Quote of the Day

"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness. Look at your 3 best friends. If they're ok, then it's you."
— Rita Mae Brown

Cultural News

Basquiat comes of age Beyeler exhibition aims to place the artist, who died at 27, high in the canon

The profile of graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose in 1988 at the age of just 27, has never been higher. The Beyeler Foundation is devoting a large-scale retrospective of more than 100 works to the Brooklyn-born painter, whose output is limited to just eight years, but whose critical acclaim is mirrored by the market interest in his work, with over 30 works on show at Art Basel on six stands.
“Basquiat’s strength was in his ability to merge imagery from the streets, newspapers and TV with the spiritualism of his Haitian heritage, injecting both into an intuitive understanding of the language of painting,” Jeffrey Deitch, the new director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, says.


Deitch’s opinion is reflected in the wide base of collectors for Basquiat’s work. The list of lenders to the Beyeler show reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary collecting, including the Miami-based Rubells and the Bramans, hedge-funder Steve Cohen, London jeweller Laurence Graff and tennis champion John McEnroe. The Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Zurich-based Daros Foundation have also loaned works. Other collectors include star names from pop music and Hollywood, such as Madonna and Leonardo DiCaprio.


“Major collectors of modern art view [Basquiat’s] work as comparable to that of Picasso and Dubuffet,” explains Beyeler director Sam Keller. “He was prolific, and produced 900 to 1,000 paintings and 2,000 to 3,000 works on paper. This amount is a condition for an active and sustained market.”


At auction, the highest price ever paid for a Basquiat stands at $14.6m for an Untitled work from 1981. It was set at the height of the art market boom at Sotheby’s New York in 2007. In November 2008, at the depth of the financial recession, an Untitled, Boxer from 1982 still made $13.5m (in the late 1990s it had sold for about $800,000). At the fair there are two works priced at $12m, at Shafrazi (F7) and Bruno Bischofberger (C9): Gas Truck, 1984, at the former, and the 1982, eight-panel work The Dutch Sellers at the latter, who represented the artist worldwide.


These two dealers are among a small, powerful group of players in this market. But Edward Tyler Nahem (F15) feels that the market is so broad today that it is no longer possible for a few dealers to control it. He is showing two works, Catharsis, 1984, priced at $9m, and Untitled (Self-portrait: the King), 1981, at $2.8m, while L&M Arts (B18) has a large work on paper, Ribs, Ribs, 1982, priced at $2.6m. Yesterday, dealers reported interest but few confirmed sales.


“Like many markets, Basquiat’s is two-tiered,” says Brett Gorvy, deputy chairman of Christie’s, which sold the Untitled, Boxer. “The most coveted material is rare, generally dating from the best period, 1981-83. There are good later works but overall the quality is more inconsistent.” Collectors really want what Gorvy describes as “emblematic works, preferably with a single figure with strong colours and a desirable scale”. Many of the top works are now with a handful of collectors: Peter Brant, Eli Broad, Philippe Niarchos and Dennis Scholl, and the collector/dealer family of Mugrabis. They are a major presence in the market, and passionate about the artist: Alberto Mugrabi even has the signature Basquiat crown tattooed on his wrist.


Below the top level is what Gorvy calls “a level of good, B+ works that sell for $800,000-$3m. These works are often bought by dealers who sell them on. There’s a healthy trade here.”


The majority of the works in the Beyeler show come from private collections. “Museums missed the boat,” says Alberto Mugrabi. Now, he says, they will have to wait for donations. His rumoured inventory of hundreds of works “is not as good as it was because I sold works”.


Since Basquiat’s death in 1988, his market has developed steadily—in line with overall art market trends—with a dramatic peak in 2007 when, at the height of the art market boom, the global auction volume for his work was over $115m, according to Artnet. During the 2008-09 financial crisis, turnover dropped back to 2006 levels, also reflecting lower volumes at auction.


In May this year Untitled (Stardust), 1983, depicting a jazz saxophonist sold at auction for $7.3m, well over the $2.5m pre-sale estimate, a price that startled some art world specialists. It was consigned by the Basquiat estate, which also has an authentication committee including John Cheim of Cheim & Read (A9), collector Larry Warsh and Basquiat’s father, Gerard.


