A Gooners view on why football deterrents work when used and a reason why they are fooishly not used nearly enough

Part One, about cheating players. by Jon Fox

My fellow Gooners, I have been following top level football and especially our club, way back since 1958 and in that long time have seen a moral sea change in football, losing respect for   honesty and encouraging win-at-all-costs attitudes and general CHEATING.

Cheating by almost everyone involved within the game, from players, coaches and managers, owners, football bodies such as FIFA and UEFA.

I will exclude, for now, refs and VAR officials, as my views on both are well known on here and I intend to write separate articles on both, shortly.

Alessia Russo “This is the last one to go, and we’re really locked in” ahead of Women’s World Cup Final by Michelle

The FIFA Women’s World Cup Final is one thing everyone is eager to watch this weekend. England and Spain battled through every obstacle to book a World Cup final. For the girls playing in that game this Sunday, it is the epitome of their careers, and Arsenal forward Alessia Russo has said as much, as per The Independent.

“Obviously, this is the biggest game, the one you dream about and means the most,” said Russo, reacting to her and her teammates managing to make it to the World Cup Final, where she hopes they will do everything to pick up a big win over Spain, who it troubled them to beat in the Euros 2022 Semi-Final last summer.

“I think it will hit when we’re in the tunnel and ready to walk out It’s an incredible occasion; it’s been an unbelievable tournament, and this is it. This is the moment we want to be in. We can’t wait.

“Right now, all I want to do is go out, put on a performance to be proud of, and obviously to win We started this tournament wanting to win seven games, and this is the message.

An auctioneer who pleaded guilty to helping produce a group of faked Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings has avoided jail time, instead receiving a sentence of probation and community service from a Los Angeles court on Friday.

The case was related to the saga surrounding a 2022 exhibition about Basquiat held at the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida. That show touched off an FBI raid, the firing of the museum’s director, and legal action that is still ongoing.

Included in the show were a group of works that the museum’s director at the time, Aaron De Groft, claimed had been produced in 1982 while the artist lived in Los Angeles. He said that after that, they were left in a storage unit, then forgotten. De Groft claimed they were major rediscoveries.

But doubt started to emerge after the New York Times ran an investigation that questioned these works’ authenticity. One expert on branding seized on the FedEx typeface that appeared in one of these paintings. He said the shipping company hadn’t started to use that typeface until 1994, more than a decade after these works were allegedly produced.

After the FBI investigated the 25 paintings, seizing them in a dramatic raid that made headlines around the world, Michael Barzman, the auctioneer who today was sentenced to probation, was interviewed by federal agents. Speaking to them in 2022, he claimed he had no role in the production of the works.

The public mural Banksy painted about domestic violence, titled Valentine’s Day Mascara, is being sold back to members of the public for $153 (£120) a share.

The London-based Red Eight Galleries is brokering the deal between the owner of the townhouse property in the British city of Margate where the mural was painted, and Showpiece, a fractional ownership platform.

The mural has an estimated value of $7.64 million (£6 million) through an evaluation by Robin Barton of Bankrobber gallery. The fractional ownership sale of Valentine’s Day Mascara will take place on August 22 with a total of 27,000 shares.

“Realistically, we are looking to achieve between £1m and £1.5m,” Usher told the Art Newspaper, which first reported the news of the sale.

The mural features a 1950s-style housewife with a swollen, black eye, a bruised cheek, a swollen lower lip, and a knocked-out tooth. She wears a bright blue gingham dress, an apron, and yellow latex gloves, and has her arms out.

Walking out on Picasso, as Françoise Gilot did in 1953, could not eliminate his impact on her own art and life. The ambiguity is right there in the final lines of what remains her most notable creation, the best-selling 1964 book Life with Picasso, coauthored with Carlton Lake: when she left Picasso, “he burned all the bridges that connected me to the past I had shared with him. But in doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful to him for that.”

It’s a peculiar statement that accords her rejected lover the motivating agency in her own self-discovery. And it’s unsupported by any careful reading of the rest of the book, which paints a clear-eyed picture of the world’s most renowned artist at the height of his fame, but also a vivid self-portrait of an inexperienced young woman from a privileged background—she was just 21 when she met the Spanish painter, who was 40 years her elder—who nonetheless had the sharpness of perception and toughness of spirit to enter an inherently unequal relationship without sacrificing her identity to it. I suspect that Gilot’s survival instinct was just as inherent as her sense of self. And survive she did: when she died this past June, she was 101.

