Tulip Press

Did David Burdeny copy Sze Tsung Leong?

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:58:00 +0000

It seems like something out of a Charlie Kaufman film.

Last month, the New York-based photographer Sze Tsung Leong was on location in La Paz, Bolivia, when he received a phone message from his New York gallerist, Yossi Milo. It had come to Milo's attention that a Canadian photographer was exhibiting a series of works in Vancouver that bore a striking similarity to an ongoing series by Leong. An image of the Canale della Giudecca in Venice? The Canadian photographer had it, and from the same perspective as Leong's. A cracking ice floe in Iceland? An Egyptian pyramid? A Japanese shrine? He had those, too, all cropped and composed in similar fashion.

Using images sent to him by a source in Vancouver, Milo identified seven photographs that he believed to be, if not "exactly the same," at least "very similar" to Leong's, as well as several images that bore direct resemblance to works by the German photographers Elger Esser and Andreas Gursky.

"Seine I," 2006, from Sze Tsung Leong's "Horizons" show. (Sze Tsung Leong / Yossi Milo Gallery)

River Seine II, Paris, 2009 by David Burdeny (added to article by Senka Kovacevic)

But it was Leong, a rising art world star whose work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, who appeared to be the principal source for the Canadian photographer, David Burdeny. The installation style of Burdeny's "Sacred and Secular" series at Vancouver's Jennifer Kostuik Gallery seemed to be borrowed from the rather idiosyncratic presentation of Leong's "Horizons" series at Milo's New York gallery. Even Burdeny's artistic statements had wording that was similar to Leong's.

A little investigation on the Internet revealed to Milo that Burdeny, 41, had studied architecture before turning to photography, as had the 39-year-old Leong. It all brought up the question: Did Leong have a doppelgänger stalking him around the globe, reproducing his images?

There's nothing particularly unusual about uncredited borrowing in the world of photography, a medium that is itself predicated on direct reproduction. But when such cases rise to the level of legal infringement is a difficult and largely subjective question.

Every photograph, even a tourist's snapshot, is protected by copyright law. But the extent of that protection is itself regulated by the doctrine of "fair use," which even the United States Copyright Office says is "unclear and not easily defined." Presumably, some form of transformation of an original work is required to avoid infringement, but just what constitutes an acceptable level of transformation is a matter of interpretation.

There have been several high-profile instances of photographic infringement. Sherrie Levine, who challenged the very nature of photographic originality by shooting the works of Walker Evans for her 1981 work "After Walker Evans," was forced to turn over that series to the Evans estate. Jeff Koons has had mixed results in court defending his own appropriation of photographic images.

The financial ramifications can be considerable. Leong's prints sell for as much as $25,000, and Burdeny's for up to $10,500. Confusion between the work of the two artists in the marketplace could adversely affect those values.

Eye of the beholder
Burdeny, for his part, denies all charges of infringement, and even denies being influenced by Leong. "These were all taken in heavily populated tourist areas," he says of the photographs whose originality has been questioned. "A big one that's come up is the pyramid. It just so happens that that's the only pyramid that you can photograph with a tripod without some very expensive permits."

Perhaps even more challenging for Leong and his attorneys is Burdeny's position on the nature of reproduction. "Nothing is truly copyable," he says. "My take on it is if I'm doing it there's always going to be a piece of me telling the story."

A narrow preponderance of commenters on the website of Photo District News, an industry source that reported the story last week, support Burdeny's contention. "It's slightly ridiculous that anybody is shocked by similar images," wrote Nathan Erfurth, a Colorado photographer. "In this day and age, just about everything has been photographed by many different people in many similar ways."

Burdeny's Vancouver gallerist, Jennifer Kostuik, goes beyond even that contention. "I don't find them substantially similar," she says of the works by Leong and Burdeny. "There are similarities in any contemporary artists' work. I'm only going to say that there's a similarity in terms of composition. But thematically, in terms of color, Mr. Leong's work, it's not even the same thing. There's nothing spiritual about Mr. Leong's work. It's all aesthetics."

Burdeny and Kostuik have not always been so dismissive of Leong's aesthetic proclivities. A signed credit card receipt furnished by Yossi Milo Gallery indicates that Burdeny purchased a copy of Leong's "Horizons" catalog at the gallery on March 6, 2009, several months before he agreed to show his "Sacred and Secular" series at the Kostuik gallery.

A year earlier, on April 2, 2008, Kostuik sent Milo an e-mail requesting permission to show Leong's work in her gallery, timed to the opening of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. Milo declined that request, but Kostuik followed it up again, two days later, pressing her interests. "Just wondering if you may still be interested in hav[ing] a show out here together with this artist [Leong]," she wrote. "Let me know and we should begin discussing if it is possible."

Clayton Caverly, a Toronto-based attorney for Leong, says, "Without knowing all of the evidence at this preliminary stage, Leong believes that there is a basis for inferring that the gallery owner and the artist engaged in a civil conspiracy to infringe copyright and appropriate his artistic expression."

Kostuik vigorously denies this charge. "I know he's trying to make it look like we cooked things up, but that's ridiculous. It's not what happened," she says. "I hadn't thought about [Leong] in years."

