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(08/05/07 11:53pm)
“Peau Rouge Indiana”, the sculpture in front of the Musical Arts Center, will undergo a complete restoration beginning Aug. 6, according to a press release from IU Media Relations.\nThe sculpture was engineered and designed by Alexander Calder in 1970 and has resided in front of the center since its opening. The sculpture will be completely stripped of all paint layers, removing any trace of lead paint that may still be visible on the sculpture, according to the release. \nIU has worked for two years with conservators to come to an agreement on the best methods of addressing the environmental and artistic interests involved in the renovation. The IU Department of Environmental Health and Safety will supervise the waste removal, according to the press release. \nThe sculpture will be repainted in its original “Calder Red.”\nThe University will have several major renovations throughout the fall and spring. Other works that will undergo renovations include Showalter Fountain, Charles O. Perry’s “Indiana Arc” located in front of the IU Art Museum and Robert Laurent’s bust of Herman B Wells.
(05/23/07 11:26pm)
Have you ever had one of those dreams that makes absolutely no sense? \nIt starts at your great-grandmother’s house and you’re playing ping pong with your best friend from fifth grade and your high school boyfriend. Then, without warning, you land at the top of the St. Louis arch and you are having a heated discussion about scrambled eggs with your cat that died five years ago. You are rescued by a zombie, who bears a striking resemblance to your Aunt Martha. She is in the middle of a lecture about the dangers of forest fires when suddenly you are awakened by the buzzing of your alarm clock. \nYou roll over, wipe the sleep out of your eyes and wonder if perhaps you need a CT scan.\nI recently had an experience like this, only I was not dreaming. I was reading Kurt Vonnegut’s “The Sirens of Titan.” \nNow, before you go on a rampage and start accusing me of disliking the greatest Hoosier author of all time, beloved by every college student “just looking for answers,” let me say that I haven’t said I disliked the book. But like a whacked-out dream, I was kind of glad when I finished reading it.\nThe story follows one man, Malachi Constant, through the far reaches of the galaxy. He was once a wealthy corporate shark who was “recruited” to the Martian Army. The Earthling, Winston Niles Rumfoord, raised the army. He sent the troops to Earth on a suicide mission so that the Earthlings would rally together and form a new religion known as “The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.”\nConstant survives the mission, becomes angry that Rumfoord manipulated him, causes some trouble back on Earth and gets exiled to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. Rumfoord, in turn, finds out that another alien planet was manipulating the entire human race for thousands of years to obtain parts for a spaceship. He dies. And so does his dog.\nThat was the simplified version.\nIf you have ever tried to recount a dream to one of your friends and found yourself unable to coherently do so, I am sure that you can sympathize with me.\nI really enjoyed Vonnegut’s stream-of-consciousness style of writing and his comments on the human situation with his own brand of dark humor. However, this story was just too difficult to follow. I recommend Vonnegut’s “God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian.” \nI have had enough of his whimsical style for now, so I am going to move on to David Mitchell’s “Black Swan Green.” It is a novel about an English town at the end of the Cold War, and it seems much more promising.
(05/23/07 11:25pm)
Fifteen artists gathered around an L-shaped table Tuesday night in the John Waldron Arts Center as Kelley School of Business professor Carolyn Wiethoff asked them about their business goals. Weithoff encouraged the artists to develop a marketing plan for future business endeavors. \n“This session is about thinking in a very program-planned way about marketing your work,” Wiethoff said. “And so come thinking strategically how you’re going to place and promote your work becomes kind of important.”\nThe meeting was part of a monthly program held at the center called “Artists After Hours,” said Jonna Risher, director of arts at the John Waldron Arts Center. Risher explained that “Artists After Hours” is a program that was developed for the different art organizations and artists around Bloomington to promote their works.\nAfter learning that most of the artists were interested in finding a way to get their businesses or goals off the ground, Wiethoff gave a mini-lecture based on the “four P’s of marketing”: price, production, place and promotion.\nWiethoff started with an example about how to market water. Wiethoff explained that if you’re going to market water, you’re not marketing the water itself, but the need that water is filling.\n“What need are you reaching?” Wiethoff asked. “Usually with art, it’s emotional. What feeling am I trying to sell?”\nWiethoff explained that product definition drives everything else you’re looking for. All of the other “P’s” fall into place once you know what need it is.\nWood artist Velma McGlothin recently relocated to Monroe County from Artists Switzerland County, Ind. She explained that her work with wood art over the past six years has only been a hobby, but now she wants to get serious about it.\n“I want to learn how to go step-by-step without trying to get to the top and then falling flat on your face,” McGlothin said.\nMcGlothin owns Two Pond Ridge Wood Art, located on Kent Road. She will have two original design articles in the August 2007 issue of Creative Woodworks & Crafts Magazine.\nSusie T. Seligman began working as a textile designer after graduating college. She spent the last six to seven years developing a furniture line and currently owns a furniture company called Tesoro Mio.\nShe explained that she began working on prototypes when her daughter was in high school. She brought them to companies to get them produced in quantities. She \nis currently working with Best Chair Company and Jasper Seating Company.\n“It feels like we took a quantum leap in my development and in the development of my company,” Seligman said. “We got out production people, we got some designs, we have our wholesale fabric sources. Now we’re down to marketing.”\nSeligman explained that. although her work has received great feedback at art shows, she wanted to create a company. With the \nguidance of the organization “Artists After Hours,” that’s what she \nis doing. \n“For the first time this year, I can say everything has just come together after eight years of very long work,” she said.\nWiethoff said the only problem with small businesses is that people remember the work but they don’t remember who did it. Wiethoff suggested making postcards, so the name of the artist or art organization would be there with a visual. \n“This kind of program, the reason I do it is because it just makes Bloomington a better place to live,” Wiethoff said. “We just have more out there, more art opportunities. It’s just one of those things, I think, where the whole culture of the city benefits when the artists are successful.”
