Terry Richardson Shoots James Franco In Drag
James Franco Poses in Drag for Candy Magazine
Posted by Joyce Lee
James Franco on the cover of “Candy Magazine” (Candy Magazine)
NEW YORK (CBS) James Franco is getting in touch with his feminine side by posing in drag for the fall issue of Candy magazine.
The cover, which was shot by famed fashion photographer Terry Richardson, features the 32-year-old actor in bright blue eye shadow, glossy red lipstick, and chunky jewelry with slicked-back hair.
On its website, Candy hails itself as “the first transversal style magazine ever completely dedicated to celebrating transvestism, transexuality, cross dressing and androgyny, in all its manifestations.”
James Frey in The Seven Circles of Sotheby’s
Seven Circles of Sotheby’s Selling
There were art works by Salvador Dali, Francis Bacon, Auguste Rodin and Jeff Koons, but everyone was watching Padma Lakshmi’s pants. The Top Chef co-host, in impossibly tight coral-colored capris covered in a gold lamé print, cut to the front of a book-signing line at Sotheby’s to glad-hand author James Frey.
What was the occasion for this unlikely mix of literature, reality TV and fine art? “Divine Comedy,” an elaborate themed display of art by the former director of the Guggenheim Museum, now Sotheby’s executive, Lisa Dennison. The exhibition, on view through Oct. 19, invites the visitor to Sotheby’s to tour hell, heaven and purgatory in the form of artworks depicting each, several of the works spectacular or particularly rare. But despite a gimmicky conceit and lighthearted demeanor—”have fun,” urged the wall text, right by a huge crucifix depicting Jesus Christ as a wart-covered frog—the show is very much about money. It represents a new business model for the auctioneer.
Drafted into all this was James Frey, who is co-owner of a Lower East Side art gallery—Half Gallery—and has written several art-catalog essays. He was on hand to sign a limited-edition exhibition catalog that featured his “Il Divino Bambino,” a reinterpretation of Dante’s story. He declined to discuss his compensation, and said he was very surprised at how many people wanted a signed catalog—”I thought I’d do two and be done with it.” Interestingly, the famous dissembler said that his two favorite works in the show were the Francken and the only “fake” chosen for the whole exhibition, a particularly harsh version of the afterlife painted not by a famous artist but by his “follower,” i.e., copycat. “I love the fake Bosch,” he said.
That Crack In My Crack Is Not Mine, Jack
Man denies cocaine found in buttocks is his
Oct. 4, 2010 04:53 PM / Associated Press 
BRADENTON, Fla. – When sheriff’s deputies allegedly discovered a bags of marijuana and cocaine between a man’s buttocks, they said he gave a quick explanation.
Manatee County deputies said Raymond Stanley Roberts told them “The white stuff is not mine, but the weed is.”
Deputies stopped the 25-year-old Wednesday in Bradenton for speeding. Officers said they smelled marijuana and searched him. That’s when they allegedly found a bag of marijuana between Roberts’ buttocks.
Officers then discovered another bag in there; the report said it contained 27 pieces of rock cocaine.
The Bradenton Herald reported Roberts was arrested for drug possession and has bonded out of jail. The person who answered Friday at a phone number listed for Roberts said it wasn’t his.
Former Spiderman Arch-Nemesis Addicted to Adderall
James Franco Buys ‘The Adderall Diaries’
By MIKE FLEMING
EXCLUSIVE: 127 Hours star James Franco has acquired Stephen Elliott’s The Adderall Diaries,which he intends to adapt, direct and star in. The memoir starts off a bit like In Cold Blood, in that a blocked writer turns to a murder trial to get himself going. Elliott, blocked for two years, reports on the trial of Hans Reiser, a computer programmer charged with killing the wife he met through a Russian dating service. Fueled by Adderall, a methamphetamine prescribed to help ADHD sufferers, Elliott’s stream of consciousness prose veers into subjects that include his cruel father, Paris Hilton, and S&M.
Franco takes on this challenge at a time when he is cutting a wide swath as an actor and director. He’ll figure prominently in the Best Actor race for his portrayal as Aron Ralston in the Danny Boyle-directed 127 Hours, and he’s currently starring in Fox’s big budget Planet of the Apes prequel Rise of the Apes, which Fox releases June 24, 2011. He plays Allen Ginsburg in Howl, and completed a role in General Hospital as the evil performance artist Franco.
