Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
August Harper's Bazaar Cover Story
Growing up, the actress thought of herself as neither a screen siren nor a great beauty. Now, with both an Oscar and a Lancôme contract, she reflects on what happens after you get what you want.
By LAURA BROWN
For this year's Academy Awards, where she won the Oscar for Best Actress, Kate Winslet wore a highly glamorous one-shouldered blue-gray Yves Saint Laurent evening gown. But a little part of her — metaphorically, at least — was in tennis whites. "I wanted to run over to my parents and do one of those Wimbledon moments when the person jumps from the court and leaps over the audience and the bleachers," she says, her face creasing into a smile. "I did have the urge to do that."
Kate is, of course, a serious actress. She has gravitas. She, like her sisters in name, Blanchett and Hepburn, could conceivably be on the head of a ship. No, not that one. But onstage on Oscar night, when her fedora-wearing "gangster" (as she calls him) father let out a whistle, his daughter turned into a little girl. "Ah, my dad's whistle," she remembers, rolling a cigarette at filmmaker husband Sam Mendes's production office in New York's meatpacking district. "On holidays when I was a kid, we would all be off in the rock pools along the beach. When it came time to go, we'd hear the whistle and we'd all come running. Like dogs!"
Later that fateful night, Kate took her parents to a post-Oscar party where, she says, "seeing my dad meet Elvis Costello and my mom shaking hands with Elton John, it was lovely." But her highlight is what the kids might call random: "Meeting Tom Colicchio. I'm obsessed with Top Chef." Turns out Kate and Mendes had been planning a win-or-lose dinner at Colicchio's New York restaurant Craft. "I was like, 'I just want to run the menu by you. For an appetizer, we're having da-da-da,' and he was like, 'Good choice, good choice.'"
Returning to New York the next day, Kate discovered that you do, in fact, have to put your Oscar through the X-ray machine at the airport. "They say, 'Is that it, in the bag?' and I was like, 'Yep!'" Kate drank champagne on the flight and took pictures while her golden boy was passed around the flight crew.
Even though she returned the champion, Kate notes of the endless awards season, "It's very hard to feel like yourself because you're not; you're on show. In the old days" — her debut in Heavenly Creatures in 1994, followed by her first Oscar nominations, for Sense and Sensibility in 1996 and Titanic in 1998 — "I'd just wing it, but now you need to give people what they want, which is someone looking composed, fresh, and put together." But she gleefully defuses the glamour mythology. "Our knickers will still go up our ass at the most inappropriate moment. And we'll still want to flick them out, but you can't, because someone is going to catch you." So what does one do? "Oh, I run behind pillars and things."
Kate hasn't really gone all shy and retiring on the red carpet. After years of wearing long, she's more recently taken a short cut — sporting, among others, a curve-loving Hervé Léger and a racy Balmain number. (She's still legging it today, perched on the couch in a gold Calypso minidress.) "I danced a lot when I was younger, and I've always had decent, shapely legs and thought it's now or never," she says. "I mean, when you're pushing 40, are you really going to wander around in a dress that's midthigh length? So I thought, Oh, fuck it, I'm just going to do it."
And so began the thousandth round of Kate Winslet body speculation. "I've heard, 'Oh, she's toned and she's lost weight,' but I am exactly the same as I've always been. The one thing that had to go during awards season was exercise. People would say to me, 'Oh, come on ...' like I was lying about it!" The topic clearly fatigues her. "Some may find it hard to believe it, but I don't care about that stuff."
But Oprah Winfrey does, as she proclaimed gloriously to the world when Kate was on her show promoting The Reader — in which her character, former Nazi guard Hanna Schmitz, is often naked — "God bless your real breasts!" Kate shrugs and says, "I'm used to people openly discussing my tits. If people are noticing my boobs in a movie and saying they do what real boobs do, then that's great." But, like her legs, the boobs have a shelf life. "I'll be 34 in October. I can't keep getting away with it. There was so much of it in The Reader because the story required it, but people have seen enough of my bum and my boobs. I have to put them back."
So while Kate's figure has been endlessly debated, it's her classic, expressive face that is most compelling. She is now a model for Lancôme — her new campaign, for L'Absolu Rouge lipstick, launches this month — and she is such a diligent ambassador that she pulls a giant Ziploc bag out of her purse and starts explaining, in detail, her favorite products one by one: "Rénergie is really, really fantastic. Résolution eye cream — excellent for puffiness! Pink Parfait Magic Blush, which I just love ... and Absolute Rouge is spectacular. Sam and I went out to the theater one night, and I double kissed everyone and it didn't come off!" Pause. "Actually, I don't double kiss. Just one will do, thank you."
Kate has been frank about not being the hottest girl on the block growing up, and she admits she was surprised when Lancôme came calling. "I really thought, me?" she says. Lest she seem disingenuous, she insists, "Seriously. Because I think what you feel like as a teenager never really goes away. If you were teased for being fat or thin or having bad teeth, you're always insecure about that particular area of yourself. So I've never thought of myself as any kind of beauty, iconic or otherwise."
Sure, Kate has an Oscar, a lauded husband, and two fetching children (Mia, 8, and Joe, 5), but she's not Gisele. She's one of us ... ish. "Part of the reason Lancôme asked me was because I come across as a woman other women can identify with. The media plays such a big role in how women measure themselves against other women, so I can be in a position where I can say beauty comes from within, we're not all perfect, and the covers of magazines are of course retouched. We do not look like that." She points to her forehead. "I have wrinkles here, which are very evident, and I will particularly say when I look at movie posters, 'You guys have airbrushed my forehead. Please can you change it back?' I'd rather be the woman they're saying 'She's looking older' about than 'She's looking stoned.'"
