“So just where you think you’re goin’ there, boy…”
Denied! No U.S. visa for Boy George
Monday, June 23rd 2008, 12:41 PM
Kitwood/Getty
Give the Boy a break!
U.S. Customs is denying Boy George his visa, cutting off his hopes for a U.S. tour.
The denial comes after the British pop icon’s offer to show his appreciation for the Department of Sanitation of New York (DSNY) and play a free concert for their Family Day on August 17. George got to know the DSNY in 2006 when he swept the streets of New York while serving a community service sentence.
“I’m pretty devastated because I am so excited about this forthcoming tour, and having my visa application denied seems unfair after I swept the streets of New York spotless,” George tells PaperMag. “I committed a crime and I happily paid the consequences, and I should be allowed to move on and get on with what I do best – and that is performing and making people dance and cry!”
Shaq Invites Kobe Over For Warmed Sushi
Dying For Porn
Disgruntled porn store owner dies in standoff
Little Falls gunman had history of disputes with county officials
Article Last Updated: 06/25/2008 07:11:09 AM CDT
A man who lost numerous legal battles with Minnesota’s Morrison County over his now-closed adult entertainment businesses was fatally shot after he walked into a county board meeting Tuesday and held at least seven people hostage.
Gordon Wheeler Sr., 60, of Little Falls, was wounded after the county sheriff, a sheriff’s lieutenant and a state trooper opened fire, minutes after he took several county officials hostage as they were wrapping up a board meeting.
Wheeler died later at St. Gabriel’s Hospital in Little Falls, about 100 miles northwest of St. Paul.
It was unclear whether Wheeler returned fire or if he turned the gun on himself, said Dave Bjerga, assistant superintendent for the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
“He talked the whole while, he never quit talking for at least 10 minutes, until the climax,” Wenzel said. “He looked to me like a farmer; he didn’t seem out of the ordinary. I thought, ‘Oh, maybe it was somebody with news or something to say.’
“He had something to say, I guess.”
Wheeler had owned a few adult businesses in the county. In 2003, the county tightened its land-use ordinance for sex-related businesses and shut down an adult book and video store Wheeler owned near Swanville called Lookin’ Fine Smut and Porno, according to reports by the St. Cloud Times.
Monet Still Moving Major Moolah
A Monet Sets a Record: $80.4 Million
Andy Rain/European Pressphoto Agency
“Le Bassin aux Nymphéas,” the record-breaking Monet.
LONDON — The summer auction season here began at Christie’s on Tuesday night when a standing-room-only crowd of dealers, collectors and art lovers came from all over the world to watch and bid on one of the largest London sales the auction house has held. Early in the evening a record price for a Monet, $80.4 million, was set for one of the rarest of his waterlilies.
A sea of hands shot in the air when that painting, “Le Bassin aux Nymphéas,” which had been expected to sell for $36 million to $47 million, came up on the block. The previous record for a Monet, $41.4 million for “The Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil,” was set last month at Christie’s in New York.
“Le Bassin aux Nymphéas,” from 1919, a large horizontal work measuring more than 3 feet by 6 feet, is from a series of four that Monet signed and dated and that experts consider to be among the most important paintings from his late period. Unlike most of his late works, which remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1926, this series was sold by him. One is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; another was cut in two; and a third is in a private collection, having been sold at Christie’s in New York in 1992 for $12.1 million, a stellar price at the time.
The Monet up for auction Tuesday belonged to J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller, collectors from Columbus, Ind. Mr. Miller, the chairman of the Cummins Engine Company who died in 2004, and Mrs. Miller, who died in February, helped transform Columbus into a showcase for modern architecture by supporting historic buildings and projects.
In addition to the Monet the Millers also owned a Cubist Picasso, another popular work in the auction. “La Carafe (Bouteille et Verre),” painted in the winter of 1911-12, went to a telephone bidder for $7.3 million, above its high $5.9 million estimate.
Another big seller on Tuesday was “Dancers at the Bar,” a Degas pastel being sold by an unidentified private collector. The work, from around 1880, is considered important not only for its composition — two young dancers, their white skirts and pink ballet slippers perfectly rendered — but also because of its provenance. It had been owned by Louisine Elder, the wife of H. O. Havemeyer, the American sugar magnate whose bequest forms the bulk of the Met’s Degas collection. The pastel remained in the Havemeyer family for three generations before being sold at Christie’s in New York in 1982 for $1 million.
