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After illegal drugs, illicit arms and human trafficking, art theft is one of the largest criminal enterprises in the world. According to the FBI Art Crime Team (ACT), stolen art is a lucrative billion dollar industry. The team has already made 11,800 recoveries totaling $160 million in losses.

The post The criminal enterprise of stealing history appeared first on OUPblog.

Doodler Alan J. Hart has raised more than $4,600 on Kickstarter for his poetry project, Everything’s Better with Monkeys. The funds will be used to cover the cost of printing 500 books.

Hart has written a lengthy poem pondering about the adding monkeys to art pieces by René Magritte, James McNeill Whistler, and Vincent Van Gogh. To accompany each funny verse, he re-created these pieces with appearances from baboons, orangutans, and more. We’ve embedded a video about the project above. Here’s more from the Kickstarter page:

“The complete poem includes homages to famous paintings including Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and more. In all, more than a dozen classic paintings get the simian improvement treatment.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Out of Print, a book-themed clothing merchant, is hosting the “Put a Poe On It” design contest.

To enter, just download this PNG file of Edgar Allan Poe’s head, create a piece of art with the image and submit to the ”Put a Poe On It” Tumblr page.

One grand prize winner will receive the “Poe Prize Pack.” The runner-up will be awarded a $50 Out of Print gift card.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In Book #3 of my SCARY STORIES Series — launching this summer, so don’t make any plans — and I mean that, no plans whatsoever — I featured a whole mess of crows in the story. You know, when it comes to foreshadowing and a general air of ominousness, nothing beats a murder of crows.

We have Van Gogh to thank for that, his intimations of mortality in the great painting, “Wheat Field with Crows.”

And, of course, there’s Hitchcock. This is one of my favorite scenes in the history of film, the essence of suspense, the knot slowly tightening, the shots of the crows gathering, cut to Tippi Hedren smoking her cigarette unawares, and back and forth, back and forth, until we get that great shot of Tippi watching one crow in flight across the sky until it lands on the playground. And her eyes grow large. In the background all the while, children sing an American variation of a Scottish folktale, “Risseldy, Rosseldy.” Young, innocent voices. That’s cinematic perfection right there. I’ve watched it a dozen times.

So I stuck some crows into my story, black harbingers of doom!, and even included a small tribute to a scene from “The Birds.” (Kids these days are always clamoring for more allusions to 1960’s films. It’s just the kind of thing that young readers nowadays expect to find in their chapter books.)

Crows are basically gross, for the most part. But useful as nature’s trash collectors. They eat the road kill, smashed squirrels and flattened chipmunks, and I think we can all agree that we’re grateful for that. Thanks, crows!

Quick crow story:

My wife Lisa is the best mother in the world. She’s tied, actually, with a long list of other mothers, but she’s right there at the top, tied for first place. One Easter long ago, when Gavin (13) and Maggie (12) were probably 3 and 1 1/2, Lisa woke early in the morning to set up an Easter egg hunt. We had a nice, woodsy backyard at the time. Plastic eggs? What? Is that what you’re thinking? Oh, please. No, Lisa used actual hard-boiled eggs and hid them around the lawn. Under bushes and often right there in the middle of the lawn, since at the time the kids were young and not exactly the best Scotland Yard had to offer.

Later it was time for the egg hunt. And lo, there were no eggs. Or, at least, very few to be found.

What happened to them? Where’d they go? We didn’t know. So we set out an egg in the middle of the lawn, ducked back inside, and watched by the window. Within two minutes, a big black crow landed, grabbed the egg in its talons, and flew off for a hearty breakfast.

While thinking about crows, and researching them ever-so-slightly, I came across this, which is why I began this post in the first place.

Oh, and here’s the brief excerpt from SCARY TALES, Book #3. In this scene, three students are trapped inside a school, surrounded by zombies, or ghouls, or whatever creepy thing they are out there. It’s not good. For a variety of reasons — the best one being “for dramatic purposes” — Carter decides to go for help. He needs to quietly make his way two blocks through the night fog, avoid the zombies that seems to be aimlessly milling around, find his folks, get help, and save the day.

