Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Black and White / Amy Adams

BLACK AND WHITE

Amy Adams

The Adams Chronicle

BIOGRAPHY OF AMY ADAMS

VANITY FAIR

December 31, 2013

Amy Adams can, and does, play anything, with a depth and range epitomized by her roles in two new movies: her sultry, foulmouthed con artist in American Hustle and her kindhearted documentary-film maker in Her. If there’s a throughline to her life, on-screen and off, it’s musical theater. In Santa Monica, Nell Scovell gets Adams talking, and singing, about her mustached co-stars, the many identities she’s assumed, and who she really wants to be.

BY NELL SCOVELL

“When things are out of control, I’ll sing the ‘Golden Helmet’ song, from Man of La Mancha,” she revealed during a recent interview in Santa Monica. “I’ll just go … [sings] I can hear the cuckoo singing in the cuckooberry tree … And everyone in my life knows that means the situation is spiraling.”

Amy Adams, photographed at the Chateau Marmont, in West HollywoodPHOTOGRAPH BY

NORMAN JEAN ROY

She still feels empowered by Wicked (who doesn’t?). She starts sobbing at “The Wizard and I” and keeps it going through “Defying Gravity.” The opening of Act II gets her, too. “You know that song … [sings] There’s a couple of things get lost / There are bridges you cross / You didn’t know you crossed / Until you crossssssssed … ” She catches herself. “I love that line. And I’m singing it for you, so now you know I’m a full nerd.”

Amy Adams
Poster by T.A.

AMY ADAMS: A REDHEAD TO ADORE!

BIOGRAPHY OF AMY ADAMS

JULY 16, 2013

By Kim Wacker

Born in 1974 in Italy, actress Amy Adams has come a long way in her career. What many people don’t know is that Adams was raised in a Mormon family with six siblings.

Fame didn’t come overnight for Amy; she always dreamed of becoming a ballerina, but ironically, a pulled muscle led her to her first film audition. Would you believe that before this actress made the big time, she worked as a Sales Associate at Gap and as a Waitress at Hooters?

Lily-Rose Depp / My dad is the sweestest most loving person I know

Lily-Rose Depp

"MY DAD IS THE SWEESTEST MOST LOVING PERSON
I KNOW"

"My dad is the sweetest most loving person I know, he's been nothing but a wonderful father to my little brother and I, and everyone who knows him would say the same "

Lily-Rose Depp

DRAGON

Beautiful Women / Amber Heard and Johnny Depp
Amber Heard files for divorce from Johnny Depp
Amber Heard granted restraining order against husband Johnny Depp
Amber Heard is pictured smiling hours after Depp's 'iPhone attack'

DE OTROS MUNDOS

Jonny Depp abandona su soltería por Amber Heard

Orden de alejamiento contra Johnny Depp por agredir a Amber Heard

FICCIONES

Triunfo Arciniegas / Diario / Johnny Depp y el arte de tronar

PESSOA

Johnny Depp é acusado de violência doméstica por Amber Heard

RIMBAUD

Johnny Depp jugé «agressif» n'a plus le droit d'approcher Amber Heard

DANTE

Donne / Amber Heard
Johnny Deep / Non solo Amber, tutte le star picchiate dai partner
La lezione di Amber /un livido basta per dire addio a Johnny Depp

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 18 / The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 18 – The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)

The book that ignited second-wave feminism captured the frustration of a generation of middle-class American housewives by daring to ask ‘is this all?’

Robert McCrumb

Monday 30 May 2016

‘I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor’: Betty Friedan in 1970. Photograph: Tim Boxer/Getty Images

Betty Friedan, the godmother of the postwar US women’s movement, was an accidental feminist. “Until I started writing [The Feminine Mystique]” she confessed in 1973, “I wasn’t even conscious of the woman problem.” Friedan had begun her research into “the problem that has no name” – a catchy homage to “the love that dare not speak its name” of Oscar Wilde’s fin-de-siècle disgrace – as part of her work for a questionnaire of her former college classmates on their 15th reunion in 1957, thinking that she would “disprove the current notion that education had fitted us ill for our role as women”.

