Celebrated Playwright Who Resists CelebrityBy ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS — Yasmina Reza is one of the world’s most successful playwrights, but she wears her fame with discomfort. She can talk at length about her red leather Prada coat. She can relate stories with biting humor about her year on the road shadowing Nicolas Sarkozy in his 2007 campaign for the French presidency. But ask her about herself, and the anxiety of the writerly persona takes over.
A blend of fragility and steel, Ms. Reza wavers between extremes: a determination to be judged by her work alone and a desire that it be understood and appreciated. The publication of her new play, “Comment Vous Racontez la Partie” (“How You Talk the Game”), has propelled her, once again, to face a reporter.
“After I write, I have nothing to say,” she said in an interview in the bar of the Lutetia Hotel on the Left Bank. “The commentary afterwards is superfluous. I write. And that’s enough.”
But then she has something to say. Speaking in French, she pours out criticism of journalists who cut too close to the bone. “Too often what are described as interviews are inquisitions,” she said. “It’s not about the work. It’s more like, ‘Who are you?,’ which really, really annoys me. If I didn’t have to do them, I wouldn’t. But if you don’t talk yourself, there will be 20 people talking about you ahead of you.”
This is a good moment for Ms. Reza. In October the film “Carnage,” adapted and directed by her friend Roman Polanski and based on her 2009 Tony Award-winning play, “God of Carnage,” will be released. Starring Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz, the movie had to be shot in France (the locations disguised to look like Brooklyn) because it is one of the few countries to which Mr. Polanski can travel without risking extradition to the United States. (Mr. Polanski, who has a home in Switzerland, remains wanted in connection with a 34-year-old case involving sex with a 13-year-old girl.)
In addition to her silences, Ms. Reza can tantalize her readers with partial information. She dedicated “Dawn Dusk or Night,” her best-selling book about Mr. Sarkozy on the campaign trail, to a man believed to be her lover at the time, a politician she identified only as “G.” There was speculation in the press then that “G” might be Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund chief, who resigned after being accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid this month in New York. The speculation was a kind of game of elimination based on phrases in the book suggesting that “G” was a Socialist who dreamed of becoming the president of France. Ms. Reza did not reveal “G” ’s name. She has no comment now.
She does not have a Web site, blog or Twitter account. She resists television interviews. “It’s degrading,” she said. “They never give you time to talk. I hesitate. I reflect. I contradict myself. Whenever I’ve done it, I was very, very bad. A catastrophe.”
When she speaks, it’s a process of showing and hiding so that her interlocutor can never quite get to know her. She responds in single-word sentences. “Formidable.” “Fantastique.” “Superb.” “Incroyable.” These are among her favorites.
“The interview is a game,” she said. “I try to structure interviews in such a way that I say nothing. It’s better for me to be mysterious.”
Often enough, though, her theatrical characters lose control and say too much. Take the two couples in “God of Carnage,” her satire about the middle class and marriage, who transform into primitive creatures during a span of 90 minutes. Or another pair of couples, in “Life x 3,” who compete ferociously under the guise of a sociable evening. Or the three men in her earlier Tony-winning play, “Art,” the comedy in which the friends fall to arguing so viciously over the purchase of a white-on-white painting by one of their number that they question how they became pals in the first place. A common theme in these plays is the tension between the sadness of the solitary human condition and blundering attempts to find solace in others, a tack often doomed to failure.
Ms. Reza, 52, who was born in France and has two children, is the daughter of a father of Jewish Iranian descent and a Jewish Hungarian mother. She has been quoted as saying that she considers her own humor to be Jewish and her plays tragedies, “funny tragedy,” perhaps, but not pure comedies. Yet she doesn’t complain excessively about the difference between her view and the perception of her as a comic writer.
In her own case, apparently, so deep is the conflict between silence and loquacity that she has made the struggle of a writer to control her persona the theme of her new play. The title, “How You Talk the Game,” is from a quotation in “The Big Room,” a collection of celebrity profiles by Michael Herr and Guy Peellaert and is a variation on the well-known line by the sportswriter Grantland Rice, it’s “not that you won or lost — but how you played the game.”
“How You Talk the Game” is a tightly wound psychological work that centers on verbal play and the strains that arise within a conversation among four people. What matters is not so much the reality of the action, but how the action is described by the characters. The protagonist, a novelist named Nathalie, is giving a public interview about her new book in a fictional French town called Vilan-en-Volène.
The interviewer, a female journalist, asks probing questions that unnerve the novelist. When Nathalie is asked why she accepted the invitation, her facade cracks: “I tell myself, what will you do in Vilan-en-Volène, you cannot go to Vilan-en-Volène, you have no reason to go to this unknown town and discuss a book that you undermine every time you speak, that you diminish every time you speak, that you watch disintegrate the moment someone mentions it to you or you mention it. And yet I cannot not go.”
Like Nathalie, Ms. Reza both hides and reveals herself under layers of beautiful clothes. Ultra-thin and tiny-boned, she exudes vulnerability as she lets her cashmere sweater slip off her shoulders, disclosing a soft, fitted knit dress. She always wears high heels. And she insisted on them while following Mr. Sarkozy.
“We were on farms and running to airports,” she said. “His people told me to wear jeans and gym shoes. I said no. Even when they mocked me, I said no. Firmly.” It was “sartorial obstinacy,” she said.
Nathalie becomes a character who is eerily close to herself.
“I can’t say that I am Nathalie,” she said in the interview, “but I would be dishonest if I said, ‘No, it’s not me at all.’ There certainly are aspects of her character that are truly similar. It’s the first time I have deliberately constructed a character with myself in mind.”
“Art,” Ms. Reza’s breakthrough in the United States in 1998, has been performed in more than 30 languages. It’s not enough. She talks about a fantasy: to have one of her plays performed at the Comédie-Française in Paris.
She has a “scoop,” she said. She is “in conversations” with Muriel Mayette, the administrator of France’s national theater, about a possible production of her new play. She acknowledges that it must undergo a rigorous judging process by committee. But she is excited.
“I’m in the greatest national theaters in the world, but not yet in France’s great national theaters like the Comédie-Française,” she said. “The Comédie-Française. It is a myth.”
Monday, May 30, 2011
Case Study
Case studyActor Tom Hiddleston reveals how he conveys emotion
Share Tom Hiddleston
The Guardian, Saturday 7 March 2009 Article historyWhen I'm given a role, the first thing I do is read the play over and over again. I scour the script and write down everything the character says about himself and everything that everyone else says about him. I immerse myself in my character and imagine what it might be like to be that person.
When I played Cassio in Othello I imagined what it would be like to be a lieutenant in the Venetian navy in 1604. I sat down with Ewan McGregor and Chiwetel Ejiofor and together we decided that Othello, Iago and Cassio had soldiery in their bones.
I took from the script that Cassio was talented and ambitious, with no emotional or physical guard - and that's how I played the part.
For me, acting is about recreating the circumstances that would make me feel how my character is feeling. In the dressing room, I practise recreating those circumstances in my head and I try to not get in the way of myself. For example, in act two of Othello, when Cassio is manipulated to fight Roderigo and loses his rank, some nights I would burst into tears; other nights I wouldn't but I would still feel the same emotion, night after night. Just as in life, the way we respond to catastrophe or death will be different every time because the process is unconscious.
By comparison, in Chekhov's Ivanov I played the young doctor, Lvov. Lvov was described as "a prig and a bigot ... uprightness in boots ... tiresome ... completely sincere". His emotions were locked away. I worked around the key phrase: "Forgive me, I'm going to tell you plainly."
I practised speaking gravely and sincerely without emotion and I actually noticed how that carried over into my personal life: when I played the open-hearted Cassio, I felt really free; when I played the pent-up Lvov, I felt a real need to release myself from the shackles of that character.
It's exhilarating to act out the emotions of a character - it's a bit like being a child again. You flex the same muscles that you did when you pretended to be a cowboy or a policeman: acting is a grown-up version of that with more subtlety and detail. You're responding with real emotions to imaginary situations. When I'm in a production I never have a day when I haven't laughed, cried or screamed. There are times when I wake up stiff from emotional exhaustion.
Film is a much more intimate and thoughtful medium than theatre because of the proximity of the camera. The camera can read your thoughts. On stage, if you have a moment of vulnerability you can hide it from the other actors; on film, the camera will see you feel that emotion and try to suppress it. Similarly, if you're pretending to feel something that isn't there, it won't be believable.
Share Tom Hiddleston
The Guardian, Saturday 7 March 2009 Article historyWhen I'm given a role, the first thing I do is read the play over and over again. I scour the script and write down everything the character says about himself and everything that everyone else says about him. I immerse myself in my character and imagine what it might be like to be that person.