Playing to Russian collectors, Christie’s sale included a group of works by Russian artists. One, called “The Flowers,” from 1912, by Nathalia Goncharova, was estimated to bring $6.9 million to 8.9 million. It sold for $10.8 million, a price that set two records: for the artist at auction, and for a female artist at auction.
Several works that had belonged to Simon Sainsbury, the British philanthropist and grocery store magnate who died in 2006, were also for sale Tuesday. Among the best was an early pointillist painting by Signac, “Collioure, Les Balancelles,” a composition of sailboats in the water created in September and October 1887 while he was in the seaside Mediterranean town of Collioure. The painting sold for $5.8 million, higher than its expected estimate of $3.6 million to $4.9 million.
Van Man Black Disses Sedaris
from The GalleyCat @ MediaBistro
‘Why does David Sedaris hate America?’
Michael Ian Black, author of My Custom Van: And 50 other mind-Blowing Essays that will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face is endorsed by Amy Sedaris (“Enjoy the ride of your lifetime”) but is gunning for her brother David. Since Black realized that his book is currently higher ranked on Amazon.com than David Sedaris’s 1994 book Barrel Fever, Black’s begun a “desperate bid to dismantle that mo-fo David Sedaris’s lock on all things ‘best-selling,'” Most importantly he wonders “Why does David Sedaris hate America?” (Sedaris lives in France)
In Black’s laugh-out-loud collection of short comic essays from Simon Spotlight Entertainment (which includes an introduction from Abraham Lincoln) he throws down the gauntlet with the essay ‘Hey David Sedaris – Why Don’t You Just Go Ahead and Suck It?’ He now continues the fued online with several Sedaris blogs at the moment including Some Ways to Casually Put Down David Sedaris at Your Next Social Event Without Looking Like a Total Jerk which includes this gem:
Say, for example, you are at league bowling night and your buddy finds himself facing an easy pick-up for a spare. Just before he bowls say something like, “Don’t miss, Bob, or you might hear David Sedaris telling a long and humorous story about what a boob you are on ‘This American Life.'”
Interview w/James Frey in Macleans
Interview with James Frey
‘I would say hello but I can’t imagine Oprah and I would have much to talk about’
HEIDI STASESON | May 28, 2008 |
It’s been 2-½ years since James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, published as a memoir, was denounced as a liar by the queen of daytime television, Oprah Winfrey. The scandal over Frey’s book not only ruined his reputation among readers (the book had by then sold more than 3.5 million copies) but called into question the integrity of the entire book publishing industry. Frey has just released a novel, Bright Shiny Morning, with a new publisher.
Q How important will Oprah’s opinion about this new book be to you? Do you think she might ever trust you again?
A: Um, you know, I don’t really even think about it. If she reads it, cool; if she doesn’t, cool. I don’t expect ever to be back on her show.
Q: What if you saw her walking down the street, what would you say to her?
A: I would say hello and be as polite as I needed to be but I can’t imagine that we would have much to talk about. I wish Miss Winfrey the best in everything she does.
Q: After A Million Little Pieces, you lost your agent, were abandoned by friends and peers, shunned by the publishing industry, and cast out as a not-to-be-trusted pariah. How has this life experience changed you?
A: I mean it was an unpleasant experience. I can think of a lot of things in life that would be much worse.
Q: Like what?
A: I mean nobody died; I didn’t lose anybody in my life. My family is okay, my wife and child are great. I’m not a soldier fighting in a war, I’m not sick. There are many, many, many things involved in life that are a much bigger deal than anything I had to deal with. How did it change me as a person? It definitely humbled me; it definitely made me realize how fortunate I am in a lot of ways to have a family who was there, and friends who were there.
Q: Evgenia Peretz [in Vanity Fair] talked about how it was humiliating to the point where you actually felt driven to go back to the bottle for a while. Is that true?
A: It was hard, sure. I have a history of addiction. Sometimes when you feel things you might want to drink. But I never did. I was never, I felt, in any danger. It was a sh—y situation but you get through it like any other sh—y situation. I mean at no point was I, like, in the corner, huddled up crying. It was a bad couple of months. And there were some really, really hard moments, but you get through them.
Q: You just plowed into the book and didn’t [succumb]?
A: I mean I wrote a movie before I wrote the book. I didn’t start the book until October of 2006.
Q: Was that the Hells Angels movie by [director] Tony Scott?
A: Yes. I don’t know when it’s even getting made or if it’s getting made. I had been hired to write it in 2005 and after everything happened Tony was like, “Well, I still want you to write it. Let’s get to work.” And so I did. I wrote the movie.