When Friedan discovered that many of her former classmates were unhappy with their lives as women in society she pitched an article based on the questionnaire to McCall’s magazine, which “turned the piece down in horror”. By now, she was sure she was “on the track of something. But what?” Gradually, “from somewhere deep within me”, a project that was now becoming a book began to take shape. “I have never experienced anything as powerful, truly mystical, as the forces that seemed to take me over when I was writing The Feminine Mystique”, she wrote later, in an almost perfect summary of that peculiar literary phenomenon, the zeitgeist book.As the critic Jay Parini has written, Friedan’s work “almost single-handedly ignited a revolutionary phase that has deeply affected the lives of countless American women and men”. Or, as Alvin Toffler put it, hers was a book “that pulled the trigger on history”. Rarely has a title in this series flown off the shelves as this did, selling 300,000 copies within the first year. Thirteen foreign language translations followed. Within three years of the book’s publication, Friedan had sold more than 3m copies.

Friedan herself professed puzzlement about what it was she had identified, right up to publication. After five years research and hard work in the New York Public Library, she continued to see herself as the prisoner of “that mystique, which kept us passive”. Indeed, in common with many American women of the early 1960s, she “thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor. I was a freak, writing that book.”

Today, The Feminine Mystique seems far from freaky, at times even staid verging on reactionary. Still, it retains a polemical undertow that’s plainly designed to shift the minds of her readers. Compared to the other classic postwar statement of feminism, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, Friedan speaks quite practically to the concerns of middle-class American housewives, but mainly about the independent woman’s life in house and home. “The problem,” begins Friedan’s narrative, “lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – ‘Is this all?’”

In a society famously dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness”, Friedan reported that American women had lost their smiles. “I feel empty,” declared this first generation of desperate housewives. Friedan intensified her argument by braiding it with one of many personal admissions: a slave to the feminine mystique, she had made her own sacrifices for “the dream of love”, and become frustrated. (She, and her estranged husband, Carl, would fight about their marriage up to and beyond their eventual divorce.) Away from her failing home life, as a seasoned magazine journalist she conducted more reportage into the condition of female college students (“I don’t want a career I’ll have to give up”, says one) following this up with a fairly simplistic assault on Freud (“the puritan old maid who sees sex everywhere”) and then against social anthropology, and Margaret Mead, whom Friedan convicts for “the glorification of the female role”.Having anatomised this crisis of identity among American women, at least to her own satisfaction, Friedan wrenches her argument back to the present. She and her generation, she argues, are victims of the 20th century, specifically the depression, the second world war, and the anomie of the atomic age. The baby boom, she says, was a reaction to more than a decade of dehumanising crisis, an instinctive quest for the traditional comforts of hearth and home. She is not really against this, rather determined to level the playing field for husbands and wives.

Watch an interview with Betty Friedan on Canada’s CBC.

As Friedan’s narrative works through sex, consumerism and dehumanisation, she builds to her stirring conclusion: “the feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive”.

Finally, after a call to have contemporary women taking up roles “requiring initiative, leadership and responsibility”, her book becomes a rallying cry, exhorting women to make change happen for themselves. This path to liberation, she concedes, would not be easy. Nevertheless, now was the time for a final breakthrough: “In the light of women’s long battle for emancipation, the recent sexual counter-revolution [of the 1950s] has been perhaps a final crisis before the larva breaks out of the shell into maturity.” Women, who had allowed the liberation of wartime to be taken away from them, would soon recognise their self-incarceration and break free, sexually and socially.

Friedan’s sometimes awkward, occasionally inspired rhetoric would underpin women’s lib, which in turn would morph into the ongoing feminist revolution in the writing of Susan Brownmiller, Germaine Greer (No 13 in this series), Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, even Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1991), and many more. Few books in this series have enjoyed such a direct and immediate influence on their readership. Friedan, who died in 2006, was a magazine journalist more than a literary writer, but unquestionably a 20th-century icon. To her admirers, she was the woman who changed the course of history for American women. In her obituary notice, Germaine Greer wrote a more careful verdict. Friedan had pioneered something important, even if subsequent feminists were uneasy in her company, and “though her behaviour was often tiresome, she had a point. Women don’t get the respect they deserve unless they are wielding male-shaped power.”

A signature sentence

“With a vision of the happy modern housewife as she is described by the magazines and television, by the functional sociologists, the sex-directed educators, and the manipulators dancing before my eyes, I went in search of one of those mystical creatures.”

