Thursday, July 31, 2014

Elizabeth Taylor remembered by Shirley MacLaine

Elizabeth Taylor remembered 

by Shirley MacLaine


She had a way with men, but also great humour and humanity, recalls her friend and fellow actress
Elizabeth Taylor on the set of the the 1956 movie Giant: 'She knew she was seen as a product and might as well use it.' Photograph: Frank Worth/Getty
I will remember looking at her jewellery in the sun. In recent years, I would go up to Elizabeth's home all the time to make sure she was exercising or I would send someone else to make her get in the pool. She was not a fan of exercise, so most of the time we would end up taking out her jewellery and just looking at it in the sunlight.
We first met when I was 21 and she was 23 and found we were very relaxed together. I can't remember how it happened, but then I can't remember much now about when I was 21. A man I knew was in love with Elizabeth, I think, and I knew both of them.
At that time, people were not fawning all over her – except the men, of course. We would talk mainly about work. We were both working six-day weeks and she was looking for the next piece of work. She never had a scheme, though. She was the kind of person who felt that things just happened when they should happen. Her marriage to Michael Wilding was ending and, although he was a nice person and was very nice with her, Elizabeth had adventures to go on. And, when I think of it, one of those adventures she never got around to having was to be anonymous. She talked to me about being a regular housewife. She honestly wanted that – to look after a home and kids.
She had been a star since she was a child and was not as naturally outgoing as me anyway. When I was pregnant, I would go to her house and eat ice-cream and she would tell me what the rest of pregnancy was going to be like. Later on, she would come to my one-room shack on the beach. She told me so much about her life there, not just about her childhood but about things that had happened to her and which I will never tell.
I introduced her to Mike Todd, her third husband, on Around the World in 80 Days and then watched the negotiations between them. And theywere negotiations. She was very funny. She used to bargain with him about going out to dinner.
Later, she told me about asking for $1m to do Cleopatra and she laughed. She never expected anyone to pay it. But she was a good businesswoman and later she turned all that into a multimillion dollar concern. She felt that, since she was perceived as a product, she might as well use it. Elizabeth was always regarded as a prize and she knew how to manipulate that with men, too.
She did not see herself as "Elizabeth Taylor" at all. She was much more like a Yiddisher momma, to be honest. She used to say she was going to have to be "Elizabeth Taylor" and put on that show. That was the gig, after all. It's what she had to do.
She was so much more down to earth than you would imagine. I miss her deep, deep humanity – something you don't find very often. And, of course, her humour. We wanted to make fun of the world together. Not to look down on it, though. We just watched.





Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Eight hundred dead Palestinians. But Israel has impunity

Eight hundred dead Palestinians. But Israel has impunity

There’s something very odd about our reactions to these two outrageous death tolls

by Robert Fisk
Saturday 26 July 2014


Impunity is the word that comes to mind. Eight hundred dead Palestinians. Eight hundred. That’s infinitely more than twice the total dead of flight MH17 over Ukraine. And if you refer only to the “innocent” dead – ie no Hamas fighters, young sympathisers or corrupt Hamas officials, with whom the Israelis will, in due course, have to talk – then the women and children and elderly who have been slaughtered in Gaza are still well over the total number of MH17 victims.
And there’s something very odd, isn’t there, about our reactions to these two outrageous death tolls. In Gaza, we plead for a ceasefire but let them bury their dead in the sweltering slums of Gaza and cannot even open a humanitarian route for the wounded. For the passengers on MH17, we demand – immediately – proper burial and care for the relatives of the dead. We curse those who left bodies lying in the fields of eastern Ukraine – as many bodies have been lying, for a shorter time, perhaps, but under an equally oven-like sky, in Gaza.
Because – and this has been creeping up on me for years – we don’t care so much about the Palestinians, do we? We care neither about Israeli culpability, which is far greater because of the larger number of civilians the Israeli army have killed. Nor, for that matter, Hamas’s capability. Of course, God forbid that the figures should have been the other way round. If 800 Israelis had died and only 35 Palestinians, I think I know our reaction.

