The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America
‘Painter In a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America’ by Miles Harvey
July 2, 2008
Glimpsed in history’s rearview mirror, events seem to follow one upon the other with fluid inevitability. Thus, the 516-year arc from Columbus’ first wondering footfall on the shore of the New World to this morning’s traffic jam on the 405 appears seamless and foreordained.
Those who find the view from that vantage point unconvincing also will find much to admire in Miles Harvey’s engaging new book, “Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America” — not least its illuminating portrait of just how halting, helter-skelter and contingent a process the early exploration of the New World really was. Eight years ago, Harvey published a well-received exploration of the intersection of graphic representation and history, “The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime.” In this new work, his subject is the artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, a mysterious figure whose astonishingly adventurous life included service with a disastrous attempt to plant a colony of French Huguenots on the Florida coast, near what’s now Jacksonville.
Through the mists of time
Harvey has set himself quite a challenge, because while Le Moyne’s significance is clear, much that’s important about him is unknown and unknowable. He left no self-portrait, for example, so it’s impossible to conjure a mental image of the approximately 30-year-old artist who set out with 300 
other, mainly Protestant French soldiers and sailors from the Norman port of Le Havre on April 22, 1564. One of the strengths of this account is that, while the author does not hesitate to speculate about key elements in Le Moyne’s life, he’s modest about what he asserts based on that conjecture and he’s clear regarding the evidence on which he relies.
It’s apparent, for example, that the artist was formally trained, and he appears to have had royal connections, possibly gained through a relative who was chief embroiderer to Mary Queen of Scots while she reigned alongside the short-lived Charles IX of France. The younger Le Moyne may have supplied his relative — and, therefore, the queen — with accurate floral patterns for embroidery. While Le Moyne’s relations were Catholic, he was a Calvinist, and his family may have wanted him out of the country following the first of the religious wars that would culminate in the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
Nick Flynn From The Ether
Nick Flynn, well-traveled poet
Nick Flynn’s poetry led to a memoir, a play and a possible movie. But it has taken many years and many, many drafts to get this far.
July 2, 2008
 Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night In Suck City |
NEW YORK — On his passport, Nick Flynn lists his profession as “poet,” but there is nothing anemic or brooding about his appearance. On a recent afternoon in New York’s West Village, he dismounted the bike he rides every day from Brooklyn to Manhattan looking like a man ready to ride another 50 miles. In person, as in his prose and poetry, Flynn is exuberant and present, a friendly force to be reckoned with.
He pushed his long hair out of his face and rearranged his backpack before settling into his favorite Greenwich Village cafe. He talked about everything but his work — most especially about the birthing classes he had been taking with his partner, actress Lili Taylor, who was about to give birth to their daughter. Nick Flynn, the award-winning poet and the bestselling author of a 2004 memoir “Another . . . Night . . .,” whose clever, angry title cannot be printed in full, is happy and healthy. After some prodding, he talked about his career, which he agreed had “not been very calculated or thought out.” He paused a moment, staring around the cafe in wonder. “At least not for financial compensation,” he laughed.
Flynn is 47 and many of the details of his life can be found in the two books of poetry he has published, “Some Ether” in 2000 and “Blind Huber” in 2002, along with the memoir. This month he returns with his first full-length play, “Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins,” to be published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
I Love Partying With My Best Friend And His Dates
Literature Bit by Bit
Doors Opening? Bit o’ Lit for Reading Riders
By Laura Yao
Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, July 1, 2008; Page C01
Bored and cranky, Shannon MacDonald was riding the Metro one morning four years ago, headed to her job as a paralegal at Akin Gump.
She was tired of crosswords and Sudokus. She’d never been much of a newspaper person. She was a “book nut” — but due to recent poor choices at the library, she didn’t have anything good to read.
Cue the light bulb: Wouldn’t it be great if you could pick up free commuter-length book excerpts at Metro stations? Wouldn’t publishers be eager to cooperate, to promote new books and authors? Couldn’t somebody, say Shannon MacDonald, turn this into a profit-making enterprise?
Well, she’s about to find out. It took a few years for MacDonald to focus her ideas, meet publishers, line up designers and printers and quit her day job. But she’s now the sole publisher of the latest and most literary addition to the local freebie reading lineup — Bit o’ Lit.
