Release Party for New Monograph on Rachel Feinstein (Foreword written by James Frey)
from Glenn Horowitz and John McWhinnie
Rachel Feinstein Monograph
Book Release Party
Saturday, August 2nd, from 6 to 8 p.m.
The first monograph on Rachel Feinstein includes full-color reproductions of paintings, drawings, and sculptural constructions from 1998 to 2008 as well as installation views from her exhibitions. Foreword by James Frey, interview with Feinstein by Sofia Coppola, edited by Bill Powers.
87 Newtown Lane
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Art Gallery & Bookshop
Mon thru Sat: 10am to 5pm
Sun: 12pm to 4pm
Closed Wed & Thurs, Oct thru April
God Loves A Troll
The Trolls Among Us
Robbie Cooper for The New York Times
The Trolls Among Us: Weev (not, of course, his real name) is part of a growing Internet subculture with a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online.
One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” 
Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.
/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”
Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.
Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod. The “an hero” meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell’s death in absurdity.
Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. 
The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.
In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”
In Defense Of Art In LA
from the San Jose Mercury News
Graffiti vandals turn violent in LA
LOS ANGELES—One man got stabbed. Another got shot in the chest. A 6-year-old boy was temporarily blinded when he was spray-painted in the face. And they were the lucky ones among those who have had run-ins with graffiti “crews,” or gangs.
Over the past 2 1/2 years in Southern California, three people have been killed after trying to stop graffiti vandals in the act. A fourth died after being shot while watching a confrontation between crews in a park.
“We have seen a marked increase in these graffiti-tagging gangs taking to weapons and fighting to protect their walls, their territory, their name,” said Los Angeles County sheriff’s Lt. Robert Rifkin.
“If we see someone calling the police, then we target them,” said Mario Garcia, 20, who describes himself as a former tagger trying to become a professional artist. “You are trying to stop me from what I live, what I believe in and what I breathe? We are not going to let no one get in the way.”
In an attack last month, two youths spray-painted the face and body of the 6-year-old boy who spotted them scribbling gang signs on a wall near Compton. The boy recovered from chemical burns to his eyes.
On the same day, a 51-year-old auto mechanic was shot in the chest in Los Angeles when he confronted two suspected gang members painting the wall of his shop.
Another man, Michael Lartundo, 26, was stabbed in the hand and arm after yelling at a group of graffiti vandals scrawling on a wall in March behind his brother’s house in suburban Whittier. “I just told them it ain’t right,” Lartundo recalled. “I said, ‘If you are going to write on the wall, write on your own wall.'”
Last August, Maria Hicks, 58, was shot in the head and died after flashing her headlights and honking at a teenager spray-painting a wall near her home in Pico Rivera, a blue-collar suburb east of Los Angeles. Four people have been charged with murder.
Ten days after Hicks died, Seutatia Tausili, 65, was fatally shot and her grandson wounded when he told taggers to stop vandalizing a trash can outside their home in Hesperia in San Bernardino County. Three men were charged with crime.
The First Anniversary of Jake Brown’s Blowout
The greatest wipeout in sports history – a 4.5 story flailing drop to the hardwood. Skip to the slo-mo’s at the end and watch Jake’s shoes ejecting for a sense of just how hard he hit. And then he walks away.
1984 Is Almost Here
29 July, 2008 by orwelldiaries
Orwell Diaries
23 July, 2008 by orwelldiaries
‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens.
From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.
What impression of Orwell will emerge? From his domestic diaries (which start on 9th August), it may be a largely unknown Orwell, whose great curiosity is focused on plants, animals, woodwork, and – above all – how many eggs his chickens have laid. From his political diaries (from 7th September), it may be the Orwell whose political observations and critical thinking have enthralled and inspired generations since his death in 1950. Whether writing about the Spanish Civil War or sloe gin, geraniums or Germany, Orwell’s perceptive eye and rebellion against the ‘gramophone mind’ he so despised are obvious.
