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In this case, perhaps, SBIFF means a contribution to a film, since Dujardin and Bejo were little-known in the United States before “The Artist” debuted to raves at Cannes and became a major player in the Oscar race.

The Palm Springs International Film Festival has already announced plans to honor “The Artist” director Michel Hazanavicius with its Sonny Bono Visionary Award.

“In an age of sight and sound spectacle, there is great risk in a silent film,” said Durling in the press release announcing the awards to Dujardin and Bejo. “Jean and Bérénice’s acting is an amazing pas des deux both physically and emotionally – recalling classic Hollywood pairings like Hepburn and Tracy, and of course indelibly Ginger and Fred.”

The Santa Barbara announcement, which was made by festival executive director Roger Durling, makes “The Artist” a rare film that will be feted at both of Southern California’s January film festivals, which often compete to bestow awards on Oscar contenders.

The awards will be presented at the Arlington Theater on Saturday, February 4, during the 11-day run of the 27th Santa Barbara International Film Festival. The festival begins on January 26.

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, the stars of the silent film “The Artist,” will receive the Cinema Vanguard Award from the 2012 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, SBIFF announced on Tuesday evening.

Before breaking into American consciousness with “The Artist,” Dujardin appeared in “The Brice Man” and in Hazanavicius’ spy spoofs “OSS 11: Cairo, Nest of Spies” and “OSS 117: Lost in Rio.” Bejo appeared in the first of those movies, as well as in “A Knight’s Tale.”

The award, which in the past has gone to the likes of Nicole Kidman, Christoph Waltz, Stanley Tucci and Vera Farmiga, is designed to recognize actors who are “taking artistic risks and making a significant and unique contribution to film.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) Suspicion is growing that operatives in China, rather than India, were behind the hacking of emails of an official U.S. commission that monitors relations between the United States and China, U.S. officials said.

News of the hacking of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission surfaced earlier this month when an amateur “hacktivist” group purporting to operate in India published what it said was a memo from an Indian Military Intelligence unit to which extracts from commission e-mails were attached.

But U.S. officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity said the roundabout way the commission’s emails were obtained strongly suggests the intrusion originated in China, possibly by amateurs, and not from India’s spy service.

A large cache of raw email data from the security breach, reviewed by Reuters, indicates that the principal target of the intruders was not the commission, but instead a Washington-based non-governmental pro-trade group called the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC).

The trade council is headed by William Reinsch, a former top U.S. Commerce Department official who until recently served as the U.S.-China Commission’s chairman.

A large proportion of the raw email traffic downloaded by the hackers consists of messages to and from Reinsch at his NFTC email address. Many of the emails were spam, but some related to the work of the commission, which was set up by Congress to take a critical look at a wide range of U.S. dealings with China.

Reinsch told Reuters that the NFTC first became aware in November that large quantities of its message traffic had been hacked. He said that law enforcement authorities, including the FBI, had been quickly notified. The FBI has declined comment.

Reinsch said he could think of “no particular reason” why the Indian government or Indian hackers would be interested in him. By contrast, he and several other U.S. officials said that Chinese hackers, whether amateur or directly affiliated with Chinese government, would have great interest in the U.S.-China Commission’s activities, both public and private.

SOFT TARGET

Sources familiar with the hacking and the related investigation said they draw two inferences from the fact that the principal target of the hack appears to have been Reinsch’s email account at NFTC.

First of all, the sources said they found it difficult to believe anyone connected with India would have taken the time or effort to track down Reinsch or his NFTC account, whereas his chairmanship of the U.S.-China Commission made him a potential major target for Chinese hackers.

Secondly, said the sources, the fact that Reinsch’s NFTC emails were the principal target suggests that whoever hacked them was hunting for a soft target with poor cyber-security. This suggests the hackers were amateurs rather than a foreign spy service.

Pinning down the origin and perpetrator of a particular cyber-intrusion can be fiendishly difficult, if not impossible, as hackers frequently take steps to mask their identity or appear that they are from a third country.

One official familiar with the matter said that it was possible that all the hacked email traffic, including messages related to the U.S.-China Commission, originated with the NFTC.

