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“A word to the wise ain’t necessary,” Mr. Cosby likes to say.
“It’s the stupid ones who need the advice.”
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After the first try, put those pencils down
By Seema Mehta
Students who take the PSAT more than once are wasting their time, some say.
"The main importance of the PSAT is really to give students a dry run before they take the SAT," said Heather Keddie, director of college counseling at Sage Hill, a private school. "Colleges and universities don't generally see the students' PSAT scores. . . Its main benefit is giving them the chance to take it without all the pressure of knowing all the scores are sent to colleges."
But many also take it during their sophomore year for practice and some even as freshmen.
[ed. note: Or in sixth grade by Duke U. (N.C.) Go Nathan!]
"It had a lot to do with the recognition of the PSAT being a gateway to college, and the idea it's such a useful tool. Students who take the PSAT tend to do better on the SAT. . . and learn their strengths and weaknesses from the score reports."
To prepare to take the PSAT again next year, and the SAT after that, the 15-year-old -- who hopes to attend UCLA or UC Berkeley -- said she plans on taking timed practice tests and reviewing her vocabulary and math skills.
Tsovinar Karapetyan said she might seek tutoring to prepare for the test before taking it again.
"It was very stressful, very nerve wracking,"
"I think it's absurd for students to take that more than once," he said. "The advice I give students is don't make a career out of taking these exams. It's counterproductive and really not what admissions officers are interested in seeing," he said. "I'd much rather a student be engaged in some meaningful activity" instead of spending their time "prepping for these exams or taking multiple sittings of the exams."
seema.mehta@latimes.com
On Oct. 18, 1968, the United States Olympic Committee suspended two black athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, for giving a "black power" salute as a protest during a victory ceremony in Mexico City.
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When Bennett gets home and starts blogging, however, an alter ego emerges: The Field Negro. On his website called field-negro.blogspot.com, he lashes out at commentator Bill O'Reilly as an "ignorant racist self-delusional buffoon." President Bush is "the frat boy," and "the man 'who doesn't care about black people' " -- a nod to rapper Kanye West's comments of 2005. Black activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are "pimping the 'man' in the name of civil rights."
His signature feature, a riff on a famous Malcolm X speech, categorizes the public figures of the day as either "field negroes" or "house negroes" -- the former being those who consistently fight on behalf of their race; the latter those who are self-serving, inauthentic, or out of touch with their people.
Sometimes he explains the distinctions in detail; other times, not so much. Mr. Clean once earned "honorary field negro" status, Bennett says, smiling, "just because he looks like a field negro to me."
More often, they are the stuff barroom arguments are made of: While Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) is labeled a "field negro" for his civil rights record, Jesse Jackson is tagged a "house negro." Maya Angelou, Bill Cosby and Denzel Washington are "in the fields," while Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan and George Foreman are in the "massa's house."
Bennett has even invented a third category, the "patio negro." This is someone who is, he writes, "Wisely moving between both worlds and doing what it takes to fit in when they have to."
He cites Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as a prime example. Tiger Woods, too. "You will be cheering like hell for him to beat all those old white men this weekend at Augusta," Bennett wrote in April, "but. . . there is the white wife, the passionate obsession for being viewed as a color neutral icon, and all that white love."
He is less than enthusiastic about some of the black spokesmen with church roots -- such as the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton -- and he thinks that the next black leaders might emerge on the Web.
"Traditionally, the church building or the church square was the only place we could organize," he says. "Now, to me, the church, or the physical space where we organize, is the Internet." If that is the case, Bennett began his career in punditry screaming from the back pews. In 2005, he says, he was commenting frequently on a blog written by La Shawn Barber, a black conservative evangelical. After he criticized certain black preachers for taking advantage of their flocks, Barber kicked Bennett off her site by blocking his IP address. (Barber, who runs one of the more popular right-wing black blogs, doesn't recall the episode, but doesn't doubt it happened.)
When he sat down to build his blog in March 2006, he wanted to synthesize the disparate black voices that had influenced him. There were the thinkers his radical older sister had introduced him to when he was a child: the anticolonialist Frantz Fanon and the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Like Malcolm X, Bennett would be honest about race, no matter how painful. Following the lead of his fellow countryman Marcus Garvey -- and the conservative black thinker Shelby Steele -- he would borrow the message of black pride and self-sufficiency.
His daily experiences would also factor in -- from family court, where he saw "all these pathologies and all of these messed up black families." And from his other job as a defense attorney, where he saw lives ruined by a broken system and bad personal choices: "You go down to the holding cells," he says, "it's like the old slave ships, with row after row of young black males locked away."
The voice that emerged was a thing of its own -- angry, chatty, scatological and street -- about as inside-the-beltway as a Richard Pryor monologue, and as polite as a punch in the throat.
"I wish I could be in Jena, but sadly, I guess I am not such a field Negro after all. The plantation work needs to be done, and massa is calling."
She doesn't read the blog much, and teases her husband about the "chump change" ad revenue it generates.
A few days later, he wrote that he would be retiring the "Coonies," the tongue-in-cheek awards that he occasionally gives out.
He figures that he has enough weapons to use against black people he disagrees with.
As a last hurrah, he posted his "Lifetime Achievement Awards." The list included rapper 50 Cent (his music is "not hip hop, and it's not gangsta rap"); Sammy Davis Jr. (the Rat Pack thing "was kind of cool and all that, but you were always the happy black guy"), and Bobby McFerrin (" 'Don't worry be happy?' Negro please!").
Also listed was Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, a civil rights group that has moved to the right in recent years.
Innis had never heard of the website until he was contacted by phone. When he pulled it up on the computer, he laughed.
"Well, look -- I am for a free market of ideas, and for different points of view to be exchanged on the net," Innis says.
"This guy's obviously being offensive on purpose."
He added: "If there are 100 knuckleheads out there putting out garbage, but there is one true black intellectual whose ideas are allowed to be heard and expressed for the first time
-- then God bless the Internet."
Innis didn't say whether he thought Bennett was an intellectual or knucklehead. When asked to choose, Bennett instead offers up: "truth-teller," "smart ass," "mirror."
"truth-teller," "smart ass," "mirror."
The photo on his website shows his bare shoulders and bald head turned away from the viewer, a la Miles Davis.
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Battle over the drug trade has led to escalating violence in Florence-Firestone,
an unincorporated neighborhood north of Watts.
