Mark Sarvas’ Next Elegant Variation
Q & A: blogger and first-time novelist Mark Sarvas
The man behind the Elegant Variation blog and author of ‘Harry, Revised‘ is ready for the criticism he’s built a reputation on. Sarvas says he expects the ‘sharp knives will come out.’
Mark Sarvas, who was raised in a Hungarian Jewish family in Queens, N.Y., has become notorious as the acid-fingered blogger at the Elegant Variation, a literary site he launched in 2003.
Right out of the gate, he’s been a champion of authors he loves — John Banville, J.M. Coetzee, Zadie Smith — and a harsh critic of those he doesn’t: the Los Angeles Times Book Review, British provocateur Christopher Hitchens, literary “it” boy Keith Gessen, and, going back to the site’s first week, writer Steve Almond. (That vendetta provoked a 4,000-word retort on Salon’s website from the Boston-based journalist and author.)
Sarvas’ new novel, “Harry, Revised,” is about a disoriented nebbish who is so self-conscious he can barely act. But that doesn’t keep him from falling for a red-haired waitress named Molly while getting lunch at Cafe Retro on the day of his wife’s funeral. Complications ensue.
We talked to Sarvas, who lives on the Westside and came across as a remarkably well-behaved lad. Could it be because of the book about to drop?
What came first for you, the desire to criticize and assess or the urge to create characters and narrative?
The desire to write, to create, came first. Like a lot of others, I came out to Los Angeles originally to write screenplays, and when you spend any amount of time doing that, you quickly find that it’s not very satisfying. I would get feedback from my agent and producers that ‘There’s a novelist in you trying to get out.’
The Best Of The ‘Ass
from Jackass
artnews on artnet
JAMES FREY, ART WORLD DARLING
Ever wonder what James Frey — the author who went through a very public shaming at the hands of Oprah Winfrey when it was revealed that his memoir,A Million Little Pieces, had been fabricated — is up to these days? Well, among other things, he has moved aggressively into the art world. Along with Andy Spade and Bill Powers, Frey bankrolled the Half Gallery at 208 Forsyth Street in New York’s booming Lower East Side. The new space opened last month with a show of paintings by Matt Damhave, co-founder of the fashion label Imitation of Christ. According to an article in the New York Sun, Frey has also invested the earnings from his memoirs well — that is, in artworks by the likes of Matthew Barney, Cecily Brown, Damien Hirst and Ed Ruscha.
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| Robert Hawkins May 14th – June 14th Opening reception May 14th 6 – 8pm |
McWhinnie’s Frey has a new book coming out from HarperCollins, this one a baldly fictional narrative collage about life in L.A. titled Bright Shiny Morning, and if he manages to resurrect himself it will be no small part due to sympathy from the art world. Among his champions are art-book publisher extraordinaire John McWhinnie, who is putting out a deluxe edition of Bright Shiny Morning, and artist Richard Prince, who is doing the cover for the book and who says he counts Frey as a personal friend.
McWhinnie’s collaboration with Frey is titled Wives, Wheels, Weapons, and pairs three sections of the new novel (including one about an adulterous affair that was deemed too hot for the American edition) with photo illustrations by fashion photographer Terry Richardson. The book is priced at $150 for the hardcover and $75 for softcover, both in an edition of 1,000. In addition, five copies of an even-more-exclusive “Wife / Girlfriend” edition, accompanied by art works from Prince and Richardson, are signed by all three men. These are priced at $30,000-$50,000.
Still A Better Investment Than Real Estate
For Sale: Art and Optimism
YOU can’t help but wonder just how many of the smartly dressed people sitting night after night at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury over the next two weeks will be serious bidders and how many will be voyeurs hoping to witness an implosion of the multibillion dollar art market.
Man-Crazy Nurse 2 by Richard Prince (offered by Douglas S. Cramer)
For years collectors and the news media have been speculating about when prices would finally top out. Spring sales estimates don’t suggest pessimism. The auction houses clearly hope that things will play out as they did three months ago in London, when, despite global economic queasiness, a Francis Bacon triptych sold for $51.6 million. Now two Bacon triptychs, whose owners no doubt want to capitalize on that high, are going on the block, at estimates of $25 million to $35 million (Christie’s, shown above) and a whopping $70 million (Sotheby’s).
But despite the bullish prices, this auction season feels different. Economic anxiety has deepened in recent months, with the proposed bailout of Bear Stearns in March, continuing stock-market gyrations and increasing signs that we either are in or about to be in a recession.
And the art market has its own problems. Sotheby’s stock price is roughly half what it was last October, and its latest annual report shows that the amount of money owed to the house more than doubled to $835 million last year. Hoping to keep the bubble afloat, Sotheby’s has been giving buyers more time to hand over the money for their purchases. (It is the only publicly traded company of the three houses.)
But despite it all, sales estimates at the auction houses are more robust than ever.
Aside from the Bacon triptychs (to be auctioned at Christie’s on May 13 and at Sotheby’s on May 14), Sotheby’s is selling a coveted Cubist painting by Fernand Léger at its Impressionist and modern art sale on Wednesday. It is estimated to fetch $35 million to $45 million.
Christie’s boasts some splashy offerings too. A rare Monet will be auctioned on Tuesday, and next week’s sale includes a strong sampling of Pop Art by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann. Sotheby’s and Christie’s are also selling 1950s red-and-yellow Rothkos that they predict will bring $35 million to $45 million each.
Never Forget Me I Am Nirodh
“It’s my life’s ambition not to be the subject of a Krakauer book.”
