Counterculture comic. Obscene. Genius. Fearless. Wise. Revolutionary.
Seven words to describe the man whose seven words defined an era and continue to impact those of us in the wake of his innovation. George Carlin should be the only one speaking about his own passing.
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?cl=8481659
Saying he’ll be missed seems so lacking…
A lovely lady who reminded movie goers what elegance looked like…
LOS ANGELES — Cyd Charisse, the long-legged Texas beauty who danced with the Ballet Russe as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday. She was 86.
Charisse was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Monday after suffering an apparent heart attack, said her publicist, Gene Schwam.
Charisse appeared in dramatic films, but her fame rested of the Technicolor musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. Classically trained, she could dance anything, from a pas de deux in 1946’s Ziegfeld Follies to the lowdown Mickey Spillane satire of 1956’s The Band Wagon (with Astaire).
She also forged a popular song-and-dance partnership on television and in nightclub appearances with her husband, singer Tony Bennett.
Her height was 5 feet, 6 inches, but in high heels and full-length stockings, she seemed serenely tall, and she moved with extraordinary grace. Her flawless beauty and jet-black hair contributed to an aura of perfection that Astaire described in his 1959 memoir, Steps in Time, as “beautiful dynamite.”
Charisse arrived at MGM as the studio was establishing itself as the king of musicals. Three producers — Arthur Freed, Joe Pasternak and Jack Cummings — headed units that drew from the greatest collection of musical talent. Dancers, singers, directors, choreographers, composers, conductors and a symphony-size orchestra were under contract and available. The contract list also included the screen’s two greatest male dancers: Astaire and Kelly.
Astaire, who danced with her in The Band Wagon and Silk Stockings, said of Charisse in a 1983 interview: “She wasn’t a tap dancer, she’s just beautiful, trained, very strong in whatever we did. When we were dancing, we didn’t know what time it was.”
She first gained notice as a member of the famed Ballet Russe, and got her start in Hollywood when star David Lichine was hired by Columbia Pictures for a ballet sequence in a 1943 Don Ameche-Janet Blair musical, Something to Shout About.
Although that film failed to live up to its title, its ballet sequence attracted wide notice, and Charisse (then billed as Lily Norwood) began receiving movie offers.
“I had just done that number with David as a favor to him,” she said in The Two of Us, her 1976 double autobiography with Martin. “Honestly, the idea of working movies had never once entered my head. I was a dancer, not an actress. I had no delusions about myself. I couldn’t act — I had never acted. So how could I be a movie star?”
She overcame her doubts and signed a seven-year contract at MGM. She also got a new name, the exotic “Cyd” instead of her lifelong nickname Sid, to go with her first husband’s last name.
The 1952 classic Singin’ in the Rain marked a breakthrough.
When Freed was dissatisfied with another dancer who had been cast, Charisse inherited the role and danced with Kelly in the Broadway Melody number that climaxed the movie. She stunned critics and audiences with her 25-foot Chinese silk scarf that floated in the air with the aid of a wind machine.
Charisse also danced with Kelly in Brigadoon,It’s Always Fair Weather and Invitation to the Dance. She missed what might have been her greatest opportunity: to appear with Kelly in the 1951 Academy Award winner, An American in Paris. She was pregnant, and Leslie Caron was cast in the role.
In 1996, Charisse recalled her reaction on entering the movies: “Ballet is a closed world and very rigid; MGM was a fairyland. You’d walk down the lot, seeing all these fabulous movies being made with the greatest talent in the world sitting there. It was a dream to walk through that lot.”
Her first assignment was a Ziegfeld Follies sequence in which she was one of the female dancers “flitting around Astaire as he danced.”
Like most young MGM contract players, she was schooled in drama and voice, and diction lessons eliminated her Texas accent. The singing lessons didn’t take, however, and the songs in her musicals were dubbed.
She graduated to featured dancer in sequences for such films as Till the Clouds Roll By,Fiesta,On an Island with You and Words and Music. She also appeared in such dramatic films as East Side, West Side,Tension and Mark of the Renegade.
Silk Stockings in 1957 marked the end of her dancing career in films, as well as the twilight of the movie musical. With the film business suffering from the onslaught of television, MGM dismantled its great collection of talent. Musicals were too expensive, and foreign audiences had soured on them.