A bite-size (8 1/2 -by-5 1/2 -inch) magazine containing four or five excerpts in each issue, Bit o’ Lit made its debut May 5 and has come out on alternate Mondays since then. In a world where more and more reading is being done on a screen, the 25-year-old MacDonald is headed in the other direction: using one dead-tree medium to promote another.
“It’s kind of a retro idea, in this read-excerpts-online world, but it’s a neat idea — giving books to people who have time to kill on the subway,” said Carl Lennertz, vice president of Independent Retailing at HarperCollins.
Rings Stolen From Lord
Tolkien’s children fight for ‘Lord of the Rings’ gold
Pierre Vinet / New Line Cinema
The trust of the “Lord of the Rings” creator says New Line cheated it out of millions.
The ‘Lord of the Rings’ film trilogy has raked in billions for others, but for the heirs of beloved author and creator J.R.R. Tolkien, nothing.
SO “THE LORD OF THE RINGS” made no money.
Let me amend that. The film trilogy, which grossed $2.96 billion worldwide at the box office and $3 billion or so more in DVD and ancillary markets, has not made any money for the heirs of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the famous books.
Tolkien obviously isn’t Peter Jackson, who directed the franchise, or Liv Tyler or Viggo Mortensen, who starred in it, or New Line Cinema, the studio that financed it, or Miramax, which owned the film rights for a second but couldn’t get the movie made, or producer Saul Zaentz, who bought the rights in 1976. He’s just the guy who dreamed up the cosmology, the whole shebang of hobbits and dwarfs, orcs, ents, wargs, trolls, whatnot. “Three rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-Lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne.” Those were old John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s words.
But he’s dead, so why should Hollywood share any of the dough?
I wondered if that’s what the Time Warner empire must be thinking when I waded through the lawsuit filed against New Line in February by Tolkien’s children on behalf of two Tolkien trusts. There are only two Tolkien children still living — Christopher, age 83, and Priscilla, age 79 — and the case is not scheduled to be heard until October 2009. Days after the filing, New Line folded and became a division of Warner Bros. — some might call that karma.
Maybe I’m naive, but I find it hard to believe that not a sliver of gold could be found in all of Middle-earth for not only the aged Tolkiens but also the charitable trust that gets 50% of their fortune and distributes money to such causes as Save the Children, the Darfur Appeal, the National Campaign for Homeless People and UNICEF.
Coolhunter Launches Fashionation
Welcome to Fashionation, an alternative fashion universe where fashionistas, photographers and creatives can get their weekly fix of the best fashion editorial from around world. Never before has the world’s best fashion editorials/photography converged in one great central hub. Each day we scan the globe’s top fashion magazines – from every international edition of influential glossy bibles Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, right through to obscure and cutting edge fashion and pop culture tomes such as Pop, Marmalade, ID and Dutch to unearth the most creative and inspiring work happening in the world right now. From Moscow to the Netherlands, Bejing to Melbourne, New York to London and Milan, Fashionation is searching the globe to deliver inspiration direct to your desktop.
In addition to bringing you the hottest fashion editorial, Fashionation will also cover the coolest offerings from fashion week events around the world. We’ve also brought the best of the web’s street style blogs together into one place, providing a truly global view of street style, city by city.
Subscribe now to the weekly newsletter. Fashionation – the only fashion destination online. Fashionation has been designed by UK based creative studio, Something Somewhere.
Cocker’s Got A Leather For His Fred
Cody’s Books Lives On In Spirited Defiance of Bourgeois Berkeley
Image of the Day: The Show Goes On
Cody’s Books may have closed suddenly 10 days ago, but Bob Calhoun aka Dante, author of the recent punk-wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling (ECW Press, distributed by Independent Publishers Group), plans to hold an event scheduled there for tonight anyway. Calhoun will read on the sidewalk on Shattuck Avenue in front of the shuttered Berkeley, Calif., store at 7 p.m. A Bay Area resident and regular for years with the Bay Area’s Incredibly Strange Wrestling tour, Calhoun may draw many fans as he did at BEA, where he gave free headlocks.
Click here to buy Beer, Blood and Commeal at Amazon.com
300 x 2
Counting Down to 300 Sequel
Warner Bros. Entertainment
For Greece! For glory! For ripped guys in skimpy armor!
Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. are looking for a plot to hang a follow-up to 300on, as they try to repeat the surprise blockbuster success of the 2006 flick adapted from Frank Miller‘s graphic novel.