Early on, Gilot experimented with abstraction but then seems to have accepted Picasso’s dismissal of abstract painting as merely a “kind of invertebrate, unformulated interior dream.” In any case, her paintings up through the 1960s are primarily representational—and, as with many French painters of her generation, they show the strong imprint of Picasso’s influence.

Later she began to alternate between imagistic and nonobjective modes, though she always attributed autobiographical content to her abstract works. In writing about her 1979–80 composition The Hawthorne, Garden of Another Time, a luminous arrangement of flat, clearly demarcated color forms, she described it as embodying “the recollection of looking toward my paternal grandmother’s garden in Neuilly”—the affluent Paris suburb where she was born in 1921—“through the red stained-glass windows of the billiard room on the second floor.” Distilling her memories and perceptions into abstract form, she often secreted fragments of imagery within her works, blurring the distinction. Still, it can be argued that it was in her efforts toward abstraction that Gilot achieved her true independence as an artist. There, she was free to use color, as she said, “to exaggerate, to go beyond, to pursue the extreme limit of what is suggested by the pictorial imagination.”

She also achieved double-barreled success, as both a painter and a writer: Though academic attention to her career has been scarce, her exhibitions were legion, and in 2021 a couple of her paintings sold for $1.3 million each through Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Her book Life with Picasso sold millions of copies worldwide and was succeeded by Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art (1990) and the autobiographical Interface: The Painter and the Mask (1983).

Fans and prospective visitors of Anish Kapoor’s massive Cloud Gate sculpture won’t be able to see the public artwork until next year due to construction at Millennium Park.

The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events posted an alert on its website about construction on Grainger Plaza that started this week, limiting public access and views of Cloud Gate, more often known as the Bean, until spring 2024.

“This necessary maintenance by the City of Chicago will replace pavers and make other repairs and accessibility upgrades to the Plaza—to enhance the nearly 20-year-old Park’s appearance, visitor experience, and position as the #1 attraction in the Midwest,” the department wrote.

Cloud Gate (2006) is 33 feet high, 42 feet wide, and 66 feet long, making it one of world’s largest public art installations. The $23 million sculpture is comprised of 168 stainless steel plates welded together and then polished to a mirror finish, making it extremely popular for selfies and other photographs.

In 2017, the British-Indian artist told ARTnews about his complicated feelings about the sculpture’s popularity and its ability to incite strong opinions.

Two battling lawsuits that stem from the sale of an Alexander Calder sculpture are being waged in New York, with an art adviser alleging that the transaction was illegal and a prominent dealer claiming that she is attempting to keep him from doing business.

The legal action, first reported on Friday by the Daily Beast, began in January, when Lea Lee, the adviser, filed suit against French dealer and self-described “art detective” Elisabeth Royer-Grimblat, New York dealer Edward Tyler Nahem, and others.

Lee is the granddaughter of the architect Oscar Nitzschké, whom she described as a “close friend” of Calder. Prior to her death in 2017, her mother had owned the Calder work in question, which Nahem’s gallery exhibited at its Art Basel booth in Switzerland in 2018.

The parties disagree on how Nahem obtained the work. (The work’s title changes over the many documents submitted: Lee labeled it Mobile de Bretagne, while the defendants sometimes called it La Roche jaune, or The Yellow Rock, and dated it to around 1950.) Lee said she was unaware that the work was removed from her mother’s estate, which her sisters, Rose and Julie Groen, both defendants in that lawsuit, had been “feasting on,” according to Lee.

Writing in the present tense in an affidavit, Lee claimed that Royer-Grimblat “smuggles” the work out of her mother’s estate in 2017, and that when she raised concerns about the work in 2021, the sisters and Royer-Grimblat “commenced a slander campaign against me, aimed at destroying my professional reputation as an art advisor that seriously and negatively impacted my business both in New York and elsewhere.”

A large advertisement for the superhero movie Blue Beetle is currently installed on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where a famed sculpture of the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa is sited. Since going on view, many, including a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, have decried the ad, claiming that it is an eyesore.