We would call it – rightly – a slaughter, an atrocity, a crime for which the killers must be made accountable. Yes, Hamas should be made accountable, too. But why is it that the only criminals we are searching for today are the men who fired one – perhaps two – missiles at an airliner over Ukraine? If Israel’s dead equalled those of the Palestinians – and let me repeat, thank heavens this is not the case – I suspect that the Americans would be offering all military support to an Israel endangered by “Iranian-backed terrorists”. We would be demanding that Hamas hand over the monsters who fired rockets at Israel and who are, by the way, trying to hit aircraft at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. But we are not doing this. Because those who have died are mostly Palestinians.
More questions. What’s the limit for Palestinian deaths before we have a ceasefire? Eight hundred? Or 8,000? Could we have a scorecard? The exchange rate for dead? Or would we just wait until our gorge rises at the blood and say enough – even for Israel’s war, enough is enough. It’s not as if we have not been through all this before.
From the massacre of Arab villagers by Israel’s new army in 1948, as it is set down by Israeli historians, to the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when Lebanese Christian allies of Israel murdered up to 1,700 people in 1982 while Israeli troops watched; from the Qana massacre of Lebanese Arabs at the UN base – yes, the UN again – in 1996, to another, smaller terrible killing at Qana (again) 10 years later. And so to the mass killing of civilians in the 2008-9 Gaza war. And after Sabra and Shatila, there were inquiries, and after Qana there was an inquiry and after Gaza in 2008-9, there was an inquiry and don’t we remember the weight of it, somewhat lightened of course when Judge Goldstone did his best to disown it, when – according to my Israeli friends – he came under intense personal pressure.
In other words, we have been here before. The claim that only “terrorists” are to blame for those whom Hamas kills and only “terrorists” are to blame for those whom Israel kills (Hamas “terrorists”, of course). And the constant claim, repeated over and over and over, that Israel has the highest standards of any army in the world and would never hurt civilians. I recall here the 17,500 dead of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, most of whom were civilians. Have we forgotten all this?
And apart from impunity, the word stupidity comes to mind. I will forget here the corrupt Arabs and the killers of Isis and the wholesale mass murders of Iraq and Syria. Perhaps their indifference to “Palestine” is to be expected. They do not claim to represent our values. But what do we make of John Kerry, Obama’s Secretary of State, who told us last week that the “underlying issues” of the Israeli-Palestinian war need to be addressed? What on earth was he doing all last year when he claimed he was going to produce a Middle East peace in 12 months? Doesn’t he realise why the Palestinians are in Gaza?
The truth is that many hundreds of thousands of people around the world – I wish I could say millions – want an end to this impunity, an end to phrases such as “disproportionate casualties”. Disproportionate to what? Brave Israelis also feel this way. They write about it. Long live the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz. Meanwhile, the Arab, Muslim world becomes wilder with anger. And we will pay the price. 



Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Andrew Wyeth / Five

Andrew Wyeth 

(1917 – 2009) 


Andrew Wyeth

FIVE


Andrew Newell Wyeth was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century. 

In his art, Wyeth's favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine. Wyeth often noted: "I paint my life." One of the best-known images in 20th-century American art is his painting, Christina's World, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This tempera was painted in 1948 when Wyeth was 31 years old.


5) “COMBERS”
4) “TRODDEN WEED”
3) “WEATHER”
2) “THE INTRUDER”
1) “CHRISTINA´S WORLD”

Monday, July 28, 2014

John Le Carré on Philip Seymour Hoffman / Staring at the Flame


MOVIES

Staring at the Flame

John Le Carré on Philip Seymour Hoffman

By John Le Carré
The New York Times, July 17, 2014



I reckon I spent five hours at most in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s close company, six at a pinch. Otherwise it was standing around with other people on the set of “A Most Wanted Man,” watching him on the monitor and afterward telling him he was great, or deciding better to keep your thoughts to yourself. I didn’t even do a lot of that: a couple of visits to the set, one silly walk-on part that required me to grow a disgusting beard, took all day and delivered a smudgy picture of somebody I was grateful not to recognize. There’s probably nobody more redundant in the film world than a writer of origin hanging around the set of his movie, as I’ve learned to my cost. Alec Guinness actually did me the favor of having me shown off the set of the BBC’s TV adaptation of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” All I was wanting to do was radiate my admiration, but Alec said my glare was too intense.

Come to think of it, Philip did the same favor for a woman friend of ours one afternoon on the shoot of “A Most Wanted Man” in Hamburg that winter of 2012. She was standing in a group 30-odd yards away from him, just watching and getting cold like everybody else. But something about her bothered him, and he had her removed. It was a little eerie, a little psychic, but he was bang on target because the woman in the case is a novelist, too, and she can do intensity with the best of us. Philip didn’t know that. He just sniffed it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, left, and John le Carré, during the filming of “A Most Wanted Man,”
which opens on July 25.



In retrospect, nothing of that kind surprised me about Philip, because his intuition was luminous from the instant you met him. So was his intelligence. A lot of actors act intelligent, but Philip was the real thing: a shining, artistic polymath with an intelligence that came at you like a pair of headlights and enveloped you from the moment he grabbed your hand, put a huge arm round your neck and shoved a cheek against yours; or if the mood took him, hugged you to him like a big, pudgy schoolboy, then stood and beamed at you while he took stock of the effect.