Q: You have a fascination with gang life and bikers and tough guys — they’re all in this new book. Did that research from Scott’s movie help you with this book?
A: The bikers in Bright Shiny Morning are absolutely not Hells Angels. I got an interesting education in biker culture writing the Hells Angels movie. I had a lot of fun hanging around with some of the members of the club.
Q: Why are you interested in Hells Angels?
A: They’re rebels. They do what they want, when they want. They don’t care about what people think about them.
Q: Kind of like you. Didn’t you hang out with the Top Dog of the club?
A: I met Sonny Barger on a number of occasions and he’s a really cool, funny, very, very smart guy. It was a real honour to get to hang out with him. Sonny’s had a really interesting life. He’s an American hero to millions of people. He’s 69, maybe 70. He’s the founder of the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels.
Q: But they’re tough guys and you portray a lot of tough dudes in your novels, including even yourself in A Million Little Pieces.
A: I’m nowhere near as tough as any Hells Angel on the planet.
Q: Let me see your [right wrist] tattoo?
A: Those are my daughter’s initials.
Q: How many tattoos do you have?
A: Ten, 15 — I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about my tattoos.
Q: While labelled as fiction, your novel is strewn with factoids about Los Angeles. It seems more akin to the non-literary fiction style of contemporary American pros like Joan Didion or the Mailers of the world. Were you going for something like that here?
New Titles Out Next Week
Attainment: New Books Out Next Week
Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, July 1:
Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World by David Maraniss (S&S, $26.95, 9781416534075/1416534075) examines a politically eventful yet often overlooked Olympics.
Death Angel: A Novel by Linda Howard (Ballantine, $26, 9780345486547/0345486544) features a woman fleeing her crime lord lover after stealing his money.
The Last Patriot: A Thriller by Brad Thor (Atria, $26, 9781416543831/141654383X) chronicles the worldwide struggle to uncover an ancient Islamic secret.
A Summer Affair: A Novel by Elin Hilderbrand (Little, Brown, $24.99, 9780316018609/0316018600) tells the story of a Nantucket glass artist having an affair with her friend’s husband.
Chasing Darkness by Robert Crais (S&S, $25.95, 9780743281645/0743281640) continues the Elvis Cole series.
The Modern Day Definition Of Hope
Many Dutch prepare for 2012 apocalypse
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, June 23 (UPI) — Thousands of people in the Netherlands say they expect the world to end in 2012, and many say they are taking precautions to prepare for the apocalypse.
The Dutch-language de Volkskrant newspaper said it spoke to thousands of believers in the impending end of civilization, and while theories on the supposed catastrophe varied, most tied the 2012 date to the end of the Mayan calendar, Radio Netherlands reported Monday.
De Volkskrant said many of those interviewed are stocking up on emergency supplies, including life rafts and other equipment.
Some who spoke to the newspaper were optimistic about the end of civilization.
“You know, maybe it’s really not that bad that the Netherlands will be destroyed,” Petra Faile said. “I don’t like it here anymore. Take immigration, for example. They keep letting people in. And then we have to build more houses, which makes the Netherlands even heavier. The country will sink even lower, which will make the flooding worse.”
Kevin Teare: Bumpology, the Clinton Years @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
Kevin Teare: Bumpology, the Clinton Years
June 28 through August 3, 2008
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Kevin Teare. Teare admits to a perhaps unhealthy level of preoccupation with covert U.S. history, English rock bands from the 60s, and other matters pop or political. You wouldn’t immediately know it to look at his paintings – gorgeous abstract compositions of shape and color floating on pale expanses of primed canvas—but titles like There Are Exactly 57 Reds (for John Frankenheimer), which alludes to both a notorious quotation from Senator Joe McCarthy and to Frankenheimer’s film The Manchurian Candidate, suggest that Teare’s paintings are operating on other levels besides those immediately apparent. 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
Carlin Gone
COMEDIAN GEORGE CARLIN DIES AT 71 IN LOS ANGELES
7 minutes ago
Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs and dirty words, died of heart failure 
at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday, a spokesman said. He was 71.
Carlin, who had a history of heart problems, died at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. PDT (9 p.m. EDT) after being admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains, spokesman Jeff Abraham told Reuters.
