Sweet Home Alabamagrad
from Dr. Jack Wheeler’s TO THE POINT
| ROCKING RUSSKIES |  |
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| Written by To The Point News
Prepare yourself for this one – maybe with a Stoli martini or two. Back in the days of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Red Army had an official choir composed of male soldiers and musicians. It still exists. The Red Army Choir performs throughout Russia to this day. Now consider the Finnish rock band called The Leningrad Cowboys. A little while ago, they held a concert in Russia, in which – to the screaming applause of Russkie teen-agers – they got the Red Army Choir to join them on stage for a performance of “Sweet Home Alabama.” In English. You couldn’t make this up. We’re talking seriously off the wall here. Better have that Stoli ready when you watch it: |
LA Times: James Frey Rises From The Ashes
James Frey rises from the ashes
Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
Author James Frey is promoting the release of his latest novel “Bright, Shiny Morning,” a book about life in Los Angeles.
He’s trying to step clear of ‘A Million Little Pieces’ as he publicizes his novel.
JAMES FREY was back in his old neighborhood, strolling happily along the Venice boardwalk, enjoying a sunny day in a T-shirt and aviator shades as he passed tattoo shops and a man who was selling what he claimed to be “philosophy.” It doesn’t get any better than this, Frey’s body language seemed to say.
“This,” Frey, 38, said. “This doesn’t exist in New York. This weather — it’s like this in Venice all year. Never that hot here because of the ocean. I mean, dude, every day — all year.”
That’s when he bumped into an old neighbor, who still lives across from the house where Frey wrote the 2003 book, “A Million Little Pieces.”
“Jesus! I thought you won the Nobel Prize for literature!” shouted Marvin Klotz, a retired English professor, hanging out on a bench with some friends. He’d seen all the recent press. “Newsweek! Time! Vanity Fair!”
“Washington Post, I got a good one,” said Frey, who talks through his nose with a bored-guy flatness.
Frey could have been just another local boy made good. Then Klotz, a dead ringer for Jerry Garcia and Albert Einstein, introduced the writer to another friend as “the disgraced James Frey!”
“The most notorious author in America,” Frey offered, smiling his crooked smile.
They all cracked up, laughing in the seaside sun.
There was a time, not too long ago, when Frey’s travails were no laughing matter. “A Million Little Pieces” became a critical hit and a huge bestseller. Bret Easton Ellis called it “a heartbreaking memoir defined by its youthful tone and poetic honesty”; Pat Conroy dubbed it “The ‘War and Peace’ of addiction.”
“If I can get myself a set of drums, I’ll play at the Troub”
a video short by Wil Robinson of Greg Handbeck,
25 year resident of Hollywood who’s “doin’ all right”
After the public tongue-lashing…
Will You Read the New James Frey Book?
Soon after Oprah chose James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces for her book club, the memoir became a bestseller. But then it was revealed that Frey had exaggerated and even made up pivotal plot elements and characters in his “memoir.” Not only was Frey humiliated in the publishing world, but after Oprah dragged him onto her couch for a difficult-to-watch public tongue lashing, many figured the man would never work again.
Well, he did work again. Frey wrote a novel called Bright Shiny Morning (on bookshelves today) that was given a glowing review by the New York Times in which the reviewer wrote, “He got another chance. 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 this time.”
That is the kind of review that is hard to come by for any author, much less one whose career hit rock bottom in a swirl of controversy and who managed to enrage the queen of book clubs. I have to say I’m intrigued by this excellent review.
How do you feel about checking out a new book by James Frey?
Will You Read the New James Frey Book?
Thief In The Temple
Thief in the CNN mailroom!
It appears that the CNN mailroom has an entrepreneur who, rather than schlep stolen books down to the Strand bookstore for some cold hard cash, is selling them on eBay. This just came in through the Galleycat tipwire:
This was sent out by Brian Sack, author of In the Event of My Untimely Demise via the book’s Facebook page. It’s funny but definitely must be maddening from an author’s standpoint at the same time: “I received an email from someone who bought IN THE EVENT OF MY UNTIMELY DEMISE from a third party vendor on Amazon. He was curious why his new book was signed with a note to a guy named Evan. First I thought I was being pranked. How could someone buy my book on Amazon and receive a copy that I’d personally signed and mailed to Evan, a producer at CNN? Too weird. But I emailed Evan – and he said he’d never received the book. Hmm. We did a little Sherlock Holmesing and came to realize that someone in the TimeWarner/CNN mailroom is actually stealing books that arrive in the mail and re-selling them on Amazon. Isn’t that great? They didn’t bother to open the book and notice that I’d signed it to someone. Now Evan’s working hard to find the thief and teach him or her a valuable lesson in sudden occupational reassignment.”
This certainly makes a good argument to follow up on books that you send out.
Solid Action Love Partner
a silent short by Walter Williams
Transcript from WaPo Chat with James Frey
read full transcript at the WashingtonPost’s Book World
Book World: ‘Bright Shiny Morning’
Controversial Memoirist Turns to Fiction
James Frey
Author
Tuesday, May 20, 2008; 3:00 PM
A transcript follows.
Join Book World Live each Tuesday at 3 p.m. ET for a discussion based on a story or review in each Sunday’s Book World section.
____________________
James Frey: Hi, this is James Frey. I’m happy to be here today with you and the Washington Post. Thanks to the Post for having me and you for checking this out. Hope you have fun, have a good day.