Philip took vivid stock of everything, all the time. It was painful and exhausting work, and probably in the end his undoing. The world was too bright for him to handle. He had to screw up his eyes or be dazzled to death. Like Chatterton, he went seven times round the moon to your one, and every time he set off, you were never sure he’d come back, which is what I believe somebody said about the German poet Hölderlin: Whenever he left the room, you were afraid you’d seen the last of him. And if that sounds like wisdom after the event, it isn’t. Philip was burning himself out before your eyes. Nobody could live at his pace and stay the course, and in bursts of startling intimacy he needed you to know it.


A Most Wanted Man trailer
Philip Seymour Hoffman, with Rachel McAdams, in “A Most Wanted Man,” based on the John le Carré novel. CreditKerry Brown/Roadside Attractions




No actor had ever made quite the impact on me that Philip did at that first encounter: not Richard Burton, not Burt Lancaster or even Alec Guinness. Philip greeted me as if he’d been waiting to meet me all his life, which I suspect was how he greeted everyone. But I’d been waiting to meet Philip for a long time. I reckoned his “Capote” the best single performance I’d seen on screen. But I didn’t dare tell him that, because there’s always a danger with actors, when you tell them how great they were nine years ago, that they demand to know what’s been wrong with their performances ever since.



But I did tell him that he was the only American actor I knew who could play my character George Smiley, a role first graced by Guinness in the BBC “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” and more recently by Gary Oldman in the big-screen adaptation — but then, as a loyal Brit, I was claiming Gary Oldman for our own.



Perhaps I was also remembering that, like Guinness, Philip wasn’t much of a lover on screen, but mercifully, we didn’t have to bother about that in our movie. If Philip had to take a girl in his arms, you didn’t actually blush and look away as you did with Guinness, but you couldn’t help feeling that somehow he was doing it for you rather than himself.


Our filmmakers had a lot of discussion about whether they could get Philip into bed with somebody, and it’s an interesting thought that when they did finally come up with a proposal, both partners ran a mile. It was only when the magnificent actress Nina Hoss appeared beside him that the makers realized they were looking at a small miracle of romantic failure. In her role, which was hastily bulked out, she is Philip’s adoring work mate, acolyte and steadying hand, and he breaks her heart.

That suited Philip just fine. His role of Günther Bachmann, middle-aged German intelligence officer on the skids, did not allow for enduring love or any other kind. Philip had made that decision from Day 1 and to rub it in, carried a well-thumbed paperback copy of my novel around with him — and what author of origin could ask more? — to brandish in the face of anyone who wanted to sex the story up.

Mr. Hoffman, right, on that film’s set with the director, Anton Corbijn, far left, and Willem Dafoe.CreditKerry Brown/Roadside Attractions

The movie of “A Most Wanted Man” also features Rachel McAdams and Willem Dafoe, and opens in a cinema near you, I hope, so start saving now. It was shot almost entirely in Hamburg and Berlin, and numbers in its cast some of Germany’s most distinguished actors in relatively humble roles, not only the sublime Nina Hoss (the film “Barbara”), but also Daniel Brühl (“Rush”).

In the novel, Bachmann is a secret agent on his uppers. Well, Philip can relate to that. The character’s been whisked home from Beirut after losing his precious spy network to the clumsiness or worse of the C.I.A. He has been put out to grass in Hamburg, the city that played host to the 9/11 conspirators. Its regional intelligence arm, and many of its citizens, are still living with that embarrassment.



Bachmann’s self-devised mission is to put the score straight: not by way of snatch teams, waterboards and extrajudicial killings, but by the artful penetration of spies, by espousal, by using the enemy’s own weight to bring him down, and the consequent disarming of jihadism from within.

Over a fancy dinner with the filmmakers and the high end of the cast, I don’t remember either Philip or myself talking much about the actual role of Bachmann; just more generally, about such things as the care and maintenance of secret agents and the pastoral role incumbent on their agent runners. Forget blackmail, I said. Forget the macho. Forget sleep deprivation, locking people in boxes, simulated executions and other enhancements. The best agents, snitches, joes, informants or whatever you want to call them, I pontificated, needed patience, understanding and loving care. I like to think he took my homily to heart, but more likely he was wondering whether he could use a bit of that soupy expression I put on when I’m trying to impress.


