Entertainment – July 12, 2009

Dillinger’s Ohio Crime Spree Left Out of New Movie

Before becoming Public Enemy No. 1, gangster John Dillinger pulled off his first bank robbery in a sleepy Ohio town.

Police captured him months later when they swarmed his girlfriend’s apartment, but within weeks he brazenly strolled out of jail after his gang killed a rural sheriff.

His Ohio escapades aren’t part of the new movie ”Public Enemies,” which tells of his life on the run after an escape from an Indiana prison and of his death in Chicago. But his rise from small-town bank robber to America’s most wanted man can be traced to a string of holdups during the summer of 1933 and the daring escape that left the Ohio lawman dead.

Even though Dillinger didn’t kill the sheriff, it was the first murder in which he was involved, said John Carnes, curator of collections at the Allen County Museum in Lima.

”After the sheriff was killed,” Carnes said, ”everybody knew about him.”

Dillinger, born in Indianapolis, is better remembered for his gang’s crime spree through Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana and for his death outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater, where FBI agents shot him.

The Universal Pictures movie, starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger, focuses on those final months. Dillinger’s time in Ohio often is overlooked because it wasn’t until months later that he became the FBI’s top priority, Carnes said.

”I wasn’t really surprised the movie left it out,” Carnes said. ”But it is an important part of the story.”

Universal spokeswoman Jennifer Chamberlain said the film takes place during a specific time in Dillinger’s life and was not intended to be a biopic.

Dillinger had served nearly nine years in a Michigan City, Ind., prison for robbing a grocery when he and his prison buddies, including a few with Ohio roots, hatched a plan that would set in motion his infamy.

They decided that Dillinger, who was to be released first, would begin knocking off banks so he could buy guns and break his friends out of prison. They targeted banks in small towns where Dillinger could easily get away, and his first bank robbery was in New Carlisle, near Dayton, in June 1933.

In the next few months, he robbed banks in Indiana and then in Bluffton, Ohio. The money helped him smuggle guns to his Indiana prison buddies, who overpowered guards and broke out in September 1933.

But just days before the prison break, Dillinger was captured while visiting his girlfriend in Dayton. He was moved 100 miles north to Lima, where he faced a bank robbery charge in the Bluffton holdup.

Dillinger was playing cards with a few other inmates in Lima on Oct. 12, 1933, when three men claiming to be officers from Indiana walked into the jail.

They were Dillinger’s old prison buddies from Indiana.

The three men told Allen County Sheriff Jess Sarber that they wanted to speak to Dillinger. When Sarber asked for their credentials, one of them shot him and then began beating him.

Dillinger heard the gunfire, got up from the card game and grabbed his coat. He knew he was free again.

Sarber died in the escape, and the three men who killed him later were captured and convicted.

Dillinger and the rest of his gang continued robbing banks in the Midwest before they were caught in Tucson, Ariz. Dillinger was taken back to Indiana, where he escaped while awaiting trial on charges that he killed a police officer during a Chicago bank robbery.

By that time, he was the FBI’s Public Enemy No. 1.

The movie, which opened July 1 and features Christian Bale as FBI man Melvin Purvis, renews the debate about whether Dillinger was a Robin Hood-type hero for those who were angry with banks and had lost their savings during the Great Depression.

”He was, as far as I’m concerned, a criminal and a murderer,” said Sgt. Tim Garlock, of the Allen County sheriff’s office, who began studying Dillinger’s escape in Lima after he started working in the former sheriff’s residence.

Visitors still stop by about once a month asking to see the old jail, which still looks the same on the outside, Garlock said.

”People,” he said, ”still have the fascination for it.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/07/11/arts/AP-US-Dillinger-Ohio.html

Photo: http://hhs59.com/more.htm

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The Lost Boy in Neverland

The sad tale of Michael Jackson will be retold a few thousand times more as autopsy reports and estate details emerge.

Meanwhile, the presumed verdict is that Jackson died of prescription drugs. On CNN’s “The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer” on Thursday, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske, said that Jackson’s death was a wake-up call to the country about prescription drugs.

Maybe. Maybe not. We all know that abusing prescription drugs — taking them for purposes other than prescribed — is bad for our health. Potentially deadly, in fact.

Regardless, people choose to abuse drugs (or smoke cigarettes or drink booze) for a variety of reasons. But drugs aren’t really what killed Jackson, are they? They may have led to the stopping of his heart, but Jackson’s death spiral began decades ago.

You could see it in his face.

Michael Jackson’s identity crisis wasn’t subtle. There could hardly be a more vivid physical manifestation of a human being’s chaotic psyche than Jackson’s ever-changing visage. Imagine trying so hard to become whole — however one imagines one’s complete self — that you subjected your face to multiple transfigurations until you are hardly recognizable as the person you once were.

Fame and the spiritual poverty of lost childhood are what killed Michael Jackson.

It seemed inappropriate to air these thoughts before the memorial service. It’s still too soon — and probably irrelevant — to focus on Jackson’s attraction to other people’s children. New York Rep. Peter King’s declaration following Jackson’s death that the pop star was a “lowlife” and a “pervert” not only offended many Americans, it served no useful purpose. An online poll conducted by HCD Research, using the MediaCurves.com Web site, found that 60 percent of participants felt that King went too far and that 57 percent didn’t agree with his statements.

Otherwise, King’s blunt-instrument analysis fell far short of insight into the truly tragic dimension of Jackson’s life. Like the face Jackson tried to fashion around some ideal image, his search for that lost part of himself found expression in his Neverland Ranch.

For a man whose musical genius was unconstrained by gravity, Jackson’s personal search bordered on the banal. Peter Pan?

The lost boy in Jackson seemed to grow younger with age. And though interviews through the years suggested that he understood what ailed him, he wasn’t able to approach a grown-up remedy. Perhaps having all the money you could ever dream of — and the worship of millions — meant not ever having to grow up. But a man who isn’t an adult is doomed to pain — and Jackson’s was excruciating to witness.

Rather than receive the therapy he so desperately needed, he projected his needs onto real children and apparently sought to repair himself through them. His sometimes odd relationships with children — including his defense of sleeping with little boys — will always be a postscript on any appraisals of his immense talent.

Whether Jackson’s good works — not just his artistry but his charity — outweighed his peculiarities will be measured elsewhere. Meanwhile, his life — more than his death – is a wake-up call, but not about prescription drug abuse.

Whatever killed Michael Jackson was merely an instrument of self-destruction. The real disease was his own racked soul that pivoted between a drive to push himself to preternatural levels and an almost fetal recoil from the demands of adoration.

The message I suspect even Jackson would hope we get is that children need a childhood, not fame. They need two loving parents, not material things.

Jackson’s life is a testament to genius, yes, but also to a culture best characterized by misplaced priorities. The loss of innocence and our obsession with fame and celebrity are the real plagues, for which drug abuse and other pathologies are but symptoms.

By all accounts, Jackson was painfully empathic toward children’s suffering and, apparently, sought his own relief in their company. Unfortunately, there was no shortage of peers. Millions of lost boys and girls are wandering in the neverland of instant gratification unbuffered by responsible adults. Most won’t meet such dramatic ends. Few can afford to indulge their inner child for long or to subsidize the extreme expressions that Jackson underwrote.

But the afflictions of loneliness and delayed maturity born of inadequate nurturing are the same for many. Until we cure those, prescription drug abuse is the least of our problems.

Kathleen Parker, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/10/AR2009071002935.html

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Mary Louise Parker: Prude or Pin-up?

Mary-Louise Parker in a “Weeds” promo pic.

Whoa — can one get celebrity news-induced whiplash? If so, Mary-Louise Parker, who stars as a pot-peddling suburban mom on the Showtime series “Weeds,” may force me to strap on a neck brace.

Back in May, Parker told MORE magazine she regretted filming a nude scene for her Showtime series “Weeds”:

“I didn’t think I needed to be naked. I fought with the director about it, and now I am bitter. I knew it was going to be on the Internet: ‘Mary Louise shows off her big nipples.’ I wish I hadn’t done that. I was goaded into it.”

Yet Parker seems to have had no compunction about posing as a near-naked baker (NSFW pix) in the latest issue of Esquire and, in fact, showing off her big nipples.

Parker has a long history of posing, and writing, for the magazine, too. She’s just launched a video series in which she reads bedtime stories clad in bra and panties and, in March, she shared her enthusiasm for having sex in public:

Public and even semipublic sex will get you a burst of cortisol and a particular delicious anxiety. If you can’t stomach the thought of a light felony charge or possible public stoning, consider the hallway…

Listen, I’m all for going starkers, but make up your mind, Mary-Louise. Either you’re a prim prude or an exhibitionist (and if I have that bod at 44, I might consider some naked baking myself), but you can’t be both.

Liz Kelly, Washington Post

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Full article and photo: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/celebritology/2009/07/mary_louise_parker_prude_or_pi.html

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Obama artist admits to 3 Boston vandalism charges

Artist Shepard Fairey stands at Boston Municipal Court Friday, July 10, 2009, during a status hearing in connection with 13 vandalism charges around Boston. Fairey, 38, who created the “Hope” poster of President Barack Obama was arrested by Boston police in February when he was in the city for an event kicking off his exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

The artist who created the “Hope” poster of President Barack Obama was sentenced to two years of probation Friday after pleading guilty to three vandalism charges. Prosecutors dropped 11 other charges.

Shepard Fairey pleaded guilty in Boston Municipal Court to one charge of defacing property and two charges of wanton destruction of property under $250, all misdemeanors.

The 39-year-old Los Angeles street artist, who became famous for plastering his posters and stickers throughout cities, must pay $2,000 to a graffiti removal organization and cannot possess tagging materials – such as stickers or paste – in Boston except for authorized art installations. He also must tell officials when he plans to visit Suffolk County, where Boston is located.

“I think that people should be responsible about sharing their art, and that’s not a transition or an evolution of my philosophy,” Fairey said outside court. “Fortunately, I’m at a place in my career where I can get sanctioned spaces, so it’s not an issue that I’ll ever have to worry about again.”

Fairey was arrested in February when he was in Boston for an event kicking off a solo exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The arrest came three days after he failed to appear in court on a charge of placing a poster on a Boston electrical box in September 2000.

In the plea deal, Fairey admitted to the 2000 incident and two others this past January: placing a sticker on the back of a traffic sign and affixing a poster to a private condominium building.

He faces no further vandalism charges in Suffolk County. Prosecutors dropped 14 charges last month, saying they could not prove Fairey had placed stickers on properties in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood.

“I share my art and it works virally. People make printouts from the Internet and people buy my stickers online,” he said. “There was absolutely no way for the city of Boston to assert that Obama posters put up when I wasn’t even in town were done by me, which is ridiculous.”

Assistant District Attorney Josh Wall said prosecutors aren’t responsible for judging the artistic merits of street artists when they break the law to display their work.

Fairey intends to return to Boston on July 31 to attend a party at the museum for his exhibit, which ends next month.

In a separate case, Fairey and The Associated Press have sued each other over the “Hope” poster, which Fairey’s lawyers acknowledge was derived from a photo taken for the AP.

The AP has said his uncredited and uncompensated use of the image violates copyright laws. Fairey says he didn’t violate copyright law because he dramatically changed the image.

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Full article and photo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/10/AR2009071001737.html

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Entertainment – July 11, 2009

Wary Christmas Looms For Music Retailers

Retailers expect music sales to be better during the Christmas shopping season than the rest of this year, but most anticipate a case of the holiday blues.

“Last year was such a bad Christmas for music sales that if we can’t top that, then we’ve got a serious problem on our hands,” says a purchasing executive at a retail chain who asked to remain anonymous because he isn’t authorized to speak about sales projections.

The executive expects year-end sales to be up from last year, which would be the first time since 2003 that fourth-quarter U.S. recorded-music sales haven’t posted a year-on-year decline.

But that’s one of the more optimistic forecasts. Others say they assume that year-end recorded-music sales will slide in line with the rest of 2009, when year-to-date sales have dropped 14.5 percent from the same period last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

A strong release schedule could help slow the decline. High-profile releases expected this fall include albums by Jay-Z, 50 Cent, T-Pain, Leona Lewis and Shakira. But merchants and distribution executives say it’s too early to assess the impact of this year’s slate.

“Overall, (U.S. CD sales) are down about 20 percent this year,” says Universal Music Group Distribution president/CEO Jim Urie. “It may get better due to a strong release schedule, but it won’t provide a major improvement.”

SPENDING ON HOLD

Most industry executives say the distressed economy, weak CD profit margins and the increasing displacement of physical music product in brick-and-mortar stores by other entertainment products will make it difficult for holiday sales to remain steady over last year, much less show an upswing.

The CFO at a leading retail chain says that while he expects some U.S. economic indicators to show improvement in the fall, “it will be 2011 before we see any serious spending out of consumers, and it won’t be at previous levels.”

The wild card is U.S. monetary policy, according to the executive. “If they don’t focus on strengthening the dollar, I worry that hyper-inflation will kick in,” he says, adding that hopes for a near-term economic recovery will be dim “if the dollar is not strong and foreign investors start pulling out.”

Bruce Ogilvie, co-owner of music and video distributor Super D, says he doesn’t expect the current rate of decline in U.S. physical music sales to accelerate during the rest of the year, after a 21.2 percent fall in CD sales during the first six months of the year from the same period of 2008. “If the economy got better, it would help things,” Ogilvie says.

But making matters worse are this year’s significantly slowed DVD sales, retail executives say. They’re divided, however, on whether the poor sales have been the result of a weak release schedule and tough economic conditions or a decline in the DVD format’s popularity among consumers, many of whom have already stopped buying CDs.

PRICE WARS

Whatever the answer, DVDs have supplanted music at the front of most home entertainment superstores, thanks to aggressive marketing by film studios. This year, studios are being just as aggressive with DVD catalog, merchants say. But they may be backing off from releasing big DVD titles close to Thanksgiving weekend, out of fear of a possible price war, says a Wall Street analyst who follows movie studios. The analyst notes that intensive promotional pricing last year led to a pricing battle, triggered by pressure from big-box retailers on the studios to provide them with unusually large promotional budgets.

Alan Tuchman, president of independent distributor Alliance Entertainment, says he assumes that floor space dedicated to music will continue to dwindle right through the holiday shopping season. “The labels have made it very clear to me that they want to manage the CD down … because they fear it is cannibalizing potential digital sales,” he says. “The labels see it as a declining business and will no longer invest in it” beyond the big-box merchants.

But Tuchman says labels should view the CD as a different business from digital downloads, and one that targets a different demographic. If the labels look at it from that perspective, and cut prices and invest in other music merchandisers, then the CD can be incremental business for them, he says.

“Christmas depends on how much real estate we have left,” Tuchman says. “We don’t see much of a change in pricing from the label side … so we think music will continue to fade. By Christmas merchants will have a much smaller music section, so I am not bullish.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/07/11/arts/entertainment-us-christmas.html

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GLAAD: ‘Bruno’ Reinforces Negative Gay Stereotypes

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said Friday that ”Bruno,” the new film starring Sacha Baron Cohen, reinforces negative stereotypes and ”decreases the public’s comfort with gay people.”GLAAD president Jarrett Barrios, who saw the film Friday, said that ”the movie was a well-intentioned series of sketches — some hit the mark and some hit the gay community pretty hard and reinforce some damaging, hurtful stereotypes.”

In a style similar to his popular Borat character, Baron Cohen brings Bruno, a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashionista, into ridiculous situations with unsuspecting everyday people.

Universal Pictures, which released ”Bruno,” sought GLAAD’s input on the film and invited staff members to advance screenings, Barrios said.

The organization ”shared a number of concerns, and unfortunately, the scenes that we had the biggest concerns about remained in the film,” Barrios said.

One such scene shows Bruno in a hot tub with his adopted infant son and two naked men involved in a sex act.

”Scenes like that don’t help America understand the hundreds of thousands of gay families who get up every day, do the carpool then rush home to make dinner and be with their children,” Barrios said.

Similarly, the movie’s mock marriage scene ”doesn’t help Americans understand the lives of gay couples who are denied the rights and protections of marriage in 43 states,” he said.

Universal Pictures maintains that ”Bruno” is a satire that ”uses provocative comedy to powerfully shed light on the absurdity of many kinds of intolerance and ignorance, including homophobia.”

”While any work that dares to address relevant cultural sensitivities might be misinterpreted by some or offend others, we believe the overwhelming majority of the audience will understand and appreciate the film’s inarguably positive intentions, which we’ve seen demonstrated whenever we have shown it,” the studio said in a statement.

Barrios said that while he believes the filmmakers had good intentions and that some moviegoers will see the satire, ”some people in the gay community will be as troubled as GLAAD is that the movie doesn’t decrease homophobia, but decreases the public’s comfort with gay people.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/07/10/arts/AP-US-Film-Bruno-GLAAD.html

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Paris Hilton Insists She Plugged Sorority Movie

Paris Hilton repeatedly fussed with her hair and makeup in a federal courtroom Friday, sported six-inch stiletto heels and a black dress and amused the judge with a little wave on the way to the witness stand.Once on the stand, though, Hilton was businesslike when it came to defending herself against an $8 million lawsuit’s claim that she didn’t do her part to promote the 2006 box-office bomb ”Pledge This!” She acknowledged in court the movie didn’t turn out very well but insisted she plugged it for everything she was worth.

”If I have my name attached to something, I want it to be as big as it can be,” the 28-year-old heiress, model and actress testified. ”It could have been a lot better if it was done more professionally. I wanted it to do as well as possible.”

Hilton is accused by an investor’s lawsuit of turning her back on the film, which made just $2.9 million, at a crucial time when it was being released on DVD and in foreign markets. The lawsuit seeking $8.3 million in damages claims she violated her contract by rejecting or ignoring requests by producers to appear on talk shows and do radio and magazine interviews for the film.

Hilton insisted she was never told her contract required appearances after the October 2006 premiere of ”Pledge This!” and said she spent more than two years promoting it beforehand, including two high-profile trips to the Cannes Film Festival in France.

She also testified during four hours on the stand that she relied on her managers and agents to vet most of her promotional appearance offers because she was constantly working on projects ranging from TV shows and films to a lines of perfume and handbags. She wasn’t aware of many suggestions made by the ”Pledge This!” producers, she said.

”My people handle my schedule. I’m a brand. I’m a businesswoman. I have 13 different product lines. I’m always working,” Hilton said.

The trial is being heard by Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno, who reacted with surprise when Hilton gave him a little wave before testifying. ”I’ve never had a witness wave at me before,” the judge cracked.

In another exchange, Moreno was puzzled by the title of Hilton’s current reality show, ”My New BFF.”

”What does that mean?” he said. After Hilton gave the title — ”Paris Hilton’s My New Best Friend Forever” — the judge remarked ”This will be my best case forever.”

Without missing a beat, Hilton replied ”You’re my best judge forever.”

At one point, Hilton was testifying about how full her schedule was during rehearsals for her next film, 2008′s ”The Hottie & The Nottie,” when Moreno interrupted.

”Was it better than this one?” the judge said, referring to ”Pledge This!”.

”It was really good,” Hilton answered with a giggle. Along with the heels, Hilton wore an all-black sleeveless dress tied at the back and sported diamond rings and a bracelet.

Testimony concluded Friday but Moreno did not immediately issue a ruling. If he finds Hilton breached her contract, a separate proceeding could be held to determine any damages.

The lawsuit was filed by attorney Michael Goldberg, a court-appointed receiver for a now-defunct entertainment company that was the major investor in ”Pledge This!” The company, Worldwide Entertainment Group, was shut down as a $300 million Ponzi scheme by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Goldberg is attempting to recoup losses for some 3,300 investors.

Goldberg said Friday he put up the final $600,000 from his receivership account to complete the movie in hopes that Hilton’s promotion prowess would enable it to turn a profit. He said her unwillingness to do events after the premiere was the reason it lost money.

”I said, ‘Just do one little thing and you’ll never hear from me again,”’ Goldberg told Moreno. ”We had no support whatsoever.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/07/10/arts/AP-US-Promoting-Paris.html

Photo: http://icantandiwont.blogspot.com/2006/10/it-looks-like-paris-hiltons-latest_20.html

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Entertainment – July 9, 2009

Michael, a Foreign Affair

“It has this sense of finality,” said a CNN reporter Tuesday at the end of the Michael Jackson memorial service.

Yes, pictures of a casket being lifted into a hearse and driven away will do that for you.

Yet the beat goes on. On Wednesday, there was Jackson’s skin doctor on ABC, announcing that he was not, “to the best of my knowledge,” the biological father of Jackson’s two oldest children. (Isn’t that the sort of question a person’s dermatologist should be able to answer without hedging?) The mayor of Los Angeles wondered if fans wouldn’t like to chip in to help the city pay for the cost of crowd control. And the coroner’s office is still working on the autopsy. (“They Saved Michael Jackson’s Brain!” announced E! Online.)

Meanwhile, in Washington the House Foreign Affairs Committee is weighing a 1,500-word resolution in Jackson’s honor.

Why, you may ask, is this the job of the Foreign Affairs Committee? Exactly the same question the committee members were undoubtedly asking, although on Wednesday they were too busy holding a hearing on nuclear cooperation with the United Arab Emirates to have much comment.

Perhaps because the resolution calls Jackson a “global” humanitarian. Perhaps because the House has not yet created a Committee on Controversial Musical Icons.

Anyhow, it’s there. The resolution was introduced by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas. It praises the entertainer’s charitable activities, perhaps in more detail than is absolutely necessary. (“Whereas in December 1991, Michael’s office MJJ Productions donated more than 200 turkey dinners to needy families in Los Angeles. …”)

Jackson Lee gave a long and emotional speech at the memorial, in which she claimed to be appearing on behalf of the entire House of Representatives. All of whom, she seemed to suggest, owed their careers to the singer. (“He called us into public service. …”)

People tend to get carried away when someone famous dies, so it’s best not to be hypercritical about the eulogies. Still, it was a little peculiar hearing Brooke Shields’s weepy testimony about her deep friendship with Jackson given the fact that she told reporters that the last time she saw him was at Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth wedding in 1991. And while Representative Jackson Lee correctly pointed out that Jackson was acquitted of all charges in that child molestation trial, nobody really wants their memorial service dotted with comments like “People are innocent until proven otherwise!”

The media, for its part, plans to continue talking about Michael Jackson for quite a while — this is the first time since the election that we feel we have everyone’s attention. The practice of churning out stories about a deceased celebrity for as long as possible is an old tradition. It used to be known as the “John Garfield Still Dead” syndrome, after the extensive postfuneral coverage of a movie star who had a fatal heart attack in 1952 in the bed of a woman other than his wife.

When I worked as a wire service reporter, there was a legendary tale about funeral overkill involving Daniel Patrick O’Connell, the political boss of Albany who died in 1977. Since O’Connell had run the town since 1919, this was a huge local story. There were many headlines about the death, the wake, the burial. Then … what next? A beleaguered editor at U.P.I. finally solved the problem by filing an update that said: “Today, God said hello as thousands said goodbye to Daniel Patrick O’Connell.” It became a cautionary story about how not to freshen a lead.

The government, at least, can let Michael Jackson go.

Jackson Lee’s Resolution No. 600 “honoring an American legend and musical icon” is not going to make it through the House without a fight, given the fact that Representative Peter King, a Long Island Republican, discovered over the Fourth of July weekend that he could get several hundred thousand hits on YouTube with a home video in which he called Jackson a “pervert” and unfavorably compared the singer to fallen firefighters.

If I were running the world, I’d find a way to misplace the paperwork or change the subject. “We’re running out of dead people to name post offices after,” suggested the committee’s vice chairman, Gary Ackerman of Queens, thoughtfully.

America is a sea of woe these days, and we want to believe our elected representatives are spending every waking minute trying to help. Deep in our hearts, we know that many of them wouldn’t know what to do with a problem if they had it captured in a glass jar with no air holes. But we prefer not to be reminded of their uselessness by hearing that they spent their time arguing about whether the King of Pop deserves a posthumous ceremonial commendation.

If you can’t do anything serious, guys, it’s really better not to do anything at all. Spend your free time in prayer and contemplation.

Gail Collins, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/opinion/09collins.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

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See also:

One Last Michael Jackson Controversy

Pelosi says ‘no’ to honoring the King of Pop.

Michael Jackson led a controversial life, but it’s the good things that Reps. Diane Watson and Sheila Jackson Lee chose to remember this week as they co-sponsored a House bill calling the late pop singer a “global humanitarian and a noted leader in the fight against worldwide hunger and medical crises.”  Too bad Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday that the bill won’t be brought up for a vote.

The Speaker’s decision means that the House won’t officially debate Mr. Jackson’s legacy, humanitarian or otherwise.  Congresswoman Watson, for one, might have highlighted one of Mr. Jackson’s odder choices.  “I just marveled at the fact that he bought the remains of the Elephant Man,” she told me this week. The Elephant Man, aka Joseph Merrick, suffered physical deformities that made him a cause celebre in Victorian England and later the subject of an Oscar-nominated film coproduced by Mel Brooks. That Jackson (reportedly) purchased Merrick’s remains demonstrated, Ms. Watson said, “a sensitivity that expanded beyond entertainment. I think he was really looking to harmonize the world through peace and love.”

Ms. Watson, a Los Angeles Democrat, was quick to dismiss criticism of the superstar’s personal life, including some stinging words by House colleague Peter King, who blasted the media for lionizing “a pervert, a child molester [and] a pedophile.” The Long Island Republican’s comments were “some of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen an elected official say about a performer,” Ms. Watson told me. “I just wrote him a note and I said ‘Judge not lest you be judged.’”

Ms. Watson stresses her background as a school psychologist, including work in the Los Angeles public schools. “We have no facts that [Jackson's] behavior was inappropriate when he was among children,” she said. “We would say that a grown man shouldn’t have kids in his bed, but how many kids jump in bed with their parents?” Added the Congresswoman: “Michael saw the world through his own lenses. He saw no harm, no danger, nothing wrong with romping on the bed with children.”

Now that Ms. Pelosi quashed the Watson-Lee bill, we won’t get to learn who else in Congress accepts Mr. Jackson’s view of things.

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124715729460818611.html

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Entertainment – July 8, 2009

Dole Sues “Bananas” Documentary Maker

Dole Food Company Inc filed a defamation lawsuit on Wednesday against a Swedish film makers it accuses of knowingly including “patent falsehoods” in a documentary about Nicaraguan banana workers who sued Dole for allegedly exposing them to pesticides on its Nicaraguan plantations.

Dole said it repeatedly “implored” director Fredrik Gertten and producer Margarete Jangard to revise the film “Bananas!*” to show the bananeros’ lawsuits against Dole were thrown out in April by a Los Angeles judge who found a “pervasive conspiracy” to defraud U.S. courts by plaintiffs attorneys and Nicaraguan judges.

Gertten “refused to make any meaningful changes to the film and persisted in publicly screening it and touting its accuracy in the face of court rulings that the story was false …,” said the suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.

“To screen, promote, and profit from this film, despite the fact that its entire premise has been (judged) a fraud on Dole and California’s courts, is the epitome of reckless and irresponsible conduct.”

An attorney representing Gertten could not immediately be reached for comment.

In a July 1 letter posted on a website promoting the film, Gertten described Dole’s demands as “blatant intimidation” and said the company, “attacked the film without seeing it.”

The film chronicles a “David versus Goliath” struggle by U.S. plaintiffs attorney Juan Dominguez to bring what he says in the film are the first ever claims by third-world farm workers in U.S. courts.

“I do not like when other people are exploited … I never like the big guy picking (on) the little guy,” Dominguez says in the trailer.

The film was first screened in June, over Dole’s objections, at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

“Bananas!*” concludes with Dominguez winning a $2.5 million punitive damages verdict on behalf of five Nicaraguan plaintiffs, but leaves out what happened next.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney threw out that award and some claims, cut down other damages awarded by a jury, then threw out two of Dominguez’s pending cases.

Chaney found that medical evidence and some plaintiffs’ proof of employment had been forged. She ruled that Dominguez and others had run a large-scale operation to recruit men who had never worked on Dole plantations to act as plaintiffs and had coached them in how to testify.

The judge referred Dominguez and other attorneys to states’ bar associations and to prosecutorial agencies.

Film Independent officials warned the audience before a June 20 screening that, “there seems to be a little question that the version of reality that the film portrays does not match the reality that emerged in the courtroom.”

But FIND officials said they decided to screen the film, despite the threat of litigation from Dole as, “a case study of what makes (and doesn’t make) a responsible documentary.”

The lawsuit says the film is set for wide release to movie theaters in October.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/07/08/arts/entertainment-us-dole-lawsuit.html

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Pamplona’s Fearsome Festival Gets Underway

Spain is renowned for its bull fights and Pamplona’s San Fermin Festival capitalizes on this tradition. With nine days and nights of bull runs, it’s not surprising that there have been some nasty injuries in the festival’s history. There was a collective sigh of relief then as proceedings got off to a relatively a safe start this year.

Waving their red bandanas and cheering in anticipation, thousands of people crowded onto the streets of Pamplona on Monday, July 6 to witness the start of the annual San Fermin festival. Locals and tourists danced on the streets as the nine-day extravanganza began with a rocket being fired from the city hall at noon sharp.

San Fermin is known throughout the world for its main attraction — the bull runs which take place every morning at 8 a.m. local time. Each day, six fighting bulls and two herds of bullocks run the 825 meter route from their pens in Santo Domingo to the bull ring, where they fight in the afternoon. They chase adrenaline junkies through the enclosed streets of Pamplona, often trampling on anyone not quick enough to get out of their way. This year, reports suggest that 2,000 people took part in the first run.

Revelers run on Estafeta Street  as a man clashes with a bull, centre right, during the run of the Alcurrucen fighting bulls at San Fermin festival in Pamplona, northern Spain, Tuesday, July 7, 2009. Thrillseekers sprinted through Pamplona in a swift and relatively clean start to the running of the bulls. No one was gored on Tuesday, but four people were hospitalized with bumps, bruises or scrapes, Spanish Red Cross spokesman Jose Aldaba said.

The run of the bulls is not without its critics. Activists from animal rights groups PETA and Anima Naturalis held a demonstration outside the town hall in Pamplona on July 5 to protest against bullfighting as a cruel sport.

Participants in the “1st International Ernest Hemingway doubles and impersonators contest” laugh as an actor dressed as a bullfighter jokes around before the start of the contest in Pamplona July 4, 2009. U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway made Pamplona’s San Fermin festival world known and now the city is marking the 50th anniversary of his last visit to the festival with this contest, two days prior to the kick-off of the festival.

People arrive in Spain from all across the globe to take part in the first run on Tuesday morning. Victor Gaona, a 26 year-old tourist from Mexico, described the run as “incredible.” “I saw a bull fall in front of me, and it is an unforgettable experience,” he told the Associated Press. Another tourist, Mark Kowalski of Alberta, Canada also braved the run. “I feared for my life. It was pretty intense,” said 23-year-old runner told AP.

It’s not all fun and games though. So far this year, the Spanish Red Cross has only reported treating four people with minor injuries, but the festival has seen major casualties and even fatalities in its history. Fourteen people have died as a result of the bull runs since records began in 1924, the last victim being 22 year-old Matthew Tassio in 1995. But this will not deter thousands of thrillseekers from descending onto the streets this year. Anyone can join in — as long as you arrive in good time, dressed in white and sporting a red neckerchief, you’re free to try your luck against the bulls.

The festival, which dates back to the thirteenth century, is named after the patron saint, San Fermin, who is said to protect the runners from the bulls. In keeping with tradition, a procession was held on Tuesday July 7, during which a statue of the saint was paraded along the streets of Pamplona in his honor.

Those attending the event can look forward to a total of nine days of bull runs, parties and celebrations. Festivities will continue until July 14 and will culminate in a spectacular show of fireworks at midnight.

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Full article and photos: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,634833,00.html

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In Russia, Obama’s Star Power Does Not Translate

No one was swooning as President Obama gave the graduation speech at the New Economic School in Moscow on Tuesday.

Let other capitals go all weak-kneed when President Obama visits. Moscow has greeted Mr. Obama, who on Tuesday night concluded a two-day Russian-American summit meeting, as if he were just another dignitary passing through.

Crowds did not clamor for a glimpse of him. Headlines offered only glancing or flippant notice of his activities. Television programming was uninterrupted; devotees of the Russian Judge Judy had nothing to fear. Even many students and alumni of the Western-oriented business school where Mr. Obama gave the graduation address on Tuesday seemed merely respectful, but hardly enthralled.

“We don’t really understand why Obama is such a star,” said Kirill Zagorodnov, 25, one of the graduates. “It’s a question of trust, how he behaves, how he positions himself, that typical charisma, which in Russia is often parodied. Russians really are not accustomed to it. It is like he is trying to manipulate the public.”

Others suggested that after decades of social turmoil, Russians were simply exhausted with politics, and had been so often disappointed by Western leaders that they were not inclined to get excited by the latest one. Asked by one Moscow newspaper what they expected to come out of Mr. Obama’s visit, most respondents had the same answer: traffic jams.

Some Obama aides said they were struck by the low-key reception here, especially when compared with the outpouring on some of his other foreign trips. Even Michelle Obama, who typically enjoys admiring coverage in the local news media when she travels, has not had her every move chronicled here.

In the background is the question of race, which Russians view through a complicated prism. For decades, Soviet propaganda hammered home the idea that the United States was an irredeemably racist country, as opposed to the Communist bloc nations. But Russia in recent years has been plagued by racist violence against people from the Caucasus region and Central Asia, as well as other immigrants.

Yet many young Russians, like David Zokhrabian, 21, who recently received a graduate degree in international relations from Moscow State University, said Mr. Obama’s race cut both ways. “Students in Moscow, they are pretty positive about this,” he said. “It’s cool, modern, progressive. All the students know American history, they know about segregation, so it shows us about democracy, how it can be.”

But the same cannot be said for average Russians, he said, adding: “It looks weird to them. They just think that America has gone crazy.”

Many here noted that Russia went through an enthusiastic phase with President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, when Russians were reaching out to Americans. Mr. Clinton conducted a town hall meeting in Moscow that was broadcast across Russia (and featured a woman in the audience jumping up and hugging Mr. Clinton on camera).

By contrast, Mr. Obama’s speech on Tuesday, billed as his third major foreign policy address after speeches in Cairo and Prague, was not shown live on any of the major Russian channels, to the White House’s disappointment.

Mr. Obama used the speech, at the New Economic School, to declare that Russia and the United States “share common interests.” The Kremlin tightly controls Russian television, and it was not clear why officials chose to disregard the speech.

They may have believed that there would be little public interest, or they may not have wanted to provide Mr. Obama with unfettered access to the country, which might have allowed him to overshadow Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin or President Dmitri A. Medvedev.

Tom Malinowski, who was a speechwriter for Mr. Clinton, said Russian audiences were always the toughest to connect with.

“It is a jaded political culture that has had a very hard experience with a system that professed universal idealism while delivering unbearable suffering,” said Mr. Malinowski, now Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. “Some degree of cynicism about high-minded ideals is a natural outcome of that.”

He said Mr. Obama’s facility with language gives him the ability to talk around governments directly to people. Mr. Obama, he said, has the talent to “do that in every part of the world, except possibly Russia.”

Sergei Brilev, a top television anchor at Rossiya, the state-owned national channel, said that Mr. Obama’s oratory might not translate well into Russian. He recalled that when he watched Mr. Obama’s speech in Cairo with dubbing in Russian, he found it lackluster. It was only when Mr. Brilev, who speaks polished English, saw the original that he realized what all the fuss was about.

Russians tend to view Mr. Obama not so much with hostility as with indifference. “Despite Russia becoming part of the rest of the world in the last 5 or 10 years,” Mr. Brilev said, “the interesting thing about Russia is that so many things which fascinate the American and European publics are Page 26 stuff here.”

After relations with the United States curdled in the final years of President George W. Bush’s tenure, many people here were relieved by Mr. Obama’s election. But that does not necessarily mean they are overly optimistic about his pledge to improve ties.

Valery Kanishev, 68, a designer for the state circus company, said he was pleased that Mr. Obama had brought his children with him to Russia. But Mr. Kanishev said Mr. Obama’s address on Tuesday would not get him far with many older Russians, who grew weary of political speeches after enduring the wooden recitations of Leonid I. Brezhnev, the former Soviet leader.

In Soviet times, speeches were composed by committees, Mr. Kanishev said, “10 or 12 people who would drink a glass of cognac and then put something together.”

“Russians are the smartest people in the world,” he said. “The main thing is results. Our people don’t trust anyone.”

Younger people were generally more welcoming. Oksana Sytnova, 24, graduated first in her class at the New Economic School, an honor that was particularly sweet because Mr. Obama presented it to her at the graduation on Tuesday.

“For my generation, he is a very attractive politician,” Ms. Sytnova said. “And today’s speech showed that.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/world/europe/08russia.html?hpw

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See also:

Somebody Loves Me, I Wonder Who

President Bush was supposed to have alienated the entire world, but Reuters reports Vladimir Putin didn’t get the memo:

Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin praised the hospitality and openness of U.S. former President George W. Bush in a telegramme sent hours before meeting his successor Barack Obama.

“During the last years we have been working on strengthening Russia-U.S. cooperation. Although there were differences between our countries, I always valued your openness and sincerity,” Putin said, congratulating Bush on his 63rd birthday on July 6.

“With special warmth I recall your hospitality in the Crawford ranch and your family estate in Kennebunkport,” Putin wrote, referring to their 2007 meeting at the Bush family vacation home when the two leaders went fishing and ate lobster.

Did you even know Bush’s birthday was July 6? Surely it cannot be all chance.

James Taranto, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124707228937412745.html

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A Comedy that Shifts Downward, Literally Below the Belt

British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is back on the big screen — this time he’s infuriating his victims and causing hilarity with his Brüno character, a gay Austrian television reporter who specializes in fashion. But some reviewers are asking exactly how real “Brüno” is.

Brüno is Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat and is just as likely to ruffle the audience’ feathers.

Michael Jackson hasn’t been this popular in 25 years. When he was alive, the pop star was often derided — in the animated series “South Park,” for example, or in the science fiction comedy “Men in Black II” — portrayed as an extraterrestrial with a special fondness for children, whose nose would occasionally fall off.

Sacha Baron Cohen, the British guerilla humorist, has also scored big at Jackson’s expense in his new film “Brüno.” In the film, Cohen manages to trick Jackson’s sister, LaToya, into doing an interview. At the end of the conversation, Cohen grabs her mobile phone, finds Michael’s number and begins to read it out loud.

But the film’s eventual viewers will never see that scene because Cohen cut it after the pop star’s death — while at the same time ensuring that the world, by way of British tabloid, The Sun, would find out about his coup. This mock-reverent act of self-censorship is proof of two important things: Firstly, Cohen, 37, is a master of self-promotion. And, secondly, his talent for PR has come to eclipse his comedic genius.

In 2006, Cohen transformed himself into Borat, a reporter from Kazakhstan. As such he managed to elicit the most outrageous remarks about Jews and Roma and Sinti from ordinary Americans. In the film Cohen, himself Jewish, asks a gun shop owner to recommend the type of pistol that would be best for fending off a Jew. “A nine-millimeter or a 45,” the man replied.

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev also became an involuntary actor in Cohen’s film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” After the film was released, Nazarbayev’s government made the mistake of complaining about the comedian, because he had claimed that in his (cinematic) country, incest, rape and Jew-baiting are popular pastimes. And when the Kazakh ambassador to London called Cohen “a pig of a man,” the actor retaliated by stating he was in favor of suing “that Jew.”

Stretching the Bounds of Comedy

With “Borat,” which grossed more than $260 million (€187 million), Cohen became one of the first big-screen-bound proponents of that unique genre, the docu-comedy, which moves between ludicrous fiction and bitter reality, to become popular in Germany. Indeed there are still lawsuits pending because of the film. For “Brüno,” this is both first-rate PR and a heavy burden. Cohen, who violated many taboos with “Borat” and significantly stretched the boundaries of comedy, is like a pioneer wondering what to conquer next.

And now, ironically, the effeminate Brüno, a gay Austrian fashion journalist who wants to become a celebrity at all costs, is stepping into Borat’s oversized shoes He wants to be: “the biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler.” To achieve that goal, he travels through the United States, filming his exploits and clad only in his skimpy outfits, sometimes even nude. For example, in one scene Brüno manages to slip into a swinger party and, in another, he drops his trousers in the presence of Republican Congressman Ron Paul.

Millions of television viewers got to know Brüno intimately about a month ago when, during the MTV Movie Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, he sailed down from the ceiling on angel wings before accidentally colliding, ass first, with rapper Eminem’s face. The hip-hop star, who has been criticized for his homophobic lyrics in the past, seemed outraged and stormed out of the venue.

How Real Is Brüno?

A few days later, it was revealed that Eminem had actually known about the stunt in advance and was part of the plot. Which has given many of Brüno’s reviewers pause for thought. “The suspicion persists that most of the sequences were staged, with the majority of the participants in on the gag or even portrayed by actors,” Todd McCarthy, film critic for the leading Hollywood industry newspaper, Variety, wrote in his review.

In Madrid in June to promote the movie, Cohen made sure to strike a pose dressed as a bull.

But irrespective of how many of the scenes were staged, it’s surprising how far Cohen has to go in order extract homophobic statements from Americans. When he accompanies three hunters on a night time shoot in the woods in order to learn more about traditional masculinity, the men respond patiently to his provocations. In fact, the fictional character Brüno, which like Borat was developed by Cohen for his British television series, “Da Ali G Show,” has only limited use as an instrument of satire and social analysis. For many Americans, Borat was a retarded Kazakh caveman to whom they believed they could show off how advanced their country was. While doing so they accidentally revealed exactly how prejudiced and regressive they themselves were.

Stale Suspicion

It was Borat’s utter foreignness that made him so easy to trust. His unwitting interviewees opened up to him precisely because he was — apparently — from such a backward place. Some even admitted, quite candidly, that they wanted to see slavery re-introduced. But in the eyes of Cohen’s new victims, Brüno is no such thing. He is a decadent gay man, the product of the modern age. And this makes them far more cautious.

As a result “Brüno” — directed by Larry Cohen, the same man who made “Borat” — doesn’t seem to be able to get at the dark heart of American culture. And so the comedy shifts downwards, literally going below the belt. In a naughty montage, the various bizarre sexual practices Brüno’s Asian toy boy uses to pleasure him are shown. Later on in the film Brüno appears to be performing oral sex on a member of the pop band Milli Vanilli for several long minutes. All of that is often juvenile and occasionally cry-out-loud funny. As in one scene when Brüno is casting young children for a TV program and gets their parents’ permission to put them in Nazi uniforms.

But viewers don’t get the same “oh my lord, what is he up to?” feeling that they often did in “Borat.” Instead, they are left with the stale suspicion they have just seen something that was cleverly written but probably didn’t have a lot to do with reality. Nobody knows which parts of the film are real and which are not. And Cohen refuses to answer questions about that. In a promotional appearance in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate at the end of June, he wore a rose colored bodysuit complete with a fake, woolen penis. It was probably one of the most ridiculous outfits ever worn by man — as well as being the best protection Cohen could hope for.

Because it allowed him to hide behind Brüno. The comic actor pranced around in front of the Brandenburg Gate with as much affectation as Brüno would and spoke only in the same accent as Brüno. During the few interviews he gave, he remained in character and costume. It seems that Cohen, who has had great success with hidden cameras and exposing other people’s foibles, is extremely worried about being caught out of character.

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Full article and photos: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,634861,00.html

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Thailand’s lèse majesté law

Treason in cyberspace

The battle over the royal family between government and opposition goes online

And don’t you deny it

ON YOUTUBE, he was “thaiman 8”, a prolific poster of crude videos that mocked Thailand’s royal family. These days Suwicha Thakhor goes by another identity: inmate in Bangkok’s Khlong Prem prison. In April he was sentenced to ten years in jail after pleading guilty to lèse majesté, the crime of defaming or threatening the Thai crown. Since 2005 this century-old law has enjoyed a renaissance, netting politicians, scholars, activists and an Australian author. Recently, it seems to have got more coercive.

Daranee Charnchoengsilpakul was arrested in 2008 after a blistering anti-royal public tirade. She went on trial last week and the judge ordered the case to be heard behind closed doors on national-security grounds—a ruling that would conveniently bar the foreign press. Ms Daranee and her lawyer cried foul. An appeal is pending.

The scope of investigations under the law is widening. This week police began inquiries into whether the board of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand is guilty of lèse majesté. Equally disturbing is a new snitch scheme set up by the justice ministry. The scheme, claims a free-speech activist, is a way of monitoring social-networking sites. In May the prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, signed up as the first volunteer. The goal seems to be to defend the royal family from criticism.

Thailand, unlike China, claims to be a democracy. But as in China, cyberspace has become a battleground between free speech and censorship. Online speech has been freer than Thailand’s supine news media. But censors are working overtime. Since March 2008 the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology (MICT) has blocked 8,300 website pages on lèse majesté grounds. Thailand’s police have jammed another 32,500 pages for various offences. In 2007, YouTube was blocked for several months.

Cyberspace is being subjected not only to lèse majesté constraints but to other laws. Mr Suwicha fell foul of one. He was charged under Thailand’s 2007 Computer Crime Act, which makes it an offence to import computer data that harm national security. In the eyes of Thai authorities, rude anti-royal videos fall into that category. Mr Suwicha is the first person to be convicted under a law that carries a five-year jail term and was passed by a military-appointed legislature. He is unlikely to be the last. Police have arrested dozens of internet users who posted comments on web boards. Some face criminal charges.

The authorities are also going after webmasters for failing to delete offensive posts promptly enough. One, Chiranuch Premchaiporn, who runs Prachatai.com, a news website, was charged in April because her site carried a comment by one user which allegedly excoriated Queen Sirikit. Ms Chiranuch insists that she deleted the post when asked to by MICT. But Aree Jiworarak, an official at the ministry, says Ms Chiranuch should have spotted the post herself and is “responsible for what happens”. To her distress, Ms Chiranuch was forced to disclose private data that led police to the user, a Thai woman with the online name “Bento”, who was arrested and charged. Ms Chiranuch faces multiple counts that could, potentially, send her away for 50 years.

Crime or politics?

The political backdrop to this witch hunt is well known. Since a coup in 2006 Thailand has been torn between supporters of the ousted prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, and his conservative opponents in the armed forces, judiciary and, many assume, the palace. In December a coalition led by Mr Abhisit took power in the wake of anti-Thaksin protests by yellow-clad royalists known as the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD). A red-coloured protest movement allied to Mr Thaksin failed in April to force out Mr Abhisit. He has claimed that there is a conspiracy to undermine “the institution”, as the crown is known. His backers point the finger at the irascible Mr Thaksin, who denies disloyalty to the throne while cocking a snook at “aristocratic” Thai government.

But the efforts of self-proclaimed royalists are arguably doing as much harm to the institution as criticism by their opponents. The justice minister, Pirapan Salirathavibhaga, for instance, has declared that his highest priority is the protection of the monarchy. So an elite law-enforcement agency in his ministry, which is supposed to take on drug kingpins and other crooks, is busy chasing lowly bloggers.

By persecuting Thais who give vent online, these moral guardians may be adding to the anger against Bangkok’s elite and, perhaps, fanning the flames of republicanism. Their zeal certainly undercuts Mr Abhisit’s feeble efforts to unite a polarised nation. Many observers conclude that the crown must be behind the crackdown. They think the royal family wants to keep a lid on frank discussion, at least until the 81-year-old King Bhumibol hands over to his likely successor, the unpopular crown prince, Maha Vajiralongkorn. Not so, insists a source in the palace, who blames an overzealous government for the spurt of arrests. King Bhumibol himself said in 2005 that he was not above criticism. He has also pardoned lèse majesté convicts, including Harry Nicolaides, an Australian author, in February.

Even in China, it is hard to control the internet (this week, the country delayed plans to put internet filtering software into every computer). And compared with China’s sophisticated controls, Thai censorship is Firewall 101. It uses keyword searches to turn up suspect websites. Wily netizens will no doubt stay a step ahead of the censors, using proxies and other tools, as they do in China and Myanmar. Meanwhile, the government’s efforts to protect the good name of the king are not only damaging democracy but may even rebound upon the royal reputation.

The Economist

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Full article and photo: http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13962550&source=hptextfeature

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Entertainment – July 7, 2009

Lights, Camera, Lots of Action. Forget the Script.

Savanna Samson, an adult film actress, says she favors scripts with more dialogue.

The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. “I couldn’t wait to get my next script,” she said.

There’s no reason to look at them anymore, she said, because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.

The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks.

“On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes,” said Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment. “We have to cater to that.”

Vivid, one of the most prominent pornography studios, makes 60 films a year. Three years ago, almost all of them were feature-length films with story lines. Today, more than half are a series of sex scenes, loosely connected by some thread — “vignettes” in the industry vernacular — that can be presented separately online. Other major studios are making similar shifts.

The industry’s interest in scripted scenes has waxed and waned in recent decades because of changes in technology. In the early 1970s, movies with loose story lines, like “Deep Throat” and “Behind the Green Door,” won a mainstream audience, and others tried to copy their success, selling plot-centric movies to couples watching at home with the VCR technology introduced in 1975.

The falling cost of hand-held video cameras gave birth to a generation of pornographers with little interest in drama beyond a clichéd plot involving a pizza delivery boy, said Paul Fishbein, president of the AVN Media Network, an industry trade publication.

Mr. Fishbein said plot came into vogue again in the late ’90s with the boom of the DVD. Big studios, he said, figured plots would make their films more appealing to women and encourage couples to bring them into their homes — whether on disc or pay-per-view.

Plot-centrism was in full bloom in 2005 with the release of “Pirates,” about a ragtag group of sailors who go after a band of evil pirates.

That movie, with a budget of more than $1 million, had special effects (pirates materializing from the mist), and, yes, lots of sex. Two years later, the movie’s studio, Digital Playground, spent $8 million on a sequel — a remarkable sum in an industry where the average movie costs $25,000, according to the director of the two movies, Ali Joone.

But interest in DVDs has fallen sharply, Mr. Fishbein said, because the Internet has made it easy to watch snippets of video.

Mr. Fishbein estimated that pornographic DVD sales and rentals in the United States generated $3.62 billion in 2006 but had fallen as much as 50 percent since then. He says the slump has made some companies reluctant to share sales figures, so his estimates are getting rougher.

The big studios, like Vivid and Digital Playground, have turned to a subscription model, charging monthly fees for access to their Web sites and advertising the frequency with which they add new clips.

Mr. Joone said that of Digital Playground’s 60 productions this year, roughly 30 had little or no plot, up from about 10 two years ago. At Wicked Pictures, which averages one production a week, one-third are essentially just sex, twice as many as a few years ago, said the company’s president, Steve Orenstein.

“The feature is not as big a part of the industry today,” Mr. Orenstein said. But he says he still plans two to three bigger-budget releases each year, including the recently shot “2040,” which is about the pornography business of the future. Mr. Orenstein described the movie as “an almost Romeo-and-Juliet story between an aging porn star and a cyborg.”

In lieu of plot, there are themes. Among the new releases from New Sensations, a studio that makes 24 movies a month, is “Girls ’n Glasses,” made up of scenes of women having sex while wearing glasses.

“It’s almost like we’re back to the late ’70s or early ’80s when the average movie was eight minutes and just a sex scene,” Mr. Hirsch said, sounding wistful.

Some in the industry would prefer their sex with a little more character development.

Ms. Samson, for example, said she took her acting seriously and used to prepare studiously for her roles, like the character she played in the 2006 movie “Flasher.”

She said she played a psychotic who, because of the way her mother treated her, “had an obsession with flashing and doing things in public.”

“I used to have dialogue,” said Ms. Samson, whose given name is Natalie Oliveros, and who is one of the industry’s biggest stars.

“Getting it on in one hardcore scene after another just isn’t as much fun,” she added.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/business/media/08porn.html?hp

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The King Is Dead, Long Live the King

ELVIS PRESLEY, his eyes closed, his dark hair brushed back off his forehead, wearing a white suit, a light blue shirt and a white tie, lay in a coffin opened from the top of his head to the middle of his chest as tens of thousands of men, women and children jostled in the summer heat for a chance to get in.

This was Aug. 17, 1977. Presley had been found unconscious the day before in the bathroom of Graceland, his home in Memphis, on the eve of a concert tour he had been in no physical shape to undertake. Now, dead at 42, he lay in repose in the foyer. To protect the red carpeting from the bottoms of the shoes of the thousands of strangers who would be filing past, someone had spread white sheets over the floor.

For those of us who were present at Graceland that day to report the story, it seemed barely conceivable that Presley’s father, Vernon, had made this decision: to open the property’s white gates, decorated with green metal guitars and musical notes, and summon all those who could push their way in to stand and stare at his son. It was an invitation to chaos. Presley, who during his lifetime had endlessly been referred to as an idol, was turned into a literal one. People gasped and cried, spoke aloud to themselves and prayed as they looked down at his body.

In Los Angeles today, at the Staples Center, the public memorial service for Michael Jackson is scheduled to be held. Whatever may or may not transpire, there is precedent for such an outpouring, and the precedent was established that day in Memphis.

In the years before Presley’s death, the grounds of Graceland had been off limits to virtually everyone except his family and trusted buddies. So to see it for the first time was something of a surprise. Graceland was situated on a congested commercial street, not a pastoral, country-manor setting; among its neighbors were a Mr. Tax income-tax-preparation storefront and a Tuffy Muffler and Brake Shop.

In the decades that would follow, the house at 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard would become one of America’s most visited tourist attractions. But as Presley lay in the foyer, few had seen the grounds beyond the gates.

Perhaps elaborate marketing plans were already being formulated, even before Presley was buried; perhaps that was what opening Graceland to the public that August day was all about. Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s longtime manager, famously said to some business associates, in the hours after his client died: “This changes nothing.”

As cynical as the words may have sounded at the time, they were prescient. Presley, in death, became an enormous earner, a new kind of profit center. Joe Jackson, Michael Jackson’s father, within three days of his son’s death told an interviewer: “Right now, he’s bigger than ever.” Some lessons stick.

At Graceland that day, the people who had fainted on Elvis Presley Boulevard as they waited to get in were the recipients of a bonus: they did, indeed, secure priority entry; they were carried through the gates by paramedics and were laid carefully on Presley’s lawn. As the crowd swelled by the minute, threatening to overwhelm the police, the faint flicker of a realization began to occur: the next phase of a career was, in fact, being born.

There were, of course, many distinctions between Elvis Presley, who seemed to find his only security inside the walls of the home where he lived and died, and Michael Jackson, who was, at the end, an itinerant, long gone from the Neverland compound the world associated with him. But there remains between them a connective thread, that unsettling feeling of tragedy as career propellant. The men may have been dead; the frenzy had new life.

In Memphis that day, a baby-blue golf cart, driven by a Graceland staff member, zipped around the periphery of the line of mourners. On the back of the cart, half torn off, was a sticker that read: “I’m Just Crazy About Elvis Presley.” On the side was painted one word, “Lisa,” in honor of Presley’s daughter, the future wife of Michael Jackson.

Seven steps into the foyer, there was Presley, at peace, or some semblance of it. The sounds of sobbing filled the little room as each fresh wave of fans caught sight of him. He seemed defenseless: not in the traditional sense, for no one could hurt him now, but defenseless against all that was to come.

Bob Greene is the author of “Late Edition: A Love Story.”

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Full article:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/opinion/07greene.html

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Entertainment – July 6, 2009

Chinese Pen “Instant” Michael Jackson Biography

Two Chinese writers slaved for 48 hours straight to produce an “instant” biography of late singer Michael Jackson, despite having never met him, a state-run newspaper said on Monday.

The book, called “Moonwalk in Paradise”, hit the bookshelves over the weekend, the China Daily said, after the authors subsisted on a diet of coffee and cigarettes and worked round-the-clock to complete it.