“The Basquiat market has matured in the last few years, there’s a lot of collectors, not the old timers, mainly new collectors,” says collector Adam Lindemann, who lent to the Beyeler show. “They want Basquiat, not De Kooning. The old guard may still wrinkle their noses but Basquiat is blue-chip.”
-Art Newspaper

Literary Pick (**)

Kafka on the Shore -Haruki Murakami

Cultural News

 


5 masterpieces stolen in $123M Paris museum heist
PARIS — A broken alarm system made it as easy as 1-2-3: A masked intruder clipped a padlock, smashed a window and stole a Picasso, a Matisse and three other masterpieces from a Paris museum Thursday - a $123 million haul that is one of the world's biggest art heists.


Offloading the artwork may prove a tougher task, however, with Interpol and collectors worldwide now on high alert.


In what seemed like an art thief's fantasy, the alarm system had been broken since March in parts of the Paris Museum of Modern Art, according to the city's mayor, Bertrand Delanoe.


The museum, in a tony neighborhood across the Seine River from the Eiffel Tower, reopened in 2006 after spending $18 million (euro15 million) and two years upgrading its security system. Spare parts had been ordered to fix the alarm but had not yet arrived, the mayor said in a statement.


So with no alarm to worry about, a lone masked intruder entered the museum about 3:50 a.m., said Christophe Girard, deputy culture secretary at Paris City Hall. The thief cut a padlock on a gate, then broke a side window and climbed inside - his movements caught on one of the museum's functioning cameras, according to the Paris prosecutor's office.


The intruder later slipped back out, carrying the canvases and leaving behind empty frames. The whole thing took 15 minutes, a police official said.


Three security guards were on duty overnight, but "they saw nothing," Girard said. A night watchman discovered the theft around 7 a.m.


The stolen works included Pablo Picasso's "Le pigeon aux petits-pois" (The Pigeon with the Peas), an ochre-toned Cubist oil painting worth an estimated $28 million (euro23 million), and "La Pastorale" (Pastoral), a pastel-hued oil painting of nudes on a hillside by Henri Matisse worth about $17.5 million (euro15 million), Girard said.


Also seized were "La femme a l'eventail" (Woman with a Fan) by Amedeo Modigliani, "L'olivier pres de l'Estaque" (Olive Tree near Estaque) by Georges Braque and "Nature morte aux chandeliers" (Still Life with Chandeliers) by Fernand Leger.


Estimates of the total value of the paintings varied: The prosecutor's office initially put their worth as high as $613 million (euro500 million) but later downgraded the figure to about $111 million (euro90 million). Girard said the total value was about $123 million (euro100 million).
5 masterpieces stolen in $123M Paris museum heist


The broken alarm system also renewed concerns about museum security in the French capital. There was no operating surveillance system when a thief made off with a red sketchbook of 33 Picasso drawings from the nearby Picasso Museum while it was undergoing renovations last summer.


Within hours of Thursday's heist, red-and-white tape surrounded the Museum of Modern Art and signs on the Art Deco building's ornate bronze doors said it was closed for "technical reasons."


On a cordoned-off balcony, police wearing blue gloves and face masks examined the museum's broken window and the discarded frames. The paintings appeared to have been carefully removed from the disassembled frames, not sliced out.


Investigators were trying to determine whether the intruder was operating alone, Girard told reporters. Stephane Thefo, a specialist at Interpol who handles international art theft investigations, expressed doubt that one person could have pulled it off the heist, even if only one person was caught on camera.


Many high-profile art thefts have ended in failure, with the artworks recovered as thieves struggle to trade their illegal bounty for cash. But some famous stolen works remain at large - such as those seized more than two decades ago from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.


Alice Farren-Bradley of the Art Loss Registry in London said the Paris theft appeared to be one of the biggest art heists ever, considering the prominence of the artists, the value of the paintings and the high profile of the museum.


However, she said it will be "virtually impossible" to sell such prominent paintings on the open market and typically stolen art fetches lower prices on the black market.


