Harvey Weinstein has his annual Oscar hype machine running full throttle for his silent
movie, The Artist, starring Jean Dujardin (Peter Iovino/Weinstein PR machine)
By Nicholas Stix
If so, the winner was—drum roll, please—
"Oscar race hasn't come into focus yet."
On November 30, with most of the eventual contenders yet to be released … just like every other year?
What would the prize be for such a contest, The Collected Screenplays Adapting John Grisham Novels?
Says Angel Adams, Black Tampa Mom of 15 Illegitimate Children
[In other Florida news, see:
Angel Yulee Adams looks away from Judge Tracy Sheehan Monday as officials tell of the home, furnishings and relief given to her in Tampa. She complains about the agencies.
Judge Tracy Sheehan warns Angel Yulee Adams that she needs
to become more independent in the raising of the 12 children.
Judge in Tampa scolds mother who shows no gratitude for profuse aid given her and 12 kids
By John Barry
In Print: Tuesday, April 27, 2010
St. Petersburg Times
TAMPA — A courtroom full of people who paid off Angel Yulee Adams' debts and found a rent-free, six-bedroom home for her and a dozen of her children waited Monday morning for a sign of gratitude, a clue of cooperation. They waited for a thank you.
They didn't get it. Angel Adams, 37, said she was glad to have the home. But she wanted them all out of her life.
"I've been railroaded since day one," she said.
The state says day one was 21 months and 28 hearings ago, when Adams first landed in the courtroom of Hillsborough Circuit Judge Tracy Sheehan. Ever since then, Sheehan said, the state has tried to keep Adams and her children together.
But Adams lost her home after failing to pay rent to the Tampa Housing Authority, then recently was evicted from a two-bedroom rental apartment. All her things were dumped on the curb. She and 12 children wound up in a small motel room on E Busch Boulevard.
Her situation looked a lot better on Monday, thanks to the combined efforts of the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, the state Department of Children and Families, Hillsborough Kids Inc., the Children's Home Society and A Kid's Place — which last week gave her a temporary cottage at its shelter near Brandon.
Officials from most of those agencies packed the judge's courtroom Monday to give a status report. Nick Cox, DCF's regional director, spoke for them.
"Everyone has bent over backward," he said. "The mother has been less than gracious."
Hillsborough Kids volunteered to help cover the more than $6,000 she owes to the Tampa Housing Authority. The Children's Home Society paid the first month's rent for the six-bedroom house and found furnishings. Her rent, adjusted for income and the size of her family, will be virtually nothing, Cox said. He couldn't estimate how much the state has spent on her in the past two years.
The 12 children have been out of school for more than a week, but Cox said Adams appears to be a loving mother. She still could lose her children, he said, if she doesn't work with caseworkers and show the state she is adequately caring for them.
"From a legal standpoint, she's backing us into a corner," Cox said. He asked the judge to tell Adams to "stop complaining and start cooperating."
Judge Sheehan gave her a lecture.
Adams would not have sat through 28 hearings if her kids had been fed, got their medicines and were living in a good home, the judge said. "We know you want us out of your life," she told Adams. "We will be thrilled to close this case when you have all these things."
Adams sat at a table just below the judge's bench, looking away from Sheehan.
"A lot of people have gone way extra miles for you," Sheehan said. "Do you understand that?"
Adams replied quietly, "No comment, your honor."
"Hear what I'm saying," the judge told her. "Reach out your hand to these people instead of looking a gift horse in the mouth and asking for more, more, more."
After the hearing, Adams said she's a proud Florida native, a descendent of David Levy Yulee, a former U.S. senator and plantation owner who built the Yulee Railroad line in North Florida in the mid 1800s and was later imprisoned for aiding the Confederacy. She once worked in a linen factory. She has three other older children, besides the 12 who live with her.
She said her misfortunes began when she scuffled with a sheriff's deputy two years ago. It happened when her 9-year-old son was suspended for bringing a knife to school. She was two months pregnant. After her arrest, she said her troubles snowballed.
The Hillsborough Sheriff's Office removed her children after finding neglect in the home. She got her kids back six months ago, but the father of 10 of them, Garry Brown, was sentenced to five years for a cocaine conviction. Without his help, she said, she fell into debt. Hillsborough Kids paid the rent for her last apartment.
Adams said she wasn't planning on more children, but "whatever God wants to happen is okay with me."
