"Arrested Development" Movie

3rd\SE Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

By Lynette Rice(Additional reporting by Carrie Bell)\EW

Former Arrested Development costar Jeffrey Tambor has confirmed published reports that a movie version of the Emmy-winning Fox comedy is in the works. “After months of speculation, I think we have finally figured out for sure that we are indeed doing an Arrested Development movie," Tambor told EW.com at the premiere of Hellboy II on Saturday, the closing night of the L.A. Film Festival.

The series, which aired for three seasons, starred Jason Bateman, Portia de Rossi, Jessica Walter, Will Arnett, and Michael Cera. The single-camera comedy was beloved by critics, but was never a ratings bonanza for Fox, which canceled the show a year after it won the Emmy award for best comedy.

TKTS Booth in Brooklyn

3rd\SE Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON; Compiled by JULIE BLOOM\New York Times

A new TKTS discount tickets booth is opening [today] July 10 in Brooklyn. The booth, operated by the Theater Development Fund, will be in the MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn at the corner of Jay Street and Myrtle Avenue. For the most part, it will operate like the two other TKTS booths in Times Square and at the South Street Seaport, except that it will also sell tickets to Brooklyn arts events, like productions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The renovated TKTS booth in Times Square is scheduled to open later this summer.

The Selected Frank O'hara Poems

2nd\NE Quadrant: The Approval Matrix



Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) was one of the most original and influential American poets of the twentieth century. Although he grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts, O’Hara developed into the quintessential poet of mid-century Manhattan; soon after his arrival in New York in 1951 he evolved a new kind of urban poetry that brilliantly captures the heady excitements of a golden period in the city’s artistic life. O’Hara’s style exudes an insistent, seductive glamour; his mercurial poems, at once open-ended and startlingly immediate, radiate an insouciant confidence that has lost none of its freshness over the decades. O’Hara was at the heart of a vibrant artistic circle that embraced fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, as well as experimental painters such as Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jasper Johns. Their achievements are movingly celebrated in many of his poems, while at the same time he paid loving tribute to popular idols such as James Dean and Lana Turner:

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Artists at the Cedar Tavern, 1959. “We often wrote poems while listening to the painters argue,” Frank O’Hara recalled. (John Cohen/Getty Images/via New York Times)

This generous new selection by Mark Ford reflects all the phases and varied achievements of O’Hara’s tragically foreshortened career, including his drama, and is followed by an appendix of key prose texts such as “Personism,” in which O’Hara succinctly summed up his overall approach to poetry: “You just go on your nerve.” -- Amazon

Rhapsody Eliminates Restrictions

2nd\NE Quadrant: The Approval Matrix


US digital music service Rhapsody is the latest company to embrace MP3 downloads without copy restrictions.

"We're no longer competing with the iPod. We're embracing it," said Neil Smith, vice president at the firm.

Until recently, Rhapsody, which is owned by Real and MTV, had focused on a subscription service, which allowed users to stream an unlimited number of songs for between $13 (£6.50) and $15 (£7.50) a month. Rhapsody's streamed songs do not play on Apple's iPod, the world's most popular MP3 player.

The majority of MP3 tracks will cost 99 cents (50p), while albums will sell for $9.99 (£5). The shift comes as the British record industry announced that digital sales were going "from strength to strength". -- BBC

Pretend DEA Agent from Missouri

2nd\NE Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

By Dirk McQuigley\Daily Kos

The small town of Gerard Missouri had a drug problem — specifically, a meth problem — until a man claiming to be a federal agent showed up and began racking up drug collars in the rural community of just 1,100 residents.

That is until a reporter from the local weekly newspaper discovered that the "agent," Bill Jakob, was just a wannabe cop playing a DEA agent. The fiasco has led to multi-million dollar lawsuits by those "arrested," the dismissal of three of Gerard's five police officers, and a potential impeachment of the mayor.

The full New York Times article can be read here.

Hookworms May Cure Allergies

2nd\NE Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

By Jo Revill\The Observer

The experts [A team of British scientists] wanted to see if there would be any unpleasant or dangerous side effects from the worm, Ancylostoma duodenale, so they made the bold decision to allow their own bodies to be infected. Each scientist had to stick some of the tiny hookworm larvae on to their skin with a plaster and wait for the larvae to wriggle through the skin into the lungs, through the bloodstream and into the intestine, where they would produce eggs. The eggs are excreted, but once the adult hookworms are in the gut they start to suck blood from the walls of the intestine.

The theory is that this infection triggers an immune response which helps to 'dampen down' the over-reaction of the rest of the system, which is why patients with allergies such as asthma develop symptoms.

Professor David Pritchard and his team at Nottingham University's School of Pharmacy administered different amounts of the hookworms to themselves to prove that it would be safe. Pritchard himself stuck 50 of the larvae onto his skin.

