art

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NEW YORK (AP) — A former writer and producer for "The Simpsons," a former writer for "Saturday Night Live" and a former president of the Harvard Lampoon are finalists for the Thurber Prize for American Humor, a $5,000 award.

Larry Doyle, a contributor to The New Yorker and Esquire magazines whose previous credits include "The Simpsons," was nominated for "I Love You, Beth Cooper," his debut novel, inspired by his experiences at Buffalo Grove High School.

Doyle is now in post-production for the movie version of "I Love You, Beth Cooper."

Patricia Marx, an author of humor books and children's books who has written for "Saturday Night Live" and "Rugrats" and is a contributing editor to Time magazine, was cited for the novel "Him Her Him Again The End of Him."

The first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon, the school's famed humor magazine, her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, and The Atlantic Monthly. among other publications.

The third finalist announced Tuesday was Simon Rich for "Ant Farm," an essay collection. Rich, son of New York Times columnist Frank Rich, is a Harvard University graduate who served as president of the Harvard Lampoon.

Harvard Lampoon's previous editorial staff members include William Gaddis, John Updike, Andy Borowitz, B.J. Novak, and many comedic writers and producers who have counted The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, Seinfeld and The Office amongst their work.

The Thurber Prize, named for author-illustrator James Thurber, was founded in 1996. The award will be presented in October at New York's famed Algonquin Hotel, once home to Thurber.

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Photos courtesy of Wikipedia, crossingborder.nl, Simon & Schuster, and John J. Kim/Sun-Times

Original Source: AP, Crossing Border, Simon & Schuster, and Chicago Sun-Times (with videos)

Two Number Ones – China in Gold, U.S. in Total

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The Beijing Olympics have come to a close after 16 days of thrilling competition - with the home nation sat on top of the gold medal table.

China has spent seven years planning for this event. It must be relieved that these Olympics are being hailed as both a sporting and an operational success. Worries about air pollution, protesters and media freedom were eventually overshadowed by what went on in the sporting arenas.

At the closing ceremony the International Olympic Committee President, Jacques Rogge, said they had been "truly exceptional games".

Best of the best

Worldwide, 200 countries provided a staggering 5,000 hours of coverage through rights-holding broadcast partners. In China, 842 million people - more than twice the population of the United States - tuned in to watch some part of opening ceremony.

On the field of play, nearly 11,000 athletes from 204 nations created indelible memories with their performances, many of them smashing records.

The ceremony to mark the end of the games, held in the Bird's Nest stadium, borrowed some of the grand style of the opening ceremony. Hundreds of performers were deployed in dazzling sequences that took months of planning to execute to perfection. And this being China, there were more fireworks.

The Olympics is being seen as a success from the government all the way down to ordinary people on the streets. "The best of the best - ever," said one compere, referring to this particular Games a few minutes before the closing ceremony started.

Positive legacy

There was certainly an attempt at this last event to shape the way the world should think about the contro- versial decision to award China this year's summer Games.

Liu Qi, president of the Beijing organizing committee, said the Chinese people had honored the commit- ments it made when bidding for the games. Speaking at the closing ceremony, he said: "The Beijing Olympic Games is a testimony of the fact that the world has rested its trust upon China."

The Chinese spared no expense ($40 billion for infra- structure) and overlooked no detail, however minute, in the planning, preparation and execution of what Liu Qi called "this grand gala of humankind."

Beijing, the historic seat of power in China, set a standard for host cities in almost every way, from its efficient routing of traffic - no small feat in a city of 17.4 million - to its stunning and innovative competition venues such as the Bird's Nest and Water Cube. Some 100,000 well-trained volunteers kept the Olympic machine humming.

"We cannot be more pleased with the Chinese people's presentation of these Games," said Peter Ueberroth, chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee. "Whether it's the (Athletes') Village or the venues, they've done an incredible job."

The IOC President, Jacques Rogge, suggested this Olympics would have a positive legacy. "Through these games, the world learned more about China, and China learned more about the world," he said.

