NoirCon

Noir: Kid Lit or Bad to the Bone: The Worst Children in Literature

2012-05-30T18:41:00.002-04:00

The children from The Midwich Cuckoos
by John Wyndham

Children can be innocent, inquisitive and the embodiment of hope. But those characteristics make for boring stories. Sometimes authors enjoy creating a fictional child that is just plain nasty. Draco Malfoy might be a bigot and a bully, but he’s rarely dull and is a vital ingredient in the Harry Potter novels. Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory would not be such a tasty read without greedy Augustus Gloop, bratty Violet Beauregarde and the spoiled Veruca Salt.

Draco, Augustus, Violet and Veruca are actually mild-mannered compared to some of the horrible children on this list. Authors have not restrained themselves from portraying children as utterly evil. And while these books are fiction, and human evil-doing is prevalent in literature, there is something especially unnatural and disturbing when the perpetrator is a child, as if it represents the perversion of innocence itself. Be warned, some of these books have the potential to be distressing, particularly for parents. Some of the young characters in this selection abuse, torture, murder and commit demonic acts with barely a second thought. David Seltzer even gave us a youthful antichrist, Damien from The Omen.

Pinkie Brown from Brighton Rock and Frank from The Wasp Factory are two examples of how evil characters can also be portrayed as extremely complex. Skilled authors can make the reader ponder the key question of why a child has become bad to the bone, while being so young.

The 25 Worst Children in Literature

Veda from Mildred Pierce
by James M. Cain

This daughter is the queen of blackmail and deceit.

Frank from The Wasp Factory
by Iain Banks

It’s hard to describe Frank and his rituals – he’s very, very twisted.

The Baby in Rosemary’s Baby
by Ira Levin

This infamous child is every parent’s worst nightmare.

Rosalind from In The Woods
by Tana French

As the older sister of a murder victim, Rosalind becomes entwined in the investigation.

Vernon Little from Vernon God Little
by DBC Pierre

While not evil like some on the list, this foul-mouthed reprobate has few virtues.

Regan MacNeil from The Exorcist
by William Peter Blatty

It wasn’t Regan’s fault that a demonic spirit possessed her.

Rhoda from The Bad Seed
by William March

It’s nearly impossible for a parent to see that their child was born bad.

Pinkie Brown from Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

The 17-year-old Pinkie is a merciless thug in this classic.

Rynn Jacobs from The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane
by Laird Koenig

Rynn is a mysterious child with an absent poet of a father and a nose for trouble.

Christine Hargensen from Carrie
by Stephen King

‘Chris’ is the mean-spirited snobbish teenage girl who leads the torment of Carrie.

Leading William from All Summer in a Day
by Ray Bradbury (Found in The Stories of Ray Bradbury)

He enacts terrible psychological punishment on classmate Margot.

Matilda from The Monk
by Matthew Gregory Lewis

Coleridge said Matilda was “superior in wickedness to the most wicked of men.”

One of the Twins in The Other
by Tom Tryon

A boy whose twin brother is intertwined with a series of deaths in a rural community.

Ben from The Fifth Child
by Doris Lessing

This grotesque, violent and hateful child is tearing a family apart.

Kevin from We Need to Talk About Kevin
by Lionel Shriver

Kevin is a sociopath who murders several classmates in a school massacre.

Jack from Lord of the Flies
by William Golding

He epitomizes the worst aspects of human nature in this must-read.

Damien from The Omen
by David Seltzer

This child from hell turns out to be the antichrist.

Regina Afton from Some Girls Are
by Courtney Summers

After terrorizing others she is cast out of her clique to become the victim of her own bullying.

Gage Creed from Pet Sematary
by Stephen King

Another example of demonic possession ruining a childhood.

Nick from Hate List
by Jennifer Brown

In order to impress his high school sweetheart, Nick goes off the rails.

Jacob from Before and After
by Rosellen Brown

A family struggles after their teenage son murders his girlfriend.

The boys from Boy A
by Jonathan Trigell

Boy A and Boy B were both convicted of murdering a young girl.

The Children in Let’s Go Play at The Adams
by Mendal W. Johnson

A group of children are left alone and run amok in ways you would never imagine.

Mary Katherine ‘Merricat’ Blackwood from We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson

She cares for her sister Constance but something is not right with this 18-year-old.

Andy Evans from Speak
by Laurie Halse Anderson

Andy rapes a classmate at a school party with long-running, serious consequences for the victim.

Noir: AS QUEER AS CLOCKWORK ORANGE

2012-05-29T18:24:00.001-04:00

THE CLOCKWORK CONDITION

The author comments on his most famous book, in 1973.

by Anthony BurgessJUNE 4, 2012

ABSTRACT: LIFE AND LETTERS

about the writer’s novel, “A Clockwork Orange.” The writer first published the book “A Clockwork Orange” in 1962. Nearly ten years after its publication, its title and content became known to millions because of Stanley Kubrick’s very close film interpretation. The writer first heard the expression “as queer as a clockwork orange” in a London pub before the Second World War. It’s an old Cockney slang phrase, implying a queerness or madness so extreme as to subvert nature. In 1961, the writer began to write a novel about curing juvenile delinquency. He had read somewhere that it would be a good idea to liquidate the criminal impulse through aversion therapy; he was appalled. He began to work out the implications of this notion in a brief work of fiction. The hero of both the book and the film is a young thug called Alex. He rejoices in articulate language and even invents a new form of it; he loves beauty, which he finds in Beethoven’s music above everything; he is aggressive. With his companions, he terrorizes the streets of a great city at night. The young antihero is arrested, and the Home Office or Ministry of the Interior introduces a form of aversion therapy guaranteed to eliminate criminal propensities forever. Alex is injected with a substance that brings on extreme nausea, and the onset of nausea is deliberately associated with the enforced viewing of films about violence. Soon he cannot contemplate violence without feeling desperately sick. He is forced to walk a tightrope of imposed “goodness.” The state has gone too far: it has entered a region beyond its covenant with the citizen; it has closed to its victim a whole world of non-moral goodness. What the writer was trying to say was that it is better to be bad of one’s free will than to be good through scientific brainwashing. B. F. Skinner’s book “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” came out at the very time that “A Clockwork Orange” first appeared on the screen, ready to demonstrate the advantages of what we may call beneficent brainwashing. Given the right positive inducements, Skinner argues, we shall all become better citizens, submissive to a state that has the good of the community at heart. That the writer considers any kind of conditioning wrong must be accounted, he supposes, to the strength of Catholic tradition in which he was reared. The maintenance of a complex society depends increasingly on routine work, work with no zest or creativity. One of the slogans of George Orwell’s superstate in “1984” is “Freedom is slavery.” This can be taken to mean that the burden of making one’s own choices is, for many people, intolerable. Perhaps there is something to be said for conformity in social life when our working lives have so little room for rugged individualism. But when patterns of conformity are imposed by the state, then one has a right to be frightened. It is significant that the nightmare books of our age have not been about new Draculas and Frankensteins but about what may be termed dystopias—inverted utopias, in which an imagined megalithic government brings human life to an exquisite pitch of misery. Mentions Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It would seem that enforced conditioning of the mind, however good the social intention, has to be evil.