Fanboys will be heartened to know that, according to Variety, original director Zack Snyder is being wooed for the next installment, which will be based on a new graphic novel from the acclaimed comic-book writer.
The problem is exactly who will be going to war this time around, considering nearly all of300‘s main characters were killed off at the end of the first film, including Gerard Butlerand his heroic pecs. Butler’s testosterone-fueled King Leonidas led Sparta’s small yet fierce army in a doomed but inspiring standoff against the Persians in the Battle of Thermopylae.
Miller must work out whether the new saga will be a prequel, a sequel or a possible spinoff headlining those who survived the brutal fighting, and whether there will be a number referenced in the title (150? 600? 3,000?).
Dali’s Words Performed @ MOMA
WRITING DALÍ: THE ARTIST’S LETTERS, POETRY, AND MANIFESTO
MOMA, Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters
11 W 53rd St.
New York, NY 10020, West 40s
“I don’t do drugs. I am drugs,” the self-proclaimed genius Salvador Dalí once said. Indeed, no one should expect to go home feeling sober after tonight’s mind-altering program Writing Dalí: The Artist’s Letters, Poetry, and Manifesto. Performance artist Laurie Anderson, poet Jorie Graham, former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic, and Wooster Group founding member Kate Valk will channel the madness as they perform a range of his works, including excerpts from his film scripts, his musings on New York, and his provocative 1928 Manifest Groc (Yellow Manifesto). The evening is part of MOMA’s summer-long exhibit and performance series, “Dalí: Painting and Film.”
Ticket price: $10, students $5
Running dates: 06/30/08 6:30 pm
Fine Art At 30 Feet Per Second
Tate exhibit keeps on running
In Pictures: See a gallery of the work here
Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent, Monday June 30, 2008
guardian.co.uk
A volunteer runs through Tate Britain as part of Richard Creen’s Work No 850. Photo: Reuters
Martin Creed cheered up the Turner prize no end seven years ago, when he won the award for a piece that consisted of a gallery’s lights being switched on and off.
Now the artist is back with a new work that is likely to prove just as irritating to traditionalists.
Creed’s Work No 850 is a single athlete running at top speed through the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain – every 30 seconds, all day, every day.
Visitors to Tate Britain will see a runner streak past them, dashing “as if their life depended on it” according to the artist’s instructions. After a runner has made the 86 metre sprint (which will take around 12 seconds) there will be a 15 second pause, like a rest in a piece of music. Then the next runner will dash forth.
The runners have been recruited from various athletics magazines. Each will work a four-hour shift, with sprints interspersed with rests.
They are to be paid £10 per hour; and the Tate will be recruiting more runners through its website in due course. “We’re desperate to find enough people to keep it going for eight hours a day until November,” said Creed.
The piece has a certain mystery to it: why is the runner running? To what? From what? “They are running urgently,” said Creed, “to complete the work.”
Is it pretentious, asked someone. “No, it is not pretentious. No one is pretending. They are just running,” said Creed.
And is it art? ventured another. “It’s not for me to say what art is. I hope people enjoy it and I hope they find something in it. I make my work because I want to make my life better, to make things exciting and fun and enticing.”
The appeal of the running figure, according to the artist, is simple: “Running is a beautiful thing. You do it without a pool, or a bike; it is the body doing as much as it can on its own.”
The pauses between the sprints, he said, provide a “frame” for looking at the runner.
It was crucial, he said, that there should be no separation between runners and visitors; that the runners should have to weave past visitors and the visitors should be able to experience the runners directly, without a roped-off area. Nevertheless, those who take it upon themselves to join in the fun will be peremptorily stopped by museum security. “Running is not allowed in the galleries,” said Creed.
The Best Right Jab In The Music Business
I wonder what Mandela thinks of this.
Government Intrusion Into Personal Lives Continues
Busty lady’s breasts could ‘burst’
Monday, June 30th 2008, 11:32 AM
A woman has been denied her ninth boob job because she’s reached the legal limit for silicone in the body.
Sheyla Hershey, 28, can’t use the excuse of having had children to account for her enormous boobs. With only one kid, eight past surgeries in the last five years is definitely the culprit for her size 34FFF bras.
Determined to get move up to size 34GG even though the U.S. forbids it, she’s planning on going to her home country of Brazil to get the job done.
