HAL 9000 Gone
Douglas Rain, the creepy voice of HAL in ‘2001,’ dies at 90
Rain’s sinuous, detached reading of HAL’s lines made the computer’s murders of four astronauts all the more shocking.
By Alex Johnson
Douglas Rain, the acclaimed Shakespearean actor whose chilling performance as the voice of the homicidal HAL 9000 computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” rendered the amoral emptiness of outer space in sound, died Sunday at age 90.
The Stratford Festival, the Canadian theater company of which Rain was a founding member in 1953, confirmed his death on Sunday night. A cause of death wasn’t reported.
“Today we lost Douglas Rain, a member of our founding company and a hugely esteemed presence on our stages for 32 seasons,” the company said. “He will be greatly missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.”
The HAL 9000 computer was the sentient controller of life support, systems and — although it wasn’t revealed until later in the movie — the very mission of Discovery One, the spacecraft that is sent to Jupiter to investigate a mysterious black obelisk in the landmark 1968 science fiction film directed by Stanley Kubrick and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.
Rain’s sinuous, detached reading of HAL’s lines made the computer’s murders of three astronauts as they slept in suspended animation and its subsequent stranding of astronaut Frank Poole to die in open space all the more shocking.
Jodie Turner-Smith To QUEEN AND SLIM
Jodie Turner-Smith To Share The Screen With Daniel Kaluuya In ‘Queen & Slim’
CREDIT: Getty Images
Lena Waite and Melina Matsoukas have finally found their “Queen.” Actress Jodie Turner-Smith, who audiences may recognize for her recurring role on The Last Ship and Nightflyers, has been chosen to star opposite Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Black Panther) in the Waithe-penned film Queen & Slim.
Reported Thursday (Nov. 8) by Variety, the budding actress confirmed the news on Instagram. The romantic drama has been described as a layered love story. After a first date, the duo is embroiled in a high-stakes case of murder when they kill a police officer in self-defense after a traffic stop. Instead of turning themselves in, they go on the run.
The 2019 slated release will be directed by Matsoukas. This will be her first feature film debut. Currently, Matsoukas is the executive producer of HBO’s runaway hit Insecure. She’s also known for her previous gig as a music video director for the likes of Rihanna, Beyonce, Ciara, and Ne-Yo.
“Words cannot express how excited I am to be starting this journey with you,” Turner-Smith captioned to her Instagram post next to her co-star. “[Waithe and Matsoukas], thank you for choosing me to be your QUEEN.”
Paradise Burnt
Video Shows the Terrifying Drive to Escape Massive Fire in Paradise, California
by Matt Novak
The so-called Camp Fire has already consumed over 20,000 acres in Northern California, forcing about 50,000 people to evacuate. But the fire has moved so quickly that some people have barely escaped—like Brynn Parrott Chatfield from the town of Paradise, who posted this video to social media showing her family’s terrifying drive through the flames yesterday.
The video, published to Facebook, truly looks like something out of a movie. They’re surrounded on both sides with flames lapping at the road as they race to get out.
“I feel very vulnerable posting this but I feel I should,” Brynn Parrott Chatfield wrote on Facebook. “My hometown of Paradise is on fire. My family is evacuated and safe. Not all my friends are safe. It’s very surreal. Things always work out, but the unknown is a little scary.”
Migrating Mud Pot in Mojave
A bubbling pool of mud is on the move, and no one knows why
Traveling at about 20 feet a year, the muddy mystery has no obvious driver—and so far, it can’t be stopped.
BY
When it comes to matters of geology and rumbling earth in California, the San Andreas Fault is usually the star of the show. But this time around, the area near the infamous fault has caught people’s attention due to a mysterious pot of bubbling mud.
Refusing to stay in place, a roiling mass of carbon dioxide and slurry-like soil is migrating across the state at a pace of 20 feet a year. So far, it’s carved a 24,000-square-foot basin out of the earth, and it’s set to continue its crusade until whatever’s driving it dies out. Scientists currently have no real idea why it’s moving or if it can be stopped.