"Very often they can be used as collateral to broker other deals" involving drugs or weapons, she said. "They are not necessarily going to be bought by some great lover of the arts."


Art expert Jean-Marie Baron said the heist could have been organized by thieves who plan to sell the paintings to wealthy individuals in Russia, China or elsewhere, and "who won't verify the origins of the paintings." Another possibility was that the thieves planned to "ransom" the paintings in exchange for a big insurance payout, he said.


The FBI estimates the market for stolen art at $6 billion. The Art Loss Register has tallied up to 170,000 pieces of stolen, missing and looted art and valuables.


Picasso is the world's most stolen artist due to his prolific output and the value of his works. The Art Loss Register lists some 550 missing Picasso pieces, including paintings, lithographs, drawings and ceramics, as of 2007.


Hours after Thursday's heist, the director of the neighboring Palais de Tokyo modern art museum called the thieves "imbeciles."


"Those paintings are absolutely unsellable. First off because these are very well known paintings. And also because we are in a new civilization ... of instant global communication," Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr told AP Television News. "The entire planet has pictures of these paintings."


The loss is "like the death of a family member," lamented Flemming Friborg, manager of Copenhagen's Glyptotek museum, known for its Impressionist collection.


-The San Diego Union Tribune

Literary Quote

"Lolita, luz de mi vida, fuego de mis entrañas. Pecado mío, alma mía. Lo-li-ta: la punta de la lengua emprende un viaje de tres pasos paladar abajo hasta apoyarse, en el tercero, en el borde de los dientes. Lo. Li. Ta.
Era Lo, sencillamente Lo, por la mañana, cuando estaba derecha, con su metro cuarenta y ocho de estatura, sobre un pie enfundado en un calcetín. Era Lola cuando llevaba puestos los pantalones. Era Dolly en la escuela. Era Dolores cuando firmaba. Pero en mis brazos fue siempre Lolita.
¿Tuvo Lolita una precursora? Naturalmente que sí. En realidad, Lolita no hubiera podido existir para mí si un verano no hubiese amado a otra niña iniciática. En un principado junto al mar. ¿Cuándo? Aquel verano faltaban para que naciera Lolita casi tantos como los que yo tenía entonces. Pueden contar en que la prosa de los asesinos sea siempre elegante, vaya que lo sé.
Señoras y señores del jurado, la prueba número uno es lo que los serafines, los mal informados e ingenuos ángeles de majestuosas alas, envidiaron. Contemplen esta maraña de espinas."
Lolita— Vladimir Nabokov

Literary Pick (*)

A Brave New World
-Aldous Huxley

Quote of the Day

"Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret."
— Ambrose Bierce

Literary Pick (*****)

Lolita
-Vladimir Nabokov

Art of the Day

"Death Seizing a Woman."
Kathe Kollwitz, 1934.

Quote of the Day

"As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot."

— John Lennon

Literary Pick (***)

The Death of Ivan Ilych And Other Stories

(Leo Tolstoy)

Literary Pick (*****)

The Odyssey  

-Homer

Literary Quote

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)

Literary Pick (*)

Wide Sargasso Sea

(Jean Rhys)

Cubic Dreams

Literary Pick (**)

The Stranger  

-Albert Camus

Kris's Color Stripes

Literary Pick (**)

Lord of the Flies
-William Golding

Quote of the Day

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."

— Socrates

Studio Aandacht

Literary Pick (***)

Last Evenings On Earth
-Roberto Bolaño 

Love Letter

 