While they are not as popular as the Taiwanese and Hong Kong stars who dominate the music scene in China, Western artists are making inroads in the local market, thanks to young fans.

Jiang Xiaoyu, one of the writers, had previously written blogs and reviews about Jackson, who died on June 25 when he went into cardiac arrest at his rented mansion in Los Angeles.

“I am not only a music critic but also a fan of the King of Pop, so I understand what fans really need,” Jiang was quoted as saying by the newspaper. “I fought the deadline around the clock, as fans cannot wait for months.”

The China Youth Daily said the writers wrote the book based on their “accumulated knowledge about the King of Pop”.

“Though it is hard to tell how big the market for instant books is in China, I am sure we have done a nice job on quickly responding to market needs,” the China Daily quoted Zang Yongqing, an editor at the publishing house, as saying.

The report added that at least 10 other Chinese publishers were planning “instant” books about Jackson.

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Full article:http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/07/06/arts/entertainment-us-jackson-china.html

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See also:

Jackson biography hits Chinese market

Two Chinese writers slaved for 48 hours straight to produce an “instant” biography of late singer Michael Jackson, despite having never met him, a state-run newspaper said on Monday.

The book, called “Moonwalk in Paradise”, hit the bookshelves over the weekend, the China Daily said, after the authors subsisted on a diet of coffee and cigarettes and worked round-the-clock to complete it.

While they are not as popular as the Taiwanese and Hong Kong stars who dominate the music scene in China, Western artists are making inroads in the local market, thanks to young fans.

Jiang Xiaoyu, one of the writers, had previously written blogs and reviews about Jackson, who died on June 25 when he went into cardiac arrest at his rented mansion in Los Angeles.

“I am not only a music critic but also a fan of the King of Pop, so I understand what fans really need,” Jiang was quoted as saying by the newspaper. “I fought the deadline around the clock, as fans cannot wait for months.”

The China Youth Daily said the writers wrote the book based on their “accumulated knowledge about the King of Pop”.

“Though it is hard to tell how big the market for instant books is in China, I am sure we have done a nice job on quickly responding to market needs,” the China Daily quoted Zang Yongqing, an editor at the publishing house, as saying.

The report added that at least 10 other Chinese publishers were planning “instant” books about Jackson.

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Full article: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-07/06/content_11660465.htm

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Obama and Networks: A Symbiotic Relationship

Even President Barack Obama, a gleam in his eye as he talked at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner two weeks ago, seemed to recognize the special relationship he’s forged with TV networks in the opening months of his administration.”A few nights ago I was up tossing and turning and trying to figure out exactly what to say,” he said. ”Finally, when I couldn’t get back to sleep, I rolled over and asked Brian Williams what he thought.”

The reference to the NBC anchor and host of the prime-time ”Inside the Obama White House” special this spring drew loud laughter.

There’s no denying that broadcast networks and the president have occasionally worked for their mutual benefit: Obama gets public platforms for his ideas and the networks get programming that delivers strong ratings at a time when that’s hard to come by.

”Inside the Obama White House” was a hit, costing relatively little to produce, for a network that’s starved for hits. The two-part series was rerun the same week that it originally aired.

Two of the three most-watched episodes of ”60 Minutes” last TV season were devoted to Obama, topped by the 25.1 million people who watched Steve Kroft conduct the first postelection interview with the president-elect in November. An interview with Obama’s brain trust that aired a week earlier drew 18.5 million viewers, and another Obama interview in March had 17 million viewers. The season average for the CBS newsmagazine was 14.3 million, Nielsen Media Research said.

CBS’ ”Face the Nation” had its biggest audience of the year when Obama appeared on March 29.

The dry subject matter of ABC’s prime-time discussion with the president on health care last month meant it wasn’t a big hit, but it still did better in its time slot than anything else ABC had put on in six weeks. The ”Nightline” that completed the discussion that night beat David Letterman and Conan O’Brien in the ratings.

”Obama should change his middle name from Hussein to Nielsen,” said Gail Shister, a writing instructor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The idea of a president who grabs ratings still seems strange, as does the notion a network will need him. Yet Obama has been reliable when so many other things that broadcasters have been trying are failures.

Strong public interest in the president and his policies explains why so many people in television, magazines and newspapers want to speak to him, said Mark Whitaker, Washington bureau chief for NBC News.

Jon Banner, veteran executive producer of ABC’s ”World News,” said the White House has clearly sought to make Obama more available to networks than recent presidents have been. Obama is personally popular, more so than his policies at this point, and he’s his own best salesman, he said.

”We will take every opportunity that’s given to us to question the president about the plans he has,” Banner said. ”I would not turn any of these opportunities down.”

The network says it does not play favorites. It said the Bush administration turned down several invitations for town hall-style meetings similar to the one ABC recently organized for Obama.

Obama’s critics have raised questions of fairness. Announcement of the ABC plans set Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele in motion trying to raise money to buy airtime for a dissenting opinion on health care.

”The mainstream media has finally decided to dispense with the pointless denial of favorable coverage of the Obama administration,” Steele wrote in a memo to Republicans. ABC countered that it brought in people with disparate points of view to question Obama on health care.

Still, Obama received plenty of prime-time minutes to state his case, and ABC televised parts of ”Good Morning America” and ”World News” from the White House, too.

Whitaker said NBC took advantage of its access filming ”Inside the Obama White House” to film two Williams interviews with the president. News organizations shouldn’t be criticized for spending time with a president, but for how they are using that time, he said.

Some of it played like a valentine, however: See how hard the new president’s staff works! It’s a good bet Obama doesn’t take orders and goes out to buy staff members hamburgers too often when the cameras aren’t rolling. Williams also asked Obama about O’Brien, a clip that allowed for some high-level promotion of the new ”Tonight” show host.

While NBC has taken similar insider looks at past presidents, they got one prime-time hour. Obama got four.

”Are you going to blame NBC for giving that much time to a very exclusive, interesting and revealing look behind the scenes at the White House? Compared to what, more of `The Biggest Loser’?” Whitaker said.

The mutual star-making machinery may not last forever. As Obama holds more news conferences — many of them dry and lawyerly — the viewership is going down. Networks like exclusive opportunities to do things their competitors haven’t, but are no longer happy running prime-time news conferences.

”Some of the blockbuster ratings appeal is starting to wear off a little,” Whitaker said.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/07/05/arts/AP-US-AP-on-TV-Obama-TV.html

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Troupe’s Communal Vision Includes Lunch

Ariane Mnouchkine, right, director of Le Theatre du Soleil, talks to one of the group members behind the scenes before a dress rehearsal of the latest production “Les Ephemeres.”

Good food is an essential element of any Théâtre du Soleil production. A lunch last week started with platters of salad, colorful mosaics of fresh greens, mangoes, tomatoes, eggs and pine nuts, followed by three kinds of pasta — all prepared by members of this renowned French troupe. Baguettes adorned each of the dozen or so tables set up in two solemn wood-paneled rooms at the Park Avenue Armory, where Soleil’s latest production, “Les Éphémères,” opens on Tuesday, the first night of the Lincoln Center Festival.

“If we’re going to work well, we need to eat well,” said Maurice Durozier, who has been part of the company for 17 years. Its 70 members — actors, technicians, administrators, musicians — always dine together. And as any one of them can tell you, it is almost as much a part of the creative process as writing the script or designing the costumes. For Le Théâtre du Soleil, theater is an entirely collaborative enterprise. And one that includes the audience.

The communal lunch for Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil at the Park Avenue Armory.

“Ariane is also very concerned with how we feed the public,” Eve Doe-Bruce, a veteran of more than 20 years, explained, her fork pausing above her plate. “There’s something that happens when the public eats together and they begin to share something.”

Ariane is Ariane Mnouchkine, the founder of the 45-year-old Théâtre du Soleil. Though she is not as well known in the United States as in Europe, she is considered one of theater’s most influential innovators. This year she was given the Norwegian government’s International Ibsen Award for exceptional achievement in the arts. The citation noted how “each member of the audience is drawn into a total experience — sensual, richly colored, teeming with life and absorbing in its choreography.”

Food is a part of that, Ms. Mnouchkine explained later in a makeshift office; it is akin to welcoming an honored guest into your home. She was wearing a dusty-blue T-shirt and a long brown-plaid skirt and took a moment to play with a baby, one of the swarm of children who made the journey from France. At most theatrical performances, “as soon as it’s finished, the public is thrown out as if we didn’t want them,” she said. “But we don’t want only the money of the public, but also their presence.”

Unfortunately the logistics of the armory make it impossible to feed the 578 audience members during the nearly seven-hour, two-part cycle of “Les Éphémères,” as is the practice when the troupe is at its home base, an old munitions factory in the forest of Vincennes in Paris.

“We are very isolated in the woods, very protected,” Mr. Durozier said during lunch. “That quality of life is essential. I do not think we could do the same presentation without it.”

In 2005 the troupe presented “Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées),” or “The Last Caravansary (Odysseys),” a six-hour production based on letters and interviews that Ms. Mnouchkine and her colleagues collected during visits to refugee camps and detention centers around the world.

At the time Jonathan Kalb, chairman of the theater department at Hunter College, wrote in The New York Times that “marathon dramas by someone like Ms. Mnouchkine can be extraordinary; an odyssey through uncharted physical and spiritual territory where the theater loses its trick-box aspect and becomes a site of unexpected communion and awful reckoning.”

“Les Éphémères” started with a single question posed by Ms. Mnouchkine: What would you do if you found out that all of humanity would die out in three months? The group followed with improvisations.

“We started with about 600, and there are about 42 in the play,” said Shaghayegh Beheshti, who was seated next to Mr. Durozier. “So much of the preparation is invisible but essential.”

By the end of the nine-month process the idea about humanity’s end was jettisoned, but it had produced a rich collection of stories and snapshots from everyday family life.

Though Soleil is known for its left-wing politics, Ms. Mnouchkine is quick to say that her communal approach to theater is not ideological. “Immediately I was convinced that 10 people have more ideas and intuitions than one alone,” she said.

Ms. Mnouchkine is insistent on the absence of hierarchy. Everyone earns the same salary. Each actor takes on other responsibilities, like cooking or caring for the “chariots,” the rolling platforms that deliver and remove the actors and sets from the stage. She refuses to be interviewed unless other members of the company are included. And at 70 she has already discussed with the group the question of her successor. “It was very important that everyone agree,” she said. (Her assistant, Charles-Henri Bradier, will get the job.)

The approach is decidedly different from the traditional Western notion of the individual artistic vision. “It’s not based on the genius in the wild,” Ms. Mnouchkine said. “It’s based on the quest. We are a group that is chasing theater.”

It is an adventure to which each member of the troupe must wholeheartedly commit. It is not simply a career path, said Duccio Bellugi-Vannuccini, whose two daughters, Alba Gaïa, 14, and Galatea, 12, also perform in the show. “It’s much more a style of life.”

In other words, a family, with all the joys and strains. “Sometimes we hate together; sometimes we love together,” Ms. Doe-Bruce said.

Jeremy James, an Australian who joined seven years ago, acknowledged that the rich creative life demanded sacrifices: “We miss Christmases with our families.”

Such a life is clearly not for everyone. But for those who embrace it, Mr. Durozier said, there is an almost mysterious communion between actor and director. “It’s like a coup de foudre,” like falling in love, he added. “You cannot do anything else.”

Ms. Doe-Bruce recalled first seeing a Théâtre du Soleil production of three Shakespeare plays. “I see all my senses —— ” She struggled for the right word, looking to her companions for help.

“Activated,” Mr. James offered.

More than that, said another: “Pleased.”

“Stimulated,” Mr. Doe-Bruce said. Everyone laughed.

After lunch, as some of the company members went downstairs to attend to costumes or chariots, Juliana Carneiro da Cunha and Serge Nicolaï took a moment to explain what is unique about Ms. Mnouchkine’s vision.

“She has got something,” Mr. Nicolaï said, putting his wrists together and turning his hands right and left like a weather vane. “She’s got this barometer inside her for the theater. She feels so many things. She’s got this talent.”

Ms. Carneiro da Cunha described seeing the troupe in “L’Âge d’Or” (“The Age of Gold”) in 1976. The light slowly started to rise behind the stage, and for a moment the audience members thought they had spent the night at the theater and were watching the sunrise before suddenly realizing it was a special effect. Everyone was so energized and joyful, she said, they began dancing and running on the grass. “I fell on my nose,” Ms. Carneiro da Cunha said, “and I thought ‘What does it mean? What does it mean?’

“I am going to join this company,” she answered herself. Fourteen years later she did. “I had a dream, and it became true. I think it was like that for everyone in the group.”

Mr. Nicolaï smiled and shook his head. Not for him. He spoke instead of seeing the 1978 film “Molière” with his mother when he was 11. Most affecting was the voice of the narrator, which imprinted itself on his mind, he said. Years later he participated in one of Ms. Mnouchkine’s workshops. “I was hearing that voice,” he said, and “I found out it was Ariane.” It was only then that he discovered that Ms. Mnouchkine had been the writer, director and narrator.

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/theater/06mnouchkine.html?hpw

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Entertainment – July 5, 2009

Michael Jackson Book A Headache For Jackie Onassis

Michael Jackson crossed swords with a lot of people when he was alive, but perhaps none more important than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

The former first lady, in her capacity as an editor at Doubleday Books, secured a coveted book deal with the pop star in 1984, when he was still riding high on the success of his “Thriller” album released two years earlier.

“She was only person in America who could get him on the phone,” Stephen Davis, the ghostwriter of “Moon Walk,” said in a recent interview with Reuters.

According to a People magazine article at the time, Onassis paid Jackson a $300,000 advance for the book. Davis received what he termed “a generous flat fee.”

The book came out in 1988, topped the New York Times Best Sellers list, and quickly sold out of its initial print run of almost 500,000 copies, he recalled.

“That was an extremely successful book. They made money on it,” Davis said.

The obvious next step was to print more copies, and then prepare a paperback version. But Jackson, who had total control of the project, vetoed both plans — annoying Onassis.

“There was so much bad feeling when it didn’t go back to press,” Davis said. “It wasn’t a great experience for her.”

Relations between the two cultural icons were already strained, because Jackson had threatened to block the book’s publication unless Onassis wrote a gushing foreword.

Onassis, who fiercely guarded her privacy and did not want her name in any book she edited, reluctantly made an exception and turned in a three-paragraph blurb.

Davis had won over Jackson with his infamously seamy Led Zeppelin biography “Hammer of the Gods,” which was packed with tales of underage groupies, orgies and massive drug abuse.

“Moon Walk” on the other hand, with an apparently asexual and temperate childlike subject, was essentially “a very, very expensive press release,” Davis said.

“The book was very meat-and-potatoes — ‘Diana Ross discovered us, and then we went to Motown and we worked for (label founder) Mr. Gordy, and then we went to Los Angeles, I was in The Wiz…’”

The book’s major “scoop” was Jackson’s allegation that he was beaten by his father. But a throwaway comment Jackson made — and Davis cannot remember if it was in the book — proved to be more significant. Jackson had recounted how he and his older brothers would squeeze into a pair of hotel beds while on the road as youngsters, “and that’s how I feel best about going to sleep, to this day.”

Davis did not think it was odd that a preteen boy was always on hand at Jackson’s Encino, Calif., home where the interviews took place over an intermittent eight-month period.

“It was like his ward. It was like Batman and Robin. He was a very nice kid,” Davis said. “But there were several of them. They all looked like (actor) Macaulay Culkin, and then they became Macaulay Culkin who you may remember was called to testify at the (Jackson’s 2005 child-molestation) trial.

“I’m sure they were bedding down with Mike, but I don’t believe for a minute that he ever molested them or touched them or anything like that, or gave them alcohol.”

Rather, Davis surmised that they were playmates in Jackson’s innocent fantasy world. They would play videogames, watch movies and run errands for him.

With Onassis applying deadline pressure, Davis hurriedly cobbled his interview transcripts into a narrative, sent off a rough draft and waited to be fired for shoddy work. But within a few weeks, Doubleday was sending him back proofs to check.

“It undermined my faith in publishing a little,” he said. “I’m not even sure he read it completely…Or someone did, maybe his lawyer or manager.”

Davis and Jackson never kept in touch. He occasionally bumped into Onassis while they were summering on Martha’s Vineyard, but the whole Jackson saga remained a sensitive issue until she died of cancer in 1994.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/07/04/arts/entertainment-us-jackson-jackieo.html

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Torture-Free but Still a Rock Star

From left, John Stirratt, Pat Sansone, Glenn Kotche, Mikael Jorgensen, Nels Cline and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles, where the band recently played three shows.

SITTING at a Father’s Day barbecue on the day before a sold-out three-night stand at the Wiltern Theater here, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco was talking about his 13-year-old son, Spencer, a drummer in a rock band called the Blisters. Over the past five years Mr. Tweedy, the son of a railroad worker from St. Louis, whose toes touched bottom on the way to rock greatness, had come to an understanding about himself that applies to Spencer too: “I told him: ‘You are not a rock star. You get to do rock star things.’ ”

In his button-down shirt and with a Brewers cap hiding a mop of hair while he talked in a borrowed office a few steps from a friend’s party, he couldn’t have seemed less the alt-rock god. Still, it took him some painful years to find a place to stand between the nice guy at the barbecue and the bandleader at the Wiltern.

The success of Wilco’s current tour — the reviews have been ecstatic — and his satisfaction with the band’s splendid new record, “Wilco (The Album),” are fine and all. But Mr. Tweedy, 41, seems to care most deeply that he has finally reconciled his musical ambitions with more personal ones: to live in Chicago, be part of both a family and a band, remain sober (it’s been five years since he kicked a punishing addiction to painkillers) and live out a simulacrum of normalcy.

The family picnic backdrop for the interview was less a matter of media management than a reflection of how he rolls these days. No longer the tortured artist on the bus whose only steady companions were pills and the demons they were meant to tame, Mr. Tweedy keeps his tour jaunts short and his family close. His two kids pop in and out while he visits with a reporter, and he seems most at ease when they or his wife, Sue Miller, are at hand.

It’s not that he wears the success and stability like a loose garment — he’s a pretty complicated guy on a good day — but unlike the rock trope that only chronic agony produces important music, the absence of mayhem has been good for the work, he says.

“I was never at my best when I was at my worst,” he said, looking out the window as his sons — Spencer and Sam, 9 — bounce and laugh on a diving board. “When I did do good stuff in the past, it was because I was able to transcend the parts of my being that weren’t healthy.”

Mr. Tweedy has a Midwestern lack of pretension that is easy to be around, but he is a less than voluble interview, not because he doesn’t try to answer questions, but precisely because he does. He cares about being understood but struggles to explain himself because, as all writers will tell you, happy is nice, but happy is hard to explain.

“I suppose because everything about my life is better, markedly so, I’m a significantly happier person — well, I’m not being very eloquent about it,” he said, pausing, and then continued: “Having a solid base allows you to look at darker things and actually think about them. I debate people about this suffering myth, this tortured artist stuff, and they almost never buy it.”

On the new album, which was released last week on Nonesuch, his lyrics still veer into the personally apocalyptic, but the fatalism is leavened by sweetness. The guy onstage at the Wiltern the next night — the one who used to keep a trash bucket offstage so he could vomit between songs — is no longer ruled by the migraines, the panic attacks and the drug jags that seemed to go with fronting one of alternative rock’s most consistent and respected bands. He seems like a regular guy having fun doing rock star things.

When Mr. Tweedy walked onstage at the Wiltern in front of 2,300 fans, most of them likely steeped in 15 years of band lore, no introductions were necessary. He made them anyway, choosing “Wilco (The Song)” from “Wilco (The Album)” as the opening number for Wilco the band.

“This is an aural open arms, a sonic shoulder to cry on; Wilco, Wilco will love you baby,” Mr. Tweedy sang in a direct address rare for rock. After the years of tumult that became a backbeat to Wilco’s music, a big old hug seemed in order.

“I think they called it ‘Wilco (The Album)’ because this band knows who they are, and they are ready to own that identity in a very confident way,” said Rita Houston, the music director of WFUV, a progressive radio station in New York.

It seems to be working: “You Never Know,” the first single from the new record, is No. 4 on the AAA — or adult album alternative — chart. On June 30, the day the record came out, the 10 top-selling records on Amazon were understandably by Michael Jackson. No. 11? “Wilco (The Album).”

The basic tracks for the new album were laid down when most of the band was visiting New Zealand, far from the Wilco Loft in Chicago, which has served as a lab for sometimes radical rethinkings of the band’s sound, often assisted by the experimental producer and musician Jim O’Rourke. But Mr. O’Rourke was busy making films, and the record was produced by the band and Jim Scott, an engineer on several of Wilco’s recent records.

They brought in more directness and songcraft that leans harder on melody and hooks. The lyrics are also more engaged, less concerned with the alienation of modern life than with finding a way around it. The record has its share of the sonic hard turns that are characteristic of Wilco’s previous work, but as David Dye, the host of NPR’s “World Cafe,” broadcast from WXPN in Philadelphia, said, “There is nothing off-putting about this record.”

Mr. Tweedy’s singing, which once sometimes seemed like an exercise in overcoming reluctance, almost swings now. “No one is going to mistake him for Frank Sinatra, but he has become an amazing rock singer,” Ms. Houston said.

The album does not contain the off-the-hook experimentation of 2002’s “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel” or the sinister tug of 2004’s “Ghost Is Born” but is a kind of compilation of a band at the height of its powers. “This record probably sounds more like a summation than the other ones because Wilco allowed itself to just kind of do all the different things that we found that we do pretty good on the same record,” Mr. Tweedy said.

Back in 1994 Wilco was born in conflict, as a splinter of Uncle Tupelo, the influential alt-country band. But Wilco gradually shed its Americana roots. Each record, including the breakout “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” which sold nearly 650,000 copies, was a drama, creating a narrative for rabid fans and critics who served as Kremlinologists on the band’s every wiggle. “For a band of our size, not all that big in the scope of show business, we always drew a lot of scrutiny,” said John Stirratt, the bassist, who has been along for the whole ride.

There was plenty to gossip about. The members of Wilco fought with record labels, one another and, in the case of Mr. Tweedy, a host of psychic pursuers that had him on and off drugs and in and out of rehab for the Vicodin and benzodiazepines that he began abusing in the late ’90s.

Not everybody made it back safely. Jay Bennett, the talented multi-instrumentalist who went through a very public firing in the 2002 Wilco documentary “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” died of a drug overdose in May, just weeks after suing Mr. Tweedy and the band for breach of contract, suggesting that he had not been paid sufficiently for his contributions to the film and the band’s records.

“I still see that as one of the first decisions I made to get healthy,” Mr. Tweedy said of Mr. Bennett’s departure. “One that we made as a band,” he said, his tone not changing. “It was not going to end well.” (Other band members spoke of Mr. Bennett’s death with sadness and described it as a significant loss to music.)

Even as the acclaim grew during the band’s first decade, members came and went, and Mr. Tweedy struggled with his dual role as sensitive songwriter and yard boss of a rising band. Now, with a roster that has been together for five years — besides Mr. Stirratt, the lineup includes Nels Cline, one of the best guitarists in any genre; Glenn Kotche, a composer who happens to be a brilliant drummer; and two other equally talented musicians, the keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen and the multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone — Mr. Tweedy has assembled players who can match his demanding vision.

At the Wiltern, Wilco demonstrated that its two main threads of musical tradition — roots music and full-tilt experimentation — make for a grand live act. Watching the current lineup kick into gear is like seeing an enormous steam shovel rear to life. During a sprawling two-and-a-half hour set Mr. Tweedy seemed to be having it both ways: loping singalongs framed by over-the-top shredding, reverence alleviated by goofiness.

“I’ve been obsessed with seeing life through music,” he said at the barbecue. “My records, my relationship with records, my relationship with rock stars, everything that surrounds it, has been really one of the only ways that I ever started to understand the world.”

After Mr. Tweedy formed Wilco, he found himself split between being the guy who worshiped rock music and the one on the stage. “I wish I was like David Lee Roth, that some part of it came naturally to me, but I have an inherent self-consciousness that I think is hard to transcend on some nights,” he said. “I have an observing ego on top of an ego that tends to take a lot of the fun out of things. At some point I was able to embrace and understand that I actually am on the other side of it as well. It seems like way more work to conceal an ego than to actually just come to terms with it.”

In the studio and in concert he has always been clear about his objectives. “Jeff is as nice as they come, but he is ambitious and competitive, which means he’s demanding on musicians and his bands,” said Dan Murphy, the guitarist from Soul Asylum who played with Mr. Tweedy in the side project Golden Smog.

With a couple of Grammys and enough of an income to keep Spencer in drumsticks (all of Wilco’s studio albums have sold at least 200,000 copies) Mr. Tweedy is at a stage in his career when most musicians could care less what kind of trips people lay on their music. But he still reads reviews and listens when longtime members of the cult rant. “I’m never not going to care,” he said, taking off his hat to give his hair a swipe to no discernible effect. “I like getting that feedback, but I’m so naïve I get sideswiped by it every time. On this one, the funny thing is, they say we didn’t go out and surprise anybody.”

While there is less self-conscious effort to transgress on the new album, it is not a conservative document. “One Wing” opens with the quiet plaint of guitars, then kicks into a full-throated cautionary tale about the perils of trying to fly alone. “Bull Black Nova” uses dissonant organ and piano plinks and a worried, paranoid vocal for a bloody look into the rearview at events that “can’t be undone.” “You and I,” a duet with the indie songstress Feist, sounds romantic as all get out until the words come into focus: “You and I, we might be strangers/However close we get sometimes, it’s like we never met.”

Mr. Tweedy said: “It seems more romantic to acknowledge that you’re committed to a mystery. You’re pledging allegiance to an ongoing saga of disillusion and enlightenment at the same time.”

Like 2007’s “Sky Blue Sky,” the previous album, there is a level of engagement with others that suggests that while we are all fundamentally alone, it is still the wisest course to hold hands. On “Solitaire” from the new album, he sings, “Took too long to see, I was wrong to believe in me only.”

Ms. Miller, a former club owner and manager from Chicago, thinks her husband is “in a very good patch,” as she said at the barbecue. “I think he’s very comfortable with himself now. I think it feels good to be a good guy.”

Spencer, drummer, blogger and scenester, said he and his father “relate to each other as musicians.” Curled up in a large wicker chair by the pool, Sam said he liked the new record “a lot.” When it was suggested that he probably would not say otherwise on Father’s Day, he made eye contact for the first time. “I probably would,” he said.

While “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” is a classic portrait of a band at war, Mr. Kotche said that there was not much drama to fuel the legend anymore. “You get this impression that he is something of a tyrant to work with, and he’s really the opposite,” he said of Mr. Tweedy. “He’s generous as an artist and as a person. The other night in El Paso some of us were traveling with our wives and babies, and he offered to watch them while we went out for a movie. Not a lot of lead guys in a rock band would make that offer.”

During the show at the Wiltern Mr. Tweedy couldn’t help playing with the hipsters in the crowd, like when they responded wanly to his entreaties to clap. “You should have seen them do this in Pomona,” he said. “They clapped like they were born to clap.”

“The willingness to do this,” he said, raising his hands above his smiling face, clapping and looking out into the lights, the crowd, the spectacle, “is a good indication of just how free you are.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/arts/music/05carr.html?hpw

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Isaac Stern’s Great Leap Forward Reverberates

Vera Tsu.

THIRTY years ago this summer the violinist Isaac Stern created a sensation when he came to China for a series of concerts and master classes.

His visit, richly documented in the Academy Award-winning film “From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China” (directed by Murray Lerner and supervised by Allan Miller), was credited with giving a boost to classical music here and helping foster cultural exchanges between China and the West.

This October Beijing will commemorate that visit with a concert by the China Philharmonic to honor Mr. Stern, who died in 2001 at 81, and to pay tribute to the remarkable strides this country has made in music since then.

Among those expected to perform will be Wang Jian, whose performance as a 10-year-old in the film eventually led him to Yale University, the Julliard School, Carnegie Hall and an acclaimed career as an international recording and performing artist.

“We’ve come a long way since then,” Mr. Wang, now 40, said recently. Back then, when Stern came, “this was the only chance we had to hear a great master,” he said. “People were fighting to get into the rehearsals.”

Other young musicians like Li Weigang, Vera Tsu, Tang Yun and Ho Hongying who performed for Mr. Stern in 1979 have also gone on to perform in the world’s great concert halls.

Since the days of Stern’s historic visit, interest in and access to classical music has mushroomed in China. There are major orchestras in many cities, and an estimated 40 million students across the country study the violin or the piano. But there are not yet enough dedicated fans to support classical careers within the country, which is why, even today, Chinese musicians go abroad and now populate the world’s leading orchestras, opera houses and music schools.

The Chinese composer Tan Dun and pianist Lang Lang are international recording stars. And last month the 19-year-old Zhang Haochen, born in China, shared the top prize at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth.

Few could have imagined such triumphs in 1979, when Beijing was a sea of bicycles and Mao suits, and the tallest building in Shanghai was a mere 24 stories.

Stern arrived here at a critical moment in the country’s history, just as it was beginning to emerge from decades of self-imposed isolation, eager to turn the page.

The United States and China had just resumed diplomatic relations, and on his arrival with his family and the American pianist David Golub in June, Stern announced that the trip was less a concert tour than a “how do you do?” — using music as a kind of passport to meet the Chinese people.

And so over the next two weeks Stern — followed by a large film crew — played the gray-haired philosopher with an easy smile and a deft hand at the violin. In Beijing he performed with the Central Philharmonic and toured China’s top music academy, the Central Conservatory of Music. He played the César Franck Sonata in A before a full house at the Shanghai Concert Hall, but only after averting disaster. A day before the concert the piano prepared for Mr. Golub was deemed unplayable. At the last minute a suitable piano was found at a radio station.

Everywhere Stern went the reception was enormous. Music lovers traveled by train from distant provinces in China to catch a glimpse of one of the 20th century’s great instrumentalists. Even rehearsals were packed with standing-room-only crowds that seemed to hang on Stern’s every word.

One of the spectators in Beijing that summer was Zhao Pingguo, then an instructor at the Central Conservatory and later one of the earliest teachers of China’s piano master Lang Lang. Today, at 75, he is retired.

“I went to almost every rehearsal and performance Stern gave,” Professor Zhao said in a recent interview. “Friends and professors around me all talked about his visit. We were quite convinced that China was going to change dramatically.”

One highlight of the two-week visit was a series of performances by some of China’s best young musicians.

Mr. Wang, then a cello prodigy, played an Eccles sonata; Li Weigang, whose parents were both musicians, played Paganini’s “Witches Dance”; and the 12-year-old Ho Hongying, wearing a school uniform punctuated by a red scarf, played a Tartini sonata in G minor.

“That was my exam piece,” said Ms. Ho, now concertmaster of the City Chamber Orchestra in Hong Kong. “I was so nervous. There were 3,000 people in a hall that is supposed to hold 1,800. It was so packed.”

But Stern and Golub noticed something peculiar about the sessions. Younger students who were 8, 9, 10 or 11 were impressive. But those older than 17 lacked something. What, the Americans asked, happened in between?

The answer came from Tan Shuzhen, then 72 and the deputy director of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, who said that during the decade-long Cultural Revolution China had tried to wipe out traces of Western influence. Music schools closed, teachers of Western music were harshly criticized, beaten and even jailed. And the playing of Western music was outlawed.

Conditions were so psychologically brutal, Mr. Tan said, that 17 instructors at the Shanghai Conservatory committed suicide.

Mr. Tan, who taught violin, said he spent 14 months starting in 1968 largely confined to a tiny, dark closet under a stairwell at the Conservatory. He suffered regular beatings and denunciations before being released to work as a janitor charged with cleaning the school’s toilets.

In one of the most powerful scenes in the documentary, “From Mao to Mozart,” Mr. Tan described the time his daughter and 7-year-old granddaughter had come to see him and he was briefly allowed out of confinement. He broke into tears when the young girl called out to him, “Grandpa.”

“We were treated as criminals because we taught them Western music,” he said in the film.

When the Cultural Revolution came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976, music schools reopened, and the ban on playing Western music was lifted. Tens of thousands of young people applied to the top music schools, including many children who had had been playing Western music in secret.

One of those was Li Weigang, now a distinguished violinist who played for Stern in 1979 and later helped form the Shanghai Quartet.

“Like everyone else we played in secret,” he said recently. “Or we played scales. No one knew what we were doing.”

For Stern the biggest disappointment of the 1979 visit seemed to be the feeling that China’s musicians, while technically adept, were stiff and colorless. He pressed them to play with more passion and to feel the emotion of the music.

“You must always listen as if you are hearing something very beautiful, and then you must learn how to do it in here,” Stern said while instructing Ho Hongying. “Think in here,” he said gently tapping on her head, “and play here,” he said pointing to the violin.

Many musicians now say Stern’s visit had a profound impact on the teaching of classical music in China. In the years after his visit other maestros and virtuosos arrived for similar tours, including the conductor Kurt Masur and the violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

And many of the talented children who performed for Mr. Stern during that sultry summer of 1979 subsequently studied abroad.

Tang Yun trained with Dorothy DeLay at the Julliard School and is now a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Vera Tsu also studied at Julliard and now performs in Beijing. And Pan Chun, who delighted Mr. Stern by performing Mozart’s “Variations on ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,’ ” later studied in Russia. He is now a professor at the Central Conservatory in Beijing.

Wang Jian’s journey out of China was particularly dramatic. An American businessman with roots in China named Sau Wing-Lam saw the film and a few years later arranged for the young Mr. Wang to travel to the United States and study music at Yale University.

“He wrote to my parents and said, ‘Your son can choose any school, I will give him a cello,’ ” Mr. Wang recalled in a recent interview. “It’s the same cello I have today.”

That rare cello was produced in Italy, in 1662, Mr. Wang said.

In 1999, three years before his death, Stern returned to China and marveled at the changes he found in the quality of the students and the instruction.

While hardly representative of the spirit of his trip, one comment that Stern made during the 1979 visit stands out. At an athletic center in Shanghai he expressed amazement at the sheer ability and concentration of the young people he saw, and then joked, “Well, they can’t play Mozart.”

Stern’s son Michael, now a conductor, said the comment was misconstrued. But whether it was or not, one thing is certain: The musicians in China today can play Mozart, and Brahms and Mendelssohn and Debussy.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/arts/music/05barb.html

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Entertainment – July 4

Remixed Messages

From top: http://www.KeepCalmandCarryOn.com; Matt Jones and 20×200.com; Olly Moss; Jenny Heid and Aaron Neiradka/Everyday is a Holiday.

A blunt slogan and a simple image: these basic elements of persuasion, protest, propaganda or making a point have been used in tandem and to great effect for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. Presumably, these messages have always been received in a variety of ways. But these days, it seems, when a slogan and an image reach a significant audience, that’s not the end of the process. In fact it’s just the beginning.

For example, when red posters bearing the sans-serif slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” underneath a simple crown icon started catching on in Britain a few years back, Bex Lewis knew their provenance. Now an associate lecturer in history and media studies at the University of Winchester, Lewis wrote her Ph.D. thesis on British propaganda posters devised for the home front during World War II. The “Keep Calm” poster, meant to be distributed in the event of a German invasion, was extremely obscure for many decades. So she was interested, she recalls, to see it turning into “sort of a consumer item.”

That process began with a fluke: in 2000, Stuart and Mary Manley, owners of a shop called Barter Books in north England, found one of the original posters folded up in the bottom of a box of old books and framed it. Customers liked it, and eventually the Manleys decided to sell reproductions. “Part of it is that it does have this sort of intrinsic British feel about it,” Mary Manley says, adding that the poster evokes a “nostalgia for a certain British character, an outlook.”

On a less romantic note, the design is in the public domain, meaning it can be remade and sold by anybody. A British freelance television-production manager named Mark Coop, for one, decided it “would be a brilliant idea to put it on a T-shirt.” In 2006, he bought the domain name keepcalmandcarryon.com, and offers the slogan and design on a variety of goods, including cuff links and duffel bags. Around the same time, Victoria Smith, a San Francisco Bay Area design blogger and photographer, bought one of the Barter Books posters secondhand and ended up producing her own silk-screen “Keep Calm” prints in a variety of color variations that she sells on Etsy.com. Barter Books has added mugs and mouse pads to its lineup. (Relations among these sellers are not particularly friendly; each complains of copycats selling low-quality versions.)

It turned out that the “Keep Calm” merchandise resonated all over the world. “Germany’s really big on it, oddly enough,” Coop observes. The banking crisis, Smith adds, brought a wave of orders from people working for American financial firms (and, more recently, advertising agencies). In fact, the travails of the global economy seem to have given the slogan fresh relevance to many — as reassurance for some but as creative fodder for others. For instance, one T-shirt design tips the crown upside down and reads “Now Panic and Freak Out.”

Possibly the best-known response graphic was created by Matt Jones, a product designer with the British-based firm Schulze & Webb. He was “in a grumpy mood” when he happened to read an article in The Guardian about the “Keep Calm” trend. “It was full of this sort of British fatalism,” he recalls. Being of the mind-set that “we have to invent our way out of trouble,” he started sketching. His design — the slogan “Get Excited and Make Things” under a crown that includes wrenches — became a Web hit, leading to a T-shirt from Howies, a Welsh clothing brand, and a set of prints sold on 20×200.com; Mule Design in San Francisco is bringing out a version of the shirt in the U.S. (Jones has given his chunk of the proceeds to nonprofit groups.)

By now the iterations online and off are legion: “Keep Calm and Have a Cupcake” (substituting the pastry for the crown); “Don’t Panic and Fake a British Accent ”; “Keep Spending and Carry On Shopping,” etc. Each increases the distance from the original and simultaneously underscores its importance as a reference point, albeit an abstract one. As Bex Lewis points out, even those attracted to the poster’s past may be more revisionist than they realize. “People talk about it — Americans in particular I’m afraid — being the poster that kept the British going through the war,” she says.

In fact, few saw the poster back then. Not many were distributed, and the land invasion never came. Another poster with a similar style did generate “a huge fuss” at the time, she adds, but much of it involved criticism of the condescending, authoritarian tone. Government posters that followed abandoned the stark look and the suggestion of the crown talking down to the masses and were “a lot more colorful and a lot more people-focused,” Lewis says. Nowadays, of course, nobody waits around for the authorities to adjust the meaning of their slogans and images. We just do it ourselves.

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05FOB-consumed-t.html?ref=magazine

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A Swing and A Hit for Violinist

Musician Plays Instrument Crafted From Baseball Bat

The NSO’s Glenn Donnellan, with his unusual violin, has drawn attention on YouTube.

“I just decided, ‘Well, let’s see if I can make one,’ ” says Glenn Donnellan, a violinist with the National Symphony Orchestra. “I thought it would be cool to say to the kids, ‘Hey, you can make your own.’ “

The object in question is an electric violin made out of a baseball bat. And the answer is, Yes, he could.

Just in time for the Fourth of July, Donnellan posted to YouTube a video of himself playing the national anthem on his electric baseball-bat-violin. He didn’t necessarily mean the clip for wide circulation. He put it up because a friend with contacts in the Washington Nationals front office wanted to show it to his bosses and ask about having Donnellan play the national anthem for a game. But there are no secrets on YouTube. By Friday, the video had racked up a respectable 1,600-plus views, and some enthusiastic comments. “Totally bat-ass!” one viewer wrote.

Donnellan made his bat-violin when the orchestra was preparing to go to Arkansas this spring for the 19th of its annual American residencies, which offer concerts and outreach programs in areas of the country that may not be well served with classical music. He was looking for an instrument to use in a children’s concert; he had done the same program in D.C. with more standard electric fiddles, but he had only borrowed those instruments and couldn’t take them on tour.

Not everyone might have come up with his solution, which required hours backstage at the Kennedy Center, using the stagehands’ drill press to make holes in a baseball bat. “It’s tricky to drill a hole in the handle,” he observes. “If you use a small enough bit, it wants to drift.” He adds, “You’ll see how [the bat-violin] is kind of crude at the bottom.”

On the contrary, the video is downright elegant — both for the instrument, narrow and compact, and for the playing, executed with cool aplomb. It’s certainly not your typical classical-music approach to the national anthem. There are overtones of Jimi Hendrix in the reverberant electronic sound, though the arrangement is actually Donnellan’s own. (The video appears on YouTube as a “video response” to Hendrix, but Donnellan says that was an accident; new to the site, he randomly clicked a lot of different links when his post first went up.)

Donnellan has been with the NSO since 1997; his violinist wife, Jan Chung, frequently plays with the orchestra, too. (They have two children: Adrian, 8, and Katherine, 6.) On his own time, Donnellan tries his hand at fiddling and experimenting with jazz. “Jamming with a guitarist on ‘Hotel California’ at the California Congressional offices on the Hill, and with kids playing the Blues in Mississippi were some of the most fun and memorable musical experiences I’ve had,” he writes in a follow-up e-mail. “In terms of playing outside the classical box, I think that if you can feel it, you can play it.”

The instrument had immediate resonance in Arkansas. Iván Fischer, the NSO’s principal conductor, happened to see Donnellan playing it backstage and immediately had to try it out. Now, Fischer wants one of his own. “I just haven’t had time to make one,” says Donnellan.

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YouTube: National Anthem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9LXHrzOVYA

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Full article and photo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/03/AR2009070302342.html?hpid=moreheadlines

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From the Teeth of the Lion to the Dandelion

The stories behind the names of flowers.

This weekend, weather permitting, we will celebrate our nation’s independence at outdoor parties across the country. While savoring the barbecue, we should not forget to consider the flowers blooming all around us.

Throughout history and in cultures around the world, mankind has held a deep connection with flowers. From the smallest blossoms emerging from the melting snow, marking the end of winter, to elaborate bouquets given as gestures of love, flowers are unmatched in their ability to please the senses and delight the soul.

They have also been infused with symbolism that transcends their colorful blooms. A poetic regard for flowers is evident even in Neanderthal culture with the discovery of burial sites containing Hollyhocks — an indication that the Neanderthals too considered it as “holy”‘ as its name also suggests today.

The names we give to flowers reflect a loftier esteem than the ones we give to, say, vegetables. Broccoli, for example, derives its unappetizing moniker from the Italian brocco, meaning simply a shoot or stalk — in line with the opinions of countless picky eaters. But the names given to flowers often denote their benefit to the spirit.

Like many words in our language, many of the names of flowers hold clues about their history and relationship to us. The daisy, for example, known for its small yellow blossoms, is quite common throughout the world. Daisies are unique in that they close their golden petals during the night and keep them shut, as if in sleep, until the morning. This peculiar characteristic earned this little flower the name ‘day’s eye’ from speakers of Old English. Eventually, that name was compounded into the word daisy.

Dandelions also derive their name from their characteristically numerous thick and slender yellow petals. It is not so strange for an imaginative observer to equate the dandelion’s coarse petals to rows of teeth on a well-fanged beast. This comparison explains its French origin dent de lion, or in English “teeth of a lion.”

Some flowers, on the other hand, were named not from their appearance alone, but for their associations with mythology. The iris, a flower which appears in a wide variety of colors, shares its name with the Greek goddess who unified heaven and earth. Aptly, she was personified by the rainbow.

The narcissus flower, too, is said to have sprouted upon the death of its mythological namesake, though there is no evidence that the flower is as self-absorbed. The Virgin Mary also has left her mark on floral taxonomy with the marigold, or Mary’s gold. According to Flemish tradition, the flower sprouted from her tears.

Still, other flowers’ names offer some insight into their utility in the past. The sweet, aromatic lavender was used to add a pleasant scent to recently washed clothes and to perfume bathwater — as evidenced by its association with the Latin lavare, meaning “to wash.” Calluna, the flowering shrub also known as heather, seems to have been appreciated not so much for its beauty as its handiness as a broom. Its name originated from the Greek word meaning “to sweep.”

The Pansy blossom in late summer begins to droop. The flower’s name is derived from the French pensée, or “thought” — the source for the word pensive.

Carnations are also appreciated for their human qualities. Their soft pink petals are likened to the hue of skin, sharing its meaning closely with the word incarnation, “to be made flesh.” There are early writings, though, that refer to this flower as coronation, which some scholars believe is an allusion to its use as a garland in Greek tradition.

Flowers are so universal in their appeal that nearly every culture names their children after them. From Ambuj (Indian for lotus) to Zara (Arabic for a blossom), floral names are timeless in their popularity. While millions of people around the world share their names with flowers, the opposite is also true. The Zinnia and Dahlia flowers, for example, can thank the 18th century botanists Johann Zinn and Anders Dahl, respectively, for their names.

Ultimately, the names assigned to flowers reflect less the flowers themselves than our longstanding relationship of love and esteem for them. A rose by any other name might still smell as sweet — but a flower’s name and the story behind it are deeply meaningful, human stories. They are our contribution to one of nature’s most cherished creations.

Mr. Messenger is a writer and a linguist.

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124657689923189159.html

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Magic Flute: Primal Find Sings of Music’s Mystery

Ancient Instrument Rekindles Speculation That Melody, Which Powerfully Affects the Brain, Was a Prelude to Speech

Professor Nicholas Conard of the University in Tuebingen shows a flute during a press conference in Tuebingen, southern Germany, on Wednesday, June 24, 2009. The thin bird-bone flute carved some 35,000 years ago and unearthed in a German cave is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archeologists say, and offers the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture. A team led by Conard assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany.

The discovery of the world’s oldest musical instrument — a 35,000-year-old flute made from a wing bone — highlights a prehistoric moment when the mind learned to soar on flights of melody and rhythm.

Researchers announced last week in Nature that they had unearthed the flute from the Ice Age rubbish of cave bear bones, reindeer horn and stone tools discarded in a cavern called Hohle Fels near Ulm, Germany. No one knows the melodies that were played in this primordial concert hall, which sheltered the humans who first settled Europe. The delicate wind instrument, though, offers evidence of how music pervaded daily life eons before iTunes, satellite radio and Muzak.

All told, the researchers have found eight flutes of the same Ice Age vintage at three different caves in the region. “It is becoming completely clear that music was a normal part of life then,” says archaeologist Nicholas Conard at the University of Tubingen, who led the research team. “They must have clapped and danced and sang.”

Parrots dance to the beat. Sex-starved mice sing for love, new research shows. But true music, from rap to Rachmaninoff, is a unique human invention that resonates in us all, striking neural chords of memory, emotion, motor control, timing and meaning — and transforming us in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand.

“Music is biologically powerful,” says neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif. “Every culture ever discovered has music, no matter what else they may lack.”

By any measure, our brain is a music box. Yet no one knows why.

It certainly baffled Charles Darwin. In his landmark tome, “The Descent of Man,” the 19th century author of evolutionary theory wrote that, “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” Nonetheless, Darwin wasn’t immune to its allure. He avidly listened to Mozart, Handel and Beethoven, even though he was partly tone deaf.

Some scientists are convinced that music is only noise, a curious but compelling byproduct of our innate capacity for speech and our penchant for pattern recognition. We hear melodies in the wind, songs in falling water and percussion in the sound of rain drops.

“Music is a way of structuring sound,” says psychologist Petr Janata at the University of California, Davis, who studies the neurobiology of music. “It really gets to this underlying human desire to discover patterns in things.”

Others speculate that music evolved from animal calls to convey emotional urgency before our forebears learned to communicate through the spoken word. They detect hints of music’s beginnings in the soothing sing-song syllables of a mother’s lullaby. In this view, harmony and regulated rhythm may have been inspired by the sounds of social life, as early humans worked in unison striking stones to make tools or grinding seeds for food.

“I believe that before we evolved language, our communication was more musical than it is now,” says cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen at the University of Reading in England, author of “The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body.” Unlike Darwin, Dr. Mithen is convinced that music was crucial to human survival. “Using music to express emotion or build a sense of group belonging would have been essential to the function of human society, especially before language evolved prior to modern humans.”

Indeed, Dr. Conard and his colleagues say that the ability to create musical instruments reflects a profound mental awakening that gave these early humans a crucial edge over the more primitive Neanderthal people who lived in the same epoch. “The expansion of modern humans hinged in part on new ways of storing symbolic information that seemed to confer an advantage on these people in competition with Neanderthals,” Dr. Conard says.

To Dr. Patel, music-making was a conscious innovation, like the invention of writing or the control of fire. “It is something that we humans invented that then transformed human life,” he says. “It has a profound impact on how individual humans experience the world, by connecting us through space and time to other minds.”

There is no denying its power to change our mood — or our brain structure.

Among expert musicians, some brain areas can be up to 5% larger than in those with little or no musical training, research shows. Nerve tissue linking the right and left hemispheres of our brain is up to 15% larger among those who studied music since early childhood. Moreover, the auditory cortex of an expert musician can contain up to 130% more gray matter of neurons and synapses than someone who has never practiced on an instrument.

When we listen to music, our brain responds directly to harmony, brain scanning studies show. Listening to the classical scales and key progressions of Western music actually rewires the synapses of the human cortex, Dr. Janata and his colleagues discovered.

Music orchestrates our inner life, by activating a place in our medial prefrontal cortex region that supports our most personal autobiographical memories. There, our favorite music cues our thoughts of ourselves, the UC Davis researchers reported earlier this year. “The moment we hear a song that is familiar to us, it ramps up the amount of activity in that region,” Dr. Janata says.

Every time a zebra finch hears a new song of its species, the melody triggers a cascade of biological changes in its brain, causing thousands of genes to switch on and off in sequence, developmental cell biologist David Clayton at the University of Illinois reported last month in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences.

So far, however, there is no evidence that music has any place in the human genome. “It is tempting to say that music is in our genes,” says Dr. Patel. “But it may be universal because all over the world it has tremendous emotional power.”

Music does move us in mysterious ways. It quickens our pulse, pressing us to stamp our feet, sway or clap our hands in time. Our sense of syncopation, though, is a musical quality that we do share with other species.

Earlier this year, Dr. Patel and his colleagues at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla reported that a parrot can keep time to music, readily high-stepping to a variable beat in the discotheque of its bird brain. The subject of their study — a sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball — kept pace with the tempo in a way that dogs, cats and chimpanzees cannot. A video of the cockatoo moving to the beat of The Backstreet Boys has been viewed almost three million times on YouTube.

For the flutists of the cave, music-making was no fluke. When archaeologists made a replica of one small Ice Age flute fashioned from a swan’s wing bone, they discovered they could play four basic notes and three overtones, with a range comparable to some modern flutes.

Across a thousand generations or more, they heard the scale of our beginnings.

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Recommended reading

Recommended Reading

Archaeologists reported on the oldest known musical instrument in “New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany” published in Nature.

Psychologists at the University of California at Davis document how familiar music stirs synapses connected to personal memories in “The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories” published in the journal Cerebral Cortex. Music also strikes neural chords of meaning in the brain, just like sentences, the scientists discuss in ‘When Music Tells a Story’ in Nature Neuroscience.

Researchers at the Neurosciences Institute found that a parrot can follow a variable tempo in “Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal” published in Current Biology.

University of Reading archaeologist Steven Mithen explores the evolutionary origins of music in “The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body.”

Neuroscientist Aniruddh D. Patel offers a comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience in Music, Language, and the Brain.

Oliver Sacks writes about music and unusual brain disorders in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

Record producer and cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Levitan writes about why music affects us so strongly in This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.

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What the flute might have sounded like:

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Components/audio/2009/2009-june/090624-flute.mp3

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124656639970388165.html

Photo: http://www.idahostatesman.com/worldnews/story/812613.html

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See also: Flutes, old and new

Archaeolgists discovered the oldest known musical instrument: A 35,000-year-old flute made from a hollow bone of the griffon vulture. The flute is played with the same technique as a modern flute.

Imagine prehistoric humans, living in caves, hunting giant beasts, just trying to survive. Though life may have been “nasty, brutish and short,” early man’s mind must have been filled with curiosity, wonder and awe at her surroundings.

Paintings, sculpture and music were all part of the tapestry of early man on this earth. It seems our ancestors had highly sophisticated means of artistic expression, and took this know-how with them as they migrated into Europe.

This past Wednesday, archaeologists in southern Germany dug up the oldest instrument ever: A 35,000-year-old bone flute that was most surely well-loved and played regularly.

It is remarkable how similar this flute looks to its successors from many millenia in the future, though this archetype would have been played vertically.

In spite of that, the mechanics of making music on these two flutes are precisely the same. A player brought the carved lip plate to her mouth and blew across the opening, its sharp edge splitting the airstream and causing the instrument to vibrate.

The lovely, tuneful, bird-like sound that resulted was much louder and in a greater range than the human voice. The five holes could be covered partially or fully by her fingers — to change pitches, trill, slide, quaver and make any number of melodies, ones we can only guess at.

Though hardly as ancient in any anthropological sense, the Dorian Wind Quintet has been around for a good long time, founded in 1961 by five young musicians studying at Tanglewood in eastern Massachusetts.

The Dorian came to St. Paul in the dead of winter to play a recital as part of the Music in the Park Series.

Click the audio links to hear the concert, and listen to the flutist who plays three different instruments — piccolo, alto flute as well as the C-flute.

Audio

• Wind Quintet in E-flat; Anton Reicha
• Variations on a Theme from Wind Quintet in E-flat by Anton Reicha; Richard Rodney Bennett, George Perle, Billy Childs, Bruce Adolphe and Lee Hoiby
• Six Bagatelles; Gyorgy Ligeti
• Aires Tropicales; Paquito D’Rivera
• Three Short Pieces; Jacques Ibert

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Full article and photo: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/06/24/dorian_quintet/

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Behind the Facade

Meeting Michael Jackson in the mid-1980s was one of the creepier experiences of my life. I was an editor at The Daily News and had to present him with an award in a large room with just a handful of onlookers and a photographer at Madison Square Garden.

I wasn’t put off by the fact that Jackson, then in his mid-20s, couldn’t make small talk. Lots of people have trouble with that. There was something about his overall behavior that weirded me out. He seemed, even then, to be a person who was trying with all of his being to step outside of reality and leave it behind.

Emmanuel Lewis, the child star of the hit TV series “Webster,” was with Jackson that evening. The undersized Lewis was probably 13 at the time, but he looked much younger, maybe 7 or 8.

Jackson seemed to relate only to Lewis. He made faces at the tiny boy and giggled as Lewis hopped around and climbed over furniture, much to Jackson’s delight. I remember thinking as I left the Garden that Jackson had treated Lewis almost as a pet.

I’ve never heard any suggestion of anything improper about the relationship between Jackson and Lewis. But what I wish I had thought more about in those long-ago days of Michael-mania was the era of extreme immaturity and grotesque irresponsibility that was already well under way in America. The craziness played out on a shockingly broad front and Jackson’s life, among many others, would prove to be a shining and ultimately tragic example.

Ronald Reagan was president, making promises he couldn’t keep about taxes and deficits and allowing the readings of a West Coast astrologer to shape his public schedule. The movie “Wall Street” would soon appear, accurately reflecting the nation’s wholesale acceptance of unrestrained greed and other excesses of the rich and powerful.

In neighborhoods through much of black America, crack was taking a fearful toll. Young criminals were arming themselves with ever more powerful weapons, and prison garb was used to set fashion trends.

Motown was the label that gave us the Jackson 5. But when Michael and his brothers released their first album in 1969, the label had already reached its creative peak and most of the best work — the stunning originality of the Miracles, the Marvelettes, Mary Wells, Martha and the Vandellas, the Supremes, the Temptations, and others — had been done. Hip-hop would soon appear, and then the violence and misogyny of gangsta rap.

All kinds of restraints were coming off. It was almost as if the adults had gone into hiding. The deregulation that we were told would be great for the economy was being applied to the culture as a whole. Women could be treated as sex objects again as misogyny, hardly limited to hip-hop, went mainstream. (Have you looked at network television lately, or listened to the radio?) Astonishing numbers of men abandoned their children with impunity. Most of the nation seemed fine with the idea of going to war without a draft and without raising taxes.