“I think big boobies look beautiful,” she told The Sun. “I am just following my dream and I won’t let anyone stop me.”
Even though her wish for cleavage to literally spill would fulfill the fantasies of many men, another surgery could actually endanger her health, according to Dr. Robert Rey, plastic surgeon to the stars.
He told her, “Your breasts could literally burst.”
Is Sheyla’s husband Derek Hershey, an American, the luckiest man ever, or is he just cursed with too much of a good thing?
[ click to read article at NY Daily News – my back hurts just looking ]
Walter Iooss Jr.’s book ‘Athlete’
Here are images from ‘Athlete,’ Sports Illustrated photographer Walter Iooss Jr.’s new book, with caption information written by Iooss. Here are his comments on this 1961 boxing photo: “Ali and Terrell…I never saw this photo until 20 years after I took it. It’s from one of two fights I was at when he fought.”
Credits: ‘Sports Illustrated Athlete’ by Walter Iooss Jr.
Scrabble Rules
Spell bound
When the Great Depression left architect Alfred Butts out of work, he scrabbled around for something to do – and came up with a game whose ingenious mix of anagrams, crosswords, chance and skill is still a winner, 60 years on. And yet it nearly didn’t see the light of day… Oliver Burkeman reports
Saturday June 28, 2008
The Guardian 
At the 36th National Scrabble Championship, Paul Allen plays the word ‘bum’
The highest score that it is theoretically possible to achieve in a single turn in Scrabble is for the word “oxyphenbutazone”. Even at the top levels of tournament Scrabble, this has never actually happened: it would require the game to have unfolded in exactly the right way up to that point, leaving exactly the right open spaces, and the right combination of letters in the bag. But if it did, it would span three triple-word scores, creating seven other new words on the board, for a total of at least 1,778, depending on which official word list you used. The closest anyone has come in real life was a now deceased Kurdish player, Dr Karl Khoshnaw, who got 392 points for “caziques” at a contest in Manchester in 1982. (Oxyphenbutazone, in case you’re wondering, is a chemical compound used to treat arthritis; caziques were ancient Peruvian and Mexican princes. But if you had a Scrabble champion’s mind-set, you wouldn’t waste brain-space on what words mean: that’s not the point.)
Scrabble’s perfect equilibrium between chance and skill wasn’t an accident; Alfred Butts meticulously studied the matter. He had plenty of time to do so: born in Poughkeepsie in 1899, he trained as an architect and took a job in Manhattan, but by 1931, aged 32, he fell victim to the economic chaos engulfing the country. Years later, asked what he did after losing his job, he was self-deprecating. “Well, I wasn’t doing anything,” he said. “That was the trouble.”
He tried his hand at art, drawing New York scenes, but they didn’t bring in serious cash. “So I thought I’d invent a game.” He had a role model: by 1931, Charles Darrow, a Philadelphia heating salesman who’d lost his job in the Wall Street Crash, was on his way to becoming a millionaire thanks to Monopoly, which he claimed to have created. (It later emerged he was probably bending the truth.) “I think Alfred was hoping he could do something similar,” Robert Butts says. “Invent a game and make some money.”
The Best New Pipes of the 21st Century
Mo’ Flo’ and The Machine. Lungs.
FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE have two songs on iTunes – you can get them both for a buck98 – let’s send Florence to the top.
48 Minutes of Classic Carlin for 89cents
No Better Way To Wile A Saturday!
it’s ripped from vinyl (but it merits 4.5 stars nonetheless),
| By | Jeffrey Thames “King of Grief/KPFT 90.1 FM” (Houston, TX) |
Carlin on Campus (recorded at UCLA’s Wadsworth Theater in 1984) is the only album from the master that has yet to see a CD release. (Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s also his only solo album barring his RCA debut not distributed by Atlantic.) What you get with this mp3 is the complete program, both sides, unindexed, and ripped from a very-good-condition LP. You’ll hear the occasional light surface noise that shouldn’t detract from your enjoyment of the album. The question you have to ask yourself is if you want to pay for a vinyl rip.
Look at it this way: Carlin was apparently a vinyl guy. He had Atlantic press up promo copies of Parental Advisory on wax for his personal library, and the albums chronicled in the Little David Years box are housed in LP jacket replicas (complete with ringwear). Vinyl was apparently good enough for Uncle George, why should we quibble? (It’s also an economic alternative to seeking out the actual LP on Internet auction sites.)