_______________________
Los Angeles, Calif.: Good morning and thanks for taking my question. I’m a native Angeleno, but also interested in New York City. I’m wondering how you would compare the two cities since you lived in LA and now live in New York. What would you say are the advantages and disadvantages of each? Do you prefer one over the other?
Thanks.
James Frey: I love both cities. They are totally different. Everything is centralized in NY, nothing in LA. The weather stinks in NY, great in LA. One is much faster than the other. I could live or be happy in either.
_______________________
W. Orange, N.J.: Bright Shiny Morning = Edgar Lee Masters + John Dos Passos + Nathanael West. Fair enough?
James Frey: I’ll certainly take it. Thank you very much.
_______________________
Washington, D.C.: I am so looking forward to reading your book. I truly enjoyed “A Million Little Pieces” and “My Friend Leonard.” I am sure a lot of thought and editing goes into the process, but it seems so “stream of consciousness.” How much of it actually is your stream of consciousness and how much is a “writing style?”
James Frey: Thank you.
The books are written very deliberately. Sometimes it comes easily, sometimes not. Either way, I try to be very careful about the words and the punctuation, or lack thereof. I also never really read my own writing, so I try to make it perfect the first time through.
_______________________
Memphis, Tenn.: James, how are you enjoying your reading tour so far?
James Frey: I’m having a ball on my tour. The events in NY, LA and SF were awesome. It’s great to be out there again, I feel very lucky to be doing it.
_______________________
New York, N.Y.: Why would anyone want to read anything this fraud has to write? I only wish he left our good city and crawled under the rock from where he came.
James Frey: I hope we meet someday so I can shake your hand and give you a big hug.
It’s Not Fair That Only Women Have Cleavage
James Frey Pisses Off Oprah And Lives to Write Again
James Frey Pisses Off Oprah And Lives to Write Again
James Frey has a new book out. Bright Shiny Morning. After the controversy with his ‘memoir’, A Million Little Pieces, Frey decided to write another book – a novel, this time. His last book should have been called a novel too. So what? It’s a good book isn’t it? And more important from a business perspective, it sold lots of copies, right? So who cares what you call it?
That said, Frey could have avoided all the bad press and basked in the glory of a brilliant manuscript born out of his experience but exaggerated for literary effect – you know a novel.
Modern memoir is filled with all kinds of content that may or may not be 100% accurate, depending on who you ask. It’s the nature of the genre. Surely Oprah was aware of that as she read through Frey’s unconventional text.
So why the anger? Maybe because Frey lied to Oprah’s face. He misrepresented himself. The book was his to write as he wished, but to sit across from the most powerful woman in publishing and fail to mention that some of the specific passages the two of you were discussing didn’t actually happen, not exactly how you wrote about them – that was a bad choice.
But we’ll never know just whose choice that was. Was it Frey’s? The producer who wanted to deliver the edgiest guest? The publishers who wanted to give this incredible tale more credibility? Or a cluster of all these conspiring to create infamy. Literature does not occur in a vacuum. There is a huge marketing monster to feed.
It doesn’t matter whose idea it was because Frey complied. He went along with it and faced the consequences. And then he sat back down and wrote again. Newsflash: writers make things up. And often, it’s good for business.
So what do you think, will Oprah give him another chance?
Civil Disobedience in San Francisco
snipped from THE SNITCH at the San Francisco Weekly
James Frey Protest: Mace, Hells Angels, and Leafleting
Mon May 19, 2008 at 05:30:00 AM
Frel with mace
It’s Friday evening and I’m standing outside Slim’s with Jan Frel, his wife, Hadley, a can of mace and a stack of papers. The papers are stapled copies of John Dolan’s essay “Whose Fault Is Frey?” a document that lambastes author James Frey, whose memoir of drug addiction and subsequent recovery, A Million Little Pieces, was exposed as a partial fabrication after it took the best-sellers lists by storm. Frel is an editor at progressive Web site Alternet.org, and the founder of Down With Frey, an organization that consists of himself, his wife and a blog where one can vote on whether or not Frey is a “hack writer,” a “sad sack” or an “abomination.” Inside Slim’s, a metal band is gearing up to play a set before Frey takes the stage to read an excerpt from his new book, Bright Shiny Morning, which will be sold in the fiction section and garnered a glowing review from the New York Times.
Right now they’re talking strategy.
Hadley and Frel
Frel thinks that maybe Hadley should take the mace into the club, as she’s less likely to get the thorough search that a guy would be subjected to. They had read on Gawker that the Hells Angels might be in attendance to guard the author and Down With Frey is toting the mace for protection in the event of a scuffle. (Later in the night, someone does point out a formidable, broad-shouldered man who is rumored to be the former head of the New York Hells Angels and Frey’s bodyguard.)
Frel issued a press release prior to his protest, which read in part, “James Frey is a disgrace, a sham, a fraud and a plagiarizer…He peddles the worst lies about society: that drugs are bad and the cause of addicts’ problems, and that people can change. While most authors make a straight bee-line for the exit doors after being revealed as frauds, Frey is shamelessly sticking around, peddling his latest trash novel.”
I ask Hadley, who’s a writer, if she feels as strongly about Frey as her husband does.
“Yes,” she says firmly, then adds, “But this was his idea.”
We’re admitted to the venue without incident and stand in the middle of the largely unoccupied floor. Frey’s reading in New York pulled a crowd of hundreds, but it’s a rare hot day in San Francisco so there’s only a crowd of about sixty people at Slim’s today.
There seems to be some confusion about what the next step will be.
“I guess we should wait until he starts reading, right?” Frel asks.
