They're asking for Mo'Hawkins

Occupy Fringe: Recognizing the Roche Limit » Fringe Magazine

2011-12-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

Occupy Fringe: Recognizing the Roche Limit » Fringe Magazine

2011-09-04T06:21:00.001-07:00

An interview to Belgian newspaper Le Soir during the promotion of "W.E." in Venice brings us what it seems the first - and super smart - Madonna comment about Gaga in ages. Here's how it goes: Le Soir: "Dans W.E., vous filmez la romance de Wallis Simpson à travers le regard contemporain d’une jeune femme admirative, Wally. On pourrait y voir le regard de vos fans sur vous. Voire celui de Lady Gaga? " Le Soir: "In W.E. you filmes the Wallis Simpson love story through the contemporary eyes of a young woman who admired her, Wally. Could we see in that the way your fans look at you? Or the way Lady Gaga does?" Madonna: "De mes fans ? Disons que ce qui m’intéresse avec le regard de Wally, c’est d’arriver à percer la vérité sur Wallis Simpson. Et s’apercevoir que rien n’est jamais tout blanc ou tout noir. Vrai ou faux. La vie est de couleur grise. Et on ne peut enfermer personne dans une case. Quant à Lady Gaga, je n’ai pas de commentaire à faire sur ses obsessions ayant trait à moi, parce que je ne sais pas si ça repose sur quelque chose de profond ou de superficiel." Madonna: "Of my fans ? Let's say that what interests me in Wally's approach is to arrive to percieve the truth about Wallis Simpson. An realize that nothing is completely black or white. Truth or false. Life comes in gray color. And you can't put a human being in a box. Speaking of Lady Gaga, I have no comments about her obsessions related to me, because I don't know if they are based on something profound or superficial."

"I'm out of ways of telling art."

2011-09-04T05:54:00.000-07:00

Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh has denied reports that he is retiring from film-making.

"It's less dramatic that it sounds - it's just a sabbatical," the 48-year-old director told reporters at the Venice Film Festival.

In an interview on US radio in March, Soderbergh appeared to suggest that his next two films would be his last.

"When you see those athletes hang on one or two seasons too long, it's kind of sad," he told Studio 360.

However, speaking in Venice, where his latest film Contagion is featured in competition for the Golden Lion, he dismissed rumours that he was giving up film-making to paint, saying he was merely taking a break.

"I feel I need to recalibrate, so I can discover something new," he told The Observer, echoing words he used in a BBC Radio 4 interview in 2009.

"I'm out of ways of telling art."

Cannes breakthrough

Soderbergh became the youngest winner, at the age of 26, of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his 1989 film Sex, Lies, and Videotape, starring Andie MacDowell.

Ten years ago, he was nominated for the best director Oscar for both Traffic and Erin Brockovich.

But, speaking in March, he said: "When you reach the point where you're like, 'if I have to get into a van to do another scout I'm just going to shoot myself', it's time to let somebody else who's still excited about getting in the van, get the van."

In Venice on Saturday, Soderbergh gave no indication of how long the sabbatical may be, although reports suggest it could be as long as five years.

The director was joined by actors Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow for the world premiere of his new film Contagion in Venice.

Other highlights from Soderbergh's career include the Ocean's series and his Che Guevara biopic
A thriller, about a global pandemic - widely linked to Sars - and peopled with star names, was given a positive reception at the annual film festival.

The cast also includes Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne and Jennifer Ehle.

"It's very helpful to have movie stars playing as many of these roles as you can, because you're throwing so many characters and so much information at the audience it's very helpful for them to get a sort of reference point," he told reporters in Venice.

"There's a reason that movie stars have existed since the beginning of cinema.

"It's good for audiences - they like to have people they can identify with."

Prior to his sabbatical, Soderbergh has at least three films to complete, including a Liberace biopic, with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, and a film version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with George Clooney.

Haywire, an action thriller starring Antonio Banderas and Michael Fassbender, is due to be released in the US in January.

telling the unvarnished truth

2011-09-04T05:53:00.000-07:00

'Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies,” says Martin Parr. “Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.”

Parr, 59 years old and perhaps Britain’s best known photographic chronicler of modern life, is sitting in the kitchen of his beautiful Georgian house in Clifton, Bristol. He has served me tea from a fine china pot and “posh biscuits” bought from the deli up the hill. Susie, his wife of 30 years, is stirring something on the hob. Everything looks rather lovely.

Everything, that is, except the appalled expression on Parr’s face when I suggest that sometimes, regardless of their truthfulness, pictures of things looking their best might be exactly what people want to see. “Of course,” he says, “but what people want…” He hits that last word with the force of a punch, then lapses into silence, as if the very thought of taking a photograph that perpetuates a fantasy disgusts him beyond words.

“If you go to the supermarket and buy a package of food and look at the photo on the front, the food never looks like that inside, does it? That is a fundamental lie we are sold every day. Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.”

A new exhibition, Martin Parr: Bristol and West, opening in the city next week, reminds us quite what a ridiculous, contradictory, dysfunctional and occasionally wonderful place Parr finds the world to be. Focusing on the part of the world that he has called home for the past 25 years, its 60 images, both old and new, suggest that whatever else has changed about photography over the intervening decades – the advent of digital cameras, the death of film – Parr’s gaze remains as acute and unsentimental as ever.

Has anybody ever looked their best in a Martin Parr photograph? Certainly not the mustachioed yacht salesman shot at Bristol regatta in 1989, his face, as he courts a couple of would-be buyers, frozen in a rictus of obsequiousness. Nor the group of girls Parr stumbled upon at Badminton horse trials, as much a product of good breeding and aggressive grooming as the fillies they have gathered to watch.

That picture finds its echo in another shot in the show, taken 20 years later, of a different quartet of girls of a similar age – smoking, teetering on a lamplit pavement on a night out in 2009, off-guard, half-cut, mouths open, eyes closed. Parr’s images frequently raise a smile by exposing the gap between the public faces we wear and the private motives and insecurities that, if you know when and where to point a camera, can be seen seeping out from beneath. But if there is a joke here, nobody has let his subjects in on it.

When he is taking a photograph, Parr says, his prime responsibility isn’t towards the people in shot, but to his viewer and to his own sense of the truth of the scene. “When someone says to you, 'Oh, I don’t take a good picture,’ what they mean is they haven’t come to terms with how they look,” he says. “They take a fine picture, it’s just that their image of how they think they look is not in touch with the reality.”

I had always wondered how Parr got himself into such intimate proximity with the subjects of his photographs, who so often appear blissfully unaware of the critical lens loitering only inches from their faces. I suppose I’d imagined him to be a flatterer, or else a man of such discretion that people simply forget he is there and let down their guard.

In person, it quickly becomes clear that his chief weapon is not charm but directness. He shoots as he talks, with unflinching certainty and not a hint of self doubt. When I ask if he ever seeks a person’s permission before photographing them, that pained expression reappears. “You would never get anything done if you did that,” he says. “And besides, you still have the legal and moral right in this country to photograph anyone in a public place and do what you like with it.” So there.

Parr, who has been a member of the renowned Magnum picture agency since 1994, estimates he takes “tens upon thousands” of photographs a year. Unusually in this digital age, he prints out “maybe 15,000 of them” and, he adds, “If there are 10 good ones, it would be a good year.” Themes recur – “tourism, consumerism, the Americanisation of the world” – but his scope is dizzyingly broad: “I am interested in people and what they do,” he says, “the foibles of the world.”

As he approaches 60, Parr’s passion for his medium grips him as firmly as it did when his grandfather, an amateur photographer, first gave him a camera as a boy. “I can’t imagine a time when I wouldn’t want to take photos,” he says. “Photography for me is not work, it’s a calling.”

2011-07-11T04:59:00.000-07:00

And while I abhor the idea of disturbing you when things are getting so very exciting in your life, I just want to remind you that no matter what may ever happen, the dreamer is always greater than the dream.
You're the greatest -
The Universe

2011-06-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

New Cirque Show

2011-06-23T05:28:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (AP) — Director Francois Girard sits in an orchestra seat in the massive Radio City Music Hall and looks up at the massive challenge facing him.

The stage he has to fill these days is more than 100 feet wide and 66 feet deep. The proscenium arch soars more than 60 feet into the air. It is among the largest indoor theaters in the world.

"You can see how a human body could get lost in this space," Girard says.

That's an obvious issue for the writer and director of "Zarkana," the latest Cirque du Soleil show that opens later this month. So mammoth is the stage that it threatens to swallow up a $50 million production of 11 acts and 75 performers.

Girard insists he's more challenged than frightened by a space he acknowledges is "a monster." In fact, he says he and his team have been inspired by the arena's ghosts and Radio City has become a central character in the show.

"I feel at home right now," he says.

Girard has taken a break to sit among the 6,000 seats he hopes to fill each night when the show opens June 29. From the corner of his eye, he keeps tabs on a juggler practicing on one side of the stage, a group of trapeze acrobats on the other and new projections of clouds scudding along the back wall.

"A show like this is a place where so many disciplines are meeting," he says. "It comes from everywhere and has so many layers to it, which keeps me interested. There's not a boring day at the office for me."

One of the more quiet yet profoundly beautiful acts is performed by Erika Chen, who using only her fingers and nails swirls dark blue sand into striking images projected onto a screen at the top of Act 2. Self-taught, the 27-year-old Singapore native used to work at Deutsche Bank in asset management until she discovered sand painting on YouTube and fell in love. Cirque made her its first sand painter.

"It still feels surreal. I can't believe it's happening," she says after rehearsing to ensure her six-minute act is smooth and dynamic. "I'm just thankful. It feels like a dream."

Four years in the making, the rock-opera circus "Zarkana" is slated for a four-month ride in New York, followed by stints in Madrid, Spain, and Moscow. The hope is that it will return to Radio City next summer — and maybe every summer.

This isn't the first time Cirque du Soleil has tried to tame the Big Apple. Last year, its variety show "Banana Shpeel" — featuring a visually brilliant but disappointingly spotty program of acrobatics, juggling, dance and mostly tiresome slapstick — flopped at the Beacon Theatre.

This time around, the creative team is careful to be humble and respectful of the city. Girard calls New York "a mecca of theater" along with London, and knows there's plenty here to attract summer tourists other than whimsical circus acts.

"It's a highly saturated world, where if you want to be heard you'd better be clear and loud. That makes it both very exciting and challenging," says Girard, who directed the films "Silk" and "The Red Violin."

The other thing making Cirque executives soft-spoken is another rock opera with crazy stunts — the $75 million "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark." Girard has gotten no vicarious thrill by watching that musical's troubled birth. "When a show runs into difficulties and technical problems, it is sad. But I wish them well," he says. "It's so hard to make a show. We should be supportive of their efforts."

This is Girard's second Cirque — he also put together "Zed," the Tokyo resident show — and he began with an attempt to assemble as many cool circus acts as possible. Then he wrote a story trying to incorporate all the elements, settling on creating a magician named Zark, who has lost his love and his powers. At the opening of the show, he wanders an abandoned theater and later the show makes nods to its famous home, including to the Ziegfeld Follies.

"Zarkana" — or the land of Zark — will have plenty of clowns, acrobats and a Wheel of Death. One high wire act features a father and his three sons, while another has a father, mother and daughter performing on ladders. There are seven musicians, hundreds of costumes and one trapeze act has a spider theme that would make Julie Taymor shudder.

Canadian singer Garou plays Zark and the music for the spectacle was created especially for the show by Nick Littlemore, an Australian musician and producer who has worked with Elton John.

Work on the show began in Montreal — headquarters of Cirque — but moved temporarily to Orlando, Fla., because creators needed a stage big enough to practice the show from top to bottom. That was found at Amway Arena, the former home of the Orlando Magic that is slated to be torn down, and Cirque took it over for a few months.

Back at Radio City, Stephane Roy sits in the balcony and surveys his hard work. As the set and props designer, Roy's job has been to make the Art Deco monster place look smaller. Of course, since it is a protected city landmark, he could not alter the stage or the building.

"This is a cathedral," he says.

Roy, doing his fifth Cirque show, used a series of three differently sized arches — decorated with snakes, branches and flowers — to make the stage more intimate. The back wall is also studded with LEDs for videos and the stage itself is hand painted.

"This is, for me, the biggest project that I've ever done," he says.

The latest move into New York is part of an expansion of the Cirque du Soleil empire. By October, the hyperactive circus company will have 22 live shows around the globe, including the new $57 million "Michael Jackson, The Immortal World Tour."

Chen, the sand painter, is asked if she'll go back to the lucrative — if duller — world of international finance if "Zarkana" doesn't excite enough New Yorkers or tourists.

"No," she says firmly. "This is my dream. This is what I'm supposed to be doing."

from Cary Tennis

2011-06-23T05:13:00.000-07:00

My challenge to a therapist is this: "Tell me something I don't know. Surprise me." When I am led to see things that startle me, of which I had no inkling, that is priceless self-knowledge. And that can happen.

One thing you probably don't know about yourself is just how deeply you have been wounded. You cannot know this yet; in fact you have wisely prevented yourself from knowing this yet. It is as though, in a dream, we look down and see that we have been disemboweled; it is a moment of absolute terror; but we see that we have been disemboweled and yet we are fine! How can this be? How can we be so grievously wounded and yet smile peacefully and continue with our knitting or our guitar playing or whatever we are doing in our strange dream? We can do that because armed with the exquisite knowledge of the dream world we know that nothing can truly harm us, that we are spirit matter, that our consciousness is not affected by the disemboweling, and that it is only our severe waking attachment that causes us so much paralyzing fear.

Believing the wound is too deep to be seen, you have clouded your own sight from it. But you don't need to. There is someone who can guide you to the cliff edge from which that wound can be viewed at a safe distance, and you can see that it is just a wound to your spirit self, not your actual belly, and you can relax.

Another thing you probably don't know is just what archetype of yourself has come to the fore and is now running the show; this business of archetypes, or sub-personalities, is strange and tricky, and a person can sound like a crank for talking about them, but I'm just a writer using his imagination. A good therapist whose language and understanding are rich with myth and intuition can help you find the vantage point and language with which to view and express what you have gone through. When you can see, feel and express what has happened, then you can get better and feel better. It's pretty straightforward. Maybe you will speak of these things in the language of archetypes or maybe in some other way.

To me, it would make sense for a kind of warrior archetype to come to the fore in such a terrible time. The warrior in you would see your mother as an enemy to be vanquished, but since she is dead she cannot be vanquished, so she stands as an eternal adversary, and you are eternally stuck. So there must be some other archetype who can come to the fore to help. The other archetype might be your female, mothering self, who could let go of your mother, or it may be the dark, grieving, avenging self, who could split her sides in wailing but lead to peace, finally. If it is the warrior who is guiding the show, no wonder you are stuck. The warrior can do nothing about the past.

That is my hope for you. I think we often need to work emotionally through symbols and archetypes. These archetypes may be real or they may just be metaphors for stages of development. But it is useful to talk about these things as warriors, princesses, mothers and so forth.

So how will you get through this? With help. It is the kind of help that can guide you on a journey. It isn't so much about making individual choices about Dad No. 1, Dad No. 2 and so forth. It is more about learning what actually happened to you when you were broken as a teenager by your mother's death, and how you still have to heal from that, and how when you learned about your mother's love for this other man it further complicated and deepened this old wound. That's what it's about. And, as I say, that is my hope for you: that you can find the right person to guide you through this charged and explosive terrain.

You may need to back off on the drinking and drugs to get through this. If you are habitually blunting your feelings, you will not develop the fine feel for your inner life that you are going to need. So if you cannot afford therapy, you might consider joining a group of grief survivors. You also might consider joining a 12-step group. All this powerful emotion may make you feel like you're going mad. But you're not going mad. You're just a human feeling things.

You suffered a terrible blow as a child. In many ways, you are still a child. You were prevented from moving on. You are stuck. But you are not lost. You are right here with us. All you have to do is grow, and get help growing.

2011-06-20T07:01:00.001-07:00

See everyone you meet, Andrew, as a brand new invitation to fall in love with me. Sneaky, huh? Kiss, kiss - The Universe

2011-06-17T05:57:00.000-07:00

Charles bukowski

unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder,
don't do it.

unless the sun inside you is burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way.

and there never was.

2011-06-16T05:37:00.001-07:00

(Ni-ni-ni) "Nicki, she's just mad 'cause you took the spot"
Word, that bitch mad 'cause I took the spot?
Well, bitch, if you ain't shittin', then get off the pot
Got some niggas out in Brooklyn that'll off your top
I-I-I-I hear them mumblin', I hear the cacklin'
I got 'em scared, shook, panickin'
Overseas, church, Vatican
You at a stand, still, mannequin
You wanna sleep on me? Overnight?
I'm the motherfuckin' boss, overwrite
And when I pull up, vroom, motorbike
Now all my niggas gettin' buck, overbite
I see them dusty-ass Filas, Levi's
Raggedy-ass, hoes in your knee-highs
I call the play, now do you see why?
These bitches callin' me Manning, Eli
(Manning, Eli!) Ma, ma-ma-ma-ma, Manning, Eli
These bitches callin' me (Manning, Eli)

fuck YES!

2011-06-15T17:30:00.000-07:00

Madonna ready to record new album
Madonna's manager Guy Oseary has confirmed plans for the singer to re-enter the recording studio next month to start work on her new album.
The 52-year-old performer is said to know the people she wants to work with on the project, which will serve as the follow-up to 2008's Hard Candy.

Taking to Twitter to answer fans' questions surrounding the recording, Oseary revealed: 'Madonna goes into the recording studio next month to begin work on new album....'

'There are no back catalogue plans currently....I met with Warner Music about that very subject....but nothing has come of it....'

'There is nothing to report in regards to tour....you guys know how this works....first comes the album and next comes the....'

Oseary also indicated that Madonna knows who she wants to work with, stating: 'She has a good idea on which producers she will be working with....

From Digital Spy

2011-06-14T12:41:00.001-07:00

“It is not given us to live lives of undisrupted calm, boredom, and mediocrity. It is given us to be edge-dwellers.”

2011-06-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

2011-06-09T05:34:00.001-07:00

If you hold out long enough, Andrew, always keeping busy while you wait, your ship has to come in, love has to find you, and bugles will blare as if blown by a million angels.

You do you like bugles?

Promise,
The Universe

Site hints at Asian roots for human genus

2011-06-08T06:26:00.000-07:00

the deeper we go, the more layers we pull back, the farther we dig, the more the story changes... our scope widens & multiple truths arrive. the earth was flat. the earth was round. we are the earth.

-------

New finds in Caucasus suggest non-African origin for ancient Homo speciesBy Bruce Bower Web edition : Monday, June 6th, 2011 Text Size Early members of the genus Homo, possibly direct ancestors of people today, may have evolved in Asia and then gone to Africa, not vice versa as many scientists have assumed.

Most paleoanthropologists have favored an African origin for the potential human ancestor Homo erectus. But new evidence shows the species occupied a West Asian site called Dmanisi from 1.85 million to 1.77 million years ago, at the same time or slightly before the earliest evidence of this humanlike species in Africa, say geologist Reid Ferring of the University of North Texas in Denton and his colleagues.

The new Dmanisi discoveries point to an Asian homeland for H. erectus, the scientists propose online June 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Dmanisi was occupied repeatedly for roughly 80,000 years and supported a population that was well established and probably quite mobile,” Ferring says.

Evidence remains meager for the geographic origins of the Homo genus, says anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Several scenarios of Homo evolution are possible, and it’s possible that humankind’s genus got its start in Asia with H. erectus.

Researchers have abandoned the long-standing view that a small-brained hominid from East Africa known as Homo habilis, which first appeared about 2.4 million years ago, evolved into H. erectus. Recent fossil finds showing that the two species coexisted in East Africa for several hundred thousand years have undermined that assumption. Ferring’s team suspects that an as-yet-unidentified African hominid reached Asia before 1.85 million years ago and evolved into H. erectus.

With the new Dmanisi dates, “it certainly looks as though the African origin of H. erectus must be reconsidered,” remarks Harvard University anthropologist Philip Rightmire.

Wood regards H. habilis fossils as apelike enough to be reclassified as part of the Australopithecus lineage, which includes a more than 3-million-year-old species represented by a partial skeleton known as Lucy. Other researchers, though, champion 2-million-year-old Australopithecus fossils from South Africa as direct precursors of Homo (SN: 5/7/11, p. 16).

The new Dmanisi discoveries come from just beneath soil that previously yielded 1.77-million-year-old H. erectus fossils, including skulls with surprisingly small brain cases suggestive of an early form of the species (SN: 9/22/07, p. 179). Excavations produced 73 stone tools for cutting and chopping, as well as 34 bone fragments from unidentified creatures. The artifacts came from a series of H. erectus camps at Dmanisi between 1.85 and 1.78 million years ago, the scientists say.

Measurements of reversals in Earth’s magnetic field and of the rate of decay of the element argon in a series of volcanic ash layers provided age estimates for the new finds.

boom :)

2011-06-08T06:21:00.000-07:00

The Goodman Theatre in Chicago has announced that Washington actor Edward Gero will play painter Mark Rothko there in the Tony-winning play “Red” by John Logan. Directed by Goodman Artistic Director Robert Falls, the show will run Sept. 17-Oct. 23 in Chicago, then come to Arena Stage from Jan. 20 to March 4, 2012.

