Citizens Against ProObama Media Bia (Free subscription) | 11/28/2009
November 2, 2009 Polanski/Goldberg/rape posts Source: (10-26) The Atlantic JOHN MERONEY This is disgusting. Not only that Vidal would think and say such a thing but that the Atlantic would print it. His words speak for themselves. The 13 y/o Polanski raped was a hooker and Polanksi was wrongly accused because of anti-Semitism. JOHN MERONEY: In September, director Roman [...]
johannhari.com (Free subscription) | 11/27/2009
Over the past few years, there has been a drip-drip of artists defending old men who abuse their power over young boys and girls for sexual pleasure. It ranges from Alan Bennett's claim that a teacher who gropes his pupils can be the real child or true innocent, to the widespread assertion in Hollywood that when a 44 year old man drugs and anally rapes a 13 year-old girl, it is not "rape-rape"....
The Independent (Free subscription) | 11/27/2009
Over the past few years, there has been a drip-drip of artists defending old men who abuse their power over young boys and girls for sexual pleasure. It ranges from Alan Bennett's claim that a teacher who gropes his pupils can be the real child or true innocent, to the widespread assertion in Hollywood that when a 44 year old man drugs and anally rapes a 13 year-old girl, it is not "rape-rape"....
Hope Springs (Free subscription) | 11/26/2009
I've never seen an entire row of people leave during a play. Singles, couples, parents with screaming brats in tow, but never ten people at once. They were quite clearly a coach party, or corporate hospitality gone wrong. Mother Courage and Her Children at the National evidently proved too much for them. And why shouldn't it? Brecht's 1939 play features a woman (Fiona Shaw storming the stage) who drags...
MSNBC.com: Newsweek Entertainment (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
Welles's death in 1985 didn't rescue his reputation. "For the television generation," wrote frequent lunch companion Gore Vidal in 1989, "he is remembered as an enormously fat and garrulous man with a booming voice, seen most often on talk shows and in commercials where he somberly assured us that a certain wine would not be sold 'before its time,' whatever that meant." In 1993...
The New Yorker (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
The other day, Francesco Vezzoli, an Italian artist known for his meta-spectacles—an advertisement for a fake perfume called Greed, directed by Roman Polanski; a trailer for a fictional remake of Gore Vidal’s “Caligula,” with him and Courtney Love sharing the title role— . . .
The Morning News (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
Weekday articles from The Morning News
Quigley (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
New Moon: The awakening of the new century’s first generation By Bernie Quigley - for The Hill on 11/20/09 From my point of view President Obama is the most intelligent and savvy of Democratic Presidents to come to power in the post-war period. He has a sensory intuition which allows him to catch up quickly on things and he is far better at external things than internal things. China ambassador...
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
The 60th annual National Book Awards was a night to celebrate literature and to wonder about its future. Lifetime achievement winner Gore Vidal envisioned only pulp and dust Wednesday as he contemplated the state of books, while fellow honorary winner Dave...
Beattie's Book Blog (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
Colum McCann, Phillip Hoose Among National Book Award Winners By Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 11/18/2009 11:10:00 PM Novelist Colum McCann , (pic left, photo by Brendan Bourke) , won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction for his novel Let the Great World Spin (Random House); Gore Vidal (awarded the medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters) was rambling, witty and profound as...
Daily Intelligencer - New York Magazine (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
James Franco, actor, creative writing student, and soon-to-be published author, attended last night's National Book Awards at Cipriani downtown, and hence spent most of the evening basking in the attention of being the most famous person at the party: He was more recognizable than honoree Gore Vidal, more rakishly handsome than Dave Eggers, and definitely more rich than anyone else in the room. Franco...
monochrom (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
"Hate keeps a man alive." Those famous words do not actually appear in the original 1880 novel Ben-Hur by General Lew Wallace. Karl Tunberg, or more likely Christopher Fry or Gore Vidal (there was a dispute over the screenplay credit), gave that line to Roman patrician Quintus Arrius as he confronted the magnificent, nearly-naked galley slave Judah Ben-Hur, played by Charlton Heston, in the...
Bibliobibuli (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
The National Book Award winners were announced November 18 during a ceremony in New York City. These are probably the major US awards after the Pulitzer Prize, and there are several categories. The prize for fiction went to Irish author Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin , which is based on life in New York City in the 1970s. The piece was described as an "indelibly hallucinatory portrait...
Providence Journal (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
By News staff Waldrop Providence poet Keith Waldrop's "Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy" has won the National Book Award for poetry. Waldrop, who lives on the East Side, has taught at Brown for 41 years, where he is the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities . Waldrop, 76, has written about 20 books of poetry. He's also an actor, director and publisher. Critics and admirers have called...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
Irish-born writer's novel Let the Great World Spin, focused on Philip Petit's World Trade Centre tightrope walk, acclaimed as 'gravity-defying feat' Colum McCann won the fiction prize at the National Book awards in New York last night for his novel Let the Great World Spin, an allegorical story inspired by the events of 9/11 and set around Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the twin towers in...
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