Outside the courtroom, across the hall, Cox said DCF believes in keeping families together. That's the agency's main mission.
"She is the ultimate test of our belief."
[Last modified: April 26, 2010 10:16 p.m.]
[Thanks to NightwingBMV1 for the upload, and reader-researcher "W" for the sendalong.]
Right now lil cuz in coma but both sides of brain seems to be functioning right now pray pls.
Murder victim Eve Carson: Her killers
simultaneously fired two guns, blowing her
beautiful face off
Lawrence Lovette Jr.
By David in TN
Jury selection began Monday in the trial of Laurence Lovette, the second suspect in the Eve Carson murder. It is expected to take all week to select the jury.
The trial should finally lay out the exact scenario of the crime. One account alleges that the two assailants went into what they thought was a sorority house when they encountered Eve Carson. Why it's as if the two just made a "random" mistake.
Just what would these two be doing in a sorority house anyway?
DeMario Atwater pleaded guilty to First-Degree
Murder, in exchange for a sentence of "life without
(In Case You were Regretting Not Keeping Up on Art Criticism)
Diego Rivera's "The Uprising": What Jed Perl considers great art
Rivera addressing the Mexican Communist Party in 1956; what Jed Perl doesn't want you to see
By Jed Perl
November 22, 2011
The New Republic
They are selling postcards of Hitler in the gift shop at the Guggenheim Museum. To be precise, they are selling photographic reproductions of a work entitled Him, a polyester portrayal of the Führer that is one of the works by Maurizio Cattelan in his retrospective at the museum. I can imagine being outraged or at least troubled by the postcards in the gift shop, except that by the time I saw them I had already been bombarded by this exhibition in which nearly all of Cattelan's oversized neo-Dadaist baubles have been hung from the ceiling of Frank Lloyd Wright's rotunda. Cattelan's Hitler doll—like his Picasso doll, his bicycle, his dinosaur, and the rest of the 128 items in this stupefyingly sophomoric show—is engineered for offense, irony, comedy, or who knows what else. Those who are bothered by the Hitler postcards in the gift shop are naturally going to be dismissed as insufficiently hip.
[So far, so good. I'm taking a liking to this fellow. He has standards.]
The same goes for those who are disturbed by the sight of one of the world's greatest public spaces once again turned over to an art world charlatan as his personal playpen. My own feeling is that the postcards, however misbegotten, are speech we accept, although not necessarily embrace, in a society we prize for its openness. What is really disquieting is the event that has occasioned these postcards. "Maurizio Cattelan: All"—that's the title of the show—amounts to hate speech directed at the sponsoring institution.
I'm sorry to be a party pooper. From what I could see when I visited the other day, museumgoers were perfectly content as they meandered up and down the ramps at the Guggenheim, snapping pics of Cattelan's pixies on their iPhones. Of course, museumgoers also seemed happy—maybe more happy, I'm not sure—looking at the Impressionist and Post-impressionist paintings in a gallery off the rotunda. And everybody was definitely all smiles as they came out of the Guggenheim into a spectacularly lovely November afternoon. The truth is that Cattelan's presence at the Guggenheim has nothing to do with what the public may or may not want.
Cattelan is at the Guggenheim because the big money in the art business is behind him. The other day, one of his minor works, a miniature model of two elevator doors, sold for just over a million dollars at Christie's. (It comes in an edition of ten, one of which is hanging on Fifth Avenue and 89th Street.) And that was one of the more modest prices at Christie's contemporary sale on November 8, where a Robert Gober Prison Window went for $3.3 million and a 1961 Roy Lichtenstein for $43.2 million.
The collector Eli Broad was quoted, at the end of the auction, explaining that "People would rather have art than gold or paper." To which it seems to me the only response is that people who have millions of dollars to spend on a Cattelan, a Gober, or a Lichtenstein are not what used to be known as "the people." [Broad didn't say "the people"; he just said said, "people."] Never mind. What "the people" are more and more seeing when they go to museums is what Eli Broad and a few other collectors and dealers with very deep pockets think they should see. ['Twas ever so.] At that same Christie's auction, the gallerist ["Gallerist"? What the h-e-c-k is a gallerist? Someone who owns an art gallery?] Larry Gagosian bought an early Cy Twombly for $5.2 million. Twombly, who died in July, is nowadays regarded by some as one of the giants of modern art. His reputation is so high that over the summer the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London mounted an exhibition, "Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters," that paired him with the seventeenth-century French artist who redefined classicism for the modern world. Whatever one may think of Twombly—and I like some of his earlier work quite a bit—the Dulwich show was a rather astonishing example of reputation inflation. And who, pray tell, sponsored "Twombly and Poussin"? I can't say I was surprised, on opening the exhibition catalogue, to discover that the sponsor was none other than Larry Gagosian.