(04/26/07 4:00am)
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – What film critic Roger Ebert couldn’t say Wednesday night at the opening of his Overlooked Film Festival, his smile said for him.\nA tracheostomy has left the 64-year-old unable to speak. But at his first public appearance since surgery last June, Ebert smiled widely as he walked through the Virginia Theatre, accepting handshakes, hugs and a couple of standing ovations from movie buffs and friends.\nLast November, confined to a Chicago hospital bed, Ebert considered canceling the festival, said his wife, Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert. But festival officials told them a number of passes already had been sold, and he committed to coming to the festival in Champaign and nearby Urbana, his hometown.\n“You know, I think it did him a world of good,” she said in an interview backstage. “It helped to energize him.”\nEbert, considered the dean of American film critics, has been largely out of action since last summer. He has written occasional reviews, but hasn’t appeared on the “Ebert & Roeper” TV show.\nEbert on Wednesday showed the effects of that first surgery, in which doctors removed a cancerous growth from his salivary gland and right jaw, taking part of the jaw in the process. Two weeks later, a blood vessel burst near the site of the operation, forcing an emergency operation.\nHis mouth often hung open Wednesday night, just above his heavily bandaged neck. And he walked slowly through the 86-year-old movie house where, he said through his wife, he watched “Gone with the Wind” and his father saw Marx Brothers films.\nIn an e-mailed note to reporters and a column in the Chicago Sun-Times earlier this week, Ebert spoke frankly about his appearance, saying he’d been warned by friends that showing up would invite both unflattering photos and unkind coverage.\n“So what?” Ebert wrote. “I have been very sick, am getting better and this is how \nit looks.”\nHe wrote that he now awaits another operation that he hopes will restore his speech.\nFestival organizers set up a brown, leather recliner at the back of the theater for Ebert. He wrote in his column that he needed it for back pain, but said through his wife Wednesday that the recliner served another purpose.\n“I will fulfill a lifelong dream to have my own La-Z-Boy chair in a movie theater,” she read from a statement, to laughter and applause.\nTraditionally, Ebert introduces the movies at his film festival, then leads discussions about them afterward. This year he lined up actors, directors and others involved with the movies to introduce them.\nEbert has been a film critic at the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, the same year he teamed up with Gene Siskelof the rival Chicago Tribune to launch their movie-review show. Siskel died in 1999. Ebert has co-hosted the show with fellow Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper since 2000. Film critics and filmmakers have been subbing for Ebert during his recovery.
(09/20/06 4:14am)
NEW ORLEANS - The game is so big, it'll require two stadiums.\nTwo NFL commissioners will be there.\nTwo internationally renowned rock bands will play in the Louisiana Superdome shortly before kickoff.\nAnd two 2-0 teams will take the field while nearly 70,000 fans purge a year of post-Katrina frustration with howls almost loud enough to blow the dome's new galvanized steel roof right off.\nSaints players and coaches are well aware of all this, and they're trying not to think about it too much.\n"The evening's only special if you win it," Saints coach Sean Payton said. "We're seeing a good team come in here in Atlanta...We're going to have to have a good week of practice, and all the other stuff is stuff that we can't control and we just want to make sure it doesn't become a distraction."\nSaints spokesman Greg Bensel said more than 500 credentials have been issued to media outlets from around the world -- from Sky Sports to Al-Jazeera -- and that ESPN is sending a crew of several hundred to build up its coverage of the "Monday Night Football" telecast.\nBecause the dome is sold out for the season, there's no place in the stands to set up an overflow press box as has been done during Super Bowls, so a couple hundred media members will have to work out of the adjacent New Orleans Arena and watch the game on TV.\nFormer NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who played a leading role in making this game happen when New Orleans' future in the NFL seemed in doubt after the storm, is expected to attend, along with his successor, Roger Goodell.\nU2 and Green Day will play during pregame ceremonies. Former President George H.W. Bush is slated for the coin flip, although he may not receive quite the same welcome as another Bush -- running back Reggie, who'll be making his home debut in the refurbished dome.\nThis is a tough ticket. On the Saints' Web site, season ticket holders who have decided to resell their tickets on a team-approved exchange program are asking $690 for upper deck seats and more for premium seats.\n"Could this game be any more hyped up or bigger than it already is?" Saints quarterback Drew Brees said. "We all know what it is, but the way I'm approaching this week is: It's a football game, and we need to win it. That's it."\nWhile opening 2-0 on the road is always an accomplishment in the NFL -- and is something the Saints have never done since being founded in 1967 -- the teams they beat this month are winless. Those games were played in pleasant late-summer weather in Cleveland and Green Bay, and the results remained in doubt until past the two-minute warning.\nAtlanta is a regional rival that has long given the Saints fits. Many in New Orleans remember well that the Saints' worst loss ever, 62-7 in 1973, came at home at the hands of the Falcons.\nAnd Atlanta appears to be the stronger of the two teams this year. In games against Carolina and Tampa Bay, the Falcons have yet to allow a touchdown while outscoring their opponents 34-9.\nWith a strong offensive line and quarterback Michael Vick always a threat to run, Atlanta has rushed for 558 yards.\n"This is a respected team we're playing," said Saints receiver Joe Horn, long a crowd favorite in the Superdome both for his play on the field and his outgoing manner off it.\nHorn remembers well what the dome was like on its best days, and he anticipates a spine-tingling scene when the fans welcome back the team that wears their city's symbol, the fleur-de-lis, on its gold helmets.
