September 2009 Archives

The last time I saw Burt Britton it must have been more than 20 years ago. He simply disappeared. I'm not sure why. He told me, as I gather he told others, that if I ever wanted to contact him I could dial a special phone number, which he spelled out for me as MEL OTT, the name of the great baseball player.

Burt was a baseball fan, so that made sense. It didn't occur to me until I dialed the number, unsuccessfully of course, that it was missing a numeral. For several years in the 1990s Burt sent me mysterious postcards. They came from New Jersey, but there was no return address.

I mention all this because the other day Burt turned up in The New York Times. The article, Portrait of the Artist: The Burt Britton Collection, said his fabled archive of writers' self-portraits was being sold at Bloomsbury Auctions on West 48th Street.

Great, I thought. I'll go, and maybe, just maybe, I'll catch him there. Of course he didn't show up. But I stayed for the auction.

According to my notes, 68 lots sold -- out of a total of 213.

There were many surprises. Some self-portraits that I thought would sell, either for their artistic quality or for the eminence of their authors, didn't -- like the drawings by Tomi Ungerer, or Frank Gehry, or Jorge Luis Borges -- even at prices well below the pre-auction estimates. In fact, with very few exceptions, the portraits that did sell went for considerably less than their estimates.

Nearly half of the lots -- 29 in all -- were purchased by Lansing Moore, the director of The Dongan Collection. He told me he represented a group of buyers eager "to capture a piece of New York social history." Not to mention its literary history.

"I'm surprised at the lack of bidding," Moore said. "Anyone who knows New York should have known these were wonderful pieces. At these prices, it was a missed opportunity." He attributed the poor sales to a prevailing mood rather than to a poor economy. "It's the psychology of not buying," he said. "That's what happened."

The buyers Moore represents, whom he declined to identify, are eager to keep their part of the collection together, he said, "and we will be displaying it in the future." His purchases included self-portraits by Edward Gorey ($1,400); Maurice Sendak ($2,800); Edward Abbey ($1,900); David Levine ($300); Saul Bellow ($2,200); Brassai ($1,400); Italo Calvino ($1,000); Truman Capote ($1,800); E.L. Doctorow ($300); John McPhee ($700); Joyce Carol Oates ($1,400); Gloria Steinem ($850); Tom Wolfe ($2,800); Arthur Miller ($1,500); and Herbie Hancock ($1,000). Unsold lots are still for sale. Moore, who spent more than $18,000, said he may not be finished buying.

By my unconfirmed count, total sales came to $102,495. The most expensive item on offer, largely due to its rarity, was the self-portrait by Philip Guston. It went unsold. There were no takers at less than half the price of the $20,000-$30,000 pre-auction estimate.

Here were the top 10 sales: David Hockney ($16,000); Richard Avedon ($5,000) (see correction below); John Updike ($4,200); Ralph Ellison ($3,800); Kay Thompson et al. ($3,500); Anthony Burgess et al. ($3,200); Cormac McCarthy ($3,000); Red Grooms ($2,800); Tom Wolfe ($2,800); Maurice Sendak ($2,800).

And here's something peculiar. My self-portrait found a buyer. I suppose I should mention it was part of lot 132 with 26 other self-portraits by the likes of James Laughlin, Norman Podhoretz, Michael Korda, and Barney Rossett. Somebody actually paid $500. Which means we went for $18.50 each. Uh, call it an opportunity taken.

Correction: The Avedon self-portrait did not sell. (It's pre-auction estimate was $10,000-$15,000.)

Postscript: The Borges self-portrait, which had gone unsold, has since found a buyer. It was purchased for $5,000. (Pre-auction estimate: $6,000-$8,000.) Ditto for the Robert Motherwell self-portrait. (Pre-auction estimate: $10,000-$15,000.) Finally, for anyone interested in Burt, it's worth reading Howard Kissel's column about him. I hadn't seen it until after my posting.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

The book that made William S. Burroughs famous and established his reputation as a writer of the blackest satire since Swift is to be celebrated on its 50th anniversary with readings, films, photographs, panel discussions, scholarly papers, and performances.

Four days of events in New York are to begin Oct. 7 at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and to continue at the Fales Library of New York University's Bobst Library on Oct. 8, The Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Columbia University's Butler Library on Oct. 9, and the Little Theater at the School of Visual Arts on Oct. 10.

An exhibit of paintings, works on paper, and "shotgun" paintings by Burroughs, who died in 1997 at 83, is also currently on view at the Stellan Holm Gallery. It continues through Oct. 31.

The New York celebration follows others already held in Paris; Lawrence, Kansas; Chicago; London; and Bristol, England. Another is scheduled in San Francisco, in November.

The homage at the Poetry Project -- largely devoted to readings from Naked Lunch by friends, fans, and associates of the author -- is to include a showing of Kate Simon's photo portraits of Burroughs and an excerpt of Andre Perkowski's montage film based on another Burroughs book, Nova Express. First-night participants are Eric Andersen, Victor Bockris, John Giorno, Jan Herman, Thurston Moore, Simon Pettet, Jürgen Ploog, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Anne Waldman, and Nick Zedd.

