ALBERT SCHWEITZER Quote

"In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit."

- Albert Schweitzer

EXCERPT from IN HEAVEN EVERYTHING IS FINE

IN HEAVEN EVERYTHING IS FINE
The Unsolved Life of Peter Ivers and the Lost History of New Wave Theatre
C Josh Frank 2008 By Josh Frank with Charlie Buckholtz
Free Press a division of Simon and Shuster publishers

page XVIII "... in many ways he (Peter) exemplified the cross-pollination of punks and comics...

page XIX "He made a lot of decisions in his life, and many of them seemed to lead away from the success he so vitally desired. Some called him Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up and face facts, while others rooted for him till his last days. By choosing to live the artistic dreams that they themselves (often admittedly) had given up on, he exuded a fulfillment they could never quite achieve. With a bank account perpetually in the red, he became an unlikely role model - an icon of authenticity and a bottomless source of inspiration, emulation, and adoration - for a generation of pop culture heavyweights..."

(Peter is said to have disrobed freely since childhood.)

page 112 "It was a bad boy stage persona Peter had begun to cultivate only recently. Even his band mates were at a loss.... It all seemed a little too Hollywood. Peter had pulled a similar stunt recently at the Palladium in Hollywood, opening for the New York Dolls. He'd come out in a diaper, with a squirt gun inside it filled with milk, covered with a rubber penis He squirted milk onto the audience, which promptly booed him off the stage. At least with the Dolls crowd, Peter could be excused for expecting some punk-rock enthusiasm for his wild stage antics....

MILTON KLONSKY Quote

From ONE DROP by Bliss Broyard, quoted page 367

"The Village, with its unpredictably digressive streets and twisting free-association byways, was divided from the straight and square-away world uptown like the ego from the id. - Milton Klonsky

PLUTARCH Quotation

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
- Plutarch

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN - ROBERT FROST

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

By Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no steps had trodden black.
Oh! I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

EXCERPT from IN HEAVEN EVERYTHING IS FINE

IN HEAVEN EVERYTHING IS FINE The Unsolved Life of Peter Ivers and the Lost History of New Wave Theatre C Josh Frank 2008 By Josh Frank with Charlie Buckholtz Free Press a division of Simon and Shuster publishers 

page 232 "Helm got the sense that Peter was in search of another alternative community to be a part of. Downtown was the LA art scene's Wild West, a seedy no-man's-land with a tight sense of belonging among its artist pioneers. The social infrastructure was exclusively grassroots, which reinforced the sense of community.There were loft parties, bands playing on loading docks, and one-night-a -week clubs where people packed obscure dead venues just by word of mouth.' "Some of Peter's friends thought he was searching for something more than a new group of collaborators and friends. Peter was still Peter - upbeat and focused on his work - but something had changed. His friends sensed that the separation from Lucy affected him more deeply than perhaps even he knew. He seemed lost. His woman friends in particular .... could tell that Peter was sad, that he didn't understand why things hadn't worked out, that he was feeling a sense of failure...' Page 257 "Meanwhile, many of his friends had chosen instead to focus on the one or two things they did best, had leveraged their talents, and hit it big, achieving the kind of success that always eluded Peter. The wear and tear of constant struggle was beginning to show.... Peter sensed he was being left behind... And there was money. Having mortgaged everything on his dream, Peter was essentially destitute. The minor celebrity he was attaining on new Wave Theatre could not pay for dinner. With increasing frequency he started showing up at friends' houses around mealtime, partially for the company and partially for a free hot meal...' Pages 256-257 In the last decade before his death he (Peter Ivers) had recorded four original records and a demo for a fifth, Nirvana Cuba, which was intended as not only an album but also as a musical performance to be staged and filmed. He had created videos for a number of the Nirvana Cuba songs and secured a National Endowment of the Arts grant for his video work. He had written an iconic song for an iconic movie and a handful of other highly regarded songs and scores for theatre, television, and film. He had countless other original songs in various stages of completion...

EXCERPT from I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR - ANDY WARHOL

From the Afterward by Wayne Koestenbaum

3. The culture police want to limit creators to one medium, one stance. Paint, but don't make films. Write essays, but don't star in soaps. Be a docent, but don't be a public indecency. Warhol spread himself thin; the interview is one more slices of bread he insisted on buttering. Space hog, he laid permanent claim to the word interview by publishing a magazine with that name. His own liminal behavior, whether seen or unseen, exposed the inter within the view; vision, according to Warhol, is always cut, interrupted, interposed by a wedge of thirdness. Warhol's interviews, gathered here, play the wedge fame with indisputable mastery.

5. Andy wanted to be left alone, and yet he paradoxically pretended to seek interpersonal encounter, into the unsafe space of the interview, he inserted not his own, vulnerable, actual body, but a replacement body, a mannequin, a dummy. It looks like me, but it's not. I'm elsewhere,. I seem to be answering your questions, but don't be fooled. Transcendentally indifferent to your groveling, literal-minded suppositions. I protect you from my barbed fury by absenting myself from the scene of polite exchange. I'm priceless: off the market. I'm only pretending to take part in art's barter system.

I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews Thirty Seven Conversations with the Pop Master Edited by Kenneth Goldsmith (individual writer-interviews are named in these excerpts.

