Loogie Lovin’ Black Lips
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Maxwell’s Rock/Pop/Etc., Music The singer of this Atlanta band is known for hocking wads of spit into the air only to land them on his tongue seconds later. I’ve never tried to catch a loogie in my own mouth—it’s basically spitting on yourself, which isn’t cool or punk or revivalist. Spitting on others is a different story, but who wants to deal with messy saliva stains in 2008? Remember: There’s a difference between the Stooges and stooges. With Gringo Star. DOMBAL. |
Olsen Twins And Prince Gett Off at Annual Book Orgy
The buttoned-down publishing industry went Hollywood over the weekend as booksellers gathered for BookExpo America, their annual convention. USA TODAY’s Jocelyn McClurg and Carol Memmott report from Los Angeles. Olsens use their ‘Influence’
Young stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen mingled with 70 booksellers at a party in West Hollywood to promote their glossy October book, Influence. The bash wasn’t open to reporters, but Mary-Kate got on the phone later to talk about the project and why the twins wanted the word out early. “It was the first party to launch the book, and we just wanted booksellers to know that we’re really excited about it,” says Olsen, 21. “We worked so hard on it.” In the photo-heavy Influence (Razorbill, $35), Mary-Kate and Ashley together and separately interview 22 actors, designers and photographers they consider influential, including Karl Lagerfeld, Lauren Hutton, Diane von Furstenberg and Margherita Missoni. There will be two jackets, with a different Olsen on each front cover and the other on the back. “We wanted it to be an inspiring book about people who are successful,” Olsen says. “Sometimes we all get lost in the process of our lives, and it’s inspiring to hear others’ stories and to know there will be ups and downs and to hear how they got through it.” Does Mary-Kate, who describes herself as a perfectionist, think she is an influential fashion icon? “You would have to ask someone else that,” she demurred. — J.M. One night with Prince
Star-struck booksellers could schmooze with any number of celebrity authors, including Barbara Walters, who autographed her best seller Audition. But one ticket was the hottest: an invite to the home of rock star Prince, whose first book, 21 Nights, arrives in September. Guests wandered the palatial home and grounds in the hills above L.A. but never encountered the private rocker until he stepped onto an outdoor stage at 1:45 a.m. Saturday and gave a free concert in his own backyard. It was worth the wait: a 1 hour, 15 minute set, mostly covers of other artists, including Sly and the Family Stone, The Beatles and the Doobie Brothers. The show ended after 3, with Purple Rain and 1999, and Prince saying it was time to let the neighbors get some sleep. 21 Nights (Atria, $50) is based on his 21 concerts in 21 nights in London last year. — J.M. |
NYT Puzzles In Tribute to Noah Webster
Puzzles: Noah’s Art
Amy Goldstein, Mike Shenk and Robert Leighton
No. 1 Finding the Perfect Word
(pdf)
No. 2 Breaking Your Word
(pdf)
No. 3 Get a Word In Edgewise
(pdf)
No. 4 From the Word Go
(pdf)
No. 5 In So Many Words
(pdf)
No. 6 Mark My Words!
(pdf)
No. 7 The Last Word
(pdf)
View all the puzzles (pdf) together.
Bo Diddley Gone
Bo Diddley’s Dead
Thank the heavens we knew Diddley.
Bo Diddley, the rock ‘n’ roll architect whose trademark shuffling rhythm powered everyone from Buddy Holly to the Rolling Stones to Jack White, but whose most famous duet partner might have been athlete Bo Jackson in the famed Nike commercials, died today after years of declining health. He was 79.
Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, Diddley’s signature hits included “Who Do You Love?” and the self-titled riff, “Bo Diddley.”
Damien’s Lamb Becomes Latest Victim Of Police State
Guns guard Damien Hirst’s lamb at BCAM
Mel Melcon, Los Angeles Times
ART GUARD: BCAM uses armed guards to protect its treasures, including “Away from the Flock,” by Damien Hirst.
Armed security is not common at museums. But at LACMA, a formaldehyde work raises safety concerns.
As you stroll through the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, images of guns confront you, including Andy Warhol’s hip-swiveling, gun-slinging “Elvis,” Chris Burden’s Los Angeles policemen and the gun-brandishing fascist thugs of Leon Golub. And there are other armed men at BCAM.
On a recent day, at least three security officers with holstered guns and batons guarded the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art addition. One carries a 9-millimeter pistol. Another, armed with a .38-caliber pistol, is assigned to stand a few feet in front of an artwork with a dead lamb, embalmed in a tank filled with formaldehyde and water, created by British artist Damien Hirst.
The current guard in front of the Hirst piece has been there about a month, guards say, noting the potential for vandals to smash the tank and create a toxic leak. BCAM was evacuated for about an hour in April when a drop of formaldehyde about the size of a quarter leaked from the Hirst work, which is called “Away From the Flock.” Another museum spokeswoman said that a change in barometric pressure was responsible and that a conservator had resealed the case.
Art heists
In a world of sensational art heists, armed guards at museums filled with priceless works might not seem surprising. “The Scream,” Edvard Munch’s emblematic “Skrik” of existential angst, went back on display at the Munch Museum in Oslo this month after being stolen in 2004 and recovered, with some damage, in 2006. In the last 20 years, vandals have urinated on a Marcel Duchamp urinal at the Tate Modern, vomited on Mondrian’s “Composition in Black, Red and White” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and poured black ink into the formaldehyde encasing a Damien Hirst lamb at London’s Serpentine Gallery.