Anthony Burgess, Life and Letters, “The Clockwork Condition,” The New Yorker, June 4, 2012, p. 69

Noir: The Loves and Lusts of a Horticulturalist

2012-05-29T18:03:00.000-04:00

Flowers are flirts. Like strippers in a church, they will not be overlooked. They can’t help it. They were born that way, sex organs on their sleeves. Kind of like Lady Gaga. Both invite us to speculate about appearances and time.

For poets, roses once reported life is short. Heat cools. But poets are cowards, and lazy to boot. They sang roses—span’s forever to a lily, whose biological clock chimes with the sun.

Flowers bring us to our eyes, yet their implications vary by latitude. For northerners, they signal easy raptures and loose sprawls. In the evergreen south, they mediate the sheer fecundity of being.

Like lips tricked with rouge or breasts empowered by implants, flowers use strategies unnatural as only nature can be: the lilies’ petals pout and spill with sweet disorder, far beyond what’s called for…but then, we made them too—bred them for our pleasure, groomed them like cheerleaders buffed for daddy in the bleachers.

What we see gives little clue to what we get, in time.

But, flies on an orchid of offal? Certainly. I mean, why not?

Hatry’s bedeviling constructs are artful as nature.

A Tibetan lama once described the bardo—that state we enter after death, before the next round—as being like Paris at rush hour. Lights scream by, flying at you, better duck or you’ll get hit. Guy can spend forty days in such a state before finding the next life. The problem, the lama explained, is that most people don’t know how to choose. They see an image—a certain kind of man, a pretty woman, a sexy house—and run toward it, et voila: they awaken as bedbugs. In death, as in life, appearances deceive. That little we know.

The coexistence of beauty and ferocity in Heide Hatry's new work reveals there is holism in transforming the opposites

Essay by Askold Melnyczuk and Photograph by Heide Hatry
from the forthcoming book Not a Rose

The book will be published in January 2012 by Charta Art Books

Noir: R.I.P. Johnny Tapia

2012-05-28T20:22:00.001-04:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Johnny Tapia, the five-time boxing champion whose turbulent career was marked by cocaine addiction, alcohol, depression and run-ins with the law, was found dead Sunday at his Albuquerque home. He was 45.

Authorities were called to the house at about 7:45 p.m. on Sunday, spokesman Robert Gibbs said. The death didn’t appear to be suspicious, he said.

Tapia won five championships in three weight classes, winning the WBA bantamweight title, the IBF and WBO junior bantamweight titles and the IBF featherweight belt.

He was regarded as the consummate underdog by his fans. The more trouble he found outside the ring — including several stints in jail — the more they rallied around him.

In a 1990s-era feud with fellow Albuquerque boxer and former world champion Danny Romero, Tapia’s fans anointed him with the slang Spanish title of “Burque’s Best.”

But his life was also marked by tragedy. He was orphaned at 8, his mother stabbed 26 times with a screwdriver and left to die.

In 2007, he was hospitalized after an apparent cocaine overdose. Several days later, his brother-in-law and his nephew were killed in car accident on their way to Albuquerque to see the ailing boxer.

Tapia was banned from boxing for 3 1/2 years in the early ‘90s because of his cocaine addiction. But he knocked out Henry Martinez to win the WBO bantamweight title in 1994, and won four more championships over the next eight years.

He last fought in June, outpointing Mauricio Pastrana in an eight-round decision. He finished with a 59-5-2 record.

Gibbs said an autopsy will be performed in the next few days.

Noir: MacGyver meets Mad-Max in the Sahara

2012-05-28T20:14:00.002-04:00

Real-Life MacGyver Builds Working Motorcycle Out of Car That Broke Down in the Desert

The story has a Mad-Max-style motorcycle apparently built out of the parts of a broken-down Citroen 2CV, by a man stranded in the Sahara Desert. Pretty unbelievable stuff, only it turned out to be absolutely 100% true. It all happened back in 1993, when Frenchman was on a solo trip in Northern Africa, driving his specially prepared Citroen 2CV. His car broke down in the middle of the desert, tens of kilometers from the nearest settlement. To survive, the French MacGyver created a motorcycle out of parts of his broken down car.

So here’s how it all happened: Emile had left the city of Tan Tan, in Morocco, and was driving his Citroen 2CV across the Sahara. Upon reaching a military outpost, he is informed by the Royal Gendermerie that he cannot continue further, due to new developments in the conflict between Morocco and Western Sahara, in the area beyond Tilemsem. Left with the option to go back to Tan Tan and asked to take a passenger back with him, the Frenchman refuses invoking an insurance problem that doesn’t allow him to take any passengers. He turns his car around driving at high speed, to make sure he isn’t followed by the military, and decides to by-bass their post by circling around and returning on the original trail later. After venturing off road, on rocky and bumpy terrain, it doesn’t take too long for his car to break down, after brutally hitting a rock. Emile is now stranded in the middle of nowhere.

The Citroen’s swing arm and wheel axle were broken, and Leray knew he wasn’t going to be driving it anywhere, anytime soon. He had food and water to last him about ten days, but the nearest human settlement was tens of kilometers away, too far for him to reach on foot. The French adventurer decided his only chance of survival was to construct a working vehicle from the parts of his broken-down Citroen 2CV.

After carefully considering all the mechanical barriers he would have to surmount, Emile starts work on his DIY motorcycle, the next morning. He starts dismantling his Citroen, by removing the body, which he then uses as shelter against the sandstorms. Working under the scorching sun in a shirt with short sleeves, he makes his own sleeves out of a pair of socks, and keeps tinkering on his Mad Max-style creation. He fits the wheel arm upside down on a smaller chassis, adding the engine and gearbox in the middle. The French adventurer does all this knowing he needs to reserve some space for the battery, gas tank and his luggage, and without neglecting the arrangement of the steering system. But it’s the 2CV transmission that’s truly surprising – a drum drives the rear wheel by friction, and the laws of physics force Emile to drive it only in reverse.

It seems almost impossible for someone to build a motorcycle in the middle of the desert, with just a few basic tools, and no drills, blowtorches or welding equipment. But Emile Leray created his two-wheeler only by screwing the parts together. To make the needed holes, he bent the pieces of metal to a 90 degree angle and weakened the thinner areas using a hacksaw or a round file, puncturing them with the hammer and punch.

Emile in classic desert wear. If you look closely at his right hand, you can see the string he uses to operate the camera

The adventurer began work on his unique project thinking he would complete it in three days time, but he only succeeded after twelve days of hard work. With only 1/2 liter of water left, he managed to ride his motorcycle (called Desert Camel) out of the desert. On his way to civilization, Leray was actually pulled over by the Gendermerie, for driving an illegal vehicle.