HEROPHILES(300 BC) Quote

"When Health is absent, Wisdom cannot reveal itself, Art cannot become manifest, Strength cannot be exerted, Wealth is useless, and Reason is powerless." Herophiles (300 BC)

CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW of IN HEAVEN EVERYTHING IS FINE by JOSH FRANK with CHARLIE BUCKHOLTZ

IN HEAVEN EVERYTHING IS FINE
The Unsolved Life of Peter Ivers and the Lost History of New Wave Theatre
C Josh Frank 2008 By Josh Frank with Charlie Buckholtz
Free Press a division of Simon and Shuster publishers


... AN UNSOLVED MURDER MYSTERY on the PUNKIEST NEW WAVE SCENE in Los Angeles; Peter Ivers was found bludgeoned to death on March 3, 1983 in his downtown artist's loft, just when he'd picked up a hefty check for a screen play and was quitting his gig as the host of the New Wave Theatre show. The cable television show featured local bands and sketch comedies inspired perhaps by the mad world of National Lampoon Magazine or Saturday Night Live TV.

... Ivers was a hyperactive, we believe heterosexual, character with a zany showman's antics (wearing diapers on stage), a child of privileged back-east class, wealth, and edu, who no doubt had much more to do. He'd just used his big screen play check to pay back friends who had believed in him, his talent and energy, to keep him in that loft for quite some time. He was destitute. Still, Ivers had succeeded beyond most of his Go-West-Young-Man peers. His girlfriend, Lucy, had become a rare executive woman in movie production - a suit, while he held perhaps a bit too long to his own vision. They had recently lived a bit of a retro homespun life in musical Laurel Canyon, with all it implied.

...While the book has caused LAPD to reopen the case and no doubt the authors presented a comprehensive take on the scenesters around Peter, many who speak a few lines, it fails with too much respect to Peter Ivers. Unaddressed is the menace of the real PUNKS versus the POSERS, the competition for material success among Punk bands which most would deny. If anyone had any motivation to kill Peter, he's too beloved for that to be believed anyway, and what really spoiled this read is that the authors failed to get me even a little angry about his murder. It's as if it were reported in the La Weekly's LA DEE DA COLUMN (la dee da as in BORING, get it?), a column where generations of those desperate enough to be famous for being famous bared and glared for a little photo op.

Review by Christine Trzyna C 2009 All Rights including Internet and International Rights Reserved

PROJECT GUTENBERG (PUBLIC DOMAIN BOOKS ON LINE) HERE !

I'll probably never give up reading books - paper - in bed, with a pot of hot tea or some crackers and cheese by my side. But if you have the eyes for reading long books on the computer, Project Gutenberg is a great resource.

EXCERPT from I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR - ANDY WARHOL

From an interview with Joseph Gelmis 1969. Gelmis is described as a Newsday magazine film critic. Page 161

G: There's an element of confession and of autobiography in almost everything you film. The people who act for you seem to be constantly confessing. What's your fascination with the confessional?


W: They're just people who talk a lot.

JAMES WOLCOTT AUGUST 2009 VANITY FAIR ARTICLE - LITERARY SNOBS and TECHNOLOGY

"Books not only furnish a room, to paraphrase the title of an Anthony Powell novel, but also accessorize our outfits. They help brand our identities. At the rate technology is progressing, however, we may eventually be traipsing around culturally nude in an urban rain forest, androids seamlessly integrated with our devices. As we divest ourselves of once familiar physical objects—digitize and dematerialize—we approach a Star Trek future in which everything can be accessed from the fourth dimension with a few clicks or terse audibles. Reading will forfeit the tactile dimension where memories insinuate themselves, reminding us of where and when D. H. Lawrence entered our lives that meaningful summer. “Darling, remember when we downloaded Sons and Lovers in Napa Valley?” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. The Barnes & Noble bookstore, with its coffee bar and authors’ readings, could go the way of Blockbuster as an iconic institution, depriving readers of the opportunity to mingle with their own kind and paw through magazines for free. Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.... " James Wolcott writing

MURDOCK's UK WORLD NEWS BREAKS PRIVACY LAWS TO GET THE SCOOPS

It's time to invent your own code language to communicate with cherished and intimate friends and family. FORGET USING THE "NO PRIVACY CELL" PHONE! JUST TRY AND FIND A CLOSE, WORKING PHONE BOOTH! (Recently we learned that Thomas Jefferson wrote in a cryptic code to a friend and 200 some years later the code was finally cracked!)

Maybe I should write this blog in code?

EXCERPT from I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR - ANDY WARHOL

ANDY WARHOL interviewed by Gerard Malanga
pg 194

MALANGA: Do you feel you've changed the media?

WARHOL: No, I don't change the media, nor do I distinguish between my art and the media. I just repeat the media by utilizing the media for my work. I believe media is art.

PG 195 - 196

MALANGA: Why do you use a rubber stamp?

WARHOL: I don't always use a rubber stamp for my signature; but I turned towards the idea of a rubber stamp signature because I wanted to get away from style. I feel an artist's signature is part of style, and I don't believe in style. I don't want my art to have style.

MALANGA: Do you think of your self as media?

WARHOL: No one escapes the media. Media influences everyone. It's a very powerful weapon. George Orwell prophesied the potency of the media when he spoke of "Big Brother is watching you" in his visionary novel 1984.

From:
I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR
The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews
Thirty Seven Conversations with the Pop Master
Edited by Kenneth Goldsmith (individual writer-interviews are named in these excerpts).

FROM PARCHMENT TO PIXEL - GREEK BIBLE - BRITISH LIBRARY

Considered to be the worlds earliest surviving book, from the 4th century, and now assembled by the British Library, a handwritten on animal hide parchment bible in Greek... Catch this story now by clicking on the title above...

Parts have been assembled from Britain, Egypt, and Russia... and you can use a translater on some pages...