Under this scenario, the reason commission traffic was included in the hacked material was that it consisted of copies of commission messages which were sent to Reinsch at his NFTC email address. But other officials said it was also still possible some emails were stolen directly from the commission or private email accounts of other commissioners.

A person familiar with details of the incident and related investigation said the hacked emails spanned a six-month period from late March to late October last year. The source said that about 85 percent of the traffic consisted of emails incoming to the NFTC, with the other 15 percent being outgoing messages from NFTC’s server.

The source said that there were significant gaps in the hacked traffic, covering both day-long and week-long periods, bolstering the notion the hacking was done by amateurs.

Investigators are still trying to determine if the hacker successfully targeted NFTC’s local network or a network which fed messages to a mobile device used by Reinsch.

INDIAN MEMO

The purported Indian intelligence memo implied that the commission emails had somehow been hacked using know-how supplied to the Indian government by mobile phone companies who, as payback, were afforded greater access to the Indian market.

One of the mobile phone manufactures named in the purported memo, Apple, denied giving the Indian government backdoor access to its products. A second, Research in Motion, said the company does not typically comment on rumor or speculation, and a third manufacturer, Nokia, declined to comment.

Indian government officials and agencies declined repeated requests for comment on the alleged government document, although some former Indian officials labeled the memo a fabrication.

Two U.S. officials familiar with the hacking incident said they were puzzled why India would go to the trouble of hacking emails related to the U.S.-China Commission, since its work had little if anything to do with India, and Indian officials and diplomats had never showed much interest in its activities.

By contrast, the commission has been a regular target for what officials describe as persistent attempted hacking intrusions, many through the technique of “phishing,” which involves sending bogus but convincing emails which purport to come from insiders but contain malicious code. Investigators strongly suspect these intrusions were launched by people from, or operating on behalf of, China.

A large proportion of the hacked traffic examined by Reuters appeared to be what could be categorized as spam, including summaries of news articles and political fundraising pitches.

Some hacked traffic from the U.S.-China Commission had potentially sensitive implications, however, including messages in which commission personnel discuss matters under deliberation by the organization. These issues included the commission’s attitude toward alleged Chinese theft of intellectual property and congressional deliberations about alleged Chinese currency manipulation.

U.S. officials said there was no indication hackers managed to gain access to electronic files related to the commission’s most sensitive project – a classified version of its annual public report. Electronic materials related to this project are kept on classified servers, isolated from the Internet, which are operated by agencies other than the commission itself, one official said.

(Editing by Eric Beech)

NEW YORK They’ll be playing arenas when they tour next month, but on Thursday night, a regrouped Van Halen provided thrills in a tiny club where a VIP crowd stood elbow to elbow as the storied band played some of their greatest hits including “Jump” and “Panama.”

“Welcome to Occupy Van Halen, ladies and gentleman!” frontman David Lee Roth yelled just before the band launched into “You Really Got Me,” the first in an approximately hour-long, high energy set.

The show was at the famed Café Wha? in New York’s West Village a club owned by Manny Roth, the uncle of Roth.

David Lee Roth noted some of the greats that played in the club including Bob Dylan and told the crowd, “I’m more nervous about this gig than I would ever be in the Garden,” referring to Madison Square Garden.

The band will soon be playing the Garden and other venues like it, as they kick off a nationwide tour next month. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famers start the tour in Louisville,Wholesale Juicy Couture jackets, Ky., on Feb. 16, and will tour through June, hitting cities like Boston, Atlanta and Chicago. They’ll also be promoting a new album: The group announced Wednesday that they’ll release “A Different Kind of Truth” on Feb. 7, the group’s first album with Roth since their celebrated album “1984,” released that same year.

Van Halen has gone through plenty of changes since then. Roth left the band for a solo career and was replaced with Sammy Hagar in a messy breakup; he later returned to the band as Hagar exited in a split that had just as much discord. There would be more turmoil as bassist Michael Anthony was replaced a few years ago with Wolfgang Van Halen, the son of guitar great Eddie Van Halen.

But it was all smiles on Wednesday, as father and son, along with Eddie’s brother and drummer Alex were all on hand as the reconstituted group played a warm-up of sorts before their nationwide tour, their first together in almost four years.

