Scene outlines

LA needs to invest in Public Transportation Then it will be a city on par with NYC

2011-09-05T13:18:00.001-07:00

LA will continue to grow in stature and reputation as a world class city for important art. Of the Past and the Present. It will become as big as NYC but only if a major push towards an extensive subway system will allow this to happen. Otherwise their traffic bullshit will strangle everybody as so many people move into that town. Artists and people attempting to be part of the American Dream. Hollywood. People who want to feel part of the Myth of American culture. Like modern day Gods and Goddesses. It is analogous to a religion and a religious experience. Lauren Greenfield in her photo essay Fast Forward. All the students and people wanting to be have meaning in their lives and validation of their existence by becoming famous with all its perks and illusion of immortality. Film is the illusion of immortality. As much as it is with Barthes Death.

Bristol Palin-Celebrity culture

2011-05-07T11:16:00.000-07:00

She so obviously wants to be a celebrity, much more than she cares about being a spokesperson to prevent teen pregnancy.
It is lost on Bristol that to a lot of teen girls, her life seems great and like it improved because she became a teen Mother. She sure got rewarded for it. That's what they SEE, They don't listen to the shallow words she sprouts forth at fundraisers and paid appearances. About how "hard" teen Motherhood is and how it ruins your life. All they see is that Bristol made over 100k last year doing just that.
So how exactly is that modeling abstinence to teen girls?

Famous Artists You've Never Heard of Series: Eva Zeisel

2011-05-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

Artists You've Never Heard of Series

Eva Zeisel is remarkable at 104 years old. To make it to that age is remarkable enough in itself but Zeisel continues to create and sell ceramic art as she did at 94 years old and at 84 years old. And decades before that.

Eva Striker was born in early in the 20th century, 1906, in Budapest. Her family was wealthy, educated and intellectual. Her Mother Laura was the first woman to graduate from the University of Budapest. Eva, long attracted to the arts, enrolled in the Budapest Royal Academy of Fine Arts at age 17 hoping to study painting. Mother Laura encouraged Eva to pursue a craft in order to obtain a marketable skill, and so she changed from painting to pottery. She began learning the craft of ceramics and went to work for a German manufacturer where she proved adept at design and was influenced by the Bauhaus art movement. Modern decorative arts including ceramic dishes, tea sets etc. were beginning to be produced for the masses and Zeisel was a pioneer in this movement.

In 1934 Zeisel began another remarkable part of her long life by joining her brother in Stalinist Russia. By 1935 she was appointed Artistic Director for the Soviet Ceramic Industry. In 1936 she was arrested and imprisoned for being involved in a plot to assassinate Stalin. Zeisal spent 16 months in prison, 12 in solitary confinement, and was subject to torture and attempts at brainwashing. After the 16 months she was mysteriously boarded on a train to Vienna, probably due to her Mother's tireless efforts, but no official explanation was ever given. Eva immediately went to England where she married Hans Zeisel, a childhood friend. They immigrated permanently to America in 1938, showing up in New York with $64 to their name. A year later Zeisel had founded the Ceramic Arts Industrial Design Department of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She continued to teach there until 1952.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, Zeisler designed ceramic ware and even glass ware for many of the popular mass manufacturers like Red Wing and Fenton. Her style, with its distinctly round, fluid, sensual flowing lines, was a hit. This was a time when what came to be known as the Decorative Arts; ceramics, glass ware, pottery and furniture were designed by some of the most gifted artists, yet was targeted at the growing middle class.

Still working today at 104 yearls old, Zeisal is designing ceramic dinner sets for Crate and Barrel and Bloomingdale's.

Kodachrome Fades—Out: But the Afterglow Lingers

2011-01-31T19:51:00.000-08:00

Kodachrome Fades—Out: But the Afterglow Lingers

The last photo ever taken on Kodachrome film.

Helena Bonham Carter comments on her eccentric non-traditional style.

2011-01-27T13:51:00.000-08:00

The King’s Speech star — and Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actress — Helena Bonham Carter is the first to admit she’s made a few fashion mistakes on the red carpet but that’s not stopping her from dressing up in non-traditional styles. “Sometimes I get it right and I sometimes I get it wrong,” Bonham Carter, 44, tells PEOPLE. “But fashion is all about having fun. I think fashion has been hijacked by the fashion industry creating rules on what one should wear and I feel like breaking the mold and seeing that the world won’t crumble.” Known for her eclectic fashion choices, Bonham Carter raised a few eyebrows by attending the Golden Globe Awards wearing one red and one green shoe simply because she wanted to. “Why not wear mismatching shoes? Who says we can’t? I was just having fun,” says Bonham Carter. “For me, fashion is all about fantasy and putting unlikely things together. That’s what I love. I genuinely love dressing up.” One person Bonham Carter praises is Lady Gaga for her daring fashion choices. “I love the way she dresses. She’s like a work of art,” she says. “Anybody who is inventive, different or has fun like her, I love and admire. I’m amazed that she’s able to stand up in some of those shoes she wears.” When asked what it’s like to be compared to the “Bad Romance” singer, Bonham Carter demurs, saying “I feel honored to be compared to her but I would probably be called Lady Haha. She’s fantastic.” So what can we expect on the red carpet at the Kodak Theatre come Feb. 27? “Maybe I will wear the exact same [Vivienne Westwood] dress I wore at the Golden Globes but with matching shoes,” she says with a big laugh. “Or put the shoes on my head!” – Paul Chi

Dennis Hopper's Vast Art Collection up for Auction

2011-01-05T15:16:00.000-08:00

I was wondering about the fate of Hopper's art collection when he died.

NEW YORK - Dennis Hopper shot two bullet holes through an Andy Warhol portrait of Mao Zedong, but instead of getting mad, Warhol called the "Easy Rider" star a collaborator.

Warhol's "Mao" is among 300 works of fine art and memorabilia owned by the late actor-director of the 1969 counterculture film up for auction at Christie's next week. The 1972 colored screenprint is expected to bring $20,000 to $30,000.

Most of the items adorned the actor's Venice Beach, Calif., home.

Hopper, who was twice nominated for Oscars and earned a star last year on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, died of prostate cancer at his home in May. He was 74.

The actor/director was already stricken with cancer when he attended the ceremony for the unveiling of his commemorative star. The framed plaque of the star that Hopper received as a memento of the event is being sold next week for an estimated $1,000 to $1,500.

Hopper began collecting in the 1960s after the venerable actor, Vincent Price, himself an avid collector of Impressionist art, told him: "You need to collect, this is where you need to put your money," said Cathy Elkies, Christie's director of iconic collections. "This really was his calling."

Hopper, a photographer and painter himself, became immersed in the West Coast artist scene and pop art movement, becoming close friends with Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and many of the other artists he collected.

While eclectic, "there is some depth of certain artists" among the fine art works in the collection, including those by Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner and George Herms.

Conner's "Picnic on the Grass" and Warhol's "Mao" are the highest priced items in the sale. "Picnic on the Grass" also is expected to bring between $20,000 to $30,000.

The shooting incident involving "Mao" occurred sometime in the early 1970s at Hopper's Los Angeles home, said Alex Hitz, a family friend and a trustee of the estate.

"One night in the shadows, Dennis, out of the corner of his eyes, saw the Mao and he was so spooked by it that he got up and shot at it, twice, putting two bullet holes in it," Hitz told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. "Andy saw it, loved it and annotated those holes" labeling them "warning shot" and "bullet hole."

Hopper's four children are selling the collection because "it was Dennis' wish to sell everything," said Hitz.

"How do you cut a Warhol and all those other wonderful pieces by four," he added.

Elkies said Hopper's Venice Beach house was filled "literally from floor to ceiling with art, and realistically they (the children) couldn't take that on."

She said the family was holding on to the more sentimental pieces, including Hopper's own photography and paintings.

Posters from the movies he starred in, including "Apocalypse Now," "Blue Velvet" and "Speed," are estimated to sell for $200 to $500.

A 158-page unbound "Easy Rider" script, with extensive handwritten notes on the back of two pages is being offered at a pre-sale estimate of $2,000-$3,000. A three-sheet poster from the film, which also starred the then unknown actor Jack Nicholson, is estimated at $1,000-$1,500.

Andy Warhol's Brother John dies.

2010-12-29T16:43:00.000-08:00

Obituary: John Warhola, arts administrator

Published Date: 30 December 2010
John Warhola, arts administrator.

Born: 31 May, 1925, in Pittsburgh, USA.

Died: 24 December, 2010, in Freedom, Pennsylvania, aged 85.
John Warhola was an older brother of the Pop artist Andy Warhol and one of the original three trustees of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Although Warhola was only three years older than Andy, the youngest of three brothers,
he assumed a parental role after the death of their father in 1942. With Paul, the oldest brother, about to get married, their father, Andrej Warhola, called his middle son to his bedside and instructed him to take charge of Andy and make sure Andy attended college, for which he had set aside enough post office savings to cover two years of education.

Victor Bockris, in his book Warhol: The Biography, quoted Warhola as recalling that his father had said, "You're going to be real proud of him, he's going to be highly educated, he's going to college."

John Warhola scraped together money to help Andy finish his education at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University). After his younger brother left for New York in 1949, he called him every Sunday for the next 38 years to keep tabs on him.

Andy Warhol, who dropped the final "a" from the family name, died in 1987 and left instructions that his estate be used to create a foundation for the support of the visual arts and that his brother John be made a trustee. Warhola served as a vice president of the foundation for 20 years, playing an important role in establishing the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and creating a Warhol museum near the village in Slovakia where their parents were born.

John Warhola was born in 1925. After college, he worked in a machine shop and drove an ice cream van before going to work in 1966 for Sears, where he installed television antennas and sold appliance parts in a warehouse.

One of Warhola's first initiatives as a trustee of the Warhol Foundation was to give several Warhol drawings to the town of Medzilaborce in Slovakia, near Mikova. More artworks followed, and the foundation donated the money to open a museum there in 1991. The Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art, as it is now known, has 20 Warhols in its permanent collection, which consists entirely of works by Warhol and other family members, notably his brother Paul, a scrap dealer and chicken farmer who took up art late in life.

John Warhola was a strong, persistent voice arguing that Pittsburgh, too, should have a museum dedicated to his brother's work.

Andy with Wig

2010-12-28T19:27:00.001-08:00

God Andy
Originally uploaded by Alegraa

Original My Little Pony (photo at bottom) and MLP with a Makeover

2010-12-18T12:54:00.000-08:00

DLR in the snow

2010-11-29T17:37:00.001-08:00

DLR in the snow
Originally uploaded by Last Rounds

This must be a long exposure time given the ghost affect of a couple of autos.

Laniey on Miley Cyrus

2010-11-22T12:32:00.000-08:00

Stuff like this is when Lainey is at her best and most insightful:

JailBait is just days away from no longer being JailBait. Miley Cyrus turns 18 on Tuesday. And she’s single now, having split again from Liam Hemsworth. Liam was spotted the other night leaving Las Palmas in Hollywood with a blonde who kept looking away from the camera like she really wanted to look into the camera. I’ve always said: that boy has needs, and he won’t wait around to fulfill them.

Here’s the thing about girls like Miley, raised the way they are: they will talk hard about being confident and secure but they never are. And it’s never worse, at that age, than seeing the fresh ex with someone else. Jealousy spawns drama. Often. Especially in child stars. How will Miley deal?

Well today she dealt with it by heading to vocal lessons.

Vocal lessons?

Like, voice modification?

Please. Let there be voice modification.

Because, you know, her voice, it’s insufferable. It’s a biological weapon.

Eddie Munster/Butch Patrick in Rehab.

2010-11-16T07:53:00.000-08:00

“God I loved the Munsters and I loved it that Eddie/Butch-- had married a fan. Now, everything has gone to shit--divorce and rehab for serious drug addiction.
When I see Eddie Munster I can't help but think about the time I saw "Grandpa" wandering around a department store in Austin while smoking a stinky stogie. NO one recognized him but me-- all these women fanned themselves as they walked by him.”

Heidi Klum In A Mondo Original

2010-11-14T15:40:00.000-08:00

Heidi Klum In A Mondo Original

I love this dress. And I think it would be a better match for someone other than a tall blond Germanic model type.

Josiah McElheny: American Glass Artist

2010-11-13T11:02:00.001-08:00

Josiah McElheny (born in 1966, United States) is an artist who lives and works in New York. He has exhibited his work at national and international venues including the Museum of Modern Art, Orchard, and Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, Donald Young Gallery in Chicago, Institut im Glaspavillon in Berlin, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, White Cube in London, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Josiah McElheny's work addresses history, modernism, cosmology, reflection, infinity, purity and utopia, and has clear links to the work of the American abstract artist Donald Judd. His work also sometimes deals with issues of museological displays and one's attempts to derive inferences about historical peoples from their household possessions and objects.

The artist has also expressed interest in glassblowing as part of an oral tradition handed down generation to generation.

One of the artist's ongoing projects has been characterized as an "investigation into the origins of the universe." "An End to Modernity" (2005), a twelve-foot-wide by ten-foot-high chandelier of chrome and transparent glass modeled on the 1960s Lobmeyr design for the chandeliers found in Lincoln Center, and evoking as well the Big Bang theory, was commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. "The End of the Dark Ages," again inspired by the Metropolitan Opera House chandeliers and informed by logarithmic equations devised by the cosmologist David H. Weinberg was shown in New York City in 2008. Later that year, the series culminated in a massive installation titled "Island Universe" at White Cube in London[1] and in Madrid.[2]

In earlier works, the artist has played with notions of "history" and "fiction." Examples of this are works that recreate Renaissance glass objects pictured in Renaissance paintings and modern (but lost) glass objects from documentary photographs (such as works by Adolf Loos). McElheny has mentioned the influence of the writings of Jorge Luis Borgesin his work.
--From wikipedia----

Andy meets the Pope

2010-11-09T07:25:00.001-08:00

Piante
Originally uploaded by Me preocupan mas las pirañas

Andy Warhol was a life-long Catholic and attended mass on a regular basis all those years he lived in NYC.

English Language Word of the Week: Tautology

2010-11-04T17:45:00.001-07:00

Definition of TAUTOLOGY
1
a : needless repetition of an idea, statement, or word b : an instance of tautology
2
: a tautologous statement
Examples of TAUTOLOGY

1. “A beginner who has just started” is a tautology.

Origin of TAUTOLOGY
Late Latin tautologia, from Greek, from tautologos
First Known Use: 1574

This is Ironic because The Velvet Undergound

2010-11-03T11:05:00.000-07:00

tour of California was a notorious disaster. Mutual hate and distaste for each other--the band vs. LA.
Discovered today this band. They were inspired by the VU they even did a light show like VU.---

Warhol Trivia about this trip--The light show necessitated Paul and Danny going on the tour. Andy went. Also Gerard Malanga, Mary Woronov.

Any way read some fascinating Rock History about an LA Psychedelic band

The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band

In about 1960, Bob Markley (b. Tulsa, Oklahoma, August 25, 1935 - d. Gardena, California, September 9, 2003[citation needed]), the adopted son of an oil tycoon, and a law graduate, moved to Los Angeles with hopes of becoming a star. He was already a local TV personality in Oklahoma, but his initial attempts to develop a Hollywood career, either in movies or as a pop singer, met with little success.

At around the same time, brothers Shaun (b Colorado Springs, 1946) and Danny Harris (b Colorado Springs, 1947), children of composer Roy Harris, also moved to Los Angeles, and by 1963 had both begun playing with a teen surf band, the Snowmen. When they started attending Hollywood Professional School in 1964, they met up with Michael Lloyd (born 1948), who had been playing in several groups, latterly the Rogues. The Harris brothers and Lloyd decided to form a new band, initially called The Laughing Wind, and they recorded demos for a mutual friend, record producer Kim Fowley. Fowley already knew Markley, and suggested that the band use some of the latter’s lyrics.

In 1965, Fowley arranged a private party in Markley’s house at which the Yardbirds performed, and which the Harris brothers and Lloyd also attended. Markley was impressed by the large number of teenage girls attracted by the band, and the much younger musicians were impressed by Markley’s financial resources and potential ability to fund good quality equipment and a light show. Fowley encouraged them to join forces and, with the addition of drummer John Ware, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band was formed. The general approach was intended to parallel that being developed on the east coast by Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. Markley used his legal background to ensure that he held all rights to the band’s name.

The band’s recording debut in 1966, "Volume 1", featured Michael Lloyd, Shaun Harris, Dennis Lambert (guitar) and Danny Belsky (drums), with Markley on some vocals. It seems that much of the material was completed before the time Markley became involved. The rudimentary album included contemporary hits and original compositions and was recorded in a self-made studio in San Vincente, just outside Beverly Hills. The album was originally issued on the tiny Fifo label in Hollywood, and probably only 100 or so were made at the time. It was reissued on vinyl in 1994. An original copy of this album, complete with sleeve, sold for more than $15.000 in the early 2000s.[1]

With their impressive light show, the band became popular around Los Angeles and were signed by Reprise Records. Their first "proper" album, "Part One", ranged from anthemic pop songs and acoustic ballads to harder-edged psychedelic numbers. It reflected the tensions between the band’s musicians and Markley, who effectively controlled the band’s output but who was regarded by the others as musically untalented. Markley contributed rambling pseudo-psychedelic lyrics and spoken sections, and the album also included ill-assorted inputs from nominal co-producer Jimmy Bowen, songwriters Baker Knight and P.F. Sloan, drummer Hal Blaine and pianist Van Dyke Parks. Disputes between Markley and Michael Lloyd also led to the inclusion of guitarist Ron Morgan (1945–1989), who over time became a fully fledged member of the band.