July 6, in the morning

My angel, my all, my very self - Only a few words today and at that with pencil (with yours) - Not till tomorrow will my lodgings be definitely determined upon - what a useless waste of time - Why this deep sorrow when necessity speaks - can our love endure except through sacrifices, through not demanding everything from one another; can you change the fact that you are not wholly mine, I not wholly thine - Oh God, look out into the beauties of nature and comfort your heart with that which must be - Love demands everything and that very justly - thus it is to me with you, and to your with me. But you forget so easily that I must live for me and for you; if we were wholly united you would feel the pain of it as little as I - My journey was a fearful one; I did not reach here until 4 o'clock yesterday morning. Lacking horses the post-coach chose another route, but what an awful one; at the stage before the last I was warned not to travel at night; I was made fearful of a forest, but that only made me the more eager - and I was wrong. The coach must needs break down on the wretched road, a bottomless mud road. Without such postilions as I had with me I should have remained stuck in the road. Esterhazy, traveling the usual road here, had the same fate with eight horses that I had with four - Yet I got some pleasure out of it, as I always do when I successfully overcome difficulties - Now a quick change to things internal from things external. We shall surely see each other soon; moreover, today I cannot share with you the thoughts I have had during these last few days touching my own life - If our hearts were always close together, I would have none of these. My heart is full of so many things to say to you - ah - there are moments when I feel that speech amounts to nothing at all - Cheer up - remain my true, my only treasure, my all as I am yours. The gods must send us the rest, what for us must and shall be -

Your faithful LUDWIG.

Evening, Monday, July 6

You are suffering, my dearest creature - only now have I learned that letters must be posted very early in the morning on Mondays to Thursdays - the only days on which the mail-coach goes from here to K. - You are suffering - Ah, wherever I am, there you are also - I will arrange it with you and me that I can live with you. What a life!!! thus!!! without you - pursued by the goodness of mankind hither and thither - which I as little want to deserve as I deserve it - Humility of man towards man - it pains me - and when I consider myself in relation to the universe, what am I and what is He - whom we call the greatest - and yet - herein lies the divine in man - I weep when I reflect that you will probably not receive the first report from me until Saturday - Much as you love me - I love you more - But do not ever conceal yourself from me - good night - As I am taking the baths I must go to bed - Oh God - so near! so far! Is not our love truly a heavenly structure, and also as firm as the vault of heaven?

Good morning, on July 7

Though still in bed, my thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved, now and then joyfully, then sadly, waiting to learn whether or not fate will hear us - I can live only wholly with you or not at all - Yes, I am resolved to wander so long away from you until I can fly to your arms and say that I am really at home with you, and can send my soul enwrapped in you into the land of spirits - Yes, unhappily it must be so - You will be the more contained since you know my fidelity to you. No one else can ever possess my heart - never - never - Oh God, why must one be parted from one whom one so loves. And yet my life in V is now a wretched life - Your love makes me at once the happiest and the unhappiest of men - At my age I need a steady, quiet life - can that be so in our connection? My angel, I have just been told that the mailcoach goes every day - therefore I must close at once so that you may receive the letter at once - Be calm, only by a calm consideration of our existence can we achieve our purpose to live together - Be calm - love me - today - yesterday - what tearful longings for you - you - you - my life - my all - farewell. Oh continue to love me - never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved.

ever thine

ever mine

ever ours

Ludwig van Beethoven

Literary Pick (*****)

Revolutionary Road
-Richard Yates

Literary Pick (**)

David Copperfield
-Charles Dickens

I

Literary Quote

"If there was any word of comfort that would be a solace to her in her dying hour, and only I possessed it, I wouldn't part with it for Life itself."

David Copperfield-Charles Dickens

Literary Pick (*)

Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black
(Cookie Mueller)

Quote of the Day

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

— Albert Einstein

Life in the Fun Lane

Spotlight On Design

Literary Pick (****)

The Unruly Life of Woody Allen: A Biography
(Marion Meade)

Quote of the Day

"A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have."
— Barry Goldwater

A Black Pepper

Slipcover Your Life

Fabulous K

Literary Pick (***)

The Bell Jar  

-Sylvia Plath

Quote of the Day

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literary Pick (****)

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle 

-Haruki Murakami

Murakami is an amazing writer. Each chapter of this book was very indulging. Oddly enough Murakami possesses a feminine quality in his work, a sensitivity in the character of Toru Okada that I really appreciated coming from a male writer. A modern quality in the relationship between him and Kumiko (his wife), of which I can't quite put my finger on that one rarely finds from other male writers when describing romantic relationships.
I couldn't help compare this book with Marquez's 100 years of Solitude due of the magical realism aspects of both works. The difference between the two is that Marquez's stories all ended seamlessly with viable explanations (as much as you can explain things in the world of magical realism) of some sort to these odd stories and characters. However, Murakami failed to do that. I am open to this particular genre of writing, but things still need to make sense to an acceptable degree. There were just too many unanswered questions in the "Wind-up Bird chronicle". Some events towards the end of the story even seemed a bit convenient and left unexplained.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading this book and am happy I did. I'm looking forward to reading more works by Murakami.