Money and culture have never been easily disentangled, nor would one want them to be, considering that culture is by no means cost efficient. But there are different forms of patronage and different kinds of entanglements. And culture is now in retreat before the brute force of money. Even the most easygoing commentators can see the writing on the wall, and some critics who might have been expected to be amused by the Cattelan retrospective have not enjoyed the show. Who knows? Maybe they're tired of partying in a funhouse where they will never be more than dinner guests. As for the people who buy and sell Maurizio Cattelan, my guess is they don't give a damn what critics—or for that matter museumgoers—say.
So where do we go from here? I have spent years asking myself that question, and if anything I'm farther from an answer than ever before. I would, however, recommend that anybody who wonders about these matters take a look at "Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art," a fascinating exhibition at MoMA [the Museum of Modern Art] accompanied by an important catalogue. In 1931 Diego Rivera was the second artist selected for a one man show at MoMA; Matisse had been the first. One of the moving forces in the founding of the museum, just two years old at the time, was Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who took an interest in Rivera's work and lent financial support to the exhibition. She was much involved in getting Rivera, an avowed Leftist [he means, "an avowed Communist"], the commission for a vast mural at Rockefeller Center, a building project dedicated to the glories of capitalism. The mural was to be devoted to the theme of man at the crossroads. And the project was nearing completion when it was scrapped by the Rockefellers, who paid Rivera the rest of his fee, sent him packing, and destroyed the mural, unwilling to accept either Rivera's flattering portrait of Lenin or his unflattering portrait of John D. Rockefeller Jr. or both, it is not clear. [Oh, so Lenin good, Hitler bad; got it.] This ugly history is retold in a catalogue essay by Leah Dickerman, the MoMA curator who organized the exhibition and has emerged in recent years as one of our most lucid and persuasive students of early twentieth-century art. To the tangled relations between the Rockefellers and Rivera, Dickerman offers no simple explanation, but rather a complex dynamic, with modernism and capitalism and Leftism [Communism] sometimes at loggerheads, although not always. The portrait she gives of Rivera's time in New York is tantalizing.
Rivera created for the MoMA exhibition a group of portable frescoes meant to give a taste of the immense wall decorations he was painting in Mexico at the time. They make a striking temporary display in the museum today, where they have been set into the walls so that we feel their planar force. Some of the frescoes recapitulate passages from his Mexican work. Others, done after he arrived in New York, are direct responses to the city as it descended into the Depression, with the towers of the Art Deco city looming above a wharf where homeless people sleep in a dormitory. Rivera's work here is compelling and coarse, strong on journalistic rhetoric and weak on pictorial invention. The exhibition—and here I feel the same fine curatorial imagination that Dickerman brought to her collaboration with architecture and design curator Barry Bergdoll on MoMA's great 2009 Bauhaus show—enriches and complicates our understanding of the Museum of Modern Art's own history. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the museum's founding director, is too often nowadays regarded as a rigid formalist. Nothing could be farther from the truth. And in reminding us that among his first great projects was a show dedicated to the Mexican Leftist Diego Rivera, whom Barr had met in Moscow, Dickerman takes us one step closer to reclaiming the extraordinarily complex story of the Museum of Modern Art.
There was no aspect of modern experience that did not interest Barr. He was moved by the evangelical power of abstract art, and also believed that representational art of one kind or another had a future. (America's abstract avant-garde sometimes criticized Barr as hopelessly conservative.) One of the minor delights of this show are the pages of Rivera's 1928 Moscow Sketchbook, with view after view of parades awash in red flags and banners, the cumulative effect cinematic, fueled by Rivera's feeling for surging crowds and populist exhilaration [demagoguery]. During the period Rivera was in Moscow filling his sketchbook, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party, and by the time Rivera arrived in New York for the MoMA show he was a Trotskyite and thus aware of the Stalinist perils that no amount of brilliant red banners could disguise. Rivera's Moscow Sketchbook was owned by none other than Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who gave it to the Museum of Modern Art, a souvenir of the pageantry of Soviet Communism ["Pageantry"? Did he just speak of "the pageantry of Soviet Communism"?] deposited in an American museum by the matriarch of one of capitalism's defining dynasties. The ironies are almost incalculable. [What would he know about "ironies"?!] And we must not forget that Rivera was himself a fashionable figure in the early 1930s, at home in café society. [Among rich, decadent Communists.] As I said before, art and money can never be disentangled, nor would we want them to be. But there is money and there is money. And what Rockefeller money did for American art in the 1930s is a far cry from what the rich are doing to American art eighty years later.