Technicalities aside, this was Carlin’s most consistent release of the 80s and contains some favorite routines cited often in the past two days’ obituaries. If this is the only means of mass availability for On Campus, so be it.
When Birds Attack
The Arctic tern is fiercely defensive of its nest and young. It will attack humans and large predators, usually striking the top or back of the head. Although it is too small to cause serious injury, it is still capable of drawing blood Photograph: Andrew Parkinson/Corbis
Oates Ditches Hall in Bald-faced Rejection of Men Missing Facial Hair
Oates, Mustache Make Cartoon Crime-Fighting Team
John Oates may be coming to a cartoon near you. |
 |
June 27, 2008 , 11:15 AM ET
John Oates wants people to know that he is nothing like what he was when he had a mustache. The Hall & Oates principal is firm about the distinction, because if things go as planned, his mustachioed image could appear on TV in cartoon form kicking ass, rocking out and wearing tight pink pants.
Independent publisher Primary Wave Music Publishing, which owns a majority stake in most of the biggest hits in the Hall & Oates catalog, is shopping a cartoon titled “J-Stache” that further illustrates the dichotomy. As laid out in a two-minute trailer, Oates is portrayed as a modern-day family man and finds himself enticed back to the rock star life by his mustache, which is voiced by comedian Dave Attell.
“In a cartoon setting, the mustache has its own personality,” Oates says from Aspen, Colo., where he’s finishing his latest solo album. 
“Just as I’m represented as the John Oates of today, the mustache is the John Oates of yesterday. The focus of the music will be on the back catalog, but it’s an open-ended situation. There’s even talk of the mustache trying to bring new bands into the picture.”
The pilot, which Primary Wave estimates will be between six and 10 minutes long, is being storyboarded, and the aim is to have it completed in the next two months. It will portray Oates opening a new wing of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that focuses on mustachioed musicians.
Suddenly, a dying David Crosby appears and with his last breath warns Oates of a mysterious secret group of mustache wearers bent on killing other mustache wearers. As actor Tom Selleck attempts to escape from the latest murder scene, Oates summons his own mustache with a fist pump that simultaneously changes his clothes from conservative attire to pink pants and white boots.
Mexican High
A friend of mine just wrote an awesome novel called Mexican High.
Check it out if you can:
Museum Of Bad Art
Madonna “Give Hard Candy 2 Me” (The Chris Ciccone Sticky Mix)
Gene Simmons Gives Music Biz It’s Last Lick
Gene Simmons’ Kiss of Fate
Kevin Mazur/WireImage.com
KISS mainman Gene Simmons has been blaming the death of the record industry on bands like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and others who have experimented with alternative methods of releasing music.
Oh, and the fans, too.
“The record industry is dead. It’s six feet underground and unfortunately the fans have done this. They’ve decided to download and file share,” said Simmons, according to an AOL Australia report.
“There is no record industry around so we’re going to wait until everybody settles down and becomes civilised. As soon as the record industry pops its head up we’ll record new material.”
Are you happy now, ungrateful fans of music?
Anyway, the death of the music industry has at least gotta be good for the Kiss Kasket, the $4,700 coffin the band used to sell on its website. It could be used as a beer cooler until the lucky fan died and was placed inside.
Tim Burton’s VINCENT
Win a Free Copy of HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT
from the San Jose Mercury News
Contest: Win a copy of ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot: The Ultimate Guide to Karaoke Domination’
Enter to win today
About the book
Author Raina Lee helps beginners and veterans conquer stage fright, pick songs to showcase vocal talent (or disguise a lack thereof), and master their moves (mic twirls, Mick Jagger kicks, etc.). She turns what can be a terrifying social rite of passage into a party no one wants to miss.
With lists of the best songs for all occasions, advice from World Karaoke Champions, hand-drawn typography and illustrations, plus party scene snapshots of people singing their hearts out, this pocket-size resource will turn up the volume on happy hour.