“I’m very, very excited,” says Gero, who is playing Salieri in “Amadeus” at Round House Theatre in Bethesda through Sunday. Gero appeared at the Goodman in 2006 as Gloucester, opposite Stacy Keach, in Falls’s “King Lear.” That production was remounted at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here in summer 2009.

“Red,” which is set in the 1950s, shows the driven painter working with a young assistant whom he lectures, harangues and debates. Playing Rothko means “another huge role” for which Salieri in “Amadeus” provides “a perfect preamble,” Gero says. “It’s student/teacher . . . apprentice/master . . . father/son. It’s about art, it’s about life, it’s about whether one’s work is significant, which is very similar, I think, to what ‘Amadeus’ is about.”

For Gero, a 13-time Helen Hayes Award nominee and four-time winner, “Red” will be another facet of a multiyear run of meaty roles — from the demon barber in “Sweeney Todd” at Signature Theatre, the hapless junk store owner Donny in “American Buffalo,” the drunk Ivan in “The Seafarer,” the troubled widower John in “Shining City,” all at Studio Theatre, to Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” at Ford’s Theatre.

“What happens when you get to be a certain age, roles come your way and it’s sort of a payoff in a way for being around long enough, I suppose,” the actor says

waldosia

2011-06-07T06:49:00.001-07:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

waldosia
n. [Brit. wallesia] a condition characterized by scanning faces in a crowd looking for a specific person who would have no reason to be there, which is your brain’s way of checking to see whether they’re still in your life, subconsciously patting its emotional pockets before it leaves for the day.

movers&shakers

2011-06-07T06:44:00.000-07:00

2011-06-07T06:42:00.001-07:00

"Love me or hate me, both are in my favor… If you love me, I’ll always be in your heart… If you hate me, I’ll always be in your mind."
William Shakespeare

2011-06-07T06:41:00.000-07:00

the book of recurrent dreams, 1791

The dream of angels dreaming of men. It was during an afternoon nap that I dreamt of a ladder. Angels were sleepwalking up and down the rungs, their eyes closed, their breath heavy and dull, their wings hanging limp at the sides. I bumped into an old angel as I passed, waking and startling him. He looked like my grandfather did before he passed away last year, when he would pray each night to die in his sleep. Oh, the angel said to me, I was just dreaming of you.

2011-06-05T05:52:00.003-07:00

"Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.”
“Hell,” I said. “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?”
“Yes. I want to ruin you.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s what I want too."

2011-06-05T05:52:00.001-07:00

2011-06-05T05:51:00.003-07:00

2011-06-05T05:51:00.001-07:00

Sleep with someone you aren’t sure you should, take a job without knowing where it leads, tell her she looks great when she talks about cooking, tell him he looks sad when he drives his car, don’t put things away, take road trips without directions, forget to lock the doors and let’s not say no. Cleanliness is the hobgoblin of memorable lives, so let’s all make a mess of things.

2011-06-05T05:49:00.000-07:00

Tamara Dobson in Cleopatra Jones (1973, dir. Jack Starrett)

“She handles a car like a gun. She handles a gun like a man. And she handles a man like Cleopatra…”

riveting.

2011-06-03T11:05:00.001-07:00

Ruined by Lynn Nottage

it's great that they have real conversations about this in London newspapers

2011-06-03T08:51:00.000-07:00

See sequences of artciles below... 3, total.

The School for Scandal - review

Barbican, London

oo Michael Billington

o guardian.co.uk, Sunday 22 May 2011 16.50 BST

I fear that the great tradition of English artificial comedy, written mainly by Irishmen and running from the Restoration to Oscar Wilde, is in danger. Either we neglect it or we revive it badly – and the latest victim is Sheridan's 1777 comic masterpiece, given an uncharacteristically duff production by Deborah Warner that strains to point out the parallels between then and now.

Warner prefaces the evening with a punkish, Alexander McQueen-style fashion parade, uses Brechtian captions and mixes 18th-century costume with Gucci shopping bags. But, although there are obvious connections between Sheridan's world of hypocritical scandal-mongering and our own, the fusion of periods misfires. For a start, Sheridan was not writing a savage satire but a free-spirited comedy in which virtue, in the shape of the amiably profligate Charles Surface, triumphs over vice in the form of his sanctimonious sibling, Joseph. But the real failing of Warner's approach is that the striving for contemporary relevance wildly distorts character and denatures Sheridan's comedy.

Leo Bill is, for instance, encouraged to play Charles Surface as a manic druggie presiding over a commune: the result is to make Charles's benevolently forgiving uncle, played by John Shrapnel in robust 18th-century style, seem positively delusional in his obliviousness to his nephew's lifestyle. Even the famous screen scene, in which the aged Sir Peter Teazle discovers his wife hiding in Joseph Surface's library, is not immune to Warner's heavy-handedness. Sheridan's Lady Teazle may be a tease, but, in place of the coy flirtatiousness with which she resists Joseph's advances, Warner has her ready to engage in consensual sex with him. This turns Lady Teazle into an even more flagrant hypocrite than Joseph since she later tells her husband she was not prepared to "sacrifice your honour to his baseness".

A few performances transcend the stylistic mish-mash of Warner's production. Alan Howard brings to Sir Peter vocal precision, a peppery temperament and a delicate pathos, and Matilda Ziegler catches exactly the silky corruption of Lady Sneerwell. The evening, in fact, begins with a nice touch in which Ziegler is stripped of her workaday modern clothes and gradually arrayed in the hooped artifice of 18th-century costume.

If only Warner had been content to leave the juxtaposition of periods there rather than banging us over the head with the play's contemporary relevance, the production might have worked. As it was I found myself nostalgically crying, like William Hazlitt when confronted in mid-life by a similarly vulgar revival: "Why can we not always be young and seeing The School for Scandal?"

The School for Scandal: storm in an 18th-century teacup

A modern version of The School for Scandal has outraged some critics. Deborah Warner, who directed it, can't believe their short-sightedness

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· Deborah Warner

· guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 June 2011 22.00 BST

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I've just opened my production of The School for Scandal at the Barbican, and it seems the critics are up in arms. Five-star reviews or one star. "Highly theatrical, provocative and intelligent, the show is unmissable," reads one, while another says, "Watching this School for Scandal is like witnessing a group of louts spray-painting an elegant old building with graffiti. It's time Deborah Warner was served with the theatrical equivalent of an Asbo."

How can Sheridan's comic morality play so polarise opinion? Traditionally, it's hardly been a play to frighten babies and old ladies, but now it seems it has. I'm no stranger to strong critical response, though. In 1994, I found a picture of my Glyndebourne Don Giovanni on the front of the Times, with the line: "Boos and catcalls greet Glyndebourne opening." Indeed, there was some controversy on opening night, but I certainly hadn't expected it to be world news by the next morning.

The year before, I read the reviews of Beckett's Footfalls, only to find myself again on the front in a column headed: "Director banned for life from directing Beckett." I've since directed Happy Days with the full approval of the Beckett estate and am represented by the very agent who placed the ban – thus making life seem, in this regard, sweet and long. Still, neither myself nor the School for Scandal company were prepared for this current furore. A storm in an 18th-century teacup?

We revive old plays because we think they may have something to say to us now. The job of directors and actors is to pitch these plays against our moment and see what happens. Strangely, it is the very "now" of our production that seems to have caused some of the upset. One very negative review says: "If the Earl of Rochester and Bertolt Brecht got together in Shoreditch one night and decided to host a rave (inviting Handel to man the decks), the result might look a lot like Deborah Warner's new production of The School for Scandal." Hang on, though, that's exciting isn't it? That's exactly what I wanted this production to be. The School for Scandal is a play obsessed by wit, fashion, celebrity and reputation, and whose central theme is hypocrisy. Does that ring any contemporary bells? I think so.

In this paper, Michael Billington was upset that hard-living Charles Surface, a rake and libertine, could not ultimately be thought of as virtuous by an uncle who had witnessed his appetite for drink and probably drugs. Is there a generation gap here? Might there be a generational reluctance to map our own Pete Doherty on to the classics?

I want to say this to the critics: I know the version of this play you recognise and miss. That version was great for its time but – and this is important – it might not be right for now. The job of director and actor is to test these plays against now; if they lose charm in some critics' eyes, then maybe the world has changed. Theatre, like all art, can make us uncomfortable. It should make us uncomfortable – it is there to shake us up.

I respect the role of the critic in the arts, and want to hear their voices, but I am concerned by one thing. Criticise as you will, but be careful not to put off the new audience. Any emerging theatre audience needs to be led to the places where they might drink, have fun and discover that the theatre holds something for them. Don't head them off at the pass. Let the new get started. This work may be for them, not for you.

I am happy to say that there are young people in the Barbican stalls really enjoying the show. It is a loud show and that aspect, perhaps, plays to a younger taste; but there are older people loving it, too. Scripts change meaning as time passes, and as producers and audiences we must put ourselves in danger to catch that new meaning. I'm surprised by what The School for Scandal became in 2011 – but I'm more surprised by the critics' refusal to yield ground.

The School for Scandal's Deborah Warner: no mother of reinvention

Director Deborah Warner's meshing of Sheridan's 18th-century comedy of manners with modern culture proves some classics are best left as they are

Michael Billington

It's good to find Deborah Warner responding to the critics in such a cool, rational manner: a welcome contrast to the vituperative rancour one sometimes gets from anguished directors. All the same, I think her argument rests on some highly questionable assumptions.

She says of the classics that "the job of the director is to pitch these plays at our moment and see what happens". But, surely, a lot depends on the nature of the play and how you pitch it. The night before The School for Scandal opened many of us had seen, and admired, Rupert Goold's Las Vegas-based The Merchant of Venice. But Shakespeare's play has a mythical quality that makes it easily transposable to another time and place. Sheridan, in contrast, was writing a social comedy rooted in 18th-century manners and delighting in verbal precision. To place it, as Warner does, in a world that's part 18th century and part punk fashion and hard rock is simply to sow confusion.

Behind Warner's argument also lies a veiled contemporary arrogance. She says of the standard period approach to Sheridan, "that version was great for its time but might not be right for now". But how do we know? It's nearly 30 years since London saw, at the Haymarket and the National, what might be termed a traditional School for Scandal. It also strikes me as faintly patronising to assume that a young audience will only grasp the modern resonances of a play that deals with gossip and scandal if you deck it out with Alexander McQueen-style fashion parades and Gucci shopping bags. If Warner were to tackle The Importance of Being Earnest, would she feel Jack and Algy had to watch internet porn or snort coke to bring the play home to a modern audience?

There are few absolute rules in theatre. Updating sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. And I'm all for giving directors a free hand. But my objection to Warner's The School for Scandal was that it drained much of the humour from the play and was neither one thing nor another: neither a radical rewrite nor a realisation of Sheridan's world. My hunch is that Warner has spent too long seeking to reinvent the classics. If she wants to speak directly to the young, why doesn't she, just for once, stage a play by a living writer?

living legend

2011-06-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

The Ringleader
Since childhood, award-winning playwright Robert O'Hara has marshaled the means to tell wondrous tales
by Will O’Bryan
Published on June 2, 2011, 3:56am | 0 Comments, 2 Tweets

Robert O'Hara, the 41-year-old playwright whose latest work, Bootycandy, is having its world premiere run at Washington's Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, is very familiar with ''3-ways.''

''It's something that reminds you of where you were raised,'' he admits. ''It's also sort of an item that you only get now and then. As a kid I couldn't really get it as many times as I wanted it.''

O'Hara
(Photo by Todd Franson)O'Hara is of course talking about the famous Skyline Chili ''3-ways'' of spaghetti, cheddar and chili, a steady staple in his hometown of Cincinnati.

He could've just as easily been talking about sex. He's very familiar with that topic as well. Sex, after all, is Bootycandy's heartbeat. He's explored slavery, time-travel and romance in Insurrection: Holding History, winner of the 1996 Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Play. He found a curious and acclaimed bridge between Nazi Germany and the Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind in Antebellum, a Woolly Mammoth world premiere in 2009. He's seen a family repay a gruesome debt in the slasher flick, The Inheritance, which he wrote and directed. The Obie-winning director has plenty of topics to fill out his résumé, but this is likely his first artistic expression so dedicated to sex.

'''Bootycandy' is a word my parents used for the penis,'' explains the Brooklyn-based O'Hara. '''Oh, did you wash your bootycandy?' It's the oddest thing on earth that my parents would tell the little gay boy 'bootycandy,' … just being told that.''

Obviously, the word never left O'Hara's consciousness. Today it's taken on greater meaning for him, as well as his audiences. As he directs his play, Bootycandy becomes the vehicle for exploring sex.

''Whether we know it or not, we're one of the most outrageously sexual cultures,'' O'Hara observes, sitting in the lobby of Woolly Mammoth one recent Friday morning. ''Whether we acknowledge it or not, it happens all the time. We like to pretend we're not interested, but the first thing you do with new technology is figure out, 'How can I get more sex from it?' I'm dealing with that. How do we talk about sexuality?''

And talking about sex in O'Hara's world can be both outrageous and innocent, a conversation that revels in equal-opportunity offenses.

''Bootycandy is that sort of experience of seeing something really, really hilarious and vulgar at the same time. It is risqué and blue, but I think really, really funny,'' he says. ''I think people will find something in it to love and something in it to go, 'Oh, my God. Did you really have to go that far with it?' But there's also a story inside there.''

Just as there are plenty of stories inside O'Hara. From the fictional to the factual, O'Hara is a man who knows how to hold an audience. It's no wonder his grandmother dubbed him ''The Ringleader'' when he was just a little boy. Or that the professional accolades keep on coming.

METRO WEEKLY: Growing up in Cincinnati, what kind of family did you have? Nuclear? Single parent? Only child?

ROBERT O'HARA: My grandmother had 12 kids, and my mother was the oldest daughter. I had 11 uncles and aunts. I think they went there in the late '50s, and they're all still there, most of them. Before that, they were in Alabama and Georgia. When I was born, they were already heavily in Cincinnati. And they're all certifiable nuts.

MW: Friendly nuts?

O'HARA: Mixed nuts. Some of them are friendly. Some of them are quite out there, actually.

MW: No belligerent nuts, I hope.

O'HARA: Absolutely. Mixed nuts includes belligerent nuts, crazy nuts, meek nuts, nutty nuts – all that.

My mother had me when she was younger, so I was an only child with a single parent until I was 6. Then I had a little brother and we were two kids with a single parent. My mother got married when I was 12, and she's been with that person since. I've always had a sort of nuclear family that had its own sort of craziness, but there was a normality to it.

Going over to my grandmother's house was a circus, which I loved. My grandmother always called me the ''ringleader.'' I would go over there and just act out. It was a lot of fun. ''Ringleader'' fits in that I was sort of bookworm-ish. I would make up plays and I would make up songs and sort of corral the cousins to do things in the backyard.

My grandmother was basically my babysitter. All the cousins went over to Granny's. You could actually go about two doors up to my first school, so I would stay with my grandmother for the week and my mother would pick me up on the weekends; or she would drop me off in the morning and pick me up after school. My experience at my grandmother's house is very connected to me.

MW: Now we'll all want to picture her as some wise and wonderful matriarch. What was the reality?

O'HARA: She was not this evil lady, she was also not this, ''Come all around me and let's have an Oprah moment.'' It was not that. My grandmother could cuss up a storm. My grandfather could cuss up a storm. They cussed each other out every day and I would record them, because it was really, really funny.

MW: Seriously? You had a tape recorder?

O'HARA: Absolutely. I would go to the dinner table and put the recorder underneath the table and I would tape the family conversation. I had to be 5 or 6. I continued doing it till I was, like, 12, whenever I could get away with it.

MW: Do you remember why you started doing it?

O'HARA: Because my grandmother didn't talk like a normal person.

I was going to school with all white kids and I was coming home to this woman who grew up in the South – and my grandfather and this crazy amount of uncles and aunts and cousins – and the language was just completely different. And it was a lot of fun. At 4 years old, I was going to school and cursing people out with these words I did not know. [My grandmother] would make up words. It was just the most incredibly colorful language, and I guess I just gravitated toward it. I think that's why my plays have a lot of language issues. I like to make up words and put words together that don't normally go together.

MW: Did that ever get you into trouble at school?

O'HARA: Yeah. [Laughs.] I think it was a reaction to the fact that I was small and skinny and bookish, so I couldn't really physically fight. But I could fight with my words.

I guess I was loud and talkative. My family was loud and talkative, so I didn't really think of it as a problem. My teachers did – because I would always give them word for word. There was no way they were just going to tell me something and I was just going to do it. I had a lot of questions, and I had colorful language.

MW: Granted, it's a quiet Friday morning, but you seem fairly soft-spoken now.

O'HARA: Oh, I am. I sort of get that out of my system in my writing. I have no need for that in my real life [now]. I can be colorful, and I'm sure most people who have worked with me would say that I'm rather colorful. But I'm not this crazy guy. I think it's been channeled into my work. People who meet me, and they have seen my work, they completely think it's a different person.

MW: I interviewed Chay Yew in 2009 when he was here directing the world premiere of Antebellum, and he gave me this wonderful quote about the play: ''When else is there an opportunity to see hoop skirts, Nazis, gay people and mammies onstage at the same time?'' Is that sort of the O'Hara signature style?

O'HARA: Yes. [Laughs.] I never write a play until there are at least 88 ideas bumping up against each other. Why have just one crazy person in the play? Make 'em all messes and crazy, and then see what happens.

MW: I'm guessing the stories you're trying to tell aren't just about being wacky and crazy, though.

O'HARA: No. Rarely are they. They're actually sometimes very dark. And I love history. Someone will look at me and see me and put me in a category, and my first instinct is to burst out of that category.

Every play to me is an experiment. When people ask me how I write, I go, ''Everyone is welcome and no one is safe.'' That is something that I try to carry into my work. I try to find the beauty and the horror of events. It could be a horrific experience, but it's going to be beautiful. What is that pull of watching something that you know is going to be a little bit uncomfortable, or a little bit horrific, or a little bit scary?
MW: Speaking of horror reminds me: You would've been living in New York during 9/11, right?

O'HARA: I was living in New York, but I wasn't actually in New York. I was on a cruise ship with my family in the Bahamas.

MW: Frantically trying to get cell service?

O'HARA: Exactly. And my family saying, ''We're going back to the slot machines. What are we gonna do? Build the building back up? You can't be here all sad. This is vacation.'' This was two days into the vacation. ''But I'm from New York!''

They were like, ''We understand, but what, you gonna be upset all day?''

There was a memorial service for five minutes, and then people walking right out to the slot machines, right into drinking some more. I guess it's because it felt fake on television, watching it on a ship.

MW: That's the play I want to see.

O'HARA: Most of the people on the ship were foreigners, and they were sad about it, but that didn't stop people from partying, doing the conga line, all this stuff.

Most of my family was there. They were very happy that I was not in New York. Everyone was very sad, but the attitude was, ''There is nothing you can do.'' But there was just something wrong with this slot-machine playing and this drinking going on when I know that there are now people missing loved ones in the city that I have to go back to. And just being on a cruise ship with my family, it's like being locked in Times Square with a bunch of tourists and your family. It's nuts.

MW: Continuing with the horrific, but moving to fiction, I want to know about your horror movie, The Inheritance. Is the ''slasher movie'' genre one you grew up liking? All the Halloween movies? All the Friday the 13th movies?

O'HARA: Oh, I absolutely loved horror movies, because I was such a scaredy-cat. I was afraid of the dark. I would make up creatures and people in my room. It was ridiculous. But I love scary movies. The Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street – all those things.

The Inheritance was this thing, like, I had been waiting for something just out of the blue, to turn on the TV and [see], ''Oh, that's a member of my family who just chopped somebody's head off.'' I'd been waiting for that to happen. I never really know what my family members are doing. I only hear about them after something outrageous has happened. And I'm like, ''Really? She burned the car and mistakenly lit herself on fire and had to go to the hospital?''

MW: True story?

O'HARA: True story. It's just ridiculous. A fistfight at the funeral, over the body. There are all these sorts of different stories [I'm told], because I don't go home on a regular basis. They would call saying, ''Guess what happened.'' So The Inheritance was about, ''What would happen if your family was involved in a cult?''

MW: None of your family should take this movie personally, should they?

O'HARA: [Laughs.] No.

MW: Do they ask, ''Is that supposed to be my head on the stick?''

O'HARA: And, ''Why are you using my biography?'' Some of their names are in the piece. It's a catch-22. Either their name's in it and they're like, ''Why would you put my name in it? Where's my royalties?''; or their names aren't in it and, ''Why isn't my name in it? When am I going to be in the movie?''

MW: How often do you make it back to see your family?

O'HARA: I'm in touch with them a lot. We just had the family reunion last year. That was a treat. But I don't like Cincinnati. When I go back, I realize how segregated it is and how conservative it is. I get this feeling of wanting to get out every time I go there. I feel like I'm a stranger in a foreign land, actually. But it was a great place to grow up, I guess. I had a sort of different perspective than if I grew up in some major metropolitan city where I could do anything I wanted, be anything I wanted to be. I really had this need from a very early age to get out of Cincinnati as soon as possible.