But it turns out that waiting isn’t an option. Frey has been standing off near the edge of the bar, eying us and conversing with some people grouped around him. He crosses the floor and now we’re all standing there with Frey and an extremely angry-looking guy with black hair and tattoos.
“Hey, you’re here!” Frel exclaims, sounding genuinely excited and friendly.
Frey is wearing an unassuming white T-shirt, glasses, and an LA Dodgers baseball hat.
“I heard you had some essays; I was thinking of reading them out loud on stage,” Frey returns.
Frel and Frey
It’s obvious that Frel has thought out ahead of time what he would like to say to the author’s face, but now that it’s really happening, things just seem awkward. He tells Frey that he’s a disgrace, that he’s a fraud, and that his continuing popularity is symptomatic of the attitude that allows George Bush to retain office after committing war crimes. Frey is nodding in response to this and tells Frel that he’s entitled to his opinion. The whole time, Black Hair Tattooed Guy, a member of the opening band, 3rdrail, is at Frey’s side, mad-dogging Frel, fists clenched. The confrontation sputters out, and Frey walks away.
“You mess any shit up….” Black Hair Tattoed Guy hisses into Frel’s face.
“And what?” Frel asks.
“Guess!” BHTG barks, and turns heel.
Unfortunately, we never get to find out what fate lies in store for Frel should he continue his campaign against literary fraud, as he and Suter are unceremoniously ejected from the club by a man in a black leather vest and white ball cap. There’s a short-lived smattering of clapping from bystanders.
Frel and Hadley being asked to leave
I’m ready to follow them outside but first I talk to Frey. What does he think of Frel’s protest?
“I think it’s awesome!” He grins, but quickly adds that they should be conducting their protest outside, as they’re being disruptive.
Outside, Frel is trying to hand copies of the essay to people who are standing in line. Confused, some accept the pieces of paper. Bouncers quickly descend on those with leaflets and confiscate them.
“We can’t have a bunch of paper in the club,” one bouncer tells Frel.
One woman who still has her essay gets out of line and hands it back. “I don’t want to stand here and read this,” she mumbles.
The bouncers then tell Frel and Hadley they have to stand at the end of the street if they want to keep handing out the papers.
Frel attempting to hand out essays
Frel printed about thirty essays and says he’s handed out ten. Well, maybe eleven if you count the one that was handed back. Frel chews Skoal, and he’s got a paper cup jammed in the front pocket of shirt now, so that he can deposit his spit into it. I ask him if he thinks his protest was a success.
“No,” he says. “Frey still has sucker fans showing up to talk to him.”
Hadley adds, “It was bad atmosphere for a protest.”
“That’s the problem with writers,” Frel says cryptically.
“It was such a sad little protest!” says Hadley.
“Well, what did you expect?” asks Frel. “Throngs? Hundreds?”
They decide to deposit the remaining essays in a convenience store across the street and go grab a bite to eat. They’re calling it a night.
I get back in line to be re-searched by the bouncers and re-admitted so I can get a drink. The bouncer tells me that, obviously, I can’t have anything on my person that Down With Frey may have given me, which I do. I tell her that I need the stapled essay because I’m a journalist and she looks doubtful. I ask her if I can just keep the last page, since I wrote some notes on the back of it. She consents, tearing off the first two pages and handing the last one back to me.
Frey’s reading goes off without a hitch. Over music provided by 3rdrail, he reads a passage about a woman purchasing a gun after being raped. Photographs by Terry Richardson of glowering thugs and guns are projected on a screen behind him. Frey opens the floor to questions afterwards and one person asks how he really feels about Oprah. Nobody mentions the protest. It’s a thing of the past, just like Frey’s public undoing, and now fans are happily lining up to chat with the author and get their books signed. –Andy Wright
Frel and Hadley leaving
James Frey Discusses The Writing of BRIGHT SHINY MORNING
I Am From, Jekyll & Hyde
Winning poems from the Jackson Heights Poetry Festival
Friday, May 9th 2008, 5:44 PM
The two poems below were chosen from more than 100 entries from Queens middle- and high school students, and will be performed by their authors at the Jackson Heights Poetry Festival next Saturday.
Jekyll & Hyde
by Royah Nunez
Martin Luther High School
What am I really on the inside. Am I the player or will I sit on the sidelines. What are my guidelines, the rules and regulations. Will I stay calm, or am I the type for debatin’? Stand my ground or go with the wind. Never bat an eye or will I flinch and cringe. Commit a sin with an evil grin or study the Bible turn around with a spin? Maybe wear flats high heels get the mature feel…or cop the jordans. Do I steal…or do I purchase? Bold or hide behind the curtains? Do I feel great, or am I really hurtin’ am I lurkin’? Or do I walk like I own the town? Head to the sky or shame face walk with my head down? Act like a clown or the business type? Solid colors or polka dots with pin stripes? Cellphone addict or go payphone manic? Flat screen TV or am I seeing static? Do I–travel to the city or work at the corner store? Am I the soft type or am I just hardcore? Do I appreciate what I have or do I ask for just one more? Am I with the peace group or do I say on with the war? Pent house status or apartment building right on the first floor? What am I really … on the inside? Two different people …like Jekyll and Hyde.
I Am From
by Robert John Hansen
JHS 189Q
I am from the jerk chicken in my fridge,
From my Nike Air Force 1‘s
and from my Craig Jordan jeans.
I am from the ghetto,
The feeling of depression
I am from the mud beneath my shoes,
I am from the tree that stands alone
in a concrete jungle.
I am from anger and shyness
From the quiet old man
and to the raging old lady.