Three to compare

AC Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)

Kate Millett: Sexual Politics (1969)

Susan Brownmiller: Against Our Will (1975)

THE GUARDIAN

THE 100 BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF ALL TIME

The 100 best nonfiction books of all time

001 The Sixth Extintion by Elizabeth Kolbert (2004)
002 The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion(2005)

003 No Logo by Noami Klein (1999)

004 Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes (1998)

005 Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (1995)

006 A brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)

007 The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (1979)

008 Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)
009 Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
010 The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

011 North by Seamus Heaney (1975)

012 Awekenings by Oliver Sacks (1973)

013 The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)

014 Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom by Nick Cohn (1969)

015 The Double Helix by James D Watson (1968)

016 Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag (1966)

017 Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965)

018 The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)

019 The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)

020 Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)

021 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S Kuhn (1962)
022 A Grief Observed by CS Lewis (1961)

023 The Elements of Style by William Strunk and EB White (1959)
o24 The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958)

025 The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life by Richard Hoggart (1957)

026 Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955)

027 The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art by Kenneth Clark (1956)

028 The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin (1953)

029 Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1952 / 53)

030 A Book of Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David (1950)

036 Black Boy by Richard Wright (1945)

Sunday, May 29, 2016

Amber Heard is pictured smiling hours after Depp's 'iPhone attack'

Pictured is Heard (left) at her friend Amanda de Cadenet's (centre) birthday party with Amber Valletta on Sunday - the day after she was allegedly attacked. Her hair covers the areas which appeared to be bruised the day before. The picture was posted on Instagram and has since been deleted

Amber Heard is pictured smiling

hours after Depp's 'iPhone attack'

Amber Heard is pictured smiling hours after Depp's 'iPhone attack': Actress claims 'cocaine and booze binges turned Johnny into an abusive monster who left her fearing for her life' - but why was this image deleted before court appearance?

Photographs submitted to the court show Amber Heard with a large bruise on her face, as well as broken bottles, picture frames and shattered glass on the floor. Photograph: Ettore Ferrari/EPA

Amber Heard granted restraining order against husband Johnny Depp

A judge ordered Depp to stay away from his estranged wife, who filed for divorceon Monday and accused the actor of repeatedly physically assaulting her

Nicky Woolf in Los Angeles
Saturday 28 May 2016 10.31 BST

A Los Angeles judge has granted a restraining order against Johnny Depp from his estranged wife Amber Heard, who has accused him of domestic violence, court documents show.

Amber Heard

Amber Heard files for divorce from Johnny Depp

The actor cites ‘irreconcilable differences’ in court papers a little more than a year after they were married

Nicky Woolf and Agencies
Thursday 26 May 2016 01.09 BST

Johnny Depp’s wife has filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences after just over a year of marriage.

Court records show that Amber Heard filed for divorce on Monday and is seeking spousal support from the Oscar-nominated actor. The split also comes hard on the heels of the death on 20 May of Depp’s mother, Betty Sue Palmer, after a long illness.

Amber Heard and Johnny Depp are to divorce, court papers said.
Photograph by Jordan Strauss

Depp and Heard recently hit the headlines for a bizarre spat with Australian deputy prime minister and minister for agriculture Barnaby Joyce, after Heard fell foul of biosecurity rules for unlawfully bringing the pair’s dogs into the country. Joyce threatened to have the dogs euthanised unless they “buggered off” back to the United States.

The 100 best nonfiction books of all time by Robert MaCrum

Umberto Eco, who writes that ‘the list is the origin of the culture’.

The 100 best nonfiction books of all time

Robert McCrum launches the Observer’s definitive 100 works of nonfiction – key texts in English that have shaped our literary culture and made us who we are

Robert McCrum
Monday 25 January 2016 05.44 GMT

A

nother book list? Yes and no. When we completed our 100 best novels in the English language last August, you did not have to be one of its fiercest critics – there were a few of those – to recognise it was still a job half done. Plainly, the English literary tradition is rich in great works of poetry and prose that are not novels. The King James Bible of 1611, for instance, is every bit as influential as the greatest novelists of the past 300 years, from Austen to Waugh. Indeed, as the 100 best novels series drew to a close, we began to wonder what a complementary list of 100 great English-language nonfiction titles might look like.

Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard / Macbeth / Posters

Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard

MACBETH

Posters

Park Chan-wook

“Mademoiselle”

THE HANDMAIDEN

Kristen Stewart / 'Sometimes I do feel a bit like I have my limbs cut off'

Kristen Stewart
Photo by Mario Testino

Kristen Stewart:

'Sometimes I do feel a bit like I have my limbs cut off'

The star of Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, in which she plays an assistant to an immensely famous model, says she sometimes feels debilitated by fame and shares her thoughts on the supernatural

Henry Barnes
Tuesday 17 May 2016 14.41 BST

The lack of freedom afforded to you by being famous feels a bit like “having your limbs cut off”, Kristen Stewart told press at the Cannes film festival.

The actor was speaking at the press conference for Olivier Assayas’s supernatural drama, Personal Shopper. The second film at Cannes in which she stars (the other is Woody Allen’s Café Society, which opened the festival last week), Personal Shopper sees her play Maureen, a psychic medium who, during daylight hours, assists a famous fashion model with her clothing choices.

Kristen Stewart

Kristen Stewart:

'I'd love to work with Lars von Trier'

The Twilight actor, who has two films playing at Cannes, would next most like to collaborate with the controversial Danish auteur

Nigel M Smith in Cannes
Wednesday 18 May 2016 11.30 BST

Kristen Stewart has said that she would “kill” to work with Lars von Trier. Stewart confessed to her love for von Trier to the Guardian while discussing Allen’s Cannes-opener, Café Society.

Speaking at a press event for Cafe Society, Stewart was asked which film-makers she was keen to work with and said: “I love Lars von Trier. It’s hard for me to think of those things and I’m reluctant to say [who] because they follow you around. Seems horse before the cart. But I would kill to work for Lars von Trier.”

Isabelle Huppert / Elle is not about a woman 'accepting her rapist'

Isabelle Huppert
Cannes 2016

Isabelle Huppert: Elle is not about a woman 'accepting her rapist'

At the Cannes film festival, the actor said that her controversial dark comedy, about a woman dealing with sexual assault in an unconventional manner, should be taken as a ‘fantasy’

Benjamin Lee
Saturday 21 May 2016 13.02 BST

The fantasy is within yourself but it’s not necessarily something that you want to happen’ ...
Isabelle Huppert on her character in Elle. Photograph: Valery Hache

Isabelle Huppert has spoken about her provocative new film Elle, claiming “it’s not a statement about a woman being raped”.

The controversial black comedy was greeted with shocked laughter and enthusiastic applause as it screened at the Cannes film festival earlier today. In the film, directed by Paul Verhoeven, Huppert plays a woman who is brutally raped but deals with the fallout in a perverse and often darkly comical way.

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 17 – Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965)

The groundbreaking collection of work that established Plath as one of the last century’s most original and gifted poets

Robert McCrum
Monday 23 May 2016 05.44 BST

ith Birthday Letters (No 4), this series has already identified the radioactivity buried within the work of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and recognised their place in the canon. With Ariel, Plath’s second volume of poems, we approach the catalyst for 20th-century poetry’s thermonuclear explosion.

First, the terrible circumstances surrounding the first appearance of Ariel are essential to any reading of Plath’s work. In the early years of her marriage to Ted Hughes, Plath had been the junior partner. She was known as the author of The Colossus: and Other Poems (1960), a well-received first collection, described by the Guardian as an “outstanding technical accomplishment”, but not yet indicating the extraordinary power locked within Plath’s literary psyche.

The key to Plath’s final years, on top of the disintegration of her marriage to Hughes, lies in her lifelong fascination with her own death. As she expresses it in Ariel, her title poem, “I am the arrow… that flies. Suicidal, at one with the drive. Into the red eye...” Everything she wrote now was shadowed by this obsession.

Between 1961 and ’62, working fast and urgently, she completed her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, writing to her mother that what she had done “is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalising to add colour – I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown… I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.”

The Bell Jar was released by William Heinemann (publisher of The Colossus) in London on 14 January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. This was a decision inspired by Plath’s desire to spare the feelings of her mother and a number of real-life characters in the novel. Plath’s first novel appeared in the midst of the most bitter English winter of the century, and aroused virtually no comment.