“This has been a really long time coming,” Roth told the audience.

The band hardly seemed rusty. Though his mic was weak, Roth’s voice wasn’t, as his signature screech was in top form, as was Eddie Van Halen’s scorching guitar play on songs like “Hot for Teacher” and “Dance the Night Away.”

Roth joked about the small size of the club: “The last time I stood on a stage this low, I had to get the car home by midnight.”

Later, he talked about how he used to wander through the club as a kid, dreaming of a chance to play on its stage.

“It took us 50 years to get this gig. It was easier to get in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame than to get this gig,” he said.

Roth’s uncle Manny, now 92, was in the audience, sitting next to John McEnroe, one of several luminaries in the crowd.

“It’s come full circle,” said a beaming David Lee Roth amid the audience’s cheers.

___

http://www.van-halen.com

___

Nekesa Mumbi Moody is the AP’s music editor. Follow her at http://www.twitter.com/nekesamumbi

WASHINGTON Looking beyond the wars he inherited, President Barack Obama on Thursday launched a reshaping and shrinking of the military. He vowed to preserve U.S. pre-eminence even as the Army and Marine Corps shed troops and the administration considers reducing its arsenal of nuclear weapons.

The changes won’t come without risk, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said. But he called it acceptable and, because of budget restraints, inevitable.

In a presentation at the Pentagon, Obama said the U.S. is “turning a page” after having killed Osama bin Laden,Inflatable Bouncers, withdrawn troops from Iraq and begun to wind down the war in Afghanistan. He outlined a vision for the future that some Republican lawmakers quickly dubbed wrong-headed.

“Our military will be leaner, but the world must know the United States is going to maintain our military superiority,” Obama said with Panetta and the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Gen. Martin Dempsey, at his side.

In a presidential election year the strategy gives Obama a rhetorical tool to defend his Pentagon budget-cutting choices. Republican contenders for the White House already have attacked him on national security issues including missile defense, Iran and planned reductions in ground forces.

Obama unveiled the results of an eight-month defense strategy review that is intended to guide decisions on cutting hundreds of billions from planned Pentagon spending over the coming decade. The eight-page document contained no details about how broad concepts for reshaping the military such as focusing more on Asia and less on Europe will translate into troop or weapons cuts.

Those details will be included in the 2013 defense budget to be submitted to Congress next month.

In about every major war or defense speech Obama hits themes intended to resonate with American voters mainly, that the United States is turning a page from two wars, and that any nation-building will focus on improving the United States, not strategic allies abroad.

The economy is more likely to determine Obama’s re-election fate than national security. To keep his promises to shrink the deficit and to prove he is serious about fiscal management to voters wary of enormous government spending, Obama must show the oft-protected Pentagon is not exempt.

The political danger, though, is that his opponents will use any slashing of spending to paint the president as weak on security.

Both Panetta and Dempsey said they anticipate heavy criticism of their new strategy, which was begun last spring by then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates after Obama called for defense spending cuts. The Pentagon now faces at least $487 billion in cuts in planned defense spending over 10 years.

The criticism from Republicans came quickly.

Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, issued a statement saying, “This is a lead-from-behind strategy for a left-behind America.” He called it a “retreat from the world in the guise of a new strategy.”

Panetta said that smaller military budgets will mean some trade-offs and that the U.S. will take on “some level of additional but acceptable risk.” But in a changing world the Pentagon would have been forced to make a strategy shift anyway, he said. The money crisis merely forced the government’s hand.

Obama wants the new strategy to represent a pivotal point in his stewardship of defense policy, which has been burdened by two expensive wars begun under President George W. Bush. The drag those conflicts placed on military resources has deferred other priorities.

Obama said his administration would not repeat the mistakes made after World War II and Vietnam when defense reductions left the military ill-prepared.

“As commander in chief, I will not let that happen again,” he said. “Not on my watch.”

Obama’s involvement in the defense review and his decision to personally announce it at the Pentagon underscore that he is not just a commander in chief coping with a slimmer military in debt-ridden times. He is also an incumbent president seeking a second term and wanting to show who’s in charge.

Dempsey praised the military strategy and the work of crafting it, calling it inclusive and comprehensive.