Mr. Hoffman as a German intelligence officer on the skids in “A Most Wanted Man.”CreditKerry Brown/Roadside Attraction




It’s hard now to write with detachment about Philip’s performance as a desperate middle-aged man going amok, or the way he fashioned the arc of his character’s self-destruction. He was directed, of course. And the director, Anton Corbijn, a cultural polymath in Philip’s class, is many wonderful things: photographer of world renown, pillar of the contemporary music scene and himself the subject of a documentary film. His first feature,“Control” in black and white, is iconic. He is currently making a movie about James Dean. Yet for all that, his creative talents, where I have seen them at work, strike me as inward and sovereign to himself. He would be the last person, I suspect, to describe himself as a theoretical dramatist, or articulate communicator about the inner life of a character. Philip had to have that dialogue with himself, and it must have been a pretty morbid one, filled with questions like: At which point exactly do I lose all sense of moderation? Or, why do I insist on going through with this whole thing when deep down I know it can only end in tragedy? But tragedy lured Bachmann like a wrecker’s lamp, and it lured Philip, too.

There was a problem about accents. We had really good German actors who spoke English with a German accent. Collective wisdom dictated, not necessarily wisely, that Philip should do the same. For the first few minutes of listening to him, I thought, “Crikey.” No German I knew spoke English like this. He did a mouth thing, a kind of pout. He seemed to kiss his lines rather than speak them. Then gradually he did what only the greatest actors can do. He made his voice the only authentic one, the lonely one, the odd one out, the one you depended on amid all the others. And every time it left the stage, like the great man himself, you waited for its return with impatience and mounting unease.

We shall wait a long time for another Philip.


John le Carré is the author of “A Most Wanted Man” and, most recently, “A Delicate Truth.” “A Most Wanted Man” will be in theaters on Friday.




The 100 best novels / No 45 / The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)



The 100 best novels

writtein English

No 45

The Age of Innocence 

by Edith Wharton (1920)


The story of a blighted New York marriage stands as a fierce indictment of a society estranged from culture

Monday 28 July 2014


Edith Wharton (nee Newbold Jones), who was born into a rich and distinguished New York family in 1862, is perhaps a great city's greatest novelist. From The House of Mirth (1905) to The Custom of the Country (1913) to her masterpiece The Age of Innocence, Wharton's subject was the changing scene of New York City, the foibles of its fashionable elites and the ambitions of the "new people" who, she felt, threatened its traditional culture. Wharton was also close to Henry James whom she described as "perhaps the most intimate friend I ever had, though in many ways we were so different". Together, from 1900 to the end of the Great War, the work of James and Wharton dominates American literature.


The Age of Innocence tells the story of a forthcoming society wedding, and the threat to the happy couple from the appearance in their midst of an exotic and beautiful femme fatale, a cousin of the bride. Newland Archer (the name makes a nod to James's heroine Isabel Archer) is a distinguished lawyer looking forward to his marriage to shy, lovely, sheltered May Welland. But when he meets Countess Ellen Olenska, scandalously separated from her European husband, a Polish count, he falls hopelessly in love and blights his marriage to May by failing to break off his relationship with the countess. Meanwhile, in a typical Wharton twist, Newland Archer's bride may be timid, but she is determined to marry her fiance and uses all the power of New York society to bring him to heel.The social tragedy of Newland Archer's unhappy union was informed by Wharton's own marital breakdown, a crisis brought on by her husband's acute nervous collapse. By 1913, however, Wharton was divorced and free to explore her gifts as a writer of fiction.
As with all her New York novels, The Age of Innocence makes an ironic commentary on the cruelties and hypocrisies of Manhattan society in the years before, during and after the Great War. Strangely, when it won the 1921 Pulitzer prize, the judges praised it for revealing "the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood". Today, while not as merciless in its analysis as The House of Mirth, Wharton's late masterpiece stands as a fierce indictment of a society estranged from culture and in desperate need of a European sensibility. This had been an issue for American writers since Washington Irving, Melville and Hawthorne. Some critics would say it remains unresolved to this day.



A Note on the Text

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton's 12th novel, which takes its title from a 1785 painting of A Little Girl by Joshua Reynolds, was first serialised in four parts during 1920 in the Pictorial Review. It subsequently appeared in book form from the American publisher D Appleton & Company of New York. In 1921, The Age of Innocence became the first novel written by a woman to win a Pulitzer.



The book has inspired many film, television and theatrical adaptations: most recently, in 1993, Martin Scorsese directed a film version starring Michelle Pfeiffer as Countess Ellen Olenska, Daniel Day-Lewis as Newland Archer and Winona Ryder as May Welland Archer.

Three More From Edith Wharton

The House of Mirth (1905); Ethan Frome (1911); The Custom of the Country (1913).
THE GUARDIAN



THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)