To Joshua Chuang, a curator at the Yale University Art Gallery who has purchased Leong's work, that argument is unconvincing. "[Burdeny] is more or less claiming that his ideas were original. That his ideas were inspired by a whole visual culture," says Chuang. "What I find egregious is a lack of acknowledgment of his sources. I think he's delusional, in the case of pretty hard evidence that he studied Leong's work."

Question of originality
Leong's photographs are themselves hardly produced out of thin air, as Antonio Homem, a director of New York's Sonnabend gallery, which represents Esser, points out. "Both [Burdeny] and Leong have a body of work that relates to Esser, but in the case of Burdeny, it's more than relating, he went to the place to take the photographs that Esser took." Esser, according to Homem, is at present planning no action against Burdeny.

Leong, a trim and studious Guggenheim Fellow who is self-taught as a photographer, has devoted considerable thought to the nature of originality in his chosen profession. One of the ironies of the situation in which he now finds himself embroiled is that he actually began photographing his work in series because he felt that was a way to develop a distinctive personal vision, one that would be his and his alone.

"It's more difficult to create something new and unique within a single image," says Leong. "It's easier to create something unique through multiples exploring a theme." Indeed, this was the subject of his strangely prophetic essay, "A Picture You Already Know," published in August 2008 by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "To shape a personal vision requires revisiting a subject over many images to create a more focused and particular view."

"In photography, you see a lot of quotation," he says. "Every photograph has traces of past photographers." Sometimes, those traces are just a bit too close for comfort. Whether they are too close for the law is another matter, and yet to be determined.

-By Mark Lamster

Mark Lamster is author, most recently, of Master of Shadows, a political biography of the painter Peter Paul Rubens.

The Dirt

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:04:00 +0000

This is one of the most entertaining books I have read in a long time. No joke.

Read the excerpts, it is very much worth your while.

(If the full size image is still too small to read on your screen hit "ctrl+" until it is large enough.)

Neil Anderson

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:49:00 +0000

If you find yourself in Philidelphia make sure you check out this exhibition.

Nightlife & The Divided Plane
Opening Reception March 5 6:00-8:30pm
March 2 - March 27, 2010
Bridgette Mayer Gallery
709 Walnut Street First Floor

David Burdeny

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:40:00 +0000

These panoramas are absolutly breathtaking in person. At 44"x55", and in high gloss, they are incredibly pristine and beautiful.

Be Good Johnny Weir

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:02:00 +0000

Senka Kovacevic

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:08:00 +0000

Ivan Stojakovic

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:46:00 +0000

I was born in Belgrade – a cosmopolitan city at the time, in ex-Yugoslavia, which in my teens fell apart into separate nation states and transitioned from communism to capitalism. My early education was shaped by historical materialism – an ideology that advocates a religious belief in science and suggests a revolutionary unity of all people in the communist system…

Ironically, I descend from a lineage of 9 generations of Serbian Orthodox priests. The lineage ended with my grand grandfather during the time of WWII and the communist revolution, which banned all religious practices in the Balkans…

In my early 20’s, I immigrated to Canada and then to the USA – New York, where I currently live. As I naturally became interested in the relationship between land and identity, I also discovered a potential in painting to construct and deconstruct the ‘self’ in terms of environment and environment in terms of the ‘self’, from/to abstract reality.

-Ivan Stojakovic

Kilimanjaro Magazine Edits: art, love and everyday life

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:08:00 +0000

My friend Henry Roy will be featured in an upcoming show in London. If you are in the area, I urge you to go check it out.

Kilimanjaro Magazine Edits: art, love and everyday life
4th February – 27th February 2010
20 Hoxton Square Projects
Tel: +44 207 033 0506
Admission Free

Kilimanjaro Magazine Edits: art, love and everyday life, is a show curated by Olu Michael Odukoya at 20 Hoxton Square Projects. The show features work by five photographers and three sculptors.

Established and founded in 2003, Kilimanjaro magazine is Odukoya’s personal labour of love. Collaborating with 20 Hoxton Square Projects, Kilimanjaro is now an exhibition too. In this show, like all the things Odukoya does, there is a rich mixture of cultural references. Erected in the middle of the gallery are a series of tunnels designed by architect Tom Finch and built out of flat pack mdf. Inside the space are photographs by international talents, Henry Roy, Robi Rodriguez, Claudia Stockli, J.H.Engstrom and Lukas Wassmann.

Henry Roy was born in Port au Prince in 1963 but grew up in France. He studied photography in Paris, after which he worked as a photojournalist and in 1996 published a book of black-and-white studio portraits, reminiscent of Richard Avedon or Irving Penn, titled Regards Noirs. JH Engstrom learnt his craft as Mario Testino’s assistant in the early 1990s and in 2009 he was part of Ca me touché, a photography show curated by Nan Goldin at the Arles Photofestival. While Roy and Engstrom are more established, Lukas Wassmann, born in 1980 is an emerging, as well as prolific talent. In the past year his work has appeared in Art Review, Das Magazin, I-D, Another Magazine, 032c and Interview.

Participating artists:
Henry Roy, Robi Rodriguez, Claudia Stockli, J.H.Engstrom , Lukas Wassmann, Alex Hoda, Michael Samuals, Milton Marques.