By Sam Quinones, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, sam.quinones@latimes.com
October 18, 2007
As the story goes, the East Coast Crips robbed a Florencia 13 drug connection of a large quantity of dope nearly a decade ago. Since then, the tale of how a black street gang ripped off a Latino rival has taken on mythic proportions.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-firestone18oct18,0,120694.story?coll=la-tot-topstories&track=ntothtml
Martin Magdaleno, who works for a graffiti removal company, paints over graffiti on the side of a garage, in the Florence-Firestone area of Los Angeles County
"It used to be that innocent bystanders were not targeted.
Now it's deliberate. 'I'm deliberately shooting you because of your color.' "
announced a sweeping indictment against more than 60 members of Florencia 13, accusing the Latino gang of waging a violent campaign to drive out African American rivals.
The Mexican Mafia
tipping the balance of power from black to Latino and turning it into a tinderbox of racial tensions.
But during the mid-'90s, the Mexican Mafia prison gang began directing Latino gangs to stop fighting each other, to "tax" drug dealers and to push blacks from their neighborhoods.
Florencia, in particular, had warred for years with 38th Street, a Latino gang to the north.
In 1996 tensions erupted when members of a gang associated with East Coast Crips, known as the 6-5 Hustlers, killed a Florencia member.
After some retaliation, the gangs held a peace summit at Parmelee Elementary School one night, and that "kind of squashed everything," the gang member said.
But the fighting resumed when word, perhaps mythical, spread about the East Coast Crips' drug rip-off of Florencia 13.
The result: a gangland version of racial profiling.
"They just see a young man of the opposite race and they shoot."
"They don't stop to question whether or not they are a member of the gang."
"We used to kick it with" Latinos, said Perry's father, Benny, who is black and grew up in the area. "Now you constantly hear about it: This is their land first and they've come to take it back."
Latino gang members often drive by shooting at blacks. He doesn't allow his kids to go to the store and he never uses alleys anymore.
People no longer sit outside in the evening.
"You don't want to go out at night."
"You never know when you're going to be the next target."
Fewer people ride bikes; fewer children play outside after school. Movable basketball stanchions, once ubiquitous in driveways, are gone.
Irv Sitkoff, a local pharmacist, said people of one race complain if his employees attend faster to people of the other race.
"You've got to very careful," he said. "Before, we didn't think about it."
Sitkoff said his pharmacy has sold grim supplies to customers because of neighborhood violence: more colostomy bags, for example.
One Latino mother bought antidepressant medication from him for many months after her son, an innocent bystander, was killed by a black gang, Sitkoff said.
Meanwhile, the exodus continues. More black families depart every year for Palmdale or the Inland Empire. Some cliques of the East Coast Crips in the neighborhood don't exist any more.
"Everybody's going to have to go."
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andrew.blankstein@ latimes.com
California Adventure to get a new tap of Disney's wand
The theme park will undergo a major renovation in an effort to bring in the crowds that never materialized.
California Adventure's Hollywood Pictures Backlot area in 2004. The park's makeover will include several new attractions based on Pixar animated films such as "Cars" and "Toy Story."
53 acres of strawberry fields and parking lots.
At the same time, Disney and Anaheim city leaders have been locked in a stormy yearlong dispute over a proposal to build condominiums and low-cost apartments near the parks.
Long criticized for its shortage of children's rides and its failure to connect emotionally with visitors, California Adventure has seen disappointing attendance since its 2001 opening.
At a news conference Wednesday, Disney executives confirmed plans to overhaul, and perhaps rename, the struggling park in the image of the Los Angeles that Walt Disney experienced when he arrived in the 1920s, complete with a Main Street and a replica of the Carthay Circle Theatre where "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" premiered.
If Disney's plans to remake California Adventure prove successful, industry observers say, it could spur the company to revamp a struggling companion park to the Disney park in Paris, to add a second park in Hong Kong or to launch the long-rumored third park in Anaheim.
From the time guests got their first peek, many have complained that California Adventure was short on magic.
David Koenig, who has written extensively about Disney, said that since the park's opening, there has been "continuous, nonstop backpedaling away from its hip and edgy roots."
"People went to Disneyland for nostalgic reasons, to be with their families, to be transported to exotic environments that they couldn't [find] anywhere else," said Koenig. "You could fly your own magic carpet, or flying elephant or end up in a cannonball fight between pirates.
"California Adventure took you to California, and you were already here," he said. "Maybe if you were in Kansas, it would have worked. Why do you want to see fake mountains when you can see real mountains right outside the park?"
"In Disneyland, you're in another world, and here you're in more of a theme park," she said. "This is just rides."
Critics complained that California Adventure was built "on the cheap" and dubbed it a Wall Street park.
At the time, Eisner had faced heavy pressure from investors to keep costs down as Disney's earnings slowed and the company faced heavy losses from its Euro Disney operation.
"They really shot themselves in the foot by trying to do it on the cheap."
andrew.blankstein@ latimes.com
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Tinseltown filling campaign coffers
By Dan Morain
Democrats are reaping the benefits of wealthy and glamorous donors while entertainment executives hope to be heard in Washington.
Plan Would Ease F.C.C. Restriction on Media Owners
By STEPHEN LABATON
The plan would relax decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television station in the same city.
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Nuclear-Armed Iran Risks World War, Bush Says
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
President Bush suggested that if Iran obtained nuclear arms, it could lead to “World War III.”
Iraq Awards Contracts to Iran and China
By JAMES GLANZ
The contracts, awarded to build a pair of power plants, prompted concerns among American military officials.
Chill cast on U.S.-Russia relations
By James Gerstenzang
Bush says Putin was 'wily' at their last meeting.
Thousands gather to welcome back Bhutto to Pakistan
By Laura King
The former prime minister
U.S. honors Dalai Lama
By Maura Reynolds and Johanna Neuman
China expresses anger.
Honoring the Dalai Lama
We would like to think that the spiritual leader’s dedication to tolerance might rub off on the people he meets in Washington.
‘The American’ in France
Deep in the Gallic soul resides the notion that work is exploitation, best regulated and minimized and offset by hours of idleness.
Viacom to offer all clips of 'Daily Show' online
By Thomas S. Mulligan
Switching gears, it will provide free views of the program in a bid to generate ad revenue.
THEATER REVIEW | 'A FEMININE ENDING'
Torn Between Two Loves: The Oboe and the ‘Hot Mess’
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
No amount of actorly nuance could paper over the shortcuts and disjunctions of Sarah Treem’s new play.
TELEVISION REVIEW | 'VIVA LAUGHLIN '
Singing in the Casino? That’s a Gamble
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
“Viva Laughlin” on CBS may well be the worst new show of the season, but is it the worst show in the history of television?
An Enigmatic Night at the Atelier:
Bring In the Clown
“nicely titled ‘DUMB DUMB BUNNY.’”