Stephen J. Cannell Gone
Stephen J. Cannell, prolific TV producer, dies
Stephen J. Cannell, bestselling novelist and Emmy-winning TV producer of hits like “The Rockford Files” and “21 Jump Street,” died at his Pasadena home of complications of melanoma on Thursday. He was 69.
Cannell’s family released the following statement about the producer who wrote for iconic series including “Adam-12,” “Mission: Impossible” and “It Takes a Thief” before founding a company that churned out classic action adventure series “The A-Team,” “The Greatest American Hero” and a string of other franchises:
Cannell, who famously wrote scripts on an old IBM Selectric typewriter, told Success magazine recently that he’d been getting up at 4 a.m. for 40 years to write and that he never tired of the process, even though he’d battled dyslexia as a youngster. (He employed what he called “a mop and pail crew” to clean up his prose.)
“One of my work ethic traits comes from the fact that I absolutely love what I do. I’ve never felt that writing was work,” he told the publication. “I get up every morning, and I’m not going to work, I’m going to play. I get to play cops and robbers.”
His latest novel, “The Prostitutes’ Ball,” the 10th in the Shane Scully series, is set for publication Oct. 12.
“If James Frey and Michael Bay Remade ‘Twilight'”
I Am Number Four Trailer: If James Frey and Michael Bay Remade Twilight
The teaser trailer has been released for the new sci-fi drama I Am Number Four, a Michael Bay–produced adaptation of the young-adult series by Jobie Hughes and famed A Million Little Piecesfabulist/vocoder-wielding alien James Frey. The primary takeaway? Boys, here is your Twilightsaga. This time, the beautiful high-school outsiders are aliens who’ve fallen to Earth, and hero John Smith (rising Brit Alex Pettyfer, whose American debut in Beastly was delayed from this summer to next March) is simultaneously on the run from extraterrestrial assassins, wooing Dianna Agron from Glee, and discovering telekinetic superpowers that he appears to have stolen from Sookie on True Blood. [ click to continue reading at New York Magazine ]
FORBES: The James Frey Redemption Train
The James Frey Redemption Train Rolls On With “I Am Number Four”
Writer James Frey suffered one of the most humiliating smack downs of all time when it turned out parts of his hit memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were fabricated.Oprah had chosen the book as one of her book club selections and the writer had to have his wrists slapped by the daytime doyenne on her TV show in from of millions of people.
Few would be able to make a comeback after that kind of punishment (not to mention the fact that he had lost the trust of thousands of readers).
But Frey has slowly been returning to the literary limelight. In 2008 he published the novel Bright Shiny Morning which landed on the New York Times bestseller list.
Now he’s making inroads in Hollywood. Frey co-wrote the young adult novel I Am Number Four which has been turned into a movie by Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks. A new trailer for the film is currently making the rounds on the Internet. (Click here to see the trailer.)
Arthur Penn Gone
Arthur Penn, ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ director and pioneer of cinematic violence, dies at 88 in New York
Anonymous
Arthur Penn is shown during the filming of “Target.” Penn, a myth-maker and myth-breaker who in such classics as “Bonnie and Clyde,” died at 88.
Arthur Penn, the screen and theater director whose “Bonnie and Clyde” single-handedly blasted cinematic violence into a new realm in 1967, died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88. The cause was heart failure.
Penn was 44 when he made the youth-centric classic about Depression-era gangsters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, but star/producer Warren Beatty – who’d previously acted in Penn”s “Mickey One” – selected the filmmaker after Francois Truffaut turned the project down.
“Bonnie and Clyde” polarized critics and was shortchanged by its studio, Warner Bros., until Beatty and Penn’s grassroots campaign got back into theaters in late 1967, where the movie’s much-discussed violence made it a hit. The movie’s resurrection is Hollywood legend, just as its hail-of-bullets ending is still imitated, studied and admired.
Make Your Own Mozzarella
A Renegade History of the United States
Shelf Starter: A Renegade History of the United States
A Renegade History of the United States by Thaddeus Russell (Free Press, $27, 9781416571063/141657106X, September 28, 2010)
This is a new story.
