Renek Gaszewski [Blog]

“Gossip Girl” Leighton Meester has a wild side. And we’re not just talking about on the popular series in scenes with her GG character, Blair Waldorf’s, on-again, off-again lover, Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick). Read the rest of this entry »

The days of passing notes in class are long gone.
Teens now primarily use their cell phones to communicate with one another, frequently sending text messages. Read the rest of this entry »

The School of London has always posed a problem on this side of the Atlantic. The term was coined by the American ex-pat R.B. Kitaj for the 48 artists he included in a show called The Human Clay at the Hayward Gallery in 1976. Today we associate the term primarily with Kitaj, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, and Leon Kossoff. Of these artists, Bacon and Freud are of course the best known in the United States. Kitaj has hovered at the margins, a kind of literary curiosity that no one quite knows what to make of, while Auerbach and Kossoff have remained comparatively obscure. A major critical stumbling block has been the group’s inborn conservatism — having coalesced, as it were, at the moment the coffin lid was slamming shut on the art object in general and painting in particular. Kitaj’s criterion that the work in The Human Clay be exclusively “pictures representing people” was, for a Greenbergian, as intellectually bankrupt as a premise could get. Read the rest of this entry »

I am not a nudist, but I decided to try the Fifth Annual “Bare Buns Fun Run” advertised at the Nude Wreck Beach in Canada last July. The innocuous word “fun” seemed to balance the more threatening words, “bare” and “buns.” Read the rest of this entry »

Gossip Girl star Leighton Meester is the latest to find herself in the middle of a sex tape controversy. A website posted clips of the video, including scandalous use of her feet, online Friday, making the full item available to paying customers. Read the rest of this entry »