Must Have Been Some Good Drugs

In the "did ya know" category, here's one for coctail banter. Did you know that there are two bullet holes in Andy Warhol's 1972 screenprint of Chairmain Mao?

There are-and it didn’t deter a collector from buying it for $302,500 — 10 times the high presale estimate of $30,000 — at Christie’s in New York last month.

The reason the piece was coveted has to do with the shooter as much as it has to do with the artist and subject matter. During a wild night in the 1970s, Dennis Hopper got spooked by the picture and shot it twice. Warhol loved the results and annotated the holes with circles and the words “warning shot” and “bullet hole,” which made the work an unplanned collaboration.

Must have been some good drugs Dennis.

The Best "Clear Out" of All Time

A British mother and son were having a "clear out" or what I affectionately call "a feng shui fit" (definition: when I can't stand the clutter in my house any longer and start sorting through things for Goodwill) recently when they stumbled upon a vase on a shelf. I probably would have given the vase to Goodwill or Age Concern out of complete ignorance. This wise pair took their "what is this" to Bainbridges in London.

Smart move.

Today the Chinese vase sold for $68 million dollars.

That's one hell of a knick-nack.


The elaborately decorated 16 inch (40 cm) ceramic vase, which dates from the mid-18th century Qianlong period, was bought by a private buyer from mainland China on Thursday in Bainbridges, a small west London-based auction house.

After the addition of the 20 percent fees on its hammer price the final bill for the buyer was £53,105,000 ($85,176,578).

According to CNN souces, it is thought to be the highest price ever paid for any Chinese artwork say Bainbridges, who auctioned the vase on behalf of a mother and son.

The pair, who want to remain anonymous, were clearing out a house in Pinner, a leafy suburb of north-west London, when they came across the dusty vase on a shelf.

They had no idea what it was says Helen Porter, a researcher at Bainbridges.


Luan Grocholski, a Bainbridges' valuer and specialist in oriental antiquities, told CNN: "When I saw it for the first time I thought it was a wonderful piece, I wasn't sure if it was real. But, after some research and examination we decided that it was real.

"It is indeed a world record in ceramics, definitely the most expensive piece of oriental art sold at auction", he added

Porter said: "They were hopeful but they didn't dare believe until the hammer went down. When it did, the sister had to go out of the room and have a breath of fresh air."

The vase was believed to have been acquired by an English family during the 1930s although how it came to reside on a shelf in Pinner is not known says Porter.

The vase was made in the mid to late-18th century during the reign of the fourth emperor in the Qing dynasty, Qianlong. It would have resided in the Chinese Royal Palace and was almost certainly fired in the imperial kilns, say Bainbridges.


The vase is reticulated and double-walled -- there is an inner vase that can be viewed through the perforations of the main body.

Peter Bainbridge, the owner Bainbridges, said "It helps balance the books rather more easily but it also means jolly good bonuses for the staff".

Pardon me, I'm off to check out my knick-nacks.

Art That Survived Hate

In 1937 the Nazi's launched two major shows that toured cities across Hitler's Germany- one was called the "Degenerative Art" Show and featured dozens of sculptures, pictures and bronzes that the party deemed innaprorpriate. The point of the show was to illustrate to people what and why these pieces stood against all that was truly German and good.

Part of the collection, thought to be completely destroyed by bombing and fire during the war, have been excavated in Berlin by a group digging to build a new rail line. These pieces have not seen the light of day, much less the light in the eyes of onlookers in over 70 years. They now stand again-but proudly- as cornerstones of classical modernism.

There was a wonderful article on cnn today about the find that showcases several of the works.

How moving that this should come out on Veterans Day, and how amazing that these lost works have been found again. It goes to show that art can survive hate.

Farewell Leo- What Will Happen to the New Yorker

I have a love/hate relationship with my weekly issue of the New Yorker. I love it because it is full of wonderful articles, it has all the museum and theater information that I could need about a city that I don't live in. The last part of that sentence is also the part of the New Yorker that causes the hate part of the relationship. If I had a dollar for every time I rushed to the Internet to find a cheap flight to make it to some wonderful showing or event in New York City that I'd read about in the New Yorker I'd never have to worry about paying for another subscription.

Part of the wonderfulness of the New Yorker has been the little cartoons that sprinkle through it. I love the last page that asks you to create the tagline to an image. Turns out I have a nice man from New Jersey to thank. Sadly, he passed away this week. I'm not sure how my New Yorker will manage to move on.