All-star cast

The closing ceremony is partly about handing over to the next host of the summer Games, which in 2012 will be London. That gave the British capital the chance to stage its own mini-show within the closing ceremony.

It began when the Olympic flag was handed to recently- elected London Mayor Boris Johnson, who seemed to fumble to unfurl the banner before holding it aloft. A red London bus than entered the stadium, out of which popped singer Leona Lewis and guitarist Jimmy Page, who together performed the rock classic "Whole Lotta Love". Britain's most recognizable footballer, David Beckham, then appeared from inside the double-decker - surely no other London bus can have carried such an all-star cast.

To huge cheers, Beckham kicked a football into the crowd of athletes who had also paraded into the stadium. As the bus left, pretend passengers clung to the sides holding up umbrellas. It was an attempt to poke fun at Britain's rainy weather and its people's preoccupation with it.

Gold medals

But the Chinese still stole the show, with some sequences that were vast in scale and ambition. China won 100 medals and led with 51 gold in an eye-opening performance. A successful Olympics, with 51 gold medals for the home country, is probably exactly what China's leaders had hoped would happen.

After the event, one closing ceremony performer, Ying Ying, said her team of cheerleaders had been practicing since last autumn. "I feel very lucky just to be here. I've been moved to see so many athletes - and China has done really well," said the 20-year-old Beijing university student.

The U.S. finished with 110 medals total, leading the overall medal standings for the fourth consecutive Olympics and setting a U.S. record for medal production in a full-participation Games.

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Photos courtesy of Jeff Gross/Getty Images, Shaun Botterill/Getty Images, Stu Forster/Getty Images, Phil Walter/Getty Images, Clive Rose/Getty Images

Original Source: BBC News and Kansas City Star

Image Gallery: Pictures of 2008 Olympics Closing Ceremony

Related Articles: Beijing Wrap-Up: The 25 Most Marketable Olympians and Top 50 moments of Beijing 2008

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In 1969, the American writer John Updike famously declared, "I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic strip novel masterpiece."

The statement was immediately ridiculed by literary traditionalists, who disparaged comics as a "low" medium unworthy of serious critical attention. But it became a rallying cry among comic book creators, long second-class citizens in the art world.

Forty years has proved their prescience. Graphic novels – usually defined as extended-length illustrated books with mature literary themes – have risen to widespread prominence, spurred on by the work of respected talents such as Art Spiegelman ("Maus: A Survivor's Tale") and Will Eisner ("A Contract With God").

Graphic novel sales in Canada and the United States hit $375 million in 2007, five times the figure reported in 2001, according to ICv2, a pop culture site. "Jimmy Corrigan," a book by Chris Ware, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies alone; "Persepolis," originally a graphic novel by Marjane Sartrapi, picked up an Oscar for best animated film in February.

The world of comics and graphic novels is in the midst of a creative renaissance that may be greater than the dawn of the Marvel Universe in the 1960s. This development has been a longtime coming, considering that the beginnings of both newspaper comics and the cinema occurred at roughly the same time in the late 19th century. Film quite quickly matured into the 20th century's great American art form, while comics remained relatively insular and ignored by adults.

Alternative graphic novels are represented on film as well (Road to Perdition, Ghost World, American Splendor, Persepholis) and are increasingly making their presence felt at traditional book store chains where there are now entire sections devoted to graphic novels as well as manga (Japanese graphic novels, which are another subject entirely).

Generation Next folks currently coming-of-age are almost as conversant about the latest graphic novel as Generation X-ers were about grunge music. The main difference is that graphic novels show no signs of being a temporary trend. Indeed, they may be here to stay, well into the 21st century.

