Great stuff! How will this work? Have you officially taken over the domain names? Since the site owner can see PMs, will these be cleared before the transfer of the site to you? And is there any way the forums could be kept going or at least reactivated once you've had time to settle in?

I think this is fantastic news. When you consider the resource that we would have lost if the sites had gone completely having them available, even in a frozen form, is a huge bonus. Thanks Member555 for your timely intervention.
Best wishes for the future,
Martyn

Good for you Member 555 for taking this site on,

& thanks Dave for developing this excellent site.

........it is appreciated.

Excellent work 555 and good luck!

Does anyone know what's happening with .org? There have been no updates for two months.

http://www.contactmusic.com/pi...40106.jpg


Transcript of said broadcast on the bbc prior to ben uri;

Claudia Winkleman:
".... uhh that was the brilliant Al Green and errr take me to the river"

"err I am still with the art critic and genius Estelle Lovatt and you want to mention an exhibition that's out now by a guy called lenqivitz that I don't know a lot about, tell me"

Estelle Lovatt:
"A lot of people don't, this is a fantastic exhibition on at the Ben Uri gallery in boundary road, that's London NW8 and I'll tell you what makes it so unusual is that lenquicz was such an unusual man, age nine he decided he wanted to paint after seeing Charles Laughton play Rembrandt in a film and heee, Lenquiz was the first man to embalm a tramp, long before Gnter von Hagen,

Claudia Winkleman:
"yeah"

Estelle Lovatt:
"yeah, the German scientist and long before Damien Hurst pickled animals, lenquiz had the idea to embalm a person, actually it was a friend of his, this tramp, who wanted his body the idea to be mumiphied and saved as a work of art so lenquiz kept it in his studio, so it's all these strange things that happened in his life that heeee then tried to depict in his self portraits, he linked up with the big issue which was a very big project for him where he painted vagrants on the streets and portraits of homeless beggars and in every city there are numerous amounts around, he was born in 1941 the son of Jewish refugees coming from Germany and refugees coming from Poland, so they escaped the Nazis and he had that baggage to deal with and they built a hotel in cricklewood in in north west London and all the survivors from the concentration camps stayed there, so he was mixing with these people that were obviously very troubled so you've got holocaust survivors that he's dealing with, you've got his fascination with Leonardo da Vinci and err the dissection of err human bodies, But he was a great artist even though he was chucked out of art school, when he went on to become a teacher he had people who would sit for him who didn't have much money or lived on the streets so that's how his relationship started with beggars and he started various homes to help them;"

Claudia Winkleman:
"how amazing"

Estelle Lovatt:
"anyway at the exhibition you will see some portraits which range from the very early ones when he was just a teenager through to his last when he was sixty in 2002 and as they progress you can see how brave he was as an artist because heeee, he went against the grain, went against being contemporary and doing abstract paintings to paint something that is so serious that painters like Rembrandt, Goya and Manet would tip their hat at him."

Claudia Winkleman:
"yeah, isn't that interesting, but not very fam.. or maybe I'm just an idiot, but not massively famous but you say definitely worth going to see"

Estelle Lovatt:
"well that's the wonderful thing about this Ben Uri exhibition, its giving a second chance to reassess how wonderful lenquitz was"

Claudia Winkleman:
"thank you very much for bringing him to our attention"

------

If we put to one side the mangled facts, wrongheaded emphasis, quite random sound bite sampling of the dated themes and general utter stupidity of the piece you have to say they missed a really good opportunity to link Lenkiewicz with Al Green - I mean rejection, suicide, fanatical beliefs and all those songs about love ... it was an open goal.

Hello Frank,

This comment section is the thinnest of threads sustaining this as a forum while we wait for the re-hosting of the site to happen.

I listened to the BBC's broadcast of the above. Like you say, it's the same old Lenkiewicz-for-dummies spiel.

Not being in the UK, I've lost touch with the latest events in the Lenkiewicz world. Is there any news to report? Does anyone know of any exhibitions or auctions?

It really is a long time for a site to be frozen. I know that the new site owner is working behind the scenes to get it up and running but it's taking an awfully long time.

Regards,

sartre