TotallyOz

I was just getting into the area last night when I saw all the fire trucks, police, etc. There was a huge fire. In the article below, there are a lot of photos. http://www.pattayadailynews.com/en/2010/08/14/blazing-fire-ignites-at-south-pattaya-labour-encampment/

I love Ansel Adams. When I was pursuing a career in photography, he was one of my most admired photographers. The collection in DC is fantastic. I have been following the story below. It is a wild ride. SAN FRANCISCO — It was a dream come true, straight out of “Antiques Roadshow.” In 2000 Rick Norsigian, a painter in a school maintenance department, bought a box of photo negatives at a garage sale in Fresno, Calif., for $45. Last month, a decade later, he stood in a Beverly Hills art gallery to announce that a team of experts had concluded “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Ansel Adams had taken the pictures. Rick Norsigian with one of the 65 glass negatives he bought in a California garage sale. Prints from them are being sold as the work of Ansel Adams. The gallery’s owner, David W. Streets, appraised the value of the 65 images, which the experts called “the lost negatives,” at $200 million, and the incident made news around the world. But a fairy-tale ending is eluding Mr. Norsigian. A day after the announcement, Matthew Adams, a grandson of the photographer, disputed the finding, questioned the credentials of the experts and went so far as to call the whole business a “scam.” A few days after that, an Oakland woman, Marian Walton, announced that she had a photo that was identical to one of the negatives. It had been taken, she said, not by Adams, the famous outdoors photographer, but by an uncle of hers, Earl Brooks. And now, in the latest complication, court records reveal that Mr. Streets, who set the value for the negatives and is handling the related sales, is a convicted felon with a criminal record for petty theft and fraud in Louisiana and Kentucky. Though he says on his Web site, davidstreetsbeverlyhills.com, that he has 25 years of fine-art appraisal experience, two of Mr. Streets’s former employers say his true talent is in the embellishment of his credentials. Doris Allen, who owns the Bryant Galleries in New Orleans, says that though Mr. Streets, 45, can be “very charming,” he had said he had no appraisal experience when she hired him at her business in 2000. Now she is amazed to see him occupy an influential role in a national art debate. “How can he get up there and claim that those negatives are worth $200 million?” she said. “That is absurd.” The discussion of just who took the pictures is far from over, and Mr. Norsigian’s lawyer, Arnold Peter, said Mr. Streets’s past has little bearing on that question. But in a subjective field where credibility and expertise matter, it cannot help Mr. Norsigian that Mr. Streets’s résumé appears to be tarnished. For his part, Mr. Streets initially denied in an interview that he was the same David W. Streets who was convicted of passing bad checks, fraud and petty theft over a seven-year period that ended in 1998 when he was in his early 30s. But he later sent an e-mail in which he cited his extensive civic involvement in recent years, described the incidents as old, and attributed them to “untreated manic-depression” that he began to experience after his mother “committed suicide when I was 15, and my father died the following year.” “I took complete responsibility and learned from that experience,” he said. The art debate has its roots in Mr. Norsigian’s purchase of the box of negatives, a rummage-sale find that took on a new light when he later noticed in an Adams biography that certain features of the plate-glass negatives he bought, which depict California landscape scenes from Carmel, Yosemite and around San Francisco, seemed to match events in in Adams’s life. In particular, the plates showed evidence of fire damage, and in 1937 Adams lost negatives to a darkroom fire. “The size, the fire damage, the locations and different stuff like that,” Mr. Norsigian said. “I kept researching little pieces at a time.” He took his discovery to members of the Adams family, who disputed his claims. Adams had been notoriously protective of his negatives, locking them in a bank vault when he lived in San Francisco. Would he misplace a box of negatives? “Ansel would never have done something like that,” said William Turnage, managing trustee of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, which owns the rights to Adams’s name and work. But in 2007 Mr. Norsigian and Mr. Peter, his lawyer, set about organizing an authentication team that included a former F.B.I. agent, a former United States attorney, two handwriting experts, a meteorologist (to track cloud patterns in the images), a landscape photographer and a former curator of European decorative arts and sculpture for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. They concluded, without question, that the prints were of the sort made by Adams as a young photographer in the 1920s. Mr. Peter said he decided to market the materials through Mr. Streets, whom he did not know but whose work as a dealer he was aware of. Mr. Streets, who moved to California from New Orleans in 2005, bills himself as “Los Angeles’s leading appraiser of all genres of fine art and celebrity memorabilia.” Among clients listed on his Web site are three former presidents, including Bill Clinton, and numerous celebrities. It features photos of him with Hollywood stars and with Maria Shriver, the wife of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California. A spokesman for Mr. Clinton said he did not recognize the dealer’s name. For the Entire Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/arts/design/14photos.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss Also, some of Adams works:

Thanks. Quite YUMMY. Jeeze. GREAT photos!

Don't forget this sexy guy!

I think the Supremes know more about love than we give them credit for. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2yLMpGPU8A

I agree. I wonder how long it will take him to get a new job in Florida after this controversy? I also wonder if WeHo Police have contacted him yet about a move.

Music from the 60's. Drop by and support Krazy Dragon with this event. http://www.krazy-dragon.com/events.html

New York-based SmarTours is offering a 14-day tour of Thailand that

We are working on cleaning up the entire site. This is not something that will happen overnight. It is going to take us a few months to get things working the way we want. We have started changing things and working on code that will make the site even better. You may notice that we have removed the Chat and News Links from the top menu bar. The Chat was not popular and outdated. The Calendar and News area have not been updated in years. We believe that most who would look at those area would be reading the forums anyway. We have removed the Chat and News Links. We have also directed the Calendar area to the Forum Calendar. We will work on finding a way to keep the Calendar updated so the events are easily accessible to all. The Nuts and Bolts area have been totally revamped. There are also several pages with links that we are working on. We have placed a much brighter link to the Message Boards on the home page as we want be sure everyone who comes to the site knows about it but also sees the value we place on the boards. We continue to ask for advice on ways to improve the site and make it better! Thank you for your support and encouragement!

We have an article section inside the message board. We also have a section on the site called Nuts and Bolts. This area had odd characters and was difficult to edit and people are unable to comment and make suggestions. We have now cleaned up this area and made it easier to read. I am also posting links to all these articles here as we think Newbies to Thailand should read them. A Monk

We are 100 percent hoping to work as sister sites with your board. So far I have seen a great deal of co-operation with other sites. I hope that this will continue.

I loved these. Thanks. Many years ago there was a gay thug company in NYC that had a great website. A lot of the hustlers from Stella's and Cats worked for them. Is it still around? Anyone have the link?

Those were great. I loved the shower head ad. LOL

Thank you guys. I showed my Thai boyfriend these today and he thought they were fantastic. The one with the young boy asking someone to dance really had him rolling on the floor. Thanks.

I have read several articles on this today. I don't think they have standing. If the law is truly upheld, this is the end of the debate. However, never say never.