Orwell wrote of what he saw in Dickens: ‘He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry— in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’
What will you see in the Orwell diaries?
I Do (With Blueberry Maple Syrup On Top)
New Entertainment Service Offers Every Man A PILF
Pregnant Prostitutes To Face Charges
Two women were charged with prostitution in Camden County on Thursday after they were arrested in a sting operation at a Lake Ozark hotel last week.
Two other women were also arrested, and three of the women are pregnant. Alexandra Wells and Allysia Waldrop were both charged on Thursday. Waldrop is pregnant, but is not known if Wells is also.
The undercover bust went down at a Lake Ozark area hotel after the sheriff’s department received several reports that pregnant women were advertising prostitution on an internet advertising site.
One of the women arrested was eight months pregnant, another six months pregnant, and another was three months pregnant. They ranged in age from 18 to 22 years old.
When The Wife Doesn’t Listen
Butthole Surfing Now Taught At School of Rock
Back to School With the Butthole Surfers
They’re collaborating with teenagers now. Terrible idea. Wonderful idea.
By Michael Hoinski
Gibby Haynes is 50, but he’s still off the wall like he was in the ’80s, when he and the rest of his Butthole 
Surfers were passing off hallucinogenic-fueled performance-art shows as “music” for the likes of a young, impressionable Daniel Johnston and other Austin freaks looking to get their psych on outside of cosmic country.
“It’s a big que sera, fuckin’ Hallmark, fuckin’ Valentine’s Day, kinda fuzzy- feeling dealie,” Haynes says over the phone about the Surfers’ classic lineup—including guitarist Paul Leary, bassist Jeff Pinkus, and stand-up drummers King Coffey and Teresa “Nervosa” Taylor (the weirdo in Slacker who tries to pawn off the Madonna pap smear)—reuniting for the first time since their 2002 reincarnation at Japan’s Fuji Festival, this time for a 14-date run with the Paul Green School of Rock Music All-Stars.How ass-backwards. The Surfers are (or were, back in the day) totally X-rated. Among 
other acts of decadence, their shows featured a naked dancer named Kathleen Lynch, a/k/a “Ta-Da the Shit Lady,” whom Haynes reportedly had sex with onstage while Leary punctured the club’s speakers with a screwdriver. They used films of penis-reconstruction surgery andFaces of Death–type car wrecks as backdrops. And, of course, they got a real kick out of cross-dressing and arson, too. Meanwhile, the fact that the 2003 movie School of Rock is based on the grade-school bashers who receive tutelage at the Paul Green School of Rock Music chain (with Jack Black starring as a non-anal version of Paul himself) just about says it all. But this is of little consequence to Haynes, who insists that Surfers gigs are way tamer than in the olden days and that it’s now more or less about the music.
“It’s just really fun,” he adds of the collaboration, facilitated by fellow shtick-rock band Ween. “I mean, they’re kids, and some of ’em are really, really talented. You can see the ones who are gonna be totally fucked up when they’re older.”
Seminal Surfers albums like Psychic . . . Powerless . . . Another Man’s Sac, their 1985 debut, with its innovative tape-looping up against Haynes’s perverted, bullhorn- amplified, “Gibbytronix”-inflected gibberish, are indeed lessons in coordinated chaos lost in translation as noise. But in order to properly convey the older, borderline- improvisational hardcore-punk songs that constitute most of the Surfers’ set lists on this tour, some live theatrics are essential. That’s where Sheehan and Johnson strike again: The smoke machines, projectors, and strobe lights are part of their double-duty tour, thanks to their work in the same capacity during a string of Haynes solo shows in New York (where he relocated five years ago) that preceded this tour. “By now, we’re into a groove on how to do that,” says Johnson, who also plays in a band called the Will.
Get Some Nuts (Banned SNICKERS Ad)
Cuckoo’s Nest To Be Razed
Cuckoo’s Nest Hospital to be Torn Down
By AP/BRAD CAIN
(SALEM, Ore.) — So long, Cuckoo’s Nest.