A desert hike through Joshua Tree with high tech
Finding solitude in Joshua Tree National Park — albeit with a satellite phone, GPS unit and locator beacon. Call it ‘e-survival.’
“Whoso walketh in solitude, and inhabiteth the wood . . . into that forester shall pass . . . power and grace.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
But what if I snap my ankle? Or blow a cardiac gasket? Or fall or get stuck on a mountain where I can’t go up or down, what climbers call getting “cliffed out”? What then, Ralph Waldo? I won’t give a tinker’s damn about power and grace then. I’m going to be looking for that orange-and-white rescue whirligig in the sky. Swing low, sweet Stokes litter.
Going solo into the backcountry — or on a sailboat around Catalina, or on a mountain bike in Moab, Utah, for that matter — always implies a trade-off, the exchange of safety for reverie. Nearly always, the risk is worth it, and for all the reasons Emerson made a career of. To be alone in big-N nature is to challenge yourself, to calibrate yourself, to fully inhabit the body you were born with, to feel the chill of the absolute run up your spine.
But things can go very wrong. The patron saint of doomed solitary rapture is Chris McCandless, the subject of last year’s film “Into the Wild,” based on the Jon Krakauer book. In 1992, the smart and charismatic McCandless marched into the Alaskan bush desiring nothing more than to disconnect from civilization utterly, a transcendentalist Garbo wanting to be alone. He never walked out.
It’s my life’s ambition not to be the subject of a Krakauer book. I have kids, a wife, a cat who’d miss me terribly. But sometimes, I want to be alone too. Why? Because I have kids, a wife, a cat etc.
iPods Kill
This PSA poster is part of the New South Wales Police iPod Death Awareness Campaign. This is apparently a real crime photo and this girl is really dead I think.
Subway Idol
SHOT AT TRANSIT GLORY
BUSKERS AUDITION FOR ‘SUBWAY IDOL’
By PATRICK GALLAHUE
The search is on for the subway’s best undiscovered talent.
Fifty-five musicians performed their hearts out yesterday in an audition for “Subway Idol” – an MTA-hosted contest to earn a date singing for straphangers at some of the transit system’s most high-profile venues.
PHOTO GALLERY: Subway Idol Tryouts
“Where else in the world are you going to find every demographic represented?” said Gibran Soul, a 32-year-old tryout from Harlem.
“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”
The MTA had whittled down the first 230 applicants in advance and called in the remaining musicians to duke it out for the final 20 spots in its 21-year-old Music Under New York program.
“I auditioned for ‘American Idol,’ ” said folk singer Natalie Gelman, 22. “They’re big cattle calls. This is a little more friendly.”
Graffiti, U-Bahn Barcelona Backjump action 1xHoleCar, 2x End
VANITY FAIR interview with James Frey
James Frey’s Morning After
What’s it like to write a mega-selling memoir, then become a household word for “liar”? Was James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces an ex-junkie’s con job, part of a proud literary tradition, or just the standard hype of an increasingly embattled publishing industry? In his first U.S. interview since Oprah nailed him, in 2006, Frey tells his version of the story, including how his new novel, his family, and the late Norman Mailer helped him survive the resulting maelstrom, sober all the way.
by EVGENIA PERETZJune 2008
The story of what really happened with A Million Little Pieces has not been told in its full complexity. Owing to a non-disclosure agreement between Frey and Random House (which owns Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, the imprint that published it), neither he nor the publishing house can speak about what happened. But an investigation by Vanity Fair suggests that the story is significantly more complicated than Man Cons World. There were no fake Web sites, no wigs worn, no relatives pretending to be spokesmen for nonexistent corporations. It is the story, first, of a literary genre in which publishers thought they had found the surefire recipe for success, but one with such dangerously combustible ingredients that it could explode at any moment. On the one hand, memoirs have often been afforded a certain poetic license to stray from absolute truth in the interest of storytelling. On the other, they have the appeal of the real. Over the years, the marketplace hungered for more of both. Give us more drama! And tell us it’s all true! The publishing world responded, pumping up both. It was inevitable that one day the mixture would blow up in someone’s face. Frey had the right story to tell, the talent to get heard, the soaring ambition, and the right professional champions hungry for a hit.
Now he would just as soon forget the whole mess. He fears and loathes the media. He has been press shy since his January 2006 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and doesn’t plan to speak to the press again after this interview.
“Frankly, I don’t even care,” he says, exasperated, after I pushed him on the subject of the scandal for the 16th time. “I don’t care, if somebody calls [A Million Little Pieces] a memoir, or a novel, or a fictionalized memoir, or what. I could care less what they call it. The thing on the side of the book means nothing. Who knows what it is. It’s just a book. It’s just a story. It’s just a book that was written with the intention to break a lot of rules in writing. I’ve broken a lot of rules in a lot of ways. So be it.”