“It’s not perfect,” the general said. “There will be people who think it goes too far. Others will say it doesn’t go nearly far enough. That probably makes it about right. It gives us what we need.”

Obama said the military will be reshaped between now and 2020 with an emphasis on countering terrorism, maintaining a nuclear deterrent, protecting the U.S. homeland and “deterring and defeating aggression by any potential adversary.”

Those are not new military missions, and Obama announced no new capabilities or defense initiatives. He described a U.S. force that will retain much of its recent focus, with the exception of fighting a large-scale, prolonged conflict like the recently ended Iraq mission or the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

“U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations,” the strategy document said, referring to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Left unsaid: The military was not sized for those unexpectedly long wars when they began. The Army had to be expanded by tens of thousands of soldiers and the Marine Corps also grew. The military at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was being shaped in somewhat the same form as Obama’s vision for 2020: agile, flexible, reliant on high-tech weaponry and dependent on allies.

The new strategy moves the U.S. further from its longstanding goal of being able to successfully fight two major regional wars at the same time.

It said the U.S. will maintain a robust nuclear arsenal but hinted at reductions.

“It is possible that our deterrence goals can be achieved with a smaller nuclear force, which would reduce the number of nuclear weapons in our inventory as well as their role in U.S. national security strategy,” the strategy said.

The new strategy strongly suggests a reduced U.S. military presence in Europe, notwithstanding a continuing close relationship with NATO, and says Asia will be a bigger priority. It also emphasizes improving U.S. capabilities in the areas of cyberwarfare, missile defense, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen praised the U.S. strategy, calling it consistent with the alliance’s vision for collective defense.

___

Associated Press writers Ben Feller and Pauline Jelinek in Washington contributed to this report.

• Robert Burns can be reached on Twitter at http://twitter.com/robertburnsAP

As of New Year’s Day, residents of Michigan can no longer claim charitable contributions to homeless shelters, food banks, community foundations, public universities or other nonprofits on their state income tax, says CBS Detroit. As part of the Public Act 38 budget cuts package, Gov. Rick Snyder repealed Section 261 of the Michigan Individual Income Tax Act, eliminating charitable giving credits. Here’s information about these changes.

Which organizations are affected?

The Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan explains the three tax credits. The Public Contribution Credit covered institutions like public broadcasting stations, higher education facilities, colleges, universities, university fundraising groups, donations of publicly displayed artwork, public libraries and museums. The Community Foundation Credit provided credits for local civic organizations. The Homeless Shelter and Food Bank Credit reimbursed contributions made to rescue missions, food kitchens and pantries and organizations whose purpose is to provide accommodation for indigent persons.

How much is the charitable tax credit worth?

Michigan Legislature defines the three credits as 50 percent nonrefundable amounts that can only be used to reduce owed taxes. On each credit, married couples filing jointly can claim up to $200 for $400 in contributions. Individual filers receive up to $100 back. CBS Local said about 250,000 residents took advantage of the credit in 2010. Snyder eliminated the Michigan Business Tax as well. That tax included charitable giving credits. These credits saved taxpayers $40 million in income taxes. Gov. Snyder is hoping to recover some of those lost income tax funds to revitalize Michigan’s struggling economy.

Can donations made last year be claimed?

Donations to nonprofit organizations made before Dec.31 can be claimed on 2011′s income taxes. The Holland Sentinel says mailed donations made close to the end of the year cannot count because the payment might not have processed and a receipt issued in time. Electronic, Automatic Clearing House or credit card donations are easier to claim because they provide an immediate confirmation number for payment, even though the bill may not be paid yet. All receipts for charitable gifts should be saved.

How will this affect local organizations?

The charitable contribution credits have brought in $100 million for nonprofit organizations, says CBS Detroit. Of that amount, the 2011 Community Education/Foundation and Homeless Shelter/Food Bank Credits Report says the MBT contributed a significant portion to public institutions. The majority of IIT funds went to support homeless shelters and community food banks.

Marilisa Kinney Sachteleben writes about people,wholesale Ed hardy shoes, places, events and issues in her home state of “Pure Michigan.”

(Reuters) Network equipment maker Cisco Systems has decided to pull the plug on umi, a home video conferencing system it once touted as a quality alternative to popular video chat service Skype — as it continues with its restructuring plans.