Oregon State Hospital, the mental institution where the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed, is making way for a new complex. 
Most of the dilapidated, 125-year-old main building will be torn down and replaced starting this fall.
Although mean Nurse Ratched was pure fiction, the Oregon State Hospital has struggled with some very real troubles over the years, including overcrowding, crumbling floors and ceilings, outbreaks of scabies and stomach flu, sexual abuse of children by staff members, and patient-on-patient assaults.
Politicians had been talking for years about the need to replace the hospital, but didn’t get serious about it until a group of legislators made a grim discovery during a 2004 tour: the cremated remains of 3,600 mental patients in corroding copper canisters in a storage room. The lawmakers were stunned.
“Nobody said anything to anybody,” said Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney, who dubbed the chamber “the room of lost souls.”
The remains belonged to patients who died at the hospital from the late 1880s to the mid-1970s, when mental illness was considered so shameful that many patients were all but abandoned by their families in institutions.
Milos Forman, the director, lived for six weeks at the institution and had his actors study real patients, according to a 1975 account in Rolling Stone magazine. Nicholson became depressed because of what he saw, including electroshock being administered to a patient.
The front section of the building, including the cupola, will be preserved as a museum on the history of mental health care.
Other parts of the building were abandoned decades ago and are now a ghostly sight. The paint has been scoured off the bricks by the weather and the passage of time, and the wings are cluttered with old equipment, fallen plaster and piles of pigeon droppings. The third floor is so rotted it is not safe to walk on. The building is also contaminated with lead paint and asbestos.
The Morning After (With Him)
The Green Areas Indicate Where The Cancer Has Metastasized
Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America
In the spirit of Toby’s Walmart growth video, using data from Freebase, I mapped the spread of Walmart using Modest Maps. It starts slow and then spreads like wildfire.
Yeah go ahead and SuperPoke me again motherf@cker…
‘Shank’ website is aimed at the kids who carry knives
All in the game … list of SuperPoke! icons includes smacks, hugs, bouquets, smiles – and horrifying ‘shank’ threat
By JAMES CLENCH and JONATHAN WEINBERG
THE uncle of murdered Harry Potter actor Rob Knox last night said Facebook bosses should be arrested for allowing a vile knifing game.
Members of the social networking site have been using a chilling blade icon to virtually “shank” – street slang for stab – other users.
The news comes amid an epidemic of knifings across the country, with tragic Rob, 18, among the victims.
Uncle John, 57, branded the website “disgusting” and said the game targeted teen thugs who carry blades.
Knife victim … tragic actor Rob Knox
He said: “Why the hell would a social networking site for teenagers put something like this forward?
“If the authorities really want to get tough on knife crime, the CEO or directors of Facebook should be arrested for inciting violence.”
“The stupidity of having this on their site is unbelievable. And they deliberately use the street term ‘shanked’, which is even worse. They are targeting the kids who are on street corners carrying knives.”
Facebook allowed the virtual knife threat as part of its SuperPoke! application.
Members use the blade icon to deliver the “attack” to any friend or stranger who has a profile. The victim then receives a chilling message saying they have been “shanked”. The SuperPoke! system is a favourite among teens, with more than a BILLION virtual actions sent – including kisses, hugs and slaps.
The software is made by US firm Slide, which tells users: “Use SuperPoke to do stuff to your friends. If you get lucky, they might just do it back to you.”
Gnarls Rips White Boy’s Heart Out in New Video
For Those Who Like It Hair-y
‘Hair’s’ bohemian chic is still hip
Monday, July 21st 2008, 4:00 AM
‘Hair’ starts previews Monday night in Central Park.
When “Hair” starts previews Monday in Central Park, it will be a flashback to the 1960s, the decade the rock musical debuted. That era that looks a lot like today: an unpopular war was raging, young people were keyed up about activism, and people let it all hang out — Naked Cowboy-style — to express their freedom.