I am from biting my nails
and chewing my lips
And from an argument over nothing.
I am from lies and betrayal
And “Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are”
from Grandpa’s chapped lips.
I am from Bob Marley‘s reggae music.
I am from Jamaica, Queens and Chinese, Cuban and Jamaican blood.
Rum cake and curry chicken.
From late night robberies
Where they climb through your window just for a buck.
Where we don’t smile.
Living under my bed with dark souls that don’t come out,
Blood from my family’s past on my white walls,
And my heart ripped from my chest
By the one I love.
Win a Copy of Bright Shiny Morning – Signup Ends Today
from Kelly Hewitt’s LOADED QUESTIONS Author BlogBright Shiny Morning… adopts a cast of characters who are all at once lost, confused and struggling — grasping at creating lives for themselves in the city of Los Angeles. The novel’s online synopsis lays each of the characters out clearly: 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. Each with their own dramatic narrative, these characters appear and disappear from the novel’s canvas, moving in and out of the reader’s view.I found myself genuinely interested in this book, in finding out more about Frey’s style and for that reason am happy to present it as our next Loaded Questions Giveaway.
Click here to visit Kelly Hewitt’s Loaded Questions blog
Mad Prankster Crazy Willy Gone
Illustrator and Prankster Will Elder Dies at 86
Journalista: The Comics Journal Weblog is reporting that Will Elder, the famed illustrator and one of the founders of MadMagazine, has died at 86. (This comes via boing boing.) Elder was considered a major influence on artists like Robert Crumb and Daniel Clowes.
Gary Groth, an editor at Fantagraphics, which published several Elder books (including Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art and Chicken Fat) told the Media Mob, “He was such a fabulous talent in the sense that he could do almost anything.” Recalling his penchant for pranks, Mr. Groth called Mr. Elder “instrumental in making Mad.”
In David Hajdu’s recent book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, the author described Elder as follows:
He could render anything he could see with the precision of a photograph—or mimic virtually any fine-art style, including various modes of impressionism and early abstract art—yet he had no inclination to waste his time on anything other than his overriding interest, pranksterism. The sound of his name to those who knew him well, such as his former schoolmates and fellow cartoonists, Al Jaffee (who met Elder in eighth grade, when they were both being tested for admission to the High School of Music and Art), John Severin, and David Gantz, was a cue for grin and a round of ‘Crazy Willy’ stories: the time, when he was a kid in the Bronx, when Elder took discarded pieces of beef carcasses from a meat-processing plant, arranged them in old clothes on the railroad tracks, and started screaming that his friend Moishe had been killed; or the time, when he was in high school, that he smeared chalk dust on his face and pretended to be hanging in the coat closet; or, when went to lunch with some friends from EC [Comics] and tried to pay the cashier with leaves of lettuce that he had in his wallet. His humor was almost aggressively madcap, startling, often dark, and silly.
Bang Your Head
from the New York Times article ‘One or Two Murderers in Any Crowd’
To The Reader by Charles Simic
Don’t you hear me
Bang my head
Against your wall?
Of course, you do,
So how come
You don’t answer me?
Bang your head
On your side of the wall
And keep me company.
Guggenheim Museum Exploiting Young Children
Children’s artwork makes big impression at the Guggenheim
Saturday, May 17th 2008, 4:00 AM
Anyone who’s ever been to an art museum and thought, “My kid could do that,” will appreciate the new show at the Guggenheim Museum.
Take this installation: photographs of frozen and melting milk meant to symbolize the westward movement of European settlers into Native American lands.
The brainchild of some edgy East Village artiste?
Nope. It’s the work of a fifth-grade class at Public School 9 in Brooklyn, participants in the Guggenheim’s annual “A Year With Children” exhibit.
Not exactly Crayola stick figures, is it?
The creativity and intellectual thought displayed by the budding art-world stars even impressed Roland Augustine, who owns a gallery in Chelsea.
Augustine, head of the Luhring Augustine Gallery and president of the Art Dealers Association of America, said he was impressed by the “celebratory” range of colors and media in the exhibit, which runs through June 13.
“The beauty of children’s art is that it’s unedited – it’s direct,” he said. “And it’s so empowering for the students.”
A fifth-grader’s collage of a heron in a pond with a broken mask at the bottom of the water was deemed “amazing” by Augustine.
“It’s so poignant and introspective – the mask is bifurcated as if to show what’s being imagined. It has a deep sense of pathos,” he said.
Barnes & Noble Tags James Frey Woo-Hoo!
Uwe Boll Will Roll You
Call Him the Worst Director (Then Duck)
Chris Helcermanas-Benge/Event Film
Verne Troyer in “Postal,” the latest film by the much-vilified director Uwe Boll.
UWE BOLL is often referred to as the worst filmmaker in the world.
This seems to pain Mr. Boll, a gregarious 42-year-old German whose best-known movies are based on video games. So he has shared the pain with his critics, literally, challenging several to a series of boxing matches in 2006. Mr. Boll, a former boxer, thumped them handily.
But what he really wants is respect.
There is a Web site called StopUweBoll.org, with a petition demanding that he stop making movies. The petition had drawn only 18,000 names until last month, when Mr. Boll told the horror-movie Web site FearNet.com that he would quit making films if a million people signed. With his own version of “bring it on,” the list has now grown to more than a quarter of a million.
Why play along? “I have to live with it,” Mr. Boll said with an unhappy smirk. “It’s better to make fun with it,” as an alternative to “being depressed, sitting at home, slowly crying.”
We won’t even talk about UweBollIsAntichrist.com.
