Entries Tagged 'Books' ↓

Keepin’ it real unreal: Margaret “B. Jones” Seltzer gets into character

Who, exactly, is Margaret Seltzer? Empathic writer? Gangster wannabee? Estranged daughter? One-time aspiring eco-terrorist?

MEDIA ASSASSIN has obtained what appears to be the only known copy of a damning video that Margaret “B. Jones” Seltzer’s publisher, Riverhead/Penguin, buried last month, once the book documenting the author’s foster home-living, gangbanging, drug-running past—Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival, right—was revealed to be completely and totally fabricated.

The 10:10 video, shot and edited before she was exposed as a liar, may be the only existing footage of Seltzer in her full-on “hood” persona.

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The first time I saw the trailer for 2005’s Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, the images that threw me most for a loop were those of the panoramic space battle over planet Coruscant, pictured below.

With its massive, mile-long cruisers, acres of explosions and laser bolts, and the shimmering, metal world below, I found myself overwhelmed by the realization that digital tools in filmmaking had created new possibilities in the artform, not merely for effects, but for outright visual density.

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When asked about marriage, or even when not, I typically say that it’s a hard thing to do well; that probably, apart from raising children, it’s the hardest thing anyone will ever attempt. And that, in marriage, communication is not only important, but that it is the blood plasma of your relationship, though, again, it is always a difficult thing to do correctly. And that you need to have an unbreakable agreement that your marriage is for life for it to even have a chance at working. And that, particularly as a person who aspires to Christianity, you need God in your relationship to make it work. And that…well, you get the idea.

These are hard-earned truths from over 15 years of betrothal to Zakiya, and, believe me, I’m learning more all the time, every day, or at least trying to do so.

But this guy says forget all that: Just don’t get married and, if you do, do not, under any circumstances, marry an American woman.

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Book agent John Brockman’s Edge site is like crack if you’re into reading some of the world’s smartest thinkers address compelling questions related to their own typically cutting-edge research, or larger issues about the role of science in human culture.

Reuben Hersh is one such Edge intellectual. He’s professor emeritus in the University of New Mexico’s department of mathematics and statistics and author of the 1999 book What Is Mathematics, Really?, right.

Hersh’s 1997 mind-blowing elaboration on numeracy, below, is proof perfect, not only of the maxim that the more one understands a subject, the more simple and elemental their questions become but, that those questions—the simplest ones—are always the hardest to answer.

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One very happy smiley face: del Rio shows her considerable talents

Count on the impossibly design-consistent Taschen to come up with something like this: Not only does their foot-square, 396-page, 1,500 numbered copies, $700 Vanessa del Rio—a retrospective book on the life and career of the ’70s porn star—arrive signed by her, in a slipcase, with an original 140-minute DVD documentary. As well, one buyer, and only one, is going to find something even more amazing, below: A Willy Wonka-like “Golden Ticket good for an all-expenses paid evening with Vanessa, to be documented by a world famous-photographer”:

I’m presuming “an all-expenses paid evening with Vanessa” merely means dinner. However, clicking on her ticket here will get you the next best thing to that meal: a short, but aurally NSFW Taschen video clip of del Rio riffing on her life and history as, not only the first Latina porn star but, “the first woman to do a DP.” Don’t ask. My favorite part: Toward the end, del Rio displaying two fellatic black & white 8x10s…after having put on her granny glasses.

Wow: Can you believe anything anybody writes any more?

The New York Times is still reeling after their gut-felt rave over the book Love and Consequences, and loving profile of its author, Margaret B. Jones. Love and… is Jones’ memoir of her life as a scrappy, foster white girl, growing up wild with the Bloods in the streets of South Central LA.

Meanwhile, Consequences are what her behind, the Times, and he publisher, Riverhead/Penguin, are feeling right this instant.

We now know that “Margaret B. Jones” is actually—get this—Margaret Seltzer. (Wow…does it get any whiter?) Instead of being dragged through inummerable foster homes, Seltzer was raised by both parents in the well-heeled San Fernando Valley. As opposed to ducking in and out of violent, drug-infested Compton alleyways, she spent her teen years ducking in and out of private Episcopal school hallways. Instead of gangs, she had her hair in bangs…o.k., I’m going too far, now, but you get the point: She made up the whole 296 pages.

But did a group of eminent medical researchers, including a Nobel Prize-winner, just get caught doing the same thing?

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Peter Eisenman does not cheer at football games.

Peter Eisenman is a hardcore football fan. (The Wall Street Journal called him “an unrepentant sports nut.”) He has been buying season tickets to NY Giants games for a half-century.

He doesn’t cheer at them.

