...at every quiet turn of this unlikely bildungsroman – set against the basketball courts of a small German town – Benjamin Markovits frustrates generic convention....The twenty-something narrator....leaves his hometown in Texas to pursue a basketball career in provincial Landshut....Playing Days is a deceptively slight-seeming narrative, composed largely of ‘empty time’: the ‘non-hour[s]’ before a game starts, and the ‘margin’ of early evenings before practice. Overarching this listlessness however, is a profound desire for shape and structure – visually encapsulated by the arcs and dotted lines of the playing court.
http://www.literateur.com/2010/06/playing-days-by-benjamin-markovits/
Rodes Fishburne's Going to See the Elephant appeals in both its subject (journalism) and setting (San Francisco), although when the reviewer writes that "the novel soars into the surreal and absurd," I start to worry that it might be akin to two recent and overrated novels that go that route, Yann Martel's The Life of Pi and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End. (I was not in the least surprised to see Martel's and Ferris's follow-up novels tank with the critics; when thin talents are overpraised, backlash is inevitable and often happens quickly.)
http://kevinfromcanada.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/going-to-see-the-elephant-by-rodes-fishburne/
Matthew Cheney at The Mumpsimus -- one of the rare blogs that give literature and cinema equal time -- is very impressed by Nnedi Okorafor's complex speculative novel Who Needs Death:
http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2010/06/in-which-i-exhort-you-to-read-who-fears.html
http://nnedi.com/
RIP (I guess): Sebastian Horsley. Horsley was one of those outrage-the-bourgeois-by-mortifying-my-own-flesh types that have never stopped surfacing in the arts since Baudelaire ratified the decadent attitude. Shock rockers can fall into this more-extreme-than-thou category (Sid Vicious, G.G. Allin), as do Chris Burden and a good number of his conceptual artist progeny. Horsley qualified by, among other activities, having himself crucified and (of course) filming it. ("When being crucified, his footrest slipped and he fell off the cross, which would have been funny if it hadn't been so gruesome.")
The son of an alcoholic millionaire, Horsley was found dead in his flat in Soho yesterday, aged 47 – reportedly from a heroin overdose....Unstoppable in his eagerness to share the grittier details of his experiences through his writing, art and interviews, he revelled in the intensity of his relationship with smack, crack, sex and death, and would rather stir up a room with an outrageous comment than tolerate a harmonious atmosphere. Once, when a woman offended him, he sent her one of his turds in a beautiful Tiffany box.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/jun/18/sebastian-horsley-found-dead
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/amy-jenkins-theres-a-fine-line-between-the-rebellious-and-the-farcical-2004813.html
As individual and amusing to read as the details of their outrages are, these guys -- are there female exemplars? -- are certainly a recurring type.
Marc Myers at JazzWax clears up the legends surrounding the death of alto saxophonist Joe Maini in 1964:
http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/06/the-truth-about-joe-mainis-death.html
El Museo del Barrio in New York is presenting a retrospective of the Puerto Rican artist Rafael Ferrer (b. 1933). Although it can be a cliche to say that the work of a Latin-Ameruican artists is explosive with color, it is hardly inaccuarate in this case:
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38526
http://www.elmuseo.org/en/event/retroactive-work-rafael-ferrer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Ferrer_%28artist%29
Among notables born on this date are composers Igor Stravinsky, Charles Gounod, and Sammy Fain, violinist Christian Ferras, country singer Red Foley, tennis player Venus Williams, film directors Ken Loach and Lee Tamahori, poets Henrik Wergeland (Norway), Ferdinand Freiligarth (Germany), and Henry Lawson (Australia), politician Ken Livingstone, artist M.C. Escher, novelists Carl Van Vechten, John Hersey, and Gail Jones, designer Charles Eames, and actors Setsuko Hara, Ralph Bellamy, Thomas Haden Church, and Greg Kinnear. The Wikipedia article on Red Foley (1910-1968) notes that "his country boogie material was a clear precursor of [rock'n'roll]," and this incredibly brisk performance is a good example of that. The clip looks like it might come from Foley's series Ozark Jubilee, one of the first country music shows on network television, premiering in 1955.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Foley
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