Alistair Bell

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:59:00 +0000

Igor Posner

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:18:00 +0000

Notes From the Underground

Born in St. Petersburg (former Leningrad), Russia, Igor Posner moved to Los Angeles, California in the early 90s. His early work includes photographs taken in south-central and downtown Los Angeles, Tijuana, Mexico. Igor returned to Russia in 2006, taking up photography full time.

At present, he lives between St. Petersburg, Russia and New York. He is currently working on two series: One focusing on Russian immigrant communities in Brooklyn and LA, and the other focusing on former Jewish ghetto settlements in Russia, Western Ukraine and Belarus.

Blood Sports

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:14:00 +0000

Monkey Beach was the first book my mother gave me in university. English is her second language, so these types of gifts have been few and far between. She liked the title, and wrote her hopes for my success in the future on the first page. As you can imagine, it is one of my most treasured gifts. However, despite the special circumstances of my discovering it, it has always been one of my favourite books.

Blood Sports is Eden Robinson's second novel. Considering my anticipation for more of her writing, I couldn't believe that I had missed its release in 2006. The excerpt below proves that it was worth the wait:

Hi Mel,

If you’re not eighteen yet, I want you to put this letter down right now. Okay? There’s a whole bunch of shit you don’t need to deal with until you’re ready. Your mom (I call her Paulie, even though she hates it. Try it, and you’ll get her Popeye squint) and I talked it over. We agreed not to put the heavy on you because we’re trying not to fuck your head up too bad.

You probably won’t be Melody when you read this. I’m wondering what Paulie will change your name to. Paulie was stuck on Anastasia, after the princess, but I thought no one would be able to spell it and you’d get tagged with Stacy or Staz or anything but your real name. My top choice was Sarah, but Paulie thought that was going to bite you in the ass in school when you met up with the hundred other Sarahs in your class. We went through a whole bunch of baby-name books, and couldn’t agree on a single name. Paulie’s picks were too fancy and she thought mine were dull. Her words in the operating room: “If you fucking stick my girl with Jennifer while I’m under, I will rip your nuts off.”

Paulie wanted an all-natural birth at home. Her friends here are into hippie shit like giving birth in wading pools and eating the placenta. Besides, she hates hospitals, doesn’t think they’re clean enough and hated the thought of you in a germ-factory. I’m not a big fan of hospitals myself, so we were all set to have you enter the world at home (no pool or placenta though). But things got hairy, and Ella, the midwife, called an ambulance. Paulie kept saying she’d spent enough of her life wasted and didn’t want any shit, but she ended up having every drug in the book. I’m sure when she’s mad she tells you what a pain you were to deliver.

Paulie exploded when they put the tent around her belly because she wanted to watch you coming, even if they were going to cut you out. Is your mom all ladylike now? Ha. I bet she is. You wouldn’t believe the things that came out of her mouth, but they put the tent up anyway and she asked me to videotape everything so she could watch it later. I saw the first incision and said, “Can’t do it, Paulie.”

The midwife wouldn’t videotape, but she said she’d describe everything to Paulie. Ella is this tiny fireball, a Filipina in her mid-forties, and she had to hop to peek over. I went and found her a stool and then waited in the hallway because there was no way I could listen to that. I walked down to the vending machine and got a coffee. So I missed your grand entrance. But we have a tape of everything up to that point, even the ambulance ride. I’m sure Paulie’s made you watch it by now. I stapled Ella’s business card to the back of this page, so you can look her up if you want.

I could hear you crying. You were loud as an opera singer. I could hear you all the way down the hall. Sad fact: Your dad is a big old weenie. I got a head rush and had to sit down. When I finally got my rear in gear, the nurse and midwife were checking you out, cleaning you up and swaddling you in the corner. The surgeon was finishing up your mom. She was pretty wiped. We’d been awake for three days by then.

When Paulie asked Ella if she should nurse, Ella laid you on her and you latched just like that. No problemo. All the shit going down and you took it in stride. Your mom’s smile, all proud of you.

“Come around here, you’ve got to see this,” Paulie said. “It’s like she’s mainlining.”

The nurse beside her stiffened. We’d had to disclose about Paulie being in Narcotics Anonymous. I think we freaked some of the staff. The whole week we were in the hospital, they acted like we were going to break out the rigs and turn our room into a shooting gallery.

I never got the deal with newborns. You were bald but hairy, red and wrinkled like any other newborn, and I’m sorry, Mel, but man, that is not a good look on you. You were sucking at Paulina’s boob like there was no tomorrow, your eyes screwed tight in ecstasy.

Read an online copy of Blood Sports at McClleland & Stewart.

Today's Note

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:20:00 +0000

Going West

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:36:00 +0000

Fantastics stop animation by the New Zealand Book Council for Maurice Gee's book Going West.

The Untamed: A Sinner's Prayer

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:59:00 +0000

I saw a brief interview with Stranger Comics publisher Sebastian A. Jones and was absolutely floored with the story of The Untamed: A Sinner's Prayer. Untamed is the introduction to new comic book universe centred on the world of Asunda and focuses on a character known only as the Stranger, who is returned to the land of the living for seven days to avenge his own, and his family's murder. Each day reveals one of the seven murders, his opportunity for revenge, and the moral struggles he faces.

