on the famous 1976 blind tasting in Paris in which two California wines came out on top, much to the chagrin of the expert — and very French — wine tasters, opens today at theaters across the Southland.
From the husband-wife filmmaking team of Randall Miller and Jody Savin (he’s directing; they’re co-writers and producers), the film stars Alan Rickman (Professor Severus Snape in the “Harry Potter” films) as British-born, Paris-based wine merchant Steven Spurrier, who organized the tasting; Bill Pullman (“Independence Day,” “Sleepless in Seattle”) as Jim Barrett, the beleaguered owner of Chateau Montelena(which won for its 1973 Alexander Valley Chardonnay); and Chris Pine (“Carriers,” “Just My Luck”) as Jim’s long-haired son Bo Barrett.
Filmed in the Napa and Sonoma valleys, “Bottle Shock” takes a romantic view of winemaking and the significance of that long-ago tasting, embellishing and heightening the drama for the screen.
Four writers took a stab at the screenplay, which in places reads like Wine 101 with the Spurrier character pompously opining that “great wine is great art. I am a shepherd . . . .” Hokey violin music playing in the background doesn’t help.
Guess the 100 Most Common Words in the English Language
Win the UK version of BRIGHT SHINY MORNING from InStyle
click to enter contest at InStyle
competition
THE PRIZE:
Win one of ten copies of James Frey’s latest novel, Bright Shiny Morning
Critically acclaimed writer James Frey returns with yet another moving tale, this time the purely fictional Bright Shiny Morning. Set in Los Angeles, it follows the lives of a group of characters in pursuit of their dreams in the relentless metropolis, from the bum on the boardwalk to the Hollywood mega-star with a big secret. Instyle.co.uk is offering you the chance to win a copy of this moving book as it hits bookshelves this week. Simply fill in your details below.
Find out more at www.james-frey.com
[ click to enter contest ]
Natación Sincronizada
Beijing, China: Members of Spain’s Olympic synchronized swimming team practise in the pool. Photograph: Mark Terrill/AP
[ click to view today’s 24 Hours in Pictures at Guardian UK ]
Nectarine Berry Pie with Black Pepper Crust
Follow The Bouncing Sitcom
Another ‘jiggle’ show of its day was ‘Three’s Company.’ Photo by NY Daily News
Rupert Likes BRIGHT SHINY MORNING
Pretty Good, For a Book Publisher! Harper Collins Stars Frey, Wall, Oz Earn Rupert Murdoch … Millions!
Getty Images
News Corp.’s fourth quarter earnings report is in, and it looks like HarperCollins made Rupert Murdoch about as much money this year ($160 million) as it did in 2007. His TV, cable, and film divisions, meanwhile, made him about $1.3 billion each!
Sorry, sorry, just some perspective. Back to HarperCollins: earnings for this quarter ($29 million) were down slightly compared to Q3, but up by a full third compared to Q4 last year. According to the summary provided in the report, the biggest titles of the quarter were James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning, Elissa Wall’s Stolen Innocence, and an updated edition of YOU: The Owner’s Manual by Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet Oz.
For reference, Bright Shiny Morning has clocked 59,973 copies on BookScan, which means that it has actually sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 86,000. List price for the book was $26.95 per book, which puts gross sales for each copy at about $13.50 and gross sales overall at about $1.2 million.
“Trust me, dude, you don’t want that sh@t – It tastes like dookey.”
See more Nick Swardson videos at Funny or Die
Burlesque is Back!
NYC’s new burlesque
Burlesque performer Julie Atlas Muiz. She will be at Spiegelworld later this month.
Lessing’s Visceral Latest
Lessing Looks Back on Shadows and Parents
Doris Lessing once declared that “fiction makes a better job of the truth” than straightforward reminiscence, and while that might well be true of her celebrated and semi-autobiographical Martha Quest novels, it’s an observation that doesn’t apply at all to her latest book, “Alfred & Emily,” an intriguing work that is half fiction, half memoir. The sketchy, insubstantial first half of the book imagines what her parents’ lives might have been like if World War I had never occurred. The potent and harrowing second half recounts the real life story of her parents, and the incalculable ways in which the war fractured their dreams and psyches and left them stranded in the bush in Africa, eking out a meager existence on a tiny farm in Rhodesia.
This portrait of her parents is familiar in outline from Ms. Lessing’s 1994 autobiography, “Under My Skin,” but whereas the author adopted a detached, matter-of-fact tone in that volume, she writes here with a visceral immediacy, conjuring the awful, unrelieved hardship of her parents’ lives in Rhodesia, and the aching disappointment that shrouded their daily existence.
In the first half of this book Ms. Lessing tries to give her parents the lives they might have had in a world without that awful war. Alfred becomes the English farmer he dreamed of becoming, marries a woman named Betsy — instead of Emily — and becomes a father not to Doris but to twin sons.