MW: Where did you go?

O'HARA: I went to Boston, to Tufts University, to be a pre-law major. And then I was like, ''That's not gonna happen.'' Eventually I ended up in English. And I was like, ''That's not gonna happen.'' I ended up taking all these theater classes. I never thought I would be making a living doing theater. I like to do plays, I like to write, but I never thought I'd be a playwright. That never, ever crossed my mind.

MW: Why not?

O'HARA: It was my mother going, ''Are you out of your mind?'' Every time I would go home, there was this black woman going, ''Are you out of your fucking mind? Are you crazy?'' [Laughs.]

But I had always been doing that. I had written all my life. Directed and performed all my life. It was always a hobby, until I got to my junior year and realized that I actually could go into this as a business.

MW: What changed your mind to be a playwright?

O'HARA: It wasn't playwriting -- it was directing. I've always been a playwright. I could be a lawyer and continue writing plays. But to have a career, I always thought that I would have to be a director.

It was also around the time I was coming out to myself. I was sort of still in this, ''Oh, I'm gonna get married and have a wife and a kid and be a lawyer.'' Once all those things started to break down, [I thought], ''Well, that's never gonna happen, so now let's just get real with it. I want to be a director and a writer and an artist.'' It was part of my whole identity changing that allowed me to go.

I think what sparked it is that you had to choose a major in your junior year. It was my sort of relationship to, ''What am I going to do after I get out of here? Where am I going to live and what am I going to do?'' And mind you, my entire college experience was, ''We don't have enough money. I don't know if you're going to be there next semester. You have to get another work-study job. You have to get another loan.'' Everything was money, money, money, money. I went to a very expensive school. But I didn't give a fuck. There was no way in hell I wasn't going to be there. It was all very much this madness.

My parents said to me, ''We can't help you with graduate school.'' I said, ''Fine.'' I had written a play and it was very well received. The chairman of the department, Sherwood ''Doc'' Collins, said to me, ''Robert, you are a really, really talented writer.'' He was this old white man, sort of a legend. I was always terrified of him. He was this huge, hulking, Santa Claus of a man [who told me], ''You are amazingly talented.'' I felt like he, his presence, challenged me to do more and to be more as an artist. That's sort of when I really closed in around the fact that I could do this.

Doc followed my career for a number of years. I'd get these long letters from him after I got out of school, about work that I didn't even know he had heard about. This was before people would write in the press, ''This sucked! And his name is Robert O'Hara.'' He would write these long passages about something he'd read of mine. He was so amazing that he could be very critical, but very giving at the same time. When you have an old, white man say to you – about something that you think no one in their right mind would get – that he really, really loved it, it allowed me to go, ''Oh, wait a second. I'm valid? Even my sort of crazy Cincinnati homo self and my work can actually have a relationship to someone who's completely the opposite of me?'' It showed me the universality of writing, actually. It was just a really, really lovely relationship.

MW: The universality of your writing, specifically?

O'HARA: Yes. I always thought that my grandmother spoke in a weird way, an exciting way. But I realized everyone has those two sections. Everyone is different with their family, different in public, and we're sort of carrying those two personas. We all have secrets, and we all have sort of those inner beings that come out whenever we're in different situations. You can embrace them all. I think that's what Doc showed me. I was obviously this gay, black kid – that he embraced completely. He embraced me as an artist, not just as a professor.

MW: So you continued to graduate school?

O'HARA: Right out of undergraduate. There was no, like, five years of ''let me go find myself,'' and then graduate school. In graduate school, it's all theater, all day, in New York at Columbia [University]. It was overwhelming.At the end of my first semester, at my evaluation, the chair looked at me and said, ''Your teachers think you're a little bit too focused on African-American and gay issues.'' We're sitting in Harlem. I'm the only black student in the department. I'm the only out gay student in the directing program. And you're going to tell me that I'm too focused on African-American issues and gay issues? I had to laugh. ''Did you tell my colleague she was too focused on feminist studies and German expressionism?''

What it came down to was my professors would do things like, ''This week we're going to do gay theater, and it's going to be As Is and Torch Song Trilogy. Next week we're going to do fathers and sons, and it's going to be Edward Albee and James Baldwin.'' And I'm like, ''Edward Albee and James Baldwin were faggots. I don't know why they're not in this week.'' People are like, ''They're homosexuals?'' They're challenging me about Edward Albee and James Baldwin being homosexuals.

They wanted to categorize everything, and I would always go, ''Wait a minute. You can't put Tony Kushner just in that place and not in this place. You can't put August Wilson and James Baldwin just in the 'black place' and leave them out of this place.'' It was the absence of people allowing the otherness in the room.

What it is – because I'm teaching now – you have to evaluate every student. Obviously, I did not know. Everyone was older than me. I think what [the chair] was saying was, ''We want you to broaden yourself. We want you to read more Shakespeare and more Chekhov, Ibsen, stuff like that.'' Of course, I was doing that. But because they had to evaluate me, they had to find out what I needed to work on. But I only heard, ''You're too focused on blah blah blah.'' And that led to my first play, which is about a Columbia student who goes back in time to slavery and falls in love.

MW: Regarding the black and gay focus, it seems that gay playwrights are really making their marks right now. Is this the decade of the black, gay playwright?

O'HARA: Every decade is the decade of the black, gay playwright! [Laughs.] That's what you should say. Robert O'Hara says yes.

I don't really know. I know a couple of black playwrights that are men that are not gay. But Tarell [Alvin] McCraney, Marcus Gardley, Tracey Scott Wilson…. I think it is the decade of the black, gay playwright. If that means I get more work, then, yeah, say that. [Laughs.]

But I definitely know that there are more white, straight men getting productions done about white, straight men than there are black people or women productions being done. That's a fact. All you have to do is look at the brochures of theaters. In this city you can look at the brochures. And there are certainly more white people directing plays. I find it so odd that there's this new fad of ''white women and black plays'' or ''white people directing black plays,'' and there's no fad of ''black people directing white plays.'' It's like they're perfectly fine to have a white woman direct some black play. But me? I would never get a call to direct a Sarah Ruhl play. I would never get a call to direct an Adam Rapp play. And I just find that odd. White women should be able to direct any play they want to fuckin' direct. But why am I looked at as ''the black playwright''?

MW: What is the fit, exactly, with you and Woolly Mammoth?

O'HARA: They had the audacity to say, ''We're going to put your play on, and we know you're not done with it. And we don't know what's going to come out of it. And we know you're Robert O'Hara.'' That takes balls. [Artistic director Howard Shalwitz] allows me to be all of me. To not just be the black, gay playwright, but to be the intellectual. To be the complete zany guy. The sort of sad and lonely person at times. He allows me to bring all of myself into the room. I feel like I can do anything I want in there because they have said, ''We trust you and believe in you as an artist.'' There's no fear in that. It's one of the places I can go and be all of me.

Bootycandy runs through June 26 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, 641 D St. NW. Tickets, $30 to $65, are available by calling 202-393-3939 or online at woollymammoth.net. The website also includes a schedule of special programming during the run tied to Capital Pride.

Yasmina Reza

2011-05-30T19:44:00.001-07:00

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.”

2011-05-30T18:57:00.000-07:00

Case Study

2011-05-30T18:51:00.001-07:00

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.

Tom Hiddleston

2011-05-30T18:33:00.001-07:00

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...

2011-05-30T17:57:00.000-07:00

...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.

a great storyteller

2011-05-27T19:01:00.001-07:00

"
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

2011-05-27T10:50:00.000-07:00

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.”

2011-05-26T13:59:00.000-07:00

"Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious."

2011-05-25T06:18:00.001-07:00

"Your journey has molded you for the greater good, and it was
exactly what it needed to be. Don't think that you've lost time. It
took each and every situation you encountered to bring you to the now.
And now is right on time." -Asha Tyson

2011-05-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

:)

2011-05-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

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.

Rise of the strays: Who hasn't had a partner who is now with the other sex? | Life & Style

2011-05-17T22:08:00.000-07:00

Rise of the strays: Who hasn't had a partner who is now with the other sex? Life & Style

fluid, fluid.

And I Should Know

2011-05-17T08:25:00.000-07:00

And I Should Know

amazing artcle.

rinse & spit

2011-05-13T17:35:00.001-07:00

mohawkins essentials.

2011-05-09T18:15:00.000-07:00

2011-05-09T17:12:00.000-07:00

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

Imagine this life, imagine her story..

2011-05-06T05:27:00.000-07:00

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.

such a tremendous play

2011-05-02T11:39:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-02T11:27:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-02T09:46:00.000-07:00

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.

WOW

2011-05-02T08:23:00.001-07:00

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.”

:)

2011-05-02T05:55:00.003-07:00

Stevie is BACK!

2011-05-02T05:55:00.001-07:00

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

Archaeology Magazine - Slideshow - The Islamic Stepwells of Gujarat, India

2011-04-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

Archaeology Magazine - Slideshow - The Islamic Stepwells of Gujarat, India

Tonight

2011-04-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

She credited Cave with giving her the confidence to express herself artistically, saying: "He taught me to never veer too far from who I am, but to go further, try different things, and never lose sight of myself at the core. For me, the hard part was unleashing the core of myself and being totally truthful in my music."

2011-04-28T19:08:00.001-07:00

"Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free." -Rumi

Cayetano - Fairy Tales

2011-04-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

2011-04-23T11:58:00.001-07:00

weaving into the fabric of my self-evolution...

2011-04-23T10:41:00.001-07:00

Madonna, my partner in aging

When I was a stripper, I danced to her songs. Now, in my 40s, she's leading me into a new adventure: Middle age

By Christine Macdonald

Saved by Pop Culture is a new series about the redemptive power of art. This piece originally appeared on Christine Macdonald's Open Salon blog.

The first time I heard Madonna sing she was telling me to get up and do my thing. I was 14 and dancing with Mitch Ruben, one of my many high school crushes. We were barefoot, dancing on the grass in the backyard of Lori Morgan's house. I couldn't make eye contact so I just swayed to Madonna's "Everybody," looking at the clouds, the grass, the sky, my feet. My mouth closed, I traced my braces with the tip of my tongue underneath my upper lip, snapping my fingers and feeling alive. High on hormones and Fresca, I lost myself in the lyrics: Let the music take control / Find a groove and let yourself go / When the room begins to sway / You know what I'm trying to say.

By the time high school graduation rolled around, I was one of a slew of 17-year-old Madonna wannabes donning a forearm full of black rubber bracelets, fake rosary beads and lace headbands. The song "Holiday" became my personal anthem, my break from the anguish of everyday teenage life.

In my 20s, working as a stripper, I danced to "Like a Prayer" without once thinking of the irony; if Madonna could burn crosses in her video, surely a naked dancer could give the pole a spin. "Vogue" was another stripping favorite of mine. I posed onstage like I was in one of her videos, letting my body groooove to the music.

After seeing the documentary "Truth or Dare," my Madonna obsession escalated. When rubbing elbows with the other club-hoppers in Waikiki, I wore fishnet tights complete with hot pants and a black, mesh body suit with a black bra underneath.

A couple of years later I met one of Madge's backup dancers at a club. I took it as a personal message that he was coming on to me and slept with him almost immediately. After the walk of shame in his hotel (a scene completely reminiscent of "Justify My Love"), I phoned my best friend (a gay dude, naturally) and we giggled for hours.

After an earth-shaking heartbreak in 1998, I shed countless tears to "Power of Goodbye" -- only to feel cleansed and stronger after repeating her lyrics: Freedom comes when you learn to let go / Creation comes when you learn to say no / There's no greater power than the power of good-bye. She just got me.

I'm now in my early 40s and, although my wild days are behind me, I am still influenced by Madonna. On the treadmill I think of her toned body as I try to visualize my old stripper self underneath the coat of cellulite and body fat. "Jump" reminds me to focus: I haven't got much time to waste, it's time to make my way. And I push myself just a little bit harder.

To some, she's too radical. Others may say she's tired. But for me, she'll always be part of my pop culture DNA, an artist who weaved her way through the fabric of my self-evolution timeline without ever missing a beat.

Lovely Lynn

2011-04-22T09:48:00.001-07:00

Just a Maid in Movies, but Not Forgotten
By MANOHLA DARGIS
FOR Lynn Nottage, the aha moment that led to “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” her new play about race, sex, fame and the dream — and crushing reality — of Hollywood, was unexpected. She was watching “Baby Face,” a delectably sordid 1933 studio film about an Übermensch in silk stockings played by Barbara Stanwyck, who climbs to the top one bed at a time.

But it wasn’t the star who caught Ms. Nottage by surprise, it was the woman next to her: Theresa Harris, the African-American beauty with the honey voice and sly look who was holding her own against Stanwyck and taking up precious screen space.

This wasn’t one of those nearly invisible black actresses who filled Hollywood movies in the years before the civil rights era, the woman at the edge of the screen announcing visitors and taking hats. Harris’s character is a maid, but she’s also Stanwyck’s companion, and something of a friend. Entranced by both the character and actress, Ms. Nottage started wondering about Harris — who she was and how she got to Hollywood and the types of films she had been able to make in that notoriously inhospitable town. “I was struck,” she said of the performance, “by how different it was from so many of the other representations of African-American women that I had seen from that period.”

Curious to know more, she set off on an intellectual investigation that became an aesthetic revelation, as she searched for Harris’s traces in the Hollywood histories of African-Americans, in biographies, online, on YouTube and DVD. She didn’t find much, save for movies like “The Flame of New Orleans,” a period confection directed by René Clair in which Harris somewhat reprises her role in “Baby Face,” but with more lines and real glamour shots. With little to go on but the movies, Ms. Nottage began filling in the blanks with her imagination. The result is “By the Way,

Meet Vera Stark,” an imaginary history that, like other of Ms. Nottage’s plays, weaves the personal with the political. Now in previews at the Second Stage Theater, it opens May 9.

Ms. Nottage, 46, has a MacArthur “genius” grant and a Pulitzer for her play “Ruined,” about women in war-ravaged Congo. These bona fides suggest a level of intimidating gravitas, but this is also a woman who, I discovered when we met one afternoon in March in a Midtown apartment, greatly enjoys gabbing about old movies. She had just come from rehearsals for “Vera Stark,” which stars Sanaa Lathan, best known for movies like “Love and Basketball,” as Vera; Jo Bonney is the director. Ms. Nottage arrived with a small wheeled suitcase that she uses to haul around her scripts and a handful of DVDs for us to sample. As I fumbled with the player she talked about “Vera Stark” and how it had been inspired by watching Stanwyck and Harris.

Tellingly, Ms. Nottage couldn’t remember the name of Stanwyck’s character (Lily Powers), but she did remember Harris’s: Chico. It’s no wonder. From the moment Harris, whose character works in a speakeasy alongside Stanwyck’s, appears on-screen, leaning over a pile of dishes and singing “St. Louis Blues,” she draws your eyes to her. Your interest deepens soon after, when Lily’s abusive father fires Chico for breaking some dishes. “If Chico goes, I go,” Stanwyck snarls.

“I love that moment,” Ms. Nottage said, with a small laugh. “This is what first gave me pause, seeing that moment — wow, this is going to be a different experience.”

For a while it is. Because while Stanwyck is unquestionably the star, Harris has real screen time: she’s attractively lighted, and stands and sits side by side with Stanwyck like the intimates they convincingly play. The relationship shifts after Lily sleeps to the top and Chico starts wearing a maid’s uniform (if sometimes a white fur muff and stole). They can’t “occupy the same universe once Lily moves into society,” Ms. Nottage said.

Directed by Alfred E. Green in 1933, a year before the production code was strictly imposed, “Baby Face,” with its brazenly sexual lead, was too racy to make it into theaters uncensored. Its offending sections were excised and remained unseen by general audiences until 2004 when a curator at the Library of Congress found an uncensored copy, adding another gem to the “precode” DVD catalog.

The film’s frank, even brutal portrayal of sex is what knocked me out the first time I saw it. Here, after all, is a studio film about a sexually abused young working-class woman (Lily) who, inspired by a lecture from a Nietzsche-reading cobbler, takes her revenge on men. What I didn’t see, however, and what Ms. Nottage showed me as we watched the film, was something nearly as startling: Theresa Harris.

Harris’s character isn’t merely an embellishment in “Baby Face”: she has important lines, a strong presence and — this is crucial given how black women could be made into grotesques and comically desexualized — lovely, at times glamorous. The director wants us to see her as the beautiful woman she was, and I was taken aback that I hadn’t really noticed her before. Watching Harris, I realized that when I had looked at women’s pictures, those five-hankie weepies, the only women I had seen before were white. I’m not alone. Most academic books about women in film are really about white women in film.

These were the other women in women’s pictures: the black cooks, nurses and maids, maids, maids who, breaking out of the margins if only a little, joked with Mae West, fretted about Claudette Colbert and stood by white woman after white woman, scolding them and appealing to their better selves if every so often, like Chico, also playing their laughing co-conspirator. Sometimes they didn’t have names, and they didn’t necessarily make it into the credits. Still, they were there. And they did what they could with what they were given, a strategy that Ms. Nottage illustrates when Vera tells a friend that the Southern epic she has her eye on doesn’t just have slaves — it has “slaves, with lines.”

“Vera Stark” opens in 1933 with its title character helping rehearse her employer, a white actress, Gloria Mitchell, who’s up for the role of “the beautiful octoroon prostitute” in the fictional “Belle of New Orleans.” Vera, an actress who works as a domestic, lands her first important role as the prostitute’s sister and “devoted servant and companion” and over time achieves such a level of success that later observers (seen intermittently) debate her legacy. “She was shackled to the stage and paraded like chattel,” one character says of Vera’s time at the Folies Bergère. “She was doing what she loved,” another shouts. The play suggests that both are right.

Ms. Nottage seems less interested in rescuing the African-American actresses who were her inspirations than in arguing for the complexity of their images. She sees films like “Baby Face” and movies made before the code was enforced as presenting a more realistic vision of race in America than many later films simply because they show blacks and whites existing alongside one another. “If that code hadn’t set in,” Ms. Nottage speculates, “the whole trajectory of Hollywood would have been different, and some would argue that race in America would be different because the representations of people of color and particularly of women would have been much more expansive.”

It didn’t happen that way, of course, and there was nothing that Harris — who died in 1985 but about whom little else has been written — and actresses like Fredi Washington and Nina Mae McKinney could do to stop history’s tide. Yet, like the quietly biting title of “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” — with its suggestion of a life that’s seen as an afterthought — meaning can run deeper than its surfaces initially suggest. Look at an old Hollywood movie and you may see a woman playing a maid. Ms. Nottage wants us to look harder.

“As an actress, she was progressive,” she said of Harris. “She was asserting her presence in the films. I wouldn’t argue that it’s entirely directors. I would argue that there’s something this woman did that was unique — that demanded directors pay attention.”

thanks Sarai :)

2011-04-22T07:38:00.001-07:00

The Laughter Cure
Laugh more and you'll be healthier and happier.

By Rachele Kanigel

As I lie on a wooden floor stretched out in Savasana, my mind is calm after an hour of vigorous exercise and deep breathing. The people around me are still and the room is quiet, save for the sounds of slow, gentle inhalation and exhalation. It could be the final moments of any yoga class. But then the man next to me suddenly lets out a thunderous guffaw. Across the room, a woman giggles in response. Soon the entire room is alive with sound—chortles and chuckles, hearty laughs and howling hoots.

The whole evening has been filled with such eruptions of laughter, some spontaneous, some scripted. In fact, Madan Kataria, the leader of this class, has promised to make us all laugh harder, more deeply, and more fully than we’ve ever laughed before.

Kataria, a physician from Mumbai, India, is the founder of and chief proselytizer for Laughter Yoga, a movement that since 1995 has spawned 5,000 laughter clubs—in which people meet regularly just to laugh—worldwide. To date there are just 200 or so clubs in the United States, including ones in Atlanta; New York; Orlando, Florida; St. Louis; and Tucson, Arizona. But Kataria hopes to change that over the next few years, by training more teachers. “Our objective is to build an international community of people who believe in love and laughter,” Kataria says. About 20 people—yoga instructors and health care providers, retirees and middle-aged people looking for a new life path—have gathered in a spacious 1910 Craftsman bungalow near Pasadena, California, for this workshop. The five-day training includes sessions on the health benefits of laughter, starting and running a laughter club, and working with particular populations, such as children and the elderly. But most of the time is spent on what Kataria calls his “breakthrough technology”: exercises designed to get people to laugh for no reason. These, combined with simple yoga breathing techniques and “laughter meditation,” are the heart of Laughter Yoga. Though little clinical research has been done to date, Kataria promises that Laughter Yoga relieves stress, boosts immunity, fights depression, and eventually makes people into more positive thinkers. On the opening day of the training, Kataria, 50, greets his disciples dressed in kurta pyjamas, the traditional Indian tunic and pants. His elegant silk ensemble, combined with his erect posture, gives him the look of an Indian prince. That, or a priest, because when he walks into the room, many look to him with almost religious devotion.

How Laughter Heals
In his introductory remarks, Kataria explains why laughter is good for the body. “When you start laughing, your chemistry changes, your physiology changes, your chances to experience happiness are much greater,” he says. “Laughter Yoga is nothing more than prepping the body and mind for happiness.”