When American history was first written, it featured and often celebrated politicians, military leaders, inventors, explorers, and other “great men.” Textbooks in high school and college credited those goliaths with creating all the distinctive cultural and institutional characteristics if the United States. In this history from the top down, women, Indians, African Americans, immigrants and ordinary workers–in other words most Americans–seldom appeared. In the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of scholars began to place labor leaders, feminists, civil rights activists, and others who spoke on behalf of the people at the center of the story. This became known as history “from the bottom up.” Yet more often than not, it seemed to me, the new stars of American history shared many of the cultural values and assumptions of the great men. They not only behaved like “good” Americans but also worked to “correct” the people they claimed to represent. They were not ordinary.
A Renegade History goes deeper. It goes beneath what the new “social history” portrayed as the bottom. It tells the story of “bad” Americans–drunkards, prostitutes, “shiftless” slaves and white slackers, criminals, juvenile delinquents, brazen homosexuals and others who operated beneath American society–and shows how they shaped our world, created new pleasures, and expanded our freedoms. This is history from the gutter up.–selected by Marilyn Dahl
Gideon’s Sword Picked-up By Michael Bay
Chap Taylor to Adapt GIDEON’S SWORD for Michael Bay
by Ramses Flores
Earlier this year, we reported on the news that Paramount has optioned the upcoming Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child novel Gideon’s Sword for Michael Bay to produce through his Bay Films label. Now, screenwriter Chap Taylor (Changing Lanes) has been hired to adapt the story for the screen. Gideon’s Sword will be the first of a twelve-book series, with the first book due to hit stores in February. The series centers on “a hero imbued with the ability to convince people of almost anything. The story involves the man trying to clear the name of his father, falsely imprisoned by the NSA, and possibly save the world at the same time.”
According to Heat Vision, the aim of adapting the book series is supposedly to “kick-start a Jason Bourne-style franchise that would give Bay an opportunity to show character work while delivering high-octane set pieces.” The project marks Bay’s second foray into adapting books for the big screen, following his producing credit on James Frey’s I Am Number Four.
I Treasure Your Love – I Want To Show You How To Use It
James McSherry’s “Poetry Man”
Lehman High School teacher makes winning ‘Poetry’ out of life and death
Chu for News
Filmmaker James McSherry, who teaches film at Lehman High School, won several awards for his new short ‘Poetry Man’.
James McSherry was back teaching at Lehman High School this week, far from the smog and glitz of L.A., where his independent movie won its seventh top award at a major film festival.
“I’m so proud of this film,” said McSherry, 48. “It tells a story from my life, a story about the Bronx.”
The shoestring-budget short “Poetry Man” – about a childhood pal who went to jail for murder – won the President’s Award at last weekend’s Burbank International Film Festival.
It also has won honors at the Manhattan Film Festival, the Los Angeles Movie Awards, the Long Island Film Expo and the Jersey Shore Film Festival.
Facebook Old School
from J to the E to the S
Black Tide Update
from Cal State Fullerton’s Daily Titan
Heavy metal tide rolls in
By ALYSSA WEJEBE
Daily Titan Staff Writer
Published: September 21, 2010
Flashback to 2007′s Ozzfest, the annual metal rock American tour founded by heavy metal legend Ozzy Osbourne. Second stage festival sponsor and alcohol manufacturer, Jagermeister intended to remove Miami-based band Black Tide from the bill because the band, comprised of members from 14 to 19 years old at the time, was under the legal drinking age of 21.
Black Tide manager Cory Brennan made an appeal to festival sponsor Live Nation and Sharon Osbourne, Ozzfest’s chief executive. Black Tide was bumped to the main stage where the stage’s sponsor did not sell alcoholic beverages.
Since then, Black Tide has continued to move up in the music industry. They’ve toured with All That Remains, Bullet for My Valentine and Avenged Sevenfold. Signed with Interscope Records, Black Tide released their debut album, Light from Above, in 2008.
Rolling Stone named Black Tide “Metal’s New Teen Titans” and one of the “Best Rookies of 2008.” Black Tide is currently on tour with Drive A, Escape the Fate and Bullet for My Valentine. The last stop on their tour is Oct. 27 at the Palladium in Hollywood.
Black Tide has played at a book reading of James Frey, who asked them to play at his book reading. A riot between Frey’s fans and Black Tide’s fans broke out.
