Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
It's funny how some poems (or stories for that matter) can start with a single image. In this poem's particular case, it's a series of churches engulfed in flames. I started to think about how and why and this is what spewed out. The more I thought about it, the creepier it became to me.
AS WE MOAN From the peak of the reservation, I watch the churches burn. We all do. I stare at maybe 20 or 30 scattered cathedrals in the distance, as they smolder into the night. The carroty sun of dusk blends into the crimson flames peppered through the horizon. No one ever saw this happening. Not now or here. As the first one burns through to its frame, the weeping begins. We weren’t safe anymore. None of us. Ever. As they begin to plummet, the moans grow louder and louder and then just stops. Suddenly.
The new issue of Empire Magazine features an exclusive photo of Heath Ledger as The Joker from the "Batman Begins" sequel, "The Dark Knight." It's certainly sinister and quite a departure from Jack Nicholson's cartoonish and campy take on the famed villain.
Ledger talked to SFX Magazine about the Joker's make-up:
"It's made up of three pieces. It's a new technology. It's not a prosthetic. This guy created these silicone pieces and they stamp them on. It's a lot quicker and super flexible. You hardly even know it's on your face. If it were a prosthethic, I'd have to have my whole neck and jaw done."
On this day of Thanksgiving, I give everyone this odd, original poem about a little boy and the creation of a future drunk.
THE SECRET SOCIETY OF BOURBON DRINKERS Every other night they convened to talk about whatever. Be it the Yeti, price of Gold, horses or who was on Carson, they’d yap it up together. And all over Kentucky’s sweet nectar. I was about eight or so when I attended my first gathering. My uncle snuck me into the back door of this backwoods juke joint and plopped me in a torn corner booth with a folded up Richie Rich comic. After visiting ‘Ol Phil at the bar my uncle gave me this sweet red drink. At the time he called it a “Popeye” but let’s face facts, I was riding the Good Ship Lollipop.
After making sure I was settled he patted me on the head and joined the fellas. I just stared. They all seemed so very loud. One of them kept flicking his suspenders every time he laughed. Another didn’t say a word but just pointed in agreement every time someone made a point. The leader, or so it seemed, wore a monocle and every five minutes or so would look over to me and nod, making sure I was still with them. About an hour -- or three Popeyes later, I was called over to the men. The leader had me sit on his lap and I looked for my uncle who was in the two o clock position. All I really remember now is the smell of the place – a pungent concoction of talcum, cigar and tobacco, musk and bourbon. Lots of bourbon. He told me that it was a special night because I was becoming a special member of their sacred club. He poured a small amount into a shot glass and, in an almost slow motion, slid it over to me. After the hellfire of the spirit slid down my young throat all I could think about was getting another one of those godforsaken Popeye drinks. But I was now a member and Phil would have to listen to me for the rest of my life.
While the new book, "GONZO: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson: An Oral Biography," by Corey Seymour, along with media god and Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner was released on Halloween day, an abridged, albeit extended book jacket version can be found in this month's Men's Vogue in a well-documented piece.
No self-respecting modern journalist hasn’t at least once fancied the notion of chucking the conventional route and just going plain gonzo like the late renegade writer Hunter S. Thompson. Corey Seymour, a senior editor at Men's Vogue magazine, had his first journalism gig at Rolling Stone as the $18,000-a-year handler of Thompson. Seymour recounts his diverse duties included resuscitating the writer from comatose states, buying him inflatable sex dolls, and preventing him from throwing heavy objects out of hotel windows. Ah, the life of a modern would-be handler… A must-read for aspiring gonzo scribes and those interested in modern journalism in relation to the modern journalist celebrity.
The dudes at United Hollywood have edited together another incredible video that pretty much hits home as to why the writers are on strike.
The following clip is entitled “The Heartbreaking Voices of Uncertainty”. The videos from United Hollywood that have been released since the strike are a prime example of how creative, clever and crafty the writers are - even under duress.
Check out this bird's eye view of the cluster of office buildings in Century City of the massive Writers Guild demonstration outside Fox studios on Friday.
Hemingway's Lounge wholeheartedly supports the writers strike. If you do as well, click HERE to sign the petition.
Pulitzer winner Norman Mailer dead at 84 By Richard Pyle, Associated Press
Norman Mailer, the pugnacious prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Executioner's Song," has died at the age of 84.
Mailer died Saturday of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, J. Michael Lennon, the author's literary executor and biographer, said.
"He was a great American voice," said a tearful Joan Didion, author of "The Year of Magical Thinking" and other works, struggling for words upon learning of Mailer's death.