Attend the karaoke book release party with author Raina Lee
9 p.m. on Friday at Seven Bamboo in San Jose
7 p.m. on Saturday at the the Mint Karaoke Lounge in San Francisco
Axl Don’t Mess
Guns n’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy” Leaker Gets FBI Visit
6/24/08, 5:45 pm EST
Last week, the Internet was rocked when California blogger Kevin Skwerl posted nine newly leaked Chinese Democracy tracks, 
including three previously unheard songs allegedly from Guns n’ Roses long-awaited album. Skwerl — who used to work in the distribution department of Universal Music and is now a Web designer — runs the blog Antiquiet, and says he received the tracks from “an anonymous online source.”
Yesterday Skwerl was surprised to find himself face to face with two FBI agents who paid a visit to his day job. “It was kind of an ambush,” Skwerl tells Rolling Stone. “When I came back from lunch they were waiting in the lobby for me. It’s a little creepy they know where I work.” Two young FBI officers, who Skwerl describes as “Mulder and Scully types,” questioned him for 15 minutes about where he got the tracks and made plans to visit his house at 7:00 a.m. this morning.
“I wasn’t sure if they were going to come by with a warrant and trash the place, like in the movies,” he says. “It was nothing like that.” The FBI officials wanted to see the 
original files, but Skwerl erased them last week per instructions from Axl Rose’s attorneys. Skwerl ultimately gave them second-hand files that are now widely available on the Internet.
Last week Skwerl’s blog crashed from the traffic flood that resulted from his controversial posting. “My host contacts me and says, ‘What the fuck did you do?’” I go, “Uhhhh. I posted some music.” He goes, “What exactly did you post?” I go, “Uhhhh. [Meek voice] New Guns n’ Roses.” He goes, “Motherfucker.” Before long his cell phone rang with an unfamiliar 323 number. “It was a really cool guy from the Gn’R camp that was a middle man between someone who was very angry and me. He was trying to reach out and see if I’d go without a fight, which is more or less what I did.”
Geisha Head So Good Cultural Revival via Internet
Renewed respect as geisha make a comeback – and take to cyberspace
Teenage girls are flocking to enter ‘floating world’ in return to traditional culture
Kyoto geisha girls. Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert
Miehina has barely taken a dozen steps along a Kyoto street before the audio backdrop to her every public move comes to life. In the fading light of an early summer evening, the metronomic clip-clop of her platform okobo sandals is accompanied by the clicking of shutters, as a gaggle of amateur photographers seeks the perfect snapshot of one of Japan’s most venerated women.
They stay with her until she retreats down a backstreet and slips through the sliding wooden door of her teahouse, her emerald green kimono, worth tens of thousands of pounds, now no more than a photogenic imprint.
In the past tourists would have had to wait hours for a fleeting glimpse of a lone geisha on her way to an appointment. Now they are spoiled for choice.
After decades of decline, Japan’s traditional entertainers are making a comeback. Earlier this year the number of geisha trainees – known as maiko – reached 100 in Kyoto for the first time in four decades.
Much of the mild embarrassment many Japanese felt about the geisha thread running through their cultural fabric arose from popular misconceptions: the suspicion that, beneath the veneer of cultural exclusivity, they were little more than high-class prostitutes.
Experts believe the recent surge in teenage girls hoping to enter the “floating world” of tea ceremonies, performing arts, and yes, flirtatious exchanges with inebriated clients, is evidence of renewed respect among the Japanese for their traditional culture.
The 14,000 Words He Left Us – Carlin’s Last Interview
George Carlin’s Last Interview
By Jay Dixit on June 23, 2008 in Brainstorm
Ten days ago, on Friday, June 13th, 2008, I had the extraordinary privilege of talking to George Carlin. As far as I know it was the last in-depth interview he gave before he passed away yesterday at age 71. Originally it was slated to run as a 350-word Q&A on the back page of Psychology Today. But I was so excited to talk to him—and he was so generous with his time—that I just kept on going. By the end I had over 14,000 words.
On stage, George Carlin came across as a grouch, often vulgar and sometimes misanthropic. But with me he was patient and warm, happy to talk through the minutiae of his creative process and eager to share stories about his childhood, his evolution as a comic, and his influence. What struck me most was the joy in his voice as he talked about the wonderful feeling he got in his gut while writing. I was also moved by the gratitude he expressed for his mother, who he said “saved” him and his brother—leaving her bullying, alcoholic husband when George was just two months old, getting a job during the worst years of the Depression, and raising two boys on her own.