Recorded and released in 1967, "Volume Two – Breaking Through" was a more ambitious and coherent album, with all of the tracks credited either in whole or in part to members of the band. It featured Markley’s anti-war rant "Suppose They Give A War And No One Comes?" – partly based on a speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt and later covered by Punk band T.S.O.L. – and the song "Smell of Incense", featuring Morgan’s guitar work and later covered by Southwest F.O.B. The album also started to demonstrate Markley’s lyrical obsession with young girls.

The next album, "Volume III - A Child's Guide To Good And Evil" is generally regarded as the group's high point. However, again the naive peace-and-love message of some of the songs sat uneasily beside the ironic cynicism of tracks like "A Child Of A Few Hours Is Burning To Death", and the songs showed a tension between the Harris brothers’ melodies, Morgan’s strident lead guitar and effects, and Markley’s sometimes bizarre declamations. By this time, the band effectively consisted of Markley, Morgan and Shaun Harris, with Danny Harris having withdrawn through illness.

The two Harris brothers, both disillusioned with Markley and with the group’s lack of commercial success, reunited in 1968 to form a touring band, California Spectrum, apparently also with Michael Lloyd’s involvement. However, this was not a success, and they returned to record a further West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band album, "Where's My Daddy?" This was credited to a line-up of Markley and the Harris brothers, although both Lloyd and Morgan also contributed. In 1970, a further album emerged, "Markley, A Group", which, although presented as a Markley solo album, had the active involvement of the whole band, including both Lloyd and Danny Harris.

After that time, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band ceased to exist. Michael Lloyd became the Vice President of A & R at MGM, aged 20, in 1969, and went on to win a Grammy with Lou Rawls, to produce hits for the Osmonds, Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett, and to produce the best-selling soundtrack to "Dirty Dancing". Shaun Harris released a solo album in 1973, and worked with Barry Manilow, but eventually retired from the music scene to set up a successful children’s film festival. Danny Harris also released a solo album, in 1980, and has worked as a folk musician and actor. Ron Morgan went on to join Three Dog Night and then a touring version of the Electric Prunes, and later worked as a cab driver and janitor, before his death from hepatitis in 1989. Bob Markley worked as a record producer and later fell into ill health before dying in 2003.

Fascinating Early Rock History, Tragic Deaths

2010-11-02T13:50:00.001-07:00

In terms of popular culture, many commentators start the Swinging Sixties with the Beatles in 1963, but the Sixties started swinging in January 1960 itself with the UK's first rock'n'roll package tour featuring the American stars, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Judging by reports in regional newspapers by inappropriate theatre reviewers, the tour was a Grade A disaster, but of course it wasn't. The audiences loved the shows and more importantly, fledgling British musicians watched closely and determined that this was the way forward. Considering there are now films about relatively unimportant moments in rock history, it is inexplicable that there has not been a film about Cochran and Vincent, especially when the story is so colourful.

In 1956, the impresario Larry Parnes had catapulted Tommy Steele to stardom as Britain's answer to Elvis Presley. Steele played along for a while, but he was not threatening enough to be a Presley and his records made with London jazzmen lacked Presley's commitment. As Steele developed into a family entertainer, Parnes tried again with Marty Wilde and Billy Fury, who were more committed to the new music.

The managers of the American rock'n'roll stars had been reluctant to send their charges to the UK as there was more money to be made in the US. Bill Haley had passed his peak when he visited in 1957; and although Buddy Holly toured with success in March 1958, the rest of the bill was end-of-the pier variety. Lew and Leslie Grade promoted Haley and Holly but they came unstuck in May 1958 when a Jerry Lee Lewis tour was cancelled after he revealed the age of his wife.

There never was a sweet Gene Vincent. In 1956, when he was 21, the curly-haired boy from Norfolk, Virginia had stormed to success with "Be-Bop-A-Lula", but his unpredictable behaviour alienated him from his band, the Blue Caps, who complained to the union. By the autumn of 1959, he was banned from many States and reduced to playing small-time dance halls with pick-up bands. His new manager, Norm Riley, thought European dates were the answer as nobody would know of his problems. The TV producer, Jack Good booked him for ITV's Boy Meets Girl and arranged a guest appearance at Tooting Granada on Marty Wilde's stage show.

Gene was super-polite, saying "sir" and "ma'am" to everyone, and performed very well. Parnes set up some tour dates with Wee Willie Harris in January, while Good worked on his image. He loathed Vincent's vivid green suit with "GV" on the pocket, but loved the intense way he would gaze into the distance while he sang his songs. "Gene wore a leg iron," he recalls, "so he hobbled a bit. I was a Shakespeare fan, so hobbling to me meant Richard III. I even thought of giving him a hunchback, and I'm glad I didn't! Then I thought, 'He can also be moody like Hamlet', so we'll dress him in black from head to toe and put a medallion round his neck."

Norm Riley suggested another artist to Good and Parnes: Eddie Cochran. Cochran was a great-looking 21-year-old musician, who had grasped the techniques of over-dubbing, often playing several instruments on his records. His wittily observed commentaries on teenage life, "Summertime Blues" and "C'mon Everybody", matched Chuck Berry's, but following Buddy Holly's death in a plane crash in February 1959, he had been reluctant to tour. Riley told him that once he got to the UK on a major airline, there would be no flying. Indeed, most of the tour was by train and there is a telling photograph of Brian Bennett, later with the Shadows, struggling with his drum-cases on Bexhill Station.

Parnes set up a tour, mostly two houses a night, from January 24 to April 16, a combination of complete weeks in the big cities and one-night stands elsewhere. He completed the bill with his own artists, Billy Fury, Joe Brown, Vince Eager and Tony Sheridan, as and when they were available, and he secured valuable TV and radio publicity via further appearances on ITV's Boy Meets Girl and the BBC Light Programme's Saturday Club. This was the first 100 per cent rock'n'roll package to tour the UK and advance ticket sales were good.

Marty Wilde met Cochran when he arrived on mid-January: "The first thing I noticed about Eddie was his complexion. We British lads had acne, and Eddie walked in with the most beautiful hair and the most beautiful skin – his skin was a light brown, a beautiful colour with all that California sunshine, and I thought, 'You lucky devil.'"

Cochran and Vincent would be backed by young British rock'n'roll musicians, among them, 16-year-old Georgie Fame: "We were told to report to this club in Soho to meet them. I remember Eddie playing guitar and we were astounded. Apart from his own stuff, he could do all that brilliant finger-style stuff that Chet Atkins did. Then he played this amazing intro to "What'd I Say" and apart from a few blues enthusiasts who had the Ray Charles record, nobody had heard it before. He played "What'd I Say" every night and within six months, every band in the country was playing it."

In a couple of days, Cochran had turned the British youngsters into a viable rock'n'roll band. "Eddie had a great trick," says Joe Brown. "He put a second string instead of a third string on his guitar, so that he could bend it and get those bluesy sounds that you never heard in England. I nicked the idea and got lots of session work as a result."

The tour began at the Gaumont, Ipswich. Eddie said: "It's great to be hear in Hipswich", and then gyrated his hips, thus milking the screams. Cochran was an instant success but Vincent proved to be variable. All his songs opened with "Wel-l-l-l-l" and it was touch and go as to whether the band would pick up what was next.

"Gene liked me to crouch down so that he could swing his bad leg over my head," says Joe Brown. "He was very accident prone and at one stage he was in plaster up to his thigh. He swung his leg up in the usual way, but caught me on the side of the head. It knocked me flat and squashed my guitar."

As they toured the country, the reviews were appalling. The Yorkshire Post described the tour as "a prolonged assault on the eardrums". The Leicester Mercury said: "These 'singers' seemed to get enjoyment out of leg-kicking, face-pulling and making the youngsters scream. I cannot believe this is true entertainment. Why do these idiotic teenagers behave in such a ridiculous fashion? "

Cochran, who, prior to the tour, had only known Vincent casually, realised what a liability he was, a paranoid fantasist who needed looking after. However, they were strangers in a strange land, not used to cities that shut down at 10.30pm, no daytime or late-night TV and no American comics.

The young British musicians were drinking occasional pints of bitter and they were surprised to find Cochran and Vincent constantly slugging Jack Daniel's from the bottle. They were wary of Vincent who, if antagonised, would say, "Wanna meet Henry?" and pull out his switchblade. One night, he cut up the road manager's suit... while it was still being worn.

The guitarist Big Jim Sullivan remembers, "Eddie was so drunk at the Liverpool Empire that we weren't sure that he would make it to the stage. It had one of those microphones that came up from the floor. We positioned Eddie so that it would come up between his body and his guitar and he could balance on it."

One thing that kept Eddie Cochran happy was a succession of girlfriends. After melancholy phone calls to a Hollywood girlfriend, the songwriter Sharon Sheeley, he was surprised when she came to England and joined the tour party. Parnes was very happy with the receipts and persuaded Cochran to join Vincent for a further tour in late April. The final week of the first leg was at the Bristol Hippodrome.

They were flying out on Sunday lunchtime from London airport, and they decided to go to London after the final show in an unlicensed cab. Speeding outside Chippenham, both Eddie and Sharon were singing "California, Here I Come" as the car hit a concrete lamppost, and Eddie Cochran was killed.

Monday's Daily Mirror led with the story, "Rock Star Dies in Crash", but such was the antipathy towards youth culture that the accident was not even highlighted in The Times.

The driver was fined £50. To be paid off at £5 a year.

Gene Vincent had been in a serious road accident, lost a close friend and damaged his ribs. He returned to America but Parnes brought him back within a fortnight for the second leg, now billed as a tribute to Eddie Cochran. One booking was at Liverpool Stadium on May 3. To replace Cochran, the bill was completed with local acts including Gerry and the Pacemakers but not the Beatles as the promoter Allan Williams did not consider them good enough. A few weeks later, Larry Parnes came to Liverpool, heard them and booked them to back Johnny Gentle on a tour of Scotland. British rock'n'roll was finding its own identity.

Parnes's tour with Gene Vincent collapsed at Theatre Royal, Nottingham, after the singer read out a telegram which said his daughter, Melody, had been killed. The audience laughed as they thought Vincent in his mumbled, incoherent way was talking about a dog. Vincent flew home to find his daughter was safe, which was always the case as he had sent the telegram to himself.

Gene Vincent staggered on with increasingly chaotic gigs and his wild personal life. He died in October 1971 of a perforated ulcer: he was a destitute, confused, overweight, alcoholic and humiliated wreck. He was buried in black leather in Newhall, California. After 15 nomadic years, Gene Vincent was staying put.

New Favorite Painter: James Rosenquist

2010-10-31T07:49:00.000-07:00

Newly enamored with James Rosenquist. I love the painting Dishes (directly above). It looks like Fiesta Ware. The other painting is entitled Let's Go For a Ride.

Reponse to NYT article: Why can't middle-age women have long hair.

2010-10-25T12:01:00.000-07:00

Dominique Browning's piece is first, my comments follow. Please note that the accompanying photo of Kristen MacMenamy has her recent photo at age 45 when it caused some brou-ha-ha on HP. The author of the story says she is 55 years old. I guess both ages could be considered "midlle-age."

I feel great about my hair.

I have long hair. I’m not talking about long enough to brush gently on my shoulder — when I tilt my head. I’m not talking about being a couple of weeks late to the hairdresser. I’m talking long. Long enough for a ponytail with swing to it. Long enough to sit against when I’m in a chair. Long enough to have to lift it up out of the sweater I’m pulling over my head. Long enough to braid.

What’s worse (to my critics) is that my hair is graying. Of course it is. Everyone’s hair is graying. But some of us aren’t ready to go there. That’s fine with me — I’m not judgmental about dyes. In fact, I find the range and variety of synthetic hair color to be an impressive testament to our unending chemical creativity. I’m particularly fascinated by that streaky kaleidoscopic thing some blondes do that looks kind of like Hair of Fawn. For my own head, I’m a tad paranoid about smelly, itchy potions.

No one seems to have any problems when a woman of a certain age cuts her hair off. It is considered the appropriate thing to do, as if being shorn is a way of releasing oneself from the locks of the past. I can see the appeal, and have, at times in my life, gone that route. Some women want to wash the men (or jobs) right out of their hair. Others of us have to have at them with scissors. Again, I do not judge. Go right ahead, be a 60-year-old pixie.

So why do people judge middle-aged long hair so harshly? I’ve heard enough, by now, to catalog the multitudinous complaints into several broad categories.

YOU’RE ACTING OUT. Long hair is not the appropriate choice of grown-ups. It says rebellion. Hillary Rodham Clinton softens her do, and sets off a bizarre Howl of Angry Inches, as if she had betrayed some social compact. Well, my long hair is indeed a declaration of independence. I am rebelling, variously, against Procter & Gamble, my mother, Condé Nast and, undoubtedly, corporate America in general. Whereas it used to be short hair that was a hallmark of being a liberated woman — remember the feminist chop? I do; I did it — these days, long hair is a mark of liberation.

My mother has a lot to say about my looks: Where did you find that shirt? Did you forget your makeup? She recently suggested, fluttering her hands in the vicinity of her ears, that I get just a very little trim. As if she thought she could still trick me into the barber’s chair to re-enact one of the central traumas of my childhood, when I was marched into a hair salon (so that’s where mothers went?) with hair to my waist and came out an outraged, stunned, ravaged 7-year-old with a stylish, hateful pageboy.

My mother’s favorite expression to me is “Make an Effort.” What she doesn’t understand, of course, is that just because things don’t turn out the way she thinks they should doesn’t mean an effort wasn’t made. It is incredible how parents and children never let go of old habits of relating. My mother still makes me feel like a 15-year-old. However, that no longer feels like a bad thing, if you see what I mean.

YOU’RE STILL LIVING IN THE ’70S. And why not? I like being 55 going on 15. As far as I’m concerned, we never did get better role models than that gang of girls who sang their hearts out for us through lusty days and yearning nights: Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Cher. Emmylou Harris is still a goddess in my book, with that nimbus of silver hair floating past her shoulders. Next thing you know, we’ll take to wearing beaded Next thing you know, we’ll take to wearing beaded leather headbands across our foreheads. And, I might add, that was a good look.

If you want to throw Princess Grace, Brigitte Bardot, Ingrid Bergman, Pussy Galore, Sophia Loren, Charlotte Rampling, Isabelle Huppert, Julie Christie and Catherine Deneuve into the mix, who am I to complain? While those sexy sisters are hovering, I might note, with a sense of wonder, that Europeans are much more comfortable with long hair on women of a certain age. But then again, they’re more comfortable with women of a certain age in general. Perhaps I should move to Paris. Come to think of it, this would be making the kind of effort that would make my mother happy.

LONG HAIR IS HIGH MAINTENANCE. Yes, I’ll admit that it is a look that requires tender loving care. It is impossible to body surf without getting seaweed tangled up in it. It is impossible to get it completely dry when one is in a rush to get to a job interview or a blind date. It is impossible to forget one’s hairbrush when one travels. It is impossible to garden or farm or weave or cook without one’s hair getting in the way. I have knitted many a gray strand into many a scarf. Which, by the way, I consider a nice touch. Anyone who disagrees can send me back his Christmas present. It is impossible to let the vacuuming go for too long, lest the bezoars (new vocabulary word) become large enough to choke a tiger.
You would think that having long hair means you are spending a lot of money on hair products. I won’t even tell you what my Madison Avenue hairdresser, Joseph — the consummate high-end hair professional! — told me about how we shouldn’t even be using all those chemically laden shampoos. O.K., I will tell you: Those shampoos strip out the hair’s protective oils, and then you have to replace them with other chemical brews. He recommends regular hot water rinses and massaging of the scalp with fingertips. A little patience is required while the scalp’s natural oils rebalance themselves and — voilà — glossy, thick tresses, for free.
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Is it not wonderfully sexy the way our grandmothers, those women of the prairie, or concrete canyons, would braid their hair up in the morning and let their cowboys unravel them at night? Is there not a variety of excellent looks for taming long hair in high winds? What is cooler than stopping to wrap a silk scarf around your mane before you step into a zippy convertible?

MEN LIKE LONG HAIR. Wait. You say that like it’s a bad thing? Long hair is archetypal. And everyone knows that archetypes are all tangled up with desire. There’s a reason mermaids, Selkies and witches have long hair. Ballerinas, too. We all know Rapunzel’s tale, how she sat at the top of her lonely tower, her long hair hanging out the window, until finally, a prince climbed its ropy length to rescue her. Or impregnate her, depending on which version you read. Either way, it worked.

Men like to play with women’s long hair. They like to run their fingers through heavy tresses. They like to loosen tight braids. They like it when long hair tents over their faces during soulful kisses. The long of it is that long hair is sexy. (So is short hair, of course, but in a different way, and we’re not making that case — yet.) The short of it is that long hair means there is always, at least, hope.

What she is talking about is loss of her sexuality. Her hair represents her sexulity, thus her womanhood and femininity. She doesn't want to feel the pain of that loss completely. Her Mother like many others feels that you must put your sexuality behind you at a certain age. Your sexuality at the very least if not most of your femininity and womanliness. On one level the author is rebelling against that.
The other component is the" looks thing" and the "aging thing." A Woman's hair can look "aging" if it is not healthy and shiny and youthful etc. That is why in most of the make-overs you see--the women (who are the usual subjects) have 10 years taken off their face just by the haircut alone.
What the author means when she says "there is hope" is: her hair allows her; enables her to feel that her outward youthful beauty and inward sexuality some of it at least remains.
This is something that can define a whole woman's life, or just be a part of it. That is why it is an issue for an aging woman. But I have noticed that no one really wants to talk about it.