So, what do we know about it?
This curiosity appeared in the Salton Trough, an area of California that’s being stretched apart by a tectonic battle between the forces of the San Andreas Fault and the East Pacific Rise, a mid-ocean ridge. This unique environment is where the Colorado River dumps plenty of its sediment, which gets packed up so that the lower layers a few miles down get heated up and squashed a little. (Find out how a powerful earthquake snapped a tectonic plate in two.)
Reznor / Ross Score A MILLION LITTLE PIECES
Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross Scoring Amy Adams’ Woman In the Window’
Thriller set to arrive in 2019
By JON BLISTEIN
David Buchan/Variety/REX/Shutterstock
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are composing the score for Amy Adams’ forthcoming thriller, The Woman in the Window, which is set to arrive in 2019.
The Joe Wright-directed film is based on A.J. Finn’s novel of the same name, which was published in January. The story is centered around a reclusive woman named Anna (Adams) who obsessively spies on her new neighbors until one night she sees something she wasn’t supposed to. The film will also star Julianne Moore and Gary Oldman.
Along with The Woman in the Window, Reznor and Ross are also composing the music for HBO’s forthcoming television adaptation of the famed graphic novel, Watchmen. Though an exact release date has yet to be announced, the show is expected to premiere in 2019.
More recently, Reznor and Ross composed the music for A Million Little Pieces – an adaptation of James Frey’s controversial memoir of the same name – and Jonah Hill’s directorial debut, Mid90s. In June, Nine Inch Nails released their most recent record, Bad Witch.
The B-52s 1980
See, I told you they used ramps!
New discovery throws light on mystery of pyramids’ construction
Egyptologists stumble across ramp that helps explain how huge blocks of stones were hauled into place
The mystery of how, exactly, the pyramids were built may have come a step closer to being unravelled after a team of archaeologists made a chance discovery in an ancient Egyptian quarry.
Scientists researching ancient inscriptions happened upon a ramp with stairways and a series of what they believe to be postholes, which suggest that the job of hauling into place the huge blocks of stone used to build the monuments may have been completed more quickly than previously thought.
While the theory that the ancient Egyptians used ramps to move the stones has already been put forward, the structure found by the Anglo-French team, which dated from about the period that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built, is significantly steeper than was previously supposed possible.
They believe the inclusion of the steps and the postholes either side of a rampway suggests the builders were able to haul from both directions, rather than simply dragging a block behind them. The team believes those below the block would have used the posts to create a pulley system while those above it pulled simultaneously.
They believe the find to be significant because they say it suggests the work could have been done more quickly, albeit still involving the heavy labour of a large number of people.
Quantum Consciousness
Roger Penrose On Why Consciousness Does Not Compute
The emperor of physics defends his controversial theory of mind.
BY STEVE PAULSON
EMERGENT BEAUTY: Roger Penrose has always been in search of deep structures of the universe, reflected in the tiling he created, where basic shapes—in this case the rhombus—give rise to extraordinary patterns.
Once you start poking around in the muck of consciousness studies, you will soon encounter the specter of Sir Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist with an audacious—and quite possibly crackpot—theory about the quantum origins of consciousness. He believes we must go beyond neuroscience and into the mysterious world of quantum mechanics to explain our rich mental life. No one quite knows what to make of this theory, developed with the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, but conventional wisdom goes something like this: Their theory is almost certainly wrong, but since Penrose is so brilliant (“One of the very few people I’ve met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius,” physicist Lee Smolin has said), we’d be foolish to dismiss their theory out of hand.
Penrose, 85, is a mathematical physicist who made his name decades ago with groundbreaking work in general relativity and then, working with Stephen Hawking, helped conceptualize black holes and gravitational singularities, a point of infinite density out of which the universe may have formed. He also invented “twistor theory,” a new way to connect quantum mechanics with the structure of spacetime. His discovery of certain geometric forms known as “Penrose tiles”—an ingenious design of non-repeating patterns—led to new directions of study in mathematics and crystallography.