Noir: WTF Holy Hannibal Lecter

2012-05-28T13:23:00.000-04:00

Naked man killed by Police near MacArthur Causeway was ‘eating’ face off victim

This surveillance video from a camera on the Miami Herald building shows a police officer shooting the suspect, as well as the aftermath, when many more patrol cars arrived.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/26/2818832/naked-man-shot-killed-on-macarthur.html#storylink=cpy

It was a scene as creepy as a Hannibal Lecter movie.

One man was shot to death by Miami police, and another man is fighting for his life after he was attacked, and his face allegedly half eaten, by a naked man on the MacArthur Causeway off ramp Saturday, police said.

The horror began about 2 p.m. when a series of gunshots were heard on the ramp, which is along NE 13th Street, just south of The Miami Herald building.

According to police sources, a road ranger saw a naked man chewing on another man’s face and shouted on his loud speaker for him to back away.Meanwhile, a woman also saw the incident and flagged down a police officer who was in the area.

The officer, who has not been identified, approached and, seeing what was happening, also ordered the naked man to back away. When he continued the assault, the officer shot him, police sources said. The attacker failed to stop after being shot, forcing the officer to continue firing. Witnesses said they heard at least a half dozen shots.

Miami police were on the scene, which was just south of The Miami Herald building on Biscayne Boulevard. The naked man who was killed lay face down on the pedestrian walkway just below the newspaper’s two-story parking garage. Police have requested The Herald’s video surveillance tapes.

The other man was transported to the hospital with critical injuries, according to police. Their identities were not released.

The incident, which came as crowds descended upon South Beach for the annual Urban Beach Week hip-hop festival, snarled traffic on the causeway for several hours.

In a text message, Javier Ortiz, spokesman for Miami police’s Fraternal Order of Police, said the officer who fired the fatal shots was “a hero.”

“Based on the information provided, our Miami police officer is a hero and saved a life,’’ he said.

Sergeant Altarr Williams, supervisor of Miami police’s Homicide Unit, said a man doesn’t have to be armed to be dangerous.

“There are other ways to injure people,’’ Williams said. “Some people know martial arts, others are very strong and can kill you with their hands.’’

Investigators believe the victim may have been homeless and laying down when the crazed man pounced.

Police theorize the attacker might have been suffering from "cocaine psychosis," a drug-induced craze that bakes the body internally and often leads the affected to strip naked to try and cool off.

Miami Herald writers Alexandra Leon and Curtis Morgan contributed to this report.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/26/2818832/naked-man-shot-killed-on-macarthur.html#storylink=cpy

Noir: A DEATH IN MEXICO - BRILLIANT

2012-05-27T17:14:00.003-04:00

The Approval Matrix: Week of May 28, 2012

Our deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies.

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Woods, Jonathan. A Death in Mexico. New Pulp Pr., dist. by Ingram. May 2012. 218p. ISBN 9780982843680. pap. $14.95. F
Woods (Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem) spins a gritty noir tale set in San Miguel de Allende and filled with sex and a cynical detective, Insp. Hector Diaz. A gringo model working at an art school is found brutally murdered and mutilated, and Diaz suspects the well-known erotic artist Gregory Gregorovich is involved. When the dead girl’s father arrives in San Miguel to retrieve her body and then goes missing, the case turns from a random act of violence to sinister conspiracy. Diaz battles his own alcoholic tendencies, political pressure from the mayor’s office, and the (sometimes) unwanted sexual advances of female witnesses and suspects.

Noir: When Is A Rose NOT A ROSE

2012-05-27T10:13:00.002-04:00

It is in these clashing layers of beauty and ugliness, desire and abject, life and death, so carefully woven together that these contemporary fleurs du mal reveal their unique and enigmatic essence, one that brings us to question our approach to nature and its alleged beauty through the shattering of our certainties.
Giovanni Aloi

