Feel-good stories about the NYC Subway are rare and this one is as good as it gets. The fortunate felines, newly named August and Arthur, are currently in a Brooklyn shelter and will be put up for adoption.
Via NY Daily News:
“Two kittens that shut down a New York City subway line for more than an hour have been found and rescued from the tracks.
Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokeswoman Julie Glave says the kittens were discovered Thursday evening under the third rail of an above-ground express track in Brooklyn.
Glave says MTA workers and police officers removed the kittens in crates.
Earlier Thursday transit officials cut power to the B and Q lines in Brooklyn for more than an hour after reports the kittens were on the loose in the subway system.
Transit workers were dispatched onto the tracks to try to corral the kittens. And the kittens’ owner even tried using food to try to coax them out.”–NY Daily News
“We want to recognize our consumers as more than just moms but also as women and give her a campaign that has her view Kraft Salad Dressings in a whole new way,” a Kraft statement says.
Why do I feel that someone in the marketing department has been reading 50 Shades of Grey? This cheesy campaign really is trying too hard– Shades of Fabio and “I can’t believe it’s not butter.”
Wonder if salad dressing stud is selling salad dressing?
Conservative group One Million Moms find Zesty man offensive and are boycotting Kraft.
Huh? There is no other explanation for this except the obvious one: Madge needs attention. Still waiting for her to join the Twitteratti . With her Mean Girl Diva wit, she’d be fun to follow. As for the dental display?
This is what 55 shouldn’t look like.
Elvis died 36 years ago, today. Remember him by doing what he would have done: eat a cheeseburger and buy something you don’t need.
Why Elvis Presley Never Really Died
Aug 16, 2013 12:00 AM EDT
Via The Daily Beast:
“The King died 36 years ago Friday. So why does he still strike such a chord in the age of Bieber and Gaga? Larry Durstin on the rocker’s divine message.
While the American media captures every move Justin Bieber makes, and news items one week old are treated as ancient history, Elvis Presley—who died 36 years ago today—remains nearly as popular as ever. Why?
Well, it’s not just because our popular culture idolizes its heroes to near-messianiac heights. That’s a given. No, at the heart of the Presley phenomenon is something much simpler and peculiarly American: dreaming big dreams and making those dreams come true.
A 23-year-old Orson Welles directing sequences for “Too Much Johnson,” a stage revival incorporating film, in Lower Manhattan around 1938. The show never made it to Broadway.In 1941, Orson Welles made his debut as a feature film director with “Citizen Kane,” a fact well known to everyone who has ever taken Film 101.
Less well known is that “Kane” wasn’t Welles’s debut as a filmmaker. That distinction belongs to “Hearts of Age,” an eight-minute parody of an avant-garde allegory that Welles, as the world’s most precocious teenager, codirected with a friend, William Vance, at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Ill. Amazingly, that 1934 effort, in which Welles wears old-age makeup that anticipates the elderly Kane, has survived, and can even be seen on YouTube.
But neither was “Kane” Welles’s first professional encounter with the cinema. That happened three years before his Hollywood debut, in the form of about 40 minutes of footage intended to be shown with “Too Much Johnson,” a revival of an 1894 farce that Welles intended to bring to Broadway for the 1938 season of his Mercury Theater.
The cast of “Too Much Johnson” included several members of his Mercury troupe: Joseph Cotten, Arlene Francis, Howard Smith, Edgar Barrier, Mary Wickes and Welles’s wife at the time, Virginia Nicholson, billed under her stage name, Anna Stafford. The music was composed by Paul Bowles (who later wrote “The Sheltering Sky”); legend has it that an aspiring comedian named Judith Tuvim, later Judy Holliday, was one of the extras.
For generations, Welles scholars have been intrigued by “Too Much Johnson,” which would seem to represent Welles’s first real experience composing a film to be seen by a paying public, with the support of a professional cast and a professional crew. But for over 50 years, no print had been known to exist.
Welles never quite finished editing the large amount of footage he shot for “Too Much Johnson,” and when the show folded out of town, after a disastrous preview in Stony Creek, Conn., he set the film aside and forgot about it.
Sometime in the 1960s, as Welles told Frank Brady for an article in the November 1978 issue of American Film, he came across the material again, in his villa in Spain. “I can’t remember whether I had it all along and dug it out of the bottom of a trunk, or whether someone brought it to me, but there it was,” Welles recalled. “I screened it, and it was in perfect condition, with not a scratch on it. It had a fine quality. Cotten was magnificent, and I immediately made plans to edit it and send it to Joe as a birthday present.”