One of my "bucket list" items of life accomplishments is to have my obituary in the New York Times. It's obituaries like this one to Leo Cullum that make that a wish that I hope someday (a long time from now) comes true.

Leo Cullum, a cartoonist whose blustering businessmen, clueless doctors, venal lawyers and all-too-human dogs and cats amused readers of The New Yorker for the past 33 years, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 68 and lived in Malibu, Calif.

The cause was cancer, said his brother, Thomas.

Mr. Cullum, a TWA pilot for more than 30 years, was a classic gag cartoonist whose visual absurdities were underlined, in most cases, by a caption reeled in from deep left field. “I love the convenience, but the roaming charges are killing me,” a buffalo says, holding a cellphone up to its ear. “Your red and white blood cells are normal,” a doctor tells his patient. “I’m worried about your rosé cells.”

Mr. Cullum seemed to have a particular affinity for the animal kingdom. His comic sympathies extended well beyond dogs, cats and mice to embrace birds — “When I first met your mother, she was bathed in moonlight,” a father owl tells his children — and even extended to the humbler representatives of the fish family. “Some will love you, son, and some will hate you,” an anchovy tells his child. “It’s always been that way with anchovies.”

“There are many ways for a cartoon to be great, not the least of which is to be funny, and Leo was one of the most consistently funny cartoonists we ever had,” said Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker. “He was certainly one of the most popular — some of his cartoons were reprinted thousands of times.”

In all, Mr. Cullum published 819 cartoons in The New Yorker, the most recent in the issue for Oct. 25. Many of them were gathered in the collections “Scotch & Toilet Water?,” a book of dog cartoons; “Cockatiels for Two” (cats); “Tequila Mockingbird” (various species) and “Suture Self” (doctors).

Leo Aloysius Cullum was born on Jan. 11, 1942, in Newark and grew up in North Bergen, N.J. He attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where he earned a degree in English in 1963. On graduating, he entered the Marine Corps as a second lieutenant and underwent flight training in Pensacola, Fla.

In 1966 he was sent to Vietnam, where he flew 200 missions, most in support of ground-troop operations, but at one point he flew secret bombing runs over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. “Who these were secret from I’m still not sure,” Mr. Cullum told Holy Cross magazine in 2006. “The North Vietnamese certainly knew it wasn’t the Swiss bombing them.”


He went straight from Vietnam to employment with TWA, flying international and domestic flights. He retired at 60 from American Airlines, which merged with TWA in 2001.

During layovers he rekindled a childhood interest in drawing and decided to become a cartoonist. “It looked like something I could do,” he told Holy Cross magazine. “I bought some instructional books which explained the format, and I began studying the work of various cartoonists.”

Inevitably, he set his sights on The New Yorker. The magazine rejected his early submissions but bought some of his ideas, turning them over to Charles Addams to illustrate. The first one resulted in a captionless Addams cartoon from 1975 of an elderly couple canoeing on a peaceful lake. Their reflection in the water, depicting the husband’s actual state of mind, shows him, in a homicidal rage, attacking his wife with his paddle.

After Mr. Addams encouraged him to strike out on his own, Mr. Cullum sold his first magazine cartoon to Air Line Pilot Magazine and soon placed his work with True, Argosy, Saturday Review and Sports Afield.

Before long he cracked The New Yorker. On Jan. 3, 1977, the magazine published his first cartoon, which showed a bathrobed businessman drinking coffee at his desk, surrounded by chickens and speaking into a telephone. The caption read: “No, you’re not disturbing me, Herb. I’m up with the chickens this morning.”

Mr. Cullum quickly became a regular. By the 1980s he was one of the magazine’s most prolific and beloved contributors. “Starting around the mid-1990s, no one was published in The New Yorker more than Leo,” Mr. Mankoff said. He also contributed regularly to The Harvard Business Review and Barron’s.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Cullum managed the delicate feat of finding humor when the prevailing national mood was black. The issue of The New Yorker that came out immediately after the attacks carried no cartoons, but Mr. Cullum’s was the first cartoon that the magazine’s readers saw the following week, on Page 6 under the list of contributors. A woman, turning to the man next to her at a bar, says: “I thought I’d never laugh again. Then I saw your jacket.”