Black Tide has had less explosive interactions with literature before, as their songwriting is sometimes influenced by books.
“We take influence from everything and everybody ? doesn’t even necessarily have to be music,” Sandler said.
Angelica Brown, 20, of Detroit, Ill, said she liked Black Tide because they’re her generation’s Metallica and Megadeth.
“They don’t hold back or try to fit into a genre that could land them on the radio,” Brown said. “Instead, they play with passion and are sincere.”
Jean-Luc Godard Still Riling The Establishment
Film Director Comes to the Defense of a Convicted Internet Pirate
By ERIC PFANNER
ARIS — A Frenchman convicted of copyright theft for illegally downloading thousands of songs on the Internet has found an unlikely patron: a famous film director.
Jean-Luc Godard, the 79-year-old director of movies like “Breathless” and “Alphaville,” has come to the support of James Climent, a photographer who faces a fine of 20,000 euros ($26,520) for violating musical copyrights.
Mr. Climent, who lives in Barjac, a picturesque old town of artists and organic farmers in the Gard region of southern France, wants to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The highest French court rejected his last appeal in June, siding with music royalty collection agencies that brought the complaints against Mr. Climent five years ago.
Mr. Climent said Mr. Godard this month donated 1,000 euros to his fund, helping him get him more than halfway toward the 5,000 euros he needs for legal fees and other costs of taking his case to the European Court.
While Mr. Godard’s views on intellectual property are widely shared on the libertarian fringes of the Internet, they might seem surprising coming from a director who, under French law, retains editorial control over his work and derives financial benefit from it.
Yet Mr. Godard, a pioneer of the New Wave of French cinema in the 1960s, whose films skewered the conventions of bourgeois society, clearly still delights in provoking the establishment, even if it could cost him money.
Mr. Godard’s support for Mr. Climent comes as the debate over file-sharing is growing ever more politically charged in France.
Celebration!!!
Eat Drink Local Profile #24: Sotheby’s Heirloom Veggie Auction & Farmers Market
Black Sea Man tomatoes like these will go to the highest bidder on Sept. 23 at Sotheby’s. Photograph courtesy of Seed Savers.
The Auction:
Art of Farming at Sotheby’s
What it Is:
It’s a little known fact that we here at Edible Manhattan have an Art section that celebrates food-centric Gotham works like Andy Warhol’s soup cans, a rendering of McSorley’s bar, and Hopper’s Nighthawks, the iconic image of a lonesome Manhattan soda shop in 1942. So we are particularly delighted that on Thursday (Sept. 23rd) some 30 some-odd farmers from the greater New York foodshed will bring their art — meaning heirloom veggies from cranberry beans to Newtown Pippin apples — to Sotheby’s to be offered up on the auction block to chefs, grocers and other bidders.
The auction is a passion project for some Sotheby’s staff and farmer friends, who declare there’s as much valuable works being created on nearby farms as in SoHo studios. The cases of auctioned produce will get eaten throughout the city in the days that follow, becoming part of the ingredients and dishes celebrated during Eat Drink Local. (Decide where you are going to dine now.)
How to Go:
Tickets are still available to the cocktail party ($250), which will be crammed with chefs, farmer and other food community movers and shakers (not to mention some arty types). That includes admission to the experiential auction of Edible-friendly items, like a private tasting with the owners of Tuthilltown Spirits, a tour and tasting at Red Hook Winery, four potted Newtown Pippin seedlings (delivered to anywhere in the five boros), a B&B getaway to Long Island wine country, and a signed copy of a cryptic, comestible tale, “Celebration!!!,” commissioned from James Frey for the auction. The gala dinner (sold out at $1000 per seat) follows with courses prepared by Jeff Gimmel of Swoon Kitchenbar in Hudson, New York, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Chef of ABC Kitchen, Roberto Alicea, Executive Chef of Andaz 5th Avenue and Myriam Eberhardt, Pastry Chef of DBGB Kitchen and Bar.
YouTube Time Machine
Should Joaquin Phoenix get the James Frey treatment?
Casey Affleck – the New James Frey of Documentaries??
In a recent New York Times interview, Cassey Affleck admitted that almost all of his new movie “I’m Still Here,” including Joaquin Phoenix’s appearance on Letterman in 2009, was a staged performance.