From his classic debut novel to such masterworks of literary journalism as "The Armies of the Night," the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality.
Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old "enfant terrible."
Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as bellicose, street-wise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.
He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York City on a "left conservative" platform, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women's liberation.
Mailer had numerous minor run-ins with the law, usually for being drunk or disorderly, but was also jailed briefly during the Pentagon protests in the late 1960s. While directing the film "Maidstone" in 1968, the self-described "old club fighter" punched actor Lane Smith, breaking his jaw, and bit actor Rip Torn's ear in another scuffle.
But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, "In the end, it is the writing that will count."
Mailer, he wrote, possessed "a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real blood streams and nervous systems, a great openness and eagerness for experience, a sense of urgency about the need to test thought and character in the crucible of a difficult era."
Norman Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, N.J. His father, Isaac, a South Africa-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, soon moved to Brooklyn.
Mailer earned an engineering science degree in 1943 from Harvard University, where he decided to become a writer, and was soon drafted into the Army. Sent to the Philippines as an infantryman, he saw enough of soldiering to provide a basis for his first book, "The Naked and the Dead," published in 1948 while he was a postgraduate student in Paris.
The book became a best seller, and Mailer returned home to find himself anointed the new Hemingway, Dos Passos and Melville.
Buoyed by instant literary celebrity, Mailer embraced the early 1950s counterculture, defining "hip" in his essay "The White Negro," allying himself with Beat Generation gurus Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and writing social and political commentary for the Village Voice, which he helped found. He also churned out two more novels, "Barbary Shore" (1951) and "Deer Park" (1955), neither embraced kindly by readers or critics.
Mailer turned reporter to cover the 1960 Democratic Party convention for Esquire and later claimed, with typical hubris, that his piece, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," had made the difference in John F. Kennedy's razor-thin margin of victory over Republican Richard M. Nixon.
While Life magazine called his next book, "An American Dream" (1965), "the big comeback of Norman Mailer," the author-journalist was chronicling major events of the day: an anti-war march on Washington, the 1968 political conventions, the Ali-Patterson fight, an Apollo moon shot.
His 1968 account of the peace march on the Pentagon, "The Armies of the Night," won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and was listed in the top 20 on a 1999 New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.
When he covered the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago for Harper's magazine, Mailer was torn between keeping to a tight deadline or joining the anti-war protests that led to a violent police crackdown. "I was in a moral quandary. I didn't know if I was being scared or being professional," he later testified in the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven.
Jorge Herralde, editor of Mailer's Spanish publishers, Anagrama, said Saturday that Mailer was a titan of literature who, like Kafka, was never awarded a Nobel prize. "He surely had too excessive a profile for that award," Herralde said.
Mailer's personal life was as turbulent as the times in which he lived. In 1960, at a party at his Brooklyn Heights home, he stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a knife. She declined to press charges, and it was not until 1997 that she revealed in her memoir how close she had come to dying.
His other wives were: Beatrice Silverman, Lady Jeanne Campbell, Beverly Bentley, Carol Stevens and Norris Church. He had five daughters, three sons and a stepson.
"He had such a compendious vision of what it meant to be alive. He had serious opinions on everything there was to have an opinion on, and everything he had was so original," friend William Kennedy, author of "Ironweed."
Mailer's suspicion of technology — "insidious, debilitating and depressing" — was so deep that while most writers used typewriters or computers, he wrote with a pen, some 1,500 words a day. In a 1971 magazine piece about the new women's liberation movement, Mailer equated the dehumanizing effect of technology with what he said was feminists' need to abolish the mystery, romance and "blind, goat-kicking lust" from sex.
Time magazine said the broadside should "earn him a permanent niche in their pantheon of male chauvinist pigs."
"He could do anything he wanted to do — the movie business, writing, theater, politics," author Gay Talese said Saturday. "He never thought the boundaries were restricted. He'd go anywhere and try anything. He was a courageous person, a great person, fully confident, with a great sense of optimism."
In "Advertisements for Myself" (1959), Mailer promised to write the greatest novel yet, but later conceded he had not. Among other notable works: "Cannibals and Christians" (1966); "Why Are We in Vietnam?" (1967); and "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (1968).
"The Executioner's Song" (1979), an epic account of the life and death of petty criminal Gary Gilmore, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. "Ancient Evenings" (1983), a novel of ancient Egypt that took 11 years to complete, was critically panned.