On another note: The old days she speaks could be confining, time-consuming and difficult dealing with really long, thick heavy hair. The ease of shampoo, conditioner, hot running water from a shower, blow dryers and array of brushes, have made long hair much easier to care for now than it was a during our grandmother and great grandmothers time. esp. if they had that super-long super heavy hair that had to be piled on top of their head during the day.

Another note is that it is connected with fashion and culture. A short bob haircut was a symbol of sexual freedom and assertion for women. Because they threw the shackles off of the long hair described in my previous paragraph. There is an excellent description of this in a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Berenice Bobs her hair."

FF Coppola on Financing his own Films

2010-10-22T12:05:00.000-07:00

You've said at this stage in your career you're making the movies you want to make. With something like Apocalypse Now, there was obviously a lot of pressure on you from the studios, but now that you're self-financing, are you in a happier place?

FFC: Totally. I have a lot of my colleagues of that era who got into [the movie business] because they wanted to make cinema. They didn't want to get into some sort of predigested business just to make money and to have the grosses published every week in the newspaper. That would have appeared to me, as it does now, as an absurdity. With Apocalypse Now, it was, "Wow, we have this incredible script and we'll make a great big picture like A Bridge Too Far or The Guns of Navarone, and it will make a lot of money, and then we'll have money to make little personal art films." Look, the whole reason one wants to do lower budget films is because the lower the budget, the bigger the ideas, the bigger the themes, the more interesting the art. Otherwise, when the films gross so much, they're just super controlled by a group of people -- and today, they have it down more than ever how to control a film. They'll replace the director, or they'll choose the director on his ability come across with this preconceived project.

I gladly, I voluntarily gave up the kind of commercial film career I had going as soon as I had enough money to finance my own films. I didn't make that money necessarily from the film business, but I eventually made a lot of money and that's what I do. Of course, I consider myself unbelievably fortunate, and I'm pretty content with my life.

From an interview in Rotten Tomatoes 10-21-10

Celebrity Culture

2010-10-12T11:30:00.000-07:00

Art & Culture
Celebrity Culture in America
Has personality finally replaced reality?

By David McNair
11/11/03

In 1961, historian and social critic Daniel Boorstin argued in his book Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America that our nation was threatened by a “menace of unreality” which was replacing the authentic with the contrived in American society. “We need not be theologians,” Boorstin wrote “…to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman….It is we who keep them in business and demand that they fill our consciousness with novelties, that they play God for us.”

Boorstin argued that America was living in an “age of contrivance” in which manufactured illusions were becoming a powerful force in society. He believed that public life consisted more and more of “pseudo-events”—staged and scripted happenings designed to “create” news and influence our perceptions of reality. Just as there were now “pseudo events,” he said, there were also “pseudo-people”—celebrities—whose identities were being staged and scripted to create illusions that often had no relationship to reality. “Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused,” Boorstin wrote. “Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but are famous because they are great. We come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety.”

Today, as Boorstin predicted, reality has proven to be no match for the power of our celebrity culture. How else can one explain the immense popularity of “reality” TV shows, the way the masses move herd-like to see the latest summer blockbuster, or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s shockingly swift transition from action-movie star to governor of California? In fact, you could say we have grown so accustomed to this “menace of unreality” that Boorstin’s arguments have become passé. We understand the complex and sophisticated marketing strategies used to sell us cars, politicians, laundry detergent, celebrities, movies and TV shows, even wars. We understand it; we accept it as a given; we even embrace it. We know why men like Karl Rove are important to the President. We know why it is important to have a public relations manager when you’re in the public eye. We know we are being manipulated and deceived, but our indignation is overruled by the extent to which we are entertained and wooed by the sales pitch, the spectacle, or the freak show; overruled by the extent to which we feel like we’re “in the know” or “in on the joke”; or, for the more sophisticated among us, overruled by the extent to which we understand the strategies and methods behind the deception. We know that Arnold Schwarzenegger has no business being governor of California; we know that reality TV shows are staged and scripted; we know that news has become more like entertainment. But we don’t really care, as long as the illusion “fills our consciousness with novelties,” fuels our fantasies and desires, shames us with an awareness of our inadequacies, or serves as a kind of intellectual puzzle or mystery to unravel. It rarely occurs to any of us to simply stop watching, to stop talking about it, to stop participating in the ritual.

Commenting on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent election triumph, New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane suggested that there would be little surprise if “other monarchs of the movie industry, emboldened by the California recall, were to make the principled leap from screen to stump.” Indeed, Schwarzenegger’s swift rise to power seems to signal an era beyond which even Boorstin imagined. “The distance between the two is shrinking by the day,” Lane goes on to say. “Modern voters, given a choice between quiet political certitude and the cacophony of fame, are not hard to sway…. Celebrity now comes equipped with an in-built aggression that makes it ideal for the purposes of electioneering, and before which more traditional qualifications must learn to tremble. To put the matter at its bluntest: what has Wesley Clark got that Angelina Jolie hasn’t?”

Lane goes on to suggest that a stuffed shirt like Clark would be no match for the sexy tomb raider with a gun strapped to her thigh. Lane, of course, is being menacingly coy here. But in the midst of his playful analysis lies the fact that the people of California happily elected an illusion, a personality manufactured on-screen and in the media that had no relationship to reality. In a very real sense, the people of California elected their own fantasy of what a governor should be.

Celebrity has always influenced and been a part of American politics, of course, but this time it was like our celebrity system itself seized political power. The Austrian accent, the fact that his father was a Nazi, his lack of political experience, his fuzzy ideology, the serial groping charges, his pornographic interview in OUI Magazine, his admitted drug use, and an opponent with 30-plus years of political experience and the backing of the Democratic Party… all of this was no match for the sheer power of Schwarzenegger’s celebrity.

Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and 62 days later it was Jay Leno who introduced Arnold before his victory speech. Standing directly behind Schwarzenegger, a mural of both Republican and Democratic celebrities and entertainment heavyweights cheered him on. NBC’s Tom Brokaw declared it “an amazing American story” and wondered if Schwarzenegger might run for president if a constitutional amendment were passed. According to the Tyndall Report, the national broadcast networks devoted 169 minutes to stories about the recall in the last two months before the election, with 69 minutes devoted solely to Schwarzenegger. That’s compared to 40 minutes dedicated to all 36 gubernatorial races combined in 2002 and 34 minutes of coverage about the upcoming presidential campaign in the same period.

When our celebrity-obsessed culture clicked into gear on this one, Schwarzenegger’s name and image and familiar movie phrases dwarfed everyone on the political scene. Even the Presidential race was overshadowed by Schwarzenegger’s debut. For emphasis, only a day after he won, the A&E cable network announced it was producing a documentary about Schwarzenegger’s “rise to power.” When asked what story line the film would follow, an A& E vice president said “We will rely on news reports. The beauty of this is a lot of it has already played out.”

Today, you could say that Americans are divided less by race, class, or political ideology than they are by their participation in our celebrity culture. We are divided into two main groups: the famous elite and the unfamous masses who watch them. While the ranks of the famous swell (making Andy Warhol a visionary), the unfamous masses bring with them varying degrees of sophistication to the spectacle, all of them making subtle and not-so-subtle emotional and intellectual investments in the illusion.

Now that our celebrity culture has been operating for so long and at such a high level of sophistication, at least since the 1930s, it’s worth wondering what the long-term effects of developing complex emotional and psychological connections to “people we don’t know” might have over a decade or two. And that’s an important thing to remember: celebrities are “people we don’t know” who we nonetheless make very complex, subtle, and often intense emotional and psychological connections with over the course of our lives.

The fact that we “don’t know them” gets ignored in some fundamental way as we “enter” the famous person’s “identity” into our consciousness. In many ways, we get to “know” these famous people in a more intense, intimate way than we do the people we work with or see on a daily basis. It’s intimacy without the risk; it’s getting “close” to someone without having to risk exposing yourself. In addition, our “friend” or “role model” or “idol” is larger and more charismatic than any real acquaintance could ever be.

It’s no accident, I think, that celebrity worship took hold in America during the Depression. While the economy and spirit of America floundered in the 1930s, the illusion called Hollywood and our media culture filled the void and flourished. Eighty million people a week went to the “picture shows” and bought up celebrity paraphernalia. The music recording industry showed a 600% increase in sales between 1933 and 1938, and radio brought entertainers such as Rudy Vallee, Jack Benny, and Burns and Allen into millions of living rooms, where they began to make themselves at home in the minds and imaginations of the public.

During that bleak time, the illusion of celebrity manufactured on the screen, in magazines and photos, and on the radio offered a seductive, larger-than-life presentation of reality. When television came along, our modern celebrity culture found the perfect medium for manufacturing this kind of unreality. In fact, it was the first televised presidential debates between Kennedy and Nixon, in which the images of the two men so strongly influenced viewers (Nixon looking pale, unshaven and nervous; Kennedy looking tanned and relaxed), that prompted Boorstin to write The Image. The Kennedy era/myth was born and played itself out on television. (Of course, it’s interesting to note that Schwarzenegger’s star is attached to the Kennedy myth as well via his marriage to Maria Shriver.)

The young, beautiful people; those powerful images, the live violence, and the illusion of intimacy we felt turned a rather short, troubled presidency into the myth of “Camelot.” In many ways, it was the first “reality” TV show in which we all shared in the horror and grief of the participants and swallowed whole-hog the script we were shown.

In truth, we now know that much of the Kennedy myth was at odds with reality. The Kennedy years saw the beginning of our involvement in Vietnam and a growing discontent among Black Americans. In addition, we now know that JFK was a voracious womanizer, chain-smoked cigarettes, and was physically unhealthy—a far cry from the athletic, loyal husband and family man portrayed in the media. And that’s to say nothing of the question marks surrounding his assignation.

But despite all that, reality has proven to be no match for the power of the myth. Generations of Americans are still deeply affected and moved by the story of the Kennedys. When JFK, Jr. died in a plane crash in 1999, the media coverage was overwhelming and intense. That single photo of John-John saluting his father’s casket made him ours, and we never took our eyes off him. CBS’ Dan Rather got choked up reporting the story, and every major news outlet used it as an opportunity to retell the Kennedy myth in all its tragic/romantic splendor. Networks broadcast his burial at sea the entire day, although all that was visible was a small ship in the distance.

Undoubtedly, JFK, Jr. was a handsome, personable man who managed his inherited celebrity with grace and dignity, but he had done nothing remarkable in his life. He was, as Boorstin defined celebrity, someone who was “well-known for their well-knownness.” (Rather appropriately, he had just begun to make his mark on the world by publishing the magazine George, a kind of Vogue or Vanity Fair-styled magazine about the celebrity of politics.) Yet he was afforded the attention of a fallen national leader or a beloved movie star.

In many ways, the Kennedy era ushered in the modern age of celebrity, an age in which, as Boorstin wrote, “Nothing is really real to us unless it happens on television.” In his 1986 book Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America, film critic Richard Schickel argues that the “illusion of intimacy” between the famous elite and the unfamous majority has created a potentially violent and destabilizing tension in our society. By obliterating the traditional boundaries between public and private life, Schickel argues that American society has become a kind of modern-day, technologically advanced equivalent of the Roman Coliseum, where the participants in the ferocious arena of public life are at the mercy of the moods and fantasies of the crowd. “This new relation is based on an illusion of intimacy,” Schickel writes. “… which is, in turn, the creation of an ever tightening, ever more finely spun media mesh … that cancels the traditional etiquette that formally governed not merely relationships between the powerful and the powerless, the known and the unknown, but, at the simplest level, the politesse that formally pertained between strangers.”

As a result, the interplay between public figures, celebrities, and the great unknown masses has grown increasingly aggressive and even psychotic in nature. As an example, Schickel examines John W. Hinckley, Jr.’s assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. As we all know, Hinckley had developed an obsession for the actress Jodie Foster. (What you might not know is that Hinckley’s father, a very successful businessman, was a friend of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.)

However, to be more precise, Hinckley, Jr. had an obsession with the character that Jodie Foster played in the movie Taxi Driver, in which a lunatic about to assassinate a politician is instead made famous for saving the life of a child prostitute, as played by Foster. “Jody, I’m asking you please to look into your heart and at least give me the chance with this historic deed to gain your respect and love,” Hinckley wrote to Foster shortly before trying to kill the President, an act that would, like Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver, make Hinckley famous as well. It was one of many passionate letters he had written to Foster, letters he had even begun to hand deliver while she was a freshman at Yale. Desperately seeking her acknowledgment, he began hanging around her dorm and had even succeeded in reaching her by phone a few times.

Of course, Hinckley’s attachment to Jodie Foster is an extreme and complex example of this “illusion of intimacy” fostered by our celebrity culture. But Schickel believed that Hinckley’s crime viciously parodied the unhealthy nature of the relationship between the famous and unfamous in our society. It’s interesting to note here that a recent study conducted by British psychologists at the University of Leicester and published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease has defined this kind of obsession, calling it Celebrity Worship Syndrome (CWS). Thirty-six percent of the people they studied showed an “unhealthy fascination” with celebrities, and two percent believed they had a “special bond with their celebrity” and would be willing to lie or even die for them.

Although most people wouldn’t go as far as Hinckley did in believing his relationship to Foster was real, most people would have to admit to having emotional and psychological connections to the celebrities they have been attracted or exposed to. For example, it’s not unusual for perfectly intelligent, normally sane people to be on a casual, first-name basis with celebrities—to speak of Oprah, Phil, Jerry, or Geraldo as if they were old friends. Or, likewise, it is not unusual for intelligent people to speak of political celebrities such as Bill, Dubya, Hillary, Condi, and Cheney as if they were personal enemies or representatives.

On a more subtle level, it’s not unusual for intelligent people to hold strong opinions about public figures or to indulge in nasty or careless gossip about them. Our celebrity culture allows us to shamelessly praise, berate, gossip about, and lust after other human beings without consequences. Who among us has not directed some nasty remark or shameless praise at a character or personality on television? Of course, that is to say nothing of the garden-variety obsession on display in our national interest and attraction to popular actors, entertainers, and musicians. In many ways, it is a kind of pornography of the spirit, turning us all into voyeurs and gossip mongers, tempting us all to bend down and peep through the keyhole and to substitute provocative imagery for real intimacy.

Thanks to our sophisticated media and celebrity system, thanks to their constant exposure on television and in other media, we can’t help but feel we know them. Over the decades we have been exposed to the media machinery of our celebrity culture, we have been conditioned to “know” these people we have never met, to invite them into our inner lives, to carry on an inner dialogue with them. “To a greater or lesser degree,” Schickel writes, “we have internalized them, unconsciously made them part of our consciousness.” The problem is that this kind of false intimacy creates unrealistic expectations and makes disappointment and self-loathing all but inevitable because, as Schickel writes, “Another part of the approaching stranger’s mind is, of course, aware that he is totally unknown to the celebrity. And he resents that unyielding fact. A chip grows on his shoulder. An undercurrent of anger is felt.”

Indeed, along with the sovereignty we feel we have over the lives of our celebrities and public figures, free as we are to praise and criticize them without restraint, there also exists the painful knowledge that we are alone in this relationship, that we are like stalkers who the people we’ve made a connection with neither know or care about. To some degree or another, Schickel argues, we are all victims of our celebrity culture because we are all susceptible to feeling this kind of false intimacy—and therefore inevitable disappointment—with our celebrities and public figures.

The larger danger to society, Schickel warns, is that our obsession with celebrity has given the power of personality authority over the power of ideas, ideologies, and even authentic human connections. As Schickel writes, “We have come a very long way in a very short time to our present isolation, subjectivity, and desperate hope that the cult of personality may substitute for a sense of organization, purpose, and stability in our society.”

So, where do we go from here? What happens when we seriously consider the illusion of a movie star’s personality to be a legitimate qualification for public office? What happens when public relations finally and completely replace politics? Will we as a society have finally and officially lost our minds?

Ignominious--Is this a great fucking Vocabulary word or what?

2010-10-07T17:43:00.000-07:00

ig·no·min·i·ous
adj \ˌig-nə-ˈmi-nē-əs\
Definition of IGNOMINIOUS
1
: marked with or characterized by disgrace or shame : dishonorable
2
: deserving of shame or infamy : despicable
3
: humiliating, degrading
— ig·no·min·i·ous·ly adverb
— ig·no·min·i·ous·ness noun
Examples of IGNOMINIOUS

1.
2.

Ted Hughes poem on Sylvia Plath published

2010-10-07T16:03:00.001-07:00

From Yahoo News-----
LONDON – The late British poet laureate Ted Hughes repeatedly tried to perfect a poem describing the night his wife Sylvia Plath killed herself, drafts of a work published for the first time Thursday show.

The draft poem, called "Last Letter," describes Hughes' anguish in the days leading up to Plath's death in her London home on February 11, 1963. Beginning with "What happened that night? Your final night," it ends with the moment Hughes is informed of his wife's death.

Hughes had never so directly written about Plath's suicide. The New Statesman magazine, which published the drafts Thursday, called the abandoned poem an important missing piece in Hughes' collection "Birthday Letters" — the only place readers have so far been able to find explicit references in Hughes' work to the tragedy.

The doomed romance of Hughes and Plath, both celebrated poets, continues to fascinate the literary world. Plath, an American writer, married Hughes in 1956 then struggled with depression and the difficulties of balancing her literary ambitions with domestic life. She committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning at age 30.

Hughes, who had two later marriages, went on to become poet laureate from 1984 until his death. He didn't speak out about Plath's suicide until the anthology "Birthday Letters" was published in 1998, just months before he died.

"Last Letter" described Hughes' pained reaction when a phone call broke the news of Plath's death.