(09/14/06 4:00am)
NEW ORLEANS -- When members of the Archdiocese of New Orleans started referring to him as Saint Reginald, Reggie Bush suspected he was meant to play here -- and play well.\nSo far, so good, and so much more to come, Bush says.\n"I just felt I was close to breaking" a long run, Bush said Wednesday, recalling his workman-like performance in the New Orleans Saints' season-opening victory against the Cleveland Browns. "I was only one step away."\nIn his NFL debut, last year's Heisman Trophy winner ran 14 times for 61 yards, caught eight passes for 58 yards and returned three punts for 22 yards.\nHis longest run was 18 yards, yet his dependable, modest gains helped sustain enough scoring drives to help secure a road victory for a team that went 3-13 last season, hired a new coach and replaced more than half its roster by the time training camp ended.\n"He played within himself. He didn't try to do anything crazy," quarterback Drew Brees said. "He played solid."\nNot the spinning, zigzagging, jaw-dropping touchdown runs that became Bush's trademark in college, but there's plenty of time for that.\n"I'm going to make plays regardless. They may not all be big plays, flashy plays, home runs, but I'm going to make plays," Bush promised. "When I touch the ball, I'm going to be exciting. That's just me. That's my personality. That's just the way I play."\nAround here, fans expect nothing less.\nThe day he was drafted, some people who had lost everything during Hurricane Katrina attended the festivities at Saints headquarters and celebrated like they had hit the lottery. Ticket sales, already picking up steam with Brees' arrival, sailed into uncharted territory.\nThe Saints have broken season-ticket sales records and need to sell fewer than 2,000 more to sell out all 68,354 seats in the refurbished Louisiana Superdome for the entire season.\nNew Orleans' first home isn't until Sept. 25, a Monday night match-up with the Atlanta Falcons. Already, Saints jerseys and T-shirts with Bush's No. 25 are omnipresent in the metro area.\nYet what impresses Bush most is the reception he has received from the locals.\nA particularly poignant moment for him came when he donated $50,000 to a Catholic school for special needs children. The Archdiocese presented him with a plaque depicting Saint Reginald of Orleans, who lived in France about eight centuries ago -- prompting some to suggest he take the nickname Saint Reginald of New Orleans.\nMeanwhile, schoolchildren went wild, as did administrators and parents, when Bush got up on stage.\nThe scene nearly moved Bush to tears.\n"I wasn't expecting it to be that big, that magnitude," Bush recalled. "They had the whole school in there. Parents were in there. It was really touching."\nBush has since recalled how it became apparent when he toured some of the neighborhoods hardest hit by Katrina that his success on the field could lift the spirits of a recovering, football-mad region.\nHe organized the donation of several Hummers to a suburban police department, recently delivered several tons of food to needy families and has put up $86,000 to help fix storm damage at one of the main high school football stadiums in the city.\nIf his competitive side caused him any disappointment about being passed over as the No. 1 draft pick by Houston last spring, his perspective has changed.\n"I feel like God has a plan for everybody, and it was in his plan to have me here," Bush said. "While I'm here, I'm going to make the most of it."\nThat kind of attitude could bring a lot of joy to New Orleans -- and headaches for opposing defenses, which are already spending much of their preparation time for the Saints on coming up with ways to contain the dynamic rookie.\nBush heard about that from several Browns defenders after his first game.\n"They told me they were focusing on bracketing me, and they said they were pretty sure it was going to be like that the rest of my life," Bush said.\nHaving shown a knack for being supremely confident without coming off as arrogant, Bush has little doubt he can handle the pressure.\nNeither do his teammates.\n"Reggie's a guy who's very versatile. We can do a lot of things with him," Brees said. "He is a very confident guy. He feels like he can do everything. ... The guy's got all the talent in the world, and I know with his work ethic it's going to turn into a great achievement for him"
(06/21/06 11:13pm)
The first show of the IU Department of Theatre and Drama's summer series runs through this week with performances at 8 p.m. June 21 to 25 at the Brown County Playhouse in Nashville, Ind. Tickets for Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday are $18, and $11 for ages 25 and younger. Tickets for Friday and Saturday are $20, and $12 for ages 25 and younger. The play's final week will be next week. Call the BCP box office for more information at 988-2123.
(11/28/05 3:22pm)
LONDON -- Kate Moss is the subject of four paintings by Stella Vine now on show at a London exhibit, including one based on a tabloid photo that allegedly shows her preparing a line of cocaine.\nA portrait titled, "Must Be the Season of the Witch," is based on a photo of the 31-year-old supermodel that was published in a London tabloid in September. Vine said Friday she usually bases her work on press photos.\nMoss entered The Meadows rehab clinic outside Phoenix after the photo was published. She left the clinic in late October and has resumed her modeling career.\nTwo of Vine's other paintings of Moss are also portraits. One shows a wide-eyed Moss holding a champagne glass. Another, titled "Holy Water Cannot Help You Now," shows her holding a cigarette in her hand as paint drips from her face.\nThe fourth shows Moss waving from a window in the Priory clinic where she was treated for alcohol and drug problems in 1998. It also features her boyfriend Pete Doherty, ex-boyfriend Johnny Depp and other celebrities.\nVine said she became interested in painting Moss because of the spirit she saw in her eyes.\n"She's like Mona Lisa; she may not be the most beautiful woman in the world, but something comes through her eyes. ... There's a bravery in Kate's eyes," the 36-year-old British artist said.\nVine gained attention last year with her painting of Princess Diana with blood dripping from her mouth. It was sold to Charles Saatchi, one of Britain's most influential collectors of modern art.\nThe paintings of Moss are on display until Jan. 1 at Hiscox Art Projects, an exhibition space located in the office of a fine art insurer in East London.
(11/28/05 3:21pm)
NEW ORLEANS -- France has offered to fly over some of the city's musicians and provide them with rent-free residences and monthly stipends for up to three months, in hopes of compensating for concerts canceled after Hurricane Katrina.\nMajor French museums -- including the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay and the Centre Pompidou -- also intend to help the New Orleans Museum of Art put on an exhibit of major French artists, probably in 2007.\nIt's all part a French effort to help residents of Louisiana, which has retained strong cultural ties to France since Napoleon sold the territory to the United States in 1803.\n"It's like a family story," said Pierre Lebovics, the French consul general in New Orleans. "You love a person, and this person goes to the hospital and you discover that you really love that person. Such tragedy happens and you discover the reality and the depth of your feelings."\nFrench companies have donated more than $18.5 million in aid to Louisiana, and the national and local governments are sending money and planning programs aimed at helping Louisiana cash in on its cultural heritage.\nA recent concert in Paris with celebrity French performers and some Louisiana musicians -- including Zachary Richard who often sings in French -- also raised $100,000 for relief efforts.\nFrance also has set up 15-rent free residences in hopes that New Orleans musicians can focus on their music until they can make a living again at home, Lebovics said.\nThe French city of Nantes gave $40,000 to St. Martinville, a small south Louisiana town that was among the first settlements of Acadians — also known as Cajuns — expelled from the maritime provinces of Canada in 1755. Another French city, Clermont-Ferrand, donated nearly $60,000 for New Orleans schools, some of which offer an "immersion" curriculum in which most classes are taught in French.\nFewer than 200,000 of Louisiana's 4.47 million residents speak French regularly today, and most of those still speaking the language are elderly and living in small-town Acadiana. Still, the state's continued ties to France have remained apparent in other ways.\nThe official symbol of the Louisiana Recovery Authority — the state body created to direct post-hurricane rebuilding — is a fleur-de-lis, which was the symbol of the French monarchy when France established colonial Louisiana.\n"Even among those who don't really comprehend and have not supported the ties between France and Louisiana, it seems to be understood, if only at a subconscious level, that Louisiana's uniqueness is its Frenchness and its ties to the Francophone world," said Warren Perrin, president of the Council for Development of French in Louisiana.