The breadth of Penrose’s interests is extraordinary, which is evident in his recent book Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe—a dense 500-page tome that challenges some of the trendiest but still unproven theories in physics, from the multiple dimensions of string theory to cosmic inflation in the first moment of the Big Bang. He considers these theories to be fanciful and implausible.
Oumuamua Invasion
Mysterious interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua could be a giant solar sail ‘sent from another civilization to look for signs of life,’ claim astronomers
- Mysterious object Oumuamua arrived in our solar system in October 2017
- NASA spotted unexpected boost in speed and shift in trajectory as it passed through the inner solar system last year
- Now one study claims it could actually be a solar sail sent by aliens
By MARK PRIGG
A mysterious asteroid called Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever seen in the solar system, could be a gigantic alien solar sail send to look for signs of life, a new study has claimed.
Astronomers from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) analyzed the strange cigar shape of the object, and an unexpected boost in speed and shift in trajectory as it passed through the inner solar system last year.
They concluded that the strange asteroid ‘might be a lightsail of artificial origin.’
The study – ‘Could Solar Radiation Pressure Explain ‘Oumuamua’s Peculiar Acceleration?’, which recently appeared online – was conducted by Shmuel Bialy, a postdoctoral researcher at the CfA’s Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) and Professor Abraham Loeb, the director of the ITC, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, and the head chair of the Breakthrough Starshot Advisory Committee.
The researchers say the strange acceleration could the the result of solar radiation pushing a giant solar sail.
137
Why the number 137 is one of the greatest mysteries in physics
Famous physicists like Richard Feynman think 137 holds the answers to the Universe.
- The fine structure constant has mystified scientists since the 1800s.
- The number 1/137 might hold the clues to the Grand Unified Theory.
- Relativity, electromagnetism and quantum mechanics are unified by the number.
Does the Universe around us have a fundamental structure that can be glimpsed through special numbers?
The brilliant physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) famously thought so, saying there is a number that all theoretical physicists of worth should “worry about”. He called it “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man”.
That magic number, called the fine structure constant, is a fundamental constant, with a value which nearly equals 1/137. Or 1/137.03599913, to be precise. It is denoted by the Greek letter alpha – α.
What’s special about alpha is that it’s regarded as the best example of a pure number, one that doesn’t need units. It actually combines three of nature’s fundamental constants – the speed of light, the electric charge carried by one electron, and the Planck’s constant, as explains physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies to Cosmos magazine. Appearing at the intersection of such key areas of physics as relativity, electromagnetism and quantum mechanics is what gives 1/137 its allure.
Physicist Laurence Eaves, a professor at the University of Nottingham, thinks the number 137 would be the one you’d signal to the aliens to indicate that we have some measure of mastery over our planet and understand quantum mechanics. The aliens would know the number as well, especially if they developed advanced sciences.
Kepler Gone
RIP, Kepler: NASA’s Revolutionary Planet-Hunting Telescope Runs Out of Fuel
The most prolific planet-hunting machine in history has signed off.
NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which has discovered 70 percent of the 3,800 confirmed alien worlds to date, has run out of fuel, agency officials announced today (Oct. 30). Kepler can no longer reorient itself to study cosmic objects or beam its data home to Earth, so the legendary instrument’s in-space work is done after nearly a decade.
And that work has been transformative. [Kepler’s 7 Greatest Exoplanet Discoveries]
“Kepler has taught us that planets are ubiquitous and incredibly diverse,” Kepler project scientist Jessie Dotson, who’s based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, told Space.com. “It’s changed how we look at the night sky.”
Death Valley Burros
Love those heehaws and snorts, but Death Valley aims to become a ‘no-burro zone’
As the sun set on a landscape of scruffy mountains and sweeping plains, 20 wild burros watched Mark Meyers with ears erect.
They had reason to be quizzical: Meyers and his hired hands were building traps around their muddy watering hole.
