Tina Fey’s new memoir Bossypants deals with stardom, sexism, and, to nobody’s surprise, Sarah Palin. ABC breaks out a few nuggets from the new release: “Some may argue that exploiting Governor Palin and her family helped bring attention to my low-rated TV show,” Fey writes of 30 Rock. “I am…
Continue reading …The family of the San Francisco Giants fan beaten into a coma outside Dodger Stadium have urged his fellow fans not to seek revenge against LA fans when the teams meet again next week. Bryan Stow, a paramedic and father of two, suffered brain damage in the attack last week…
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Artists inhabit the borders between fact and fiction – no wonder their works and lives have inspired writers from Vasari to Dan Brown I recently read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time since I was a teenager. I understood what was going on a lot better than I did when I was 14 and had not heard of a gay subtext. But it also triggered me to think about why art inspires so many good stories. In Wilde’s scintillating novel, a painter creates a portrait of a young man he is in love with. All his unrequited, indeed unspoken, passion goes into the painting, which somehow makes it more than a passive work of art. It takes on magical, mysterious properties, and when young Dorian wishes for the portrait to age and decay while he is preserved in his pristine beauty, he gets his wish. This story belongs to a particular class of art fictions – tales about works of art. Other examples include The Unknown Masterpiece by Balzac and The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe. If writers can tell such stories about works of art, imagine what they can do with the lives and milieux of artists. From Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece , a dark portrait of the French 19th-century avant-garde, to Michel Houellebecq’s La Carte et le Territoire , which satirises the contemporary art world, novelists have had their fun with artists. This goes back to the very origins of artistic celebrity. The first great work of art criticism and art history, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists , published in 1550 with an expanded second edition in 1568, is sometimes dismissed by pedants as nothing more than a collection of sensational anecdotes about artists and their works. In fact it is nothing less than a collection of great stories about art. Vasari saw art as an adventure, its creators as heroes or anti-heroes whose travails make terrific tales. Have you heard the one about Andrea del Castagno murdering Domenico Veneziano? He relates the story of these 15th-century artists who took their rivalry to the point of actual murder. It is not true: the supposed killer predeceased his victim. But Vasari’s compelling murder mystery says a lot about the obsessive rivalries of the Renaissance, so it remains artistically true. Dorian Gray would have understood. Vasari created the modern image of the artist by telling stories that hover on the borders between fact and fiction. His contemporary Benvenuto Cellini, sculptor and criminal, told his own life in a way that just as richly weaves reality with fantasy. It is no wonder that writers have continued to recognise in art and artists a tantalising subject matter that lingers between truth and lies, between the plausible and the fabulous. Cellini’s life was turned into an opera by Berlioz; Vasari’s life of Michelangelo was spun into Irving Stone’s bestseller The Agony and the Ecstasy , which was filmed with Charlton Heston. Since then we have had the life of Vermeer in Girl with a Pearl Earring and the commercial king of them all, The Da Vinci Code. All these fictions exist in the enigmatic borderland between art and life. If life is real and art is an illusion, does the life of an artist glide between illusion and truth? Do artists take on the unreality of their works? Or perhaps, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is a two-way relationship, and art reveals truths that the illusion of everyday life conceals. Either way, art is easily strange enough to inspire many more stories. Art Dan Brown Oscar Wilde Jonathan Jones guardian.co.uk
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Rewards for World Cup victory over Sri Lanka include big bonuses, free travel, luxury homes … and a road for captain’s ancestral village For one small Indian village, the nation’s cricket World Cup win last weekend means more than a boost to national pride. It means a paved surface on the dirt track that currently leads to the nearest road, three miles away. Since beating Sri Lanka in Mumbai’s Wankhede stadium on Saturday night, the Indian cricket team has been showered with gifts: Indian cricketing authorities announced a 10m Indian rupees (£143,000) bonus for each player. Sheila Dikshit, chief minister of Delhi, also announced an award of 20m rupees (£286,000) for the captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, and additional sums for the four players from the Indian capital. Now Dhoni’s ancestral village is finally getting a paved road to replace the dirt track that links it to the nearest highway, according to Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, the state’s chief minister. The road to Lwali in northern Uttarakhand state – population: “60 families” – will be built within four to five months, officials said. Celebrations have continued throughout the week since India’s first World Cup win since 1983, and the players have been amply rewarded. The winning players and their families will be allowed to travel free in first class air-conditioned cabins on the Indian railways for the rest of their lives. One private airline has pledged a lifetime of free travel on domestic and international flights for all 15 players in the team, along with their wives and children. Dhoni has been made an honorary officer – a lieutenant-colonel – in the Indian army and the government of Jharkhand state, one of the poorest in the country, said it would give a plot of land to the captain to set up a cricket academy there. “The Jharkhand government has decided to allot the land to help Dhoni to fulfil his long-cherished dream to set up a cricket academy,” the deputy chief minister, Sudesh Mahto, said. One major property company announced it was presenting the whole team with homes worth a total of £1.2m in a new development in a satellite town of Delhi. A spokesman said the company was not planning on renegotiating its deal with Dhoni, who already acts as its “brand ambassador”, in the light of the win. He said that the 29-year-old sportsman, who currently endorses around a dozen brands, was “not business-minded”. Industry analysts say that Dhoni, who previously charged around £1m to endorse a brand, can now charge at least twice that. Dhoni’s father left the village of Lwali 30 years ago, for the town of Ranchi in the state of Bihar. “We have heard that there will be [a] road for Lwali,” Dhanpat Singh Dhoni, the Indian captain’s uncle told one reporter who visited the village. “But I am not impressed as many such announcements come to nothing.” Indian politicians frequently promise such developments for immediate publicity or political gain. Currently villagers face a three-mile walk. The capital is 200 miles and seven hours’ drive away. Another problem is water and sanitation. Since the victory, a local member of parliament has pledged £1,500 worth of government funds for toilets and a well. India Cricket World Cup 2011 Cricket Jason Burke guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Landing a single-engine aircraft on a beach takes skill but the FAA isn’t impressed with a young pilot who brought his plane down on New York City’s Rockaway Beach because of an airsick passenger. Wisecracking pilot Jason Maloney, 24, offered air traffic controllers a variety of excuses before telling them…
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The disappearance of Becky Godden-Edwards makes one wonder about the people in one’s own life who simply wisp away Some parents joke about the missing-child moment as a rite of passage, but when it actually happens, it doesn’t feel particularly amusing. From the first instant of missing them, every moment of the child’s absence cranks the agony a little higher. At one minute, you’re scanning the surrounding area; at two, you’re eying up exits and road crossings; at three, you become fearful of strangers; at four, you’re wondering if it would be excessive to scream for help; at five, you’re not wondering any more. It isn’t the separation that makes these moments so dreadful, of course. It’s the not knowing. As long as your child is out of sight, the only thing you can imagine are the possibilities. How far could they have got, and who could be with them? Do they know how to look after themselves in this or that situation? Did you tell them everything they need to know? And in the rush of terrible fates, the thread of hope that wherever they are, they’re OK and they’ll find their way back to you. And mostly, they do – although the older they get, the longer they might take to do it, with broken curfews and unplanned sleepovers all part of the teenage toolkit for causing parental anguish. Sometimes, horrifically, they don’t. This, of course, is the distressing case for the family of Becky Godden-Edwards , who went missing eight years ago after becoming estranged from her family, and whose body was finally found in a shallow grave and identified this week. (Taxi driver Chris Halliwell, who has already been charged with the murder of Sian O’Callaghan, will be questioned over the discovery.) The family were informed on what would have been her 29th birthday. Godden-Edwards had been dead for several years while her family continued to look for her. They discussed hiring a private detective and last year, her mother posted what is in retrospect a devastatingly poignant notice on the Missing You website: “Karen Edwards is trying to trace the location of Becky she has been missing for 8 years, and I need to contact her urgent or just to know that she is ok! can anyone help?” They approached the police, but Godden-Edwards was never officially reported as missing. Her relatives, no doubt, went through just the same contemplation of what-ifs as anyone in a similar situation, but Godden-Edwards was an adult rather than a helpless infant, and that thread of hope would surely have remained throughout the near-decade that she was missing. There is something exceptionally cruel about the thought of living every day in the faint expectation of a loved one’s return, only to