I, like many others, am still trying to get a real fix on his work.
What we talk about when we talk about Louis James may not be what you think
the Klimt exhibit opening today
at the Neue Gallerie (NY)
his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,
"half queen, half Vegas showgirl,” and “the perfect New Yorker"
“The Face That Set the Market Buzzing,”
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latimes.com
INNER LIFE
Role of a lifetime
COLLECTOR
Actor Tab Hunter has been collecting for ages.
A look at his home in Montecito shows what really matters to him.
Hint: It's not Hollywood.
By Kathy Bryant, Special to The Times
October 18, 2007
Tanned and fit, Tab Hunter walks down the red brick steps of his Montecito house with the same self-effacing smile that made him a movie star 50 years ago in "Battle Cry" and "Damn Yankees!" The house that lies beyond looks like some classic Hollywood throwback too, the black-and-white marble entry yielding to a view of the garden, blue agapanthus and stately oaks peering through the windows. The scene is a reminder that once upon a time houses weren't built to the lot line, that when newcomers first flocked to Southern California, they sought sunshine and breathing room.
Hunter's property spans more than an acre, but the classic 1928 Spanish-style house by George Washington Smith is only about 2,000 square feet -- all the more space for fruit orchards and an area that the actor calls Villa Debris because of its storage shed and dog run for two whippets.
His casual California
But no matter how modest in size the house may be, there will always be room for one of Hunter's lifelong loves: antiques.
"I've always collected something. At first it was horse memorabilia, and then little by little I added other things," says Hunter, 76, who had his own Asian-imports shop in Beverly Hills in the early 1960s. Tab Hunter's Far East did well, but it wasn't open long before the actor decided to sell the store. "It had been a fun hobby for the couple of years it lasted, but you can only sell so many Imari plates to Katharine Hepburn," he quipped in "Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star," the 2005 autobiography for which Hunter's partner, producer Allan Glaser, is working on a big-screen adaptation.
That store may be long gone, but today Hunter's house stands as nothing short of a collection of a lifetime, some pieces bought while shooting on location, others acquired from people close to him. "I like having all these things around me because they're my memories of friends and places I've been," he says. "I look around and I see Santa Fe flea market, England, Virginia, Portugal."
His tastes run to the intricately carved pieces of the 17th century English Jacobean period, and furniture from Spain and Portugal -- "the country pieces," he says. "I love patina and a good piece of wood. It sort of speaks to you."
Although all that wood is dark, the house is surprisingly bright, with natural light flowing through windows overlooking the garden for a classic California indoor-outdoor feeling. The rich oak paneling that Hunter restored in the living room provides a warm backdrop for antiques galore, an eclectic mix that includes a Dutch tortoise shell corner cabinet, an 18th century English wainscot chair, a rare Oushak carpet and a French Louis XXIV chair, a piece he purchased in the '60s in New Orleans while traveling the country on the theater circuit.
The first pieces he ever bought were Spanish sconces, now in the dining room, that he picked up while on location for his first major role, in "Island of Desire." "I had my 20th birthday on the set," he recalls.
One sofa sports pillows that Hunter needlepointed himself, a craft he learned from Rosey Grier and put into use during breaks in the production of the 1972 John Huston film "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" with Paul Newman.
An English oak drop-leaf table and two armchairs were bought at a 20th Century Fox auction in the 1980s. The chairs, which can be seen in old black-and-white movies including 1949's "Letter to Three Wives" with Kirk Douglas, have since been re-covered in raw green silk velvet and taken their new place in a sitting area overlooking the garden.
WALK through the house that Hunter shares with Glaser, and it's clear that the horns mounted on the walls and hoof candlesticks on the table aren't so much a celebration of kitsch or nods to current decorating trends, but rather a reflection of the actor's lifelong love of the outdoors.
Hunter learned to ride horses as a teen at an L.A. stable near Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard, and to this day he calls riding "my life." His horse, Harlow, is boarded elsewhere, but Hunter's house is filled with related collectibles, including his latest obsession, brass plaques used for harness decoration.
At times the outdoorsman's world collides with Hunter's life as a devout Catholic, a faith that permeates the house, though not always in austere ways.
"This I love," he says, pointing to one of the folk art statues sitting on a 1682 dresser. "I got it when I was living in New Mexico. I call it our Lady of the Canned Hams. Someone took a ham can, added all this wonderful work around the rim, and then put an 18th century Madonna inside it."
There is the icon he bought from an old monk in Greece, and the black Madonna that was one of his first collectibles. "I got it in 1954, around the time I got a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers."
The headboard on his bed came from L.A. antiques dealer Paul Ferrante. "He was taking this to a flea market when I bought it right off his truck," Hunter says. "It's funky, but I love the meaning of its carving: Labor for love, serve God above; to God always, I will give praise."
Glaser has posters from Hunter's Hollywood days and other movie memorabilia in his bedroom, but you won't find such pieces elsewhere in the house.
"He's not one to keep photos or awards of himself out on display," says Glaser, whose sense of humor, especially when it comes to the world of Hollywood, is on full display in his bathroom. That's where you'll find the "most promising new male personality" trophy that Hunter received at the 1955 Audience Awards, something akin to today's People's Choice Awards. The statuette is showcased across from the commode along with an Emmy and an Oscar -- neither originally Hunter's, the latter won by a deceased friend and former neighbor who was a costume designer.
"Nothing bores me more than looking at work of mine," Hunter says. "That's a past life."
Indeed, the actor declared in his autobiography: "Today, I am happy to be forgotten."
He loves to work in his garden. When the weather is warm, he and Glaser entertain friends on a patio that looks back toward the house's tall arched windows, a George Washington Smith trademark. Yew and oak trees rise from the back lawn, accompanied by the trickle of a wall fountain.
"I love the feeling of this house," Hunter says. "At first I thought it was tiny, but I liked the feel to it. It seemed to embrace me. Now every day here is a thank-you day."
home@latimes.com
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SET PIECES
The Traditional Lives of 'Mad Men'
By David A. Keeps, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 18, 2007
david.keeps@latimes.com
When they leave their Modern offices, the characters head to Colonial Revival suburban enclaves.
Comfort
The AMC drama "Mad Men," which paints a gin-soaked, cigarette-stained, ulcer-inducing picture of Manhattan's advertising industry circa 1960, is a period-perfect re-creation of the past, colored by the emerging trends of the present: When those hard-driving executives leave their masculine Modern office suites, they go home to the feminine Colonial Revival homes of suburbia.
Call it an antidote to the midcentury minimalism that has become so prevalent in Los Angeles home design today.