When I played Cassio in Othello I imagined what it would be like to be a lieutenant in the Venetian navy in 1604. I sat down with Ewan McGregor and Chiwetel Ejiofor and together we decided that Othello, Iago and Cassio had soldiery in their bones.
I took from the script that Cassio was talented and ambitious, with no emotional or physical guard - and that's how I played the part.
For me, acting is about recreating the circumstances that would make me feel how my character is feeling. In the dressing room, I practise recreating those circumstances in my head and I try to not get in the way of myself. For example, in act two of Othello, when Cassio is manipulated to fight Roderigo and loses his rank, some nights I would burst into tears; other nights I wouldn't but I would still feel the same emotion, night after night. Just as in life, the way we respond to catastrophe or death will be different every time because the process is unconscious.
By comparison, in Chekhov's Ivanov I played the young doctor, Lvov. Lvov was described as "a prig and a bigot ... uprightness in boots ... tiresome ... completely sincere". His emotions were locked away. I worked around the key phrase: "Forgive me, I'm going to tell you plainly."
I practised speaking gravely and sincerely without emotion and I actually noticed how that carried over into my personal life: when I played the open-hearted Cassio, I felt really free; when I played the pent-up Lvov, I felt a real need to release myself from the shackles of that character.
It's exhilarating to act out the emotions of a character - it's a bit like being a child again. You flex the same muscles that you did when you pretended to be a cowboy or a policeman: acting is a grown-up version of that with more subtlety and detail. You're responding with real emotions to imaginary situations. When I'm in a production I never have a day when I haven't laughed, cried or screamed. There are times when I wake up stiff from emotional exhaustion.
Film is a much more intimate and thoughtful medium than theatre because of the proximity of the camera. The camera can read your thoughts. On stage, if you have a moment of vulnerability you can hide it from the other actors; on film, the camera will see you feel that emotion and try to suppress it. Similarly, if you're pretending to feel something that isn't there, it won't be believable.
Tom Hiddleston
Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming. And don't be afraid of wearing your heart on your sleeve - in declaring the films that you love, the films that you want to make, the life that you've had, and the lives you can help reflect in cinema. For myself, for a long time... maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn't worth hearing, and I think everyone's voice is worth hearing. So if you've got something to say, say it from the rooftops.
-
His parents divorced when he was 12, a shattering family event that sent us all off in different directions. It was very difficult and I always say that it was the thing that made me who I am' – he speaks gingerly, careful not to implicate anyone else with his words – because it made me take responsibility for my life and I saw my parents for the first time as human beings, not as perfect love machines. They were both very badly hurt. I mean, it's hard enough when you're ending a short-term relationship, isn't it? I can't imagine what it's like to end a 17-year marriage. But I'm so proud of them and I couldn't do without them and as a result [of the divorce] I have grown-up, intimate relationships with both of them.'
He took a first in Classics at Pembroke College, Cambridge and arrived at RADA with a spectacular grasp of etymology (I don't think I've ever not been able to understand what a word means') but with a lot to learn about tumbling, backflips and sword fighting.
And anyway, acting is about instinct, it's not a matter of the head. It's about finding the truth in your heart, not about what school you went to.'
By the time he left RADA, he still couldn't sing like Freddie Mercury, to his regret, but he was otherwise limber, deft with a cutlass and ready for anything.
He clearly enjoys the shapeshifting aspect of his profession – to excess, perhaps. While he was in the early rounds of auditioning for the Marvel comic adaptation, along with every other blond English-speaking actor in the world' it was suggested to him that, as he was being considered for the part of Thor, he might bulk up a bit.
Accordingly, he followed a strict exercise regime and ate nothing but chicken, as bodybuilders do. Chicken salad for every meal. And sometimes the odd egg.'
After six weeks of this, he received a phone call from the producers telling him they wanted him in the film, only playing the part of Loki, Thor's lean and hungry-looking brother. I guess it was a relief to go back to my natural body shape,' he says, admirably unfazed by the whole experience.
He's delighted to be playing Loki, anyway, the god of mischief (which is the one you want to be, isn't it?'). Anthony Hopkins is playing his father, Odin.
In a perfect Hopkins accent, Tom recounts a recent message, relayed via Branagh: Tell Tom I don't like fava beans, and I'm not a complete psycho…'. To cap it all off, Tom loved the Marvel Superpower Top Trumps card game as a child. If you went back and told the eight-year-old Tom this is what you will be doing, I'd have been…' Words fail him.
Hiddleston is a softy in love, and prone to grand romantic gestures such as spontaneous road trips. I like saying, “Pack your bags, we're off.” 'Yes, there is someone' in his life, he says coyly, but for the moment he lives alone in Kentish Town, although his bags are currently packed for a five-month stint in Hollywood.
Filming the Marvel blockbuster will be a new experience.
On stage he has proved himself, winning an Olivier award for Best Newcomer and an Ian Charleson award nomination for his work with theatre production company Cheek By Jowl. He loves the evanescence of live theatre, quoting Stoppard's quip on its magic: If you weren't there, you missed it.'
Hiddleston played the scrupulous young doctor, Lvov, in a Stoppard translation of Chekhov's Ivanov starring Branagh (again). Since Chekhov was a doctor, did he see his part as an authorial self-portrait? No, in rehearsals Tom [Stoppard] said he thought Lvov was probably based on someone Chekhov knew, another medical student. Because Lvov is so judgemental and Chekhov is the opposite, totally compassionate, totally aware that Ivanov is suffering what would now be understood as depression.'
Despite the manifold sufferings on stage, the cast had a jolly time. There were lots of laughs. It's often said that backstage on a comedy the mood can be quite depressed, but when you're doing a tragedy everyone has great fun.'
Wallander, a cop show that's so gloomy it makes Inspector Morse look like a Carry On film, follows the same rule of thumb.
On screen, we try to show what it costs the police, emotionally, to deal with murder victims. But behind the scenes, we're filming in Sweden on Midsummer's Eve, which is like their New Year's Eve, and everyone in the crew is in high spirits. They're so kind and have what I now understand as a Scandinavian sense of humour, very dry and with far fewer taboos than we have.'
But Ystad, where the programmes are set – and where the bodies pile up under the sickly yellow sun – is, he says, a funny old town; I wouldn't want to spend too much time there.'
With Hiddleston's career speedily gathering pace, this seems unlikely. He's an ethereal spirit; beautiful rather than sexy; a powerful presence on stage but unobtrusive in person.
Gentle, cerebral and entertaining, he's off to throw a girdle round the earth. The first stop is India, where his elder sister is getting married. I'm going to wear three sets of pyjamas, do a little dance and go mad!' he laughs – and then it's on to Hollywood, and beyond.
25 years of Oprah...
...a world of richness and wisdom.
I'm happy I was able to experience some of it, and I'm honored to witness genius in my lifetime.
Nobody but you is responsible for your life. It doesn't matter what your Momma did or what your Daddy did - you are responsible for your life. And what is life? Energy. You are responsible for the energy your create for yourself, and the energy you bring to others.
Be responsible. Take responsibility for the energy you bring into the space.
All life is energy and we are transmitting it at every moment.
Newton's 3rd law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
You are responsible for your life. No one completes you.
--
There's a difference between THINKING you deserve and KNOWING you deserve something.
There is a common thread of unworthiness in us all. Sometimes we block our own blessings. You are worthy because you were born. Because you are here.
Everyone wants validation. We all have that desire. Everyone wants to be heard.
I see you.
I hear you.
What you say matters to me.
Allow grace in. Be sitt. Know it. Know it. Wait & listen. Wait & listen for the guidance that is bigger than you. It comes first in whispers. I only make mistakes when I don't listen.
What are the whispers in your life? Your will will whisper to you... what is it saying?
--
Be a safe harbour for someone else.
Find your platform. Find your stage.
Don't confuse fame and success.
Find your passion and give it to the world.
Gratitude.
I'm happy I was able to experience some of it, and I'm honored to witness genius in my lifetime.
Nobody but you is responsible for your life. It doesn't matter what your Momma did or what your Daddy did - you are responsible for your life. And what is life? Energy. You are responsible for the energy your create for yourself, and the energy you bring to others.
Be responsible. Take responsibility for the energy you bring into the space.
All life is energy and we are transmitting it at every moment.
Newton's 3rd law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
You are responsible for your life. No one completes you.
--
There's a difference between THINKING you deserve and KNOWING you deserve something.
There is a common thread of unworthiness in us all. Sometimes we block our own blessings. You are worthy because you were born. Because you are here.
Everyone wants validation. We all have that desire. Everyone wants to be heard.
I see you.
I hear you.
What you say matters to me.
Allow grace in. Be sitt. Know it. Know it. Wait & listen. Wait & listen for the guidance that is bigger than you. It comes first in whispers. I only make mistakes when I don't listen.
What are the whispers in your life? Your will will whisper to you... what is it saying?