be informed that they have in fact been buried for years, and nobody else noticed. Because the other part of this story is that Godden-Edwards was not seemingly missed by anyone but her relatives. Whatever friends or associates had replaced her family, they seem to have let her slip from their lives without thinking her loss worth reporting. The police have appealed for anyone who knew her after 2002 to come forward with information that could help them reconstruct her life – and, hopefully, help discover how she died. In such cases, I imagine that the investigation is a bit like trying to catch a ghost, tugging at the worn fibres of memories in an effort to weave an existence back together. After all, how much do you know about the many people who pass through your life? The ones you’ve chatted to, maybe even socialised with, and who then seem to simply wisp away. Would you realise they had gone? Would you wonder if anyone else was looking? Because, sad as Godden-Edwards’s case is, at least someone was waiting for her. Out there, somewhere, maybe near to you, are the people so lost than no one will know when they’re gone. Crime Sarah Ditum guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The disappearance of Becky Godden-Edwards makes one wonder about the people in one’s own life who simply wisp away Some parents joke about the missing-child moment as a rite of passage, but when it actually happens, it doesn’t feel particularly amusing. From the first instant of missing them, every moment of the child’s absence cranks the agony a little higher. At one minute, you’re scanning the surrounding area; at two, you’re eying up exits and road crossings; at three, you become fearful of strangers; at four, you’re wondering if it would be excessive to scream for help; at five, you’re not wondering any more. It isn’t the separation that makes these moments so dreadful, of course. It’s the not knowing. As long as your child is out of sight, the only thing you can imagine are the possibilities. How far could they have got, and who could be with them? Do they know how to look after themselves in this or that situation? Did you tell them everything they need to know? And in the rush of terrible fates, the thread of hope that wherever they are, they’re OK and they’ll find their way back to you. And mostly, they do – although the older they get, the longer they might take to do it, with broken curfews and unplanned sleepovers all part of the teenage toolkit for causing parental anguish. Sometimes, horrifically, they don’t. This, of course, is the distressing case for the family of Becky Godden-Edwards , who went missing eight years ago after becoming estranged from her family, and whose body was finally found in a shallow grave and identified this week. (Taxi driver Chris Halliwell, who has already been charged with the murder of Sian O’Callaghan, will be questioned over the discovery.) The family were informed on what would have been her 29th birthday. Godden-Edwards had been dead for several years while her family continued to look for her. They discussed hiring a private detective and last year, her mother posted what is in retrospect a devastatingly poignant notice on the Missing You website: “Karen Edwards is trying to trace the location of Becky she has been missing for 8 years, and I need to contact her urgent or just to know that she is ok! can anyone help?” They approached the police, but Godden-Edwards was never officially reported as missing. Her relatives, no doubt, went through just the same contemplation of what-ifs as anyone in a similar situation, but Godden-Edwards was an adult rather than a helpless infant, and that thread of hope would surely have remained throughout the near-decade that she was missing. There is something exceptionally cruel about the thought of living every day in the faint expectation of a loved one’s return, only to be informed that they have in fact been buried for years, and nobody else noticed. Because the other part of this story is that Godden-Edwards was not seemingly missed by anyone but her relatives. Whatever friends or associates had replaced her family, they seem to have let her slip from their lives without thinking her loss worth reporting. The police have appealed for anyone who knew her after 2002 to come forward with information that could help them reconstruct her life – and, hopefully, help discover how she died. In such cases, I imagine that the investigation is a bit like trying to catch a ghost, tugging at the worn fibres of memories in an effort to weave an existence back together. After all, how much do you know about the many people who pass through your life? The ones you’ve chatted to, maybe even socialised with, and who then seem to simply wisp away. Would you realise they had gone? Would you wonder if anyone else was looking? Because, sad as Godden-Edwards’s case is, at least someone was waiting for her. Out there, somewhere, maybe near to you, are the people so lost than no one will know when they’re gone. Crime Sarah Ditum guardian.co.uk