In many ways we descended as a society into a fantasyland, trying to leave the limits and consequences and obligations of the real world behind. Politicians stopped talking about the poor. We built up staggering amounts of debt and called it an economic boom. We shipped jobs overseas by the millions without ever thinking seriously about how to replace them. We let New Orleans drown.

Jackson was the perfect star for the era, the embodiment of fantasy gone wild. He tried to carve himself up into another person, but, of course, there was the same Michael Jackson underneath — talented but psychologically disabled to the point where he was a danger to himself and others.

Reality is unforgiving. There is no escape. Behind the Jackson facade was the horror of child abuse. Court records and reams of well-documented media accounts contain a stream of serious allegations of child sex abuse and other inappropriate behavior with very young boys. Jackson, a multimillionaire megastar, was excused as an eccentric. Small children were delivered into his company, to spend the night in his bed, often by their parents.

One case of alleged pedophilia against Jackson, the details of which would make your hair stand on end, was settled for a reported $25 million. He beat another case in court.

The Michael-mania that has erupted since Jackson’s death — not just an appreciation of his music, but a giddy celebration of his life — is yet another spasm of the culture opting for fantasy over reality. We don’t want to look under the rock that was Jackson’s real life.

As with so many other things, we don’t want to know.

Bob Herbert, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/opinion/04herbert.html?_r=1

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Entertainment – July 3

Algerian Star Jailed In France Over Forced Abortion

Algerian singer Cheb Mami was sentenced on Friday to five years in a French prison after being found guilty of forcing an attempted abortion on his former lover.

The 42-year-old star of Algeria’s popular rai music, whose real name is Mohamed Khelifati, was tried for complicity in kidnapping, group assault on a vulnerable person, threatening a victim and administering harmful substances.

His agent, Michel Le Corre, was sentenced to four years in prison. Two other men, Hicham Lazaar and Abdelkader Lallali, were sentenced to three and six years respectively although neither man was in court and arrest warrants have been issued.

Known globally for “Desert Rose,” a duo with pop star Sting in 2000, Mami was arrested on his arrival in France on Monday night, having fled to Algeria two years ago.

He was charged with arranging for his then-partner, a French photographer, to be abducted in August 2005, a few days after she told him she was pregnant.

During the trial, Mami said he had done “wrong” but did not express clear regret and did not speak to his former partner.

The court heard that Le Corre lured the woman to Algiers under the pretext of a business trip. One of the other men then slipped a tranquilizer into her orange juice and drove the semi-conscious woman to Mami’s villa.

There, the fourth man and two women, who have not been identified, attempted to perform an abortion on the woman, according to the prosecution. The victim’s account of the attempt was confirmed by a medical expert. She also said Mami was present during the abortion attempt, which he denies.

After she returned to France, the victim realized she was still pregnant. She gave birth to a baby girl in March 2006.

Mami was held in France for three months in late 2006 and early 2007 as part of the investigation, but skipped bail in 2007 and fled to Algeria. He returned for the trial.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/07/03/arts/entertainment-us-france-singer.html

Photo: http://www.casafree.com/modules/xcgal/displayimage.php?pid=22526

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Turkish TV Gameshow Looks to Convert Atheists

What happens when you put a Muslim imam, a Christian priest, a rabbi and a Buddhist monk in a room with 10 atheists?

Turkish television station Kanal T hopes the answer is a ratings success as it prepares to launch a gameshow where spiritual guides from the four faiths will seek to convert a group of non-believers.

The prize for converts will be a pilgrimage to a holy site of their chosen religion — Mecca for Muslims, the Vatican for Christians, Jerusalem for Jews and Tibet for Buddhists.

But religious authorities in Muslim but secular Turkey are not amused by the twist on the popular reality game show format and the Religious Affairs Directorate is refusing to provide an imam for the show.

“Doing something like this for the sake of ratings is disrespectful to all religions. Religion should not be a subject for entertainment programs,” High Board of Religious Affairs Chairman Hamza Aktan told state news agency Anatolian after news of the planned program emerged.

The makers of “Penitents Compete” are unrepentant and reject claims that the show, scheduled to begin broadcasting in September, will cheapen religion.

“We are giving the biggest prize in the world, the gift of belief in God,” Kanal T chief executive Seyhan Soylu told Reuters.

“We don’t approve of anyone being an atheist. God is great and it doesn’t matter which religion you believe in. The important thing is to believe,” Soylu said.

The project focuses attention on the issue of religious identity in European Union-candidate Turkey, where rights groups have raised concerns over freedom of religion for non-Muslim minorities.

Detractors of the ruling AK Party government, which is rooted in political Islam but officially secular, accuse it of having a hidden Islamist agenda, a charge it denies.

Some 200 people have so far applied to take part in the show and the 10 contestants will be chosen next month.

A team of theologians will ensure that the atheists are truly non-believers and are not just seeking fame or a free holiday.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/07/03/arts/entertainment-us-turkey-religion-gameshow.html

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I Hate Valentine’s Day (2009)

Nia Vardalos and John Corbett in the romantic comedy “I Hate Valentine’s Day.”

The Game of Love, Played With an Unorthodox Rule Book

Genevieve (Nia Vardalos) and Greg (John Corbett), the conflicted lovebirds in the bottom-drawer romantic comedy “I Hate Valentine’s Day,” may be in their 30s, but they play the game of romance with the finesse of sixth graders in the spin-the-bottle phase of hormonal exploration.

Genevieve, who owns a Brooklyn flower shop called Roses for Romance, has contrived a code of serial courtship in which she terminates each budding relationship after five dates, before she can be seriously hurt.

Greg, a former lawyer from Atlanta, has opened a nearby restaurant called Get on Tapas, whose cutesy-poo name, which nobody seems to get, says everything about the movie’s moronic level of wit.

Ms. Vardalos, who directed, plays her character like a walking smiley-face button. Accompanied by two chirping gay Stepin Fetchits, Genevieve is so “on” that when her rules backfire and the fatuous grin is finally wiped off her face, your impulse is to applaud. His thin lips twisted into what seems to be a sneer, Mr. Corbett (Ms. Vardalos’s co-star in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) squints through the role of the doltish restaurateur who wreaks havoc by dutifully following her rules.

Their romance proceeds like clockwork until it is consummated with a two-night sleepover, which she interprets as their fourth date and he (after the second night) as their fifth. It takes the last third of the movie to resolve their disagreement, which is settled on Valentine’s Day, exactly a year after the story begins.

You might blame Nora Ephron, whose screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally” established the formula that “I Hate Valentine’s Day” runs into the ground. Compared with this, Ms. Ephron is Chekhov.

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Full article and photo: http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/07/03/movies/03hate.html

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Stop the Music: Oscar Misses the Melody

“Something truly remarkable happened this year,” Hugh Jackman intoned at the Academy Awards show in February, “something we thought would never happen in our lifetime.” His earnest manner suggested that he was about to deliver an obligatory Obama laudation. The gag was that something even less probable than an African-American president had happened: A movie built around songs — “Mamma Mia!” — had done boffo box-office. “The musical,” Mr. Jackman proclaimed, “is back!”

It took the movie industry a scant four months to quash that conceit. Last week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new rules for its annual awards. One of the changes means that years may go by without an Oscar being awarded for best original song.

The guessing is that the Academy’s rule change — if, in the nomination-voting, no song rises to a certain minimum score, then “there will be no nominees and thus no Oscar presented for the category” — has less to do with maintaining standards than with making room for clips from the extra films that will now be contending for best picture. The Academy figures that ratings for the Oscar telecast are hurt when blockbuster entertainments, such as last year’s Batman pic “The Dark Knight,” don’t even get nominated. From now on, there will be 10 films in the running for the top honor, not five.

But there is also a sense that the best-original-song category just isn’t what it used to be, that the movies aren’t producing the sort of tunes they once seemed to manufacture with ease. There were years when the Oscars considered songs so brilliant that even the losers became standards. Take 1936, when “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “Pennies From Heaven” were defeated by “The Way You Look Tonight.” In the decades to come, the Academy would give awards to songs such as “Over the Rainbow,” “Mona Lisa,” “All the Way” and “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Compare them with the deathless melody honored for best movie song of 2005: “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.” All together now, let’s all hum a few bars . . . anybody?

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t terrific modern music in movies — orchestral scoring of incidental music is practiced at a high level these days. Nor is music somehow less important in film than it once was. It’s just that very little new music is created specifically for new movies. Tinseltown used to employ a small army of tunesmiths; now it primarily pays for song rights, not songwriters.

Most directors prefer to rely on off-the-shelf songs as an evocative way to establish mood and context. For the movie “Goodfellas,” Martin Scorsese used a parade of songs from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s to set the scenes of each era. When it came to the closing credits, Mr. Scorsese didn’t have to commission a tune to express the film’s cynical summation; he just tapped a recording of Sid Vicious sneering his way through “My Way,” a choice of deranged perfection.

If borrowed songs can be crucial tone-setters today, the original songs from the Golden Age were often little more than diversions. A standard shtick was to have one of the female characters be a nightclub canary. The romantic lead comes to talk with her backstage, but first he has to sit and listen to her sing something from, say, Harry Warren, who knocked out an astonishing number of great tunes, often for the lightest of B-movies. He would eventually collect three best-song statues out of 11 nominations, and his songs are still being sung.

At the most recent Academy Awards, Beyoncé Knowles performed in a medley of movie tunes, at one point tossing in a phrase from “At Last.” It was the song that she had sung for the Obamas’ Inaugural Ball dance a month before, a performance that copied Etta James’s 1961 recording of the song — and earned a bitter rebuke from Ms. James: “She had no business up there singing . . . my song that I’ve been singing forever.”

But of course “At Last” isn’t Etta James’s song. It was written by Harry Warren and lyricist Mack Gordon for the delightful Glenn Miller vehicle “Orchestra Wives” in 1942. According to the Academy, “At Last” wasn’t even the best song in that picture — Warren was nominated instead for “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.” And yet more than a half-century later, artists are still fighting over who can claim “At Last” as their own.

Will anyone be fighting over any of today’s crop of movie songs 60 years from now? “Lose Yourself” — Eminem’s Best Original Song winner of 2002 — should be so lucky.

The occasional blockbuster still produces a hit, as when Celine Dion sang “My Heart Will Go On” over the credits of 1997′s “Titanic.” But the closest thing to the old studio song machine in the past 20 years has been the string of Oscar-winning tunes for Disney cartoons. Some have been catchy enough. Others, such as the treacly “Colors of the Wind” from “Pocahontas,” are downright regrettable. But even the best of these struggle to escape their animated origins.

It’s a shame that the best-original-song Oscar may drift into disuse. With more encouragement, Hollywood might produce better music. For all his skilled borrowing, Mr. Scorsese brought to the screen one of the last movie songs to become an undisputed standard, the theme from his 1977 film, “New York, New York.” The tune didn’t even get nominated, which suggests that maybe the problem isn’t just a lack of good material but an inability to recognize it when it does turn up.

Mr. Felten, who wrote the “How’s Your Drink?” column in Weekend Wall Street Journal for four years, here begins a weekly column for the Taste page.

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124658277116889945.html

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Entertainment – July 2

In Death as in Life, Michael Jackson Sets Music Sales Records

Work by Michael Jackson, shown rehearsing on June 23, sold extremely well after his death.

As soon as the news of Michael Jackson’s death began to spread last Thursday afternoon, radio programmers around the country cued up his songs, and fans rushed to retail and online outlets to buy his music in quantities that broke records on Billboard’s sales charts.

The three best-selling albums in the United States last week were all by Mr. Jackson: “Number Ones” sold 108,000 copies; “The Essential Michael Jackson” sold 102,000; and “Thriller” sold 101,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan. In total, 422,000 copies of Mr. Jackson’s albums were sold in the week that ended on Sunday —more than 40 times the previous week’s figure — as fans snapped up everything in sight.

Many retail stores reportedly ran out of stock over the weekend, which might have contributed to Mr. Jackson’s remarkable sales tally online: 57 percent of his album sales were digital downloads, and 2.3 million downloads of single tracks were sold, separate from album sales. In the five years that SoundScan has tracked downloads, no artist has sold more than 1 million tracks in one week. Last year Mr. Jackson sold a total of 2.8 million tracks.

Because of Billboard’s chart rules, though, Mr. Jackson’s albums do not qualify for the Billboard 200, its standard albums chart, since they were all released more than 18 months ago. Instead Mr. Jackson will occupy the top nine spots on the catalog chart, as a solo artist or with the Jackson 5. (Mr. Jackson’s music is released by Epic/Legacy, a division of Sony; Jackson 5 albums are released by Motown.)

The best-selling new album last week, “The E.N.D.,” (Interscope) by the Black Eyed Peas, will be No. 1 on the Billboard 200, though it had only 88,000 sales. It is the first time since 1991, when SoundScan began to provide reliable sales data, that Billboard can confirm that a catalog album outsold a new one.

“The level of dominance by Michael Jackson on the top pop catalog albums chart is unlike anything we’ve ever seen on any Billboard chart, regardless if it occurred pre- or post-death,” said Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard’s director of charts.

For days after Mr. Jackson’s death, his albums occupied most of the top slots on the running music sales charts for iTunes and Amazon.com. The most popular tracks online were “Thriller,” with 167,000 downloads in the United States; “Man in the Mirror,” with 165,000; and “Billie Jean,” with 158,000.

On the radio the hierarchy of hits was slightly different. “Billie Jean” was by far the most popular, with more than 4,500 spins through Sunday, according to Nielsen BDS, which monitors airplay. “Thriller” was next, with nearly 3,600, followed closely by “Rock With You.” Over all, radio play for his songs was 18 times what it was the week before.

Predictably, in the hours and days following the news of Mr. Jackson’s death, at 50, his music became ubiquitous on radio. But the increase in airplay was made more dramatic by the fact that in recent years Mr. Jackson’s songs have had relatively little. In the three days before his death, for example, “Billie Jean” had only 94 spins on the 1,600 stations that Nielsen BDS monitors across the country; in the ratings blocks between 3 p.m. and midnight on Thursday (he died at 5:26 p.m. Eastern time), when many stations went wall-to-wall Michael Jackson, it logged 1,011.

“I don’t think radio stations had been playing his music in the last couple of years, due to his legal issues,” said Greg Strassell, the senior vice president for programming at CBS Radio, which owns 134 stations around the country. “Then all of a sudden the audience wanted to hear his songs again. I think they had forgotten how great that music was.”

But airplay began to trail off on Monday.

Catalog sales often spike in the days and weeks after a superstar dies, but Mr. Jackson’s sales were extraordinary even in that context. Sales of Nirvana albums, for example, increased by more than 150 percent, to 77,000, the week after Kurt Cobain died in 1994. When the Notorious B.I.G. was killed in 1997, his album “Life After Death” was just about to be released. It sold 689,000 copies in its first week.

On this week’s regular Billboard 200 chart, sales were much less spectacular. The Jonas Brothers’ “Lines, Vines and Trying Times” (Hollywood) has fallen one spot to No. 2 in its second week out, with 68,000 sales, a drop of 72 percent; and Regina Spektor’s “Far” (Warner/Sire) opens at No. 3 with 50,000. The Dave Matthews Band’s “Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King” (RCA) is No. 4 with 47,000, barely 100 more than Eminem’s “Relapse” (Interscope).

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/arts/music/02sales.html

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David Carradine Died Of Asphyxiation: Pathologist

The medical examiner who oversaw a private autopsy on David Carradine said on Wednesday that the “Kung Fu” star died from asphyxiation and the way the actor’s body was bound allowed him to rule out suicide.

Carradine was found hanging in the closet of his Bangkok hotel suite on June 4 and his family hired New York-based forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden to conduct a follow-up death investigation to the one handled by Thai authorities.

Baden had earlier said the actor’s death was not a suicide, but details of autopsies have been scant and on Wednesday Baden stressed that his full determination of how Carradine died will not be ready until at least a week.

“The cause of death was asphyxiation, an inability to breathe, now why that happened is still what we’re working on,” Baden told Reuters.

Authorities in Thailand conducted the first autopsy on Carradine shortly after his death, and said on June 8 it would take a month to know how he died. A Thai police colonel told Reuters early in the probe the likely cause of death was asphyxiation.

Baden, the host of cable channel HBO’s “Autopsy” series, also said the ligatures, or ties that bind, which were on Carradine’s body at the time of his death helped him rule out suicide.

“He didn’t die of natural causes, and he didn’t die of suicidal causes from the nature of the ligatures around the body, so that leaves some kind of accidental death,” he said.

The media has suggested Carradine could have died from accidental autoerotic asphyxiation. In response to a question on that topic, Baden did not rule out that possibility, but he also did not say autoerotic asphyxiation was the cause.

Contradicting media reports saying Carradine’s hands were tied behind his back, Baden told Reuters the actor’s hands were above his head.

A representative for Carradine’s brothers said the family had no comment on preliminary results of the second autopsy.

Baden, who oversaw a second autopsy in the United States after Carradine’s body was flown to Los Angeles from Bangkok, said he is awaiting more information from Thai police to rule out the possibility that Carradine was killed by someone.

Baden said he wants to see data from the pass keys for the hotel where Carradine died, and security video to ensure no one was in the room with him at the time.

The forensic pathologist said he is not disappointed with how long it has taken Thai authorities to send him material for his death investigation. “It takes time to finish a case sometimes, so it’s not unexpected,” he said.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/07/01/arts/entertainment-us-carradine.html

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Jay Leno Wins Cybersquatting Case

Comedian and talk show host Jay Leno has won a cybersquatting case against a Texas man found by a U.N. agency to have misused the domain name thejaylenoshow.com to direct Internet users to a real estate website.

In a ruling issued on Thursday, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said Leno had common law trademark rights to his name after a 30-year career in entertainment, even though Guadalupe Zambrano registered the site in 2004.

Furthermore, real estate agent Zambrano did not have any legitimate rights to the disputed web address and had registered it in “bad faith,” according to the ruling by William Towns, an independent arbitrator appointed by the Geneva-based agency.

Towns ordered the domain name transferred within 10 days to Leno, who will be hosting a new comedy show on NBC in September after a 17-year run at “The Tonight Show” which ended last May.

The new prime-time talk show will be called “The Jay Leno Show” from September 14, according to an NBC announcement last week.

Oprah Winfrey, Larry King and Martha Stewart are among other television hosts who have filed domain name cases under WIPO’s fast-track arbitration and mediation center.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/07/02/arts/entertainment-us-leno.html

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A Trend With Teeth

THE symptoms are unnerving: a taste for fresh meat — rare, if you please; an aversion to sunlight; and a passion for spectral-looking, fine-boned rakes. All are indications that the sufferer has been bitten by the vampire bug.

Sookie Stackhouse, the feisty young heroine of “True Blood” on HBO, risks doom whenever she visits with her otherworldly beau. And Oskar, the adolescent misfit of the Swedish art film “Let the Right One In,” a favorite in fashion circles, courts extinction each time he ventures out with Eli, the eerily ageless shape-shifter he befriends.

Undead style, displayed by Deborah Ann Woll in “True Blood.”

Sookie and Oskar are in the throes of vampire lust, a pop-culture contagion being spread via television, films and fiction. What began with the Twilight Saga, the luridly romantic young-adult series by Stephenie Meyer, followed by “Twilight,” the movie, has become a pandemic of unholy proportions.

Is it a wonder?

Rarely have monsters looked so sultry — or so camera-ready. No small part of this latest vampire mania seems to stem from the ethereal cool and youthful sexiness with which the demons are portrayed. Bela Lugosi they are not.

“The vampire is the new James Dean,” said Julie Plec, the writer and executive producer of “The Vampire Diaries,” a forthcoming series on the CW network based on the popular L. J. Smith novels about high school femmes and hommes fatales. “There is something so still and sexy about these young erotic predators,” she said.

This generation of undead prowls high school hallways and dimly lighted dance clubs as menacing — and as seductive — as they have ever been. The June premiere of the second season of “True Blood,” in which Sookie, played by Anna Paquin, is reunited with her imperious fanged suitor, drew 3.4 million viewers, making it HBO’s most-watched program since the “Sopranos” finale in 2007.

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Vampires are part of a hoary tradition that harks back to Nosferatu and Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” at least. But the undead are returning with a vengeance. Left, Helen Chandler and Bela Lugosi in the 1931 “Dracula.”

Catherine Deneuve played a predatory vampire and David Bowie her pallid consort in the 1983 film “The Hunger.”

Oskar, the adolescent misfit of the Swedish art film “Let the Right One In” courts extinction each time he ventures out with Eli, the eerily ageless shape-shifter he befriends. Left, Lina Leandersson in “Let the Right One In.”

A page from Italian Vogue. The style world, too, has come under the vampire’s spell, in the shape of the gorgeous leather- and lace-clad night crawlers who have crept into the pages of fashion glossies.

A vampy look from Rick Owens’s fall 2009 ready to wear fashion show in Paris.

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Charlaine Harris has just published “Dead and Gone,” the ninth novel in her Sookie Stackhouse series, variations on Southern Gothic fiction on which “True Blood” is based. The publishing world has been intrigued by “The Strain,” a first installment in a planned trilogy written by the film director Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, about bloodthirsty predators run amok in Manhattan.

The style world, too, has come under the vampire’s spell, in the shape of the gorgeous leather- and lace-clad night crawlers who have crept into the pages of fashion glossies.

Vampires, of course, are part of a hoary tradition that harks back to Nosferatu and Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” at least. Anne Rice updated the genre, introducing the ghoulishly aristocratic vampire Lestat. But the undead are returning with a vengeance, in part because they “personify real-world anxieties,” said Michael Dylan Foster, an assistant professor in the department of folklore at Indiana University in Bloomington.

“Especially during these post-9/11 times of increased vigilance, representations like the ‘Twilight’ series reflect a kind of conspiracy-theory mentality, a fear that there is something secret and dangerous going on in our own community, right under our noses.”

Given all that baggage, what keeps vampires so alluring?

One might point to their combination of deathless good looks and decadent sexuality. Their faces, as described in “Twilight,” “were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine.”

Vampirelike glamour figures strike come-hither poses in a flurry of recent fashion publications. Portrayed as androgynous creatures in the June issue of W, they affect killer glares, their menace accentuated by their chalky pallor. In the magazine’s current issue, Bruce Willis appears about to be raked by the talons of his new wife, Emma Heming, in a series of photographs by Steven Klein.

Italian Vogue has also succumbed to the vampire’s cold charms: In the June issue, the latest to arrive on American newsstands, models pose as willfully spooky night crawlers like those who once haunted Manhattan clubs; one image captures a female stalker whose supper, the smear of scarlet on her cheek suggests, has just been interrupted.

The vampire’s attraction is “all about the titillation of imagining the monsters we could be if we just let ourselves go,” suggested Rick Owens, a fashion bellwether whose goth-tinged collections sometimes evoke the undead. “We’re all fascinated with corruption, the more glamorous the better” and, he added, with the idea of “devouring, consuming, possessing someone we desire.”

That sort of predatory glamour is personified by Catherine Deneuve in “The Hunger.” In that morbidly stylish 1983 cult classic, directed by Tony Scott, Ms. Deneuve is Miriam, a bloodsucking seductress in sharp-shouldered suits married to a pallid David Bowie and drawn to Susan Sarandon, a tomboyish specialist in sleep and longevity. (According to Mr. Scott, a sequel is in the writing stage.)

The undead of “The Hunger” were blessed — or cursed — with riches, hauteur and the kind of indestructible good looks aspiring glamazons can only dream of. Their modern counterparts come from every stratum of society and appeal to an array of psycho-sexual preferences.

Comely upper-crust demons haunt the corridors of Duchesne, the Upper East Side private school of “Blue Bloods,” a young-adult vampire series by Melissa de la Cruz. In “The Strain,” Mr. del Toro’s gory tale, which is framed like a police procedural, the vampires are lowlifes, unremittingly vile. Saya, the eternal schoolgirl of “Blood: The Last Vampire,” a supernatural action film that will open July 10, is a reluctant monster in a middy blouse, living a Spartan existence. Eli, the bloodsucking waif of “Let the Right One In,” based on a much-talked-about novel of the same name, is gorgeous but apparently destitute and needs only the occasional sanguinary fix to keep from shriveling. (Vampires, too, can be done in by their addictions.)

The most up-to-date — and least menacing — of this nocturnal breed are, well, deathless romantics who pine like their mortal companions for a love that lasts through eternity. Stefan, the handsome archfiend of “Vampire Diaries,” which will be broadcast on the CW network in September, keeps his lust for the human Elena resolutely in check.

In “New Moon,” the “Twilight” sequel that will open in November, the lead vampire Edward is a noble swain, performing feats of valor usually reserved for Superman. Seductive as he is, he, too, is a model of restraint. More than once in the original film Edward stops short of draining Bella, his mortal girlfriend. “I don’t want to be a monster,” he tells her urgently (though it seems she wouldn’t mind).

“Edward has rejected all humanity, but he is struggling to be human,” Ms. Plec said, adding: “There is always the question, ‘Does this person have it in him to be good, to make the right decision?’ It’s a theme that works like gangbusters in films and television.”

Impulse-control is an especially resonant theme in the current era of conflicts and cutbacks. “Periods of war, economic downturns and cultural turmoil all give rise to the production of vampire and fantasy fiction,” said Thomas Garza, chair of the department of Slavic and Eurasian studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and a specialist in vampire lore. “With a recession and war, the conflict has indeed seemed to turn inward, as we question our fiscal, political and moral status. ‘Have we been too excessive? Do we need to be more restrained?’ We seem once again to be questioning these very fundamental values.”

And, at the same time, renewing a flirtation with the dark side. Emily Rose, a performance poet in Chicago, is a devotee, she said, of “the wantonness, the gorgeousness that is the vampire.” She went on to catalog its exquisite charms: “eternal youth, invulnerability and, of course, the night life — staying up way past your bedtime.”

Surely there are worse things. “There are monsters so much bigger and more realistic in our day-to-day lives,” Ms. Rose said. “Having somebody clamp onto your neck and drain you — that doesn’t seem so scary anymore.”

“It wouldn’t be on my top 10 list of ways not to die,” she added, “especially if that vampire is at all attractive.”

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/fashion/02VAMPIRES.html?ref=global-home

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Karl Malden, Actor Who Played the Uncommon Everyman, Dies at 97

Karl Malden with Vivien Leigh in “Streetcar Named Desire” in 1951.

Karl Malden, the Academy Award-winning character actor who for more than 60 years brought an intelligent intensity and a homespun authenticity to roles in theater, film and television, from “A Streetcar Named Desire” to “The Streets of San Francisco,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 97.

His family announced his death to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which Mr. Malden served as president from 1989 to 1992. The announcement said family members were present when he died of natural causes in his home in the Brentwood section.

Mr. Malden was perhaps the ideal Everyman. He realized early on that he lacked the physical attributes of a leading man; he often joked about his blunt features, particularly his crooked, bulbous nose, which he had broken several times while playing basketball in school. But he was, he once said, determined “to be No. 1 in the No. 2 parts I was destined to get.”

He wound up playing everything from a whiskey-swigging cowboy to a prison warden, from an Army drill sergeant to the combative priest opposite Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.”

On Broadway he appeared with Mr. Brando in a legendary production of Tennessee Williams’s “Streetcar Named Desire,” then repeated the role in a film version that brought him an Oscar. On film he won memorable parts in a host of other major productions, including “Ruby Gentry,” “Fear Strikes Out” and “Patton,” in which he played Gen. Omar Bradley.

On television, too, he found wide popularity — as the gruff Lt. Mike Stone in “The Streets of San Francisco” and as a long-running pitchman for American Express travelers’ checks in the 1970s. His signature line, “Don’t leave home without them” — delivered as he peered intently from under the brim of his “San Francisco” fedora — became a national catch phrase.

Mr. Malden’s Broadway career began in 1937 with a small part in “Golden Boy,” the Clifford Odets drama about a doomed prizefighter; it reached its peak a decade later, in 1947, when he appeared in two major plays, both directed by Elia Kazan.

He began the year in “All My Sons,” Arthur Miller’s searing drama about a profiteering manufacturer (played by Ed Begley) who sells faulty parts to the Army during World War II and then pins the blame on his partner. Mr. Malden played the partner’s disillusioned son. It was Mr. Miller’s first Broadway hit and a triumph for Mr. Kazan and the cast.

A few months later, Mr. Malden won a plum role in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The production made a star of Mr. Brando, who created the role of the brooding, hard-drinking mechanic Stanley Kowalski. The cast also included Kim Hunter as Stella, Stanley’s long-suffering wife, and Jessica Tandy as Stella’s fragile, haunted sister, Blanche DuBois. Mr. Malden played Mitch, Blanche’s hopelessly inept suitor.

The production won rave reviews and Mr. Malden, Mr. Brando and Ms. Hunter repeated their roles in the 1951 film version, also directed by Mr. Kazan, with Vivien Leigh as Blanche. Mr. Malden’s performance brought him an Academy Award as best supporting actor.

Three years later, he received an Oscar nomination for his role as a militant priest in “On the Waterfront,” Budd Schulberg’s drama of dockside brutality. Again, Mr. Kazan directed and Mr. Brando starred, as a battered former prizefighter persuaded to oppose the venal leadership of the longshoremen’s union.

Mr. Malden continued performing on the stage in Broadway revivals of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” with John Garfield and Mildred Dunnock, and Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” in which he starred as the flinty patriarch of a hardscrabble New England farm.

In 1957 he played the lead role in “The Egghead,” a drama by Mr. Kazan’s wife, Molly, about a liberal professor who defends a former student charged with Communist sympathies. Brooks Atkinson, writing in The New York Times, was cool to what he saw as a strained thesis play, but he lauded “one of those excellent Malden performances in which thoughtful timing, the poised stance, the inquiring look into the faces of other actors yield a winning impression of homeliness and sincerity.”

When “The Egghead” closed after only 21 performances, Mr. Malden turned to films. For a while he shuttled between New York and Hollywood, but finally, after co-starring with Mr. Brando in the 1961 western “One-Eyed Jacks,” he bought a house in Los Angeles and moved west with his wife, Mona, and two daughters, Mila and Carla.

In December, the couple celebrated their 70th anniversary. In addition to his wife, Mr. Malden is survived by his daughters as well as three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

He was born Mladen Sekulovich in Chicago on March 22, 1912. His father, Petar Sekulovich, was a Serbian immigrant who worked in a steel mill and later delivered milk; his mother, the former Minnie Sebera, came from Bohemia, later to become part of the Czech Republic. As a young man, Mladen helped his father deliver milk in Gary, Ind., and spent three years working in a steel mill.

At 22, having acquired a taste for the theater and determined to make his own life far from the mills, he set off for Chicago with a few hundred dollars in savings to study acting at the Goodman Theater. He earned tuition by building sets and eventually met the woman he would marry, an aspiring actress named Mona Greenberg.

He graduated from the Goodman in 1937 but found himself back in Gary driving a milk truck, much as his father had. Luck came along in a letter from Robert Ardrey, a playwright he had met at the Goodman. Mr. Ardrey invited him to New York to try out for a part in his latest play. That play was never produced, but Mr. Malden also auditioned for the director Harold Clurman and Mr. Kazan, who were casting “Golden Boy” for the Group Theater. He wound up with “four lines in the third act,” he later wrote, but it was a significant initiation.

The Group Theater and “Golden Boy” began an enduring friendship between Mr. Malden and Mr. Kazan. It was Mr. Kazan, in fact, who persuaded the young actor to change his name to something less daunting. So Mladen became Malden, and he took the name Karl from one of his grandfathers.

He also took classes with the Group Theater in the early 1940s and later with the Actors Studio, but he did not regard himself as one of the studio’s Method actors. “I do have a method, of course,” he wrote in his 1997 autobiography, “When Do I Start?” He said it was “any method that works.”

After serving in the Army in World War II, Mr. Malden played a drunken sailor in a Clurman and Kazan production of Maxwell Anderson’s 1946 play “Truckline Cafe.”

The play was a flop, but Mr. Malden got good notices. The reviews also took note of another young actor who had made the most of a small role: Mr. Brando. The two actors became friends, and little more than a year later, they and Mr. Kazan collaborated on “Streetcar.”

Mr. Malden had made a handful of movies before “Streetcar,” including “Kiss of Death” (1947), “The Gunfighter” (1950) and “Halls of Montezuma” (1950). But his Oscar-winning performance in “Streetcar” made Mr. Malden one of Hollywood’s leading character actors.

He went on to portray the wealthy man Jennifer Jones marries to spite Charlton Heston in “Ruby Gentry” (1952); the policeman in Alfred Hitchcock’s “I Confess” (1953); and the slow-witted husband of a child bride in “Baby Doll” (1956), another Tennessee Williams story directed by Mr. Kazan.

In 1962 he was the doggedly loving boyfriend of Rosalind Russell in “Gypsy,” and in 1970 he won critical praise for his stalwart General Bradley in “Patton,” starring George C. Scott.

With his movie career tailing off in the early 1970s, Mr. Malden reluctantly tried his hand at television. “I felt that I had started at the bottom in the theater and worked my way up for 20 years, then started at the bottom with bit parts in films and worked my way up for another 20 years,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I didn’t feel like starting at the bottom again.”

Still, he agreed to star in a new detective series on ABC, “The Streets of San Francisco.” Making its debut in 1972, the show was an immediate hit and ran through June 1977. The sidekick to Mr. Malden’s Lieutenant Stone was Michael Douglas, who left the show in 1976.

He appeared in a few more movies in the 1980s, notably as the stepfather of Barbra Streisand’s call girl in Martin Ritt’s film “Nuts.” There were television shows, including the 1980 NBC series “Skag,” in which he reached back to his roots to play a hard-bitten foreman in a steel mill. In the 1984 NBC drama “Fatal Vision,” he played a man who belatedly realizes that his son-in-law is a murderer. His performance brought him an Emmy award.

In one of his last appearances, in “The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro,” a 1989 made-for-television movie, he was cast as Leon Klinghoffer, the American Jew who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists on a Mediterranean cruise ship. And in 2000, in the first season of “The West Wing,” he played a priest one last time, counseling President Jed Bartlet on the death penalty.

In 1989 Mr. Malden began his term as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization responsible for the Academy Awards. Ten years later he used that standing in Hollywood to urge the academy’s board to award an honorary Oscar to his old friend and mentor Elia Kazan.

The recommendation was bitterly opposed by those who had never forgiven Mr. Kazan for testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 and informing on colleagues who had been members of the Communist Party. But the board voted its approval.

“If anyone deserved this honorary award because of his talent and body of work,” Mr. Malden said after the vote, “it was Kazan.”

Mr. Malden never forgot his beginnings as a son of immigrants, nor did he lose his perspective. Not long after his Oscar-winning work with Vivien Leigh in “Streetcar,” he referred to himself as probably “the only ex-milkman Vivien ever kissed in a movie.”

In an interview nearly a half-century later, he said he thought of an actor’s work as “digging ditches.”

“Sometimes they’re deep and sometimes they’re shallow,” he said, “but we keep digging them.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/movies/02malden.html?ref=global-home

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Ruling for Salinger, Judge Bans ‘Rye’ Sequel

Fredrik Colting, 33, published the novel in dispute under the name J. D. California. Lawyers for J. D. Salinger called it an unauthorized sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye.”

In a victory for the reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, a federal judge on Wednesday indefinitely banned publication in the United States of a new book by a Swedish author that contains a 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of “The Catcher in the Rye.”

The judge, Deborah A. Batts, of United States District Court in Manhattan, had granted a 10-day temporary restraining order last month against the author, Fredrik Colting, who wrote the new novel under the pen name J. D. California.

In a 37-page ruling, Judge Batts issued a preliminary injunction — indefinitely banning the publication, advertising or distribution of the book in this country — after considering the merits of the case. The book has been published in Britain.

“I am pretty blown away by the judge’s decision,” Mr. Colting said in an e-mail message after the ruling. “Call me an ignorant Swede, but the last thing I thought possible in the U.S. was that you banned books.” Mr. Colting and his lawyer, Edward H. Rosenthal, said they would appeal. The decision means that “members of the public are deprived of the chance to read the book and decide for themselves whether it adds to their understanding of Salinger and his work,” Mr. Rosenthal said.

Marcia B. Paul, a lawyer for Mr. Salinger, declined to comment on the decision.

J. D. Salinger’s last new work appeared in print in 1965.

In a copyright infringement lawsuit filed June 1, lawyers for Mr. Salinger contended that the new work was derivative of “Catcher” and Holden Caulfield, and infringed on Mr. Salinger’s copyright.

The work by Mr. Colting, 33, centers on a 76-year-old “Mr. C,” the creation of a writer named Mr. Salinger. Although the name Holden Caulfield does not appear in the book, Mr. C is clearly Holden, one of the best-known adolescent figures in American fiction, aged 60 years.

(The similarities between the characters were not much in dispute. As Judge Batts wrote in her ruling, “Both narratives are told from the first-person point of view of a sarcastic, often uncouth protagonist who relies heavily on slang, euphemisms and colloquialisms, makes constant digression and asides, refers to readers in the second person, constantly assures the reader that he is being honest and that he is giving them the truth.”)

Mr. Colting’s lawyers argued, among other things, that the new novel, titled “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” did not violate copyright laws because it amounted to a critical parody that had the effect of transforming the original work.

Judge Batts rejected that argument, writing:

To the extent Defendants contend that 60 Years and the character of Mr. C direct parodic comment or criticism at Catcher or Holden Caulfield, as opposed to Salinger himself, the Court finds such contentions to be post-hoc rationalizations employed through vague generalizations about the alleged naivety of the original, rather than reasonably perceivable parody.

The judge’s ruling weighed literary arguments made by both sides in the dispute. “To the extent Colting claims to augment the purported portrait of Caulfield as a ‘free-thinking, authentic and untainted youth,’ and ‘impeccable judge of the people around him’ displayed in Catcher by ’show[ing] the effects of Holden’s uncompromising world view,’” Judge Batts wrote, citing a memo submitted by Mr. Colting, “those effects were already thoroughly depicted and apparent in Salinger’s own narrative about Caulfield.”

Judge Batts added:

In fact, it can be argued that the contrast between Holden’s authentic but critical and rebellious nature and his tendency toward depressive alienation is one of the key themes of Catcher. That many readers and critics have apparently idolized Caulfield for the former, despite — or perhaps because of — the latter, does not change the fact that those elements were already apparent in Catcher.

It is hardly parodic to repeat that same exercise in contrast, just because society and the characters have aged.

While the case could still go to trial, Judge Batts’s ruling means that Mr. Colting’s book cannot be published in the United States pending the resolution of the litigation, which could drag on for months or years.

Mr. Salinger, who has not published any new work since 1965, has sued several times to protect his works, including successful efforts to stop publication of some of his personal letters in a biography and to halt a staging of “Catcher” by a college theater company in San Francisco. He has also turned down requests, from Steven Spielberg, among others, for movie adaptations of “Catcher.”

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Full article and photos: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/judge-rules-for-salinger-in-copyright-suit/

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Entertainment – July 1

Digital images of all Rembrandt’s work on show

Jouke ter Hofstede of the Van Straaten printing company mounts digital images onto boards to prepare them for an exhibit of images of all paintings by Rembrandt in Boesingheliede, Netherlands, Thursday, June 25, 2009. The images will be displayed at an exhibition of images of all 317 known paintings, 285 etchings and more than 100 drawings by Rembrandt in Amsterdam. The artworks are being reproduced in their true size and have been digitally enhanced by one of the world’s leading Rembrandt experts, Ernst van de Wetering, to restore the color and detail they had when they left Rembrandt’s studio nearly 400 years ago. The exhibition will start at July 5.

The life work of Rembrandt – all 317 known paintings, 285 etchings and more than 100 drawings – go on display next week in full-sized digital reproductions that attempt to recreate the works as they emerged from the artist’s studio rather than as they exist today.

In some ways, the high resolution images are more authentic than the real paintings, said Ernst van de Wetering, a leading Rembrandt scholar who supervised the project.

Employing computer wizardry, pieces of canvas or panel that were sliced off centuries ago have been patched back on. Colors are restored to the vibrancy they had when they came off the master’s brush. Details hidden in darkness because of aging pigments emerge into view.

“The Complete Rembrandt, Life Size” exhibition opens Sunday in the former Amsterdam Stock Exchange building and runs through Sept. 7.

Not everyone is happy with the idea of passing off posters as true art. But even Van de Wetering, who has examined much of 17th century artist’s work with x-rays and microscopes, said he discovered details he had never seen before.

“I got surprises,” he said, as he watched the folds of painted cloth materialize on the computer screen and dark corners highlighted.

Organized chronologically, the exhibition brings together work from more than 100 museums and collections around the world to offer viewers “a walk through Rembrandt’s mind,” said the art historian. It follows his 45-year evolution from young painter to possibly the most famous master of his day, and the sudden leaps of inspiration and conceptualization in between that jolt him to new levels.

Van de Wetering heads the Rembrandt Research Project, created in 1968 to verify whether disputed works were true Rembrandts. Since then, it has disallowed about half the 600 paintings that once were attributed to the Dutch master, identifying them as either works by his students, copies by later admirers or deliberate forgeries.

The group of experts also has authenticated several previously unknown Rembrandts.

Over 40 years Van de Wetering has learned to dissect a Rembrandt into its smallest components, from the paint he used, the grounding of the work, the grain in the wood from which he cut his panels and the number of threads in his canvas.

Working with that knowledge and from contemporary copies by students, Van de Wetering could reconstruct works like “The Night Watch,” arguably Rembrandt’s most famous work, which has been radically altered and which he calls “a ruin” of the original.

“It’s a wreck,” he said in an interview.

In the exhibition, a copy of The Night Watch – a 1642 group portrait of an Amsterdam militia in colorful formal attire – as it is in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, stands next to a recreation of the original. Over the years, the massive painting had been trimmed on all sides, and two figures were cut completely from the left side. The result moved the two central characters to the middle of the canvas, destroying Rembrandt’s intention to convey an image of motion.

Van de Wetering reconstructed the original work using a small copy painted by Amsterdam artist Gerrit Lundens seven years after Rembrandt finished The Night Watch. The copy not only included the pieces later lopped off but its colors had better retained their brightness because it was painted on panel.

Van de Wetering worked with computer specialist Aehryan Hesseling to alter high resolution photographs. The images were then printed and mounted by the Van Straaten company, which specializes in billboards and large-scale advertising.

The exhibit revives a 3-year-old debate about the value of seeing copies of the full range of Rembrandt’s work as compared with viewing a few originals. The argument first arose during an exhibit of 290 photographs – some of them poor quality – for Rembrandt’s 400th birth anniversary.

Van de Wetering argues that the reproductions have the advantage of stripping away the aura of awe viewers often have when they see an original, which hinders their assessment of the work.

Axel Ruger, director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, complained in 2006 that the organizers appeared to see no qualitative difference between a reproduction and the real thing.

“Reproductions cannot convey anything of the wonderful three-dimensional quality of Rembrandt’s painted surfaces,” Ruger wrote at the time. A spokeswoman said the Van Gogh director has not changed his mind, but declined to comment specifically about the current exhibition.

Rather than duck the controversy, Van de Wetering reprinted Ruger’s complaints in an epilogue to the book accompanying the show.

He argues that Rembrandt made copies of his work, and had his students make more copies, because he wanted a wider audience.

“Rembrandt would have been very happy if he had known we were doing this,” he said. “But the copies he made of his works are many times worse than ours.”

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/01/AR2009070100686.html

Photo: http://www.kansascity.com/451/story/1300195.html

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Enough already on Michael Jackson!

Actually, let me rephrase the question. Have you heard much of anything else since Thursday?

Watching the news that night, I was floored at how much time was devoted to the developing story.

And Friday morning it was all Jackson all the time on the radio. After a few minutes of it, I sought refuge in the most reliable of my radio presets: WBUR and the edifying oasis that is “On Point’’ with Tom Ashbrook.

A guest host was filling in, leading a discussion about . . . Michael Jackson.

In the last few days, there has been story after story about his genius, his pioneering appeal as a crossover artist, the rapture that came over the audience that first saw his moon walk, the now-resolved ambivalence the African-American community felt toward him. I’ve heard how he virtually created the music video, how he was the last artist all of us listened to before the culture fractured into a thousand pieces.

Perhaps. I’m not an expert on pop music or Jackson’s oeuvre, so I don’t know, though I do find myself wondering if history will really judge him as epic a figure as everyone now seems to think.

But whatever his musical legacy, in his death, Jackson has gone from strange and troubling character to national icon in the blink of an eye. Yes, he was acquitted of charges of sexual molestation in his 2005 trial, but there was enough evidence that the verdict hardly cleared the cloud of suspicion – particularly since he had forked over $20 million or more to make previous molestation allegations go away. His bizarre activities also included paying for voodoo death curses, one of which supposedly included ritualistic animal sacrifice, intended to bring about the death of his enemies, or so Vanity Fair has reported.

Still, the weekend retrospectives and tributes were expected; that’s the natural arc of the news cycle.

But there it should have ended. This week, however, the latest “developments’’ (read: relative trivia) in the Jackson story remained breathless news on CNN, and the supposedly sober network news broadcasts started the week little better.

Would Jackson be buried at Neverland? Probably not, but Tuesday’s “breaking news’’ was that a public viewing and a memorial service would be held there. What legal battles would occur over his children – and his estate? Could Neverland come to rival Graceland?

Mind you, those were just some of the crucial matters TV pondered.

NBC led its Monday evening newscast with Jackson epiphenomena, putting it ahead of stories like the sentencing of swindler Bernie Madoff. CBS gave Madoff top play, but then went to Jackson coverage; a comparatively restrained ABC put Jackson third, behind Madoff and the Supreme Court decision about New Haven’s firefighters – but still ahead of the coup in Honduras and the news from Iraq.

Something’s afoot here that seems to have started with Princess Diana, whose death turned into, or was turned into, an epoch of mourning. Then came the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., and the endless hours of TV footage showing ships searching for the wreckage of his plane.

And now this. It’s as though the TV networks think we’re ever in search of a new celebrity death to bring us together and a spate of national mourning to offer us catharsis – and that such a death is a story that will keep people glued to their televisions.

Perhaps there are millions who have hung on every word of this orgy of excess, who daily reach for the TV remote saying, “I just have to know the latest about Michael Jackson’s death or the custody of his children.’’

And yet somehow I doubt that. I don’t hear Jackson talked about as much as I hear the obsessive coverage of his death decried.

So come on, news people. It’s time to cede this story to the inside pages, Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, the celebrity mags, and the National Enquirer.

Real things – important things – are happening in the world.

Scot Lehigh, Boston Globe

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Full article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/07/01/enough_already_on_michael_jackson/

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Sweden’s Global Gaming snaps up Pirate Bay

A little-known Swedish software firm has snapped up file-sharing website The Pirate Bay with the hope of turning the source of legal controversy into a money-spinner that appeals to both users and content providers.

Global Gaming Factory X AB, which operates Internet cafes and provides software, said Tuesday that it had agreed to buy Pirate Bay for 60 million Swedish crowns ($7.7 million).

The website made world headlines in April when the three Swedish founders and a financial backer were each sentenced to one year in jail and ordered to pay a combined $3.6 million in damages for breaching copyright law with the free downloading site, which was one of the biggest sites of its kind on the Internet.

Swedish News Agency TT cited one of the founders, Peter Sunde, as saying that the money would not go directly to him or any of the others sentenced in April.

Sunde told TT that the money would be placed in a company outside Swedish borders and it would be used for Internet projects other than downloading sites.

Pirate Bay could not be immediately reached for comment.

Global Gaming said it believed the website was a viable business with its plans for a new, legal business model.

“We would like to introduce (business) models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” the company said in a statement.

USERS AS EARNERS

Global Gaming Chief Executive Hans Pandeya told a news conference that the revamped website would generate money via advertising, supplying storage space and helping telecom operators optimize Internet traffic.

He also said users would be able to earn money by supplying storage space, which would encourage people to use the site.

“That’s what is interesting. If you can earn money by file-sharing, it’s no big deal to pay for what you download,” Pandeya said.

Analysts were unimpressed by the move, comparing it to Napster, an online file-sharing site that quickly lost popularity after it started to charge its users.

“It looks like they are going to Napsterize it,” said Leigh Ellis, intellectual property partner at Gillhams Solicitors.

Mark Mulligan, vice president at research firm Forrester, said that many of Pirate Bay’s around 20 million users would move on to other free downloading options.

“The bottom line is that most people who use file-sharing networks use it because it’s free. They are not likely to start paying just because the owners have a new business model,” he said.

“There has not yet been a single example of a legal file-sharing network which has made a successful transition to a legal business.”

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/01/AR2009070100953.html

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Dumbest Moments in Business 2009…midyear edition

GM partners with Segway

It became clear this spring that General Motors was going to have to get smaller to survive, but this was ridiculous. A week after President Obama gave the company a 60 day deadline to avoid bankruptcy, GM took time out from its turnaround efforts to unveil the PUMA, a two-seat vehicle being developed with Segway that looked more like a rickshaw than a car.

The vehicle, capable of going only 35 mph and traveling 35 miles between charges, got lots of attention, but did little to change popular opinion about the company that had ridden large SUVs to the cusp of failure. On June 1, GM filed for bankruptcy.

Tropicana’s botched redesign

Tropicana drinkers, it turns out, are as passionate about packaging as they are about pulp. That’s why they rebelled when parent company PepsiCo and consultancy Arnell overhauled the juice line’s packaging in January as part of a $35 million branding campaign called “Squeeze.”

Tropicana fans said the simplicity of the new design reminded them of store-brand generics. And who wants to be mistaken for a generic consumer?

Within a month, the public’s flogging by e-mail, phone, and blogs forced PepsiCo to bring back the old straw-in-an-orange cartons. Other parts of the campaign remain, but PepsiCo will probably think twice before it tries updating this icon again.

Apple ‘shakes the baby’

On April 22, visitors to Apple’s iPhone App Store found a new — and very twisted — offering: “Baby Shaker.” For 99 cents, you could download the “game,” the object of which was to silence an animated baby’s cries by shaking the iPhone until two red X’s appear over the infant’s eyes.

“See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down,” the instructions read.

Two days later, and shortly before Apple announced its 1 billionth App Store download, the company took down the app and apologized. No word on any resulting shakeup that may have occurred in Apple’s quality control department.

John Thain’s $35,000 ‘commode on legs’

When Bank of America agreed to buy struggling broker Merrill Lynch, BofA chief Ken Lewis promised to take his customary ax to costs. He soon found targets aplenty, thanks to Merrill CEO John Thain.

Just weeks after BofA completed the Merrill deal in January, with the help of $138 billion in taxpayer-funded promises, it emerged that Thain had spent $1.2 million on a makeover of his Lower Manhattan office — including an $87,000 area rug and a $35,000 “commode on legs.”

Thain later said he’d reimburse the company, but by then he was out the mahogany-paneled door.

SEC bars Madoff…just in time!

All hail the Securities and Exchange Commission, the newest inductee in the Fat-Lot-of-Good-That-Does-Us Hall of Fame.

A mere nine years after SEC staffers started getting hit over the head with red flags about Bernard Madoff’s fishy finances, the commission finally got around to taking decisive action: In mid-June, the commission barred the Ponzi-schemer from the securities business.

Of course, this investor protection came only after Madoff stole more than $13 billion, pleaded guilty to multiple felonies and went to jail. With regulators like that, who needs regulators?

Grassley to AIG execs: ‘Commit suicide’

Indignation over AIG bonuses was all the rage in March, but no one took more offense than Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who infamously told an Iowa radio station that AIG executives should consider committing hara-kiri:

“The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them is if they’d follow the Japanese model and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things — resign, or go commit suicide.”

A spokesperson for Grassley later said the senator was only speaking “rhetorically.”

Yankees’ $200,000 seats

The New York Yankees opened a new $1.3 billion ballpark in 2009, and were hoping to cover some of the cost with pricey $2,500 tickets, sold in season packages for $200,000.

The Yanks didn’t get enough takers, and after a month of empty prime seats dominating the television coverage, the team was forced into an unprecedented and embarrassing mid-season cut.

Now the seats are a bargain…at just $1,250.

U.S. debt is ‘safe.’ Seriously. Stop laughing

Following a speech at Peking University on his first trip to China as Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner was asked to share his thoughts about the safety of Chinese investments in the United States. They are “VERY safe,” he quickly asserted.

At which point the audience burst out laughing. Apparently, the audience was amused not only by the answer’s substance, but by the flat “don’t worry your little young heads about it” certainty with which Geithner insisted that China’s U.S. debt holdings were A-OK. Because as even a group of Chinese college kids understood, that’s just not as clear as the Treasury Secretary insisted it was.

Geithner gives few details, tanks the market

In February, President Obama used his first White House press conference to alert the public to a momentous event. “Tomorrow, my Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, will be announcing some very clear and specific plans for how we are going to start loosening up credit once again,” he said.

But when Geithner appeared at Treasury the next day, on Feb. 10, he offered few plans of any sort, let alone clear and specific ones, which helps to explain the stock market’s 5% plunge that day. Since then Geithner has loosened up, with the help of a media trainer — and the market has bounced back. Coincidence?

Obama’s spending cuts…a ways to go

You’re eight months behind on your $500,000 mortgage, your bank is demanding a meeting, and you respond by telling them there’s nothing to worry about. Why not? Because you just saved $40 by canceling your newspaper subscription.

That, essentially, is the kind of fast budget talk President Obama trotted out in April when he made a big to-do out of instructing his cabinet to cut $100 million from their budgets.

$100 million may sound like a big number, but the cut would only reduce the United States’ projected $1.8 trillion budget deficit by 0.005% — less than what you’d save for your mortgage by giving up the daily paper.

Credit card crackdown — and gun

President Obama signed a bill in May making it more difficult for credit card companies to increase fees and interest rates…and easier for people to bring loaded guns into national parks and wildlife refuges.

While Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who backed the gun provision, said it wasn’t meant to be a “‘gotcha’ amendment,” Democrats in the House and Senate had to push it through in order to pass the high-profile credit card legislation.

An aide of Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), one of the bill’s chief sponsors, summed it up best: “It’s just wacky.” But don’t go waving your firearms at Yellowstone just yet; the bill won’t take effect till February 2010.

We don’t need your stinkin’ stimulus

Okay, so it’s probably only the second-dumbest thing that Mark Sanford has done in 2009: In March, the South Carolina governor boldly announced he was rejecting $700 million of federal stimulus funds for his state, based on his fiscal conservative principles.

Apparently, South Carolina’s issues — the state has the nation’s second-highest unemployment rate, for instance — were somewhat less of a concern for Sanford, who was considered a 2012 presidential hopeful until his recent vacation adventure.

GOP governors like Sarah Palin of Alaska joined Sanford in his stand, but most accepted funds in the end, and in South Carolina, the fight went to the state supreme court, which ordered Sanford to take the money (but not to run).

Not-so-stressful stress tests

Phew: On May 8, the government revealed the results of the `stress tests’ and we learned that the nation’s biggest banks were in okay shape to handle “adverse” scenarios — like, say, 8.9% unemployment. Thank heavens for that, because just one day later the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate hit — you guessed it — 8.9%.

Nearly two months later we’re at 9.4%…and counting.

British Airways to staff: Wanna work for free?

Responding to a record $595 million loss in its recently completed financial year, British Airways took the recession-inspired trend of voluntary job furloughs one step further this June and asked its 40,000 employees to work for free.

“The new unpaid work option means people can contribute to the cash-saving effort by coming to work while effectively volunteering for a small cut in base pay,” explained CEO Willie Walsh. Perhaps fearing the possibility of involuntary and permanent cutbacks, about 4,000 workers agreed to take unpaid leave, some 1,400 opted to work part-time, and 800 said they would work for free for up to a month.

The chief executive himself — who made more than $1.2 million last year and received a 6% pay hike for 2009 — plans to work for free in July. BA’s unions pointed out it was a luxury he could probably afford.