Amid the clatter of hammers and occasional heehaws and snorts in a remote corner of Death Valley National Park, Meyers called out to the descendants of pack animals used by miners and prospectors more than a century ago.
“Don’t worry. You’ll be all right.”
Federal officials have charged Meyers with safely capturing the roughly 2,500 to 4,000 wild burros said to be roaming the 3.4-million-acre park as quickly as possible for transport to adoptive homes and sanctuaries across the nation.
As of Oct. 22 — six days into the campaign — the team had snared 28.
The image of the burro as the grizzled sourdough’s faithful beast of burden contrasts, officials say, with the reality that they breed prolifically and out-compete native vegetarians — stately bighorn sheep, tiny kangaroo rats and bulky chuckwalla lizards — by devouring and trampling available greenery.
“Burros are not part of the natural California desert ecosystem,” said Mike Reynolds, superintendent of Death Valley National Park.
Burro roundups are nothing new in Death Valley, where the hardy and remarkably adaptive animals have come to dominate contoured badlands and carpet life-giving seeps and springs with their droppings. The most recent was in 2005.
But officials hope a five-year agreement signed by the National Park Service and Meyers’ nonprofit Peaceful Valley Donkey Rescue may amount to the last large-scale roundup conducted in the park, where 20-mule teams once pulled wagons loaded with borax.
5,000-year-old Toy Car Found
5,000-Year-Old Version of a Toy Car Found in Archeological Dig in Turkey
It’s not Hot Wheels or Matchbox. In fact, it predates those by several millennia.
Many gearheads grew up playing with toy cars. Loyalties to Hot Wheels or Matchbox were as divisive as those between Ford and Chevy are today. But kids have been fascinated by wheels since long before these companies—or even the car itself—existed. An archeological dig in Turkey has revealed that our fascination with toy wheels goes back at least 5,000 years, reports the International Business Times.
The ongoing excavation of the ancient city of Sogmatar, in modern-day Turkey, has dug up some children’s toys. The big surprise was the discovery of a small earthen carriage toy. Even back in the time of Moses (who is said to have sought refuge in Sogtamar after escaping Egypt), kids played with toy cars—or, at least, the equivalent of them back in the day.
“In one of these tombs, we found a four-wheeled miniature horse carriage, a children’s toy, as well as a rattle with a bird motif,” assistant professor Yusuf Albayrak of Turkey’s Harran University told the International Business Times. “Children’s toys were buried in children’s tombs. We thus know that rattles existed for children 5,000 years ago.”
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY REVIEW
Ancient Ship Found
World’s oldest intact shipwreck discovered in Black Sea
Archaeologists say the 23-metre vessel has lain undisturbed for more than 2,400 years
The world’s oldest shipwreck dating from 400BC of ancient Greek origin, most likely a trading vessel. Photograph: Black Sea map
Archaeologists have found what they believe to be the world’s oldest intact shipwreck at the bottom of the Black Sea where it appears to have lain undisturbed for more than 2,400 years.
The 23-metre (75ft) vessel, thought to be ancient Greek, was discovered with its mast, rudders and rowing benches all present and correct just over a mile below the surface. A lack of oxygen at that depth preserved it, the researchers said.
“A ship surviving intact from the classical world, lying in over 2km of water, is something I would never have believed possible,” said Professor Jon Adams, the principal investigator with the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project (MAP), the team that made the find. “This will change our understanding of shipbuilding and seafaring in the ancient world.”
The ship is believed to have been a trading vessel of a type that researchers say has only previously been seen “on the side of ancient Greek pottery such as the ‘Siren Vase’ in the British Museum”.
Fascistic Mahler Fans
A concert-goer rustled a bag of gum during a Mahler symphony. A “violent attack” ensued.
By Isaac Stanley-Becker
It is said to represent the composer’s love letter to his new bride. And, like love, the Adagietto transports those who receive it – its atmospheric notes offering release from the grim foreboding and frenetic outbursts of the earlier movements of Gustav Mahler’s 5th Symphony.