NYT Fiction Bestseller List 05/11/2008
Hardcover Fiction
| This Week |
Last Week |
Weeks On List |
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| 1 | THE WHOLE TRUTH, by David Baldacci. (Grand Central, $26.99.) An intelligence agent and a journalist team up against a warmongering defense contractor. | 1 | |
| 2 | HOLD TIGHT, by Harlan Coben. (Dutton, $26.95.) The aftermath of a high school kid’s suicide rocks a New Jersey suburb. | 1 | 2 |
| 3 | THE MIRACLE AT SPEEDY MOTORS, by Alexander McCall Smith. (Pantheon, $22.95.) The ninth novel in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. | 3 | 2 |
| 4 | UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, by Jhumpa Lahiri. (Knopf, $25.) Stories about the anxiety and transformation experienced by Bengali parents and their American children. | 4 | 4 |
| 5 | WHERE ARE YOU NOW?, by Mary Higgins Clark. (Simon & Schuster, $25.95.) A woman searches for the truth about her brother, who is alive but has disappeared. | 2 | 3 |
| 6 | CERTAIN GIRLS, by Jennifer Weiner. (Atria, $26.95.) A girl discovers the sexy, somewhat autobiographical novel her mother wrote years earlier. | 5 | 3 |
| 7 | QUICKSAND, by Iris Johansen. (St. Martin’s, $26.95.) The forensic sculptor Eve Duncan tracks a killer who claims to have murdered her daughter years earlier. | 1 | |
| 8 | * DEAD HEAT, by Joel C. Rosenberg. (Tyndale, $24.99.) With the world on the brink of war, terrorists plot to assassinate a candidate in a closely fought presidential election. | 5 | |
| 9 | THE APPEAL, by John Grisham. (Doubleday, $27.95.) Political and legal intrigue ensue when a Mississippi court decides against a chemical company accused of dumping toxic waste. | 6 | 13 |
| 10 | SANTA FE DEAD, by Stuart Woods. (Putnam, $25.95.) A Santa Fe lawyer investigates his nefarious former wife. | 1 | |
| 11 | THE THIRD CIRCLE, by Amanda Quick. (Putnam, $24.95.) In Victorian England, a crystal reader joins forces with a hypnotist to steal a mysterious stone (an Arcane Society novel). | 1 | |
| 12 | COMPULSION, by Jonathan Kellerman. (Ballantine, $27.) Several Los Angeles women are murdered, and the psychologist-detective Alex Delaware investigates. | 7 | 5 |
| 13 | BELONG TO ME, by Marisa de los Santos. (Morrow, $24.95.) When she moves to the suburbs, a woman becomes enmeshed in complications and secrets. | 8 | 4 |
| 14 | BULLS ISLAND, by Dorothea Benton Frank. (Morrow, $24.95.) An investment banker returns to the South Carolina island home she had left 20 years before. | 11 | 3 |
| 15 | A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, by Khaled Hosseini. (Riverhead, $25.95.) A friendship between two women in Afghanistan against the backdrop of 30 years of war. | 12 | 49 |
| 16 | * CHANGE OF HEART, by Jodi Picoult. (Atria, $26.95.) A prisoner on death row begins performing miracles. | 10 | 8 |
| Also Selling | |||
| 17 | SMALL FAVOR, by Jim Butcher (Roc) | ||
| 18 | REMEMBER ME?, by Sophie Kinsella (Dial) | ||
| 19 | THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, by Junot Diaz (Riverhead) | ||
| 20 | SO BRAVE, YOUNG AND HANDSOME, by Leif Enger (Atlantic) | ||
| 21 | WORLD WITHOUT END, by Ken Follett (Dutton) | ||
| 22 | WINTER STUDY, by Nevada Barr (Putnam) | ||
| 23 | THE DAY I ATE WHATEVER WANTED, by Elizabeth Berg (Random House) | ||
| 24 | THE HOUSE AT RIVERTON, by Kate Morton (Atria) | ||
| 25 | 7TH HEAVEN, by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro (Little, Brown) | ||
| 26 | THE THIRD ANGEL, by Alice Hoffman (Shaye Areheart) | ||
| 27 | ZAPPED, by Carol Higgins Clark (Scribner) | ||
| 28 | A PRISONER OF BIRTH, by Jeffrey Archer (St. Martin’s) | ||
| 29 | PEOPLE OF THE BOOK, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking) | ||
| 30 | HONOR THYSELF, by Danielle Steel (Delacorte) | ||
| 31 | LUSH LIFE, by Richard Price (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) | ||
| 32 | GUILTY, by Karen Robards (Putnam) | ||
| 33 | PLEASURE, by Eric Jerome Dickey (Dutton) | ||
| 34 | LOST SOULS, by Lisa Jackson (Kensington) | ||
| 35 | THE GIRL WITH NO SHADOW, by Joanne Harris (Morrow) | ||
Props For Perez
Such An Honor!
The amazing critic Bob Lefsetz just wrote these even more amazing words about the Gossip Gangstar!
He says:
“Gossip
Please separate the man from the site.
Perez has got all the gossip you want, as soon as it becomes available. He’s rarely scooped by Harvey Levin’s TMZ and there’s a personal attitude that makes the site attractive. All those doodlings might befuddle you, but you certainly believe he created them, no underling drew them.
Perez knows that you want to both adore and trash celebrities, believe and hate. He understands the culture of gossip. That’s it just not presentation, but pure entertainment for the reader, more fulfilling than the entertainment products those featured create.
As for his entry into the music business… You’re just jealous. He’s passionate about acts, he’s got an audience, he’s a tastemaker. Are he and his picks for the ages? Doubtful, but in the Internet world, it’s all about the here and now.
As for the shameless self-promotion… He gets away with it because he’s gay. As an inherent outcast, he’s fighting for all those without standing, he’s entitled to trumpet his cause.
Amazing he’s doing it right and no one else can do it as well. Could it be that unlike the others looking for a buck, he just likes gossip THAT MUCH?”
Wow. Wow. Wow.
And thank you!
Yes, we love gossip THAT MUCH. This website is much much more than a job. It’s our passion! It’s a way that we’re able to be creative, express ourselves and entertain millions of people worldwide every single day.
Thanks you Mister Lefsetz!