KFC runs out of chicken

KFC, owned by Yum! Brands, angered millions of customers when a free-chicken promotion in May backfired. The chain recruited Oprah Winfrey to help sell a healthier grilled chicken alternative, but when the talk show host told viewers that anyone who downloaded a coupon within a two-day period would be eligible for a complimentary two-piece grilled chicken meal, patrons clamoring for free chicken overwhelmed KFC restaurants.

The chain gave away 4 million meals before it began refusing coupon-holders, some of whom protested in the blogosphere and staged sit-ins in stores. At least two have sued. KFC, which is trying to shake its fast food image and has even started calling itself KGC — as in Kentucky Grilled Chicken — in some commercials, has issued rain checks.

“We apologize to any customers who were inconvenienced and we remain committed to providing a free Kentucky Grilled Chicken meal plus a medium soft drink to those who submitted valid coupons,” said KFC spokesman Rick Maynard.

Investors selling low and buying high

It’s often said that fear and greed drive the stock market — they also make poor market timers out of most of us. And the behavior of mutual fund investors over the past several months is just more evidence.

From September through December of last year, as the S&P 500 plummeted 30%, investors pulled some $99 billion out of domestic equity funds, according to data from the Investment Company Institute. During the first three months of 2009, they withdrew a net total of $23.5 billion more. And in March alone — when the S&P 500 bottomed at a value of 677 on March 9 and then rallied 18% to finish at 798 — investors withdrew $16.2 billion.

Then, just as the market began to rally, they started buying. Since the end of April — when the S&P 500 closed 29% higher than that March 9 low — investors have plowed $16 billion back into domestic stock funds. Time to sell?

Bonusgate

Hard to know who the award goes to on this one:

1) AIG, which insisted on sticking with $165 million in retention payments to executives, even after the troubled insurance behemoth landed in the arms of the U.S. government, or

2) the U.S. House, which tossed political pitchforks at the hapless one-buck-a-year CEO recruited to clean up the mess — and then passed a confiscatory 90% tax on Wall Street bonuses.

Fortune’s vote goes to No. 2.

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Full article and photos: http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/fortune/0906/gallery.dumbest_moments_midyear2009.fortune/index.html

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Entertainment – June 30

Jackson Wrapped Video Before Death

Two weeks before he died, Michael Jackson wrapped up work on an elaborate production dubbed the ”Dome Project” that could be the final finished video piece overseen by the King of Pop, The Associated Press has learned.

Jackson was apparently preparing to dazzle concert audiences in London with a high-tech show in which 3D images — some inspired by his ”Thriller” era — would flash behind him as he performed on stage.

”It was a groundbreaking effort,” said Vince Pace, whose company provided cameras for the shoot, a 3D system he created with filmmaker James Cameron.

”To think that Michael’s gone now, that’s probably the last documented footage of him to be shot in that manner,” Pace said.

Two people with knowledge of the secretive project confirmed its existence Monday to the AP on condition they not be identified because they signed confidentiality agreements.

They said it was a five-week project filmed at Culver Studios, which 70 years ago was the set for the classic film ”Gone With the Wind.” Four sets were constructed for Jackson’s production, including a cemetery recalling his 1983 ”Thriller” video.

With 3D technology ”the audience would have felt like they were visiting the ‘Thriller’ experience, like they were there,” Pace said.

Shooting for the project lasted from June 1-9, with Jackson on the set most days. The project was in post-production, at the time of Jackson’s death, and had been expected to be completed next month. It was not immediately clear what would be made of the video footage now.

Producer Robb Wagner, founder of music-video company Stimulated Inc., did not immediately return a message seeking comment on the project.

Michael Roth, a spokesman for Jackson’s Los Angeles-based promoter AEG Live, said he hadn’t heard about the production but did not rule that it could be part of the company’s contract with the entertainer.

According to one of the people with knowledge of the project, a willow-thin, pallid Jackson left a memorable impression on the crew, arriving in a caravan of SUVs with hulking security guards in tow. The person said Jackson introduced himself to workers on the set and walked with a spring in his step but at one point needed assistance as he descended steps off a stage.

Besides the cemetery, one set was draped in black with an oversized portrait of Jackson in his ”Thriller” werewolf costume. Another set was designed to simulate a lush jungle, and a fourth was built to replicate a construction site, with a screen in the back to allow projection of different backgrounds.

Taping took place in marathon sessions ending early in the morning. One scene filmed on the construction site set included scantily clad male dancers wearing carpenter’s belts.

According to Stimulated’s Web site, the company was hired to produce screen content for Jackson’s planned comeback concerts in London. Stimulated has worked with Def Leppard and the Pussycat Dolls, and produced content for the Academy Awards and the Emmys.

Last year, U2 released the concert film ”U2 3D,” a film of the band’s 2005-06 Vertigo tour, shot at several shows in South America with 3-D technology.

At the time, guitarist The Edge told The Associated Press the 3-D technology allowed ”the songs to shine through.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/30/arts/AP-US-Jackson-Video-Project.html

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His Brother’s Keeper

A new movie shows life as it is for our soldiers at war.

If you are one of those Americans who believe that we are not really at war with terrorists, Jake Rademacher has a message for you. Actually, what he has is a film about an ordinary family from Decatur, Ill., that has two members serving in Iraq. It’s the kind of film that will give you a new appreciation for the men who make Independence Day possible.

The two soldiers here are Capt. Isaac Rademacher and Sgt. Joe Rademacher, a fact that makes this war highly personal for their filmmaker brother. Isaac is a West Pointer who married another West Pointer, and Joe is a sniper who graduated at the top of his class in Army Ranger school. Older brother Jake wants to know why they fight, and so he takes his camera to Iraq “to find my brothers’ war.”

Though “Brothers at War” focuses on the Rademachers, they nowhere pretend to be the model family. While Isaac and Joe are off risking their lives in Iraq, another brother, Thad, loses his life to drugs at home. It all makes for sibling relationships that can be close and distant at the same time.

Of the two in uniform, Joe is more reticent about talking about his experiences for the camera, and more skeptical about what his brother could have learned there — at least during his first, relatively brief embed. As Jake puts it, “Joe needs me to have some confirmed kills, [and] then maybe I can sit next to him at the dinner table.”

Over the course of 110 minutes, the film takes us back and forth from Iraq to the home front. The actual fighting is minimal, and politics is completely absent. In some ways, the flatness provides the emotional punch: Watch Isaac kissing his wife and child goodbye before he boards a plane for his latest deployment to Iraq — and then try telling Mrs. Rademacher that her husband is not so much fighting a war as participating in an “overseas contingency operation.”

The scenes in Iraq have a similar feel, less about capturing the big firefights with the enemy than putting faces on the grunts doing the hard work that needs to be done. However many news accounts you may read about what these men go up against every day, it can’t compare to hearing a National Guardsman sitting atop a roof in the Sunni Triangle speaking with great relief about the time he didn’t squeeze the trigger — the moment he realized that the terrorist with an AK-47 in his sights was a child with a toy.

While many reviewers apparently find Mr. Rademacher’s presence in the film irritating and wonder why there isn’t a visual of a wounded or dead American, the military families who have been flocking to this film have a different reaction. When they see Mr. Rademacher in his Kevlar helmet and vest sweating away in the oven-like interior of a Stryker combat vehicle, they see what life is like for their husband, son, or brother.

When Mr. Rademacher shows soldiers cleaning their guns as they watch videos of the TV series “The OC,” they get a picture of how their loved ones relax. And when they hear that Pennsylvania Guard unit getting the news about a soldier that has been killed by a foreign sniper, they share the frustration — and the desire to get the guy responsible.

Though neither pro-war nor antiwar, this film does offer something that probably explains why one reviewer dismissed it as “achingly patriotic”: It shows our soldiers and Marines as professionals. In short, there are no victims here, just decent men doing a tough job. In New York, Washington and Los Angeles that may not sound like exciting fare. But in places like Oceanside, Ca., Savannah, Ga., Kileen, Texas., Norfolk, Va., etc. — cities that are home to our military families — “Brothers at War” speaks to audiences filled with people who know firsthand what it is like to have a husband or brother in Iraq.

Though it does have its patriotic moments, they are quiet and hard to draw out from men who would rather joke about their cheating girlfriends back home. While spending five days with a reconnaissance unit reporting on foreign terrorists crossing through the Syrian border, Mr. Rademacher asks the men he is with why they fight. A young Army specialist named Christopher MacKay says he’s fighting for a better life for his nieces.

Mr. Rademacher presses him: Would it be worth it if it ends up costing you your life? Spc. MacKay answers matter of factly. “Yeah, I’d give my life for America any day. Wouldn’t think twice.”

That’s not John Wayne speaking. That’s a young man who knows what he signed up for, knows why he signed up, and knows who he’s fighting for. In an America where Michael Jackson’s death gets more press coverage than a Medal of Honor winner, it’s sure nice to see at least one camera filming men who really matter.

William McGurn, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124631664790370713.html

Photo: http://moviecentre.net/upcomingmovies/movie_gallery.php?Pid=4332&Id=100

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Airline Has Nothing to Hide. Really.

A screen grab from Air New Zealand’s new in-flight safety video featuring employees clad in nothing but body paint.

The instructions in Air New Zealand’s new in-flight safety video are given by employees who are nude except for body paint and strategically placed seat belts.

Passengers on the video’s maiden flight Monday — the 7 a.m. from Auckland to Wellington, on New Zealand’s North Island — may have never paid more rapt attention to the line “undo the seat belt by lifting the metal flap.”

The video — and a related ad campaign — are rare moments of levity in an industry that has been savaged by drastic drop-offs in passenger travel and air freight. Airlines around the world, including Air New Zealand, have had to cut flights, employees and investment plans.

The point of the three-and-a-half-minute safety video and the 45-second commercial that started running last month is that unlike other airlines, which increasingly add hidden charges to fares in an effort to increase falling revenue, Air New Zealand has nothing to hide.

“Which is why the price you pay includes everything — up front,” reads the ad’s tag line.

The video and commercial are not as revealing as some might think (or perhaps hope, given the toned bodies of the employees). The realistic body paint makes it look as if the employees — flight attendants, baggage handlers and a pilot — are wearing uniforms. The one person not shown doing his actual job is the company’s buff chief executive, Rob Fyfe, who plays a baggage handler.

An Air New Zealand television commercial features employees whose uniforms are actually body paint. The baggage handler at left in the ad is the airline’s chief executive, Rob Fyfe.

Air New Zealand has suffered as much as some other airliners in the downturn: long-haul travel has fallen sharply and new domestic competitors have arisen, like Jetstar and Pacific Blue, even though the airline still has a market share of more than 80 percent, said Rob Mercer, an analyst at Forsyth Barr in Wellington.

But Mr. Mercer said that unlike other airlines, Air New Zealand has “never stopped being innovative and nimble.”

Last year, the airline paid people to shave their heads and wear temporary tattoos that said, “Need a change? Head down to New Zealand.”

This year’s cheeky ad campaign and the safety video, “Bare Essentials of Safety,” have brought Air New Zealand a lot of attention that it hopes will put lots of bottoms in seats.

The commercial, “Nothing to Hide,” has been viewed nearly two million times on YouTube — the most-viewed clip ever to come out of New Zealand, Steve Bayliss, the airline’s marketing manager, said by telephone Monday.

Each video took a day to shoot and cost about 10 to 15 percent of the cost of a major brand commercial, Mr. Bayliss estimated, since there were no actors to pay. The Air New Zealand staff members did not receive extra pay, just increased exposure.

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YouTube:

Bare essentials of safety from Air New Zealand

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-Mq9HAE62Y

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Full article and photos: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124631664790370713.html

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Entertainment – June 29

High court won’t block remote storage DVR system

Cable TV operators won a key legal battle against Hollywood studios and television networks on Monday as the Supreme Court declined to block a new digital video recording system that could make it even easier for viewers to bypass commercials.

The justices declined to hear an appeal on whether Cablevision Systems Corp.’s remote-storage DVR system would violate copyright laws. That allows the Bethpage, N.Y.-based company to proceed with plans to start deploying the technology this summer.

With remote storage, TV shows are kept on the cable operator’s servers instead of the DVR inside the customer’s home, as systems offered by TiVo Inc. and cable operators currently do.

The distinction is important because a remote system essentially transforms every digital set-top box in the home into a DVR, allowing customers to sign up instantly, without the need to pick up a DVR from the nearest cable office or wait for a technician to visit.

Movie studios, TV networks and cable TV channels had argued that the service is more akin to video-on-demand, for which they negotiate licensing fees with cable providers.

They claimed a remote-storage DVR service amounts to an unauthorized rebroadcast of their programs.

In a statement, the Copyright Alliance, whose members include Hollywood studios and television broadcasters, called the Supreme Court action “unfortunate and potentially harmful to creators and creative enterprises across the spectrum of copyright industries.”

Cablevision argued its service was permissible because the control of the recording and playback was in the hands of the consumer.

Industry experts say the new technology could put digital recording service in nearly half of all American homes, about twice the current number.

“This is a tremendous victory,” said Tom Rutledge, Cablevision’s chief operating officer, in a statement. “At the same time, we are mindful of the potential implications for ad skipping and the concerns this has raised in the programming community.”

Rutledge said the technology could benefit programmers and advertisers.

Cablevision, which has 3 million subscribers in the New York metro area, has launched targeted, interactive advertising in half a million households and plans to double that number by year’s end. TiVo’s DVR users already see ads when they pause or fast-forward shows.

Less clear is whether there will be savings down the road for consumers. Remote-storage DVR saves cable operators money because they don’t have to invest and deploy digital set-top boxes with hard drives anymore, nor would they have broken machines inside homes to fix in person. Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett had estimated that DVRs account for as much as 10 percent to 15 percent of major cable’s capital spending.

But whether those savings will trickle down to the consumer depends on the level of competition, expenditures by cable to deploy the new system and other factors. Cable operators also have to contend with bandwidth capacity, as shows will be transmitted to each DVR viewer from their central servers, instead of individual DVRs already in the home.

Still, it’s a win for cable even though most consumers won’t see much of a change for years, in part because there are millions of in-home DVRs already in use.

“It’s clearly an important chapter in the history of digital television,” said Standard & Poor’s analyst Tuna Amobi. But the new system will take “a few years to materialize. Right now the focus is on trying to get up to speed and get this technology beyond the test phase.”

Perhaps in the next decade, remote-storage DVR would start to make set-top boxes obsolete, he said.

At least, cable operators won’t be hampered by the limits of a DVR hard drive. They can choose to offer more storage capacity to consumers whenever they wish, as they respond to competition or try to retain subscribers.

Amobi said satellite TV operators also are losers in the high court’s decision because their systems don’t let them offer remote-storage DVR. Their subscribers still have to get DVRs with hard drives and satellite TV companies have to continue to invest in these boxes.

In siding with Cablevision, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling that Cablevision, rather than its customers, would be making copies of programs, thereby violating copyright laws.

The Screen Actors Guild, songwriters, music companies, Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the NCAA all sided with the networks and studios in asking for high court review, while the Obama administration urged the court not to hear the case.

The case is Cable News Network v. CSC Holdings Inc., 08-448.

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/29/AR2009062901691.html

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Ex-Edwards Aide to Write Tell-All

Rielle Hunter recording John Edwards after a rally in New Hampshire in December 2006.

A man who was one of former Senator John Edwards’s closest aides has a deal to write a book claiming that Mr. Edwards said he “would be taken care of for life” in return for falsely claiming he was the father of the baby carried by Mr. Edwards’s mistress, Rielle Hunter.

The aide, Andrew Young, sold his book proposal to St. Martin’s Press for an undisclosed price late last week. In his proposal, Mr. Young quotes Mr. Edwards, a Democrat who was his party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2004 and ran for president last year, as begging him to confess to fathering Ms. Hunter’s baby.

“ ‘You know how much I love you,’ Edwards said. ‘You know I’d walk off a cliff for you, and I know you’d walk off a cliff for me,’ ” Mr. Young wrote in the book proposal. “ ‘I will never forget this. And I will always be there for you.’ ” The proposal was shared with The New York Times by a book publishing industry executive. Portions of it were reported over the weekend by The Daily News of New York.

Federal prosecutors are investigating whether any of Mr. Edwards’s campaign money was improperly used with regard to his affair or efforts to keep it from becoming public. Mr. Young wrote that he had been questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had been subpoenaed to speak before a grand jury.

A spokeswoman for the United States attorney in Raleigh, N.C., would not comment. Mr. Edwards has issued statements saying he is confident his campaign acted properly.

After news of Mr. Edwards’s affair and Ms. Hunter’s pregnancy first surfaced in the National Enquirer in fall 2007, a lawyer for Mr. Young said his client was the father. Mr. Edwards was preparing for the Iowa presidential caucuses at the time.

Mr. Edwards denied being the father after admitting the affair last summer, and there is yet to be DNA testing. A spokeswoman for Mr. Edwards’s legal team, Joyce Fitzpatrick, said Mr. Edwards had not seen the book proposal, and she would not comment on it. A lawyer for Ms. Hunter, Robert J. Gordon, said he no longer represented her.

Mr. Young’s proposal states that he was writing the book because he had become disillusioned with Mr. Edwards’s behavior and recklessness, which he said included participating in the production of a sex tape with Ms. Hunter that Mr. Young later discovered.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/us/politics/30edwards.html?hp

Photo: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/08/11/us/11edwardsCA01.span.ready.html

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Entertainment – June 28

Michael Jackson Set to Make Chart History, Again

Michael Jackson will once again make music history next week as many of his albums are poised to shake up the Billboard charts with incredible sales increases.

The impact of Jackson’s shock death on Thursday was felt immediately in the marketplace. Industry sources report that the demand for Jackson’s albums were so high, many stores simply ran out of his CDs.

The albums with the greatest sales increases — at least on the physical side of things — look to be his greatest hits packages “Number Ones” and “The Essential Michael Jackson” along with the expanded reissue of “Thriller.” The sets, released between 2003 and 2008, were the three Jackson albums that perhaps had the most stock available in stores.

In the digital realm, where the supply problem doesn’t exist, Jackson’s songs and albums swarmed the top of the constantly-updating best sellers lists in both the iTunes’ and Amazon’s online music stores. At one point on Friday in the iTunes Store, nine out of the top 10-selling albums and 40 of the top 100-selling songs were by Jackson.

The three aforementioned albums, along with Jackson’s classic studio sets “Off the Wall,” “Bad” and “Dangerous” all will likely zoom into the upper region of Billboard’s Top Pop Catalog Albums chart next week. Initial reports of Jackson’s album sales from Thursday alone indicate that one of his albums — possibly “Number Ones” — will easily fly to No. 1 on the chart next week. Last week, the set — which also was his top-selling album of the week — was at No. 20 on the Catalog chart with 4,000 sold.

To compare, last week’s No. 1 on the Catalog chart was TobyMac’s “Portable Sounds” with 9,000 copies sold. Sources say that at least one of Jackson’s albums sold more than double that amount just on Thursday.

Nielsen SoundScan’s tracking week ends at the close of business on Sunday (28). Billboard and SoundScan’s new weekly charts will be released on Wednesday, July 1.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/27/arts/entertainment-us-music-jackson.html

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Jailhouse Links in La. Focus of Golf Channel Show

A golf course tucked among 18,000 acres in Louisiana’s scenic Tunica Hills would seem an ideal vacation getaway if it was not on the grounds of the sprawling Louisiana State Penitentiary.

The only course inside the confines of a U.S. prison captured the attention of the Golf Channel, which on Tuesday is highlighting the Prison View Golf Course in the ”Golf in America” series set to air at 9 p.m. CDT.

The 10-episode series, which premiered earlier this month and runs through Aug. 25, chronicles more than 20 inspirational stories about golf and those who love the game. One episode follows soldiers who use golf for physical and mental therapy after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Another is about the rebuilding of a New Orleans golf course after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

”Golf ends up allowing you to enter some really interesting places in the human experience,” said Scott Walker, the correspondent who visited the prison for the series. ”They are golf stories that transition into life stories.”

Walker said producers were drawn to the golf course at the penitentiary — a series of prison camps employing more than 1,500 people on a former plantation at the isolated town of Angola — because of its uniqueness.

”We really wanted to go somewhere off the beaten path,” Walker said.

The prison’s nine-hole course, with two tee boxes at each hole for an option to play 18 holes, is cared for by the inmates and is open to the public. The inmates are not allowed to play, but they are granted the opportunity to work the grounds as a reward for good behavior, said longtime Angola warden Burl Cain.

Caring for the golf course is part of a vocational program that trains inmates to maintain the course to make them employable after their sentence.

”They learn how to care for the plants, the greens,” Cain said. ”They also learn about the herbicides, the mowing, the varieties of grass, the use of sand and even drainage. It’s very complex.”

Cain adds that even those who will never be released — most of the 5,000-plus inmates are violent offenders and more than half are serving a life sentence — have an incentive to work on the almost 50-acre course: It is, he says, the closest thing to freedom many will experience.

”The golf course is so large and open,” Cain said. ”It’s a beautiful place to work. It has roughs and water, even alligators.”

The course was built about seven years ago as an incentive to keep resident staff on the 18,000-acre prison site — additionally guarded by the currents of the Mississippi River and the snake-infested Tunica Hills — in case of an emergency, Cain said.

During his January visit, Walker talked to inmates, including one serving life for killing his wife. The inmate was proud of his involvement in the construction of the golf course and his ongoing role in its maintenance.

”What I learned is that everyone needs hope in life, whether you’re behind bars or not,” Walker said.

Another episode in the series chronicles the recovery of the golf complex at New Orleans City Park following Hurricane Katrina. City Park’s 54 holes were wiped out by floodwater when the city’s levee system failed during the 2005 storm.

One of the most gripping stories in the series, Walker said, is about a man who died after being hit by a ricocheting golf ball hit by his son.

”That story was tough, but it is probably the one I’m most proud of of everything I’ve worked on,” Walker said.

Other episodes center on celebrities who love the sport, such as pop superstar Justin Timberlake and business mogul Donald Trump.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/27/arts/AP-US-Prison-Golf.html

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Dillinger Captured by Dogged Filmmaker!

Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard star in Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies.”

IT’S a Hollywood truism that for every movie that sees the light of day, a hundred others languish in the purgatory (or worse) of development. But how many movies owe their very existence to a roster of films that never happened? Such is the case with Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” a dual portrait of the bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the young, ambitious F.B.I. agent who took him down.

The film, which opens Wednesday, is unusual on many fronts. Its Depression-era setting, R rating and dense storytelling make it an anomaly, an Oscar hopeful planted in the middle of a season traditionally more accommodating to the shape-shifting robots of “Transformers” than to J. Edgar Hoover. It refurbishes a genre — the 1930s gangster movie — that studios have left largely unexploited in the two decades since Brian De Palma’s “Untouchables.” And, appropriately, it leaves a trail of cinematic corpses in its wake: two feature films, an HBO mini-series and a prison epic starring Mr. Depp. With its portrayal of two men clenched by obsession and its meticulous visual sheen, “Public Enemies” plays as if it were intended to be a Michael Mann movie all along. But it got there the hard way.

The project began its life, sort of, in the mind of Mr. Mann before he had even embarked on his directorial career, which now runs to 10 movies over 29 years. Mr. Mann, 66, grew up in Chicago, not far from where Dillinger spent his last months hiding out. In the 1970s, he recalled, “my wife and I used to go to art films at the Biograph,” the movie house where Dillinger spent his last night watching the Clark Gable gangster film “Manhattan Melodrama” before F.B.I. agents gunned him down on the street outside. Fascinated by the period, Mr. Mann began work on a screenplay, not about Dillinger but about Alvin Karpis, one of the last of that era’s criminals to be captured.

The Karpis project “got me into the period,” Mr. Mann said, “trying to understand the history, imagining the tough, tough existence of these guys being pressed on both sides by twin evolutionary forces — on the one hand, J. Edgar Hoover inventing the F.B.I., and on the other, organized crime evolving rapidly into a kind of corporate capitalism” that had no room for independent criminals either. But despite several attempts to get the screenplay into filmable shape, Mr. Mann said he was never satisfied enough to proceed. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, as he directed several films that showcased his strong interest in cops and criminals — “Thief,” “Manhunter,” “Heat” — he began shifting his attention from Karpis to Dillinger, whose clean-cut looks and savvy control of his publicity made him a more movie-friendly subject.

Years later, in 1999, the author and journalist Bryan Burrough (“Barbarians at the Gate”) was at home in Maplewood, N.J., watching a documentary about another set of outlaws from the period, the Ma Barker gang. Intrigued, Mr. Burrough started reading everything he could on the subject and realized that he had found a great story: the astonishing chronological convergence from 1932 to 1934 of a rogue’s gallery comprising Dillinger, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly and the Barkers, just as Hoover was attempting to create America’s first centralized law enforcement system.

Mr. Burrough said he loved the idea of “a joint narrative of the period,” but not as a book. “I had two young sons, 7 and 5 at the time, and I didn’t relish the idea of spending the next five years of my life crisscrossing the Midwest in a rental car with McDonald’s bags piling up.” So he pitched it to Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal’s Tribeca Films, which sold the idea to HBO as a multicharacter eight-hour mini-series, with Mr. Burrough as executive producer and writer.

Mr. Burrough said he quickly figured out that he didn’t “know the first thing about writing screenplays.” Beyond that the F.B.I. case files on those crimes and investigations had now become public in Washington and had made a book (and less travel) possible. By 2000 he had amicably left the HBO project, which continued in development without him, and begun researching a manuscript about the same material. Enter Kevin Misher, the studio executive who in 2001 left his job as president for production at Universal Pictures to become an independent producer.

Like Mr. Burrough and Mr. Mann, Mr. Misher was an aficionado of the era. “The cars are cool, the guns are cool, the girls are beautiful, the guys are dressed” in sharp suits, he said. “It has much more cool factor than just a quaint sepia-toned history.” Eager to revive the genre, Mr. Misher acquired the life rights to Purvis, the agent who, under Hoover’s mentorship, led the pursuit of Dillinger but broke with Hoover soon after Dillinger’s death and, disillusioned, resigned from the F.B.I. in 1935, when he was 31.

While Mr. Misher began work on a Purvis project, Mr. Burrough’s book “Public Enemies” was coming together, and the HBO mini-series was falling apart. HBO returned the rights to be resold by Mr. Burrough’s agents at the Creative Artists Agency, and Mr. Mann and Mr. Misher, now working together, quickly jumped in with an offer. Their plan: to jettison any material that didn’t concern Dillinger or the formation of the F.B.I. and use what remained as what Mr. Misher called a “research bible” for a Dillinger film. In mid-2004 they sold the project to Universal, thanks in some measure to a powerful partner: Appian Way, Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, which stepped in when Mr. DiCaprio expressed a desire to play Dillinger.

Over the next three years Mr. Mann supervised several drafts of the script written by Ronan Bennett, the Irish novelist (“The Catastrophist”) whose qualifications for the job included time spent in Long Kesh prison as a teenager for an I.R.A. bank robbery. (The conviction was later overturned.) Eventually Mr. Mann and Ann Biderman (the creator of “Southland” on NBC) took over; the final screenplay is credited to all three.

Mr. Burrough assumed the film would never happen. “There are a million different ways for a Hollywood project to die,” he said, “and this had already died once. Then, in December 2007, I get an e-mail from C.A.A. saying not only that the movie had been green-lit, but that it was going to star Johnny Depp. I thought it was a joke.”

It was no joke. The now-or-never mentality under which every studio was operating at the end of 2007 had cost the project Mr. DiCaprio. Production of “Public Enemies” — in fact, of all movies — had to finish by June 30, 2008, before the start of an anticipated Screen Actors Guild strike. With Mr. DiCaprio committed to Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” (opening this fall), Universal turned to Mr. Depp, whose own project, an adaptation of Gregory David Roberts’s novel “Shantaram,” about a robber and heroin addict who escapes from prison, was about to be postponed.

Mr. Bale signed on soon after, fascinated, “not only by Purvis’s pursuit of Dillinger,” he said, “but by his pursuit to achieve the vision of Hoover, and his reaction when Hoover seemed to compromise his vision of how to enforce the law.”

Despite its tortuous history, “Public Enemies” looks, on screen, as if Mr. Mann intended all along to reshape the material as a fresh chapter in his remarkably cohesive body of work. Like “Heat” (1995), which paired Mr. De Niro as a master thief and Al Pacino as a police lieutenant, the new film positions two A-list stars on opposite sides of the law — and like “Heat,” it’s a film in which the two stars barely share a scene. Like “The Insider” (1999), Mr. Mann’s most acclaimed film, “Public Enemies” looks closely at two skilled professionals who each struggle with personal codes of honor. And as in “Manhunter” (1986) Mr. Mann seems enthralled by the subject of a lawman so willing to pursue a criminal that he endangers his sense of himself.

“Honestly, no,” Mr. Mann said, laughing when asked whether the thematic consistencies are deliberate. “From my point of view, which is maybe not other people’s, it isn’t a mano-a-mano movie. What I was taken with was the love affair between Dillinger and Billie Frechette,” his girlfriend, played by the Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard. “They’re symbiotic. He didn’t have a mother and was desperate for love of women. She needed a father. They were preformed for each other.”

His movies are known for many things, from technological virtuosity to narrative complexity, but prominent roles for women are not among his trademarks. The character of Billie is something of an exception. Several American actresses wanted the part; Ms. Cotillard won it even though her English was less than rock steady. “But she’s ferocious,” Mr. Mann said. “She’s so focused and artistically ambitious that you knew that come hell or high water she was going to get there.”

Her character features prominently in a memorable scene, the film’s most overt nod to contemporary issues, specifically the use of torture to obtain information. That resonance, Mr. Mann said, was intentional. “In the movie when Hoover says, ‘Take off the white gloves,’ what he means is, turn informants using extortion, round up innocent family members and make their lives miserable, set aside habeas corpus, be pre-emptive,” he said. “And when Purvis, who doesn’t believe that, starts to go against his native self, it’s disastrous.”

As the start date of “Public Enemies” neared, Mr. Mann was coming off the exhausting experience of writing, directing and producing the 2006 film adaptation of “Miami Vice,” the 1980s television series that made his reputation. That film, plagued by production difficulties, threatened to spiral out of control, and disappointed at the box office, where it brought in just $63 million domestically (less than half its estimated production budget). This time Mr. Mann had to cram preproduction into 11 weeks, an unusually short time for a $100 million period movie that would be shot largely on Midwestern locations. “And then we had radical weather,” he said. “Hailstorms. So the movie became a race, in a way. Not a rush, but a race to get what I had to get.” He finished with a couple of days to spare.

Mr. Mann is known as a perfectionist, someone who wants every visual and technical detail nailed down. Surprisingly, he said that wasn’t the primary challenge on “Public Enemies.” “The biggest struggle, for me is always: Get the story to land,” he said. “Get it to work.

“You know John Dillinger is going to die in front of the Biograph. So by then the story has to have hijacked the show-and-tell nature of the plot. The story has to be about the inner experience of the guy, so that by the end, it’s not about him getting shot. Do you understand his inner experience? Is your heart with him? Do you know him? That’s the battle.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/movies/28harr.html?hpw

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Entertainment – June 27

The Susan Boyle Experience

What was Susan Boyle?

Not who: that we know. She’s a stout, plain, 48-year-old Scotswoman whose bravura performance of the “Les Misérables” anthem of entitlement, “I Dreamed a Dream,” on a British talent show in April became a hugely popular YouTube clip.

Then in May, a tabloid reaction — or something — eroded Boyle’s popular support. After she sang beautifully again in the finals of “Britain’s Got Talent,” voters nonetheless awarded the competition’s top prize to Diversity, a multiracial, 11-member dance troupe. Four weeks ago, days after abjectly conceding the loss on stage (“The best people won,” she said), Boyle checked into a London clinic and was treated for exhaustion.

The fans need some rest now, too. We need to build up our strength for when the next star-making video surfaces and requires that we be amazed. But this downtime also presents an opportunity to ask: What was the Susan Boyle spectacle, that chunk of culture that held us, for days at least, so firmly rapt?

The answers still lie in the video, a small, insidious masterpiece that really should be watched several times for its accidental commentary on popular misery, the concept of “expectation” and how cultures congratulate themselves. First off, the Susan Boyle phenomenon truly belongs to the world of online video, whose prime directive is to be amazing. The great subjects of online video are stunts, pranks, violence, gotchas, virtuosity, upsets and transformations. Where television is supposed to satisfy expectations with its genres and formulas, online video confounds them.

In the Boyle video, we first see her sitting alone, wearing a Sunday-best dress and eating a sandwich. Boyle tells the camera that she has never been kissed. “Aw, shame,” she adds, with the sweetly pathetic theatricality of David Brent, Ricky Gervais’s character on the BBC version of “The Office.”

Once she’s onstage, it’s not her frumpiness but her hammy efforts at sex appeal that seem to disquiet Simon Cowell, the world’s ranking judge of stage talent. Cowell is, after all, a connoisseur of British frumps, having championed Paul Potts, the schmo tenor who won the first season of “Britain’s Got Talent.” (The 2009 Boyle clip is patterned almost beat for beat on Potts’s 2007 blow-the-judges-away video clip.) Seconds into the song, though, Cowell’s eyebrows rise, and by the time Boyle sings “I dreamed that God would be forgiving,” she’s saved. The audience is on its feet, and Cowell beams.

At one point, a jumpy M.C. gloats from the wings, demanding of the camera: “You didn’t expect that, did you? Did you?”

Well, no, we didn’t. Or, rather, in the passive voice: Expectations have been overthrown. But expectations about what, exactly? Surely it’s no surprise that a fat woman can carry a tune. Perhaps the upsetting of generalized expectations comes instead from the deft video editing and the judges’ campy expressions of awe. But the effect must also derive from the music itself, from the wonderfully coercive “I Dreamed a Dream.” To quote an “American Idol” truism, this was a great song choice.

You may know it by heart or from an adolescent diary. I dreamed a dream in time gone by, when hope was high and life worth living. In march the tigers — with their voices soft as thunder — to ravage those dreams. Finally, I had a dream my life would be so different from this hell I’m living. That word “hell” breaks up the anodyne tautologies of dreaming dreams, and Boyle, like others who have interpreted “I Dreamed a Dream,” gets hoarse and hellish on the word. And that’s it: had dreams, lost dreams, dreams dead. A suicide song. Call it “I Will Not Survive.”

Every culture likes to re-enact the moments it designates its finest. Just as American self-love is dramatized in Tom Sawyer’s enthusiasm for restaging emancipation — by having Huck “free” Jim, who is already free — British self-love often surfaces in the drama of romantic populism. Humble villagers speak their minds; fancy hypocrites are put to shame. Cowell knows well the cultural unconscious, and he lustily plays his role as high priest. And it’s no wonder that Boyle, the Scottish daughter of Irish parents, is told by a judge that she “did it for Great Britain” — for Falstaff, for the rustics, for the lowliest characters in Dickens. It’s probably also no wonder — given the deep unease of the British people with triumphalism, as well as the song’s prophecy of misery — that Boyle ultimately lost.

But don’t worry, Susan: there is a land of dreams where people love to win and where tigers live to profit off the dreams of dreamers. Cowell called it on that last night when he hinted that, win or lose, she would find “stuff coming your way in America.” The groundwork stateside had, as Cowell well knew, already been laid on YouTube — where the luminous performance we Americans didn’t expect was, happily, exactly what we expected.

Points of Entry: This Week’s Recommendations

Videography

A Susan Boyle YouTube marathon begins with the ”I Dreamed a Dream” video that made her famous. Then review some juvenilia in Boyle’s 1984 performance of ”I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” And don’t miss her performance of ”Memory” in the semifinals. Finally, Boyle’s dignified concession. All on YouTube.

Comparative Dreaming

Boyle’s combination of ingenuousness and exhaustion suits her perfectly for ”I Dreamed a Dream.” It may be heresy to say so, but as a performer, she outstrips the sophisticated Patti LuPone, whose version also is found on YouTube.

Even Aretha

Boyle even beats the ever-victorious Aretha Franklin, for whom the song was rewritten so the tigers could be vanquished. It’s on YouTube, too, of course.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/magazine/28FOB-medium-t.html?ref=magazine

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Exact Details of Jackson Death Still Unclear

Michael Jackson performs at the Super Bowl XXVII halftime show, on January 31, 1993.

The final act of Michael Jackson’s life came into clearer focus Friday, a picture of a fallen superstar working out with TV’s “Incredible Hulk” and under the care of his own private cardiologist as he tried to get his 50-year-old body in shape for a grueling bid to reclaim his glory.

While the exact circumstances of his death remained unclear, early clues suggested he may simply have pushed his heart too far.

Police said they had towed the doctor’s BMW from Mr. Jackson’s home because it may include medication or other evidence, and a source familiar with the situation told The Associated Press that a heart attack appeared to have caused the cardiac arrest that led to the pop icon’s sudden death.

Fans stage an impromptu celebration of the life of Mr. Jackson outside UCLA Medical Center.

As grief for the King of Pop poured out from the icons of music to heartbroken fans, and the world came to grips with losing one of the most luminous celebrities of all time, an autopsy showed no sign of trauma or foul play to Mr. Jackson, who died Thursday at UCLA Medical Center after paramedics not could not revive him.

The AP source who said Mr. Jackson apparently suffered a heart attack was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity. Mr. Jackson’s brother Jermaine had said the pop singer apparently went into cardiac arrest — which often, but not always, happens because of a heart attack.

Authorities said they spoke with the doctor briefly Thursday and Friday and expected to meet with him again soon. Police stressed that the doctor, identified by the Los Angeles Times as cardiologist Conrad Murray, was not a criminal suspect.

Craig Harvey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner, said there were no signs of foul play in the autopsy and further tests would be needed to determine cause of death. He said Mr. Jackson was taking some unspecified prescription medication but gave few other details.

Meanwhile, a 911 call released by fire officials shed light on the desperate effort at the mansion to save Mr. Jackson’s life before paramedics arrived Thursday afternoon. Mr. Jackson died later at UCLA Medical Center.

In the recording, an unidentified caller pleads with authorities to send help, offering no clues about why Mr. Jackson was stricken. He tells a dispatcher that Mr. Jackson’s doctor is performing CPR.

“He’s pumping his chest,” the caller says, “but he’s not responding to anything.”

Asked by the dispatcher whether anyone saw what happened, the caller answers: “No, just the doctor, sir. The doctor has been the only one there.”

The president of the company promoting Mr. Jackson’s shows said Mr. Murray was Mr. Jackson’s personal physician for three years. Mr. Jackson insisted Mr. Murray accompany him to London, said Randy Phillips, president of AEG Live.

Mr. Phillips quoted Mr. Jackson as saying: “Look, this whole business revolves around me. I’m a machine, and we have to keep the machine well-oiled.” Mr. Phillips said Mr. Jackson submitted to at least five hours of physicals that insurers had insisted on.

On Friday, the autopsy was completed in a matter of hours, but an official cause of death could take up to six weeks while medical examiners await toxicology tests. No funeral plans had been made public.

Mr. Jackson had remained out of the public spotlight during intense rehearsals for the London concerts, but those with access said he was upbeat and seemingly energized by his planned comeback. Ken Ehrlich, executive producer of the Grammys, said he watched Mr. Jackson dance energetically as recently as Wednesday.

“There was this one moment, he was moving across the stage and he was doing these trademark Michael moves, and I know I got this big grin on my face, and I started thinking to myself, “You know, it’s been years since I’ve seen that,’” he said.

Lou Ferrigno, the star of “The Incredible Hulk,” said he had been working out with Mr. Jackson for the past several months.

Still, Mr. Jackson’s health had been known to be precarious in recent years, and one family friend said Friday that he had warned the entertainer’s family about his use of painkillers.

“I said one day we’re going to have this experience. And when Anna Nicole Smith passed away, I said we cannot have this kind of thing with Michael Jackson,” Brian Oxman, a former Jackson attorney and family friend, told NBC’s “Today” show. “The result was I warned everyone, and lo and behold, here we are. I don’t know what caused his death. But I feared this day, and here we are.”

Mr. Oxman claimed Mr. Jackson had prescription drugs at his disposal to help with pain suffered when he broke his leg after he fell off a stage and for broken vertebrae in his back.

The worldwide wave of mourning for Mr. Jackson continued unabated for the man who revolutionized pop music and moonwalked his way into entertainment legend.

“My heart, my mind are broken,” said Elizabeth Taylor, who was one of Mr. Jackson’s closest friends and married one of her husbands at a lavish wedding at the pop star’s Neverland Ranch in 1991. She said she had heard the news as she was preparing to travel to London for Mr. Jackson’s comeback show, and added, “I can’t imagine life without him.”

Hundreds made a pilgrimage to the Jackson family’s compound in Los Angeles, leaving flowers and messages of love. They did the same at his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and at the home in Los Angeles’ Holmby Hills where Jackson was stricken. Some camped out overnight.

In New York, people stopped at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, where Mr. Jackson had performed as a child with his brothers in one of rock’s first bubblegum supergroups, the Jackson 5.

Scores of celebrities who knew or worked with Mr. Jackson — or were simply awed by him — issued statements of mourning. Some came through publicists and others through emotional postings on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, where countless everyday fans were sharing memories as well.

His two ex-wives both said they were devastated. One of them, Lisa Marie Presley, posted a long, emotional statement on her MySpace page in which she said her ex-husband had confided to her 14 years ago that he feared dying young and under tragic circumstances, just as her father, Elvis Presley, had.

Ms. Presley’s father, the King of Rock & Roll to Mr. Jackson’s King of Pop, died in 1977 at age 42 of a drug-related death.

At rehearsals for Sunday’s Black Entertainment Awards show, stars like Beyonce, Wyclef Jean and Ne-Yo were frantically revamping their performances in an effort to turn the evening into a Michael Jackson tribute.

“There’s a direct line from Ne-Yo to Michael Jackson,” said executive producer Stephen Hill. “There’s a direct line from Beyonce to Michael Jackson. There’s a direct line from Jay-Z to Michael Jackson. I think they’ll want to pay tribute in their own way.”

When he was on trial on child molestation charges in 2005, Mr. Jackson appeared gaunt and had recurring back problems that he attributed to stress. His trial was interrupted several times by hospital visits, and Mr. Jackson once even appeared late to court dressed in his pajamas after an emergency room visit.

After his acquittal, Mr. Jackson’s prosecutor argued against returning some items that had been seized from Neverland, the Santa Barbara County estate Mr. Jackson had converted into a children’s playland. Among the items were syringes, the powerful painkiller Demerol and other prescription drugs.

Demerol carries a long list of warnings to users. The government warns that mixing it with certain other drugs can lead to reactions including slowed or stopped breathing, shock and cardiac arrest.

Within hours of Mr. Jackson’s death on Thursday, fans were inundating Web sites that sell his music, and physical stores reported they had been cleaned out of Michael Jackson and Jackson 5 CDs. All 10 of the albums on Amazon.com’s bestseller list Friday were Jackson’s; the 25th anniversary edition of “Thriller,” the bestselling album of all time, was at the top.

Meanwhile, fans were snapping up every Jackson recording they could get their hands on.

Bill Carr, Amazon.com Inc.’s vice president for music and video, said the Web site sold out within minutes all CDs by Michael Jackson and by the Jackson 5. Mr. Jackson’s albums accounted for all 10 of Amazon’s “Bestsellers in Music” list Friday, with the 25th anniversary edition of the celebrated “Thriller” album taking the top spot.

Barnes and Noble Inc.’s Web site and retail stores also sold out most Jackson CDs, DVDs and books, and its 10 best-selling CDs were Jackson titles as well.

“They love him,” said Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president for music and video. “He’s a legend, and they’re anxious to make sure they have his music in their collections.”

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Full article and photos: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124607424852364581.html

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Animal House at 30

College students find new ways to channel their inner Bluto.

When Animal House first came out just over 30 years ago, it dominated the cultural landscape. College students were nostalgic for the “raunchy, pre-1960s undergraduate ideal,” says Peter Rollins, who has been studying pop-culture academically for over 30 years. Mr. Rollins, who attended Dartmouth in the 1960s, says that students back then tried to live “the fantasy” on their own campuses. Some still do, taking Bluto’s counsel to heart: “My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.”

Take Alpha Delta, the Dartmouth College fraternity that the infamous Delta house of the movie is based on. The movie, co-written by Dartmouth graduate and Alpha Delta brother Chris Miller, still inspires some of the fraternity’s traditions today.

John Belushi as John Blutarsky

In spring 2008, a band covering Otis Day and the Knights played on Alpha Delta’s front lawn to an audience of boozers, brawlers and, probably, future U.S. senators. This past spring, Alpha Delta organized an Animal House-themed party with the preppy brothers Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the inspiration for the sadomasochistic Omega house in the film. And on any given Friday night, it’s not just beer making the basement floor of Alpha Delta sticky. Paying tribute to the movie that made their fraternity famous, the brothers of Alpha Delta relieve themselves in plain sight along their basement wall.

This behavior is frowned upon by some. James Watson, a senior at Dartmouth and the current president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, says that the Animal House culture is “very irresponsible.” Speaking as the president of a fraternity whose motto is the “true gentleman,” Mr. Watson unsurprisingly takes issue with such Bluto-inspired basement practices as “doming,” where one chugs a six-pack as quickly as possible until projectile vomiting is induced.

Deborah Carney, director of Greek letter organizations and societies at Dartmouth, echoes Mr. Watson’s concerns. “I saw Animal House twice and I thought it was funny,” she says. “But when I show clips of Animal House to student leaders of Greek organizations today, they tell me that the clips are funny, but also . . . not funny.”

So why do so many college men see Bluto as a model? “People think that behaving like Bluto will win them respect,” Mr. Watson says. Bluto has nearly become the archetype of the college man. His poster is found in dorm rooms across the country. He is a binge drinker, physically aggressive and impervious to pain — especially when he is chugging a fifth of whiskey.

Add one ingredient to Bluto’s mischievous mix, sexual prowess, and you have what at Dartmouth is currently called “the hard guy.”

An Alpha Delta insider, who agreed to be quoted on condition of anonymity, describes the hard guy. Referencing the excesses of typical Friday festivities, he says, “Your Friday night is my Monday morning.” A Web site, created by Dartmouth alumni David Grey and Bobby Zangrilli, is devoted to selling T-shirts emblazoned with that and other hard-guy mottos. Another: “Hard Guy Dating: Having a girlfriend and not even liking her.”

Interestingly though, the one variable that could check the hard guy is sex — or more precisely, the opposite sex. Ms. Carney, looking back at her time at Dartmouth, says, “Over the last couple of decades, one of the biggest changes to the Greek scene has been the presence of women.” Women were admitted to Dartmouth in 1976.

Mr. Watson agrees: “Having women around changes the way men act.” The Alpha Delta insider has a different take: “My personal theory is that the college really didn’t appreciate the attention from the movie and tried even harder to suppress the Animal House culture.” As Dean Wormer once said, “The time has come for someone to put their foot down. And that foot is me.”

The Alpha Delta insider is referring to the college’s heavy oversight of Greek life. In 1999, Dartmouth’s board of trustees passed the Student Life Initiative to sap the Greek system of its social dominance. Just one of the many highly unpopular provisions of the Student Life Initiative required Greek houses to register parties and kegs with the college. “Students tell me that, since the Student Life Initiative, parties have grown much tamer. There is more administrative oversight of the parties,” Ms. Carney says.

Whatever the cause — the presence of women or tougher supervision — the Animal House culture is not the Sodom and Gomorrah it once was. Still, even after 30 years, neither the administration nor women can take the mischievous boy out of the college man. Back then, the frat brothers raged defiantly against the stuffiness of Omega house and the authority of the college administration. Today, they’ve been reduced to channeling their inner Bluto with hard guy T-shirts.

Ms. Smith, a recent Dartmouth graduate, is a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal.

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124605877163763579.html

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Entertainment – June 26

Selected Discography for Michael Jackson

A selected discography of Michael Jackson’s music:

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No. 1 songs:

”Ben,” 1972.

”Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” 1979.

”Rock With You,” 1980.

”The Girl Is Mine,” 1982.

”Beat it,” 1983.

”Billie Jean,” 1983.

”Say Say Say,” 1983.

”Bad,” 1987.

”I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” 1987.

”The Way You Make Me Feel,” 1987.

”Dirty Diana,” 1988.

”Man In The Mirror,” 1988.

”Black Or White,” 1991.

”You Are Not Alone,” 1995.

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Solo albums:

”Got To Be There,” 1972.

”Ben,” 1972.

”Music & Me,” 1973.

”Forever, Michael,” 1975.

”Off The Wall,” 1979.

”Thriller,” 1982.

”Bad,” 1987.

”Dangerous,” 1991.

”Invincible,” 2001.

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Albums by ”The Jackson 5,” the family R&B quintet that launched Jackson to fame:

”Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5,” 1969.

”ABC,” 1970.

”Third Album,” 1970.

”The Jackson 5 Christmas Album,” 1970.

”Goin’ Back to Indiana,” 1971.

”Maybe Tomorrow,” 1971.

”Lookin’ Through the Windows,” 1972.

”Get It Together,” 1973.

”In Japan!,” 1973.

”Skywriter,” 1973.

”Dancing Machine,” 1974.

”Live!,” 1974.

”Moving Violation,” 1975.

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Albums by ”The Jacksons,” which formed after the group — without older brother Jermaine — left Motown Records for the Epic record label:

”The Jacksons,” 1976.

”Goin’ Places,” 1977.

”Destiny,” 1978.

”Triumph,” 1980.

”Live,” 1981.

”Victory,” 1984.

”2300 Jackson Street,” 1989.

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”We Are the World,” a 1985 charity song co-written by Jackson and Lionel Richie. It reached the top of the charts, featuring the voices of Jackson, Richie, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Charles and a host of others.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/25/arts/AP-US-Discography-Michael-Jackson.html

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Death of a showman

Michael Jackson made great pop records, lurid headlines and lots of money

FOR a life so extraordinary the manner of Michael Jackson’s passing on Thursday June 25th was utterly banal: a middle-aged man succumbing to an apparent heart-attack. (There was speculation that an alleged dependency on prescription painkillers may have been a contributing factor.) During his progress from child prodigy to the self-styled “King of Pop” and, more recently, an eccentric semi-recluse, no part of Mr Jackson’s private life had given any other hint of normality. But behind the mask that plastic surgeons had made of his face was a keen brain for wringing cash out of pop music—and for spending it.

Mr Jackson first performed on stage at the age of six, accompanying his four older brothers. The Jackson Five, under the strict stewardship of their manager and father, signed to Motown Records in the late 1960s and began producing a string of hit records—a sequence of success that Mr Jackson continued in a 30-year solo recording career. It is reckoned that his final tally of album sales is around 750m—the most that any artist has sold. And one of those, “Thriller”, released in 1982, became the most successful yet seen, shifting 65m units. This record may well remain unchallenged: sales of albums have suffered as pop fans these days prefer downloading individual tracks from the internet.

The length of Mr Jackson’s career ensured that he experienced, popularised and even pioneered many of the techniques that help artists to profit from their musical talents. At the beginning of his career, touring was a vital component of performers’ incomes, though a shift to earning money from selling records was well under way. By its peak, in the 1980s, touring had come to be seen by the music industry as a loss-making promotional tool to shift albums.

Mr Jackson did not invent the pop promotional video, as he is sometimes credited with doing. But he took this art form to new heights with the lavishly expensive video he made in 1983 for the title track of the “Thriller” album. He brought in one of Hollywood’s top directors, John Landis (best known for “The Blues Brothers”), and spent an unprecedented $500,000 on the 14-minute miniature epic. But it was money well spent: the launch of MTV, two years earlier, whose format was being copied by other broadcasters, meant that videos had rapidly become one of the most valuable tools for marketing recorded music, and more cost-effective than concert tours. The “Thriller” video was broadcast incessantly all around the world, pumping up the album’s sales.

At the height of his success Mr Jackson and his team of managers made the shrewd calculation that the value of pop music was wrapped up in the publishing rights to songs just as much as in record sales. In 1985 he paid $47.5m for ATV Music, which owned the copyrights to most of the Beatles’ songs. Ten years later he sold half his interest for $150m to Sony. The value of his stake was probably around $500m when he died. This was roughly equal to the upper estimates of the debts he was struggling to refinance, which he had amassed funding his increasingly bizarre style of living.

Despite his vast earnings Mr Jackson was forced to borrow huge sums against his stake in ATV and his future earnings (recently reckoned to be about $19m a year) to pay for his huge shopping sprees and the upkeep of “Neverland”, his ranch in California. Last year he announced plans for a long series of concerts in London to boost his income and pay off his creditors. Playing live has re-emerged as the way to make money from pop as falling sales, rampant piracy and digital distribution have slashed revenues from recorded music.

Despite having built himself an extravagant fun palace, with its own zoo, fairground and elaborate topiary, Mr Jackson cut an increasingly lost and lonely figure in his later years. Though twice married and with three children, his closest relationships appeared to be with a chimpanzee and a succession of young boys. The questions raised by these unusual friendships continued to hang in the air until his death. He was acquitted in a Californian court in 2005 on charges of molesting one 13-year-old boy but reportedly paid $20m out of court in 1994 to head off other allegations of child abuse.

His status as a pop genius may well always be tainted by the strangeness of the life he chose to lead. Elvis Presley, still the unchallenged King of Rock’n’Roll, is increasingly remembered for his music, as memories fade of his own unusual private life. Mr Jackson would doubtless have craved to be held in the same public awe and affection (his dynastic ambitions even stretched to a brief marriage with Lisa Marie, Presley’s only child). But, sadly, for now he will be remembered by many as “Wacko Jacko” rather than the King of Pop.

The Economist

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Full article and photo: http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13919497&source=features_box1

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Entertainment – June 25

German Jews Horrified by Britney Holocaust Role

The news that Britney Spears may hit the silver screen as the star of a Holocaust-era romantic tragedy has raised eyebrows in Germany. The plot calls for the pop-star to travel back in time to a concentration camp — and the Central Council of Jews in Germany says the idea is “reprehensible.”

 

After the 2002 cinematic flop “Crossroads,” few would have been surprised if teen-talent-turned-adult-disaster Britney Spears never again appeared on the silver screen. According to reports this week, though, Spears is weighing a return to acting — and it is a comeback that Jews in Germany are viewing with extreme distaste.

Spears, who is currently in the process of successfully resuscitating her recently languishing music career with her global “Circus” tour, is reportedly reviewing a script for a film tentatively titled “The Yellow Star of Sophia and Eton.” The flick would see her playing a character named Sophia LaMont who travels back in time to fall in love with a Jewish concentration camp prisoner named Eton. In a tricky critique of ongoing anti-Semitism, the script concludes with the lovebirds travelling back to the present day before being killed by Nazis.

Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has said she is horrified at the prospect of Britney making a Holocaust film. “In films that deal with the Holocaust, the script should be carefully chosen and the cast picked with care,” Knobloch told the German tabloid Bild. “It is reprehensible to combine the issue of the Holocaust with Britney Spears in an attempt to secure financing for the film ‘The Yellow Star of Sophia and Eton.’ Ethical considerations should have priority.”

Spears’ music career got off to an impressive start and she quickly became one of the most successful acts of all time, having sold more than 87 million albums. But the 27-year-old’s image has taken a hit in recent years with a seemingly unending series of scandals involving custody of her two boys, substance abuse problems and a number of salacious pictures circulating across the Internet.

Whether her presence on the cast of the new film would be enough to secure funding remains questionable. Her first film was universally panned and she won the Golden Raspberry award in 2002 for worst actress. The “Circus” tour is scheduled to make a stop in Berlin at the end of July.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,632338,00.html#ref=nlint

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Academy Expands Best-Picture Pool to 10

The Oscars just got a whole lot bigger.

In a surprise announcement the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said Wednesday that it would double the number of nominees for the best-picture Academy Award to 10 from 5, returning to a practice it used more than a half-century ago when the number of films released was larger.