In the interview, Affleck calls Phoenix’s act “…. the performance of his career.” For two years, Phoenix embodied a caricature of himself as scraggly bearded, drug-addled, incoherent, actor pursuing delusions of a rap career. The “mockumentary” was released last week by Magnolia Pictures to scathing reviews by a number of critics. Roger Ebert wrote that the film was “a sad and painful documentary that serves little useful purpose other than to pound another nail into the coffin.”
Affleck discloses to the newspaper that not even the opening shots, supposedly of Mr. Phoenix and his siblings swimming in a water hole in Panama, was real. Those opening shots were taken in in Hawaii with actors, then run back and forth on top of an old videocassette recording of “Paris, Texas” to degrade the images.
Like Mr. Frey, who played his readers – most damagingly Oprah – for a fool, Mr. Affleck dupes his viewers (many of them who saw the film prior to this articles publication), adding contrived details to enhance his story. Again, a major public figure is injured in the process. This time the victim was David Letterman who was not in on the joke when Mr. Phoenix showed up on his show as a man who’d lost his marbles who happened to be an actor. Mr. Letterman concluded: “Joaquin, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight.”
Mr. Affleck, who is married to Mr. Phoenix’s sister and has been his friend for almost 20 years, claims he wanted audiences to appreciate the films message about the disintegration of celebrity authentically.
Affleck claims that as the film progresses, subtle cues were supposed to provide hints of his real intention. Scenes in which Mr. Phoenix appears to snort drugs, consort with hookers, and display violent behavior used actors and required several takes.
Whatever, their intentions, the viewer never gets a disclaimer. Nothing ever confirms or denies the truth of what you are watching. Unlike Borat and its ilk, where the audience (if not the participants) are always in on the joke, the audience might be duped by these shenanigans. Phoenix, one of five children of a hippie family, embodied a persona that could very possibly dissolve into the bizarre. It’s all very possible.
Joaquin Phoenix is set to make another appearance on the David Letterman Show on September 22nd, 2010. What do you think – should he get the the James Frey treatment? Will you still go see the film?
Blowing-up Hay Bales
What The Spell!? 2010
Spelling is for the bees…
I thought this was interesting because it had two things we’ve covered in class: spelling and James Frey, author of A Little Million Pieces.
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
Diane von Furstenberg Studio
440 W 14th Street, NYC
7:00pm Canapes ‘n Cocktails
Buzzless Bidding Silent Auction
8:00pm Bee
Ben Greenman returns to defend the coveted aluminum foil crown against a swarm of usurping spellers.
Brave Spelling Bees so far:
Jonathan Burnham (Publisher, HarperCollins) Sloane Crosley (HOW DID YOU GET THIS NUMBER) Nancy Franklin (The New Yorker) James Frey (BRIGHT SHINY MORNING) Ben Greenman (WHAT HE’S POISED TO DO) Tyehimba Jess (LEADBELLY) Tayari Jones(THE UNTELLING) Dave King (THE HA-HA) Philip Lopate (NOTES ON SONTAG) Patrick McGrath (TRAUMA) Bernice McFadden (GLORIOUS) Jay McInerney (HOW IT ENDED) Rick Moody (THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH) Michael Musto (LA DOLCE MUSTO, The Village Voice) Francine Prose (ANNE FRANK: THE BOOK, THE LIFE, THE AFTERLIFE) Tiphanie Yanique (HOW TO ESCAPE FROM A LEPER COLONY) And More!
Emcee: Bob Morris (ASSISTED LOVING)
Judge: Jesse Sheidlower (Editor-at-Large, OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY)
A compassionate writer who truly understood addiction
Treasuring Hubert Selby Jr
The author of Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream was a compassionate writer who truly understood addiction
For many non-academic readers, Frank Kermode, who died aged 90 last month, is perhaps best known for his spirited defence of Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, at the obscenity trial surrounding it in 1966. According to the Daily Mail, observers described his appearance as “more [like] a Reith lecture than an investigation into alleged obscenity”. In the foreword to the book’s post-trial edition, written by the original publishers, John Calder and Marion Boyars, we are told that Kermode analysed the novel chapter by chapter, placing it firmly in “the tradition of American naturalistic literature, which … had developed from writers like Zola and Dickens”. Selby died in 2004, having suffered from ill health for most of his life. Although he wrote six novels and a collection of short stories, he is widely known only for Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream (made into a film by Darren Aronofsky in 2000). Since his death, and in spite of plaudits from Kermode, Anthony Burgess and Lou Reed, among many others, there has so far been little popular or critical reappraisal of his work. This is a shame. Selby should be regarded alongside Philip Roth and Norman Mailer as one of the great American novelists, and one who has helped us to understand the nature of addiction and the human condition better, perhaps, than any other.