During a lunch interview in New York, he pressed a freshly copied DVD into a reporter’s hands. It was a rough cut of a serious film he’s been working on, about a brutal prison rape in Germany in 2006. “I would be interested to see what you think about it,” he said.
He also noted that there are counterpetitions urging him to keep making films. At least part of what is going on, he argued, is an online pile-on, a “can you top this?” game with Mr. Boll on the bottom.
“Is it the movies are all so bad?” he asked. “Something is not fitting together in the story, that I’m the worst of the worst.”
Mr. Boll’s most recent film, “Postal,” might not be the best vehicle for winning respect. The first sequence of the film, which opens on Friday, portrays 9/11 hijackers squabbling over the precise number of virgins who will be awaiting them after their martyrdom. The scene switches to a World Trade Center’s-eye view of an oncoming jet.
As the movie’s scattershot plot rocks along, the audience gets a long full-frontal look at a nude Dave Foley, the boyish comic best known for his work in the Kids in the Hall comedy troupe and on the television show “News Radio,” who portrays a sleazy satyr of a cult leader.
Pussycat Say No Peanuts
The Gallerist Who Graffiti’d ‘Guernica’
When Artworks Collide
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
“Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?,” a group show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in Chelsea, is the latest proof that you don’t have to be a museum to shake things up. It was organized by Gavin Brown, who has a downtown gallery of his own, and Urs Fischer, a Swiss artist he represents.
Demonically aerobic for brain and eye, the show conflates two exhibitions and several different times, styles, art markets and notions of transgression. Highly site specific, it may also be one of the last words in appropriation art, institutional critique and artistic intervention, not to mention postmodern photography and, especially, wallpaper.
The histories entwined here begin with Mr. Shafrazi, an infamous one-hit-wonder graffiti artist and longtime graffiti art dealer. In 1974 he spray-painted, in red, the words “Kill Lies All” on Picasso’s “Guernica,” then at the Museum of Modern Art (he meant to write “All Lies Kill”). By 1982 he had a SoHo gallery known for showing graffiti-related artists like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Donald Baechler. In 2004 Mr. Shafrazi relocated to an austere second-floor gallery in Chelsea, putting up long-running shows and concentrating mostly on the resale market: not only the graffitists but also blue-chip works by Picasso, Picabia and Francis Bacon. In October he reprised his glory days with “Four Friends,” an echt-’80s exhibition of paintings and a few sculptures by Haring, Basquiat, Mr. Scharf and Mr. Baechler.
Mr. Brown and Mr. Fischer had been lobbying Mr. Shafrazi to let them organize a show at his gallery, and “Four Friends” only spurred their determination. “The show had been up for six months,” Mr. Brown said. “There needed to be an intervention.” About six weeks ago Mr. Shafrazi finally agreed; Mr. Brown and Mr. Fischer went to work.
The resulting exhibition is an adventure in juxtaposition and visual argumentation; either way it’s a far cry from the quiet contemplation of isolated art objects. Nothing escapes unimplicated or unmanipulated, least of all the show’s announcement: a picture of Mr. Shafrazi being arrested at MoMA in 1974.
Review of James Frey & Black Tide @ The Whisky
This article isn’t entirely complete – “Good behavior prevailed, discounting a little mosh pit action that briefly tore into a pair of tables near the stage,” yet there was indeed a huge brawl on the floor of the Whisky about two minutes into Black Tide’s second set. It took four bouncers all 225+ nearly 5 minutes to get a 5’6″ tweaker out the door, then the brawl continued on the sidewalk outside for another five minutes when the tweaker’s tweaking foe followed him out the do’. Finally, a couple WeHo Sheriff’s Deputies rolled up on their bicycles, pulled the cuffs off their little black shorts and put the whole matter to rest. (NOTE: Dear Bill – we couldn’t find an arrest report to link for this – can you troll one for us. Thanks, man.) Other than that, the crowd was in fact exceptional especially the Black Tide posse, altho the author/photog here does forget to mention about how he almost got into a throwdown himself with Black Tide’s drummer Steven Spence out on the Strip before the gig began. We won’t mention it either. As Producer of the event, Eric Hanson of TreeLAWN Artists opined after the action, “Hey – it’s just another book reading, right.” – Editor
The band, the bodyguards: the James Frey show
There were no Hells Angels at the Whisky a Go-Go on Thursday night, although a ripple of curiosity was circulating among the people waiting in line along Sunset Boulevard.
Would James Frey, whose newest offering is “Bright Shiny Morning,” a novel set in Los Angeles, have the kind of bad karma on the West Coast the Rolling Stones had at Altamont when they used the motorcycle gang for security at the Bay Area speedway in 1969, which resulted in the death of one man and the symbolic death knell of the ’60s?
Not at all.
Good behavior prevailed, discounting a little mosh pit action that briefly tore into a pair of tables near the stage. Frey’s self-proclaimed “Rock-and-Roll Book Tour” attracted not only the usual crowd of well-read graduates, but also a heady throng of about 100 high school kids who’d come just to see a popular band playing for free.
And what a band it was. Black Tide was its name, and the combined age of its four members couldn’t be more than 70. They played double bass-pedaled, flying V headbanger paeans. Their fans pumped their fists and shook their heads and managed to displace a handful of worried adults, most of them wearing glasses and clutching books.
How does one follow a set like that? With a book reading?
More ….
Frey took the stage with two bodyguards, entering down the stage-left stairs past a sign that read, “If you stage dive you go home.” He wore a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap, a gray T-shirt and khaki slacks. In the thick of fog machine smoke, under the mechanized lights, he sat down on a stool and spoke into the microphone.