In perfect compliment to the story, Swedish artist Peter Bergting has created beautifuly cinematic pannels reminicent more of a storyboard for a Kurosawa film.

The Untamed: A Sinner's Prayer #1 is available for free for the iPhone via digital comics distributor Panel Fly. An extended print edition will arrive in stores in 2010.

Forthcoming Asunda comics include:
Dusu, Path Of The Ancient - by Sebasitan Jones and Christopher Garner; art by Steph Stamb
Erathune - by Sebastian Jones and Darrell May; art by Sheldon Mitchell.

Randy Pandora

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:06:00 +0000

Pandora's work is beautiful. In fact I've put my money where my mouth is and purcahsed a couple pieces. He is a fascinating individual, and the Vancouver Sun interview below is worth a read.

MAKING ART FROM TRASH...REALLY
Randy Pandora has spent most of his life falling between the cracks. He was a teenage runaway, lived on the street for years, and admits to an on-and-off drug problem -- more on than off.

He's also been a longtime binner, sifting through people's garbage for bottles and cans to cash in. But he finds something else in the things people throw away -- the material for his art.

Pandora makes sculptures from almost anything: bicycle seats, a smoker's pipe, a faucet, a garlic press, an antique funnel from a gas can. In his hands, salad forks become noses, a shoe becomes a head, and a thumb from a boxing glove becomes a tongue.

It's not the kind of stuff you see at the big commercial galleries. But it fits right in at the Interurban Gallery at Carrall and Hastings in the Downtown Eastside, where Pandora's first solo show opened this week.

It's the highest public profile in decades for Pandora, who was a leading light in Vancouver's underground music scene, circa 1978-79. Back then he was the tall, whippet-thin singer in the Generators, an art-punk outfit infamous for its riotous live shows and songs like I Wanna Be A Girl.

"When we were good we were better than the New York Dolls," he states, "and when we were bad, we were just as bad as the New York Dolls. But we were definitely fun."

Unfortunately, the Generators broke up before they made any records. Then Pandora suffered a terrible beating which left him permanently injured.

"I had a head injury, a really major head injury, that still affects me to this day," says Pandora, who turns 51 on April 1.

"Somebody called me faggot and put my head in a corner and stomped on it with steel-toed boots. Caved in the whole left side of my head: six months in the hospital, three surgeries, huge memory loss.

"I'm pretty smart for a brain-damaged person, but my ability to memorize isn't the same, [and] my personality changed."

Since then, he's been on and off the street, although currently he has a place to live.

"I call it the fat man's coffin," he says. "I live in a seven-by-10 windowless room that I pay $350 a month for."

He has quite a story, Randy Pandora. He was born in Toronto, where his father J.J. Conroy was a bouncer and professional wrestler who went by a variety of names: Killer Kane Conroy, the Masked Marvel, the Assassin and the Psychedelic Killer.

Naturally, dad was a villain, or in Randy's words, "a beast." Dad also had a role as a villain in the Bob and Doug McKenzie movie Strange Brew: "He was the big fat ugly guy in the jail that scared the hell out of them."

But Randy Charles Conroy Hunter McArthur didn't spend much time with his father, who he claims sired 22 children by a variety of women. His mother was declared "unfit" to raise her children, so young Randy was put up for adoption. He ran away at 11, and ran away permanently at 14.

He moved to Montreal, where he landed a gig as a David Bowie impersonator in a drag show from 1972-74. "Two, three thousand people a week would see the show."

Somewhere along the line, Randy McArthur became Randy Pandora.

"Some drunken Russian sailors said my makeup reminded them of a panda bear," he recounts. "They went 'Randy Panda', and I said Pandora is much better."

He kept the moniker when he moved to Vancouver in 1976.

"I was reunited with my biological family; my mother had come out here to get away from my father," he says. "Harry Rankin did their divorce, actually."

In Vancouver he started attending the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr).

"I had been going there for about two years when they hauled me into the office and said 'Randy, has it ever occurred to you to register?' I said 'What do you mean, register?' 'Well, actually sign up. Enrol.' I said 'Why?' They said 'Well, you'd get marks in art.' Then they mentioned grant money, so I finally registered."

The first Talking Heads album had come out, and art students everywhere were inspired to start punk/new wave bands. Hence the Generators, which included the great Gary Middleclass (whose real name was Gary Bourgeois) on guitar.

After the Generators broke up, for a short time Pandora had a band called Exxotone. But then he more or less vanished from the local music and art scene, although there was the odd Randy Pandora sighting over the years.

His current comeback of sorts is due to the efforts of artist Carel Moiseiwitsch (who insisted he do a show) and John Lawrence of DoDa Antiques (who sells Pandora's work).

"I think Randy is incredibly resourceful, and very witty, and very inventive," says Moiseiwitsch.

"He's got absolutely no money, but he makes all this amazing stuff. All the rest of us [artists] have to have studios and God knows what, and this guy just makes it out of nothing. He's like a conjurer, he just brings the stuff up."

Lawrence feels the same way.

"I think he's a real product of his environment, which is very street-oriented. I like the idea of putting it all up and seeing it in a show where people can respond to it as a group, because there's a very wide variety of reaction to it, both on his part and on the part of the people who see it. He has said to me that sometimes he is frightened by his own work."