Charisse continued with dramatic films, several of them made in Europe. She and Martin took their musical act to Las Vegas and elsewhere. In 1992 she finally made her Broadway debut, taking over the starring role as the unhappy ballerina in the musicalized Grand Hotel. The musical had premiered in 1989 with Liliane Montevecchi in the role.
“I’ve done about everything in show business except to play on Broadway,” Charisse said in a 1992 Associated Press interview. “I always hoped that I would one day. It’s the World Series of show business. If anybody tells you they’re not intimidated, they’re lying.”
In 1974, Charisse returned to MGM for a television drama. Gazing over the half-filled commissary at lunchtime, she mused: “You never realize that good things are going to be over sometime. It all seemed so natural then: Clark Gable and Robert Taylor lunching at one table. Lana Turner would be lunching at a table in the corner. Ava Gardner, too.”
“I grew up at this studio, and it didn’t seem unusual to see all those stars. Nowadays, you’d never find so many names in one commissary. In fact, there aren’t that many stars.”
Her name was Tula Ellice Finklea when she was born in Amarillo, Texas, on March 8, 1922. From her earliest years she was called Sid, because her older brother couldn’t say “sister.” She was a sickly girl who started dancing lessons to build up her strength after a bout with polio.
“I was so frail they were afraid to touch me,” she recalled in that 1996 interview.
At 14 she auditioned for the head of the famed Ballet Russe, and became part of the corps de ballet and toured the U.S. and Europe. To appear with the nearly all-Russian company, she was first billed as Celia Siderova, than as Maria Istromena.
At one point during the European tour, she met up again with Nico Charisse, a handsome young dancer she had studied with for a time in Los Angeles. They married in Paris in 1939.
The Ballet Russe disbanded after the war broke out, and the newlyweds returned to Hollywood. In 1942, a son Nicky, was born.
In 1948, the year after she and Nico divorced, Charisse married Martin. Her second son, Tony Jr., was born in 1950.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The following article from The New York Times is fascinating! It really does put into focus the benefits and infringements (?) of state medicine.
How do you measure up according to the Japanese standard?
Somewhere in Egypt I read that Sydney Pollack had died. Pollack was a favorite of mine– both as an actor (for which he never got enough credit) and as a director (Out of Africa is one of my all-time favorites). I will miss his creative work. His work on behalf of future artists will insure his legacy for years to come.
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When news broke Monday that Sydney Pollack had died of cancer at age 73, the tributes poured out.
Many critics praised his work ethic, of directing high-class, star-driven, commercially viable movies for 40 years, from “The Slender Thread” (starring Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft) in 1965 to “The Interpreter” (starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn) in 2005. Others focused on his prime productive period in the ’70s and ’80s, when he made such classic films as “Jeremiah Johnson,” “Three Days of the Condor,” “Tootsie” and his Oscar-winning “Out of Africa.”
David Edelstein at New York magazine complimented Pollack’s work as an actor, portraying men comfortable with power and wealth - either in comic roles (as Dustin Hoffman’s agent in “Tootsie” or Will Truman’s philandering dad on “Will & Grace”) or, more menacingly, in thrillers such as “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Michael Clayton.”
And Robert Redford emerged from his shell of privacy to speak to Time magazine about his nearly five-decade friendship with Pollack. (The two met as young actors on the set of “War Hunt,” and Pollack proceeded to direct Redford in seven films.)
What was glossed over, and sometimes missed altogether, in the numerous obituaries and appreciations was Pollack’s pivotal role in the creation of the Sundance Institute. He was a founding member of the Sundance board and one of the founding creative advisors of the Sundance Filmmakers Lab.
“His deep commitment to artists and his generosity in mentoring emerging filmmakers will always be a cornerstone of the work of the Institute,” Michelle Satter, director of Sundance’s Feature Film Program, said in a statement this week.
It goes deeper than that, though. Pollack was in at the beginning of what made the Sundance Institute what it is today.
It goes back to Pollack’s long friendship with Redford, of course. In his interview with Time, Redford recalled, “I think that the best times that he and I had were when the film industry was a different business. It was mainly because, in more of the films he and I did during the time we worked together, we were going against the grain.”