Kataria goes on to explain that laughter has two sources, one from the body, one from the mind. Adults tend to laugh from the mind. “We use judgments and evaluations about what’s funny and what isn’t,” he says. Children, who laugh much more frequently than adults, laugh from the body. “They laugh all the time they’re playing. Laughter Yoga is based on cultivating your childlike playfulness. We all have a child inside us wanting to laugh, wanting to play.”

The idea that laughter has beneficial effects is not new. Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review, documented his own laughter cure in the 1979 book Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient. Cousins had been diagnosed in the mid-1960s with ankylosing spondylitis, a painful degenerative disease of the connective tissue that left him weak and barely able to move. Doctors gave him a 500-to-1 chance of recovery. But instead of undergoing conventional treatments, Cousins checked out of the hospital and into a hotel, where he set up a film projector and played funny movies. He took massive doses of vitamin C and submitted himself to hours of the Marx Brothers. “I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect,” he wrote, “and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.”

Cousins recovered and lived for another 26 years. And, in part inspired by his experience, a handful of scientists began researching the healing power of laughter.

One of them was William Fry, then a psychiatrist at Stanford University. In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Fry documented some of the health benefits of what he calls “mirthful laughter.” In a series of studies, Fry and his colleagues found that laughter increases circulation, stimulates the immune system, exercises the muscles, and even invigorates the brain. Other researchers have found that laughter reduces stress hormones and may even help prevent heart disease.

But can fake laughter—laughter devoid of humor, laughter that’s forced rather than spontaneous—have the same beneficial effects? Fry believes that aside from the mental stimulation that comes in the moment of discovery when you hear a good joke or appreciate a pun, the effects should be largely the same. “I think it’s definitely beneficial,” says Fry, who has heard about but hasn’t experienced Laughter Yoga. “I’m very much in favor of this program.”

Everyday laughter
Kataria himself was not always so jovial. As a young man, he admits, “I wanted to be rich and famous.” But later he hungered for something more. In 1995, Kataria was researching an article on the health benefits of laughter for a medical magazine he edited. In the middle of the night it struck him: If laughter is so good, why not make it part of people’s daily routine? The next morning he went to a public park near his home and began talking to people who were out for their morning walk. “I want to start a laughter club. Will you join me?” Most people brushed him off—“I’m too busy,” “That’s silly.” But his wife and three others agreed to try it. They took turns standing in the center of the group and telling jokes to make the others laugh.

Kataria kept going back to the park for these “laughter club” meetings. Members told silly jokes, sexy jokes, vulgar jokes. And the club grew. Passersby would see the group of laughing people in the park and join in. But after a few weeks, people got tired of hearing the same jokes. So Kataria decided to try something new: laughter without humor. “We’re looking for the purest form of laughter,” he says.

Over time, Kataria developed a series of laughter exercises, most involving interactions with other people. Since he had practiced yoga for many years and his wife, Madhuri, was a yoga teacher, Kataria integrated stretching and yoga breathing techniques—particularly deep diaphragmatic breathing and prolonged exhalation—into the laughter sessions. He coined the term “Hasya Yoga.” (Hasya is the Sanskrit word for laughter.)

Kataria has since taken Laughter Yoga to schools and orphanages, prisons, senior homes, institutions for people with disabilities, and corporations. Though he charges for teacher training sessions, he decided not to license the Laughter Yoga brand, and most certified teachers offer sessions for free or a nominal fee.

Banishing Stress
Back at the training, Kataria begins the Laughter Yoga session with his standard warm-ups. He starts by having people clap rhythmically and chant, “Ho, ho, ha, ha, ha” several times. Then he tells us to take a series of deep breaths, filling our lungs with air and releasing with a big laugh. Next come the laughter exercises. We are to go around the room and greet each person with a laugh. He encourages us to look into other people’s eyes and says not to worry if the laughter feels forced. “If you can’t laugh, fake it,” he says. “The body doesn’t know the difference between real laughter and fake laughter.”

I can’t help but feel a little ridiculous, laughing my way around a room full of strangers. As I gaze into each person’s eyes, I try to figure out if they are really laughing or, like me, just faking it. I think I catch a knowing, are-we-really-doing-this? glance from one woman. But after a few minutes, many of my classmates seem to be genuinely laughing. One woman, Lucia Mejia, is practically rolling on the floor during some of the exercises, her body convulsed with laughter.

“I’ve never laughed like that,” Mejia says later. A nurse from Southern California, she had impulsively signed up for the workshop after attending a lecture by Kataria the previous evening. “That night was a breakthrough, a life-transforming experience for me,” she says. Mejia, who was traumatized as a child, says she had developed a defensive approach to the world. “People would ask me, ‘Why are you so angry?’ It was like I had a mask on. Laughter Yoga broke through my body’s memories, to the point where my facial expressions changed.”

Jeffrey Briar, a boyish-looking man with an infectious giggle, says Laughter Yoga changed his life, too. He became certified to teach it in 2005 and founded a club that now meets daily in Laguna Beach, California. Though he has taught yoga for 33 years and has been trained in Ashtanga, Kundalini, Iyengar, Sivananda, and Integral Yoga, he says, “I’ve never been this enthusiastic about any technique.”

In addition to leading and attending daily Laughter Yoga sessions, Briar says he uses the techniques throughout the day to relieve tension. If he’s sitting in traffic or feeling upset, he’ll laugh. “I can laugh myself out of stress in as little as 20 seconds,” he says, and then demonstrates with an uproarious cackle.

In my two days of Laughter Yoga sessions, I never quite reach the point where my laughter “flows like a fountain from deep within,” as Kataria promised the first day. But I do get quite a workout. By the end of the second day, my belly aches from my exertions.

A few weeks after the training I’m in my car, driving my 12-year-old son, Dashiell, home from fencing class. It’s been a stressful day of deadlines, traffic jams, and nearly missed appointments, and when he says something annoying I’m tempted to snap at him. Instead, I throw my head back and let out a big laugh that reverberates deep in my belly.

“Laughter Yoga?” he asks with a smile. I nod my head and shoot him a big grin.

How do you laugh when nothing’s funny? Just open your mouth into a wide smile and force the breath out. You may feel silly at first, but when you’re in a group of people committed to laughing, the make-believe version often transforms into the real thing. A typical Laughter Yoga session involves some warm-up clapping and chanting (“Ho, ho, ha, ha, ha”), a few deep breaths with prolonged exhalation, 15 to 20 minutes of laughter exercises interspersed with deep breathing, and then 15 to 20 minutes of laughter meditation. Here’s a primer to help you get started:

Greeting Laughter Walk around to different people with palms pressed together at the upper chest in the Namaste greeting or shake hands and laugh, making sure to look into other people’s eyes.

Lion laughter Thrust out the tongue, widen the eyes, and stretch the hands out like claws while laughing.

Humming laughter Laugh with the mouth closed and hum.

Silent laughter Open your mouth wide and laugh without making a sound. Look into other people’s eyes and make funny gestures.

Gradient laughter Start by smiling and then slowly begin to laugh with a gentle chuckle. Increase the intensity of the laugh until you’ve achieved a hearty laugh. Then gradually bring the laugh down to a smile again.

Heart-to-heart laughter Move close to a person and hold each other’s hands and laugh. If people feel comfortable, they can stroke or hug each other.

To learn more about Laughter Yoga or to find a club near you, go to www.laughteryoga.org.

Rachele Kanigel is a writer in Oakland, California.

Art in the Time of War

2011-04-22T06:39:00.001-07:00

Art in the Time of War
From the May-June 2011 issue | More Richard J. Evans | April 19, 2011

THE LOOTING of artifacts and cultural objects in times of war and violent political upheaval continues to arouse international concern in the twenty-first century just as it did in the twentieth. The plunder of archaeological sites in Egypt during the recent revolution (after they were abruptly abandoned by teams of archaeologists who were understandably concerned about their personal safety) is only the latest example. In Afghanistan and Iraq too, war was followed by the wholesale looting of museums and other sites, and it was not long before plundered objects began to find their way into collections in the West.

What can be done about the trade in looted art? How has society dealt with it in the past and how should it deal with it now? The history of this practice goes back far indeed, beginning perhaps with Jason and the Argonauts looting the Golden Fleece; and it continued with the Romans’ habit of looting art from conquered cities in order to parade it through the streets of Rome in the ceremonial procession of the Roman triumph before putting it on display in the Forum.

Cultural looting on a grand scale, with the stolen objects appropriated for public display in the conqueror’s capital, was in the ancient world an act of state designed to advertise the supremacy of the victor and underline the humiliation of the defeated. Here, these displays said, was a great power whose generals could best rich and well-resourced rival powers; they advertised both to the victorious state’s own citizens the rewards that could be gained from military conquest and to the rest of the world the inadvisability of coming into conflict with a state of such power and magnificence.

In Byzantium, the Hippodrome was adorned with looted art, and during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 the city itself was in turn looted by the crusaders, with large amounts of cultural booty taken back to Venice to adorn the Basilica of St. Mark—most notably, of course, the four gilded horses of the Apocalypse which can be seen in the city today. During the Thirty Years’ War, Swedish troops looted book collections across Europe to stock the university library at Uppsala. In other examples, such as the sack of Magdeburg in 1631, when the army of the Catholic Holy Roman emperor massacred the inhabitants of the rebellious Protestant town, wanton destruction as well as the theft of riches was carried out by individual soldiers for their own personal enrichment. Magdeburg, in fact, caused widespread shock and dismay across Europe; while early modern lawyers such as Grotius conceded that, provided a war was being fought for a just cause, any property seized from the enemy became the property of the individual or state that took it, they also urged moderation and insisted that soldiers needed the express permission of their commanding officer before engaging in looting of any kind.

Private looting indeed has always gone on side by side with state-sponsored spoliation, but it has also aroused more disapproval. Most notorious of all was Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman court. He obtained permission from the sultan to take away old pieces of stone from the Parthenon in Athens, then under Turkish rule, which he and his team did with such enthusiasm—and carelessness, breaking a number of the sculptures in the process—that several shiploads returned with them to Britain, where he intended to use them to decorate his home.

These are only the best known of a vast series of acquisitions of ancient archaeological remains in the nineteenth century, many of which were taken from territory occupied by the Ottoman Empire by purchase or agreement with the Ottoman authorities, often achieved through the use of bribery. Even at the time, Elgin’s action ran into widespread criticism, in England as well as from the nascent Greek independence movement—supported by Lord Byron with some of his most biting satirical verses. Defenders of such acquisitions argued above all that they would not be safe if they remained in situ, since local people were already quarrying many of these sites for building materials; critics argued that the remains were far more seriously damaged by those who took them to pieces in order to carry off the most valuable parts.

ELGIN’S ACTIONS reflected his belief that educated Englishmen were the true heirs of classical civilization, whose legacy permeated the minds of educated elites across Europe. This influence was nowhere greater than in revolutionary France, where Napoleon’s victorious armies began concluding a series of treaties with conquered states across Europe, notably the Treaty of Tolentino, signed by the pope in 1797, that allowed them to appropriate artworks to stock the Louvre Museum, founded in 1793. The loot carried off to Paris from all over Italy included the four horses of the Apocalypse from St. Mark’s in Venice and scores of ancient Greek statues, which entered the city in a Roman-style triumphal procession, accompanied by banners that read: “Greece relinquished them, Rome lost them, their fate has changed twice, it will never change again.” They were joined by Renaissance paintings, live camels and lions, and the entire papal archive. All this underlined the claim of Paris to be the new Rome. Only the French, so the proclamation went, were civilized enough to appreciate such treasures.

During the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, large quantities of antiquities were collected by a team of 167 scientists, scholars and artists shipped over to Africa by Napoleon. When he was defeated, the British claimed the collection—including the famous Rosetta stone—as booty, validated by the Treaty of Alexandria, and put it in the British Museum, where it remains. No one seems to have objected.

Spoils (or the decision as to what to do with them) still went to the winner, and after Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, the Prussians took back the artworks and cultural objects stolen from them by force. However, at this point, attitudes were already beginning to change. The Duke of Wellington, commander of the allied armies, resisting pleas from Britain’s prince regent to purchase some of the finer pieces for the royal collection, decided to arrange for the rest to be returned to the “countries from which,” he wrote, “contrary to the practice of civilised warfare, they had been torn during the disastrous period of the French Revolution and the tyranny of Buonaparte.” “The same feelings which induce the people of France to wish to retain the pictures and statues of other nations,” he added, “would naturally induce other nations to wish, now that success is on their side, that the property should be returned to their rightful owners.” In addition, he noted, returning it would underline to the French the scale and finality of their defeat, while keeping it in Paris might encourage them to believe that they were still the rightful masters of Europe.

In the event, only just over half of the looted objects were returned; the rest had been sent out to provincial museums in France, beyond the knowledge of the occupying allied armies. These events sparked widespread debate across Europe. Paradoxically, they led to a new determination by European states to found or expand museums and to send out expeditions to acquire ancient cultural artifacts, following the lead of Napoleon rather than that of Wellington. This new development, among others, led, for example, to the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles by the British Museum in 1816.

Nevertheless, Wellington’s disapproval of military plunder did find an increasing number of supporters as the nineteenth century progressed. The duke himself thought that plunder distracted the troops from the military operations at hand and alienated the local population, which, as his experience in expelling Napoleon’s forces from Spain had shown, it was very important to keep on one’s side (at the time, Wellington had won over the locals by keeping his soldiers well disciplined, and in return, guerrilleros had fought alongside the British and the Portuguese).

This latter consideration played a significant role in the American Civil War, in which the Union wanted to avoid lasting damage to universities, museums and their collections in the South and so ordered that:

Classical works of art, libraries, scientific collections, or precious instruments, such as astronomical telescopes, as well as hospitals, must be secured against all avoidable injury, even when they are contained in fortified places whilst besieged or bombarded.

This was the first formal recognition that cultural property was different from other kinds of property and formed the basis for subsequent international declarations on the issue.

THE RISE of the nation-state brought with it a growing consciousness of the need to preserve the national heritage. The idea that the looting of cultural objects in wartime should be outlawed thus gained strength. European nations began to catalog and protect their own artifacts and valuables, and to take steps to preserve what was increasingly regarded as the common European cultural heritage, above all in Greece and Italy. Even the destruction and looting of the Chinese emperor’s Summer Palace in the Second Opium War in 1860 aroused widespread criticism in Europe. In 1874, the Brussels Declaration on the laws and customs of war outlawed the destruction of enemy property unless it was militarily required. These principles were elaborated at the first Hague Conference in 1899 and enshrined in the Hague Convention of 1907, to which Germany was a signatory (a significant point in view of events later in the century).

The Hague Convention explicitly banned what it called “pillage” and declared that an occupying country must act as the trustee of the property and possessions of the defeated state and its citizens. The problem was, however, that modern artillery warfare, high-explosive shells, and the sheer mass and weight of the military hardware then available made indiscriminate bombardment of towns and cities far easier than ever before. Meanwhile, the advent of democracy and mass nationalism had begun to transform the nature of warfare into a conflict not between professional armies but between whole nations and peoples, in which attacking the civilian population by means of economic blockade or, indeed, bombardment from the ground or air was becoming tacitly accepted, even though with the state of military technology at the time, accurate pinpointing of targets to avoid cultural monuments was more or less impossible.

In the First World War, zeppelins bombed London, and German and Austro-Hungarian shelling destroyed the Serbian National Museum in Belgrade. It proved impossible to stop actions such as the destruction of the Catholic University of Leuven’s library by the German army in 1914 along with sundry other, less famous monuments. On the other hand, actual looting, and in particular the theft or removal of works of art, was carried out on a fairly limited scale during the First World War, at least in comparison to what came after. The stalemate on the western front ensured that there was little opportunity for the occupying Germans to acquire works of art illicitly—Paris was well beyond the German zone, for instance—and few examples seem to be known of theft on the more mobile eastern front. The Hague Convention, signed so recently, still commanded some respect.

NOT FOR long. The Second World War saw the plunder, looting and spoliation of cultural objects in Europe to a degree that dwarfed anything seen even in the French revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. World War I may not have witnessed much state-sponsored theft, but the upheaval of the conflict opened up a new world of expropriation on a general scale. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was followed by the wholesale confiscation of private property. And in Germany, the Nazis believed they had a right to take what their enemies—notably the trade unions and the socialists—owned, without compensation, which they did as soon as they came to power, following this with the stage-by-stage expropriation of the property of Germany’s Jews. In the struggle of all against all that social Darwinism (at least in the version the Nazis believed in) preached, might was right, and the defeated had no rights either to property or even ultimately to life.

In practice, of course, such beliefs legitimized not only formal practices of looting and expropriation by the Nazi Party and the German state but also random yet very widespread acts of individual theft, blackmail and extortion by ordinary party members, lower state officials, low-ranking storm troopers and, during the war, members of the armed forces. Not surprisingly, the Third Reich soon became a byword for corruption.

A few leading Nazis used their newly acquired fortunes to start building up large collections of art, both personal and institutional. Hermann Göring for instance owned ten houses, castles and hunting lodges, all provided and maintained at the taxpayers’ expense. In all these locations, and particularly in his vast and ever-expanding principal hunting lodge at Carinhall, named after his first wife, Göring wanted to display artworks, tapestries, paintings, sculptures and much else besides to emphasize his status as the Reich’s second man.

By contrast, the Reich’s first man, Adolf Hitler, made a point of avoiding ostentatious displays of personal wealth, preferring instead to accumulate an art collection for public use. Hitler had long planned to turn his hometown of Linz, in Austria, into the cultural capital of the new Reich, even drawing sketches for the new public buildings and museums he hoped to construct there. Berlin, too, had to have art museums suitable for its new status as “Germania,” the coming capital of the world. In 1939, Hitler engaged the services of an art historian, Hans Posse, a museum director in Dresden, to build the collection he needed for this purpose. Posse was provided with almost limitless funds, and by the middle of the war he was acquiring art objects (at manipulated prices and in defiance of individual countries’ laws) from all over German-occupied Europe, amassing an almost incredible total of more than eight thousand by the time of his death.

In March 1938, the Nazis invaded Austria. While German soldiers and Austrian Nazis broke into the homes of Jews, stealing whatever they wanted, or stopped Jewish women on the streets and divested them on the spot of their fur coats and jewelry, the SS and Gestapo made straight for the homes of Vienna’s most prominent Jewish families with orders to confiscate the contents.

Top of the list were the Rothschilds, whose collections were confiscated and then put up for auction to meet alleged tax liabilities—a common practice in the 1930s, made easier by 1939 through the imposition of special taxes and levies on German and Austrian Jews. Further regulations required Jewish emigrants to leave their assets behind if they emigrated, for appropriation by the Reich. After the conquest of France in 1940, too, the property of citizens who had fled the country also fell to the German Reich; the same applied eventually to all Jews deported from every occupied country in Europe to Auschwitz and other extermination camps in the east.

Looting was also widespread in countries inhabited by people the Nazis regarded as “subhuman.” German culture to the Nazi mind was intrinsically superior to that of others, and inferior races were capable neither of sustaining their own heritage nor of properly safeguarding the products of other cultures. Thus, German cultural artifacts had to be repatriated. Such beliefs were reminiscent of the French view, under Napoleon, that only France had the right to safeguard European culture, but of course the Nazis took this credo much further, gave it a racial twist and applied it in an extreme version of the nationalist ideology of the nineteenth century to their own alleged heritage rather than that of the classical world.

Following the German takeover in March 1939 of what remained of the Czech state after the Munich Agreement of the previous September, the invaders began confiscating objects without compensation from both public and private collections, including not only allegedly German items from the Czech National Museum and the library of Charles University in Prague but also from the palaces of the Hapsburg, Schwarzenberg and Lobkowitz families.

However, Hitler’s treatment of Czechoslovakia was relatively mild compared to that meted out to the Poles, whose country he invaded in September 1939. Hitler vowed to wipe Polish culture and identity off the face of the earth. The German invaders carried off large quantities of cultural booty. Country houses along the invasion route were ransacked, and pressure was applied to their aristocratic owners to reveal the whereabouts of hidden treasures. On December 16, 1939, the German authorities ordered the compulsory registration of all artworks and cultural objects dating from before 1850, together with jewelry, musical instruments, coins, books, furniture and more from the same period, in the parts of Poland annexed to the Reich. These were duly confiscated, along with the vast majority of Polish property in these areas. The orders in effect constituted a license to Germans to loot what they wanted.

Nazi legal expert Hans Frank ruled the remainder of Poland, decorating his headquarters with stolen artworks and shipping trophies back to his home in Bavaria (when American troops arrived there in 1945, they found a Rembrandt, a Da Vinci, a fourteenth-century Madonna from Kraków, and looted vestments and chalices from Polish churches). Quarrels broke out as Hermann Göring tried to obtain pictures for himself, with Hans Frank objecting to the removal of prize finds from his headquarters. Perhaps this was not such a bad idea, however, since Frank had no idea how to display or preserve Old Masters, and was once reprimanded by Nazi art historian Kajetan Mühlmann for hanging a painting by Leonardo da Vinci above a radiator.