Quote of the Day

"Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight."

— Phyllis Diller

Sound of the Moment

Philadelphia (Neil Young)
-Click here-

Sometimes I think that I know

What love's all about

And when I see the light

I know I'll be all right.

I've got my friends in the world,

I had my friends

When we were boys and girls

And the secrets came unfurled.

City of brotherly love

Place I call home

Don't turn your back on me

I don't want to be alone

Love lasts forever.

Someone is talking to me,

Calling my name

Tell me I'm not to blame

I won't be ashamed of love.

Philadelphia,

City of brotherly love.

Brotherly love.

Sometimes I think that I know

What love's all about

And when I see the light

I know I'll be all right.

Philadelphia.

Literary Pick (*)

The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)

Quote of the Day

"Kiss me and you'll see how important I am."

— Sylvia Plath

Literary Pick (***)

It's Always Something (Gilda Radner)

I feel guilty not giving this a 4 or 5 star review because I love Gilda so much. I thought she was hysterical. It wasn't one of the best written biographies, but I couldn't put the book down either. It was interesting to read about her struggle with cancer and her never-ending relapses. She was one amazingly strong person. I know that's what people usually say to describe other people, but you should read this bio so you know what I mean. She lived through one stroke of bad luck after another. I don't even know where she got her strength from. Kudos to her husband Gene for sticking by her side. What a shame how she finally ended up dying. Life can be so cruel sometimes.

I read the 20th "newly revised" anniversary edition with a forward by Alan Zweibel, and I wonder why they didn't give the reader an update on her death later on. Fortunately I had already found out on the internet some months back, but they should definitely add that in future revisions.

We still love you Gilda!!

Lovely Clusters

Literary Pick (****)

Grapefruit  

-Yoko Ono

Recipe

Potato Kugel

Put peeled potatoes through a food mill and add a little dry government issue flour and salt. Grease a mold or ovenproof dish with paraffin or stearin and bake for 2 1/2 hours. Serve with rotten strawberry compote. (Onions not available. Nor oil for mold or dough!)

-Diary of a Young Girl

Art of the Day

Oedipus Cursing His Son, Polynices (Henry Fuseli)

Henry Fuseli's dramatic painting, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1786, depicts the tense climax of Oedipus at Colonus, a drama by Sophocles. In that ancient Greek tragedy, King Oedipus had gone into self-imposed exile at Colonus, a town near Athens, after discovering to his horror that, unwittingly, he had murdered his father and married his own mother. Oedipus, having blinded himself in remorse, is depicted here with blood-red eyes in a thick, scabby paint—the opposite of the normal use of smooth, clear textures for eyes.

The kneeling Polynices, one of Oedipus’ two sons, hopes to win his father's favor over his brother, who had usurped the throne. Outraged at both his unfaithful boys, Oedipus condemns them to die in battle by each other's hand. The blind king extends his powerful arms to curse them, while Polynices recoils as if struck a painful blow. Standing between her father and brother, Antigone seeks reconciliation. In contrast to Antigone’s strength of will, her weeping sister, Ismene, personifies sorrow.

Fuseli, a Swiss clergyman, became a classical scholar before studying art in Rome. After immigrating to London in 1780, Fuseli was elected the Royal Academy’s professor of painting.