'The trials proved that at a low 'dosage' of 10 worms the infection was safe. Last week the first patients arrived at the school of pharmacy to have the hookworm larvae administered, to see if it would quell hay fever symptoms. Pritchard said: 'The pollen season is coming in spring and we hope that we might see an alleviation of symptoms in some of the patients who received the worms. If we think there's some indication of success, we would move on to asthma patients.'

Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls

2nd\NE Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

"Take Out"

2nd\NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

Take Out is a day-in-the-life of Ming Ding (Charles Jang), an illegal Chinese immigrant working as a deliveryman for a Chinese take-out shop in New York City. Ming is behind with payments on his huge debt to the smugglers who brought him to the United States. The collectors have given him until the end of the day to deliver the money that is due. After borrowing most of the money from friends and relatives, Ming realizes that the remainder must come from the day's delivery tips. In order to do so, he must make more than double his average daily income.

In a social-realist style, the camera follows Ming on his deliveries throughout the upper Manhattan neighborhood where social and economic extremes exist side by side. Intercutting between Ming's deliveries and the daily routine of the restaurant, Take Out presents a harshly real look at the daily lives of illegal Chinese immigrants in New York City.
-- Take Out The Movie

"Dynamic Towers"

2nd\NE Quadrant: The Approval Matrix



One can reserve an apartment here.

The World Trade Center Site Debacle

1st\NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

By DEROY MURDOCK, Scripps Howard News Service

In olden days, Americans needed just 13 and a half months to erect the Empire State Building, four and a half years to build Hoover Dam, and six years, four months to install the Transcontinental Railroad. And yet this Independence Day, six years, nine months, and three weeks have elapsed since September 11, and Ground Zero remains an 80-foot-deep international embarrassment for the United States.

The wholesale lethargy at Ground Zero became painfully clear in Tuesday's report on the 16-acre site ...

Overall construction costs and schedules cannot be determined due to 15 pending "essential decisions."

Signature elements such as the Freedom Tower and September 11 memorial will be incomplete 10 years after the 9-11 attacks. Reported cost overruns are at least $1.23 billion, and rising rapidly.

Mayor Bloomstein Mispronounces "Garfunkel"

1st\NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

Yesterday[6\30\08], Mayor Bloomberg and Jon Bon Jovi announced that the Jersey rocker (now a resident of Manhattan) would be one of a select handful of artists to play Central Park. On July 12 he will take over the Great Lawn and perform for free for 60,000 fans.

In the above video, Bloomberg and Bon Jovi announce the concert together. Watch as Bloomberg makes some bad baseball jokes and then mispronounces the name of Art Garfunkel, one of the only artists to perform previously on the lawn (and one of Bloomberg's neighbors on 79th Street!) and Bon Jovi mercilessly teases him. -- NYMag

Chinese Ecodisaster Olympic Problems

1st\NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix


By JIM YARDLEY\New York Times

With less than six weeks before it plays host to the Olympic sailing regatta, the city of Qingdao, China, has mobilized thousands of people and an armada of small boats to clean up an algal bloom choking the coastline and threatening to impede the competition.

Local officials have begun an intense effort to clean up the algae by mid-July. News reports estimate as many as 20,000 people have either volunteered or been ordered to participate in the operation, while 1,000 boats are scooping algae out of the Yellow Sea. The country’s official news agency, Xinhua, reported that algae currently cover a third of the coastal waters designated for the Olympic competition.

Instead, scientists blamed the increased rainfall and warmer waters in the Yellow Sea for the bloom. Algae blooms now affect more than 5,000 square miles of seawater, Xinhua reported.

“I believe we will make sure the Olympics sailing area is clean by July 15 through our efforts, and make sure the Olympics sailing goes smoothly,” Mr. Yuan said, according to the Shandong News Web site.

Sculpture Falls at MET

1st\NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix


(AP) A 15th-century sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was damaged after it came loose from its moorings and fell to the floor.

The museum says the damaged piece is a terra-cotta sculpture of Saint Michael the Archangel by Andrea della Robbia.

It fell late Monday night or early Tuesday. It had been hanging over a doorway in the European Paintings and Decorative Arts Galleries since 1996.

The museum said Tuesday that a preliminary investigation shows the 62-inch-by-32-inch piece can be repaired.

As a result of the accident, the Met is inspecting all its pedestals and wall mounts.

-- CBS News

9/11 German Shepherd to be Cloned

1st\NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix


The German shepherd, who lives with his owner, James Symington, in Los Angeles, was picked by BioArts International, a Californian cloning firm, as the most "clone-worthy" canine in a competition offering an owner a free chance to replicate their pet.

Mr Symington said he and Trakr were among the first search and rescue teams to arrive at the New York site after the attacks, and were responsible for locating the last human survivor under about 30 feet of debris.

"Trakr means the world to me," Mr Symington said. "To know that part of him is going to live on is just beyond words. It's the greatest gift I've ever received."

In the next month, BioArts said it would transport a sample of Trakr's DNA to the South Korean lab of its partner, the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, and the clone could be ready by the end of this year.

-- Telegraph

The Approval Matrix: Week of July 14, 2008