--
Be a safe harbour for someone else.
Find your platform. Find your stage.
Don't confuse fame and success.
Find your passion and give it to the world.
Gratitude.
Friday, May 27, 2011
a great storyteller
"
April 26, 2011
I have just returned from the dubbing studio where I spoke into a microphone as Severus Snape for absolutely the last time. On the screen were some flashback shots of Daniel, Emma and Rupert from ten years ago. They were 12. I have also recently returned from New York, and while I was there, I saw Daniel singing and dancing (brilliantly) on Broadway. A lifetime seems to have passed in minutes.
Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume, and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the entire, massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands.
It is an ancient need to be told stories. But the story needs a great storyteller. Thanks for all of it, Jo.
"
- Alan Rickman
April 26, 2011
I have just returned from the dubbing studio where I spoke into a microphone as Severus Snape for absolutely the last time. On the screen were some flashback shots of Daniel, Emma and Rupert from ten years ago. They were 12. I have also recently returned from New York, and while I was there, I saw Daniel singing and dancing (brilliantly) on Broadway. A lifetime seems to have passed in minutes.
Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume, and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the entire, massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands.
It is an ancient need to be told stories. But the story needs a great storyteller. Thanks for all of it, Jo.
"
- Alan Rickman
joys of everyday living
Will Secretary of State Hillary Clinton take on a role as a global advocate for women’s rights? Clinton didn’t exactly dodge and weave when asked about that possibility in an interview with Laurence Ferrari of France’s TF1 TV network.
In an exchange about Clinton’s post-Obama administration plans, Ferrari asked, “You will be maybe a world ambassador for women’s right?”
Clinton responded: “Well, I am committed to human rights and women’s rights. And I spoke about both of those at two of the meetings yesterday and today, for the OECD and UNESCO, because I want our world to keep moving toward those ideals of both the American and the French Revolutions. And I want everyone to share in a more prosperous, peaceful world where security and opportunity go hand in hand. And so for me, I will continue to advocate as I always have, even before I was in any official position. So I’m sure whatever the future holds, it will hold work like that, and I look forward to it.”
One thing is certain: Clinton is looking forward to some time off. Earlier in the interview with Ferrari, she said: “I mean, here I am in Paris it’s a beautiful day, yesterday was even more beautiful, and I have no time to do anything other than my official work. And I would like to get a few more years where I can just wander aimlessly through the beauties of a city like Paris and meet with my friends and just have a life filled with the joys of everyday living. So I’m looking forward to it, but I have no plans.”
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
:)
Almodovar, Banderas reunite in 'The Skin'
By JENNY BARCHFIELD, Associated Press Jenny Barchfield, Associated Press
1 hr 15 mins ago
.CANNES, France – After decades of playing Hollywood Latin lovers, Spanish heartthrob Antonio Banderas returns to his roots — and the director who helped launch his career — with a slow-burning role in Pedro Almodovar's "The Skin I Live In."
Banderas was an early muse of the acclaimed filmmaker, but it's been 22 years since the two luminaries of Spanish cinema worked together.
"It's part of my life.... I could almost compare it to a return to my country, to my roots, with all its misery, with all its greatness, all its contradictions and everything that goes along with that" Banderas said at a news conference at the Cannes Film Festival, where the movie screened Thursday. "That's what returning to Almodovar is, a homecoming."
And what a homecoming it is.
In "The Skin I Live In," Banderas plays a psychotic plastic surgeon who devises a Machiavellian plot to exact revenge on the man he believes raped his daughter. Cold and calculating, Banderas' character Robert wears an impassive mask of icy sternness throughout the film.
The restrained performance — one of his strongest since his Almodovar days — contrasts with the exuberance and oozing charm of his Hollywood characters.
"The spectators discover that this is a tormented character as the story goes along, but without any grand gestures, no great things in front of the camera," Banderas said.
Banderas' restrained performance also contrasts with his early work with Almodovar, where he played a boy-toy in 1988's "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and a toreador in training in the 1986 "Matador," among other flamboyant roles.
With a cast that also includes another of the filmmaker's old school favorites, Marisa Paredes, "The Skin I Live In" is classic Almodovar at his best.
The themes that have obsessed Almodovar since his first experiments in cinema in late-1970s Madrid — obsession, gender-bending, family secrets — are all here, worked masterfully into a roller-coaster plot.
A loose adaptation of the novel by French author Thierry Jonquet, the movie is a bloodless thriller that keeps audiences' knuckles white without drenching them in gore.
Copyright © 2011 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
By JENNY BARCHFIELD, Associated Press Jenny Barchfield, Associated Press
1 hr 15 mins ago
.CANNES, France – After decades of playing Hollywood Latin lovers, Spanish heartthrob Antonio Banderas returns to his roots — and the director who helped launch his career — with a slow-burning role in Pedro Almodovar's "The Skin I Live In."
Banderas was an early muse of the acclaimed filmmaker, but it's been 22 years since the two luminaries of Spanish cinema worked together.
"It's part of my life.... I could almost compare it to a return to my country, to my roots, with all its misery, with all its greatness, all its contradictions and everything that goes along with that" Banderas said at a news conference at the Cannes Film Festival, where the movie screened Thursday. "That's what returning to Almodovar is, a homecoming."
And what a homecoming it is.
In "The Skin I Live In," Banderas plays a psychotic plastic surgeon who devises a Machiavellian plot to exact revenge on the man he believes raped his daughter. Cold and calculating, Banderas' character Robert wears an impassive mask of icy sternness throughout the film.
The restrained performance — one of his strongest since his Almodovar days — contrasts with the exuberance and oozing charm of his Hollywood characters.
"The spectators discover that this is a tormented character as the story goes along, but without any grand gestures, no great things in front of the camera," Banderas said.
Banderas' restrained performance also contrasts with his early work with Almodovar, where he played a boy-toy in 1988's "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and a toreador in training in the 1986 "Matador," among other flamboyant roles.
With a cast that also includes another of the filmmaker's old school favorites, Marisa Paredes, "The Skin I Live In" is classic Almodovar at his best.
The themes that have obsessed Almodovar since his first experiments in cinema in late-1970s Madrid — obsession, gender-bending, family secrets — are all here, worked masterfully into a roller-coaster plot.
A loose adaptation of the novel by French author Thierry Jonquet, the movie is a bloodless thriller that keeps audiences' knuckles white without drenching them in gore.
Copyright © 2011 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Friday, May 13, 2011
Monday, May 9, 2011
GOD: I own you like I own the caves.
THE OCEAN: Not a chance. No comparison.
GOD: I made you. I could tame you.
THE OCEAN: At one time, maybe. But not now.
GOD: I will come to you, freeze you, break you.
THE OCEAN: I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what’s happened to me.
How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers
THE OCEAN: Not a chance. No comparison.
GOD: I made you. I could tame you.
THE OCEAN: At one time, maybe. But not now.
GOD: I will come to you, freeze you, break you.
THE OCEAN: I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what’s happened to me.
How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers
Friday, May 6, 2011
Imagine this life, imagine her story..
By MUNIR AHMED, Associated Press Munir Ahmed, Associated Press
1 hr 24 mins ago
ISLAMABAD – One of three wives living with Osama bin Laden has told Pakistani interrogators she had been staying in the al-Qaida chief's hideout for six years without leaving its upper floors, a Pakistani intelligence official said Friday.
The woman, identified as Yemeni-born Amal Ahmed Abdullfattah, and the other two wives of bin Laden are being interrogated in Pakistan after they were taken into custody following the American raid on bin Laden's compound in the town of Abbottabad.
Pakistani authorities are also holding eight or nine children who were found there after the U.S. commandos left.
The corpses of at least three slain men were also left behind, while bin Laden's body was taken and buried at sea.
The wives' accounts will help show how bin Laden spent his time and how he managed to avoid capture, living in a large house close to military academy in a garrison town, a two-and-a-half hours' drive from the capital Islamabad.
Given shifting and incomplete accounts from U.S. officials about what happened during the raid, the women's testimonies may also be significant in unveiling details about the operation.
A Pakistani official said CIA officers had not been given access to the women in custody. Military and intelligence relations between the United States and Pakistan have been strained even before Monday's helicopter-borne raid, and have become more so in its aftermath. There is also anger among Pakistanis over the raid, which many see as a violation of their country's sovereignty.
On Friday, American drone-fired missiles killed 10 people in North Waziristan, an al-Qaida and Taliban hotspot close to Afghanistan, Pakistani officials said. The strike risks more tensions between the two countries. Such attacks were routine last year, but their frequency has dropped this year amid opposition by the Pakistan security establishment.
The Pakistani intelligence official did not say on Friday whether the Yemeni wife has said that bin Laden was also living there since 2006. "We are still getting information from them," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give his name to the media.