-NGA

Literary Pick (*****)

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

I'm really surprised by the number of people who thought this book was boring.
I could understand how an adult man might find the musings of a young girl rather dull, but how can people in general not find this journal utterly fascinating? Here is a teenage girl who up until the end wrote with the same emotional consistency as when she began. Whoever thinks this books is boring, is because they simply fail to realize, or even imagine the conditions in which this diary was written. To think how this young girls personal life continued beyond the details of the war is rather remarkable.
What would anyone else have written about in their diary as young boy or girl in the same predicament as the Franks?
Anne is surprisingly strong and mature for her age, impressively intelligent, and although there was a World War going on, her own particular world never abated. Her personal life was just as important, if not necessary in order for her to survive the day to day living conditions at the Annex.
Yes, there were brief moments of panic, but she had to live life, even if her living space was limited. She carried on as if being in hiding was a mere temporary inconvenience. She wasn't going to let that rob of her of her right to claim her passage into womanhood..her God given right to experience puberty, moodiness, emotions, and even love.

Here I thought I was about to read the semi-interesting scribbles of a blooming young lady, with ambiguous references to the war. But there is nothing cryptic about her diary. She shoots straight from the hip in this incredibly and shockingly honest account of what life was like for her and her family living in hiding during the WW. It's not what I expected. I expected something rather tame, but it's far from it. This young girl was very interesting and quite special.

You can't read this journal and think it's just an ordinary diary of a young girl, because it's not. Anne's diary is a representation of how other Jewish families lived and coped during the Nazi war. That's really powerful. Many people don't realize how fortunate we are (thanks to Anne Frank, her Father Otto Frank and Miep Gies) to have some insight on how it must have been for the Jews to coexist this way. Because of Anne, we can have some sort of idea of how it was like to live under floorboards, in between walls, and behind bookshelves. This diary humanizes and brings back to life the Jewish people who mysteriously disappeared but who had not yet died.
I love this diary and I'm so grateful to have read it.


It must have been extremely difficult for her father Otto Frank, to read his daughters diary after her death.

Quote of the Day

To whom shall I hire myself out?

What beast should I adore? What holy image attack? What hearts break? What lies uphold? In what blood tread?

—A Season in Hell, Rimbaud

Lovers of the Century

Maria Callas and Aristo

Literary Pick (***)

Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier)

Sound of the Moment

Y Como es el (Jose Luis Perales)
-Click here-

Mirandote a los ojos, juraria

que tienes algo nuevo que contarme

empieza ya mujer, no tengas miedo

quiza para manana sea tarde

quiza para manana sea tarde

y como es el?, en que lugar es enamoro de ti?

de donde es?, a que dedica el tiempo libre?

preguntale, por que a robado un trozo de mi vida

es un ladron, que me a robado todo

X2

Arregla te mujer, se te hace tarde

y llevate el paragas por si llueve

el te estara esperando para amarte

y yo estare celoso de perderte

y abrigate, te sienta bien ese vestido gris

sonriete, que no sospeche que has llorado

y dejame, que vaya preparando mi equipaje

perdoname, si te hago otra pregunta

y como es el?, en que lugar es enamoro de ti?

de donde es?, a que dedica el tiempo libre?

preguntale, por que a robado un trozo de mi vida

es un ladron, que me a robado todo

From: http://lyricstranslate.com

Honor Spotlight

 

Gilda Radner
(June 28, 1946 - May 20, 1989) was an American comedienne and actress.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Radner attended the University of Michigan as a drama major and moved to Toronto, Canada. Her first professional stage experience was a Toronto production of Godspell following which she joined the Toronto Second City comedy troupe. She first rose to widespread fame as one of the original "Not Ready For Prime Time Players" on Saturday Night Live. (She was the first actor cast for the show.) On that show from 1975 to 1980 she created such characters as Roseanne Rosannadanna, Baba Wawa, and Emily Litella. She had a knack for combining extreme physical comedy with soft, caring characters that were easy to love. (There is a legend that Radner broke several ribs during one comedy sketch that required her to slam herself against a door repeatedly, but the next day she went on as scheduled.)

After leaving Saturday Night Live, Radner appeared on Broadway in a successful one-woman show that featured racier material, such as the humorous song "Talk Dirty to the Animals". This show was captured on film in 1981 as Gilda Live! and co-starred Paul Shaffer and Don Novello.