Velvety
Pinch-pleat curtains, knotty-pine cabinetry and plaid wallpaper set a kitchen scene for January Jones as Betty, left, and Kiernan Shipka as Sally. It’s a far cry from the décor of the series’ Madison Avenue offices.
"Do I think homes will be filled with frills and knotty-pine paneling?" asks New York City designer Jeffrey Harris, who's hooked on the show. "No, but I do think that we will be seeing reinterpreted elements of that look."
We already are. Take the headboard in the bourgeois boudoir of main characters Don and Betty Draper, whose names, series creator Matthew Weiner says, are a tip of the pillbox hat to Dorothy Draper, the most influential Manhattan decorator of that era. Swathed in button-tufted velvet in a frosty shade between blue and green so in vogue now, the headboard is an amped-up, Doris Day version of models found at showrooms such as Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams and Restoration Hardware.
"Mad Men" set decorator Amy Wells swapped out the mahogany headboard that was part of a vintage bedroom suite used in the show in favor of a replacement whose elaborate curves and tufting made it "very sexual-looking," she says.
"The headboard scared me," admits Weiner, whose show closes its first season tonight. But he soon realized that the bedroom was important to Betty's character and needed a "special flavor," of which sexuality was an important component.
Wells says she practiced "presentism -- the act of interpreting the past through the present." She was an admirer of the Hollywood Regency headboards in Kelly Wearstler-designed hotels and had been shopping for a tufted headboard of her own at Cisco Bros. and Williams-Sonoma Home.
An even more over-the-top version of the headboard pops up in a female secret agent's apartment in the NBC comedy "Chuck." It all reflects what Diamond Foam & Fabric owner Jason Asch says is a growing interest in upholstered beds.
"Button tufting is really an art," he says. "It's like pleating or smocking on a James Galanos dress -- a sign of craftsmanship and luxury."
The result is a classic, finished look that more people are turning to as the starting point when designing a bedroom, says Dave DeMattei, president of Williams-Sonoma Home. Two years ago, the firm began offering tufted headboards inspired by the 2003 Diane Keaton film "Something's Gotta Give."
Now, custom-upholstered headboards account for the majority of the company's bed business.
"The fact that the headboard in 'Mad Men' and the ones that inspired Williams-Sonoma Home both look so current speaks to the timelessness of this look," DeMattei says.
FOR the distinctly different vibe of the Madison Avenue offices in the series, Wells found inspiration from still-popular Danish modern furniture and the corporate American designs of Florence Knoll.
"I got the whole suite of furniture in Don Draper's office from Futurama and Denmark 50 in Los Angeles," she says. "Futurama made me a beautiful coffee table with a magazine ledge, and their reproduction couches are the only ones that are comfortable on the set."
The Manhattan furniture is as sleek and tailored as the pegged skirts and bullet-bras worn by the secretarial pool, but the pinch-pleat curtains that Wells bought at JC Penney and the skirted davenport in the Draper home are meant to be as ladylike as June Cleaver's crinolines. Wells describes the Drapers' home in Ossining, N.Y. -- decorated as a counterpoint to the modernist Manhattan office furnishings -- as a "page out of a 1955 House & Garden."
Some viewers might be surprised that the Drapers "don't live in Eames-ville and wear Pucci clothes," Wells says. "But we are portraying a very realistic view of a time when we were not such a throwaway society, and buying furniture was a lifetime investment."
Series creator Weiner thinks that what was going on in American homes then is the same now: a mix of antiques, tradition and comfort. He strove to make sure that furnishings were not all contemporary, "that every previous era was represented -- the way it is in real life. I believe that Betty Draper, having an upstate New York home, would want to fill it with traditional furniture and family heirlooms."
The attention to detail impressed Jon Hamm, the actor who plays dashing but dark Don Draper.
"There was a towel holder in the bathroom with a clip shaped like a lady's gloved hand on a faux marble stand," he says. "My grandmother had one of those."
Production designer Dan Bishop based the Draper house on a 1916 Colonial Revival he found in Pasadena.
"It's a fairly prevalent style in older suburbs," Bishop says. "There's a huge chunk of this country that is still tapped into Americana and Anglophilia, folks wanting to identify with their historic past. It's certainly never going to go away for people who are raising kids and like to bake."
Bishop is responsible for creating that vibe in the Draper kitchen, Weiner says. "We talked about knotty pine because we all remembered it."
Mixed with plaid wallpaper?
"When I saw it, I thought it had the perfect match of tradition, taste and a little bit of flair that gave the room at times joy and at times a somberness," says Weiner, whose show has been renewed for a second season.
Designer Harris, a fan of wood paneling and Formica in unexpected places, says he is updating Colonial Revival furniture for contemporary interiors by giving them a fresh coat of paint or an outrageous upholstery fabric. The designer also has been working on a collection called Colonial Mod, which reinterprets Americana through the use of modern materials. Next year it will include deconstructed Colonial chairs and tables encased in acrylic boxes.
Is he a mad man? Hardly.
"It seems fresh and hip again," Harris says. "It adds history and nostalgia to a room and, at least to us city types, even a subversive touch."
david.keeps@latimes.com
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Talk Show: Hey, Listen!
Dick Cavett recalls the evening when he waited on Richard Nixon at a seafood restaurant.
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Tales of the illegal endurance race circuit.
“symptoms of the disorder known as irrational exuberance.”
150 m.p.h. and up
Take a peek inside Louis James's mind
Retrace the history of illustrated story-telling
Enter to win the Collectible Comic of the Year contest
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Today, on Oct. 18, 1968:
The United States Olympic Committee suspended two black athletes,
Tommie Smith and John Carlos,
for giving a "black power" salute as a protest during a victory ceremony in Mexico City.
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SEXPIT: THE ONLINE DAILY
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Roxy Erickson is an all-round bike nut, and she’s spent the last fourteen months working as a producer for the Bicycle Film Festival (which runs from 17th – 21st of October), in between earning her bread as a photographer, snapping the likes of Avril Lavigne and Jimmy Saville.
My favorite places in London..
1. Pellicci’s (if you don’t know, I ain’t telling).
2. Walking across the bridges with Parliment and the eye in site contrasting each other.
3. My garden playing with my cat, Willy Nelson.
4. Riding my bike turning off of Hackney road and onto Columbia Road late at night.
Well, my hopes and dreams for the future are..
1. People to stop talking about if and why global warming is happening but instead what we’re going to do about it.
2. To say “yes” more often.
3. To learn to sleep in.
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album:Learned_Hand>photos bucketsites|buy prints
Sexpit : Screensaver Slide Show Happy Halloween
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“A word to the wise ain’t necessary,” Mr. Cosby likes to say.