“Several museums feel that the risk of a shootout, where many of the public may be hurt, is a bigger concern,” Hall wrote in an e-mail. “They would rather have the police respond. Some institutions face risks, though, where they feel they need armed officers as a deterrent, and to protect visitors and staff. . . . Risk varies, from location to location.”
‘A kind of paranoia’
One LACMA visitor, Laura Silagi, a Venice artist, said she first noticed the armed guard in front of the Hirst piece a few weeks ago. “I’ve never in my life seen armed guards in a museum,” she said. “It interferes with an art experience. There’s a kind of paranoia attached to it.”
Inside BCAM, one armed guard is stationed in front of Hirst’s white lamb, entombed in a glass case that shows some condensation at the top.
Nearby is a device marked “Formaldehyde monitoring” and “Do not touch,” with instructions to call the number for the “Conservation Center” with any questions. The Environmental Protection Agency classifies formaldehyde as a probable carcinogen, with immediate respiratory risks.
“Some crazy guy could smash it with a hammer, and the formaldehyde would spill all over the floor, and it could take two weeks to clean up,” the guard, who declined to give his name, said of the Hirst work.
anne-marie.oconnor@latimes .com
STUCK In America’s Windshield
Hit-and-run drives this taut drama
‘Stuck’ Thriller about a hit-and-run victim trapped in a windshield. With Mena Suvari, Stephen Rea. Directed by Stuart Gordon (1:25).R: Violence, sexuality. At the Angelika.
Horror and gore, in the right hands, can free up ideas. David Cronenberg refined himself through great psycho-chillers, and Sam Raimi and George Romero didn’t let blood get in the way of satire. Writer-director Stuart Gordon is the same way, though his output has been spotty since the 1985 cult favorite “Re-Animator.”
But Gordon was inspired when he came upon a disturbing true story in 2001: A homeless man, hit by a car driven by a woman who didn’t want to report the accident, spent hours trapped in her windshield before dying. Gordon turned that story into “Stuck,” and, with scripter John Strysik, altered it to make a taut drama that manages to be thoughtful without forgetting it’s a creep-out.
Mena Suvari is Brandi, first seen conscientiously cleaning up after residents at the nursing home where she works. After a night of partying with drug-dealer boyfriend Rashid (Russell Hornsby), Brandi gets behind the wheel and hits Tom (Stephen Rea), a down-on-his-luck guy whose day began by being evicted from a fleabag hotel before being shooed away by an employment agency.
When Tom goes sailing into Brandi’s front window, her initial terror turns to trickiness. She pulls into her garage, intending for Tom to just die there. But he doesn’t: While she and Rashid have sex and do what they can to hurry along his demise, Tom attempts to free himself from the shards of glass keeping him attached to the car. From the glimpses into his life prior to the accident, he’s had bad breaks. This one, however, he’s going to fight.
Rarely do films show the systemic disregard faced by people living on the edge, the little pushes that hurry along a slipping-down life. “The Pursuit of Happyness” was maybe the last. This movie actually takes time to know its characters. Tom’s descent to sleeping in a park is mirrored by Brandi’s eagerness to get promoted. Suvari (“American Beauty”) and, especially, Rea (“The Crying Game”) show how hunger for respect can bring out a person’s true colors.
Of course, “Stuck” is anything but high-minded. Any movie that has bloody windshield wipers, ripped-up faces and people on fire really just wants to get a reaction. Gordon wields horror traditions like a scalpel – will the neighbor come to the rescue? Do we root for the monster or the victim? Don’t go with a weak stomach. But expect it to be turned into knots.
Happy Emos “not afraid to keep on living” – Mothers feel safe leaving newly chipper kids alone to go shopping
Emo runs high as fans defend band against Daily Mail
Fans of My Chemical Romance came from all over the country but the atmosphere was more carnival fairground than protest. Photograph: Anna Gordon
There are few things that would drag a typical teenager out of bed early on a Saturday morning, but defending the honour of a beloved band from tabloid attacks is probably one of them.
Around 100 My Chemical Romance fans had already gathered at Marble Arch, in central London, by 10.30 this morning – not bad given that organisers had given the protest a 12-hour window, of 10am to 10pm, and that there was a last minute change of venue.
The fans were objecting to Daily Mail reports describing My Chemical Romance as a “suicide cult band” and linking the recent suicide of a Peckham schoolgirl, Hannah Bond, 13, to the fact that she had started following the band two weeks before her death.
The Daily Mail has called the New Jersey-based band one of the foremost of the “suicide cult” groups forming part of the “emo” phenomenon. The paper described “emo” as a teenage trend that started in the US in the 1980s and was “characterised by depression, self-injury and suicide”. Its followers, the tabloid said, wore tight jeans, studded belts and wristbands and had dyed-black hair and long fringes obscuring their faces.
The atmosphere at the protest was more carnival fairground than riot, with fans clutching balloons and soft toys and singing My Chemical Romance songs loudly and passionately – but not always tunefully. Lyrics included “teenagers scare the living shit out of me” and “I’m not afraid to keep on living”.
A few were dressed in typical dark, “emo” fashion but most followed the request of the organisers, who had written on the website: “Please consider dressing to suit the day … Don’t try to dress stereotypically.” Many of the fans had homemade shirts with positive slogans such as, “Think happy thoughts.”
“I love MCR, it saves lives. The Daily Mail are liars and all they want to do is put the youth against the adults; they just hate us and it’s really unnecessary, it’s just wrong,” she said. “I’ve read a couple of the [Mail] articles and they’ve actually misquoted lyrics and the research was so badly done, it was unbelievable. I actually thought [the story] was a hoax when I found it on the internet.”
