#brad gooch

[tonreihe]

“The Catholic Church does not dictate to my family what time I go to Mass.”

Flannery O’Connor, age six, puts her foot down.

(Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor)

[guy60660]

Brad Gooch | Robert Giard

[deadpresidents]

Read any good books since your last update about your recent reading?

Yes, although I forget when I last shared the books I've been reading, so hopefully I don't repeat anything.

I know that I've repeated this book because I've mentioned it several times over the past couple of weeks, but I can't help but remind everyone again about Steve Coll's excellent new book, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO). It's definitely the best book I've read so far this year, and it's one of the better books I've read in the past 10 years.

Other recent books that I've read and would recommend checking out:

•Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Brad Gooch

•The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania, and Mutiny in the South Pacific (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Brandon Presser

•UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here -- and Out There (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Garrett M. Graff Garrett Graff has quickly become one of those authors who I go out of my way to immediately pick up his latest books because he's so well-connected and I ALWAYS learn fascinating things from his books. I don't know if there's a writer/journalist today who has better access to the American defense establishment or proven to be more capable of shining a light on many of the most secretive aspects of the United States government.

•"Uncool and Incorrect" in Chile: The Nixon Administration and the Downfall of Salvador Allende (BOOK | KINDLE) by Stephen M. Streeter

•Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Jared Cohen

•The Liberation of Paris: How Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and von Choltitz Saved the City of Light (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Jean Edward Smith

•Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by David Mitchell

•The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis, 1700-1948 (BOOK) by Ilan Pappe

•In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Terry Alford

•Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Brian A. Catlos

•Borgata: Rise of Empire: A History of the American Mafia, Volume 1 of the Borgata Trilogy (BOOK | KINDLE) by Louis Ferrante

•Soldier of Destiny: Slavery, Secession, and the Redemption of Ulysses S. Grant (BOOK | KINDLE) by John Reeves

•His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Joseph Lelyveld

•Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Scott Eyman

[jeoel]

[quotesfrommyreading]

Rumi was born in the early thirteenth century, in what is now Afghanistan. He later settled in Konya, in present-day Turkey, with his family. His father was a preacher and religious scholar, and he introduced Rumi to Sufism. Rumi continued his theological education in Syria, where he studied the more traditional legal codes of Sunni Islam, and later returned to Konya as a seminary teacher. It was there that he met an elder traveller, Shams-i-Tabriz, who became his mentor. The nature of the intimate friendship between the two is much debated, but Shams, everyone agrees, had a lasting influence on Rumi’s religious practice and his poetry. In a new biography of Rumi, “Rumi’s Secret,” Brad Gooch describes how Shams pushed Rumi to question his scriptural education, debating Koranic passages with him and emphasizing the idea of devotion as finding oneness with God. Rumi would come to blend the intuitive love for God that he found in Sufism with the legal codes of Sunni Islam and the mystical thought he learned from Shams.

This unusual tapestry of influences set Rumi apart from many of his contemporaries, Keshavarz told me. Still, Rumi built a large following in cosmopolitan Konya, incorporating Sufis, Muslim literalists and theologians, Christians, and Jews, as well as the local Sunni Seljuk rulers. In “Rumi’s Secret,” Gooch helpfully chronicles the political events and religious education that influenced Rumi. “Rumi was born into a religious family and followed the proscribed rules of daily prayer and fasting throughout his entire life,” Gooch writes. Even in Gooch’s book, though, there is a tension between these facts and the desire to conclude that Rumi, in some sense, transcended his background—that, as Gooch puts it, he “made claims for a ‘religion of love’ that went beyond all organized faiths.” What can get lost in such readings is the extent to which Rumi’s Muslim teaching shaped even those ideas. As Mojadeddi notes, the Koran acknowledges Christians and Jews as “people of the book,” offering a starting point toward universalism. “The universality that many revere in Rumi today comes from his Muslim context.”

  —  The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi

[anniflamma]

Yes !! A question for you my friend !

I saw a post of yours showing a rumi quote about shams and you said in the tags that the first translation was released in 2006 , if you don't mind could you give me the name of the book poems or anything I can find about them?