2008 Edgar Award Winners
Awards: The Edgars; Arthur C. Clarke Prize
Winners of the Edgar Allan Poe Awards, sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America and announced last night, are:
- Best Novel: Down River by John Hart (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
- Best First Novel by an American Author: In the Woods by Tana French (Viking)
- Best Paperback Original: Queenpin by Megan Abbott (S&S)
- Best Fact Crime: Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi (Norton)
- Best Critical/Biographical: Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley (Penguin Press)
- Best Short Story: “The Golden Gopher” in Los Angeles Noir by Susan Straight (Akashic Books)
- Best Juvenile: The Night Tourist by Katherine Marsh (Hyperion Books for Young Readers)
- Best Young Adult: Rat Life by Tedd Arnold (Dial Books for Young Readers/Penguin)
- Best Play: Panic by Joseph Goodrich (International Mystery Writers’ Festival)
- Best TV Episode Teleplay: “Pilot” for Burn Notice, teleplay by Matt Nix (USA Network/Fox Television Studios)
- Best Motion Picture Screenplay: Michael Clayton, screenplay by Tony Gilroy (Warner Bros. Pictures)
- Robert L. Fish Memorial Award: “The Catch,” in Still Waters by Mark Ammons (Level Best Books)
David Mamet’s REDBELT
David Mamet’s film inspirations for ‘Redbelt’
Sunday, April 27th 2008, 8:22 AM
Writer-director David Mamet‘s new film, “Redbelt,” takes place in the world of mixed martial-arts competition, culminating in an arena showdown similar to the Ultimate Fighting Championships.
Mamet draws a straight line between “the bushido code of the samurai films and the code of the American gunfighter. Samurai movies had an influence on American westerns,” he says.
But to make the film, he drew upon his love of film noir, and points to three specific fight scenes that were models for what he hoped to accomplish in “Redbelt”:
“White Heat” (1949): The famous Jimmy Cagney film (“Top o’ the world, Ma!”) cast Cagney is crazed killer Cody Jarrett and Edmond O’Brien as the lawman sent undercover to infiltrate Jarrett’s gang in prison. “There’s a pretty good fight in ‘White Heat’ between Edmond O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney,” Mamet says. “And O’Brien is ganged up on by some of Jimmy Cagney’s thugs. He uses a little bit of judo – he applies a cross-collar choke that’s pretty accurate.”
“Night and the City” (1950): In Jules Dassin‘s film, the late Richard Widmark played an American small-timer on the hustle in London, who puts together a wrestling match between a popular wrestler known as the Strangler (Mike Mazurki) and an aging wrestling champion known as Gregorius: “Jules Dassin had seen Stanislaus Zbyszko wrestle as a young man and said he wanted someone like him for Gregorius,” Mamet says. “They said, ‘Why not get Zbyszko?’ Zbyszko was in his 70s – but he played the part. He beats Mazurki in the film – and then dies after the match.”
“Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955): In Raoul Walsh‘s progressive drama, Spencer Tracy played a one-armed veteran who goes to the tiny town of Black Rock in 1945 to present a posthumous medal to the father of a Japanese-American soldier who has been killed in combat. But he runs into nothing but hostility in the town because he is on the verge of uncovering its dark secret. “I love the fight scene in that film,” Mamet says. “Spencer Tracy fights with one arm. And he beats up Ernest Borgnine.”
This Isn’t Really Progress
Honda Robot Will Conduct Detroit Symphony
By Eliot Van Buskirk
Yo Yo Ma and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra will soon submit to a robotic overlord in the form of Honda’s Asimo, which will pick up a baton to conduct the orchestra.
The robot will lead the humans in a performance of “Impossible Dream” from the musical “Man of La Mancha,” which has become something of an anthem for Honda.
The irony of a Japanese automaker trotting out an advanced robot in the Motor City will likely be lost on most of the attendees, who will be students from the Detroit School for the Arts. The concert takes place at 8 p.m. May 13, with a master class for the school’s students to be held on-stage in front of area children. In addition to the concert, Honda plans to donate $1 million to the orchestra’s “Power of Dreams” educational fund.
It Worked When You Were Ten, It Works Now
James Frey SayNow Number
« Bun B —- Ray J on 106 & Park »
James Frey posted on May 1st, 2008 by may
James Frey, controversial author of A Million Little Pieces has a SayNow number. For those who don’t know about him, there’s a great piece on him in the current issue of Vanity Fair.
What’s it like to write a mega-selling memoir, then become a household word for “liar”? Was James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces an ex-junkie’s con job, part of a proud literary tradition, or just the standard hype of an increasingly embattled publishing industry? In his first U.S. interview since Oprah nailed him, in 2006, Frey tells his version of the story…
While the Vanity Fair piece is the first interview he’s done since 2006, you can actually hear directly from him by calling. He’ll be sending updates about his upcoming book and whatever else he wants to talk about.
You can also listen to messages other people have been sending him over here.
James Frey’s SayNow Number: (917) 720-7510
James Frey’s SayNow Messages
James Frey’s Website
Pete Wentz Is Too Emotional
from The Daily Swarm
MAY 01, 2008
PETE WENTZ SUED FOR SCHUBA’S BEATING IN CHICAGO…
Anyway, now the dude allegedly on the receiving end of Wentz’s fury — a gentleman named Andy Kallas — has filed suit against both the Fall Out Boy bassist and Chicago rock-spot Schuba’s Tavern (where the beatdown took place), seeking unspecified damages. In the suit, Kallas alleges that he suffered “serious injuries to his head, mouth, and face” after being attacked by Wentz and as many as ten other individuals, and that said attack was totally unprovoked.