The move constitutes the most radical revision of the Oscar-night ritual in recent memory.

“We will be casting our net wide,” Sidney Ganis, the academy’s president, said in announcing the change at a morning news conference at the group’s headquarters here.

In a question-and-answer session that followed the announcement Mr. Ganis said, “I would not be telling you the truth if I said the words ‘Dark Knight’ did not come up.”

This year “The Dark Knight,” a critically acclaimed blockbuster fantasy, did not make the final list of nominees that included “Frost/Nixon,” “Milk,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Reader”and the eventual winner, “Slumdog Millionaire.”

None of those films were as widely seen as “The Dark Knight” or the animated “Wall-E,” another favorite that was snubbed by the best-picture category, adding heat to a debate about whether the Oscar voters had drifted too far from the moviegoing public.

Mr. Ganis said that no changes had been made to other Oscar categories. He also emphasized that the nominees would not be subdivided, as with the Golden Globes, which are awarded for best drama as well as best comedy or musical. All 10 nominees will compete for one best-picture award.

Mr. Ganis said that the deliberations leading to the change began in earnest after this year’s show, which in February drew a larger audience than in the past thanks in part to an effort by its producers, Laurence Mark and Bill Condon, to include widely publicized tributes to popular films that were not in contention.

Following the show, Mr. Ganis said, Mr. Mark and Mr. Condon both argued that the awards event would have been served by a broader range of nominees.

The discussion was later brought into focus by the academy’s work on a retrospective of the films of 1939, when the list of best-picture nominees included “Gone With the Wind,” the eventual winner, in addition to “Ninotchka,” “Of Mice and Men,” “Dark Victory,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” “Love Affair,” “Stagecoach,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “Wuthering Heights.”

Between 1931 and 1943, Mr. Ganis said, the academy usually had 10 best-picture nominees, though in some years it had either 8 or 12.

The academy’s discussions this year were part of a regular post-show analysis it conducts, usually in two sessions, one with the producers and one without.

In all about 300 films were eligible for awards in 2008. Were that to hold going forward, roughly one of every 30 films would become a best-picture nominee.

While a best-picture nomination now becomes a bit easier for makers of documentaries, animated films and foreign-language films to aspire to, it may also dilute the value of that nomination. In the past studios have built the marketing campaign for many films around a coveted best-picture nomination.

In a phone interview Mr. Ganis said support for the change had been very strong among the academy’s governors. He said the academy, which has about 6,000 voting members who work in the film industry, did not consult studios about the possible implications for business. “We’re the arts organization, not the business organization,” he said.

At the same time, though, Mr. Ganis said the academy clearly hoped for a ratings bump from the change. “Our partners at ABC are very, very happy,” he said.

The surprise announcement is certain to trigger recalibration among studio executives, some of whom privately said after this year’s ceremonies that they planned to step back from the expense of campaigning for Oscars, rather than risk throwing money after prizes that do not yield much in return at the box office.

Michael Moses, a spokesman for Universal Pictures, declined to comment on the change. Universal invested heavily in a campaign for “Frost/Nixon,” only to see the film come up short on Oscar night and at the box office.

Diana Loomis, a spokeswoman for Fox Searchlight, which released “Slumdog Millionaire,” also declined to comment.

A possible pitfall for studios is that a larger number of filmmakers will see awards potential in their own work and press for campaigns. “Who knows, there might even be a comedy” among the nominees next year, Mr. Ganis suggested.

Oscar nominations next year are set to be announced Feb. 2. The ceremony itself, the 82nd, is to be held at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood and is scheduled for broadcast on ABC on March 7, somewhat later than this year’s February broadcast, promising a longer — and more crowded — awards season.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/movies/25oscars.html?_r=1&hpw

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Wired Editor Apologizes for Copied Passages

Chris Anderson editor in chief of Wired magazine, apologized on Wednesday for copying parts of his forthcoming book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” from Wikipedia without attribution. The passages were discovered by a reviewer for The Virginia Quarterly Review, who was reading an advance galley of the book, which is being published by Hyperion next month. The passages, some copied word for word, include references in a section titled “The First Free Lunch,” as well as segments on usury and the learning curve. “It’s really simple,” Mr. Anderson said in a telephone interview. “Mea culpa.” He said that he originally had put the Wikipedia material in quotations, but that he and his publisher had not been able to agree on a format for citations. When he took the passages out of quotations, he failed to attribute Wikipedia or rewrite the material in his own words. “That’s my screw-up,” he said.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/arts/25arts-WIREDEDITORA_BRF.html?hpw

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Snatched from northern climes

Greek demands to get back the Elgin marbles risk stopping a better idea: museums lending their treasures

THERE is much to be said for moral clarity. Greece is insisting that the British Museum surrender the marble sculptures that Lord Elgin took down from the Parthenon and carted away in the early 1800s. Anything less, it says, would “condone the snatching of the marbles and the monument’s carving-up 207 years ago.” The Greek demand for ownership will arouse widespread sympathy, even among those who accept the British Museum’s claim to the marbles. With the opening of an impressive new museum in Athens, the sculptures from the Parthenon now have good cause to be reunited, if only for artistic reasons.

New Acropolis Museum

But sometimes clarity is self-defeating. A previous Greek administration was willing to finesse the question of ownership and co-operate with the British Museum over a joint display of the marbles. By hardening its position, the Greek government risks driving museums everywhere into clinging to their possessions for fear of losing them. If the aim is for the greatest number of people to see the greatest number of treasures, a better way must be found.

As curators all over the world will see it, those who call for the permanent return of the Parthenon sculptures from London are arguing for international museums to be emptied. Many other collections have a more dubious provenance than the marbles—think of the British Museum’s Benin bronzes, seized in a punitive raid in Nigeria; of the Pergamon altar removed from Turkey and now in Berlin; of Chinese treasures carried off during the Boxer rebellion and again during the civil war; of hundreds of works in Russian museums that were snatched from their owners in the Bolshevik revolution.

You cannot go very far in righting those wrongs without entangling the world’s museums in a Gordian knot of restitution claims. That is why, in December 2002, 18 of the world’s leading directors—from the Louvre to the Hermitage and from the Metropolitan Museum to the Getty Museum—argued for a quid pro quo. The Munich declaration, as it is called, asserts that today’s ethical standards cannot be applied to yesterday’s acquisitions; but in return it acknowledges that encyclopedic museums have a special duty to put world culture on display.

This has led to a new level of co-operation between museums over training, curating, restoration and loans. Thousands of works are now lent each year between museums on every continent. Who thought that China’s Palace Museum and the National Palace Museum in Taiwan would hold a joint show in Taipei, as they plan to in October, reuniting Qing-dynasty works that have been separated ever since they were borne away from Beijing by the retreating Nationalist forces in 1948? The British Museum was not party to the Munich declaration, but it seems to embrace its spirit. During the Olympic games in China in 2008 it sent the Discobolus, the discus-thrower of Myron, to Shanghai where 5,000 people queued each day to see it. It will soon lend the Rosetta stone, the cornerstone of written language, to Egypt for the opening of the Giza museum. On the day the new Acropolis Museum was opened, the British Museum’s director was in Riyadh, to arrange loans for an exhibition on the haj in London in 2011.

Beware of Greeks causing rifts

The choice is between the free circulation of treasures and a stand-off in which each museum grimly clings to what it claims to own. Instead of grandstanding, the Greek culture minister should call the British Museum’s bluff and ask for a loan. The nervous British would then have to test the waters by, say, sending to Athens a single piece of the Parthenon frieze. If that piece were to be seized, then so be it. But if on the due date, the Greeks surprised everybody and returned the sculpture, then the lending programme would surely be expanded. By taking small steps, the Greeks may yet encourage the British to make the big leap.

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Full article and photo (1): http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13900966&source=hptextfeature

Photo (2): http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13895071

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Actress Farrah Fawcet Dies at 62

Farrah Fawcett, front played Jill Munroe, one of three fearsome female private investigators on the 1970s TV show “Charlie’s Angels.” Left, Ms. Fawcett in the show with her co-stars Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson.

Farrah Fawcett, 62, golden-haired sex symbol of the late 1970s most remembered for her appearance on bedroom posters and the detective series “Charlie’s Angels” and who later found a niche portraying troubled women in made-for-television dramas, died today at a hospital in Santa Monica, Calif., of cancer.

Ms. Fawcett was a Texas-born college dropout who parlayed success as a model for toiletries such as Ultra Brite toothpaste and Wella Balsam shampoo into a viable acting career.

Still a relative unknown, she achieved two iconic roles at the same time in 1976. On Wednesday nights, she was Jill Munroe, the blond Angel on the ABC detective drama produced by Aaron Spelling. The rest of the week, she was the star attraction on a poster that sold a record 12 million copies. Haloed by the curls of her impossibly buoyant curly hair, wearing a red swimsuit that left little to the imagination, she entered the dreams of adolescent boys everywhere and brought women into hair salons to copy her style.

Thanks to her radiant sexuality, Ms. Fawcett became the breakout star of “Charlie’s Angels,” appearing in such suggestive episodes as “Angels in Chains,” where she and her beautiful co-detectives — played by Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith — went undercover on a chain gang. The show’s tone led to its nickname: “Jiggle TV.”

As Ms. Fawcett said, “When the show was number three, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.”

In 1973, she married Lee Majors, soon to star in “The Six Million Dollar Man,” and acquired the name she would use in the “Charlie’s Angels” title sequence, Farrah Fawcett-Majors.

She left “Charlie’s Angels” after one season to pursue a movie career and immediately was served with a lawsuit from Spelling and producer Leonard Goldberg for breach of contract, which was resolved only when she agreed to make a series of guest appearances on the show over its next several seasons.

Meanwhile, Ms. Fawcett appeared in an unsuccessful star vehicle, “Somebody Killed Her Husband,” a 1978 film with Jeff Bridges known in the industry as Somebody Killed Her Career. She also was Burt Reynolds’s love interest in the comedy “The Cannonball Run” (1981).

But it was in made-for-television movies that she began reinventing herself, often to critical acclaim.

Washington Post television critic Tom Shales wrote of Ms. Fawcett’s “strenuous and superb performance” playing a battered wife out for revenge in “The Burning Bed” (1984). She found a niche as vulnerable women in troubled or abusive relationships, such as “Extremities” (1986) and “Small Sacrifices” (1989).

She also portrayed photographer Margaret Bourke-White, Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld and heiress Barbara Hutton in made-for-television productions.

Mary Farrah Leni Fawcett was born Feb. 2, 1947, in Corpus Christi, where her father started a pipeline construction company. She was an art major at the University of Texas at Austin and began modeling for a local clothing store. She was voted one of the 10 most beautiful women on campus, and Hollywood publicist David Mirisch urged her to quit school for a career in show business.

At first reluctant to leave college, she met with almost immediate success as a model and received guest roles on television shows such as “I Dream of Jeannie” and “The Partridge Family” and films including “Myra Breckinridge” (1970) and “Logan’s Run” (1976). She also appeared with her then-husband, Majors, on “The Six Million Dollar Man” and on other shows produced by Goldberg and Spelling before “Charlie’s Angels” made her a national name.

Her marriage to Majors also foundered, and she began a long relationship with actor Ryan O’Neal, with whom she had a son, Redmond. Survivors include her son, whose drug use was well documented by tabloids in recent years.

Starting in the 1990s, she attempted to recapture her status as a sex symbol. She underwent plastic surgery and appeared nude in Playboy photo shoots as well as a 1997 Playboy video called “All of Me.”

That same year, she turned in a memorable supporting performance as the wife of Robert Duvall’s philandering minister in “The Apostle.” Critic Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times praised her by noting how she disappeared convincingly into the role, adding she was “surprising” and “gaunt, almost unrecognizable.”

Mostly she was followed by the tabloids for her troubled personal life, including several accounts of domestic abuse by boyfriends. She also appeared incoherent as a guest on “The Late Show With David Letterman” in 1997.

In 2005, she was once again the star of her own show, “Chasing Farrah,” a reality-style program on the channel TVLand that followed her life with cameras. It was quickly overshadowed by her diagnosis with cancer the following September. At the end of 2007, she announced plans to reunite with the videographer of “Chasing Farrah” to televise her cancer battle in another documentary, “A Wing and a Prayer.”

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/25/AR2009062501971.html?hpid=artslot

Photo: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/06/25/arts/20090625-FAWCETT_index.html

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Entertainment – June 24

“Jon & Kate” Breakup Wins Large TV Audience

If misery loves company, then reality TV couple Jon and Kate Gosselin had plenty of both Monday night when millions of viewers watched on television as the parents of eight announced they were breaking up.

Cable channel TLC, which airs reality show “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” on Tuesday said that the previous night’s episode attracted its biggest prime-time audience ever at 10.6 million total viewers with 6.5 million of those in the key 18-49 age group, a demographic sought by advertisers.

The episode aired the same day Kate Gosselin filed legal papers for divorce in the couple’s home state of Pennsylvania.

The Gosselins are famous for having twins and sextuplets, which made for a crowded house, and the show documented their family’s trials and triumphs as the kids grew up.

But their relationship had increasingly turned sour, and the Gosselins became fodder for celebrity press and paparazzi that speculated about extra-marital affairs in the weeks leading up to Monday night’s telecast.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/23/arts/entertainment-us-gosselins.html?_r=1

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No More ‘Celebrity’ for Patti Blagojevich

Illinois’ former first lady won’t be queen of the jungle.Patti Blagojevich on Tuesday was voted off NBC’s reality series ”I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!” She lasted 23 days in the Costa Rican jungle as a replacement for her husband, who was barred by a judge from leaving the country amid his pending corruption charges.

Patti Blagojevich said during Tuesday’s episode that her favorite moments on the series include being tossed into a river and making her way out, and speaking to her family over the Internet.

Former Gov. Rod Blagojevich has pleaded not guilty to wide-ranging federal charges, including attempting to sell an appointment to Barack Obama’s Senate seat.

Patti Blagojevich has said she did the show because of her family’s finances.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/23/arts/AP-US-Patti-Blagojevich-Reality-TV.html

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Perez Hilton Not Backing Down for Using Gay Slur

Perez Hilton isn’t apologizing for using a gay slur.The openly gay gossip blogger said in a statement Tuesday that he would continue to say things upsetting to gay and straight people alike. The comments came after the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation called for Hilton to apologize Monday for unleashing the word during an altercation at a nightclub with Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am.

”I wish none of it had happened,” said Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira. ”I can’t take it back. I did what I thought was best at the moment to stand up for myself in a nonviolent yet still assertive way. Clearly, I am not homophobic. Also, I am not nor have I ever claimed to be a spokesperson for the gay community.”

Hilton said he used the gay slur because he thought it would be the worst thing he could possibly say to will.i.am. after the musician told the blogger not to write about his band on his Web site. Police charged the band’s tour manager with assault for allegedly punching Hilton during the confrontation at a Toronto nightclub early Monday morning.

”For someone in our own community to use it to attack another person by saying that it is ‘the worst possible thing that thug would ever want to hear’ is incredibly dangerous,” said GLAAD media programs senior director Rashad Robinson. ”It legitimizes use of a slur that is often linked to violence against our community.”

Earlier this year, Hilton incited a brouhaha when he asked then Miss California USA Carrie Prejean if every state should follow Vermont in legalizing same sex marriage. Her response that ”marriage should be between a man and a woman” received more attention than the winner. Prejean, who was later dethroned, said she lost her crown because of the comment.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/24/arts/AP-US-People-Perez-Hilton.html

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Dick Cheney Working on Memoir

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has signed a book deal with a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster and said he hopes readers of all ideologies will be interested in his story. The memoir by Cheney, widely considered the most powerful vice president in history, is expected to be published in Spring 2011, a few months after President George W. Bush’s book comes out.Cheney’s work is currently untitled and will cover his long career in government, from chief of staff under President Ford to vice president under Bush, from Vietnam and Watergate to the first Gulf War and the Sept. 11 attacks.

In a telephone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, the 68-year-old Cheney noted that he had never written a book about his years in government, which dates back to the 1960s.

”I’m persuaded there are a lot of interesting stories that ought to be told,” Cheney said. ”I want my grandkids, 20 or 30 years from now, to be able to read it and understand what I did, and why I did it.”

Financial terms were not disclosed. A publishing official with knowledge of the negotiations, but not authorized to publicly discuss, said the deal was likely worth at least $2 million. Cheney’s literary representative, Washington attorney Robert Barnett, declined comment.

Known for his secrecy while in the Bush administration, Cheney has made it clear since leaving office that he was planning a memoir. He is working on the book — in longhand and on computer — at his home outside of Washington, D.C., and in collaboration with his daughter, Liz Cheney.

Books by former vice presidents rarely attract a lot of interest unless the author is likely to run for president (Richard Nixon had a best seller in the early 1960s with ”Six Crises”), or claims an expertise outside of electoral politics (Al Gore’s ”An Inconvenient Truth,” released in 2006 and the companion to the Academy Award-winning documentary about global warming).

But Cheney’s influence is like no other vice president’s and his side of the story should at least catch the attention of the general public, including the many who don’t like him. An architect and aggressive defender of Bush administration policies, from the Iraq War to the treatment of suspected terrorists, Cheney has consistently had low approval ratings, sometimes under 30 percent, but he is deeply admired by those that stand by him.

”He appeals very strongly to the conservative side of the political spectrum. That’s absolutely true,” said Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy. ”But what also fascinates me is the sheer breadth of his experience.”

The book will be published by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions imprint, founded in 2005 and headed by a longtime Cheney friend and former aide: Republican strategist Mary Matalin. Threshold has become an unofficial publishing home to the Cheney family, releasing memoirs by Cheney’s wife Lynne Cheney and by daughter Mary Cheney.

Matalin has not only reaffirmed her Washington connections, but tapped into — like few others — the current conservative market. She has published one of the most popular works of 2009, Mark Levin’s ”Liberty and Tyranny,” and recently released ”Glenn Beck’s Common Sense,” which on Tuesday ranked No. 1 on Amazon.com.

”A lot of those kinds of books were selling well before, but they’ve certainly been enhanced by this environment, where conservatives feel a certain urgency; the future of the party feels uncertain,” Matalin said. ”Cheney’s book may play into that — it can’t not, I think. But it will also be about the policies that played out under that philosophy of government, over almost half a century.”

Cheney said his book will reflect his conservative outlook, but that he has no plans to write ”a screed” and sees no reason why liberals shouldn’t want to read it, ”because it covers some of very interesting and important events in our recent history.

”I would hope it has an appeal to anyone who has an interest in these developments,” Cheney said.

Interest in Cheney can be measured by how many books have been written about him. It is a vast, diverse and mostly unflattering library, from parodies such as ”Dick Cheney’s Diary” and ”Duck! The Dick Cheney Survival Bible” to Barton Gellman’s investigative ”Angler,” in which Cheney is portrayed as a virtual law unto himself in the Bush administration.

Cheney said Tuesday that he was aware ”there have been quite a few (books) about me as vice president,” and added, ”A couple of them I have looked at,” mentioning Stephen Hayes’ sympathetic ”Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President,” a 2007 release written with his cooperation.

Cheney said that he has a ”stack of books” by his bedside, accumulated while he was vice president, and ”wanted to read at least some of them.” Asked if he might have a look at the Gellman book, or another critical take, Cheney said, ”I expect I would.”

He has made sharp comments over the past few months, not just about the Obama administration, but about former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who often differed with Cheney when they served under George W. Bush. But when discussing his book Tuesday, Cheney said, ”In terms of carrying grudges or trying to settle grudges, that’s not my purpose. If it had been, I wouldn’t have lasted very long in politics.”

”He knows he’s called Darth Vader,” said Simon & Schuster’s Carolyn Reidy. ”He’s aware of how he’s been portrayed. But I didn’t feel any defensiveness when I met with him. I remember thinking, `I can see why four presidents gave him very responsible jobs in their administrations.”’

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/23/arts/AP-US-Books-Cheney.html

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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Megan Fox and Shia LaBeouf escape destructive calamity caused by robots in “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”

The creative people behind the cretinous “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” the second blockbuster inspired by the popular Hasbro toys, have segmented their demographic into four discrete categories:

1. Young teenage boys who still play with Transformer toys (or keep them under the bed).

2. Older teenage boys who identify with the professional doofus Shia LaBeouf.

3. Somewhat older teenage boys who would like to play with the professional hottie Megan Fox.

4. Boys of all ages who think it would be cool to go to war and run around the desert shooting guns.

Of course, viewers can embrace several categories at once; say, those who collect toys and liked Mr. LaBeouf in the last “Indiana Jones” movie. Or those who fantasize about having sex with Ms. Fox while shooting guns, a vision that distills the auteurist ambitions and popular appeal of the movie’s director, Michael Bay.

And make no mistake: Mr. Bay is an auteur. His signature adorns every image in his movies, as conspicuously as that of Lars von Trier, and every single one is inscribed with a specific worldview and moral sensibility. Mr. Bay’s subject — overwhelming violent conquest — is as blatant and consistent as his cluttered mise-en-scène. His images, particularly during the frequent action sequences, can be difficult to visually track, but they are also consistently disjointed. (And proudly self-referential: the only director he overtly cites is himself, with a shot of the poster for his movie “Bad Boys II.”) The French filmmaker Jacques Rivette once described an auteur as someone who speaks in the first person. Mr. Bay prefers to shout.

The shouting here commences just as Sam Witwicky (Mr. LaBeouf) heads off to college having ridden shotgun on a battle royal between extraterrestrials in the first flick. While fighting over the fate of the planet, the heroic Autobots and the villainous Decepticons hang out on Earth disguised as machines with cute nicknames, mostly fast cars, big rigs and military planes. The Autobot leader, Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen), usually rolls as a Peterbilt truck tricked out with shiny chrome and red painted flames, while the car parked in Sam’s family garage, a screaming if now voiceless yellow 2010 Camaro, goes by Bumblebee. Every so often, the aliens convert to their true shapes, their articulated parts opening up like metallic origami.

Given Mr. Bay’s predilection for action over introspection, it’s no surprise that he plucks Sam out of school right after he cracks his first textbook. Along with his unlikely girlfriend, Mikaela (Ms. Fox), Sam heads off to an adventure that reunites him with many of the first movie’s characters, including an embarrassing John Turturro as Simmons, who provides some wincingly unfunny comic relief, and some military beefcake in the hardbody forms of Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson. Also back, if not for long, are the Autobots Ratchet (a Hummer H2) and Ironhide (a GMC TopKick pickup), which have suffered a fate more terminal, at least to the brand, than any meted out by the Decepticons: General Motors has sold Hummer and discontinued the TopKick.

There’s a serious disconnect in the movie between the image of power that those GM brands are meant to convey and the bankrupt car industry they now signify. That disconnect only deepens with the introduction of two new Autobot characters, the illiterate, bickering twins Skids (Tom Kenny) and Mudflap (Reno Wilson), both of which take the shape of Chevrolet concept cars. The characters have been given conspicuously cartoonish, so-called black voices that indicate that minstrelsy remains as much in fashion in Hollywood as when, well, Jar Jar Binks was set loose by George Lucas. For what it’s worth, the script, by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, also includes a crack about Simmons, who’s coded as Jewish, and his “pubic-fro head.”

You’re not meant to take that seriously, of course, just like there’s nothing to the reference to President Obama being whisked out of danger instead of standing tall like Optimus Prime and the rest of the robotic heroes. But that’s the perverse genius of Michael Bay. Despite the tediousness of his stories and inanity of his visual ideas, he always manages to keep you laughing and shaking your head in disbelief at the outlandishness of his cinematic spectacles, with their orange explosions, armament fetishism and even their noxious stereotypes. The man just wears you out and wears you down, so much so that it’s easy to pretend that you’re not ingesting 2 hours and 30 minutes of warmongering along with all that dumb fun.

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Bloodless violence.

TRANSFORMERS

Revenge of the Fallen

Opens on Wednesday nationwide.

Directed by Michael Bay; written by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, based on Hasbro’s Transformers action figures; director of photography, Ben Seresin; edited by Roger Barton, Paul Rubell, Joel Negron and Thomas Muldoon; music by Steve Jablonsky; production designer, Nigel Phelps; visual effects and animation by Industrial Light & Magic; produced by Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Ian Bryce; released by DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

WITH: Shia LaBeouf (Sam Witwicky), Megan Fox (Mikaela Banes), Josh Duhamel (Major Lennox), Tyrese Gibson (U.S.A.F. Master Sgt. Epps), John Turturro (Simmons), Kevin Dunn (Ron Witwicky), Julie White (Judy Witwicky) and John Benjamin Hickey (Galloway).

WITH THE VOICES OF: Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime), Hugo Weaving (Megatron), Tom Kenny (Wheelie; Skids), Reno Wilson (Mudflap) and Tony Todd (the Fallen).

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Full article and photo: http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/movies/24transform.html?hpw

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Entertainment – June 23

Peas Manager Charged In Perez Hilton Fight

Toronto police have charged the manager of chart-topping hip-hop band the Black Eyed Peas with assault after a confrontation with celebrity blogger Perez Hilton at Sunday’s MuchMusic Video Awards.

Liborio Molina, 36, was ordered to appear at Old City Hall in Toronto on August 5 to answer the assault charge.

Hilton first alerted the police via Twitter that he had apparently been involved in an altercation with the Black Eyed Peas entourage at an awards show afterparty during the early hours of Monday morning.

“I’m in shock. I need the police ASAP. Please come to the Soho Metropolitan Hotel now. Please,” Hilton tweeted at around 3 a.m., according to local media reports.

Hilton’s next message alleged that he had been assaulted by will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas and his security guards. “I am bleeding. Please, I need to file a police report. No joke,” he added.

Will.i.am reportedly created his own Twitter account to deny Hilton’s story.

Hilton was a presenter at the MuchMusic Video Awards, and Black Eyed Peas performed and picked up an award for best international video group for their hit “Boom Boom Pow,” which has spent 11th weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/22/arts/entertainment-us-perezhilton.html

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Unseen Dali Drawings to Be Shown in Buffalo

Fifteen drawings Salvador Dali made for a doctor who treated him are going on exhibit for the first time in Buffalo.

The University at Buffalo’s Anderson Gallery plans to display the works of the Spanish surrealist for two months this summer.

The university says in a release that the artist gave the late dermatologist Edmund Klein the personalized drawings as payment for treatment over nearly a decade, beginning in 1972.

The drawings were made on pages from sketchpads, art books and a paper Klein had written. Some depict angels and bear dedications to the doctor.

Klein and his family stored the drawings in a bank vault. His widow, Martha, revealed their existence last summer. She says she wants to sell them.

Klein died in 1999, a decade after Dali.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/22/arts/AP-US-Doctors-Dali-Collection.html?_r=1

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Ed McMahon, America’s Top Second Banana, Dies

Ed McMahon with Johnny Carson on the set of “The Tonight Show.”

Ed McMahon, who for nearly 30 years was Johnny Carson’s affable second banana on “The Tonight Show,” introducing it with his ringing trademark call, “Heeeere’s Johnny!,” died early Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 86.

His publicist, Howard Bragman, told NBC that Mr. McMahon died at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center surrounded by his family. Mr. Bragman did not give a cause of death, saying only that Mr. McMahon had a “multitude of health problems the last few months.”

A person close to Mr. McMahon, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to release information, said Mr. McMahon had bone cancer, among other ailments, The Associated Press reported. In February he had been hospitalized with pneumonia, Mr. Bragman told CNN.

With his broad, genial, regular-guy features, Mr. McMahon had the face of someone you would buy a used car from. Indeed, for decades he was one of television’s most ubiquitous pitchmen, selling everything from boats to beer. He also took a few acting roles and in later years was the host of the television talent show “Star Search” and wrote some popular books, includinghis memoirs.

But it was in the role of the faithful Tonto to Carson’s wry Lone Ranger that Mr. McMahon made his sideman’s mark. After he rolled out his introduction like a red carpet for the boss, and after Carson delivered his nightly monologue, Mr. McMahon, in jacket and tie, would take his seat on the couch beside the host’s desk, chat and banter with Carson a bit before the guests came on and almost invariably guffaw at his jokes, even when he was the butt of them. When the guests did arrive, he would slide over to make room and rarely interrupt.

The work paid handsomely — some reports said $5 million a year — and it made Mr. McMahon a familiar face, and voice, in millions of households. “The Tonight Show” became the country’s most popular late-night television diversion, and the “Heeeere’s Johnny” introduction became a national catchphrase.

“I laugh for an hour and then go home,” Mr. McMahon once said. “I’ve got the world’s greatest job.”

Off camera he and Carson were friends and occasional drinking buddies, although Mr. McMahon noted that Carson, who died in 2005, was not terribly social. “He doesn’t give friendship easily or need it,” he said. “He packs a tight suitcase.”

Mr. McMahon rarely ran the risk of upstaging Carson. “To me, he’s the star and I’m on the sidelines, just nudging him a bit,” he said. But early in their association he slipped up.

It happened one night when Carson was telling the audience about a study concluding that mosquitoes preferred to bite “warm-blooded, passionate people.” Before Carson could deliver his punch line, Mr. McMahon slapped his own arm, as if crushing a mosquito. The audience roared. Carson coolly produced a giant can of insect spray from under his desk and said, glaring at Mr. McMahon, “I guess I won’t be needing this prop, will I?”

It was a rare flare-up in an association that began in the late 1950s, when Carson was the host of the ABC comedy quiz show “Do You Trust Your Wife?” and Mr. McMahon was hired to announce the show and read the commercials. (The title was later changed to “Who Do You Trust?”) In 1962, when Carson moved to “The Tonight Show,” replacing Jack Paar, he took Mr. McMahon with him.

Mr. McMahon warmed up the studio audience, read commercials and served as Carson’s straight man until Carson left the show in 1992. Though Mr. McMahon sometimes projected the image of an amiable lush and got laughs for it, the cup that was always before him on “The Tonight Show” held only iced tea, he said. Years later, he said he had missed only three tapings in 30 years, because of colds or the flu.

Edward Leo Peter McMahon Jr. was born in Detroit on March 6, 1923. His father, a vaudevillian, had to move a lot to find work, and young Ed had attended 15 high schools by the time he was a senior. Edward Sr.’s career was so erratic that one year, awash in money, the McMahons lived in the Mark Hopkins hotel, atop Nob Hill in San Francisco; another year, flat broke, they existed in a cold-water flat in Bayonne, N.J.

As a boy in Bayonne, Mr. McMahon recalled, he dreamed of becoming an entertainer and did imitations of stars, using a flashlight as his microphone and his dog, Valiant Prince, as his audience. He shined shoes, sold newspapers, dug ditches, sold peanuts, worked as an usher, labored on a construction gang and sold stainless-steel cookware door to door.

At his request he spent his last high school years in Lowell, Mass., where his grandmother lived. By the time he was 18 he had been a traveling bingo announcer in New England and had sold a gadget called the Morris Metric Slicer to tourists on the Atlantic City Boardwalk and in Times Square. He also took elocution lessons at Emerson College in Boston.

Mr. McMahon enlisted in the Marine Corps toward the end of World War II and became a fighter pilot, but did not see combat. After his discharge he attended the Catholic University of America in Washington, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1949. He then landed a job at a Philadelphia radio station and began appearing on television as, among other things, a clown and the host of a cooking show.

But his budding television career was interrupted when he was recalled into military service during the Korean War. He flew 85 combat missions in 15 months, winning six Air Medals, and remained active in the Marine Corps Reserve afterward.

Returning from the war, he resumed his television work in Philadelphia while traveling to New York hoping to break into network television. He also pursued a separate career as a businessman. By the time he made it as an announcer, he had acquired a stationery company, a company that made knickknacks, two television and film companies and a talent agency. He also speculated in real estate.

Even when he got his big break with Carson, he never let up on his business activities. Carson would tweak him about them on “The Tonight Show,” suggesting that after that night’s show was over, Mr. McMahon would be selling jams and jellies in the elevator.

Over the years Mr. McMahon became a paid spokesman for many products and companies, including Budweiser beer, Alpo dog food, Chris-Craft boats, Texas Instruments, Breck shampoo, Sara Lee baked goods and Mercedes-Benz. His name and photograph were fixtures on the form letters mailed by American Family Publishers announcing sweepstakes winners. He marketed his own brand of liquor, McMahon Perfect Vodka. Most recently, he and the rapper MC Hammer promoted a gold-buying business called Cash4Gold.

And for more than 40 years, Mr. McMahon appeared with Jerry Lewis on Mr. Lewis’s Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon over Labor Day Weekend. He did some acting as well. Among the movies he appeared in were “The Incident” (1967), in which he played a passenger brutalized by young thugs on a New York subway train; “Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off” (1973); and “Fun With Dick and Jane” (1977).

After leaving “The Tonight Show,” Mr. McMahon appeared in summer stock and kept his hand in television. He was the host of the talent show “Star Search”; he joined Dick Clark on “TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes”; he was Tom Arnold’s sidekick on the short-lived sitcom “The Tom Show.” For the USA Radio Network, he broadcast “Ed McMahon’s Lifestyles Live” weekly from his home.

There were books, too, most recently the best-selling “Here’s Johnny! My Memories of Johnny Carson, the Tonight Show, and 46 Years of Friendship” (2005). Others were “For Laughing Out Loud: My Life and Good Times” (1998), written with David Fisher; “Ed McMahon’s Barside Companion” (1969); and “Here’s Ed, or How to Be a Second Banana, From Midway to Midnight” (1976).

Despite his many business ventures, Mr. McMahon encountered hard times in his last years. He was forced to sell his Beverly Hills mansion last year after falling behind in payments on $4.8 million in mortgages, and a former lawyer sued him for nonpayment of fees.

Mr. McMahon blamed two divorces, bad money management and bad investments for his woes. “I made a lot of money, but you can spend a lot of money,” he said by way of explanation.

He was plagued by health problems as well, undergoing a series of operations after breaking his neck in a fall in 2007.

Mr. McMahon married Alyce Ferrell during World War II. They were divorced in 1976. They had four children, Claudia, Michael, Linda and Jeffrey. His second marriage, to Victoria Valentine, in 1976, ended in divorce in 1989. They adopted a daughter, Katherine Mary McMahon. Mr. McMahon and his third wife, Pam Hurn, a fashion designer, were married in 1992.

Mr. McMahon regarded his friendship with Johnny Carson as a marriage of sorts. “Most comic teams are not good friends or even friends at all,” he wrote in “Here’s Johnny.” “Laurel and Hardy didn’t hang out together, Abbott and Costello weren’t best of friends.” But, he added, “Johnny and I were the happy exception.”

”For 40 years Johnny and I were as close as two nonmarried people can be,” he wrote. “And if he heard me say that, he might say, ‘Ed, I always felt you were my insignificant other.’ “

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/arts/television/24mcmahon.html?hp

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Entertainment – June 22

In this image released by Tony Hawk, professional skateboarder Tony Hawk skateboards in the hall at the White House as part of a Father’s Day celebration, Friday, June 19, 2009 in Washington.

Hey, kids, don’t try this at home. Professional skateboarder Tony Hawk on Friday took a brief ride at the White House as part of a Father’s Day celebration.

Hawk, 41, skated in the grand foyer and the nearby Old Executive Office Building, with the permission of White House officials.

The skateboarding icon, also known for his popular brand of skateboarding video games, posted photos to his Web site and Twitter page.

One photo shows Hawk on his skateboard with his hands in the air in what appears to be a hallway.

“…and here is my exit,” he wrote in a message on Twitter, which linked to a picture of him skating. “Supposed to return at noon for the First Fathers event if they let me back in.”

Hawk posted other insights from his Washington visit on his Twitter page, telling fans about eating Frosted Flakes cereal inside the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. In another tweet, he says “back at White House, Tweeting live from the Diplomatic Room. Unbelievable.”

Hawk joined other dads, athletes and celebrities at a Father’s Day forum hosted by President Barack Obama. Celebrity chef Bobby Flay helped man the barbecue grills for a White House picnic for the attendees, which included NBA players Dwyane Wade of the Miami Heat and Etan Thomas of the Washington Wizards.

“The Prez addressing all of us fathers before we split up to visit DC charities,” Hawk tweeted. “D Wade & Etan T make me feel short.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/19/AR2009061902289.html

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Chris Brown Pleads Guilty to Assault

Rihanna and Chris Brown attend a pre-Grammy party on Feb. 7, 2009.

Chris Brown pleaded guilty Monday to assaulting Rihanna and the two were ordered to stay away from each other, in a deal that keeps the singer out of prison but requires him to clean up graffiti or roadside trash.

Brown’s plea to a felony charge will subject him to substantial scrutiny by probation officials, and the judge’s order puts the kibosh on any short-term prospects for reconciliation with his pop diva girlfriend as well.

The guilty plea came before a preliminary hearing was scheduled to start. The hearing had been billed for weeks as a public face-off between the pair, with Rihanna set to testify against her one-time boyfriend.

Instead, Brown averted the potentially damaging meeting by entering a plea that will subject him to probation for the next five years as well as force him to perform six months of community service.

Mark Geragos, Brown’s lawyer, said the plea represented the singer taking responsibility for his actions – which included beating, choking and biting Rihanna during a fight early Feb. 8, according to police.

After Brown left the courtroom, Rihanna entered and was addressed by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Patricia Schnegg, who explained to the Barbados-born singer that she had issued a stay-away order.

Rihanna had not been seeking such an order, but the judge imposed one anyway. The order requires that Brown and Rihanna stay at least 50 yards from each, except at industry events when the distance is reduced to 10 yards.

The judge also told Rihanna it’s not a one-way order – and that she, too, shouldn’t get any closer to Brown than the order allows.

“This is a kid who’s never been in trouble before,” Geragos said after the hearing. “He embraces this as chance to get the message out that domestic violence will not be tolerated. He wants to get his life back on track.”

Brown will be formally sentenced on Aug. 5.

Schnegg accepted Brown’s plea, but expressed some concerns because Brown is not a California resident. She said Brown likely will be allowed to do his service in his home state of Virginia, but she didn’t want him to spend his time at churches or community centers.

Instead, Schnegg ordered Brown to get his hands dirty by doing work equivalent to what he would do in California – clean up grafitti or roadside trash.

She also said he’ll have to return to California every three months and attend domestic violence counseling.

Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, said the terms were in line with what others receive when they are charged with similar crimes and have no prior criminal history.

Brown spoke softly throughout the hearing as he waived his rights and told the judge he understood the gravity of his plea.

“I think it’s commendable you took responsibility for your conduct,” Schnegg told Brown.

She said she hoped “the terms and conditions of your probation will have some meaning.”

Rihanna spoke briefly, too, telling Schnegg she understood the terms of the stay-away order and that after Brown’s sentencing she might ask for its terms to be loosened.

Rihanna, 21, recorded one of 2007′s most popular songs with “Umbrella” and has numerous other hits. Her looks have made her a cover girl for magazines, as well as a pitchwoman for Cover Girl cosmetics.

The deal provides an end to a case that sparked intense media interest and severe backlash against Brown. Sponsors and radio stations dropped him, and the singer had to cancel several high-profile appearances, including a performance at the Grammys.

The singer once known for his squeaky-clean image now has a substantial blemish on his record. Brown, 20, rose to fame after the 2005 hit “Run It!” He was nominated for a Grammy for “No Air” with Jordin Sparks and named Billboard’s top artist in 2008.

Intense media coverage led to Rihanna being identified as Brown’s victim mere hours after the attack. Within weeks, a photo of the singer and model’s bruised and battered face was posted on celebrity gossip site TMZ.

The posting sparked an investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department into whether one of its own officers leaked the photo to the Web site. Brown’s attorney unsuccessfully argued the leak hurt Brown and that he should be granted access to LAPD’s investigative files.

Brown recently proclaimed in a video posted to YouTube that he was “not a monster.”

Even after Monday’s hearing, lawyers for Brown and Rihanna refused to discuss the status of the pair’s relationship.

Brown was arrested hours after police say he hit and threatened Rihanna after leaving a pre-Grammy party in Los Angeles. He was later charged with felony assault likely to produce great bodily harm and making criminal threats.

If convicted, the singer faced sentences ranging up to nearly five years in prison.

After an inital retreat from the public eye, both musicians have gradually appeared in public more frequently. Lately they have been photographed separately, including at a National Basketball Association finals game between the Orlando Magic and Los Angeles Lakers.

But neither has been able to shake the stigma of the court case and return to their usual jobs – making music.

The logistics of Brown’s sentence may make it difficult to get back to his job.

“It amounts to a very sweaty house arrest,” said Loyola University Law School Professor Stan Goldman, who was in the courtroom. “You have to have the discipline to show up several times a week. How many times will this interfere with a record date or an appearance?”

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/22/AR2009062200452.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Photo: http://personals.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/03/09/2009-03-09_chris_brown_and_rihanna_their_past_fight.html

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White House Dog Photographed, Remains Cute

The Obama family’s dog, Bo, a Portuguese water dog, poses on the South Lawn of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

There’s not much we can tell you about the just-released official White House portrait of First Puppy Bo Obama … except that, yes, he’s still adorable, and still treating his office with the dignity and respect it deserves. (That dignity and respect, of course, includes his penchant for munching on jackets and microphones belonging to journalists.)

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Full article and photo: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/06/19/white_house_dog_photographed_r.html?wprss=44

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Angelina gets a Foxy mini-me

The similarities – the hair, the wardrobe, even the body art – are too close for comfort.

Angelina Jolie, that inscrutable idol, may soon be fastening her seat belt for a “bumpy night,” if ravenous copycat Megan Fox has her way.The bumpy night, of course, alludes to Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1950 film, All About Eve, in which cunning ingenue Eve (played by Anne Baxter) imitates, and insinuates herself into the life of, her mentor – Broadway star Margo (played by a fulminating Bette Davis) – stealing her man, colleagues, friends and career.

A 23-year-old Tennessee native and model-actress, Fox’s star ascended with her 2007 role in Transformers opposite Shia LaBeouf.

She has spent her time, in the interim, studying Jolie “like she was a play or somethin’” (to quote Margo’s tireless assistant Birdie), and allegedly carrying on about the older actress’s redundancy. Jolie is 34.

This week, US magazine drew a series of visual comparisons between the two stars, under the rubric “The New Angelina?”

We see Fox dressed in identical (colour and design) couture; we see that her hair is styled in Jolie’s swept-back, mermaid fashion, and that both women bear similarly hideous tattoos across their shoulder blades.

Jolie’s, acquired first, is the infamous latitudinal and longitudinal tribute to her children’s birthplaces, admittedly a more significant, even moving bit of body art compared to the disfiguring black cross tattooed over Billy Bob Thornton’s name; her scrap of dilettante-Latin and so on.

Fox’s is a misquotation of a line in Shakespeare’s King Lear that reads: “We will all laugh at gilded butterflies.” The line is supposed to be: “And we shall laugh at the gilded butterflies.” Not to be pedantic, but given the context of the quotation (Lear is being led to jail with his doomed, beloved daughter), the error is compounded in this inky restatement, which already reads like a ridiculous new-age pep-talk.

Beautiful women, however, can do what they please. And Fox is that, and then some – her tattoo could say: “I come to pluck your Baconators harsh and crude.” Or: “John Milton writes copy for Wendy’s.” Who cares?

Inexplicable, however, is the perpetual desire dumb, gorgeous women express to be considered intelligent. Isn’t that a little greedy? People will faint in shock if these women speak in full sentences, so why do they pretend to read books and so on? Marilyn Monroe, also tattooed clownishly as a sad, pop cartoon on Fox’s arm, actually suffered the company of the dour, cruel (hack) Arthur Miller in order to seem smart.

Jolie’s latest gambit is, typically, of the contrary: While appearing in public, she never speaks. Or smiles, or moves a single facial muscle, unless performing at an event honouring one of her boyfriend’s or her own increasingly wretched films.

What happened to the woman who never stopped raving about herself, her proclivities and practices, and her hatred of her bewildered old father, actor Jon Voight, who merely told the press, at some point in Jolie’s 10-year-long seduction of the media, that he was concerned about her mental health (surely seeing his daughter neck with his son upset Voight to some extent?). She is starting to look glassy-eyed, stiff and vaguely sinister, like one of the wax figures Tussaud museums keep in a poorly ventilated basement.

Fox, on the other hand, looks alive, vibrantly so – is it her steady diet of Angelina Jolie?

In the new issue of Maxim, Fox far surpassed Jolie in the Hot 100 list; recently, Paramount revealed that she was the first choice to replace Jolie in the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider series.

Yet Fox declined the part, claiming she did not want to be thought of as an imitator, and says of Jolie: “I’m actually frightened of her. I haven’t had the opportunity to meet her and I try to avoid that because I’m afraid of her. She’s a powerful human being, she could eat me alive.”

Goth goddess of blood and death, where is thy sting? Why has Jolie not slapped this irritating insect from her skin?

And, for that matter, why is she so ominously quiet about everything? In spite of her and her boyfriend’s recent, large charitable donation to a Missouri hospital (in Brad Pitt’s hometown of Springfield), she is never seen being indulged by the United Nations or breathing into the mouths of starving children any more.

She actually laughed at the crumpled-paper-bag-faced Jennifer Aniston’s wretched performance at the Oscars, instead of glowing and tightening her cobra-grip on The Housekeeper Next Door’s former husband.

And, instead of fighting Fox by doing a more steamy movie, she made The Changeling . The Changeling , in which her voice is pitched at an adenoidal whine throughout; in which a cloche hat looks about to smother her tiny, starved pinhead.

Worried? I can’t sleep.

I hope Jolie wakes up and secures the rights to All About Eve , and asks Fox to star in it with her.

Making the film jump-started Bette Davis’s flagging career and love life: Margo is a powerful role, and has so much to say, so stylishly, about women’s lives and how, on occasion, even the most perfect of people – and Fox is right, Jolie could eat her alive – may find themselves face-to-face with, in Davis’s exact and exacting words, “Eve. Eve Eve Eve. Little Miss Evil.”

Question: And who will play Birdie? Or Bill? Or Addison? Phoebe? Tell me.

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Full article and photos: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/angelina-gets-a-foxy-mini-me/article1192354/

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Entertainment – June 21

FBI Tried in Vain to Stop ‘Deep Throat’ Film

When the FBI investigated the landmark 1972 porno movie ”Deep Throat,” the case touched the highest levels of the FBI, even its second-in-command W. Mark Felt, the shadowy Watergate informant whose ”Deep Throat” alias was taken from the movie’s title.

W. Mark Felt in 1980 in Washington after being fined for approving illegal break-ins in an F.B.I. push against radicals. Seven months later, he was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan.

The FBI documents newly released to The Associated Press reveal the bureau’s sprawling and ultimately vain attempt to stop the spread of a movie some saw as the victory of a cultural and sexual revolution and others saw as simply decadent.

Agents seized copies of the movie, had negatives analyzed in labs and interviewed everyone from actors and producers to messengers who delivered reels to theaters.

”Today we can’t imagine authorities at any level of government — local, state or federal — being involved in obscenity prosecutions of this kind,” said Mark Weiner, a constitutional law professor and legal historian at Rutgers-Newark School of Law. ”The story of ‘Deep Throat’ is the story of the last gasp of the forces lined up against the cultural and sexual revolution and it is the advent of the entry of pornography into the mainstream.”

The papers are among 498 pages from the FBI file on Gerard Damiano, who directed the movie and died in October. Released this month following a Freedom of Information Act request by the AP, they are just a glimpse into Damiano’s roughly 4,800-page file. More than 1,000 additional pages were withheld under FOIA exemptions and because they duplicated other material; the balance of the file has not yet been reviewed and released.

Many parts of the released files are whited out and the FBI’s ultimate targets are unclear, but the seriousness with which the agency treated the investigation is unquestionable.

The file includes memos between the FBI’s top men — L. Patrick Gray, William Ruckelshaus and Clarence Kelley, successive heads of the agency after J. Edgar Hoover — and field offices so widespread, it seemed nearly all of the country’s biggest cities were involved.

On various entries in the file, a checklist of top FBI brass appears in the top right corner, with initials next to some names. One of those listed is W. Mark Felt, the FBI second-in-command whose ”Deep Throat” alias as a Watergate informant came from the movie’s title. None of the markings indicate he read any of the materials on the movie whose name became synonymous with his role in bringing down Richard Nixon’s presidency. However, former FBI agents interviewed by the AP after the documents were released said Felt almost certainly would have been aware of the huge investigation.

Felt got the double-entendre nickname because he leaked crucial information about Nixon administration corruption on ”deep background” to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. His identity remained a secret until 2005. He died in December.

While much of the probe centered in New York, where many involved in the film lived, and Miami, where it was largely shot, agents from Honolulu to Detroit were involved.

Aside from investigative records tracking subpoenas, interviews, screenings and shipments of the film, the Damiano file includes various FBI agents’ play-by-play accounts of the movie’s plot, and the specific role of Damiano in the agency’s investigation.

The FBI notes Damiano had been ”somewhat cooperative,” On Aug. 7, 1973, an assistant U.S. attorney general writes to Kelley, saying Damiano is being considered for immunity. The memo doesn’t specify the crime, though mentioned throughout the file is the charge of interstate transportation of obscene material.

Among the areas of the case file whited out is an interview with the star of the film, who at the time went by the name Linda Lovelace.

”Deep Throat” achieved fame unlike any pornographic film in history and become the most widely known adult film to reach a general audience. It was hugely profitable — made for about $25,000 and amassing hundreds of millions in receipts — and became a cultural buzzword.

Authorities have long said the movie was made with mafia money — and the FBI has linked the mob with porn over the years — but the file includes no mention of mob links.

Officials at every level of government tried to stop screenings and obscenity trials continued for years. But in the end, experts say, it represents the end of an era in which the government sought to stop the changing cultural tides.

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, said the oddity of the scope of the investigation into ”Deep Throat” is a reflection of very different times.

”Certainly today, with our broadly socially less restrictive attitude to most pornography and to sex more broadly it may seem odd that the government was spending so much effort on something like this,” he said. ”But attitudes back then were much different.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/20/arts/AP-US-FBI-Deep-Throat.html?_r=1

Photo (1): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Throat_(film)

Photo (2): http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/washington/19felt.html

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An Englishman Returns to the Gallic Boudoir

Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend in Stephen Frears’s“Chéri’,” adapted by Christopher Hampton from a Colette novel.

“I’VE spent my life being cheeky,” said Stephen Frears, the versatile director of, among other films, “My Beautiful Laundrette”“The Grifters,” “High Fidelity” and “The Queen.” Mr. Frears, speaking by telephone from his London home, was responding to the suggestion that there might be, let’s say, a certain effrontery involved in the creation of his most recent picture, “Chéri” (opening Friday). Because it seems, to say the least, a mite risky for a couple of British chaps, Mr. Frears and the screenwriter, Christopher Hampton, to tackle a tale of such profound, irredeemable Frenchness as Colette’s 1920 novel “Chéri” — and with an entirely non-French cast besides.

It helps, of course, that Mr. Hampton is a Francophile of some distinction; a French play he translated, Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage,” recently won the Tony Award for best drama. And it helps too that, as Mr. Frears noted, “we’ve all worked together before” — “we” meaning himself, Mr. Hampton and the star of “Chéri,” Michelle Pfeiffer, who 21 years ago collaborated on another Anglophone invasion of French territory, “Dangerous Liaisons.”

The great success of that film, which was based on Mr. Hampton’s stage adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’s classic 1782 novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” and which was rewarded with seven Oscar nominations (three wins), didn’t, however, make “Chéri” a less tough nut to crack. “Chéri,” Mr. Hampton said, “turned out to be a false friend.” He added, “I thought this was going to be easy, and it wound up being one of the most difficult jobs I’ve ever had.”

Colette’s novel is a short and apparently simple chronicle of a love affair between a 49-year-old courtesan, Léa de Lonval (Ms. Pfeiffer), and a handsome, vain and rather frivolous young man named Frederick Peloux (Rupert Friend), whom she prefers to call Chéri: the erratic course of their explicitly casual and seemingly danger-free liaison is pretty much the whole story.

“Actually,” Mr. Hampton said, “ ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ was much easier, because that plot has more complexity, more drive. In ‘Chéri’ everything important is in little turns of phrase, tiny shifts of attitude.”

That’s one problem. Another is that in this story “you’re always doing two things at once,” Mr. Frears said. “You’re making a sort of silly, frothy piece of nonsense, and you’re making a sad story underneath. At any point the surface and what’s underneath can be totally contradictory. You have to be very, very attentive to the tone, so you can see both things at the same moment.”

And the surface in this case is especially dazzling, since “Chéri” is set in the era known as La Belle Époque, between the 1890s and the beginning of the First World War, a period distinguished by a taste for luxury and, at least among the class to which this story’s characters belong (or pretend to belong), a notable lack of interest in the weightier matters that would eventually transform their opulent playground into a killing field.

The tension between the surface and what’s underneath is also central to the very slender plot of “Chéri,” for this is the love story of two determinedly superficial people: people who don’t want love, who don’t believe in it, who even fear it as a mortal threat to the integrity of their elegant and meticulously constructed surfaces. Tricky stuff, this. But maybe not any more fundamentally difficult for a couple of cheeky British gentlemen to convey on screen than it would be for the worldly French.

Mr. Hampton cited a 1950 French film of “Chéri,” on which Colette herself had worked. “It wasn’t good at all,” he said. “Léa wasn’t memorable, and Chéri looked about 40 years old.” (For the record, Léa was played by Marcelle Chantal, who is indeed long forgotten, and the movie’s Chéri, Jean Desailly, was actually 30.) And although neither Mr. Hampton nor Mr. Frears mentioned it, Hollywood’s most celebrated Colette adaptation, Vincente Minnelli’s “Gigi” (1958), is proof that you can have too many Frenchmen in a movie like this: Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan are fine, but there is also, alas, Maurice Chevalier, singing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” with unseemly Gallic smarm.

That awful ooh-la-la tone is nowhere in Colette, whose signal virtue as a writer is her (sometimes chilly) objectivity. It’s a quality Mr. Frears prizes too. “Part of the job of being a film director,” he said, “is to be quite objective about things, even while you’re deeply involved in them.” He is a filmmaker who has over the years developed a mixture of passion and hardheaded practicality that, in a way, makes him an ideal interpreter of this odd story about the war between love and survival. (In the characters’ minds anyway.)

Mr. Frears, who just turned 68, is notably reluctant to generalize about his worldview or his artistic personality — “Far too much of that going around,” he said — and he’s happiest, it seems, thinking of himself simply as a working director, someone who’s good at solving the problems of telling stories on film.

He has come to enjoy, even to revel in, the unpredictability of being a gun for hire. He spent most of his early days as a director, in the ’70s, making films for British television. “They’d send you a script and say, ‘Do you want to direct this?’ And often it would be written by one of the best writers in England.” (One was Mr. Hampton, whose “Able’s Will” Mr. Frears filmed for the BBC in 1977.) “I’ve discovered,” he said, “that in some way I’m better off sitting at home waiting for scripts to arrive.”

Besides, Mr. Hampton said, “Stephen, like me, is someone who doesn’t like to do the same thing over and over.” The director’s wildly varied filmography fully supports the idea of his restless temperament. He made his reputation with two gritty multiethnic comedy-dramas written by Hanif Kureishi, “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985) and “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid” (1987), which he followed up with the coolly sumptuous “Dangerous Liaisons.”

His résumé since then has included the blistering Oedipal noir “The Grifters” (1990), adapted by Donald E. Westlake from a novel by Jim Thompson and set in a luminously seedy Southern California; a pair of low-budget Irish comedies by Roddy Doyle, “The Snapper” (1993) and “The Van” (1996); a languorous modern western, “The Hi-Lo Country” (1998); a new television version of the nuclear cautionary tale “Fail Safe” (2000); a dark thriller about organ harvesting, “Dirty Pretty Things” (2002); a jaunty farce, set in the 1930s, about a West End nude revue, “Mrs. Henderson Presents” (2005); and a couple of bracingly intelligent docudramas about recent British politics, “The Deal” (2003) and “The Queen” (2006), both written by Peter Morgan.