A successor to Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, John Fante and Charles Bukowski, Selby’s influence can be detected in the work of modern writers including Richard Price, Irvine Welsh, James Frey and more recently Tony O’Neill and Richard Millward. In tracing Selby’s lineage, Kermode highlighted the deep compassion of this remarkable writer. Able to humanise addiction and to demonstrate how it is exacerbated by the consumerist motors of television and advertising, Selby is a novelist whose insight and humanity we should treasure for a long time to come.
Number Four Films at Robert Morris U.
from Robert Morris University News
RMU Provost’s Home to be Featured in New Sci-Fi Flick
On a quiet Saturday morning back in April, Sue Jamison, part-time faculty member and wife of David L. Jamison, J.D., RMU provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, heard a knock at the door.
The man behind the knock was Kent Jackson, assistant location manager for the movie “I am Number 4,” a new DreamWorks film, which will debut in February 2011. Jackson told Sue that he and his crew really liked the all-American look of her house, and that they may want to use it for a new movie project.
“I was a little suspicious at first,” said Sue, who assumed Jackson was talking about some small, local film. “We’re all about supporting local filmmakers,” she said, “but I was still somewhat hesitant. Then he mentioned that one of the executive producers was Steven Spielberg, so I invited him in for coffee.”
Pagans Plotted To Kill Hell’s Angels With Grenades
Guy Art
Art for Guys Who Hate Museums
By ERIC WILSON
ON Monday morning, the street artist known as Blek le Rat, considered the godfather of stencil graffiti art, set out to create his latest work on a wall opposite the Standard Hotel on West 13th Street.
Mr. le Rat (né Xavier Prou) has been spray-painting his tag on monuments and street corners since 1981, and because what he does is usually illegal, he uses stencils to be speedy. He was working more leisurely on Monday, since the new work was commissioned by Details magazine as part of a strategy to align itself with creative types in different fields, including perhaps what is the last corner of the art world that had not yet been appropriated by fashion for its marketing purposes. Three other graffiti artists will create murals for Details in the coming weeks.
“Public art is probably one of the most transformative parts of urban living,” said Bill Wackerman, the publisher of Details. Mr. Wackerman is interested in how modern men, particularly those living in big cities, have outlived their metrosexual phase and are now going through something he called a “metromorphosis.” That is to say, they’re interested in things besides moisturizer. Like art.
So Mr. le Rat was asked to create a mural that spoke to the modern masculinity. He was nearly finished with the work, called “My Mother’s Eyes,” around 3 p.m. Against a black brick wall, he had stenciled a mother and child, after a Baroque painting by Guido Reni, and a man holding his hand up to silence a crowd of onlookers on the other side.
“It means take care of your family and don’t bother me too much,” Mr. le Rat said.
Bad Pop’s “Harvest The Beast” Released
Singaporean Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign – Brilliant
Teresa Palmer’s Kick-butt Fantasies of Angelina Jolie
Teresa Palmer casting her spell
Sorcerer’s Apprentice star Teresa Palmer leaves behind some awkward years as she heads up the Hollywood starlet ranks, writes Jacqueline Smith.
It’s hard to believe Teresa Palmer was less than a babe at school, but she insists she did her time as the nerdy kid.
“I was so dorky up until I was about 14 or 15 and started to get a little bit cooler, but I was a socks and sandals girl. I would wear big frilly socks with sandals and all the kids would tease me.”
Having dealt with her own awkward stage, Palmer says she was able to identify with the nerdy hero of her latest film the The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
She recently fulfilled another fantasy by playing the kick-butt Angelina Jolie-style character in I Am Number Four – dressed top to toe in leather, beating people up and riding a motorcycle. But what is most exciting about that film is she is not only the tough-chick, but the Australian tough-chick.