When we first covered the story back in June, one Schuba’s patron said that Kallas was “calling Pete a sell-out, asking him ‘Where’s [girlfriend] Ashlee [Simpson]?’ and making fun of his hoodie.” Wentz himself said that he only punched Kallas because he grabbed him, and that he was only acting in self-defense.
‘I know that I’m not unfortunate looking.’
‘Michiko Kakutani is the stupidest person in New York City’
Jonathan Franzen: Michiko Kakutani Is ‘The Stupidest Person in New York City’
Getty Images
Speaking at Harvard yesterday during a discussion with literary critic James Wood, Jonathan Franzen said that “the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times.”
He was referring, of course, to Michiko Kakutani, who presumably got on Mr. Franzen’s bad side with her brutal review of his recent memoir, The Discomfort Zone. In that review, Ms. Kakutani wrote: “there is something oddly preening about [Franzen’s] self-inventory of sins, as though he actually reveled in being so disagreeable.” Also: “Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about [Franzen’s unhappy marriage] or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen’s mind remains something of a mystery.”
During the talk with Mr. Wood—described in the Harvard Crimson as a face-off between Mr. Franzen and one of his fiercest critics—the Corrections author is also quoted as saying” “The reviews tend to be repetitive and tend to be so filled with error that they’re kind of unbearable to read, even the nice ones …. The most upsetting thing nowadays is the feeling that there’s no one out there responding intelligently to the text …. So few people are actually doing serious criticism. It’s so snarky, it’s so ad hominum [sic], it’s so black and white.”
Aram Saroyan Smoked Pot
This book collects nearly all the poems Aram Saroyan wrote in the 1960s, when he was in his early 20s and, as he put it, “the only person available at a typewriter who didn’t have
some predetermined use in mind for it.” The resulting pages, tapped in Aram Saroyan by his typewriter, were succinct. Saroyan was the master of the one-word poem. But his works were as musical and meaningful as more conventional poetry, too, and a lot more amusing. The minimal poems were eye openers, ear openers and mind openers, and no one else was doing anything much like them at the time, and no one has since.
Granted — as Saroyan has — he was smoking a lot of grass at the time. But every second person in the United States was, and is, on something or other often enough. The grass factor is interesting because: 1) it’s typical of the era, always an interesting dimension of art; 2) one realizes it couldn’t be an unfair advantage, since no one else wrote like he did; and 3) the reader’s knowledge of it confers a nice extra little psychedelic ting to the pages.
Saroyan and his poetic cohort mostly lived in New York, and it was an exhilarating time for poetry — one of those extended moments, like the advent of Cubism in Paris or rockabilly in Memphis, where the artists who got it could do no wrong. Even the least writers of this Second-Generation New York School, as it’s sometimes called, were gorgeous and exciting for a while there, in the general vicinity of the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project circa 1966-71. Most of this material appeared in mimeographed pamphlets, but for a short time some of the wildest books were brought out by uptown commercial publishers too. Holt, Rinehart & Winston published Ron Padgett’s starry, blue “Great Balls of Fire” (1969), and Ted Berrigan’s “Sonnets” (1964) went into a second printing at Grove. Clark Coolidge’s “Space” (1970) — he treated words somewhat similarly to the way Saroyan did, but more abstractly — was published by Harper & Row. Saroyan’s 1968 volume “Aram Saroyan” was published by Random House. Its format was a nearly full-size representation of its contents as they would have been in typescript (or mimeograph), in the classic Courier typeface, looking unevenly inked, printed on one leaf-side each, for a total sheaf of only 30 poems. The book could be read in two minutes or so (as it was, aloud, by Edwin Newman on the “NBC Evening News” in New York), but one could look for a long time at its pages as well, repeatedly, and with great interest and pleasure.
Some of Saroyan’s poems could only be looked at; they couldn’t be pronounced.
(Jesse Helms would use “lighght” to mock the National Endowment for the Arts after Saroyan won a cash award for it.)
Some of Saroyan’s other poems were about real-life phenomena made of words, so to speak, like the Joycean whistling in the street a car turning in the room ticking.
Others were more about the effects of the sounds of the words, as well as their appearance (similar sounding words tending also to look alike), tangled up with their denotations:
____________________________
My arms are warm
Aram Saroyan
____________________________
You could feel him in a room at his typewriter, like a monkey or a cat with a little extra brainpower.
Saroyan was known as a “concrete poet” — that is, he was writing poems meant to be looked at as much as read. His poems aimed to be things as well as words, and they used all the resources of the alphanumeric page (or slab of stone, as Ian Hamilton Finlay did, or poster or other medium) rather than being merely linguistic expression of pre-existing ideas or perceptions. All interesting poems do this to a degree, poetry being a recognition that consciousness is made of language, but concrete poems are an extreme example, which accounts for a substantial part of their poetic pedigree (and high-class license).
Frey Forgoes Oprah for Hell’s Angels
Frey Forgoes Oprah for Hell’s Angels
By | April 28, 2008
Who needs Oprah to promote your book when you have friends in the art world, a narrative dripping with sex and violence, and firsthand knowledge that ordinary readers care little about the publishing world’s efforts to shame a former darling?
Memoirist James Frey has a novel coming out next month, and it’s a safe bet that Ms. Winfrey won’t be selecting it for her book club. After all, two years ago she publicly excoriated Mr. Frey for having fabricated details of his book “A Million Little Pieces,” after her praise for his saga of drug addiction helped propel the book to best-seller-dom.