His most popular cartoon, from 1998, showed a man addressing the family cat, which is sitting next to the litterbox. “Never, ever, think outside the box,” he says.

He is survived by his wife, Kathy; a brother, Thomas, of Reston, Va.; and two daughters, the former child actresses Kimberly Berry and Kaitlin Cullum, both of Los Angeles.

In 2006 Mr. Cullum’s work appeared in “The Rejection Collection,” a book of cartoons rejected by The New Yorker. Asked to complete the sentence “When I’m not cartooning, I ...,” he wrote, “am wrestling, then showering, with my demons.”


Farewell Leo- you will be greatly missed.

Zen and the Art of Pencil Carving

Years ago I went with some friends to a Zen Buddist meditation group. We were in our early-thirties: bright-eyed, looking for inner peace and enlightenment while balancing ladder-climbing careers, hangovers and unhealthy relationships with the opposite gender. Basically your run-of-the-mill Atlanta artists-cum-career girls. This sounds like the beginning of a bad New York Times bestseller right?

Anywhoo- we went to the two hour meditation group shepherded by a boneless, sanguine hippy lady who looked like she could have been blown down by a slight breeze, but was also clearly as strong as a giant Redwood tree. She looked at about halfway through the meditation and I could practically see her thinking "Not Buddists".

In my experience there is a calm pond, quiet breeze sort of aura or air about those who practice Zen Buddism. I don't have it. Wish I did. I don't.

The Zen sand garden drives me nuts.
Moving a mountain of rice one piece at a time across a room. I'd go insane.

I'm working on it-trust me. But not there yet.

Where am I going with this? Patience. No, not you, me. I don't have an endless supply. My glass is half empty. But, a friend of mine sent me an article about an artist named Dalton Ghetti who makes sculptures out of pencils- specifically the lead of pencils. These things are teeny, itty-bitty, Borrower size sculptures that must take forever to create. They are an example of how in simplicity can be found perfection.

In an article from 2007 in the New York Times, Ghetti talks about a piece that he's working on in reaction to the 9/11 bombings. There will be a single rice-grain-sized teardrop for every soul claimed by the attacks. From a distance it will look like a giant tear, but up close you'll see its made of tiny little ones. He tries to carve one tear a day and expects the project to take about 10 years before it's completed.

That's patience.

He has carved the entire alphabet, letter by letter into the tip of a pencil (that project took two and a half years). There's a bust of Elvis, a heart in the center of a pencil, a boot, and a beautiful 24 link chain made out of a single pencil lead.

They're magnificent, and I just wanted to share them with you.
They make me want to work harder to find my inner Zen Buddist.
Or at least, if nothing else they've given me a new appreciation of the beauty that can be found inside something as simple as an everyday pencil.

Save the Words One Sentence at a Time

If I ever really worried that the bookish part of bookishredhead was fading with age I was disabused of that this morning when I was introduced to the Oxford English Dictionary's Save the Words website.

DELICOUS!!! And, what a fantastic idea. The premise of the site is to invite people to adopt and use an old word as much as possible so that it will boot out those silly, fakey words like "unfriend" and "staycation" that pop up so often these days.

Much like the old "Save a Child" tv commercials with Sally Struthers you can sponsor a word (BUT ITS FREE) by promising to use it at least once a day in a sentence. BONUS- if you like you can create and buy a tshirt with your adopted word on it for all to see and repeat.

Oh, how this appeals to the tamped-down literatti in me. It makes me want to run through my vepricose, senticous garden tussicating from all the pollen but still bravely singing the prasies of these long forgotten words. Save them. Save them all!

I think it might be difficult to find appropriate uses for words like avunculize and recineration, but I'll work on it.

Now if I could just find a use for this scandiscope.

Art With the Simplest of Elements

If you had told me that a woman making images with sand on a light table with some music in the background would practically bring me to tears (and did bring a large Ukranian audience to tears-not an easy task) I would have given you the crooked eyebrow and carried on with my day. But, it's true. Another interesting offshoot of "Britain's Got Talent" is "Ukraine's Got Talent- and quite remarklble talent it has.

Check out Kseniya Simonova's piece. Of course, it also doesn't hurt that she's stunning.

Rest Well Chacha Roux

Natacha, you will always be remembered. You lived your life so well.

Lunacy's Back...and she's fine.