Maryanne’s best friend, Sandy, flew down with us. Her father was a CEO of Standard Oil. He, and most of his family were murdered by a black extremists group who invaded their home on Thanksgiving. Sandy arrived late to find nine members of her family blown away by shotguns. Sandy had a severe drinking problem I did my best to help her with.
Everyone is dying to know just a smidgen about the mysterious and immortal author, Thomas Pynchon, who had the comedian, professor Erin Corey, accept a prestigious award in his place. When we went to New York to pick up my wife’s father’s Thunderbird, that we drove cross country, we stayed the night at two of Maryanne’s friends. One was one of the Chicago Seven, Lee Weiner, and the other was Sol Yurick, who wrote The Warriors. Yurick’s books have been compared to Pynchon’s novels.
I met Bryan’s sister, Maria Mckee, just after she was born. Maria became a famous singer-songwriter, she inspired by her brother, who was a good artist. His drawings of Beach Bunny Surfer Girls were classic.
The famous muralist, Garth Benton, did some acting as did Rick. Bryan dated Lisa Minnelli and sang show tunes with her and her mother. Bryan almost became a Monkey, and Rick may have played the part of the Beast in a TV series.
As destructive as our parents were, Christine and I struggled to be creative, and spiritual. Being sane was not easy for us. I hate those folks who got close to us, who disqualified us for our mental illness – many creative people suffer from! These people are not creative, and see themselves as amateur cops, shrinks, lawyers, and what have you.
Maryanne was a good artist who did a life-size portrait of her friend Mimi Farina, Jona Baez’s sister, who she met through Richard and Thomas when she attended Cornell.
Jon Presco
Given Pynchon’s penchant for popular music, it seems appropriate that his novel V. inspired at least two musical compositions in the 60’s. The first was an instrumental piece entitled simply V. by Pynchon’s Cornell friend Richard Fariña. It appeared on Celebrations for a Grey Day (Vanguard, 1965), which the New York Times critic Robert Shelton chose as one of the ten best folk records of that year. The song also appears on The Best of Mimi and Richard Fariña (Vanguard, 1971), a two-record anthology.
V. is played on a dulcimer with tambourine accompaniment by Bruce Langhorne. The droning dulcimer has a Near Eastern flavour which seems to have been inspired by the Alexandria of V.’s Chapter 3. In his liner notes for Celebrations for a Grey Day, Fariña describes his composition thusly:
“Call it an East-West dreamsong in the Underground Mode for Tom Pynchon and Benny Profane. The literary listener will no doubt find clues to the geographical co-ordinates of Vheissu, the maternal antecedents of the younger Stencil, and a three-dimensional counter-part of Botticelli’s Venus on the half-shell. May they hang again on a western wall.”
[edit] Biography
He was born in 1925 to a working class family of politically active Jewish immigrants. At the age of 14, Yurick became disillusioned with politics after the Hitler-Stalin pact. He enlisted during World War II, where he trained as a surgical technician. He studied at New York University after the war, majoring in literature. After graduation, he took a job with the welfare department as a social investigator, a job he held until the early 1960s, when he took up writing full time.
Yurick was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and the anti-war movement at this time. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[2]
In 1972, Yurick was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[3]
[edit] Writing
His first novel, The Warriors, appeared in 1965. It combined a classical Greek story, Anabasis, with a fictional account of gang wars in New York City. It inspired the 1979 film of the same name.[4]
His other works include: Fertig (1966), The Bag (1968), Someone Just Like You (1972), An Island Death (1976), Richard A (1981), Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel (1985), Confession (1999). Yurick is still an active writer.
In the early 1980s, Yurick published a quite prescient and imaginative short story that considered how the use of a virtual, entirely imaginary island nation combined with advanced computer networking might be used to suck tremendous wealth from, and wreak havoc on, the global banking system. Appearing in Datamation, a then-leading trade magazine focused on enterprise computing, “The King of Maleputa” (translation: bad whore) predates by at least 15 years Neal Stephenson’s better-known novel, Cryptonomicon (1999) and its imaginary island nation, Kinakuta, which has been set up for use in anonymous, computer-based banking activities. Yurick’s island “exists” only as bogus entries in various banking and geographic databases; when searched for in these databases, the island appears to exist in many dimensions, including map coordinates and convincing satellite photos, but it is entirely virtual – a figment of digital imagination. Elsewhere, criminals use satellite dishes to hack into the global banking system and divert money to the imaginary island and then, into their own pockets. The story reflects Yurick’s longstanding focus on banks and bankers as the source and agents of much power and trouble in the highly-capitalized modern world.
Currently, Yurick is working on a project, which analyzes all possible texts from a Marxist, evolutionist perspective.
http://papertiger.org/node/542
Film and television, from cold war alien stories to the highly popular X-Files, have so frequently depicted corporate, political, and otherworldly conspiracies that Richard Donner´s 1997 film, Conspiracy Theory, seems at once historically, emblematic and utterly redundant.
