Posts tagged as Yow
"The police arrived at Dotcom Mansion in Auckland on Friday morning in two helicopters."
Kim Dotcom, just 37, and the "founder, former CEO and current chief innovation officer" of the now-seized MegaUpload (and "Megavideo.com, Megaporn.com, and Megapay.com"), has lived a lot more than the rest of us. Arrested yesterday, again, he did it the hard way: "Mr. Dotcom, a 37-year-old with dual Finnish and German citizenship, retreated into a safe room, and the police had to cut their way in. He was eventually arrested with a firearm close by that the police said appeared to be a shortened shotgun." READ MORE
AIDS Benefit Gets Terrible, (Delightfully) Mean Review
They say you mellow as you age. And yet, this is likely the single cattiest dispatch Bob Morris has yet filed for the Times in his many [redacted] years. "Nearby, under a gnarled old tree, a black granite gravestone for one of the host’s dogs had been littered with empty wineglasses. "
Magical Recording of Beyoncé Doing Prince
And here is Beyoncé covering Prince's "The Beautiful Ones" (and Kings of Leon's "Sex on Fire" (whatever)) this weekend. She's been doing this on tour for a bit (and covering Prince for a couple of years, and of course she performed "Purple Rain" with him in 2004) but this is the first really stellar recording of this; I would describe this as LIFE-CHANGING. Stop work, put your headphones on, etc. I do wish she hadn't switched the genders in the lyrics though. (via, previously)
Tina Fey Amuses, Harrows
The Tina Fey thing in the New Yorker today—subscription only, cheapos!—is actually great. It's a funny, tangled little thing that still feels raw and a little frightening! True fact: "Network executives really do say things like 'I don't know. I don't want to fuck anybody on this show.'"
"But Now You're Dead": The Never-Before-Seen Ted Hughes Poem
"In a final coda to one of literature's great doomed romances, a previously unseen poem by Ted Hughes was published Thursday in which he describes the dark last days leading up to Sylvia Plath's suicide." And here's a dramatic reading! READ MORE
Norman Spinrad Trashes Knopf, Sonny Mehta, Chip Kidd and American Publishing
Last night, the long-time scifi writer Norman Spinrad (who earlier this year was diagnosed with stomach cancer) published the second of a three-part series on "THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL." It's amazing! In it, he trashes his relationship with Knopf, who sank one of his books, trashes book designer Chip Kidd (for having more power than the editors) and trashes his Knopf editor for being useless, spineless and not so bright. It's a great read; I don't agree with all of it but it's illuminating. One thing that really stands out is the way the U.S. book publishing system is an entirely different animal than that of other countries. In the U.S., publishers will buy books and then, shortly thereafter, not care about them in the slightest, and on some level, Spinrad can't quite accept that this is a systematic thing. He's looking for a reason from Knopf honcho Sonny Mehta of why books like his get thrown on the pyre, and actually, there is no reason, and Sonny Mehta doesn't care about your book! It's expediency, it's capitalism, it's people who don't have time, it's because there's no incentive in American publishing to care. Last week, actually, Spinrad did a pretty good job of explaining the diminishing returns of orders and expectations for writers. READ MORE
Mehretu and Goldman Sachs: "They need artists to bring perfume to the terrible stench of their death"
"The writer and activist Meridel Le Sueur once wrote, in reference to artists feeding at the corporate trough, 'They just want you to perfume the sewers. They need artists to bring perfume to the terrible stench of their death.' It's a pity that an artist as talented as Julie Mehretu cannot imagine other possibilities for herself as an artist than to take millions from Goldman Sachs and 'just hope it will feel O.K. over time.'" READ MORE
The Wikileaks Iraq Video Release
I'm not looking at the Wikileaks release of video and other documentation of the death of a group of people, including two Reuters reporters, at the hands of US soldiers in New Baghdad in July of 2007. But it seems like stuff that should be out there, particularly as it was leaked from folks in the military, so good for them.
Boing Boing's Latest Legal Victory
This is how you deal with nutty nuisance lawsuits against bloggers-you take it all the way, baby.
Our Legendary Fake History
Are you following this Errol Morris investigation into the photography of Walker Evans and pals? A new installment, part 3 of 7, went up last night and it is BONKERS. Basically it is about alterations-suspected or proven or even wildly obvious, in retrospect-in 1930s documentary work of the FSA photographers (Evans, Dorothea Lange, et al). Essentially, much of what we view now as documentary-and what we see in our minds as the visuals of recent American history-was actually pretty close to propaganda. READ MORE