“It’s the stupid ones who need the advice.”
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After the first try, put those pencils down
By Seema Mehta
Students who take the PSAT more than once are wasting their time, some say.
"The main importance of the PSAT is really to give students a dry run before they take the SAT," said Heather Keddie, director of college counseling at Sage Hill, a private school. "Colleges and universities don't generally see the students' PSAT scores. . . Its main benefit is giving them the chance to take it without all the pressure of knowing all the scores are sent to colleges."
But many also take it during their sophomore year for practice and some even as freshmen.
[ed. note: Or in sixth grade by Duke U. (N.C.) Go Nathan!]
"It had a lot to do with the recognition of the PSAT being a gateway to college, and the idea it's such a useful tool. Students who take the PSAT tend to do better on the SAT. . . and learn their strengths and weaknesses from the score reports."
To prepare to take the PSAT again next year, and the SAT after that, the 15-year-old -- who hopes to attend UCLA or UC Berkeley -- said she plans on taking timed practice tests and reviewing her vocabulary and math skills.
Tsovinar Karapetyan said she might seek tutoring to prepare for the test before taking it again.
"It was very stressful, very nerve wracking,"
"I think it's absurd for students to take that more than once," he said. "The advice I give students is don't make a career out of taking these exams. It's counterproductive and really not what admissions officers are interested in seeing," he said. "I'd much rather a student be engaged in some meaningful activity" instead of spending their time "prepping for these exams or taking multiple sittings of the exams."
seema.mehta@latimes.com
On Oct. 18, 1968, the United States Olympic Committee suspended two black athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, for giving a "black power" salute as a protest during a victory ceremony in Mexico City.
===========================================
When Bennett gets home and starts blogging, however, an alter ego emerges: The Field Negro. On his website called field-negro.blogspot.com, he lashes out at commentator Bill O'Reilly as an "ignorant racist self-delusional buffoon." President Bush is "the frat boy," and "the man 'who doesn't care about black people' " -- a nod to rapper Kanye West's comments of 2005. Black activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are "pimping the 'man' in the name of civil rights."
His signature feature, a riff on a famous Malcolm X speech, categorizes the public figures of the day as either "field negroes" or "house negroes" -- the former being those who consistently fight on behalf of their race; the latter those who are self-serving, inauthentic, or out of touch with their people.
Sometimes he explains the distinctions in detail; other times, not so much. Mr. Clean once earned "honorary field negro" status, Bennett says, smiling, "just because he looks like a field negro to me."
More often, they are the stuff barroom arguments are made of: While Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) is labeled a "field negro" for his civil rights record, Jesse Jackson is tagged a "house negro." Maya Angelou, Bill Cosby and Denzel Washington are "in the fields," while Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan and George Foreman are in the "massa's house."
Bennett has even invented a third category, the "patio negro." This is someone who is, he writes, "Wisely moving between both worlds and doing what it takes to fit in when they have to."
He cites Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as a prime example. Tiger Woods, too. "You will be cheering like hell for him to beat all those old white men this weekend at Augusta," Bennett wrote in April, "but. . . there is the white wife, the passionate obsession for being viewed as a color neutral icon, and all that white love."
He is less than enthusiastic about some of the black spokesmen with church roots -- such as the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton -- and he thinks that the next black leaders might emerge on the Web.
"Traditionally, the church building or the church square was the only place we could organize," he says. "Now, to me, the church, or the physical space where we organize, is the Internet." If that is the case, Bennett began his career in punditry screaming from the back pews. In 2005, he says, he was commenting frequently on a blog written by La Shawn Barber, a black conservative evangelical. After he criticized certain black preachers for taking advantage of their flocks, Barber kicked Bennett off her site by blocking his IP address. (Barber, who runs one of the more popular right-wing black blogs, doesn't recall the episode, but doesn't doubt it happened.)
When he sat down to build his blog in March 2006, he wanted to synthesize the disparate black voices that had influenced him. There were the thinkers his radical older sister had introduced him to when he was a child: the anticolonialist Frantz Fanon and the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Like Malcolm X, Bennett would be honest about race, no matter how painful. Following the lead of his fellow countryman Marcus Garvey -- and the conservative black thinker Shelby Steele -- he would borrow the message of black pride and self-sufficiency.
His daily experiences would also factor in -- from family court, where he saw "all these pathologies and all of these messed up black families." And from his other job as a defense attorney, where he saw lives ruined by a broken system and bad personal choices: "You go down to the holding cells," he says, "it's like the old slave ships, with row after row of young black males locked away."
The voice that emerged was a thing of its own -- angry, chatty, scatological and street -- about as inside-the-beltway as a Richard Pryor monologue, and as polite as a punch in the throat.
"I wish I could be in Jena, but sadly, I guess I am not such a field Negro after all. The plantation work needs to be done, and massa is calling."
She doesn't read the blog much, and teases her husband about the "chump change" ad revenue it generates.
A few days later, he wrote that he would be retiring the "Coonies," the tongue-in-cheek awards that he occasionally gives out.
He figures that he has enough weapons to use against black people he disagrees with.
As a last hurrah, he posted his "Lifetime Achievement Awards." The list included rapper 50 Cent (his music is "not hip hop, and it's not gangsta rap"); Sammy Davis Jr. (the Rat Pack thing "was kind of cool and all that, but you were always the happy black guy"), and Bobby McFerrin (" 'Don't worry be happy?' Negro please!").
Also listed was Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, a civil rights group that has moved to the right in recent years.
Innis had never heard of the website until he was contacted by phone. When he pulled it up on the computer, he laughed.
"Well, look -- I am for a free market of ideas, and for different points of view to be exchanged on the net," Innis says.
"This guy's obviously being offensive on purpose."
He added: "If there are 100 knuckleheads out there putting out garbage, but there is one true black intellectual whose ideas are allowed to be heard and expressed for the first time
-- then God bless the Internet."
Innis didn't say whether he thought Bennett was an intellectual or knucklehead. When asked to choose, Bennett instead offers up: "truth-teller," "smart ass," "mirror."
"truth-teller," "smart ass," "mirror."
The photo on his website shows his bare shoulders and bald head turned away from the viewer, a la Miles Davis.
===========================================
Battle over the drug trade has led to escalating violence in Florence-Firestone,
an unincorporated neighborhood north of Watts.