Vikki Bourne, who came to the protest from Crawley in West Sussex with her daughter Kayleigh, 15, and their dog, Jack, said they were both huge fans of My Chemical Romance and had a closer relationship as a result.
“Emos are being portrayed as self-harming and suicidal and miserable and they’re not,” she said. “Since my daughter met the friends she’s got, she’s happy, she’s got a social life, she’s not suicidal, she’s got confidence. It’s about the music and being friends and having fun.
“It’s a waste of time, there’s no one here today,” one security guard told MediaGuardian.co.uk. “Look at them – they’re eating their lunch and their mums are off shopping.”
One of the few boys to attend today’s protest, Craig Goodwin, 17, from Upminster in Essex, said he was there with the blessing of his parents. “They didn’t mind – my dad used to do protests because he was a rocker back when it was mods and rockers, and my mum liked My Chemical Romance, so she didn’t care, either,” he said.
“I know people who’ve done it [self harm] in the past but they’ve always come through it. Some have listened to MCR and it’s built their confidence up so they could come back like they were before.”
The Poo Date
Michelangelo in Marble (with a 500-year Warranty)
Michelangelo for Readers With Deep Pockets
BOLOGNA, Italy — The gala presentation of “Michelangelo: La Dotta Mano” (“Michelangelo: The Wise Hand”), a volume of photographs of this Renaissance master’s sculptures, may well have been the most lavish book debut in history.
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| Aurelio Amendola/FMR |
With Piazza Maggiore, Bologna’s main square, as the backdrop, a short video depiction of the volume, which can be seen onwww.fmronline.it, was followed on Thursday night by an hourlong spectacle that included dozens of costumed dancers, a string quartet playing from a stage suspended in midair, suckling pigs roasted over a pit, a fake snowfall and a foppishly dressed acrobat walking Spiderman-style up the facade of San Petronio, the city’s cathedral.
But then, this is no ordinary book, starting with its retail price of 100,000 euros, or around $155,000, at Friday’s exchange rate.
Included in the price of what its publishers are calling “the most beautiful book in the world” is a sleek black case, its own stand and a 500-year guarantee.
“This isn’t an appliance,” Marilena Ferrari, chairman of the book’s publisher, Gruppo FMR, told Bologna’s mayor and guests at the book’s official presentation in a grand salon in City Hall on Thursday morning. “That’s the amount of time we feel we can guarantee the materials we used to craft it.”
Using the high standards of the privately published books in the 19th century — an ideal known as the “book beautiful” — as a starting point, FMR sought expert artisans from various fields to create something Ms. Ferrari described as “a work of art in itself.”
Aurelio Amendola’s black-and-white photographs were printed on paper made exclusively for the project. There are detachable reproductions of Michelangelo drawings on handmade folios created according to centuries-old traditions. And then there’s the cover: a scale reproduction in marble of the “Madonna della Scala” (“Madonna of the Steps”), a bas-relief of the Virgin and Child sculptured by Michelangelo when he was still in his teens. The original is housed in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence.
I Hope Jerry Garcia Goes Zombie So He Can Stomp All Over This
Simply wrong.
Activist Guerillas Begin Bombing L.A.
Guerrilla gardener movement takes root in L.A. area
Scott planted the garden on the median early in the morning to avoid detection. He continues to weed and clean. Residents encourage his work. Photo by Mark Bolster/LA Times
Stealth growers seed or plant on land that doesn’t belong to them. The result? Plants that beautify or yield crops in otherwise neglected or vacant spaces.
BRIMMING with lime-hued succulents and a lush collection of agaves, one shooting spiky leaves 10 feet into the air, it’s a head-turning garden smack in the middle of Long Beach’s asphalt jungle. But the gardener who designed it doesn’t want you to know his last name, since his handiwork isn’t exactly legit. It’s on a traffic island he commandeered.
“The city wasn’t doing anything with it, and I had a bunch of extra plants,” says Scott, as we tour the garden, cars whooshing by on both sides of Loynes Drive.
Scott is a guerrilla gardener, a member of a burgeoning movement of green enthusiasts who plant without approval on land that’s not theirs. In London, Berlin, Miami, San Francisco and Southern California, these free-range tillers are sowing a new kind of flower power. In nighttime planting parties or solo “seed bombing” runs, they aim to turn neglected public space and vacant lots into floral or food outposts.
Part beautification, part eco-activism, part social outlet, the activity has been fueled by Internet gardening blogs and sites such as GuerrillaGardening.org, where before-and-after photos of the latest “troop digs” inspire 45,000 visitors a month to make derelict soil bloom.
“We can make much more out of the land than how it’s being used, whether it’s about creating food or beautifying it,” says the movement’s ringleader and GuerrillaGardening.org founder, Richard Reynolds, by phone from his London home. His tribe includes freelance landscapers like Scott, urban farmers, floral fans and artists.
“I want to encourage more people to think about land in this way and just get out there and do it,” says Reynolds, whose new handbook for insurgent planters, “On Guerrilla Gardening,” is out this week.
The activists see themselves as 21st century Johnny Appleseeds, harvesting a natural bounty of daffodils or organic green beans from forgotten dirt. It’s a step into more self-reliant living in the city,” says Erik Knutzen, coauthor with his wife, Kelly Coyne, of “The Urban Homestead” to be released in June. The Echo Park couple have chronicled “pirate farming” on their blog, Homegrown Evolution. Guerrilla gardening, Knutzen says, is a reaction to the wasteful use of land, such as vacant lots and sidewalk parkways. He’s turned the parkway in front of his home into a vegetable garden.