Then Frey asked whether anyone in the audience had a copy “I can borrow?”
He read breathlessly from a borrowed book while the band settled into a low, menacing rhythm. Behind them, images by celebrity and fashion photographer Terry Richardson flashed on a screen: tattooed women holding pistols, beds of golden ammunition, profanity-laden signage, headshots of young toughs whose business it was, no doubt, to be simply that.
Frey read about “a man who hates everything and everybody,” about “Rickie, who hasn’t had a job in four years.” About “the ways and means of obtaining semiautomatic and full automatic machine guns.”
There was a panorama of character names and quick details of the blink-and-you’ll miss them variety:
“He held a gun to her head and made her drive to the hills in Malibu.”
“She didn’t tell her parents or her co-workers, and she stayed at home and cried in bed for two weeks.”
When Frey finished — after about 10 minutes — he took rapid-fire questions, in the manner of someone who’s figured the attention span of his audience to be momentary.
Q: “What was your favorite book to write?”
A: “This one.”
Q: “Who’s your favorite band?”
A: “Black Tide.”
Q: “Why do you live in New York?”
A: “My wife. If it were up to me, we’d live here.”
Perhaps the best question was from a gangly Latino in a Motley Crue T-shirt: “Who are you?”
It was certainly rhetorical, and the author did not answer.
Frey then began signing autographs. Tucked into a booth, a bodyguard beside him, Frey looked serious and workmanlike. He should have been. After all, he had a limited amount of time. A long line of adults waited to collect his autograph, but up front the kids were getting restless. Black Tide was coming back to play a second set.
–George Ducker
(Photos of James Frey at the Whisky by George Ducker)
BLACK TIDE’s Flawless Debut Album
Unreal. The best new rock ‘n roll since Axl and The Boys – purchase the CD now or download from iTunes.
Check out Black Tide’s performance on Jimmy Kimmel for a taster…
Los Angeles Mayor Urging Citizens To Drink From Their Toilets
LOS ANGELES — Faced with a persistent drought and the threat of tighter water supplies, Los Angeles plans to begin using heavily cleansed sewage to increase drinking water supplies, joining a growing number of cities considering similar measures.
Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who opposed such a plan a decade ago over safety concerns, announced the proposal on Thursday as part of a package of initiatives to put the city, the nation’s second largest, on a stricter water budget. The other plans include increasing fines for watering lawns during restricted times, tapping into and cleaning more groundwater, and encouraging businesses and residents to use more efficient sprinklers and plumbing fixtures.
The move comes as California braces for the possibility of the most severe water shortages in decades.
Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada, which supplies about a third of Los Angeles’s water, is short of expectations. At the same time, the Western drought has lowered supplies in reservoirs, while legal rulings to protect endangered species will curtail water deliveries from Northern California.
Worsening the problem, Los Angeles is expected to add 500,000 people by 2030, forcing the city to examine new ways to meet demand. One option off the table, Mr. Villaraigosa said, is a repeat of the city’s troubled history, fictionalized in the movie “Chinatown,” of diverting a distant river southward to slake the city’s thirst.
The city, pushed by legal claims, is already paying millions to restore dried-up portions of the river, the Owens.
“There simply are no more holes or straws to pitch,” Mr. Villaraigosa said at a news conference at a water plant.
Many cities and towns across the country, including Los Angeles, already recycle wastewater for industrial uses and landscaping.
But the idea of using recycled wastewater, after intense filtering and chemical treatment, to replenish aquifers and reservoirs has gotten more notice lately because of technological advances that, industry leaders say, can make the water purer than tap water.
Oprah’s Dead Dogs Commemorated in Gilt
A statue of Oprah Winfrey and her dead dogs will be unveiled May 22 in New York by Daniel Edwards. The pop artist has unveiled a series of controversial works in the last few years.
Art Has Purpose, Yet Exhibiting It Does Not?
Exhibition Suspicion
Martin Gayford questions the point of art shows. Should they educate or give pleasure — or both?
Towards the end of June, 1814, Maria Bicknell, the wife-to-be of the painter John Constable, went to an exhibition at the British Institute on Pall Mall. It was the second retrospective exhibition ever held in London. The first, the previous year, was devoted to the work of Joshua Reynolds and had been so popular that special evening viewings by candlelight were announced. The same was done in 1814 for the follow-up, a joint show of work by Hogarth, Gainsborough and Richard Wilson.
Maria managed to get a ticket for one of the candlelit evening sessions, only to be disappointed. ‘I prefer it infinitely by day,’ she wrote to Constable; ‘it was crowded to excess, certainly a very fine place to see, and be seen.’ So only two years into the history of blockbusters, their main drawback had become apparent: too many other people want to see them; their success is as much social as artistic.
What is the point of exhibitions? As a critic, one spends most of one’s time reviewing them, and yet there is no real agreement as to what their function is. According to Nicholas Penny, the new director of the National Gallery, the point of exhibitions is to teach the public, and consequently, as he told Martin Bailey of the Art Newspaper, he does not much like the word ‘blockbuster’, ‘which masks the distinction between entertainment and education’. At the National Gallery, he went on, ‘We are in the education business, and are concerned with quality.’
That, however, sounds a little puritanical. Art, after all, is enjoyable. It can cause pleasure, as well as awe, terror, contemplation, relaxation, horror, rage, pity, laughter and the more inexplicable varieties of visual delight. ‘Education’ and ‘quality’ are pallid words to describe all that. Nor is there any incompatibility between what we find entertaining and what we learn from. Nonetheless, Mr Penny has a point.