Indeed. His paintings -- which tend to be self-portraits -- can be quite sad.

"This is the sad clown with the vacant eyes," says Pandora, pointing to one of his favourite works.

"I think it [relates to my] head injury -- there's no top of the head. The eyes are vacant, there's a sadness. I suffer from bi-polar hyper-manic depression, it sometimes can be quite debilitating."

But in the main, Pandora's pieces are quite fun, playful and imaginative. He works wonders with bicycle seats, transforming them into amazing masks.

"It's a ripoff from Picasso," laughs Pandora.

"He's got the famous bicycle seat with the handle bars, like the bull's head. Bad artists copy, good artists steal."

Petropolis

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:47:00 +0000

Couldn't resist it. Anya Ulinich's writing is hilarious and she has a really great site for Petropolis worth checking out.

A CORRUGATED FENCE RAN THE ENTIRE LENGTH OF A STREET WITH NO NAME, until it crossed another street with no name. At the end of the fence, there were six evenly spaced brick apartment buildings and a grocery. Just under the buildings' cornices, meter-high letters spelled: glory to the, soviet army, brush teeth, after eatin, welcome to, asbestos 2, and model town! The letters, red and peeling, were painted along the seams in the brickwork, which forced the authors of the slogans to be less concerned with their meaning than with the finite number of bricks in each facade.

In the fall of 1992, Lubov Alexandrovna Goldberg decided to find an extracurricular activity for her fourteen–year–old daughter.

"Children of the intelligentsia don't just come home in the afternoon and engage in idiocy," declared Mrs. Goldberg.

She would've loved it if Sasha played the piano, but the Goldbergs didn't have a piano, and there wasn't even space for a hypothetical piano in the two crowded rooms where Sasha and her mother lived.

Mrs. Goldberg's second choice was the violin. She liked to imagine the three–quarter view of Sasha in black and white, minus the frizzy bangs. This is Sasha practicing her violin. As you can see, there is a place for the arts in the increasing austerity of our lives, she wrote in her imaginary letter to Mr. Goldberg, whose address she didn't know. But after the money was spent and the violin purchased, three consecutive violin instructors declared Sasha profoundly tone deaf and musically uneducable.

"A bear stepped on her ear," Mrs. Goldberg complained to the neighbors, and Sasha thought about the weight of the bear and whether in stepping on her ear the animal would also destroy her head, cracking it like a walnut.

"Sit up, Sasha," said Mrs. Goldberg, "and chew with your mouth closed."

Then came auditions for ballet and figure–skating classes, which even Mrs. Goldberg knew were a long shot for Sasha. On the way home from the last skating audition, where the instructor delicately described her daughter as overweight and uncoordinated, Lubov Alexandrovna walked two steps ahead of Sasha in a tense and loaded silence. Trudging through the snow behind her mother, Sasha contemplated the street lamps. She tried to determine the direction of the wind by the trajectories of snowflakes in the circles of light, but the snow seemed to be flying every which way. Sasha was staring straight up when her foot hit the curb and she landed flat on her face in a snowbank. This was more than Mrs. Goldberg could take.

"I told you to stop taking such wide steps. You want to see what you look like walking? Here!" Mrs. Goldberg swung her arms wildly and took a giant step. "See? This is why you fall all the time! You trip over your own feet!"

Sasha got up and dusted herself off. Her right coat sleeve was packed with snow all the way up to her elbow, and the anticipation of it melting made her shiver.

"I have some advice for you!" shrieked Mrs. Goldberg. "Watch your step! You should see yourself in the mirror, the way you move!"

Sasha woke up and stared at the water stain on the ceiling. For a while, her eyes were empty. She allowed the horror of life to seep into them gradually, replacing the traces of forgotten dreams. It was the first day of winter recess. The Fruit Day.

Mrs. Goldberg had a new diet for Sasha: each week, six days of regular food, one day of fruit only. Fruit meant a shriveled Moroccan orange from the bottom of the fridge and a mother's promise of more, since oranges were the only fruit found, if one was lucky, in midwinter Siberia. Mrs. Goldberg was already at work or orange–hunting somewhere, her bed neat as a furniture display.

Sasha got up and went to the kitchen. Feeling faintly revolutionary, she boiled water in a calcified communal teapot and pulled a chair up to the cupboard. In the corner of the top shelf was her mother's can of Indian instant coffee. Sasha put four spoons of coffee granules and four spoons of sugar in her cup and added water. The next stop was the fridge. Her mother had hidden all the food that belonged to the Goldbergs, but the other tenants still had theirs.

Sasha found half a bologna butt wrapped in brown paper, an egg, a brick of black bread, and half a can of sweetened condensed milk. She ate a bologna omelet and washed it down with burning coffee. For dessert she had the bread with condensed milk. Some of the milk seeped through the pores in the bread and made a mess. "Fruit!" cursed Sasha, licking the drips off her fingers. When her hands were clean, she made another cup of coffee and returned to the fridge.

Sasha Goldberg was determined to enjoy her vacation. Winter recess would be over in six days, and her fellow inmates would be waiting for her by the gates of the Asbestos 2 Secondary School Number 13, ready to knock her bag out of her hands and send her flying backward down the iced–over staircase. Hello, Ugly! Wanna die now or later? She would pluck her books and her indoor shoes out of the deep snow like birthday candles out of frosting and hurry to class.