"Then a voice like a selected weapon/ or a carefully measured injection/ coolly delivered its four words deep into my ear," Hughes wrote in one version of the drafts.

"Your wife is dead."

Hughes was separated but still married to Plath when she died, leaving behind their two young children.

Several drafts of the poem are held in the British Library's archives, which bought it from Hughes' third wife, Carol Hughes. The poem is believed to have been written in the early 1970s.

Carol Ann Duffy, Britain's current poet laureate, called it the "darkest poem (Hughes) has ever written."

Mike Kelley Artist

2010-10-05T09:13:00.000-07:00

This is from the artwolf.com
The writer is explaining the artwork depicted accompanying photo. Sounds incredible--I wish the detailed picture were not blurry. It is something that needs to be in detail and sharp focus. The larger picture is entitled Memory Ware Flat #29. The writer talks about a MWF#18. Maybe the artist made several of these and numbered them.
I will post more photos from this artist who I just found out about on the sublime PBS series Art 21.
On a pop-culture level, Mike Kelley's art is featured on a couple of Sonic Youth Albums. John Baldessari was a teacher of his at CalArts in Valencia.

I clearly remember my first direct contact with Mike Kelley's works. It was in an occasion which I had the opportunity to attend an exhibition about the little known and very complete collection Herbert, featuring contemporary masters such as Hans Hofmann, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman, or important sculptors as Eduardo Chillida or Sol Lewitt. There, in one of the last rooms, I suddenly faced the Memory Ware Flat #18 (2001). The spectacularity of the work was so that it surpassed every other work in the room: the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pieces of imitation jewellery, metal plates, keys, key rings, and other daily objects supposed an exciting challenge for the spectator, taking it to an impossible debate between the possibility of facing the work in its totality, or in the partial contemplation of the infinity of daily and easily recognizable objects. It was frankly peculiar that the union between cheap, out-fashioned earrings, a few plastic flowers, pins of almost every pop band of the 80s, and a funny Flubber pic could suppose a comparable to a complete set of Quianlong dishes.

log line questions

2010-10-03T12:52:00.001-07:00

This is an example from a website of dull vs. intriguing log-lines.

(I have have been reading about including the elements of Protagonist, her goal/what she wants and obstacle/antagonist. )

What is the goal of the minister's wife and what is her obstacle?

It seems missing to me.

Dull logline: A woman confronts her past when her illegitimate daughter shows up after twenty years.

Intriguing logline: A minister's wife confronts her long-buried past when her illegitimate daughter shows up after twenty years.

What is the goal of the minister's wife and what is her obstacle?

Arthur Penn Great American Director

2010-09-29T09:55:00.001-07:00

NEW YORK - Director Arthur Penn, a myth-maker and myth-breaker who in such classics as "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Little Big Man," refashioned movie and American history and sealed a generation's affinity for outsiders, died Tuesday night, a day after his 88th birthday.

Daughter Molly Penn said her father died at his home, in Manhattan, of congestive heart failure. Longtime friend and business manager Evan Bell said Wednesday that Penn had been ill for about a year. A memorial service would be held before the end of the year. Penn's older brother was photographer Irving Penn, who died in October 2009.

Penn's older brother was photographer Irving Penn, who died in October 2009.

After first making his name on Broadway as director of the Tony Award-winning plays "The Miracle Worker" and "All the Way Home," Penn rose as a film director in the 1960s, his work inspired by the decade's political and social upheaval, and Americans' interest in their past and present.

"Bonnie and Clyde," with its mix of humor and mayhem, encouraged moviegoers to sympathize with the lawbreaking couple from the 1930s, while "Little Big Man" told the tale of the conquest of the West with the Indians as the good guys.

"A society would be wise to pay attention to the people who do not belong if it wants to find out ... where it's failing," Penn once said.

Penn's other films included his adaptation of "The Miracle Worker," featuring an Oscar-winning performance by Anne Bancroft; "The Missouri Breaks," an outlaw tale starring Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson; "Night Moves," a Los Angeles thriller featuring Gene Hackman; and "Alice's Restaurant," based on the wry Arlo Guthrie song about being turned down for the draft because he had once been fined for littering.

Penn was most identified with "Bonnie and Clyde," although it wasn't a project he initiated or, at first, wanted. Beatty, who earlier starred in Penn's "Mickey One" and produced "Bonnie and Clyde," had to persuade him to take on the film, written by Robert Benton and David Newman and inspired by the movies of the French New Wave. (Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc-Godard each turned down offers to direct the film).

Penn was in his 40s when he made "Bonnie and Clyde," but his heart was very much with the gorgeous stars, played by Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and with the story, as liberal in its politics as it was with the facts — a celebration of individual freedom and an expose of the banks that had ruined farmers' lives.

Released in 1967, when opposition to the Vietnam War was ballooning and movie censorship crumbling, "Bonnie and Clyde" was shaped by the frenzy of silent comedy, the jarring rhythms of the French New Wave and the surge of youth and rebellion. The robbers' horrifying death, a shooting gallery that took four days to film and ran for less than a minute, only intensified their appeal.

"I thought that if were going to show this (violence), we should SHOW it," Penn said in the documentary "A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies."

Casey Kasem, Not So Uptempo

2010-09-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

Casey Kasem, Not So Uptempo

I can't believe I never knew about this until I viewed the Walton Ford segment on Art 21

2010-09-24T10:11:00.001-07:00

When I heard and saw Walton Ford's comment about this photo--I was intrigued and curious enough to google info. about the Passenger Pigeon and surprised that I have not been privy to the history. I agree with him that the photo is ominous with its' "underlightling" I believe he called it.

Passenger Pigeon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Passenger Pigeon or Wild Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) is an extinct bird, which existed in North America. It lived in enormous migratory flocks – sometimes containing more than two billion birds – that could stretch one mile (1.6 km) wide and 300 miles (500 km) long across the sky, sometimes taking several hours to pass.[1][2]

Some estimate that there were three billion to five billion passenger pigeons in the United States when Europeans arrived in North America.[3] Others argue that the species had not been common in the Pre-Columbian period, but their numbers grew when devastation of the American Indian population by European diseases led to reduced competition for food.[4]

The species went from being one of the most abundant birds in the world during the 19th century to extinction early in the 20th century.[5] At the time, passenger pigeons had one of the largest groups or flocks of any animal, second only to the Rocky Mountain locust.

Some reduction in numbers occurred because of habitat loss when the Europeans started settling further inland. The primary factor emerged when pigeon meat was commercialized as a cheap food for slaves and the poor in the 19th century, resulting in hunting on a massive scale. There was a slow decline in their numbers between about 1800 and 1870, followed by a catastrophic decline between 1870 and 1890.[6] Martha, thought to be the world's last passenger pigeon, died on September 1, 1914, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

In the 18th century, the passenger pigeon in Europe was known to the French as tourtre; but, in New France, the North American bird was called tourte. Tourtière, a traditional meat-pie originating from Quebec and associated with French-Canadian culture, was so-named because tourte was historically a key ingredient. Today, the dish is typically made from pork and/or veal, or beef. In modern French, the bird is known as the pigeon migrateur.

The passenger pigeon was a very social bird. It lived in colonies stretching over hundreds of square miles, practicing communal breeding with up to a hundred nests in a single tree. Pigeon migration, in flocks numbering billions, was a spectacle without parallel:
Early explorers and settlers frequently mentioned passenger pigeons in their writings. Samuel de Champlain in 1605 reported "countless numbers," Gabriel Sagard-Theodat wrote of "infinite multitudes," and Cotton Mather described a flight as being about a mile in width and taking several hours to pass overhead. Yet by the early 1900s no wild passenger pigeons could be found.
—The Smithsonian Encyclopedia[3]
There was safety in large flocks which often numbered hundreds of thousands of birds. When a flock of this huge a size established itself in an area, the number of local animal predators (such as wolves, foxes, weasels, and hawks) was so small compared to the total number of birds that little damage would be inflicted on the flock as a whole. This colonial way of life and communal breeding became very dangerous when humans began to hunt the pigeons. When the passenger pigeons were massed together, especially at a huge nesting site, it was easy for people to slaughter them in such great numbers that there were not enough birds left to successfully reproduce the species.[12] As the flocks dwindled in size with resulting breakdown of social facilitation, it was doomed to disappear.[13]

The extinction of the passenger pigeon has two major causes. The primary cause is held to be the commercial exploitation ( unregulated hunting) of pigeon meat on a massive scale.[3] But current examination also focuses on the pigeon's loss of habitat.
[edit]Hunting
Prior to colonization, Native Americans occasionally used pigeons for meat. In the early 1800s, commercial hunters began netting and shooting the birds to sell in the city markets as food, as live targets for trap shooting and even as agricultural fertilizer.
Once pigeon meat became popular, commercial hunting started on a prodigious scale. The bird painter John James Audubon described the preparations for slaughter at a known pigeon-roosting site:
"Few pigeons were then to be seen, but a great number of persons, with horses and wagons, guns and ammunition, had already established encampments on the borders. Two farmers from the vicinity of Russelsville, distant more than a hundred miles, had driven upwards of three hundred hogs to be fattened on the pigeons which were to be slaughtered. Here and there, the people employed in plucking and salting what had already been procured, were seen sitting in the midst of large piles of these birds. The dung lay several inches deep, covering the whole extent of the roosting-place."[14]
Pigeons were shipped by the boxcar-load to the Eastern cities. In New York City, in 1805, a pair of pigeons sold for two cents. Slaves and servants in 18th and 19th century America often saw no other meat. By the 1850s, it was noticed that the numbers of birds seemed to be decreasing, but still the slaughter continued, accelerating to an even greater level as more railroads and telegraphs were developed after the American Civil War.
One of the last large nestings of passenger pigeons was at Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878. Here 50,000 birds were killed each day and the hunt continued for nearly five months. When the adult birds that survived the slaughter attempted second nestings at new sites, they were located by the professional hunters and killed before they had a chance to raise any young. In 1896, the final flock of 250,000 were killed by the hunters knowing that it was the last flock of that size.

Another significant reason for its extinction was deforestation. The birds traveled and reproduced in prodigious numbers, satiating predators before any substantial negative impact was made in the bird's population. As their numbers decreased along with their habitat, the birds could no longer rely on high population density for protection. Without this mechanism, many ecologists believe, the species could not survive.
[edit]Methods of killingAlcohol-soaked grain intoxicated the birds and made them easier to kill. Smoky fires were set to nesting trees to drive them from their nests.[15]
One method of killing was to blind a single bird by sewing its eyes shut using a needle and thread. This bird's feet would be attached to a circular stool at the end of a stick that could be raised five or six feet in the air, then dropped back to the ground. As the bird attempted to land, it would flutter its wings, thus attracting the attention of other birds flying overhead. When the flock landed near this decoy bird, nets would trap the birds and the hunters would crush their heads between their thumb and forefinger. This has been claimed as the origin of the term stool pigeon,[16] though this etymology is disputed.[17]

Attempts at preservation

Conservationists were ineffective in stopping the slaughter. A bill was passed in the Michigan legislature making it illegal to net pigeons within two miles of a nesting area, but the law was weakly enforced. By the mid 1890s, the passenger pigeon had almost completely disappeared. In 1897, a bill was introduced in the Michigan legislature asking for a ten-year closed season on passenger pigeons. This was a futile gesture. This was a highly gregarious species—the flock could initiate courtship and reproduction only when they were gathered in large numbers; it was realized only too late that smaller groups of passenger pigeons could not breed successfully, and the surviving numbers proved too few to re-establish the species.[3] Attempts at breeding among the captive population also failed for the same reasons.
Attempts to revive the species by breeding the surviving captive birds were not successful. The passenger pigeon was a colonial and gregarious bird practicing communal roosting and communal breeding and needed large numbers for optimum breeding conditions. It was impossible to reestablish the species with just a few captive birds, and the small captive flocks weakened and died. Since no accurate data were recorded, it is only possible to give estimates on the size and population of these nesting areas. Each site may have covered many thousands of acres and the birds were so congested in these areas that hundreds of nests could be counted in each tree. One large nesting area in Wisconsin was reported as covering 850 square miles, and the number of birds nesting there was estimated to be around 136,000,000. Their technique of survival had been based on mass tactics.

The extinction of the passenger pigeon aroused public interest in the conservation movement and resulted in new laws and practices which have prevented many other species from going extinct.[citation needed]

Walter Ford Art: 21

2010-09-24T09:57:00.000-07:00

I love his twisted take on Audubon and nature painters. From Wikipedia:

Walton Ford (born 1960) is an American artist who paints large scale watercolors in the style of Audubon's naturalist illustrations. Each painting is a meticulous study in flora and fauna, while being filled with symbols, clues and jokes referencing a multitude of texts from colonial literature and folktales to travel guides. Ford's paintings are complex narratives that critique the history of colonialism, industrialism, politics, natural science, and man's effect on the environment.

Walton Ford appropriates the crisp, descriptive style of 19th-century naturalists and artists—John James Audubon, Karl Bodmer, George Catlin—but he puts their conventions to work in an investigation of natural history itself.

Repurposing a field-guide aesthetic, Ford composes dense allegories that make sometimes pointed, sometimes sidelong allusions to everything from conservationism and consumption to war, politics and imperialism.

While staying uncannily faithful to the natural history mode, Ford paints on a much larger scale, producing outsize watercolors with epic compositions. He renders his scenes with operatic drama, capturing moments when the natural order changes, such as the last member of a species struggling just before extinction.”[1]

Walton Ford is the recipient of several national awards and honors including a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and is one of the artists profiled on the PBS series Art:21. He had his first major one-man show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2006 and is currently represented by the Paul Kasmin Gallery in Manhattan.

After living in New York City for more than 10 years, Ford moved his family and studio to Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

More Zac in London

2010-09-21T18:53:00.000-07:00

DO NOT make fun of the beard!

English Language Word of the Week: Supercilious

2010-09-21T18:49:00.001-07:00

Definition of SUPERCILIOUS
: coolly and patronizingly haughty
— su·per·cil·ious·ly adverb
— su·per·cil·ious·ness noun

Zac Efron looking good at London Premiere

2010-09-17T14:03:00.000-07:00

Lainey recounted a dream that had Zac Efron in it and her smoking weed. OK who cares? I am posting the part she wrote about Zac, and reacting to his new facial hair.

"Had the most random, random dream last night. We were at a party. I was hanging out with Zac Efron, who seems to have replaced his LipGloss with a big boy beard, or at least an attempt at one. Looks ridiculous. Patches of facial hair are not going to land him the kind of roles that are going to Ryan Gosling. Boy, please."

Now what does that mean? And what does this mean?:

"This is Zac in London tonight at the premiere of Charlie St Cloud. Again, not sure who he thinks he’s fooling with this growth."

Fooling with this growth--meaning that HE's GAy??! Sounds like it. or that he can't act? or both? sounds like all three possibly.
I don't care if he is gay--- but I do believe Mr. Efron has potential to win some Ryan Gosling roles. And Lainey obviously doesn't. I think his intent is to do his career the Gosling way.-- he needs good advice and people around him who have his best interests at heart.
So I am sticking up for Zac and his future beyond teen heartthrob--dom the same way I do R. Patz and NOT because I myself am a lovestruck teen. You say anything good about those two and you get immediately accused of what I said. Well I ain't!

Accompanying picture also from Lainey's column.

LA Art History

2010-09-16T20:00:00.001-07:00

After informally studying NYC AbEx and Pop Art for so many years I knew nothing about LA artists of the same era until just the last few months.
Around the same time I saw a documentary "The Cool School." and bought a book for $5 at Borders, Catalog LA: Birth of an Art Capital 1955-1985. I learned about artists such as Robert Irwin, Wally Berman, Ed Keinholz, Bill Al Bengston, John Baldessari and others. Then I found myself at MOCA and LACMA this summer viewing these artists' works in person. That was great!
I hope that MOCA is able to promote/publicize this incredibly rich artistic legacy of LA artists of the recent past. It seems to be not as well known as I think it should!”

I am a firm believer in "earned talent"--the kind you acquire the hard way, through trial and error. My paintings reveal not only a timeline of my life, marking events, but a journey of continual change infused with self-examination and reflection----Robert Irwin

The King's Speech with Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush

2010-09-10T14:04:00.000-07:00

My brother-in-law just returned from Telluride Film Festiva and he raved on and on and on about The King's Speech film just like Lainey Gossip does in this article. What Lainey fails to mention here, is that Geoffrey Rush costars in the film with the sublime Colin Firth.

He celebrated last night at an exclusive private party at Soho House, an intimate, elegant affair, and, as always, was beautiful and charming, as was his wife, and together, well, it’s too much beauty and charm, and then they brought him his birthday cake, adorned with 9 candles, and she beamed at him from across the table, and he beamed back, and they giggled over a portrait that was presented to him when he had really shaggy, long 70s hair, and he delivered an impromptu address, self deprecatingly of course, about how much he values his friends, and how he hopes to keep his hair, and not become increasingly jowly, and she threw her head back and laughed at everything he said, and afterward they embraced and once in a while, not often, but once in a while, you get to see an actual movie star, a celebrity in every sense of the word, who is actually a human being too. This is Colin Firth. He’s perfect.

And he knows how to have a good time. On junket yesterday, interview after interview, he was funny and light and present and sweet. Like a normal person after a long day at work, Colin needs to kick back too.
Please. It’s pure James Bond: a dry Grey Goose martini for him, it’s his favourite, while everyone else, myself included, was cleaning out the supply of the “Torontonian” – they theme 3 drinks at every festival, and this one is Grey Goose with Canadian ginger beer, cucumber, mint, and some other magic, and yeah that British crowd can pound it down.