For scientific reasons ofc

You've come to the right place, my friend! But I need to correct something: the book that was released in 2006 is The Forbidden Rumi. That one is a collection of poems that were banned when the Islamic world started to become more like the British Victorians cuz they can't help themselves to ruin everyting. Essentially, all poems that were too 'sensual' or too gay were put on the top corner shelf, hoping no one would notice them. So it wasn't until 2006 that someone actually translated them into English. However, other Rumi poems have had English translations since the 1760s.

I bought a book called Rumi: Unseen Poems, which was released in 2019, translated by Brad Gooch and Maryam Mortaz. In that collection, they specifically picked poems that had never been translated into English before, and of course, many of them are really gay. So it follows the same motivation as The Forbidden Rumi. Also, in that post where I counted every single time Rumi mentioned Shams.... yeah, that wasn’t even all of them… The guy just won’t stop gushing about him!

[virtualmemoriespodcast]

Episode 579 - Brad Gooch

With RADIANT: The Life and Line of Keith Haring (Harper), Brad Gooch brings us the biography of Keith Haring, an artist who transformed public art & the art world in the 1980s and whose work has become part of global culture in the three decades since his untimely death from AIDS. We get into Brad's common threads with Haring, the parallels between this book and his biography of Rumi, how fatherhood helped Brad better understand Haring, and his surprise at discovering what a serious artist Haring was. We talk about why Haring's work makes more sense now than in the '80s, what he would have made of social media, the fire that drove him to make more than 10,000 pieces of art in his decade-plus career, the relationship of Haring to artists of color (among other race issues), where the Radiant Baby image came from, and what the younger gay population doesn't know about the AIDS crisis. We also discuss the incredible memorial of Keith and Howard Brookner at a recent Madonna concert, why 60 is a great age to start having kids, how Instagram reminds him of '80s social life, the parallels between the AIDS crisis and the early months of COVID, what Brad's learned in the course of writing four biographies, why Barbra Streisand's memoir reminds him of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle (!), and more. Follow Brad on Instagram and listen to our 2015 and 2017 conversations, and check out the Nakamura Keith Haring Collection • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter

Check out the new episode of The Virtual Memories Show

[spacewitchbot]

get to know me better tag meme

thanks for tagging me, @idrilka !

rules: answer all the questions, then tag 9 people you want to get to know better!

three ships: minkey (choi minho/kim kibum from shinee), fengqing (feng xin/mu qing from tgcf), and uhhh aziraphale/crowley from good omens

first ship: first thing I ever sought out fic for was phryne fisher/jack robinson from miss fisher’s murder mysteries.

last song i listened to: abracadabra by brown-eyed girls. it’s gay

last movie i watched: i watched strange world with the botkids. i liked the visuals and the characters, the plot felt kind of preachy even though it’s a message that’s really important to me personally, so mixed review for that one, mostly positive

currently reading: city poet, a biography of frank o’hara by brad gooch. it’s very gossipy in a good way

currently watching: moonlight chicken (thai bl) and I just finished beyond evil (kdrama)

currently consuming: nothing

currently craving: i want hot tea without having to go downstairs and get it

tagging @thirtysixsavefiles @distantbluesky @brofisting @pearlo @no-birdstofly @helcinda @sophia-helix @halotolerant @deepbutdazzlingdarkness

[sheoftheeyeballs]

I long for the morning breezes to breathe.

I have my breath but long for someone to tell secrets to.

-Rumi (trans. Brad Gooch & Maryam Mortaz; Unseen Poems)

[ulkaralakbarova]