(09/16/05 4:47am)
NEW ORLEANS -- In a big step toward restoring the pulse and soul of New Orleans, the mayor announced plans Thursday to reopen over the next week and a half some of the Big Easy's most vibrant neighborhoods, including the once-rollicking French Quarter.\nThe move could bring back more than 180,000 of the city's original half-million residents and speed the revival of its economy, which relies heavily on the bawdy, Napoleonic-era enclave that is home to Bourbon Street, Mardi Gras, jazz and piquant food.\n"The city of New Orleans ... will start to breathe again," a beaming Mayor Ray Nagin said. "We will have life. We will have commerce. We will have people getting into their normal modes of operations and the normal rhythm of the city."\nThe announcement came as President Bush prepared to propose a sweeping plan for the federal government to pick up most of the costs of rebuilding New Orleans and the rest of the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast -- estimated at $200 billion or beyond.\n"There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again," the president said in remarks to delivered to the nation from the French Quarter's Jackson Square.\nNagin said the "re-population" of the city would proceed ZIP code by ZIP code, starting Monday in the Algiers section, a Creole-influenced neighborhood across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter. The city's Uptown section, which includes the Garden District's leafy streets and antebellum mansions, will open in stages next Wednesday and Friday. The French Quarter will follow on Sept. 26.\n"The French Quarter is high and dry, and we feel as though it has good electricity capabilities," the mayor said. "But since it's so historic, we want to double- and triple-check before we fire up all electricity in there to make sure that ... if a fire breaks out, we won't lose a significant amount of what we cherish in this city."\nThe plan came a day after government tests showed that New Orleans' putrid air is safe to breathe, even if the receding floodwaters that still cover half the city remain dangerous from sewage and industrial chemicals.\nWhile the areas set to be opened were never part of the 80 percent of New Orleans under water, they still suffered from the failure of services that left them prey to the looting that gripped the city after Hurricane Katrina hit Aug. 29\nNow, the designated neighborhoods have 70 percent to 90 percent of their electricity restored, and have water that will be good for flushing and firefighting, if not drinking. The sewer system works, trash removal is running, and at least two hospitals will be able to provide emergency care, authorities said.\nAnd Nagin said the city's convention center, which became a symbol of the city's despair when thousands of weary refugees gathered amid filth and corpses, will now become a hub of the rebuilding effort. Three major retailers will set up there to sell lumber, food and other supplies.\nSecurity will be tight in the reopened neighborhoods. Nagin said a dusk-to-dawn curfew will be enforced, and residents and business owners will be required to show ID to get back in.\nIf the initial resettlement goes smoothly, Nagin said other areas will slowly be brought back to join in what he called perhaps the biggest urban reconstruction project in U.S. history.\n"My gut feeling right now is that we'll settle in at 250,000 people over the next three to six months, and then we'll start to ramp up over time to the half- million we had before, and maybe exceed that," he said. "I imagine building a city so original, so unique that everybody's going to want to come."
(05/23/05 6:31pm)
ATHENS, Ohio - Spanish professor and former journalist Nelson Hippolyte opened his photography exhibit "Re/Trato, Mirrors of a Postmodern World" May 13 at Adleta Galleries in Canaanville, just outside Athens. \n"I love photography," Hippolyte said, attributing his interest to his days as a journalist in Venezuela. \nThis exhibit is not Hippolyte's first, but he has been working on the collection of images for four years. While in Spain for Ohio University's study abroad program, Hippolyte began taking pictures of posters for art events in the Cheuca area of Madrid, a place within the city where artists gather. \n"I'm really fascinated with the streets in Madrid," he said. \nThe exhibit is made of pictures of portraits displayed on these street posters. "Retrato" means portrait in Spanish, but "re trato" means to re-work. In his work, Hippolyte is re-working the original pictures with his choices of angles and lighting. \n"These are portraits that are portraits of portraits," said Don Adleta, owner of Adleta Galleries and OU professor of graphic design. \nHippolyte met famous photographer Carlos Canovas while in Pamplona, Spain, and took his photography workshop, during which he worked on his photographs of the street posters. \n"It's a process of seeing and doing and learning," he said. \nAdleta said that an image of Christ shown in one of Hippolyte's photographs was powerful and could be used in a place of worship. \nAlthough Hippolyte took hundreds of pictures, only 14 will be displayed in the gallery. Adleta chose which images will be displayed in the show, and these will be for sale.
(05/15/05 11:49pm)
NEW ORLEANS -- Renowned blues pianist Henry Butler imagined a human knee as he put his hands against the knots of a tree limb in New Orleans' Audubon Park. Intrigued by the image he could visualize but could not see, the blind musician stepped back, pulled out the camera he's been carrying around for years, and snapped a photograph.\nA blind man as photo artist? Now there's a novel concept -- but not one to be dismissed out of hand, say some who can see just fine and have made their living dealing in art.\n"It's amazing to me how he does what he does," says Jonathan Ferrara, whose downtown New Orleans gallery showcases an array of paintings and photographs. "It's very intuitive and there's almost a surreal quality to it. I mean, a blind photographer?"\nThe two tree limbs were among the nearly three dozen Butler photos that made up an exhibit at Ferrara's gallery earlier this month called "How Eye See It." And from the angle and distance at which they were captured, some viewers saw a resemblance between the two tree limbs and human leg, one slightly bent \nat the knee.\n"It defies reason that these photos would be good, but they are because there is a thought-out composition," Ferrara says. "There is an editing process that goes into it and a quality factor. The images are pretty good and there's also the diversity: nature shots, people images, Mardi Gras-type images."\nButler has displayed his photos periodically around the country, usually at music events. However, his works have not previously been the marquee exhibit in a commercial gallery, and rarely have his pictures been critically reviewed. Professional photographers are mixed about Butler's work, saying that while some shots are ridiculous, others are "actually pretty good." His work was exhibited at Ferrara's because of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival earlier this month, where Butler performed.\nButler at times has a sighted assistant help him with matters such as aiming the camera as well as developing and editing the photos. But it's Butler who chooses the subjects, takes the actual pictures and makes editing decisions based on what the assistants say. He started with film but now primarily uses digital cameras.\nAnd he doesn't really care what others think, even if he stands to gain a little extra cash from the photos, priced from $325 to $800.\n"I didn't start doing this for anybody else and I didn't start doing it to earn a living. My main thing is music," says Butler, who wears black wraparound glasses and a black felt, narrow-rimmed hat that do not obscure his wide, \nebullient smile.