Tonight is The King’s Speech gala. And the crowd will lose their sh-t. Sarah from Cinesnark noted during our liveblog the other day that while Never Let Me Go is dominating the spotlight, it would be the little guy The King’s Speech that will truly run away with it. She’s right but The King’s Speech is very much no longer a little guy. It has everything Oscar wants without that offbeat weirdness that could turn some Academy voters off on Black Swan. All of Harvey Weinstein is behind this. And if it’s one thing about Harvey, when he believes in a film, he’ll work for it like it’s his only mission in life.

The King’s Speech will be released in November. You must go. I promise you, you will love it so much. Here’s Colin walking around, no fuss, with his assistant yesterday. For more Colin Firth, check my Twitter later on this afternoon.

Lady Gaga Not First with a Meat Swimsuit

2010-09-07T17:03:00.001-07:00

Ann Simonton has been arrested and jailed 11 times for committing acts of non-violent civil disobedience. In the 1980s, she and Nikki Craft led the "Myth California" protests, a series of counter-pageants which disrupted the Miss California pageant in Santa Cruz, California and San Diego, California, protesting "the objectification of women and the glorification of the beauty myth."[2] The protests garnered international attention, and were partially responsible for the Miss California pageant eventually relocating from Santa Cruz.---from Wikipeida

Lady Gaga on the cover of Vogue Hommes Japan.
Ann Simonton being arrested at a beauty pageant.

Beautiful flowers around Venice CA

2010-09-07T11:04:00.000-07:00

Kristen Stewart

2010-09-05T15:55:00.001-07:00

Kristen Stewart
Originally uploaded by sarahmonline

Has anyone scene this lovely photo of Kristen Stewart taken March of 09?

Precise article about Lindsey Lohan's prediciment courtesy of Lainey Gossip

2010-09-01T06:07:00.000-07:00

She covers the new issue of Vanity Fair in an interview that took place BEFORE she went to jail and rehab. And apparently at one point she goes to adjust her ponytail and one of the extensions comes out. All while Lilo is trying to convince the journalist that she’s not an addict, that she doesn’t abuse alcohol, that she doesn’t pop pills, and that she’s serious about getting back to work and acting again. Remember, this went down prior to her spending a couple of weeks in prison which preceded her spending another couple of weeks in treatment.

So are you ready for the lies?

"If I were the alcoholic everyone says I am, then putting a [scram] bracelet on would have ended me up in detox, in the emergency room, because I would have had to come down from all the things that people say I'm taking and my father says I'm taking — so that says something, because I was fine. I've never abused prescription drugs. I never have — never in my life. I have no desire to. That's not who I am. I've admitted to the things that I've done — to, you know, dabbling in certain things and trying things 'cause I was young and curious and thought it was like, O.K., 'cause other people were doing it and other people put it in front of me. And I see what happened in my life because of it."

Boring, right?

And totally overplayed.

It’s the same sh-t she said two years ago, it’s the same sh-t she says every day until they find her passed out in a car somewhere after a 72 hour bender. And to the magazine’s credit, Vanity Fair did point this out to her, that she claimed to have changed in 2008 with this statement (and every week since then) only to get busted for dumb sh-t over and over again.

No surprise, Lindsay Lohan once again insists that she’s transformed. That she works hard. That she works so hard she defies court ordered appearances and counselling sessions:

"I have to support myself. I have to pay for my apartment. I have to pay for food. People root for me and say they want me to work, but then everyone's against me."

Really? Because this is Lindsay yesterday shopping and spending, a smug bitch expression on her face, clearly hoarding away all that money so she won’t go homeless. And this is Lindsay the night before, with a friend at the Chateau Marmont, because, what, she’s allowed to go out, you know, she’s allowed to relax, she’s allowed to haunt the places that have always tempted her, that have always troubled her, without judgement, without everyone believing she’s f-cked. After all, it was at the Chateau where Lilo acknowledges herself, during the interview, that she lost her way:

"I didn't have any structure. In the beginning, I had structure, and then I lost all the structure in my life. I think a lot of it was because when I was doing my first slew of movies, it was very go-go, and I had a lot of responsibility, and I think just the second I didn't have [structure] anymore -- I was 18, 19 -- with a ton of money and no one really here to tell me that I couldn't do certain things … And I see where that's gotten me now, and I don't like it."

Well it’s hard to disagree with her there. Because it’s all true. Except for the 18 or 19 part. She was in fact much younger. Like 16 or 17 when Dina let her go off to live at the Chateau, to mess around without supervision and/or, as Lilo says, Structure, which is actually one of the 5 principles that form the basis for the Continuum of Care at Covenant House – wayward young celebrities and street kids all lack structure, and are therefore governed by instability, which only exacerbates anxiety and confusion.

Dina Lohan refuses to accept responsibility for allowing her daughter to live in free fall. Ultimately however, it’s Lindsay who cannot actually fully own those words. This truly is a person who regurgitates what sounds good, without actually knowing what that sh-t means.

But that doesn’t matter as long as people are buying it.

Is anyone buying it?

Maybe in a few months but definitely not yet.

She still has to submit to drug testing. She still has to attend alcohol education classes. She is still in outpatient treatment for addiction at UCLA. She is still making terrible decisions. And as noted in Vanity Fair from a publicist who has watched all this go down:

"She's Hollywood kryptonite right now. No one wants their name mentioned in the same breath as hers."

Because it’s not only that she has to convince people, and get her sh-t right enough to stay focused on a film set, it’s also that there are SO MANY other options now, what does Lindsay Lohan have to offer that Emma Stone can’t? When would you ever make that choice? She can blame it on perception and play the victim card all she wants, but ultimately, Hollywood is small, and Hollywood replaces, and even if Lilo gets clean, even if she straightens out, even if she gets back on track forever, there’s a reason why the most common nightmare in Hollywood is called Too Late and Closed Doors. If ever there was a consequence in show business, this one would be the one they fear the most.

Dino Martens renowned Italian Glass Artist

2010-08-31T19:16:00.000-07:00

I am now very interested in the work of Dino Martens from Italy. I saw several pieces of his at the Modernism Show in Denver. I saw an example of the ribbon "candy dishes" you see in the photo above.
Any more info. is greatly appreciated

I purchased the Charcoal decanter on the left. More Blenko History.

2010-08-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

After World War II, Winslow Anderson took the company’s design reigns. He introduced indented vases of various sizes and colors, bent-neck cruets, and slender, flat-bottom decanters with teardrop stoppers. Anderson laid the groundwork for one of Blenko’s most influential designers, Wayne Husted, who was with the company from 1953 until 1963. During that decade, Husted pushed both forms and color to bring Blenko into step with the prevailing Mid-century Modern aesthetic.

Of particular interest are Husted’s wedge-cut decanters, portrait vases, the Echoes series from the late 1950s, and the Spool decanters, which recall Brancusi’s "Endless Column." In fact, decanters and vertical pieces became something of a Blenko trademark during this period—some pieces stood three feet tall.

In the mid-to-late 1960s, Joel Philip Myers, who is now a well-known artist in his own right, designed for Blenko, injecting the company’s sensibility with humor and whimsy. Especially charming are some of the clear decanters with green or turquoise spouts and stoppers, the lovely coiled and mushroom pieces, and the decanters with cowboy hats and longhorn skulls for stoppers.

One of the tricks about collecting Blenko is to know how to identify the company’s marks since most of its pieces are not signed. The exceptions to this rule are the engraved signatures on the bottoms of pieces in 1958, the sandblasted Wayne Husted-designed logo used between 1958 and 1961, and the pieces signed "Blenko Joel Philip Myers," which grace the bottoms of products made for Gump’s in 1964.

Instead, the company practice has been to affix a foil, hand-shaped label to its pieces with the words "BLENKO HANDCRAFT" on it—paper was substituted during World War II. This label was used from the 1930s through 1982. A different paper label of a stylized Blenko glassblower was glued to the Raindrop, Regal, and Rialto Specialty Lines in 1960 and 1961.

A bit of history: Blenko Art Glass

2010-08-30T19:11:00.000-07:00

When William J. Blenko came to the United States from England in 1893, his vision was to produce and sell American-made "antique" (mouth-blown) flat glass instead of having it imported from Europe. After a few failed ventures, he started The Eureka Glass Company in 1921 and produced stained glass from its Milton, West Virginia glassmaking facility until the Depression. Struggling to stay afloat, Blenko switched his product line to glass tableware, and in 1930, Eureka became Blenko.

Blenko’s first designers were Axel Mueller and Louie Miller, a pair of Swedish glass-blowing brothers who had the background in stemware that Blenko and his son, who joined his father in 1923, lacked. Blenko’s output from the pre-war years is characteristically clean and spare. Its footed goblets and tumblers were uniform in color and simply proportioned. Even the stems were straightforward, though elegant in a casual, distinctly American sort of way.

As the 1930s progressed, the brothers got a bit fancier, applying, say, a colored glass leaf onto the outside of a clear iced-tea glass, or wrapping dusty-green highball glasses with threads of vivid red. These objects, as well as Blenko’s candleholders, rolled-rim plates, and crackle-body decanters, caught the eye of the folks running Colonial Williamsburg. In 1933, Blenko became the exclusive manufacturer of table and stemware for the historic site.

Emmy Awards 2010 Ricky Gervais.

2010-08-30T10:38:00.000-07:00

What was the best thing about the 2010 Emmy Awards.
Well Fucking Ricky Gervais of course.
Sorry the links don't work for me on blogspot.

His timing of the Mel Gibson line was SO perfect as was the deliverey. As was his intro.

I love how he waltzes out and calls the Hollywood culture on itself with out mean-spirited-ness but still wicked.
And I love how he called out on himself with his joke about how bloody rich he is now--- with The Office in syndication.

http://tv.popcrunch.com/watch-ricky-gervais-emmy-awards-2010-presentation-video/comment-page-1/#comment-25953

Blenko Art Glass

2010-08-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be posting about some of the artists I learned about yesterday at the Denver Modernism show. I collect knowledge and facts about different types of artists. Several of the artists I learned about yesterday were glass artists. I am dashing a quick post right now accompanied by some photos of Blenko, an American art glass company.

The fish I think is their famous crinkled glass technique. I purchased a Charcoal decanter yesterday at a booth. I will post pics of that soon.

More stress for Leonardo Di Caprio from wacko "fans"

2010-08-27T12:53:00.000-07:00

By ANTHONY McCARTNEY, AP Entertainment Writer Anthony Mccartney, Ap Entertainment Writer – 1 hr 21 mins ago

LOS ANGELES – Leonardo DiCaprio has been granted a temporary restraining against a woman he said claims to be his wife and carrying his baby.

Court records show Superior Court Judge Carol Boas Goodson granted the order Wednesday against Livia Bistriceanu, 41, of Chicago.

"Given this obsessive and harassing behavior, I am frightened of Ms. Bistriceanu and feel that my personal safety, and the personal safety of those around me, is in jeopardy," DiCaprio wrote in a sworn declaration.

An e-mail message sent Friday to Bistriceanu seeking comment was not immediately returned.

DiCaprio's request included statements from the actor and his security team claiming Bistriceanu had traveled from Chicago to Los Angeles at least twice to try to meet DiCaprio at his home and business office. She refused to leave the properties and acted aggressively, the court filings state.

The Academy Award-nominated actor wrote that she "has evidenced a willingness to make physical contact with me regardless of the consequences."

Bistriceanu has been placed on a psychological hold twice, according to the documents.

DiCaprio said he has never met Bistriceanu, but she has sent him numerous handwritten letters. Some were attached to his request for the restraining order and reviewed by the judge.

One letter included the greeting, "Dear husband Leo," and contained statements that Bistriceanu believed DiCaprio was the father of baby Jesus.

On Thursday, another woman was ordered to stand trial on a charge of slashing DiCaprio's face with a piece of glass during a party in 2005.

Aretha Wilson pleaded not guilty to assault with a deadly weapon after being returned to Los Angeles from her native Canada.

DiCaprio suffered injuries to his face and neck.

WTF was this woman doing at a party with Leo Di Caprio?

2010-08-26T19:18:00.000-07:00

LOS ANGELES – A judge ordered a woman to stand trial on a charge of slashing Leonardo DiCaprio's face with glass during a 2005 party.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Edmund Willcox Clarke ordered Aretha Wilson to face one count of assault with a deadly weapon. The charge includes an allegation that Wilson, 40, caused great bodily injury.

The details and extent of Caprio's injuries were not made public, although the judge, who has reviewed photos of the injuries to the actor's ear and neck, said Thursday that "this would not be an injury that would be called trivial or moderate, in my view."

Those photos also were not made public. DiCaprio did not attend the hearing.

Wilson was returned to Los Angeles in the five-year-old case after waiving extradition from Canada.

She has pleaded not guilty and remains jailed in lieu of $150,000 bail.

Wilson's attorney Freddy Sayegh said the ruling was not unexpected and that Wilson has vehemently professed her innocence. He said he expected to trial to begin within 60 days.

She is due back in court on Sept. 9.

Authorities have said Wilson attacked DiCaprio with a broken beer bottle, but a witness called Thursday said it was a wine glass. The criminal complaint identifies the object only as glass.

If convicted, Wilson faces up to seven years in state prison.

End of article---
I read in a different article that this took place at Rick Salomon's house--who is some LA character best known for being Paris Hilton's sex partner in that infamous video. I just can't figure out why this person was even at that party. And what went down?!

Well the analysis has started-Jennifer Anniston-See yesterday's post.

2010-08-24T11:05:00.000-07:00

The Aniston Box-Office A-Bomb Goes Off Again
Wonderwall, August 23, 2010
Related: News, WW Features, Jennifer Aniston

By Michelle Lanz

There are a billion theories floating around about why Jennifer Aniston -- big-time movie star and tabloid appointed A-list celebrity -- bombed at the box office last weekend with her latest film "The Switch." Like so many of her former suitors, have we as a collective movie-going nation fallen out of love with Jen? Is it because she used an insensitive word in a recent interview? Perhaps she has simply worn out her welcome as the perpetually single "Friend."

RELATED VIDEO: See Jen Aniston and Jason Bateman Talk 'The Switch'

For ESPN's Bill Simmons, Aniston's continued existence in Hollywood, despite rarely delivering the box office bucks, has to do with the creation and success of what has become the Brangelina empire. "She became America's adorable little victim for seven years until Bullock finally pushed her aside," he says. "Maybe it was the worst thing that ever happened to her personally, but professionally? Godsend." Simmons has a point. Despite "The Switch" opening at No. 8, Aniston still has multiple projects in development, including something called "The Divorce Party." So she's good at playing the

jilted girl-next-door, but how much longer can that last?

A film critic argues in the New York Post that Aniston can only play the same role for so long, and that her continued box office failure is in correlation with her age. The critic (who wants to stay anonymous probably to not risk being banned by her publicist!) is quoted as saying: "Aniston just can't play the good friend anymore. She's aged out, no matter the yoga and the highlights. She just can't do America's sweetheart next door. She needs a big wake-up call." Ouch.

RELATED: Check out pics of Jen's style throughout the years

Then there are those on the extreme end who seem to have made it their mission of the week to ensure that Jennifer Aniston's career and "The Switch" go the way of the buffalo. Conservative talk show blabbermouth Bill O'Reilly espoused on air that Aniston and her beliefs in single motherhood are straight up "destructive" to our society. Though we agree with Salon that everything that spews out of O'Reilly's mouth comes covered in a layer of crazy, you can't deny that the guy has a rabid following. Many of his rabid followers probably go to the movies, and they also probably let some talking head on TV dictate their weekend cinema-viewing plans.

RELATED: See more pics of Jennifer Aniston

So, what we can learn from Aniston's continual slide at the box office? Probably that we're all really sick of the sympathy game. It's been seven years since the Brangelina debacle, and this wave she's been riding is beginning to ebb into oblivion. Jen has established herself as the childless, perpetually single middle-aged woman we all feel sorry for, thus ensuring that her face will turn up on magazine covers and that she'll stay bankable enough until the next rom-com comes calling. But, think back to Jennifer Aniston, circa 2000, as Rachel Green on "Friends" and Ron Livingston's spunky love interest in "Office Space." She was likable and wasn't yet marked with the stigma of being the woman Brad Pitt left for Angelina Jolie. (And I was actually

interested to see what she'd do next.)

Here's a tip, Jen: Stop playing the same, worn-out, sad sack character. America is totally bored with that act. Be a stripper, a prostitute, or better yet, a mentally challenged person. You might even get nominated for an Oscar instead of playing the mortified presenter.

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Jennifer Anniston

2010-08-23T12:20:00.000-07:00

Jen Anniston's movie tanked but her publicist's worked it by having the headline be about her guest role on Friend Courtney's show Cougartown. she will find more fulfilling work on Television as she did before and as all the women are saying the best roles are: Virginia Madsen., Nora Ephron (from Vanity Fair funny women issue) What does it mean that The Switched tanked so very badly. Does it mean she can't "open" a film? IF Julia Roberts opens Eat, Pray Love with a smash how will JA feel inside. Will she tell anyone if she feels worth-less in comparison? Is a person perceived as "worth-less as a human soul if they tank and film in such a public way.j Or an analogous humiliating situation?
I do knopw that Jen Anniston will continue to be at the heart of the tabloid drama wars, nearly nude magazine covers, coorporate sponsorship of products, appearances on talk shows with witty reparte and banter. But will this translate into more big Rom com "failure" parts of the last few years: The Break-Up, The Switch, Rumor has it now that Jen is 40? I wonder? Films that she was supposed to "open" in the Julia Roberts way. Not like Me and Marley with Owen Wilson.
But Holy Cow! She has no-less than 10 films in pre-production--checked it out on imdb So it really doesn't matter if she is that booked! OK but still, what affect if any does it have on films to sign on for, to get the green light with her name scheduled for 2013 and 2014?