In the late 1980s, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Even with the support of her second husband, actor Gene Wilder, (she had previously been married to Saturday Night Live band leader G.E. Smith,) she suffered extreme pain (physical and emotional) as a chemotherapy patient. Eventually she was told she had gone into remission, and she wrote a memoir about her life and struggle with the illness, called It's Always Something. The book was written by Radner in tribute to cancer sufferers everywhere, and she used humor to overcome tragedy and pain. The book's title came from a common catch-phrase from her Saturday Night Live character Roseanne Rosannadanna, who would often quote an elderly relative by saying "My Uncle used to say...it's always something! If it's not one thing, it's something else!"

In 1989 doctors did a more detailed examination and discovered that Radner's cancerous cells had not all been removed and had spread to other areas of the body. She died in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, in 1989, where she had been admitted for a CAT scan. She was given a sedative and passed into a coma. After three days, she died without regaining consciousness but with Wilder at her side.

Wilder has since established the Gilda Radner Ovarian Detection Center at Cedars-Sinai to screen high-risk candidates and run basic diagnostic tests. He testified before a Congressional committee that her condition was misdiagnosed and that if doctors had inquired more deeply into her family background they would have found numerous cases of ovarian cancer and might have attacked the disease earlier.

Wilder has continued his involvement in both detection and treatment of ovarian cancer. In tribute to Radner, Gilda's Club was founded. It is a place where cancer sufferers can go to be around other people in the same situation and embrace one another in life. It grew to multiple locations across the country.

-Bio Base

Quote of the Day

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

— Mark Twain

Instruction

HIDE-AND-SEEK-PIECE

Hide until everybody goes home.

Hide until everybody forgets about you.

Hide until everybody dies.

1964 spring

Yoko Ono

Cultural News

the 20th anniversary of a photograph. It's a very dramatic photo, even though, at first glance, it's mostly dark and seems to show nothing at all.

But if you look closely, you can see a tiny speck of light. That speck is the Earth, seen from very, very, very far away.

Two decades ago, Candice Hansen-Koharcheck became the first person to ever see that speck, sitting in front of a computer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California. "I was all alone, actually, that afternoon, in my office," she recalls.

Her office was dark. The window shades were drawn. She was searching through a database of images sent home by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which at the time was nearly 4 billion miles away. "I knew the data was coming back," she says, "and I wanted to see how it had turned out."

Finally, she found it.

"It was just a little dot, about two pixels big, three pixels big," she says. "So not very large."

But this was the Earth — seen as no human had ever seen it before.

What's more, an accidental reflection off the spacecraft made it look as though the tiny speck was being lit up by a glowing beam of light. "You know, I still get chills down my back," says Hansen-Koharcheck. "Because here was our planet, bathed in this ray of light, and it just looked incredibly special."

And yet, if you weren't searching for it, that special little speck would be almost invisible. The Apollo astronauts had taken photos that showed the Earth as a big blue marble, swirling with clouds and continents. But this picture showed the smallness of Earth in the vastness of space.

A New Perspective On The Planet

The late astronomer Carl Sagan eloquently tried to express how he felt about this photo in his book Pale Blue Dot:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Robert Poole, a historian at the University of Cumbria in the United Kingdom who wrote a book on images of Earth from space called Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, says this particular photo shows what an extraterrestrial might see as it approached our solar system.

"This is not our view. We've managed to go out and get the view that somebody else might have, whereas the early Apollo pictures of the blue marble were our own view of Earth," Poole says. "Like most people, I saw it in the newspaper not long after it was taken and kind of intellectually I thought, 'This is amazing!'"

A Photo That Almost Didn't Happen

Pictures like this are still few and far between. They are not exactly easy to take. In fact, we almost didn't get this one. Carl Sagan lobbied for it early in the Voyager 1 mission. But others objected that taking it might fry the spacecraft's camera. That's because the Earth is so close to our extremely bright Sun. "There was a reluctance to take any kind of risk when we would point back towards the Sun, we didn't want to accidentally damage the cameras in any way," says Hansen-Koharcheck.

"Oh, there was a lot of debate as to what its value would be," recalls Edward Stone, who was — and still is — the chief scientist for the Voyager mission. "It was not a scientific image. It was really, I think, an image to sort of declare that here, for the first time we could take such an image, and second of all it provided a new perspective of Earth and its place in our solar neighborhood."