But in this reincarnation of the seminal show at the Delacorte Theater, some of the biggest things on parade are the costumes. “Hair” costumer Michael McDonald looked to rock stars — Donovan, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin — for inspiration in putting together the looks for the cast in the groundbreaking musical about youths rebelling against conservative authority and the Vietnam War.
Director Diane Paulus, who also staged the concert version of the show last summer, was a stickler for authenticity, says McDonald: “It’s so easy to make it look like a Halloween party.” No-nos included tie-dyed shirts and elephant bell-bottoms.
“Too ’70s,” he says. He speaks with authority. McDonald researched the era extensively, studying footage of the ’67 Monterey Pop Festival for reference.
Gorillaz Make Monkey Movie for Olympics
Before Hannah and Dora, There Was Sid & Marty
Sid and Marty Krofft are still pulling the strings
Krofft Picture Archive
THEIR HEYDAY: Sid, left, and Marty Krofft with Jack Wild, the young star of “H.R. Pufnstuf,” which premiered in 1969. The show’s premise — a child stumbles upon a hidden fantasy world — turned into a winning formula for the Kroffts, who also created “Lidsville” and “Land of the Lost.” There’s a new appetite for their low-budget shows.
Nearly 40 years after the psychedelic splash of ‘H.R. Pufnstuf,’ the bickering puppeteers believe their time has finally come.
By Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, July 26, 2008
Hollywood is often described as a dream factory, but really it’s just as often a salvage yard. Anxious studio executives would rather bet their $100-million budgets on nostalgia than on new ideas, which is why, against all odds, Sid and Marty Krofft are back in business.
The Krofft brothers, both now in their 70s, have a showbiz story that dates back to the final days of vaudeville. But for children of the Nixon years, their name is the brand behind some of the era’s strangest TV programming: shows such as “H.R. Pufnstuf,” “Lidsville,” “Land of the Lost” and “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.”
Those low-budget shows had rubber-costumed actors, fluorescent puppets and psychedelic sets that were by the 1980s hopelessly dated; and by the end of that decade, the same could be said of the Kroffts.
Today, though, thanks to the Hollywood appetite for all things kitschy and high-concept, the Kroffts are poised for the biggest payday of their career — unless, of course, they strangle each other first.
“Things did get lean, but we never gave up,” said Sid, 78, the smiling, soft-spoken dreamer of the two.
There are still plenty of young dreamers, oddballs and colorful hucksters in the entertainment industry, but, really, the modern corporate era has wiped away most of its greasepaint charm. In the flashbulb era, big stars were bigger and tall tales were taller.
For example, take the celebrated Krofft family history: Sid and Marty are supposedly fifth-generation puppeteers, dating to the opening of the Krofft Theater in the early 1700s in Athens. It is a truly amazing tale and cited in almost every article every written about them, and it’s the first line of their bio.
The Olympics’ Strangest Moments
from the Independent Publishers Group
The Olympics’ Strangest Moments
Extraordinary but True Stories from the History of the Olympic Games
Updated edition
Geoff Tibballs (Author)
The world’s greatest sporting occasion has historically been filled with unusual occurrences and peculiar situations. In 1908, Dorando Pietri was stripped of his gold medal in the marathon after he was helped over the finish line by over-anxious officials. From “Eric the Eel” of Equatorial Guinea—the slowest swimmer in the history of the games—to Fred Lorz, who was disqualified after it was discovered that he had hitched a lift in a car during his marathon run, this is an exciting collection of the most humorous and jaw-dropping stories from the Olympic games.
Geoff Tibballs is the author of numerous books, including Great Sporting Scandals, Motor Racing’s Strangest Races, and Royalty’s Strangest Characters.
A Pretty Ugly Exhibition
Art Makes Such Weird Bedfellows
Thomas Müller
Pretty Ugly The group exhibition, split between Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and the Maccarone Gallery, features works from about 75 artists, including Bernard Buffet’s “Les Folles.” More Photos>
Everyone-into-the-pool gallery group shows are always a welcome distraction in a steamy New York midsummer, even when the water is tepid and unsightly matter floats to the top, as is the case in “Pretty Ugly,” a group exhibition split between Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and the Maccarone Gallery.