When a reporter goes undercover as a nanny to get the inside scoop on a playboy prince, she gets tangled in some royal intrigue and ends up finding love – but will she be able to keep up her lie? Credits: TheMovieDb. Film Cast: Amber: Rose McIver Prince Richard: Ben Lamb Queen Helena: Alice Krige Princess Emily: Honor Kneafsey Count Simon: Theo Devaney Mrs. Averill: Sarah Douglas Baroness Sophia: Emma Louise Saunders Prime Minister Denzil: Tom Knight Rudy Moore: Daniel Fathers Mr. Little: Richard Ashton Max Golding: Amy Marston Melissa: Tahirah Sharif Andy: Joel McVeagh Ron: Vaughn Johseph D.P.S. Gill: Paul Courtenay Hyu Jack: Doru Catanescu Vlad: Axel Moustache Sandy: Irina Săulescu Ian: Radu Andrei Micu Nigel: Lace Akpojaro Ted: Andrew Barron Film Crew: Director: Alex Zamm Writer: Karen Schaler Associate Producer: Vince Balzano Executive Producer: Eric Jarboe Unit Production Manager: Amy Krell Executive Producer: Brad Krevoy Casting: Carolyn McLeod Executive Producer: Amanda Phillips Executive Producer: Jimmy Townsend Editor: Marshall Harvey Casting: Melissa DeLizia Gaffer: Lucian Diaconu Music Editor: Dave Lawrence Director of Photography: Viorel Sergovici Co-Producer: Nate Atkins Production Design: Sorin Dima Co-Executive Producer: Mickey Gooch First Assistant Director: Joel Morales Line Producer: Cristian Bostanescu Camera Operator: Lulu de Hillerin Camera Operator: Alecu Popescu Production Sound Mixer: Nicolae Radu Original Music Composer: Zack Ryan Movie Reviews: trineo03: First of all, the acting in this film isn’t that bad. You can easily tell that everybody is trying their hardest to portray these characters. Some of them came across as real-life people while others just felt like characters in a movie. This could mainly be pointed to the writing in this film. Some of the lines in this film were just hilariously bad and cringy and I would give examples but I already forgot them. But I do have to say the scenery was stunning and the production on this was well done. Each set and costume looked perfect for each scene. The costumes fit each character and showed a bit more into their personality. For example, Richard’s outfits made him look like royalty but at the same time, a normal guy because that’s what he wants to be. This film had lots of pacing issues. From beginning to end it didn’t feel like that was the speed it should be going at. The beginning felt slow while the ending felt to fast. The creators of the film might have thought they had a longer film and then realized they only had a one hour and thirty-two-minute film so they had to quickly resolve the film. The last thing I want to talk about is the relationship in this film. It’s not believable or relatable. I know it shouldn’t be relatable seeing how it is about a journalist falling in love with a prince but the writers still should make it so some people can relate to at least one of them. And it isn’t believable because it seems too rushed. Throughout the entire film, they are hardly around each other and then all of a sudden he just loves her. There is no explanation why just little subtle hints. In the end, A Christmas Prince is perfect for people who like RomComs but for others not so much. I give A Christmas Prince a 6/10. Kamurai: Decent watch, probably won’t watch again, but can recommend. While it isn’t anything truly special, it’s a decent version of a “journalist in disguise falls in love” trope. Though the object of affection being a prince allows for resources that almost anyone wouldn’t turn down. There certainly is a lot of production put into the movie to maintain the grand perception of royals, but the best part of the movie is the heart felt Christmas vibe of it. Unfortunately, this is mostly achieved through the secondary characters and them influencing the royal family.

[tonreihe]

Mary Flannery O’Connor, born March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. (Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor)

[dankusner]

GOOCH + HARING

“Finding a chronicler with the proper combination of familiarity and detachment can be like going on a series of bad Hinge dates, but in Gooch, Haring has met his match.”

Book Review: ‘Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring,’ by Brad Gooch

A New Keith Haring Biography Draws the Most Complete Picture Yet

In his thoroughly researched “Radiant,” Brad Gooch considers the short, blazing life of the ’80s artist, activist and man about downtown.

A photograph of Keith Haring shows a young shirtless man, with curly hair and large clear glasses, from the waist up. Behind him is a brightly colored red, yellow, green and black painting that suggests bodies in motion. Modern art can baffle and intimidate. Keith Haring strove to democratize it.

Haring, who died at 31 of complications from AIDS after a brief but dizzyingly productive international career, drew and painted for the masses and the kids, sometimes getting handcuffed and fined for his trouble. In the garbage-and-graffiti-weary New York of the 1980s, his creations — first chalked on blank advertising boards in subways, then bolder and more enduring, like the safety-orange “Crack Is Wack” mural that still stands in an East Harlem handball court — were like a fresh new roll of wallpaper.

As his canvases and sculptures began selling to private collectors for big bucks, he carried on doing public work, notably for a children’s hospital in Paris.