When Redford bought the old Timp Haven ski resort in Provo Canyon in 1969, he brought Pollack up to shoot a movie there: “Jeremiah Johnson,” the brooding 1972 Western in which Redford played an ex-soldier trying to live as a mountain man. The resort, rechristened Sundance, became the base of operations for Redford’s ideas of conservation and artistic development.
When the fledgling Utah/U.S. Film Festival was launched in 1978, Redford was on the festival’s board and Sterling van Wagenen (who later directed the second and third “Work and the Glory” films, and then was Redford’s brother-in-law) was the festival director. In 1979, in the festival’s second year, Pollack came to Salt Lake City and led a discussion on directing, according to Lawrence Smith’s 1999 memoir, Party in a Box.
When Redford convened the first planning conference to create the Sundance Institute in 1979, Smith’s book says, Pollack was one of the filmmakers in attendance. When the institute established its labs, Pollack was a frequent adviser.
But Pollack’s most permanent contribution to Sundance’s legend may have been a single suggestion he made in 1980 to Smith and the organizers of the U.S. Film Festival (which Sundance took over in 1985 and officially renamed the Sundance Film Festival in 1991). Here is the moment as Smith describes it in his book:
“It was spring of 1980, and he said something that forever changed the course of the event. He was wearing his traditional Levi’s and cowboy boots, and he leaned back in a big leather chair, speaking in that raspy voice that one gets only from years of smoking, ‘You know what you ought to do? You ought to move the festival to Park City and set it in the wintertime. You’d be the only festival in the world held in a ski resort during ski season, and Hollywood would beat down the door to attend.’ ”
If you’ve ever been to the Sundance Film Festival and cursed the cold, the snow and the icy sidewalks, now you know whom to blame.
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* SEAN P. MEANS writes a daily blog, “The Movie Cricket,” at blogs.sltrib.com/movies. Send questions or comments to Sean P. Means, movie critic, The Salt Lake Tribune, 90 S. 400 West, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, UT 84101, or e-mail movies@sltrib.com.
When I read the following article from The Atlantic, I recognized, all too familiarly, the pains experienced by the author. Similar to the college composition class, my public speaking classes have been taking an enormous toll on me. Each semester professors are given an opportunity to describe their classroom experience in a self-evaluation, at my school. This semester for COMM 110, I am going to respond in one simple way: 1/3 of my students missed the following vocabulary matching question on a quiz:
15. ____ resembles steel in hardness. She can be tough, and even a little _____, an attitude that stems, at least in part, from wanting to live up to the high expections her father set for her.
a. aspiring
b. grandiose
c. edgy
d. scrutiny
e. steely
A final insult took place when a Ph.D. colleague of mine, at another institution, got it wrong too, saying “Well, it takes me a minute.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/college
The art world has lost a pop artist, collaborator, sculptor, choreographer– a person “curious. … learning something new every day. ” In actuality, we all have lost someone special.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080513/ap_on_re_us/obit_rauschenberg
News comes from Virginia that Mildred Loving, civil rights pioneer, has died. In an era where all that want to marry cannot, her work (the simple work of wanting to be with your true love) still continues.
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Mildred Loving, matriarch of interracial marriage, dies
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.
Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.
“I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble — and believed in love,” Fortune told The Associated Press.
Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.
“There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause,” the court ruled in a unanimous decision.
Her husband died in 1975. Shy and soft-spoken, Loving shunned publicity and in a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, insisted she never wanted to be a hero — just a bride.
“It wasn’t my doing,” Loving said. “It was God’s work.”
Mildred Jeter was 11 when she and 17-year-old Richard began courting, according to Phyl Newbeck, a Vermont author who detailed the case in the 2004 book, “Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers.”
She became pregnant a few years later, she and Loving got married in Washington in 1958, when she was 18. Mildred told the AP she didn’t realize it was illegal.
“I think my husband knew,” Mildred said. “I think he thought (if) we were married, they couldn’t bother us.”
But they were arrested a few weeks after they returned to Central Point, their hometown in rural Caroline County north of Richmond. They pleaded guilty to charges of “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” according to their indictments.
They avoided jail time by agreeing to leave Virginia — the only home they’d known — for 25 years. They moved to Washington for several years, then launched a legal challenge by writing to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who referred the case to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Attorneys later said the case came at the perfect time — just as lawmakers passed the Civil Rights Act, and as across the South, blacks were defying Jim Crow’s hold.