Courtney Love considering selling Nirvana rights--Wonder what is going on with this currently

2010-08-23T08:22:00.000-07:00

Love offered $162 million for Nirvana rights
May 25, 2010, 12:10 PM EST

WENN -- Courtney Love has been offered a staggering $162 million for her majority stake in Nirvana's back catalogue.

Love inherited Nirvana's publishing rights when her husband and Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994.

Love, the singer of Hole, sold off 25 percent of the End of Music catalogue in 2006, pocketing $50 million. But she recently admitted she was considering offloading her remaining 75 percent share after becoming convinced the royalty payments she receives are "cursed."

She insisted the decision was motivated by emotions, not financial gain, because she simply wants to move on from the Cobain tragedy.

She said, "I'm thinking about selling off all of Kurt's publishing. All of the rights, everything. It's not a financial decision; it's an emotional one.

"He was the best friend I've ever had, but Kurt and I were only married for three years, and now I need to have my own life. I'm always 'the widow' and that drives me nuts. That money has been cursed since the day it started to come in. It's not really my money."

Executives at Evergreen Capital are keen to relieve Love of her worries and have stepped up with the big money offer, reports the New York Daily News.

A source says, "Courtney thinks the catalogue comes with too many memories. It's haunted."

Love has yet to respond to the offer.

Photo by me--what is it?

2010-08-21T14:11:00.000-07:00

He's Hot, He's Sexy, He's Dead.

2010-08-20T18:12:00.000-07:00

Remember that headline from the cover of Rolling Stone circa 1982? Writing about how many "units" The Doors were still selling --whatever the hell units are, some music industry configuration. Likely an outdated term in the music industry of today. Stephen Davis uses the term quite liberally in his bio. of Morrison which was published in 2004.
The Doors music was still selling like crazy in 1982 and undoubtedly is selling quite well on i-tunes these days. Something to look up.
People Are Strange--a great documentary recently released, narrated by Johnny Depp and shown on the vastly unappreciated PBS

Jeff Koons Balloon Dog taken by me at LACMA where I had and attempted car break-in

2010-08-20T17:56:00.000-07:00

This was messed in in my other entry.

Herbert Bayer

2010-08-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

Going to add some of Herbert Bayer's type face. And post his entry from Wikipedia. someone came in to the DAM yesterday and actually asked to see his work. Shock.

Herbert Bayer (1900 – 1985), Austrian graphic designer, painter, photographer, sculptor, Art Director, environmental & interior designer and Architect, was widely recognized as the last living member of the Bauhaus and was instrumental in the development of the Atlantic Richfield Company's corporate art collection until his death in 1985.
Bayer apprenticed under the artist Georg Schmidthammer in Linz. Leaving the workshop to study at the Darmstadt Artists' Colony, he became interested in Walter Gropius's Bauhaus manifesto. After Bayer had studied for four years at the Bauhaus under such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy, Gropius appointed Bayer director of printing and advertising.
In the spirit of reductive minimalism, Bayer developed a crisp visual style and adopted use of all-lowercase, sans serif typefaces for most Bauhaus publications. Bayer is one of several typographers of the period including Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold who experimented with the creation of a simplified more phonetic-based alphabet. Bayer designed the 1925 geometric sans-serif typeface called universal,[1] now issued in digital form as Bayer Universal.[2] The design also inspired ITC Bauhaus and Architype Bayer, which bears comparison with the stylistically related typeface Architype Schwitters.
In 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus to become art director of Vogue magazine's Berlin office. He remained in Germany far later than most other progressives. In 1936 he designed a brochure for the Deutschland Ausstellung, an exhibition for tourists in Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games - the brochure celebrated life in the Third Reich, and the authority of Hitler. However, in 1937, works of Bayer's were included in the Nazi propaganda exhibition "Degenerate Art", upon which he left Germany in 1938 to settle in New York City where he had a long and distinguished career in nearly every aspect of the graphic arts. In 1944 Bayer married Joella Syrara Haweis, the daughter of poet Mina Loy.
In 1946 the Bayers relocated. Hired by industrialist and visionary Walter Paepcke, Bayer moved to Aspen, Colorado as Paepcke promoted skiing as a popular sport. Bayer's architectural work in the town included co-designing the Aspen Institute and restoring the Wheeler Opera House, but his production of promotional posters identified skiing with wit, excitement, and glamour.
In 1959, he designed his "fonetik alfabet", a phonetic alphabet, for English. It was sans-serif and without capital letters. He had special symbols for the endings -ed, -ory, -ing, and -ion, as well as the digraphs "ch", "sh", and "ng". An underline indicated the doubling of a consonant in traditional orthography.
While living in Aspen, Bayer had a chance meeting with the eccentric oilman, outdoorsman and (to those who knew him) visionary ecologist, Robert O. Anderson. When Anderson saw the ultra-modern, Bauhaus-inspired home that Bayer had designed & built in Aspen, he walked up to the front door and introduced himself. It was the beginning of a life-long friendship between the two men and instigated Anderson's insatiable passion for compulsively collecting contemporary art.
With Anderson's eventual formation of the Atlantic Richfield Company, and as his personal art collection quickly overflowed out of his New Mexico ranch and other homes, ARCO soon held the unique distinction of possessing the world's largest corporate Art Collection, under the critical eye and sharp direction of Bayer as Arco's Design Consultant.
Overseeing acquisitions from within Arco Plaza, the newly-built twin 51 story office towers in Los Angeles, Bayer was also responsible for the Arco logo and designing all corporate "branding" related to the company. Prior to the completion of Arco Plaza, Anderson commissioned Bayer to design a monumental sculpture-fountain to be installed between the dark green granite towers. Double Ascension still stands between the twin skyscrapers to this day.
Under Bayer's and Corporate Art Curator Leila Mehle's direction & supervision, Arco's Collection grew to nearly 30,000 Artworks nationwide. Arco's collection was quite eclectic, and consisted of an extremely wide range of media & styles; ranging from large resin sculptures by Dewain Valentine to original signed photographs by Ansel Adams. The vast majority of the collection consisted of original "signed" prints & "artist's proofs" of hand-pulled prints. Major works were reserved for lobbies, reception areas and executive & upper management offices.
Bayer and Ms. Mehle instigated a unique program for the collection in that large paintings and sculptures were often "circulated" within the company and transported from one Arco building to another, often making the journey from LA to New York and back again.
With the purchase of Anaconda Copper, Arco built an office tower in downtown Denver, and again, Anderson commissioned Bayer to oversee Anaconda's Art Collection for the new company. Eventually, Bayer gave the Denver Art Museum a collection of around 8,000 of his works. Author's note: I must ask about this--are they in storage at the DAM or is this even accurate?
Bayer's works appear in prominent public and private collections including the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

John Baldessari, Jeff Koons, LACMA

2010-08-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

I saw this great show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The Lamp Posts are in front of the LACMA.

The Jeff Koon's blue balloon Dog was there also.

Skinner House, Wm. Kesling, Designer 1936

2010-08-10T22:26:00.001-07:00

Skinner House, Wm. Kesling, Designer 1936
Originally uploaded by Michael Locke

This beauty is located in the Silver Lake area Los Angeles. The area I got lost in when I was searching for the walking tour. The HUGE Disney Building HQ is in that area as I discovered.

Henry Darger, Second documentary I have seen by Jessica Yu: In the Realm of the Unreal

2010-08-05T21:32:00.000-07:00

Henry Darger is the lastest in my collection of cult figures. What is that you ask? Too hard to explain and not necessary to know.
Henry Darger lived an almost completely anonymous life. After his death, his landlord found a vast collection of his stories and paintings in his apartment.

See the Film In the Realm of the Unreal directed by Jessica Yu. Darger has exhibitions in museums and and coffee table books about him. Warhol would have loved his art. Esp. The way he took drawing lessons and copied from advertising and popular illustration of the day. The Coppertone Girl. Yes, Warhol would have loved that.

Frantisek Drtikol, Photography History

2010-07-27T14:18:00.000-07:00

There was a Czech photographer named Frantisek Drtikol . He lived 1883-1961.

Here is a sample of his elegant exquisite work. I love the form and shadows.

I will also include the brief wikipedia entry.

I have recently added the History of Photography to my cultural obsession.

I learned of Drtikol from seeing two photos at the DAM's collection. I may have seen him in LA too.

He is one of the latest I have learned about in my studies. Along with Francesca Woodman, Julia Margaret Cameron, Barbara Kruger.

Gerry Winograd. Saw those same prints in LA well you can't do that with a painting.

So that is a question for Eric Paddock. haha

How does that affect the value. But it is also giving the piece prestige, I would imagine, because it is like the curators are saying "this is an important piece of photographic arts."
Same with the Diane Arbu twins photo, is at the DAM and LA.

From 1907 to 1910 he had his own studio, until 1935 he operated an important portrait photostudio in Prague on the fourth floor of one of Prague's remarkable buildings, a Baroque corner house at 9 Vodičkova, now demolished. Drtikol made many portraits of very important people and nudes which show development from pictorialism and symbolism to modern composite pictures of the nude body with geometric decorations and thrown shadows, where it is possible to find a number of parallels with the avant-garde works of the period. These are reminiscent of Cubism, and at the same time his nudes suggest the kind of movement that was characteristic of the futurism aesthetic.
He began using paper cut-outs in a period he called "photopurism". These photographs resembled silhouettes of the human form. Later he gave up photography and concentrated on painting. After the studio was sold Drtikol focused mainly on painting, Buddhist religious and philosophical systems. In the final stage of his photographic work Drtikol created compositions of little carved figures, with elongated shapes, symbolically expressing various themes from Buddhism. In the 1920s and 1930s, he received significant awards at international photo salons. Drtikol has published:
"Le nus de Drtikol" (1929)
Žena ve světle (Woman in the Light)

Some his photos look very Art Deco to me. Wikipedia doesn't mention that.

Serendipity? Unseen Franz Kafka Writings Inch closer to the Light

2010-07-26T20:00:00.000-07:00

I have it in me to be sublime talk show host, and interviewer. A really good intellectual, funny, campy, don't give a fuck, cuts to the chase, doesn't mince words, cuts through the bullshit in a George Carlin way Joyce Behar type talk show host.

I hadn't of thought of Franz Kafka in years, (Kafka esquese is now an entry word in the dictionary. So anyway, somehow I thought of Barbara Kruger used a quote twice in the new coffee table book about her, that quote is seen twice, one of the time an artwork on the side of a bus. so the quote "The point of life is that it stops," is in that genre of being a selection of words that cuts through the bullshit, is precise, exact,True with a capital T. The phrase made an impact, an impression on me as being showing the ability to sum of with a few words a profuned multi-layered Truth. How you say?

So this is why I began to think of Kafka, googled him, bought The Trial two days ago

Just getting into a pop-culture, slightly deeper than surface knowledge/ web search education about Kafka. ( It is proving hard to read his book The Trial. Not quite as ploddingly through as Pride and Prejudice but I have this mental laziness with all classic literature)

Tues. night I first googled him I read a story of some missing correspondence letters written by Kafka and left after his death at age 40, into in the hands of his last lover. I got the impression the location of the letters was uncertain.

About ten minutes after reading that website, I went back to the search page and noticed a NYT story released 5 hours ago that very afternoon. Guess what the topic of that story was?
The missing correspondence was in safety deposit boxes about to be released to the public after legal battles. Now what are the chances of that? But my life is filled with things like that when I get into one of my "historical" characters, cult figure tangents.

OK, simple, strange, odd things amuse and fascinate me.....

Story below.

Unseen Franz Kafka Writings Inch a Bit Closer to the Light
By PATRICIA COHEN; Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: July 22, 2010
F

A list of manuscripts, letters and journals written by Franz Kafka, below, that languished in safe-deposit boxes in Tel Aviv and Zurich for decades will soon be released, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. The documents have been the subject of a legal battle between the National Library in Israel and Eva Hoffe, who inherited the documents. Ms. Hoffe’s mother, Esther, was the secretary to Max Brod, a close friend of Kafka who served as executor of his estate after he died in 1924. Although Kafka requested that all his personal papers be burned, Brod, who immigrated to Israel in 1939, never complied. The District Family Court judge in Tel Aviv who heard the case ordered attorneys to prepare a detailed list of the contents of four boxes that had been stored in a Zurich bank and opened on Monday. Haaretz reported that a handwritten short story by Kafka, never before seen, is among the papers. Several more safe-deposit boxes with Kafka’s documents are also expected to be opened by the Tel Aviv court. The library contends that the Kafka papers are “cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people,” David Bloomberg, chairman of the National Library, said.

Dennis Hopper's estate for sale.

2010-07-25T10:19:00.000-07:00

Dennis Hopper's compound for sale
The actor's art collection isn't included, but the $6.24 million estate in Venice, Calif., offers plenty of room for your own exhibit.
Posted by Mai Ling at MSN Real Estate on Friday, July 23, 2010 8:46 AM
The late Dennis Hopper may be best known for some of his unique acting roles, such as in "Blue Velvet," "Apocalypse Now" and "Easy Rider."

But Hopper also was an artist and photographer, as well as an art collector who displayed works from such masters as Andy Warhol at his estate in Venice, Calif.

On May 29, Hopper died in that same home after a years-long battle with prostate cancer. And now everything is on display, starting with an exhibit of Hopper's own work at the Los Angeles MOCA. In addition, his estate is up for grabs for $6.24 million, and Reuters reports that his art collection is set to hit the auction block at Christie's this fall.

I was just in Venice and had no idea that is where he lived. I wonder which house it is--I must have seen them all!

Just because

2010-07-18T19:29:00.001-07:00

I like the eye candy.....

Francesca Woodman photographer from Colorado

2010-07-01T16:13:00.001-07:00

Rediscovering Francesca Woodman
Date: 18 Dec 2006 | | Views: 3992

Art imitates life. Or perhaps it's the other way around.

This dual notion haunts the often enigmatic, sometimes unsettling photography of Francesca Woodman, who jumped to her death in 1981 at age 22.

While the Colorado native's short yet surprisingly prolific output would gain considerable attention, especially in Europe, the cultish romanticism that grew up around her suicide long clouded serious discussions of her work.

But now, with the clarifying distance of a quarter- century, perceptions are changing. Curators and critics are looking anew at the more than 800 images Woodman created in a 10-year period from junior high school to young adulthood.

She is being rediscovered and reconsidered, a process likely to accelerate with the publication of the most comprehensive book yet on her, including edited journals and 250 photographs ("Francesca Woodman," Phaidon Press, 256 pages, $75).

"I think her work is growing in importance historically," said Douglas Fogle, curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

"People are looking back at it now as something that has been influential more recently with younger artists."

Although Woodman's work has been featured in major solo shows, including a large one organized in 1998 by the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris, she has yet to have a major touring retrospective in the United States. But Fogle believes such an exhibition is only a matter of time.

"I think you're right now at the moment where there is enough interest, where there are curators sniffing around," he said.

Career in the cards

It was all but pre-ordained that Woodman would become an artist. Her parents, Betty and George Woodman, are nationally known artists; her father taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder while she grew up. Their home served as the social center of the city's art scene, with prominent and not-so-prominent artists frequently passing through.
In the summer of 1972, before Woodman left for boarding school in Andover, Mass., her father gave her a camera. She took an immediate liking to it, sitting in on a university photography class to learn the basics.

An image from that nascent period, "Self-Portrait at Thirteen" (1972), is reproduced in the book. Already, many of the defining qualities of her work are present: the use of herself as the subject, explorations of space and perspective, the blurry, atmospheric effects.

"It was all about making art," her father said. "It wasn't about documenting birthday parties or camping expeditions. I don't think she ever made a snapshot.

She quickly became sufficiently sophisticated to have nothing but contempt for the snapshot."
After graduating from the well-regarded Rhode Island School of Design in 1978, she spent a year in Italy, where her parents often had taken her during summers and their study trips. In 1965-66, she even attended second grade there.

Chris Townsend, a senior lecturer at the University of London who authored the Woodward monograph, believes she did her best work during that time, working in an old factory building in Rome.

Far from the inspired naif, as she sometimes has been portrayed, he believes she drew on a range of influences including but not limited to surrealism, especially the work of Man Ray and Duane Michals, and fashion photography by Deborah Turbeville and others.
"Suddenly, she is making a body of photographs that are all her own," Townsend said. "They take a lot of the reference points and they subvert them. They alter them. They stop being about aesthetics, and they're about the properties of photography."

Woodman probed the nature of photography and its uneasy relationship with reality. She relentlessly explored what Townsend calls the "spatial and temporal mismatches" between image and object.

She wanted to evoke the elusive, transient realm between what is and isn't, constantly depicting herself as a kind of specter, disappearing into or emerging from floors and walls, depending on the viewer's

1977-78: from "eel" series, Rome (Photograph courtesy George and Betty Woodman) perception.

"She was starting to play all these interesting games within the photograph, examining formal, conceptual problems of photography as a medium," Townsend said. "And very few photographers of the 1970s and even very few photographers outside of conceptualism do that."

Although Woodman sometimes employed models, she mainly depicted herself, usually interacting in some staged way with the environment around her - wrapping her nude body in wallpaper in the 1977 "Space" series or thrusting herself into nature in images at the MacDowell Colony in 1980.

"Francesca was ashamed that she took so many pictures of herself and irritated by the simplistic self-portrait label attached to her work," Betsy Berne, a close friend, wrote in an essay in the book. "She tried using models over and over - but the reality was she was her own best model because she alone knew what she was after."

