March 18, 2012
Sergio Leone [lee-oh-nee] (1929 – 1989) was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter most associated with the ‘Spaghetti Western’ genre. Leone’s film-making style includes juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots. His movies include ‘The Last Days of Pompeii,’ ‘The Colossus of Rhodes,’ the Dollars Trilogy (‘A Fistful of Dollars,’ ‘For a Few Dollars More,’ and ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’), Once ‘Upon a Time in the West,’ ‘Duck, You Sucker!’, and ‘Once Upon a Time in America.’
Born in Rome, Leone was the son of the cinema pioneer Vincenzo Leone (known as director Roberto Roberti) and the silent film actress Edvige Valcarenghi (Bice Waleran). During his schooldays, Leone was a classmate of his later musical collaborator Ennio Morricone for a time. After watching his father work on film sets, Leone began his own career in the film industry at the age of 18 after dropping out of law studies at the university.
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March 17, 2012
Rose Mary Woods (1917 – 2005) was Richard Nixon’s secretary from his days in the Congress in 1951, through his Vice Presidency, Presidency, and until the end of his political career. Before H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman became the operators of Nixon’s presidential campaign, Woods was Nixon’s gatekeeper. Rose Mary was born in northeastern Ohio, part of blue-collar America and as most such households were then, her family was strongly Democratic. Following graduation from McKinley High School, she went to work for Royal China Inc., the city’s largest employer. Her fiance died during WWII; to escape the memories of her hometown she moved to Washington, D.C. in 1943, working in a variety of federal offices until she met Nixon while she was a secretary to the Select House Committee on Foreign Aid.
Impressed by his neatness and efficiency, she accepted his job offer in 1951. She developed a very close relationship with the entire Nixon family, especially First Lady Pat Nixon. Fiercely loyal to Nixon, Woods claimed responsibility in a 1974 grand jury testimony for inadvertently erasing up to five minutes of the 181⁄2 minute gap in a June 20, 1972 audio tape. Her demonstration of how this might have occurred — which depended upon her stretching to simultaneously press controls several feet apart (what the press dubbed the ‘Rose Mary Stretch’) — was met with skepticism from those who believed the erasures, from whatever source, to be deliberate. The contents of the gap remain a mystery.
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March 16, 2012
Enzo Ferrari (1898 – 1988) was an Italian race car driver and entrepreneur, the founder of the Scuderia Ferrari Grand Prix motor racing team, and subsequently of the Ferrari car manufacturer.
He was often referred to as ‘il Commendatore.’ Ferrari’s management style was autocratic and he was known to pit driver against driver in the hope of improving performance. He did not often get close to his drivers. Enzo Ferrari spent a reserved life, and rarely granted interviews.
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March 16, 2012
Zigaboo Modeliste (b. 1948) is an American drummer best known as a founding member of the funk group The Meters. Considered to be one of the most innovative, and highly acclaimed drummers ever to hail from New Orleans. Modeliste is a pioneer of second-line funk. He remains a strong influence for drummers and his syncopated style is the source of a great many hip-hop and drum and bass samplers.
He also cofounded The Wild Tchoupitoulas and has worked extensively with other musicians, notably Keith Richards, Robert Palmer, and Dr. John. Zigaboo released his first solo CD in 2000 – ‘Zigaboo.com.’ In 2011, he released his fourth solo album entitled ‘New Life.’ This record has elements of rock, funk and blues and features such artists as arranger Wardell Quezerque and Trumpeter Mic Gillet of Tower of Power fame. He resides in Oakland, California and continues to teach, release records, as well as manage his publishing Company Jomod Music and record label JZM records.
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March 11, 2012
Brian Bosworth (b.1965), also known as the “The Boz,” is a former American professional football player. He played college football for the University of Oklahoma, and was a two-time All-American. He played professionally for the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks. In college, he was known for his radical hairstyles and criticism of the NCAA as much as his play on the field. Bosworth was never one to shy from publicity or controversy.
On more than one occasion he referred to the NCAA as the ‘National Communists Against Athletes.’ He wore a shirt bearing that slogan during the 1987 Orange Bowl. Banned from the game because of steroid use, Bosworth unveiled the shirt while standing on the sidelines to the shock and outrage of many, including his own coach, Barry Switzer. While Switzer was known for running a loose ship, this incident was too much even for him, and he threw Bosworth off the team.
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March 9, 2012
Topiary, real name Jake Davis, is a hacker and self-described ‘Simple prankster turned swank garden hedge. Worked with Anonymous, LulzSec, and other such paragons of intense cyber victory.’ He is an associate of the Internet group Anonymous, which have publicly claimed various online attacks, including hacking HBGary, Westboro Baptist Church, and Gawker. They have also claimed responsibility for the defacing of government websites in countries such as Zimbabwe, Syria, Tunisia, Ireland, and Egypt. 18-year Jake Davis was arrested in Scotland in 2011.
Police confiscated a Dell laptop and a 100-gigabyte hard drive that had 16 different virtual machines. The hard drive also contained details relating to an attack on Sony and hundreds of thousands of email addresses and passwords were found on the computer. A London court released Davis on bail under the conditions that he live under curfew with his mother and have no access to the Internet. His lawyer stated that, while his client did help publicize LulzSec and Anonymous attacks, he lacks the technical skills to have been anything but a sympathizer. After his arrest, Anonymous launched a ‘Free Topiary’ campaign.