Linguae Anitum Rosae, New York, NY 2011In a process of fabrication that [Hatry’s work] might well be called recombinant taxidermy, this most fleshly of all conceptualists has fabricated her bounteous blooms out of blood and guts, fairly turning Sweeney Todd into a botanist. ...
This is a nasty but concise kind of visual pun, a game of eye-rhyme that finds chicken parts and the bodies of sea life transforming readily, seemingly effortlessly, into the members of some other natural kingdom.
Peter FrankAridus Capita Piscis, Beijing, China 2011Heide Hatry’s flowers triumphantly confuse categories, calling both artificiality and reality into question, as art should do. ...
The process exposes our culture’s selfish disrespect for anything we can exploit, and to hell with the long term consequences.
Lucy LippardAridus Capita Piscis Ophiurida, Beijing, China 2011Turning life and death into death and life, these images are arresting. A fierce, shameless collaboration with nature.
Amanda PalmerRubores Conchae Pelagi Lutea Conchula, New York, NY 2011Heide Hatry’s reconfiguration of animal flesh into flowers is a wonderful enactment of Buddhist philosophy. When the repulsive is also beautiful, then we have arrived at a place of wisdom that transcends our usual subjective prejudices.
Stephen T. AsmaConchae Ciliae Cervorum Oesophagus, Cervi, Dallas, TX 2011Nothing is actually as it seems to be… we are seduced by alchemical illusions. Hatry, the alchemist of forbidden transmutations creates photographs of exquisite, delicate flowers sculpted from repellant animal organs. Our perceptions are pulled asunder while the accompanying essays provide a history to deepen this remarkable compilation.
Carolee SchneemannEchinodermae Alae Papillionis Ocellus Piscis, New York, NY 2011Heide Hatry’s flowers bring to visibility and nameability this mixed body of death and delicacy, lust and loveliness commingling. ...
In her corporeal punnings, her plays on ears, bellies, fingers and tongues, Heide Hatry hothouses this flowering of flesh into word and word into flesh.
Steven ConnorRubores Conchae Pelagi, Beijing, China 2011Hatry’s flowers, then, might be considered a modern vanitas, exposing the death that lies at the heart of our dreams of love, of beauty, and of life itself.
Alex MackintoshCaesaries Linguae Cruores Cervorum, Dallas, TX 2011Heide Hatry’s flowers can be fruitfully considered in the context of this semantic play with flowers and virginity. Her photographs parallel the works of Thomas Demand in that they double the mimetic process … they are the imitation of an imitation Her photographs encompass the similarity and the contiguity that link flowers and virginity. They literally give flesh to metaphor and metonymy.
Jonas GrethleinMagnum Forcipes Crancrorum, Seattle, WA 2011Hatry's work is willful, it is planned, but, I want to say, it is not wholly unconnected to an array of traditional practices, including haruspicy, and perhaps including a sort of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine in reverse. ...
Hatry is giving something like an offering. It's not clear to whom, and it's not clear why, but the guts of slaughtered animals are being offered up for something or other, rather than discarded or gulped down; and that feels awkwardly regressive. ...
Hatry's work does not, like that of Hermann Nitsch and the Vienna Actionists, explicitly attempt to breath new life into the ancient cult of sacrifice. It is (slightly) more subtle than that: it confounds our idea of what art is by taking what is ordinarily off-limits as an artistic medium and turning it into one, at high risk of being misunderstood as the work of a Hannibal Lecter, or as, you know, 'another one of those Germans'.
Justin E H SmithAures Porcinarum, Harlem, 2008Hatry has grown these Flowers in that No Mans Land between terror and desire, which is a hairy, scary but by no means unpromising place for the growth and cultivation of art.
Anthony Hayden GuestPinnae Dorsale Piscis, Seattle, WA 2011[Hatry’s work] involves the discovery of an entirely and disturbingly original way to artistically depict the mortal nature of objects not in words, not in colors or harmonious sounds, but in actual mortal objects that inhabit the three-dimensional reality we share, where the line between perishing and being born, the flourishing of life and its decay and annihilation in death is not at all clear cut but remains, constantly, an inexplicable mystery that needs such images to bridge it, to make for some of us our existence here easier to endure and more fluently praised. Her new work is among other things a marvelous expression of the ancient lamentation for its maker’s own mortal flesh, and its fragile resurrection in the only slightly less ephemeral flowering of a concept and a work of art, whose mysterious and futile beauty seems, at least, not to be decaying right before our eyes.
Franz WrightPalata Anitum, New York, NY 2011Hatry has grown these Flowers in that No Mans Land between terror and desire, which is a hairy, scary but by no means unpromising place for the growth and cultivation of art.
Anthony Hayden GuestBecci Anitum, Hong Kong, China 2011[Heide Hatry shows] the “itself,” the soul of art in the modern age: to transcend and transfigure our daily matter, to be dysfunctional yet purposive – to display waste as the essence of becoming.
Kiene Brillenburg WurthOs Aures Cervorum Linguae Gallinarum Barbus Siluri, Dallas, TX 2011Hatry has ingeniously found a way to externalize the malaise many of us feel in consuming the messages and products of our commercial culture. We’re attracted... but we feel queasy about it. Something is not quite right, and Hatry has given us a wonderfully effective reason for our discomfort.
Joel SimpsonBecci Gallinarum Branchialis Lutjani, Hong Kong, China 2011Hatry's decision to use material that Westerners usually eschew – because, among other reasons, it reminds us of our base antecedence – to craft beautiful forms is subtly provocative, goading us to wrestle with ontological questions that, like the discarded meat the artist works with, we prefer to neglect.
Christopher RiegerBohadschia Graeffei Antennae Crancrorum, Hong Kong, China 2011Hatry’s bedeviling constructs are artful as nature.
Askold MelnyczukCaudae Ocelli Piscis, Miami, FL 2010A rose is a rose is a rose
SteinCaudae Piscis, Hong Kong, China 2011A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
ShakespearePartes Conchae, Boston, MA 2011Qui du cul d’un chien s’amourose, Il lui paraît une rose
Proust["Fall in love with a dog's behind and it will seem like a rose."]Sculptura Conchae, New York, NY 2011Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world; he becomes aware of himself only within the world, and aware of the world only within himself. Every new object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception in us.
GoetheAridus Sepiae, Beijing, China 2011The flowers depicted in Not a Rose are photographic documentations of sculptures composed mainly out of animal organs, disposed in different natural environments. The photographs make the flowers appear to be “real,” so real that it is quite difficult to see that they are, in fact, constructions, without having been provided with additional information. They are not concieved as polemical, but are supposed merely to look like simple snapshots of flowers. They appear convincing, in part, as a consequence of visual habit and expectation.Forcipes Crancrorum, Hong Kong, China 2011

The flowers with which we normally surround ourselves are dead detached sex organs from living things, bred explicitly to serve our pleasure, and not even our sustenance. The animal materials of which the sculptural flowers that are at the heart of the present collaboration undeniably derive from living creatures bred solely to die for our sustenance, but they are the “worthless” waste products of that process, that is, they serve no, or only an incidental, role in alimentation – lungs, hearts, stomachs, livers, tongues, bladders and, yes, sex organs as well. Yet their presence excites abhorrence while that of the former confers joy.

Linguae Porcinarum Antennae Locustarum, Gloucester, MA 2011

The biological purpose of even the demurest flower is seduction; its social function among humans is often that as well. And my flowers are also intended to seduce, but only to seduce the unthinking into thought and the thinking into imagining.

Rubores Luteolus Partes Conchae, Boston MA 2011

Not a Rose, 248 pages, 80 images, CHARTA, Milan, New York, 2012
€ 42 / $49 - Regular
€ 25 / $35 - Special Pre-Order Price
(If you would like to pre-order the book, please send your inquiry to hhjwny@gmail.com)

There is no other book that has addressed the meaning of flowers to human beings so diversely, comprehensively, and thoughtfully as Not a Rose. Masked as a traditional coffee table book, it quotes from the genre while turning it inside out, for the images it offers are not innocent pretty flowers but elegant, compelling, and yet grotesque sculptures that the artist has created from the offal, sex organs, and other parts of animals, reminding us that the flowers that grace our homes are really the detached dead sex organs of living beings, and making us question the foundations of aesthetic reception in general.

Woven through the images, and taking its cue from them, is the writing of more than eighty prominent intellectuals, writers, and artists (such as Lucy R. Lippard, Steven Pinker, Kate Millett, Donna Haraway, Anthony Haden-Guest, Siri Hustvedt, Klaus Theweleit, and Stanley Rosen) who address “the question of the flower” from a multiplicity of perspectives, including anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, philology, botany, neuroscience, art history, gender studies, physics, and chemistry.

As in her previous conceptual book projects – Skin and Heads and Tales – Hatry has perfected a new form, a hybrid work that is both book and conceptual art installation. Described by legendary artist Carolee Schneemann as an “alchemist of forbidden transmutations, [who] takes our perceptions and pulls them asunder” Hatry follows in the wake of the smartest of the surrealists and the most humane of the conceptualists with work that is both blasphemous and funny, moving and provocative.

In Not a Rose you will experience contemporary art at its best: it is thinking through art.

Noir: David Goodis, Mansfield, THE BURGLAR (1955) and 1956

2012-05-26T22:43:00.002-04:00

Goodis's BURGLAR had been filmed the year before. It starred Dan Duryea as Nat Harbin and Jayne Mansfield as Gladden. Duryea and Mansfield shared the same room at night and were not shy about their off-film acting!
Jayne in Broadway smash hit
"Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter" (1955)

Enter 1966 LIFE..........

The End in 1967

Noir: This Little Piggly Wiggly!

2012-05-26T08:44:00.000-04:00

Lonneshia Shafaye Appling - Apprehended!

Meet Lonneshia Shafaye Appling.

The Georgia woman, 26, was so determined to shoplift beer, bacon, cheese, and chicken wings from a Piggly Wiggly that she punched, spit at, and pepper-sprayed store workerswho confronted her as she tried to flee the supermarket Wednesday afternoon, according to cops.

Appling, pictured in the above mug shot, allegedly hid items worth $88.27 in a canvas bag. She “attempted to check out, only putting one item on the counter,” according to a worker quoted in an Athens-Clarke County Police Department report.