Elliott Wall

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:09:00 +0000

You Look Familiar

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:47:00 +0000

No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:02:00 +0000

No Subtitles Necessary follows the lives of renowned cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond from escaping the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary to present day.As film students in Hungary, they shot footage of the Russian invasion of Budapest and subsequently volunteered to smuggle it out of the country. Barely escaping with their lives, they fled to America and settled in Hollywood, eventually saving enough money to buy their own 16mm camera to begin shooting movies.

Both rose to prominence in the late 60's and 70's having shot films such as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Deliverance, Paper Moon, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. During that time, working with directors including Robert Altman, Bob Rafelson, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese, they helped define a new American film aesthetic, and pioneered innovative, fearless ways to tell stories.

This is the story of a 50 year journey, an intimate portrait of two giants of modern imagemaking and their deep bond of brotherhood that transcended every imaginable boundary. Two heroes. One road.

A Message from Another World

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:12:00 +0000

In the summer of 1899, whilst alone in his Colorado Springs laboratory working with his magnifying transmitter, the inimitable Nikola Tesla observed a series of unusual rhythmic signals which he described as 'counting codes'. Having just detected cosmic radio signals for the first time, Tesla immediately believed them to be attempted communications from an intelligent life-form on either Venus or Mars, and later said of the experience, 'The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another'. The next year, Tesla was asked by the Red Cross to predict man's greatest possible achievement over the next century. The letter below was his reply. A much-needed transcript follows.

To the American Red Cross, New York City.

The retrospect is glorious, the prospect inspiring: Much might be said of both. But one idea dominates my mind. This - my best, my dearest - is for your noble cause.

I have observed electrical actions, which have appeared inexplicable. Faint and uncertain though they were, they have given me a deep conviction and foreknowledge that are ere long all human beings on this globe, as one, will turn their eyes to the firmament above, with feelings of love and reverence, thrilled by the glad news: "Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one… two… three…"

Christmas 1900

Nikola Tesla

Dec 10th posting on www.lettersofnote.com

I Cut Like A Buffalo

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 03:34:00 +0000

Last Day of Magic

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:17:00 +0000

The Real Hank Moody

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:50:00 +0000

Daphne loved speed.

Not in the traditional sense: she rarely pushed her weathered Honda Civic past third gear. The race for Daphne lay in the corridors of her mind, long and labyrinthine, and the girl needed her get-up-and-go. Cocaine, when she could afford it; ephedrine-powered nasal decongestants when she couldn't. But she was never happier than the couple of times I'd seen her receive a shipment of Simpamina, which was apparently Italian for "seventy-two straight hours of sex, rock and roll, and menial household chores completed with manic gusto." Followed immediately by four hours of paranoid delusions, violent arguments over meaningless nonissues, and, during our final week together, a pair of suicide attempts wrapped around assault with a deadly weapon.

I met Daphne when I returned to the U, a broke sophomore in need of a part-time job. My summer plans to bus tables for the snobs at the Hempstead Golf and Country Club had collapsed when I'd tried to drive a fully airborne golf cart through a plate-glass window. My passenger -- a bridesmaid with Stevie Nicks hair who minutes earlier I'd been fingerfucking behind the Pro Shop -- was late for her scheduled toast at the wedding on the other side of the window. The ensuing explosion of glass delivered a thrilling end to what had been, up until that point, a brilliantly executed shortcut across the bunkers on Hole 13, improvised with the help of a half-bottle of Stoli, an angry golf marshal in hot pursuit, and the bridesmaid's reciprocating fingers down the front of my pants. We escaped mostly unscratched, thanks to vodka's armor-plating effects, and the talk of pressing charges turned outto be just that. But the job was history. I spent the rest of the summer as an unemployed thorn in my parents' collective ass.

Back at school, I responded to an ad in the student paper: banquet catering. I began the interview with a heavily edited account of my country club experience, but at the urging of my interviewer -- a twenty-something peroxide blonde punk rocker and weekend college radio DJ with a killer smile -- I kept adding details until we were both rolling on the floor. I won both the job and an initiation into the strange and wonderful world of Daphne Robichaux, a crash course in alternative music, pharmaceuticals, and a lot of sex, with the occasional light bondage. I let her pierce my left ear and learned to play a few chords on the guitar. When I returned home for Christmas, I announced that I was dropping out of school to write music and shack up with my new soulmate. My mother wept and refused to talk to me for the rest of the break. My father just shrugged. "Save us some money, anyway," he said.

Whether by miracle or cosmic joke, Daphne and I survived a seemingly endless cycle of dustups and were still together the following Thanksgiving. Neither of us wanted to spend it with family -- mine was still sore at me, while Daphne claimed to be an orphan -- so instead we planned a Long Weekend of Glorious Ingratitude: four days and three nights in Niagara Falls, where we planned to make a point of never using the word "thanks," preferably while doing a lot of fucking in the tackiest honeymoon suite we could afford.

We packed the Civic and backed out of her snowy driveway, Daphne nearly guiding the car into the mailman. He sneered at us as he handed her a small white box with an Italian postmark.