He spoke about the pride he took in his work. As a ninth-grade dropout, he said, it was gratifying to see his words quoted in textbooks, classrooms, and courtrooms. And he was proud to have inspired other comedy greats, who routinely called him to say, “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be doing this.” As he looked back on his astonishingly prolific 50-year career—which includes 130 Tonight Show appearances, 23 albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, and one Supreme Court case—the interview became a sort of retrospective of his life.
One Artist We Hope Has Filed His Tax Returns Properly
Photographer Documents Secret Satellites — All 189 of Them
By Bryan Gardiner 
06.21.08
Artist Trevor Paglen’s time-exposure photographs show the streaks of light left by classified satellites.
Photo: Trevor Paglen
BERKELEY, California — For most people, photographing something that isn’t there might be tough. Not so for Trevor Paglen.
His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit — despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don’t exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum through September 14, is only a small selection from the 1,500 astrophotographs Paglen has taken thus far.
In taking these photos, Paglen is trying to draw a metaphorical connection between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo’s time.
“What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn’t exist in orbit around Jupiter?” Paglen says.
Satellites are just the latest in Paglen’s photography of supposedly nonexistent subjects. To date, he’s snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, “torture taxis” (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.
While all of Paglen’s projects are the result of meticulous research, he’s also the first to admit that his photos aren’t necessarily revelatory. That’s by design. Like the blurry abstractions of his super-telephoto images showing secret military installations in Nevada, the tiny blips of satellites streaking across the night sky in his new series of photos are meant more as reminders rather than as documentation.
“I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy,” Paglen explains. “You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.”
More significant than the discovery itself, Paglen says, was the idea that anyone with a telescope could verify it and see the same exact thing that Galileo saw — an idea Paglen is trying to re-create in his own photographs.
“It really was analogous to a certain kind of promise of democracy,” says Paglen, who sees a similar anti-authoritarian premise running through his own work.
Richard Prince’s Fast Cars, Nurses and Other Male Obsessions
Girlz on the hood
Richard Prince has a thing about fast cars, nurses and other supposed male obsessions. Adrian Searle wonders what lies behind all the secondhand jokes and macho excess
Tuesday June 24, 2008
The Guardian 
A sculpture installation of a car at the Richard Prince: Continuation exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi
Walking into Richard Prince’s show, the bonnet of a car greets you, like a shark or a maître d’ with perfect American teeth. Every exhibition at the Serpentine gallery in London now has to have a dramatic opening: last time it was a self-portrait by Maria Lassnig, naked and pointing a gun at us, another gun pressed to her temple; Anthony McCall opened his show last year with a projector aimed straight at the door, like a Gatling gun. Such gambits are designed to make us forget the gallery was once just a tea house in Kensington Gardens.
Prince chartered his own flight to London, stacked with work for the Serpentine, and installed the show himself, in record time. But his car isn’t going anywhere – it’s just a fibreglass body set into a chunky cubic block. Surrounding this are further car hoods, hung on the wall like paintings, or the shields of gasoline warriors in a comic-book universe. These, too, appear to have been sculpted from some plaster-like material. Their chevron shapes are inset with cowls and scoops, giving them the air of a certain kind of painted, post-industrial abstract relief I haven’t seen in years.
Never mind that what I’m actually looking at are auto bonnets and custom cowl induction hoods. According to Carhoods.com, where Prince orders these bizarre body parts, they “can be flanged, trimmed and easily welded in place to fit your needs – whether you want to draw more air into your engine, are in need of engine clearance, or yearning for a cool new look”. They could have been manufactured with art in mind.
These objects also appear to have been coloured with loose, brushy paintwork; one might think of early Richard Diebenkorn or Ron Gorchov. Up close, it turns out to be the work of a disk sander and a filler knife. That’s not impasto – that’s Bondo. Instead of Cézanne gone abstract, or a sensitive balancing of directional brushstrokes, we have the tough but tender swagger of the bloke in the garage.
Prince, of course, knows this. It is one of the things his art is dealing with. Nevertheless, works such as Gomper, Hum Bomb and the wonderfully titled No Milk No Butter Since My Cow Left Home have a satisfyingly weighty, chunky feel. The masculinity in Prince’s art is as unavoidable as it is ambiguous.