“The law that threatened the Lovings with a year in jail was a vestige of a hateful, discriminatory past that could not stand in the face of the Lovings’ quiet dignity,” said Steven Shapiro, national legal director for the ACLU.
“We loved each other and got married,” she told The Washington Evening Star in 1965, when the case was pending. “We are not marrying the state. The law should allow a person to marry anyone he wants.”
After the Supreme Court ruled, the couple returned to Virginia, where they lived with their children, Donald, Peggy and Sidney. Each June 12, the anniversary of the ruling, Loving Day events around the country mark the advances of mixed-race couples.
Richard Loving died in a car accident that also injured his wife. “They said I had to leave the state once, and I left with my wife,” he told the Star in 1965. “If necessary, I will leave Virginia again with my wife, but I am not going to divorce her.”
As they ask on their website, “What are you going to do to end the silence?”
Final Exams will occur during the specified times listed for each course. Rearranging exam times requires approval from the VPAA.
COMM 495– Monday 5/5/08 12:00- 2:00 p.m.
COMM 110A– Tuesday 5/6/08 10:00- 12:00 a.m.
COMM 324– Tuesday 5/6/08 12:30-2:30 p.m.
COMM 110B– Wednesday 5/7/08 8-10 a.m.
FRANCE MAY OUTLAW INCITING EXTREME THINNESS
By DEVORAH LAUTER, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 40 minutes ago
The French parliament’s lower house adopted a groundbreaking bill Tuesday that would make it illegal for anyone — including fashion magazines, advertisers and Web sites — to publicly incite extreme thinness.
The National Assembly approved the bill in a series of votes Tuesday, after the legislation won unanimous support from the ruling conservative UMP party. It goes to the Senate in the coming weeks.
Fashion industry experts said that, if passed, the law would be the strongest of its kind anywhere. Leaders in French couture are opposed to the idea of legal boundaries on beauty standards.
The bill was the latest and strongest of measures proposed after the 2006 anorexia-linked death of a Brazilian model prompted efforts throughout the international fashion industry to address the repercussions of using ultra-thin models.
Conservative lawmaker Valery Boyer, author of the law, argued that encouraging anorexia or severe weight loss should be punishable in court.
Doctors and psychologists treating patients with anorexia nervosa — a disorder characterized by an abnormal fear of becoming overweight — welcomed the government’s efforts to fight self-inflicted starvation, but warned that its link with media images remains hazy.
French lawmakers and fashion industry members signed a nonbinding charter last week on promoting healthier body images. Spain in 2007 banned ultra-thin models from catwalks.
But Boyer said such measures did not go far enough.
Her bill has mainly brought focus to pro-anorexic Web sites that give advice on how to eat an apple a day — and nothing else.
But Boyer insisted in her speech to lawmakers Tuesday that the legislation was much broader and could, in theory, be used against many facets of the fashion industry.
It would give judges the power to imprison and fine offenders up to $47,000 if found guilty of “inciting others to deprive themselves of food” to an “excessive” degree, Boyer said in a telephone interview before the parliamentary session.
Judges could also sanction those responsible for a magazine photo of a model whose “excessive thinness … altered her health,” she said.
Boyer said she was focusing on women’s health, though the bill applies to models of both sexes. The French Health Ministry says most of the 30,000 to 40,000 people with anorexia in France are women.
Didier Grumbach, president of the influential French Federation of Couture, said he was not aware how broad the proposed legislation was, and made no secret of his strong disapproval of such a sweeping measure.
“Never will we accept in our profession that a judge decides if a young girl is skinny or not skinny,” he said. “That doesn’t exist in the world, and it will certainly not exist in France.”
Marleen S. Williams, a psychology professor at Brigham Young University in Utah who researches the media’s effect on anorexic women, said it was nearly impossible to prove that the media causes eating disorders.
Williams said studies show fewer eating disorders in “cultures that value full-bodied women.” Yet with the new French legal initiative, she fears, “you’re putting your finger in one hole in the dike, but there are other holes, and it’s much more complex than that.”
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Associated Press writer Emmanuel Georges-Picot in Paris contributed to this report.