Known for his edgy, provocative material, Carlin achieved status as an anti-Establishment icon in the 1970s with stand-up bits full of drug references and a routine about seven dirty words you could not say on television. A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of his “Filthy Words” routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
(Reporting by Dean Goodman; Editing by Patricia Zengerle)
Ten-Hanging Fans of ‘Amistad’ Star Beat Paparazzo With His Own Stick
Violent Surfers Shred Paps Over McConaughey
A group of surfers just got gnarly on a group of paps — all over photos of beach king Matthew McConaughey!
Around 12 photographers were on the beach in Malibu this afternoon trying to get shots of Matty hitting the surf, when an all-out smackdown was laid on the pappers by turf-protecting surfers.
One pap was hit in the face and we’re told suffered a broken nose, while another was thrown into some rocks and had his camera smashed. McConaughey was not involved in the ruckus.
Police tell us a battery report was filed by one photographer and no arrests have been made.
A rep for Matthew has yet to get back to us.
My Little Dog Lucy & The Blonde
I pulled into the crowded parking lot at the Super Wal-Mart Shopping Center and rolled down the car windows to make sure my little dog Lucy had fresh air.
She was stretched full-out on the back seat and I 
wanted to impress upon her that she must remain there. I walked to the curb backward, pointing my finger at the car and saying emphatically, ‘Now you stay. Do you hear me?’ ‘Stay! Stay!’
The driver of a nearby car, a pretty young blonde lady, gave me a strange look and said,…
“Why don’t you just put it in park?”
Massive Vangelis
Massive Attack, Vangelis and other replicants
Massive Attack’s memorable rendering of Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack with the Heritage Orchestra helps the movie legend live on
June 19, 2008 12:30 PM
A still from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Photograph: The Kobal Collection
On Tuesday, as part of the Meltdown festival they’re curating, Massive Attack mixed Vangelis’ original score of Blade Runner with the 45 piece Heritage Orchestra. The triumphant event marked yet another appearance of the infamous score in the pop culture zeitgeist.
The mythology surrounding Blade Runner is well known: the movie being re-cut at least seven times; Scott being fired by the producers of the film but continuing to work on it 
regardless; the notorious original release, which featured a Harrison Ford voiceover dubbed in pre-production and with unused scenes from Kubrick’s The Shining spliced into the closing scenes. Yet the soundtrack, too, is the subject of legend. Like the movie, it has been released and re-released with more and more extras added but, unlike the movie (a seven DVD box set was released last year), it remains far from complete.
Though trailed on the credits of the original theatrical release, the full soundtrack was never released. Instead, the producers got the New American Orchestra to arrange Vangelis’ original score. However, the last 25 years have seen the emergence of a cottage industry of bootleggers releasing the Vangelis version. Over 25 known versions exist in some form or other (some even more complete than the recently released three CD box set) and there is a blog where you can hear them.
The reason why Vangelis withheld the score has never been adequately explained, beyond his vague remarks upon the re-release in 1994 score about “finding myself unable to release these recordings at the time”. Some point to Scott’s use of other source music beyond Vangelis’ score. Others say that Vangelis never signed his contract to allow commercial use of the recordings. It’s rumoured that a rift between Scott and Vangelis was subsequently healed, upon which Vangelis ceded the commercial rights.
The constant stream of bootlegs was the official reason why Vangelis decided to release his 1994 version of the score. Even though his was the official version, many fanatics still regarded it as incomplete. It appeared to have been embellished by Vangelis after the fact. It was, however, to be the final word on the subject from Vangelis until last year when he released the three CD set of music to accompany the movie.
So why all the fuss?
The Integratron
Encountering the Integratron in the Mojave Desert
Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
Carlos Coyan of Rancho Cucamonga meditates as more than a dozen people gather at the Integratron in Landers for a “sound bath.” “I would describe it as the fusion of art, science and magic,” said co-owner Joanne Karl. Video
Three sisters take over the dome in Landers, where therapeutic ‘sound baths,’ time travel and who knows what else are said to be possible.
If you set off one morning and drive into the desert, past swirling dust devils and Wile E. Coyote rock formations, and then you drive some more, all the way until the paved road ends, you might find yourself at the Karl sisters’ place, where time travel might, or might not, be possible.
Here’s Joanne Karl now, at 53, the oldest of the trio, striding across the compound. Today, she’s all desert flower — billowing dresses and sun-bleached tresses. Like the others, she’s strayed from her roots.
The sisters grew up in the New York suburbs. Their father worked in plastics; Saturday meant the country club and Sundays meant church. They also had a whimsical mother who, at 79, has yet to acknowledge that questions have been raised about the existence of Santa Claus.