This diversity of style and subject matter “just means you stay interested and you stay fresh,” Mr. Frears said. “It’s always challenging. There’s always a different part of your brain being exercised.”

The one and only constant he was willing to admit to was this: “I really direct with my ear. I can hear the conviction in the voice, hear the sort of shapes of the sentences, and I often feel that’s more revealing than what you see.”

And that’s perhaps another indication of his suitability for “Chéri,” with its “little turns of phrase” that reveal everything the characters don’t want the world to see too clearly. Mr. Frears may resist generalizations about his work, even delight in frustrating critics and academics who search for Frearsian themes to hang their analyses on. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, with an unmistakable lack of sincerity. “Poor lambs.” But it’s probably worth noting that a fair number of his best films — “The Grifters,” “The Deal,” “The Queen,” certainly “Dangerous Liaisons” — are, like “Chéri,” about a kind of emotional gamesmanship, which always, of course, entails negotiating that sticky wicket of surfaces and what lies beneath.

And it may be germane too to point out that there’s some strange affinity between the courtesan’s world and that of theatrical folk like Mr. Frears and Mr. Hampton, who, like their heroine Léa, try to be objective about their passions, so they’ll be able to move on to the next, completely different and ephemeral involvement. It’s not always that easy, no matter how well you play the game.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/movies/21raff.html?hpw

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Action!

THE take on Kathryn Bigelow is that she is a great female director of muscular action movies, the kind with big guns, scenes, themes and camera movements as well as an occasional fist in the face, a knee to the groin. Sometimes, more simply, she’s called a great female director. But here’s a radical thought: She is, simply, a great filmmaker. Because while it is marginally interesting that she calls “action” and “cut” while in the possession of two X chromosomes, gender is the least remarkable thing about her kinetic filmmaking, which gets in your head even as it sends shock waves through your body.

Above left, Kathryn Bigelow with the cinemaphotographer Barry Ackroyd on the set of “The Hurt Locker.”

Her latest is “The Hurt Locker,” a film about men and war. Set in Iraq in 2004 and shot just over the border in Jordan, it centers on a three-man American bomb squad that sifts through the sand day and night disabling explosives. It was first shown at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008 (it opens Friday), where it was greeted with rapturous praise and some misapprehension. Mostly, it seems, because its extraordinary filmmaking, which transmits the sickening addiction to war as well as its horrors in largely formal terms, doesn’t come wedded to a sufficiently obvious antiwar position. One British critic went so far as to say that while the film had “excellent acting, camerawork and editing, it could pass for propaganda.”

“The Hurt Locker” doesn’t traffic in the armchair militarism of Hollywood products like “Top Gun” and “Transformers,” but neither is it an antiwar screed. It’s diagnostic, not prescriptive: it takes an analytical if visceral look at how the experience of war can change a man, how it eats into his brain so badly he ends up hooked on it. And, like all seven of Ms. Bigelow’s previous feature films, this new one is also as informed by the radical aspirations of conceptual art as it is by the techniques of classical Hollywood cinema.

She might live and sometimes shoot within driving distance of the major studios that have distributed if not financed her films. But in many respects she remains an industry outsider.

“I’ve never made a studio film,” Ms. Bigelow gently reminded me during a leisurely conversation here not long ago. Although most of her movies have been released by studios, they have been bankrolled by independent companies, which nonetheless don’t necessarily grant the autonomy any artist seeks. The experience of making “The Hurt Locker” — the “purity” of it, as she puts it — marks her return to liberating conditions under which she thrives. She hasn’t had this kind of freedom since her 1987 breakthrough, “Near Dark,” an erotically charged vampire movie made on the cheap, or her 1995 science-fiction thriller “Strange Days,” which came with some heavy protection courtesy of one of its producers: her former husband, James Cameron.

It’s hard to imagine Ms. Bigelow letting anyone push her around. She’s unfailingly gracious — and tends to speak in the second person, preferring “you” over “I” — but there’s a ferocious undercurrent there too, as might be expected. She works to put you at ease, but even her looks inspire shock and awe. Because she was early for our interview and already tucked into a booth, I didn’t realize how tall she was until we both stood up, and I watched, from a rather lower vantage, her unfurl her slender six-foot frame. It was like watching a time lapse of a growing tree. Like a lot of tall women she describes herself as shy, but she has learned to take up space.

At first that space wasn’t on screen but on a canvas. An only child, she was born in 1951 and raised in a town, San Carlos, 25 miles south of San Francisco, where she first nurtured a lifelong love of art and horses. (When we meet again her arms are flecked with bruises after a perilous ride on her mare.) She was a student painter at the Art Institute of San Francisco and later the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, where she studied with Vito Acconci and Susan Sontag. She joined a conceptual art group, appeared in the feminist movie “Born in Flames” and earned her master’s in the film division of the Columbia University School of the Arts, where she immersed herself in theories about signs and meaning and the cinematic spectacle.

“Film,” she says, “became the interchange where all these ideas were intersecting.”

As she moved between uptown and down, she also made her first film, “The Set-Up” (1978), a short in which two men (Gary Busey included) fight each other as the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky deconstruct the images in voice-over. Although she now plays down the film, it seems like a template for much of her later work, with its emphasis on men, masculinity, violence and power. A few years ago she elaborated on its themes: “The piece ends with Sylvère talking about the fact that in the 1960s you think of the enemy as outside yourself, in other words, a police officer, the government, the system, but that’s not really the case at all, fascism is very insidious, we reproduce it all the time.”

That enemy lurks in the anomie of the motorcycle biker (Willem Dafoe in his screen debut) who motors through her 1982 debut feature “The Loveless” (made with Monty Montgomery) and in the bloodstream of the young cowboy initiated into a gang of vampires in “Near Dark,” the western-horror hybrid that made her a cult favorite. It sneaks into the head of the undercover F.B.I. agent in “Point Break” (1991) who’s philosophically seduced by the koan-spouting leader of some bank-robbing surfers. And it slips into the rigid body of a devout 19th-century immigrant wife in “The Weight of Water” (2000), who, after sharing a chaste bed with another woman, responds to her awakened sexual desire with a murderous swing of an ax.

Much as she does in her far-out 1990 feminist freak-out “Blue Steel,” about a female cop (Jamie Lee Curtis) literally seduced by a male killer who fondles her gun with lethal results, Ms. Bigelow isn’t just playing with genre. She’s having her unruly way with gender, sometimes by inverting traditional masculine and feminine roles, as in “Strange Days,” a future shock love story that also explores voyeurism and the pleasures of violent spectacle. Shot in a Los Angeles still hurting from its 1992 civil unrest, it features Angela Bassett (whose bare, sculptured arms outmuscle those of Michelle Obama) rescuing a hapless white man (Ralph Fiennes) who, despite being the narrative’s center, never becomes its hero.

“Strange Days” originated with Mr. Cameron, who wrote the first draft before handing it over to her. With Jay Cocks, she finished the script and made the film her own. (She and Mr. Cameron divorced in 1991; she’s now in a relationship she prefers to keep private.) It was poorly released by its studio, which seemed unsure of how to sell it (kinky sex? millennial meltdown?), and it flopped. “The Weight of Water,” a trickily plotted drama that toggles between two bad marriages in separate time periods, and notably her only movie to touch on matrimonial life, followed and disappeared on impact. Two years later, in 2002, she returned to blockbuster form with “K-19: The Widowmaker,” an unnerving, very human thriller about the first Soviet nuclear submarine. It too died a quick box-office death.

She had to scale back for the next one. “I definitely wanted to have full creative control and final cut,” she says of “The Hurt Locker,” which was written by Mark Boal and based on his experience working as an embedded journalist in Iraq. She wanted up-and-coming actors who weren’t so famous that their characters couldn’t die, even if their names wouldn’t mean much in the ads. She also wanted to shoot in the Middle East. Her security detail talked her out of filming in Iraq, though she inched close to the border. Given her demands and the scant interest that American audiences have expressed in fiction films about the war, she looked outside the country for financing. The French company Voltage Pictures gave her money and control.

“It was a no-note experience,” she says, referring to the suggestions that movie executives like to issue — and enforce — “absolutely zero interference.” She laughs when I ask if she might become addicted to the freedom, much as the bomb tech played by Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker” becomes hopped up on war. It’s a ludicrous comparison, granted. But moviemaking is littered with broken spirits, and there’s something improbable about the longevity of her career in the mainstream. Partly because, yes, she’s working in an sexist field where even female studio chiefs are loath to hire female directors, but also because of the stubborn persistence of her artistic vision and intellectualism. She’s still investigating signs and meaning, but now through genres she deconstructs and sometimes immolates.

It’s telling, then, that after she made “The Loveless” a postmodern motorcycle movie in which she stretched narrative to the limit, she started receiving scripts for high school comedies, which she quickly realized was considered a suitable subject for her gender. “It was an intersection of absolutely inappropriate sensibilities,” she said, though I would love to see what havoc she could wreak on that genre. She was living in New York in a condemned building without heat and electricity. A juvenile comedy might have paid the bills, but instead she accepted an offer from her friend, the artist John Baldessari, to teach at the California Institute of the Arts, just north of Los Angeles. Hollywood was the inevitable next step. Through the director Walter Hill, she landed a deal at a studio, but it led to nowhere.

It was at this point, she said, that she understood “if I had a prayer of shooting something that intrigued me, I was going to have to be the architect of my own fate.” She went off and made “Near Dark,” a vampire film steeped in the kind of hot, sticky, shocking violence that’s alternately exciting and appalling. It was the perfect vehicle for a director discovering that we go to movies for what they do to our bodies and not just the ideas they plant in our heads. She wants to take you on a mental journey: “To transport you to an event or a physicality or a location or an experience or an emotional odyssey that is purely experiential.” Her use of the word odyssey seems significant. I can’t imagine her sitting at home and weaving.

If anything, her refusal to make the types of movies most associated with women suggests that in American movies, at least, genre is destiny, to repurpose a familiar Freud maxim about gender. She’s steered clear of the industry ghetto to which female directors are usually consigned, bypassing the dreaded chick flick for stories and archetypes traditionally if reductively seen as the province of men. She still makes relationship movies, but the relationships evolve both through the chatter at which women are supposed to excel and the contact of bodies, often male, sometimes female, running, surfing, parachuting, living and dying out in the world. She learned from the masters — De Kooning, Peckinpah, Goya, Pasolini, Rembrandt and on and on — in order to become her own woman.

The number of male mentors and aesthetic influences seems instructive as does her seeming discomfort when I ask why she likes to make movies about men. It’s one of the few times when she searches for her words. She mentions Richard Serra, whom she’s known for years, and “Torqued Ellipses,” his curvilinear steel sculptures that weigh about 40 tons apiece and which she describes as “real statements of power.” Suddenly I’m reminded of the moment in “K-19” when the camera glides between two submarines sitting parallel on the surface of the water, a glorious image of heavy metal that is itself a statement of power. When she was painting, she says, she loved “big, gestural, visceral, raw, immediate pieces.” She starts to move her fingers, as if she were sewing.

“Nothing really struck me,” she says, of the art she first loved, “that was tight and precise and patient and careful and perhaps more introspective. Perhaps,” she laughs, “it’s just a sensibility defect.”

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Full article and photos (1) and (2): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/movies/21darg.html?hpw

Photo (3): http://my.cineplex.com/photos/752/

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Cowell admits mistakes over Boyle

Boyle became a global hit thanks to video-sharing websites

Mistakes were made in the handling of Britain’s Got Talent runner-up Susan Boyle, the show’s chief judge and creator Simon Cowell has admitted.

Writing in the Daily Mail, Cowell said that it had become “clear to me that we didn’t handle the situation with Susan as well as we could have”.

The singer, 48, from West Lothian, was taken ill in London suffering from exhaustion after the TV show.

She has since missed a number of shows on the Britain’s Got Talent live tour.

Organisers said Boyle would be taking a “rest day” on Saturday, missing a matinee and an evening performance in Nottingham, but was expected to perform shows at Wembley Arena on Monday.

Cowell, 49, said he was not in showbusiness to upset “a nice lady” like Boyle, who shot to international fame after performing I Dreamed A Dream on the ITV1 show.

“Looking back on it all, it has become clear to me that we didn’t handle the situation with Susan as well as we could have,” he said.

“Yet, to be honest, I don’t know that I could have done it any differently.”

He said that, after she sang in her first audition, he “thought she had come over well, but not sensationally”.

He added: “I certainly didn’t think, ‘here comes a phenomenon who is going to become the most famous woman in the world, I wonder if she can mentally cope with it?’

Dance group Diversity beat Boyle in Britain’s Got Talent

“I thought she looked a bit eccentric and certainly a character, but that was all.

“Then, several weeks later, after Susan had become a global sensation, we were on a satellite link to the Oprah show together.”

He said that in the run-up to the semi-final and final, he “started getting calls from the production team”.

“It had become clear that Susan was finding the experience difficult to cope with.”

But Boyle gave him assurances she was still happy to carry on.

Talent tour

Cowell said he had realised how distressed Boyle was immediately after dance group Diversity were declared winners of the live final of Britain’s Got Talent.

“I looked over at her face and thought, ‘Christ, she doesn’t know how to deal with not winning’.”

Boyle later said she was well enough to join the UK tour but has so far pulled out of dates in Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff and Nottingham.

Cowell said he had spoken to Boyle’s family last week and asked them, “did we do right or did we do wrong” in letting her carry on with Britain’s Got Talent “once it became clear that she was finding it stressful”.

“And they said, unanimously, that we did the right thing,” he added.

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Full article and photos: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8110906.stm

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Entertainment – June 20

‘America’s Got Talent’ Looking for Its Own Boyle

”America’s Got Talent” has got a problem: Susan Boyle.

Will the NBC talent show, which begins its fourth season Tuesday, be able to find its own version of the 48-year-old Scottish singing sensation? Boyle’s first appearance on the British production earlier this year generated millions of YouTube hits and sparked an unmeasurable amount of attention. The show’s judges are putting the onus on the auditioning public.

”I think the Susan Boyle effect has had a huge effect on the show,” Piers Morgan, the British judge who serves as arbiter on both editions of the competition, said during a break from a recent Los Angeles audition.

”What she has done is laid the gauntlet down to America. Beat that. She’s the biggest star from any talent show ever. See what you can do, America.”

Among the acts the judges have seen so far this season that may reach Susan Boyle status stateside: a trio of siblings called Voices of Glory who serenaded their comatose mother; an impressive singer who said she was turned away from auditioning for a cruise line because of her appearance; and a chicken farmer who clucked one mean Garth Brooks tune.

”It would be great to have a Susan Boyle,” said judge David Hasselhoff. ”I think it’s a wonderful story. I think it’s great story because that story brings us together. It shows us we’re stuck up, judgmental and sometimes full of ourselves. She comes out there, appreciative to be there, and sings just about better than anyone on Earth.”

This season, the show has scoured for Boyles of all kinds — comedians, contortionists, jugglers, magicians, dancers and singers — in nine cities: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Seattle, Boston and Houston. Former host Jerry Springer was replaced by actor-rapper Nick Cannon, who is happy he doesn’t have to dismiss any of the wannabes.

”I don’t have to judge,” he beamed. ”All I have to do is stand on the side of the stage and root for the team.”

The show’s previous winners — tween crooner Bianca Ryan, ventriloquist Terry Fator and operatic insurance salesman Neal E. Boyd — haven’t become household names in the vein of Boyle after winning the $1 million prize. It’s usually the odd acts that have viewers talking each season. Sharon Osbourne said the wackiest she’s seen so far is a man with a dancing toe.

”He made this little theater to put his toe in,” said Osbourne. ”He put a little wig on his toe, but the wig fell off, and then you couldn’t see his toe in his little theater. It was just insane. Why would you think to build a theater around your toe? What’s so great about your toe moving to the music? It can only go from side to side and back and forth.”

Even if the show doesn’t find an American who follows in the footsteps of Boyle, it may have the next best thing: Boyle herself. She’s been asked to appear on the American show sometime during the fourth season. Morgan thinks it may be Boyle, who ultimately lost ”Britain’s Got Talent” to the dance group Diversity, who leaves the lasting impression.

”When I die,” Morgan envisioned, ”the headline will be: Man Who Was In Susan Boyle’s YouTube Clip Dies at Age 97.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/19/arts/AP-US-TV-Americas-Got-Talent.html

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The Accused

A controversial new film looks at the treatment of women in Iran

“The Stoning of Soraya M.” is as blunt as the rocks hurled in the execution of its title. The independent film, set in an Iranian village in the late 1980s, tells the story of a woman falsely accused of adultery, then put to death according to religious laws enacted after the country’s Islamic revolution. A grisly climax helped doom the film’s chances for traditional distribution in the U.S., but the filmmakers say it was essential to call attention to the horror of stoning, which still occurs in Iran and some other Muslim countries, according to human-rights groups.

Actress Mozhan Marnò plays the title role in ‘The Stoning of Soraya M.,’ a film with a plot set in Iran based on a nonfiction book by a French-Iranian journalist.

“A movie like this needs to be absolutely uncompromising in its approach. The subject demands it,” says director Cyrus Nowrasteh, who was born in Colorado to Iranian parents. He has tackled sensitive topics in his previous work, such as the ABC miniseries “The Path to 9/11,” which he wrote and produced.

But some human-rights advocates call the film inaccurate and sensationalistic. “It presents Iranians as barbaric, bloodthirsty savages,” says the Iran country specialist for Amnesty International USA, Elise Auerbach, who saw the movie at an advance screening. At least six stonings (five men and one woman) have occurred in Iran since 2002, Amnesty reports, and they were carried out by government agents, not in public. Meanwhile, the most aggressive efforts to end stoning are being led by Iranians themselves, Ms. Auerbach says. Without that context, she argues, the movie has “the appearance of being agitprop, stirring up fear that people in the West already have about Iranians.” In response, Mr. Nowrasteh says, “Stoning is in the written law of Iran. As long as it exists in the penal code in Iran, something needs to be done about it.”

With his wife, Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh, the director wrote the screenplay from a 1994 nonfiction book of the same name by French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam. The movie, with dialogue predominantly in Farsi, was produced by Mpower Pictures, a company founded by a producer of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” That hit film also featured religious violence, as well as dialogue in Aramaic and Latin.

The producer, Steve McEveety, knows “Stoning” will be a tough sell to some audiences. But “it wasn’t a good business decision either to make a movie about Jesus Christ in in two dead languages,” he says. “If [“Stoning”] doesn’t succeed financially, I can live with that.”

The film has been sold to several overseas distributors, including one planning a Middle East release, but U.S. distributors have been wary. Mpower is footing the bill for the U.S. release and has hired distributor Roadside Attractions to book it in theaters. Made for less than $4 million, according to the director, the movie will open Friday in 10 major markets.

“Stoning” has been in the works since the Nowrastehs acquired the rights to the book in 2005 for $3,000, but it arrives as Iran is dominating international headlines. Protests with flares of violence have swept Tehran since last week’s disputed election.

To actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, the unrest represents the “unfinished business” begun 30 years ago when the Shah, Iran’s monarch, was overthrown by Islamic revolutionaries. At the time, Ms. Aghdashloo’s family—like Mr. Nowrasteh’s—fled Iran; she hasn’t visited the country since. Known for her roles in “The House of Sand and Fog” and the TV series “24,” the actress says she has spent recent days counting heads in the photos of the protesting crowds, trying to estimate their size for herself. “I’m ever so happy and excited about what’s happening,” she says.

The actress says she saw a video of a stoning—two men accused of homosexuality—that circulated in 1980s among Iranian exiles. The memory of that compelled her to work with Mr. Nowrasteh before he had secured backing for “Stoning.”

In the movie she plays the fiery Zahra, who urges a traveling journalist (“Passion of the Christ” star Jim Caviezel) to tell the story of her niece, Soraya (Mozhan Marnò). Set up by her philandering husband bent on divorce and a complicit mullah, the young mother falls victim to a mob persecution that recalls “The Crucible” and “The Ox-Bow Incident.”

“Stoning” was shot over six weeks in a mountain village in Jordan. The director says the most demanding sequence was the stoning, which took six days to shoot. Ms. Marnò spent much of that time buried in the ground to her waist. Mr. Nowrasteh says he’s already drawn fire for lingering on the bloody sequence in slow motion. However, to convey the “anger, rage, frustration and injustice” of the story, Mr. Nowrasteh says, “you have to put the audience in that hole with her.”

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204119704574235830111853594.html

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Activists upset at Obama’s fly swat

The group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants US President Barack Obama to try taking a more humane attitude the next time he’s interrupted by a fly in the White House.

Peta is sending Obama a Katcha Bug Humane bug catcher device that allows users to trap a house fly and then release it outside unharmed.

“We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals,” Peta spokesman Bruce Friedrich said.

“We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals.”

During an interview for CNBC at the White House on Tuesday, a fly intruded on Obama’s conversation with correspondent John Harwood.

“Get out of here,” the president told the insect.

When it didn’t, he waited for the fly to settle, and then smacked it dead.

“Now, where were we?” Obama asked Harwood. Then he added, “That was pretty impressive, wasn’t it? I got the sucker.”

Friedrich said that Peta was pleased with Obama’s voting record in the Senate on behalf of animal rights.

Deputy press secretary Josh Earnest said the White House has no comment.

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Full article: http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/NewsDetails.asp

Photo: http://www.ecorazzi.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/obamafly1.jpg

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See also:

No Flies on PETA

I thought it awfully strange that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was weighing in on President Obama’s fly-swat (the headline on website TMZ: “PETA Swats at Obama for Killing That Fly!”), so I emailed PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich this morning to ask why he was devaluing his currency on such nonsense. Shocking, I know, but it seems his remarks were taken out of context for the sake of a better, if ridiculous, story. Here’s his reply:

Hi Kathleen,

It must be a slow news day. Here’s me talking about it on CNBC, and this is a New York Daily News piece about it. Most of the press has really created a story where there is none. In every interview, we’ve stressed that this is not a big deal, is not something we thought to comment on until TMZ called us, etc. This is the statement we put out:

Well, who is perfect? Certainly, President Obama has been helpful in his opposition to factory farming, which involves the mutilation and slaughter—while fully conscious—of 10 billion chickens and other farmed animals every year and is something that America can truly be ashamed of. He condemned the Canadian seal slaughter, which is the largest massacre of marine mammals in the world. His wife won’t wear fur, which means that she doesn’t support allowing animals to die slowly in traps or to live abysmal lives and suffer horrific deaths on fur factory farms for a coat. His administration supports openness with regard to how government money is spent, which will save millions of animals from painful experiments every year. He also had a perfect voting record in behalf of animals while he was in the Senate and spoke out publicly in support of animal protection on multiple occasions during his presidential campaign. Swatting a fly on TV indicates that he’s not the Buddha, that’s all.

And it was blown into “PETA outraged.” That’s just not true; all we said is “it shows he’s human.” I guess that was a revelation for some journalists!

But there you go.

Bruce

p.s. I do appreciate your checking in, Kathleen. I’ll bet if we’d refused to comment at all, the story would have been “PETA Refuses to Condemn Fly Murder!” or something.

Kathleen Parker, Washington Post

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Full article: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/06/no_flies_on_peta.html

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See also:

Obama’s Fly Move

The White House has two kinds of aides: The ones who prefer to think of their boss as gifted but human, and the ones who think their boss is on a date night with destiny.

The first group thinks that when things go really well for President Obama that he’s benefiting from luck as well as skill. For instance, they suggest, if any one of the sharpshooters from the Navy Seals who killed the three Somali pirates holding the American captain had aimed a millimeter to the left, maybe the captain would have been killed, and the incident would have turned into a symbol of weakness — as when Jimmy Carter’s attempt to free the hostages in Iran ended with a helicopter crash in the desert.

And what if there had been another terrorist attack in America? Everything would be seen through a darker lens.

The second group of aides are more caught up in the myth and magic, feeling that Mr. Obama summons the three-point swishes when he needs them; that his popularity is not so fragile; that the president’s unparalleled vision and buzzer-beating will can shape fate.

Just so, there are some Americans who think the president got an excess of attention from an excitable news media for expeditiously executing a fly that was buzzing around his face during an interview with CNBC and the Times’s John Harwood.

And there are others who see a mystical, metaphorical dimension to the way the president nonchalantly lasered in on the meddlesome insect after it ignored his admonition, “Hey, get outta here.” Without even uncrossing his legs or lunging about, the Chill One caught it, crushed it and kicked it aside and then said to Harwood, “Now, where were we?” before returning to his point about regulatory reform.

“It’s like he’s got one of those Fly Terminator targeting systems in his eyes,” marveled Jon Stewart.

Maybe the president who collected Spider-Man comics as a kid couldn’t resist the age-old face-off with a fly.

The moment had echoes of parables in which the ordinary one becomes the golden one.

In “The Karate Kid,” a teenager whose father has died learns lessons about the body and spirit from his surrogate father and karate teacher, Mr. Miyagi. His lessons are about not going to the dark side, the importance of discipline, and catching flies. “Man who catch fly with chopstick,” Mr. Miyagi says, “accomplish anything.”

In the Grimms’ fairy tale, “The Brave Little Tailor,” a tailor brandishing a rag kills seven flies swarming around his jam-smeared bread. The little man admires his own bravery so much — “For joy his heart wagged like a lamb’s tail” — that he wants the whole world to know of it. So he stitches up a belt for himself embroidered with the legend “Seven at one blow!” and saunters out.

Protected by his legend, using brains rather than brawn, he dispatches two giants and captures a unicorn and a wild boar before winning a princess and living happily ever after as a king.

The president didn’t order up a “One at one blow!” belt. You don’t need such accessories in the era of YouTube viral videos. But he did admire his own ninja moves so much that he gave himself a shout-out: “That was pretty impressive, wasn’t it? I got the sucker.” Then he solicited more snaps for what Harwood called his “ ‘Make my day’ moment” from his press secretary off camera: “Whaddya think, Gibbs?” After the interview was over, he continued his superfly moves by cleaning up the carcass with a napkin.

The moment may have resonated so much because some Americans fear that President Obama is too prone to negotiation, comity and splitting the difference, that he could have been tougher on avaricious banks and vicious Iranian dictators.

The “shocking murder in the White House,” as Stephen Colbert dubbed it, was a small moment. “All they want is to be loved and to feed on our waste,” Jeff “The Fly” Goldblum said in a dry defense of the exoskeletal creatures on the Colbert Report.

But at least this moment didn’t involve any talking or therapy or charm or compromise or seminars.

“The snuff aspect of it was psychologically useful for Obama,” Harwood told me. “He decided to take it out and he did take it out.”

If only the president could be so brazen about pushing through gay rights and health care.

Harwood was bemused about the serious issues in his interview getting swallowed by a bug.

“It will be the most noticed thing in my career,” he conceded, “but I’m rolling with it.”

Maureen Dowd, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/opinion/21dowd.html

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Duck! A Runaway Moon Is Speeding Toward a TV Near You

From left, Kendall Cross and David James Elliott in the two-part mini-series “Impact,” on ABC.

“Impact,” a two-part mini-series beginning on Sunday on ABC, is about averting the end of the world in less time — 39 days — than the warranties expire on most food processors. And like “24,” it might have arrived with the subtitle “We’re running out of time,” all bold type, no minimum on the exclamation points. Should you choose to drink every time you hear that phrase, or some similarly fervent expression of temporal anxiety, I can promise that you will be too hung over on Monday morning even to understand what goes on during the fourth hour of the “Today” show.

Recessions seem to breed the disaster impulse in filmmakers. In 1974 “The Towering Inferno” served as a lesson in the consequences of cost cutting. (Scrimp to come under budget on urban renewal, and you are going to need Steve McQueen to rescue you from a living hell.) “Impact,” though, is purely escapist, quaintly imagining the Moon on a collision course with Earth, something 99 percent of us have never worried about. And yet doing so now feels like a nice little respite from fretting over rising unemployment and the crazed restlessness of Kim Jong-il. I didn’t mind “Impact’s” well-paced goofiness, despite really wanting to mind it.

How — you must be wondering — does the Moon end up catapulting its way toward Earth, threatening to destroy humanity and all that it has produced? Well, as the entire world is observing a phenomenally cool meteor shower, a “brown dwarf” (you’ll hear that one a lot, so go ahead and have a swig), or failed star, crashes into the Moon, causing bits of it to hit Earth and igniting anomalies that become weirder and more frequent, until the Moon’s orbit goes haywire.

At first the disturbances are minor, taking the form of static charges and cellphone disturbances (“Impact” seems to be BlackBerry-centric, so you’re left to consider how the iPhone would hold up), but then people and submarines start to levitate, and the madness, induced by gravitational shifts, begins.

The greatest astrophysicists in the world, the ones who can stop it all, turn out to be a voluptuous blonde named Maddie (Natasha Henstridge) and a cute widower named Kittner (David James Elliot from “JAG”). They’ve got heat in their background, stints at NASA and the ear of a president who probably wouldn’t have won a primary against a post-scandal Larry Craig and who approaches oratory as if he were doing voice-over for a Burger King ad.

Much is made of the fact that Kittner is raising his two children with the marginal help of his grumpy father-in-law (played by James Cromwell, who is too good for this). “Impact” is the kind of television that seeks to exploit the tensions between the obligations of work and family, even if, in this instance, work isn’t trading kooky kinds of derivatives but trying to ensure the continued existence of civilization.

To this end, the camera lingers on the faces of Kittner’s son and daughter, whose expressions alternate from peeved to agonized, as their father leaves them behind for Washington, Germany, a spaceship. Initially Kittner doesn’t want to be away from his children for even a night, but Maddie gets him with an entreaty to his ambitions: “We are part of something here that’s going to be written about in the same context as Newton and Einstein. I know you don’t want to miss out on that.”

It should be noted that “Impact” is a German production with an international cast and a we-are-the-world sensibility. In the end it fantasizes that saving the globe from spattering into countless trillions of dust bits brings all of mankind together in one giant, cross-continental heart-hug. No more international rivalries; no more ethnic hostilities. “Impact” makes the Disney Channel seem dark.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/arts/television/20impact.html?hpw

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Former Catholic Priest Has New Wife, New Life As Episcopalian

The Rev. Alberto Cutie and wife Ruhama Buni Canellis chat with a member of the Church of the Resurrection in Biscayne Park, Fla., after services recently. Cutie is a former Catholic priest.

Alberto Cutie walked away from a Coral Gables, Fla., court early one morning this week, marriage license in hand, according to a record posted on Miami-Dade County Clerk of Courts Web site that lists 35-year-old Ruhama Buni Canellis as the bride.

The former Catholic priest is a widely popular figure among Latinos in the United States. He caused an uproar when photos showing him nuzzling Canellis on a Florida beach — a violation of his vow of celibacy — were published in a celebrity magazine early last month.

The couple were legally married by a judge Tuesday, but sources say they will have a religious ceremony in an unnamed Episcopal church. The Rt. Rev. Leo Frade, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida, will officiate that wedding.

Not on the church list: Miami’s Trinity Cathedral, the diocese’s flagship church and one that dozens of international reporters flooded after the former Roman Catholic priest and Canellis switched Christian denominations May 28.

Cutie gave his first sermon as an Episcopalian on May 31 at Church of the Resurrection in Biscayne Park and has started a yearlong process to become an Episcopal priest. In the meantime, he will continue to give sermons and rehabilitate ailing Episcopal churches, including the Church of the Holy Comforter in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood.

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Full article and photo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/19/AR2009061902948.html?hpid=sec-religion

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Rihanna set to give US its latest courtroom fix

As her boyfriend, Chris Brown, goes on trial, America shows there’s nothing it enjoys more than a celebrity in the dock.

Rihanna ‘s ex-boyfriend, Chris Brown, stands accused of punching and threatening to kill her.

Roll up, roll up! With OJ behind bars and Phil Spector serving life for murder, the US legal system is about to raise the curtain on what promises to be its next great celebrity media circus: the prosecution of Chris Brown on charges of beating up his ex-girlfriend and fellow pop star, Rihanna.

The R&B singer will appear at Los Angeles Superior Court tomorrow morning for a preliminary hearing to determine whether he should face trial for an altercation that occurred in a rented Lamborghini car in the early hours of the morning of February’s Grammy Awards.

Mr Brown stands accused of punching and threatening to kill Rihanna, whose real name is Robyn Fenty, before leaving her to be discovered by police, bloodied and bruised, by the side of a road in the city’s Hancock Park district. If found guilty, he faces up to five years in prison.

Compellingly, in a case that has prompted unremitting media coverage, tomorrow’s hearing will see Ms Fenty, 21, talk judge Patricia Schnegg through her recollection of the incident, which apparently occurred after she discovered a text message from one of Mr Brown’s ex-girlfriends on his mobile phone.

The couple, who were on their way home from a showbusiness party, have both so far refused publicly to share their version of events. An affidavit from a policeman who interviewed Ms Fenty claims Mr Brown struck her several times, bit her, and tried to choke her, adding that the frenzied attack caused her mouth to fill with blood.

Television cameras have been banned from the courtroom. However, hundreds of journalists and members of the public are expected to turn up to see Ms Fenty, 21, explain how she sustained her injuries. A police photo taken after the incident, which was leaked to a tabloid website, showed her face bruised, swollen and covered in cuts.

Both stars have huge followings, and the charges, to which Mr Brown has pleaded not guilty, have prompted soul-searching about domestic violence and misogyny in hip-hop culture. Shortly after the incident, Oprah Winfrey devoted an entire show to spousal abuse, which she dedicated “to all the Rihannas of the world”.

Womens’ rights groups have been concerned by polling data which indicates that many young adults believe that Rihanna was to blame for the alleged assault. A recent survey by the Boston Health Commission revealed that 46 per cent of teenagers believed she was responsible.

Tomorrow’s hearing allows Judge Schnegg to determine whether there is sufficient evidence for Mr Brown to stand trial in front of a jury. Ms Fenty has been subpoenaed to appear, and is likely to face questions from both prosecution and defence lawyers.

Legal experts expect the outcome to be a formality, saying they can see few circumstances in which a judge would not consider there to be “probable cause” for a trial to proceed. However, they expect the occasion to be used for PR purposes by Mr Brown’s attorney, Mark Geragos.

“Geragos represented Winona Ryder during her shoplifting trial, and played to the media at a preliminary hearing, with vicious cross-examinations that tried to give a message to the world that his client was being railroaded,” said Royal Oakes, a legal analyst for several US television news organisations.

“In a case like this, he could also use the hearing to serve a similar PR purpose for Chris Brown. The downside, of course, is that it can tip his hat and let the prosecution and witnesses know where he’s going to come from during a trial.”

Mr Geragos had already tried, unsuccessfully, to delay tomorrow’s hearing until he had been granted access to police files about the officers who arrested Mr Brown. His camp has suggested that their client was a victim of LAPD officers hoping to exaggerate the incident so they could profit by leaking details to the media.

In the event that the case goes to trial, Mr Brown is likely to be offered a plea bargain, in which he’d face a reduced sentence of between two and three years in return for pleading guilty.

“This case screams out for a deal,” Mr Oakes said. “Chris Brown’s career will not benefit from the four to five years in prison he would face if convicted, and the pictures are so graphic that a full trial could be highly damaging to his reputation, whatever the eventual verdict.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rihanna-set-to-give-us-its-latest-courtroom-fix-1711572.html

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Entertainment – June 19

Capsule Reviews: ‘The Proposal’ and Other Films

Capsule reviews of films opening this week:

”Food, Inc.” — You put food in your mouth every day. But do you know exactly what you’re consuming when you pick up chicken breasts at the grocery store or drive though a fast-food restaurant for a quick cheeseburger? Or do you even bother to care? Probably not, says documentarian Robert Kenner — and you should. Kenner presents an even-tempered but nonetheless horrifying dissection of the U.S. food industry, where corporate-owned, mass-produced and chemically enhanced edibles can be unhealthy at best and deadly at worst. One look inside a cramped, dusty chicken house — where the birds are so puffed up from being stuffed with chemicals, they collapse under the weight of their breasts and die before they can be slaughtered — will make you think twice about how you spend your money at the supermarket. Similar to Al Gore’s warnings about climate change in the Oscar-winning ”An Inconvenient Truth,” Kenner’s findings — with significant contributions from authors Eric Schlosser (”Fast Food Nation”) and Michael Pollan (”The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) — produce a cumulative effect that’s depressing. But he balances that sense of helplessness with evidence that organic foods are becoming more prevalent, and with suggestions of how individual consumers can affect change through their purchasing decisions. Not rated but contains disturbing images. 93 min. Three stars out of four.

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”The Proposal” — All the romantic comedy conventions are shamelessly on parade here, trampling on our brains and turning them into mush. They include an uptight character who literally lets her hair down to show she’s loosening up, a spontaneous sing-along, wacky relatives, a shocking mid-wedding revelation, a mad dash to the airport and, finally, some very public I-love-yous. Where is the creativity, people? By definition, this is a predictable genre — a guy and a girl who are clearly meant for each other eventually end up together, despite the many madcap obstacles and misunderstandings that come their way. We know the destination before we even park the car at the multiplex; it’s how we get there that matters. ”The Proposal” seemed to be getting there with some spark and ingenuity, led by a couple of actors with solid comic chops. Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds are both well suited for snappy banter and they play off each other with some nice friction off the top. Bullock has always shown a flair for physical humor, but here she gets a chance to play a scheming, tyrannical book editor, which is a refreshing change from her frequently daffy winsomeness. But Anne Fletcher (who also directed the by-the-numbers ”27 Dresses”) and screenwriter Peter Chiarelli obliterate any good will they’d generated when ”The Proposal” turns gushy and goes precipitously downhill. Bullock stars as Margaret Tate, a Canadian who’s on the verge of being deported. She blackmails her put-upon assistant, Andrew (Reynolds), into marrying her to stay in the country. Think they’ll fall in love for real? PG-13 for sexual content, nudity and language. 104 min. Two stars out of four

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”Whatever Works” — Woody Allen continues in whatever-works mode, churning out another slight plot with slighter characters and lackadaisical storytelling that recycles enough of the neuroses-fueled charm of his earlier films to keep him in business. Kindred soul Larry David, co-creator of ”Seinfeld” and star of ”Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is Allen’s ranting, curmudgeonly stand-in, a suicidal misanthrope who never met a person with whom he couldn’t find extreme fault. For his first film back in New York after four shot in Europe, Allen manages his best string of one-line zingers in a long while. He throws in a May-December romance involving a naive Southern runaway (Evan Rachel Wood) and some radical Manhattan transformations for her conservative parents (Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr.). It’s all contrivance, as is the performance from David, who smirks his way through the movie, delivering hearty laughs but never quite capturing the melancholy and self-loathing underlying his character’s bluster. PG-13 for sexual situations including dialogue, brief nude images and thematic material. 92 min. Two stars out of four.

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”Year One” — Making a solid summer comedy starring Jack Black, Michael Cera, David Cross and Hank Azaria should be so easy, a caveman could do it. Somehow, despite the presence of those reliable actors and the highly advanced skills of comic veterans Harold Ramis and Judd Apatow behind the scenes, ”Year One” manages to be a dud. A few amusing moments and ideas pop up here and there, but more often the script feels flat, with a needlessly heavy reliance on scatological gags. (Director Ramis co-wrote it with ”The Office” writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg; he and Apatow are among the producers.) Black’s character literally eats feces at one point, while Cera’s urinates all over himself — upside down; it could be a metaphor for what everyone is stuck doing in this movie. Black and Cera star as hunter Zed and gatherer Oh, mismatched Neanderthals who are banished from their village after Zed eats some forbidden fruit. Basically this allows Black to be Black (manic, unhinged but always overconfident) and Cera to be Cera (awkward, sarcastic but always sweet). Not much heavy lifting required of either of them. Zed and Oh set off on a road trip that takes them from their primitive land to a series of biblical settings, including encounters with Cain and Abel (Cross and an uncredited Paul Rudd) and Abraham and Isaac (Azaria and Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Ramis seems to be aiming for his own version of the Mel Brooks classic ”History of the World: Part 1,” but there’s nothing terribly memorable about these adventures. PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, brief strong language and comic violence. 97 min. One and a half stars out of four.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/18/arts/AP-Film-Capsules.html

Photo (1): http://www.screeninglog.com/journal/tag/year-one

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Greece to Open New Acropolis Museum This Weekend

(AP) — About 1,500 years after Christian zealots vandalized the Parthenon’s pagan sculptures, Greece’s Orthodox Church Wednesday formally blessed the new Acropolis Museum, set to open this weekend after years of delays.Standing near the remains of an inaugural sacrifice for a 3rd century B.C. town house excavated under the citadel, priests burnt incense and chanted blessings for the building where Greece hopes one day to display the Elgin — or Parthenon — Marbles.

The euro130 million ($180 million) museum will be officially inaugurated Saturday. Foreign heads of state and government are expected to attend, including Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It will open to visitors Sunday, at a nominal euro1 ($1.40) charge.

Officials say the glass and concrete museum, about 400 yards (meters) from the Acropolis, will boost Greece’s old but fruitless bid for the return of the 2,500-year-old sculptures, displayed in the British Museum for nearly two centuries since their removal from the site.

Athens says the sculptures were stolen from a work of art so important that its surviving pieces should all be exhibited together.

But the British Museum counters that it legally owns its collection, and displays it free of charge in an international cultural context.

Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said the new museum would turn public opinion in favor of the Greek campaign.

”It is a catalyst for the return of the Parthenon Marbles,” he said during a press preview Wednesday. ”This is a symbol of modern Greece which … honors its past with works comparable to those of our ancestors.”

Spreading across five levels, the museum provides an airy setting for some of the best surviving works of classical sculpture that once adorned the marble Acropolis temples. The basement contains remains of an ancient Athenian neighborhood, which will open to visitors next year.

By day, printed glass panels filter the bright sunlight while revealing the ancient citadel in the background. The internal lighting projects the statues outward at night, contrasting with the floodlit hilltop temples.

”The natural light, which combines with artificial lighting, helps greatly to set off the color of the works,” museum director Dimitris Pantermalis said.

U.S.-based architect Bernard Tschumi said the proximity of the Acropolis itself was a major challenge in designing the building.

”(The Parthenon) is one of the most perfect buildings that has influenced generations for centuries in Western architecture,” he told The Associated Press. ”At the same time, I often say that to be an architect you have to be — especially in this case — both very humble and very arrogant.”

”What we tried to do was to be as simple, as clear, as precise as we could be establishing a visual relation between the Parthenon, the museum with the beautiful sculptures and with the archaeological remnants,” Tschumi said.

The Parthenon was built between 447-432 B.C., at the height of ancient Athens’ glory, in honor of the city’s patron goddess, Athena.

Despite its conversion into a Christian church, and Turkish occupation from the 15th century, it survived virtually intact until a massive explosion caused by a Venetian cannon shot in 1687.

About half the surviving sculptures were removed by Scottish diplomat Lord Elgin in the early 1800s, while Greece was still an unwilling part of the Ottoman Empire.

Most belong to a frieze depicting a religious procession that ran round the top of the temple.

The new museum holds more than 4,000 ancient works in 150,000 square feet (14,000 square meters) of display space.

The highlight is the top story where Greece’s Parthenon sculptures will be displayed in their original alignment in a glass hall, next to plaster casts of the works in London.

”It is a beautiful space that shows the frieze itself as a narrative — even with the plaster copies of what is in the British Museum — in the context of the Parthenon itself,” Tschumi said.

”I am convinced that sooner or later the Marbles in the British Museum will come back to Athens.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/18/arts/AP-EU-Greece-Acropolis-Museum.html

Photo: http://e-architect.co.uk/athens/jpgs/new_acropolis_museum_rfa210409_nd_2.jpg

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Documentary Draws Ire of Dole After Plot Thickens

A documentary on Nicaraguan banana workers who claimed they became sterile from pesticides is set for its American premiere on Saturday — unless a threatened lawsuit stops the show.

Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten’s film ”Bananas!” might now be more appropriately punctuated with a question mark after a judge declared its star, a Los Angeles lawyer, a fraud for recruiting plaintiffs to lie.

Attorney Juan J. Dominguez previously won a $1.5 million award for the purported workers before being discredited by Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney as the engineer of a massive scheme targeting Dole Food Co. in cases in the U.S. and Central America. The cases sought more than $40 billion in damages.

The fraud was not uncovered until the film was finished, and questions are swirling about whether the filmmaker has an ethical obligation to change the documentary.

The Los Angeles Film Festival has pulled the documentary from contention for a prize. It also plans a discussion about the perils of wrapping a documentary production before a story has reached its conclusion.

Festival director Rebecca Yeldham did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment Friday.

Gertten, 53, stands by the film and his experiences interviewing workers in Nicaragua.

”I haven’t seen any fraud. If I saw it, I would publish it,” he said. ”This film is valid. I hope Dole will understand it is a legitimate piece of work. … I believe in freedom of speech and telling the story as I saw it.”

Gertten would not provide an advance copy of the movie to The Associated Press. However, a trailer on his Web site shows a man in his coffin with a voiceover from one of his relatives saying: ”Every time a banana worker who was exposed to this chemical dies, that is a victory for Dole. Every death is another victory.”

Dole attorney Theodore Boutrous Jr. said Gertten has refused to let Dole representatives see the film before it is screened.

”This isn’t complex and it isn’t remotely a free speech or artistic expression issue,” Boutrous said.

”Mr. Gertten got duped, but he won’t admit it and instead apparently is intent on screening a knowingly false film.”

Dole has threatened to sue for defamation if the film is shown and then distributed commercially.

”Bananas!” which has the subtitle ”On Trial for Malice,” documents the plight of workers who say they were made sterile by the pesticide DBCP used on Dole banana plantations in the 1970s.

It uses footage of a trial against Dole and details the efforts of Dominguez to help the workers.

An advance review in the LA Weekly says the film portrays Dominguez as ”the unquestioned man-of-the-people hero,” seeking justice for downtrodden workers.

But Judge Chaney said Dominguez and his Nicaraguan counterpart recruited men to pretend they had been banana workers and to make false allegations against Dole.

Chaney heard testimony that the men recruited by Dominguez were given false work histories and schooled in what it would have been like to work on a plantation. Some denied fathering their own children in their attempt to prove sterility.

The judge said if she had known the extent of the fraud, she would have stopped the trial over which she presided — the same trial depicted in the movie. The case is now being appealed. Chaney dismissed two other similar cases brought by Dominguez after hearing testimony.

”Contrary to their sworn testimony, most of the plaintiffs never worked on Dole-affiliated banana farms and none were involved in the DBCP application process,” Chaney wrote in a 60-page dismissal ruling issued Wednesday.

”These plaintiffs and their counsel were part of a broader conspiracy that permeates all DBCP litigation arising from Nicaragua,” it said.

Chaney was shown the trailer for the movie but said she would not intercede in its release because that would be impermissible prior restraint on free speech.

Dominguez’s lawyer, Michael McCarthy, has told the AP his client is not being treated fairly by the court. He would not comment further.

Gertten said he is a former journalist who has produced or directed more than 20 documentaries, most of them on human interest subjects. He said ”Bananas!” was made with support from a number of public broadcasting companies across Europe and the Sundance Channel.

”I’m not an activist filmmaker,” he said, adding he was drawn to the subject when he heard that former banana workers had been camped outside the Nicaraguan Parliament in Managua for years demanding justice for being harmed by pesticides. He went there to see for himself.

Gertten said that if the accusations against Dominguez are true, ”Of course it’s terrible, but it’s a complex situation.”

In light of the controversy, film festival directors removed ”Bananas!” from competition and placed it on the program as a case study.

Viewers at the planned screening will be given written material about the developments in the case and hear a statement that attempts to place the film’s subject matter in context with Chaney’s ruling. It will be followed by a discussion of the plight of a documentarian when a story continues to develop after the film is completed.

Gertten has also added a written card at the end explaining that the case depicted is on appeal and there are ongoing developments.

He repeatedly cited Judge Chaney’s remark in her initial ruling that because of the fraud, ”We will never know what happened in Nicaragua.”

Asked if he now feels victimized by Dominguez, Gertten said, ”Right now, I’m being victimized by Dole Food Co. I have to find out what really happened. Maybe that’s my next film.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/19/arts/AP-US-Dole-Banana-Workers.html

Photo: http://doclounge.se/malmo/files/2008/10/bananas-small.jpg

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Entertainment – June 18

Federal Gay Marriage Challenge Has Hollywood Style

The story of two famous U.S. lawyers from opposite ends of the political spectrum banding together to launch a bold and unexpected fight for gay marriage sounds like it could have been written in Hollywood.In many ways, it is.

A handful of political filmmakers led by a Democratic consultant have crafted a gay rights challenge they hope will reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

The case which has its first hearing in a federal San Francisco court on July 2 could quickly make gay marriage a national right, or, some veteran gay rights advocates fear, cripple the movement.

The team has political experience, winning referenda in California in particular, and has brought together real-world firepower in the form of Ted Olson and David Boies, the lawyers who faced off in the 2000 election vote recount that led to George W. Bush’s presidency.

What sets them apart is the willingness to take on a court case that advocates steeped in the cause have avoided.

“Patience is a virtue I’ve quite frankly never possessed — if patience is a virtue,” said Chad Griffin, 35, who began his career in the political big leagues more than a decade ago as the youngest person to work on a president’s West Wing staff.

“History is on our side, law is on our side,” added Griffin, who is gay.

Rob Reiner, the “When Harry Met Sally” director and advocate for children’s health, and Bruce Cohen, the producer of “Milk,” a film about the first openly gay elected politician in California, are two of the six-member board of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, founded for the court challenge.

HIGH STAKES

Despite losses in California courts and at the ballot box, gay rights advocates have made major strides in recent months with marriage and domestic partner rights in a number of states, especially in the Northeast.

President Barack Obama’s Justice Department this week argued in a federal case against recognizing same-sex marriage, but Obama on Wednesday extended some federal rights to gay partners of federal workers in what he called a first step to end discrimination against gays and lesbians.

The federal judiciary is widely seen as conservative, and gay rights movement leaders have argued that a gradual approach to change public opinion and win in states would be crucial preparation for a challenge in the Supreme Court, which gauges public opinion in such morality-linked cases.

But with a swing vote in the nine-member Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy, already ruling in favor of gays in two important cases — and no signs of court conservatives retiring soon — the Los Angeles-based filmmaker group decided to act.

“You get into the habit, which I think is a good one, of going for it,” said Cohen. “From the political world we bring the knowledge that there is no such thing as a sure thing. From the Hollywood world, everything is a one in a million chance.”

Gays and their allies were astounded when California, considered trendsetter for social change, ended a summer of legal same-sex marriage last November by passing Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment that limited marriage to man-and-woman couples. The state’s top court, which opened the way to gay marriage last year backed the ban in late May.

Griffin, expecting the state court’s rebuff, had been talking to friends who led him to one of the most conservative lawyers in the land — Olson, who won Bush his presidency. But Olson passionately believed gays should be able to marry and believed the lawsuit, arguing Prop 8 was unconstitutional on equal rights and due process bases, could win.

“Half way through that conversation I realized that I was perhaps sitting across from someone who, if we decided to proceed, could become one of the most eloquent, important spokespeople in this movement for equality,” Griffin said.

Olson suggested to Griffin that he work with David Boies, who represented former Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in the landmark Supreme Court case that led to Bush’s presidency.

Jarrett Barrios, incoming president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said the pair could help his cause. “It’s transcending politics and where we can transcend the politics of blue and red we will achieve full equality,” he said.

But long-time national gay marriage advocates are wary of the lawsuit.

“The lawsuit has been filed. We all have an interest in it going as well as possible,” said Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry. “The best way is to win more states and to continue moving more hearts and minds,” he said.

A loss could mean years before the Supreme Court revisited same-sex marriage, even if societal attitudes change. Moreover, an opinion backing marriage for only heterosexual couples could cause a backlash against gays in other legal fights.

It could take a couple of years for the case to wind its way up to the Supreme Court, which also could refuse to hear it. In the mean time, the public debate led by the super-lawyers may help the gay marriage cause.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/18/arts/entertainment-us-gaymarriage-hollywood.html

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Woody Allen Eyes Carla Bruni For Film Role

Woody Allen would like to use France’s first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy for a film role, the U.S. director told RTL radio on Thursday.”I’m sure she would be wonderful,” he said through a translator. “She’s got charisma, she’s already acted so she’s not unknown to an audience. There are a lot of ways I could use her though I don’t have a story for her at the moment,” he said.

“But I’ll certainly talk to her about it and I’ll ask her if she’s interested.”

Bruni-Sarkozy, one of the world’s top models before starting a career as a singer and marrying President Nicolas Sarkozy last year, has appeared briefly on the big screen, playing herself in Robert Altman’s 1994 fashion satire “Pret-a-Porter.”

Allen, whose latest film “Whatever Works” comes out on French screens next month, plans to shoot a film in Paris next year, RTL said.

Something of a specialist in creating roles for women, he made Diane Keaton a star with “Annie Hall” in 1977 and has since worked with actresses ranging from his former wife Mia Farrow to Mira Sorvino and Scarlett Johansson.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/18/arts/entertainment-us-allen-bruni.html

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Dress the Set With Tears: It’s a Wrap

A sign of the recession: 20th Century Props is set to close.

The rattan sofa from “The Golden Girls” awaits its next role from a shelf deep inside the 20th Century Props warehouse here. Nearby is the futuristic shower Tom Cruise used in “Minority Report” and an armchair that starred with Marilyn Monroe in multiple films. Overhead: Art Deco chandeliers from “The Aviator.”

On Tuesday, Harvey Schwartz stood amid it all, in tears, wondering how his prop shop, which offers a vast inventory of items to be used in film and television productions, became the latest victim of a rapidly changing Hollywood.

Mr. Schwartz, the owner of 20th Century Props, plans to go out of business next month and auction the inventory. Battered by the surge in out-of-state movie production and the demise of scripted programming on network television, the once-thriving business — one of a handful of its type remaining — is failing.

“I ran out of money three months ago, and I don’t know what else to do,” he said softly. “It’s terrifying. I’ve devoted my entire life to something that is over.”

Set decorators are equally upset. “The closing of 20th Century is a disaster for us,” said Melinda Ritz, who won three Emmy Awards for her work on “Will & Grace.” “Harvey is a great person, and it’s one fewer place that offers one-stop shopping.” She added, “The fabric of Hollywood is fraying so fast that it’s scary.”

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Battered by the surge in out-of-state movie production and the demise of scripted programming on network television, the once-thriving business — one of a handful of its type remaining — is failing.

Harvey Schwartz, owner of 20th Century Props, with a morgue tray used in “The X-Files.”

These chandeliers were made in a week for the film “Miracle on 34th Street.”

In the foreground is a desk that once belonged to Howard Hughes, used in the film about his life, “The Aviator.”

A scaled down version of Air Force One that was used in “Independence Day.”

This oversize champagne glass was used by Beyonce in one of her performances.

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Not long ago all movie and television studios operated their own prop houses. A dozen independent companies did a brisk business filling in the gaps — an unusual medical device here, a 1960s-era radio there. Outside prop suppliers like 20th Century also handled commercials and period needs (Mr. Schwartz has a large inventory of Art Deco items) along with special events like lavishly decorated premiere parties.

Studios started gutting their prop departments in the 1990s to free space on their lots. Mr. Schwartz’s inventory — at last count 93,752 items, ranging from teacups to a life-size submarine — includes the former holdings of 20th Century Fox, for instance. Walt Disney and Paramount have also jettisoned their props divisions. (Sony, Universal and Warner Brothers are the holdouts, and they’re open to outside clients.)

Independents like Mr. Schwartz and Omega Cinema Props stayed healthy — despite runaway production and the rise of reality television — largely because of special-events divisions. Such events made up a third of the revenue at 20th Century Props just two years ago, Mr. Schwartz said.

