One of my favorite bloggers, Clive Davis, has left the Spectator and struck out on his own with Clive Davis’ Confab. Add it to your RSS feed.

I’m extending the deadline for my Fawlty Towers competition to Monday, November 2. Come on people! Send me your hotel horror stories…

Today marks the sixth anniversary of my arrival in New York and a little over five years since I started this blog. Thank you for reading.

Next time, I’m shopping in Queens. (Via Macboy.)

Following up on my post from the other day, it seems the New York Review of Books has more details on David Hockney’s use of the iPhone to create art.

Apparently, Hockney has been regularly “painting” with the iPhone app Brushes, then emailing his miniature works to friends. His three main subjects are self portraits, flowers and the dawn.

Having spent most of the past 30 years in California, Hockney is reveling in the opportunity of being able to paint the sun rising in the east over water; not to mention the convenience of having a miniature electronic easel with him at all times. As he told the reporter, Lawrence Weschler:

After all, what clearer, more luminous light are we ever afforded? Especially here where the light comes rising over the sea, just the opposite of my old California haunts. But in the old days one never could, because, of course, ordinarily it would be too dark to see the paints; or else, if you turned on a light so as to be able to see them, you’d lose the subtle gathering tones of the coming sun. But with an iPhone, I don’t even have to get out of bed, I just reach for the device, turn it on, start mixing and matching the colors, laying in the evolving scene.

[...]It’s always there in my pocket, there’s no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there’s this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it’s over, best of all, there’s no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There’s something, finally, very intimate about the whole process.

There is a brilliant audio slideshow that accompanies the piece, featuring a series of images of the dawn that Hockney emailed to friends every three minutes, the sky and the sea changing color as the sun rises.

And I love the kicker:

“People from the village,” he says, craning back over that shoulder, “come up to me and tease me, ‘We hear you’ve started drawing on your telephone.’ And I tell them, ‘Well, no, actually, it’s just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.’”

David Hockney’s iPhone Passion (NYRB)

Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch, does something he never anticipated. On the op-ed page of the New York Times, he joins the organization’s critics:

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast (NYT)

The BBC today releases a deluxe, special edition DVD box set of Fawlty Towers. And they’ve kindly agreed to give one set to EiNY readers.

I wanted to come up with a suitably difficult quiz question. But in the days of Google it seems that just about every answer is never more than a few Google clicks away. (Though Googling “who is the real life Basil Fawlty” throws up a few wrong answers.)

instead, I’ve decided you’re going to have to get creative. So, drop me an email with your favorite real life Fawlty Towers story. It can be anything: a shoddy hotel, a rude manager, incompetent staff, awful food. If you have photos, even better.

Keep it short. And send it in before October 29. I’ll announce the winner on November 2. For inspiration, here are a few examples from Season One of how not to treat your staff and guests:

David Hockney is renowned for tinkering with technology, such as photography and fax machines, in his artwork. But hidden at the end of this great profile in this weekend’s New York Times is, to my mind, a really fascinating fact about his use of new media today:

Mr. Hockney, wearing one of the old Savile Row suits he likes to paint in (“Even when they’re wrecked, they still look good”), was sitting at a table in the middle of the space, holding forth on the stupidity of smoking bans and his theories about lenses, mirrors and image making, and showing off his iPhones. With the program Brushes, he uses them to paint miniaturized sunrises and still lifes; he now has two, because he quickly filled the first.

It was immediately clear that — his new passion for plein-air painting aside — Mr. Hockney has a new love: digital technology. Around the room hung multiple photographs by Jonathan Wilkinson, his full-time technology assistant, of artworks that were also hanging on the walls. They were so exact that it was often hard to tell the originals from the photographs.

The confusion was intensified because some of the originals actually began life as photographs — like the two 27-foot-long friezes depicting a group of trees Mr. Hockney noticed at the edge of town, which he photographed individually, then collaged together and detailed in Photoshop. Others were made at home on a Macintosh, including portraits he painted earlier this year using Photoshop and a Wacom tablet. (A selection will be at Pace Prints.) Near a table covered with video cameras, someone had tacked up printouts of Mr. Hockney’s iPhone paintings.

Mr. Hockney also uses the computer to compose his paintings, either to help him step back and regard the whole of a multipanel work or to refine individual canvases. He often tries out colors and ideas on a photograph of an unfinished painting, or plays around with a JPEG of the image in Photoshop. Afterward he returns to the studio to put his ideas on canvas.

There’s a very interesting audio slideshow and an excerpt from a Hockney documentary too.

David Hockney’s Long Road Home (NYT)