A security official said the wife was shot in the leg during the operation, and did not witness her husband being killed. He also said one of bin Laden's eldest daughters had said she witnessed the Americans killing her father.
Meanwhile, Pakistan's intelligence agency has concluded that bin Laden was "cash strapped" in his final days and that al-Qaida had split into two factions, with the larger one controlled by the group's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, according to a briefing given by a senior officer in the agency.
The officer spoke to a small group of Pakistani reporters late Thursday. A top military officer also present at the briefing told The Associated Press what was said, as did two of the journalists. All asked that their names not be used because of the sensitivity of the meeting.
The officer didn't provide details or elaborate how his agency made the conclusions about bin Laden's financial situation or the split with his deputy, al-Zawahri. The al-Qaida chief had apparently lived without any guards at the Abbottabad compound or loyalists nearby to take up arms in his defense.
The image of Pakistan's intelligence agency has been battered at home and abroad in the wake of the raid that killed bin Laden. Portraying him as isolated and weak may be aimed at trying to create an impression that a failure to spot him was not so important.
Documents taken from the house by American commandos showed that bin Laden was planning to hit America, however, including a plan for derailing an American train on the upcoming 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The confiscated materials reveal the rail attack was planned as of February 2010.
Late Thursday, two Pakistani officials cited bin Laden's wives and children as saying he and his associates had not offered any "significant resistance" when the American commandos entered the compound, in part because the assailants had thrown "stun bombs" that disorientated them.
One official said Pakistani authorities found an AK-47 and a pistol in the house belonging to those in the house, with evidence that one bullet had been fired from the rifle.
"That was the level of resistance" they put up, said the official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
His account is roughly consistent with the most recent one given by U.S. officials, who now say one of the five people, killed in the raid was armed and fired any shots, a striking departure from the intense and prolonged firefight described earlier by the White House and others in the administration.
U.S. officials say four men were killed alongside bin Laden, including one of his sons.
The raid has exacerbated tensions between America and Pakistan. The army here is angry that it was not told about the unilateral raid on a target within its territory, while there are suspicions in Washington that bin Laden may have been protected by Pakistani security forces while on the run.
1 hr 24 mins ago
ISLAMABAD – One of three wives living with Osama bin Laden has told Pakistani interrogators she had been staying in the al-Qaida chief's hideout for six years without leaving its upper floors, a Pakistani intelligence official said Friday.
The woman, identified as Yemeni-born Amal Ahmed Abdullfattah, and the other two wives of bin Laden are being interrogated in Pakistan after they were taken into custody following the American raid on bin Laden's compound in the town of Abbottabad.
Pakistani authorities are also holding eight or nine children who were found there after the U.S. commandos left.
The corpses of at least three slain men were also left behind, while bin Laden's body was taken and buried at sea.
The wives' accounts will help show how bin Laden spent his time and how he managed to avoid capture, living in a large house close to military academy in a garrison town, a two-and-a-half hours' drive from the capital Islamabad.
Given shifting and incomplete accounts from U.S. officials about what happened during the raid, the women's testimonies may also be significant in unveiling details about the operation.
A Pakistani official said CIA officers had not been given access to the women in custody. Military and intelligence relations between the United States and Pakistan have been strained even before Monday's helicopter-borne raid, and have become more so in its aftermath. There is also anger among Pakistanis over the raid, which many see as a violation of their country's sovereignty.
On Friday, American drone-fired missiles killed 10 people in North Waziristan, an al-Qaida and Taliban hotspot close to Afghanistan, Pakistani officials said. The strike risks more tensions between the two countries. Such attacks were routine last year, but their frequency has dropped this year amid opposition by the Pakistan security establishment.
The Pakistani intelligence official did not say on Friday whether the Yemeni wife has said that bin Laden was also living there since 2006. "We are still getting information from them," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give his name to the media.
A security official said the wife was shot in the leg during the operation, and did not witness her husband being killed. He also said one of bin Laden's eldest daughters had said she witnessed the Americans killing her father.
Meanwhile, Pakistan's intelligence agency has concluded that bin Laden was "cash strapped" in his final days and that al-Qaida had split into two factions, with the larger one controlled by the group's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, according to a briefing given by a senior officer in the agency.
The officer spoke to a small group of Pakistani reporters late Thursday. A top military officer also present at the briefing told The Associated Press what was said, as did two of the journalists. All asked that their names not be used because of the sensitivity of the meeting.
The officer didn't provide details or elaborate how his agency made the conclusions about bin Laden's financial situation or the split with his deputy, al-Zawahri. The al-Qaida chief had apparently lived without any guards at the Abbottabad compound or loyalists nearby to take up arms in his defense.
The image of Pakistan's intelligence agency has been battered at home and abroad in the wake of the raid that killed bin Laden. Portraying him as isolated and weak may be aimed at trying to create an impression that a failure to spot him was not so important.
Documents taken from the house by American commandos showed that bin Laden was planning to hit America, however, including a plan for derailing an American train on the upcoming 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The confiscated materials reveal the rail attack was planned as of February 2010.
Late Thursday, two Pakistani officials cited bin Laden's wives and children as saying he and his associates had not offered any "significant resistance" when the American commandos entered the compound, in part because the assailants had thrown "stun bombs" that disorientated them.
One official said Pakistani authorities found an AK-47 and a pistol in the house belonging to those in the house, with evidence that one bullet had been fired from the rifle.
"That was the level of resistance" they put up, said the official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
His account is roughly consistent with the most recent one given by U.S. officials, who now say one of the five people, killed in the raid was armed and fired any shots, a striking departure from the intense and prolonged firefight described earlier by the White House and others in the administration.
U.S. officials say four men were killed alongside bin Laden, including one of his sons.
The raid has exacerbated tensions between America and Pakistan. The army here is angry that it was not told about the unilateral raid on a target within its territory, while there are suspicions in Washington that bin Laden may have been protected by Pakistani security forces while on the run.
Monday, May 2, 2011
such a tremendous play
Robin Williams brings different sort of funny to Iraq war play
By Melissa Maerz and Los Angeles Times, Sunday, April 24, 10:07 AM
New York
Long before Robin Williams was in an Iraq war play, he was very close to the Iraq war.
Sitting in his dressing room at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, where he’s making his Broadway debut as the talking tiger in Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” the 59-year-old actor recalled his many trips to Baghdad to do stand-up for the troops stationed there. There was the day he rode a helicopter over the Arabian Sea and the night he slept in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, a cheaply gold-plated former hunting lodge with marble walls that crumbled to the touch.
What Williams remembers most vividly, though, is the time he spent in a hospital with a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He won’t discuss their conversation except to say that the experience was part of why he wanted to do “Bengal Tiger.”
“The writing was so powerful,” Williams says. “I felt like it was speaking to the experience of soldiers like him.”
But accepting the role was a bigger responsibility than Williams initially imagined. The play refuses to spout an overt political message, underscoring instead the darkly comic nature of war. And Williams delivers its most brutal punch lines. In one scene, the tiger describes watching a little girl’s skull get blown apart by a bomb. “The girl is no dummy, even if she does only have half a brain,” he says, deadpan. Many nights, the audience gasps.
“I think a few people didn’t know what they were getting into,” he says during previews. Williams, who has decorated his dressing room with photos of tigers (and the famous DUI mug shot of Nick Nolte), says, “The women would line up for the ladies’ room, and you could hear them say” — he assumes the voice of an old New York woman — ‘It’s too dahhk! Where is the funny?’ ”
Williams’s name appears on the marquee for “Bengal Tiger” to let audiences know that this isn’t one of those humorless plays about the soul-crushing nature of war — this one has jokes about the soul-crushing nature of war.
During an initial run at the Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, and a later engagement at the Mark Taper Forum, actor Kevin Tighe played the tiger, and the play received critical acclaim for its savage wit. The Los Angeles Times’ Charles McNulty called it “the most original drama written about the Iraq war.”
After it was nominated for a Pulitzer, director Moises Kaufman says, he knew that Broadway was the next step — and he wanted a well-known comedian in the cast to persuade people to see a fairly grave play in which a tiger gnaws off a soldier’s arm, gets shot to death and roams the bombed-out city as a ghost, waxing existential about violence, innocence, the existence of God and the delicious taste of human flesh.
“There is so much absurdity in war that the play wouldn’t have worked if it didn’t have this ferocious humor,” Kaufman says. “Robin gets the brutality, and he gets people to laugh at it, not in mockery, but in recognition.”
Even the most critically acclaimed Iraq war plays have been a tough sell for mainstream theatergoers: Christopher Shinn’s “Dying City” and the National Theatre of Scotland’s “Black Watch” never quite made it to Broadway. Though “Bengal Tiger” has performed well enough at the box office, it probably would need Tony nominations and awards for a longer run. Knowing that the production would contend with the usual challenges faced by serious plays on Broadway, the remaining members of the Los Angeles cast welcomed Williams, even as they felt conflicted about seeing Tighe go.