When a Piggly Wiggly employee--who had been tipped to the pilfering by a shopper--asked Appling about the concealed items, she tried to exit the store. After worker Jonathan Orr tried to stop Appling, she “pulled out some pepper spray and sprayed him in the face.”

Appling kept spraying as several workers tried to keep her from fleeing. The 340-pound Appling also allegedly punched Orr in the face and spit on the 28-year-old employee. As she successfully bolted from the Athens store, Appling “was dropping beer cans out of her purse.”

Responding to a 911 call, a cop reported spotting “a very large black female in a purple dress standing there screaming at two store employees” who followed her outside the Piggly Wiggly, which was filled with a choking cloud of pepper spray.

Police then arrested Appling, whose rap sheet includes several prior shoplifting convictions and outstanding arrest warrants in three Georgia counties.

Cops prepared an inventory of the items Appling sought to swipe: five packages of cheese; eight cans of Coors Light; vegetable oil; chicken wings; and five packages of bacon.

While in police custody, Appling told a cop to add whatever charges he wanted “because she was going to plea bargain and half of the charges would be dropped anyway,” according to the report. She also asked Officer Nathaniel Franco if her arrest would make the police blotter, requesting that the cop make his report “more interesting so that her arrest would make” the department’s compendium of notable incidents.

The unemployed--and now incarcerated--Appling “also commented that store personnel shouldn’t chase people like that because they could get themselves hurt.” Or shoplifters could get busted.

Noir: Body Fluids of POTUS

2012-05-26T08:30:00.001-04:00

Brooklyn Lee, whose Twitter bio includes “astronaut/dick-sucker extraordinaire,” posted this photo of herself (on the right) and fellow porn star Tasha Reign with the former president. (The third woman in the photo was ID’d on Twitter as @jennifer_taule).

Lee was recently awarded “Best New Starlet” at this year’s AVN Awards. She also took home “Best Sex Scene” for her stellar work in Mission Asspossible.

When asked by COED Magazine afterward about her motivation, she said, “I don’t do anything unless I’m going to give it my all. I absolutely love this industry and the variety of opportunities it affords. I get to travel the world, and have sex with beautiful people! Why stop now when I’m having so much fun?”

Can’t argue there — the adult film industry made it possible for Lee to attend a high-end gala in Monaco and pose for pics with the one-time leader of the free world.

President Obama, Bill Clinton sees your “cool” and raises you “porn star cool.”

Noir: No Regan Zombie

2012-05-26T07:17:00.002-04:00

Auction of Ronald Reagan blood vial canceled

By Del Quentin Wilber

Thursday, May 24, 2012

The controversial auction of a vial that contained President Ronald Reagan’s blood has been halted, and the valuable glass tube is being donated to the former president’s foundation.

“We are grateful to the current custodian of the vial for this generous donation to the Foundation ensuring President Reagan’s blood remains out of public hands,” said John Heubusch, the foundation’s director.

The vial in question contained residue of blood drawn from Reagan while he recovered from a near-fatal gunshot wound in 1981. It was being sold by an online auction house based on the island of Guernsey, an autonomous British protectorate, in the English Channel. With only hours left in the auction, the vial had garnered bids exceeding $30,000.

The provenance of the vial can be traced back to just days after Reagan was shot as he left the Washington Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981, and rushed to George Washington University Hospital, where he underwent life-saving surgery.

The president was treated there for 13 days. During that stay, a vial of blood was drawn to test for lead and sent to a laboratory in Columbia, Md. A laboratory worker was given permission to keep the old vial and its paperwork, according to a statement by PFC Auctions, which was selling the items. When she died, her son sold the vial at a U.S. auction in February for $3,550 to a collector of presidential memorabilia, the auction site said in a statement.

That collector, who has not been identified, then contacted PFC Auctions, which put the vial up for sale on his behalf, saying it contained “dried blood residue from President Reagan.” Reagan’s former doctors told The Washington Post that they believed the item was authentic.

Reagan’s presidential library in Simi Valley, Calif., has an exhibit dedicated to the assassination attempt that includes the suit the president was wearing that day. It still has a small slit just under the left armpit — evidence of the round that struck the president. The would-be assassin unleashed six shots in 1.7 seconds, hitting Reagan and three other men — Secret Service Agent Tim McCarthy, White House press secretary James Brady and D.C. Police Officer Thomas Delahanty. All survived. Reagan was hit by John W. Hinckley Jr.’s final shot; it ricocheted off the side of the presidential limousine, slipped through a small gap between the door and door frame and then hit the president as he was being shoved inside the car by an alert Secret Service agent.

The vial was not the only memento of the shooting kept by medical personnel. One doctor hung onto Reagan’s stitches, and others kept copies of reports. FBI agents spent weeks fruitlessly hunting for one of Reagan’s “Golden Bear” cuff links — a keepsake from his time as California’s governor — that vanished, most likely after his clothes were cut off of him in the trauma bay. It has never been found.

Noir: R.I.P Meme

2012-05-25T14:12:00.001-04:00

Online Mourning as meme

Basking In Reflected Glory = BIRG vs Cutting Off Reflected Failure = CORF

(The noir alternatives that are not at odds with one another are BIRD (Basking In Reflected Darkness) and ERF (Embracing Reflected Failure)

Minutes after Robin Gibb’s death, it began — the tweets of misery, the hashtagged mourning, the maudlin aphorisms streaming up and down Facebook walls and across Pinterest boards. The musician’s life was collated and curated by fans and passersby who felt compelled to make sense of it all in 140 characters or less.

“R.I.P. Robin Gibb,” the first wave wrote, acting as virtual Paul Reveres for followers and friends. Next came the people who listened to him in high school, one-upped by the people who lost their virginity to the Bee Gees record they purchased with their first paycheck in high school.

What was presented as genuine emotional loss sometimes looked like competitive grieving — sadness mixed with the performance art of social media. Or as Jacob Silverman witheringly sighed on Jewcy.com, “On Twitter, grief is just another meme.”

If your Facebook feed was free of Gibb adulation, then it might have been nostalgia-bombed by Donna Summer retrospectives, Adam “MCA” Yauch tributes, Levon Helm memories, Maurice Sendak mash notes, and Chuck Brown YouTube videos, photographs and moldering interviews. Everyone was sad, so sad. Everyone was everyone’s favorite artist.

In the boomer icon death flood of recent weeks, certain behaviors have emerged, the new rules for mourning online: Sorrow is poignant. Sorrow is public. Sorrow is pithy.

“He finally reached Brooklyn. -#RIPMCA,” one Twitter user wrote. (Actually, dozens wrote it or variations on it.)

“Robin Gibb, you’ll be stayin’ alive in my heart.”

“Maurice Sendak has gone where the wild things are,” wrote another hundred or so — it’s convenient when your dead heroes leave behind lyrics or phrases that lend themselves to mortality musings.
If grief is a meme, it’s not a meme only on Twitter. Our need to publicize sadness goes beyond the online realm, which is why Buckingham Palace wheezed with the pollen from flowers left by Princess Diana’s mourners, why Michael Jackson’s tear-stricken fans aimed themselves like homing pigeons toward Neverland. Kurt Cobain died in 1994, and armies of eighth-graders waited for adults to ask why they were wearing black arm bands, just so they could have the satisfaction of rolling their eyes.