By Sam Quinones, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, sam.quinones@latimes.com
October 18, 2007
As the story goes, the East Coast Crips robbed a Florencia 13 drug connection of a large quantity of dope nearly a decade ago. Since then, the tale of how a black street gang ripped off a Latino rival has taken on mythic proportions.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-firestone18oct18,0,120694.story?coll=la-tot-topstories&track=ntothtml
Martin Magdaleno, who works for a graffiti removal company, paints over graffiti on the side of a garage, in the Florence-Firestone area of Los Angeles County
"It used to be that innocent bystanders were not targeted.
Now it's deliberate. 'I'm deliberately shooting you because of your color.' "
announced a sweeping indictment against more than 60 members of Florencia 13, accusing the Latino gang of waging a violent campaign to drive out African American rivals.
The Mexican Mafia
tipping the balance of power from black to Latino and turning it into a tinderbox of racial tensions.
But during the mid-'90s, the Mexican Mafia prison gang began directing Latino gangs to stop fighting each other, to "tax" drug dealers and to push blacks from their neighborhoods.
Florencia, in particular, had warred for years with 38th Street, a Latino gang to the north.
In 1996 tensions erupted when members of a gang associated with East Coast Crips, known as the 6-5 Hustlers, killed a Florencia member.
After some retaliation, the gangs held a peace summit at Parmelee Elementary School one night, and that "kind of squashed everything," the gang member said.
But the fighting resumed when word, perhaps mythical, spread about the East Coast Crips' drug rip-off of Florencia 13.
The result: a gangland version of racial profiling.
"They just see a young man of the opposite race and they shoot."
"They don't stop to question whether or not they are a member of the gang."
"We used to kick it with" Latinos, said Perry's father, Benny, who is black and grew up in the area. "Now you constantly hear about it: This is their land first and they've come to take it back."
Latino gang members often drive by shooting at blacks. He doesn't allow his kids to go to the store and he never uses alleys anymore.
People no longer sit outside in the evening.
"You don't want to go out at night."
"You never know when you're going to be the next target."
Fewer people ride bikes; fewer children play outside after school. Movable basketball stanchions, once ubiquitous in driveways, are gone.
Irv Sitkoff, a local pharmacist, said people of one race complain if his employees attend faster to people of the other race.
"You've got to very careful," he said. "Before, we didn't think about it."
Sitkoff said his pharmacy has sold grim supplies to customers because of neighborhood violence: more colostomy bags, for example.
One Latino mother bought antidepressant medication from him for many months after her son, an innocent bystander, was killed by a black gang, Sitkoff said.
Meanwhile, the exodus continues. More black families depart every year for Palmdale or the Inland Empire. Some cliques of the East Coast Crips in the neighborhood don't exist any more.
"Everybody's going to have to go."
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andrew.blankstein@ latimes.com
California Adventure to get a new tap of Disney's wand
The theme park will undergo a major renovation in an effort to bring in the crowds that never materialized.
California Adventure's Hollywood Pictures Backlot area in 2004. The park's makeover will include several new attractions based on Pixar animated films such as "Cars" and "Toy Story."
53 acres of strawberry fields and parking lots.
At the same time, Disney and Anaheim city leaders have been locked in a stormy yearlong dispute over a proposal to build condominiums and low-cost apartments near the parks.
Long criticized for its shortage of children's rides and its failure to connect emotionally with visitors, California Adventure has seen disappointing attendance since its 2001 opening.
At a news conference Wednesday, Disney executives confirmed plans to overhaul, and perhaps rename, the struggling park in the image of the Los Angeles that Walt Disney experienced when he arrived in the 1920s, complete with a Main Street and a replica of the Carthay Circle Theatre where "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" premiered.
If Disney's plans to remake California Adventure prove successful, industry observers say, it could spur the company to revamp a struggling companion park to the Disney park in Paris, to add a second park in Hong Kong or to launch the long-rumored third park in Anaheim.
From the time guests got their first peek, many have complained that California Adventure was short on magic.
David Koenig, who has written extensively about Disney, said that since the park's opening, there has been "continuous, nonstop backpedaling away from its hip and edgy roots."
"People went to Disneyland for nostalgic reasons, to be with their families, to be transported to exotic environments that they couldn't [find] anywhere else," said Koenig. "You could fly your own magic carpet, or flying elephant or end up in a cannonball fight between pirates.
"California Adventure took you to California, and you were already here," he said. "Maybe if you were in Kansas, it would have worked. Why do you want to see fake mountains when you can see real mountains right outside the park?"
"In Disneyland, you're in another world, and here you're in more of a theme park," she said. "This is just rides."
Critics complained that California Adventure was built "on the cheap" and dubbed it a Wall Street park.
At the time, Eisner had faced heavy pressure from investors to keep costs down as Disney's earnings slowed and the company faced heavy losses from its Euro Disney operation.
"They really shot themselves in the foot by trying to do it on the cheap."
andrew.blankstein@ latimes.com
=================================
Tinseltown filling campaign coffers
By Dan Morain
Democrats are reaping the benefits of wealthy and glamorous donors while entertainment executives hope to be heard in Washington.
Plan Would Ease F.C.C. Restriction on Media Owners
By STEPHEN LABATON
The plan would relax decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television station in the same city.
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Nuclear-Armed Iran Risks World War, Bush Says
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
President Bush suggested that if Iran obtained nuclear arms, it could lead to “World War III.”
Iraq Awards Contracts to Iran and China
By JAMES GLANZ
The contracts, awarded to build a pair of power plants, prompted concerns among American military officials.
Chill cast on U.S.-Russia relations
By James Gerstenzang
Bush says Putin was 'wily' at their last meeting.
Thousands gather to welcome back Bhutto to Pakistan
By Laura King
The former prime minister
U.S. honors Dalai Lama
By Maura Reynolds and Johanna Neuman
China expresses anger.
Honoring the Dalai Lama
We would like to think that the spiritual leader’s dedication to tolerance might rub off on the people he meets in Washington.
‘The American’ in France
Deep in the Gallic soul resides the notion that work is exploitation, best regulated and minimized and offset by hours of idleness.
Viacom to offer all clips of 'Daily Show' online
By Thomas S. Mulligan
Switching gears, it will provide free views of the program in a bid to generate ad revenue.
THEATER REVIEW | 'A FEMININE ENDING'
Torn Between Two Loves: The Oboe and the ‘Hot Mess’
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
No amount of actorly nuance could paper over the shortcuts and disjunctions of Sarah Treem’s new play.
TELEVISION REVIEW | 'VIVA LAUGHLIN '
Singing in the Casino? That’s a Gamble
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
“Viva Laughlin” on CBS may well be the worst new show of the season, but is it the worst show in the history of television?
An Enigmatic Night at the Atelier:
Bring In the Clown
“nicely titled ‘DUMB DUMB BUNNY.’”