“It’s impossible for any Broadway show to survive without a star unless you have a nonprofit theater that can back you,” says Arian Moayed, who has played an Iraqi translator in the East and West Coast versions of the play. “And this play has the word ‘Baghdad’ in it. In tough economic and political times, the first thing people want to do is see a musical.”
That’s the paradox behind “Bengal Tiger”: The production needed Robin Williams, but to serve the play, he couldn’t really be Robin Williams — at least not the one most of America knows. There are no zany voices, no wild mugging, no bounding around in a tiger suit. Both on- and offstage, his tone is contemplative, and his performance has been praised as a model of restraint. Williams isn’t acting like himself — and critics love him for it.
“People forget that he’s a Juilliard-trained actor,” says Kaufman, who points out that Williams co-starred in an off-Broadway production of “Waiting for Godot” with Steve Martin in 1988. “So when people say they’re not seeing the real Robin Williams, to me, that’s a testament to his craft.”
Even when he’s not performing, Williams seems more quiet than one would expect, only occasionally breaking into a funny accent or risque penguin joke, and even then, doing it almost apologetically — as if he knows that’s what you came for, but he’s just not up for it tonight. Since he had open heart surgery last year (doctors replaced a valve with a bovine valve), he says he’s more openly emotional. “It almost literally cracks your armor,” he says.
He seems a little sad, especially when he talks about opening night.
“They opened the curtains, and you know that part where the star walks out and everybody claps? Well, nobody clapped,” Williams recalls. “That just set the mood, like, all right, that’s just how it’s going to be.”
Still, that ability to be vulnerable — even when people are expecting him to be this manic, free-associating windup toy of a man — is what makes Williams right for this play, Kaufman says. “It’s a dialogue between our primal selves and our spiritual selves,” he says. “It captures what’s animal within us, but it also has this great sense of humanity and a broad range of emotion. And Robin gets all of that.”
Plus, Williams makes the story feel personal. “He’s been there,” Kaufman says. “He’s gone to the hospitals and talked to the soldiers, and he knows that it’s easy to care for the physical wounds but the psychological ones take much longer to heal. And the play deals with those psychological repercussions.”
Sometimes, when Williams delivers the final monologue in the play — a devastating scene in which the tiger asks God, “If you think killing people is wrong, then why did you make us predators?” — he still thinks of the soldier he met in the hospital. And apparently, he’s not the only one for whom difficult memories are triggered during that scene.
“Last night, when I did it, this woman in the front row burst out crying,” Williams says. “I had to make it through that scene with her just sobbing the whole time.” He lets out a long, slow breath. “That was rough. It was rough for me, too. But we got through it.”
— Los Angeles Times
Bernadette
Bernadette Peters and Stephen Sondheim pair up again, this time for ‘Follies’
By Peter Marks, Friday, April 29, 3:46 PM
As far as Bernadette Peters was concerned, all Stephen Sondheim had to do was ask. She’d had prestige-laden success on Broadway a couple of years earlier in his Pulitzer-winning “Sunday in the Park with George,” in which she starred as Dot, the muse and lover of pointillist painter Georges Seurat. And now, Sondheim was two weeks away from rehearsals for his next musical, the fractured fairy tale “Into the Woods,” and he desperately needed a Witch.
“By sheer coincidence I was up in the country, Bernadette was passing through Connecticut and I invited her to have lunch,” the composer recalls of that day in the mid-1980s. “She asked, ‘How are things?’ and I told her, ‘We’re having casting problems’— I wasn’t hinting.”
To Sondheim’s surprise, Peters immediately suggested playing the Witch herself, even though it wasn’t the magnitude of role to which a leading lady of her stature would usually commit. And Sondheim thinks he understands why:
“I think her experience with ‘Sunday’ was life-changing,” he says. “She had never played anything like that before. The kind of musical it was, was completely new to her and extremely exciting for her. And I think she wanted that again.”
Yes, it seems fair to say that Peters had fallen in love — and we all know the lengths to which people go because of that. The affair between Peters’s voice and Sondheim’s brain would rage on for the next 25 years, through countless shows, benefits, albums and concerts.
“I’m drawn to him,” Peters says, sitting at a table in a conference room at the Kennedy Center, where the latest manifestation of her devotion — the lavish $7.3 million revival of the Sondheim-James Goldman masterwork “Follies” — is in the final preparatory stages before preview performances begin Saturday.
“Follies,” the tale of two unraveling marriages at a memory-saturated reunion of one-time Ziegfeld-style showgirls, is by some margin the most expensive home-grown production ever mounted by a Washington theater. And as a starry revival of one of Sondheim’s most narratively complex works, it is likely to attract national attention. If things go very well during its six-week run at the Kennedy’s Eisenhower Theater, the whispers about bringing this production to New York will follow.
Directed by Signature Theatre’s Eric Schaeffer and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, this production has proved a magnet with one group: mature actresses of renown. The Kennedy Center as a result has assembled a major-league roster of stage performers: critics’ darling Jan Maxwell as aloof Phyllis; “Evita’s” and “Cats’s” original British star Elaine Paige, playing the gritty survivor Carlotta; Linda Lavin, in the role of veteran hoofer Hattie. In other supporting parts are Broadway actress Terri White, nightclub owner Regine and mezzo-soprano Rosalind Elias. (Ron Raines and Danny Burstein are Ben and Buddy, the musical’s leading men.)
First among equals, though, is Peters, a two-time Tony winner whose presence confers urgent status on this “Follies” regardless of the ultimate outcome; she is in the minds of many the most accomplished musical-comedy actress of her generation.
“After I did ‘Gypsy,’ I thought, ‘What do you do after that?’ ” she says of her provocatively offbeat work in the 2003 Broadway revival. She adds that she’d been thinking for some time about “Follies” and the crucial part of Sally, the achingly regretful ex-chorus girl who pines for her onetime lover, Phyllis’s husband Ben.“I usually come to the role through the music,” Peters says. “And these songs — ‘Losing My Mind,’ ‘Buddy’s Eyes’ — are really great.”
At 63, Peters looks so naturally youthful and like the version of herself from three decades ago that you imagine her being asked constantly, “What’s your secret?” She is fresh from a day of dance rehearsals when she agreeably takes a chair and starts to talk about her life in show business and the growth of her professional association with Sondheim. (And her secret, by the way, is evidently no secret. “Good genes,” she says, and a lifelong avoidance of the sun.)
You quickly get the sense, as she ranges over the whimsically disjointed segments of an actor’s life — her off-Broadway breakthrough in “Dames at Sea” in the ’60s; a failed musical, “Mack and Mabel,” and a Norman Lear sitcom, “All’s Fair,” in the ’70s; stints on “The Carol Burnett Show” and “The Hollywood Squares” — that finding Sondheim in the ’80s brought some order to the chaos and gave her for the first time a taste of authentic artistic mission.
“He writes so beautifully for character, for what is happening in the scene,” she says. “When I did ‘Sunday in the Park,’ I learned so much about life from that show. Especially when you get to that song ‘Move On.’ ” She hums a few bars of the musical’s so-called 11 o’clock number, in which she had to sing of the need of artists to pursue their vision without heed to those who might judge it.
“It’s not that he writes about something,” she adds. “He writes about something.”
As Sondheim himself characterizes it, Peters’s appeal is of a transcendent sort. “She’s so endearing as a personality, she could play an ax murderer and you’d forgive her,” he says by phone from New York. With his support and encouragement, she has become, along with Angela Lansbury and Mandy Patinkin, one of the actors most prominently identified with his music. It was no surprise that this spring she was the latest recipient of Signature Theatre’s Stephen Sondheim Award, an honor for which the composer is intensively consulted.
She certainly earned it. Over the years she has played a passel of Sondheim heroines, from among the most sentimental (Desiree, in the recent revival of “A Little Night Music”) to the most neurotic; her Mama Rose in “Gypsy,” for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics to Jule Styne’s music, was a provocative take, in part because she infused the character with a heretofore absent sexual heat. (One wonders what her disarming embraceability would do for the pragmatic Mrs. Lovett of Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.”) Her allegiance to the composer has been immortalized in concert form as well: The recording of her 1996 Carnegie Hall performance is called “Sondheim Etc.”
For all their interwoven experience, you’d imagine that at some point, Sondheim would have had Peters in mind when he composed. You would be mistaken. He says that only in the rarest cases has he written for a specific voice or person, chiefly because of the ever-present danger of a performer giving up on a project. The exceptions, he says, were Ethel Merman, for whom Mama Rose was created; Lansbury, who’d been thought of early for Mrs. Lovett; and Elaine Stritch, for whom he wrote “Company’s” show-stopping “The Ladies Who Lunch.”