In much of her work, Woodman treats the body as a kind of fetish, camouflaging and confusing identity. A few images have an air of innocence, while others, such as a 1979- 80 rear view of an undulating female torso, are sexually charged.

Still others take on an almost violent edge. In "Horizontale" (1976), she binds her legs with spiraling tape. "Portrait of a Reputation" is an undated book of five images in which her darkened hand leaves ugly stains on her body with each touch.

Woodman was living in an East Village loft in New York City and had barely begun her professional career when she took her life. Apparently, it did not come as a total surprise; Berne writes that on the photographer's "darkest days," she would mention suicide.

Even though, as Berne puts it, Woodman was "beset by the same contradictions and conflicts" visible in her work, Townsend and the photographer's parents caution against interpreting the photographs through the lens of the suicide.

She clearly had dark moments, but her parents describe her as a charming, witty and sociable person, a description backed up by Berne's lively and touching account of the young artists' time together.

"On the other hand," Betty Woodman said, "she did commit suicide. Things were not rosy and wonderful for Francesca. That was her choice. It is there. It's hard for us. I know I just tend not to make this be what the work is about."

Beset by trends

When Woodman died, changing trends were already overshadowing her. A new breed of post-modern artists driven by mass culture, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, were uprooting photography and exploiting it for very different purposes.

While Woodman had a foot in this conceptualist camp, she was also very much attached to traditional photography, using techniques little different from the 19th century to fastidiously create and print her images.

As often happens in the natural cycle of the art world, the photographer's work has found new resonance among today's artists, who are looking back at the 1960s and ྂs with fresh eyes and combining the past and present in inventive ways.

With the help of the respected dealer Marian Goodman, who began representing the photographer's estate in 1998, Woodman's photographs are increasingly making their way to the market. And the book, with more than 100 photographs never before published, should only increase her visibility.

What will Woodman's ultimate place in photographic history be? Only time can tell. What cannot be denied is the distinctiveness and innate power of her provocative, sometimes troubling images.

"There's no manipulation of the art market or how they are promoted," said Betty Woodman. "People simply respond to them. So I guess there's some kind of legacy, because isn't that what art's all about?"

By Kyle MacMillan, Denver Post

Jantzen Swimwear Exhibit.

2010-06-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

By Karen Vitt, NEAT editor in chief
“Own the sea and the sun and the sand and all the men in site!” That fabulous copy, lifted straight from a 1954 Jantzen ad in Look magazine, sums up exactly why we love Jantzen and all it’s vintage, vampy glory. Especially here in Portland, where the legendary local label was launched in 1910.
While no longer headquartered in PDX, we can still celebrate 100 Years of Timeless Glamour in the current Jantzen anniversary exhibit on display now through Friday, April 30 at The Art Institute of Portland Gallery. To celebrate a century of style, Jantzen has brought in its iconic 21-foot fiberglass Diving Girl to preside over the gallery all month. Visitors can browse glamorous vintage swimming suits and bathing caps from every era, and giggle over old advertisements featuring celebrities and fashion statements as they change through the decades.
“The Jantzen Archive is unique. There is no other archive like it,” said Jantzen archivist Carol Alhadeff. (That’s right, folks, Jantzen is so rich with history they have an offical archivist!) “It represents the history of swimwear as well as the history of visionary advertising. There is a century of textile innovation in our vintage garments to inspire our collections.”
As the brand enters its second century, the exhibit makes for fun fashion viewing and a neat Portland history lesson at once – not to mention a thorough look at the evolution of swimwear and fashion marketing.
You’ll learn how Jantzen was born out of downtown Portland as Portland Knitting Company in 1910, turning out wool suits (itch) for a rowing team on a few hand-knitting machines above a tiny retail store. Then follow along as they grow into Jantzen Knitting Mills in 1918, as the Diving Girl becomes an international icon in the ’20s, as movie stars begin wearing Jantzen in the ’30s, as the company survives World War II, thrives in the ’60s surf scene, makes adventurous ’80s statement suits, and finally stages a return to its current classic American glamour.
Win a Jantzen Heritage Collection Swimming Suit! Jantzen’s 2010 Heritage Collection swimming suits also are featured in the exhibit, so visitors can get a total picture of how far Jantzen has come and the direction they’re heading, plus it’s a chance to browse some gorgeous retro and modern styles they can buy for themselves today. One lucky Neat Sheet reader will win this ’50s inspired Jantzen Heritage ruffled one-piece swimming suit (right, retail value $120). To enter, just send an e-mail with the subject line “JANTZEN HERITAGE” to neatsheet@karenvitt.com or leave a comment on this post. We’ll pick a lucky random winner on Monday, May 10.
If you’re too excited to wait, you can also shop for Jantzen suits at neat local swimwear boutique Popina Swimwear, (4831 N.E. 42nd Ave.; 503-282-5159) where they have several styles of the vintage-inspired Jantzen Vamp Swimming Suits in stock. And be sure to visit Macy’s in downtown Portland (621 S.W. Fifth Ave.; 503-223-0512), where you’ll find all the latest Jantzen suits and can also view the entire Jantzen 2010 Heritage Collection on display in Macy’s front windows.
Happy birthday, Jantzen. See you at the beach.
Jantzen, 100 Years of Timeless Glamour
Through Friday, April 30
The Art Institute of Portland Gallery
1122 N.W. Davis St.; 503-228-6528
www.artinstitute-portland.com
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More proof we are living in an Andy Warhol world

2010-06-26T13:50:00.000-07:00

IPeople may not want to publicly admit it but instead of Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, stars of the new action film Knight and Day, they secretly really want to know ALL about warring ex-fiances, The Bachelors’ Jake Pavelka and Vienna Girardi. The Bachelor Break-up actually trumps Tom’s blockbuster as the need-to-know EVENT of the week.

At the premiere of Grown Ups in New York City this week, who did the fans scream for most? No it wasn’t the A-List stars of the film, Adam Sandler and Salma Hayek. Instead, it was Jersey Shore’s infamous Snooki, Jwoww and Ronnie. I was there and nicely dressed young women nearly trampled me on the way out of the theatre, trying to get a snapshot of Snooki!

Don’t believe me? Well, let’s discuss TV shows with recent HUGE ratings. That would be American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, and So You Think You Can Dance. Then consider that The Bachelor, Real Housewives of New York, Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Kendra, The City, and The Celebrity Apprentice have all had their biggest ratings ever this year.

Then consider the state of traditional sitcoms and dramas. They’ve pretty much all seen better days.

There used to be a celebrity pecking order that magazine editors believed in when they determined who to feature on their covers. They were convinced that newsstand sales could be juiced-up first by first movie stars, then TV stars, then music stars. Of course, reality stars didn’t exist in those days. I can confidently tell you however , that the old sales rule has now been kicked into the trash can.

You only had to look at People magazine this week to see the new paradigm in action. On the cover is The Bachelor’s Jake Pavelka, telling HIS side of the breakup story. Shockingly way inside the mag you’ll find Tom Cruise in a “20 Questions”-style interview as part of the promotion for his film Knight and Day. Also deep inside– a feature on the former biggest box office star in the world, Harrison Ford, who finally married his longtime girlfriend, TV star Calista Flockhart. Let me point out that it wouldn’t have been all that long ago that Tom or Harrison would only have “cooperated” with People, or any other magazine, if they were GUARANTEED the cover.

But you see, the Hollywood landscape has been transformed by the reality star tsunami.

Let me also remind you about other reality stars besides Jake, Vienna and the Jersey Shore crew that we’ve REALLY cared about in the past year.

We held our breaths while Celebrity Apprentice star Bret Michaels recovered from a brain hemorrhage. We followed the trials and tribulations of Kate Gosselin through her split from Jon, we followed every detail of Khloe Kardashian’s wedding to Lamar Odom, we were horrified/fascinated when both Kendra and Danielle Staub had sex tapes, and we couldn’t get enough of the Bethenny/Jill Zarin feud! Yes, some would say it’s sad…but it’s true, we have CARED about these people!

So how did reality stars WIN?! How did they kick the traditional A-Listers to the curb? For one thing, they are far more accessible than A-Listers. They happily talk to reporters on red carpets at events instead of walking right on by. They even return reporters phone calls and do easily set-up interviews. They are genuinely friendly to the press and their own fans. They LOVE their fame and don’t run away from it.

All of this accessibility is contradictory to what traditional celebrity publicists believe in and allow their A List clients to do. Part of the appeal of reality stars is that they seem “more like us” than traditional Hollywood stars. That’s partly because many of them really are more like us. They aren’t as wealthy as old Hollywood stars us. They still live and travel amongst us, without bodyguards. So we relate to them more easily.

Also, because they are accessible and talk to the press, they feed their fans very regularly with tv and internet sound bites and tidbits about their own lives… and their fans LIKE that. Fans aren’t turned off by seeing and reading about their favorite reality stars on a daily basis.

Traditional Hollywood publicists were adamant that “overexposure” would kill their star client’s careers. That’s why they limited their magazine covers, controlled what their stars said and certainly NEVER let them talk about their personal lives.

The result– they made their A-Listers BORING!

And VERY BORING compared with the new fan friendly, blabby reality stars, who are much more like us.

by Bonnie Fuller Hollywood Life

LACMA's film program 'still in jeopardy' - latimes.com

2010-06-24T19:15:00.000-07:00

LACMA's film program 'still in jeopardy' - latimes.com

Herbert Bayer

2010-06-20T18:33:00.000-07:00

At the age of nineteen Herbert Bayer took up an apprenticeship with the architect and designer Georg Schmidthamer in Linz, where he produced his first typographic works. From 1921 Bayer worked at the Darmstadt artists' colony as assistant to the architect Josef Emmanuel Margold. In the same year Bayer enrolled as a student at the Weimar Bauhaus, where he initially attended the pre-course under Johannes Itten followed by a workshop on mural painting, lead by Wassily Kandinsky.
In 1925 the artist completed his training with a final examination. Herbert Bayer was appoined head of the newly created workshop for print and advertising at the Dessau Bauhaus, where they also produced the school's own printworks. In 1928 the artist left Bauhaus to focus more on his own artwork and moved to Berlin, where he worked as a graphic designer in advertising and as an artistic director of an advertising agency called "Studio Dorland".
During his time in Berlin, the artist also devoted his time to the design of exhibitions, painting and photography and was art director of "Vogue" magazine in Paris.
In 1938 Herbert Bayer emigrated to the US, where he arranged the exhibition "Bauhaus 1919-1928" at the New York Museum of Modern Art in the very same year.
In 1946 he moved to Aspen, Colorado, where he worked as a painter, graphic designer, architect and landscape designer. Furthermore, Herbert Bayer worked as an artistic consultant for several companies and institutions, including the "Container Corporation of America", the "Atlantic Richfield Company".
He was also the design consultant for the Aspen cultural center and member of the art board for the information bureau of the United States of America. In 1974 the artist moved to Montecito, California, where he died in 1985.
Herbert Bayer received numerous awards and honors, including an honorary doctorate of the "Technische Hochschule Graz", the "Österreichisches Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft und Kunst", the "Ambassador's Award for Excellence" in London and the "Kulturpreis für Fotografie" in Cologne.

Herbert Bayer
"Ätherisch"
60,300 $
Details

Herbert Bayer
"Winter "
1,474 $
Detailansicht

Rough outline Remake of I Capture the Castle. Romola Garai, Tiger Woods

2010-06-19T12:03:00.000-07:00

How about a remake of I Capture the Castle with Romola Garai. The one made by the producers of Shakespeare in Love.

RG has a beautiful but decidedly unsexual vibe in this film. Supposed to be to contrast with the highly alluring sister Rose. What a great part for a young woman.
A retro pective look at this actress.
Her one Holly wood movie was of course a role that sucked. And tried to play up the babe aspects of her. Dirty Dancing Havana Nights is the title.

She is an actress who doesn't exclusively play the hottie babe or a character that must be pretty or beautiful or the beautiful girl friend.

Tiger Woods has more need for sex than anyone woman can provide.
Now that she is leaving he has dropped the sex rehab.
I think if she had stayed he would have kept it up. That's what she said.
He is insatiable and a true sex addict. it is obvious tied to his family. Never knew Earl was such a bum.

Elin Nordgren is fascinating.

Puffed up lips.
Loredana.

The Vanity Fair article in the issue with Grace Kelly on the front.

Teens Call Hyper-Sexualized Media Images 'Normal' | Womens eNews

2010-06-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

Teens Call Hyper-Sexualized Media Images 'Normal' | Womens eNews

English language word of the week: Erudite

2010-06-15T14:34:00.000-07:00

Adj. 1. Erudite - having or showing profound knowledge; "a learned jurist"; "an erudite professor"
learned
scholarly - characteristic of scholars or scholarship; "scholarly pursuits"; "a scholarly treatise"; "a scholarly attitude"

Erudite [ˈɛrʊˌdaɪt]
adj
having or showing extensive scholarship; learned
[from Latin ērudītus, from ērudīre to polish, from ex-1 + rudis unpolished, rough]
eruditely adv
erudition [ˌɛrʊˈdɪʃən], eruditeness n
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

The tarting up of Miley Cyrus

2010-06-08T20:05:00.001-07:00

Is anyone really surprised to see the Miley Cyrus image morph into the latest tarted up Lolita? I for one, am not. It strikes me as quite unoriginal, premeditated, contrived and predictable. It is something I knew was inevitable during the heyday of Hannah Montana. It's been years in the making. We saw it building with Vanity Fair a few years ago. Does anyone remember the sexy leaked cell phone photos. The pole dance—the lap dance now the latest; girl on girl –kissing, gyrations and stripper/porn star costumes. It all seems contrived, full of pretense, lacking authenticity."Growing up" for many female performers these days, automatically means you thrust your female physical attributes to the fore and overemphasize the whole sex thing.I'm sure this career turn was propelled by Miley herself. As young women/actresses/models/pop stars and aspiring whatevers think this is the way to be "empowered."

English language word of the week: Aplomb

2010-06-06T12:02:00.000-07:00

Main Entry: aplomb
Pronunciation: \ə-ˈpläm, -ˈpləm\
Function: noun
Etymology: French, literally, perpendicularity, from Middle French, from a plomb, literally, according to the plummet
Date: 1823
: complete and confident composure or self-assurance : poise
synonyms see confidence

For Jake Gyllenhaal's Fans-- HIBest Movies

2010-06-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

Total Recall: Jake Gyllenhaal's Best Movies

Small Movies Flower Before Late-June 'Eclipse' | Womens eNews

2010-06-04T14:59:00.000-07:00

Small Movies Flower Before Late-June 'Eclipse' | Womens eNews

Hillary Swank, Diane Lane, Reality Shows and Reality

2010-06-04T09:53:00.000-07:00

HIlary Swank can't seem to get decent roles between her Oscar winning performance roles.

Did Diane Lane do that salacious internet porn picture detective gritty unglamorous role to have an "assured" box office hit?
Does Ms. Swank feel pressure to have a box office hit?

Prostitutes do have to have sex with "gross" guys. That is the inhibiting factor as to why more women don't charge men--Mr Super Freakonomics.

Documentary: go to cattle call auditions. Docu. on out of work and working actors auditioning Reality Shows. Reality shows are now viable jobs for actors. Paritcularly if it is a reality show on struggling actors. Thier life of auditions and up and downs would be employment.

It an authentic Fake. Not the fake fake but the real fake. Is it an authentic fake. Is this the fake?--no it's the fake fake this is the real fake.

LA Times Obit. Louise Bourgeois

2010-06-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

Louise Bourgeois, an internationally revered artist whose intensely personal work was inspired by psychological conflict, feminist consciousness and a fertile imagination, has died. She was 98.

Bourgeois died Monday at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan after suffering a heart attack on Saturday, said Wendy Williams, managing director of the Louise Bourgeois Studio in New York.

Known for sculptures of giant spiders, women with extra breasts, double-headed phalluses and rooms that resonate with loneliness and dread, Bourgeois was a fearless creative force whose work could be disturbing and perversely witty. Although she got little attention from the art world until her seventh decade, she became its grande dame, constantly in demand and showered with honors.

Bourgeois often left viewers with questions about the meaning of her work, but made no secret of painful experiences that shaped it. The spiders — including "Maman," a 35-foot-tall piece commissioned for the inauguration of the Tate Modern gallery in London in 2000 — are a tribute to her beloved mother, whom she described as a pillar of inner strength who was "clever, patient and neat as a spider."

Her father, whom the artist perceived an a domineering philanderer, didn't fare so well. In "The Destruction of the Father" — a 1974 installation that appeared at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008-2009, in a traveling retrospective — Bourgeois re-created a youthful fantasy of her father being dismembered and devoured by his family.

"She smashed a taboo," said Christopher Knight, The Times' art critic. "Bourgeois was the first modern artist to expose the emotional depth and power of domestic subject matter. Before her, male artists had only nibbled around the edges, and women just weren't allowed."

Born in Paris on Christmas Day 1911, Bourgeois lived in France until 1938. The second of three children born to Josephine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois, she was part of a family that operated a tapestry gallery below their apartment on Boulevard Saint-Germain and a tapestry restoration firm in a village south of Paris. They had a comfortable life, except for a period during World War I, but her parents' marriage was fraught with tension that escalated when Louis had a liaison with an Englishwoman who was the children's live-in tutor.

Louise's resentment about the ménage à trois eventually became fodder for her art. In a 1982 New York Times interview, she said that twisted forms in her work reflected her childhood dream of getting rid of her father's mistress by "twisting her neck." But Bourgeois' indomitable spirit and creative energy prevailed.