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Images courtesy of Marjane Satrapi. Art Spiegelman, Naoki Urasawa, Neil Gaiman, and Evanston Review

Original Source: Christian Science Monitor and Evanston Review

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Groundbreaking yet familiar, part romance, part sci-fi, Pixar's latest work is wonderful and full of wonder. - Kenneth Turan, Times Movie Critic

If Pixar Animation Studios has an enviable record of consistent success -- and with a worldwide box-office gross of $4.3 billion from its eight films, it certainly does -- it's because the company has an uncanny gift for pushing things further without pushing too far. Pixar's adventurous new film, the one-of-a-kind "Wall-E," shows how it's done. Daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental, "Wall-E" gains strength from embracing contradictions that would destroy other films. Directed by Pixar stalwart Andrew Stanton, who co-wrote and directed the Oscar-winning "Finding Nemo," "Wall-E" is the latest Pixar film to manage what's become next door to impossible for anyone else: appealing to the broadest possible audience without insulting anyone's intelligence.

The origins of "Wall-E's" story, as related in the film's teaser trailer, go back to 1994, when Pixar honchos held a now-celebrated lunch to spitball story ideas, which became "A Bug's Life," "Monsters, Inc." and "Finding Nemo." "Wall-E" is the last of that group to get made, in part because elements of it are so unconventional. For one thing, the film's exceptional first half hour or so lives and breathes on screen with just about zero human dialogue. But with the storied Ben Burtt, who did the job on "Star Wars," creating all kinds of noise as the film's sound and character voice designer, as well as music by Thomas Newman, you won't miss those words at all. You also won't miss them because the world of "Wall-E," created by production designer Ralph Eggleston and his team, with the advice of high-powered cinematography consultants Roger Deakins and Dennis Murren, is so remarkable. The time is 800 years in the future and the setting is our own Earth, but it's not an Earth anyone would want to recognize.

Not to put too fine a point on it, our planet is a disaster, a bleak and disheartening ruin where every available surface is covered by towering skyscrapers of trash. It got so bad that Buy n' Large, the conglomerate that has somehow taken charge of the planet, leaned on the entire human population to leave with a "space is the final fun-tier" campaign that featured slogans such as, "Too much garbage in your face? There's plenty of space out in space." Though not likely the main reason the film was made, "Wall-E" can't help but send out a powerful and even frightening environmental message. Though G-rated, its dystopian vision (shot by Jeremy Lasky and Danielle Feinberg) of what the perils of consumer excess have in store for the planet is unnerving without trying too hard.

One reason "Wall-E" is as audience-friendly as it finally is is the presence of the endearing title character, whose name is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter -- Earth Class. What that means in practical terms is that Wall-E is a robotic trash compactor who has been quietly doing his job attacking Earth's endless mountains of refuse for 700 years. Unless you count his pal, a nameless but convivial roach, Wall-E is the only thing still moving on the entire planet. Given all that, it's to be expected that Wall-E, whose large binocular eyes and narrow neck turn him into a squat, mechanical E.T., has developed a few personal eccentricities over the years. For one thing, he's quite the collector, squirreling away everything from old Rubrik's Cubes to light bulbs to an actual living plant.

More than that, this set-in-his-ways old bachelor robot has developed a fixation with the movies. Not really the movies, but one movie in particular, the only video he's got. It is, of all things, "Hello, Dolly!" and screenwriters Stanton and Jim Reardon had the shrewd idea of opening the film with the jaunty lyric, "Out there is a world outside of Yonkers," as the camera somberly pans both the universe and the ruins of Earth. What really entrances "Wall-E" about "Hello, Dolly!" is the spectacle of people expressing emotion and connection by holding hands. Not a word is spoken, but we understand that this lonely Robinson Crusoe, like so many movie creatures before him, would like nothing better than to hold hands with another entity. And then it happens. A spaceship lands in Wall-E's neighborhood and leaves behind a sleek white oval-shaped probe-droid with bewitching blue eyes named Eve (for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), sent to Earth to find signs of life. High tech and armed with a laser weapon that pulverizes anything in sight, Eve fascinates Wall-E and he nervously scuttles around after her, fearful but intoxicated by her every move.