Welcome to LA
Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey
From the publisher: Welcome to LA. City of contradictions. It is home to movie stars and down-and-outs. Palm-lined beaches and gridlock. Shopping sprees and gun sprees. Bright Shiny Morning takes a wild ride through the ultimate metropolis, where 
glittering excess rubs shoulders with seedy depravity. Frey’s trademark filmic snapshots zoom in on the parallel lives of diverse characters, bringing their egos and ideals, hopes and despairs, anxieties and absurdities vividly to life. Some suffer, like the otherworldly wino who tries to save a spoilt teenage runaway. Others gain, like the canny talent agent who turns sexual harassment to blackmailing advantage. Some are loaded, or grounded, and have luck on their side. Others, like the countless actresses-turned-hookers, or schoolboys-turned-gangsters, are doomed.“
Out of the many characters in Bright Shiny Morning, one dominates them all – the city of Los Angeles. Frey etches out the city’s persona through the experiences of a cross-section of its inhabitants, from the highest to the very lowest. It is testament to his skills that even the most profoundly unsympathetic of these individuals cannot fail to get under your skin and the novel is always engaging although don’t expect a story in the conventional sense.”
Tom Goddard, Waterstones.com
An ambitious and wide-ranging first novel from the author of the controversial rehab memoir, A Million Little Pieces which paints a vivid fictional portrait of the city of Los Angeles and its many and varied inhabitants…Did you feel that James Frey suceeded in creating believable and sympathetic characters here? How did you find the unconventional narrative structure of the book? Did it affect your overall enjoyment of the book? Does the book provide a rounded portrait of the city that gives a real impression of sense of place and what the city is like? Did you empathise with any of the characters more than others? Amberton, Dylan, Old Man Joe – who did you feel was the most convincing character?
UK Releases Slasher PSAs To Quell Knife Crimes
Home Office enlists teenagers for £3m anti-knife adverts
Video ads such as the one above will be distributed on mobile phones and social networking sites. WARNING: CONTAINS EXTREMELY GRAPHIC IMAGES OF STAB WOUNDS. DO NOT CLICK PLAY IF YOU ARE ONE TO ABHOR THE GORE.
A £3m advertising campaign devised by teenagers to warn young people of the physical and emotional consequences of knife crime is to be launched today by the Home Office.
The campaign, which will run over the next three years, will feature national radio, website and mobile phone adverts as well as print and “viral ads” to be distributed via social networking sites such as Bebo and mobile phones.
The radio commercials feature teenagers talking about the emotional impact of a knife attack on their boyfriends and girlfriends while promotional postcards feature a thumbless hand, with the message: “If you carry a knife you’re more likely to get stabbed yourself.”
The campaign concept was devised by a group of young people who also scripted and recorded the radio adverts. The 18 teenagers from England and Wales took part in a creative summit in April to share ideas on how to make their peers think twice about carrying a blade.
One of those who took part, Khadijah Murchison, aged 18, from Bristol, said: “All the young people that went to the creative summit have been affected by knife crime, so to share our experiences and come up with ideas and adverts that will help reduce knife crime was great. Hopefully it will make a real difference.”
The creative summit followed discussions between the Home Office and 70 teenagers which aimed to gain an understanding of young people’s experience of knife crime and possession and what motivated them to carry a blade.
The ads are to be supplemented by a series aimed at mothers encouraging them to talk about knives with their children, and to offer them support.
Home Office minister Vernon Coaker said: “We know that many young people carry a knife because they are fearful and these adverts tell powerful stories about the dangers of going down that path. People have got to get the message that if they carry a knife there’s more chance of it being used against them.”
Instructions for a fun time on the interstate
Step 1. Tie these balloons to your car.
Step 2. Drive like a bat out of hell.
“If he wasn’t such a [punk], he could have avoided all of that…”
Comcast Hijackers Say They Warned the Company First
By Kevin Poulsen May 29, 2008 | 7:44:07 PMCategories: Crime, Hacks And Cracks
The computer attackers who took down Comcast’s homepage and webmail service for more than five hours Thursday say they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.
In an hour-long telephone conference call with Threat Level, the hackers known as “Defiant” and “EBK” expressed astonishment over the attention their DNS hijacking has garnered. In the call, the pair bounded freely between jubilant excitement over the impact of their attack, and fatalism that they would soon be arrested for it.
“The situation has kind of blown up here, a lot bigger than I thought it would,” says Defiant, a 19-year-old man whose first name is James. “I wish I was a minor right now because this is going to be really bad.”
The two hackers are members of the underground group Kryogeniks. The interview was arranged by Mike “Virus” Nieves, an 18-year-old New Yorker who pleaded guilty as a minor last year to hacking AOL. Neives, who was on the call, is also a member of Kryogeniks, though he and his compatriots say he’s stopped hacking.
Nieves vouched for the identities of the hackers. Threat Level also confirmed Defiant’s identity over AOL instant messenger, on a handle that’s known to belong to Defiant.
Neither hacker would identify their full names or locations. Defiant’s MySpace profile lists him in Cashville, Tennessee, but he says that’s incorrect. His girlfriend lists herself in New York. Threat Level expects both hackers’ names and locations will emerge soon.
The hackers say the attack began Tuesday, when the pair used a combination of social engineering and a technical hack to get into Comcast’s domain management console at Network Solutions. They declined to detail their technique, but said it relied on a flaw at the Virginia-based domain registrar.