In psychology, the behavior is linked to the concept of “basking in reflected glory” — the impulse to share in or take credit for the triumphs of loved ones — the ones we actually know, such as siblings, and the ones we don’t, such as celebrities. “It’s abbreviated ‘BIRG,’ ” Spee Kosloff says. Kosloff, an experimental psychologist at California State University at Fresno, studies the public’s relationship with famous people.

“Celebrities are symbols,” Kos-loff says. Symbols of fame, wealth, uniqueness, good hair. “By our association with them, we can BIRG and gain a feeling of cosmic specialness.” When they die, the specialness disappears, so we cling however we can — reminding everyone that we identified with them, understood their writing, listened to the B-side more than all the other Twidiots out there. “It’s inflating your own personal tie to the thing that makes you exceptional.”

The more you grieve, the more special you are.

“I’m so sad that Robin Gibb passed away,” wrote one Twitter user, a student who would not have been born when the Bee Gees were at their peak. “I can’t focus on this lecture I want to go home and cry.”

(The inverse of BIRGing, incidentally, is “cutting off reflected failure” — or CORFing — which explains our need to criticize Charlie Sheen’s drug use or John Edwards’s infidelity. We want to make it clear that those indiscretions had nothing to do with us.)

Perhaps not coincidentally, Kos-loff’s other area of expertise is how people grapple with their own mortality. His research has found that people who have just been reminded of their inevitable demise feel more positively about celebrities.

Maybe the reverse is also true: When celebrities die, we become more aware of our ephemeral existence. Everyone dies, even a Bee Gee, and bleating out tweets is so much less about the musicians than it is about us. In one way or another, it always is.

Our natural fixation with celebrities has collided with the Internet-inspired desire to get there before everyone else. (Those hasty “R.I.P.” tweets seem as if they were written by the commenters who ecstatically proclaim themselves “FIRST” in online comment sections, absolving themselves of actually having anything interesting to say.)

These tendencies have collided with social networking’s inherent self-absorption — when used as directed, Facebook becomes a baby book for grown-ups, and users are encouraged to chart their milestones and feelings on a literal timeline. Social scientists go back and forth about whether Facebook makes us self-absorbed or un-self-conscious, insecure or overconfident. At the very least, one could argue that it makes us aware of the fact that undocumented lives are easily forgotten.

“Having something shared to talk about is an important way to build what sociologists call ‘social solidarity,’ ” writes Nathan Jurgenson, a social media theorist and graduate student at the University of Maryland. It’s what used to happen at the water cooler — where nobody cared that much about the weather, but everyone talked about it anyway because it performed a “social grooming function,” Jurgenson says. “It reminds us that we are together in this social group, not alone.”

Online, people don’t talk about the weather because it’s different for each far-flung friend. But we create an online funeral potluck for a dead Beastie Boy in which everyone brings a memory casserole to pass around the table. “We use the death, a shared culturally significant moment, to do this everyday social grooming,” Jurgenson says. “To have something to talk about together.”

But even a dead celebrity can only bind our ties for so long. Within 24 hours — 48, for the ultra-celebrities — social networks return to normal biorhythms. That, more than anything, is a commentary on the contrived nature of online mourning. Real grief can’t be confined to a 24-hour news cycle any more than it can be confined to 140 characters. This Internet grief comes, conquers and quickly leaves.

But before tweets and posts peter out, they occasionally reach levels of arch self-awareness. Observe this tweet by Babe Walker, whose “White Girl Problems” Twitter account often captures the zeitgeist, then frog-marches the zeitgeist to its most ridiculous extreme. On the occasion of Summer’s passing, Walker tweeted:

“In a way, Donna Summer was my mom.”

Noir: A Memorial Day Reminder!

2012-05-25T10:57:00.000-04:00

Noir: The Washington Post Does Goodis Right!

2012-05-24T22:23:00.001-04:00

David Goodis’s ‘Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s’: Dark tales of losers

By Dennis Drabelle

If David Goodis (1917-1967) is not a household name, this may be due, in part, to the kind of households he wrote about. His characters tend to live on the wrong side of the tracks, socialize on skid row, and ply such trades as burglary — if they work at all.

The grittiness of Goodis’s novels gave mainstream publishers an excuse to leave them mostly to the pulp houses, and his fiction had all but dropped out of sight when the Library of America took note of him in 1997: That year, it published a two-volume anthology of noir novels that included Goodis’s “Down There” (originally published in 1956), the basis for Francois Truffaut’s movie “Shoot the Piano Player.”

Similarly, the library has billed the five unnerving novels in this new Goodis collection as “noir.” They could just as well be described as “naturalistic,” though — descendants of Stephen Crane’s “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” Frank Norris’s “McTeague,” Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” and any number of novels by the father of naturalism, Emile Zola. The signature trait of such works is the conviction that humans are severely limited — perhaps even trapped — by heredity and environment.

Born in 1917 to a news dealer and his wife, Goodis grew up in a middle-class Philadelphia neighborhood and graduated from Temple University, where he majored in journalism. Despite his education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals. (In editor Robert Polito’s chronology of Goodis’s life at the end of this new volume, the novelist is described as having lived for a while in “a Los Angeles flophouse, although he [was] apparently earning $1,000 a week.”)

The extravagantly prolific Goodis (he estimated that during one five-year period, he cranked out 5 million words) started out writing for pulp magazines and ended up begetting cheap paperbacks. In between, he had his share of success, including hardcover publication and movie sales.

After his 1946 novel “Dark Passage” (included in this collection) was bought and filmed by Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart in the starring role, Goodis went to Hollywood, where he ultimately made $2,000 a week as a screenwriter. (That same novel, Goodis charged, was the unacknowledged basis for the 1960s TV drama “The Fugitive,” and he sued United Artists for damages. The suit ended in a settlement, but by then, Goodis was dead of a stroke at age 49.)

He later moved back to Philadelphia, where he was considered a “semi-celebrity” as he wrote stories and screenplays for television.

Judged by this omnibus, Goodis is a novelist of almost hypnotic intensity, as well as a card-carrying member of the stripped-down Hemingway Style Club. Also like the early Hemingway — the Hemingway of “The Sun Also Rises” — Goodis can be quite funny, especially when writing dialogue. In “The Moon in the Gutter,” a battle axe with a mouth on her keeps her volatile stepdaughter in line by hurling such threats as, “Talk back again and I’ll slap you so hard you’ll go through the wall.” A bar floozy says of a rival, “She don’t worry me. She starts with me, she’ll need nurses night and day.”
“Moon in the Gutter” showcases the naturalistic strain in Goodis’s fiction. The humbly born protagonist, William Kerrigan, resists what is shaping up as a rapturous love affair because he believes that too wide a gap separates him from Loretta, the middle-class beauty who adores him. Like McTeague or the railroad workers of Zola’s “La bete humaine,” Kerrigan feels as if he’s sentenced to a lifetime of limited prospects, except that the judge meting out the punishment is Kerrigan himself. So complex is Goodis’s portrait of the man in his milieu that the reader has a hard time deciding whether Kerrigan’s inclination to spurn Loretta reflects wisdom or masochism.