\nWhen he talks in his booming, baritone voice, his words are well enunciated and at a deliberate pace, as if he's reflecting carefully about each sentence. He comes off as kind of a deep, philosophical thinker -- one with huge, Herculean hands that pound the piano keys and make an octave seem tiny.\nHe began his photography hobby in 1984, while living in Los Angeles, where his musical career included consulting on talent development for Stevie Wonder and Motown Records. There, he periodically attended art exhibits with friends, who would try to describe the \nfeatured works.\n"I could grasp what they were saying intellectually, but I felt this emptiness like I wasn't getting everything," Butler recalls. "Now I feel a part of at least making some visual art. ... I know I probably won't be able to get the total picture, so to speak, because I'm still not seeing it. But at least I'm feeling more of what photographers feel when taking pictures and I know some of reasons why they want to take pictures in the first place."\nThere's a series of photographs Butler shot of filmmaker Woody Allen playing clarinet. It captures Allen in a variety of posses and expressions and looks as if a sighted person took them. Other photos clearly were guided by senses other than sight. One of a Mardi Gras reveler captures only the top half of a head, but in doing so brings the focus to the subject's smiling eyes and the hanging strands of braids that frame the individual's tall \nforehead.\n"I thought the eyes were enough," to keep the photo as part of his collection, Butler says. "Sometimes when I've taken a photo, the head is cut off, but as I'm listing to people describing things in the image, I think, 'This still has some value.'"\nAnother photo captures a woman's upper torso, which happened to be adorned with dozens of jingling keys that were part of her Mardi Gras costume. A man with a painted blue face has positioned his head behind her shoulder as if to pose for a photo that he expected would turn out as head shots of the pair. But it was the keys that had Butler's attention and dominate the photograph, while all that's visible of the man is his blue-painted chin and lower lip.\n"You almost have to look at it as conceptual art. It's not just about images but about what he's doing," Ferrara says. "And let's be frank. If the work wasn't any good, I wouldn't be showing it. It's not a gimmick, I don't have that kind of gallery."\nButler also enjoys photographing landscapes at sunset. One captures soft, reflected light from train rails that arch slightly as they disappear into a silhouetted tree line backlit by glow of the descending sun.\nWhile many who can see love sunsets for their color, such as the orange, pink and red hues that emerge at that time of day, Butler's inspiration is a little different.\n"Sunset denotes a change in energy. ... While I'm standing out there, it's definitely more obvious. The feeling against my face is different, you feel less invasive light, changing heat and energy against the face and body," Butler says. "Each phase of that can be interesting to capture, especially if you're near a big body of water or some object that helps to reflect the light energy"
(05/06/05 3:18am)
NEW YORK -- "American Idol" has kicked off contestants for concealing sordid secrets about their pasts -- including Corey Clark, who now says he had an affair with judge Paula Abdul while competing two years ago.\nWill Abdul be next?\nResponding Thursday to Clark's accusations, Fox and the show's producers didn't mention Abdul's name and minimized the role of judges in choosing winners. But it's clearly a crisis for "American Idol," which has managed to shake off other challenges.\nOusted contestants, clogged phone lines that hindered voting, incorrect voting phone numbers that forced a do-over earlier this season, superior singers being suspiciously eliminated -- nothing has derailed the "Idol" juggernaut, which was watched by an estimated 24.5 million people Wednesday.\n"We have gone to great lengths and great expense to create a voting system that is fair and reliable," Fox said Thursday. "Judges may offer opinions, but viewers vote using their own subjective criteria, and it is the voters who ultimately determine each season's American idol."\nThere was no immediate comment Thursday from Abdul about Clark's claims on ABC's "Primetime Live," which were buttressed by phone records, a voicemail message, the testimony of his parents and friends and other circumstantial evidence. She has called Clark, who's almost 20 years younger than her and was kicked off "Idol" for not coming clean about charges he assaulted his younger sister, a "liar" and an opportunist with a new book and CD to sell. She has not specifically denied his charges, however.\n"If there is a shred of truth that she messed around with a contestant, you won't see her as a judge next year," said Shari Anne Brill, a television analyst for the media buying firm Carat USA.\nStill, Brill said, "The franchise will live on. They seemed to weather all of these other storms."\nIt would be far worse if, like during the 1950s quiz show scandals, nefarious backstage dealings influenced the outcome of the contest, said both Brill and Stacey Lynn Koerner, another representative of a company that advises advertisers where to place their commercials.\nResearch by Koerner's company, Initiative Media, indicates that Abdul is one of the top reasons why fans love "American Idol."\n"It would be difficult to say how forgiving they would be," she said. "But given the fact that they are predisposed to love her, they could be very forgiving."\nFox needs to do some research about whether fans would accept Abdul being forced out, she said.\nThe former Laker girl and choreographer for Janet Jackson became a pop star and MTV favorite in 1989 with her danceable pop hits like "Straight Up" and "Forever Your Girl."\nShe was married twice, to Emilio Estevez and then clothes manufacturer Brad Beckerman, and divorced twice. She's been single since 1998.\nFor many years, Abdul fought bulimia and chronic pain related to dance injuries and accidents. After years of dealing with painkillers that she said sometimes made her "loopy," Abdul told People magazine in this week's issue that she's been feeling better with the help of a new medication.\nShe told People she's ready for a relationship, looking "for someone who wants to get to know me."\nAbdul kept busy as a writer and choreographer when her music career fizzled. But her casting as one of three "American Idol" judges -- the "nice girl" antidote to nasty Simon Cowell -- gave her a second life in the limelight.\nShe told The Associated Press earlier this year that the attention she gets for being nice is one of the funniest things she's ever \nwitnessed.\n"I've always liked it to be one of my most powerful traits, because I'm in a position where I can be a creepy person," she said. "I could choose to be mean or nasty but I choose to find the good in business."\nClark, a 24-year-old amateur singer from Nashville, Tenn., said on "Primetime Live" that he was unable to resist the advances of the 42-year-old Abdul.\nHe says Abdul advised him on his clothes, haircut and song selection for "American Idol," and slept with him in the guest bedroom of her Los Angeles home, where he shared space with her dogs Thumbelina, Tulip and Tinker Bell.\nThe "Primetime Live" special drew 13.8 million viewers, winning its time slot against original episodes of "CSI: NY" on CBS and "Law & Order" on NBC.\nFox says Clark has not responded to requests for help investigating his charges. Clark says he has no interest in helping the show that booted him off.\nSentiment was running in Abdul's favor among some 200,000 people who participated in an instant poll on America Online's Web site on Thursday. Asked if they believed Clark's allegations, 47 percent said no and 30 percent said they believed only some of them.\nWhile they may like Abdul, when AOL asked readers if they thought "American Idol" is fair, the vote was fairly close -- only 54 to 46 percent in favor.
