1. Robert De Niro and Richard Price have sold a crime drama to CBS called Rookies that’s about “a team of six freshman cops who are sent into high-crime trouble spots.” They will also executive produce the series. [via THR]
2. Indie filmmaker Whit Stillman is busy at work shooting his first movie since The Last Days of Disco. It’s called Damsels in Distress, stars Greta Gerwig and Adam Brody, and tells the story of “a group of style-obsessed college girls” at a grungy school. [via THR]
3. Sorry iPhone users: An anti-sexting patent filed by Apple back in 2008 has finally been approved. Now you’re going to have to get a lot more creative with your spelling. [via Gawker]
4. E! is launching a new reality show about three women married to members of famous rock bands, including Perry Farrell’s wife Etty. [via LF]
5. Some unknown artist named Alisa Apps is challenging Lady Gaga to a sing-off with a $1 million prize because she believes her to be “just a plastic doll generated by the music money marketing machine.” [via NME]
Richard Price’s recent self-outing as Jay Morris, the unknown author behind a forthcoming series of detective thrillers, is a reminder that aliases can sometimes be more about artistic autonomy than anonymity. But if public pen names are used with the same self-mocking playfulness as Halloween attire, then Fernando Pessoa’s rolodex of “heteronyms” can be better understood as a costume closet for a sold out Broadway extravaganza.
1. The tagline/image combination on the Yogi Bear movie poster is a little surprising given that it’s a kid’s movie and not a gay porn, don’t you think? [via BWE]
2. David Cross has revealed new details about what Tobias will be up to in the Arrested Development movie: “It’ll be the year 2087. He’ll be working on a garbage barge in space. And it’ll be made out of wasabi peas, which of course, he’s allergic to. But he’ll be hungry…” [via Wonderwall]
3. Richard Price will write a series of detective novels under the pen name Jay Morris starting in fall 2011. [via Sarah Weinman]
4. To be filed under things that make Jack Whitereally angry: when “hip motherfuckers” like Mary-Kate Olsen consume free drinks while he’s trying to play music. [via Gatecrasher]
5. Justin Timberlake will voice a gay character in an upcoming episode of Fox‘s cartoon comedy The Cleveland Show. [via omg!]
Is glass the new plastic? Or, perhaps better phrased: Is the ancient, magical medium of glassworks challenging artists anew? Two European exhibitions suggest that glass is back big-time and, while still in touch with tradition, reflecting contemporary concepts of art-making.
Glas(s), Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam 1969-2009 is being held at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands, and Glasstress, which features an international group of artists from the past 80 years, is on view at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti at the Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti in Venice, Italy. Taken together, these two shows represent an amazing overview of some of the best modern and contemporary artists manipulating the medium. Read More »
Oh, New York, it was a pleasure to spy on you this week. We saw Middlesex, The Great Gatsby, and Jane Eyre in kanji. We saw two novels about the gentrification of our fair city: Lush Life by Richard Price and The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Sure, we’ve seen a lot of these books on the subway before, but they’re great, and we’re always happy to see some one enjoying one of our favorites for the first time. Read More »
The only major disappointment to report from last night’s inaugural Joe’s Pub sesh of the Happy Ending Music & Reading Series was not seeing Richard Price‘s ass as promised. Curator Amanda Stern requires that every reader who graces the stage also perform one public risk: “You know, singing opera, sharing PIN numbers, that sort of thing,” she explained. Price wanted to get the “dare portion of the evening” out of the way, telling us he planned to moon the whole room, showing us the tattoo on his butt.
We just got back from McNally Jackson Bookstore, where we’d run out to buy a copy of Richard Price’sLush Life as a belated holiday gift for a friend — she really loves gritty crime dramas and Schiller’s Liquor Bar, which graces the book’s cover. They were sold out.
This is third time we’ve tried to find Lush Life (which came out in March of last year!) in New York, only to be told that there were no copies left in the store. At a Barnes & Noble on 5th we came close; a clerk comforted us with the information that someone else had snatched up the last copy only 15 minutes earlier.
December is the month of the listicle. Every magazine, newspaper, and Web site has its own series of year-end round-ups. While there may be plenty of best-of lists for books (heck, the New York Times Book Review alone has at least three), they tend to play to the cut-and-dried categories of Fiction, Non-fiction, etc., and as a result, plenty of interesting works get thrown under the bus. After the jump, we’d like to pay tribute to the year’s best books for scholars of the bar, so pull up a stool and get comfortable.