That he and Peters have amassed such a thick scrapbook together, Sondheim says, has more to do with their coincidental convergence of interests. “A number of my shows have really good parts for women,” he explains. “People who like to act, and singers who like to act, are attracted to my songs — they’re about acting.”
And although he views Peters as a more intuitive performer — the opposite in a sense of Lansbury, who has a knack for “subsuming her personality” — Sondheim feels an admiration for the way Peters shapes a role to the contours of her own style: “There’s an aspect of Bernadette that’s always Bernadette — she brings a ‘Bernadette-ishness.’ And yet, she completely plays the character.”
Some mutually advantageous protectiveness exists in their relationship, too. It turns out, for instance, that Peters was recruited to follow Tony-winning Catherine Zeta-Jones as Desiree in “Night Music” only after Sondheim did some putting-it-together, to quote one of his “Sunday” songs. Peters recalls that she was speaking to the composer one day when the musical came up: “He said, ‘Did they ever call you to replace Catherine Zeta-Jones?’ I said, ‘No, nobody called.’ The next day they called. And okay, I was in the show.”
Peters grins. How come, she is asked, she wasn’t approached to play Desiree in the first place? She smiles again, and shrugs.
She has long trusted in that shrug, at least as a kind of philosophical underpinning for her career. She says she never developed a plan for where she was going, just counted on one interesting job to segue into another. “I just let the universe do its work,” she says, which may help to explain why along with the triumphs — small movie gems such as “Pennies From Heaven”; her performance in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Song and Dance” — there have been a significant number of misfires.
The universe has not always been kind, either, in her personal life: She was widowed in 2005 when her husband of nine years, financial adviser Michael Wittenberg, was killed in a helicopter crash.
But the work, she says, has always been steady, and this former child actor has always applied herself, whether the material was Pulitzer worthy or not. “When you’re starting in the business, you’re making money to stay alive. Did I like doing ‘Hollywood Squares?’ ’’ she asks, in an inflection that reminds you she was once Bernadette Lazzara, of Ozone Park, Queens.
So into the rehearsal room at the Kennedy Center Peters totes her lifetime in showbiz, to play the part of a woman who has unhappily walked away from all of that. “People of that stature, they can coast,” director Schaeffer says of Peters. “But it’s really the opposite, and that’s what I found refreshing. She is working her [butt] off.”
She’s still in the process of figuring out what kind of Sally hers is going to be, but clearly, like her Mama Rose, this Sally will be something other than a frump. “She’s in love with Ben, and you don’t forget your first love,” Peters says. “There’s a reason she’s come back — she’s come to get back the love of her life.” The shrugging demeanor is gone; now Peters warms to the dramatic task.
“I know he’s not happy with Phyllis. I know it. And I have to appear appealing to him.”
It’s fun to hear her begin to absorb Sally’s point of view. As with so many actors, she’s more animated while flirting with Sally’s psyche than when analyzing her own. She says she is shy by temperament, more contented, say, to watch people at a party than to try to be the life of it. And happiest of all to be in a theater, in Sondheim’s orbit. “Onstage,” she says, “I’m totally safe.”
‘FOLLIES’
Directed by Eric Schaeffer. Book by James Goldman. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Music direction by James Moore. Choreography by Warren Carlyle. With Bernadette Peters, Jan Maxwell, Danny Burstein, Ron Raines, Elaine Paige, Terrence Currier, Christian Delcroix, Rosalind Elias, Colleen Fitzpatrick, Lora Lee Gayer, Michael Hayes, Florence Lacey, Linda Lavin, Regine, David Sabin, Kirsten Scott, Frederick Strother, Nick Verina, Susan Watson and Terri White.
May 1
Osama Bin Laden, Adolf Hitler both declared dead on May 1
BY Helen Kennedy
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Originally Published:Monday, May 2nd 2011, 1:54 AM
Updated: Monday, May 2nd 2011, 10:48 AM
Osama Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler share a towering reputation for evil - and also an anniversary.
Both were declared dead on May 1.
Late on May 1, 1945 - about as late as President Obama's TV announcement Sunday - German radio announced that Hitler had fallen "fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany."
He had actually committed suicide the day before.
In some cultures May 1 is the official beginning of summer. In many places, May Day is also Labor Day, a celebration of the working man.
May 1 is also the anniversary of President Bush's ill-conceived 2003 Mission Accomplished speech, prematurely announcing an end to combat in Iraq.
Obama, who might have used the words in his TV address, did not.
BY Helen Kennedy
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Originally Published:Monday, May 2nd 2011, 1:54 AM
Updated: Monday, May 2nd 2011, 10:48 AM
Osama Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler share a towering reputation for evil - and also an anniversary.
Both were declared dead on May 1.
Late on May 1, 1945 - about as late as President Obama's TV announcement Sunday - German radio announced that Hitler had fallen "fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany."
He had actually committed suicide the day before.
In some cultures May 1 is the official beginning of summer. In many places, May Day is also Labor Day, a celebration of the working man.
May 1 is also the anniversary of President Bush's ill-conceived 2003 Mission Accomplished speech, prematurely announcing an end to combat in Iraq.
Obama, who might have used the words in his TV address, did not.
WOW
Getting bin Laden: How the mission went down
By: Mike Allen
May 2, 2011 10:32 AM EDT
The helicopter carrying Navy SEALs malfunctioned as it approached Osama bin Laden’s compound at about 3:30 p.m. ET Sunday, stalling as it hovered. The pilot set it down gently inside the walls, then couldn’t get it going again.
It was a heart-stopping moment for President Barack Obama, who had been monitoring the raid in the White House Situation Room since 1 p.m., surrounded by members of his war cabinet.
“Obviously, everyone was thinking about Black Hawk Down and Desert One,” a senior administration official recalled.
The SEALs disembarked.
“The assault team went ahead and raided the compound, even though they didn’t know if they would have a ride home,” an official said.
The special forces put bombs on the crippled chopper and blew it up, then lifted off in a reinforcement craft just before 4:15 p.m., capping an astounding 40 minutes that gave the United States a tectonic victory in the 10-year war on terror touched off by 9/11.
The sick chopper turned out to be a tiny wrinkle in an astounding military and intelligence triumph. Bin Laden was shot in the face by the SEALs during a firefight after resisting capture.
He was buried at sea less than 12 hours later. He was 54.
Here’s how the world’s most-hunted man was vanquished, as recounted by senior administration officials:
Contrary to the intelligence community’s long-held belief that bin Laden was in a lawless “no man’s land” on the Pakistani border, bin Laden had been hiding in a three-story house in a one-acre compound in Abbottabad, about 35 miles north of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. Officials describe it as a relatively affluent community, with lots of residents who are retired military.
“Bin Laden was living in a relatively comfortable place: a compound valued at about $1 million,” a senior U.S. official told POLITICO. “Many of his foot soldiers are located in some of the remotest regions of Pakistan and live in austere conditions. You’ve got to wonder if they’re rethinking their respect for their dead leader. He obviously wasn’t living as one of them.”
Officials described the raid as the culmination of years of highly advanced intelligence work that included the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which specializes in imagery and maps, and the National Security Agency (NSA), the “codemakers and codebreakers” who can covertly watch and listen to conversations around the world.
On June 2, 2009, just over four months into his presidency, Obama had signed a memo to CIA Director Leon Panetta stating “in order to ensure that we have expanded every effort, I direct you to provide me within 30 days a detailed operation plan for locating and bringing to justice” bin Laden.
In the biggest break in a global pursuit of bin Laden that stretched back to the Clinton administration, the U.S. discovered the compound by following one of the terrorist’s personal couriers, identified by terrorist detainees as one of the few al Qaeda couriers who bin Laden trusted.
“They indicated he might be living with and protecting bin Laden,” a senior administration official told reporters on a midnight conference call. “Detainees gave us his nom de guerre, or his nickname, and identified him as both a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of September 11th, and a trusted assistant of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the former number three of al Qaeda who was captured in 2005.”
Officials didn’t learn the courier’s name until 2007. Then it took two years to find him and track him back to this compound, which was discovered in August 2010.
“It was a “Holy cow!” moment,” an official said.
The compound had been relatively secluded when it was built in 2005 — on the outskirts of the town center, at the end of a narrow dirt road.
“In the last six years, some residential homes have been built nearby,” an official said on the call. “The main structure, a three-story building, has few windows facing the outside of the compound. A terrace on the third floor … has a seven-foot privacy wall. … [T]he property is valued at approximately $1 million but has no telephone or Internet service connected to it.”
Everything about the compound signaled that it was being used to hide someone important.
“It has 12- to 18-foot walls topped with barbed wire,” the official said. “Internal wall sections — internal walls sectioned off different portions of the compound to provide extra privacy. Access to the compound is restricted by two security gates, and the residents of the compound burn their trash, unlike their neighbors, who put the trash out for collection.