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Students are impossible and senior staff undermine us, say 70 teachers at Darwen Vale high school Teachers at a Lancashire comprehensive will go on strike on Thursday in protest at the unruly behaviour of their pupils. The teachers of Darwen Vale high school say pupil behaviour has become impossible to deal with and that students are pushing them, challenging them to fights, and threatening to film their lessons and post them online. Some 70 of the 80 staff at the school will not turn up to take lessons on Thursday. They argue that senior teachers at the school are not giving them enough support to deal with poor discipline, and say that when they confiscate pupils’ mobiles, senior managers undermine them by giving the phones back to their owners. It is highly unusual for teachers to go on strike over the misbehaviour of their pupils – most industrial action is taken in protest at pay and conditions. On Monday, Michael Gove, the education secretary, issued new guidance to schools on discipline . It reminded teachers that, in extreme circumstances, headteachers could press criminal charges against pupils. Inspectors who visited Darwen Vale last June said the behaviour of its 1,150 pupils was good. Chris Keates, general secretary of the Nasuwt teaching union, says its members were left “with no other option but to take strike action”. “Teachers can’t teach and pupils can’t learn where there is pupil indiscipline. Teachers feel unsupported and vulnerable in the workplace. Governors have a duty of care to staff and pupils, and it’s in no-one’s interest that these matters are left unaddressed. All the teachers want is to secure a safe environment for pupils and staff.” But Simon Huggill, one of the school’s governors, denies there is a behaviour problem. “Look at the outcomes from the school – it is fantastic,” he says. “I think there are one or two specific issues around a very small minority of school pupils. The majority are good, hardworking pupils.” The strike is expected to last one day and is supported by three teaching unions. Teachers say that for two terms they’ve been trying to hold talks with senior managers to avoid a strike. The headteacher, Hilary Torpey, began in November 2009. No one was available for comment from Blackburn with Darwen borough council. Pupil behaviour Schools Teaching Secondary schools Jessica Shepherd guardian.co.uk
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Bashar al-Assad also orders closure of Syria’s only casino in bid to appease Muslims ahead of proposed anti-regime protests Syria has closed the country’s only casino and reversed a ban on teachers wearing the Islamic veil – moves seen as an attempt to reach out to conservative Muslims ahead of calls for pro-democracy demonstrations. Syrian activists have urged protesters to take to the streets on Wednesday and the following two days to honour more than 80 people who were killed in a crackdown on demonstrations that erupted nearly three weeks ago. President Bashar al-Assad’s decisions on Wednesday were unusual concessions to religious concern in Syria, which promotes a strictly secular identity. The recent protests, however, have brought sectarian tensions into the open with thousands of people taking to the streets calling for democracy in a country where Alawites – followers of a branch of Shia Islam who represent just 11% of the population – have been in power for nearly 40 years. The country is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. Assad banned the niqab, the full Islamic face veil that reveals only a the wearer’s eyes, in July . Hundreds of primary school teachers who were wearing the niqab at government-run schools were transferred in June to administrative jobs in a move that angered many conservative Muslims. On Wednesday, Ali Saad, the education minister in Syria’s temporary government, said the teachers were now allowed to return to their jobs, according to the state-run news agency, Sana. He added that the ministry would discuss any new application by teachers willing to go back to work. Wearing the niqab – a billowing black robe – is not widespread in Syria, although it has become more common recently – a trend that has not gone unnoticed by the secular regime. The Syrian state-run Tishrin newspaper reported that the Casino Damascus had been closed because the practices of the club’s owners “violate laws and regulations”. It did not elaborate further. Many Muslims consider casino betting, lottery participation and sports betting to be particularly unIslamic. On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch called on Assad to order Syrian security forces to stop using “unjustified lethal force against anti-government protesters”. “For three weeks, Syria’s security forces have been firing on largely peaceful protesters in various parts of Syria,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, its Middle East director. “Instead of investigating those responsible for the shootings, Syria’s officials try to deflect responsibility by accusing unknown ‘armed groups’.” Syria Bashar Al-Assad Middle East Protest Islam Arab and Middle East unrest guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Oh-oh. Is there another little one on the way for Angelina Jolie? Sharp-eyed reporters have spotted a seventh tattoo on Jolie’s upper left arm, the same place where she has already marked the latitude and longitude of the birthplace of each of her six children—three biological and three adopted….
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