"My work is a form of psychoanalysis," she wrote in an e-mail exchange with the Los Angeles Times in 2007. "It is a way of coming to grips with my anxiety and fears. It is an attempt to be a better person.… There is a lot of ambivalence in the work. There are many hanging pieces, which signify a fragile state. There are pieces that oscillate and rock, which also convey fragility. We all have pink days and blue days. I am trying to seek a balance between the extremes that I feel. I want to be reasonable."

In the art world's eyes, she succeeded.

Art historian Robert Storr has praised Bourgeois as "among the most inquisitive and best-informed artists of her generation. No analysis of her work or its internal dynamics that sidesteps this fact, or fails to consider the unique mix of intuition and erudition, psychological compulsion and sheer intelligence that has guided her, can possibly claim to measure the full range of its meanings."

Bourgeois studied art at several Parisian schools, including the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, and in the studio of painter Fernand Legér. In 1938, she married American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York, where she spent the rest of her life.

She began to establish herself as an artist in the 1940s while raising three sons, Michel, Jean-Louis and Alain, and had her first solo exhibition in 1945 at a New York gallery. Her husband, a professor at New York University, became known for exploring connections between so-called primitivism and Western modernism. The couple enjoyed a rich intellectual life until Goldwater's death in 1973, about a decade before Bourgeois gained wide recognition.

She began her career as a painter of tapestry-like abstractions, but soon became intrigued with the Surrealists' exploration of the subconscious as a source of images and ideas. Her "Femme-Maison" paintings of 1946 and1947 merge Surrealism with feminism in depictions of women with houses for heads, defined by their domestic roles.

As her interest shifted to three-dimensional forms, she turned to sculpture and worked with many materials, including wood, metal, latex, plaster, marble and bronze. Her early totem-like figures led to sexually explicit sculptures and ambitious installations that evoke troubling states of mind and physical conditions.

Alice in Wonderland/Disney

2010-05-31T17:44:00.000-07:00

Alice in Wonderland appeals to the intellect and not the heart. A flop upon first release.

JIngoism: English Language word of the week.

2010-05-31T15:25:00.000-07:00

Jingoism is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "extreme patriotism in the form of aggressive foreign policy".[1] In practice, it refers to the advocation of the use of threats or actual force against other countries in order to safeguard what they perceive as their country's national interests, and colloquially to excessive bias in judging one's own country as superior to others – an extreme type of nationalism.
The term originated in Britain, expressing a pugnacious attitude towards Russia in the 1870s. During the 19th century in the United States, journalists called this attitude spread-eagleism. "Jingoism" did not enter the U.S. vernacular until near the turn of the 20th century. This nationalistic belligerence was intensified by the sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor that led to the Spanish-American War of 1898.

This is from Wikipedia

Kristen Stewart flipping photographers off. I am in awe of her. Someone has to do it. What a great statement to ALL the BS of celebrity culture.

2010-05-30T19:30:00.001-07:00

You go girl!
You are more real than real..
You have the guts to dare people to not like you.
You are brave.
You are a brave young woman.
You are rare.

R.I.P. Dennis Hopper

2010-05-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

Questions for Michael Douglas

2010-05-25T11:21:00.000-07:00

Questions for MIchael Douglas:

Did you ever talk with Karl Malden about Brando and Kazan?

Your character was a gender role reversal: in Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction and Disclosure --the victim of the predatory female, You even shrieked like a woman in BI. We don't see the predatory female that much. ( I would ask Susan Douglas about that.)

Some people, like Kirk Douglas I heard, thought Jack Nicholson was just playing himself and not the character. Some were critical about Jack's much lauded performance--which I thought was untouchable. Jack in coo-coos Nest which I saw when I was about 15. Why didn't Kirk Douglas play the role himself as he planned?

Francesca Woodman photographer from Colorado

2010-05-23T14:23:00.000-07:00

Yet another artist whose existence I was previously unaware of. I love learning about new artists, photographers, actors and other historical figures. In fact, it is about my very favorite thing in life. I especially enjoy it if there is some sort of weirdness associated with them. Ms. Woodman is from right here in Colorado and went to Boulder HS. It was apparent that from an early age she was gifted in photography. She did a lot of self-portraits and I love this one with the hairy armpits. I am pretty sure it is her, although she did on occasion use models. What a sad waste to end her life at 22 years young. Read something about her parents (well known artists themselves) being stingy with releasing a lot of her work in their possession. That probably has something to do with the overwhelming grief they experienced about their daughter's suicide.

Francesca Woodman was born April 3, 1958, in Denver, Colorado, to well-known artists George Woodman and Betty Woodman.[4][6] Her older brother Charles later became an associate professor of electronic art.[7]
Woodman attended public school in Boulder, Colorado, between 1963 and 1971 except for second grade in Italy. She began high school in 1972 at the private Massachusetts boarding school Abbot Academy, where she began to develop her photographic skills. Abbot Academy merged with Phillips Academy in 1973; Woodman graduated from the public Boulder High School in 1975. Through 1975, she spent summers with her family in Italy.[4](p.154)[6]
Beginning in 1975, Woodman attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island. She studied in Rome, Italy between 1977 and 1978 in an RISD honors program. As she spoke fluent Italian, she was able to befriend Italian intellectuals and artists.[4](pp.26-30,154) She went back to Rhode Island in late 1978 to graduate from RISD.[4](p.154)[6]
Woodman moved to New York City in 1979. After spending summer 1979 in Stanwood, Washington, she returned to New York. There, "to make a career in photography" she sent portfolios of her work to fashion photographers, but "her solicitations did not lead anywhere."[4](p.155) In summer 1980 she was an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.[4](p.155)[6]
In late 1980 Woodman became depressed due to her work and to a broken relationship.[8] On January 19, 1981, she committed suicide by jumping out a loft window in New York.[4](p.155)[6] An acquaintance wrote, "things had been bad, there had been therapy, things had gotten better, guard had been let down."[9]
[edit]Works

English language word of the week: Numinous

2010-05-22T20:25:00.000-07:00

nu·mi·nous [noo-muh-nuhs, nyoo-] Show IPA
–adjective
1.
of, pertaining to, or like a numen; spiritual or supernatural.
2.
surpassing comprehension or understanding; mysterious: that element in artistic expression that remains numinous.
3.
arousing one's elevated feelings of duty, honor, loyalty, etc.: a benevolent and numinous paternity.
Origin:
1640–50; < L nūmin- (s. of nūmen) numen + -ous
Dictionary.com Unabridged

Surpassing comprehension or understanding---Oh I like that!!!!!

Art by Lichtenstein

What a wonderful picture of Ricky!

2010-05-20T18:10:00.000-07:00

Schedule of Films Coming Soon to Film Forum in New York City

2010-05-19T07:59:00.000-07:00

Schedule of Films Coming Soon to Film Forum in New York City

English language word of the week: Nihilism

2010-05-13T15:46:00.000-07:00

ni·hil·ism (nī'ə-lĭz'əm, nē'-)
n.
Philosophy

An extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence.

A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.

Rejection of all distinctions in moral or religious value and a willingness to repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief.

The belief that destruction of existing political or social institutions is necessary for future improvement.

also Nihilism A diffuse, revolutionary movement of mid 19th-century Russia that scorned authority and tradition and believed in reason, materialism, and radical change in society and government through terrorism and assassination.

Psychiatry A delusion, experienced in some mental disorders, that the world or one's mind, body, or self does not exist.

[Latin nihil, nothing; see ne in Indo-European roots + -ism.]
ni'hil·ist n., ni'hil·is'tic adj., ni'hil·is'ti·cal·ly adv.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Cite This Source

Medical Dictionary

ni·hi·lism definition
Pronunciation: /ˈnī-(h)ə-ˌliz-əm, ˈnē-/
Function: n
1 : NIHILISTIC DELUSION
2 : skepticism as to the value of a drug or method of treatment
ni·hi·lis·ticPronunciation: /ˌnī-(h)ə-ˈlis-tik, ˌnē-/
Function: adj
Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary, © 2007 Merriam-Webster, Inc.
Cite This Source
nihilism ni·hil·ism (nī'ə-lĭz'əm, nē'-)
n.

The belief that destruction of existing political or social institutions is necessary for future improvement.

A delusion, experienced in some mental disorders, that the world or one's mind, body, or self does not exist.

The systems are thoroughly empty and false. The term is from the Latin nihil, meaning “nothing.”

withdrawal from Paxil and Remeron

2010-05-13T11:38:00.000-07:00

Better. I feel much less hungry so the weight is coming off. Anti-depressants are notorious for weight gain. I don't feel as bloated in my belly. I am using sleeping pills but have only one prescription for them. Otherwise, I feel pretty good but kind of weepy a lot, which I did on the drugs anyway.

Withdrawal from Paxil and Remeron

2010-05-08T17:07:00.000-07:00

Ok I am fucking depressed, and confused and boiling over with desperate need to create and be heard and matter and make a difference. And my tolerance of the non-authentic and the bullshit and the screwed-up priorites of our country and all the famewhores--my tolerance is approaching nil....

Getting Off Anti-depressants

2010-05-07T10:02:00.000-07:00

I have decided to get off of the anti-depressants and it has now been a few days since I took the last one. Broken down to a 5mg. dosage. I weaned from them so no side affects there. But, I have had the insomnia and felt like shit yesterday. I slept much better last night despite Jett crying and awakening me. He was scared of the dark. I am pretty proud of myself, that I showed him compassion.
I MIght as well keep a log/ diary of sorts on this blog as no one reads it, and only a handful of people have visited it. yikes. I need to know what I am like, esp. with regard to creativity, not using the brain chemicals, the chemicals designed to alter my brain into a manageable piece of a coping mechanism. It never really helped the depression. It did help (originally) when I had anxiety and jealousy with Ben, and then when Evan was about 4 and really getting under my skin. It help regulate sleep. The last one is the most desirable benefit. But the completely bat-shit way that I reacted to the Remeron. Thank god I am aware enough to do get off that shit. Other people likely do not have the finesse I do with such things and they take massive doses of it despite feeling like shit, or they go off of it cold turkey. I admit I did that too and learned the hard way. It is likely also responsible for my knowledge of how to get on to the right dosage. You give up days of your life adjusting to the drug, so that the drug will in turn help you adjust for your life. Supposedly.

LIfe is so arbitrary, capricious, tenuous, I am going to look into becoming a NIhilist

Iggy Pop Click on photos.

2010-05-03T19:53:00.001-07:00

Vadge Without Photoshop?

Posted using ShareThis

Go for it Iggy. Show off that 60+ wrinkled ass body. That real human body. WE, all over the world, are conditioned to plastic perfection and you dare to stand up to it, and let it all hang out. Good on you Iggy! Thank you for your real flesh of a true Artist.

Latest homogenized celebrity face Alexa Ray Joel

2010-04-29T16:56:00.000-07:00

Alexa Ray Joel shaved down her nose and it took away all the individuality of her face as one can see in this before and after. The same thing happened to Jennifer Gray and Kim Kardashian. Thank god for women like Sarah Jessica Parker who don't get thier strong or big or "ethnic" looking noses changed into a petite turned up WASP- blonde Barbie doll nose.
Why must women look so homogenized??? I think it is a "WASP Nordic- Germanic" look that is considered "ideal." There is subtle racism in the need to conform to this ideal. Brittany Murphy was a victim of it. Her self-destructive tendencies didn't do well with her need to conform to the ideal. To look like a Diane Kruger or an Amanda Seyfired. They epitomize that ideal. Esp, with their damn turned up noses. Oh, don't hate them because they are beautiful. LOL
Perhaps Barbra Streisand was a pioneer in not changing her nose and her "individual" look. SJP may have had some plastic surgery, but she didn't turn her nose and face into yet another bland boring blonde. Or brunette. Whatever the hell.

GI Blues Elvis T-shirt

2010-04-29T11:42:00.000-07:00

Women's: Elvis - G.I. Blues">

Out to Lunch: Sue Mengers Culture: vanityfair.com

2010-04-27T18:29:00.000-07:00

Out to Lunch: Sue Mengers Culture: vanityfair.com

Fascinating brief article about 70s super agent Sue Mengers. I was reminded of her existence in Hollywood history watching a great documentary about Dominick Dunne.

English language word of the week: Leitmotif. SUrprised at it German origins.

2010-04-27T14:53:00.000-07:00

jack and jill Nursery will be the leitmotif of my film. When I saw the Dad picking up his daughter and saying Hello Squirt, Every afternoon I would watch him there to pick up his daughter.

Leit·mo·tif also leit·mo·tiv (ltm-tf)
n.
1. A melodic passage or phrase, especially in Wagnerian opera, associated with a specific character, situation, or element.
2. A dominant and recurring theme, as in a novel.
[German Leitmotiv : leiten, to lead (from Middle High German, from Old High German leitan; see leit- in Indo-European roots) + Motiv, motif (from French motif; see motif).]

Notorious vs. Infamous

2010-04-27T11:50:00.001-07:00

no·to·ri·ous [noh-tawr-ee-uhs, -tohr-, nuh-] Show IPA
–adjective
1.
widely and unfavorably known: a notorious gambler.
2.
publicly or generally known, as for a particular trait: a newspaper that is notorious for its sensationalism.

infamous [ˈɪnfəməs]
adj
1. having a bad reputation; notorious
2. causing or deserving a bad reputation; shocking infamous conduct
3. (Law) Criminal law, (formerly)
a. (of a person) deprived of certain rights of citizenship on conviction of certain offences
b. (of a crime or punishment) entailing such deprivation
infamously adv

Laconic, Timorous, English language vocab. of the week

2010-04-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

la·con·ic (l-knk)
adj.
Using or marked by the use of few words; terse or concise.

Aitch's cultural observations are laconic.

la·con·ic (l-knk)
adj.
Using or marked by the use of few words; terse or concise.

Timorous [ˈtɪmərəs]
adj
1. fearful or timid
2. indicating fear or timidity
[from Old French temoros, from Medieval Latin timōrōsus, from Latin timor fear, from timēre to be afraid]
timor

Already have timorous somewhere on the blog but can't find it so here it is.

Laird Cregar

2010-04-23T21:07:00.000-07:00

Laird at his heaviest---I think. He loathed being a character actor and was trying to break into leading man roles. He thought losing weight could achieve this. He did lose weight and it was evident on his last film Hangover Square--what wasn't as obvious was he was abusing speed for the weight loss. This affected his heart and mood. He argued with the director of the film John Brahm apparantly toward the end of his life . Also director of Cregar's famous film, "The Lodger." Cregar had a heart attack and died. Another part of his body image complex was his inner conflict about being a homosexual. I wish there was a biography of Laird Cregar. The best information I get is the commentary on The DVD's I can't imagine where these historians are getting info. about Cregar. There is a glaring absence of biographical material on the man

Film Log: Notes of Marie Menken

2010-04-21T18:57:00.001-07:00

3802088353_03852a19e1
Originally uploaded by AitchCS

Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol connection, Gerard Malanga.
The film did not show Marie Menken's photo taken with Tennessee Williams. The one in Factory Made by Steven Watson. The photo was taken at a history making Factory Party with Judy Garland and Truman Capote. I believe that is the same party. I will look in my copy of the book later on tonight.
(A history of the Avant-Garde in America film for PBS) Marie Menken and William Maas were the inspiration for Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff.
Yes, I like to provide the pretty.

I feel like Mina in 51 Birch Street

2010-04-20T13:48:00.000-07:00

My mind wandered a lot. My mind wanders a lot. Particularly on marijuana. Mind seems to speed up and every thought gives birth to a new thought and on and on and on. It's like the world of art and ideas and creating, is so exciting and passion filled. God I sobbed for that woman in 51 Birch Street. She was who the Feminine Mystique was about. She now has minor fame from the film. But she could still get out at night if she were alive. But since she passed this is not an issue, however her son filmmaker Doug Block and the rest of his family do have 15 minutes worth of fame.

Alexander Skarsgard

2010-04-20T11:40:00.001-07:00

Alexander Skarsgard
Originally uploaded by Alexander Skarsgard FanBlog

More of my new lust object.

Alexander Skarsgard

2010-04-20T11:38:00.001-07:00

Alexander Skarsgard
Originally uploaded by Alexander Skarsgard FanBlog

OK now I am smitten with this guy. Robert Pattinson is a thing of the past.

Female Sensibility, Sense and Sensibility, female POV

2010-04-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

What do I mean by the female sensibility? I first paid attention to the word in relation to Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. The movie of course with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet; directed by Ang Lee. It is akin to the word POV for starters.
Teasing, prolonging, yearning, the building of sexual tension, is more intrinsically female. More women find these types of things erotic than women who do not. I think it is more of the female sensibility to want "romance" in the erotic stories they read or films they watch. Not necessarily referring to sappy- sighing- romantic- sentimental bullshit here. But that is how the term Romance has come to be disparaged. Somehow it is not manly.

There is an enormous variety of erotic novels for women on the market. Some are way into S&M or anal sex. Some have only chaste romance and marriage. So obviously women in our society have very many many levels of what expresses thier sexuality or artistry. However I feel that what I said above basically holds true. If more women were honest with themselves, like I was eventually, one can see that there is nothing inferior or inherently wrong with the feminine or female sensibility. When it comes to not being oriented to jumping in the bed and fucking upon first meeting some one, most women are not really into that, some sure, most not. What is inferior about that?

Then to go beyond that, as an adult I realize that those moments of orgasmic bliss are only fleeting. It is a transcendent experience. It provides the same euphoria as a mood/mind altering drug. In fact Orgasm works very much like a drug. You can certainly get addicted to its feeling.