He loved children, and his more G-rated drawings — with faint inflection of Robert Hargreaves’s Mr. Men and Little Miss series — have been grafted onto many books for them, one by his sister Kay Haring. (All four siblings were given “K.A.H.” initials after their parents’ alma mater, Kutztown Area High in Pennsylvania, which the son — Mr. Famous — found screamingly funny.)

There have been oodles of ink spilled previously about the artist for adults too, including from his own pen. Haring’s journals, published in 1996, are still in print, and he’s been the topic of multiple monographs and a Lives of the Artists installment by the former Barneys fixture Simon Doonan.

The authorized biography (more of an oral history) that soon followed his death, by the critic, composer and photographer John Gruen, is harder to locate, and the disco-dotted musical it inspired was a bust. Gruen’s memoir, with the delightful title “Callas Kissed Me … Lenny Too!,” describes how his daughter, Julia, came to be employed as Haring’s assistant and studio manager, and then executor of his estate and director of his foundation — maybe a little cozy.

A New Keith Haring Biography Draws the Most Complete Picture Yet In his thoroughly researched “Radiant,” Brad Gooch considers the short, blazing life of the ’80s artist, activist and man about downtown.

March 3, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

A photograph of Keith Haring shows a young shirtless man, with curly hair and large clear glasses, from the waist up. Behind him is a brightly colored red, yellow, green and black painting that suggests bodies in motion.

Keith Haring at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in 1978, in front of his untitled painting.The Keith Haring Foundation

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

RADIANT: The Life and Line of Keith Haring, by Brad Gooch

Modern art can baffle and intimidate. Keith Haring strove to democratize it.

Haring, who died at 31 of complications from AIDS after a brief but dizzyingly productive international career, drew and painted for the masses and the kids, sometimes getting handcuffed and fined for his trouble.

In the garbage-and-graffiti-weary New York of the 1980s, his creations — first chalked on blank advertising boards in subways, then bolder and more enduring, like the safety-orange “Crack Is Wack” mural that still stands in an East Harlem handball court — were like a fresh new roll of wallpaper.

As his canvases and sculptures began selling to private collectors for big bucks, he carried on doing public work, notably for a children’s hospital in Paris.

He loved children, and his more G-rated drawings — with faint inflection of Robert Hargreaves’s Mr. Men and Little Miss series — have been grafted onto many books for them, one by his sister Kay Haring. (All four siblings were given “K.A.H.” initials after their parents’ alma mater, Kutztown Area High in Pennsylvania, which the son — Mr. Famous — found screamingly funny.)

There have been oodles of ink spilled previously about the artist for adults too, including from his own pen. Haring’s journals, published in 1996, are still in print, and he’s been the topic of multiple monographs and a Lives of the Artists installment by the former Barneys fixture Simon Doonan.

The authorized biography (more of an oral history) that soon followed his death, by the critic, composer and photographer John Gruen, is harder to locate, and the disco-dotted musical it inspired was a bust.

Gruen’s memoir, with the delightful title “Callas Kissed Me … Lenny Too!,” describes how his daughter, Julia, came to be employed as Haring’s assistant and studio manager, and then executor of his estate and director of his foundation — maybe a little cozy.

Finding a chronicler with the proper combination of familiarity and detachment can be like going on a series of bad Hinge dates, but in Gooch, Haring has met his match. “Radiant,” referring to both Haring’s recurrent drawing of a crawling baby and his own fast-burning star, is a faithful retracing of his steps, with over 200 people interviewed or consulted: devoted and probably definitive. (The word “magisterial” is too stuffy to apply to its subject, who favored jeans, sneaks and bared biceps.)

Gooch, himself an energetic multihyphenate, has written biographies of Frank O’Hara, Flannery O’Connor and Rumi. He is a poet, which shows in phrasing at once shrewd and evocative. “His radiant baby was a trademark, a brand,” he writes of Haring’s signature image, “but also a warm compress of meaning.”

“Smash Cut,” Gooch’s memoir, detailed his own arrival from Pennsylvania to the late-70s Manhattan club scene, and his love affair with the filmmaker Howard Brookner, who also died in his 30s of AIDS.

He writes of originally intending to do Haring’s life as a novel; this endeavor, published less than a year after a big retrospective at the Broad museum in Los Angeles, is obviously more dutiful — it’s hard for prose to keep pace with Keith’s primary-colored kapow — but nonetheless a public service. Facts are not wack.