But worldly concerns have a way of intruding: an iPhone light, a candy wrapper, one too many trips to the restroom.
The rustling of a gum wrapper at a performance of the symphony last week in the Swedish city of Malmo brought a section of the audience back down to earth, and brought several concertgoers to blows. Mahler’s late Romantic epic became the occasion for an epic clash over candy.
As Andris Nelsons, an eminent Latvian conductor, coaxed the quiet notes from the string section of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, a woman in the balcony rustled a bag of gum, the Sydsvenskan newspaper reported. A young man sitting next to her glared a few times and then lost his patience. He snatched the bag from her and threw it onto the floor.
Witnesses told the daily newspaper published in southern Sweden that the woman sat stoically through the rest of the Adagietto, which typically lasts about 10 minutes (“very slow,” Mahler instructed in the score), and the vigorous and triumphant finale. The symphony, composed in 1901 and 1902, has been described as a “large-scale journey,” similar to climbing Mount Everest. Leonard Bernstein conducted the Adagietto at the funeral services for Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
But as the concert hall vibrated with the final, resounding notes, and as applause rang out, she exacted her revenge….
Signed Copy of KATERINA @ Powell’s
Gulper Eel Awesome
KATERINA on New York Post Must-read List
This week’s must-read books
Katerina
James Frey (Gallery/Scout Press)
Set in 1992 Paris and 2018 Los Angeles, a love story between a young writer and a young model, both on the verge of fame. Twenty-five years later, the writer receives an anonymous message that draws him back to that relationship and all the magic of that earlier time.
Silver Twirler Rules
The Murky Origins Of Money
Conflict reigns over the history and origins of money
Thousands of years ago, money was a means of debt payment, archaeologists and anthropologists say
BY BRUCE BOWER
Wherever you go, money talks. And it has for a long time.
Sadly, though, money has been mum about its origins. For such a central element of our lives, money’s ancient roots and the reasons for its invention are unclear.
As cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin multiply into a flock of digital apparitions, researchers are still battling over how and where money came to be. And some draw fascinating parallels between the latest, buzzworthy cryptocurrencies, which require only a virtual wallet, and a type of money developed by one Micronesian island community that wouldn’t fit in anyone’s wallet, pocket or purse.
When it comes to money’s origins, though, conflict reigns. Economists have held one view of money’s origins for hundreds of years. But a growing number of anthropologists and archaeologists, holding a revisionist view, say that economists’ standard story is bankrupt.
Economists and revisionists alike agree that an object defined as money works in four ways: First, it serves as a means for exchanging goods and services. Currency enables payment of debts. It represents a general measure of value, making it possible to calculate prices of all sorts of items. And, finally, money can be stored as a wealth reserve.
From there, the two groups split. Mainstream economists assume that bartering of goods and services inspired money’s invention. Anthropologists and archaeologists contend that early states invented currency as a means of debt payment.
“Much academic work assumes that [monetary systems] arose in nation-states within the last 200 to 400 years,” says sociocultural anthropologist Daniel Souleles of Copenhagen Business School in Frederiksberg. But financialized transactions and debt show up in lots of places much further back in time.
Recent research from the Americas adds new questions to the debate. These investigations suggest that money independently appeared for different reasons and assumed different tangible forms in many parts of the world, starting thousands of years ago.
A MILLION LITTLE PIECES Deadline Cover
Taco Bell Rules
Taco Bell voted best Mexican restaurant in the country
ST. LOUIS (KMOV.com) — The Harris Poll, a nationwide customer survey of their favorite brands, has released its 2018 results.
The poll surveyed more than 77,000 customers in the U.S. on more than 3,000 brands to find which companies are the favorites among consumers.
Respondents weighed in on everything from printers to pizza, and the results are surprising. Here are some of consumers’ top choices.