There are about 75 artists on the guest list, though it feels like a cast of thousands, so logic-defying is the lineup. Hannah Wilke rubs shoulders with Marsden Hartley, and both press flesh with Elizabeth Peyton, Rudolph Schwarzkogler and Bruce LaBruce.
Like most art world shindigs, this is an intensely networked affair. Lots of best friends of friends — artists who are the partners of curators, who are planning retrospectives of other artists, who are represented by the galleries presenting the show — along with a few bused-in oddballs (two Stanislaws, Szukalski and Witkiewicz) and recruits from the modernist mothball brigade (Pierre Alechinsky, Bernard Buffet).
Summer shows of this kind can be newsy; they can indicate shifts in direction in art that will unroll in the season ahead. But this one doesn’t feel that way. In fact it feels a little old. Its basic premise is that our ideas of beauty in art are changing, but we’ve known that for years. Pretty and ugly have been the twin poles of contemporary figure painting for ages now. Merged together — and they are always merging — they turn into weird. And weirdness is, basically, what “Pretty Ugly” is about.
An installation of such paintings across a front wall at Maccarone establishes a couple of things: first, the show as a whole will be organized by themes; and second, it will be an old-new mix. In the floral lineup we find a 1918 Abraham Walkowitz still life next to Andy Warhol’s 1964 poppies along with Mark Grotjahn’s “Angry Flower (Big Nose, Baby Moose)” (2003), all bracketed by Takashi Murakami smiley faces from just last year.
The sculptor Stanislaw Szukalski (1893-1987), also from Poland, was an art star in his day, so highly regarded that, when he was at mid-career, the Polish government erected a museum in his honor. When the building was leveled by German planes in 1939, Szukalski fled to the United States and settled in Burbank, Calif.
Although he lived in obscurity there, he was not inactive. Among other things he formulated a universalist theory of history called Zermatism, based on the premise that all human life originated on Easter Island, that Polish was the source of all languages, and that a race of malevolent Yetis was destroying civilization as we know it.
His freely espoused aesthetic and political views gained attention in California cultural circles: he was as rabidly anti-Picasso as he was pro-Ronald Reagan and regarded art critics as the scum of the earth. The attraction of his neo-Symbolist sculpture — a life-size bronze bust in the show of the Polish military hero Bor Komorowski looks like a sad-eyed Darth Vader — is harder to fathom.
Summertime Fingerfood For Heartless Barbarians
James Frey Reading Tonight @ BookCourt in Brooklyn 7pm
JAMES FREY Reading Tonight
Thursday, July 24 at 7pm
@ BookCourt in Brooklyn
163 Court StreetBrooklyn, NY 11201(718) 875.3677
[ click for map ]
Would You Do Yoga In The Nude?
THE NAKED CITY
NUDES FLASH: IN-BUFF STUFF IS HUGE!
By ADAM NICHOLS
Welcome to Nude York City.
Some folks are stripping down to escape the scorching summer temperatures – but others aren’t waiting ’til they hit the area’s clothing-optional beaches.
The au naturel look is catching on at city restaurants, a Midtown yoga club and even a stand-up comedy joint.
“We’re just more comfortable nude,” said John Ordover, who rents city eateries for dinner parties with a strict dress code – no clothes allowed.
Vote: Would you do Yoga in the buff?
“We’re not out to shock or put on a public spectacle. We want only to do things that other people do in the way that we are most comfortable doing them. That, for us, is without clothes,” he said.
About 50 diners – whose motto is “no hot soup” – regularly turn up for Ordover’s monthly meals held at venues including the Mercantile Grill on Pearl Street and Pete’s Downtown in Brooklyn.
“I had such a transformative experience on my own when I did yoga naked rather than clothed,” said Naked Yoga NYC teacher Isis Phoenix. “I wanted to share that.”
The classes have about 10 devotees who have to obey two rules – leave your clothes behind, and bring your own mat.