James Frey In The HOT SEAT
Time Out New York / Issue 659 : May 14–20, 2008
James Frey
The fabulist author has got friends in low places. Really.
Illustration: Rob Kelly
Other than a recent feature in Vanity Fair, James Frey has kept a low profile since his January 2006 televised smackdown by Oprah Winfrey. That infamous episode came, of course, shortly after a muckraking website found numerous inaccuracies in his best-selling addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and shamed not only Frey but the publishing industry as a whole. This week, the 38-year-old New York resident will face both fans and foes when he sets out on a tour to promote his new book, Bright Shiny Morning—which Frey unequivocally and absolutely promises is complete fiction.
Time Out New York: In Vanity Fair, you said you weren’t doing any more press. What gives?
James Frey: There are two answers to that. The first is that I felt more comfortable doing that interview than I expected to. And second, my publisher asked me to do more press, and it’s my job to do what my publisher asks me to do.
TONY: Are you nervous about reading in public?
James Frey: Of course I’m nervous. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. I’m sure there’ll be some people there who want to yell at me.
TONY: There could be a riot.
James Frey: Well, I hope there’s no riot. But if there is, at least I know I’ll be safe.
TONY: Right. You hired the Hells Angels to handle security on the book tour.
James Frey: Yes. At some of the venues.
TONY: Do you really need security?
James Frey: We don’t know. I do get pretty harsh hate mail.
TONY: Like what?
James Frey: Some guy sent me a letter saying he hoped I got ass cancer and died in front of my wife and kid. I got another that said, “I want to cut your head off and shit down your neck.”
TONY: Wow, maybe you do need security. It would suck to be decapitated and then used as a toilet.
James Frey: Yeah. Obviously I hope that never happens. It would be pretty unpleasant. Although once my head came off, I guess I wouldn’t have to deal with any of the rest of it.
TONY: Why the Hells Angels?
James Frey: I wrote a movie about the Hells Angels for Tony Scott. I spent time with them. They’re fun guys to hang out with. Frankly, they’re very intimidating. I feel very safe around them.
TONY: They’ve given you a nickname, haven’t they?
James Frey: They haven’t given me a nickname.
TONY: Come on! Not Chuckles? They don’t call you Chuckles Frey?
James Frey: No. But if they start calling me that I’ll let you know.
TONY: Do the Hells Angels know that you wrote a movie in 1998 named after a George Michael song?
James Frey: What, Kissing a Fool? I don’t know. That hasn’t ever come up.
TONY: Maybe it shouldn’t. Will Father Figure be your next novel, then?
James Frey: Yeah. Or maybe Patience. In big capital letters.
TONY: Do you have any other embarrassing musical influences?
James Frey: New Edition. “Popcorn Love” and “Candy Girl” are classic songs from my childhood. Occasionally in the car I listen to channel 3 on Sirius Radio, which is love songs.
TONY: Really? You strike me as a Hootie and the Blowfish kind of guy.
James Frey: I saw Hootie once at the Wetlands and I gotta say, they actually sorta rocked. And when they played “Hold My Hand,” my fist was in the air.
TONY: Do you feel any vindication that only about 1,600 people actually asked for the refund offered by Random House for A Million Little Pieces?
James Frey: You know, I can’t discuss any of that. I can’t discuss any legal anything.
TONY: Did everybody in your family take their copies back?
James Frey: [Laughs] They might have and didn’t tell me. That’s pretty funny. I’ll call my mom and ask her.
TONY: It seems to me that someone could make a pretty decent living going door to door rounding up copies of your book and returning them.
James Frey: There’s probably much easier and less complicated ways to try to make money. But they probably could.
TONY: So. Oprah. Did you send her a copy of Bright Shiny Morning?
James Frey: I certainly didn’t. I don’t know if my publicist did. I profoundly doubt it.
Bright Shiny Morning (Harper, $27) is out now.
Bloomberg News Review
James Frey’s “Bright Shiny Morning” falls apart
Bloomberg News
“Bright Shiny Morning” by James Frey
Harper, 501 pp., $26.95
BOOK REVIEW |
A young couple who lift $20,000 from a biker gang. A predatory gay superstar whose latest fixation is a football hero. An adorable Chicana with thighs the size of tree trunks. A homeless wino who wants to save a meth-addled teen.
These are the major characters and plot lines of James Frey’s “Bright Shiny Morning.” Frey is the disgraced author of “A Million Little Pieces,” the Oprah Winfrey-endorsed memoir that turned out to be partly made up.
“Bright Shiny Morning” is a meaty social novel in the Tom Wolfe/Richard Price mold, though Frey’s manic run-on sentences can’t rival theirs in terms of craft. Its subject is Los Angeles from the bottom to the top, and unless you have ice in your veins you’ll find its 501 pages of tiny print compulsively readable. I did. By page 100 I was telling myself, “I love this book!” By page 300 I was restless. By the end I pretty much hated it.
Why? Because Frey doesn’t deliver on the expectations he raises. He doesn’t even seem to know he’s raised them. At first, as you weave among the major stories and the hordes of minor ones, you all but quiver with anticipation: How’s he going to tie this all together? Little by little you deflate as you realize: He’s not.
Nobody in one plot so much as brushes against someone in another plot. The themes in the free-standing essays bear little or no relation to the narrative sections.
Literary insanity?
