Category: people

“Horror novelist and Bangor radio station owner Stephen King announced on Tuesday a new talk radio show featuring a former vice presidential candidate and a former Maine secretary of state’s communications director.”

“My ambition is to get better as an actor. I still think there’s room for improvement. … But I’m only an actor. I’m not a writer. I’m not going to leave any legacy. All I’ve ever done is learn the lines and say them.”

The star of the Moulin Rouge was the abused daughter of a Paris courtesan; much of the public’s fascination with her dancing was because of the sudden spasms she experienced due to a neuromuscular disorder; her first experiences performing were as an inmate at a hospital.

“Frida Kahlo wore plaster corsets for most of her life because her spine was too weak to support itself. She painted them, naturally, covering them with pasted scraps of fabric and drawings of tigers, monkeys, plumed birds, a blood-red hammer and sickle, and streetcars like the one whose handrail rammed through her body when she was eighteen years old.”

The duo’s songs, which range from “Hound Dog” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” to “Love Potion No. 9” and “Yakety Yak (Don’t Talk Back)” to “Is That All There Is?” were some of the most enduring – and, sometimes, the funniest – songs of the rock ‘n’ roll era.

“It’s a great life. I’ve been able to get up and do something few others have a chance to do. I’ve done it OK, could always do better. In that sense, I’m one of the least egotistical people — and here I am making an egotistical remark! But no one can ever say or write about you as scathingly as what your inner self believes to be true.”

“The Elegance of a Hedgehog” sold like mad in France and the U.S., and experienced producers and directors vied for the movie rights. How did a new, young director end up writing the adaptation and helming the film? Mona Achache just “has something.”

With a career that spanned more than 100 films and a life that included flight from Chilean dictator Pinochet, Ruiz “left us all inspired, bewildered, and more in love than ever with the possibilities that cinema could create.”

“Early on, he saw the potential for breaking with the narrative sequences and anthropomorphic forms that defined the medium. … [V]iewers were bombarded with wiggling lines, letters, abstract shapes and live-action images that jumped and flashed, zoomed and receded, appeared and disappeared, inflicting what Mr. Breer once called ‘assault and battery on the retina’.”