Born in 1958, the same year NASA launched its first spacecraft[16], Haring wanted to be an artist from pretty much the moment he could clutch a crayon. He was plainly influenced by Disneyland, television and other boomer eye candy. His father, Allen, an electronics technician, amateur cartoonist and basement ham radio tinkerer, was in the same Marine squadron as Lee Harvey Oswald (���That’s Ozzie!” he exclaimed, seeming him shot on TV); his mother, Joan, sewed little Keith a bat-eared hat to watch “Batman.” (Later, with terrible poignancy, she would help sew his memorial panel for the AIDS Memorial Quilt.)

In perfect sync with his much-hyped generation, Keith turned on, tuned in and would drop out of two art schools; he was a workaholic, but on his own terms. He adored the Monkees more than the Beatles and was briefly a Jesus freak. His homosexuality emerged gradually and was not much discussed with his parents, even after he became a prominent member of ACT UP.

He always liked being part of something bigger. “It was never just Keith; there was always a circle around him,” the curator and reliable bon mot generator Jeffrey Deitch tells Gooch. “He was like a Pied Piper.” Starting at around 15, and later at the Paradise Garage, Palladium et al., Haring did an unholy amount of drugs.

Once he gets to Ed Koch’s Gotham, it’s black and white and bled all over. The artist Kenny Scharf, a friend, rival and onetime roommate, describes the stabbing victim who wanders into one of their parties: “People thought it was an art performance and just watched him wander around.”

Gooch likens Haring’s homage to Michael Stewart, a Black graffiti artist who died after police brutality, to Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”

Such highbrow comparisons have been late arriving.

Haring may have out-Warholed Warhol, a mentor and collaborator, in enjoying celebrity friends — “there goes the neighborhood” The Village Voice captioned a photo of him with Brooke Shields — and the Concorde. But he was less cool than hot, eager and earnest: handing out free buttons and selling cheap merch at his prescient Pop Shop but fretting about his place in the canon and firing off indignant letters to editors.

Time magazine’s influential critic Robert Hughes emerges here as a particular Joker to his Batman, likening Haring and his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat to “those two what’s their names on ‘Miami Vice’” and calling them “Keith Boring” and “Jean-Michel Basketcase.” (Good lord!)

“They come out fast, but it’s a fast world,” Haring said of his squiggles to Charles Osgood in 1982, and that was before we all uneasily merged onto the information superhighway.

With licensing and replication now turbocharged — you can buy Haring wares on the sale rack at Uniqlo — Gooch’s book insists readers slow down and consider the artist’s legacy. And its cover feels like a secret handshake, done in the colors of an old-fashioned New York City taxicab.

RADIANT: The Life and Line of Keith Haring | By Brad Gooch | Harper | 512 pp. | $40

[bookjubilee]

Book Review: ‘Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring,’ by Brad Gooch

bookjubilee.com http://dlvr.it/T3XwxK

[fivedollarradio]

Pictures of Freddie from the late 70s, the sort leather era, makes me think of this quote from writer Brad Gooch on being a newly out gay man at that time: 

Most of us experienced our first love in our mid-twenties, in the seventies. And even though the smell and pitch of fast sex was palpable on every street downtown, so, too, were aching hearts and love-tossed looks. The seventies had a romantic aura because so much first love among grown men.

[fivedollarradio]

I think for gay guys, at least of that generation, the adolescent spring of first love, the pang often described in short stories, was invariably arrested. I suppose we were still recovering from fifties' childhoods in a repressive society, where there was no such thing as 'gay' or 'coming out.' Most of us experienced our first love in our mid-twenties, in the seventies. And even though the smell and pitch of fast sex was palpable on every street downtown, so, too, were aching hearts and love-tossed looks. The seventies had a romantic aura because so much first love among grown men.

Brad Gooch from Smash Cuts

[jonathanmorse]

Photohistory: Frank O'Hara during World War II

Photohistory: Frank O’Hara during World War II

In City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (Knopf, 1993), Brad Gooch publishes two photographs of the poet taken on board USS Nicholas, the destroyer on which he served during World War II. I don’t know whether the third photograph below has also made it into the literary record, but in any case I’ve photoshopped it to make it a little clearer.

It comes from the ship’s wartime cruise book,…