Courtesy White Flags Projects

No butts about it.

Someone out there in St. Louis is working really hard to cover our asses.

White Flag Projects founder and director Matthew Strauss says he arrived at 10 a.m. yesterday morning to discover someone had vandalized a large print hanging outside the gallery (4568 Manchester Avenue, 314-531-3442). The image is a promotion for the art nonprofit's current photography exhibit, Coconut Water.

"It's an unpleasant reminder of what you're up against sometimes with this kind of thing," Strauss sighs.

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Via Facebook

Playwright Neil LaBute lends his name to the St. Louis Actors' Studio

Eight professional playwrights and five high school students will have their one-act plays performed during the St. Louis Actors' Studio's first annual LaBute New Theater Festival this summer at the Gaslight Theater. As its title suggests, the festival pays homage to playwright Neil LaBute, best known for such plays-turned-movies as In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things as well as the film The Wicker Man.. LaBute is also penning a one-act play to debut during the festival and is scheduled to appear during the inaugural weekend of the event.

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T.D. El-Amin

T.D. El-Amin's debut novel takes place in Italy and St. Louis but was birthed in Montgomery, Alabama. Specifically the federal prison camp in Montgomery where El-Amin served nearly eighteen months in 2010 and 2011 for soliciting and taking a bribe as a Missouri state representative.

"For me, writing was a way to express myself and my desires," El-Amin tells Daily RFT. "In prison you have to create a world for yourself, and that world has to sustain you. The characters in my book did that. They kept me company."

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Yesterday the website Apartment Therapy published a "House Tour" of St. Louis-based painter and sculptor Mary Sprague's studio/living space in the Locust Business District.

Mary Sprague in her studio, working on St. Udio | via Apartment Therapy

Like the artist herself, the loft and the photoessay are very cool.

The post, which includes a slideshow and a mini-profile of Sprague, was written and photographed by St. Louisans Ann Manubay and Dabney Frake.

"They did a helluva job and made me look mahvelous, don't you think?" Sprague responds when Daily RFT e-mails to ask how it all came about.

"Those two women are art-school graduates from Wellesley and moved back here recently cause the livin's easy." They're friends of Sprague's upstairs studio-mate Elisa Forgelman, who recently brought them over to meet her.

"It's all history from there on," Sprague says. "They made an appointment for the next week and before I had a chance to think twice, they arrived at the door. I was busy making my messes and told them where the bathroom was, if they needed anything just ask, go ahead and do whatever you do because I'm too busy working on St. Udio to micromanage -- or eat lunch for that matter. I did make my bed that morning. Fortunately."

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via miketyson.com

Mike Tyson will be in St. Louis today to perform his one-man show, The Undisputed Truth as part of a 36-city tour, directed by Spike Lee. The Tyson monologue is, according to producers, "a rare, personal look inside the life and mind of one of the most feared men ever to wear the heavyweight crown."

In case you missed it, check out Daily RFT's interview with Tyson this week in advance of his stop at the Peabody Opera House tonight.

And in honor of the most feared man ever gracing us with his presence, we've collected for you videos of some of the best Tyson knockouts and other notable moments in his career. Ear biting and more below.

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Jon Gitchoff

Stan Lee on Saturday.

Comic book hero creator Stan Lee, now age 90, was in St. Louis on Saturday for the Wizard World St. Louis Comic Con at America's Center. The man who helped shape Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man and Thor, among others, met with fans bright-and-early for a Saturday, 9 to 9:45 a.m.

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Love is in the air in St. Louis.

Are you feeling blue this Valentine's Day? Sitting at your desk dreaming of a love note that you probably won't receive? We've got you covered. Daily RFT got in touch this morning with STL Improv Anywhere, which is brightening the days of random folks in St. Louis with some handmade February 14 cheer.

"On the subject of Valentine's Day, people are very passionately divided," Mallory Nezam, founding director of the group, tells Daily RFT. "People tend to take it way too seriously."

So, her group, is taking it very not seriously -- singing to strangers on the street and giving out the quirkiest of quirky cards. We've got the best of them for your below.

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National Park Service, Jefferson National Expansion Memorial

Workers on the Arch leg in the 1960s. More photos below.

On February 12, 1963, construction began on the Gateway Arch, launching the two-and-a-half year, $13 million build-out of the tallest national monument in the country. In honor of the anniversary this week, we've assembled historic photos below.

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courtesy Harris Diamant

If you plan to be in New York this week, you might want to take a couple of hours and venture to Hirschl & Adler Galleries on Fifth Avenue, near Central Park, and take a look at their new exhibition, "Talisman of the Ward: The Album of Drawings By Edward Deeds." After all, it's winter and too told for tramping around outside, and these are really amazing drawings.

Deeds, as recounted in "The Electric Pencil", a Riverfront Times feature that ran last September, spent most of his adult life in State Hospital No. 3, a mental hospital in Nevada, Missouri, where he created a remarkable collection of colored-pencil drawings. He bound some of the drawings into a book as a gift for his family; the book was lost for nearly 40 years and then, miraculously, rediscovered and subsequently recognized as a brilliant work of outsider art.

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Bathing for a good cause. Big photos below.

You know those calendars where good-looking firefighters take off their shirts to raise money for charity? This is like that -- only it's plumbers.

But it's still a good cause! And some of them are, you know, hunky. For your viewing pleasure, Daily RFT brings you the "Men of Spengler," an O'Fallon, Illinois, charitable endeavor.

The company, Spengler Plumbing, Heating & Cooling, is now spreading the word about its 2013 calendar, which the business hopes will help them donate $20,000 to local fire departments through its newly formed "Spengler Everyday Hero Fund."

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