Rickles.  Hagen.  Two great tastes that taste great together.  “Individual God Identity?”  VD humor?  Oh, mid-eighties daytime television, I so miss your zany spontaneity!

 
Interesting report by Joel Rubin at the L.A. Times metro desk this morning: Apparently, Richard L. Weisman, the (former) owner of that big cache of stolen Warhols (valued at $25 million) has decided to forgo the insurance money because he doesn’t want to go through “the hassle” of the investigation. Weisman’s decision, first reported by the Seattle Times, was confirmed by LAPD today.

Dets. Donald Hrycyk and Mark Sommer, who make up the Los Angeles Police Department’s art theft detail, had few leads to follow. There was no sign of forced entry and no substantial witness accounts. And, oddly, other valuable pieces of art in the home had been left untouched.

Now, Weisman has said he is not going to pursue a payout from the company that insured the paintings.

“It is curious,” Sommer said. “We’d like to talk to him about it.”

We’d have to agree. How many people—even fabulously wealthy people—would choose to eat $25 million because of a perceived “hassle”?

PS Is this not the best Wanted poster of all time?

Cross posting this at Brand X

 
Disturbing portraits from Los Angeles based photographer Susan Anderson:

High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Beauty Pageants is a close-up and intimate look at America?

 
Genius funny account of a guy who waited on Mick Jagger in a Seattle toy store:

One of the nice parts of the job was getting to meet the celebrities that shopped there. The biggest of those was Mick Jagger. It was during the Stones?

 
An online auction of rare memorabilia from the estate of comedian Lenny Bruce, whose outspoken views on sex, drugs and religion paved the way for generations of comics, is currently accepting bids.The auction, set up by Bruce’s daughter, Kitty Bruce, is to benefit Lenny’s House, a nonprofit recovery program for women who are dealing with drug and alcohol addictions. Items for sale include Bruce’s typewriter, several private family photographs, his bed frame and one of Bruce’s trademark black trench coats, often seen in his arrest photos. This is the first time items from the Bruce estate have ever been put up for auction.

Other celebrity supporters who have also donated items include Chris Rock, Yoko Ono, Hugh Hefner, Jonathan Winters, Elizabeth Taylor, Carl Reiner and Arianna Huffington.

Bidding on the auction will end Oct. 28, and that evening a benefit for Lenny’s House will be held at The Laugh Factory comedy club with performers Paul Mooney, Rick Overton, Paul Provenza, and Bobby Slayton, with Richard Belzer hosting. Tickets are $35 and $50.

Auction details are at lennybruceofficial.com

Cross posting this at Brand X

Matt Johnson, under the moniker of The The, played the Hank Williams of the 1980s. Inspired by a Throbbing Gristle cassette as a teenager, he went on to record some of the most poignant and heartfelt pop music of the decade, helping lay the groundwork for the “alternative” heart-sleeving of the 1990s.

The The’s stuff is, to my mind, just brutally honest and True about the human condition. Johnson’s albums have gotten me through some hard parts of my life… and judging from his Amazon comments, I’m not alone. The Cult of Johnson, while small, is about as rabidly dedicated as you could expect a fan base to be?

 
These are just three of the disturbing images found on the website of California artist, Brendan Lott, who finds the source for all of them, it seems, online:

So I finally abandoned my studio practice and began to spend my art making time collecting digital snapshots anonymously from peer-to-peer file sharing networks.  I can access the snapshots of thousands of people at a time all across the globe.  These are images of people I know nothing about and cannot ever know personally—only look at.  The network serves as both a barrier and a bridge—I can see photographic depictions of their lives but never actually know them, and the people depicted have no way of knowing me.

Even stranger (yet somehow truer to life now as we know it), Lott himself never touches a canvas.  So as to better stay, as he puts it, “above the fray,” Lott outsources the actual painting of the works to artists living in China.  The top piece’s title, by the way?  “All I Have To Give You Is A Love That Never Dies.”

 
This week, Roger Ebert revisits one of his earlier pieces on conceptual artist Chris Burden, and turns it into a lovely meditation on the role of the artist in society:

Were these people all frequent visitors to the museum, or to art exhibitions in general?  Five years after the 1960s ended, were they now drawn to a man whose work seemed to negate love and music and flowers and—anything at all?  Burden was not of the Woodstock Generation.  His art perhaps said that art was a mockery.  That it was about the artist, who when fully committed was not engaged in life at all, but was on Pause.

One of Burden’s more infamous works was his possibly Vietnam-critical piece, “Shoot” (below).  In it, Burden was shot in the arm by an assistant standing five meters away.  After the “performance” was over, Burden was taken to a psychiatrist.

34 years later, on campus at UCLA, graduate student Joseph Deutch attempted a similar stunt.  The fallout lead, one month later, to the resignation of professor Chris Burden, who likened the piece to an act of “domestic terrorism,” and urged Deutch’s expulsion.

 
Bonus: Chris Burden’s Big Wheel

From Roger Ebert’s Journal: The Agony Of The Body Artist

 
Rabbits can’t get a break, these days.  I remember not too long ago where German breeders were in talks with North Korea about sending them giant rabbits for food.  Today, though, brings news of bunnies as the new bio-fuel:

Thousands of rabbits, some of them pets abandoned by their owners, are being shot, deep-frozen and burned in a heating plant in Sweden, a professional hunter who works for the city of Stockholm said on Tuesday.

The center of the Swedish capital is being plagued by thousands of rabbits, some of them wild and some of them stray pets, and 3,000 have been culled this year, down from 6,000 in 2008, Tommy Tuvunger, who hunts rodents for the Stockholm city administration, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.  ‘We are shooting rabbits in Stockholm center, they are a very big problem,’ said Tuvunger. The rabbits are eating their way through the city’s central parks.  ‘Once culled, the rabbits are frozen and when we have enough; a contractor comes and takes them away.’

The frozen bunnies are shipped to a heating plant in Karlskoga in central Sweden which uses them as biofuel and incinerates them to heat homes, media reports said.  A spokeswoman for the plant declined to comment.  The plant’s supplier, Konvex, a company that produces biofuels from animals, could not immediately be reached for comment.

In Spiegel Online: Sweden Turning Stray Rabbits Into Bio-fuel

Dangerous Minds pal Marty Beckerman just sent me his new article, “Kill Fatty,” a proposal of Swiftian proportions:

Overweight people are fucking abhorrent, which seems like an obvious and uncontroversial statement, but you cannot turn your head these days without gawking at the vile cascades of shapeless distended flesh that ubiquitously engulf your grotesque countrymen.


Look at these nauseating statistics:

1. 33 percent of Americans are overweight, according to the federal government.
2. Another 34 percent are obese, which is even worse.
3. Six percent are ?