"Tough Guys Don't Dance" (1984) became a 1987 film. Some critics found "Harlot's Ghost" (1991), a novel about the CIA, surprisingly sympathetic, considering Mailer's left-leaning past. In 1997, he came out with "The Gospel According to the Son," a novel told from Jesus Christ's point of view. The following year, he marked his 75th birthday with the epic-length anthology "The Time of Our Time."
Mailer lived for decades in a Brooklyn Heights town house with a view of New York harbor and lower Manhattan from the rooftop "crow's nest," and kept a home in Provincetown, Mass., where he spent increasing time in his later years.
Despite heart surgery, hearing loss and arthritic knees that forced him to walk with canes, Mailer retained his enthusiasm for writing and in early 2007 released "The Castle in the Forest," a novel about Hitler's early years. "On God: An Uncommon Conversation," came out in the fall.
In 2005, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards, where he deplored what he called the "withering" of general interest in the "serious novel." Authors like himself, he said often, had become anachronisms as people focused on television and young writers aspired to screenwriting or journalism.
Lennon said arrangements for a private service and burial for family members and close friends would be announced next week, and a memorial service would be held in New York in the coming months.
___
National Writer Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report.
In celebrating the Lounge's 200th post, I give you this original poem. Somewhere up there - in that great beyond - I hope that Chuck Buk isn't laughing. While I would in no way fancy myself a poet, I will say that the form itself is a wonderful way to tell a short story. It's slightly abstract and perhaps a tad mystical. I hope everyone enjoys.
THE FULL READING The mystic told me to stay away in that cold way they do. I didn’t know if she truly did know anything but shit, she certainly sounded like it, looking at me all suspicious and knowing. Like she had one up. What a gift, to be able to see through people and all of their bullshit. I wish I had that. I’d know if I was wasting my time here or there. As she spoke, I kept looking at the ocean, onto the horizon, wondering how far it went... But I did hear her. Stay away, she advised once more. She kept asking me odd questions as if I knew what she meant. Then she asked if I wanted the full reading. After asking what it entailed, she broke out a beat-to-shit deck of tarot cards. I remarked on them and she told me they were a gift from her aunt,another mystic. She dealt my hand and all sorts of weird shit popped up. I thought I’d have a better chance inside at one of the casinos, but what did I know? I’m the one sitting here. She told me things I didn’t want or care to hear. She drudged up old memories, feelings. Images. And then I could swear I smelled the smells of ten years earlier. I panicked. This was a mistake. The full reading, I mean. And then she turned her cards over and asked me for my fifty dollars.
When I can't sleep at night I usually tune into a late-night radio program that leans towards the unusual, paranormal type stuff. With my headphones on, stories of the unexplained usually tuck me in. The other night, though, I heard something that I couldn't believe. A Colorado man kicked the bad habits in his life when an old photo of him surfaced. Read below for more ...
It's a picture you really have to look at, and when you do, you'll notice something is just not normal, in fact it might be... paranormal.
The man, Joe Martinez, reports he was able to kick his drug habit when a picture of him at a relative's anniversary celebration showed what appears a demon on his shoulder.
Joe Martinez told Fox 31 News in Denver that drugs were killing his soul.
Because of the photograph, however, he's now on the road to recovery.
"I look at it and I carry it wherever I go," he told the local TV station. The photo showed a typically smiling couple at a anniversary reception. What it also shows is what Martinez's wife, Patty, describes as "Satan."
"Right away I really thought, I said, 'You're really walking with Satan'," she told the stationm.
The creepy pic was taken at a family anniversary celebration several years ago. It was in an album until just months ago, but Martinez says he won't be without it now because of the reminder it provides.
What appears to be a dog is looking over Joe's shoulder, in a closer view of the anniversary reception photo:
"There's good and evil in life. The good on the right hand side of me, and the evil on the left side of me," Martinez told the station.
The photograph, on closer examination, appears to include the image of a dog peering over Martinez's shoulder.
Brian Bonner of the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society said most such cases are explained relatively simply. But for this one, he said, there's not enough evidence to support a conclusion.
A photographic expert, John Davenport of Roach Photo, told the station the picture did not have evidence of tampering.
"It doesn't look like it was double-printed or spliced in," he said. "The grain is uniform."
Martinez admits having battled drugs. "I always prayed to the Lord and told him, 'I can't do it alone,'" he said to the station.
He and his wife credit the appearance of the image in the photo for his recovery from addiction.
"There's not another high left in me," Martinez said.
Viral marketing seems to be the rage these days with various TV shows and future films making audiences solve puzzles that will boost the profile of a particular project. That said, a jumble on the "Dark Knight" viral website WhySoSerious.com was solved, which involved gathering photos of letters from cities around the United States.
