Category: people

“[C]ertainly leading up to the Iraq war, when I was asking unpopular questions, there were lots of attacks from the hate radio jocks asking for something to be done about me. I had death threats. There were people who felt, thanks to the right-wing papers, I was un-American.”

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology “is a singular trip through some iconic American film moments, in which Zizek is inserted into the action – sitting on an ice floe next to Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in the final scene of Titanic, … prancing across the same hilltop Julie Andrews did in The Sound of Music – all the while explaining his theories about what ideological ideas each movie contains.”

“A photograph believed to be an extremely rare image of Emily Dickinson has surfaced in her home town of Amherst, Massachusetts, showing a young woman in old-fashioned clothes, a tiny smile on her lips and a hand extended solicitously towards her friend.”

“One of Billie Holiday’s most iconic songs is ‘Strange Fruit,’ a haunting protest against the inhumanity of racism. Many people know that the man who wrote the song was inspired by a photograph of a lynching. But they might not realize that he’s also tied to another watershed moment in America’s history.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers): “Nobody is representative. That’s just narrative nonsense. People may be part of a larger story or structure or institution, but they’re still people. Making them representative loses sight of that.”

“As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn’t exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you’re doing. Close-ups too. Writers can use filmic devices that we’ve all accepted so much that we don’t even see them as devices any more.”

Satrapi, on her new movie Chicken with Plums, based on her book of the same name: “”I like to be sad once in a while. … You need it for your equilibrium. At the moment in my life when I wrote the book, I had a lot of questions about life, love, and death.”

“David and his longtime partner composer Burt Bacharach etched an indelible footprint on the American songbook when they penned dozens of top 40 hits. The two crafted a slew of memorable singles in the 1960s and early 1970s for a range of artists including Dionne Warwick, the Carpenters, Dusty Springfield, Gene Pitney and Tom Jones.”

“Our early songs were rather ordinary. Musically, I gave Hal material that I thought was very commercial – nothing like what we would later write. We wrote some bad songs, songs you have never heard and never will. Songs like ‘Peggy’s in the Pantry’ and ‘Underneath the Overpass’.”

“A former ditch digger for a natural gas company in his native Chicago, Duncan began his Hollywood saga as a celebrity bodyguard in the mid-1990s. He received his first big acting break … in the big-budget 1998 movie Armageddon … [and] received an Academy Award nomination for his moving portrayal of a gentle death row inmate in the 1999 prison drama The Green Mile.”