I, like many others, am still trying to get a real fix on his work.
What we talk about when we talk about Louis James may not be what you think
the Klimt exhibit opening today
at the Neue Gallerie (NY)
his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,
"half queen, half Vegas showgirl,” and “the perfect New Yorker"
“The Face That Set the Market Buzzing,”
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latimes.com
INNER LIFE
Role of a lifetime
COLLECTOR
Actor Tab Hunter has been collecting for ages.
A look at his home in Montecito shows what really matters to him.
Hint: It's not Hollywood.
By Kathy Bryant, Special to The Times
October 18, 2007
Tanned and fit, Tab Hunter walks down the red brick steps of his Montecito house with the same self-effacing smile that made him a movie star 50 years ago in "Battle Cry" and "Damn Yankees!" The house that lies beyond looks like some classic Hollywood throwback too, the black-and-white marble entry yielding to a view of the garden, blue agapanthus and stately oaks peering through the windows. The scene is a reminder that once upon a time houses weren't built to the lot line, that when newcomers first flocked to Southern California, they sought sunshine and breathing room.
Hunter's property spans more than an acre, but the classic 1928 Spanish-style house by George Washington Smith is only about 2,000 square feet -- all the more space for fruit orchards and an area that the actor calls Villa Debris because of its storage shed and dog run for two whippets.
His casual California
But no matter how modest in size the house may be, there will always be room for one of Hunter's lifelong loves: antiques.
"I've always collected something. At first it was horse memorabilia, and then little by little I added other things," says Hunter, 76, who had his own Asian-imports shop in Beverly Hills in the early 1960s. Tab Hunter's Far East did well, but it wasn't open long before the actor decided to sell the store. "It had been a fun hobby for the couple of years it lasted, but you can only sell so many Imari plates to Katharine Hepburn," he quipped in "Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star," the 2005 autobiography for which Hunter's partner, producer Allan Glaser, is working on a big-screen adaptation.
That store may be long gone, but today Hunter's house stands as nothing short of a collection of a lifetime, some pieces bought while shooting on location, others acquired from people close to him. "I like having all these things around me because they're my memories of friends and places I've been," he says. "I look around and I see Santa Fe flea market, England, Virginia, Portugal."
His tastes run to the intricately carved pieces of the 17th century English Jacobean period, and furniture from Spain and Portugal -- "the country pieces," he says. "I love patina and a good piece of wood. It sort of speaks to you."
Although all that wood is dark, the house is surprisingly bright, with natural light flowing through windows overlooking the garden for a classic California indoor-outdoor feeling. The rich oak paneling that Hunter restored in the living room provides a warm backdrop for antiques galore, an eclectic mix that includes a Dutch tortoise shell corner cabinet, an 18th century English wainscot chair, a rare Oushak carpet and a French Louis XXIV chair, a piece he purchased in the '60s in New Orleans while traveling the country on the theater circuit.
The first pieces he ever bought were Spanish sconces, now in the dining room, that he picked up while on location for his first major role, in "Island of Desire." "I had my 20th birthday on the set," he recalls.
One sofa sports pillows that Hunter needlepointed himself, a craft he learned from Rosey Grier and put into use during breaks in the production of the 1972 John Huston film "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" with Paul Newman.
An English oak drop-leaf table and two armchairs were bought at a 20th Century Fox auction in the 1980s. The chairs, which can be seen in old black-and-white movies including 1949's "Letter to Three Wives" with Kirk Douglas, have since been re-covered in raw green silk velvet and taken their new place in a sitting area overlooking the garden.
WALK through the house that Hunter shares with Glaser, and it's clear that the horns mounted on the walls and hoof candlesticks on the table aren't so much a celebration of kitsch or nods to current decorating trends, but rather a reflection of the actor's lifelong love of the outdoors.
Hunter learned to ride horses as a teen at an L.A. stable near Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard, and to this day he calls riding "my life." His horse, Harlow, is boarded elsewhere, but Hunter's house is filled with related collectibles, including his latest obsession, brass plaques used for harness decoration.
At times the outdoorsman's world collides with Hunter's life as a devout Catholic, a faith that permeates the house, though not always in austere ways.
"This I love," he says, pointing to one of the folk art statues sitting on a 1682 dresser. "I got it when I was living in New Mexico. I call it our Lady of the Canned Hams. Someone took a ham can, added all this wonderful work around the rim, and then put an 18th century Madonna inside it."
There is the icon he bought from an old monk in Greece, and the black Madonna that was one of his first collectibles. "I got it in 1954, around the time I got a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers."
The headboard on his bed came from L.A. antiques dealer Paul Ferrante. "He was taking this to a flea market when I bought it right off his truck," Hunter says. "It's funky, but I love the meaning of its carving: Labor for love, serve God above; to God always, I will give praise."
Glaser has posters from Hunter's Hollywood days and other movie memorabilia in his bedroom, but you won't find such pieces elsewhere in the house.
"He's not one to keep photos or awards of himself out on display," says Glaser, whose sense of humor, especially when it comes to the world of Hollywood, is on full display in his bathroom. That's where you'll find the "most promising new male personality" trophy that Hunter received at the 1955 Audience Awards, something akin to today's People's Choice Awards. The statuette is showcased across from the commode along with an Emmy and an Oscar -- neither originally Hunter's, the latter won by a deceased friend and former neighbor who was a costume designer.
"Nothing bores me more than looking at work of mine," Hunter says. "That's a past life."
Indeed, the actor declared in his autobiography: "Today, I am happy to be forgotten."
He loves to work in his garden. When the weather is warm, he and Glaser entertain friends on a patio that looks back toward the house's tall arched windows, a George Washington Smith trademark. Yew and oak trees rise from the back lawn, accompanied by the trickle of a wall fountain.
"I love the feeling of this house," Hunter says. "At first I thought it was tiny, but I liked the feel to it. It seemed to embrace me. Now every day here is a thank-you day."
home@latimes.com
===========================================
SET PIECES
The Traditional Lives of 'Mad Men'
By David A. Keeps, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 18, 2007
david.keeps@latimes.com
When they leave their Modern offices, the characters head to Colonial Revival suburban enclaves.
Comfort
The AMC drama "Mad Men," which paints a gin-soaked, cigarette-stained, ulcer-inducing picture of Manhattan's advertising industry circa 1960, is a period-perfect re-creation of the past, colored by the emerging trends of the present: When those hard-driving executives leave their masculine Modern office suites, they go home to the feminine Colonial Revival homes of suburbia.
Call it an antidote to the midcentury minimalism that has become so prevalent in Los Angeles home design today.