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March 9, 2012
The Jester (th3j35t3r) is a computer vigilante who describes himself as a grey hat ‘hacktivist.’ He claimed responsibility for attacks on WikiLeaks, 4chan, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Islamist websites. He claims to be acting out of American patriotism. The Jester uses a denial-of-service (DoS) tool known as ‘XerXeS,’ that he claims to have developed.
One of The Jester’s habits is to tweet ‘TANGO DOWN’ on Twitter whenever he successfully takes down a website. The Jester had stated that he was a former soldier and had served in Afghanistan and elsewhere.The Jester claims to have originally developed his DoS script as a means to test and harden servers. After learning from an article that Jihadists were using the Internet to recruit and coordinate terror cells, The Jester resolved to disrupting online communications between Jihadists. He weaponized his script and created a front-end known as ‘XerXeS’ in order to solve the script’s usability problems.
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March 9, 2012
Sabu, real name Hector Xavier Monsegur (b. 1983), is an American computer hacker and the founder of the hacking group LulzSec. LulzSec intervened in the affairs of organizations such as News Corporation, Stratfor, British and American law enforcement bodies, and Irish political party Fine Gael.
Sabu later turned informant for the FBI, working with the agency for over ten months to aid them in identifying other hackers from Lulzsec and related groups. His online handle is a reference to a professional wrestler. Monsegur was based out of a housing project on the lower east side of Manhattan while operating as Sabu; he is currently in a witness protection program.
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March 8, 2012
Jan Švankmajer [shvank-mai-er] (b.1934) is a Czech filmmaker and artist whose work spans several media. He is a self-labeled surrealist known for his surreal animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Terry Gilliam and the Brothers Quay. An early influence on his later artistic development was a puppet theater he was given for Christmas as a child. He studied at the College of Applied Arts in Prague and later in the Department of Puppetry at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts.
He contributed to Emil Radok’s film ‘Doktor Faust’ in 1958 and then began working for Prague’s Semafor Theatre where he founded the Theatre of Masks. He then moved on to the Laterna Magika multimedia theatre, where he renewed his association with Radok. This theatrical experience is reflected in Švankmajer’s first film ‘The Last Trick,’ which was released in 1964. Under the influence of theoretician Vratislav Effenberger Švankmajer moved from the mannerism of his early work to classic surrealism, first manifested in his film ‘The Garden’ (1968), and joined the Czechoslovakian Surrealist Group.
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March 8, 2012
PES (Adam Pesapane) is a director and animator of numerous short films and commercials. He uses everyday objects and stop-motion animation to create short films such as ‘Roof Sex,’ and ‘Western Spaghetti.’ An early influence on PES’s animation style is the work of Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer. PES’s first animated film, ‘Roof Sex,’ features two life-sized chairs having sex on a New York rooftop. Though only a minute long, the film took 20 shooting days to complete. The war short ‘KaBoom!’ (2004) was instrumental in defining the artist’s personal style and approach to animating objects. The film features an atomic airstrike on a miniature city using children’s toys and festive objects such as gift bows, Christmas ornaments, and clown-head cupcake toppers.
In ‘Game Over’ (2006) PES recreated classic arcade death sequences (from the games Centipede, Frogger, Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man) with familiar objects including muffins, toy cars, insects, pizza and fried eggs. The film was inspired by an interview with Toru Iwatani, the creator of Pac-Man, who said the original source of inspiration for the Pac-Man character was a pizza with a slice missing. In 2008, PES released his short ‘Western Spaghetti.’ The film shows PES cooking spaghetti (the hands in the film are PES’s) but all the ingredients in the dish are replaced with objects such as tomato pin cushions, rubber bands, rubik’s cubes, post-it notes, and bubblewrap, and all are brought to life through stop-motion animation.
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March 7, 2012
Joseph Kony (b.1964) is a Ugandan guerrilla group leader, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a group engaged in a violent campaign to establish theocratic government based on the Ten Commandments throughout Uganda. The LRA say that spirits have been sent to communicate this mission directly to Kony. Directed by Kony, the LRA have also spread to parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. It has abducted and forced an estimated 66,000 children to fight for them, and has also forced the internal displacement of over 2,000,000 people since its rebellion began in 1986.
Kony received a surge of attention in early March 2012 with the release of ‘Kony 2012,’ a thirty minute documentary, was made by filmaker Jason Russell for the campaign group Invisible Children Inc.
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March 7, 2012
Milton Glaser (b.1929 is an American graphic designer, best known for the ‘I Love New York logo,’ his ‘Bob Dylan’ poster, the ‘DC bullet’ logo used by DC Comics from 1977 to 2005, and the ‘Brooklyn Brewery’ logo. He also founded ‘New York Magazine’ with Clay Felker in 1968. Glaser was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in New York. He was educated at Manhattan’s High School of Music & Art (now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), graduated from the Cooper Union in 1951 and later, via a Fulbright Scholarship, the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna under Giorgio Morandi. He was greatly inspired by his sister’s partner, who had studied typography in great depth.
In 1954 Glaser was a founder, and president, of Push Pin Studios formed with several of his Cooper Union classmates. Glaser’s work is characterized by directness, simplicity and originality. He uses any medium or style to solve the problem at hand. His style ranges wildly from primitive to avant garde in his countless book jackets, album covers, advertisements and direct mail pieces and magazine illustrations. Milton Glaser, Inc. was established in 1974 in Manhattan, and is still producing work in a wide range of design disciplines, including: corporate identities, environmental and interior design, packaging, and product design.
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