Though the ad is only slated to be there for seven days, the large vinyl stickers are plastered across all 72 of the famous steps climbed by Rocky Balboa in the 1976 film Rocky.

CBS News spoke to a range of locals who disliked the advertisment, with one visitor from Dallas saying, “I think it’s tacky to put an ad like this on such an old prestigious place.”

Others seemed more nonplussed. “It gives color, it gives emotions. It’s cool, it’s fine,” Italian tourist Diletta Dinalle told CBS News.

The ad was approved by the Philadelphia Parks & Recreation department, which maintains the museum and the stairs. A parks department spokesperson told CBS that the city will receive $28,000 for the seven-day installation.

Until last week, no study had ever been published that tested period products—tampons, pads, discs, cups, and underwear—using human blood. A team of four women just changed that. 

On August 7, Dr. Bethany Samuelson Bannow and a group at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland released a study to test saturation and capacity levels in menstrual products in hopes of better understanding how to diagnose heavy menstrual bleeding, or HMB, which impacts millions of Americans.

Why had it taken so long to test a product made to contain human blood with human blood? “I think with women’s health, including menstrual health, we’ve been a little bit behind the eight ball,” Dr. Bannow told me. “They didn’t even require women to be included in NIH studies until 1993. I think that that’s telling of what we prioritize as a society.”

Providers trying to diagnose HMB depend on self-reporting, which can be subjective with people falling prey to myths and miseducation. A patient experiencing pain, fatigue, or other related symptoms will come in and ask: Is this normal? To tell if the bleeding is excessive, doctors try to ascertain how many period products are used per hour. But measurement is imperfect. Menstruators change out products for tons of reasons; and products may claim they can sustain a certain amount of “flow,” but their actual capacity is different. That is what Dr. Bannow hoped to make clear in her testing.

The team took 21 different products and saturated or filled them with expired human-packed red blood cells. This isn’t an exact match to menstrual blood—which has clots and secretions—but it’s a lot closer than salty water. In their research, they found that how the companies were labeling the boxes did not match up with their results. The majority of menstrual products reported that they had greater capacity than the testing found.

I’m interested in stories that gently erase the boundaries between love and friendship, featuring characters who shuffle the two feelings in unexpected ways. I like narratives that navigate contradictions and do away with false binaries, illustrating the complexity of what we humans call intimacy. Who is really capable of drawing a hard boundary between feelings? My story in the Summer issue of the Review, “My Good Friend,” follows two elderly friends who have shared a lifetime of friendship right in the neighborhood of romance. For these two old folks, friendship is the mountain one climbs to reach a deeper viewpoint on love.

Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Inseparables, about the friendship between two young girls, Sylvie and Andrée, is one of the many gems I’ve encountered. Based on de Beauvoir’s own passionate friendship that began in youth, with a girl named Zaza, the book was written five years after she published The Second Sex, and it’s clear how the feelings born from that friendship structured her personality and helped to shape even her philosophical interests. “Nothing so interesting had ever happened to me,” Sylvie says of the first time she met Andrée. “It suddenly seemed as if nothing had ever happened to me at all.”

Young Sylvie wants to express this feeling somehow, to tell her friend about the transformation that has happened inside her. On Andrée’s thirteenth birthday, Sylvie carefully and anxiously sews a silk purse by hand as a gift, hoping it will tell her friend something that words can’t quite. Sylvie hands the bag to Andrée and, seeing her astonishment, she has the impression that something would have happened between them, maybe a tender kiss, had it not been for the presence of their mothers.

Together they become teenagers, and Andrée, the more extroverted of the pair, begins a little romance with a boy against her mother’s wishes. Sylvie starts to feel jealous before she even knows the name of the feeling. Andrée is forced to admit to her mother that, yes, she had kissed the boy, she had kissed him because she loved him. She later tells Sylvie, who is overcome by complete shock: “I lowered my head. Andrée was unhappy and the idea of it was unbearable. But her unhappiness was so foreign to me; the kind of love where you kiss had no truth for me.” After a few pages we realize that a kiss is something of a metric of passion for the two young girls, the naive way in which they measure the beginnings of love even as they wrestle with the ambiguity of their own relationship.