(05/06/05 3:17am)
Visitors to the IU Art Museum have a chance to see a wide variety of works that have special relevance to the university.\nThe IU Art Museum is currently hosting the Bloomington Biennial 2005, where contemporary work by 36 artist-teachers on the faculty of the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts is displayed. The works in the exhibition include paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, ceramics, handmade artist's books, metalwork, textiles and digital art.\nThe show features six emeriti faculty including Rudy Pozzati, who built IU Bloomington's printmaking program. Also in the show are works returning home after exhibitions abroad, such as Georgia Strange's sculptures returning from a show in New York City and a painting from Barry Gealt's exhibition in Cologne, Germany. Newcomers to the IU Bloomington fine arts faculty are featured as well, such as painter Caleb Weintraub and sculptor Galo Moncayo.\nNanette Brewer, the Lucienne M. Glaubinger Curator of Works on Paper at the IU Art Museum, says the breadth of pieces in this year's show is remarkable.\n"As the organizing curator of these faculty biennials since 1988, I have seen a lot of new directions in contemporary art. This year's exhibition offers the widest range of media that I've ever seen in a faculty biennial, from representational painting to interactive video installation," she said. "The diversity of styles and ideas is a tribute to the Hope School of Fine Art's long history and its national reputation."\nAlong with the exhibition, the special events of the biennial include a tour of the faculty studios and noon talks by the artists about their works.\nThe exhibit is on view through May 8 in the Art Museum's Special Exhibitions and Hexagon Gallery.
(05/06/05 3:16am)
INDIANAPOLIS -- Don't be afraid: it's only a museum. That's what those at the Indianapolis Museum of Art are saying as it reopens after a renovation aimed at attracting the reluctant visitor.\nThe museum is reopening this weekend after being closed to the public since January as crews completed work on the new look that began in late 2001. About 6,000 square feet of space has been added to the museum's first level, which houses the American and European galleries, and other sections of the museum are scheduled to reopen through next year.\nDiane De Grazia, the IMA's deputy director and interim chief art officer, said research showed that some people thought the museum was intimidating and that children weren't welcome. So museum staffers hope the building's new design will appear more inviting to the public.\n"Museums were founded as educational tools for the public, and somehow along the way, a lot of the public that these museums were made for weren't coming," De Grazia said. "You have to make people feel welcome."\nIMA officials say the first step in making people feel welcome is the new towering glass entrance pavilion, which De Grazia compares to the Vatican's colonnades -- an architectural allusion to welcoming arms.\n"There was a very conscious effort to open things up, to make sure that we had places for families and that people are welcome," De Grazia said.\nThe museum's reopening to the public is Friday, with celebration events scheduled through the weekend.\nIf people once thought that the IMA was a bit too serious or stuffy, one new exhibit might dispel that notion.\nThe newly added Star Studio houses "Amorphic Robot Works: The Feisty Children," a troupe of child-sized robots resembling stick figures that clank and gyrate when visitors approach. In a room adjacent to the gallery, children and families can create crafts to take home.\nA short stroll from the robots, a new space with walls painted in a subdued hue of red is the backdrop for Raphael's "La Fornarina," a 16th century masterpiece that has appeared at only two other museums in the United States.\nThe painting is on loan from the National Gallery of Art at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, and IMA officials also brought in 15 related works to help visitors understand more about the painting, the artist and the time in which he lived.\n"This is a beautiful painting, but if you don't know anything about it, you just think it's a beautiful nude, and you may not understand what it meant in the 16th century," De Grazia said.\nOne of the accompanying works, "Honors Rendered to Raphael on his Deathbed," by Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret, is a portrait of the dying Raphael, surrounded by notable artists of his time. Next to the painting is a numbered key naming each figure in the bedside scene.\nDe Grazia said displaying just a title and artist's name next to a painting does little to help visitors understand what they're seeing. That's why the museum has posted short, bulleted lists alongside works of art to give people more information.\nThe museum also is testing 20 new hand-held devices that, through wireless technology, allow users to learn more about specific works of art as they walk through the museum. And in the new Davis X Room, people can put on a pair of 3-D glasses to take a virtual-reality look at objects from the IMA's Chinese collection.\nTechnology will allow people to see how Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini created a painting. A Web site, which can be accessed from the gallery or offsite, uses infrared reflectography to show the underlying sketches that Bellini used to create his finished works.\n"I think quite a few art museums have realized that people are fascinated by the science behind conserving and authenticating and the restoring ... it's true, people want to know how something is made," said Linda Duke, director of education for the IMA.\nAs the IMA made last-minute preparations for its opening, museum experts from across the country were in Indianapolis for the American Association of Museums convention. Professor Jay Rounds of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said a common conversation topic among convention attendees was whether museums should try to be more user-friendly to attract visitors.\nBut Rounds said museums -- like churches -- were deliberately designed so that visitors enter a separate world when they cross the threshold. And Rounds wonders whether art museums that adopt a more approachable look might lose some of what makes them special spaces.\nTraditional museum architecture is "assumed to heighten your receptivity to the kinds of experiences that you'll have inside the museum," he said.\nBut the IMA is counting on the new building to lure newcomers inside.\n"Come in for half an hour. Come in for the day," De Grazia said. "Or walk the grounds and don't come in, but start to feel comfortable. Maybe the next time you'll come in"
(05/06/05 3:15am)
NEW YORK -- Winning a playground game of rock paper scissors has paid off handsomely for the auction house Christie's.\nThe auctioneer made a handy profit Wednesday by selling four paintings for $17.8 million, having earned the right to conduct the sale by beating rival Sotheby's in what's been called the most expensive game of rock paper scissors ever played.\nTakashi Hashiyama, president of Maspro Denkoh Corp., which owned the art work, had asked Sotheby's and Christie's to each choose a weapon -- rock, paper or scissors -- because he could not decide which auction house to use for the sale.\n"I sometimes use such methods when I cannot make a decision," Hashiyama told The New York Times in an April 29 story. "As both companies were equally good and I just could not choose one, I asked them to please decide between themselves and suggested to use such methods as rock paper scissors."\nUsing a game of chance to make a decision is not unusual in Japan.\nAt a meeting earlier this year in Tokyo, the auction houses were asked to make their selections and write them down. The World Rock Paper Scissors Society dubbed the contest the RPS Match of the Century.\nChristie's chose scissors, defeating Sotheby's paper. (Scissors cut paper, paper smothers rock, rock smashes scissors). And so the collection was sold as part of Christie's sale of impressionist and modern art.\nThe centerpiece of the company's collection, Paul Cezanne's "Les grands arbres au Jas de Bouffan," sold for $11.8 million, including Christie's premium of 20 percent on the first $200,000 and 12 percent on the rest, said auction house spokeswoman Sara Fox. The piece's presale estimate had been $12 million to $16 million.\nThe company's Alfred Sisley piece, "La manufacture de Sevres," sold for $1.6 million, Fox said. Its presale estimate had been $1.4 million to $1.8 million.\nPablo Picasso's "Boulevard de Clichy" went for $1.7 million, and Vincent van Gogh's "Vue de la chambre de l'artiste, rue Lepic" went for $2.7 million. Both had been expected to sell for around $2 million.\nThe identities of the winning bidders were not immediately released.\nCommissions vary depending on the item, the price and the auction house.\nChristie's, for example, had a two-day sale of impressionist and modern art last fall that brought $155.9 million. The final prices included a commission of 19.5 percent of the first $100,000 and 12 percent of the rest.