Prince also expects his audience to be as knowing as he is. (It never does to overestimate the intelligence of the art lover, especially the collecting classes. They say Rothko killed himself because he met the people who bought his art.) Prince has chosen these forms both because he’s a car nut, and because he, too, recognises their resemblance to art. And also, undoubtedly, because the car and the artwork are both commodity fetishes whose place in culture is more than utilitarian. His art often depends on its resemblance to other things – to other art, as well as to its overt references in popular culture. If you hold a mirror to the world, are you responsible for what it reflects?
Lots of artists have worked with cars – from the French artist César to Gustav Metzger, from Sarah Lucas to Gabriel Orozco to Joseph Beuys. There’s another automobile-cum-altar in the centre of another room in this show, and a real Buick 1987 Regal, whose entire body has 
been covered in a vinyl wrapping of images of hot young babes. Prince is really tripping on the unreconstructed male psyche here, unless, that is, he’s deconstructing it.
Prince has just held a Guggenheim retrospective, of which the Serpentine show is a pared-down continuation (hence the exhibition title). Yet, it is disarmingly accessible and oddly attractive. In the middle of one gallery is a giant garden planter, fashioned from a truck tire and cast in glowing orange resin. You could say that Prince has domesticated his art for London, except that the artist, who lives in depressed, upstate New York, has always liked to see his work in domestic situations: he has bought several countryside properties to work in and house his stuff.
The artist is also an avid collector of books – from Nabokov to pulp, hardboiled crime to Beat poetry – and, in the words of Jack Bankowsky, the Artforum editor-at-large, ” traffics in rumour and refusal”. There is much that remains opaque about Prince’s practice. For ZG magazine in the mid-1980s, Prince invented an interview between himself and JG Ballard, and insinuated that his father did something shady for the CIA down in Panama, where Prince was born.
Elsewhere in this show, there are appropriated photos of biker chicks lounging on motorcycles, their stockings ripped, their chests bared. There’s a recent set of drawings riffing on the style of Willem de Kooning, except the old abstract expressionist only drew women who looked like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, while these are manic androgynes, De Kooning’s swervy charcoal swipes and blurry erasures reduced to a merely competent and 
mannered style. One figure shows his/her willy, encased in a pair of see-through plastic panties. Prince’s art appears to celebrate trashiness and low-rent style. He has rephotographed Marlboro adverts, keeping the wild west cowboy fantasy and losing the logo and the fags. His art is full of recycled gags; he also has a thing about nurses, whose images fill a concurrent Gagosian gallery show in London’s West End.
Either Prince just lets his obsessions hang out, or he has something to say about the state of American culture – or both. It is too late to be a wide-eyed pop artist. Prince is not just an appropriationist, though he first appeared on the New York scene in the mid-1970s as just that, and as the then partner of Cindy Sherman, for whom success came much more quickly. In the end, Prince’s problem is that he’s just not as good as Bruce Nauman or Matthew Barney, or Sherman at her best. His art knows this and tries to deal with it by way of jokes and excess.
Prince’s nurses stalk the Serpentine as though patrolling the wards on night duty. In their masks, mascara and starched uniforms, they appear both bloodied and predatory. Derived from the covers of pulp novels, Prince 
photographically reproduces these images on canvas and then overpaints them, giving them the transgressive frisson of medical fetishism. His nurses are more Carry On Matron than Sister Ingrid the Catheter Queen.
Somehow, Richard Prince’s art spurns my critical advances. My excuse is that what Prince does and deals with is just too much a macho guy thing for me. I don’t drive, I have no interest in cars, I’ve never had the fantasy of nailing a nurse on the hood of my Buick or of being picked up by a bare-boobed biker chick riding a throbbing Harley. I even had to have the cultural significance of Brooke Shields, about whom Prince once made an iconic and infamous early work, explained to me. Prince the artist is cool and fashionable, both attributes I have some difficulty keeping up with.
When he copies old New Yorker cartoons and sad stand-up jokes on canvas, stencilling their punchlines or using them to interrupt achingly vacuous fields of colour, he is just compounding one kind of empty gesture with another. “A girl phoned me the other day and said, ‘Come on over, nobody’s home.’ I went over, nobody was home,” reads one canvas. Ba-boom.
Maybe the artist sees himself as the failed comedian, the fall guy in the gag. Or maybe that’s us, his audience. Maybe the art is like the girl on the phone, promising everything, delivering nothing. It’s a joke all right. It’s painful.
· Richard Prince: Continuation is at the Serpentine gallery until September 7. Details: 020-7402 6075.