“Be bold,” Jackie Karl told them time and again, “and mighty forces will come to your aid.”
That, topped off with a collective case of wanderlust, helps explain how Joanne, Nancy and Patty Karl came to own 11 acres of unforgiving Mojave Desert moonscape — and one 38-foot-tall, blindingly white dome called the Integratron.
Out There Southern California chronicles
- Mojave Desert: Encountering the Integratron
- Historic Filipinotown: Back on a roll in L.A. with Derby Dolls
- Chino Hills: Tiny tributes to life in L.A.
- Poinsettia Park: United by death
- Montrose: A small town war
- San Diego: The artist behind the iconic ‘running immigrants’ image
- Skid row: Joy is permitted on Fridays
Air Face
from the San Francisco Chronicle
Guitar Hero’s front man: Adam Jennings
Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic
(06-17) 04:00 PDT Sherman Oaks (Los Angeles County) —
About once a week, actor Adam Jennings drives a few miles down the San Fernando Valley from his apartment to a converted warehouse in nearby Woodland Hills. He lies on a couch for the better part of an hour while technicians attach about 70 little spherical sensors to his face with adhesive.
When they are done, Jennings sits on a stool in a large, dark room for eight-hour sessions and lip-syncs rock songs while his face is filmed by as many as a dozen motion-capture cameras, collecting data that will be turned into computer-generated graphics for video games.
Adam Jennings is the face of the wildly popular Guitar Hero.
“There may not even be a handful of people doing facial motion capture,” says the 24-year-old Bay Area native and Burlingame High School graduate.
He cradles the toy guitar that comes with the game and sits on the edge of his living room table as Journey’s “Any Way You Want It” blasts out of his plasma TV. Jennings, eyes locked on the screen, flutters his fingers over the colored buttons on the fret board and picks away at the plastic tab where a real guitar’s strings would be. He’s done this before. Every few bars a sign pops up on the screen: “50 Note Streak.” At the end of the song, the screen informs him he hit 94 percent of the notes.
Jennings fell into the work. After graduating from high school in 2001, Jennings moved south to attend Cal State Northridge but dropped out four years ago to pursue acting full time. His agent sent him to audition for the Tony Hawk skateboard game. A lifelong skateboarder, Jennings felt right at home delivering the punchy dialogue (“Hey skater, meet me over by the half-pipe”) while holding a board under his arm. “I booked the part,” he says.
From saloon girls to swedish
He worked on three Tony Hawk games, playing all the parts, reading all the lines, after studying scripts the size of small telephone books. 
When Neversoft went into production on a Wild West fantasy game called Gun, Jennings again did all the roles, including the saloon girls. When the company landed Guitar Hero, it put Jennings to work learning how to expertly lip sync.
Jennings cut hundreds of rock songs. He lip-synced in foreign languages as remote from his native tongue as Swedish. He learned the Axl scream for “Welcome to the Jungle” and taught himself to lip-sync in a British accent.
Neversoft likes to work with real rock musicians. The Sex Pistols and Living Colour are among the bands that have re-recorded their old repertoire for the game. Joe Perry of Aerosmith saw his kids playing the game and approached the company. The entire band wore the rubber suits for Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, and vocalist Steven Tyler did the facial motion capture, putting on a face full of tiny, round sensors, which are inevitably referred to as “balls.”
“There’s pretty much an endless stream of ball jokes,” says Jennings, without any particular enthusiasm.
Video: To see Adam Jennings as DMC in Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, go to links.sfgate.com/ZDUB
Archaic Forms Of Social Networking, Exhibit 334
Roller Derby Yeah
Back on a roll in L.A. with Derby Dolls
Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times
Roller derby is making a comeback with the L.A. Derby Dolls. Sandra “Tara Armov” Frame, clockwise from top left, Alex “Axles of Evil” Cohen, Mary Krueger and Vanessa “Fighty Almighty” Williams are a few of the roughly 60 women on four teams who race at a warehouse in Historic Filipinotown.
The Sweetness Of The Avisual Artist
John McEwan on the new book by Peter Mann and Sargy Mann
This is the tribute of a child to a parent, especially commendable when the very concept of fatherhood is threatened; rarer still, the co-authors are themselves artists in their separate fields. Peter Mann is responsible for the pleasing design and photographs, and Sargy Mann has answered his son’s questions to provide an autobiographical text which largely concerns visual perception, ‘not at all straightforward even when you can see’, as Peter Mann says.