Best Mexican Restaurant: Taco Bell
The after-hours crowd is still probably Taco Bell’s biggest customer base, but the company has grown its popularity through creative ads like the Nacho Fries conspiracy theory movie trailers starring Josh Duhamel and a strong social media presence.
The company has 7,000 locations and does nearly $2 billion in revenue.
More A MILLION LITTLE PIECES @ TIFF
Sam And Aaron Taylor-Johnson Breathe Fire Into James Frey’s Controversial Addiction Memoir ‘A Million Little Pieces’
Entertainment One
A Million Little Pieces is as raw, bloody and messy as James Frey wrote it. With the startling intensity he shocked Toronto with in Nocturnal Animals two years ago, Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Frey through his evolution from a hopeless, cornered animal descending down a drug-induced death spiral to someone who pulls out of the nosedive after reluctantly embracing help from a group of fellow addicts to create distance from the seduction of crack cocaine and hard liquor ravaging his body.
The right filmmaker came along when the Taylor-Johnsons came knocking. Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson had been an inseparable couple since she cast him in her directorial debut, 2009’s Nowhere Boy, as a young John Lennon. They liked the idea of pulling something more modest together, after the miserable time Sam had directing the first Fifty Shades of Grey movie. She’d been expecting to make a trilogy out of E.L. James’s erotic fiction series, but even though her first chapter grossed $571 million, she withdrew. Speculation was that the unprecedented level of creative control Universal offered James, a first-time novelist, in order to beat out the offers pouring in from other studios, caused issues.
Sam had been captivated by Frey’s memoir since she read it shortly after its publication, when she was known for her eye as a still photographer, and before she ever made her feature debut. “I loved the way it was told,” she remembers. “90 miles an hour is a good way to describe the ferocity and pace of his writing. I remember feeling exhausted and elated at the end, thinking it would make an amazing movie. Later, I’d hear or read that some other filmmaker signed on and I’d feel a twinge of jealousy.”
After they met, she gave it to Aaron, who devoured it. He says: “The journey of redemption, the light at the end of the tunnel, and the rhythm James put into his writing which provides such energy, it made us want to try and translate that into a character on screen.”
GAWKER Alive
Gawker Set to Relaunch Under New Owner Bryan Goldberg (EXCLUSIVE)
Amanda Hale hired as publisher for new iteration of the media gossip blog
Gawker will rise from the ashes in a new iteration of the website to be launched next year, Variety has learned.
The reborn Gawker comes under the ownership of Bryan Goldberg, founder and CEO of Bustle Digital Group, who was the winning bidder for the remaining assets of Gawker Media in July. Goldberg paid $1.35 million for the media gossip blog, which has been dormant for over two years after Gawker Media was sued into bankruptcy by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.
In a memo to Bustle staff Tuesday obtained by Variety, Goldberg said he has hired Amanda Hale as the new publisher of Gawker. Based in New York, Hale most recently was chief revenue officer of The Outline, the culture website founded by Joshua Topolsky (who previously worked at Bloomberg Media and The Verge) that recently laid off one-fourth of its staff.
Goldberg is targeting the Gawker relaunch for early 2019. “We won’t recreate Gawker exactly as it was, but we will build upon Gawker’s legacy and triumphs — and learn from its missteps,” he wrote in the memo. “In so doing, we aim to create something new, vibrant, highly relevant, and worth visiting daily.”
Sam Taylor-Johnson on A MILLION LITTLE PIECES
Sam Taylor-Johnson on “the Dream” of Directing Husband Aaron in A Million Little Pieces
The adaptation of James Frey’s book—debuting at the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday—is the couple’s first collaboration since Nowhere Boy.
by JULIE MILLER
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Jeff Gros
Since making 2009’s brilliant John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, director Sam Taylor-Johnson and actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson had been looking for an excuse to work together again.
But their personal collaborations complicated reunion possibilities for several years. Sam and Aaron fell in love after making the movie, got married, and had two daughters. (Sam also has two older daughters from her first marriage.) Rather than leave the kids in the care of strangers, husband and wife took turns making movies—with Sam adapting E.L. James’s bodice-ripping best-seller Fifty Shades of Grey into an artful blockbuster; and Aaron cycling through genres in Anna Karenina,Godzilla, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Nocturnal Animals.
