NightBlogger

A new book of photographs by his friend Barry Feinstein takes us behind the scenes during Dylan’s first electric tour of Europe.

Scotland, 1966
In the book, photographer Weinstein writes of his relationship with Dylan: “Bob and I were friends long before we worked together. We hung out and understood each other. When there was something to say we would talk, when there wasn’t we were silent. We were similar in that way, no bulls___.” More

Interesting looking book flagged by the WSJ, called Confessions of a Subprime Lender. The story is told by Richard Bitner, who founded his own subprime mortgage company right as the industry was taking off. Over five years, the company boomed. Confessions of a Subprime Lender is his insider story — disillusionment, fraud, greed, ignorance. A year after he gets out and leaves the industry, sub-prime imploded. More

Telegraph
Michelangelo hid a secret code in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel made up of mystical Jewish symbols and insults aimed at the pope, according to a new book. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which the renaissance artist worked on for four years in the early 16th century, is actually a “bridge” between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish faith, according to The Sistine Secrets: Unlocking the Codes in Michelangelo’s Defiant Masterpiece.

The book, which is already on the New York Times bestseller list, is the work of Rabbi Benjamin Blech, an associate professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University in New York, and Roy Doliner, a tour guide at the Vatican. Scanning through the arrangement of figures on the vast 14,000 square foot ceiling, the authors have found shapes that correspond to Hebrew letters. More

campaignspot
Sometimes, this rumor of this alleged tape of Michelle Obama denouncing “whitey” sounds like something out of a clichéd political thriller novel.

Actually, it sounds exactly like something out of a clichéd political thriller novel. Specifically, Stephen Frey’s The Power Broker, published in 2006 by Ballantine Books.

A major plot line of the novel is the presidential campaign of Democrat Jesse Wood, aiming to be the country’s first African American president — “Wood was handsome, smart, charismatic, and being mentioned increasingly often in the press as someone who could unite a twenty-first century America growing more, not less, racially and economically divided.” (p.35) More

The Guardian
She had probably done this a dozen times before. Modern digital technology had made clandestine communications with overseas agents seem routine. Back in the cold war, contacting a secret agent in Moscow or Beijing was a dangerous, labour-intensive process that could take days or even weeks. But by 2004, it was possible to send high-speed, encrypted messages directly and instantaneously from CIA headquarters to agents in the field who were equipped with small, covert personal communications devices. So the officer at CIA headquarters assigned to handle communications with the agency’s spies in Iran probably didn’t think twice when she began her latest download. With a few simple commands, she sent a secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA’s spy network. Just as she had done so many times before.

But this time, the ease and speed of the technology betrayed her. The CIA officer had made a disastrous mistake. She had sent information to one Iranian agent that exposed an entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran. More

Democracy Now
…we turn to political journalist, nationally syndicated columnist, David Sirota. His first book, Hostile Takeover, was a Times bestseller. His latest book, just published, is called The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington.

Well, you look at the major social indices right now, and people are really, really angry, and you can see it in the polling, you can see it in market research. And I think what’s really interesting right now is that we’re seeing a level of anger and a level of disaffection not just with the government, but with major other institutions in society. Gallup’s poll shows that the anger in the country rivals, in terms of anti-government anger, or dissatisfaction with the government rivals that of the late 1970s. What’s different is that there is an increase in anger at corporate America, at big business, at banks, at the financial system. And I think that that means that gives us a real opportunity—progressives—a real opportunity to take this momentary uprising and explode it into a full-fledged political and social movement.

More

Photo reinn
Laura Miller
“We can talk all we want about being brand-proof,” Walker writes, “but our behavior tells a different story.” Experimental subjects presented with two identical glasses of Coca-Cola, one labeled as such and the other presented as a mystery rival brand, routinely picked the one they thought was Coke as the better-tasting soda. Citing one cunningly designed study after another, Walker presents ample proof that we are only kidding ourselves if we believe we’re impervious to the multibillion-dollar marketing industry.

Nevertheless, we are not “obsessed” with consumption, as many critics claim. As Walker sees it, Americans prefer not to ruminate on that particular subject, even as we shop and spend our little hearts out. “To qualify as obsessed we’d have to really think about why we buy what we buy,” Walker writes, instead of just telling ourselves that we, unlike the rest of the sheep, purchase things for purely rational, utilitarian reasons like price, quality and convenience. More

Excellent short film to Jackson Browne’s “Lives In the Balance”. This is worth a couple minutes of your time to watch.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
The new short film by Blu

An ambiguous animation painted on public walls. Music by Andrea Martignoni. Produced by Mercurio. Film assistant: Sibe. Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche)

“Esref Armagan is a blind painter of Turkish origin. He was born blind to a poor family in Turkey, and has been drawing or painting since childhood. In 2004, he was the subject of a study of human perception, conducted by the psychologist John Kennedy of University of Toronto”.

Photo Towodo

“That is a huge price to pay for a painting,” said Elaine Holt, a Hong Kong-based curator at Opera Gallery, which specializes in Western artworks. “Considering how well-known Warhol is in China and how wealthy some Chinese are, I wouldn’t be surprised if a mainland collector bought the painting.”

Warhol’s 1963 “Green Car Crash,” an acid-green painting of a gruesome car wreck, sold in New York for an artist auction record of $71.7 million last May at Christie’s. A Warhol portrait of Elvis Presley sold privately last year might have fetched more than $100 million.
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Photo Freeparking
American Impressionist John Singer Sargent: a dinner table at night

Artists from France - Monet, Renoir and Cezanne, to name a few - are most closely associated with the Impressionist style of painting because the beloved movement developed there in the late 19th century. But a new exhibition serves as a reminder that there were also some talented and important U.S. artists who embraced Impressionism. “Sunlight in a Paintbrush: American Impressionism from Regional Collections” opened Thursday at the Muskegon Museum of Art. Of the 59 paintings on display, 16 are from the museum’s own collection.
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