* * *
I tried to post the following comment, but TNR only permits paid subscribers to post comments at its site.
The critic is disgusted with Hitler being presented both as a subject of art, and an opportunity for commercialization. So far, so good. But then he criticizes the Rockefellers for scrapping a Rockefeller Center mural by Diego Rivera idealizing Lenin.
By the way, someone at PBS wrote,
Considered the greatest Mexican painter of the twentieth century, Diego Rivera had a profound effect on the international art world.
Should a man feel flattered or insulted to be "Considered the greatest Mexican painter of the twentieth century"? Similarly, was the PBS propagandist insulting "the international art world"?
Lenin, good; Hitler, bad? How does that work? Lenin murdered millions in his five years as dictator, and Stalin continued his work. Together, they murdered many millions more people than Hitler did. But they were "the good guys"? Or does Perl expect us to think that the mass-murdering Lenin was good, but the mass-murdering Stalin—he of "the Stalinist perils"—was bad? Perl speaks of "the Mexican Leftist Diego Rivera." That would be the Mexican Communist Diego Rivera.
I guess Jed Perl (and his spiritual brother, Diego Rivera), in my unfashionable way of speaking—is a "good communist," as opposed to those "bad communist" Stalinists.
Beth Warren and the 2005 Brian Nichols Murder Spree
From "Brian Nichols in Atlanta: PC Kills… Again"
Funny Papers
But if CNN was guilty of politically correct coverage of the Nichols case, they were pikers, compared to alleged reporter Beth Warren, also of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who embodies what I call the banality of bias.
In an article in which Warren listed one example after another of Nichols' racism, she concluded that his crimes were not racially motivated. Right. Just like with Colin Ferguson, the Long Island Railroad mass murderer.
Brian G. Nichols considered himself a "soldier on a mission" the day he terrorized a courthouse and a city with a gun, according to a law enforcement official who witnessed Nichols first statement to authorities.
The official said Nichols, who was being tried in a rape case when Friday's deadly shooting spree occurred, considered himself a wrongly accused man in a legal system unfair to African-Americans….
In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the official said Nichols described how he had been stewing in jail while awaiting retrial on charges that he held his ex-girlfriend hostage and sexually assaulted her. The first jury couldn't agree and the judge declared a mistrial.
Nichols said he was angry that many of the inmates around him were also black and he wondered how many were innocent.
[Based on what former Fulton County Assistant DA Denise A. Sorino told me in a telephone interview, one could more accurately conclude that Nichols had been surrounded by violent, persistent felony offenders, who typically had "over a page of priors." ]
"He called it systematic slavery," the law enforcement official said.
Nichols didn't feel he was mistreated by deputies at the jail or courthouse, the official said. But he also didn't care that the deputies he would soon hurt were black. His anger was focused more on the legal system than race. And the main target was Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, who was preparing to resume hearing Nichols' rape trial.
But Warren admits that Nichols said that "the attack [on Judge Barnes] wasn't personal. In fact, he told authorities he thought Barnes had been fair to him during court proceedings."
Warren hears 'race, race, race,' but concludes, 'not race.' Why, if Nichols felt that Judge Barnes had been fair to him, would he kill him anyway? Because the judge was a white authority figure. Why would he kill the white court reporter, but none of the blacks in the room with her? Because she was white. And she wasn't even an authority figure!
Chaz Thrailkill, 19, of Markham, Ill., has been charged in the fatal shooting of Steven R. Agee II, 22, of Park Ridge in south suburban Chicago. The two reportedly got into an altercation early Wednesday.
[N.S.: Apparently, these murders are scheduled parts of the entertainment: "And now, the part you'll all been waiting for. To enhance your pleasure, and as an offering to the party Gods, some unsuspecting partygoer will be slaughtered!"