This process of looting and expropriation was repeated on an even-larger scale when Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Among the most famous of these items was the celebrated Amber Room given to Peter the Great by King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia and subsequently augmented by further gifts from his successor. The Soviets had taken away all the furniture and movable items but left the amber paneling in place, and the room, installed in the Catherine Palace in the town of Pushkin, was dismantled and returned to Königsberg in East Prussia where it was put on display; most of it was in all likelihood destroyed in the battle for Königsberg at the end of the war, and any items remaining in storage will by now have crumbled into dust. The Soviets of course had removed many cultural treasures out of reach of the invading armies. There were no great private collections left in the Soviet Union, since all had been confiscated by the Communist state, and the Germans never managed to conquer Moscow or St. Petersburg; but much still remained to be looted. Two hundred seventy-nine paintings were carried off from Kharkhov, then the third-largest city in the Soviet Union and the most populous the Nazis captured. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler requisitioned considerable quantities to decorate and furnish the planned SS headquarters at Wewelsburg.

THE SCALE of looting and expropriation practiced by the Germans between 1938 and 1945 was thus unprecedented—and its legacy carried on far beyond the Nazi defeat. The Bolsheviks, who had used Communist ideology to justify the mass confiscation of private property after 1917, were not unfamiliar with the practice, and the Nazis’ atrocities gave the opportunity, or excuse, for similar acts of plunder (both official and individual) by the incoming Red Army in the later stages of the war. In their hasty retreat, the Germans were forced to leave behind numerous collections, like others across Europe by this time placed for safekeeping in cellars, mines and other hiding places away from the heat of battle and the destructiveness of bombing raids. Special Soviet art-recovery units roamed the countryside searching for these hoards, and those they succeeded in finding were carried off to a special repository in Moscow. One and a half million cultural objects were eventually returned to East Germany with the establishment of the German Democratic Republic as an ally, or client state, of the Soviet Union after 1949.

But a good deal went astray. The mayor of the northwest German town of Bremen for example had sent the city’s art collection for safekeeping to a castle not far from Berlin, where Red Army troops found it. Arriving to inspect the collection, Viktor Baldin, a Russian architect enlisted in the Red Army, found the valuable works scattered around the countryside and did his best to recover them, in one case trading a Russian soldier a pair of boots for an etching by Albrecht Dürer. While Baldin kept the hundreds of drawings he had found, waiting for an opportunity to return his hoard to Bremen, other items from the same collection began to turn up on the art market at intervals; one dealer gave a Berlin woman 150 marks and a pound of coffee in return for a Cranach in 1956.

Eventually, when Mikhail Gorbachev inaugurated a more liberal regime in Russia, Baldin was able to petition the government to start negotiations for the collection’s return. The Bremen City Council offered a panel from the Amber Room taken by a German soldier who had been employed in packing it away, and a small number of other items were handed over, but this was not enough, and the Russians asked why they should give back looted art to Germany when so many of their own cultural treasures had disappeared or been destroyed as a result of the actions of the invading Nazi armies. Indeed, in 1998 the Russian Duma declared all the looted art state property, requiring an act of parliament to return it to the Germans. Controversy continues to rage in Russian political circles, and in the meantime, the bulk of the collection remains in the Hermitage; one thousand five hundred items from the Bremen state museum are still reckoned to be missing.

In the chaos and destruction of the last months of the war, many valuable cultural objects of all kinds were lost or destroyed. The Western Allies, not least as the result of pressure on the military authorities by concerned art experts in Britain and the United States, were acutely aware of the need to preserve the cultural heritage of Europe in the final phase of fighting—even before the D-day landings in 1944. Eisenhower’s supreme headquarters established a Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section, or MFAA, charged with locating and safeguarding cultural objects and preventing looting by Allied troops. U.S. officials everywhere began compiling lists of stolen art to prevent Nazis from keeping the works hidden and profiting on the art market once the memory of the war had faded. MFAA units followed the army into liberated towns, scoured castles and mines, and began storing artworks preparatory to returning them to their original owners.

Looted art found in Germany was stored at the Munich Central Collecting Point. A major operation soon began to return the works, and lorries and trains carried many thousands of paintings, drawings, sculptures, altarpieces and other objects across Europe back to their places of origin. The collecting points were finally closed down in 1951, when the remaining objects were handed over to a West German agency, which returned another million finds to their owners, three-quarters of them outside Germany, over the next ten years. The rest, some three thousand five hundred lots, were then distributed to German museums and other institutions from which they could, and can still, be claimed on presentation of the proper documentation.

Inevitably, a large number of pieces remained unaccounted for—at least twenty thousand of them according to one estimate. Most of these are small items—silver, jewelry, crockery and the like—or paintings and drawings by minor artists that are obscure enough to have escaped the attention of art experts. It may not have been simple to conceal well-known paintings by celebrated artists, but such items as these were far easier to hide away until the opportunity presented itself to bring them to sale. During the 1950s, art dealers were not particularly concerned about the provenance of the items they were asked to put up for auction: most of their effort went into establishing their authenticity. Large numbers of artworks were brought onto the market by people who had acquired them in a variety of dubious ways during the war, and then sold them on to institutions that in many cases bought them without knowing where they had come from.

Following the return of so much looted art to its owners in the aftermath of the war, the number of restitution actions and claims fell sharply during the 1950s. Furthermore, time limits on legal claims to the return of stolen goods existed, and still exist, in almost all European countries (Germany, thirty years; England, six years). Only two countries in Europe do not have such legislation: Poland, because of the sheer scale of the spoliation to which Polish collections were subjected during the war, and Greece, because of the Elgin Marbles. In essence, it became very difficult for former owners to obtain legal redress against the misappropriation of their possessions during a war that ended as long ago as 1945. The interest in restitution more or less died in the face of all these obstacles.

THEN, IN 1989–90, came the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. As court cases for the restitution of houses and businesses seized by the Communists from 1949 onward grew in number, compensation actions for loss and damage caused by the Nazi regime were launched, especially by former slave laborers. In the United States, and to some extent elsewhere as well, historical memory of the Holocaust moved to the mainstream of national culture, with memorial museums being founded in many cities, and increased attention in the mass media, reaching perhaps a high point with Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. The 1990s saw the renewal of war-crimes trials in some countries (although few in number and not uniformly successful). And Eastern European archives were opened for investigation, allowing many missing works to be traced.

Thus the art world reawakened to the problem of looted art after decades of treating it as a low priority. In December 1998, the new tone was set by the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, hosted by the U.S. Department of State with over forty national governments and numerous NGOs invited. The meeting built on the experience of the previous year’s international conference set up to deal with the question of Nazi gold, including that taken from the dental fillings of extermination-camp victims, much of which had found its way into the vaults of Swiss banks by the end of the war. The 1998 conference demanded the identification of all art confiscated by the Nazis, with a view to restoring it to its former owners on moral grounds even if they were not entitled to it legally. The commitments forged at the Washington Conference were followed up by similar agreements made by art-gallery and museum directors. There have been resolutions by international bodies such as the Council of Europe to similar effect. In this climate, the chances of claimants successfully securing the return of looted art were dramatically increased.

Considering the favorable environment for looted art’s return, many expected museums and galleries in the UK and elsewhere to be inundated with claims. But this has not happened. In many cases, the trail has gone cold, and evidence is almost by definition hard to obtain, since the cases in which claims were clear were often settled in the immediate aftermath of the war. Often the original owners are dead, and sometimes their heirs had been killed by the Nazis as well. Entire families perished in very large numbers in Auschwitz and the other death camps, and while institutions, museums and galleries possessed the knowledge, the resources and the evidence to mount actions to try and regain what they had lost, the same was seldom true of individuals. So only a small fraction of the artworks identified by museums and other bodies as of uncertain provenance during the years 1933 to 1945 have actually attracted claims. The UK Spoliation Advisory Panel set up in 2000 by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has dealt with little more than one case a year since then, though the steady trickle of claims shows no sign of drying up. In view of this trend, other countries such as the United States have been reluctant to follow suit and set up similar public bodies.

WHAT IS the future of preservation and restitution, then? As far as art taken from one country by another is concerned, as a general principle there is clearly a clash between any nation’s need to preserve and display its own cultural heritage and the global community’s need to learn about other cultures through universal museums like the Metropolitan or the British Museum. The way forward is surely to accept the validity of the universal museum, but to make exceptions where an object has been stolen relatively recently, or where it is of overwhelming cultural and historical importance to the nation or region from which it has been, whether legally or illicitly, removed.

In the process of righting the wrongs of the past, it is clearly not possible to achieve anything like adequate restitution on a global scale. The major thrust of the restitution effort has been directed toward reparation for the crimes committed by the Nazis, not least because the survivors and their immediate heirs are still among us. As professor Michael Marrus remarked in his recent study of the subject, “the Holocaust restitution campaign arose in highly unusual circumstances, unlikely to be replicated and unlikely therefore to affect other campaigns for justice for historic wrongs.” In the end, as he says:

Restitution is more about the present than about the past: it speaks to the survivors who are still among us . . . to the society at large for which such issues may be said to matter . . . and to a world in which injustice and wrongdoing are still too common—but for which, at the very least, we should have mechanisms available, when the carnage ends, to seek some measure of justice.

While there is a sincere and to some degree effective worldwide effort to restore art looted in the Nazi period, however, the international community has been signally unsuccessful in preventing looting and destruction from occurring during and immediately after new military conflicts. While there is now a mass of international legislation in place to preserve cultural artifacts in times of war, it is still very difficult to enforce it effectively. International intervention in conflicts like the Balkan wars of the 1990s is obviously difficult to organize and slow to implement. By the time it takes place, it may be too late. In the wake of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Serbian forces deliberately shelled the public library in Sarajevo in an attempt to obliterate the cultural and historical memory of Bosnia, while Croatian gunners knocked down the historic and symbolic bridge at Mostar and vandalized Serbian Orthodox churches in the places they conquered.

In the chaos following the invasion of Iraq by U.S. and allied troops in the early twenty-first century, the motivation for looting and destruction was not cultural genocide but private gain, coupled with military indifference. As the reporter Robert Fisk noted:

I was among the first to enter the looted Baghdad archaeological museum, crunching my way through piles of smashed Babylonian pots and broken Greek statues. I watched the Islamic library of Baghdad consumed by fire—14th and 15th century Korans embraced by flames so bright that it hurt my eyes to look into the inferno. And I have spent days trudging through the looters’ pits and tunnels of Samaria, vast cities dug up, their precious remains smashed open—thousands upon thousands of magnificent clay jars, their necks as graceful as a heron’s, all broken open for gold or hurled to one side as the hunters burrowed ever deeper for ever older treasures.

As Fisk explains: “Of 4,000 artefacts discovered by 2005 from the 15,000 objects looted from the Baghdad Museum two years earlier, a thousand were found in the United States . . . 600 in Italy,” many of them pillaged by order from private collectors and their agents. Greed, he noted, had been globalized. It is hard to resist the comparison with 1945, when the careful preparations made by the MFAA ensured that European cultural heritage was largely preserved and its looted assets returned to their rightful owners.

It is vital to learn the lessons of the Second World War and put effective arrangements in place in advance of future fighting to rescue and restore cultural objects and prevent looting. Such arrangements were not made in Iraq in 2003, and the devastation was vast. The international community cannot prevent looting and destruction in the course of civil unrest, but it can take steps to minimize it in cases of interstate conflicts. Above all, the art and museum world needs to be more vigilant in monitoring the trade in looted goods in the wake of conflicts such as those in Iraq or Afghanistan, and law-enforcement agencies need to step in with sanctions against those who encourage—or benefit—from it. In a globalized world, every state has, as the Hague Convention urged more than a century ago, a duty to act as the trustee of the culture of all nations, not just its own.

Lady Gaga Born This Way vs. Express Yourself (by @DollAndTheKicks) cover

2011-04-22T06:38:00.000-07:00

NO QUESTION.

SMFH.

What an amateur...

2011-04-22T06:36:00.000-07:00

SMH.

The biggest pop star in the world has had a mini-meltdown. Lady GaGa broke down in tears (as usual) during her recent interview with NME magazine after being questioned over the similarities between her hit “Born this Way” and Madonna’s classic “Express Yourself”.

A bit of it does sound quite a lot like ‘Express Yourself’, though, doesn’t it?

“I don’t think… I swear to you. I am not stupid enough to put out a record and be that moronic.”

The reference seemed so obvious that it had to be intentional because, as you say, you’re not stupid…

“No. Listen to me. Why the fuck…? I’m a songwriter. I’ve written loads of music. Why would I try to put out a song and think I’m getting one over on everybody? That’s retarded. What a completely ridiculous thing to even question me about. I will look you in your eyes and tell you that I am not dumb enough or moronic enough to think that you are dumb enough or moronic enough not to see that I would have stolen a melody. If you put the songs next to each other, side by side, the only similarities are the chord progression. It’s the same one that’s been in disco music for the last 50 years. Just because I’m the first fucking artist in 25 years to think of putting it on Top 40 radio, it doesn’t mean I’m a plagiarist, it means that I’m fucking smart. Sorry.”

The criticism did seem to take the wind out of the song’s sails.

“There’s a lot of people who want to see me fail. The minute they see something to shoot at, they shoot, and the bigger I become the bigger target I am. Nobody in this room at any point looked around and said ‘Oh my God, it’s ‘Express Yourself’. ‘ Not once. Listen. I swear to you. I can only be honest with you about it.”

What will people say about ‘Judas’?

“I dunno… I think they will really love it. (Starting to well up) I just don’t want my fans… I don’t know. This is exhausting. I just don’t wanna perpetuate that shit. I’m sure you want to address it but it’s just so ridiculous. I was just fucking shellshocked by it. It’s so funny to hear you say, ‘It must have been a homage’, I’m like, NO. When I homage, I fucking homage with a big sign saying I’ve done it. Why would I not do that now? (Sighs) I just like… I just have to say… (Starts crying) I feel like honestly that God sent me those lyrics and that melody. When you feel a message to give to the world and people are shooting arrows at it… there’s no way for something that pure to be wrong. (Reaches for Marilyn Monroe lighter) I need a cigarette.”

Who knew that it was so easy to send GaGa into meltdown mode?

It’s all very interesting to hear her swearing black and blue that the similarities were unintentional. Especially after the back ‘n’ forth that went on between GaGa and Madge after “Born this Way” premiered.

The drama started when Madonna randomly uploaded the 1989 VMAs performance of “Express Yourself” onto her official Youtube. GaGa subtly retaliated the next day by performing “Born this Way” at the Grammy awards rocking a similar version of Madonna’s iconic platinum ponytail from the Blonde Ambition tour, followed by an odd acceptance speech in which she thanked Whitney Houston for giving her the strength to write “Born this Way” — if you know your diva history, then you’d know that Whitney and Madonna were notorious enemies throughout the 1990s. Shade to the highest power.

GaGa followed up her Grammy performance by announcing on Jay Leno that Madonna and her team e-mailed her their blessings over “Born this Way”. Madonna’s rep then hilariously told CNN that they were “unaware” of any such e-mail having been sent.

Somethin’ in the milk ain’t clean!

Imagine if the Tea Party was Black

2011-04-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

Tim Wise: Imagine if the Tea Party was Black
By Jamie Triplin-Hines, DC Civil Rights Examiner
April 25th, 2010 9:07 am ET
Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists in the U.S. Wise has spoken in 48 states, on over 400 college campuses, and to community groups around the nation. Wise has provided anti-racism training to teachers nationwide, and has trained physicians and medical industry professionals on how to combat racial inequities in health care. His latest book is called Between Barack and a Hard Place.

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure - the ones who are driving the action - we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.

Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of $hit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama.

Imagine that a prominent mainstream black political commentator had long employed an overt bigot as Executive Director of his organization, and that this bigot regularly participated in black separatist conferences, and once assaulted a white person while calling them by a racial slur. When that prominent black commentator and his sister — who also works for the organization — defended the bigot as a good guy who was misunderstood and “going through a tough time in his life” would anyone accept their excuse-making? Would that commentator still have a place on a mainstream network? Because that’s what happened in the real world, when Pat Buchanan employed as Executive Director of his group, America’s Cause, a blatant racist who did all these things, or at least their white equivalents: attending white separatist conferences and attacking a black woman while calling her the n-word.

Imagine that a black radio host were to suggest that the only way to get promoted in the administration of a white president is by “hating black people,” or that a prominent white person had only endorsed a white presidential candidate as an act of racial bonding, or blamed a white president for a fight on a school bus in which a black kid was jumped by two white kids, or said that he wouldn’t want to kill all conservatives, but rather, would like to leave just enough—“living fossils” as he called them—“so we will never forget what these people stood for.” After all, these are things that Rush Limbaugh has said, about Barack Obama’s administration, Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama, a fight on a school bus in Belleville, Illinois in which two black kids beat up a white kid, and about liberals, generally.

Imagine that a black pastor, formerly a member of the U.S. military, were to declare, as part of his opposition to a white president’s policies, that he was ready to “suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do.” This is, after all, what Pastor Stan Craig said recently at a Tea Party rally in Greenville, South Carolina.

Imagine a black radio talk show host gleefully predicting a revolution by people of color if the government continues to be dominated by the rich white men who have been “destroying” the country, or if said radio personality were to call Christians or Jews non-humans, or say that when it came to conservatives, the best solution would be to “hang ‘em high.” And what would happen to any congressional representative who praised that commentator for “speaking common sense” and likened his hate talk to “American values?” After all, those are among the things said by radio host and best-selling author Michael Savage, predicting white revolution in the face of multiculturalism, or said by Savage about Muslims and liberals, respectively. And it was Congressman Culbertson, from Texas, who praised Savage in that way, despite his hateful rhetoric.

Imagine a black political commentator suggesting that the only thing the guy who flew his plane into the Austin, Texas IRS building did wrong was not blowing up Fox News instead. This is, after all, what Anne Coulter said about Tim McVeigh, when she noted that his only mistake was not blowing up the New York Times.

Imagine that a popular black liberal website posted comments about the daughter of a white president, calling her “typical redneck trash,” or a “whore” whose mother entertains her by “making monkey sounds.” After all that’s comparable to what conservatives posted about Malia Obama on freerepublic.com last year, when they referred to her as “ghetto trash.”

Imagine that black protesters at a large political rally were walking around with signs calling for the lynching of their congressional enemies. Because that’s what white conservatives did last year, in reference to Democratic party leaders in Congress.

In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?

To ask any of these questions is to answer them. Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. Which is why Rush Limbaugh could say, this past week, that the Tea Parties are the first time since the Civil War that ordinary, common Americans stood up for their rights: a statement that erases the normalcy and “American-ness” of blacks in the civil rights struggle, not to mention women in the fight for suffrage and equality, working people in the fight for better working conditions, and LGBT folks as they struggle to be treated as full and equal human beings.

And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the mess we do, on a daily basis.

Game Over.

Thank you for this piece, Tim. Wish more prejudiced people in general would take the time to step outside themselves and imagine what it would be like if the shoe was on the other foot. But, unfortunately, people tend to see how if the perceived "minority" were to be treated if they replicated some of the same prejudiced actions; and they use that to fuel their own power. Simply put, they know that they will and can get away with it.

Continue reading on Examiner.com: Tim Wise: Imagine if the Tea Party was Black - Washington DC Civil Rights | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/civil-rights-in-washington-dc/tim-wise-imagine-if-the-tea-party-was-black#ixzz1KG6cnBat

Persistance, Prudence.

2011-04-22T06:33:00.001-07:00

Eighty Years Along, a Longevity Study Still Has Ground to Cover
By KATHERINE BOUTON
After reading “The Longevity Project,” I took an unscientific survey of friends and relatives asking them what personality characteristic they thought was most associated with long life. Several said “optimism,” followed by “equanimity,” “happiness,” “a good marriage,” “the ability to handle stress.” One offered, jokingly, “good table manners.”

In fact, “good table manners” is closest to the correct answer. Cheerfulness, optimism, extroversion and sociability may make life more enjoyable, but they won’t necessarily extend it, Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin found in a study that covered eight decades. The key traits are prudence and persistence. “The findings clearly revealed that the best childhood personality predictor of longevity was conscientiousness,” they write, “the qualities of a prudent, persistent, well-organized person, like a scientist-professor — somewhat obsessive and not at all carefree.”

“Howard, that sounds like you!” Dr. Friedman’s graduate students joked when they saw the statistical findings. On a recent visit to New York, Dr. Friedman and Dr. Martin did both seem statistically inclined to longevity. Conscientiousness abounded. They had persisted in a 20-year study — following up on documentation that had been collected over the previous 60 years by Lewis Terman and his successors — despite scoffing from students: Get a life!

The hotel room (Dr. Martin’s) was meticulously neat, and they had prudently ordered tea and fruit from room service. Both were trim and tanned, measured in their answers, trading off responses like the longtime collaborators they are. Despite a busy schedule they were organized enough for a relaxed talk.

In 1990, Dr. Friedman and Leslie Martin, his graduate student at the time, realized that an invaluable resource for studying well-being and longevity existed right in their own state of California. In 1921, Dr. Terman had chosen 1,528 bright San Francisco 11-year-olds for a long-term study of the social predictors of intellectual leadership. Dr. Terman interviewed the children, their families, their teachers. He studied their play habits, their parents’ marriages and their personalities: were they diligent, extroverted, cheerful? He and his team followed up with the participants every five or 10 years. Dr. Terman died in 1956, but colleagues continued the regular interviews with the original subjects, asking the same questions Dr. Terman had asked.