These novels lie at the opposite end of the spectrum from the cozy mystery subgenre. Yet the violence to which Goodis subjects his characters is never gratuitous. In the most painful of them all, “Street of No Return,” a famous crooner forfeits his meal ticket — his golden voice — to a pair of thugs working him over at the behest of the common-law husband the singer has cuckolded. It’s within the victim’s power to stop the beating — all he has to do is promise never to see his inamorata again — but he refuses to lie. His name is Whitey (after the beating, his hair turns white overnight), and he is a prototypical noir hero: a man who maintains his integrity against people to whom the word means nothing — and pays a terrible price.

For the record, the other two novels in the collection are “Nightfall” and “The Burglar.” The latter is memorable for treating burglary as a profession, breaking down its practice into what almost amounts to a flow chart.

As one who can hardly bring himself to watch football anymore (given what we have learned about the sport’s tendency to produce severe and lasting head injuries), I find myself in the odd position of recommending this handful of harrowing novels. In them, Goodis shows that it’s possible to write brilliantly about desperate losers in hopeless neighborhoods and that a true artist can handle virtually any subject with class.

Drabelle is the mysteries editor of Book World.

Noir: Fay Watson and Cocaine

2012-05-24T18:27:00.000-04:00

Mug shot of Fay Watson, 24 March 1928, Central Police Station, Sydney. Special Photograph no. D6, (Drug Bureau Photograph). Although no record for Fay Watson is found in the NSW Police Gazette for 1928, the Sydney Morning Herald (26 March 1928, p. 12) reports her arrest in a house in Crown Street, Darlinghurst, and subsequent conviction for having cocaine in her possession, for which she was fined ten pounds. (Photo by NSW Police Forensic Photography Archive, Justice & Police Museum, Histiric Houses Trust of NSW)

Noir: Kathleen Ward and Drunkness, Indecent Language and Theft

2012-05-23T14:41:00.000-04:00

Kathleen Ward, criminal record number 658LB, 14 May 1925. State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay. Kathleen Ward had convictions for drunkenness, indecent language and theft. She obviously enjoyed thumbing her nose at the authorities, as can be seen in this image where she appears to have deliberately fluttered her eyes in order to ruin the long-exposure photograph. (Photo by NSW Police Forensic Photography Archive, Justice & Police Museum, Histiric Houses Trust of NSW)

Noir: Joan Schenkar's Apropos Of Patricia Highsmith

2012-05-23T13:41:00.001-04:00

Apropos of nothing

“The thought of what Patricia Highsmith, in her most sexually active period (the 1940s were feverish for Pat) and in the right mood, might have made of Wonder Woman‘s bondage-obsessed plots and nubile young Amazons can only be inscribed on the short list of popular culture’s lingering regrets.” — Joan Schenkar

The Definitive Biography

Noir: Flooding with Love for The Kid - One Man Rambo

2012-05-23T09:08:00.000-04:00

Meticulously adapted from David Morrell's novel First Blood, which introduced the world to a kid named Rambo waging a one-man war against a sheriff and small town, FLOODING WITH LOVE FOR THE KID is in itself a one-man cinematic war. Shot entirely for $96 in a 220 square foot studio apartment in Manhattan, it was adapted, directed, filmed, acted, designed, and edited by one man. Actor and filmmaker Zachary Oberzan, performing all two dozen characters himself, created this monumental, transgressive film as a testament to the animal ingenuity and triumphant spirit of the lone artist with no money, no resources, no nothing. A wild, violent, compassionate ride through the back hills and caves of Kentucky, this film and its maker embrace their harsh limitations, and in doing so, ultimately transcend them. As Rambo and Sheriff Teasle hunt each other in the woods, the audience suddenly redefines the very nature of suspension of disbelief and watches a powerful and poignant drama unfold before them. How and why this story is told is a statement far larger than any story itself. This film asks the questions, "What do you need to make a great film? How much money, how many actors, how much space?" An action-filled drama, FLOODING WITH LOVE FOR THE KID destroys all previous notions of low-budget filmmaking with a determination lifted from Rambos own infuriated rampage.

An absolutely amazing concept. Wildly creative and energetic.—David Morrell, New York Times bestselling author of First Blood

One mans pulp is another mans perfection. A brilliant morsel.—Charles Isherwood, New York Times

Oberzan has not just walked the line between irony and sincerity, hes erased it.—Adam Green, Vogue

Noir: 5 Most Dangerous Cities in the U.S.

2012-05-23T07:34:00.000-04:00

The 5 Most Dangerous Cities in the U.S.

1. Flint, Mich.

With a median income of $27,049 — a whopping 46 percent below the national average — and 36 percent of its population living below the poverty line, gang activity and drugs have hit Flint hard.

2. Detroit, Mich.

Few cities have had as precipitous a decline as Detroit. The bankrupt auto industry, the collapse of the housing bubble and the flight from the inner city — all have had a hand in Detroit’s Shakespearean fall from vital Midwestern hub to urban wasteland.

3. St. Louis, Mo.

Violent crime, particularly gunplay, has exacted a grim toll. St. Louis has the country’s second-highest citywide gunshot rate for residents between the ages of 10 and 19 — a sorry statistic, indeed. It also recorded 41 murders per 100,000 people, five times the national average.

4. New Haven, Conn.

New Haven has long wrestled with inner-city crime and poverty, and the result is a high ranking on the list of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. It had nearly 628 robberies per 100,000 people — nearly triple the number found in comparable urban areas.

5. Memphis, Tenn.

Memphis has struggled with poverty and gang activity for years, and the city’s 2010 robbery statistics were double that of the national average, earning it a spot on the list of the most dangerous cities in the U.S.

Noir: Banana Tattoos

2012-05-22T18:25:00.000-04:00

Banana Tattooist Turns Fruits into Awesome Artworks

Multimedia artist Phil Hansen uses a technique similar to pointillism to turn ripe bananas into organic canvases, recreating some of history’s most famous artworks.

If this offbeat art doesn’t make you go bananas, I don’t know what will. Hansen’s works are just so detailed it’s hard to believe all he uses to create them is a common pushpin and the banana’s natural oxidation process. The talented artist just punctures the peel repeatedly with the pushpin and the banana, and as the the banana browns, his intricate designs are revealed. Phil Hansen is currently promoting his book, Tattoo a Banana: And Other Ways to Turn Anything and Everything into Art, due next month. In it, he explains how to create art from anything at hand - - like a piece of toast, your own fingerprints, or a stack of marshmallows – using offbeat techniques.