My Republic for a Pickle
CALIFORNIA COOK
Pickles add punch to summertime meals
WHERE have all the pickles gone?
It wasn’t so long ago that every well-dressed American dinner table was bejeweled with an assortment of them — emerald green tomatoes, ruby red beets and opalescent pearl onions, as well as less glamorous (though certainly no less delicious) okra, mushrooms and watermelon rind. The pickle tray was a standard part of a Sunday supper.
Nowadays, almost the only pickle you’ll find is cucumber. And while there’s nothing wrong with your basic bread-and-butter, half-sour or dill, there are so many other possibilities to explore.
What about radishes, for example, pickled pink, with a refreshing sweet-tart bite to match their crisp texture? Or tangy peppers, yellow turmeric-stained zucchini or even surprisingly savory pickled grapes?
First, a little definition: A pickle is a fruit or a vegetable that is preserved through acidity. Because most harmful bacteria have a hard time surviving in a low-pH environment, pickling was an important part of preserving the harvest in the days before refrigeration.
THOUGH ordinary, white distilled vinegar can be used for most pickles, you can get a different effect by substituting apple cider or Asian rice vinegar. Similarly, don’t feel bound to the common pickling spices of mustard, peppercorns, dill and their brethren. Try using cloves, allspice or cinnamon, fresh ginger or dried chiles.
[ click to continue reading about pickles at the Los Angeles Times ]
Avenging Poetry
Lumley attacks ‘obscure’ new poetry
The actress has been lambasted as old and out of touch for her controversial views on modern verse
Amelia Hill , social affairs correspondent, The Observer
When Joanna Lumley agreed to pen an introduction to a collection of poems, she probably thought she was simply doing a favour for an unknown poet in need of a publicity boost. Instead, the Absolutely Fabulous star has caused controversy by publishing views on modern poetry that have offended some of Britain’s best-known writers.
Rather than limiting her comments to the book in question, Lumley attacked contemporary poetry, dismissing ‘so much’ of it as maddeningly obscure and, at worst, self-indulgent. At the other extreme, she argued that less demanding poetry risked becoming humdrum and commonplace.
The actress was a judge for the Booker Prize in 1985 and led readings of Sir John Betjeman’s poetry at the 1996 unveiling of a stone tablet to the late Poet Laureate at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Lumley wrote the controversial introduction to Liz Cowley’s forthcoming book, A Red Dress and Other Poems. She went on to say: ‘It is a rare modern poem that achieves the balance between being challenging and accessible.’
Lumley praises Cowley for preferring to call herself a writer than a poet: ‘Liz would never dream of describing herself as a “poet”. She even dislikes the very word “poetry” because she feels there is a divisive ring to it, as if the genre were up there on a rarefied pedestal.’
But her comments have drawn the wrath of many of Britain’s leading poets. Ian McMillan, presenter of BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, poet in residence at Barnsley football club and a contender for the next Poet Laureate, accused Lumley of being ill-informed. ‘I suspect that she hasn’t read very widely because she’s ignoring the fact that poetry in the 21st century is a broad church,’ he said.
Review of James Frey & Terry Richardson @ The Strand
Frey Goes Arty: ‘The Idea Was To Do A Cool Book That Would Piss People Off’
James Frey (right) and Terry Richardson grin at the prospect of ticking folks off at their book talk.
Controversy-friendly author James Frey and photographer Terry Richardson don’t much believe in rules, so the two intentional outsiders teaming up on a book/photo project makes a sort of sense. For those who don’t know that Frey is co-partner of Half Gallery with Andy Spade and Bill Powers, the move may surprise, but for the writer himself, it was just a matter of time.
“I’m much more part of the art world than I am the literary world,” Frey said before the duo’s Thursday night talk at Manhattan’s Strand Bookstore. “I wanted to make a cool, sort of radical, fun art book. I have no interest in being called a memoirist. I’m a writer.”