Readers didn’t seem to mind the details Mr. Frey had fudged, though. When Random House offered refunds to readers who had purchased the book before the falsifications came to light, only 1,536 people requested their money back. “A Million Little Pieces” remains among the books most frequently borrowed from libraries. Mr. Frey was able to find a new agent and sell his novel, “Bright Shiny Morning,” to HarperCollins.
Mr. Frey’s plans to promote the novel disclose something of what he has been up to in the years since the Oprah flap, and how comfortable he is in the zone of celebrity and spectacle. He is relying largely on connections outside the publishing world, such as friends at Sotheby’s auction house, where a dinner in honor of him is being held, and the artists Richard Prince and Terry Richardson, who have contributed to a limited-edition “companion volume” to Mr. Frey’s novel.
“Despite the fact that he writes books, he’s much more a part of the art world than the literary world,” Mr. Frey’s friend John McWhinnie said of him. With the money from his two memoirs (the second was “My Friend Leonard”), Mr. Frey has purchased works by, among others, Mr. Prince, Matthew Barney, Damien Hirst, Ed Ruscha, and Cecily Brown, Mr. McWhinnie said. (Mr. Frey was unavailable to be interviewed for this article, because, as Mr. McWhinnie put it, he is “in media lockdown” in advance of his novel’s publication, under the terms of his contract with HarperCollins.)
He also recently opened a tiny art gallery on the Lower East Side with his friends Andy Spade and Bill Powers.
The companion volume to “Bright Shiny Morning” was partly the idea of Mr. McWhinnie, who runs a bookstore and gallery on the Upper East Side, where he sells immaculate first editions of 20th-century books, and mounts solo shows of artists including Mr. Prince and Mr. Richardson, Mr. Barney, Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton, and Ryan McGinness.
“Bright Shiny Morning,” he explained, tells the loosely intertwined stories of four couples in Los Angeles. Interspersed are dozens of vignettes about L.A., including digressions on immigration, water politics, the porn industry, gang culture, and cars.
Mr. McWhinnie had a vision for a book that would pair a few of these episodes from the novel with photo essays commissioned from Mr. Richardson, who is known for his often louche portraits of celebrities. Mr. McWhinnie selected three vignettes: one about an affair between a politician’s wife and a schoolteacher (an account so torrid, he said, that it was ultimately cut from the American edition of the novel); one about car culture in L.A., and one about gangs. Mr. Frey gave the sections the titles “Wives,” “Wheels,” and “Weapons” — a trinity that is also the title of the book.
Mr. McWhinnie, Mr. Frey, and Mr. Richardson then went out to L.A. and checked in at — where else? — the Chateau Marmont for a week to do the shoot. For the “Wheels” section, Mr. Richardson photographed hot rods and souped-up cars and took shots of L.A.’s freeways from a helicopter. For the “Weapons” section, he recruited Bloods, Cholos, skinheads, and Hell’s Angels.
For “Wives,” Mr. McWhinnie’s idea was for Mr. Richardson to capture quintessential L.A. “MILFs” — an acronym for a phrase, unprintable in a family newspaper, which denotes extremely attractive mothers. Although Mr. Richardson stopped short of depicting actual sex acts, Mr. McWhinnie described the eight photos in this section as “dripping with sexuality.”
Mr. McWhinnie is publishing “Wives, Wheels, Weapons” in both hardcover and softcover, priced at $150 and $75, respectively. He is also publishing a boxed, limited-edition “Wife Girlfriend” edition, so-named for the cover image by Mr. Prince, which is titled “Girlfriend,” and for a special pullout photograph of a “Wife” by Mr. Richardson. The “Wife Girlfriend” edition will be signed by both artists and by Mr. Frey, and will cost in the $30,000–$50,000 range. (Mr. Prince also supplied the cover image for “Bright Shiny Morning.”)
The sections about L.A. history and culture in “Bright Shiny Morning” are “sprinkled with facts that may or may not be accurate,” Mr. McWhinnie said. “The book opens with a tongue-in-cheek disclaimer that nothing in it can be considered true,” he continued. Mr. Frey intentionally mixed true and made-up “facts” — mixing real names of gang members with fake ones, for instance — in order to highlight both the factitiousness of L.A. culture and the ironies in his own authorial past.
To promote the book, Mr. Frey will eschew typical bookstore readings for events at rock venues. He will appear at the Blender Theater in New York, Whisky A Go Go in L.A., and Slim’s in San Francisco. At each venue, he will have music and a light show, with images from “Wives, Wheels, Weapons” projected on a screen while he reads. At the San Francisco and L.A. readings, local heavy metal bands will perform.
Members of the Hell’s Angels will handle security at the events, in what Mr. McWhinnie described as an allusion to the infamous 1969 concert at the Altamont Speedway, in which fighting between members of the crowd and the Angels led to one fan’s being stabbed to death. Presumably Mr. Frey will not attempt to carry the historical echo that far, but who knows? Perhaps he can stage an altercation and use it as grist for his next book
Annie Shoots Hannie Montannie
NOTE: This is the issue of Vanity Fair that will also feature an exclusive interview and fully-clothed spread on James Frey. – Editor
Miley Cyrus ‘Embarrassed’ by Photo Spread
15-Year-Old Says She Thought Photographs Would Be ‘Artistic’
Miley Cyrus, the 15-year-old star of “Hannah Montana,” said she is “embarrassed” by a provocative photo spread shot by famed photographer Annie Liebovitz that is appearing in the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair.
“I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed,” she said in a statement released today. “I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.”
Cyrus, the daughter of country music star Billy Ray Cyrus, is the singing and acting sensation known to her legions of teenage fans from the Disney Channel series “Hannah Montana.”