(I know, it’s sounds kind of dumb, but it’s a lot of fun.)

Here goes . . .

Carter stepped out into the mist with supreme calm. Cool as a lake. It was foggy, but he could still see about 30 feet in any direction. He gave a thumbs-up to the worried faces that stood vigil at the door.

It’s all good.

A crow landed near his foot, cawed noisily. Then another, and another. Carter stepped cautiously, not wishing to disturb the birds. He noticed a dark figure ahead and veered away from it.

CAW-CAW! Carter looked up to see a crow dive-bombing from above, talons out. The black bird hit Carter’s head at full force, wham, and tore into his scalp.

“Ow, shoot,” Carter cursed. He staggered a step, dazed, and waited for the dizziness to pass. Carter tenderly probed the injury with his fingers. His scalp was torn. Under a loose flap of skin, his flesh felt like raw hamburger. It was wet.

He checked his fingers. Blood. Lots of it.

Oooooaaaaannnn, oooooaaaaannnn.

The moans came, louder and louder, from every direction. As if the creatures were calling to each other. Now more shapes appeared in the distance, moving toward him. “It’s the blood,” Carter thought. “They smell it.”

Tonto Fielding’s contribution to painting is a story that Art Historians refuse to recognize. But, any guerilla artist will tell you that art encompasses so much more than what hangs in museums.

Tonto spent years working on perfecting the art of mixing colors. I drew my inspiration from the journals of Vincent Van Gogh, who wrote, "It is impossible to say, for instance, how many green-grays there are; there is an endless variety. But the whole chemistry of colors is not more complicated than those few simple rules. And having a clear notion of this is worth more than 70 different colors of paint -- because with those three principal colors and black and white, one can make more than 70 tones and varieties. The colorist is the person who knows at once how to analyze a color, when it sees it in nature, and can say, for instance: that green-grey is yellow with black and blue, etc. In other words, someone who knows how to find the grays of nature on their palette.”

Finally, I came up with the perfect combination of pigments for my signature color of paint. Now, the walls of every hospital in the world are covered with the “Fielding Shade” of green.

Name: Yours, Vincent: The letters of Vincent Van Gogh
Platform: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
(Requires iOS 3.0 or later)
Cost: FREE!

A while back I discovered that various museums have free apps, and since then I’ve been eagerly filling an iPhone folder with museum guides from around the world. While some, like the Explorer App for the American Museum of Natural History certainly informed my recent visit, others, like Your’s Vincent make the actual visit icing on the cake.

This is how it is with Pentimento’s Your’s Vincent app created by Antenna Audio for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Using Van Gogh’s own letters as a guide to his works, the app combines image, video, and sound into a personalized and detailed examination of the artist and his art.

Organized chronologically, the museum website claims that Your’s Vincent “features many of Van Gogh’s sketches and paintings from the Van Gogh Museum collection, video interviews with the museum’s letters experts and new picture galleries that showcase his art.”  Better yet, the app delivers on these claims. The app in engrossing and detailed and is able to stand alone from its exhibit. I have yet to visit Amsterdam or the Van Gogh museum, and this app gets me close to that possibility while still enticing me to actually visit (wistfully sighs). 

This is more that a bolstered gallery tour (like one might find with the Louvre’s free app) and it amazes me that it is available for free. It’s like an entire art history lesson / biography at my fingertips. For more raves, and even some discussion from the app creators, check this  detailed review on the MediaCombo blog.

The app is available in Dutch or English, which means, that even though I don’t speak Dutch, I can still access and understand what is being shared. It also means my library patrons (in my case high school students) can also access the information. It means I can approach an art teacher and invite them to share this with their students when they are studying Van Gogh. It means I can approach English teachers to create lessons around letter writing or archiving personal histories. I could teach students to make their own journals which they could use to write down their

Below, Miguel Hernandez, shares his memories of Richard Cook (The Independent’s Obituary).

It is with great sadness that we share the news that Richard Cook passed away on August 25th, of cancer. He was a wealth of knowledge on jazz music, appropriate considering he authored Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia, It’s About Time and co-authored the monumental Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD. (more…)

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