Emily, meanwhile, marries the doctor she thought she loved, but finds this marriage cold and unfulfilling; she never has any children. After her unloved husband dies, she uses the tidy fortune he has left her to establish a charity that sets up schools in impoverished neighborhoods and counties. Although she does not find personal happiness, this Emily goes on to become a beloved figure in society, renowned for her good works.
The fictional Alfred and Emily are curiously abstract figures, fleshed out with few psychological specifics; like the people in the author’s weaker recent books like “The Sweetest Dream,” they are spindly line drawings, assigned a single quality or two and sent on generic social peregrinations. These characters suggest that Ms. Lessing has a hard time imagining her mother and father as people other than her parents, or, for that matter, imagining a reality in which she herself did not exist.
More JAMES FREY Interview from Simply Media
James Frey on Writing BRIGHT SHINY MORNING
Damien Hirst on Economics
Golden calf, bull’s heart, a new shark: Hirst’s latest works may fetch £65m
Artist bypasses galleries and dealers to go straight to Sotheby’s auction
In pictures: Hirst’s new works
The Incredible Journey, by Damien Hirst. An auction at Sotheby’s in September will sell more than 200 pieces of the artist’s work. Photograph: Sotheby’s/PA
A small menagerie of new Damien Hirst pickled animals took a bow yesterday, including a new shark, a zebra, a calf with solid gold horns and hoofs valued at up to £12m, and even a unicorn – a white foal fitted with a resin horn, rather than an apparition from a fairytale.
All have been churned out by his small army of assistants this year for an auction at Sotheby’s in September which will sell more than 200 pieces. The auction is predicted to raise £65m, comfortably setting a new world record for the artist, and blazing a trail which other artists will watch with interest, of bypassing the gallery and dealer system and going straight to auction.
Larry Gagosian said his gallery would probably be buying: “He can certainly count on us to be in the room with paddle in hand.”
Sotheby’s and Hirst have been forging an equally intense relationship. Earlier this year he joined with the singer Bono to lead the RED charity auction at Sotheby’s in New York, which raised over $42m (£21m) with donations from Banksy, Marc Quinn and Anish Kapoor, the most successful charity art auction ever.
Last year Hirst briefly set the auction record at Sotheby’s – £9.65m for Lullaby Spring, a medicine cabinet – for any work by a living artist. However, he was knocked off his perch within a few months by the American pop artist Jeff Koons, whose Hanging Heart sold at another Sotheby’s auction in New York for $23.6m, leaving New York dealer Richard Feigen to include both, along with Andy Warhol, on his personal list of the world’s most over-valued artists.
“Damien Hirst is still an artist punching above his weight – this is a body of work which takes him into new realms,” [Oliver Barker, senior international specialist at the auction house] added. “It would be so easy to say we’ve seen it all before with Hirst, but I think people will be blown away by the scale and ambition of this collection. I think he’s interested in getting work into parts of the world that have not had the opportunity of buying major pieces before, including India, China and Russia – and we’ve certainly had a lot of interest from collectors in these places.”
Religious theme
The top lot, estimated at up to £12m, is The Golden Calf – a title continuing Hirst’s interest in religious themes, referring to the false idol set up and worshipped by the Israelites before an enraged Moses berated them for idolatory. The piece is a tank made of glass and gold-plated steel, holding a real calf with solid 18 carat hoofs, horns and golden disc on its head. A smaller tank piece, The Immaculate Heart – Lost, a bull’s heart pierced with a dagger in formaldehyde, also plays on traditional Catholic imagery.
Last year he created and sold through White Cube the world’s most expensive piece of contemporary art, the platinum and diamond cast of a human skull, For The Love of God. It was sold for £50m to an investment consortium, with Hirst retaining a share and persistent rumours that White Cube is also part owner.
Single Broke Female Spends Next To Last Pence to Buy BRIGHT SHINY MORNING
from the Single Broke Female blog
SINGLE BROKE FEMALE
THE INCESSANT RAMBLINGS OF A SINGLE 20 SOMETHING TRYING TO GET HER LIFE AND HER DEBTS IN SOME SORT OF ORDER…WELL, HERE’S HOPING ANYWAY!
SUNDAY, 3 AUGUST 2008
I got paid on Thursday and sent £150 to my credit card…I’m now thinking that maybe that wasn’t such a good idea! I have just run a total of how much cash I have til the end of the month and it’s not very much!
Thankfully, this weekend was pretty cheap as I didn’t do much; on Friday I took myself off to a book signing in Oxford Street where James Frey was promoting his new book, Bright Shiny Morning. I am currently half way through A Million Little Pieces and can’t put it down so when I saw he had a new book out and was doing a signing, I was intrigued to go along and see what he was like. I have to say he was very charming and wrote in my book ‘You are a beautiful woman, have a beautiful life, a beautiful life’ which I thought was lovely. Saturday I had the trip to the dentist which was the usual £16 for a 5 minute check up and clean- pointless! I wish we had US dentist standards here! Then I just went to my mums as I am still feeling under the weather and just wanted to be looked after, pathetic I know but what can you do!?