A month ago, he had what most sports fans could have only described as an out-of-body experience: He went and saw his favorite pro football team—50 years running—win one of the most amazing championship victories in sports history—Super Bowl XLII, his first.

He didn’t cheer.

But even more, of the 60,000 people who saw the event live, Peter Eisenman was the only person sitting in University of Phoenix Stadium, pictured above, who, while watching those men do battle, could look out at the retractable roof; its roll-in natural grass field; the completely unobstructed seating; and the massive supercolumns supporting the whole structure, say two little words, and be telling the truth.

“My baby.”

Peter Eisenman, of Eisenman Architects, designed University of Phoenix Stadium. Peter Eisenman watched his first live Super Bowl as it was won with feats of superhuman cunning and strength by a team he’s loved all of his adult life in a massive stadium people are raving about but that he remembers when it weighed less than a paper clip, when it was nothing but a pattern of neurons firing in his formidable brain.

And he still didn’t cheer.

He’s either the coolest or the most tightly-wound person ever made. Me? If I’d held all that passion, history, talent, and juice inside me, after Plaxico Burress’s game-ending catch, I’d have let out a Cuba-Gooding-Jr.-winning-best-supporting-actor-at-the-Academy-Awards style war cry squared, run out onto the field naked, and set myself on fire. But I guess that’s why I’m not Peter Eisenman.

That I’m not Peter Eisenman is also why I didn’t spend Super Bowl Sunday seated next to the smart, slender, friendly, and blonde Cynthia Davidson. The person who knows that Eisenman doesn’t scream over great plays (“We high-five! He yells when he’s angry, not when he’s happy”) knows an awful lot more about him, enough to fill a book. So she did one.

I’m talking with Cynthia about that book tomorrow, Friday, March 7, at 2 pm ET, on NONFICTION, my weekly WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, broadcasting terrestrially in the NYC tri-state, and streaming live here. The book’s called Tracing Eisenman: Peter Eisenman Complete Works (Thames & Hudson). It details Eisenman’s history and ouevre as only someone who knows him well, understands his intent, but who was an architectural critic and theorist before she met him, might do. Cynthia is cofounder of the nonprofit Anyone Corporation, and editor on a dozen books for MIT Press’s Writing Architecture series. As well, she publishes Log, an architectural journal.

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I met Jill Herbers at a WBAI fete which she attended with a friend, then proceeded to spend almost all the rest of that evening talking to her. Thoughtful, more than a little opinionated, and utterly serious about the art and science of fabricating living spaces, what was not to love? I’ve grabbed her books: 1996’s Tile, and 1990’s Great Adaptations to find out more on her ideas. But I would have picked up 2004’s Prefab Modern for the cover alone. O.K.: The cover, and pages 50-59 alone.

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If I could have been anywhere other than with you, last week, it would have been in Monterey CA at the TED Conference. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and the event, held annually since 1984, thrives on bringing together disparate thinkers from diverse fields to ask less-than-obvious, critical questions about ideas. Big-picture stuff.

Of course, people from WIRED went, and one, Kim Zetter, brought back this report of a presentation by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist with the Indiana University School of Medicine in Bloomington. I’d not heard of Dr. Taylor before this piece, but now, man, I’ve got to get this woman on NONFICTION, my WBAI-NY radio show.

See, on December 10, 1996, Taylor woke up to realize that she was having a stroke—a rare type called an arterio-venous malformation or AVM. What makes the episode odd, yet captivating, as Taylor recounts it, says Zetter, is that her

knowledge of the brain made her the perfect witness to her body’s gradual shutdown. Over the course of four hours she watched her body deteriorate in stages, all the while processing its breakdown as if she were a curious explorer taking field notes.

Yet, at first, she didn’t realize what was happening to her. So after feeling searing discomfort in her head,

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The Associated Press reports Clarence Thomas’s ongoing and unchallenged record of judicial mime. From that piece:

Two years and 142 cases have passed since Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas last spoke up at oral arguments. It is a period of unbroken silence that contrasts with the rest of the court’s unceasing inquiries.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas says he’d like to be known as the “listening justice.”

Hardly a case goes by without eight justices peppering lawyers with questions. Oral arguments offer justices the chance to resolve nagging doubts about a case, probe its weaknesses or make a point to their colleagues.

Left, right and center, the justices ask and they ask and they ask. Sometimes they debate each other, leaving the lawyer at the podium helpless to jump in. “I think you’re handling these questions very well,” Chief Justice John Roberts quipped to a lawyer recently in the midst of one such exchange.

Leaning back in his leather chair, often looking up at the ceiling, Thomas takes it all in, but he never joins in.

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