Edgar Degas’ dancers

Phil Hansen isn’t the first to use the banana’s oxidation process into an artistic technique. Last year, we featured Australian artist Jun Gil Park, who uses a toothpick to carve his designs into the banana peel.

The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo

Birth of Venus by Andro Botticelli

Skull with Burning Cigarette by Vincent van Gogh

Noir: Ronald Regan's Blood Up For Auction

2012-05-22T13:38:00.001-04:00

A glass vial which was used to hold a sample of President Ronald Reagan’s blood after an assassination attempt in 1981

The 5” glass vial with a half inch diameter has a green rubber stopper. Dried blood residue from President Reagan (1911-2004) can be seen clearly in the vial with a quarter-inch ring of blood residue at the end of the inserted rubber stopper.

A 3½” x 1” white label has been affixed to the vial. It is printed, in purple ink, “REAGAN RONALD 940029 THOR / 610892572 AARON PRESIDENTIAL / SUITE 3/30/81 M 2/02/11 JAP.” 940029 was Reagan’s patient ID. AARON refers to Benjamin L. Aaron who was Chief of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery at George Washington University Hospital where Reagan was in the Presidential Suite. THOR refers to thoracic. Reagan was admitted on March 30 1981 and M refers to male. The President’s date of birth is incorrectly stated as “2/02/11” when his actual date of birth is February 6 1911.

A second white label, this time printed in green identifies the manufacturer of the vial as “BD / Rutherford, N.J. 07070” – Becton, Dickinson and Company – and “Sodium Heparin / Sterile Interior.” The interior of the tube wall is coated with the anticoagulant sodium heparin which inhibits clotting. This BD “vacutainer” label is filled out in black felt tip marker: “For lead level / Draw 15ml + invert.”

The vial is accompanied by a 7” x 5½” printed form on light green paper headed “Bio-Science Laboratories,” filled out in ink: [Patient] “REAGAN RONALD” [Ident No.] “940079” / [Patient’s Age] “70” [Sex] “M” / [Referring Physician] “AARON” / [Total Number of Containers Submitted for this Specimen] “3” / [Dates of Collection] “4-6-7” / [Name of Physician, /Hospital or Lab.] “William L. Marsh MD / Geo Washington un Hp / 901-23rd Street NW / Washington DC 20037.” Dr. William L. Marsh was the Director of Laboratory Medicine at the George Washington University Hospital. [Other Tests or Instructions?] “LEAD LEVEL” No tests desired are marked in the list printed at the right. Reagan’s Patient ID number, 940079, is circled in green felt tip. At the right, on the printed listing of tests, a notation in green felt tip reads “622 / Int- / BSx – M – Vitol.” Sixteen branches of the Bio-Science Laboratories are listed on verso, including the Baltimore/Washington Branch in Columbia, Maryland.

The face of the form features two small pieces of transparent tape, partial separation at a horizontal hold between two lines of Marsh information and creases but is otherwise in very good condition.

President Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr on March 30 1981 as he was leaving the Washington Hilton Hotel after addressing a group of union officials.

Also included in this lot is a letter of provenance which reads:

“These articles have actually been in my family’s possession since 03/30/1981, the day that President Reagan was shot in Washington D.C. Back in the 70’s and 80’s, my mother worked for Bio Science Laboratories in Columbia, Maryland. Her laboratory was the laboratory contracted by Walter Reed Army Medical Center as well as the George Washington University Hospital to handle blood testing as well as other types of testing. Her lab did the blood work and testing for President Reagan. The test tube and the lab slip that I have are for his blood work to be tested for lead on [Monday] 03/30/1981. The testing was completed and the test tube was sitting on my mother’s desk. At the end of the week, she asked the director of her laboratory if she could keep the paper work and the test tube. The director of the lab told her no problem and really never gave it a second thought. It has been in my family ever since. My mother passed away back in November last year [2010] and my father passed away in January 2009. Prior to their passing, they knew that it was the only thing that I wanted with regards to their personal property or money that they accumulated over the years…

“About 3 to 4 months ago, I contacted the Reagan National Library and spoke to the head of the library, a Federal Agent. I told him what I had, how I came across it and so on. We spoke for about 45 minutes. The reason that I contacted the Reagan National Library was to see if they would like to purchase it from me. He indicated that if I was interested in donating it he would see to it that he would take care of all of the arrangements. Prior to hanging up the phone, he said to me, do me a favor, don’t move from where you are, I will call you back within 30 minutes but I have to make a couple of phone calls to seek legal counsel, consult with National Archives, the FBI and other three or four letter agencies that I have heard of. I said am I in any kind of trouble or will there be some black cars/suv’s or helicopters hovering above my home and he said not yet but possibly in the very near future depending on what he learned from the phone calls he had to make. I told him alright, I will not move from where I was sitting and would await his return call. He called back in 25 minutes and said that everything was ok, National Archives was not interested in what I had, nor was the Secret Service, the FBI and other agencies.

Since 30 years had passed by, he thought that it was simply something that was of no importance at this time and that I was free to do with whatever I wanted with it. He then stated that he felt the family would be interested in it being returned to them and if I was interested in doing so to contact him and he would make all of the arrangements. I told him that I didn’t think that was something that I was going to consider, since I had served under Pres. Reagan when he was my Commander in Chief when I was in the ARMY from ’87-’91 and that I was a real fan of Reaganomics and felt that Pres. Reagan himself would rather see me sell it rather than donating it.”

Current bid: £7,587.00

Top Bidder:Another user is currently the top bidder.

Ending On:2012-05-24 19:00:00 GMT +1

Current Time:2012-05-22 18:20:53 GMT +1

Time left:2d 0h 39m 7s

Noir: Quentin Tarantino's DJANGO UNCHAINED

2012-05-22T13:09:00.003-04:00

Django Unchained is about something on which Hollywood is traditionally very reticent: slavery. To the music of Johnny Cash and James Brown, a weird drama of violent revenge in the Old South unfolds. Christoph Waltz is a bizarre travelling dentist, whose profession is, in fact, a cover for his activities as bounty hunter, gunfighter and assassin.

With maximum and freaky violence, he frees a slave called Django, played by Jamie Foxx, and they track down some brothers with whom he has business.

Django wears an electric blue suit and a stylishly raked hat, and they encounter a very haughty slave owner, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. We don't get to see what Samuel L Jackson actually does in the movie, other than checking him in the credits.

The footage looks good – of course it would – but it's impossible to tell what the movie is going to be like. It could be brilliant, like Kill Bill, or underwhelming like Inglourious Basterds. Well, the chains come off at Christmas and we'll see then.

Noir: Facebook IPO Purgatory

2012-05-22T12:49:00.001-04:00

Noir: Ken Bruen's Way To Find God In The 21st Century

2012-05-22T12:33:00.000-04:00

Ken Bruen's Introduction for "How to Find God in the 21st Century" by Rick Fulton and Susan Williams. The best Irish writer of the 21st Century Music: "When It's All Been Said and Done" By Robin Marks, and "Slow Fade"by Casting Crowns.

Photograph of Merton by John Lyons.