(11/20/02 3:48am)
Middle Hanson brother becomes father at 19\nTULSA, Okla. — The middle brother of the pop singing trio Hanson has become a father. \nTaylor Hanson, 19, and his wife Natalie Anne Bryant, 18, became parents Oct. 31. \nBryant gave birth to Jordan Ezra on Halloween morning. \n"We're so excited to start a family," Hanson said in a statement. "Having Ezra is the best thing we've ever done. Life and art are all about these moments." \nHanson married Bryant, his girlfriend of two years, in June at a private ceremony in Pine Mountain, Ga. \nThe group Hanson sparked the teen pop craze of recent years when they debued in 1997. \nThe brothers were just 16, 14 and 11 years old when their first hit, "MMMBop," went to No. 1 in 27 countries. \nTaylor and brothers Isaac and Zac are finishing work on their next CD, due early next year.\nThree sue cops over Sydney arrest \nSYDNEY, Australia — Three men accused of blackmailing Russell Crowe over his role in a brawl said Monday they're suing police and prosecutors for malicious prosecution and wrongful arrest. \nPolice accused Philip Cropper and Malcolm Mercer, both 38, and Mark Potts, 45, of trying to extort money from the actor after he was allegedly captured on a videotape in a brawl outside a nightclub in Coffs Harbor on Nov. 18, 1999. \nCrowe, the Oscar-winning "Gladiator" star, has a ranch in the hills behind Coffs Harbor, a seaside town halfway between Sydney and Brisbane. \nCharges against Potts were withdrawn shortly before he was to go to trial earlier this year. A jury cleared Cropper and Mercer in June of demanding money from Crowe in return for not publicizing the video. \nOn Monday, the three filed statements of claim in the New South Wales Supreme Court against the state of New South Wales and police officers, alleging malicious prosecution and wrongful arrest. \nMercer and Cropper also are suing for false imprisonment after being held for more than a week before they could post bail. \nEach seeks unspecified damages, claiming "their lives have been ruined" and that they suffered enormous financial loss, said their lawyer, Greg Walsh. \n"As a result of these charges and having the charges over their heads for so long and the proceedings themselves ... in effect their businesses were ruined," he said. \nWalsh said Crowe likely would be called as a witness. A hearing is expected next year.\nGardener says TLC member owes cash\nMOORPARK, Calif. — A gardener is suing Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins of the R&B group TLC for allegedly stiffing him on a bill for snapdragons. \nThe lawsuit contends that the singer and her husband, Detrick Rolison, ordered landscaping last year for their gated Moorpark home but never paid their gardening firm, Kevin Persons Inc. \nPersons alleges the couple owes him nearly $15,000 for providing 50 flats of mixed snapdragons, four 15-gallon plants, sod, sprinklers, tree lighting and 10 square yards of walk-on bark. The Thousand Oaks gardener claims he had an oral agreement with Mack 10. \nThe couple did not have an immediate comment Monday.
