- Art is the ultimate subjective topic. There is no right or wrong and what one person sees as a masterpiece could be nothing more than a mass of squiggly lines and paint splatters to another. Trying to make sense of it all is futile, so when someone tells you that a rare Eskimo shaman's mask with facial protrusions that look like hands, dangling sticks and feathers and a sadistic grin sold for over $2.5 million Thursday to a U.S. collector, just nod and smile. The mask, which is revered among Surrealists, was put on the auction block by the Donati Studio and broke the previous record for indigenous U.S. art sold at public auction, said a spokesman for the Winter Antiques Show in New York, where the mask was sold. Along with the record-setting mask, a second one sold for more than $2.1 million to another private buyer from the United States. The mask that sold for $2.5 million dates to the late 19th century and was discarded by its original Yup'ik Eskimo maker once its part in a ritualistic dance was over. Clearly, that designed did not appreciate the value of obscure, bizarre art because if he had only possessed the foresight to hold onto it, pass it down to his children and have them keep passing it down until the time came when some pretentious, snooty American art collector would pay $2.5 million for it, his family could have been filthy rich. Instead, Surrealist painter and sculptor Enrico Donati added it to his collection in 1945 and it increased in value as one of the best-known and rarest shamanistic masks of the Yup'ik, an Alaskan indigenous people. These sorts of elaborate masks were created by Yup'ik shamans for special dances performed to bring good weather. Several famous writers wre supposedly inspired by them even though they have never been publicly displayed before. That will change when they appear at the Winter Antiques Show in New York which runs from Jan. 21-Jan. 30. Other masks obtained about the Yup’ik people have appeared in museums around the world, including a mask related to the Donati masks owned by the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland. It is ironic that the masks are so sought after by collectors but were even more highly valued by the Yup’ik, who used them to request an abundance for the years to come from the gods. Now, these masks have a value and it probably would have stunned even those who created them in the first place……..
- This has international incident written all over it. When you take the cinematic farce that is Sasha Baron Cohen and combine his juvenile, sophomoric wit with a novel written by one of the worst dictators in world history, the odds of it ending well are somewhere between zero and -10 percent. But who am I to stand in the way of a “good” idea from Hollywood? So prepare yourselves, world, for Cohen’s take on one of the four novels written by late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was apparently an aspiring writer when not oppressing a nation and seeking to reign tyrannically over the Middle East. Hussein penned four novels while ruling Iraq and Cohen will adapt one of them for his Cohen's next film, "The Dictator." The film is inspired by Hussein's "Zabibah and the King," a romance novel originally published anonymously in 2000. Yes, a brutal fascist dictator wrote a romance novel. No word on whether Hussein hoped that Fabio would appear on the cover for the paperback edition, but the story itself was reportedly an allegory for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the First Gulf War. According to Paramount Pictures, which will distribute the film version of the tale, Cohen’s interpretation of the tale "tells the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed." The project already has a release date - May 11 of next year - and if it’s anything like Cohen's comedies "Bruno" and "Borat," prepare for a lot of pissed-off Iraqis. Neither or the two aforementioned films from Cohen were intelligent, high-brow or well-executed comedies and in truth, neither of them was good enough to work as what they were intended to be: lowest-common denominator, bathroom humor comedies. The fact that Cohen will also will direct "The Dictator" doesn’t make me feel any better about this train wreck in the making, so here’s to a movie that will be promoted out the wazoo and end up crashing and burning so badly that it’s on Blu-Ray and DVD within two months………..