"Thank you," she blurted at the mailman. He gave her the finger and walked away.

"I'd just like to point out," I said, looking at the shitty Timex my father hilariously called my inheritance, "that it took you under thirty seconds to violate our only rule for the weekend."

"You're driving," she said, already scampering over me. In the time it took me to get behind the wheel and pull the car into the street, she'd ripped through several layers of tape, cardboard, Bubble Wrap, and child-proofing to liberate a handful of the Italians. Her eyes lit up as they traced the pill's familiar contours: one half painted a sinister black, the other half transparent to reveal the timed-release payload of tiny orange and white spansules. "A salut," she toasted, swallowing one dry.

An hour later we pulled into an abandoned drive-in movie theater near Seneca Falls. She'd already removed her pants and unzipped mine. I barely had time to shut off the ignition before she climbed over the console, sprung my cock from my fly, and pulled her panties aside far enough to take me in. She slid slowly down to the point where our pelvises met.

That was the end of the slow -- from then on we were moving to Simpamina time. Using one hand to buffer her head against the Civic's low ceiling, I reached down with the other to recline my chair. The seat flopped backward with a bang, its momentum combining with the physics generated by our energetic coupling to start the car rolling backward down a gentle slope. I hadn't thought to secure the emergency brake.

Daphne's eyes widened with emotion. Fear? Arousal? Both? I was experiencing mostly panic as my body slid backward with the car, making it impossible to reach the brake pedal with my foot. Grabbing the passenger seat, I pulled myself through an incline sit-up toward the hand brake, wrapped my fingers around the handle, and jerked hard. We slid another few anxious feet down the icy grass before crashing into a metal post, one of the drive-in's speakers.

Daphne bowed her head and laughed and quickly rediscovered her earlier rhythm. We finished quickly and exited the car to inspect the damage to the bumper, which proved minor. She popped another pill and we were back on the road.

Two hours later, we checked into the Royal Camelot Inn, sold by the availability of the honeymoon suite and the "I came-a-lot at the Camelot" T-shirts on sale in the lobby. We cracked open the complimentary bottle of pink champagne, broke in the Jacuzzi tub, and managed one more ferocious screw in the heart-shaped bed before I collapsed into a dreamless sleep. I awoke eight hours later to find Daphne cleaning the tub, having commandeered a spray disinfectant during her sleepless exploration of the hotel and its surrounding area. She'd already planned our day: a visit to a winery just across the Canadian border.

The region was too cold for traditional winemaking, our tour guide explained -- the grapes froze on the vine before they were ready to be harvested. Driven by ingenuity and the desire for drink, the locals had developed a time- and labor-intensive process that squeezed just a few drops out of each icy fruit, the result a thick and sweet concoction called "Icewine."

Which we never got to try. While we'd taken the tour as a way to exploit Canada's more kid-friendly drinking age -- Daphne was a wise old twenty-two, but I still had a year and a half to go before my twenty-first birthday -- Daphne pulled me into a restroom as our group moved into the tasting room.

Our sexual odyssey, however, was taking its toll, specifically on my manhood: the chafing made Daphne's soft and wet feel like an electric power sander. I told her so when, on our return to the parking lot, she unzipped my pants, seemingly intent on giving me head.

"Whatever," she said, jerking the zipper closed. She began to walk toward the area's main event -- the roaring Falls -- then picked up her speed to a light jog. Soon it was a full-on sprint.

Maybe she wasn't going to hurl herself over the side, I thought as I sprinted after her, ignoring all kinds of pain as my jeans gave my sore groin a good working over. But she sure looked hell-bent on trying. As she neared the edge, I literally leapt for her ankles and pulled her to the ground.

"What the fuck, Daphne?"

My chivalry was rewarded with a flurry of punches to the face and chest. I shielded my face and bucked her off me. I waved at a few gawkers who were pointing in our direction. "We're all right," I yelled. "She's got a medical condition."

We didn't speak the entire drive back to the hotel. As I climbed out of the car, she grabbed the keys and sped away. I returned to the room, where I lay in the bed watching the same highlights on ESPN for almost four hours before she returned.

"I wasn't sure you were coming back," I said.

"Neither was I," she replied. "But I was afraid you'd keep the pills." She retrieved the bottle from the bathroom and helped herself to another.

"You want to fuck yourself go right ahead," I said.

"You already told me that when you rejected me in the parking lot."

I don't remember what else was said that night. The pattern, by now, was familiar: accusations and tears, harsh words, and, eventually, reconciliation. An attempt at makeup sex, cut short by the sorry state of my inflamed penis. We fell into a wordless cease-fire and, finally, a restless sleep.

Or at least I did. When I jerked awake, she was staring at me, bouncing slightly, seemingly full of life. Only her zombie eyes betrayed the fact that she was on her second straight day without sleep. "Number Three," she stated.

Our "Worst Fight Ever" took place just two weeks into our relationship, on our way back from a Meat Loaf concert. Then, a week later at an around-the-world party in my dorm, we fought a sangria-fueled reenactment of the Spanish Civil War. During a recent makeup session we'd listed our Top 5 Fights on the chalkboard in her kitchen, hoping the sight of so much water under the bridge would inspire future harmony. So far, the list had only succeeded in presenting more opportunities for argument, as new battles jockeyed for position with the old.