In one of the photos, Cyrus is shown from the side, with most of her back bare, clutching what appears to be a satin sheet loosely around herself.
The Disney Channel, after learning of the Vanity Fair photo spread and article also issued a statement critical of the magazine.
Working Class Hollywood Relying On Salvation Army For Food
TV crew members still feeling effects of writers strike
Many can’t find work with production down, and their bills are piling up. Some are facing foreclosure and bankruptcy. By Richard Verrier, Los Angeles Times
The writers strike ended two months ago. But many in Hollywood remain on the brink. Some are at risk of losing their homes. Some can’t afford groceries. Others have filed for bankruptcy. Still others struggle to work enough hours to hold on to their health insurance.
Across Los Angeles, many crew members who work behind the scenes and on the sets of television shows and movies are still quaking from the temblor of the 100-day writers strike that shut down scripted TV production.
Blame the aftershocks. Networks have sharply curtailed the number of TV pilots this year, continuing a trend toward ordering fewer shows for the new season.
The shows that did return are filming 20% to 40% fewer episodes. And in Los Angeles County, location permits for sitcoms and dramas since the strike ended have plunged 51% and 35% from last year, respectively, according to FilmL.A., which handles film permits.
Although hard figures are not available, union officials say that thousands of crew members who normally would be busy at this time of year are still idled because of the sharp contraction in television production. Some union locals report a quarter of their members are sitting at home.
Karen Hartjen is one. She can’t bring herself to open the utility bills lying on her kitchen table in Simi Valley.
The 53-year-old assistant prop master has been out of work since early November, when a string of jobs on TV shows such as “CSI: New York” and “Medium” came to a halt after the writers walked out.
Although Hartjen is accustomed to earning $100,000 a year, she is now $10,000 in debt and her home is threatened with foreclosure. She has turned to her church and the Salvation Army for help with groceries.
“I’ve been in this business for two decades, and I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Hartjen said. “I’m just fighting for my life.”
Across Los Angeles, many crew members who work behind the scenes and on the sets of television shows and movies are still quaking from the temblor of the 100-day writers strike that shut down scripted TV production.
Blame the aftershocks. Networks have sharply curtailed the number of TV pilots this year, continuing a trend toward ordering fewer shows for the new season.
Win a Free Copy of GODS BEHAVING BADLY by Marie Phillips
courtesy of Kelly Hewitt’s LOADED QUESTIONS blog
Marie Phillips’ first novel finds a number of the famed Greek Gods and Goddesses living in modern day London, all packed in a dilapidated house that no one takes the time to upkeep. Far from the powerful beings they once were these gods find that their powers are wanning, the monotony of holding down mortal jobs taxing. In Gods Behaving Badly we find Apollo working as a television psychic, his aunt Aphrodite passes her days working as phone-sex worker and Artemis a dog walker all while Zeus ages slowly in the attic under the watchful eye of the dangerous Hera.Gods Behaving Badly picks up steam as Aphrodite and her son Eros hatch a plan to make Apollo fall in love with a mousy cleaning lady who continually dodges his attempts at wooing her.
I read this book before it was released and really enjoyed it, Phillips does a great job of keeping the story moving while offering the reader a very new view of otherwise ancient Greek mythological characters.
One-Hour Scorcese Revisited
I love this commercial so I posted it – the best of the AmEx ads…
Revamping East L.A. – One Artist At A Time
CULTURE MIX
A rediscovering of East L.A.’s core
Latino artists help revamp a place where the community (and freeways) intersects.
People often refer to the heart of East Los Angeles, but it never seems to be in the same place. In newspapers, the term turns up all over the map. That’s because the area is more identified by its busy arteries — Whittier, Atlantic or Cesar Chavez — than by any essential center.
Finding the heart of this sprawling Latino neighborhood was on the mind of artist Linda Arreola when she won her first public art commission recently. Her task was to design a sculptural piece for the expansive new courthouse plaza at the East Los Angeles Civic Center, a refurbished and repurposed government complex that will be dedicated next month. Her design started with the idea of a public square that would serve as a focal point for residents.
“I really wanted to create a space for gathering of the community,” says Arreola. “I felt our community really needed that.”
The result is “Meso-American Dream,” a tranquil network of gardens and water fountains leading to an open space defined by stone blocks laid out in a square. The 1,300-pound blocks, made of red and gold travertine from New Mexico and Peru, are stacked two and three high, to create seating areas that evoke the shape of a pyramid.
Arreola is one of several East L.A. artists commissioned to beautify the park-like complex that once was a foreboding, military-like compound used primarily by law enforcement. Near the intersection of the 60 and 710 freeways, the Civic Center features a new bilingual library with a mosaic mural by Jose Antonio Aguirre, a pristine lake with two leaping fish sculptures by Jose Rude Calderon and two inviting gateways marked by Michael Amescua’s towering steel sculptures carved to recall papel picado, the traditional Mexican folk art of intricate designs on colored paper.
American Idol Tragedy
Graffiti is Writing As Well As Art
‘Bomb It’ looks at all sides of graffiti issue
Wednesday, April 23rd 2008, 1:52 AM
Jon Reiss‘ latest documentary, “Bomb It,” explores the controversial subculture of graffiti through themes of public space, freedom of speech, corporate advertising, and social and political issues. The film visits cities from around the world – Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Barcelona, Cape Town, Sao Pãulo and Tokyo – and delves into how writers have incorporated graffiti into each of their varying cultures as a means of expression, protest, and beautification.