Dr. Friedman and Dr. Martin pored through Dr. Terman’s records, dredged up death certificates and asked Dr. Terman’s questions of study participants’ survivors. They also conducted a group analysis of other similar studies, and collaborated with experts in many fields.

The secret to a long life has been much studied. The health economist James Smith, at the RAND Corporation, found that the answer was education. Stay in school. This is no doubt true. But his findings don’t necessarily conflict with Dr. Friedman and Dr. Martin’s: what keeps people in school is often conscientiousness.

The New England Centenarian Study, on the other hand, found that the children of centenarians scored in the low range for neuroticism and the high range for extroversion. (For women it also helped to be agreeable.) Both men and women were about average in conscientiousness. Dr. Friedman pointed out that this was a selected group — the researchers could not study the centenarians themselves, except by self-reporting, so they turned to their children. There was also no control group. The Friedman/Martin/Terman study is unique in that it followed a single set of participants from childhood to death.

How do you pose the same questions to participants over an 80-year period? Dr. Friedman deferred to Dr. Martin. One of Dr. Terman’s original questions to parents was “How likely are you to upbraid a workman?” Not very relevant in contemporary life. Employing a complicated linguistic measurement called factor analysis, Dr. Martin said, the researchers were able to come up with the 21st-century equivalent: “How do you deal with co-workers?”

Many assume biology is the critical factor in longevity. If your parents lived to be 85, you probably will, too. Not so, Dr. Friedman said. “Genes constitute about one-third of the factors leading to long life,” he said. “The other two-thirds have to do with lifestyles and chance.” As an example of chance, he cited veterans of World War II. “A disproportionate number of those sent overseas, especially to the Pacific, died at a greater rate after the war than the men who had been deployed at home,” he said. In any given year, men sent overseas were more than one and a half times as likely to die, compared with their peers who had stayed home.

There are three explanations for the dominant role of conscientiousness. The first and most obvious is that conscientious people are more likely to live healthy lifestyles, to not smoke or drink to excess, wear seat belts, follow doctors’ orders and take medication as prescribed. Second, conscientious people tend to find themselves not only in healthier situations but also in healthier relationships: happier marriages, better friendships, healthier work situations.

The third explanation for the link between conscientiousness and longevity is the most intriguing. “We thought it must be something biological,” Dr. Friedman said. “We ruled out every other factor.” He and other researchers found that some people are biologically predisposed to be not only more conscientiousness but also healthier. “Not only do they tend to avoid violent deaths and illnesses linked to smoking and drinking,” they write, “but conscientious individuals are less prone to a whole host of diseases, not just those caused by dangerous habits.” The precise physiological explanation is unknown but seems to have to do with levels of chemicals like serotonin in the brain.

As for optimism, it has its downside. “If you’re cheerful, very optimistic, especially in the face of illness and recovery, if you don’t consider the possibility that you might have setbacks, then those setbacks are harder to deal with,” Dr. Martin said. “If you’re one of those people who think everything’s fine — ‘no need to back up those computer files’ — the stress of failure, because you haven’t been more careful, is harmful. You almost set yourself up for more problems.”

How about exercise? Dr. Martin once ran the Marathon des Sables, a six-day race across the Moroccan desert, carrying her own food, bedding and clothing over 150 miles. But extreme exercise is not a predictable indicator of longevity (though the organization and persistence required to get there probably are). As important as exercise and lifestyle are to health, and thus to longevity, pushing yourself to extremes is not necessarily going to lengthen your life span, particularly if you don’t enjoy it.

Spend your time working at a job you like instead. “There’s a misconception about stress,” Dr. Friedman said. “People think everyone should take it easy.” Rather, he said, “a hard job that is also stressful can be associated with longevity. Challenges, even if stressful, are also a link.” In the end, he said, “if people were involved, working hard, succeeded, were responsible —no matter what field they were in — they were more likely to live longer.” Many people, of course, have to stay in a job they don’t like or don’t do well in. That’s bad stress, and they found those people were more likely to die young.

When it comes to marriage, there are many caveats. Marriage itself, adding together the husband’s and the wife’s happiness, was a good predictor of future health and longevity. But more interestingly, it was the man’s happiness that was the better predictor of health and well-being — for both the husband and the wife. Her own happiness mattered much less to her future well-being. Their mutual compatibility was also a strong factor in predicting their children’s longevity: the single strongest social predictor (as opposed to personality predictor) of early death was parental divorce during childhood.

I asked Dr. Friedman and Dr. Martin what the single strongest social predictor of long life was. Their unhesitating answer: a strong social network. Widows outlive widowers. (Widows also tended to outlive still-married women.) Women tend to have stronger social networks. Interestingly, neurotic widowers tended to outlive their less neurotic peers — they were more likely to take care of their health after their wives were gone.

One of my friends commented after hearing about the importance of conscientiousness, “No wonder women live longer than men.” That’s partly true, Dr. Friedman said, but a great deal of it also has to do with social networks, a social support system, which women are often more likely to have. “Among male/female differences, that’s a big piece,” he said.

The project is far from finished. Dr. Martin also wants to look into other variables affecting health, like sleep patterns. And she is interested in how their findings can begin to have an effect on public policy. Dr. Friedman said he thought the most important as-yet-unanswered question was about work — “retirement kinds of issues,” he said. “We know it’s not good to retire and go to the beach.” But it’s also not good to stay in a stressful boring job. “We need to think about negotiating these transitions in a healthy way,” he added.

“The Longevity Project” is written for the general reader, and it is full of self-assessment questionnaires, structured cleverly so the correct answers are not obvious. The subject matter of the questionnaires is illustrative of some of the other factors that are associated either positively or less positively with longevity: They include sociability (are you the life of the party?), emotional sociability, neuroticism, catastrophic thinking, life satisfaction, marital happiness, job passion and accomplishment, religiosity and social support network.

But the book is also amply footnoted with scholarly citations that others may want to follow up. It’s far more nuanced in its discussion than any short summary could be. When I asked Dr. Friedman how he could prevent people from oversimplifying his findings, he sighed. He said he tells them they have to read the book. I have oversimplified, of course, and I, too, would recommend you read the book. It’s a lot more complex than it sounds.

2011-04-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

“Love, in itself, doesn’t trouble me at all. It gives you courage, security, helps you to ignore other trifling things. It’s in great passion that I have never believed.

Give me one example of a great passion, a true one, one with Christian names, surnames, and addresses, not some legendary one, and I’ll believe it. You see? You’re silent.

Great passions, my dear, don’t exist, they’re liars’ fantasies. What do exist are little loves that may last for a short or a longer while. That’s why, every time I’ve loved a man, I’ve never let it overwhelm me. I have loved him, I’ve even been jealous of the flies touching him, but I have known all along that it had to end. And when it ends…you cry a bit, but then you get over it. Two, three months later, you meet him in the street and it seems impossible you could ever have lost any sleep or shed any tears over him. Pouf!”

-Anna Magnani, quoted in 1963 interview (reprinted in Oriana Fallaci’s Gli antipatici)

City's last Geisha

2011-04-05T05:55:00.001-07:00

At 84, a City’s Last Geisha Defies Time
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
KAMAISHI, Japan — The requests to see her perform had dwindled over the years. But when the earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, this city’s last geisha was, fittingly, at home getting ready to sing that night at Kamaishi’s 117-year-old ryotei, an exclusive restaurant featuring fine food and entertainment where she began working as a 14-year-old seven decades ago.

She had already put on the white split-toe socks she would wear with her kimono and was preparing to put her hair up. Hired to entertain a party of four in honor of a colleague’s transfer from Kamaishi, she had picked just the right song, one meant to steel young samurai going to their first battle.

But a tsunami would engulf this city within 35 minutes and, as Kamaishi trembled from at least 15 big aftershocks during that short time, the geisha, Tsuyako Ito, 84, fought to survive. She had lived through three tsunamis before in Kamaishi, a place that the waves have destroyed with regularity over the centuries, and as a girl she had listened to her grandmother’s tales of the great 1896 tsunami.

“My grandmother said that a tsunami is like a wide-open mouth that swallows everything in its path,” Ms. Ito said from a local hospital where she was being treated for asthma, “so that victory comes to those who run away as fast as possible.”

Her mother carried her on her back to safety at the time of Ms. Ito’s first tsunami in 1933. This time, after her legs gave out, an admirer carried Ms. Ito on his back to higher ground. Ms. Ito, who had planned to retire on her 88th birthday, a milestone in Japan, survived her fourth — and “most frightening” — tsunami.

The waves, however, swept away her shamisen, a three-stringed instrument, and kimono, the two tools essential to a geisha’s art.

The recent tsunami is believed to have killed about 1,300 people in Kamaishi, whose low-lying areas have been transformed into a dusty ghost town where the smell of ruined buildings now mingles with that of the sea.

The birthplace of Japan’s steel industry, Kamaishi played a key role in the country’s modernization and militarization, so that it became the first target on mainland Japan of American warships during World War II. During Japan’s postwar boom, the city’s population swelled as it easily overcame the ravages of two tsunamis.

Kamaishi became famous for its delicious seafood, the winning ways of its main employer’s rugby team, Nippon Steel, and its diversions.

As Japan’s fortunes have declined in the past two decades, Kamaishi’s fall has been faster and steeper.

Its population, nearly 100,000 two generations ago, has now fallen below 40,000 and is aging. Many who have lost homes and businesses here are not expected to remain.

But Ms. Ito vowed to sing and dance again in Kamaishi. A famous beauty, she both danced and played the shamisen, while most geishas were skilled only at playing the shamisen, said Setsuko Kanazawa, whose family owns Saiwairo, the ryotei where she performs.

To cultural preservationists here, she is the guardian of a local culture that was fast disappearing.

The last ryotei in Kamaishi, Saiwairo was also its most exclusive. It was built in 1894 on the most elevated point of an area that would be dotted with bars, brothels and other ryoteis. While tsunamis washed away Saiwairo’s neighbors, they never reached its first floor.

It was at Saiwairo that Ms. Ito began an apprenticeship at the age of 14.

“I loved to dance,” she said. “And I simply wanted to become a leading geisha in Kamaishi.”

The truth, whispered for decades inside the family home, was darker, said Satoshi Ito, Ms. Ito’s nephew. Ms. Ito’s father ran a small-time construction business and, her nephew said, had ties with Japan’s gangsters, the yakuza.

“He would repair roads here and there, using yakuza to control certain areas,” said Mr. Ito, 63, who lived with his aunt here but is now staying at an evacuation shelter.

“Her father is supposed to have told her she was suited for that life,” he added. “But to put it harshly, I think that he did it to guarantee some debts.”

After a marriage to a sushi restaurant owner, the birth of a daughter and a divorce, Ms. Ito went to Tokyo to study dance under a famous instructor. Back in Kamaishi, Ms. Ito and a dozen other geishas were constantly on call at this city’s ryoteis, as Kamaishi’s economy began booming in the 1950s. At Saiwairo, steel industry executives occupied some rooms as owners of fishing vessels held parties in others, Ms. Kanazawa said.

But Kamaishi’s economy peaked a decade before Japan’s did, as the city’s two main industries began declining in the 1970s.

Nippon Steel began moving its operations out of Kamaishi, eventually closing down its blast furnaces in 1989; fishing shrank as new rules on exclusive economic zones kept Kamaishi’s fishing vessels closer to Japan.

In 1978, the central government began building the world’s deepest and most expensive breakwater in Kamaishi’s harbor, a plan intended to protect the city against tsunamis as well as to create jobs.

But the breakwater, which took 30 years to complete, did little to stop Kamaishi’s economic slide. What’s more, after Japan’s economic bubble burst two decades ago, company executives could no longer hire geishas on their expense accounts, said Ms. Kanazawa of Saiwairo.

Saiwairo opened its doors to a larger public, first as a new site for weddings; in recent years, in a reflection of this city’s aging population, it has become a popular setting for memorial services.

“We couldn’t survive on pride alone,” Ms. Kanazawa said.

Still, sometimes the calls came for Ms. Ito, some from old customers, others from new customers reflecting the world’s new economic order.

“About once a month,” Mr. Ito said of the frequency of his aunt’s performances. “Chinese industrialists, among others, now come here.”

And so on March 11, as Ms. Ito was getting ready to perform, the biggest tsunami of her life assailed Kamaishi, tearing apart the breakwater and eventually reaching inland all the way to the house where she and her nephew lived.

As it turned out, after a wall in her house collapsed and she slowly moved to flee, Hiroyuki Maruki, 59, a sake store owner and the president of a group dedicated to preserving an old melody called “Kamaishi Seashore Song,” came by looking for her. “She is the only one who knows how to sing that song,” Mr. Maruki said.

As Mr. Maruki carried Ms. Ito up a hill, she recalled “feeling the soft warmth of his back.”

Mr. Maruki said: “I thought she’d be light, but she was surprisingly heavy. I wondered at one point what was I going to do.”

Having survived yet another tsunami, Ms. Ito said that her regret was that she had been unable to sing that night.

“I’d practiced the night before, and after putting my thoughts together, I thought this song would be all right,” she said, explaining that the song told the story of a young samurai on horseback going to his first, long-awaited battle.

“It ended without my singing,” she said. “It’s such a nice song, too.”

Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.

you know trees

2011-04-05T05:27:00.001-07:00

You've come a long way, Andrew, from the timid, shy soul you once were. Hiding out on distant planets, befriending alien tree forms, splashing in snow fed streams, and secretly planning your time on earth with a pair of sexy, euro-style pants. and all.

So what do you say we drop all the practical logic, rational reasonableness, and cautious optimism, and give those tree forms something to talk about - before they start making stuff up.

You know trees.

I'm totally with you on this -
The Universe

lightening the load

2011-04-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

things i learned today

2011-04-04T14:13:00.000-07:00

1. that i'm somebody's hero
2. that there is a 100 person attendance maximum in order to host a TEDx conference
3. that i am definitely performing this fall at the lansburgh theater
4. that i have a PHENOMINAL FICO score
5. that i will be working on a film in late summer/autumn
6. that I am out of fage
7. that i was not offered to teach english in france this fall
8. that i have friends who are eager and willing to advise me about film & photography equipment and the business.
9. that my favorite antique store in ellicott city is hiring for weekends/ omg!
10. that we have a 4th person to complete our quartet
11. that i am waitlisted for the stonehenge auditions
12.

2011-03-30T06:13:00.001-07:00

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself. - James Baldwin

2011-03-29T11:37:00.001-07:00

“Do the things you used to talk about doing but never did. Know when to let go and when to hold on tight. Stop rushing. Don't be intimidated to say it like it is. Stop apologizing all the time. Learn to say no, so your yes has some oomph. Spend time with the friends who lift you up, and cut loose the ones who bring you down. Stop giving your power away. Be more concerned with being interested than being interesting. Be old enough to appreciate your freedom, and young enough to enjoy it. Finally know who you are. ”

Kristin Armstrong -

Paul Root Wolpe: It's time to question bio-engineering | Video on TED.com

2011-03-26T08:05:00.000-07:00

Paul Root Wolpe: It's time to question bio-engineering | Video on TED.com

2011-03-25T17:08:00.001-07:00

Ronda is located in the province of Malaga, Andalusia, Spain, famous for it’s city cliffs. It is situated in the mountains at an elevation of 760 meters (2,500 ft). The city is split in two by the Guadalevin River that runs through Ronda, causing it to sit on either side of the El Tajo Canyon formed by the river. There are three bridges that precariously cross the canyon so that you can cross from one side of Ronda to the other. The city’s architecture received its influence from the Romans and Moors who once ruled the area. Ronda has the distinction of being the birthplace of bullfighting and Spain’s oldest bullfighting ring is still there.

http://www.economist.com/node/18438073

2011-03-25T14:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.economist.com/node/18438073

Was on the Line

2011-03-25T14:42:00.000-07:00

Gay Bar Mourns Elizabeth Taylor

Axel Koester for The New York Times
Patrons of The Abbey in West Hollywood, a favorite hang-out of the late Liz Taylor, pay their respects at a shrine erected in her honor.

By BROOKS BARNES
Published: March 24, 2011

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Last Halloween, David Cooley, the founder of the Abbey, a sprawling gay bar here, got a phone call. Elizabeth Taylor was on the line, and she wanted to know if it was a good night to swing by.

The Abbey was a favorite hang-out of the late Liz Taylor.
“I told her not to come,” he said. “It was too busy. And there were already a half dozen Elizabeth Taylors here anyway.”

A gay bar, even a fancy one with chandeliers and a roaring fireplace like the Abbey, seems an unlikely haunt for a megastar. But the actress, who died on Wednesday at 79, was a once-a-week regular in recent years — sipping tequila shots, downing watermelon and apple martinis or simply waving merrily from her wheelchair.

Sometimes she brought her dog, Daisy, who, some bar-goers insist, liked to nod her head along to the bar’s throbbing Madonna soundtrack.

The scene in the “Elizabeth Taylor Room” — her favorite spot amid the Abbey’s many nooks and crannies — was decidedly somber just after news of her death on Wednesday. Regulars, fans and Abbey employees started leaving flowers, candles, pictures and other tokens of affection (an autographed napkin) around a donation Ms. Taylor once made to the bar: a large portrait of herself in her prime.

Sitting untouched on an empty table nearby was a remembrance from the bar staff, a Blue Velvet martini, a bluish drink made with vodka and blueberry schnapps and named in a nod to Ms. Taylor’s 1944 film “National Velvet.”

“People have been walking up and starting to cry,” said Brian Rosman, an Abbey spokesman and a patron. “Others can’t talk, they get so emotional.”

Mr. Cooley said it should not be a surprise that people in this proudly rainbow-flag-flying town are responding to her death with such feeling. There have been other gay touchstones — Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Cher, Debbie Reynolds, Madonna — but Ms. Taylor perhaps eclipsed all of them, at least for a certain generation, with her outspoken efforts to raise the profile of AIDS at a time when people still referred to it as “the gay disease.”

“Taylor’s relationship with gay men provided a new model of gay icon,” Paul Flynn, an editor at the British gay magazine Attitude, wrote in The Guardian on Thursday. “No longer was it enough to be a woman with whom gay men retained a bass-note of empathy, the kind of strung-out glamour/tragedy axis Judy Garland immortalized.”

Ms. Taylor started raising money for AIDS research and victims after her friend Rock Hudson died of the disease in 1985. Over the next 25 years, she would become synonymous with the fight against AIDS, ultimately helping to raise more than $100 million for the cause.

“For her to testify before Congress as early as she did was really remarkable,” said John Scott, the former executive director of the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

Indeed, Ms. Taylor also became a heroine for many gay people for criticizing a slow response to AIDS from politicians. “I’m not even sure if he knows how to spell AIDS,” she said of President George Bush in 1991.

“She helped make talking about being gay O.K.,” said Mark Conaghan, a tourist from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who had his picture taken next to the Abbey’s shrine on Wednesday night. “She let it be known, God forbid, that she even had gay friends herself.”

The Abbey, which opened in 1991 and has grown to 16,000 square feet, has become a tourist attraction because of Ms. Taylor’s patronage, which started about four or five years ago, according to Mr. Cooley. Sightseeing buses regularly drive by, with guides pointing out the door through which Ms. Taylor, usually wearing gaudy rhinestone sunglasses, would enter and leave.

One such exit can be seen in a video posted to TMZ.com in June of last year. Ms. Taylor — wearing knee-high boots, a pink blouse and a white golf hat — was wheeled to her car as people shouted greetings.

“Aside from my back, fine,” she responds when asked about her health. An Abbey employee follows behind carrying Daisy.

She was not the only star of her era to frequent West Hollywood’s cluster of gay bars. Legend has it that Loretta Lynn once judged a drag contest of men dressed in her likeness. But no other celebrity of Ms. Taylor’s wattage became such a presence, said John Heilman, a member of the West Hollywood City Council. “I used to run into her all the time at clubs on the strip,” he said.

Still, the Abbey was her hangout. Mr. Cooley said she told him on one of her visits that it was her favorite pub. He had the sentiment printed on a plaque and placed near her donated portrait, which captures her diva qualities: arms extended, wearing an extravagant, shimmering gown recalling her wardrobe in “Cleopatra.”

But the bar finds itself continually replacing the plaque.

“People steal it,” Mr. Cooley said. “We’ve screwed it on. We’ve glued it on. Nothing works. I think it’s a symbol to people — that she loved us as much as we loved her.”

8 Basics by Kurt Vonnegut

2011-03-25T14:30:00.001-07:00

With his customary wisdom and wit, Vonnegut put forth 8 basics of what he calls Creative Writing 101: *

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

Rogier van der Heide: Why light needs darkness | Video on TED.com

2011-03-25T12:56:00.000-07:00

Rogier van der Heide: Why light needs darkness | Video on TED.com

what a journey..

2011-03-25T12:26:00.001-07:00

In the new Hollywood Reporter, the Comedy Central bad boys open up about their meanest spoofs (from religion to Tom Cruise), conquering Broadway with "Book of Mormon" and how they’re working “on a deeper level.”
Trey Parker and Matt Stone sit slumped at a table, exhausted.