Frey envisioned Wives, Wheels, Weapons in the vein of late 19th- and early 20th-century collaborations between writers and artists such as Baudelaire and Matisse. “When I was in Paris, I saw these books and thought they were the coolest fucking things I’d ever seen,” Frey told us. “I went over to Terry’s studio and said, ‘Dude, you want to do a book?'”
Publisher/friend to Frey and Richardson John McWhinnie moderated the two, who wore matching white t-shirts and khakis. “Moneybags McWhinnie” (so dubbed because he financed the project, i.e. put Frey, Richardson and his “camera club” up at the Chateau Marmont for five days in L.A.), saw the book’s brief chapters as standalone vignettes.
“I was drawn to what is emblematic of L.A.: car culture, the immersion of highways and being stuck on freeways. It was also the idea of L.A. culture, gang culture, East coast, West coast,” he said of Wheels and Weapons. “Then, what else to do? When James told me they decided to edit out the passage we called ‘Wives,’ I said, ‘That’s what we’ve got to do. That’s the trifecta.’ Terry [was] telling a story in pictures that James was telling in words.”
Was the alliterative title deliberate, we wanted to know? “No, it was a funny title,” shrugged Frey, “sort of ridiculous and telling.”
Friend/photographer Richard Prince shot the cover for Frey’s recent bestseller, Bright Shiny Morning, but “because Wives, Wheels, Weapons was a bit more salacious [with a] steamy subtext to it, we really wanted a Richard Prince girlfriend straight out of the Sunset Strip — 1980s, big hair bands, all of it,” McWhinnie said, describing limited-edition book’s hardcover image.
The softcover shot came out of a photo shoot at a gun club in L.A. “Terry just poured out all these casings on the floor and laid this .44 Magnum on it, and the casings and the Magnum were just sparkling. It was almost like guns as jewels. It was beautiful and fucked up,” according to McWhinnie.
Photos for the “Wives” section were shot at the home of Apocalypse Nowscreenplay writer John Milius. Milius and his wife happened to be avid IRA members, so the ’70s-era style house (a “fucking armory,” as Richardson puts it) came stocked with ammunition and shooting trophies. Over 150 rolls of film were produced during a series of 17-hour days spent with up to 25 models arrayed before seven cameras.
“I just sort of make it up as I go along,” Richardson said, swigging from an unmarked plastic flask. “My dad always told me, ‘When you don’t know what to do with people, just lean them up against a wall.'” We made a mental note to try that the next time we had to snap away.
“The idea was just to do a cool book that would piss people off,” Frey said. “People who appreciate what Terry and I do would love it and people who don’t, would hate it.” So, what’s next for the pair of provocateurs?
“I’m working on another book and a TV project,” Frey said. “The book’s about a 32-year old secular Jew in New York who comes to believe he’s the messiah.”
“Yeah, I’m thinking of doing Ulysses next,” joked Richardson.
Sex In The TV With America’s Top Artist
Sarah Jessica Parker lands show at Bravo
Aspiring artists to compete to produce various artwork
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Sarah Jessica Parker (Getty Images photo) |
Sarah Jessica Parker’s art competition reality show has found a home at Bravo.
The network has picked up “American Artist,” from Parker’s Pretty Matches production company and wunderkin producers Magical Elves, as part of its development slate. Bravo is expected to announce the deal Sunday at the Television Critics Assn. press tour.
The hourlong show has been described by the Elves team of Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz as a “Project Runway”-style competition series that takes on the art world. Aspiring artists compete to produce various styles of artwork (painting, sculpting, etc.), which is then judged by a panel of experts. The network declined to comment.
Castrated Suzuki For Sale
New Breed Of Non-Flatulating GM Sheep Recycles Old Technology To Curb Global Warming
Pedi by Petra
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Fish pedicures are creating something of a splash in the D.C. area, where a northern Virginia spa has been offering them for the past four months. John Ho, who runs the Yvonne Hair and Nails salon with his wife, Yvonne Le, said 5,000 people have taken the plunge so far.