Atlanta

See the article in its original context from September 2, 2001 Section Page Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. Some days, Jonathan Franzen wrote in the dark. He did so in a spartan studio on 125th Street in East Harlem, behind soundproof walls and a window of double-paned glass. The blinds were drawn. The lights were off. And Franzen, hunched over his keyboard in a scavenged swivel chair held together with duct tape, wore earplugs, earmuffs and a blindfold. ''You can always find the 'home' keys on your computer,'' he says in an embarrassed whisper, explaining how he managed to type under such constraints. ''They have little raised bumps.'' For Franzen, this is the imagination's price, the arduous means by which he conjures a fictional world and reproduces it on the page. ''It's very, very hard to concentrate,'' he says. ''You have to hold your mind free of all the clichés.'' The days … [Read more...] about Jonathan Franzen’s Big Book

NEW YORK – Andre Agassi's upcoming autobiography contains an admission that he used crystal meth in 1997 and lied to tennis authorities when he failed a drug test — a result that was thrown out after he said he "unwittingly" took the substance. According to an excerpt of the autobiography posted on The Times of London Web site Tuesday, the eight-time Grand Slam champion writes that he sent a letter to the ATP tour to explain the positive test, saying he accidentally drank from a soda spiked with meth by his assistant "Slim." "Then I come to the central lie of the letter," Agassi writes. "I say that recently I drank accidentally from one of Slim's spiked sodas, unwittingly ingesting his drugs. I ask for understanding and leniency and hastily sign it: Sincerely. "I feel ashamed, of course. I promise myself that this lie is the end of it. The ATP reviewed the case — and threw it out." The ATP did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Agassi … [Read more...] about Andre Agassi Admits Using Crystal Meth

EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Lonnie Holley’s life began at an impossible place: 1950, seventh among his mother’s 27 children, in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Ala., the air thick with violent racism toward him and everyone he loved. Things got even worse as he grew up. At four years old, he said, he was traded for a bottle of whiskey by a nurse who had stolen him away from his mother. Later, as the story goes, he was in a coma for several months and pronounced brain-dead after being hit by a car that dragged him along several blocks. Then he spent time in the infamous Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children until his paternal grandmother — he refers to her simply as “Momo” — was able to take him away at the age of 14. He forged his way out of the miry roads of his origins, becoming a musician and filmmaker, and teaching himself to make visual art. Since then, he has come far, far enough to have just completed a residency as an artist at the Elaine de Kooning House in this celebrity-filled … [Read more...] about Lonnie Holley’s Life of Perseverance, and Art of Transformation

One night in October, just a couple blocks from Harvard Square, a young crowd gathered at a music space called the Sinclair to catch a performance by Bill Callahan, the meticulous indie-rock lyricist who has been playing to bookish collegiate types since the early ‘90s. Callahan’s opening act, Lonnie Holley, had been playing to similar audiences for two years. A number of details about Holley made this fact surprising: He was decades older than just about everyone in the club and one of the few African-Americans. He says he grew up the seventh of 27 children in Jim Crow-era Alabama, where his schooling stopped around seventh grade. In his own, possibly unreliable telling, he says the woman who informally adopted him as an infant eventually traded him to another family for a pint of whiskey when he was 4. Holley also says he dug graves, picked trash at a drive-in, drank too much gin, was run over by a car and pronounced brain-dead, picked cotton, became a father at 15 (Holley now has 15 … [Read more...] about Lonnie Holley, the Insider’s Outsider

Thornton Dial, a self-taught artist whose paintings and assemblages fashioned from scavenged materials told the story of black struggle in the South and found their way to the permanent collections of major museums, died on Monday at his home in McCalla, Ala. He was 87. His death was confirmed by family members. Mr. Dial, the illiterate son of an unwed teenage mother, spent much of his childhood in rural poverty in western Alabama and, after moving to Bessemer, an industrial suburb of Birmingham, labored at a wide variety of occupations, all the while making works from castoff materials that he came to think of as art only when he was in his 50s. In 1987, Lonnie Holley, a self-taught artist living in Birmingham, showed William Arnett, an Atlanta collector interested in Southern folk art, one of Mr. Dial’s decorated fish lures. The two men went to see Mr. Dial, who, once he realized what Mr. Arnett was looking for, pulled a painted, welded-steel sculpture topped by a stylized … [Read more...] about Thornton Dial, Outsider Artist Whose Work Told of Black Life, Dies at 87

Bill Arnett had spent two decades collecting and dealing antiquities from around the world — African art was his passion — when, in 1986, he had an epiphany in Birmingham, Ala. There, the artist Lonnie Holley assembled sculptures from salvaged junk, and on his first visit, Mr. Arnett bought one — a statement about racism made from a mannequin and chains. It inspired him more than anything he had seen in Europe, Africa or Asia ever had. “Nothing has been the same since,” Mr. Arnett told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1993. “I had to go out and tell the world that there’s this forgotten civilization doing this great work.” To Mr. Arnett, Mr. Holley’s work — and that of other Black painters, sculptors and quilters he would soon encounter, most of them poor — was as distinguished as that of acclaimed white artists like Willem de Kooning , Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. He became their fan, promoter and patron, paid at least 20 of them stipends of $200 to … [Read more...] about Bill Arnett, Collector and Promoter of Little-Known Black Art, Dies at 81