But the idea was shelved for years, as Voyager 1 flew through the solar system and did its science, sending images back from Saturn and Jupiter.

In 1989, the mission was winding down — some staff was going to leave. And Sagan made a last-minute request to please, please, take this unique photo before the opportunity disappeared forever. The decision went to the top levels of NASA "because it was going to extend the mission in terms of imaging capability for an additional six months or so and that of course did cost money," explains Stone.

"I did get a visit from Carl Sagan. We talked about a lot of things. And somewhere in that conversation he mentioned this idea," recalls the then-head of NASA, retired Vice Admiral Richard Truly. "I thought, heck, with Voyager so far away, if it could turn around and take a picture of the different planets including the Earth, that that would really be cool. And so I was a great advocate of it, although I can't take any credit for it."

In 1990, late on February 13 — or on Valentine's Day, in the time zone used by the Voyager 1 team — the spacecraft turned its cameras to Earth.

A Relatively Tiny Object In The Vastness Of Space

Later, the image was released to the world to great fanfare. But it never really captured the popular imagination like the famous Apollo images.

"I think it was hard, it's still hard, to get really your head around the fact that our solar system is so immense, compared to Earth," says Stone.

To get the full impact of this photo, Stone says, you really have to see it up on a wall, as part of large panorama that Voyager 1 took of the solar system's distant planets.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab used to have just such a display with the full mosaic of photos posted up in an auditorium, says Hansen-Koharcheck. "And to show the whole thing it covered, oh, I don't know, 12 or 14 feet," she says — of mostly empty black space, with just a few pinpricks of light showing the planets. One of them was labeled Earth.

"One of the guys that took care of that display told me one time that he was forever having to replace that picture," says Hansen-Koharcheck, "because people would come up to look at it and they would always touch the Earth."

Voyager 1 is now about three times farther away than it was twenty years ago, says Stone. The spacecraft still routinely phones home, although its cameras no longer take photos. But if it could send back another picture, the little dot that's Earth would look even fainter and even smaller.

Cookography

Art of the Day

Tea Leaves
(William McGregor Paxton)

Quote of the Day

Sta Viator. Amabilem conjugem calcas.

"Halt, Traveler. You are trampling an adored wife"

(inscribed on the tombstone of Emma Bovary)
-Madame Bovary

Literary Pick (*)

Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson)

Sandra Juto

Literary Pick (*)

The Age of Fable  

-Thomas Bulfinch

Cultural News

Giacometti Sculpture Sells For Record $104 Million

A life-size bronze sculpture of a man by Alberto Giacometti was sold Wednesday at a London auction for 65 million pounds ($104.3 million) — a world record for the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction, Sotheby's auction house said.

It took just eight minutes of furious bidding for about 10 bidders to reach the hammer price for L'Homme Qui Marche I (Walking Man I), which opened at 12 million pounds, Sotheby's said.

The sculpture by the 20th century Swiss artist, considered an iconic Giacometti work as well as one of the most recognizable images of modern art, was sold to an anonymous bidder by telephone, the auction house said.

Sotheby's had estimated the work would sell for between 12 million and 18 million pounds.

The sale price trumped the $104.17 million paid at a 2004 New York auction for Pablo Picasso's 1905 Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice). That painting broke the record that Vincent van Gogh had held since 1990, and its sale was the first time that the $100 million barrier was broken.

L'Homme Qui Marche I, a life-size sculpture of a thin and wiry human figure standing 72 inches tall, "represents the pinnacle of Giacometti's experimentation with the human form" and is "both a humble image of an ordinary man and a potent symbol of humanity," Sotheby's said.

The work was cast in 1961, in the artist's mature period. It is rare because it was the only cast of the walking man made during Giacometti's lifetime that has ever come to auction, Sotheby's said. It was bought by Dresdner Bank in the early 1980s.

The last time a Giacometti of comparable size was offered at auction was 20 years ago. That sculpture was sold for $6.82 million, a record for Giacometti works at the time.

-NPR