A Moment of Silence for Audio Book Lovers

One of my dirty little secrets is that I love audio books. I have for years. I am a voracious reader, going through a couple hundred books a year. But, in my down time (in other words when my head isn't actually in a book) my ears are more often than not listening to one.

Audio books quench my thirst for what I call "snack books". Those are your garden variety mysteries and NYT Best Seller List titles. I like having a story told to me. I usually have one on the tape player as I nod off to sleep. Maybe it reminds me of my childhood-but I find it comforting. I've heard every audio book version of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie that I could get my hands on..probably more than once. I discovered and fell in love with the indefatigable Amelia Peabody Emerson of Elizabeth Peter's works through audio books. I heartily admit that I adore the entire "Cat Who" series that for the most part has been voiced entirely by George Guidall. I know my book readers. I favor Barbara Rosenblat, George Guidall, Charles Keating, Michael Jayston and Meegan Fellows. And of course Jim Dale of Harry Potter fame.

This week marked the end of an era in the audio book arena. Last week there was a funeral at the midtown Manhattan offices of Hachette, the book publisher, to mourn the passing of the cassette tape. While the medium long ago shuffled off this mortal coil in the music business, it has lived and thrived among audio book publishers for decades.

"Cassettes accounted for 7 percent of all sales in the $923 million audio-book industry in 2006, the latest year for which data is available, according to the Audio Publishers Association. While many publishers, like Random House and Macmillan, stopped producing books on cassette in the last couple of years, there are holdouts.

At Blackstone Audio, which produces cassette versions of its roughly 340 annual titles, Josh Stanton, the executive vice president, said there was still demand from libraries and truckers, who buy them at truck stops. But he could forecast only that his company would produce cassettes through 2009.

Recorded Books, whose authors include Philip Roth and Jodi Picoult, still issues cassettes of all its titles, roughly 700 a year. Retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble have essentially stopped ordering them, but libraries have been slower to abandon them, said Brian Downing, the company’s publisher. "

So goodbye dear friend. I'll miss those funny little comments at the beginning of most recordings; "if you have difficulty with any of these cassettes, hold the cassette in your hand and slap it smartly across your palm." Without my audio book cassette, what am I going to slap smartly across my palm? I ask you?

Ah well. I'll be holding onto my good old reliables until they snap and break.

Keep your paws off my Whitney Otto's and we'll be just fine.

Big Birds Daddy has Died...on My Birthday

Six years ago my Grandmother died on my birthday. This year we lost another great- Kermit Love, the man who brought Jim Henson’s characters- Big Bird, Mr Snuffleupagus, Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster to life.

Born in Spring Lake, New Jersey, in 1916, on leaving school Love became a puppet-maker for a theatre company. Switching to costume design, he worked for Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre in New York, before progressing to Broadway productions such as The Fireman's Flame (1937-38) and One Touch of Venus (starring Mary Martin, 1943-45).

Following his costume design for the New York City Ballet and Agnes de Mille's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo production of Rodeo (1942), Love worked with Jerome Robbins on Broadway for the ballet Fancy Free (1946) and with other leading choreographers. With George Balanchine, his creations for Don Quixote (1965) included a 28ft-tall marionette giant.

Then came Sesame Street, with Love also designing characters for 22 foreign versions of the program. His most famous character, Big Bird, also made a cameo appearance in The Muppet Movie (1979).

Jim Henson insisted that his Muppet Kermit the Frog's name was settled before he met Love, who went into semi-retirement in the 1990s, although he continued to work with the Joffrey Ballet. His partner of 50 years was Christopher Lyall.

Mr. Love, thank you for making my childhood magical and sweet dreams.

A Fragile Display of War

On April 26, 1937, twenty-eight Nazi German bombers surged through the skies of the town of Guernica, Spain wreaking havoc and killing between 250 and 1,600 people. This act of cruelty brought the Spanish Civil War to the eyes of the world. It also sparked the creation of one of the most famous modern paintings- Pablo Picasso’s great masterpiece “Guernica”. The painting portrays Picasso’s interpretation of the air raid bombings and destruction brought down upon the Basque town, it presents death, violence, brutality, suffering and helplessness. It is often said that this work stands above all as a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace.

















Commissioned by the Spanish government, the 11ft tall, 25.6 ft wide mural was originally created for display at the Paris International Exhibition. At the completion of the World’s Fair event in Paris the massive painting went on tour around the world. In the over 70 years since its creation it has continued to tour, showing in great museums and even the United Nations building. But the time for touring may be drawing to a close.

When it was on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City restorers spent painstaking hours working to preserve the integrity of the piece from the wear and tear of thousands of exhibitions and as many miles of travel. It now resides at the Renia Sofia museum in Spain.