The San Jose, California-based company kicked off a months-long overhaul last year that has included layoffs and asset sales.

Cisco said in an email on Wednesday in response to blogs that it had decided to no longer sell Cisco umi hardware as a consumer offering. In April Cisco said it would shut down its popular Flip video camera division as part of a larger revamp.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Cisco had yet to remove the product from its home product store, where interested customers were told only that the product was currently not available for shipment.

Just a little more than two months ago, Cisco announced that the umi system would be available in Best Buy’s Magnolia Home Theaters in time for the holiday shopping season.

“While we are ending the sale of umi, the umi service remains unchanged,” Cisco said, adding that existing customers will continue to be able to use the service to make calls to other umi subscribers or to Google video chat accounts.

Some users worried what the decision would mean for them.

“Let’s hope they make them Tandberg compatible. I have 7 units I use in a mental health agency for a variety of purposes,” a user by the name of umi Rumford said on Cisco’s umi chat forum, referring to Norwegian video-conferencing company Tandberg, a business acquired by Cisco in 2010.

“The new year is only four days old, and already another consumer product from Cisco Systems has been put out to pasture: This time, it’s the consumer videoconferencing product umi,” that person also said.

Cisco had launched the $599 umi home videoconference system in October 2010 as a high-quality rival to Skype and other low-cost providers, hoping to expand in the consumer market.

Marthin De Beer,Cheap Ed hardy t-shirts, head of Cisco’s emerging technologies business group, said at the time umi’s quality made it different from others.

“It is different, it’s a new class of product and you will see that the experience is transformational,” he said at the time of the launch.

Cisco declined to give sales figures for the umi system.

Videoconference start-up Vidyo, which unveiled a new technology in November that allowed its service to run using virtual servers, said the Cisco decision confirmed the trend in the industry away from hardware and toward software.

“The only way to introduce new services is through solutions

that work on devices people already own such as smart phones and tablets,” Vidyo Chief Executive Ofer Shapiro said.

Rival Skype pointed to a blog on its site written at the launch of umi and said the blog was still valid.

Skype said at the time that a $599 device could be “subject to obsoletism at the hands of mass-market options.”

(Reporting By Nicola Leske in New York, additional reporting by Tarmo Virki in Helsinki; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

(This story corrects paragraph four, which should read, “As of Wednesday afternoon …”)

NEW ORLEANS In the four-block radius where he painted and drank himself into frightening stupors, Noel Rockmore was known by the denizens of the French Quarter as an outrageous Pablo Picasso-like figure who combined the mythological and the real. He produced some 15,000 oil paintings, temperas, collages and sketches over his career and then died in obscurity.

His life was that of an American outsider and a throwback to Europe’s great expressionistic and hedonistic masters.

In the 1950s, when he was still in his 20s, his paintings hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum. He was a bright young American artist who had a taste for Rembrandt and figurative paintings, with the outlook of an American social realist.

Then, the art world changed: Abstract expressionism typified by the paint throwing of Jackson Pollock became the rave. Rockmore, who admired draftsmanship in painting, detested it.

Rockmore changed: He left his wife and three children, changed his last name and headed to New Orleans in 1959,Cheap Christian Louboutin shoes, where he would eventually get lost to the New York art world.

The story of Noel Montgomery Davis (his real name) is getting a long-overdue audience outside New Orleans, a city that is enjoying something of an art renaissance itself six years after Hurricane Katrina. From now until the end of January, his works are on view at the LaGrange Art Museum in Georgia. The retrospective is called “Creative Obscurity: The Genius Noel Rockmore.”

“He was kind of an art hobo,” said Ethyl Ault, interim director of the LaGrange Art Museum.

She said Rockmore was an overlooked genius. “Was it politics? Did he offend people? Why was he so popular in New York when he was younger, and then he leaves, changes his name and then goes on into his fairy tale land?”

The show is based on nearly 1,500 Rockmore artworks retrieved from storage units in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. For 25 years, Shirley Marvin, an octogenarian Baton Rouge patron, had been saving Rockmore artworks and memorabilia with the intention of making him famous one day.