But the recession has turned off that spigot. Add in a strike last year by movie and television writers and a continued slowdown in production caused by a threatened actors’ strike, and 20th Century Props could no longer stay afloat.

Mr. Schwartz said annual revenue was off by 30 percent last year; so far this year the figure is closer to 50 percent. He said he has been seeking a way to keep the collection together — via an investor or a sale to another prop company — but has so far come up short. The business had 28 employees at the beginning of the year; now it has 7.

“I’m a dinosaur, I guess,” Mr. Schwartz said.

Great American Group will liquidate the company’s inventory during the last week of July. The holdings are insured for about $8 million, but the value of many of the props is difficult to pin down because of the premium that memorabilia collectors will likely pay for better-known items.

“He’s got a collector’s eye and has developed an inventory unlike anybody else’s,” Ms. Ritz said of Mr. Schwartz. “He’s got quirky, interesting pieces.”

Mr. Schwartz is a bit quirky himself. Trained as an aerospace engineer, he decided to go into the furniture business in the early 1970s, opening a small store near Beverly Hills and CBS Television City, a cluster of studios that is now home to shows like “American Idol.”

He developed a fondness for rattan (“Among other reasons, it was furniture I could lift by myself,” he said) and became an expert. He was an author of a 1999 book titled “Rattan Furniture: Tropical Comfort Throughout the House.” He favors his shirts unbuttoned to about midchest and has a habit of hanging his reading glasses there.

“I’m a little bit bananas, I know,” he said.

Walking through the 200,000-square-foot warehouse, which is hunkered amid a smattering of auto repair shops and porno stores in this seedy San Fernando Valley suburb, Mr. Schwartz comes off as the curator of a museum that just happens to rent out its treasures.

“Beyoncé has danced in this,” he said, motioning to a giant plastic Champagne glass. “See that chair way back there? Claudette Colbert sat in that in ‘Cleopatra,’ the 1934 version.” He paused to point out curved desks used at Ewing Oil on “Dallas” — he’s not certain if J. R. sat at one of them — and led a visitor through a maze of macabre items (jars filled with pickled piglets) to the spot where the morgue from “The X-Files” awaits another adventure.

Some of 20th Century’s holdings are antiques with famous provenances outside of the movies. For instance Mr. Schwartz claims to have Merv Griffin’s office chair and a giant Art Deco desk once owned by Howard Hughes (and subsequently used in “The Aviator”).

What are the most frequently rented items? Certain dining room chairs have gone out more than 500 times, Mr. Schwartz said. Also popular: a heart-shaped bed, which rents about twice a month. “We don’t ask too many questions with that one,” he said.

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Full article and photos: http://nytimes.com/2009/06/18/movies/18props.html

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Entertainment – June 17

Hold the Fries

Even as he grows arugula in the White House vegetable garden, Barack Obama never again wants to be seen as the hoity-toity guy fretting over the price of arugula at Whole Foods.

That is why the president ends up sending mixed signals on food.

He clearly feels strongly about nutrition and fat. The child who looks a little chubby in that famous picture of himself with his long-lost father in Hawaii grew up to be extremely careful about eating and drinking in a healthy way.

The willowy commander in chief urges out-of-shape and overweight aides to go to his Chicago trainer who now works part-time at the White House — and even offers to treat especially recalcitrant cases.

On a date night this spring with Michelle at the Georgetown restaurant Citronelle, the president showed how calorie-conscious he was when, over a three-hour meal, he managed the impossible feat of nibbling only one French fry. “He wants to stay skinny, you know?” chef Michel Richard mischievously told “Extra” afterward.

On the campaign, Mr. Obama seemed an organic proselytizer for healthier eating, telling black audiences to stop serving their kids cold Popeyes chicken and “give ’em some breakfast.”

It was easy to imagine a scenario where the president and his body man, Reggie Love, would have their own early-morning TV show called “Downward Facing Dawn,” coaxing a reluctant nation into a regimen of yoga and yogurt.

When he talked to the American Medical Association on Monday, the president again urged Americans to make their children “step away from the video games and spend more time playing outside” and cut “down on all the junk food that’s fueling an epidemic of obesity.”

He said he was trying to instill this lesson in his own daughters and at schools around the country. “As some of you know, we started a White House vegetable garden,” he noted. “I say ‘we’ generously, because Michelle’s done most of the work.”

But often, when the cameras are rolling, Mr. Obama puts his organic tea aside and makes a show of heading for the nearest greasy spoon.

He boosted the business of Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington, Va., after he took Joe Biden there in a monster motorcade for lunch and ordered a cheeseburger with Dijon mustard (a spicy detail that amused Republicans).

When Brian Williams did his day-at-the-White House special two weeks ago, the president took the anchor to a Five Guys burger joint. He ordered himself a cheeseburger and fries and, in an extravagant attempt to prove his meaty regular guydom, brought back $80 worth of burgers and fries in a greasy bag for White House staffers. (After a tour of the Sphinx in Egypt, the president evoked his love of red meat again, saying “Five Guys was good. This is better.”)

Michelle sometimes takes her staff on impromptu lunch trips to Five Guys or other burger and barbeque spots.

But Tuesday, when schoolchildren were harvesting crops in the White House vegetable garden (though not the Thomas Jefferson lettuce, which had gone to seed), they were brushed back from fried food by Michelle and her associate chef, Sam Kass.

“This is a healthier version of fried chicken,” the first lady, wearing orange jeans, said as the kids prepared their own baked chicken snack.

Kass added: “Breaded and baked is the new fried.”

Michelle said she had wanted the organic garden as a way to underscore the need for better nutrition.

“Nearly a third of the children in this country are either overweight or obese, and a third will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lifetime,” she said. “In Hispanic and African-American communities, those numbers climb even higher so that nearly half of the children in those communities will suffer the same fate.”

She said America has become so unhealthy because too many kids “are not eating right and they’re not moving their bodies at all.”

When she was growing up, she recalled that desserts and fast food were rare: “It was a special treat. And we would beg to get it, and it was exciting if we drove into a fast-food place and got a hamburger. We were thrilled. It was like Christmas. … If we got pizza on a Friday night, that was a treat.”

Mr. Obama ostentatiously treats himself to fries and burgers to beef up his average-Joe image (even though he’s anything but). Yet maybe when Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer come next week to broadcast a special on health care from inside the White House, the president should forgo the photo-op of the grease-stained bovine bag and take the TV stars out for what he really wants and America really needs: some steamed fish with a side of snap peas.

Maureen Dowd, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/opinion/17dowd.html?ref=opinion

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Correction: ‘Food, Inc.’ Review

In a June 15 review of ”Food Inc.,” The Associated Press reported erroneously that the documentary showed chickens puffed-up and collapsing from steroids. One chicken farmer in the film showed oversized birds that had been given antibiotics. The Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture prohibit the use of steroids in raising chickens.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/16/arts/AP-US-Film-Review-Food-Inc-CORRECTIVE.html

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Baron Cohen _ as Bruno _ Poses Nude on Cover of GQ

Sacha Baron Cohen, as the character Bruno, is shown on the cover of “GQ” magazine.

Sacha Baron Cohen strips down as his alter ego — Austrian fashionista Bruno — for the July cover of GQ magazine.

According to the magazine, Bruno is the first subject to appear fully naked on the cover. Jennifer Aniston, wearing a necktie and nothing else for the January issue, came close.

Bruno sports nothing but a tanned glow and a shaggy head of highlighted hair.

The actor-comedian’s 2006 movie, ”Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” was a surprise box-office hit. His new film, ”Bruno,” is scheduled for release July 10.

Baron Cohen staged an elaborate prank at the recent MTV Movie Awards. In character as Bruno, he descended from the ceiling on a wire in a fake mishap that ended with his bare hindquarters in rapper Eminem’s face.

Eminem stormed off in a huff, but later said he was in on the joke.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/16/arts/AP-US-People-Sacha-Baron-Cohen.html

Photo (1): http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/16/entertainment/main5091431.shtml

Photo (2): http://dailyfa.org/1387/09/25/%D8%B9%DA%A9%D8%B3-%D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%B

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Gay Activists Wary About Flamboyant “Bruno”

U.S. gay activists are worried that comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film, “Bruno,” could reinforce negative stereotypes about homosexuals just as they are making gains in the fight for rights such as same-sex marriage.

Cohen, who scored a surprise hit in 2006 with “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” portrays a flamboyant gay Austrian fashion reporter in the new film that premieres on Wednesday in London and opens in the United States on July 10.

The studio releasing “Bruno” says the film’s intent is to satirize homophobia, but some gay advocates are wary.

“We do feel the intentions of the filmmakers are in the right place — satire of this form can unmask homophobia — but at the same time it can heighten people’s discomfort with our community,” said Rashad Robinson, senior director of media programs for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

With that in mind, GLAAD asked in vain for Universal Pictures, the studio behind “Bruno,” to add a message from Cohen addressing the importance of gay rights and tolerance.

Universal says in a statement it believes most moviegoers will understand the film’s “positive intentions.”

“‘Bruno’ uses provocative comedy to powerfully shed light on the absurdity of many kinds of intolerance and ignorance, including homophobia,” the studio said.

The movie comes out as U.S. same-sex couples have won the right to wed in six states amid a fierce debate on gay marriage that has seen California voters approve a ban on such marriages.

HIT? OR MISS

“Bruno” is expected to be a hit, although there remains a big question about whether the young men who make up a core Hollywood audience will turn out for a movie about a gay man.

“It’s going to be interesting to see if a bunch of teenage boys actually care to go”, said gay activist Cathy Renna.

But one thing is certain — Cohen has a huge fan base. Men and women flocked to “Borat,” a fake documentary about a Kazakh journalist traveling across the United States that used comedy to expose bigotry. It earned $128 million at U.S. and Canadian box offices and $133 million in other countries.

Like its predecessor, “Bruno” is a mock documentary that covers the fashion reporter after he loses his job in Austria and goes to America looking to become a celebrity. Bruno wears mesh shirts, talks with a lisp and has a penchant for dropping his pants.

His unscripted encounters with everyday Americans and prominent figures, who think he is real, often devolve into people’s disgusted reaction to Bruno’s in-your-face sexuality.

In one scene, for instance, a martial arts teacher shows Bruno how to guard against gays. GLAAD’s Robinson said another scene worried him that shows Bruno appearing to have sex with a man in a tub, while his adopted baby sits nearby.

“That wasn’t really unmasking homophobia, and especially in a country where same-sex couples can still be denied the ability to adopt children that they’ve raised since birth. Trivializing gay families isn’t a joke,” Robinson said.

But gay groups also see potential from the film. “Bigotry and homophobia still today get cloaked in many different nuanced ways, so a movie like this has the potential to let everyone in on the joke and to really change the way homophobia is viewed,” said Brad Luna, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/16/arts/entertainment-us-bruno.html

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Entertainment – June 16

Review: Allen’s ‘Whatever Works’ Not Quite Working

The title of Woody Allen’s new comedy, ”Whatever Works,” might define what the filmmaker has been up to the last few years.Allen churns out a movie a year like clockwork, some OK, some mediocre, none very memorable. Sure, last year’s ”Vicky Cristina Barcelona” drew solid audiences, won Penelope Cruz an Academy Award and was a step or two above other recent Allen flicks.

But the movie was emblematic of his output of late — slight plots, slighter characters, lackadaisical storytelling that recycles enough of the neuroses-fueled charm of his earlier films to keep the Woody Allen machine in business.

In other words, whatever works, emphasis on the word ”whatever,” delivered with a shrug.

”Whatever Works” upholds that uninspired standard, Allen returning to New York City after four films in Europe and falling back on familiar themes he examined more thoughtfully decades ago (the May-December romance is somehow less believable now that it’s Larry David scoring a young babe rather than Allen).

With David as Allen’s ranting, curmudgeonly stand-in, ”Whatever Works” manages the funniest stream of one-line zingers the filmmaker has offered in a long while.

It’s a lazy story, though, told lazily, starting with the casting of David himself. With their lovably grouchy and cynical demeanors, Allen and David — co-creator of ”Seinfeld” and star of ”Curb Your Enthusiasm” — certainly are kindred spirits.

Yet while Allen is not a great actor, he has the great gift of pathos, the rare ability, a la Charles Chaplin or Buster Keaton, to be not only a funny little man, but also a deeply sad little man.

David gets the laughs with his raving turn as misanthrope Boris Yellnikoff, a suicidal retired physicist who never met a person with whom he couldn’t find extreme fault. But smirking his way through the movie, David never quite captures the melancholy and self-loathing underlying Boris’ bluster.

Allen also has David’s Boris spouting long-winded monologues right into the camera. A small dose of these self-conscious ramblings might have worked, but here they turn into protracted and awkward stump speeches for the unworthiness of humanity.

David’s contrived performance is matched by the contrivances of Allen’s story as a circle of kooks and oddballs come into Boris’ orbit despite his off-putting manner.

First comes Evan Rachel Wood as naive, big-hearted Southern runaway Melody, whom Boris rescues off the New York streets. Despite Boris’ savage put-downs (and some of the insults truly are hilarious), Melody falls for her benefactor.

Next comes Melody’s mother (Patricia Clarkson), then her dad (Ed Begley Jr.), religious fundamentalists who shed their conservatism and adopt wild new lives at the flip of a switch.

Allen creates stereotypes on one extreme only to turn them into stereotypes on the other extreme. The transformations are funny, and Wood, Begley and especially Clarkson bring depth and credibility to their characters that David’s Boris lacks.

But the changes they undergo are gimmicky, the stuff of cheap laughs.

Allen says he originally wrote the screenplay in the 1970s with Zero Mostel in mind to play Boris. That almost certainly would have been a richer performance, but the discussion is academic. So whatever.

”Whatever Works,” a Sony Pictures Classics release, is rated PG-13 for sexual situations including dialogue, brief nude images and thematic material. Running time: 92 minutes. Two stars out of four.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/15/arts/AP-US-Film-Review-Whatever-Works.html?_r=1

Photo: http://www.empiretheatres.com/files/movies/2009/06/whateverworks_MPL.jpg

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ABC News to Air Obama Interview on Health Care

ABC News will present a prime-time interview with President Barack Obama on health care issues next week.The special will air June 24 at 10 p.m. Eastern, on two-hour tape delay. Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer will moderate the White House discussion with a live audience, also taking questions submitted by viewers. After a break for local news, the discussion will continue on ”Nightline.”

That morning, Sawyer will interview Obama for ”Good Morning America.” Gibson will anchor that evening’s edition of ”World News” from the White House Blue Room.

Obama has been carefully doling out access to broadcast networks. NBC had big ratings with its inside peek at the White House. Obama has also given interviews to CBS’ ”Face the Nation” and ”60 Minutes.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/15/arts/AP-US-TV-ABC-Obama.html

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Review: ‘Bataan Death March’ Detailed, Chilling

”Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath,” by Michael Norman and Elizabeth Norman: A new account of the Bataan Death March, in which more than 70,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war were victims of appalling barbarism — a particularly grim episode of World War II following Japan’s invasion of the Philippines.

Driven from Manila into the hills of the Bataan peninsula, the combined Allied forces fought without hope of reinforcement or escape until they had no choice but to capitulate. The largest surrender in U.S. military annals was followed by a forced 60-mile march along Luzon’s main highway during which more than 10,000 of the POWs were summarily murdered or died from torture, wounds and disease.

For Americans the Death March was a first encounter with the brutality that would define Japan’s military behavior, and the fact that the story has been told many times before does not dissuade Michael and Elizabeth Norman, both professors at New York University, from another effort.

The result is an extremely detailed and thoroughly chilling treatment that, given the passage of time and thinning of ranks, could serve as popular history’s final say on the subject.

American and Filipino troops in April 1942 on the Bataan Death March, a 66-mile ordeal that remains a hallmark of brutality.

The Normans spent a decade in research and writing, interviewing more than 100 surviving American veterans and relatives of scores of others, and traveling to Japan to track down the most elusive and difficult sources — some 20 former soldiers who were involved in the march and a guard from one of the miserable camps where more captives died from sickness, torture or starvation.

The authors also find an ideal protagonist in Ben Steele, a former Montana cowboy who in 1940, at 22, joined the Army Air Corps and was sent to the Philippines. Steele survived the Death March and prison camp, and his personal story is the thread by which the authors spin their harrowing narrative, also using Steele’s sketches to illustrate it.

They find some sympathy for Gen. Masaharu Homma, the Japanese commander in the Philippines. His 1946 trial and execution as a war criminal showed how the Imperial Army was driven to excesses by right-wing racist fanatics who intimidated its senior officers, Homma among them.

But as with other latter-day critics, they have little admiration for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the U.S. commander in the Philippines who was being glorified at home in 1942 as the greatest American military hero since Ulysses S. Grant.

On Jan. 15, the authors report, McArthur sent his beleaguered troops on Bataan a would-be morale booster, promising them that reinforcements in the form of troops and planes were on the way from the United States.

”It was a lie, a Judas kiss,” they write. ”The Philippines was cut off. Washington knew it and so did MacArthur.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/15/arts/AP-US-Book-Review-Tears-in-the-Darkness.html

Photo (1): http://media.us.macmillan.com/jackets/500H/9780374272609.jpg

Photo (2): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/books/17garner.html?hpw

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Author Responds to Salinger Lawsuit

J.D. Salinger, now 90 years old, is suing to stop the publication of “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.”

An author who is being sued for a coming novel that J.D. Salinger says is “a rip-off pure and simple” of “The Catcher in the Rye” will argue that his book is a legally protected literary commentary on Mr. Salinger’s original novel.

According to a legal brief provided by his lawyers, Fredrik Colting, the author of the book “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” says that his novel is not a sequel to “Catcher in the Rye,” but rather “a complex and undeniably transformative exposition about one of our nation’s most famous authors, J.D. Salinger, and his best known creation, Holden Caulfield.”

The book “explores the famously reclusive Salinger’s efforts to control both his own persona and the persona of the character he created,” according to the brief. “It also scrutinizes and criticizes the iconic stature of Salinger and his creation by comparing the precocious and self-satisfied 16-year-old Holden with a 76-year-old version of himself fraught with indecision and insecurity.”

Earlier this month, Mr. Salinger, 90, filed suit against Mr. Colting, a Swedish author who wrote “60 Years Later” under the pseudonym John David California. The book, published in Britain and scheduled for release in the United States, centers on a 76-year-old character called Mr. C, who wanders the streets of New York after he escapes his nursing home, in a manner similar to Holden Caulfield’s escape from an elite prep school. Opening arguments in the case are scheduled to begin Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

In their brief, Frankfurt Kurnit, the lawyers for Mr. Colting, say that his book is a literary commentary on “Catcher in the Rye,” Mr. Salinger and his Holden Caulfield character, and is a parody protected by fair use laws. They say Mr. Colting’s book “imagines the interaction between two narrator/protagonists: ‘Mr. Salinger,’ a bitter and angry reclusive author, and Mr. C, the fictional character he has created.”

In a written declaration filed with the brief, Mr. Colting writes, “I am not a pirate.” He adds that he did not write “60 Years Later” as a “cheap rip-off of one of the most famous works of modern fiction” but rather as “a critical exploration of such themes as the relationship between J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive author, and Holden Caulfield, his brash and ageless fictional creation.”

Mr. Colting also writes in his declaration that Mr. Salinger has “exercised iron-clad control over his intellectual property, refusing to allow others to adapt any of his characters or stories in other media.”

He says that several scenes in “60 Years Later” comment on the uneasy relationship between his imagined version of Mr. Salinger and the Holden Caulfield character: “In order to regain control over his own life, which is drawing to a close, ‘Mr. Salinger’ tries repeatedly to kill off Mr. C by various means: a runaway truck; falling construction debris; a lunatic woman with a knife; suicide by drowning and suicide by pills.”

Mr. Colting acknowledges that three original characters from “Catcher in the Rye” appear in his novel: Mr. C, his sister Phoebe and Stradlater, Holden Caulfield’s prep school roommate. He also provides a list of more than two dozen original characters he has created for his novel, including Mary, Mr. C’s deceased wife, and Daniel, his son.

The legal filing also included a written declaration from Aaron Silverman, the owner of SCB Distributors, a California-based company that planned to release “60 Years Later” in the United States. In his declaration, Mr. Silverman included a mock-up of the book’s cover, which features a rough sketch of the Manhattan skyline, with disclaimers that read “A Fictional Examination of the Relationship Between J.D. Salinger and His Most Famous Character” and “This critical literary speculation has not been approved, licensed or endorsed by J.D. Salinger.”

In additional written declarations, Martha Woodmansee, a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, writes that Mr. Colting’s novel is a work of “meta-commentary” and “is thus a complex work, more complex than” Mr. Salinger’s novel. Sara Nelson, the former editor of Publishers Weekly, writes that a US release of “Sixty Years Later” would not adversely affect sales of “Catcher in the Rye.” “Anticipated sales of ‘60 Years,’ a critical analysis by a little-known author, pale in comparison to ‘Catcher’’s success,” Ms. Nelson said in her declaration.

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Legal brief: http://www.scribd.com/doc/16477816/60Years-Brief-Opposing-Injunction

Colting’s declaration: http://www.scribd.com/doc/16477819/60Years-Colting-Declaration

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Full article and photo: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/author-responds-to-salinger-lawsuit/?hp

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See also:

Holden, Young and Old

At the end of most novels, the future lies deliciously implicit. We do not know what will become of Holden Caulfield, the hero of J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” nor are we supposed to. Whether another author — in this case, a Swedish writer named Fredrik Colting — can legally pick up Caulfield’s tale 60 years down the road is being disputed in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, which was also the city of Caulfield’s fictional day off. A temporary restraining order preventing publication of Mr. Colting’s book is in place while Judge Deborah A. Batts prepares her written decision.

Mr. Salinger’s lawyers have argued that Mr. Colting’s work is derivative, an attempt to exploit the enormous popularity of the 1951 novel. Mr. Colting’s lawyers argue that his book, “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” falls within the fair use provisions of copyright law. Readers will want to consider a different question. Do we really want to see that brash, rebellious and confused young man grow up? It is outlandish to imagine Salinger taking Caulfield into AARP territory. It is even less tempting to imagine Mr. Colting — whose clearly derivative nom de plume is J. D. California — doing so.

Some adolescents, like Holden Caulfield and Huck Finn, were born to remain adolescent. But these two characters live, as it were, in separate legal kingdoms. Because Huck Finn lives in the public domain, outside of copyright, anyone can write another chapter in his life without penalty. What keeps Huck eternally young is, in a sense, the force of his personality and the strength of his author’s imagination.

Because copyright extends during the author’s lifetime, plus 70 years, the character of Holden Caulfield does not belong to the public domain. We have no doubt that no matter what the judge rules Caulfield, like Huck, will remain forever young, simply because that is how his author imagined him. In almost every battle between the original and the derivative, in copyright or public domain, it is the original that retains our affection.

New York Times, Editorial

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/opinion/19fri4.html?ref=opinion

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Miley Cyrus Takes on the Scalpers

Miley Cyrus performed in Los Angeles last week.

The Issue

The singer Miley Cyrus, beloved by tweens, announced that her tour through 45 cities this fall will go paperless to thwart scalpers, making hers the first major tour to take this step. Ticketmaster, the company handling sales, will offer only e-tickets and deploy other innovative antiscalping technologies at each venue. But isn’t scalping harmless, even beneficial — the very essence of American capitalism?

The Argument

No. Cyrus is a teenage Joan of Arc (as was Joan of Arc, of course, though she was indifferent to the price of concert tickets). Scalping in effect robs performers and bars less-well-off fans from hot shows, unlike other distribution systems — first come, first served; a ticket lottery — and worsens the dismal effects of a money-talks society.

To give scalping its due, many states have legalized it. If Cyrus resents the prices that scalpers command, she is free to raise what she charges for tickets, which ranges from $39.50 to $79.50. It may vex her that someone who contributes no perky songs or peppy dances to the big tour should profit from her hard work, but scalpers and their advocates counter that they contribute by using the free market to distribute a scarce commodity efficiently. If it’s O.K. to resell a car or a house, why not a concert ticket?

Here’s why. Not every purchase involves a commodity. An airline ticket or a downloaded song, for example, is better seen as a license to enjoy a service. Also objectionable, particularly to Bruce Springsteen — like Cyrus, an ardent antiscalper — are those occasions when scalpers raise prices and frustrate an artist’s wish to perform for true and loyal fans, not just wealthy Mileyites or Bruce-come-latelies. (The tickets for his final shows in Giants Stadium this coming fall are priced between $33 and $98, but even weeks before they officially went on sale, scalpers were demanding 10 times face value, something the attorney general of New Jersey is investigating.

Scalpers respond with a metaphysical question: Who is a true Miley Cyrus fan? Anyone who watches “Hannah Montana”? Someone who shrieks ecstatically at the mention of Cyrus’s name? Who swoons? Scalping provides a way to calibrate a fan’s passion by what she is willing to pay for a ticket. “I love Miley $50 worth.” “Well, I love her $100 worth.”

It would be splendid if science could quantify desire, neatly settling many a lovers’ quarrel (as Frank Loesser does in the lyric from “Guys and Dolls: “I love you a bushel and a peck“, but this remains a golden dream. Markets tend to allocate tickets to the fan not with the greatest passion but with the thickest wallet.

A hypothetical $600 ticket — Cyrus’s shows have commanded that — is a daunting purchase for most of us but a mere bagatelle to, for example, Mike Bloomberg, America’s eighth-wealthiest man. If a willingness to pay is to be the gauge of Mileymania, it must be measured not in absolute dollars but as a percentage of wealth. Would you give up a 20th of a percent of everything you own to see her? A 10th?

The median worth of an American family is roughly $120,000. To snare that $600 ticket, that family must spend half a percent of all it’s got. Bloomberg is worth about $20 billion. To demonstrate equal ardor for Miley, half a percent of his worth, he must pony up $100 million. I hope he enjoys the show.

Such a proportional approach is not unprecedented. Courts consider ability to pay when determining punitive damages. Some countries peg traffic fines to income. Recently in Finland, a driver received a speeding ticket for 112,000 euros, a record. He had done very well the year before he was clocked doing 82 k.p.h. in a 60 k.p.h. zone.

But even if scalpers set prices this way, they would still do great social harm. Earning power should not be the sole criterion by which the ordinary joys of life are allocated. There is much to be said for broad access to education, Shakespeare, music. We are rightly proud of the New York Public Library, Stuyvesant High School, Shakespeare in the Park. Indeed, Olmsted and Vaux, the designers of that park, Central Park, conceived it not only as a site of recreation and an oasis of beauty and serenity but as an institution of democracy, open to all. Inclusiveness, community, an egalitarian society: these are the civic virtues that scalping corrodes. And while Cyrus tickets are not free, scalping lamentably and unnecessarily expands the dominion of cash.

Virtue aside, Ticketmaster’s high-tech system seems needlessly complicated and inconvenient. (A marketing if not a moral precept: if a formerly easy process has been updated such that a video is needed to explain it, that process should be simplified.) Tickets must be bought online. At the venue, fans present I.D. and the credit card used in the purchase, which is swiped with a novel handheld device, which then prints a “seat locator” … as the line to enter grows longer, the grumbling louder.

There’s an easier way, one that can end scalping overnight: print the buyer’s name on the tickets and then check it against ID. (Many venues — the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for example — already print tickets this way; no new technology required.) At the venue, the buyer flashes his ID, shows the party’s tickets imprinted with his name and in they all go. Resold tickets would be useless, bearing the name of the original buyer, Bob the Scalper, who is not apt to arrive, ID in hand, to escort his customers into a Cyrus show.

A little flexibility would be sacrificed: if something came up at the last minute that kept you from attending a show, you couldn’t give your tickets to a pal at work. But you could still order tickets as gifts: the seller merely prints the recipient’s name — your friend, your child — on the tickets at the time of purchase. In return for some small inconvenience there would be big rewards: greater control for the artist, greater access for the ordinary fan, greater virtue for the community.

Randy Cohen, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://ethicist.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/miley-cyrus-takes-on-the-scalpers/

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Dispatch From the Porn Belt

Health officials in Los Angeles County “say there have been 16 previously unpublicized confirmed cases of HIV in adult film industry performers since 2004 when an outbreak shut down porn production for a month,” the Associated Press reports. In one case, an “actress” tested negative, shot a film, and “tested positive immediately afterward”:

The woman’s case should be a wake-up call to the adult film industry that it isn’t doing enough to protect its performers, said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health.

He said the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health requires that safe sex be practiced on all adult movie sets.

“But we have persistent reports that that is not the case,” he said, adding his department receives an average of 15 reports a week from the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation of actors testing positive for other sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea and chlamydia.

“That’s obviously very disturbing,” Fielding said. “I don’t know of any other industry where people are subjected to that kind of risk.”

Reader Evan Slatis quips: “How did the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health ever get such a knowledge intensive job without ever hearing of the world’s oldest profession?” The answer, presumably, is that prostitution is illegal and therefore under the jurisdiction of the police rather than occupational regulatory agencies.

But wait. What exactly is the difference between pornographic “actors” and prostitutes? The former group would seem to be a subset of the latter, since prostitution is defined as the practice of engaging in sexual activity for money.

As a matter of economics, the distinction lies in who pays. In ordinary prostitution, one participant in the sex act pays the other. In porn, all the participants are paid. But as a matter of law, the distinction is that porn “actors” engage in sex acts for the benefit of spectators, which, under a series of Supreme Court precedents, makes it a form of “speech” entitled to considerable protection under the First Amendment.

This column generally favors an expansive view of the First Amendment, but even to us, this outcome seems perverse.

James Taranto, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124508483838715653.html

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Entertainment – June 15

Obama Half Brother, George Obama, Working on Book

A memoir by George Obama, the president’s half brother and a resident of Huruma, Kenya, will be published by Simon & Schuster in January 2010. George Obama, 27, shares the same father with his famous, older half sibling, although George and Barack Obama — 20 years apart in age — did not grow up together and did not meet as children.

George is the youngest of the senior Obama’s seven children and was born six months before his father died.

Little is known about George Obama. The book, tentatively titled ”Homeland” and to be written with author-journalist Damien Lewis, will tell of George Obama’s fall into crime and poverty as a teenager and his eventual embrace of community organizing — a passion shared by the president — and of advocacy for the poor, an identification so strong that he chooses to live among them.

”Even had George Obama not been our President’s half brother, his story is moving and inspirational,” David Rosenthal, Simon & Schuster publisher and executive vice president, said in a statement Sunday. ”It is an object lesson in survival, selflessness and courage.”

Financial terms were not disclosed, but an official with knowledge of the negotiations said the deal was worth six figures. The official, who was not authorized to discuss the contract, spoke on condition of anonymity.

Other Obama relatives are working on books, including a half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng; and the brother of first lady Michelle Obama, Craig Robinson. Duke University Press is releasing the doctoral dissertation of the president’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who died in 1995.

Barack Obama has written a pair of million-selling books, ”The Audacity of Hope” and ”Dreams from My Father,” in which he describes George Obama as ”a handsome, roundheaded boy with a wary gaze.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/14/arts/AP-US-Books-Obama-Relative.html?_r=1

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Susan Boyle Due Back on Tour After “Rest Day”

Susan Boyle, who became famous the world over after appearing on the “Britain’s Got Talent” television show, hopes to return to the stage on Monday after cancelling a weekend performance amid concerns over her health.

The 48-year-old amateur singer from Scotland was runner-up in the popular talent show, and finalists including Boyle were expected to join a tour around the country in June.

Boyle, whose first performance on Britain’s Got Talent was downloaded around 200 million times on the internet, making her a global celebrity, has struggled to cope with the pressures of her sudden fame.

During the run-up to the final she repeatedly broke down in tears, and soon after losing out to dance troupe Diversity she was taken to a private clinic suffering from exhaustion.

Boyle, whose dowdy image and idiosyncratic behavior made her an unlikely star, did perform at the opening tour concert in Birmingham on Friday and again on Saturday in Sheffield.

But on Sunday she dropped out, prompting fresh concerns over her mental health.

“She is due back on stage tonight,” said a tour spokeswoman, adding that a final decision on whether Boyle would appear in Glasgow, in her native Scotland, had yet to be made.

“On Sunday she was advised to take a rest day. She hasn’t pulled out of the tour.”

After the tour is finished, Boyle is expected to record an album which will hit stores by Christmas.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/15/arts/entertainment-us-boyle.html

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Letterman Apologizes — Again — to Governor Palin and Her Family

David Letterman directly apologized to Gov. Sarah Palin and her daughters on his program Monday night, saying he took responsibility for a joke that had offended Ms. Palin, her family, and her supporters.

Mr. Letterman opened the desk portion of his show with the apology in which he said he wanted to say he was sorry to “to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke.” Two weeks ago on his “Late Show” program on CBS, he had joked about Governor Palin attending a Yankee game with her daughter.

The joke, in which Mr. Letterman seemingly confused Willow, who is 14 and attended a Yankee game with Gov. Palin that week, with Bristol, who is 18 and an unwed mother, had to do with the Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez impregnating Ms. Palin’s daughter.

Last week Mr. Letterman somewhat defiantly said that there was a misperception going on and he would never make a sexually charged joke about a 14-year old. But he never expressly explained that he had inadvertently confused the two Palin daughters.

Monday he acknowledged that as the host of the program it was his responsibility to get the joke right.  “I told a joke that was beyond flawed, and my intent is completely meaningless compared to the perception.”

He also insisted he was confused about the daughters. “I was told at the time she was there with Rudy Guiliani,” Mr. Letterman said. “I should have made the joke about Rudy.”

The issue has been seized upon by supporters of Ms. Palin who have called for everything from a boycott of Mr. Letterman’s advertisers to his outright firing. They have planned a rally for the Tuesday at Mr. Letterman’s theater on Broadway in Manhattan.

Some media commentators said that Mr. Letterman was keeping the controversy alive for the sake of ratings, but he seemed to make a special effort Monday to get the apology right. He even taped it a second time after he mistakenly referred to Bristol Palin once as “Brooke” in the first effort.

CBS executives said Monday that they had exercised no pressure on the late-night star to offer any apology and that they had seen no real impact on advertisers from the protests.

One advertiser, Embassy Suites Hotels, sent word to Ms. Palin’s supporters that they had ceased advertising on CBS’s website and did not want to be associated in any way with Mr. Letterman’s comments.

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Full article: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/letterman-apologizes-again-to-governor-palin-and-her-family/?hp

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This Nurse Is Riled, Better Head for the Pills

From left, Jada Pinkett Smith, Suleka Mathew and Venessa Lengies in a new hospital series.

TNT caters to difficult women. Holly Hunter plays an alcoholic, oversexed detective on “Saving Grace.” On “The Closer” Kyra Sedgwick is a self-centered, overbearing deputy police chief with a secret craving for sweets.

As the star of TNT’s newest series, “HawthoRNe,” Jada Pinkett Smith has a flaw too. Christina Hawthorne is a caregiver who cares too much. She overcares. “I can’t jeopardize my job,” a starchy hospital administrator tells Christina, the chief nursing officer, when asked to bend the rules to help a homeless woman. “Yes you can,” Christina retorts. “I do it practically everyday.”

Christina doesn’t fit the TNT mold of unconventional heroine; she couldn’t be more predictably valiant. And that is oddly counterintuitive at a time when television increasingly savors imperfection. Edie Falco also plays a dedicated health-care worker on “Nurse Jackie” on Showtime, but her character is a drug addict who cheats on her husband with the hospital pharmacist; Jackie gets as good as she gives.

Nurse Christina is a throwback to an earlier age of television when female leads in dramas were rare and held up as role models. Christina is a beautiful young widow, a devoted mother and a fierce, selfless champion of the patients and her overworked, underappreciated nursing staff. She even stands up for the janitor when he complains that hospital bean counters made him switch to a cheaper brand of disinfectant.

Four decades have passed since Diahann Carroll played a nurse on “Julia,” a sitcom that NBC put on the air in 1968 in an attempt to address — and defuse — the racial tensions of the age. Ms. Carroll was the first African-American actress with a lead role on a television series who didn’t play a cook or devoted family retainer. Julia was a confident, respected professional, an attractive widow with a young son and many eligible suitors.

“Julia” challenged stereotypes and promoted conciliation. “HawthoRNe” challenges stereotypes about nursing, but mostly it seems intent on promoting the self-regard of its star, who also happens to be an executive producer of the show.

This might be the place to point out that Ms. Pinkett Smith is married to Will Smith, the movie star whose last two movies took in more than $790 million worldwide. Ms. Pinkett Smith has many acting credits on her résumé but fewer memorable performances, despite a Wikipedia entry that introduces her as “an American film actor, producer, director, author, singer-songwriter and businesswoman” and describes the Eddie Murphy 1996 remake of “The Nutty Professor” as “her biggest box office success,” as if she had a hand in making that movie a hit.

Film actresses usually turn to television when movie offers dry up and a series offers them an opportunity to take chances and control. Ms. Hunter had a distinguished film career (“Broadcast News” and “The Piano,” for which she won an Oscar) before playing a dissipated wreck on “Saving Grace,” a show she helped create. Ms. Sedgwick’s movie roles rarely took her beyond the part of ingénue or girlfriend, which made her first season as the whiny, willful and syrupy-voiced Brenda Leigh Johnson all the more enjoyable. Not coincidentally, she is a producer of her show.

Those actresses made a point of developing characters who are almost impossible to like and are loveable for it. Ms. Pinkett Smith chose a more pleasant — and less pleasing — alter ego.

She has made a television show in her own image before. In 2003 she and her husband were the executive producers and writers of “All of Us,” a UPN sitcom about a second marriage that was partly based on their own. The show later moved to CW, but it wasn’t a huge hit, possibly because it was a portrait of the trophy wife as blameless victim: the heroine is a young, sexy, kind-hearted kindergarten teacher whose boyfriend has a hard time coaxing his selfish, unfaithful and narcissistic first wife to give him a divorce.

In “HawthoRNe” Ms. Pinkett Smith is quite convincing as a spitfire who tramples over rules and regulations (and even, in the premiere episode, a security guard) to reach her goals. She is a petite actress with a fearsome glare, the better to quell naysayers who get in her way, but there are also glimmers of charm beneath her regal good looks. Yet some of the better story lines occur when Christina is off camera.

In one a male nurse questions a doctor’s hastily written insulin prescription but doesn’t dare defy hospital protocol. The patient almost dies, but the doctor blames the nurse — for not following those orders quickly enough.

The writing is a bit stilted and predictable, but the show is not unbearable — there are some amusing supporting actors and the occasional engrossing medical crisis. As a character study, however, “HawthoRNe” is weighed down in the pursuit of worthIness.

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Full article and photo: http://nytimes.com/2009/06/16/arts/television/16hawthorne.html?8dpc

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Blame Gets Shared For Dark Side Of Reality TV Fame

Television talent show contestants fantasize about fame and fortune but for some people, an appearance on one of the shows only leads to real problems of stress, anxiety, depression, even suicide.But who is to blame when an everyday person becomes an overnight TV sensation and can’t cope — when Susan Boyle falls ill after failing to win “Britain’s Got Talent” or when “American Idol”fan Paula Goodspeed, who was teased after a poor tryout, commits suicide outside the home of a judge?

Boyle was again making headlines on Monday when she was forced to cancel a performance over health concerns while on tour with other “Britain’s Got Talent” performers.

TV producers and industry watchers vary in opinion, but they all say networks who air the shows, companies that make them and contestants themselves shoulder some responsibility.

Emotional stress can depend on “baggage (people) bring into a show,” said John Lucas, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical School.

Some contestants may already be vulnerable to depression or expect a show “will change others’ perceptions of them or … their ability to contend with their ordinary day-to-day existence,” Lucas said. “And neither is likely to happen.”

Networks ask producers to screen potential contestants for mental health issues, said David Broome, executive producer for “The Biggest Loser,” on which contestants lose weight. It enters its eighth season on U.S. network NBC this coming fall.

The types of screenings vary, but people who live isolated in small groups for weeks, as in hit shows “Survivor” or “Big Brother,” go through more rigorous tests than contestants on talent shows such as “Idol” or “Britain’s Got Talent.”

RED FLAGS

Pre-show screenings tests for red flags like clinical depression, tendency toward anger and if someone has been abused physically in their past.

“Biggest Loser” contestants undergo in-depth psychological and medical tests, and producers expect some mental health issues to arise because “almost 100 percent of the time, weight is an emotional issue,” Broome said.

While taping a program, TV networks often require producers to hire psychological experts and counselors to be available if contestants have a breakdown.

Yet, while psychological screening and counseling can identify obvious mental issues, it is impossible to determine exactly how people will react to finally realizing their bubble of celebrity has burst when a show has ended.

“When you take regular people and suddenly put them in the spotlight, you never know what’s going to happen,” said Bob Thompson of Syracuse University’s center for television and pop culture.

“I don’t know that … we can really point the blame at anyone unless you indict the notion of celebrity. And that eliminates these kinds of shows entirely,” he said.

But yanking TV contests off the airwaves seems impossible, for now, because the shows are among the network’s most-watched and they bring in millions of dollars of advertising revenues.

Moreover, for every Susan Boyle, there is a Clay Aiken, a runner-up who went on to a successful life and new career.

In fact, experts say contestants bear some responsibility to protect their emotions and decide if they can tolerate fame, but they seemed to agree that TV networks and producers must fully explain what stardom can mean.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/15/arts/entertainment-us-realitytv.html

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Ex – Cons on Kitchen Duty on Canadian TV Show

Canadian broadcaster Citytv is putting ex-cons with no culinary skills to work in a classy Toronto restaurant for “Conviction Kitchen,” a new reality series set to premiere in the fall.Sure, TV chef Jamie Oliver trained disadvantaged youths to staff his Fifteen restaurant franchise. But the Canadian series has a film crew follow local celebrity chef Marc Thuet and his wife and co-restaurant owner Biana Zorich as they whittle down 84 former bank robbers, thieves and petty offenders to seven waiters and six cooks. The finalists then endure a three-week culinary boot camp before Conviction Kitchen opens its doors to ordinary restaurant patrons.

Thuet said the eight-part series is no media stunt to launch a new business. Instead, he said, Conviction Kitchen provides first-class food and second chances for reformed criminals newly sprung from jail.

“This (TV show) will move viewers, and prove you can hire these people. They are grabbing this second chance and turning round their lives,” he said.

Dramatic tension? The original group of 13 trainees is now down to 10 after one ex-con threatened Zorich when he was told to cut his hair. Another trainee, like many an ex-addicts, left after he was found shooting up in back of the kitchen.

Thuet, a former drug and alcohol abuser now four years sober, connects on camera with ex-cons he wants to empower as chef trainees while they fight the temptation to return to destructive habits.

“This is probably the most emotional show we’ve ever made,” said Simon Lloyd, president of Toronto indie producer Cineflex Prods. “You’ve got someone taking heroin, who can’t stay in the restaurant because he can’t be around recovering addicts.”

Lloyd added that he and Thuet, a French-born chef who originally trained at the Dorchester in London, originally envisioned a TV show where they turned a prison kitchen crew into trained restaurant chefs just before they are released.

But after they failed to secure the cooperation of Canadian prison authorities, Thuet and Zorich decided to close and relaunch one of their Toronto restaurants, Bite Me!, as an Italian restaurant.

“Conviction Kitchen” differs from most reality TV series in that no one is voted off the show at the end of each episode. But Thuet and Zorich don’t disguise their challenge to keep the new restaurant open beyond opening night.

And once the cameras stop rolling at Conviction Kitchen, Zorich hopes the trainee chefs and dining room servers remain with the new restaurant until they’ve learned enough to further their new careers elsewhere, or even open their own restaurant.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/15/arts/entertainment-us-canada.html

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Entertainment – June 14

‘Jodhaa Akbar’ Dominates Bollywood Awards

A historical epic about the romance between a Mughal king and a Hindu princess dominated the 10th International Indian Film Academy awards in the southern Chinese enclave of Macau on Saturday by winning six awards, including best picture and best actor for heartthrob Hrithik Roshan.

”Jodhaa Akbar” creator Ashutosh Gowariker was also named best director. The film also took home best music direction for Oscar-winning composer A.R. Rahman, best song lyrics and best male playback singer — an award for performers who record soundtracks for on-screen actors.

Former Miss World Priyanka Chopra was named best actress for playing a model who stages a comeback in ”Fashion.”

Gowariker, who directed the Oscar-nominated 2001 film ”Lagaan,” said he was advised not to make a film about the touchy subject of Hindu-Muslim relations but went ahead because ”I somehow felt it is the need of art.” ”Jodhaa Akbar” describes how what was intended as a politically strategic marriage between a Muslim emperor and a Hindu beauty evolved into genuine love.

Picking up his award for playing the king, Roshan saluted Gowariker, saying ”This is as much yours as it is mine.”

Chopra called ”Fashion” ”one of the most difficult films of my life.”

Best supporting actor went to Arjun Rampal for ”Rock On!!” — about the reunion of an Indian band — and Kangana Ranawat won best supporting actress for ”Fashion.”

The female star of ”Jodhaa Akbar,” another former Miss World, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan from the Hollywood movie ”The Pink Panther 2” missed out on best actress honors, but it was still a big night for her family — the first family of Indian cinema. The actress is married to actor Abhishek Bachchan, the son of Indian screen legend Amitabh Bachchan.

Aishwarya Rai did pick up awards for best actress of the decade and outstanding achievement in international cinema, joking that the second award felt like a ”mini-lifetime achievement award.” Abhishek was named best actor in a humorous role for the Miami-set comedy ”Dostana.” Accepting his award, the younger Bachchan paid an emotional tribute to his father, saying ”I was a young boy watching the greatest actor alive.”

The elder Bachchan presented the lifetime achievement award to veteran actor Rajesh Khanna — who received a standing ovation from the audience of thousands — recalling that Khanna’s fanatic female fans would pick up dirt from his car tires and place them in their hair as a gesture of worship.

”The word superstar in the Indian film industry was for the first time coined for him,” Bachchan said.

Gowariker’s ”Lagaan,” about a group of Indian villagers who play their British colonial rulers in cricket to decide the fate of their taxes, was named film of the decade. Another heartthrob, Shah Rukh Khan won male star of the decade. Roshan presented his father, filmmaker Rakesh Rohan, with the director of the decade prize.

The nominees in the top categories were chosen by film industry insiders, with the winners decided by an Internet vote.

The day’s marathon festivities began with a three-hour long red carpet ceremony along a 200-meter strip inside the massive The Venetian Macao casino-hotel resort, with passionate ethnic Indian fans from as far as the U.S. and South Africa pressing up against barricades, punching their hands in the air as they chanted the names of their idols and their movies.

The awards ceremony itself was a freewheeling five-hour variety show ending at 2:30 a.m. Sunday (1830 GMT Saturday) that combined a Cirque du Soleil circus performance, skits, movie spoofs, and the elaborate song-and-dance routines that Indian cinema is renowned for. At one point, the host waded into the VIP section to get different stars to sing Hindi numbers spontaneously.

The dance performances were a spectacular showing of fast-paced hip-swiveling action in glittering costumes amid disco lights fireworks and confetti.

Her head and body covered in silver jewelry, Aishwarya Rai was carried onto stage in a golden sedan chair by barefoot men to the music of ”Jodhaa Akbar” and then performed with a group of bare-chested dancers. Her husband showed up among the audience in a pink-striped kurta, slowly made his way to stage while high-fiving members of the audience then shook his body with female dancers in red bikini tops and red dresses.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/13/arts/AP-AS-Macau-Bollywood-Awards.html?_r=1

Photo: http://sakshijuneja.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/windowslivewriterjodhaaakbarandsomuchmore-bc99jodhaa-akbar-1-2.jpg

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A Plea for Tolerance in Tight Shorts. Or Not.

Sacha Baron Cohen in the title role of “Brüno,” a comedy that trafficks in homosexual stereotypes.

SACHA BARON COHEN recently approached Elton John through a representative. Could he use “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” Mr. John’s hit song from “The Lion King,” for a pivotal scene in his forthcoming movie?

“Brüno,” an R-rated comedy set for wide release by Universal Pictures on July 10, stars Mr. Baron Cohen as a flamboyantly gay fashion journalist from Austria. The filmmakers wanted to play the song during a scene in which the title character, participating in a cage-fighting match, pulls down his opponent’s pants and kisses him on the mouth, prompting a horrified crowd to throw garbage at him.

The answer was no. Mr. John, along with the Walt Disney Company, which owns the copyright to the song but seeks his approval in such matters, learned of the scene’s particulars and blanched, according to one of Mr. John’s advisers. But then Mr. John reversed himself — kind of. He didn’t want to be associated with the provocative scene, but he ultimately agreed to perform part of another song that functions as a coda to the film.

So it goes for “Brüno,” a movie that, in mercilessly exploiting the discomfort created when straight men are ambushed by aggressive gayness, happens to (surprise!) expose homophobia. Gay groups are reacting with deeply mixed emotions, heightened by the recent triumphs (Iowa) and losses (California) in efforts to legalize gay marriage. Is the film then vulgar, inappropriate and harmful? Or bold, timely and necessary? All of the above?

Ultimately the tension surrounding “Brüno” boils down to the worry that certain viewers won’t understand that the joke is on them and will leave the multiplex with their homophobia validated.

“Some people in our community may like this movie, but many are not going to be O.K. with it,” said Rashad Robinson, senior director of media programs for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. “Sacha Baron Cohen’s well-meaning attempt at satire is problematic in many places and outright offensive in others.”

Holding the opposite view are people like Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out magazine, who said he plans to put Mr. Baron Cohen on the August cover. “The movie does something hugely important, which is showing that people’s attitudes can turn on a dime when they realize you’re gay,” Mr. Hickland said. “The multiplex crowd wouldn’t normally sit down for a two-hour lecture on homophobia, but that’s exactly what’s going to happen. I’m excited about that.”

“Brüno” is not a lecture, at least not overtly. Like “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the 2006 smash that starred Mr. Baron Cohen as an anti-Semitic Kazakh journalist, “Brüno” is first and foremost a raunchy comedy featuring a not-so-bright guy who embraces sexism, racism and stereotypes as he happily goes about his business. Borat and Brüno are both familiar to fans of “Da Ali G Show,” Mr. Baron Cohen’s satirical talk show, which first ran in Britain in 2000 and began appearing on HBO in 2003.

Yet “Brüno” is also intended as a statement about what it is like to be a member of a minority in America in 2009. Mr. Baron Cohen’s malaprop-loaded antics are fictional, but the hate they can elicit from the people he encounters is ostensibly real. (The same was true of “Borat,” which some human rights groups also greeted with hostility; Abraham H. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League said at the time that audiences “may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke.”)

Bloggers have given “Brüno” an unofficial subtitle: “Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt.”

Universal won’t discuss the filmmaking process, but the studio insists that the vast majority of the people who appear with Mr. Baron Cohen had no idea they were being filmed for a Hollywood movie. Ads for “Brüno” trumpet, “real people, real situations.”

That was at least true of Representative Ron Paul of Texas, the former Republican presidential candidate. In a scene filmed in early 2008, Mr. Paul sits for an interview with the Baron Cohen character. (Mr. Paul has said he was told the topic would be Austrian economics.) When lighting trouble delays the interview, Mr. Baron Cohen strips to his underwear. Mr. Paul storms out muttering, “This guy is a queer.”

In a subsequent radio interview Mr. Paul said: “I don’t like the idea that he lies his way into an interview. To me it’s a real shame that people are going to reward him with millions and millions of dollars for being so crass.”

Judging from the way certain subjects in “Borat” reacted after that film was released, Universal’s lawyers will be busy. At least six lawsuits were filed against the comic and 20th Century Fox, the “Borat” distributor. So far no plaintiffs have won, but some cases are on appeal. (Universal, which won a bidding war with 20th Century Fox for the distribution rights to “Brüno,” paying $42.5 million, seems happy to take the risk. “Borat” cost $18 million and brought in $262 million worldwide.)

“Brüno” was served with its first lawsuit on May 22. According to a complaint filed by a California woman, Mr. Baron Cohen — as Brüno — infiltrated a charity bingo tournament and offended the elderly audience with vulgarities while calling a game. The plaintiff, Richelle Olson, contends that she was severely injured when she tried to grab the microphone away from him. In a statement Universal called the lawsuit “completely baseless,” noting that full footage of the encounter shows that Ms. Olson was never touched.

As roles go, there is no ambiguity about Brüno: he is a limp-wristed, sex-crazed queen. Universal’s promotional materials show him dressed in hot pants, leopard bikini underwear and riding nude on a unicorn.

The character has evolved in appearance since the television show. This Brüno has plucked eyebrows and longish hair with blonde highlights. He wears mauve lipstick. Mr. Baron Cohen also appears to have shed several pounds of arm, leg and torso hair through waxing or electrolysis.

In one scene Brüno appears on a talk show holding a baby who is wearing a T-shirt reading “Gayby.” The sequence flashes back to Brüno having sex in a hot tub while the baby sits nearby. (A person who worked on the movie noted that the flashback consists of still images that were photoshopped – no baby was actually present – and that the sex is only strongly implied.) He then boasts to the outraged talk-show audience that the baby is a man magnet (only he uses unprintable language).

In another scene Brüno, intent on becoming straight, goes to a martial arts instructor to learn how to protect himself from gay people. “If they get close to you, hit them,” the teacher says. How can you spot a gay man? “Obvious is a person being extremely nice” is the answer. Gays can be tricky, the instructor warns: “Some of them don’t even dress no different than myself or you.”

The movie also touches on the reckless pursuit of fame. For instance, under the pretext of conducting a “glamorous baby” photo shoot, Brüno interviews real moms and dads, many holding their babies on their laps. He asks one mother “is your baby comfortable with bees, wasps and hornets?” She answers, “George is comfortable with everything.” Dead or dying animals? “Yes.”

“Can Olivia lose 10 pounds in the next week?” Brüno asks another mother, who doesn’t bat an eyelash: “Yeah, I’d have to do whatever I could,” she says.

Mr. Baron Cohen declined to be interviewed for this article, as did Larry Charles, who directed the film (as well as “Borat”). Universal also declined to make a production executive available for an interview, providing the following statement instead:

“ ‘Brüno’ uses provocative comedy to powerfully shed light on the absurdity of many kinds of intolerance and ignorance, including homophobia. By placing himself in radical and risky situations, Sacha Baron Cohen forces both the people Brüno meets and the audience itself to challenge their own stereotypes, preconceptions and discomforts.

“While any work that dares to address relevant cultural sensitivities might be misinterpreted by some or offend others, we believe the overwhelming majority of the audience will understand and appreciate the film’s inarguably positive intentions.”

The studio has twice shown unfinished versions of “Brüno” to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and said that test audiences have come away with a clear understanding of the film’s positive social message. Universal also said that it screened 20 minutes of unedited footage at a Texas film festival this year, and that blog coverage was overwhelmingly upbeat.

Marketing “Brüno” poses unusual challenges for Universal, as some multiplex chains will only run trailers to R-rated films before other R-rated movies. And a stunt at the MTV Movie Awards on June 1 may have damaged the movie’s credibility, film marketers say.

During the show Mr. Baron Cohen, dressed as Brüno, dangled above the audience from wires wearing a jock strap and giant white wings. He landed face down in the lap of the rapper Eminem, who stormed out of the theater. The problem: Eminem admitted to being in on the stunt — and thus faking his reaction — which may lead audiences to doubt the studio’s assertion that actors were not used in the film.

Meanwhile the debate among gay rights advocates goes on.

“We strongly feel that Sacha Baron Cohen and Universal Pictures have a responsibility to remind the viewing public right there in the theater that this is intended to expose homophobia,” said Brad Luna, a spokesman for Human Rights Campaign.

Cathy Renna, who left the Gay and Lesbian Alliance after 14 years to start her own similarly focused consulting firm, said she thinks gay audiences will greet the film warmly. “Of all minority groups I think gay people are the most likely to be able to laugh at themselves,” she said. “If nothing else, let’s hope this prompts a lot of conversation.”