Kate has lived many lives for someone not even 34, and it lends her an old-soul quality. She had the wind in her Titanic hair 12 years ago and was married and a mother by 25. "You know, I never felt like I was young at the time," she says, "and obviously having Mia was absolutely planned, and I was married to Jim [Threapleton, who she met on the set of Hideous Kinky]. It's only now when I meet people who are my age and single, [with] no kids, that I reflect and say, Bloody hell, I really have lived at a fast pace." She rolls another cigarette. "The growing-up-fast part weirdly happened between the ages of 15 and 22. When everyone was out getting plastered, I didn't do all of that. I was working. I was doing life. Now that I look back, I feel very lucky. I've never taken drugs, never been offered cocaine. And I've done a heck of a lot of traveling: India, Australia, Morocco, New Zealand. You have to rely on your resources when you're away; you have to think quickly [and] grow up quickly."
These days, though, her peripatetic ways are behind her. "I always have the itch," she says of work and the scripts piling up in her office, "but at the moment I am deliberately resisting it. I turned to my kids after the Oscars and said, I'm not going anywhere for a while." Mendes is in the throes of his own project, so Kate is having her turn at home, relearning French for kicks and thinking about finally putting away her work bag from The Reader, which she hasn't quite "put to bed" yet. "It's still fully packed, which is very strange," she says. "I've never done that before."
How do she and Mendes keep the home fires burning, as it were? "Ah ... romance to me is spontaneity. It's not diamond earrings; it's a bunch of daffodils that's freshly picked from the field. Or just a little thing like Sam calling me at three in the afternoon, saying, 'I'm coming home now. I'm done for the day.' It's romantic because he just thought, 'I'll go home. I want to be with Kate and the kids.' I'm not one for big, grand gestures." Like rose petals on the bed? "Ha! No, given American Beauty [for which Mendes won the Oscar for Best Director in 2000], I would walk in and be like, what the fuck? I would laugh my head off."
But, of course, as of-the-people (ish) as Kate Winslet is, her success comes because she embodies our dreams — of romance, of drama, of beauty. We will always want to see her on the prow of that famous ship, or as the heavenly creature in a Lancôme commercial, meeting her lover on the Pont des Arts. Because maybe that could happen for us too.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
A Farewell to Harms
(the following was written by peggy noonan one of the leading conservative thinkers and writers of our time not by me.)
Palin was bad for the Republicans—and the republic.
Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. They mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground.
Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.
In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.
In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.
McCain-Palin lost. Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.
To wit, "I love her because she's so working-class." This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they're working class "tropes." Because, you know, that's what they teach in "Ways of the Working Class" at Yale and Dartmouth.
What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.
"She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism." This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it's included in U.S. News & World Report's top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!
America doesn't need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this.
"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.
"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.
"She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism.
"Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think "not thoughtful" is a working-class trope!
"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.
"Turning to others means the media won!" No, it means they lose. What the mainstream media wants is not to kill her but to keep her story going forever. She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why wouldn't the media want to keep that going?
Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think.
Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.
The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.
It's not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won't be that way.
We are going to need the best.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Petula Clark
i've always been in love with pet.
now playing: her first two international hits 'downtown' and 'i know a place'.
'Downtown'
i know a place
now playing: her first two international hits 'downtown' and 'i know a place'.
'Downtown'
i know a place
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Jermaine Jackson
jermaine singing 'smile' at mj's memorial:
jermaine dueted on one of my favorite dance songs with the otherwise ridiculous pia zadora.
i still like this song and jermaine but am i glad ms. zadora disappeared from sight soon after it's release.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Keith, Dave and Richard*
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
*and the 'queen moron of wasilla' makes yet another comedic reappearance. keep it coming sarah cause we all need some laughs!
Barbra Streisand
i really am soooooo over streisand. however, that being said i happen to like this song from the upcoming film 'nine'.
she does it justice but comes nowhere near shelley birch in the original broadway recording.
she does it justice but comes nowhere near shelley birch in the original broadway recording.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
R.I.P.
i'm one of those who believe michael jackson was given too much air time after his death. untimely death? i think not. we all die a little death everyday. michael just pushed his along as so many celebrities before him have done. as a white guy i have heard it insinuated that my opposition to this prolonged memorial, of almost a week in length , makes me a bigot. i take great exception to this. i am far from a bigot. i just don't believe in canonization especially of a man whose past is to say the least pretty shady. otherwise he was an entertainer. period. he in no way deserves the idolatry respected broadcasts and broadcasters bestowed on him. damn we don't even mention the dead and dying in two wars america is involved in at all. does mr. jackson deserve more than these men and women? you are on your own here. an entertainerthat's all he was! and as i write this i question why i am giving this so much time and space. i suppose i got caught up in watching that accident on the highway. it's horrific but you can't take your eyes off of it. shame on us. greater shame on me.
today's memorial which was dignified and probably deserved would have been plenty. but for msnbc and other cable news outlets to devote the time he got in his death was absurd. i mean he made music. that's all! well that's not all but i will refrain.
there were highlights today: germaine jackson singing 'smile' brought a tear or two to my eyes while jennifer hudson thrilled as her voice soared...
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
the most touching moments for me were when his daughter paris spoke of her love for her father and brooke shields touching and often funny memories. paris jackson gave me pause because she reminded me that he was for her just a dad. that is good enough for today.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
michael i hope you have more peace in death than you had in life no matter what race you turn out to be.
sadly this is what he selfishly, yes selfishly, leaves behind. you don't have three kids and abuse drugs and probably more the way he did. selfish! and dumb...just plain dumb. i best stop now because i'm getting angry and it just ain't worth it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)