Meanwhile, Plath had begun to put together the manuscript that became the framework for Ariel in early 1962. Restlessly focusing her poetic intention, she had changed its title from The Rival to A Birthday Present to Daddy to The Rabbit Catcher and finally to Ariel and Other Poems. She was now separated from Ted Hughes, whose affair with Assia Wevill had precipitated their break-up, and living alone with her two small children, Nick and Frieda, near Primrose Hill, London, in a house, 23 Fitzroy Road, once occupied by W B Yeats. By November 1962, she was done.

Then, in the early morning hours of her last few weeks, she wrote those poems that, as she herself predicted, would “make my name”. All the poems written during the autumn of 1962, and into the new year, had been inspired by the intense solitude of her situation, and many of the final poems in Ariel are attributable to her predicament as a young single mother, but also to her clinical depression and the incipient breakdown that culminated in her suicide in the early morning of 11 February 1963. (Al Alvarez’s account of this tragedy in his study of suicide, The Savage God, remains the indispensable portrait of this psychodrama.)

The poignant circumstances of Plath’s death, as they became known, intensified the Anglo-American literary interest in the poet and her work. In 1965, The Bell Jar was republished under her own name and quickly recognised as a dark classic of contemporary feminism. But it was the publication of Ariel in the same year (1966 in the US) that set the seal on her posthumous fame and reputation. Here was a collection of strange, disturbing, and confessional poems whose wild and exhilarating ferocity exerted a remarkable grip on the imagination of a new generation.

Robert Lowell, in his preface to the first edition of Ariel, describes these as poems that are “playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder”. He was acknowledging what countless subsequent readers would discover for themselves: that Ariel is the volume on which Plath’s reputation as one of the most original, daring and gifted poets of the last century rests.

The manuscript Plath had left behind on her death was titled Ariel and Other Poems. But that manuscript would not appear for more than 40 years. Instead, a rather different book called simply Ariel (published by Faber & Faber) reached bookshops in the UK in 1965 and sold a phenomenal 15,000 copies in 10 months. In the US edition (varying slightly from the UK edition), 12 of Plath’s chosen poems were cut, 15 new ones added in their place; and several other poems moved from their original order.

Ted Hughes – of whom, towards the end of her life, she had written “I hate and despise him so I can hardly speak” – had made the changes, inviting many searching and explosive questions about his apparent conflict of interest as Plath’s executor and also the subject of her poetry. A generation would pass before an enraged feminist critique softened into a belated recognition that Hughes had fulfilled an almost impossible task with remarkable sensitivity and understanding. After all, the manuscript left behind at her death was still a work in progress.

Among these groundbreaking, and often difficult, poems are numbered several classics: Lady Lazarus, Ariel, The Moon and the Yew Tree, Daddy and Stings. Plath’s fierce interrogation of herself and her feelings, and her unflinching honesty, came as a shocking revelation to poetry readers in the mid-1960s. Eventually, the Ariel of 1965, edited by Ted Hughes, was complemented in 2004 by a new edition, masterminded by Frieda Hughes, Plath’s faithful daughter, which for the first time restored the selection and arrangement of the poems as her mother had left them.

In addition, finally, there is Ted Hughes’s own response (in Birthday Letters) to his dead wife’s phoenix-like resurgence. One of the most disturbing poems here is Suttee, his record of Plath’s emergence as a poet, in which Hughes casts himself as a midwife delivering an “explosion / Of screams” and before being “engulfed / In a flood, a dam-burst thunder / Of a new myth”, a birth that “sucked the oxygen out of both of us”.

Many of the poems in Birthday Letters address the conundrum of Plath’s other self. Hughes had already rehearsed this line of thought in his 1982 foreword to the first edition of Plath’s journals, claiming that, although he had “spent every day with her for six years, and was rarely separated from her for more than two or three hours at a time”, he had never seen “her show her real self to anybody – except, perhaps, in the last three months of her life”.

Despite the unreconciled dialogue between husband and wife, in many conflicting registers, Ariel survives the obsessive extra-literary attention directed towards Plath and Hughes in the more than 50 years since Plath’s suicide. For many readers, it is likely to remain one of the great volumes in the Anglo-American canon.