Twitter retaliation: Stephen King blocks Trump from ‘It’

BANGOR, MAINE » Stephen King is retaliating against President Donald Trump for blocking him on Twitter.

In a post late Thursday, the Maine horror author said he would block Trump from seeing the upcoming movie “It” or the currently showing television series “Mr. Mercedes,” both based on his books.

King’s tweet says “No clowns for you, Donald. Go float yourself.”

The movie “It” is about a group of children who confront their fears while confronting the evil balloon-carrying clown, Pennywise. The movie is due out next month.

“Mr. Mercedes” is about a killer who drives a stolen Mercedes into a crowd. The series began airing earlier this month on the Audience network.

American holds onto Air Guitar World Championship title

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK » Matt “Airistotle” Burns is the best when it comes to pretend playing guitar.

The American successfully defended his title at the 22nd Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu, Finland on Friday after competing in the finals against 15 contestants from South Korea, Pakistan, Sweden, Britain, Canada and other countries.

Burns, of Staten Island, New York, finished ahead of runners-up Patrick “Ehrwolf” Culek of Germany and Alexander “The Jinja Assassin” of Australia, who tied for second place. Japan’s 15-year-old ShowShow placed third.

A heavy metal version of “I Will Survive” helped Burns romp away with a score of 35.4. Culek and Roberts each scored 34.6 points, Show-Show 34.5.

The Air Guitar World Championships started off as a joke, but has grown into an annual celebration of guitar-miming chordeographers that draws people to Finland from around the world.

Artist David Hockney gives close-up look at self in exhibit

LOS ANGELES » The aspiring artist was 17 when he took pencil to paper in 1954 and sketched a stunningly mirror-like image of himself as a student at England’s Bradford School of Art.

In the 63 years since, David Hockney has become world famous, not for self-portraits, but for colorful painted landscapes, portraits of others and brilliant photo collages of everything from backyard swimming pools to scenic desert vistas.

Lesser known are the literally hundreds of selfportraits he also made over the years, many tucked away privately, seemingly to simply remind him of the changes time has wrought upon his appearance. Those changes are documented colorfully, and oftentimes humorously, in the exhibition “Happy Birthday, Mr. Hockney,” which opened at Los Angeles’ J. Paul Getty Museum earlier this summer in honor of Hockney’s 80th birthday. It runs until Nov. 26.

Along with a study of the artist’s changing appearance, visitors will also see one of Hockney’s most brilliant photographic works, 1986’s “Pearblossom Highway.” The rarely displayed collage of 700 photos of California’s high desert is one of more than a dozen Hockney collages on display.

When the museum decided it wanted to do something to mark Hockney’s birthday last month — “a little tip of the hat,” says Julian Brooks, the museum’s senior curator of drawings — taking “Pearblossom” out of storage and putting it before the public was a no-brainer.

But officials also wanted a little something more for Hockney, who Brooks notes has all but been a neighbor of the museum since moving to Los Angeles in the 1960s.

London’s Tate Britain museum had already mounted a traveling Hockney retrospective earlier this year, however. It’s currently at Paris’ Pompidou Centre and will move to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in November, and Getty officials didn’t want to copy that.

“So we thought is there anything else we could do to show the passage of time that would be fun and interesting, and the self-portraits seemed like a natural idea,” Brooks said during a recent walk through of the exhibition.

To museum officials’ delight, the artist thought it was a great idea too. Hockney, who has homes in Los Angeles and his native England, opened up his personal archives and those of his foundation, letting Getty curator of photographs, Virginia Heckert, pick and choose.

Although he hasn’t publicly discussed the Getty exhibition, he’s visited and is said to be charmed.

“I have the vanity of an artist. I want my work to be seen. But I don’t necessarily have to be seen,” he told the Tate in a brief interview for its exhibition.

Hockney brings that same playful attitude to the most recent of the selfportraits displayed, a series created on his iPad in 2012 in which Brooks notes the artist seems intent on showing his grumpy-old-man side. In one image, he strikes a snarling, “Get off my lawn” pose. In another, he glares at his audience. In still another, he seems to look up in surprise at the person sketching him.