But she had forgotten about the collection due to short-term memory loss, her family said. Marvin was one of Rockmore’s most devoted fans. She saw genius in him like many others in New Orleans. The extraordinary collection was gathering dust when her son, Rich Marvin, took her down to New Orleans in October 2006, a year after Katrina, to get “a few paintings,” as her mother described it. Instead, they found the units packed with remnants of Rockmore’s life.

In the wake of the collection’s discovery, Rich and his wife, Tee Marvin, have become Rockmore’s biggest impresarios the agents Rockmore famously refused to have throughout his life as he willfully lived on the edge of the art world. He was notorious among art galleries for his temper and fits of outrage. His friends say he suffered emotional problems for much of his life.

The Marvins working with Rockmore’s family and art dealers, collectors and museum curators have begun cataloging his works and promoting him. They estimate he produced about 15,000 pieces of art and conservatively 750 to 1,000 of those are masterpieces.

“At first we thought my mom was crazy,” Rich Marvin said. “When a museum or gallery lines up his top 200 exquisite works, people will be as stunned as we are.”

Rockmore was born in 1928 in New York to a family of artists. He was supertalented. A child prodigy, he played the violin well by age 8. After suffering polio at age 10, he turned to painting. He studied briefly at The Juilliard School and had a studio at the Cooper Union. Family friends included Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin and Thomas Mann.

His 20s were prolific as he painted the bums of the Bowery district, monkeys and elephants in the backstage of the Ringling Brothers Circus and parables of Central Park and Coney Island. He was a social realist, akin to Depression-era American painters such as John Steuart Curry, but these early works contained themes and artistic styles that would stay with him: death, violence, sex, the surreal and the allegorical.

In retrospect, it was the ghoulish and morbid in Rockmore that defined him, making him a kind of American Hieronymus Bosch.

In the 1950s, Rockmore became fed up with the wave of abstract expressionists then taking hold of New York the flat tones and humanless canvases of Willem De Kooning, Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. During this period he drank heavily and his wife kicked him out because of his wildness, his daughter, Emilie Heller-Rhys, said.

At age 31, he moved down to New Orleans and began working with Larry Borenstein, an art collector, and Allan Jaffe, a business school graduate and tuba player. In the 1960s, Borenstein employed Rockmore as a kind of resident painter for a new society he’d formed with Jaffe to preserve traditional New Orleans jazz music. The society would become Preservation Hall.

Rockmore was commissioned to paint the old-time musicians. He captured the mood, scent, touch and smoke of New Orleans jazz and its musicians Punch Miller, Percy Humphrey, Louis Nelson, Sweet Emma and Billie and DeDe Pierce, and scores of others.

His output was staggering. He’d become fixated by a subject New Orleans’ Carnival traditions, the frenetic Port of New Orleans, the characters of the French Quarter, alien beings, ancient Egypt, voodoo and mined it artistically.

Some of his most cherished and memorable pieces are of the Quarter’s Bohemians, fellow outsiders: Ruthie the Duck Girl; Gypsy Lou; O.M. (standing for “Old Man”); Mike Stark; Johnny White; and Sister Gertrude Morgan.

Yet, his life was pierced by that dark side.

“He was a brilliant artist, and I don’t use those words lightly,” said Stephen Clayton, a New Orleans art collector who did not know Rockmore and does not own any of his works. “He chose to come here, came to the Quarter, climbed in a bottle and never got out.”

From his morning vodka, Rockmore kept going all day, muscling his way through sketches, wall-sized oils, nudes in charcoal, sculptures and mixed media and calling it quits at one of his favorite bars, often The Alpine, within shouting distance of the St. Louis cathedral and his bed.

There are stories of him trashing art galleries and studios. Handcuffing a woman to his stove. Sticking a mummified cat in one of his works. Going on lithium and alcohol binges that left him a wreck. Cursing at tourists viciously. Sitting in streets with his muddy tennis shoes and rumpled clothing, looking like a bum. Drawing on napkins, grocery bags and just about anything else he liked. Sitting in bars, drinking and trying to get women to go to bed with him.

One of Rockmore’s closest friends, Andy Antippas, a former Tulane University poetry professor and art gallery owner, recalled going into Rockmore’s apartment during one of his lithium binges and finding his studio in a state that resembled the home of Charles Manson.