Network Solutions spokeswoman Susan Wade disputes the hackers’ account. “We now know that it was nothing on our end,” she says. “There was no breach in our system or social engineering situation on our end.”
However they got in, the intrusion gave the pair control of over 200 domain names owned by Comcast. They changed the contact information for one of them, Comcast.net, to Defiant’s e-mail address; for the street address, they used the “Dildo Room” at “69 Dick Tard Lane.”
Comcast, they said, noticed the administrative transfer and wrested back control, forcing the hackers to repeat the exploit to regain ownership of the domain. Then, they say, they contacted Comcast’s original technical contact at his home number to tell him what they’d done.
When the Comcast manager scoffed at their claim and hung up on them, 18-year-old EBK decided to take the more drastic measure of redirecting the site’s traffic to servers under their control. (Comcast would neither confirm nor deny the warning phone call.)
“If he wasn’t such a prick, he could have avoided all of that,” says EBK. “I wasn’t even really thinking. Plus, I’m just so mad at Comcast. I’m tired of their shitty service.”
“They called me back five minutes later and said, ‘We got Comcast’,” recalls Nieves.
The defacement message was short and simple: “KRYOGENICS Defiant and EBK RoXed Comcast,” it read. “sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven.”
Fellow hackers, relying on press reports claiming that customer data may have been compromised, are hitting up the duo for passwords to Comcast e-mail accounts, which they say they don’t have. “Nobody was listening in on the ports to try and get usernames and password,” says Defiant. “We could have, but we didn’t.” (On this point, Comcast and the hackers agree).
The hackers say the flaw they exploited still exists, and that other large websites are equally vulnerable. Asked if they plan to attack anyone else, EBK says, “Who knows. Only Kryogeniks knows”
The elder hacker in the team says he was reluctant to use his access to take over Comcast.net, and emphasizes that the pair tried to warn Comcast about the flaw.
“I was trying to say we shouldn’t do this the whole damn time,” says Defiant.
“But once we were in,” adds EBK, “it was, like, fuck it.”
(David Kravets contributed to this report)
Circle K Launches Answering Service For Chatty Wives – Marks First Foray Into Telecom Sector for Slurpee King
Let’s Read To Our Kids More. Please.
Parents urged to read to children
Fewer than one in two parents say they read to their children each day, with one child in 10 getting a bedtime story less than once a month or never, according to figures published today.
A “state of the storytelling nation” study by the campaign team behind this year’s National Year of Reading presents both good and bad news: parents who do read to their children regularly do so with humour and inventiveness; but there is a rump of parents who do not bother at all.
Honor Wilson-Fletcher, director of the National Year of Reading, said: “Parents just need to understand the importance of making it fun. There is a relationship between reading in later life and storytelling and how well you do it. The better you are at it the more likely you will enjoy it, and the other way round.”
Of 2,207 parents surveyed by YouGov, 49% read to children each day. On average, 19% read four or five times a week, 14% two or three times a week, 5% once a week, 5% once a month or less, and 5% never.
Funny stories are the most popular choice. While 12% of parents said their children liked traditional fairytales, 28% said humorous stories by the likes of Roald Dahl and Dr Seuss went down the best.
Most parents throw themselves into storytelling, with 82% putting on accents for characters – “posh” was top choice for a hero (followed by Yorkshire and cockney) and cockney top for a villain (then posh and Scottish). Most popular books were The Gruffalo, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The BFG, and (tied) Where’s Spot? by Eric Hill and CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
James Frey As Yenta to DolceGoldin
MEDIA FIRM OWES ALL TO WRITER FREY
By PETER LAURIA
May 30, 2008 — In addition to being a notorious author, it turns out that James Frey is also a matchmaker.
The author of the partially fabricated memoir “A Million Little Pieces” is responsible for bringing former Details and Star Editor-In-Chief Joe Dolce and former MSNBC Editorial Director Davidson Goldin together to launch a media-strategy and branding consulting firm called DolceGoldin, The Post has learned.
The firm, which officially went into business this month, aims to be a behind-the-scenes operator helping politicians, pop culture figures and businesses make sure “the attention they are getting is the attention they want,” Goldin said in an interview with The Post.
DolceGoldin was founded after Frey’s wife, Maya, who was friends with Goldin at Cornell University, introduced Goldin to her author husband.
The two hit it off and Frey hired Goldin in January to provide support for a media strategy devised by his publisher, HarperCollins, ahead of the launch of “Bright Shiny Morning,” which will debut at No. 9 on the New York Times bestseller list this weekend.
The next month Goldin received an e-mail from Frey introducing him to Dolce and suggesting that the pair go into business together. Dolce and Goldin were soon drawing up plans and seeking out office space for their new venture.
“There are many people and companies that are great at making products, but are not as great at communicating their message to the public,” Dolce said.
Let’s Live!
My Mom Just Bought Me This New Chair But I’m Not Sure Where To Stick It
Hell’s Canucks Rumble With Canadian Politicians
Canadian Sex and Biker Scandal Comes Alive on YouTube
Finally, an inventive new use for YouTube that doesn’t involve a kid practicing Star Wars moves or Kobe Bryant jumping over a pool full of snakes. Someone by the screenname BLABLABLAPQ has posted a musical montage that starts with the phrase “Le Scandale de la Semaine au Quebec” (“The Scandal of the Week in Quebec”). The video, which is comprised of screenshots and French pull quotes, highlights the sex-politics-and-biker-gang scandal currently engulfing Canada, all set to a poppy Francophone soundtrack. (Minus a random Britney Spears vamp.)