Only a novelist at the edge of literary sanity would introduce on page 438, at a point when his parallel plots are barreling toward their climax, an 11-page essay on the L.A. art scene (a topic that has zilch to do with the rest of the book). Or follow it with a six-page list of soldiers who have been treated at local VA hospitals, with their maladies (less than zilch).
In general, the essays (on youth gangs, city districts, celebrity train wrecks and so forth) are less insightful than the tales; Frey seems to have a natural grasp of character. But although he’s a gifted storyteller, he has only two modes, saccharine and brutal. He’s also got two modes as an essayist, amazed (ah the depravity/diversity/splendor of L.A.!) and cynical:
“Everybody loves a scandal,” he writes. “Even if you try to turn away, you can’t, when you try to ignore it, you find it impossible. You know why? Because it’s awesome, hilarious, awful … The bigger the better, the uglier the more fun, the more devastation the better you feel.”
Any particular scandal come to mind?
Raw talent
Despite its moronic politics (if you can call them that), in which poor equals virtuous and rich equals bad, “Bright Shiny Morning” looks less like a failure of writing than one of editing. Frey is a prototypical raw talent — a writer who can churn out readable prose by the ream but has no idea how to shape it or imbue it with taste. So he needs a strong editor, and either he didn’t get one or he was too bullheaded to accept the advice he was proffered.
The simplest solution to the book’s structural problems (though probably not the most commercial one) would have been to disentangle the components, slap on a table of contents and sell it as what it is: a compendium of pieces — some long, some short, some fiction, some reflection — about Los Angeles.
A more ambitious possibility (and a bigger chore) would have involved sending Frey back to his desk to finish up the job the way a novelist with any pride in his work is supposed to: by weaving the disparate parts into a coherent whole. Slicing them up and jumbling them, which is all he’s done, doesn’t turn “Bright Shiny Morning” into a novel. It turns it into a mess.
The author of “Bright Shiny Morning” will appear with novelist/memoirist Josh Kilmer-Purcell at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Town Hall Seattle, 1119 Eight Ave. Tickets are $5 — sponsored by Elliott Bay Book Co. (206-624-6600;www.elliottbaybook.com). Frey will also appear at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at a “Words & Wine” event at the W Hotel (info: 206-632-2419; www.kimricketts.com).
Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company
Another Emo Tragedy
Popular schoolgirl dies in ’emo sucide cult’
A popular and fun-loving schoolgirl killed herself after becoming involved in a self-harming youth cult which glamorises death, an inquest has heard.
Hannah Bond, 13, hanged herself from a bunk bed in her bedroom with a tie believing her death would impress fellow followers of the “emo” movement, it was said.
The teenager, who left a suicide note and used the nickname “Living Disaster”, committed suicide after flippantly telling her parents, “I want to kill myself”, when she returned late from a friend’s house.
They dismissed the comment and said “don’t be silly” but an hour later found her suspended an inch from the floor.
They dialled 999 and paramedics battled for over an hour to save her but she had lost consciousness and died.
Roger Sykes, the coroner who recorded a verdict of suicide, found aspects of the youth movement, which began in America, “very disturbing”.
He said: “A girl of 13 years old has taken her own life for no reason that by anyone could be found to be justifiable.
“It is a terrible and tragic explanation to what happened. It is not glamorous, just simply a tragic loss of such a young life.”
Maidstone Coroners’ Court heard that Hannah, of East Peckham, Kent, had lived a double life, outwardly a bright fun-loving family-orientated schoolgirl, but inwardly a devotee of “emo” which stands for emotional.
She had secretly chatted to “emo” followers online all over the world, talking about death and the glamorisation of hanging and speaking about “the black parade” – a place where “emos” believe they go after they die.
TONIGHT: Meet James Frey at Slim’s in San Francisco
USA Today Review
| Disgraced author James Frey rebounds with messy ‘Morning’ |
| Updated 5/16/2008By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY
His truth-challenged memoir A Million Little Pieces may have put Oprah’s knickers in a televised twist, but Frey’s new novel, Bright Shiny Morning,reveals a massive literary ego in full, flourishing bloom. MORE: James Frey takes a novel approach with ‘Morning’ Unfettered by traditional grammar, punctuation or even paragraphs, Frey has pounded out a novel that tries to rip open the raw underbelly of modern Los Angeles. His goal: to reveal the booze-soaked, drug-crazed, porn-addicted Sodom with all its corruption, cruelty and occasional moments of transcendent beauty. Bright Shiny Morning teems with dozens of characters. Maybe hundreds. Some appear briefly, others stay for the whole book. The central ones: a psycho male movie star, a saintly Hispanic domestic, two Midwestern teens and an alcoholic bum. FIND MORE STORIES IN: Hispanic | Midwestern | Oprah |Oliver Stone | Quentin Tarantino | James Frey | A Million Little Pieces | John Steinbeck | Sodom | Bright Shiny Morning Alas, Frey is no John Steinbeck or Dos Passos. Morning is a gusher, too often spouting bad prose, predictable plot turns, and one-dimensional characters (the poor ones are good, the rich one evil). There’s also constant bad behavior: booze, abuse, crime, murder. Frey also tosses in a celebration of young love that would do a romance writer proud. By the end, Morning reads like a saccharine-sweet Hallmark Special that Oliver Stone wrote and Quentin Tarantino directed. Frey also includes a tsunami of historical trivia about the city: gang names, riots, highways, movie trivia, floods. Which is kind of neat. Bottom line: If, despite the scandal, you loved A Million Little Pieces, you might want to devour Bright Shiny Morning. Like its author, it can be called many things, but never boring. Or timid. |