“It was trashed,” said Antippas, who found pages from Playboy magazine littering the floor and feces from his two dogs in the middle of his bed. “He’d obviously been sitting in one place and drinking and painting for hours.”

“Noel was an autodidact of the highest order,” Antippas said. “There was probably no artist more prolific than Noel except perhaps Picasso.”

Antippas is like many Rockmore fans. He believes he was a genius, a master who ranks among the greatest.

In his home on St. Claude Avenue cluttered with books, paintings, decorated human skulls, African masks and paintings galore Antippas stood in front of a large subdued painting hanging on the wall near his desk. He looked at it and said he owned what he believed to be “one of the finest paintings, if not the best, painting in Western civilization, a nude portrait of his father. It’s the only such painting ever done.”

“He couldn’t relate to the real world. He lived in his own world; he was driven by his own work,” said Rita Posselt, a 59-year-old fine art photographer who lived with Rockmore between 1978 and 1984 and frequently posed for him. “He would wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, and in between those hours there was a lot of torment for him.”

“He wanted somebody to recognize his talent, and he wanted important people in the art world, museums and such, to do so, but he didn’t want to jump through hoops and parties to make it happen.”

During his life, and still today, Rockmore was a kind of New Orleans project.

He is woven into the city. Anyone who has stepped into the gloom of Preservation Hall has seen Rockmores they’re the haunting oil paintings of jazz greats on the walls. A Rockmore hangs in Johnny White’s bar. It’s a football scene, a token of appreciation for the bar owner, Johnny White, and typically Rockmore: There are three teams on the field. His paintings hang in the Old Mint, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and on the walls of galleries and homes throughout New Orleans. And who knows where else.

“My feeling was that Noel was the most democratic painter,” Antippas said. “Every waiter, bartender, in the Quarter has a Rockmore. God knows how many Rockmores are hanging on walls throughout the city.”

Rockmore died in 1995 at age 66 of an untreated infection. When he was taken to the hospital, according to friends, he was admitted as a “street person.” According to his friends, he sat up on the gurney and declared, “I’m not a street person, I’m a great artist.”

“I always say that he is America’s Picasso,” said Heller-Rhys, his daughter and an accomplished artist herself, as she stood during a recent visit outside the Skyscraper building, an 18th-century apartment building where Rockmore and many other artists, including Charles Bukowski stayed in the 1970s. “And America has to come to terms with that.”

____

Online:

http://www.rightwaywrongway.com/

http://www.lagrangeartmuseum.org/

The vacancy left by Milan Vukmirovic’s departure at Trussardi has been filled—and not a moment too soon. The Italian label announced officially today that Umit Benan, whose menswear has been a highlight of Milan men’s fashion week, will design both men’s and women’s collections for the house as its “fashion consultant,” beginning with the Spring ‘12 menswear show on June 19. Before launching his own line in 2009, the Turkish/German designer worked at Marc Jacobs, under Sophie Théallet at François Nars’ Motu Tane label, and with Rifat Ozbek at Pollini. He’ll continue to produce his eponymous collection. For a hint of what’s to come for the Spring ‘12 Umit Benan line, see our menswear preview.

Photo: Courtesy of Umit Benan

Behold a line that was made for this site: the Target and Hollywoodintuition line hitting stores this Sunday! Priced between $2.99 to $29.99!!!!!

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Check out some of your favorite stars wearing cocktail dresses!

Richards gave it the daytime treatment with nude sandals and Bailon added an evening clutch! Mostly, I love the PRICE! $168! You can also carry this into fall, as hot pink is the big seller. Add black opaque or sexy sheer tights, black gladiator heels and a blazer and you’ve definitely got it all going without breaking the bank. Purchase Info: Buy it here.

Sometimes you need the perfect 24/7 summer dress that works for all occasions: weddings, cocktails, date night, brunch, tea parties, bachelorette parties and everything else. I think we found it! And it’s a celebrity HIT. With its sweetheart neckline, oversized waist bow and mini-dress fit, this figure flattering silhouette is perfect. Denise Richards and Adrienne Bailon both wore this French Connection Flash cotton dress!