The prize is a new pretty cool new photo of The Joker, as seen above, in the back of a car.
A new puzzle is now posted at RorysDeathKiss.com. Rory’s First Kiss was the fake title used for the production of "The Dark Knight" while they filmed in Chicago. On the site is a set of all new instructions, with a promise of another reward.
Director Michael Mann ("Heat") is developing "Frankie Machine" as a star vehicle for Robert De Niro at Paramount Pictures, reports Variety.
A few months back, we reported it would be with Martin Scorsese. Check it out HERE.
In any case, the film is an adaptation of the Don Winslow novel "The Winter of Frankie Machine." De Niro will play Frank Machianno, a mob hitman who has retired to run a bait shop.
He agrees to help the son of a mob boss resolve a dispute with another Mafioso but is forced to turn into Frankie Machine again when he realizes he's been set up to be killed.
Alex Tse has just been set to do a major overhaul of the concept and Brian Koppelman and David Levien's original draft.
The bow and arrow... The blade... They're back. No CGI special effects. No studio backlot filming. No faggy PG-13 MPAA rating. For this new "Rambo" trailer, there's nothing but pure adrenaline in this vintage-feeling, old-school action flick starring Sly Stallone.
Variety reports that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio will reteam yet again early next year on the flick "Shutter Island," a Laeta Kalogridis-scripted adaptation of the Dennis Lehane ("Mystic River," "Gone Baby Gone").
Set in 1954, the drama is set in 1954, with DiCaprio in final talks to play U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, who is investigating the disappearance of a murderess who escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane and is presumed to be hiding on the remote Shutter Island.
The Paramount and Sony Pictures co-production is being rushed forward for a March start of shooting. Filming will take place in Massachusetts, Connecticut or Nova Scotia.
The duo's first joint effort was "Gangs of New York," followed by "The Aviator," and then last year's "The Departed." All of the films were nominated for Oscars in one capacity or another with "The Departed" snagging a statuette for Best Picture.
Papa H never actually dabbled in the screenplay form. Studio writers took on the novelizations of films based on his books. But we'd like to think if he did, in fact, write for the big screen, he'd fall in line with the rights of the many scribes who lay it on the line, day-after-day, staring at the blank typewriter.
Remember, no matter what you're watching in TV or film, it ALL begins on thne page ...
Hollywood Union Authorized to Strike
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Members of Hollywood's film and television writers union have overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike anytime after their contract expires at the end of the month.
More than 5,000 members of the Writers Guild of America cast ballots, with 90 percent voting in favor of authorizing the strike, the union said Friday evening. Members voted Thursday.
"Writers do not want to strike, but they are resolute and prepared to take strong, united action to defend our interests," guild President Patric Verrone said in a news release. "What we must have is a contract that gives us the ability to keep up with the financial success of this ever-expanding global industry."
Since July, the guild has been in talks with film studios and production companies represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Both sides acknowledge they have not made progress.
Nick Counter, the alliance's president, said he was not surprised by the vote.
"Our focus is on negotiating a reasonable agreement with the WGA," he said in a news release.
A key issue dividing producers and writers, as well as actors, whose contract expires next June, is compensation for DVD sales and productions that get distributed on the Internet or in other new media formats.
The writers' current three-year contract expires Oct. 31, and their vote gives the union's leaders authorization to call a strike anytime after that day.
Studios and TV networks have accelerated filming of shows and movies and begun stockpiling scripts in case of a strike.
The last strike in 1988 lasted 22 weeks. Losses to the industry were put at $500 million.
How does "Real Time" host Bill Maher deal with a combative dick in the audience?? Well, he takes matters into his own hands and confronts him on live TV and just about tosses him out himself. It all goes down at about 2:17
Kudos, Bill. You have balls. Papa H would most definitely approve.
Love him or hate him, here's the poster for the upcoming Sly Stallone pic aptly titled "RAMBO," formerly titled "John Rambo (ala "Rocky balboa) and "Rambo to Hell and Back."
Members of the "Rat Pack," from left, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Joey Bishop, perform at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas Jan. 20, 1960. Bishop, the stone-faced comedian who found success in night clubs, television and movies but became most famous as a member of Frank Sinatra's boisterous Rat Pack, has died at his home, his publicist said Thursday. Oct.. 18, 2007
It's downright scary that on the day the Sands in Atlantic City plummets to it's own death, it's announced that the last living member of the Rat Pack has passed. Here's his obit via the Associated Press.