For all their suspicions, U.S. officials never knew for sure that bin Laden was inside.
The White House’s original plan had been to bomb the house, but Obama ultimately decided against that.
“The helicopter raid was riskier. It was more daring,” an official told POLITICO. “But he wanted proof. He didn’t want to just leave a pile of rubble.”
Officials knew there were 22 people living there, and Obama wanted to be sure not to kill civilians unnecessarily. So he ordered officials to come up with an air-assault plan.
The SEALs held rehearsals of the raid on April 7 and April 13, with officials monitoring the action from Washington.
As the real thing approached, daily meetings were held of the national security principals, chaired by National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, and their deputies, chaired by John Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism adviser.
Over the past seven weeks, Obama had chaired numerous National Security Council meetings on the topic, including ones on March 14, March 29, April 12, April 19 and April 28.
“In the lead up to this operation, the President convened at least 9 meetings with his national security Principals,” a senior administration official e-mailed reporters. “Principals met formally an additional five times themselves; and their Deputies met 7 times. This was in addition to countless briefings on the subject during the President’s intelligence briefings; and frequent consultations between the [White House National Security Council], CIA, [Defense Department] and Joint Staff. The President was actively involved in reviewing all facets of the operation.”
At an April 19 meeting in the Situation Room, the president approved the air assault as the course of action. He ordered the force to fly to the region to conduct it.
Last Thursday, just after his East Room announcement that Panetta would succeed Robert Gates as Defense Secretary, the president held another meeting in the Situation Room, and went through everyone’s final recommendations.
Obama didn’t announce his decision at the meeting, but kept his counsel overnight.
In the White House Diplomatic Room at 8:20 a.m. on Friday, before flying down to view tornado destruction in Alabama, Obama informed Donilon that he was authorizing the operation. Also attending the meeting were Brennan, White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley and Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough.
Donilon signed a written authorization to Panetta, who commanded the strike team. Donilon convened a principals’ meeting at 3 p.m. to finish the planning.
The raid was scheduled for Saturday, the day when Obama and most of the West Wing was due at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. But weather pushed it to Sunday.
Top West Wing staff worked most of the day on the operation. Senior national-security officials stayed in the Situation Room beginning at 1 p.m.
The official’s e-mail gave this account of Obama’s day: “2:00pm the President met with the Principals to review final preparations. … 3:32pm the President returned to the Sit Room for an additional briefing. … 3:50pm the President first learns that UBL was tentatively identified. … 7:01pm the President learns that there’s a ‘high probability’ the HVT [high-value target] was [bin Laden]. … 8:30pm the President receives further briefings.”
In the Situation Room, the president was surrounded by Daley, Donilon, McDonough, Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and others.
Panetta was at CIA headquarters, where he had turned his conference room into a command center that gave him constant contact with the tactical leaders of the strike team.
With the team still in the compound, the commander on the ground told a remote commander that they had found bin Laden.
Applause erupted in Washington.
Three other adult males were killed with bin Laden, officials said.
“We believe two were the couriers and the third was bin Laden’s adult son,” an official said on the call. “There were several women and children at the compound. One woman was killed when she was used as a shield by a male combatant. Two other women were injured.”
U.S. forces took photographs of the body, and officials used facial-recognition technology to compare them with known pictures of bin Laden.
It was him.
At 11:35 p.m., Obama stepped into the East Room and told the world: “Justice has been done.”
By: Mike Allen
May 2, 2011 10:32 AM EDT
The helicopter carrying Navy SEALs malfunctioned as it approached Osama bin Laden’s compound at about 3:30 p.m. ET Sunday, stalling as it hovered. The pilot set it down gently inside the walls, then couldn’t get it going again.
It was a heart-stopping moment for President Barack Obama, who had been monitoring the raid in the White House Situation Room since 1 p.m., surrounded by members of his war cabinet.
“Obviously, everyone was thinking about Black Hawk Down and Desert One,” a senior administration official recalled.
The SEALs disembarked.
“The assault team went ahead and raided the compound, even though they didn’t know if they would have a ride home,” an official said.
The special forces put bombs on the crippled chopper and blew it up, then lifted off in a reinforcement craft just before 4:15 p.m., capping an astounding 40 minutes that gave the United States a tectonic victory in the 10-year war on terror touched off by 9/11.
The sick chopper turned out to be a tiny wrinkle in an astounding military and intelligence triumph. Bin Laden was shot in the face by the SEALs during a firefight after resisting capture.
He was buried at sea less than 12 hours later. He was 54.
Here’s how the world’s most-hunted man was vanquished, as recounted by senior administration officials:
Contrary to the intelligence community’s long-held belief that bin Laden was in a lawless “no man’s land” on the Pakistani border, bin Laden had been hiding in a three-story house in a one-acre compound in Abbottabad, about 35 miles north of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. Officials describe it as a relatively affluent community, with lots of residents who are retired military.
“Bin Laden was living in a relatively comfortable place: a compound valued at about $1 million,” a senior U.S. official told POLITICO. “Many of his foot soldiers are located in some of the remotest regions of Pakistan and live in austere conditions. You’ve got to wonder if they’re rethinking their respect for their dead leader. He obviously wasn’t living as one of them.”
Officials described the raid as the culmination of years of highly advanced intelligence work that included the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which specializes in imagery and maps, and the National Security Agency (NSA), the “codemakers and codebreakers” who can covertly watch and listen to conversations around the world.
On June 2, 2009, just over four months into his presidency, Obama had signed a memo to CIA Director Leon Panetta stating “in order to ensure that we have expanded every effort, I direct you to provide me within 30 days a detailed operation plan for locating and bringing to justice” bin Laden.
In the biggest break in a global pursuit of bin Laden that stretched back to the Clinton administration, the U.S. discovered the compound by following one of the terrorist’s personal couriers, identified by terrorist detainees as one of the few al Qaeda couriers who bin Laden trusted.
“They indicated he might be living with and protecting bin Laden,” a senior administration official told reporters on a midnight conference call. “Detainees gave us his nom de guerre, or his nickname, and identified him as both a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of September 11th, and a trusted assistant of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the former number three of al Qaeda who was captured in 2005.”
Officials didn’t learn the courier’s name until 2007. Then it took two years to find him and track him back to this compound, which was discovered in August 2010.
“It was a “Holy cow!” moment,” an official said.
The compound had been relatively secluded when it was built in 2005 — on the outskirts of the town center, at the end of a narrow dirt road.
“In the last six years, some residential homes have been built nearby,” an official said on the call. “The main structure, a three-story building, has few windows facing the outside of the compound. A terrace on the third floor … has a seven-foot privacy wall. … [T]he property is valued at approximately $1 million but has no telephone or Internet service connected to it.”
Everything about the compound signaled that it was being used to hide someone important.
“It has 12- to 18-foot walls topped with barbed wire,” the official said. “Internal wall sections — internal walls sectioned off different portions of the compound to provide extra privacy. Access to the compound is restricted by two security gates, and the residents of the compound burn their trash, unlike their neighbors, who put the trash out for collection.
For all their suspicions, U.S. officials never knew for sure that bin Laden was inside.
The White House’s original plan had been to bomb the house, but Obama ultimately decided against that.
“The helicopter raid was riskier. It was more daring,” an official told POLITICO. “But he wanted proof. He didn’t want to just leave a pile of rubble.”
Officials knew there were 22 people living there, and Obama wanted to be sure not to kill civilians unnecessarily. So he ordered officials to come up with an air-assault plan.
The SEALs held rehearsals of the raid on April 7 and April 13, with officials monitoring the action from Washington.
As the real thing approached, daily meetings were held of the national security principals, chaired by National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, and their deputies, chaired by John Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism adviser.
Over the past seven weeks, Obama had chaired numerous National Security Council meetings on the topic, including ones on March 14, March 29, April 12, April 19 and April 28.
“In the lead up to this operation, the President convened at least 9 meetings with his national security Principals,” a senior administration official e-mailed reporters. “Principals met formally an additional five times themselves; and their Deputies met 7 times. This was in addition to countless briefings on the subject during the President’s intelligence briefings; and frequent consultations between the [White House National Security Council], CIA, [Defense Department] and Joint Staff. The President was actively involved in reviewing all facets of the operation.”
At an April 19 meeting in the Situation Room, the president approved the air assault as the course of action. He ordered the force to fly to the region to conduct it.
Last Thursday, just after his East Room announcement that Panetta would succeed Robert Gates as Defense Secretary, the president held another meeting in the Situation Room, and went through everyone’s final recommendations.
Obama didn’t announce his decision at the meeting, but kept his counsel overnight.