Writers such as Kathy Acker, Margaret Atwood, William S, Burroughs, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joan Didion, Ralph Ellison, William Gibson, Joseph Heller, Diane Johnson, Ken Kesey, Joseph McElroy, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Kurt Vonnegut, and Sol Yurick have all produced narratives in which large governmental, corporate or social systems appear to control individual behaviour and in which characters seem paranoid, either to themselves or to other characters in the novel.
As Tony Tanner remarked in 1971, “The possible nightmare of being totally controlled by unseen agencies and powers is never far away in contemporary American fiction.” And the fact is that he post war years have witnessed a dramatic intensification on interest in such a view of the world and an increasing popular acceptance of its central premises.
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist. He is a MacArthur Fellow noted for his dense and complex novels, and both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science, and mathematics. For his most praised novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction[1] and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[2]
Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Mason & Dixon (1997). Pynchon is also known for being very private; very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have been circulated since the 1960s.
After graduating from high school in 1953 at the age of 16, Pynchon studied engineering physics at Cornell University, but left at the end of his second year to serve in the U.S. Navy. In 1957, he returned to Cornell to pursue a degree in English. His first published story, “The Small Rain”, appeared in the Cornell Writer in May 1959, and narrates an actual experience of a friend who had served in the Army; subsequently, however, episodes and characters throughout Pynchon’s fiction draw freely upon his own experiences in the Navy (Pynchon 1984: 10–11).
While at Cornell, Pynchon started his friendships with Richard Fariña and David Shetzline; Pynchon would go on to dedicate Gravity’s Rainbow to Fariña, as well as serve as his best man and as his pallbearer. Together the two briefly led what Pynchon has called a ‘micro-cult’ around Oakley Hall’s 1958 novel Warlock. Pynchon later reminisced about his college days in the introduction he wrote in 1983 for Fariña’s novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, first published in 1966. He reportedly attended lectures given by Vladimir Nabokov, who then taught literature at Cornell. Although Nabokov later said that he had no memory of Pynchon, Nabokov’s wife, Véra, who graded her husband’s class papers, commented that she remembered his distinctive handwriting as a mixture of printed and cursive letters (Sweeney 2008). In 1958, Pynchon and Cornell classmate Kirkpatrick Sale wrote part or all of a science-fiction musical, Minstrel Island, which portrayed a dystopian future in which IBM rules the world (Gibbs 1994). Pynchon received his BA in June 1959.
Gabriela von Habsburg, (born 14 October 1956), also known as Archduchess Gabriela of Austria, is the Ambassador of Georgia to Germany since 2009.[1] She is best known as the granddaughter of Charles I, the last Emperor of Austria. Ambassador von Habsburg is also a prolific abstract sculptor, working mainly in stainless steel as well as stone-printed lithography.
Francesco Clemente (born in Naples March 23, 1952) is an Italian and American contemporary artist. Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti, the art of Francesco Clemente is inclusive and nomadic, crossing many borders, intellectual and geographical. Dividing his time between New York and Varanasi, in India, he has adopted for his paintings a vast variety of supports and mediums, exploring, discarding, and returning to oil paint, watercolor, pastel, and printmaking. His work develops in a non linear mode, expanding and contracting in a fragmentary way, not defined by a style, but rather by his recording of the fluctuations of the self, as he experiences it. The goal is to embrace an expanded consciousness, and to witness, playfully, the survival of the ecstatic experience in a materialistic society.
Life and work
Following his architectural studies in Rome, Clemente travelled to Afghanistan with his friend Alighiero Boetti. Throughout the 1970s he exhibited works that reflected his interest in the contemplative traditions of India, where he lived for several years.[1] Since 1981 he has spent his time between New York City and India, where he collaborates with local artists. He has participated in numerous collaborative projects, painting with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, and illuminating poetry by Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, Rene Ricard and Salman Rushdie. Clemente is a member of American Academy of Arts and Letters. He still regularly works in India and lives in New York City with his wife Alba and their four children.
[edit] Career
[edit] 1980s
In 1981, he settled permanently in New York City. During the decade of the 1980s Clemente was featured in shows at numerous international venues including the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1983; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1984 ; the Nationale Galerie, Berlin, 1984; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985 ; the Art Institute of Chicago, 1987 ; the Fundacion Caja, 1987; and the Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1988.
[edit] 1990s
Through the 1990s, surveys of Clemente’s work were exhibited by the Philadelphia Museum of Art[2]., the Royal Academy of Arts, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Sezon Museum, Tokyo. In 1998 Clemente produced drawings and paintings for the film Great Expectations.
[edit] 2000 and after
In 1999/2000, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and in Bilbao organized a major retrospective of Clemente’s work. More recently his works were exhibited by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004); the Rose Art Museum, Massachusetts (2004); Museo Maxxi, Rome (2006), Museo Madre, Naples (2009), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2011) and Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2011).