“It was so refreshing because I haven’t been allowed to be an Aussie so far in my career. But they decided that my character, who is an alien, was placed in Australia as a young girl and grew up as an Australian, so I got to keep my accent – even my Adelaide one, my very thick South Australian accent,” she says proudly.
Clemens And Frey In Slate
Roger Clemens, James Frey, and the Thrill of Watching the Overly Ambitious Fall
Which is worse: lying to Congress or lying to Oprah?
When the news broke that former MLB star Roger Clemens was being indicted for perjury about his alleged steroid use, the figure who sprang to mind, despite coming from an entirely different world, was James Frey, the notorious memoirist publicly indicted for lying in his 2003 bestselling memoir (and Oprah Book Club selection), A Million Little Pieces. To a writer writing on scandal, Frey obviously holds a certain fascination: If I ever find myself in the midst of a horrible scandal, it’s probably going to be over something I publish, too. But more to the point, what unites these seemingly disparate figures is the charge of illicitly boosting their games by employing prohibited substances (anabolic steroids and fictional experiences, respectively). In other words, these are scandals of ambition. They’re about people doing what it takes—or what they believe it takes—to enhance their position in the marketplace. Though … doesn’t everyone, pretty much?
Modern market-societies require ambition because they’re premised on social mobility. The founding principal of democratic society is that your position in the world doesn’t derive from your origins, it’s determined by your talents and achievements. But there’s a stumbling block for the ambitious: It’s the market that determines which talents count toward achievement at any given moment. Which is where the Clemens and Frey scandals converge. It’s not that either of them were talentless schlubs who got where they did on sheer fakery. What they did was augment the talents they had in order to conform to the current demands of the marketplace. (Clemens still denies it, though no one believes him.) They may have broken the prevailing rules of their respective games—baseball and memoir-writing—but as to whether steroids should be legal or will be eventually (maybe), or if memoirists are generally so truthful (probably not), things are not exactly simple. “All memoirists lie,” says memoirist André Aciman; on the prevalence of performance-enhancing substances in sports, please consult the work of another noted memoirist, Jose Canseco.
Ambition is excessive, by its very nature. It’s predicated on desire, which is inherently limitless: When is enough ever enough when it comes to these bottomless wells of yearning? In the case of the vastly talented Clemens, the desire might have been to eke a few more playing years out of his talents—a few more wins, maybe a World Series, though he probably would have made it to the Hall of Fame even without a chemical boost. But apparently he didn’t care to be put out to pasture quite yet, or limp toward the end of his career. As for Frey, the back-story is a little more complicated, as the intersections of art and commerce tend to be. Here was an aspiring novelist who tried to publish a novel. His agent submitted it to 17 publishers; no one would buy it. When she added that it was based on a true story, he got offers—an unknown recovery memoirist looked like a more commercial prospect than an unknown first-time novelist, even though it was basically the same story. So he rewrote it to suit the dictates of the market.
Scandal specializes in revealing open secrets, and here’s one to consider. All writers write for the marketplace. If they don’t, they don’t get published, increasingly so these days, given the corporatization of publishing, the insistence on increased profits. Yes, Frey produced a book that would sell instead of the novel he wanted to write, and based on his sales figures, he wrote exactly the book the marketplace wanted, a huge commercial success. In business lingo, you would call him a product innovator: He merged the realist novel with the true-life recovery narrative, reinvigorating the form and reaping the rewards. His critics seemed to think he should have played by the rules instead of doing what it took to succeed, ignoring commercial pressures in a grand romantic gesture, as if it was up to Frey to singlehandedly contest the momentum of global capitalism. But here’s a question: Do any of us?
Lawyer Burns Koran and Bible, Then Inhales
Australian lawyer smokes pages of Bible and Koran, asking ‘Which is best?’
An Australian lawyer, Alex Stewart, has smoked pages torn from the Koran and the Bible, posting the video on YouTube just days after an American Pastor’s threat to burn the Muslim holy book caused worldwide outrage.
Australian atheist lawyer Alex Stewart smokes rolled cigarette Photo: SPLASH NEWS
In a 12-minute clip entitled “Bible or Koran – which burns best?” Mr Stewart, who works for the Queensland University of Technology, holds up the two religious texts before ripping them apart and lighting the rolled up pages.
At one stage he inhales deeply from one of the roll-ups before blowing out the smoke and commenting: “Holy”.