Velvety
Pinch-pleat curtains, knotty-pine cabinetry and plaid wallpaper set a kitchen scene for January Jones as Betty, left, and Kiernan Shipka as Sally. It’s a far cry from the décor of the series’ Madison Avenue offices.
"Do I think homes will be filled with frills and knotty-pine paneling?" asks New York City designer Jeffrey Harris, who's hooked on the show. "No, but I do think that we will be seeing reinterpreted elements of that look."
We already are. Take the headboard in the bourgeois boudoir of main characters Don and Betty Draper, whose names, series creator Matthew Weiner says, are a tip of the pillbox hat to Dorothy Draper, the most influential Manhattan decorator of that era. Swathed in button-tufted velvet in a frosty shade between blue and green so in vogue now, the headboard is an amped-up, Doris Day version of models found at showrooms such as Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams and Restoration Hardware.
"Mad Men" set decorator Amy Wells swapped out the mahogany headboard that was part of a vintage bedroom suite used in the show in favor of a replacement whose elaborate curves and tufting made it "very sexual-looking," she says.
"The headboard scared me," admits Weiner, whose show closes its first season tonight. But he soon realized that the bedroom was important to Betty's character and needed a "special flavor," of which sexuality was an important component.
Wells says she practiced "presentism -- the act of interpreting the past through the present." She was an admirer of the Hollywood Regency headboards in Kelly Wearstler-designed hotels and had been shopping for a tufted headboard of her own at Cisco Bros. and Williams-Sonoma Home.
An even more over-the-top version of the headboard pops up in a female secret agent's apartment in the NBC comedy "Chuck." It all reflects what Diamond Foam & Fabric owner Jason Asch says is a growing interest in upholstered beds.
"Button tufting is really an art," he says. "It's like pleating or smocking on a James Galanos dress -- a sign of craftsmanship and luxury."
The result is a classic, finished look that more people are turning to as the starting point when designing a bedroom, says Dave DeMattei, president of Williams-Sonoma Home. Two years ago, the firm began offering tufted headboards inspired by the 2003 Diane Keaton film "Something's Gotta Give."
Now, custom-upholstered headboards account for the majority of the company's bed business.
"The fact that the headboard in 'Mad Men' and the ones that inspired Williams-Sonoma Home both look so current speaks to the timelessness of this look," DeMattei says.
FOR the distinctly different vibe of the Madison Avenue offices in the series, Wells found inspiration from still-popular Danish modern furniture and the corporate American designs of Florence Knoll.
"I got the whole suite of furniture in Don Draper's office from Futurama and Denmark 50 in Los Angeles," she says. "Futurama made me a beautiful coffee table with a magazine ledge, and their reproduction couches are the only ones that are comfortable on the set."
The Manhattan furniture is as sleek and tailored as the pegged skirts and bullet-bras worn by the secretarial pool, but the pinch-pleat curtains that Wells bought at JC Penney and the skirted davenport in the Draper home are meant to be as ladylike as June Cleaver's crinolines. Wells describes the Drapers' home in Ossining, N.Y. -- decorated as a counterpoint to the modernist Manhattan office furnishings -- as a "page out of a 1955 House & Garden."
Some viewers might be surprised that the Drapers "don't live in Eames-ville and wear Pucci clothes," Wells says. "But we are portraying a very realistic view of a time when we were not such a throwaway society, and buying furniture was a lifetime investment."
Series creator Weiner thinks that what was going on in American homes then is the same now: a mix of antiques, tradition and comfort. He strove to make sure that furnishings were not all contemporary, "that every previous era was represented -- the way it is in real life. I believe that Betty Draper, having an upstate New York home, would want to fill it with traditional furniture and family heirlooms."
The attention to detail impressed Jon Hamm, the actor who plays dashing but dark Don Draper.
"There was a towel holder in the bathroom with a clip shaped like a lady's gloved hand on a faux marble stand," he says. "My grandmother had one of those."
Production designer Dan Bishop based the Draper house on a 1916 Colonial Revival he found in Pasadena.
"It's a fairly prevalent style in older suburbs," Bishop says. "There's a huge chunk of this country that is still tapped into Americana and Anglophilia, folks wanting to identify with their historic past. It's certainly never going to go away for people who are raising kids and like to bake."
Bishop is responsible for creating that vibe in the Draper kitchen, Weiner says. "We talked about knotty pine because we all remembered it."
Mixed with plaid wallpaper?
"When I saw it, I thought it had the perfect match of tradition, taste and a little bit of flair that gave the room at times joy and at times a somberness," says Weiner, whose show has been renewed for a second season.
Designer Harris, a fan of wood paneling and Formica in unexpected places, says he is updating Colonial Revival furniture for contemporary interiors by giving them a fresh coat of paint or an outrageous upholstery fabric. The designer also has been working on a collection called Colonial Mod, which reinterprets Americana through the use of modern materials. Next year it will include deconstructed Colonial chairs and tables encased in acrylic boxes.
Is he a mad man? Hardly.
"It seems fresh and hip again," Harris says. "It adds history and nostalgia to a room and, at least to us city types, even a subversive touch."
david.keeps@latimes.com
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Talk Show: Hey, Listen!
Dick Cavett recalls the evening when he waited on Richard Nixon at a seafood restaurant.
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Tales of the illegal endurance race circuit.
“symptoms of the disorder known as irrational exuberance.”
150 m.p.h. and up
Take a peek inside Louis James's mind
Retrace the history of illustrated story-telling
Enter to win the Collectible Comic of the Year contest
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Today, on Oct. 18, 1968:
The United States Olympic Committee suspended two black athletes,
Tommie Smith and John Carlos,
for giving a "black power" salute as a protest during a victory ceremony in Mexico City.
======================================================================
SEXPIT: THE ONLINE DAILY
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Roxy Erickson is an all-round bike nut, and she’s spent the last fourteen months working as a producer for the Bicycle Film Festival (which runs from 17th – 21st of October), in between earning her bread as a photographer, snapping the likes of Avril Lavigne and Jimmy Saville.
My favorite places in London..
1. Pellicci’s (if you don’t know, I ain’t telling).
2. Walking across the bridges with Parliment and the eye in site contrasting each other.
3. My garden playing with my cat, Willy Nelson.
4. Riding my bike turning off of Hackney road and onto Columbia Road late at night.
Well, my hopes and dreams for the future are..
1. People to stop talking about if and why global warming is happening but instead what we’re going to do about it.
2. To say “yes” more often.
3. To learn to sleep in.
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album:Learned_Hand>photos bucketsites|buy prints
Sexpit : Screensaver Slide Show Happy Halloween
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