Their sense of humor has almost vanished, their energy disappeared, their anarchists’ willingness to say “f--- you” to anything that smacks of the establishment has utterly drained away. All they can think of is sleep.

“The schedule throws you off so much,” says Parker, referring to their new Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon, about two young missionaries who are sent to Uganda. “We’ve been going to previews every night then staying up till 2 or 3. I’m worn out.”

Who can blame him? In the nine weeks since South Park’s creators decamped from Los Angeles for New York, they’ve plunged into a frenetic world of rehearsals, rewrites and directing their show — all with, between them, a wife, a girlfriend and two kids in tow. The sheer volume of work, and the lightning speed at which it has raced by, has caught them unawares.

“It’s crazy how fast it is,” says Parker, wolfing down dinner at Serafina restaurant. “We did four weeks of rehearsals, then two weeks of ‘tech,’ then went into previews. Seriously, this is what blew my mind: We only heard the thing with a full orchestra six days before the first paying audience.”

PHOTOS: South Park's wildest spoofs

On March 24, a far higher-profile audience is scheduled to attend Mormon’s opening night, when New York will be counting on the production to sustain Broadway’s momentum — with more than $1 billion in grosses last year — and restore some of the luster tarnished by Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

But at this point, with just eight days left before the premiere, that’s the last thing on the writers’ minds. Parker dreams of taking a vacation “somewhere in the Caribbean,” while Stone just wants to “go look at a wall and check out.”

He won’t have long to do so. A week after they leave New York around March 28, the pair hurtles into the 15th season of South Park, part of a new pact with Comedy Central that keeps the show on the air through 2013 and is said to be even richer than their previous $75 million deal. They’ll have just one week to create each episode, with no time to prep.

“Every show, we’re down to the wire,” says Parker, running his hand through his hair in exasperation. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it. It’s a nightmare.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“They’ve matured. I’m very proud of the men they’ve become.” — “South Park” exec producer Anne Garefino, on Parker and Stone
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This nightmare, a good problem to have, might have been averted if not for a chance meeting with Robert Lopez in 2004.

On producer Scott Rudin’s advice, Parker and Stone went to see the writer-composer’s Tony-winning Avenue Q, then took him for a drink.

“Bobby said, ‘I want to do something about Joseph Smith,’ ” recalls Stone, the younger and more extroverted of the South Park duo, referrring to the founder of the Mormon religion. “And we were like: ‘Wait! We want to do something about Joseph Smith!’ ”

Growing up in Colorado, next door to Utah, Parker and Stone had long been familiar with the Mormon church and its members; Parker even dated a Mormon girl and was badly hurt when she ditched him.

They had first thought of a fictionalized Smith while working on an aborted Fox TV series about historical characters. Now, with Lopez, they started bandying about more concrete ideas — though they weren’t sure if their work would lead to a play or a film or something else altogether — only to realize Smith didn’t provide a strong enough hook.

“Within a few days, we were like, ‘Nah!’ ” Parker says. “We pretty quickly got to a modern story.”

This new version revolved around two young men who would go into the world on behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a missionary task that’s obligatory for all Mormons. Precisely who they would be and where they would go remained undetermined.

In an effort to hone the tale, the three creators — who jointly wrote the book, music and lyrics — took a research trip to Salt Lake City.

“Bobby had never been there,” Stone remembers, “so we ended up doing all the visitor stuff and museums but mostly talking to a lot of people.”

As their ideas evolved, the principal characters crystallized into a bright-eyed zealot and his wacky, comedic companion. But developing them further proved a challenge. Lopez was based in New York, the South Park guys in Los Angeles — and they were working ceaselessly. How would they ever find the time to create an entire musical?

In 2006, Parker and Stone flew to London, where they spent three weeks with Lopez while he was working on the West End production of Avenue Q. “We wrote four or five songs and came up with the basic germ of the idea there — that they would go somewhere not Salt Lake City-like,” Parker recalls.

During the next few years, the trio met frequently to develop what they initially called The Book of Mormon: The Musical of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“There was a lot of hopping back and forth between L.A. and New York,” Parker says. “That probably helped the project because there would be, ‘Oh f---, the guy flew out; we should probably work.’ ” All the while, the format itself remained uncertain. “We were thinking, ‘Let’s make an album; let’s just write another song,’ ” Parker says.

It was Lopez who pushed for the stage, and as his partners concurred, he prodded them to take the vehicle a step further and “workshop” it. Coming from TV and film, Parker and Stone were clueless about what he meant.

“We didn’t understand the whole workshop process,” Parker admits. “Bobby had to explain, ‘We need to cast it and have people there with music stands in a little theater, reading the script and singing the songs.’ ”

The group embarked on the first of a half-dozen workshops that would take place during the next four years, ranging from 30-minute mini-performances for family and friends to much larger-scale renderings of the embryonic show. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money, still unconvinced they’d take it any further.

The workshop process was thrilling but posed its own challenges.

“In animation, we would simply have people do an ‘animatic’ [in which storyboards are designed to accompany prerecorded dialogue], something we could look at on an Avid,” Stone says. “But for Broadway, you need 20 actors and auditions — and that means dealing with Equity, the actors union. They have a pay scale just for workshops.”

A final five-week workshop took place in August, when Casey Nicholaw came on board as choreographer and co-director with Parker. By that time, several of the cast members who’d been with them all the way — like Josh Gad, the plump sidekick whose confused mangling of Mormonism with Star Wars provides some of the show’s biggest laughs — were starting to get antsy.

“August was our ‘shit-or-get-off-the-pot,’ ” Parker says. But the response they received was enough to make them commit. “Then we opened a corporation and did the whole investment thing.”

Financing Mormon proved easy and modest by Hollywood standards. “It’s more than $2 million-$3 million but less than Spider-Man,” quips Stone. An insider estimates the budget at about $10 million, low for a big musical.

With Rudin in charge, the creators had one of Broadway’s leading producers at their side, who had also worked with them on the films South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut and Team America: World Police. It was Rudin who now booked a theater and hired key players while sets were designed and built, hundreds of actors auditioned and some 28 cast. Finally, a rehearsal space was found, tape laid on the ground to mark key spots, and the actual work of producing a full-blown musical got under way.

On Jan. 10, Parker and Stone flew to New York, ready to give Mormon their all.

♦♦♦♦♦

It’s mid-afternoon on a Thursday, precisely a week before the show premieres, and their all just doesn’t seem to be enough.

They’re huddled with Rudin in the stalls of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, locked in intense discussion as Nicholaw pivots across the stage, a whirlwind of energy, putting his cast through one of the show’s bouncier numbers. The number may be bouncy, but the cast isn’t. Like the dozen or so technicians and stagehands sprinkled throughout the auditorium, they look wiped out.

Nicholaw shakes his whole head and body as two of the cast fail to get a movement quite right. “No, no, no!” he says, maintaining a remarkable ebullience despite his frustration. Across the stage, an actress who plays one of the Ugandan villagers rolls her eyes.

Parker glances up at her somberly.

At 41, he is no longer the enfant terrible who became notorious for lampooning everyone and everything — from Tom Cruise to Paris Hilton to Muhammad — and, along with Stone, even appearing in a dress at the Oscars. Rather, there’s a high seriousness to him that might surprise South Park aficionados.

He treats the series as more than a job; it’s a cause.

“South Park is way bigger than either of us,” he says. “And it’s this curse, and when we are doing it, I hate it. I’m pissed off and I’m tired, and every single Tuesday I say, ‘This is the worst show we’ve ever done!’ It’s brutal. But it’s something I am a part of that’s bigger than I am. That’s what most important.”

Says Rudin: “It’s this thing that happens rarely in the culture, where something very subversive is also very affirmative. It has affirmative values but also tears down every possible institution.”

That combination has resulted in an enterprise worth hundreds of millions of dollars. South Park T-shirts alone generated some $30 million in sales in the late ’90s.

And yet its success comes at a price: When they return to Los Angeles, Parker and Stone will have just two months to produce a batch of seven new episodes, followed by seven more after a brief hiatus. Without their usual two weeks of prep before the season begins — and without their habitual five-day writers retreat — they’ll be scribbling ideas on Thursdays and working nonstop till the early hours of the following Wednesday morning, the very day each episode airs, when it is finally locked.

Both write, but their chores are slightly different. Parker, the more introspective of the two, also directs, while the effervescent Stone, 39, interfaces with the world at large.

“He’s genuinely a true artist,” Stone says of his colleague. “I’m more mercurial. I have a temper more than Trey; I’m not proud of it, but I have that edge. Trey avoids conflict like the plague.”

Raised in Conifer, Colo., the son of a geologist father and an insurance-salesman mother, Parker spent a semester at the Berklee College of Music before meeting Stone at the University of Colorado, where the latter — from suburban Littleton — was a math major. Both shared a uniquely provocative, anti-authoritarian humor, which they quickly applied to their first movie, Cannibal! The Musical.

Cannibal sold to schlock purveyor Troma Entertainment and got them a writing deal with Rudin while they were still in their early 20s.

But it wasn’t until they made a much-talked-about video greeting card for Fox executive Brian Graden that they were commissioned to make South Park some 15 years ago. Other than the two forays into film and a TV misfire, That’s My Bush, they’ve remained exclusively with South Park ever since.

Parker says they’ve had it “pretty good.” He doesn’t voice the familiar complaints about interference from Standards and Practices — in fact, he says Comedy Central’s lawyers have helped the series.

“The Scientology episode, for instance, started with the idea that Tom Cruise is going to show up and he’s just flamboyantly gay, and we were going to say, ‘There’s that gay guy!’ ” he explains. “And the lawyers said, ‘You just can’t do that.’ So we went, ‘What if we say, “There’s that guy, and he’s in a closet?” ’ And they said, ‘Can’t do it.’ So we said, ‘What if he’s literally in a closet?’ And they said, ‘That you can do!’ ” He smiles. “Bargaining makes you come up with the best ideas.”

The Cruise episode was one of many that defined South Park as among the most cutting-edge shows of its era, a creation that made fun of individuals and institutions alike. Which makes it surprising to discover there’s a gentleness and even a kindness about Parker and Stone that’s far from the flipness one might expect.

South Park executive producer Anne Garefino. “I’m very proud of the men they’ve become.”

It’s easy to forget that the guys who started South Park as twentysomethings are now on the brink of middle age.

“We care about different things today,” Parker admits. “First, we were friends f---ing around, trying to get laid, breaking into Hollywood, sleeping on couches. Now Matt is married, and I’ve got a little family.”

Two years ago, Stone wed his longtime girlfriend, with whom he has a 1-year-old boy. As for Parker, after a failed earlier marriage, he says he’s found contentment with his girlfriend of the past two years, who has a 10-year-old son.

Both have become more sedate: Stone, who’s been with the same woman for 10 years, believes he’s born to be a family man, and Parker says most of his spare time is now spent at home.

“For better or worse, we’ve gotten older,” he acknowledges.

In his down time, the Cruise/Muhammad/Mormon satirist is obsessed with Food Network, and his hobby is designing houses. “I got into this little habit of architecture and building,” he says. “I designed a house in Colorado and one in Hawaii. The idea is supposed to be build and sell — but then I can never bring myself to sell them.”

He laughs easily, appreciating the brief respite from all the pressure. Like Stone, he’s almost shockingly normal and decent.

Even at their most sacrilegious, Parker says, they never plan to inflict pain. He seems relieved at the Mormon response to his satire.

“The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening,” the LDS website notes, “but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people’s lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ.”

“When someone goes, ‘Oh, this group is really pissed off at what you said,’ there’s not a piece of my body that goes, ‘Sweet!’ ” Parker asserts. “That means I did it wrong. I’m just trying to make people laugh.”

Which is precisely what he says he’s trying to do with Mormon.

And yet the amount of effort the writers have expended, the perfectionism they’ve brought to bear, seems designed for something far grander.

The result might have lyrics like “F--- you, God, in the ass, mouth and c---,” but that shouldn’t dispel its underlying humanity. If anything, the shock element seems a distraction, as if Stone and Parker were reminding us they’re still the South Park creators of old when in truth they’re reaching for something new.

But can they succeed?

♦♦♦♦♦

Night. Ad the 1,102-seat theater fills to capacity, a rapid-fire prologue introduces us to the history of Mormonism, then we meet the show’s leads. Minutes later, we’re whisked to Africa, where we encounter cheery locals who sing with an abandon that the rehearsals simply don’t convey:

There isn’t enough food to eat/Hasa diga eebowai!/People are starving in the street/Hasa diga eebowai!

Gad’s Elder Cunningham squeals with an infectious giggle, unaware that Hasa diga eebowai will turn out to be blasphemous. Then we’re on a roller-coaster ride of comedy and characters with names like General Butt F---ing Naked — all wild and anarchic and yet so fundamentally sweet it hurts.

As the curtain falls two hours later, the audience rises in a thunderous ovation. Mormon is very possibly about to become a phenomenon.

This isn’t South Park: It’s a deeper, more mature work, which is terrific and terrifying at the same time.

“Once you get yourselves into things that are working on a deeper level, you just have to keep going,” Stone reflects. “When you reach that deeper level, you can’t go back.”

kind words from dear friend Jenet

2011-03-25T05:37:00.001-07:00

Great to see you and your play. I said it then and I'll say it now - you are really working and distilling your unconscious/consious life in a really clear, engaging, moving and oh so human way. Thank you. Thanks to Ocean, too

little differences add up

2011-03-25T05:35:00.000-07:00

Really, all one has to do to transform their life, Andrew, is remind themselves to think and behave a little bit differently, each day.

Rainbows,
The Universe

top 20

2011-03-25T05:24:00.001-07:00

1: "Big girls need big diamonds"

2: "I've always admitted that I'm ruled by my passions."

3: "I fell off my pink cloud with a thud."

4: "I am a very committed wife. And I should be committed too - for being married so many times."

5: "I don't think President Bush is doing anything at all about Aids. In fact, I'm not sure he even knows how to spell Aids."

6: "I really don't remember much about Cleopatra. There were a lot of other things going on."

7: "I suppose when they reach a certain age some men are afraid to grow up. It seems the older the men get, the younger their new wives get."

8: "Im a survivor - a living example of what people can go through and survive."

9: "I've been through it all, baby, I'm mother courage."

10: "Everything makes me nervous - except making films."

11: "I've only slept with men I've been married to. How many women can make that claim?"

12: "If someone's dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture, I'm certainly not dumb enough to turn it down."

13: "Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses."

14: "Success is a great deodorant."

15: "You find out who your real friends are when you're involved in a scandal."

16: "It's not the having, it's the getting."

17: "Marriage is a great institution."

18: "People who know me well, call me Elizabeth. I dislike Liz."

19: "So much to do, so little done, such things to be."

20: "I don't like my voice. I don't like the way I look. I don't like the way I move. I don't like the way I act. I mean, period. So, you know, I don't like myself."

In 2009, Elizabeth Taylor also joined the Twitter revolution. During a stay in hospital, she tweeted to Kathy Ireland: "Thanks Darling for the beautiful flowers and all the prayers. Now can you just get my puppy past security?"

The Bawdy and the Beautiful

2011-03-23T16:53:00.000-07:00

The Bawdy and the Beautiful
Elizabeth Taylor's delightful vulgarity.
By Simon Doonan
Posted Wednesday, March 23, 2011, at 1:24 PM ET

Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011Elizabeth Taylor was wild and beautiful and unpretentious and insanely glamorous. When I was a kid the papers were filled with cascading images of her scandalous trials and fabulations: Liz in Capri pants clutching poodles and waving drunkenly from the deck of her yacht; Liz deathly ill; Liz back from the dead, suntanned and buying ever bigger bijoux; Liz and Eddie; Liz and Monty; and, most importantly, Liz and Dick.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were the Brad and Angelina of their day, minus all that the earnest actor-ish stuff. A movie actress her entire life, she was so confident about her ability to deliver her lines that she never descended into all that gobbledygook—it's about "the craft" and "the work"—which spouts from the mouths of contemporary actors. Dick always claimed that his wife, with her just-shut-up-and-say-the-bloody-words attitude toward acting, relieved him of the burden of his Shakespearian provenance and taught him how to just do it.

Miss Taylor differed from today's actors in another way too. SHE BOUGHT ALL HER OWN DRAG! No freebies for Liz. In truth, La Taylor had an uneasy relationship with the world of fashion. Though lauded for the beauty of her face and her violet eyes—her catlike make-up in Cleopatra inspired a million girls around the world to break out the liquid eyeliner—she was always having too much fun to seek out the approval of the snootier echelons of the world of style. (In Cecil Beaton's odiously disdainful diaries he likens her to "a peasant woman suckling her young in Peru.") When, in 1998, La Taylor's fashion influence was finally acknowledged with a CFDA award, her acceptance speech consisted of one sentence: "Eat your heart out Mr. Blackwell!" That nasty old geezer had plopped Liz's name on the worst-dressed list for years, but Liz had the last laugh.

Liz always had a way with a bon mot. For someone who earned her living delivering other people's (screenwriter's) gems, she was remarkably capable of crafting her own. A few of my favorites:

"Success is a great deodorant. It takes away all your past smells."
"If someone's dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture, I'm certainly not dumb enough to turn it down."
"Big girls need big diamonds."
"The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues."

Liz Taylor's glorious, gorgeous, generous (she was a tireless AIDS advocate long before it became trendy), incredible life is a monument to the ultimate triumph of fun and glamour and vulgarity. Yes, vulgarity. When Diana Vreeland famously said, "Vulgarity is a very important ingredient in life. A little bad taste is like nice splash of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste—it's hearty, it's healthy, it's physical. No taste is what I'm against," I feel she must surely have had a picture of the fabulous Elizabeth Taylor in her mind.

As we revisit the Taylor movie canon in the coming months, you will no doubt watch Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, BUtterfield 8 and all the greats. But don't overlook the dustier nooks and crannies of Liz-obilia. Some of the best style moments are to be found in her more obscure movies like Secret Ceremony and Reflections in a Golden Eye. My fave might just be X Y & Zee with Michael Caine. How to describe this demented movie? Imagine if Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was transposed into early '70s London and 90 percent of the characters are wearing caftans. The opening credits—a busty, boozed-up Liz plays a violent game of ping-pong with a hot-looking, bespectacled Michael Caine—are pure orgasmic joy. My hubby and I were so smitten with this movie that we installed a ping-pong table in the middle of our living room, in homage to La Taylor. Why don't you give it a whirl! What better way to remember the incredible Liz: Crack open a bottle of scotch, throw on a caftan, and grab those ping-pong paddles.

RIP, Elizabeth (as you preferred to be known). You will be horribly missed.

shhooooott

2011-03-23T13:27:00.001-07:00

don't hate me cause you ain't me.