In the White House Diplomatic Room at 8:20 a.m. on Friday, before flying down to view tornado destruction in Alabama, Obama informed Donilon that he was authorizing the operation. Also attending the meeting were Brennan, White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley and Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough.
Donilon signed a written authorization to Panetta, who commanded the strike team. Donilon convened a principals’ meeting at 3 p.m. to finish the planning.
The raid was scheduled for Saturday, the day when Obama and most of the West Wing was due at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. But weather pushed it to Sunday.
Top West Wing staff worked most of the day on the operation. Senior national-security officials stayed in the Situation Room beginning at 1 p.m.
The official’s e-mail gave this account of Obama’s day: “2:00pm the President met with the Principals to review final preparations. … 3:32pm the President returned to the Sit Room for an additional briefing. … 3:50pm the President first learns that UBL was tentatively identified. … 7:01pm the President learns that there’s a ‘high probability’ the HVT [high-value target] was [bin Laden]. … 8:30pm the President receives further briefings.”
In the Situation Room, the president was surrounded by Daley, Donilon, McDonough, Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and others.
Panetta was at CIA headquarters, where he had turned his conference room into a command center that gave him constant contact with the tactical leaders of the strike team.
With the team still in the compound, the commander on the ground told a remote commander that they had found bin Laden.
Applause erupted in Washington.
Three other adult males were killed with bin Laden, officials said.
“We believe two were the couriers and the third was bin Laden’s adult son,” an official said on the call. “There were several women and children at the compound. One woman was killed when she was used as a shield by a male combatant. Two other women were injured.”
U.S. forces took photographs of the body, and officials used facial-recognition technology to compare them with known pictures of bin Laden.
It was him.
At 11:35 p.m., Obama stepped into the East Room and told the world: “Justice has been done.”
Stevie is BACK!
Stevie Nicks calls new album her own little 'Rumours'
Gary Graff / / Billboard.com
Stevie Nicks says it wasn't her intention to take a decade between solo albums.
Nicks — whose "In Your Dreams," the follow-up to 2001's "Trouble in Shangri-La," comes out Tuesday — says that she was ready to start work on a solo set in 2005 after touring with Fleetwood Mac.
"I was definitely ready to do a record," Nicks recalls, "but the powers that be, the people that surrounded me, pretty much said, 'Don't bother. It's not a good time. The music business is in a terrible place. There's no money, and the Internet piracy is taking over.'
"I didn't know what to say, because I'm not a computer person and I don't have a computer and I don't Facebook or whatever. So I just said, 'OK.' If I hadn't been so exhausted from 135 shows I might have fought back on that a little, but I just didn't."
The wait may have been worthwhile, however. Nicks calls making "In Your Dreams" with producer Dave Stewart (along with Glen Ballard) "the best year of my life" and refers to the new album as "my own little 'Rumours.'" The trio recorded the 13-track set at a house Nicks owns in Los Angeles, and though she has mostly written alone in the past, Nicks collaborated with Stewart on seven of "In Your Dreams'" songs.
"We wrote the song 'You May Be the One,' and my eyes instantly opened and I understood why Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote together — because they each had something the other didn't have," explains Nicks, who gave Stewart a binder of 40 poems before they started working together. "And with Dave and me, he had thousands of chords and this amazing musical knowledge, and I had thousands of pages of poetry — and I know six chords. It was like an amazing little meeting of the minds, and I immediately went, 'Well this is just great!'"
Some of the songs on "In Your Dreams" date back a ways in Nicks' life, including the first single, "Secret Love," which she wrote in 1975 about a love affair, and "Moonlight," which she also started in the mid-'70s but finished after seeing the "Twilight: New Moon" film in 2009. Other collaborators on the album include guitarist Waddy Wachtel, Mike Campbell of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers and Mick Fleetwood, while Nicks called upon Lindsey Buckingham to perform on and help her finish "Soldiers Angel," which she says "is truly my most sacred and revered song."
"We recorded it live and did some harmonies, and then he did some little lead guitar things and it was perfect," Nicks says. "There's no other players, just me and him. Not only did we create something that's probably as Buckingham-Nicks as we have been since 1973, but ... I think that song really brought Lindsey and I back together. He said to me as he was leaving on that second day, 'I feel like we're closer than we've been in 30 years.' It certainly opens a lot of doors."
When she'll go through them remains to be seen, however. She and Stewart filmed the "In Your Dreams" sessions; the footage appears in the "Secret Love" video and will be used in other ways down the line, and Nicks hopes "to go all over the world with this record." She adds that touring with Rod Stewart, as she did earlier this year, "might end up being done again because it did go very well."
And Nicks predicts Fleetwood Mac isn't done, though the group will have to wait for her and "In Your Dreams" as well as Buckingham and his forthcoming album "Seeds We Sow," which is due in September and which Nicks says is "really my favorite thing he's ever done — and I wish he had saved all these amazing songs for Fleetwood Mac."
"When ('In Your Dreams') runs out of gas, as all records eventually do, then possibly Fleetwood Mac will regroup and do another thing — whether it's a record or a tour, I don't know," Nicks says. "Or maybe Lindsey and I will go off and rent a house in Wales and do a Buckingham Nicks album. I have no idea, but I do know the music will continue."
From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20110502/ENT04/105020302/Stevie-Nicks-calls-new-album-her-own-little-‘Rumours’#ixzz1LCPlBxjc
Gary Graff / / Billboard.com
Stevie Nicks says it wasn't her intention to take a decade between solo albums.
Nicks — whose "In Your Dreams," the follow-up to 2001's "Trouble in Shangri-La," comes out Tuesday — says that she was ready to start work on a solo set in 2005 after touring with Fleetwood Mac.
"I was definitely ready to do a record," Nicks recalls, "but the powers that be, the people that surrounded me, pretty much said, 'Don't bother. It's not a good time. The music business is in a terrible place. There's no money, and the Internet piracy is taking over.'
"I didn't know what to say, because I'm not a computer person and I don't have a computer and I don't Facebook or whatever. So I just said, 'OK.' If I hadn't been so exhausted from 135 shows I might have fought back on that a little, but I just didn't."
The wait may have been worthwhile, however. Nicks calls making "In Your Dreams" with producer Dave Stewart (along with Glen Ballard) "the best year of my life" and refers to the new album as "my own little 'Rumours.'" The trio recorded the 13-track set at a house Nicks owns in Los Angeles, and though she has mostly written alone in the past, Nicks collaborated with Stewart on seven of "In Your Dreams'" songs.
"We wrote the song 'You May Be the One,' and my eyes instantly opened and I understood why Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote together — because they each had something the other didn't have," explains Nicks, who gave Stewart a binder of 40 poems before they started working together. "And with Dave and me, he had thousands of chords and this amazing musical knowledge, and I had thousands of pages of poetry — and I know six chords. It was like an amazing little meeting of the minds, and I immediately went, 'Well this is just great!'"
Some of the songs on "In Your Dreams" date back a ways in Nicks' life, including the first single, "Secret Love," which she wrote in 1975 about a love affair, and "Moonlight," which she also started in the mid-'70s but finished after seeing the "Twilight: New Moon" film in 2009. Other collaborators on the album include guitarist Waddy Wachtel, Mike Campbell of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers and Mick Fleetwood, while Nicks called upon Lindsey Buckingham to perform on and help her finish "Soldiers Angel," which she says "is truly my most sacred and revered song."
"We recorded it live and did some harmonies, and then he did some little lead guitar things and it was perfect," Nicks says. "There's no other players, just me and him. Not only did we create something that's probably as Buckingham-Nicks as we have been since 1973, but ... I think that song really brought Lindsey and I back together. He said to me as he was leaving on that second day, 'I feel like we're closer than we've been in 30 years.' It certainly opens a lot of doors."
When she'll go through them remains to be seen, however. She and Stewart filmed the "In Your Dreams" sessions; the footage appears in the "Secret Love" video and will be used in other ways down the line, and Nicks hopes "to go all over the world with this record." She adds that touring with Rod Stewart, as she did earlier this year, "might end up being done again because it did go very well."
And Nicks predicts Fleetwood Mac isn't done, though the group will have to wait for her and "In Your Dreams" as well as Buckingham and his forthcoming album "Seeds We Sow," which is due in September and which Nicks says is "really my favorite thing he's ever done — and I wish he had saved all these amazing songs for Fleetwood Mac."
"When ('In Your Dreams') runs out of gas, as all records eventually do, then possibly Fleetwood Mac will regroup and do another thing — whether it's a record or a tour, I don't know," Nicks says. "Or maybe Lindsey and I will go off and rent a house in Wales and do a Buckingham Nicks album. I have no idea, but I do know the music will continue."
From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20110502/ENT04/105020302/Stevie-Nicks-calls-new-album-her-own-little-‘Rumours’#ixzz1LCPlBxjc
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