(11/20/02 3:45am)
NEW YORK -- The author of a book accusing firefighters of looting ground zero after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks defended his work Monday against mounting criticism by union officials. \nCritics of William Langewiesche's American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center have focused on a passage about the discovery of dozens of new jeans -- still tagged, folded and stacked -- inside the cab of a fire truck pulled from the rubble. \nAbout 150 demonstrators, including off-duty firefighters and widows of firefighters killed in the attack, gathered outside a museum where Langewiesche was holding a book-signing session Monday night. \nThe demonstrators -- some chanting "Liar! Liar!" -- distributed a letter from fire department Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta accusing the author of "tarnishing the memory of our city's heroes with foolish, absurd and unfounded accusations." \n"I have nothing against firefighters," William Langewiesche said. "I'm much in admiration of firefighters." \nThe uproar, Langewiesche added, comes as no surprise. \n"This is very, very emotional territory," he said. \nA longtime correspondent with The Atlantic Monthly, Langewiesche was granted full access to the cleanup site over several months. He described a war zone that brought out the best and the worst of those who labored to remove bodies and debris. \nOne office building near ground zero was "systematically rifled for valuables," Langewiesche wrote. "Whether by errant firemen, policemen or construction workers hardly mattered. All three groups were at various times implicated in a widespread pattern of looting that started even before the towers fell, and was to peak around Christmas with the brazen theft of office computers." \nWorking about 50 feet below street level last fall, construction workers found the fire truck filled with jeans, the book said. The workers began jeering firefighters at the scene after concluding that "while hundreds of doomed firefighters had climbed through the wounded buildings, this particular crew had engaged in something else entirely," it said. \nFire officials have theorized the merchandise was blown into the truck by the force of the towers' collapse. \nOne of the demonstrators, Chief Joseph Nardone, said that the book's account was full of inaccuracies. \nHe conceded jeans were found scattered near the truck but said they were from a different store and said the crew from that truck, who died on Sept. 11, "were out to do one thing --save people"
(11/20/02 3:44am)
LOS ANGELES -- James Coburn, the lean and lanky actor who rose to fame playing villainous roles in early action films and won an Academy Award decades later as an alcoholic father in "Affliction," has died of a heart attack. He was 74. \nCoburn and his wife, Paula, were listening to music at their Beverly Hills home on Monday when he suffered the heart attack, said Hillard Elkins, the actor's longtime friend and business manager. He was pronounced dead at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. \nCoburn's breakthrough performances came in 1960s action flicks such as "The Magnificent Seven," "Hell is For Heroes" and "The Great Escape." \nHe then changed direction and found what was for decades his greatest fame: portraying tongue-in-cheek secret agent Derek Flint in the late 1960s James Bond spoofs "Our Man Flint" and "In Like Flint." \nIn 1998, he turned out what some would say was his finest screen performance, as the abusive, alcoholic father of Nick Nolte in "Affliction." Coburn won a best supporting actor Oscar for that film. \n"He was a hell of an actor, he had a great sense of humor and those performances will be remembered for a very long time," said Elkins. \nCoburn had recently completed two films, the just-released "The Man From Elysian Fields" and "American Gun," which Elkins said should be released soon. In the latter, Coburn's character travels the country in search of his daughter's killer. \nBorn in Laurel, Neb., on Aug. 31, 1928, Coburn grew up Southern California, making his stage debut opposite Vincent Price in a La Jolla Playhouse production of "Billy Budd." \n"Some of them you do for money, some of them you do for love," he said of the film. "This is a love child"
(11/18/02 4:12am)
BERLIN -- They kidnapped business leaders, gunned down police officers and hijacked an airliner. But even after Sept. 11, the failed German revolutionaries who spread fear in the 1970s and '80s have acquired a certain chic. \nLeft-wingers were always nostalgic for the ideals of the student movement from which the feared Red Army Faction terrorists sprang -- strident opposition to the Vietnam War, rebellion against their parents' silence on World War II, a society still not completely purged of old Nazis. \nNow a wave of films giving the terrorists a more human face, and a series of cheeky fashion items, suggest a broader recasting of history is under way. Some, including Germany's president, are worried by the Red Army Faction's pop culture revival, while others see in it a harmless expression of a bygone era. \n"There's an in-crowd who thinks it's chic to make the RAF into Robin Hood figures," said Klaus Boelling, who was the government's spokesman when the violence reached its bloody peak 25 years ago this fall. \nOn Oct. 18, 1977, Boelling told a relieved nation that German troops had freed 86 hostages on a Lufthansa plane hijacked to Mozambique to force the release of three jailed RAF leaders. The three, Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Jan-Carl Raspe, committed suicide in prison after the attempt failed. \nBut it was also Boelling's job, the following day, to announce that the kidnapped head of the nation's Industry Federation, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, had been found shot dead in the trunk of a car. \nThe Red Army Faction went on to bomb U.S. military targets and assassinate a string of business and political figures. It only formally disbanded in 1998, although it had been inactive for some years. \nSeveral cases remain unsolved and suspects are still on the run. Yet filmmakers and writers, many from the same generation, have already begun to re-examine the period, placing a focus on the perpetrators that rankles older Germans. \nOscar-winning filmmaker Volker Schloendorff paved the way in 1999 with "The Legends of Rita," about a young woman swept into the terrorist movement by idealism and love. \nThe trickle has become a flood, with at least half a dozen new films in cinemas and on television this year. \n"Black Box Germany" featured a gripping interview with the widow of Alfred Herrhausen, the chairman of Deutsche Bank killed by a bomb in 1989 -- and balanced it with a portrait of Wolfgang Grams, an RAF terrorism suspect who, according to an official investigation, shot himself to death in 1993 as police closed in. \nOthers include "The State I Am In," described by Der Spiegel magazine as an "RAF road movie," and "What To Do In Case of Fire," an attempt to make amateur bomb-making into sentimental comedy. \nMost disputed is the movie "Baader," about the male half of the Baader-Meinhof name that evolved into the RAF. It drew stinging criticism at this year's Berlin film festival for glamorizing the era -- but still walked off with a prize. \nThe movie, by little-known German director Christopher Roth, begins with a pounding punk-rock soundtrack and spends two hours painting a stylish picture of Andreas Baader as a moody maverick with a taste for fine clothes and fast cars. \nIt ends in his fictional death in a defiant solo showdown with dozens of armed police, strutting out of a garage where he had been cornered, pistols blazing. Baader was actually captured and imprisoned in 1972, five years before his suicide. \nSome critics defend the Butch Cassidy-like embellishments as little different from any Hollywood director's efforts to freshen up a plot. But others say even that is done badly. \n"It lacks a sense of timing, plot and tension," the left-leaning Tageszeitung daily said, judging that the film ultimately "capitulates before the RAF myth." \nAddressing relatives of the terrorists' victims on the 25th anniversary of the Schleyer killing, President Johannes Rau expressed concern that young Germans know too little of what really happened. \n"For many, the acronym RAF is foreign, a phenomenon, almost a phantom," he said. \nWhile praising some documentaries for capturing the fear of the RAF years, Rau said others "seem to me to be strangely distanced and sober. They lack feeling and compassion." \nAttention also has focused on the recycling of RAF symbols, such as its trademark machine gun and red star. \nStores have marketed underwear bearing the slogan "PRADA-MEINHOF" -- a play on "Baader-Meinhof" making unauthorized use of the fashion company's name. A Berlin boutique offers T-shirts for infants with "Terrorist" in bright colors across the chest. \n"The symbols of murder have surfaced in stylish ad campaigns, as if the terrorists were heroes of pop culture," Rau complained. \nStill, others argue the terrorists could only be remodeled because the leftism of the period is no longer relevant. \nForeign Minister Joschka Fischer was once a street-fighting anarchist leader in Frankfurt -- part of the mystique that has helped make him the country's most popular politician. Lawyer Otto Schily, now Germany's interior minister, once defended Baader in court. \nFilms such as Roth's, wrote the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, show just "how completely the memories have lost their political content, and into what deep sediment October 1977 has sunk." \n"So much time has passed that it has a different value today," said Christoph Heiss, an unemployed 40-year-old, after seeing "Baader" at a Berlin movie theater. "It's already a matter for history -- even for pop history"