According to Ian Austen in today’s New York Times, Canadian minister of foreign affairs Maxime Bernier has resigned because “his former romantic interest, Julie Couillard, was linked to Quebec’s motorcycle gangs, which have long tried to infiltrate politics and the justice systems. … Biker gangs in Mr. Bernier’s home province of Quebec have, among other things, killed prison guards and shot one prominent crime journalist.” (Who knew our neighbors to the north were so hardcore?)
Shelfari Review of BRIGHT SHINY MORNING
Bright Shiny Morning
by James Frey
Editorial Review
One of the most celebrated and controversial authors in America delivers his first novel—a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating, and utterly original.
Dozens of characters pass across the reader’s sight lines—some never to be seen again—but James Frey lingers on a handful of LA’s lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives: a bright, ambitious young Mexican-American woman who allows her future to be undone by a moment of searing humiliation; a supremely narcissistic action-movie star whose passion for the unattainable object of his affection nearly destroys him; a couple, both nineteen years old, who flee their suffocating hometown and struggle to survive on the fringes of the great city; and an aging Venice Beach alcoholic whose life is turned upside down when a meth-addled teenage girl shows up half-dead outside the restroom he calls home.
Throughout this strikingly powerful novel there is the relentless drumbeat of the millions of other stories that, taken as a whole, describe a city, a culture, and an age. A dazzling tour de force, Bright Shiny Morning illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.
Bovine Growth Hormone Hits Women’s Professional Tennis
As with athletes in most professional sports, today’s tennis players are much more physically developed than their predecessors. While critics concede that bigger players have made women’s tennis in particular a faster and more exciting game for the TV audience, they also blame this rapid increase in size for the decline of the backhand on the WTA circuit.
The Fuzz on Buket
Tagger whose work allegedly appears on YouTube is arrested
YouTube
“Buket” seen applying his moniker to an MTA bus in broad daylight as passersby and passengers watch in surprise.
Cyrus Yazdani is a 24-year-old San Jose State University graduate with a degree in art and a job as a convention planner in Las Vegas.
But authorities say Yazdani is also “Buket,” one of Los Angeles’ most prolific taggers who is featured in several heavily viewed YouTube videos defacing signs and buses. His most popular video — with nearly 170,000 page views — shows him clambering behind the Hollywood Freeway sign near Melrose Avenue and tagging the structure as traffic speeds below.
Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators arrested Yazdani on Tuesday, saying that his moniker has marked hundreds of freeway overpasses, concrete walls and transit buses across the state and southern Nevada. He is believed responsible for upward of $150,000 in property damage along the Los Angeles River and in the areas patrolled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department — and at least that much in other parts of California.
Yazdani was nabbed when he showed up to meet with his probation officer and booked on multiple charges of felony vandalism.
Authorities are used to dealing with graffiti vandals — even those who display their handiwork on the Internet. But there is general agreement that “Buket” is different.
According to investigators, Yazdani is a professional graphic artist. Though he works in Las Vegas, he is frequently in Los Angeles, living with roommates at a downtown Los Angeles loft. He moved to Los Angeles two years ago, authorities said.
He’s older than many taggers — but his age hasn’t kept him down, said Sheriff’s Deputy Devin Vanderlaan, who has tracked Buket for months.
“He’s one of the most prolific taggers we’ve seen,” Vanderlaan said. “He’s on buses, overpasses, in the L.A. riverbed — he’s everywhere.”
The investigators said they spotted four “Buket” scrawls Tuesday during the short trip from downtown to the Crenshaw District to pick Yazdani up at the probation office.
But you don’t have to drive throughout L.A. to see “Buket’s” work — and that’s what did him in, authorities said.
“Buket,” they said, became something of an Internet sensation with the daredevil tagging 20 feet above the busy Hollywood Freeway — vandalism captured on videotape and posted with a rap soundtrack on You Tube and numerous tagger-related blogs.
Nikki Bitch-slaps Nicky
Finke to Defamer: No Links For You
Nikki Finke, The Observer‘s 2007 Media Mensch of the Year, has a bone to pick with Defamer.
On her Deadline Hollywood Daily blog, Ms. Finke offers a look inside the Hollywood gossip sausage factory and shows how an anonymous comment on her site attributed to “A CAA Agent” was picked up by Defamer and went on to become fodder for outlets like Variety, The Los Angeles Times, and Slate.
Ms. Finke’s tick-tock may be a bit too inside Hollywood baseball, but the best part of her post is the way she flouts Gawker Media’s entire business model in an aside:
I’m not linking because the blogger who wrote it gets paid by the page view. So don’t reward someone for inaccurate info…
Escape From Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto
From The Race That Invented Rock ‘n Roll Anyway
Rock is the new black
Sunday, May 25th 2008, 4:00 AM
The rock star named Stew doesn’t have the fondest memories of growing up African-American and loving the likes of Led Zeppelin.
“There were about four of us in this predominantly black school who listened to rock ‘n’ roll,” he says. “Everyone else would tease us. It meant you were a pansy.”
Fast-forward thirtysomething years and it’s another story.
As Stew observes, “If you walk into the Foot Locker on Times Square, every kid working there is black, Puerto Rican or Dominican. And when rock videos come on the screen, those kids rock out just as hard to emo bands as to rap. To them, it’s all the same.”
He’s not the only one who has observed the change. Earl Douglass, executive director of the Black Rock Coalition, says that growing up in the ’80s as a black kid listening to the Stones was “excruciatingly alienating. My friends, who listened to hip hop, didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand,” he says. “Now, a lot of those walls are being torn down. Black kids listen to everything.”