Jean Renoir’s Renoir, My Father is the prototype. Sargy Mann selected and discussed 27 paintings or series of paintings covering his career and Peter Mann has photographed them as they hang today in private houses. This novel idea is also indebted to Renoir, who told his son:
You don’t look at a painting. You live with it … It becomes part of your life. It acts on you like a talisman. The museums are only a makeshift. How can you get excited over a picture with a dozen or so people around you, whispering asinine comments?
So the book is in praise of art as a cherished and beautiful, as opposed to a purely marketable, thing; a reminder of the sweetness pictures can add to life.
Sargy Mann inherited very short sight and astigmatism, had cataracts removed in 1973 when he was 36, lost the sight of his right eye through a retinal detachment in 1979. From 1987 the sight in his remaining eye was so poor he used a small telescope or monocular. Soon he also required a white stick.
NATASHA by Vladimir Nabokov (Fiction from The New Yorker)
NATASHA by Vladimir Nabokov
In the stairs Natasha ran into her neighbor from across the hall, Baron Wolfe. He was somewhat laboriously ascending the bare wooden steps, caressing the bannister with his hand and whistling softly through his teeth.
“Where are you off to in such a hurry, Natasha?”
“To the drugstore to get a prescription filled. The doctor was just here. Father is better.”
“Ah, that’s good news.”
She flitted past in her rustling raincoat, hatless.
Leaning over the bannister, Wolfe glanced back at her. For an instant he caught sight from overhead of the sleek, girlish part in her hair. Still whistling, he climbed to the top floor, threw his rain-soaked briefcase on the bed, then thoroughly and satisfyingly washed and dried his hands.
Then he knocked on old Khrenov’s door.
Khrenov lived in the room across the hall with his daughter, who slept on a couch, a couch with amazing springs that rolled and swelled like metal tussocks through the flabby plush. There was also a table, unpainted and covered with ink-spotted newspapers. Sick Khrenov, a shrivelled old man in a nightshirt that reached to his heels, creakily darted back into bed and pulled up the sheet just as Wolfe’s large shaved head poked through the door.
“Come in, glad to see you, come on in.”
The old man was breathing with difficulty, and the door of his night table remained half open.
“I hear you’ve almost totally recovered, Alexey Ivanych,” Baron Wolfe said, seating himself by the bed and slapping his knees.
Khrenov offered his yellow, sticky hand and shook his head.
“I don’t know what you’ve been hearing, but I do know perfectly well that I’ll die tomorrow.”
He made a popping sound with his lips.
“Nonsense,” Wolfe merrily interrupted, and extracted from his hip pocket an enormous silver cigar case. “Mind if I smoke?”
Nabokov At Last To Live
Wylie Agency Adds Nabokov Estate To Its Client List
 Getty Images |
Less than a month after Dmitri Nabokov announced, following years of indecision, that he would publish his late father Vladimir’s unfinished final novel, The Original of Laura, he has hired a new literary agent to represent the Nabokov Estate.
That agent is Andrew Wylie, who is as famous for his expert handling of posthumous work by heavyweights like Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling and Richard Yates as he is infamous for his tendency to lure high-profile clients away from less powerful agents.
It is unclear whether Nikki Smith of New Jersey-based agency Smith-Skolnik Literary Management, who has repped the Nabokov Estate since 1986, is still involved, or how far she got in the process of finding a publisher for Laura before Mr. Wylie was brought on board.
Reached by phone this afternoon, Ms. Smith said, “We are not answering any questions,” and hung up.
The original manuscript of the book takes the form of 138 index cards—Nabokov wrote all of his first drafts on index cards—each of which contains about 150 words of prose. Before his death in 1977, Nabokov instructed his wife and son to destroy the cards because the book was unfinished, and his son publicly grappled with those instructions for about 15 years before finally deciding that his father wouldn’t be so sore if he went ahead and published it.
Nabokov scholar and biographer Brian Boyd told The Observer in April that a collection of unpublished letters, a few plays, and a compilation of interview transcripts and book reviews that Nabokov wrote early in his career for The New York Sun and The New Republic would eventually see the light of day. Presumably—though we can’t say for sure—Mr. Wylie will eventually handle these projects as well.
A book of poems, titled Verses and Versions, will be published by Harcourt-Houghton Mifflin in the fall.