- In preparing for today’s NFC championship game between the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers, everyone had their own special ritual or superstition to bestow good luck upon their team or show off their team spirit. That extended even to Minnesota, home to the Vikings, NFC North rival to both the Packers and Bears and bitter enemy of the Packers nearly as much as the Bears are. But even in frigid Minnesota, one sports bar found enough pro-Packers sentiment to come up with a unique - if not unsanitary - way to show its hate for the Bears. Blake Montpetit, the co-owner of Tiffany Sports Lounge in St. Paul, roasted a 180-pound black bear in a pig-roaster over hickory and charcoal in the hours leading up to the game in support of the Packers. Montpetit explained that his cousin shot the furry terror in northern Wisconsin during bear hunting season, which runs in September and October, and then froze it. The irony of the bear being shot in the Packers’ home state makes the story that much better and so would Montpetit’s plans to serve the meat to customers if the ass hats at the state health department hadn’t rejected the plan because the meat was unprocessed. Look, it worked for the cavemen when they took down a mastodon and roasted a hunk of the meat over an open flame (all facts may not be 100 percent historically accurate) and it will work today. But because Montpetit didn’t feel like taking on the health department and being fined or shut down because of it, the meat was taken from St. Paul to his cousin’s part in Somerset, Wis. after the game. Perhaps the sting of having customers be able to do nothing more than take pictures with the roasting bear during the game was lessened by the fact that the Packers won, 21-14, and are headed to the Super Bowl in Dallas………
- The question wasn’t if a private company would challenge the Federal Communications Commission's authority to enforce the new Net neutrality rules it adopted last month, but who the first company would be. Verizon, perhaps riding high off the buzz over the impending release of its iPhone model, did so by filing a legal appeal on Thursday challenging. "We believe this assertion of authority goes well beyond any authority provided by Congress, and creates uncertainty for the communications industry, innovators, investors and consumers," Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel Michael E. Glover said in a written statement. To refresh your mind on the rules in question, the so-called "Net neutrality" rules would give the agency regulatory power over Internet service providers with the intent of preventing Internet providers from blocking or "unreasonably discriminating" against Web content, services or applications. FCC's commissioners voted three-to-two to adopt the new measures even though the commission’s legal grounds for expanding its authority are shaky and critics of the new laws immediately ripped them as not being strict enough. Industry observers predicted that Internet providers would take the issue to court and sure enough, they have. Verizon was a logical choice because it had already worked to arrange a quiet deal with Google last year that it hoped would head off new FCC rules. The deal did not have that effect and now it’s back to court for the FCC, which has fought its share of legal wars in its attempts to police Internet providers. One of the most bitter battles came in 2007, when Comcast -- the nation's largest Internet provider -- blocked its subscribers from using peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, i.e. LimeWire and Napster, sites that have now been neutered and forced to re-launch as gutted, pathetic shells of their former selves. But at the time, the networks were legal and so the FCC tried to force Comcast to stop. Comcast returned fire with a lawsuit and in April 2010, a U.S. court of appeals ruled in Comcast's favor. That provided the impetus for the FCC’s new rules, adopted last month. Those rules definitely did not impress Verizon. "Today's filing is the result of a careful review of the FCC's order," Glover said. "We are deeply concerned by the FCC's assertion of broad authority for sweeping new regulation of broadband networks and the Internet itself." As a citizen of this here Internet you all are fighting for control of, allow me to simply say……both sides in this debate concern and alarm me……….
- Wow. Just wow. Did a romantic comedy starring Ashton Kutcher really just win a weekend at the box office? Sadly, it did. No Strings Attached is your top movie for this particular weekend, debuting with $20.3 million to best last weekend’s top earner, The Green Hornet, which dropped to second. Now, Strings was made for a scant $25 million, so it’s not as if a ton of money was wasted on this crap fest, but even so…..it has no business being the top movie for any weekend. Green Hornet chased its so-so opening week with a 46-percent decline and a haul of $18 million, elevating its cumulative total to $63.4 million after two weeks. Third place went to Vince Vaughn’s latest incarnation of the same damn romantic comedy he’s been making the past decade, The Dilemma, which fell off 45 percent from its opening weekend and made just $9.7 million in Week 2. That kind of drop-off doesn’t bode well for its chance to turn an overall profit with a $70 million budget, not with a two-week tally of $33.4 million. Fourth place went to The King’s Speech, which continues to a) add theaters and b) keep its earnings headed upward or at least level. For this weekend, that meant a decline of 0.2 percent, but earnings of $9.2 million and a nine-week total of $58.6 million. Rounding out the top five was True Grit, which declined 27 percent but managed an even $8 million to continue its impressive run. After five weeks, the remake of a John Wayne classic has garnered $138.6 million and looks to have a few more successful weeks in it. The remainder of the top 10 was occupied by: Black Swan (No. 6 with $6.2 million and its own impressive eight-week tally of $83.6 million despite being in limited release for much of its time in theaters), The Fighter (No. 7 with $4.5 million to prolong its own great stretch on the big screen and boost its cumulative total to $73 million and counting), Little Fockers (still a disgrace to the top 10 no matter where it lands, which is No. 8 this week with a meager $4.4 million and yet has made $141 million so far), Yogi Bear (No. 9 and now having passed the break-even point with $4.1 million and an $88.9 million overall haul) and Tron Legacy (dropping from No. 7 last weekend to No. 10 this time around, earning $3.7 million, elevating its running total to $163.3 million and still falling $7 million short of earning back its $170 million budget). Dropping out of the top 10 and falling all the way to No. 13 after just three week’s was Nicolas Cage’s über-disappointing Season of the Witch, which mustered just $2.2 million for the weekend and has made back only $22 million of its $40 million budget after three weeks…………
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