For proof, look to a whole wave of cool and respected modern rock acts who just happen to be led by, or entirely composed of, African-Americans. They include Gnarls Barkley, TV on the Radio, N.E.R.D.,Saul Williams and Lightspeed Champion, all of whom are so well-integrated into music’s hot set that their race is rarely mentioned.
At the same time, we’re seeing emerging artists like Danielia Cotton(a black singer who performs straight-on classic rock) and a Tony-nominated Broadway musical, “Passing Strange,” which deals specifically with the emotional issues of growing up as a black rock fan. (“Passing” stars Stew, now 46, who interacts with his alienated 22-year-old self throughout the play.)
So, why are such stunning changes happening now?
Nature Always Wins
Quake images show lake forming
Landslides caused by the Sichuan earthquake have blocked rivers and formed new, possibly unstable, lakes. Satellite images taken by the Taiwan’s National Space Organisation (NSPO) show one such lake forming in Beichuan County, one of the areas worst hit by the quake.
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James Frey’s Happy Ending
James Frey’s happy ending
His sensational memoir sold more than five million copies. But when he was forced to admit fabricating some of the details, his life fell apart. Now he’s back, with a work of fiction – and it’s already a bestseller. Guy Adams reports
Monday, 26 May 2008
Should James Frey, the American writer who was first endorsed and then publicly disowned by Oprah Winfrey for faking his bestselling memoir A Million Little Pieces, turn his topsy-turvy life story into a Hollywood film, its latest chapter would be the heart-warming, if deeply ironic, happy ending.
The author and former drug addict, whose fall from grace two years ago rocked America’s publishing industry, has miraculously rehabilitated his tattered reputation with a new book in the very literary genre he should have attempted from the start of his career: fiction.
Two weeks after its launch, Frey’s third novel, Bright Shiny Morning, has shot up the sales charts, debuting at number nine in The New York Times bestseller list, despite the onset of the fiercely competitive summer sales season which coincides with today’s Memorial Day holiday.
Having received a series of flattering reviews, the once-besmirched author has emerged from a self-imposed public exile for an international book tour. And to underline his new-found popularity, he’s also popped up in a series of surprisingly sympathetic newspaper, magazine, radio and television interviews.
It’s a far cry from the grisly events that followed the revelation in January 2006 that Frey had fabricated several elements in both A Million Little Pieces, the gut-wrenching “memoir” about his lengthy struggle with alcohol and drugs, and its sequel My Friend Leonard.
The author, who at the time was something of a literary “It” figure, had achieved fame, fortune, and sold more than five million of his book, after Oprah Winfrey chose A Million Little Pieces for her influential monthly book club, inviting him on to her daytime chat show in September 2005 as: “the man who kept Oprah awake at night”.
Fans and critics alike were impressed by Frey’s gritty narrative style, together with the moving tale of his personal journey from promising university graduate with a bright future, to a drink and drug-addled petty criminal and dropout.
Frey was born in 1969 and enjoyed a normal middle-class childhood in Ohio and Michigan. After graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, where he began working as a screenwriter, director and producer.
Things soon went awry, though. At least according to his memoir they did. A Million Little Pieces told how his dream of a career in Hollywood turned into a nightmare after he became addicted to alcohol and crack cocaine, endured a series of run-ins with the police and ended up in a treatment facility. The truth, however, turned out to be a little bit less exotic. After Frey’s first appearance with Oprah, muck-raking internet sites quickly began to investigate key claims in the memoir – and soon discovered that several important biographical details were at odds with the facts.
In particular, it was discovered that Frey’s claim to have spent three months behind bars during the 1980s was false: court records showed that he had spent just a day in jail, and that was following a drink-driving incident.
As the scandal took off, Oprah invited Frey and his publisher, Nan Talese, back on air, ostensibly to discuss another subject. Then she tearfully accused them of flat-out deception. “I feel duped,” she said. “More importantly, I feel you betrayed millions of readers.”
Literary America agreed, and the broadcast media could hardly contain its outrage. Frey and his wife, Maya, were forced into hiding in New York, while his publisher, Random House, decided to establish a legal settlement giving readers who felt cheated the chance to return their books.
Many in the industry thought that Frey would never find work again, and he was abandoned by friends and family, together with Penguin, with whom he had signed a two-book deal, and his literary agent.
But the scandal blew over, and in the event, fewer than 2,000 of the books were returned. Frey, meanwhile, set to work on Bright Shiny Morning, a novel about contemporary Los Angeles. Although the original book contract for the novel was cancelled following the televised accusation by Oprah, HarperCollins later snapped it up – and was rewarded last week when 14,000 copies were sold in hardback.
Critics have been divided by the new book. Flattering reviews, of which there were many, hailed him as a new star of serious fiction, drawing admiring comparisons with the likes of Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe and John Steinbeck.
“[James Frey] got a second act. He got another chance,” wrote the influential New York Times critic Janet Maslin. “Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying. No more melodrama, still run-on sentences, still funny punctuation, but so what? He became a furiously good storyteller in his time.”
Lev Grossman, Time magazine’s well-regarded reviewer, was also congratulatory. “The worst bits of Morning are probably worse than anything else you’ll read this year, but Frey is such a relentlessly entertaining storyteller that you just won’t care. Frey has a history of having a little too much fun with facts, among other controlled substances. As a writer of fiction, he may finally have found a job where that’s not a problem.”