Though this wordless section of the film, punctuated only by Wall-E's frequent and idiosyncratic croak of "Eve," is in some ways merely a set up for the second half, it is easily the most memorable and distinctive part of the film. This segment, a kind of song without words, is a world-creating work of pure imagination that has been thought out to the nth degree.

"Wall-E's" second half involves the dauntingly overweight humans who have sent the probe (and who are shrewdly not pictured in any publicity material.) They've lived for centuries on a cruise liner-type spaceship called the Axiom run by a barely functional captain (Jeff Garlin) in thrall to a Hal-type eminence called Auto, voiced, in a nod to "Alien," by Sigourney Weaver. This part of the story gets increasingly familiar and sometimes borders on the predictably sentimental. But along with these inevitable elements of calculation, "Wall-E" never loses its sense of wonder: wonder at life, wonder at the universe, and even wonder at the power of computer animation to create worlds unlike any we've seen before. How often do we get to say that in these dispiriting times?

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Images courtesy of Disney/Pixar, mlive.com, hamptonroads.com

Original Source and Video: LA Times

Special Gallery:Showbiz 7s: Movies that inspired 'Wall-E'

Related Article: :'Wall-E' draws design inspiration from Apple

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George Carlin, an extraordinary standup comedian whose dark social satire won him multigenerational popularity and a starring role in the most famous broadcast obscenity case of modern times, died Sunday of heart failure in Los Angeles. He was 71.

Late last week the Kennedy Center announced he would receive its annual Mark Twain prize for American humor this November. The TV network Comedy Central in 2004 named him the second best standup comedian of all time, behind Richard Pryor.

Carlin became one of the most popular standup comedians in America in the 1960s and early 1970s through programs like "The Ed Sullivan Show." Carlin was one of the first comedians to dress "naturally" for a standup routine, in jeans and a beard, and his most famous routine became "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television."

"He was a genius, and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press. "He had an amazing mind, and his humor was brave and always challenging us to look at ourselves and question our belief systems, while being incredibly entertaining. He was one of the greats," Ben Stiller said.

The comedian, who toured college campuses for years and made a name for himself delivering biting social commentaries, had released 22 solo albums and three best-selling books, including "Brain Droppings," a collection of essays and routines, and "Napalm and Silly Putty," a collection of his stand-up material. Both won Grammy awards. His third book, "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?" was nominated for a Grammy. He earned several gold comedy albums and five Emmy nominations.

Carlin first appeared on radio in 1956 at age 19, while serving in the Air Force. He took a number of TV and movie roles over the years, introducing himself to a new generation of fans with the "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" series and an even newer generation with children's shows like "Thomas the Tank Engine." He did voiceovers in films that included "Cars" and in 1993 he got his own sitcom on Fox, "The George Carlin Show." He played George O'Grady, a New York cab driver, and the show ran 27 episodes. In the 1990s he appeared in the Barbra Streisand- Nick Nolte movie "Prince of Tides." Other film roles came in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" and "Dogma," with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. He was the first host of "Saturday Night Live" and appeared some 130 times on "The Tonight Show."

The death of his wife of more than 30 years, Brenda Hosbrook Carlin, on Mother's Day 1997 was particularly hard for Carlin. "See ya Dink," he wrote on his Web site. "Miss you a lot."

Last year, Carlin released "George Carlin: All My Stuff," a 14-DVD collection of his HBO specials from 1977 to 2005. He had shown no signs of slowing down. Just last week, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced Carlin would be awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The center is scheduled to honor Carlin at a tribute performance by former colleagues on Nov. 10, which will be broadcast later on PBS.

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Photos courtesy of LA Times, The Money Times, Reuters/Mario Anzuoni, Lisa Falzon, Galella/WireImage

Original Source: NY Daily News and LA Times

Image Gallery: George Carlin 1937-2008

I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down. Pigs treat us as equals.
- Sir Winston Churchill

Note from Wind of Wisdom