Chinese Democracy Unleashed
Purported New Guns N’ Roses Tracks Hit The Web
“Rhiad,” which was played live by Guns N’ Roses in 2001 and 2002, is a pounding rocker with a trademark down-and-dirty main guitar riff and a flashy solo. “If the World” is a head-spinning blend of flamenco guitar, industrial synth tones, bluesy piano licks and Rose at the top of his vocal register, while the unnamed track is an even more unusual melange of piano-led crooning, orchestral bombast and a serene instrumental outtro. But even if its release is drawing near, “Chinese Democracy” will likely go down as the album with the most troubled birth in rock history. Work began on it way back in 1994, and since then, Rose has burned through a reported $13 million in production costs as well as every lone original member of the group. |
Nine purported “mastered, finished” tracks from Guns N’ Roses’ 14-years-in-the-making album “Chinese Democracy” were leaked online yesterday (June 18) by the Web site Antiquiet.com, prompting a quick cease-and-desist from the band’s handlers and the removal of the links.
Virgin Capture of Human Ovulation On Film
Pork And Asparagus For Eight
Pageant Of The Masters
It’s The Sake
Land Of Kamikaze Shocked At Mass Suicide Sensation
Japan gripped by suicide epidemic
Japanese professionals in their thirties are killing themselves at unprecedented rates, as the nation struggles with a runaway suicide epidemic.
Newly published figures show that 30,093 people took their own lives in 2007 — a 2.9 per cent increase in a year — leaving the country as the most suicide-prone anywhere in the developed world and rendering government efforts to combat the problem a failure.
Suicide rates remained highest among men — at 71 per cent of the total — and very high among Japan’s rising population of over-60s. Geographically, most suicides took place in the prefecture of Yamanashi, where the forested foothills of Mount Fuji continue to attract the suicidal from around Japan.
Government analysis of the figures, for the tenth year consecutive in which suicides have remained above 30,000 mark, has exposed a series of new and troubling trends: people in their thirties are the most likely to kill themselves, and work-related depression is emerging as a prime motive.
Psychologists, sociologists and other close observers of Japanese society believe that the country is in the grip of a full-blown crisis among its young working population. Experts say that high suicide rates and the recent spate of random stabbings in public places are symptoms of a malaise that the country has ignored for too long.
Mika Tsutsumi, an economist and social analyst, said that the recent stabbings in Akihabara were worryingly predictable: the killing spree for which Tomohiro Kato was allegedly responsible was, she says, driven by a sense of hopelessness in the workplace. Underneath Japanese society is concealed “an invisible reserve army of Katos”, she said.
Even more disturbing than the raw suicide figures, said police, was the astounding recent surge in people who have taken their lives by generating highly poisonous hydrogen sulphide gas from a combination of standard household products.
Unlike more traditional methods such as hanging or drugs overdoses, the production of hydrogen sulphide endangers people in the same building and turns what used to be private despair into a public event.
Twenty-nine people used that method to end their lives last year, but after the formula for the gas was circulated widely on various “suicide websites”, it has taken on a sinister appeal to the desperate and lonely.
Since February this year, 517 people have killed themselves using the gas, about half of them in their twenties, and its macabre popularity as a method of self-destruction shows no sign of waning.
The crisis of despair gripping young working Japanese has triggered plenty of official and media hand-wringing, though little in the way of change in corporate Japan. Wages remain low, and hierarchies rigid.
“We live in an uncomfortable and restrictive society where trivial matters are important,” said Professor Kiyohiko Ikeda, a veteran social commentator at Waseda University. “The young feel a sense of deadlock; society does not accept minor mistakes.”
The City Of Pictures In Pictures
‘This Side of Paradise’ at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens
The Huntington
AN EDEN?: In November 1953, dancers with the Hollywood Negro Ballet pose for a publicity photograph for Ebony magazine.
The newly refurbished Huntington mounts ‘This Side of Paradise,’ billed as the most comprehensive exhibition of photographs of Los Angeles, the city that grew up in the camera’s eye.
A 1991 photograph by John Humble shows Selma Avenue at Vine Street as a jumbled, architecturally constructed Hollywood landscape of office buildings, stores, asphalt and advertising billboards. Dominating the center is Angelyne, the cosmetically manufactured “human Barbie doll,” who adorns one enormous sign.
Radio host Rick Dees, then an eternally adolescent 41-year-old, graces a KIIS sign just above her bleached-blond head. Neutered Ken to Angelyne’s pneumatic Barbie, he’s the benign Adam to her wicked Eve in Hollywood’s media-made Garden of Eden.