Maria McKee
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Maria McKee
Background information
Birth name
Maria Luisa McKee
Born
(1964-08-17) August 17, 1964 (age 47)
Origin
Los Angeles, California, United States
McKee was a founding member of the cowpunk/country rock band, Lone Justice, in 1982, with whom she released two albums. Several compilations of both previously released and unreleased material and a BBC Live In Concert album have been released since their demise. Her band opened for such acts as U2.[1]
When she was 19,[2] she wrote Feargal Sharkey’s 1985 UK number one hit “A Good Heart”, a song she has since recorded herself and released on her album Late December. The song was originally written about her failed relationship with musician Benmont Tench. Sharkey would later go on to also cover “To Miss Someone” from her self-titled solo debut, on his third solo album “Songs From The Mardi Gras”.
In 1987 she was featured in the Robbie Robertson video “Somewhere Down the Crazy River”, and contributed back-up vocals to his debut solo album, which included the song. She released her first solo, self-titled album in 1989. Her song “Show Me Heaven”, which appeared on the soundtrack to the film Days of Thunder, was a number one single in the United Kingdom for four weeks in 1990.[1][3] She refused to perform this song in public up until recently, when she sang it for the first time in eighteen years, at Dublin Gay Pride.[4]
Following her debut, McKee has released five studio (and two live) albums. The later three, High Dive, Peddlin’ Dreams and Late December, were released independently via her own Viewfinder Records label (distributed in the UK via Cooking Vinyl).
In 1998, The Dixie Chicks recorded McKee’s track “Am I the Only One (Who’s Ever Felt This Way?)” and included it on their Grammy nominated album Wide Open Spaces.
[edit] Personal
McKee is the half-sister of Love guitarist Bryan MacLean, with whom she played in a duo as a teenager.[1] She attended University High School in West Los Angeles, California, and is married to her bass player Jim Akin, who co-writes and co-produces her solo albums since High Dive in 2003. In the 1990s, she spent time living in Dublin and the East Village, before settling in her native Los Angeles.
[edit] Session and guest work
In addition to writing Sharkey’s hit “A Good Heart”, McKee has also contributed to the Victoria Williams’ tribute album Sweet Relief, on the song “Opelousas (Sweet Relief)”. She has also provided backing vocals to U2’s cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” (B-side of 1992 “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” single from their Achtung Baby album), as well as to the Counting Crows’ 1993 debut August and Everything After on “Sullivan Street” and “Mr. Jones”. On Robin Zander’s 1993 solo album she sang backing vocals for the track “Reactionary Girl.” She also sang backing vocals on Robbie Robertson’s debut and self-titled solo album, on the track “American Roulette”. Much lesser known is her contribution of lead and co-lead vocals on two tracks on a contemporary Christian praise and worship album called “Come As You Are”.[5]
She contributed “If Love Is a Red Dress (Hang Me in Rags)” to the Pulp Fiction soundtrack in 1994.[1] McKee also contributed a song “Never Be You” for the soundtrack to the Walter Hill movie Streets of Fire.
Ricky Ross, of Scottish band Deacon Blue, wrote “Real Gone Kid” about her; the song became one of the band’s biggest UK Top Ten hits.[citation needed]
She recorded a duet, “Friends In Time”,[6] with The Golden Horde on their eponymously titled album in 1991. She also recorded another duet, “This Road is Long,” with Stuart A. Staples on his 2006 album, Leaving Songs. In addition she co-wrote the duet, titled “Promise You Anything,” with Steve Earle which appeared on his 1990 album, The Hard Way.
This is another record which I consider that deserves its own Microscope: Forever Changes by Love, released at the end of 1967. A lost gem of the 1960’s, though it has got considerable appreciation over the years. The album is slightly psychedelic, it has an acoustic spirit but the electric guitars are still very present, and the lyrics are usually non-sense but still interesting. Arthur Lee was certainly a genius. It’s said to be the American Sgt. Pepper’s, and I tend to agree with that.
Richard was somewhat rebellious during his last year of High School so his Father insisted he spend his first year of college at Valley Forge Military Academy Jr. College. From there a year at The University of Miami and a semester at Villanova University which is when Richard joined the Marines. Following his stint in the Marines Richard had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life. During summer breaks in high school and college he spent alot of his time playing guitar, singing and writing music with partner Jim Richards. They played mostly in coffee houses and cafés in Phila. and on the Jersey Shore.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0663999/bio
Garth Benton is a muralist who has been described as “one of the top five” artists in the field today. A cousin of the late Thomas Hart Benton (a teacher of Jackson Pollack and a well-known artist in his own right), Benton has worked on such notable projects as the 1,000-foot mural in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. His work has been published in books including Grand Illusions and Trompe L’oeil Murals & Decorative Painting. Decorators, art enthusiasts and those with an appreciation for the finest work seek out Benton’s murals. They tell us his pieces “need to be admired and treasured.” Insiders say Benton’s substantial experience and “never-ending” skills contribute to the diversity of his commissions, which are inspired by everything from first-century Roman frescoes to eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper. Benton often paints his murals on canvas so they can be transported, a detail clients tell us they appreciate, especially when they have to move. Sources say they “cannot put a price” on the artwork he creates, but are thrilled to write the check, no matter the size.
— Los Angeles Franklin Report
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