Last year, though, the stars finally re-aligned for the Taylor-Johnsons. Sam signed on to direct an adaptation of James Frey’s 2003 book, A Million Little Pieces. And Aaron coincidentally had a gap in his schedule.
“The minute I knew he was available, it was clear that Aaron would be James. Absolutely, without question,” Sam said in an interview ahead of A Million Little Pieces’ premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. “I think it was serendipitous timing that he was available, the book rights were available, and the timing was perfect. . . . This was the dream since we first worked together. After [Nowhere Boy], we would both go to work on different projects, and I’d say, in my mind, ‘I’m leaving the best actor at home.’”
Flying Cholitas
Stay gold, Ponyboy
The Enduring Spell of ‘The Outsiders’
S. E. Hinton’s 1967 coming-of-age novel credited teenagers with a rich interior life. Here, a tribute to the book that created young adult fiction as we know it today.
By Lena Dunham
IT WAS FRESHMAN year of college and I fancied myself someone, well, fancy. Someone who loved fancy books and fancy men. Fancy bags and fancy restaurants. I was working overtime to appear unfazed, and it was moving along about as smoothly as the Sochi Olympics. Across the Intro to Genealogy classroom sat a boy who looked like a man but was, by virtue of being 19, still a boy — dark hair and dark eyes, a denim jacket so stiff it looked starched. He barely spoke but knew all the answers, while I spoke all the time and knew none.
I was leaving in the spring, transferring to a school that my mother considered more “academically rigorous,” and it was my soon-to-be-outta-here sense of abandon that allowed me to approach him one day after class: “Hey, did you know you look like the lead singer of the Cure?”
He looked at me quizzically. “Who’s that?” he asked. I stuttered — the fact was, I didn’t actually know. I’d seen a photo of Robert Smith in another kid’s dorm room and wasn’t expecting to be questioned, but instead to receive the kind of insider approval that usually accompanied a display of hipster knowledge. (This was the privilege of not having to consider the consequences of any action, great or small, that is endemic to upper-middle-class white girls everywhere.) I stammered: “Your hair is … I mean, your faces both kind of look …” He stared.
I changed tactics.
“I’m transferring,” I haughtily informed him.
“Oh, are you?” He jutted his chin out toward me: “O.K., then … stay gold, Ponyboy.”
Bandit Gone
Burt Reynolds, Movie Star Who Played It for Grins, Dies at 82
by
The ex-jock from Florida starred in ‘Deliverance’ and ‘Boogie Nights’ but preferred making such populist, fun fare as ‘Smokey and the Bandit,’ ‘The Cannonball Run’ and ‘Starting Over.’
Burt Reynolds, the charismatic star of such films as Deliverance, The Longest Yard and Smokey and the Bandit who set out to have as much fun as possible on and off the screen — and wildly succeeded — has died. He was 82.
Reynolds, who received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of porn director Jack Horner in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) and was the No. 1 box-office attraction for a five-year stretch starting in the late 1970s, died Thursday morning at Jupiter Medical Center in Florida, his manager, Erik Kritzer, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Always with a wink, Reynolds shined in many action films (often doing his own stunts) and in such romantic comedies as Starting Over (1979) opposite Jill Clayburgh and Candice Bergen; The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) with Dolly Parton; Best Friends (1982) with Goldie Hawn; and, quite aptly, The Man Who Loved Women (1983) with Julie Andrews.
Though beloved by audiences for his brand of frivolous, good-ol’-boy fare, the playful Reynolds rarely was embraced by critics. The first time he saw himself in Boogie Nights, he was so unhappy he fired his agent. (He went on to win a Golden Globe but lost out in the Oscar supporting actor race to Robin Williams for Good Will Hunting, a bitter disappointment for him.)