Protestors: You Lie! You Lie! Click for video.
Bill Moyers: They came from all over the country to register their opposition to President Obama and big government. ...

Max Blumenthal, reporter: Who do you think is more dangerous, Al Quaeda or Obama?

Protestor: Obama.

Reporter: Obama's more dangerous than Osama?

Protestor: Absolutely.

When the Bus Crashes, Does the Driver Get a Bonus?
If you see an apter headline, please rush & phone us.
-- Leon Freilich

And so, belatedly, we turn to U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, a former criminal prosecutor and white-collar defense lawyer with a reputation as "one of the top jurists on the topic of white-collar criminal law."

He tossed out the proposed settlement between the Security Exchange Commission and Bank of America, in which the bank agreed to pay a $33 million fine for secretly authorizing $5.8 billion in bonuses for Merrill Lynch execs just before taking over their nearly bankrupt brokerage.

Not only was the fine measly by comparison with the bonuses, which came to almost 12 per cent of the $50 billion acquisition -- a bailout backed by taxpayer dollars, no less -- but the settlement was egregiously unfair and the logic behind it pointedly absurd:

"The S.E.C. argues that this is just," Rakoff continues,

Besides being unfair and unreasonable ...

Just as she did last month, she has published the best op-ed read of the day, this time with an assist from Dedrick Muhammad.

Their lede asks, "What do you get when you combine the worst economic downturn since the Depression with the first black president?" And answers:

A surge of white racial resentment, loosely disguised as a populist revolt. An article on the Fox News Web site has put forth the theory that health reform is a stealth version of reparations for slavery: whites will foot the bill and, by some undisclosed mechanism, blacks will get all the care. President Obama, in such fantasies, is a dictator and, in one image circulated among the anti-tax, anti-health reform "tea parties," he is depicted as a befeathered African witch doctor with little tusks coming out of his nostrils.

For the next 1,600-plus words, with one example after another, they illustrate and prove what the headline calls The Recession's Racial Divide. And they draw the appropriately grim conclusion that "despite the right-wing perception of black power grabs, this recession is on track to leave blacks even more economically disadvantaged than they were." Noting emphatically:

Does a black president who is inclined toward bipartisanship dare address this destruction of the black middle class? Probably not. But if Americans of all races don't get some economic relief soon, the pain will only increase and with it, perversely, the unfounded sense of white racial grievance.

Give Ehrenreich this year's Pulitzer for Commentary already. She oughta win hands down.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Bulletin: Copyright Office Assails Google's Settlement on Digital Books

SAN FRANCISCO -- The nation's top copyright official made a blistering attack Thursday on a controversial legal settlement that would let Google create a huge online library and bookstore.

Now hear this from Techdirt: Complaints Against Google Book Scanning Project Reach Ridiculous Levels

A friend who also happens to be the author of two self-published books says he agrees with Techdirt entirely.

To me the whole settlement is idiotic. The point is not Google. It's the fact that search technology in general, regardless of who owns it (and I believe Google can't maintain dominance forever), makes copyright a laughing matter. When anyone can digitize anything, post it anywhere, and find it anyhow, does it matter who has the upper hand in copyright legislation? Not much.

Consequently, what people have to give up is the idea that one can earn money by artificially limiting the reproduction of a creative work that is infinitely reproducible. That business model didn't exist 200 years ago. It won't exist 200 years from now. The sooner you adapt to new realities, the better off you'll be. I believe this with my whole heart and am proud to have Google make my every word available to anyone who cares.

What if Google decides to censor me? There will be other alternatives. This isn't a Big Brother world anymore. It's a Billion Brothers world. If Google suppresses what I write, then I or somebody else will make it available in 300 other ways. And if we or they don't, then so what? It will have deserved to die.

It's black and white to me. I'm not saying it's not painful for people who currently make a living on the old business model. But it'll only be more painful if they try to fight it.

Thus spake Nostradamus.

In case you're wondering, a hefty Google dose of The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus is readily available. But the type is too damned small. You'll have to buy the book to read it comfortably.

It goes up again tonight.

"The twin towers of light, made up of 44 searchlights near Ground Zero, are meant to represent the fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center. Depending on weather conditions, the columns of light can be seen for at least 20 miles around the trade center complex." -- Official Website of the U.S. Navy

Limited visibility is predicted for tonight, due to lingering showers, cloudy skies and patches of fog. Could be the weatherman is telling us something ... like, how about giving 9/11 a rest? That means you, Peggy, thoughtful column notwithstanding, and you and you and you and you and you ... we've still got the 10th anniversary to go.

"It's a zoo around here," a friend messages from her office in lower Manhattan a stone's throw from Ground Zero. Which is putting it charitably.

Postscript: Judging by the clicks, this exploitative photo is getting a lot of play today. When I posted it last year, I linked the photo to the history.com page about the stunning documentary 102 Minutes That Changed America. If you want to know what happened in lower Manhattan on that fateful day eight years ago, go to the page and click on the "9/11 video" or, for specific professional and homevideo views, on any of the captions in the illustration.