Will the stereotypes Mr. Baron Cohen explores offer support to opponents of gay marriage?

“I don’t think that any conservative group is going to use ‘Brüno’ to make a point about how awful gay people are,” said Frank Voci, the founder of White Knot, a nonprofit group focused on gay rights. “If they try to go there, we can easily turn around and point out how horribly these people reacted to him being gay.”

Universal would be happy if more people just took the position of Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of “Milk” and has been an outspoken opponent of California’s recent ban on gay marriage.

Asked for his thoughts on “Brüno,” Mr. Black responded by e-mail, “Sadly, I haven’t seen the film yet!”

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/movies/14barn.html?hpw

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The Screen’s Seduction of Graham Greene

THE British novelist Graham Greene was a connoisseur of human frailty: he savored the bouquet of sin. He was, unlike most of his countrymen, Roman Catholic, and unlike most practitioners of the literary arts, entirely comfortable with the movies. His religious affiliation was well known, to the point where, at the height of his fame, he bristled at being labeled a “Catholic writer.” His relationship to film was pretty visible too; almost all his 25 novels and many of his short stories were turned into movies or television shows (several of them more than once), and for some of the best of them, like Carol Reed’s classic “Third Man” (1949), he was also the screenwriter.

The Third Man (1949), directed by Carol Reed.

Both his Catholicism and his movie-friendliness are in full cry in John Boulting’s terrific 1947 gangster picture, “Brighton Rock,” which Greene adapted from his own novel and which starts a week’s run at Film Forum in Manhattan on Friday. In some strange way his religion and his skill at telling stories on film seem here to be two faces of the same rare coin. The movie shows, as clearly as anything he ever did, his very Catholic preoccupation with the allure of sin. And it suggests too why filmmaking might have appealed to him so strongly. In what other activity could he so reliably enjoy the dashed hopes, the queasy compromises and the nagging knowledge of failure, which for him were the staples of life in this fallen world?

The hero of “Brighton Rock,” a vicious 17-year-old thug named Pinkie Brown (Richard Attenborough), is a dedicated sinner and a Catholic after Greene’s own dark heart. “These atheists don’t know nothing,” Pinkie says by way of explaining his personal theology to his sweet, devout girlfriend, Rose (Carol Marsh); “ ’Course there’s hell, flames, damnation, torments.” She hopefully adds, “Heaven too Pinkie.” To which he replies, “Maybe,” sounding not at all convinced.

Richard Attenborough as a teenage thug in “Brighton Rock” (1947), which Graham Greene adapted from his own novel.

Pinkie is a ruthless, hollow-eyed sociopath who kills without a flicker of remorse; he’s courting innocent Rose only to keep her from giving testimony that could blow his alibi for a murder. What she sees in him is a mystery — or, rather, it would be, in any context other than that of a Graham Greene story, where virtue is by and large uninteresting, and moral weakness, grubby and persistent, is the main attraction, irresistible as the tawdry pleasures of an English seaside resort.

The hard candy called Brighton rock serves Greene as a handy metaphor for original sin: “Bite all the way down,” one character says, “and it still says Brighton.” That’s Pinkie — no matter how far down you look into his adolescent soul, there’s still something stubbornly evil there, some old, ineradicable corruption.

It’s worth noting that Greene’s participation in the making of the film carries at least a faint whiff of corruption too. Seven years earlier, near the end of a stint as the film critic of The Spectator, he had cheekily reviewed a movie called “21 Days,” on which he was himself one of the credited writers. He panned it, concluding with these ringing words: “Let one guilty man, at any rate, stand in the dock, swearing never, never to do it again.”

So in helping bring “Brighton Rock” — one of his favorites among his books — to the screen he was breaking an oath. And he compounded the sin by softening the story’s memorably cruel ending. He appears to have had no compunction about either his perjury or the necessity of doing a little violence to his own novel. Greene compromised gladly and seemed in later years almost to relish the cynical professionalism with which he had done the dirty work of turning literature into film.

In his next crack at screenwriting, Reed’s elegant and piercing “Fallen Idol” (1948), Greene violated his own published writing — in this case, a short story called “The Basement Room” — even more shamelessly: he transformed the tale of a lonely boy who sees a murder committed by his best friend, the family butler, into the story of a child who mistakes an accident for a crime. In Greeneland this qualifies as wishful thinking. And although the obvious intent of the change is to make the butler (beautifully played by Ralph Richardson) more sympathetic, the effect is to render the boy, who imagines the worst of his friend, slightly more sinister.

The boy’s willingness to believe that a kind man can be a murderer, however, makes him a more Greenelike character than the hero of “The Third Man,” an American writer of pulp westerns named Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), who takes an ungodly long time to come to the realization that his old college chum Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is a monster. “The Third Man” is the most famous of the three happy collaborations between Greene and Reed (the sprightly 1959 black comedy “Our Man in Havana” is the other) and the one that reveals most starkly the author’s virtues and vices, his passions and deepest prejudices.

Greene knew, better than most novelists of his high-literary stature, how to construct a thriller plot, how to deploy mystery, suspense, a pervasive sense of dread, and he knew too that the best villains, like Harry Lime, are charmers: glib marketers of evil. What Greene was temperamentally unable to do, though, was create a convincing innocent; his conception of innocence almost invariably took the form of a bumbling, foolish, irritatingly naïve Yank, like Holly Martins, who is, it seems, inherently incapable of understanding the ruined and desperate Old World of postwar Vienna.

Or like Alden Pyle, the title character of Greene’s 1955 Vietnam-set novel “The Quiet American,” whose naïveté is an act but whose idealism — you might call it a more active form of innocence — is, in Greene’s view, contemptible. He was generally tolerant of the movies’ penchant for altering his work, even when he hadn’t made the changes himself; he had no objection, for instance, to the elimination of the hero’s suicide at the end of George More O’Ferrall’s fine 1953 adaptation of “The Heart of the Matter.” But for the last 30-plus years of his life (he died in 1991) he railed against Joseph P. Mankiewicz, who brought “The Quiet American” to the screen in 1957 and turned Greene’s dangerous idealist into a sympathetic one.

That was unpardonable. (It’s a lucky thing Greene wasn’t a priest; you’d never get absolution.) Surprisingly, though, Mankiewicz’s “Quiet American” is, despite its infidelity to its source, a good movie; while it flips the novel’s politics, it actually goes further than Greene did in exploring the limitations of a certain kind of European weltschmerz, here embodied by a jaded, middle-aged British reporter played with perfectly judged ambiguity by a gangling and weary looking Michael Redgrave.

One of the great advantages of Greene’s writing, in dramatic terms, is the opportunities it provides for a particular kind of subtle, sad-eyed British actor: Redgrave here, Trevor Howard in “The Third Man” and “The Heart of the Matter,” Michael Caine in Philip Noyce’s 2002 remake of “The Quiet American” (which is much more faithful to the novel), Ralph Fiennes in Neil Jordan’s 1999 “End of the Affair” (also a remake, of a 1955 film in which Mr. Fiennes’s role, of a cynical, adulterous English novelist, was played by the wholesome American star Van Johnson).

Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes in “The End of the Affair,” directed by Neil Jordan and based on a Graham Greene novel.

What’s hard to miss, when you’re looking at films written by or based on stories by Greene, is how resilient these tales are, how powerful they can be even when they’re utterly betraying their author’s intentions. It’s fitting, in a way. His fiction is almost always about betrayals of some kind: infidelities, broken promises, treacheries large and small. And movies are a treacherous art. Greene, in love with corruption, understood them very well. Film is exciting, and impure in ways that obviously thrilled him to the depths of his soul. The movies are not innocent. That’s why he loved them like sin.

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Full article and photos (2) and (3): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/movies/14raff.html?hpw

Photo (1): http://www.bergamofilmmeeting.it/2009/Foto/FILM2009/settimanali/settimanali_Carol%20Reed/carol%20reed_The%20Third%20Man_orson%20welles_16.jpg

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Entertainment – June 13

Former Miss Calif.: Gay Comment Cost Me My Crown

Former Miss California USA Carrie Prejean says she lost her crown because of a comment she made about gay marriage and not because she had been skipping appearances.Prejean told Matt Lauer on NBC’s ”Today” show Friday that she ”absolutely” had been dethroned because of the comment, when she said marriage should be between a man and a woman.

Prejean lost her title Wednesday after California pageant executive director Keith Lewis said Prejean was skipping Miss California USA events while speaking out against gay marriage at unsanctioned appearances.

Lewis said Friday that the pageant would never try to silence its contestants. He says they should be able to voice their opinions as long as they don’t violate their contracts.

Prejean was replaced by the Miss California pageant’s first runner-up, Miss Malibu Tami Farrell. Farrell has also said she believes marriage should be between a man and a woman.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/12/arts/AP-US-Miss-California.html

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Sarah Palin: Letterman Owes Women an Apology

Sarah Palin says David Letterman owes an apology to young women across the country for his joke about her daughter.The Alaska governor appeared on NBC’s ”Today” show Friday, continuing a feud with the CBS ”Late Show” funnyman over his joke earlier this week that Palin’s daughter got ”knocked up” by New York Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez during their recent trip to New York.

Palin also said she doesn’t believe she should be automatically considered the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

Asked by Matt Lauer whether Letterman owed her daughter an apology, the former vice presidential candidate broadened it.

”I would like to see him apologize to young women across the country for contributing to kind of that thread that is throughout our culture that makes it sound like it is OK to talk about young girls in that way, where it’s kind of OK, accepted and funny to talk about statutory rape,” she said. ”It’s not cool. It’s not funny.”

Letterman has said his joke was about Palin’s 18-year-old daughter Bristol, who is an unwed mother (no name was used). Problem was, the Alaska governor was traveling with 14-year-old Willow. Palin said it took Letterman time to think of the ”convenient excuse” that he was talking about Bristol instead of Willow.

Letterman said on his show Wednesday that he would ”never, ever make jokes about raping or having sex of any description with a 14-year-old girl.” He said he was guilty of poor taste.

Palin said Friday that it was time for people to rise up against Letterman’s form of humor.

”No wonder young girls especially have such low self-esteem in America when we think it’s funny for a so-called comedian to get away with such a remark as he did,” she said. ”I don’t think that’s acceptable.”

The National Organization for Women placed Letterman in its ”media hall of shame.”

”I think what David Letterman said is terrible, is inappropriate and nobody should be making jokes about the sexual activities of teenagers, whether they are the daughters of politicians or not,” said Kim Gandy, NOW president.

”Comedians in search of a laugh should really know better than to snicker about men having sex with teenage girls or young women half their age,” NOW wrote on its Web site. Rodriguez is 33; Letterman is 62.

Palin said there was a double standard where the media treats President Barack Obama’s family as generally off-limits, while her family was the butt of jokes during last fall’s presidential campaign and beyond.

She’s a favorite target of Letterman’s. The ”Late Show” host made 95 jokes about Palin after the election through March 15 — more than Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert combined, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

Palin denied that it was also in bad taste for her spokeswoman, Meghan Stapleton, to say Thursday that Palin would not appear on Letterman’s ”Late Show” because ”it would be wise to keep Willow away from David Letterman.”

”Maybe he couldn’t be trusted because Willow has had enough of this type of comments and maybe Willow would want to react to him in a way that maybe would catch him off-guard,” she said. ”That’s one way to interpret such a comment.”

The controversy may wind up giving both Palin and Letterman attention at a time both could use it. Palin is considered a potential future candidate for national office, and standing up for her family could make her a hero to her fans. She was asked on ”Today” whether last year’s candidacy effectively puts her in the position of front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 and replied, ”Oh, heck no.”

Letterman is in the second week of his new competition with NBC’s O’Brien, and won by a solid margin Thursday night in Nielsen Media Research’s overnight ratings measurement of the nation’s top media markets. Letterman has a strong shot at beating the ”Tonight” show for a week in these ratings for the first time since 2005.

On his show Thursday, Letterman joked that Palin had called to invite him on a hunting trip — the punch line no doubt a reference to former Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shooting a friend while hunting.

His other references to the controversy were more oblique. When guest Denzel Washington said he would get in trouble with Obama for making a joke about the president’s big ears, Letterman clearly had something else on his mind.

”You aren’t in the kind of trouble I’m in,” he said.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/12/arts/AP-US-TV-Palin-Letterman.html

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See also:

Why Dave’s Not Funny

 

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin autographs a baseball during her trip to Yankee Stadium last Sunday.

One thing we can conclude from David Letterman’s bad jokes about Sarah Palin: He hasn’t flown commercial in a while.

Letterman’s “slutty flight attendant” remark about Palin was in poor taste, we can all agree. But it was a joke, and Letterman is a comedian. The joke probably would have been shrugged off and forgotten — Palin proved her humorous good sportsmanship on “Saturday Night Live” during the campaign — if not for Letterman’s sexually suggestive “joke” about her daughter.

Everyone knows by now that Letterman made fun of the Palin family’s trip to New York last week. He quipped that Palin’s daughter got “knocked up” by Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez during the seventh inning. Unable to stop his slide into the gutter, he said that the hardest part of the visit was keeping Eliot Spitzer away from her daughter.

Ba-da-bad. Alas, the only daughter with Palin was 14-year-old Willow.

Sorry, Dave, not funny. It was a joke according to stand-up formula — take two disparate news items and combine them in an unexpected way. No one does this better than humor columnist Andy Borowitz, who has the blogosphere in a snit with his column suggesting that Newt Gingrich accused Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor of faking her broken ankle to get sympathy. It was a JOKE!

The flight attendant line is a grown-up joke that one may or may not think is funny — though my guess is that many of the offended big brothers out there were happy to participate in the Palin-as-sexy-librarian fantasy. Fess up.

In any case, the joke was about an adult voluntarily in the public arena and, therefore, clearly of a different order than suggesting sexual relations between a child and a man. We call that rape. Letterman’s sort-of apology fell short of fixing things. He didn’t mean the 14-year-old daughter, he said. He meant the 18-year-old.

Sir, may I offer you a shovel? Or, perchance, a backhoe? Letterman was way off base and should apologize sincerely. But, please, may we stop there?

Calls for censorship or worse are far more dangerous to the land of the free than any inappropriate one-liner. John McCain — ever the chivalrous warrior — sallied forth with his own disapproving statement Thursday, saying: The Palins “deserve some kind of protection from being the butt of late-night hosts.”

They do? Are we talking vigilantes — or just good ol’ government censorship?

No, the Palins don’t deserve protection from late-night hosts. No one does. But children deserve protection from adults who have lost sight of their responsibility to be wardens of the innocent. And parents are the best guardians of their children. Keeping them out of the limelight seems a good starting point. And, no, I’m not suggesting that anyone “asked for it.”

The Palin jokes, for lack of a better term, were merely the latest in a string of recent hostile treatments of women — conservative women in particular. The Playboy magazine Web site listing conservative women whom men would like to have “hate” sex with was beyond the pale. The harsh treatment of poor Miss California USA (since dethroned) when she expressed her opinion that marriage should be between a man and a woman was simply unfair.

Opinions don’t get punished in this country. Period.

But we do have a problem, don’t we? Simply put, the zeitgeist has become mean and nasty, and we’re at a loss as to how to fix it. Here’s one thought: The Internet — which, ironically, contributes to the problem — may be the best solution possible.

Both gift and curse, the Internet has been so revolutionary and its gifts so immense that we’ve been like inmates in sudden possession of the keys. Instant access to a bullhorn and the world as one’s stage has unleashed a monstrous id, that undisciplined, infant part of the human psyche that wants what it wants when it wants. Multiply that by billions, and civilization is one harried nanny.

Thus, we have hate-sex Web pages and millions of others that degrade women, sexualize children and leave man — and womankind — to their basest instincts. Such is the profoundly messy, sometimes frightening, part of free expression.

On the other hand, we also have the passionate voices of sensible Americans who won’t let a comedian get away with trivializing rape. Which suggests that the best defense against rude comics is not “some kind of protection,” but the rallying cry of people who demand more from their society and themselves.

Kathleen Parker, Washington Post

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Full article and photo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/12/AR2009061202754.html

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Real ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ Gravely Ill

They were childhood chums. Then they drifted apart, lost touch completely, and only renewed their friendship decades later, when illness struck.Not so unusual, really.

Except she is Lucy Vodden — the girl who was the inspiration for the Beatles’ 1967 psychedelic classic ”Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” — and he is Julian Lennon, the musician son of John Lennon.

They are linked together by something that happened more than 40 years ago when Julian brought home a drawing from school and told his father, ”That’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”

Just the sort of cute phrase lots of 3- or 4-year-olds produce — but not many have a father like John Lennon, who used it as a springboard for a legendary song that became a centerpiece on the landmark album ”Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

”Julian got in touch with me out of the blue, when he heard how ill I was, and he said he wanted to do something for me,” said the 46-year-old Vodden, who has lupus, a chronic disease where the immune system attacks the body’s own tissue.

Lennon, who lives in France, sent his old friend flowers and vouchers she could use to buy plants at a local gardening center, since working in her garden is one of the few activities she is still occasionally well enough to enjoy. More importantly, he has offered her friendship and a connection to more carefree days. They communicate mostly by text message.

”I wasn’t sure at first how to approach her. I wanted at least to get a note to her,” Julian Lennon told The Associated Press. ”Then I heard she had a great love of gardening, and I thought I’d help with something she’s passionate about, and I love gardening too. I wanted to do something to put a smile on her face.”

Vodden admits she enjoys her association with the song, but doesn’t particularly care for it. Perhaps that’s not surprising. It was thought by many at the time, including BBC executives who banned the song, that the classic was a paean to LSD because of the initials in the title. Plus, she and Julian were 4 years old in 1967, the ”Summer of Love” when ”Sgt. Pepper” was released to worldwide acclaim. She missed the psychedelic era to which the song is indelibly linked.

”I don’t relate to the song, to that type of song,” said Vodden, described as ”the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” in the lyrics. ”As a teenager, I made the mistake of telling a couple of friends at school that I was the Lucy in the song and they said, ‘No, it’s not you, my parents said it’s about drugs.’ And I didn’t know what LSD was at the time, so I just kept it quiet, to myself.”

There’s no doubt the fanciful lyrics and swirling musical effects draw heavily on the LSD experiences that were shaping Lennon’s artistic output at the time — although many of the musical flourishes were provided by producer George Martin, who was not a drug user.

”The imagery in the song is partly a reflection of John’s drug experiences, and partly his love of `Alice in Wonderland,”’ said Steve Turner, author of ”A Hard Day’s Write,” a book that details the origins of every Beatles song. ”At the time it came out, it seemed overtly psychedelic, it sounded like some kind of trip. It was completely new at the time. To me it is very evocative of the period.”

Turner said his research, including interviews with Vodden and Julian Lennon, confirm that she is the Lucy in the song. He said it was common for John Lennon to ”snatch songs out of thin air” based on a simple phrase he heard on TV or an item he read in the newspapers. In this case, Turner said, it was the phrase from Julian that triggered John’s imagination.

Veteran music critic Fred Schruers said Julian Lennon’s reaching out to help Vodden as she fights the disease is particularly moving because of the childlike nature of the song.

”It’s enormously evocative but with a tinge of poignancy,” he said. ”It’s the lost childhood Julian had with that little Lucy and the lost innocence we had with the psychedelic era, an innocence we really cherished until it was snatched away.”

Vodden was diagnosed with lupus about five years ago after suffering other serious health problems. She has been struggling extreme fatigue, joint pain, and other ailments.

”She’s not given up, she’s a fighter, and she has her family backing her, that’s a good thing,” said Angie Davidson, campaign director for St. Thomas’ Lupus Trust, which funds research. ”We need more people like her, more Lucys.”

Davidson, who also has the disease, said it affects each person differently, typically causing exhaustion and depression. When the disease kills, she said, it does so by attacking the body’s internal organs.

It has become difficult for Vodden to go out — most of her trips are to the hospital — but recently she and her husband went to a bookstore and heard the song playing over the store’s music system. When they went to another shop, the song was on there as well.

”That made me giggle,” she said.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/12/arts/AP-EU-Britain-Beatles-Lucy-Ill.html

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See also:

Revealed: The real Lucy in the sky with diamonds

Forty years after The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper LP was released, a housewife from Surbiton is claiming she inspired the track Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.

Lucy Vodden, 43, was at nursery school in Weybridge with John Lennon’s son Julian, who one day took home a drawing of a girl surrounded by stars.

When John asked him to describe he said, “It’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds”.

Lucy Vodden, 43, was at nursery school in Weybridge with Julian Lennon

 

The painting that inspired the song.

Julian later confirmed this: “I don’t know why I called it that or why it stood out from all my other drawings, but I obviously had an affection for Lucy at that age.

“I used to show dad everything I’d built or painted at school, and this one sparked off the idea for a song about Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”

Beatles biographers and account by band members confirm that she is the most likely source of the song.

A young Lucy O’Donnell

Mrs Vodden said: “I can imagine him saying, ‘That’s Lucy at school,’ and his father asking questions like “What’s that in the sky?’”

There has been much specualtion about the song, many believe that it is an ode to LSD.

“When I told a couple of friends that Lucy in the sky with diamonds was about me, they said, ‘No, it can’t be, it’s to do with LSD.’ I was too embarrased to tell them that I didn’t know what LSD was.”

Julian’s mother Cynthia has said that she has kept the picture.

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Full article and photos: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-459145/Revealed-The-real-Lucy-sky-diamonds.html

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Reporting Argentina’s Dirty War: An Editor’s Story

Robert Cox risked his life chronicling the first years of Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-83) that left thousands missing. Decades later, though, he still couldn’t bear to write his own story of confronting a deadly junta.Now his son has told his story — how an editor at a small English-language daily in South America, the Buenos Aires Herald, courageously covered kidnappings and killings at a time most colleagues were silent.

”Dirty Secrets, Dirty War — The Exile of Editor Robert J. Cox” is a 221-page account by CNN Web producer David Cox of his father’s life reporting on the run-up to a 1976 military coup and the chaos that ensued in the South American country.

Published by Evening Post Publishing with Joggling Board Press, the book tells how his father dared to write about atrocities.

”This is the book that I could not write,” the elder Cox, 75, says in the foreword. ”I still find it too painful to relive those malevolent times by writing about them.”

A state-backed plan to silence real or perceived foes swept thousands into clandestine torture centers. Official records put the number of disappeared at 13,000; human rights groups say some 30,000 were slain.

”Within the whole family we have been dealing with this for many years,” said David Cox, 42, who spent his early years in Argentina. ”We all wanted my father to write the story of what happened to us and to him.”

Cox’s Herald raised early alarms about the junta.

”They warned him and tried to keep him in bounds, but he would publish lists of those who disappeared,” recalled F. Allen ”Tex” Harris, a U.S. diplomat in Argentina at the time.

Argentines visited the Herald when authorities wouldn’t give them information about missing loved ones and the paper tried to pressure the government.

”On the newsstand, the only voice was Cox,” Harris said. ”My stuff went back in the classified pouches to Washington. He’s a hero. There were so few people in the country speaking out.”

Cox’s accounts gained world attention after he became a stringer for such outlets as The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Cox and the Herald were allowed to continue the bold reporting — for a time.

”He printed in English and so few people in Argentina read English that it just wasn’t that important” to the military, Harris said. ”Whenever anybody said there was no freedom of the press, they could point to Cox.”

Cox himself was imprisoned for a day after writing editorials pressing the government to release an imprisoned journalist. Finally, in 1979, he fled Argentina after death threats to his young family.

David Cox writes of taking different routes to school and rides with family in a battered Peugeot in fear of being stopped by the police. ”That terror is a distant yet persistent memory,” he writes.

Robert Cox, whose career in journalism spanned six decades, retired last year after 26 years as assistant editor of The Post and Courier in Charleston.

The younger Cox says his father, despite the risks, is a ”tremendously humble man” who simply reported what was happening in Argentina when others refused.

”He would say his was doing his job as a journalist,” David Cox said.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/12/arts/AP-US-Books-Dirty-War.html

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Paulina Rubio Moves to “City” on New Album

Resplendent in a pink sequined micro-mini and fingerless gold gloves, Paulina Rubio shimmied her way through her first performance of her new single, “Causa y Efecto,” at the Billboard Latin Music Awards in April. Setting off a stadium-style wave by the dancers and drummers onstage with a flick of her wrist, Rubio presented herself as a woman in command, ready to launch yet another hit album.Whether she’s participating in a Spanish-language version of the pro-Obama “Yes We Can” video; Twittering about the importance of smiling, yoga and chocolate ice cream; or taping green-conscious public service announcements (about not wearing clothes, to save energy from washing them), Rubio is relentlessly fabulous, with an upbeat sound to match.

The Latin pop world has precious few working divas with larger-than-life personalities, a track record of hits and mainstream name recognition. So Universal Latino is pulling out all the marketing stops behind “Gran City Pop,” Rubio’s ninth album, which will be released June 23 in the United States, Spain and Latin America. (It will be released at a later date in such countries as Portugal, Italy and Germany.)

Rubio executive-produced the album and collaborated with other top writers including Estefano, Lester Mendez and Coti. That diversity of styles is typical for her albums; “Gran City Pop” was inspired by Mexico City, Miami and Madrid, the cities where the album was written and recorded.

Rubio says that through the years she’s earned her say in the creative process. “I try to be a chameleon and reinvent myself,” she says. When fans “start dedicating the songs to people, I know that the connection was really well received.”

Rubio’s last three albums topped Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, and her last one went gold or platinum in every Spanish-speaking country where it was released. In Spain, a key market for Rubio, her last album, “Ananda,” went double platinum (160,000 copies), according to Universal.

In what may be the ultimate vote of confidence from the retail sector, Rubio joined Miley Cyrus and “American Idol” winner Kris Allen in performing at Wal-Mart’s annual shareholders’ meeting this year.

At Wal-Mart, the new album will be sold in the beauty department, next to Rubio’s perfume, Oro. The perfume, which also sells at CVS, is slated for distribution at major retailers in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Spain, and Central and South America. Rubio has begun making in-store appearances promoting the perfume, including a stop at the JCPenney in Puerto Rico’s Plaza de las Americas Mall. She’ll do more in-stores in the United States and internationally during the holiday shopping season, when the fragrance will be more widely available.

Oracle Beauty Brands vice president of marketing and sales Paul Miller says it’s the first time the company has partnered with a Latin artist on a fragrance.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/12/arts/entertainment-us-rubio.html

Photo: http://paulinarubio.yaia.com/

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It’s Sir Count Dracula For Actor Christopher Lee

A portrait of Christopher Lee and art from the Pocket Book edition of DRACULA!

Dracula actor Christopher Lee and British golfer Nick Faldo will receive knighthoods in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List — and a 93-year-old station master gets a nod too.The 87-year-old Lee, famed for his role as the blood-sucking Count in the Hammer horror movie classics, has found popularity with more modern audiences by starring in the “Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars” trilogies.

Former world No. 1 golfer Faldo has captained the European Ryder Cup team and won six majors during an illustrious career.

The Queen’s twice-yearly list recognizes achievements in all walks of British life, from the rich and famous to community workers.

There are 984 nominations in all, more than 70 percent of whom are “local heroes.”

They include 93-year-old Iris Horn, the volunteer railway station master in the dainty village of Stogumber in Somerset, who is honored as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE).

Also recognized is the work of six lifeboat workers, three “lollipop ladies” who help schoolchildren cross the road and a funeral director.

There are MBEs for World Cup-winning England women’s cricket captain Charlotte Edwards, badminton player Gail Emms and former England cricketer Graeme Hick, regarded by many as one of the most naturally gifted batsman of his generation.

The man who spotted the recession coming, ex-Bank of England arch-dove policymaker David Blanchflower, will be made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

Blanchflower, who stepped down from the Monetary Policy Committee last month, spent much of the last year trying to persuade his fellow policymakers to slash interest rates to avoid a deep economic slump and mass unemployment.

“I am very pleased and honored,” Blanchflower told Reuters.

Classical pianist Mitsuko Uchida will be made a Dame, TV chef Delia Smith gets a promotion to CBE from Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), and former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion will be knighted.

Michael Burgess, the coroner who conducted inquests into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, will receive an OBE.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/12/arts/entertainment-us-britain.html

Photo: http://www.monsterbashnews.com/garygladneycollection.html

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Entertainment – June 12

Aldrin Marks Moon Trip Anniversary With the Pops

Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut, foreground, narrates as conductor Keith Lockhart, right, looks away at Boston Symphony Hall, Thursday, June 11, 2009, in Boston. As part of a special celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Apollo 11 astronaut Aldrin joined Lockhart and the Boston Pops to narrate a special rendition of Gustav Holst’s The Planets.

Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon 40 years ago. Now he’s celebrating with some moon tunes performed by the Boston Pops.The 79-year-old retired astronaut is narrating a Thursday night performance of Gustav Holst’s ”The Planets.” It accompanies a video suite by Emmy-nominated astronomer and visual artist Jose Francisco Salgado.

The show incorporates footage from NASA, the European Space Agency and historical illustrations from Chicago’s Adler Planetarium collection.

The celebration includes singalongs of the standards ”Blue Moon,” ”It’s Only a Paper Moon,” ”Moon River” and ”Fly Me to the Moon.”

Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon, following Neil Armstrong after their Apollo 11 lunar module landed on July 20, 1969.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/11/arts/AP-US-People-Aldrin-Pops.html

Photo: http://www.idahostatesman.com/apentertainment/story/799477.html

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Letterman Hunts for Jokes in Palin Feud

David Letterman joked Thursday that he things are now fine now between him and Sarah Palin because the Alaska governor called and offered to take him hunting.She’d done nothing of the sort, of course, continuing a feud with the CBS late-night host that may wind up being well-timed for Letterman in the second week of his new competition with Conan O’Brien on NBC’s ”Tonight” show.

”I’m Dave Letterman, making friends wherever I go,” Letterman said at the opening of Thursday’s show, a day after he apologized for wisecracks aimed at Palin and one of her teenage daughter — even as he milked the situation for more laughs. His lengthy discourse on Wednesday blended flashes of contrition with more pokes at Palin and her family.

Letterman invited Palin to come on his show, which her spokeswoman declined with a shot of her own.

Letterman had made several jokes on Monday’s monologue about the Palin family’s visit to New York.

His Top Ten list featured ”Highlights of Sarah Palin’s Trip,” and included: ”Bought makeup at Bloomingdale’s to update her ‘slutty flight attendant’ look.”

But the diciest joke centered on the family attending a Yankees baseball game.

Letterman said ”an awkward moment” occurred for Palin when, ”during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by (Yankee third baseman) Alex Rodriguez.”

Without naming her, the joke seemed to refer to Palin’s 18-year-old daughter Bristol, an unwed mother.

But it was 14-year-old daughter Willow, not Bristol, who had been at the game.

Todd Palin issued a statement that said ”any ‘jokes’ about raping my 14-year-old are despicable.”

And Sarah Palin charged Letterman with ”sexually perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity.”

”I am not a celebrity,” said a deadpan Letterman, interrupting himself as he read the statements aloud on Wednesday’s show. ”I’m 62 years old, but I’m not a celebrity.”

He denied the joke was meant to be about Willow Palin.

”I would never, never make jokes about raping or having sex of any description with a 14-year-old girl,” he said, dropping his signature sarcasm. ”I don’t think it’s funny. I would never think it was funny.”

”I’m not necessarily proud of these jokes,” he said in a more ironically self-deprecating moment. ”We do stuff all the time and our objective here is to get a laugh, and thank God we don’t have to go to the Hague and the World Court to defend them. It’s a joke and that’s all it’s supposed to be.”

Before he was done, he tried to boil down the situation into two key points, which he stated with playful precision:

”Am I guilty of poor taste? Yes.

”Did I suggest that it was OK for her 14-year-old daughter to be having promiscuous sex? No.”

He also invited Palin to be a guest on his show, saying, ”I think we could put these differences behind us.” But the offer, extended to both Palin and her husband (”or leave Todd at home,” Letterman suggested), was turned down on Thursday.

”The Palins have no intention of providing a ratings boost for David Letterman by appearing on his show,” said Palin spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton. ”Plus, it would be wise to keep Willow away from David Letterman.”

While the incident keeps Palin in the public eye in a manner likely to draw sympathy from supporters, it puts Letterman in the news in an extremely fortuitous time. It’s the second week of his battle for eyeballs with O’Brien and it couldn’t be closer.

In an overnight measurement of the nation’s biggest media markets, O’Brien beat Letterman by one-tenth of a ratings point on Wednesday, according to Nielsen Media Research. It was the same slim margin on Monday, and with Julia Roberts as a guest on Tuesday, Letterman beat O’Brien — the first night CBS has beaten NBC since last October.

In Nielsen’s metered markets, Letterman hasn’t beaten the ”Tonight” show for a week since November 2005.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/11/arts/AP-US-TV-Palin-Letterman.html

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Chastity Bono Announces Sex Change

Chastity Bono is having a sex change to become a man. A spokesman for Bono, born a girl to Sonny and Cher, says he ”has made the courageous decision to honor his true identity” and began the sex-change process earlier this year. Publicist Howard Bragman said Bono is proud of his decision and hopes ”that his choice to transition will open the hearts and minds of the public regarding this issue.”The 40-year-old writer, activist and reality-TV star came out as gay 20 years ago, Bragman said.

In the book ”Family Outing: A Guide to the Coming-Out Process for Gays, Lesbians, & Their Families,” Bono describes the realization of being ”somehow different — specifically different from who my mom expected me to be.”

A message left with Cher’s representatives was not immediately returned Thursday.

Bono’s second book, ”The End of Innocence: A Memoir,” details how relationships with Joan, a lover, and Sonny and Cher changed after coming out.

In 1995, Bono posed for the cover of the gay magazine The Advocate and began working for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/11/arts/AP-US-People-Chastity-Bono.html

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Property Owners Forgive Alba Plastering Posters

Jessica Alba on the red carpet for the 12th Annual EIF Revlon RunWalk For Women at Times Square on May 2, 2009 in New York City.

The owners of property plastered with great white shark posters said Thursday they have little interest in pursuing criminal vandalism charges against actress Jessica Alba, who already has apologized for her role in the stunt.Oklahoma City police are continuing to investigate the allegations, but haven’t interviewed the 28-year-old co-star of the ”Fantastic Four” movies, ”Sin City” and ”Good Luck Chuck.” Investigators first plan to meet with the property owners to see if they are willing to prosecute, said police Sgt. Gary Knight.

”That’s typical for how we handle all investigations of this nature,” Knight said. ”You want to make sure you have a victim that’s willing to prosecute.

”Typically in cases like this if people don’t want to prosecute, often times the case is closed.”

Police found the posters — aimed at raising awareness about the sharks’ declining numbers — glued to a downtown bridge, utility boxes and a billboard for the United Way charity.

Earlier this week, photographs surfaced on a Web site that apparently show Alba hanging some of the posters and posing before the defaced billboard. Alba is in Oklahoma filming ”The Killer Inside Me,” which co-stars Casey Affleck and Kate Hudson.

All the property owners contacted by The Associated Press Thursday say they don’t want to see Alba prosecuted.

”It’s not our intent to pursue any type of charges,” said Brian Alford, a spokesman for electric utility Oklahoma Gas & Electric. ”I think if we have a cost associated with the removal we would hope to be compensated for that cost, but at this point it’s a lesson learned and we just want to put it behind us.”

Telephone and e-mail messages left Thursday seeking comment from Alba’s publicist about whether she plans to reimburse the property owners or United Way were not returned.

An official with Oklahoma City’s Parks and Recreation Department filed the initial police report, but a city spokeswoman said Thursday they aren’t interested in pursuing criminal charges.

”The apology that she made through her publicist, I think, was enough for us,” said spokeswoman Kristy Yager.

The United Way advertisement, which was donated to the charity by a billboard company, has since been removed.

”Even if we had been paying for the ad, I doubt we would have filed a complaint with the police department,” said Erin Brewer, a spokeswoman for United Way of Central Oklahoma. ”I think it would be very generous of her, and certainly we would be honored if she chose to make a contribution.”

Lamar Advertising, which owns the billboard, also said the company doesn’t plan to pursue charges, said Bill Condon, general manager and vice president of the company’s Oklahoma City office.

”I think her comment and what she released seemed pretty sincere,” Condon said.

Under Oklahoma law, maliciously defacing property can be a felony punishable by prison time if the value of the damage exceeds $1,000 or more. City officials placed a preliminary value of the damage at between $500 and $700, and Condon said the damage to the billboard would not exceed $500.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/11/arts/AP-US-Alba-Investigation.html

Photo: http://www.accesshollywood.com/property-owners-forgive-jessica-alba-over-shark-poster-stunt_article_19141

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No Carradine Suicide, Expert Says

The forensics expert hired by David Carradine’s family has concluded that the ”Kung Fu” actor did not commit suicide, but said that more information was needed from Thai investigators before the cause of death could be determined.Carradine’s brothers, Keith and Robert Carradine, each read part of a prepared statement to reporters from The Associated Press at a Los Angeles hotel Thursday morning. In their first appearance since their older brother was found hanging in a Bangkok hotel room closet last week, they thanked supporters and asked for privacy.

”This is a devastating loss for our family and we greatly appreciate the compassion pouring in from all over the world,” Keith Carradine said.

They also released a statement by Dr. Michael Baden of New York that indicated a second autopsy determined Carradine didn’t kill himself.

”However, to reach a final determination as to the cause and the manner of death we must wait for further information from Thailand as to the scene findings and the completion of the crime laboratory and toxicology studies that are still being performed,” Baden’s statement said.

Reached by phone after the morning briefing, Baden said he expects to receive more information from Thai authorities in a week or two and stressed that the information at hand was incomplete. Baden didn’t elaborate on how suicide was ruled out

”The autopsy is only part of the analysis,” he said.

In the meantime, Robert Carradine asked the public and press for patience and time to allow the family to grieve.

”Until we have all of the pending results of the investigation we respectfully ask … that we be allowed to lay our beloved brother, husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather to rest in peace and with dignity,” Robert Carradine said.

Rampant speculation about the actor’s death has swirled since a chambermaid at the luxury Swissotel Nai Lert Park Hotel in Bangkok discovered his body hanging in the closet of his room June 4. A Thai newspaper published a graphic photo of the death scene that police have said appears to be a leaked forensics image.

Thai police initially said they suspected Carradine’s death was a suicide, but later conceded it could have been accidental. Their description — that the actor’s body was found nude, with ropes around his neck, wrist and genitals — fueled speculation that he was killed while engaging in a dangerous sex practice called auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Thai authorities said on June 5 that it would take about three weeks for the results of their autopsy to be released.

Medical examiners in the United States and Canada generally classify auto-erotic asphyxiation deaths as accidental.

Keith Carradine last week asked the FBI to take a role, and Thai authorities later said they would allow FBI agents to observe their investigation, but not take an active role. FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said earlier this week that the agency would not make any more comments about its role in the Carradine investigation, but that agents stationed in Thailand have a good relationship with local authorities.

Agents typically only get involved in the deaths of U.S. citizens abroad when foul play is involved, she said.

Others who knew the 72-year-old actor have said they suspect foul play was involved. Keith and Robert Carradine on Thursday urged everyone to wait until the investigation has concluded.

”Once the investigation is fully completed and definitive conclusions have been reached, we will address the findings with the public,” Robert Carradine said.

Both Keith and Robert Carradine shared the screen with their brother, a prolific TV and film actor. David Carradine rose to prominence for his role on the ”Kung Fu” series in the 1970s and experienced a resurgence in popularity after his role in Quentin Tarantino’s ”Kill Bill” movies earlier this decade.

The family’s statement did not indicate the location of his body, or offer any information about funeral arrangements. They did not take questions Thursday after reading the statements.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/11/arts/AP-US-Carradine-Death.html

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Sit! 13 New ‘Marley’ Books Coming

Jennifer Aniston in “Marley and Me”

Call it the luck of Marley.The late Labrador retriever made famous by ”Marley and Me” will be the hero of 13 children’s books by ”Marley” author John Grogan. The first of the series comes out this summer, HarperCollins Children’s Books announced Thursday.

Grogan’s ”Marley & Me,” published in 2005, is a million-selling memoir and the basis for the hit movie of the same name, starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/11/arts/AP-US-Books-More-Marley.html

Photo: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4677163n

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Bob Hope’s Spirit, but No Cheesecake

Bob Hope, at left, in Vietnam in 1969. At right, Stephen Colbert this week in Iraq.

The first comedy show entirely taped, edited and broadcast in a war zone didn’t look like your average U.S.O. tour. Except when it did. In Baghdad this past week the host of “The Colbert Report” was so imbued with the spirit of Bob Hope that he actually twirled a golf club — a Hope trademark — as he told jokes to troops in a former palace of Saddam Hussein. Stephen Colbert, the host, described Iraq as “so nice, we invaded it twice.” Even a sketch on Tuesday, in which Mr. Colbert debated himself on the issue of gay soldiers, wasn’t much of a departure from Hope’s old stand-up routines in places like Long Binh and Cam Ranh Bay.

“Miniskirts are bigger than ever, even some of the fellas are wearing them,” Hope told troops in Da Nang in 1967. A beat. “Don’t laugh,” he added. “If you’d have thought of it, you wouldn’t be here.”

Mr. Colbert’s four-day “Operation Iraqi Stephen: Going Commando,” sponsored by the U.S.O., was unexpectedly charming. His interviews with generals and even an Iraqi deputy prime minister were pleasant, not barbed, and his stand-up routines proved as easygoing and good-natured as many a Bob Hope performance. Mr. Colbert sometimes let his comic persona as an monomaniacal chicken hawk to the right of Bill O’Reilly slip a little, but mostly he stayed in character, and even that matched up with Hope’s self-caricature as someone egotistical and cowardly.

The difference wasn’t in the humor, or even the technology; it was in the intended audience. Hope’s U.S.O. tours were star-studded morale boosters for isolated troops who felt out of touch and forgotten. Mr. Colbert seemed eager to energize viewers who are out of touch with overseas news and have all but forgotten that 130,000 troops remain in Iraq.

“I thought the whole Iraq thing was over,” Mr. Colbert told the troops on Monday night in Baghdad. “I haven’t seen any news stories about it in months.”

When Hope went on the road, and his trips to military bases spanned World War II and Operation Desert Storm, his audiences were young, overwhelmingly male and cut off from home. Even in Vietnam servicemen relied on letters and the occasional scratchy phone call. Hope’s lighthearted cracks about the military, war and women were tailored to amuse and comfort the men on the ground.

Mr. Colbert’s skits and stunts — a mock stint in basic training, a haircut administered by Gen. Ray Odierno (ordered, jokingly, by President Obama via a pretaped message) — were designed to hold the attention of easily distracted audiences back home.

Today’s troops are hardly starved for entertainment; they have laptops, video cameras, satellite phones and every iteration of the Internet, including Skype, Facebook and Gchats. They stay tuned to television, even Comedy Central. Mr. Colbert’s show is broadcast at 6:30 and 11:30 p.m. Central European time on the American Forces Network. He worked in references to “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” and even the bickering stars of “Jon & Kate Plus 8.”

Hope, ever mindful of the mood of men deprived of female company, always brought some cheesecake with him: Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable during World War II; Jayne Mansfield in Korea; Joey Heatherton, Ann-Margret and Raquel Welch in Vietnam.

There were no torch songs or Golddiggers in white go-go boots on “The Colbert Report.” The closest thing to Ms. Welch was Tom Hanks, who played himself in a taped sketch about U.S.O. care packages. Today’s military is coed and in no mood to joke about it. Mr. Colbert asked Sgt. Robin Balcom, how, since women are not supposed to be in front-line positions, she won a combat badge. Sergeant Balcom, a military police officer, bristled at the word won, as opposed to earn. “I didn’t really win,” she said. “I was awarded.” Mr. Colbert quickly apologized.

There’s another difference. When NBC broadcast Hope’s Vietnam Christmas specials in the early 1970s (he performed on Christmas Day, but the fully produced shows were not televised until January), they drew 60 percent of the viewing audience. No conflict has ever been as instantly and closely covered as the Iraq War, but access spurs complacency. In the fractured universe of cable and the Internet, the entertaining of troops doesn’t get a lot of attention. World Wrestling Entertainment produces the annual tribute to the troops; Kellie Pickler, a former “American Idol” contestant who went to Iraq on last year’s U.S.O. holiday tour, made a video diary of her tour that was shown on GAC, the Great American Country cable network.

Mr. Colbert’s audience on Comedy Central isn’t very large (a little over a million on a good day), but he has cachet with young and would-be hip viewers who get most of their news from iPhone applications, blogs and comedy shows.

And that’s one reason Mr. Obama and former presidents humored Comedy Central by taping tongue-in-cheek messages to the troops: they seized the opportunity to participate in a government-sanctioned tribute alongside a comedian popular with people who despise conventional politics and government-sanctioned entertainment.

Normally celebrities go to combat zones with the U.S.O. In this case Mr. Colbert took the U.S.O. on a trip with Comedy Central.

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/arts/television/12watch.html?hpw

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Williams Talks About New CD,’ Ugly Betty’

On May 20, 2009, actress Vanessa Williams attends the Logo network’s second annual “NewNowNext” awards in New York.

Madonna isn’t the only master when it comes to reinvention.In her two decades-plus career, Vanessa Williams has been the beauty queen, the hit-making singer, Broadway star and marquee film actress, and in the last few years, she’s captivated fans yet again with her Emmy-nominated comedic turn as the power-grabbing Wilhelmina Slater on ABC’s ”Ugly Betty.”

This month, the 45-year-old returns to one of her past roles with the release of a new album, ”The Real Thing.”

In a recent interview, Williams talked about her music, the TV role that defines her for many of her fans, and how they relate to her as a result.

AP: What’s the key to your success over the decades?

Williams: Besides talent and being prepared for whatever, you have to stay open, you have to be flexible and think about your options and not get stuck in a rut and do the same thing, if this works, well, I’ve gotta do it 10 different times, always be willing to explore and reach beyond your comfort zone.

AP: How do your fans relate to you?

Williams: Younger kids know me from ”Hannah Montana,” 8 and younger … and I would say (those in their) 20s know me from ”Ugly Betty,” and then anyone over mid-30s, 40s know me from my music. And above that, it’s probably Miss America.

AP: Were you worried about taking a four-year break between albums?

Williams: I’m happy that I’ve been able not to depend on one genre to make a living. The recording industry has changed immensely. … I always hope that my fan base will follow me from project to project and I’m in a position where I have a whole new audience that doesn’t even know me as a singer, which is fascinating.

AP: Are you planning to tour with this album?

Williams: Not right now. … I have to go back to work the second week in July. So I only have eight weeks off. I’m already exhausted.

AP: What do fans think of your role as Wilhelmina?

Williams: People who know me from my recording career always get a kick out of it and say, ”I love watching you be so bad,” and the people who haven’t seen me before, the younger audience, are a little bit intimidated, sometimes afraid to approach me, which I think is hilarious. … To play such a role is very freeing as an actress because you get the chance to really be as broad and loose as you want and kind of be a brat and get away with murder.

AP: How would you describe your music to those who only know you as Wilhelmina?

Williams: I would have to let whoever is discovering me for the first time see a much softer side than what they see on a weekly basis. That’s the funny thing about playing such a terrorized role on TV; my real self is different, so I think a lot of people, if they don’t know me, will see, definitely, a side of me they don’t see on a weekly basis.

AP: There’s talk of upcoming changes on ”Ugly Betty.” Your thoughts?

Williams: I do think there is a definite ”Betty” style which is unique and I wouldn’t want it to become just another show which looks like all the other shows. I hope it will stay unique.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/11/arts/AP-US-Music-QA-Vanessa-Williams.html

Photo: http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2009/06/11/qa_williams_talks_about_new_cd_ugly_betty/

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Graffiti Star Banksy In Secret Art Launch

The figure of a Guantanamo Bay detainee wearing a hood and shackles was placed inside the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at Disneyland.

Anonymous graffiti artist Banksy, who enjoys a cult following around the world, has returned to his home town of Bristol in western England to launch his biggest exhibition to date.Typically for a man who keeps his identity secret, the whole project has been shrouded in mystery, with media, local councilors and even staff at the museum only finding out about the project on Friday, the day before it was due to open.

It has over 100 exhibits, including 70 new works. One of the pieces is a sculpture designed to convey a mother bird and two chicks in a nest but using three CCTV cameras instead to symbolize Britain’s surveillance society.

“This is the first show I’ve ever done where taxpayers’ money is being used to hang my pictures up rather than scrape them off,” Banksy was quoted by the BBC as saying. “This show is my vision of the future.”

Many of Banksy’s works are hidden amongst the art museum’s more traditional paintings, mimicking a 2003 stunt when he smuggled a work into the Tate Britain gallery in London and stuck it to the wall. It went undiscovered for hours.

Banksy became famous through illegal outdoor graffiti, including painting on the West Bank barrier and leaving a life-size figure of a Guantanamo Bay detainee at the California theme park Disneyland.

Simon Cook, deputy leader of Bristol council who has responsibility for arts, said he was thrilled Banksy was back, despite his controversial nature.

“Everybody assumed it (his new exhibition) would be in Los Angeles, in New York, in London, but he insisted it came to Bristol… and it’s just him coming home,” Cook said.

A PR company representing Banksy released a statement, which it said came directly from the artist, explaining why he was staging the show in Bristol.

“Banksy, who is rumored to hail from the Bristol area, but has never revealed his full identity due to ongoing legal complications, is mounting the show as a salute to the city, which supported his early street career,” it read.

From small time graffiti artist to global star, Banksy’s work has become so valuable that several of his street works have been salvaged and sold, including a painting on a wall in London that fetched 208,100 pounds ($340,000) in an online sale in 2008.

One of the highest sums paid for a Banksy at auction was 288,000 pounds for “Space Girl and Bird.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/12/arts/entertainment-us-britain-banksy.html

Photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5335400.stm

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Court Rules That Madonna May Adopt Malawi Girl

The highest court in Malawi ruled that Madonna may adopt a 3-year-old girl there, overturning a decision by a lower court that said the pop star had not lived in the African nation long enough.Chief Justice Lovemore Munlo of Malawi’s Supreme Court of Appeal read the three-judge panel’s ruling on Friday, saying that Madonna’s work with disadvantaged children and her creation of a charity, Raising Malawi, for Malawi children with AIDS, had contributed to its decision to allow the singer to adopt the girl, Chifundo “Mercy” James.

In April, Malawi’s High Court denied Madonna’s adoption request, saying that she had not lived in Malawi for the last 18 months, as the nation’s adoption law requires. In a ruling at that time, Judge Esme Chombo wrote, “By removing the very safeguard that is supposed to protect our children, the courts by their pronouncements could actually facilitate trafficking of children by some unscrupulous individuals.”

Malawi’s courts waived a similar rule in allowing Madonna’s adoption of a boy, David Banda, now 3, whose adoption was finalized in 2008.

Alan Chinula, a lawyer for Madonna, told The A.P. he had informed her about the ruling.

“It’s the wee hours of morning in New York but she is excited at the news,” Mr. Chinula said, according to The A.P. “As her lawyer I am happy that this has settled this contentious issue.”

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Full article: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/court-rules-that-madonna-may-adopt-malawi-girl/?ref=global-home

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Madame Tussauds Ready For Hollywood Close – Up

Clint Eastwood has holed up on Hollywood Boulevard waiting for John Wayne and busloads of visitors to join him, as Madame Tussauds prepares to open its latest wax museum in the tourist mecca this summer.The $55 million complex, featuring more than 100 celebrity waxworks spread across three floors, is the biggest attraction to join the teeming thoroughfare in years.

It also represents the latest attempt to restore some glamour to the faded area, whose 10 million annual visitors make it one of the world’s busiest tourist attractions.

While Hollywood conjures up images of beautiful movie stars and fabulous wealth, the neighborhood itself offers an awkward mix of must-see sites like the Walk of Fame and Grauman’s Chinese Theater juxtaposed with tawdry souvenir stores and costumed characters hustling tourists for money.

A decade ago, the area was much worse and gang-related crime was rampant. But since 2000, $700 million of public money has been poured into the area, which in turn has attracted $5.5 billion of private investment, according to Los Angeles city officials.

“To be very blunt, it was a rough area … Hollywood has come back as a really viable and competitive tourist destination,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist at the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation.

Key to the comeback has been the Hollywood & Highland shopping mall, which opened in 2001. It houses the Kodak Theater where the Oscars are handed out.

Madame Tussauds will attempt to depict Hollywood’s glamorous side when it opens on August 1 on the site of a former parking lot adjacent to Grauman’s, the movie theater famed for the imprints of stars’ hands and feet on its concrete tiles.

A red carpet, flashing cameras and Joan Rivers’ gravity-defying likeness — complete with microphone in hand — will greet visitors.

They can join an A-list party with stars like Jennifer Lopez, pose with old Hollywood icons like Charlie Chaplin and even give an awards speech, projected on a screen, in front of Oscar-winner Meryl Streep.

“It’s all about immersing yourself, getting into the scene with the figure and feeling like you’ve met them,” said Paul Williams, creative director of Madame Tussaud’s U.S. locations.

Rachel and Scott Brown, newlyweds from Houston, echoed that sentiment as they took a picture with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hand- and footprints on Thursday. “You just feel a closeness to them because they’ve been here,” Rachel Brown said.

Madame Tussauds’ flagship museum has been one of London’s top tourist draws since the 19th century, thrilling visitors with such exhibits as the Chamber of Horrors even as guide books like Lonely Planet decreed it “unbelievably kitsch and terribly overpriced.”

Madame Tussauds branched out to the United States in 1999 with a museum in Las Vegas, and there are also sites in New York City and Washington D.C. as well as in Amsterdam, Berlin, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

The Hollywood museum has been in the works for eight years, said Adrian Jones, a general manager at Midway Attractions, a division of Merlin Entertainments Group, the closely held parent of Madame Tussauds as well as other themed attractions.

Even as the project opens during hard economic times, he expects that it will eventually outdraw its Las Vegas location, which brings in almost 600,000 visitors a year.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/12/arts/entertainment-us-hollywood-museum.html

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Hollywood, Bollywood Meet Bradford: “City Of Film”

Bradford, an industrial city in the north of England, has been named the world’s first “City of Film” by the United Nations, ahead of more immediately famous movie capitals such as Hollywood or Cannes.UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural arm, said it was awarding Bradford the title on the basis of its historic links to the production and distribution of films, its media and film museum and its “cinematographic legacy.”

The honor may be a surprise to many as Bradford, previously known as the “wool capital of the world,” is probably best known as a city of around 500,000 people that was once a center of the industrial revolution.

“Becoming the world’s first City of Film is the ultimate celebration of Bradford’s established and dynamic history in film and media,” said Colin Philpott, director of Bradford’s highly regarded National Media Museum.

“With the UNESCO City of Film designation, Bradford will now go on to achieve inspirational projects in film.”

While not as glamorous as Los Angeles or the French Riviera, Bradford does have a strong tie to cinema and film.

It has been the location for several movies including “Yanks,” starring Richard Gere, and “The Railway Children,” a 1970s classic about the tribulations of Victorian children whose father goes missing.

Monty Python’s ground-breaking “The Meaning of Life” and the controversial hit “Rita, Sue and Bob Too,” about a married man who cannot choose between two teenage lovers, were also filmed in the city.

And in recent years Bradford has developed a close relationship with Bollywood too, hosting the International Indian Film Festival awards in 2007.

Simon Beaufoy, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Slumdog Millionaire” who originally hails from Bradford, said the city had played a crucial role in the story of cinema and deserved to be recognized.

“This is superb news for Bradford and is testimony to the city’s dedication to the film and media industry,” he said.

Bradford’s seven floor National Media Museum has 3D cinemas and a ‘Magic Factory’, which explains the basic principles behind photography, television and animation.

The museum attracted more than 700,000 visitors in 2007, making it one of the most popular museums in Britain outside London.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/12/arts/entertainment-us-title-bradford.html

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