"Seriously?" I asked, pointing to the bruises on my arm. "Number Two, missie. Might give Number One a run for its money, if there's any scarring."

"Pussy," she said, punching me in the arm.

Neither of us felt like returning to the Falls, and after two days the room felt more prison than escape. We climbed into the car and began the drive back to school. Daphne celebrated the start of our journey with another Simpamina.

"Where do you even get them?" I asked.

"From Dino," she replied.

Dino was a Roman she'd dated during a semester in Italy when she was an undergrad art major. He'd been a genius artist, or so she said. I tended to ignore most of what she said about Dino, as in addition to vast artistic talent he'd apparently been endowed with a cock molto mostruoso and the equivalent of a graduate degree in Italian lovemaking. While I was generally confident in my own size and skills, talking Dino reminded me that Daphne was our relationship's wiser and wilder elder, making me feel like a groping pretender.

"Ah, Dino," I said. "Your friend with the Flintstones name."

"That wasn't funny the first time you said it. Or the six thousand times since." Daphne's spine stiffened for a fight. And I was feeling stupid enough to give her one.

"Dino," I continued. "The genius artist who's what, thirty? And still lives with his parents."

"You know damn fucking well that's the traditional living arrangement in Italy. It's not like the consumerist hell we live in here. Family values actually mean something."

"Just saying. Real geniuses don't live with their parents."

Her response was fast, effective, and very nearly fatal for both of us. She grabbed my arm, pulling me -- and the steering wheel -- toward her. As I leaned the other way to straighten the wheel, she punched me, without letting go of my arm, around my head and neck as hard and as fast as she could. What she lacked in strength, she more than made up for in speed.

"I hate consumerism!" she screamed.

The car began to spin, slowly, but still precariously out of control. I struggled to restore authority over the vehicle with my free arm while deflecting punches with the other. "I hate consumerism!" she continued to yell again and again, like a chanting monk.

Now we were facing oncoming traffic. Cars swerved past us, their drivers' faces rigid with shock, terror, and fury at an unpredictable universe. I began to smile, the same dumb expression that was plastered on my face when the Civic completed its 360-degree turn and slammed broadside into the center divider.

We sat in the emergency lane, motionless and silent. Until Daphne leapt out of the passenger seat, skirted three lanes of interstate traffic, and disappeared into a snowy copse of trees.

I banged the steering wheel angrily. I had a pretty good case for leaving her here. Let her hitch a ride. She'd get home eventually, full of piss and vinegar and maybe unwilling to ever forgive me, but fuck it: This time our relationship was done. Number Two had become Number One and there was no going back.

I slammed the wheel a few more times, cursing Daphne, Dino, myself, and lastly my parents for being such assholes that I'd had to even take this goddamn trip. Then I unbuckled my seat belt and played a real-life game of Frogger across the highway, hoping to find her.

It wasn't very hard. She'd fallen to her knees about thirty yards from the road. I approached slowly, softly repeating her name, trying to get a read on her emotional temperature. I interpreted her silence as welcoming so I moved in, placing a hand on her shoulder. A sharp burst of pain in my own shoulder provided instant feedback as to just how badly I'd misread the situation.

The switchblade was another Italian souvenir, something she began carrying full-time after a female student had been raped on campus. She dislodged the knife from my shoulder. I had time to scream in pain before she stuck me again, this time in my thigh. Then she went for the chest. Some instinct toward self-defense ordered my forearm to push back, flinging her backward almost comically into a snowdrift. I tried to step toward her, but the pain in my leg dictated otherwise. I crumpled to my knees and rolled onto my back, staring at the dark gray sky, bleeding into the snow, waiting to die.

-Hank Moody, excerpt from God Hates Us All

The Lovely Sea

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:49:00 +0000

When you know that you have found
The love you want to keep around
The sea can rise and crash and break
But you know it’s no mistake

Though warm tides at times can cool
Churn instead of gently pool
There’s no place you’d rather be
Than swimming in that lovely sea

The horizon line is always true
Levels me and levels you
Always even up ahead
Sunrise glow around our heads.

-by Senka Kovacevic

The Mirror

noreply@blogger.com (Tulip Press) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:07:00 +0000

Andrei Tarkovsky’s visually sumptuous fourth feature is the great director’s most personal and poetic (and Proustian) film. The Mirror offers an idiosyncratic history of twentieth-century Russia, in the form of a poet’s fragmented reflections on three generations of his family. The poems used in the film were written and read by the Tarkovsky’s own father (the poet Arseny Tarkovsky); Tarkovsky’s mother appears in a small role as the protagonist’s elderly mother. In a dual role, actress Margarita Terekhova is both the protagonist’s wife and his mother as a younger woman. “The Mirror is Tarkovsky’s central film, and his most personal one, although it might be better described as a transpersonal autobiography. Dreams and memories of an individual protagonist (who is never seen on screen) blend with dreams and memories of the culture. The generations of one family mingle. The Mirror achieves something which is uniquely possible in cinema but which no other film has even attempted: it expresses the continuity of consciousness across time, in a flow of images of the most profound beauty” (Amnon Buchbinder).