Around 200 graffiti artists were interviewed for the documentary, including prominent names such as Cornbread, Taki 183, Terrible T-Kid 170, Os Gemeos, Blek Le Rat, Faith 47, Zypher, Revok, 2ESAE, and many more. Reiss also spoke with people who opposed graffiti including government officials from around the globe, anti-graffiti groups like T.A.G. (Totally Against Graffiti), and even New York’s own City Councilman Peter Vallone. The film brings both views to the fore, presenting a comprehensive look at how graffiti is viewed throughout the world and revealing the depths of graffiti culture.
“We made [“Bomb It”] so that it would appeal to all people not just people interested in graffiti and street art,” says Reiss. The film succeeds in this mission by presenting a riveting narrative with a mix of global music, striking interviews, amusing animated segments and stunning artwork.
Award Winning director Jon Reiss discuses his explosive new documentary and what to expect with the May DVD release.
Daily News: What inspired you to create this film?
Jon Reiss: I was approached in Los Angeles to write a narrative, like a regular feature film about graffiti writers. Even though it was kind of interesting to me, I realized I didn’t know enough about graffiti to write a script for a Hollywood studio without doing some research. When I made a film called “Better Living Through Circuitry,” I became friends with some people I met and one of them, who was a DJ, said, “Oh, I’m a writer, I know lots of writers”.
In terms of graffiti writers, most of them don’t consider themselves artists, they call themselves writers, it depends on who you’re talking to. She introduced me to a couple of people and that was when I interviewed my first “old school” guy, [Sharp], who had amazing depth and understanding of not only graffiti, but also its relationship to society and its relationship to history. Then I also met an up and coming writer, 2ESAE, they’re both in the film. Between those two guys I was kind of hooked. Usually when I find a culture or a subculture that has so much more depth to it than most people are aware of, to me, that’s a pretty interesting story to tell.
50 Best Cult Books
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Our critics present a selection of history’s most notable cult writing. Some is classic. Some is catastrophic. All of it had the power to inspire What is a cult book? We tried and failed to arrive at a definition: books often found in the pockets of murderers; books that you take very seriously when you are 17; books whose readers can be identified to all with the formula “<Author Name> whacko”; books our children just won’t get… 
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) Sideways fantasy from the Diogenes of American letters, a comic sage who survived the firebombing of Dresden and various familial tragedies to work out his own unique brand of science-fictional satire. Like much of Vonnegut’s stuff, this is savage anger barely masked by urbane anthropological sarcasm. Very much the place to start. TM The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60) The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963) Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961) Bitterly bouncy military farce, responsible for inventing the dilemma to which it gave its name: you’re only excused war if you’re mad, but wanting an exemption argues that you must be sane. Literary history would be entirely different if Heller had followed his original intention and called it Catch-18: it was changed to avoid confusion with a Leon Uris book. TM The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951) Ur-text of adolescent alienation, beloved of assassins, emos and everyone in between, Gordon Brown included. Complicated teen Holden Caulfield at large in the big city, working out his family and getting drunk. You’ve probably read it, be honest. TM
The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971) Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968) The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954) The book that launched a thousand trips. William Blake said that if we could cleanse the “doors of perception” we would perceive “the infinite”. Huxley thought mescalin was the way to do so. In this essay, he pops a pill, goes on about “not-self” and “suchness”, and decides love is the ultimate truth. He also took LSD when dying, but hardly stuffed it down the way his fans did. Jim Morrison was one: he named the Doors after Huxley’s book, gobbled mouthfuls of acid and was dead by 27. SD
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979) The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968) The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970) The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943) Bewilderingly popular and extremely silly Nietzschean melodrama, in which Ayn Rand gives her mad arch-capitalist philosophy a run round the block in the person of Howard Roark, a flouncy architect. Loved by the kind of person who tells you selfishness is an evolutionary advantage, before stealing your house/lover/job. TM On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971) Needs little introduction. Bad craziness as the Duke of Gonzo and his helpless attorney blaze a streak of pharmaceutical havoc across 1970s California, all in demented bar-fight prose and fever-dream set-pieces. Now also a core text for ex-public school drug bores, which tends to obscure the anarchic excellence of HST’s journalistic talent. TM The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956) Required reading in the coffee bars of the East Midlands in the late 1950s; unbelievably, some people paid good money for this study of the outsider figure in Western literature. The TLS found 285 mistakes in a sample of 249 lines, but in its young author’s eyes, it confirmed him as “the major literary genius of our century”. Modesty was not one of his virtues; nor, sadly, was literary ability. DS The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859) The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942) “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” The beach, the sun, the Arab, the gunshots, the chaplain: the stuff of millions of adolescents’ fevered imaginings. If you don’t love this when you’re 17, there’s something wrong with you. In the film Talladega Nights, Sacha Baron Cohen’s snooty French racing driver reads it on the starting grid. Strange but true: George W Bush read it on holiday two years ago. DS The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968) Take an enterprising anthropology student (Castaneda) and a Mexican shaman (Don Juan), mix in liberal quantities of peyote, and you end up with a text rooted in “nonordinary reality”. Castaneda’s multi-part account of his adventures, which started to appear in 1968, and includes lessons in how to fly and talk to coyotes, has always elicited queries as to its veracity. But when you’ve taken that many drugs, it may not matter. AC
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974) Burnt-out hippy takes son on bike trip. Remembers previous self: lecturer who had nervous breakdown contemplating Eastern and Western philosophy. Very bad course in Ordinary General Philosophy follows. If he’d done Greek at school and knew what “arête” meant, we could have been spared most of the 1970s. AMcK |