This week art experts have alerted the media that Picasso’s masterpiece is in “stable but serious” condition. Apparently, the years have taken its toll and has “suffered a lot and needs special care”. Curators from the famous contemporary art museum in Madrid gave their initial conclusions of the first detailed examination of the painting in ten years in a press conference on Tuesday.

There are no imminent plans for another restoration of the painting, as it would risk damaging it even further. The Spanish government has refused to move the famous work from Madrid to Guernica, in the Basque Country – or to the Guggenheim Museum in the Basque city of Bilbao.

Banksy Revealed? Is He Really Robin Gunningham?

For years people have wondered about the real man behind the name Banksy. One of the world's most famous names in art, his identity has been a closely guarded secret known to just a handful of friends. His grafitti art has changed how people look at grafitti. His secretiveness only added fire to the flame.

Such is the curiosity around Banksy that when he supposedly threw a pizza box into a garbage bin in LA, the box resurfaced on Ebay, with the seller suggesting that the few anchovies left inside might yeild DNA.

He is the Scarlet Pimpernel of Modern Art. The Robin Hood of the Council Estate Wall.

His stencil-style 'guerrilla' art started popping up in public spaces years ago in London, Brighton and Bristol. It's even appeared on the West Bank of Gaza on the wall seperating Israelis adn Palestinians. His work is interesting, contrversial and of late..quite sought after and expensive. Just ask Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Turns out that he may well be a Bristol boy who made his way through public school and went on to paint public walls. Renowned for his use of stencils instead of the freehand grafitti style, some councils and businesses have started protecting his creations.

But is this real or rubbish? People who know Gunningham are now unable to say what has become of him. His father Peter, who lives in Kingsdown, Bristol, denied that the man in the photograph was his son, and his mother Pamela was surprised by the picture, then denied she even had a son, let alone one called Robin.

Banksy’s publicist would neither confirm nor deny whether the artist was Robin Gunningham.

My Favorite Post Secret of 2008

I read PostSecret.com every week. It's sort of like online therapy to me. If nothing else sometimes it humbles me and reminds me that no matter how good or bad I think my life is, there are plenty of other human beings on this planet that I'll never know who are experiencing the same things, the same heartbreak, happiness, depression, pure joy, insecurity, silliness..name an emotion..that I am.

I saw this today and had to save it. I love this.

The Deliciously Fascinating Fernado Pessoa

Sometimes the New York Times has some really delicious articles. I mean, the kind of interesting writing that makes me literally salivate and sparks my mind to fifteen different directions of thought. The latest example is Michael Kimmelmans article on Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese writer and poet.

How on earth he whittled down this positively fascinating subject into two pages is quite beyond me. Pessoa, dead from cirrhosis in 1937, at the age of just 47 is a character who has so many layers it is almost unimaginable that even the surface could be scratched. In point of fact, Kimmelman lays the foundation for readers like me to find the foot and finger holds into the face of the story and begin to do our own exploration.

A lot of people find Pessoa fascinating because of his multi-year penpal relationship with the notorious Aleister Crowley. What must this quiet, spectacle clad, celibate have found to say to the British mystic, mountaineer, writer and practitioner of black magic?

I personally find him so fascinating because his mind is like an intricate labrynth-different people and lives living inside one man. While not psychotzophrenic, he literally had invented characters that he would write as-for example-Alexander Search, a Scottish engineer, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos, a retired bisexual naval engineer and melancholic with an addiction to drugs. Delicous! Pessoa’s name literally describes him. In Portuguese Pessoa means “person.”

And what a person he must have been.

Get Up on the Soapbox

Talk about the world’s biggest soapbox. Soon Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth will be transformed into a gigantic platform which will give anyone and everyone a chance to do whatever they want for an hour at a time.

The concept, developed by Anthony Gormley, is called “One and Other” is the latest winner of the “Fourth Plinth” project. Expected to go live next spring, Gormley’s piece will be a “haven for a certain degree of anarchy”. Originally scheduled to run for 365 days, the Gormley project – which will incorporate a safety net around the plinth to prevent people falling off and will necessitate six curators to guard it day and night – has since been scaled back to 100 days. The hydraulic stairs he first proposed to transport people on to the plinth have also been replaced; now a crane will lift people up for maximum theatrical impact.

"I'm favouring a crane because it will be a moment of theatre, someone lifted from common ground and made into an image when they are on top of the plinth ... It will be a spectacle, but I'm also concerned about the subjects, what they learn about themselves, exposed in a public arena," he said.

People who wish to take part in the project will be able to apply online.

Gormley did have one new, and slightly unusual, suggestion: a statue of the Mayor himself. "The idea of Boris Johnson not saying anything but simply standing there, with his hair blowing in the wind, looking at the city which he has come to be Mayor of might be a very nice thing," he said.

Another Eyedrum Book Sale- July 24th