Last 'Rat Pack' Member Joey Bishop Dies By Jeff Wilson, Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — Joey Bishop, the stone-faced comedian who found success in nightclubs, television and movies but became most famous as a member of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack, has died at 89. He was the group's last surviving member. Peter Lawford died in 1984, Sammy Davis Jr. in 1990, Dean Martin in 1995, and Sinatra in 1998.
Bishop died Wednesday night of multiple causes at his home in Newport Beach, publicist and longtime friend Warren Cowan said Thursday.
The Rat Pack became a show business sensation in the early 1960s, appearing at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in shows that combined music and comedy in a seemingly chaotic manner.
Reviewers often claimed that Bishop played a minor role, but Sinatra knew otherwise. He termed the comedian "the Hub of the Big Wheel," with Bishop coming up with some of the best one-liners and beginning many jokes with his favorite phrase, "Son of a gun!"
"He was the perfect match for the Rat Pack. He fit right in like an old shoe," Hollywood's honorary mayor, Johnny Grant, said Thursday.
The quintet lived it up whenever members were free of their own commitments. They appeared together in such films as "Ocean's Eleven" and "Sergeants 3" and proudly gave honorary membership to a certain fun-loving politician from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, at whose inauguration gala Bishop served as master of ceremonies.
The Rat Pack faded after Kennedy's assassination, but the late 1990s brought a renaissance, with the group depicted in an HBO movie and portrayed by imitators in Las Vegas and elsewhere. The movie "Ocean's Eleven" was even remade in 2003 with George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the lead roles.
Bishop defended his fellow performers' rowdy reputations in a 1998 interview.
"Are we remembered as being drunk and chasing broads?" he asked. "I never saw Frank, Dean, Sammy or Peter drunk during performances. That was only a gag. And do you believe these guys had to chase broads? They had to chase 'em away."
Away from the Rat Pack, Bishop starred in two TV series, both called "The Joey Bishop Show."
The first, an NBC sitcom, got off to a rocky start in 1961. Critical and audience response was generally negative, and the second season brought a change in format. The third season brought a change in network, with the show moving to ABC, but nothing seemed to help and it was canceled in 1965.
In the first series, Bishop played a TV talk show host.
Then, he really became a TV talk show host. His program was started by ABC in 1967 as a challenge to Johnny Carson's immensely popular "The Tonight Show."
Like Carson, Bishop sat behind a desk and bantered with a sidekick, TV newcomer Regis Philbin. But despite an impressive guest list and outrageous stunts, Bishop couldn't dent Carson's ratings, and "The Joey Bishop Show" was canceled after two seasons.
Bishop then became a familiar guest figure in TV variety shows and as sub for vacationing talk show hosts, filling in for Carson 205 times.
He also played character roles in such movies as "The Naked and the Dead" ("I played both roles"), "Onion-head," "Johnny Cool," "Texas Across the River," "Who's Minding the Mint?" "Valley of the Dolls" and "The Delta Force."
His comedic schooling came from vaudeville, burlesque and nightclubs.
Skipping his last high school semester in Philadelphia, he formed a music and comedy act with two other boys, and they played clubs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They called themselves the Bishop Brothers, borrowing the name from their driver, Glenn Bishop.
Joseph Abraham Gottlieb would eventually adopt Joey Bishop as his stage name.
When his partners got drafted, Bishop went to work as a single, playing his first solo date in Cleveland at the well-named El Dumpo.
During these early years he developed his style: laid-back drollery, with surprise throwaway lines.
After 3 1/2 years in the Army, Bishop resumed his career in 1945. Within five years he was earning $1,000 a week at New York's Latin Quarter. Sinatra saw him there one night and hired him as opening act.
While most members of the Sinatra entourage treated the great man gingerly, Bishop had no inhibitions. He would tell audiences that the group's leader hadn't ignored him: "He spoke to me backstage; he told me `Get out of the way.'"
When Sinatra almost drowned filming a movie scene in Hawaii, Bishop wired him: "I thought you could walk on water."
Born in New York's borough of the Bronx, Bishop was the youngest of five children of two immigrants from Eastern Europe.
When he was 3 months old the family moved to South Philadelphia, where he attended public schools. He recalled being an indifferent student, once remarking, "In kindergarten, I flunked sand pile."
In 1941 Bishop married Sylvia Ruzga and, despite the rigors of a show business career, the marriage survived until her death in 1999.
Bishop, who spent his retirement years on the upscale Lido Isle in Southern California's Newport Bay, is survived by son Larry Bishop; grandchildren Scott and Kirk Bishop; and longtime companion Nora Garabotti.
Associated Press Writer Bob Thomas contributed to this report.