Humble’s deceptively simple image — documentary in the most profound sense of that slippery term — hangs at the entry wall to a large new exhibition at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. Hot on 
the heels of opening its beautifully refurbished, exquisitely reinstalled mansion, so rich in 18th century European and other art, the Huntington has mounted what is being billed as the most comprehensive show of L.A. photographs ever assembled. It spans the 1860s to the present.
Those dates correspond with two epochal narratives: the history of Los Angeles, incorporated in 1850, and the modern development of the camera, invented almost simultaneously in France and England a scant decade before.
The title is borrowed from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, whose despairing protagonist laments, “I know myself, but that is all.” The alchemy of the still camera in fabricating perceptions of people and places is an inspired subject for examination. Humble’s picture is emblematic.
The show, like Fitzgerald’s book, is novelistic — less an art exhibition than a pictorial essay about L.A. as a mediated environment. Its whopping 284 photographs stand in for words.
Classic Rodeo Photos
Jeff Collins, a bareback rider from Redfield, Kan., finishes his ride at the National Finals Rodeo
Are You Talkin’ To Me, Mr. Commissioner?
De Niro Defends Hotel Design
Serge Thomann/WireImage.com
Robert De Niro has a message for New York officials: Analyze this!
The raging bull turned up Tuesday at a hearing for the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to plead for approval of a luxurious penthouse atop his newly opened $43 million Greenwich Hotel in TriBeCa. The new construction has come under fire because it didn’t match the original design.
Because of its prime location in the historic district, the seven-story, 88-room boutique hotel faced a rigorous vetting process when it was built in 2004 to ensure its handmade brick architecture meshed well with the neighborhood’s cobblestone character.
However, after opening April 1, commission members discovered that the two-bedroom posh rooftop suite was larger by about 1,300 more feet and also had a steeper roof than the 64-year-old actor and his partners proposed.
De Niro told the board the project was a “labor of love.”
“We’ve really worked quite hard on it, and so anything that would be offensive would be offensive to me,” the two-time Oscar winner said.
De Niro apologized for the inconsistencies, and urged the Fockers, um, the folks on the preservation 
board to retroactively approve the penthouse changes without forcing developers to tear it down and start from scratch—an endeavor estimated to cost $1.5 million.
“If there are any minor little mistakes, my apologies for it,” De Niro said, “because in any creation there are those things, and we hope that they’re not in any way misconstrued as being wrong or that we can do it because we want to do it. We want to do what’s right for the neighborhood.”
De Niro’s got street cred. The goodfella helped revitalize Lower Manhattan after 9/11 by founding the Tribeca Film Festival.
He also has his share of defenders in the neighborhood, most notably fellow star Ed Burns, who has a residence across the street from the hotel with a view overlooking the rooftop and who testified on De Niro’s behalf.
The One Profession That’s Never Had A Glass Ceiling (tho it would be worth an extra $100/hr. if it did)
Ho-time: Cable Channel Hard-Sells Belle du Bore
Everybody’s simply fascinated with young, sexy prostitutes! But a new series imported from Britain makes the job seem … rather humdrum
When news broke that Eliot Spitzer had been patronizing a high-class prostitute, one thing everyone seemed to want to know was what, exactly, he’d asked his call girl to do. It was “unsafe,” in the words of “Kristen,” a.k.a. Ashley Alexandra Dupre—but could that have been an excuse she fabricated in hopes of unloading an undesirable client? Speculation was all over the map, from unprotected sex to anal to dangerous S&M to wearing socks in bed (not unsafe, sure, but certainly annoying). For a few days there, as we marveled over the amount of money earned by the girls at Emperors Club VIP and wondered over their wealthy clients and envied Ms. Dupre’s Flatiron apartment, hookers were on the brain. Are their lives better or worse than ours? At the top end, at least, their jobs actually sounded more like dating than whoring.
And here’s the problem with Showtime’s auspiciously timed new series, Secret Diary of a Call Girl. As it follows Belle, a high-class London hooker who professes to “love sex” and therefore love her job, the show sanitizes hooking so much that a young woman might wonder why she even bothers trying to have another career. For Belle, whose real name is Hannah, being a prostitute means having tons of free time; a fabulous flat; a salary over 100,000 pounds (!!!); and entree to the luscious clubs and bars of London reserved only for the fabulously wealthy. Sure, she is required to have sex with her clients, or at least come close to it (more on that shortly), but please: This is 2008. Sleeping together on the first date? Not so scandalous. Belle is a professional fake-dater more than she is a whore.