- overheard everywhere.

the queen's tweets

2011-03-23T07:23:00.001-07:00

Timeline Favorites Following
Followers
Lists
» DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
My interview in Bazaar with Kim Kardashian came out!!! http://j.mp/eqQsGa
9 Feb Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
@kimkardashian @harpersbazaarus Our interview in Bazaar came out! You look like a princess in Egyptian robes, love! http://j.mp/eqQsGa
9 Feb Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Every breath you take today should be with someone else in mind. I love you.
22 Jul Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Because then it becomes about yourself...which is wrong. Giving is to give to God. Helping is to help others.
22 Jul Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
That is the thing that will give back to you all the rewards that there are. Don't do it for yourself, because then it becomes selfish.
22 Jul Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Give. Remember always to give. That is the thing that will make you grow.
22 Jul Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
You are who you are. All you can do in this world is help others to be who they are and better themselves and those around them.
22 Jul Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Never let yourself think beyond your means...mental, emotional or any otherwise.
22 Jul Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I would like to add something to my earlier tweet. Always keep love and humility in your heart.
22 Jul Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Not at least until I'm dead, and at the moment I'm having too much fun being alive...and I plan on staying that way. Happiness to all.
22 Jul Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
No one is going to play Elizabeth Taylor, but Elizabeth Taylor herself.
22 Jul Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Hold your horses world. I've been hearing all kinds of rumours about someone being cast to play me in a film about Richard and myself.
22 Jul Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
RT @kathyireland: So grateful to be a part of @WishesChallenge, starting today raising support 4 @MakeAWish. Pls join us! http://ow.ly/1WNBK
15 Jun Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I thought doctors, like priests took an oath of confidentiality. May God have mercy on his soul.
13 May Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Just what we want in our doctors. And then to say he did not betray Michael's confidence. No wonder he has death threats.
13 May Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
with someone in "Arnie's" office. It seems he supplies not only women (Debbie Rowe), but men too...how convenient.
13 May Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Dr. Arnie Klein declared on May 2 that he did not betray Michael Jackson by saying publicly that he had a homosexual relationship
13 May Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
God bless her always. I'll miss her.
10 May Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Lena Horne...one of the most beautiful women in the world passed away today. Her dignity and grace and talent shall be remembered forever.
10 May Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor @
@kathyireland. Darling, I'm still in London. Wishing you every success at Gearys on Saturday. Love, Elizabeth
7 May Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
The rumors regarding my engagement simply aren't true. Jason is my manager and dearest friend. I love him with all my heart.
12 Apr Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
When is someone going to stop the yellow press from lashing out at people who no more deserve it than the Dalai Lama!
10 Mar 10 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I am boiling to the point of eruption at the injustice of those statements.
10 Mar 10 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I have never seen anyone epitomize glamour and grace and professionalism like she did.
10 Mar 10 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
These rags said, to quote them, “She was either stoned or drunk and looked pregnant” – what???? They must be the ones on drugs.
10 Mar 10 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I heard that some scum magazines, print and internet trashed Kathy Ireland on Oscar Red Carpet night.
10 Mar 10 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
@KathyIreland. Darling, Congratulations on your beautiful "Monkey Mischief" at Neiman-Marcus. I bought them! I love you.
15 Jan 10 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Geary's is such a beautiful store filled with goodies. But, I hope you'll see both places for holiday ideas.
10 Dec 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
A special thank you to Geary's Beverly Hills who continue to carry my "Elizabeth" couture jewels.
10 Dec 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Saturday afternoon House of Taylor Jewelry has it's opening in Beverly Hills and you're more than welcome to come.
10 Dec 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
One Color Unites Us on WORLD AIDS DAY. Show your support for @joinred. Buy (RED) Save Lives. #red
30 Nov 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I truly believe this film should be nominated in every category conceivable.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
You see in front of your eyes Michael's genius blossoming on this piece of film thanks to Kenny Ortega and his crews.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
From A to Z you get Michael's input on every level. Michael's genius at work with the dancers. Mr. Ortega catches Michael in his every mood.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Kenny Ortega did a masterful job of directing the process that goes into making a complete show before hitting the stage.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
We cannot let his life be in vain / and always done with love. Remember that. Remember him and thank God for him and his genius.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
From "Black And White", "Man In The Mirror". The inspiration behind "We Are The World". We must take his words of responsibility seriously.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I won't use words like preaching because that is off-putting, but listen. Listen to his messages.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
If you listen to his lyrics they are those of a modern day prophet and it beseeches us to listen to him and what he sang.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I meant to repeat myself. I love you. I remember Michael loved you. He was totally up to now and the message of today in all his songs.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I hope I don't sound condescending. I'm sure you already know what I'm talking about, but go to see it again and again.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I loved genius in my lifetime. God was so good to me. I will love Michael forever and so will you, if you don't already.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
You owe it to yourselves and your loved ones to see this again and again. Memorize it and say to yourselves, "I saw genius in my lifetime"
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
To say he was a genius seems so little. I wish my vocabulary encompassed what I feel.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
God blessed him and squandered nothing, but loved it all. Michael knew how to put together every tone, every nuance to make magic.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
And we have this piece of film to remind us forever and ever that once there was such a man. God kissed him.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I wept from pure joy at his God given gift. There will never, ever be the likes of him again.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
To say the man is a genius is an understatement. He cradles each note, coaxes the music to depths beyond reality.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
It is the single most brilliant piece of filmmaking I have ever seen. It cements forever Michael's genius in every aspect of creativity.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I was honored with the great privilege of seeing "This Is It" last week. I was sworn to secrecy, but now I can let you know about it.
26 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I know they all helped. Love you, Elizabeth
8 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Dear Friends, My heart procedure went off perfectly. It's like having a brand new ticker. Thank you for your prayers and good wishes.
8 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
by saying that I had diabetes, which is a total lie. But I guess they can't help themselves. Talk to later as promised. Love, Elizabeth
7 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Dear Friends, I was completely honest with you about my hospitalization. Now the press, bless their little hearts, had to add something
7 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Any prayers you happen to have lying around I would dearly appreciate. I'll let you know when it's all over. Love you, Elizabeth
6 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
It's very new and involves repairing my leaky valve using a clip device, without open heart surgery, so that my heart will function better.
6 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Dear Friends, I would like to let you know before it gets in the papers that I am going into the hospital to have a procedure on my heart.
6 Oct 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Please join me in voting for her on abc.com until noon tomorrow. God Bless.
29 Sep 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Kathy was delightful, gorgeous and fit the music they chose perfectly. If they ever do a remake of The King and I she should star in it.
29 Sep 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Saw Dancing With The Stars tonight. Didn't think the judges were fair to Kathy Ireland.
29 Sep 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
All of you who are watching Kathy Ireland on DWTS tonight...please vote for her. The # is on the screen. She's so gorgeous, isn't she!
22 Sep 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
She is beauty personified because it glows from within and takes her on wing.
17 Aug 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
To watch her in movement will be a golden chance to see beauty in action and grace which is what that lady is all about.
17 Aug 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I'm so excited to see Kathy Ireland on Dancing With The Stars! She is so beautiful.
17 Aug 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I give love and I'm surrounded by love...and I thank God for that.
18 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I have to be stronger and more appreciative of what I do have.
18 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I've had many tragedies in my life, but I guess they have all taught me something. I have to look at it that way.
18 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
But as I said before I went into the hospital, "I am a survivor."
18 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I'm home from the hospital sore, but intact. Of course I'm still grieving for Michael...I always will.
18 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
My love goes out to Katherine and Michael's beloved children.
6 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I said I wouldn't go to the Staples Center and I certainly don't want to become a part of it. I love him too much.
6 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I just don't believe that Michael would want me to share my grief with millions of others. How I feel is between us. Not a public event.
6 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
And I cannot guarantee that I would be coherent to say a word.
6 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I've been asked to speak at the Staples Center. I cannot be part of the public whoopla.
6 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I will always love Michael from the depth of my being and nothing can separate us.
5 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I am a survivor not only for myself, but for my family and for Michael too.
5 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Although my grief over Michael could not be any deeper, I am not on suicide watch as some of the cheaper "rags" would have you believe.
5 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I wanted you my friends to know that I'm going into the hospital Wednesday or Thursday to complete a test I was in the middle of.
5 Jul 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I keep looking at the photo he gave me of himself which says, "To my true love Elizabeth, I love you forever." And I will love HIM forever.
26 Jun 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I can't imagine life without him. But I guess with God's help I'll learn.
26 Jun 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I don't think anyone knew how much we loved each other. The purest most giving love I've ever known. Oh god! I'm going to miss him.
26 Jun 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
It can't be so. He will live in my heart forever but it's not enough. My life feels so empty.
26 Jun 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I was packing up my clothes to go to London for his opening when I heard the news. I still can't believe it. I don't want to believe it.
26 Jun 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
We had so much in common and we had such loving fun together.
26 Jun 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
My heart...my mind...are broken. I loved Michael with all my soul and I can't imagine life without him.
26 Jun 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Dearest Elizabeth, You make the sun shine, the clouds move and the world spin. So many people love you and so do I. Love Always,______
19 Jun 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Somebody I care for very much sent the following note to me with flowers and I wanted to share it with you.
19 Jun 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Life without earrings is empty!
19 Jun 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Humor is the only way to stay alive.
18 Jun 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
My mind, my soul were transported by his beauty, his voice, his inner being. God has kissed this man and I thank God for it.
8 Jun 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I went to see Andrea Bocelli last night. The first time I've been out in months. The Hollywood Bowl allowed me to use my wheelchair.
8 Jun 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
So it's your name, your perfume. I hope you love it as much as I do. Wear it in love.
29 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Dear Fellow Twitterers: Thank you for your opinions on my new perfume's name. VIOLET EYES won hands-down.
29 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor @
@Marie_Monr0e Fortunately for me I still have an active, up to date mind which for a "hip" lady like myself comes naturally. One Slick Chick
28 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I think it's terrible for the California govt to retract the law on Gay Marriage after they made it legal. You can't treat people that way!
28 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
The perfume company wants me to name my new fragrance VIOLET EYES. I think its conceited and like FOLLOW ME. Which do you prefer?
28 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Thank you to all who make White Diamonds sparkle! Everyone here, my partners at Elizabeth Arden and all the wonderful people in the stores.
28 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
A thrill of excitement. I'm so stoked! My fragrance, White Diamonds entered the Hall of Fame at the FIFI Awards last night.
28 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
It's a shame more public servants don't have San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's courage in speaking out against Prop 8. Go Gavin!
27 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
There is no such thing as a "Gay" agenda. It's a human agenda. The California Supreme Court decision on Prop. 8...TERRIBLE!!!!
27 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I'm home from the hospital and feeling great. Thanks for all the love and support!
26 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor @
@kathyIreland Thanks Darling for the beautiful flowers and all the prayers. Now can you just get my puppy past hospital security. Love
22 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I've never been double-crossed by a sweet puppy or a lion in the jungle.
22 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
It's not true that I love animals more than people -- they are a very close second.
22 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
@kathyireland "politicians"...whoops...glasses
19 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
"politicians"...whoops...glasses
19 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor @
@kathyIreland My Darling Kathy...Have fun at the Capitol with Lily and give our polititians hell!!! Love, Elizabeth
19 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
When in Rome, check out my jewels at the Bulgari retrospective at Il Palazzo delle Esposizioni, the brand's first in 125 years.
19 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I'm enjoying some delicious tomatoes grown in my garden.
18 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Congratulations Quinn, USC Class of 2009.
15 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Just saw "Twilight" on DVD. I want more!
14 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Counting the days until Michael's opening night in London.
13 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Congratulations to Carole Bayer Sager on being selected for the 2009 Founder's Award from Lupus L.A.
12 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Thanking all my wonderful fans for their sweet messages of love and support!
11 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Also in People this week, my jewelry is on display at Cartier in NYC this month to celebrate their 100th anniversary in America.
8 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Just did interview with People about White Diamonds for Mother's Day.
8 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Looking forward to Mother's Day with my wonderful family.
7 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
White Diamonds has been nominated for a FIFI Award. Please vote! http://www.fragrance.org/ballots2009/index.php
6 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Excited about my new website, now under construction -- address coming soon!
6 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Congratulations to Kathy Ireland on being named a Hero for Feed the Children.
5 May 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Ever since "National Velvet" I've had a passion for horses. Here are a few who need help badly: www.cghs.org
28 Apr 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Enjoying life with all its many gifts. Always something to look forward to!
24 Apr 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
I just love Susan Boyle! I want to hear her magnificent voice again and again.
23 Apr 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Doing an interview with NY Times Style section today. My pearl is going in the window of Cartier.
22 Apr 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Holding the world's sweetest puppy, Delilah.
22 Apr 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Enjoying brie on a baguette, well toasted.
21 Apr 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Sending sweet birthday thoughts to my friend Dr. Lee Perry of the International Sports Medicine Institute. Happy Birthday, Leesburg!
20 Apr 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Beaming with pride and welcoming the newest member of my family, a great grandson!
20 Apr 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
You can't cry on a diamond's shoulder and diamonds won't keep you warm at night, but they're sure fun when the sun shines!
17 Apr 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Reading my friend Kathy Ireland's new book, "Real Solutions for Busy Moms: Your Guide to Success and Sanity." Congrats, Kathy!
17 Apr 09 Favorite Retweet Reply » DameElizabeth Elizabeth Taylor
Spending time with my daughter Liza in my beautiful gardens. Hope the gardenias bloom soon.
31 Mar 09 Favorite Retweet Reply

long live the Queen

2011-03-23T06:19:00.000-07:00

Oscar winning actress Elizabeth Taylor passed away today at Los Angeles, Calif.'s Cedars-Sinai Hospital at the age of 79.

"She was surrounded by her children- Michael Wilding, Christopher Wilding, Liza Todd, and Maria Burton," Taylor's publicist, Sally Morrison, said in a statement.
In addition to her children, Taylor is survived by 10 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren.
Taylor had been hospitalized six weeks ago with congestive heart failure. Though she had recently suffered a number of complications, her condition had stabilized and it was hoped that she would be able to return home.
Taylor, a two-time Academy Award-winning actress who in later life became notorious for her seven marriages and sometimes eccentric behavior, had reported health problems in recent years and appeared frail in public appearances.
Taylor reported in October 2009 that she was having a
heart procedure done via Twitter, she said it was "very new and involves repairing my leaky valve using a clip device, without open heart surgery so that my heart will function better."
Taylor's past health setbacks included a fall from a horse during one of her early film shoots, bouts with pneumonia and skin cancer, a tracheotomy, treatment for alcohol and painkiller addictions, and lung, hip, brain and heart surgeries. She has had anywhere from 30 to 40 surgeries, according to biographers.
In addition, she has seen her dramatic life frequently covered by gossip magazines, which have documented evident over the years.
But she's iconic for being one of the most popular actresses of Hollywood's golden age. Born in London in 1932 to American parents who returned to the U.S. with WWII looming, Taylor bounded into the spotlight at age 12 after starring in the 1944 box office sensation "National Velvet." She won acclaim as an adult with 1951's "A Place In The Sun" and went on to score best actress Oscar nominations for "Raintree County," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," and "Suddenly, Last Summer."
In 1963, she memorably starred in "Cleopatra." She later won Oscars for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "Butterfield 8."

Beyond acting, Taylor is credited with bringing the world's attention to AIDS with her fund-raising and activism. In 1985, when Taylor's lifelong friend Rock Hudson died of AIDS, she brought national attention to the growing disease. It satisfying to her to use her celebrity for good - she raised and donated millions to the cause, founding the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) and The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.

"I don't think President Bush is doing anything at all about AIDS. In fact, I'm not sure he even knows how to spell AIDS," Taylor said once, frustrated with President Bush's slow-moving efforts to address the crisis.

She was also an entrepreneur, spearheading a successful line of perfume and multiple jewelry lines. In 1999, Taylor was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Taylor's last major interview appeared in the March issue of Harper's Bazaar. In it, she dished to reality TV star Kim Kardashian about her love life, her iconic roles and her jewels.

"I never planned to acquire a lot of jewels or a lot of husbands," Taylor said. "I have been supremely lucky in my life in that I have known great love, and of course, I am the temporary custodian of some incredible and beautiful things."

Taylor also mused about one of her former husbands, actor Richard Burton.

"It was inevitable that we would be married again, but it's not up for discussion," she said

& more

2011-03-22T05:38:00.000-07:00

“Everyone’s childhood plays itself out. No wonder no one knows the other or can completely understand. By this I don’t know if I’m just giving up with this conclusion or resigning myself - or maybe for the first time connecting with reality.
How do we know the pain or another’s earlier years, let alone all that he drags with him since along the way at best a lot of leeway is needed for the other - yet how much is unhealthy for one to bear. I think to love bravely is the best and accept - as much as one can bear.”
-Marilyn Monroe, quoted in Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters

“Years ago, when Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon were getting divorced, a perhaps apocryphal story appeared in the scandal sheets: As an example of Grant’s supposed irrationality, Cannon cited to the judge Cary’s yearly habit of sitting in front of his television [watching the Academy Awards] and sardonically abusing all the participants. This item, true or not, must have amused nearly everyone in Hollywood, since nearly everyone in Hollywood does pretty much the same thing.
The funny thing is that from all accounts, when the Academy Awards began in 1939, they were conducted in a similar spirit of irreverence, something that has practically disappeared from the event itself. “They used to have it down at the old Coconut Grove,” Jimmy Stewart told me in the late 70s. “You’d have dinner and alawta drinks - the whole thing was…it was just…it was a party. Nobody took it all that seriously. I mean, it was swell if ya won because your friends were givin’ it to you, but it didn’t mean anything at the bawx office or anything. It was just alawta friends gettin’ together and tellin’ some jokes and gettin’ loaded and givin’ out some little prizes. My gawsh, it was..there was no pressure or anything like that.”
Cary Grant corroborated this to me: ”It was a private affair, you see - no television, no radio, even - just a group of friends giving each other a party. Because, you know, there is something a little embarrassing about all these wealthy people publicly congratulating each other. When it began, we kidded ourselves: ‘All right, Freddie March,’ we’d say, ‘we know you’re making a million dollars - now come up and get your little medal for it!’”
-excerpted from Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Hell’s In It

“Once after a dinner party, Gregory Peck and I drove Fred Astaire home. Fred lived in a colonial house that had a long porch with many pillars. When we dropped him off, he danced along the whole front porch, then opened the door, tipped his hat to us, and disappeared.
Wow! Greg and I couldn’t speak for a few minutes. It was a beautiful way to say thank you.”
-Kirk Douglas, in his autobiography Let’s Face It

shift. destiny.

2011-03-22T05:28:00.000-07:00

“Life is a betrayal. And sometimes you betray yourself too, you know. Let’s have the guts to admit it. There isn’t anybody born here lately who didn’t play dirty sometime, somewhere in his life. So why do you hide it? Truth, honesty, that’s my key [to] filmmaking.”
-André de Toth, quoted in A Personal Journey through American Movies with Martin Scorsese (1995

Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939, dir. William Dieterle) (via) “When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.”

“To be good is to be forgotten. I’m going to be so bad I’ll always be remembered.”
-Theda Bara, quoted in “The Confessions of Theda Bara”, Photoplay Magazine (1920)

“I met the French filmmaker Louis Malle through Juliette Greco. He told me he had always loved my music and that he wanted me to write the musical score for his new film, Elevator to the Gallows. I agreed to do it and it was a great learning experience, because I had never written a music score for a film before.
I would look at the rushes of the film and get musical ideas to write down. Since it was about a murder and was supposed to be a suspense movie, I used this old, very gloomy, dark building where I had the musicians play. I thought it would give the music atmosphere, and it did. Everyone loved what I did with the music on that film.”
-Miles Davis, excerpted from Miles, the autobiography

“Film operates on a level much closer to music and to painting than to the printed word, and, of course, movies present the opportunity to convey complex concepts and abstractions without the traditional reliance on words. I think that 2001, like music, succeeds in short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness to narrowly limited areas of experience and is able to cut directly through to areas of emotional comprehension. In two hours and twenty minutes of film there are only forty minutes of dialogue.
I think one of the areas where 2001 succeeds is in stimulating thoughts about man’s destiny and role in the universe in the minds of people who in the normal course of their lives would never have considered such matters. Here again, you’ve got the resemblance to music; an Alabama truck driver, whose views in every other respect would be extremely narrow, is able to listen to a Beatles record on the same level of appreciation and perception as a young Cambridge intellectual, because their emotions and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects. The common bond is their subconscious emotional reaction; and I think that a film which can communicate on this level can have a more profound spectrum of impact than any form of traditional verbal communication.
The problem with movies is that since the talkies the film industry has historically been conservative and word-oriented. The three-act play has been the model. It’s time to abandon the conventional view of the movie as an extension of the three-act play.”
-Kubrick, quoted in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (1970)

successful launch & kind words.

2011-03-22T05:27:00.000-07:00

Rick DavisVery proud of and excited for the intrepid Mason alumni/ae who launched the brand new Blacktop Theatre Company tonight with a moving reading of a completely rethought slightly used brand new play-- clearly marked lanes and as yet not a pothole in sight!

movies

2011-03-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

Just pretend you're in a movie. Be as brave and as full of love as the main character. Because we all need to believe in movies, sometimes.

galley-west

2011-03-17T05:51:00.000-07:00

Word of the Day

March 17

galley-west

\gal-ee-WEST\

adverb

:
into destruction or confusion

A rogue wave knocked the anchored boats galley-west."'Get the door, Scott.' 'Daddy, what if he's ... there?' 'Then I'll knock him galley-west with this thing.'" — From Stephen King's 2006 novel Lisey's Story

Really. Really, Really.

2011-03-17T05:50:00.000-07:00

If speaking to a spiritual novice during the darker days of human evolution, Andrew, one might explain God, metaphorically, as if "He" were angry, testing, and judgmental. To someone a bit more savvy, during easier times, one might explain God, metaphorically, as if "She" were always loving, nurturing, and forever conspiring on our behalf. And to someone on the verge of a total breakthrough, during the latter days of human evolution, one might explain God by asking them to turn up the music, take off their shoes, walk in the grass, unleash the dogs, free the canary, catch a breeze, ride a wave, dance every day, get up early, take a nap, stay out late, eat chocolate, feel the love, give stuff away, earn it back, give some more, and laugh.... Really. Really, really. Catch a breeze, Andrew - The Universe

highs and lows

2011-03-07T05:49:00.001-08:00

Low days exist to remind you that you still have choices. High days, Andrew, exist to remind you of how fast you rebound... among other things.Boing, The Universe

2011-03-06T05:52:00.000-08:00

Be strong, believe in freedom and in God, love yourself, understand your
sexuality, have a sense of humor, masturbate, don't judge people by
their religion, color or sexual habits, love life and your family.- Madonna

Photos: Elizabeth Taylor in Iran Culture: vanityfair.com

2011-03-05T09:12:00.000-08:00

Photos: Elizabeth Taylor in Iran Culture: vanityfair.com

Shhh'em-up!

2011-03-04T05:42:00.001-08:00

We often have to shhhh'em-up, Andrew, here in the unseen. It's because they become so excited when they see a really HUGE dream about to manifest in the seen, they completely forget that from where you are, nothing, yet, appears any different. SHU-U-USH IT! The Universe

Vanité on the Behance Network

2011-03-03T13:18:00.000-08:00

Vanité on the Behance Network

Aral Sea on the Behance Network

2011-03-03T13:13:00.000-08:00

Aral Sea on the Behance Network

Runners on the Behance Network

2011-03-03T13:10:00.000-08:00

Runners on the Behance Network

To Do: Illegal Art on the Behance Network

2011-03-03T13:09:00.000-08:00

To Do: Illegal Art on the Behance Network