See, previously at WEJB/NSU:
Steven R. Agee II, Northern Illinois University Student, Shot Dead At Off-Campus Party
First Posted: 11/23/11 12:07 p.m. ET; updated: 11/23/11 5:10 p.m. ET
By Anonymous
NBC Chicago/Huffington Post
Updated story
A Northern Illinois University student from suburban Chicago was shot and killed early Wednesday after getting into an argument with another man at a party being thrown in an off-campus apartment.
Steven R. Agee II, 22, of south suburban Park Forest, Ill., was shot in the 800 block of Edgebrook Drive in DeKalb, about a mile north of campus, just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, ABC Chicago reports.
Chaz Thrailkill, 19, of Markham, was arrested late Wednesday morning and charged with first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and aggravated discharge of a firearm in the fatal shooting. He is being held on a $3 million bond, NBC Chicago reports.
Police arrived at the scene within a minute of a 911 call being placed and the student was found with a gunshot wound to his chest, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. He was taken to Kishwaukee Hospital in critical condition and pronounced dead there shortly thereafter. He had been shot three times.
Detectives say the party was attended by dozens of people, including many NIU students, according to the <I>Sun-Times</I>.
The student's father, Steven Agee Sr., told the Chicago Tribune Wednesday he had "just lost his baby boy. That's it." His son was majoring in sociology at NIU, had a job offer lined up in San Diego after his upcoming graduation and was planning to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with his parents.
"And now there will be no more holidays with him, not even this one coming now," Agee told the Tribune.
The shooting prompted the university to issue an alert announcing the tragic news.
Though they originally instructed students to remain indoors, university later reported that "there is no imminent threat to the community" and that the shooting was "an isolated incident that occurred as the result of an argument that escalated between two people at a party."
The suspected shooter fled the scene after the shooting, ABC reports.
1. Sadden
Nov 27, 2011 - 12:24:15 PM
Folks I worked for DOJ as a contractor and we got the stats on crime all the time. Everyone commits them. The whole country seems to be in a frenzy, sad but true. Even the politicans are not getting along and everyone is paying for it. We need a miracle right about now.
Police are not yet definitely linking the two incidents at the Giant store in the 2700 block of University Boulevard West. But the details are similar.
After a man was taken Saturday afternoon, both he and his car were dropped off at a gas station in the 7000 block of Blair Road, NW, in D.C.
The suspect fled from the station. Police say the victim was not injured.
On Wednesday afternoon around 3 p.m., a 75-year-old man was abducted from the same Giant parking lot by a man with a box cutter. He was forced to withdraw money from at least one ATM.
Spate of cab robberies has drivers, police worried
Eleven robberies and carjackings of cab drivers have taken place in the District this November. Police say the suspects work in groups of between two and four people, hailing cabs outside Metro stations.
Suspect tries to steal car with toddler inside
A woman pumping gas in NE D.C. Wednesday faced a nightmare when a suspect jumped into her vehicle and drove off – with her infant still in the backseat.
The mother was at a gas station filling up her Porsche SUV in the 5500 block of South Dakota Avenue Northeast at about 3 p.m. when the suspect took her vehicle.
The SUV was discovered several blocks away with the child still inside.
The 13-months-old girl was unharmed. It appears the suspect only intended a carjacking, not a kidnapping, police say.
Good Samaritan carjacked at Tysons Corner II parking lot of Neiman Marcus
On Saturday, November 19, a 59-year-old woman was approached by a young woman who said she had run out of gas. The woman gave her a ride at which point the young woman allegedly pulled out a knife and took the car.
Stephanie Lynn Schwab suspected in bank robbery, carjacking
The woman suspected of a carjacking in Tysons Corner and robbing a bank in Manassas is now linked to a Tuesday bank robbery, police say.
• PHOTOS: Stephanie Schwab accused of robbing two banks, car-jacking
On Thursday, the search for 26-year-old Stephanie Lynn Schwab continued as holiday shoppers prepared to descend on malls and shopping centers across the area.
[Thanks to reader-researcher RC.]
Forwarded by A Longtime Reader
How do YOU pronounce Oklahoma? Do you think it's correct?
There is a right way and a wrong way to pronounce Oklahoma.
If you say OK...LAHOMA, you're WRONG.
The proper way is: OKLA.....HOMA. There's a gap between
the "a" and the "h."
I can prove it.....................
There, you learned something today!
I do love these educational emails.... Don't you?