The only sour note came from David Ulin, the books editor of The Los Angeles Times, who gave Frey’s new book the proverbial stinker, claiming that it offered “a cheap Hollywood movie” portrayal of Los Angeles. “Bright Shiny Morning is a terrible book,” he wrote. “One of the worst I’ve ever read. But you have to give James Frey credit for one thing: he’s got chutzpah.”
Away from the review pages, though, the book-buying public has embraced Frey’s comeback story. Having become a household word for “liar” – “I was a pariah,” he told this month’s Vanity Fair. “I was under no illusion that I was anything but that” – Frey has been enjoying a brand of celebrity reminiscent of the era before his original downfall.
Also celebrating was Eric Simonoff, the legendary Manhattan literary agent who took on the then down-at-heel Frey last year and was the man who persuaded HarperCollins to invest in Bright Shiny Morning.
“When I took James on as a client, the notion was met with some scepticism by friends in the industry,” he admitted yesterday. “It really had been pretty bad. In fact, I would go so far as to say it was unprecedented.”
“There have been other scandals in literature, but I cannot ever recall someone having received so public a drubbing. Some people felt that he was actually untouchable. But I talked to him, and looked at his writing, and felt strongly that he deserved another chance.”
Even Nan Talese, the superstar publisher at Random House whose reputation was also seriously sullied by the Oprah affair, offered congratulations, and continued to defend A Million Little Pieces when The Independent contacted her.
“James always wanted to be a novelist, and it’s good that he could put this behind him and write the California book he intended,” she said. “The incidents of exaggeration that the Smoking Gun brought to light were not germane to the story, and I hardly remembered them when they came to light.”
With Frey, who is now teetotal and happily married, gearing up for a world tour (the book is due for release in the UK in August), the eyes of literary America will now be on the bidding war for his next novel.
Mr Simonoff has revealed that it will be about “a secular Jew who believes he’s the Messiah”. Although he conceded that HarperCollins will be favourites to clinch the deal, no contract has yet been signed.
Industry experts, meanwhile, are reflecting that the success of Bright Shiny Morning proves that there is, after all, no such thing as bad publicity.
“If you look at the data, there were actually sales spikes for A Million Little Pieces when the scandal was happening,” said Rachel Deahl, of the magazine Publishers Weekly. “So while he may have lost respect in some people’s eyes, he already had plenty of fans. In many ways, the scandal has turned out to be commercially helpful.”
The launch of Bright Shiny Morning also turned out to be an object lesson in constructing a literary PR campaign. “Everyone loves a come-from-behind story, and this is certainly that,” she added. “But he’s very definitely not been doing hardball interviews. He’s not gone on Larry King. What happened two years ago has made him very cagey about talking to the press, so he has taken things slowly.”
Also still taking Frey’s rehabilitation slowly is Oprah Winfrey, whose book club managers would not respond to specific inquiries about Bright Shiny Morning yesterday.
Meanwhile, William Bastone, the investigative journalist who is also the editor of the Smoking Gun, commented that Frey’s rehabilitation and re-found success was a sad indictment of modern American morality.
“Twenty or thirty years ago, if you had been caught pulling a stunt like this you would be ostracised for good,” he said. “But this is now a country where penance ends up being very compressed. Look at Martha Stewart. She went to prison, and it was no more than a bump in the road for her.”
“Still, we have no plans to go through this book with a fine toothcomb. Frey has put a disclaimer in the front of it: he’s said that it’s fiction, so I guess he’s covered himself this time.”
Blood On Paper: Publishing As Art
BLOOD ON PAPER: THE ART OF THE BOOK
REVIEW: CHAPTERS AND VERSE Ben Lewis, Evening Standard
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There’s only a drop or two of blood on paper, in this unassuming but exquisite show of artists’ books. You’ll find the red stuff in Stains, an ultra-ironic, methodical volume of marks on the white stuff produced by various everyday substances from the cult American conceptual painter Ed Ruscha. Still, to make up for the shortage of blood there is gunpowder on paper from the Chinese artist Cai Guo Caing, cracked earth on paper from Anselm Kiefer, dried mud on paper from Richard Long, fabric as paper from Louise Bourgeois, a laser-cut fissure through a pile of paper by Anish Kapoor and plenty of lithographer’s ink on paper from a fairly inclusive list of the 20th century’s greatest artists. This bold display of work ranges from Matisse to Rauschenberg to Hirst. It includes great surprises, such as the saturated totemic prints of abstract Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida. There isn’t an overriding theme but the curators have selected works which demonstrate great craftsmanship, which is appropriately so very V&A. The book has been a hugely popular medium for modern artists but exhibitions of them are rare. It’s a broad genre which ranges from fragile portfolios in tiny editions, collected then stored in a dark place by obsessive collectors, to mass-produced artist’s catalogues, which, if out of print, have recently soared in value. Among the greatest pleasures of the exhibition are the illustrated books of poetry. The conjunction of artist and poet inspires thoughts about the shared cultures of different eras — opposite Allen Ginsberg’s anti-war poem, “Whom bomb? We bomb them!”, is a print of explosions by Roy Lichten-stein; a play by Antonin Artaud, the inventor of the Theatre of Cruelty, is accompanied by some tor tured lithographs by German Neo-Expressionist Georg Baselitz. Until 29 June. Open Sat-Thurs 10am-5.45pm, Fri 10am-10pm; admission free. Information: 020 7942 2211, www.vam.ac.uk |
 In the moment: Damien Hirst’s I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, 1997
Suitcase: Detritus by Francis Bacon
Artistic licence: Anselm Kiefer’s Steigend
No shame: Joan Miro’s Le Courtisan Grotesque
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