Regrettably, while Welles was away for an acting job, a fire destroyed the villa and most of its contents. “Too Much Johnson,” which had been shot on highly inflammable nitrate stock, had apparently been lost to the ages.
But things have turned out otherwise. “Too Much Johnson” has reappeared — discovered not in Spain but in the warehouse of a shipping company in the northern Italian port city of Pordenone, where the footage had apparently been abandoned sometime in the 1970s. Old films turn up with some regularity under similar circumstances — independent filmmakers aren’t always known for promptly paying their storage bills — but because nitrate becomes even more dangerously unstable as it ages, the usual practice is to junk it as quickly as possible.
This time, though, the movie gods were smiling. Pordenone happens to be home to Cinemazero, a cultural organization that regularly screens classic films, and which each fall partners with the Cineteca del Friuli to present Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, a gathering of scholars and cinephiles with a special dedication to the shadowy corners of film history.
The Cinemazero staff realized what they’d found and turned the footage over to George Eastman House in Rochester, where the work of stabilizing the film and transferring it to modern safety stock is proceeding with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation. “Too Much Johnson” is scheduled to have its premiere in Pordenone during this year’s festival, which begins on Oct. 5, and will be screened at Eastman House on Oct. 16. If the financing can be found, the foundation will offer the film over the Internet later in the year.
In the meantime, the frame enlargements from “Too Much Johnson” that have been released suggest a young filmmaker — Welles was all of 23 at the time — with a striking command of his medium. The images are unmistakably his, with their strong, close-cropped compositions, powerful diagonals and insistent, ironic use of the “heroic angle” — the positioning of the camera to look up at the actor as if he were a statue posed on a pedestal.
There are no heroes in “Too Much Johnson” — only a frantic womanizer from Yonkers named Augustus Billings (played by Cotten). Billings has been carrying on an extramarital indiscretion under the invented identity of the owner of a plantation in Cuba named Johnson — a figure who, inconveniently enough, actually exists, as Billings discovers when he arrives in Santiago, in the company of his wife (Nicholson), his mother-in-law (Wickes) and a jealous husband (Barrier).
Each act of the play — written by the celebrated actor William Gillette as a vehicle for himself — was to begin with a film segment. The first (and most nearly completed in the rediscovered print) was a chase across Lower Manhattan shot in the style of a silent comedy, complete with Keystone Kop-like pursuers, a suffragist parade to barrel through and Cotten tottering on the edge of a skyscraper like Harold Lloyd in “Safety Last.”
Working with Paul Dunbar, a cameraman with Pathé News, Welles shot a large amount of footage for “Too Much Johnson” — some 25,000 feet, nearly four hours’ worth — and apparently had a good time doing it. Home movies of the shoot, taken by a Mercury Theater investor and preserved in the Pacific Film Archive, show Welles wearing a battered straw hat and bellowing orders to his actors, who are splashing around in a flooded Hudson Valley rock quarry meant to represent the Caribbean. Laughing and animated, the slim, young Welles is clearly already under the spell of the apparatus he would call, at the time of “Kane,” “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had.”
For Simon Callow, the British actor, director and Welles biographer (“The Road to Xanadu”), the most important development came next, as Welles sequestered himself with an editing machine in his suite at the St. Regis in Manhattan in a frantic attempt to assemble the film in time for the play’s out-of-town tryout.
“The great thing that happened to him on ‘Too Much Johnson’ was that he discovered editing, and began to see the possibilities,” Mr. Callow wrote in an e-mail from London. “I suspect that at that point he suddenly lost interest in the production altogether and would have loved to have continued his celluloid self-education.”
The education ended abruptly. For reasons that remain unclear — perhaps because a few cast members complained to Actors Equity that they weren’t being paid enough to appear in a film; perhaps because the Connecticut theater couldn’t accommodate a movie projector — the prologue footage was scrapped. The play didn’t make much sense without it, and the decision was made not to take it to Broadway, much to Welles’s disappointment.
“He was a complete tyro,” Mr. Callow wrote, “discovering a new medium and unsure how it would work.”
Come October, we’ll at last be in a position to know if it did.”–Via NY Times
First, why does anyone (yes, even Oprah) even want a $38,000 purse? That having been said, shame on the truly ignorant clerk who refused to show the Tom Ford Alligator Jennifer bag (named after Aniston) to one of the world’s richest and most powerful dames. Winfrey didn’t do what any of us mere mortals would have done–namely, ask the judgmental jerk to Google ‘Oprah Winfrey’ on her smart phone and then watch her squirm.
VIA Inquirer: “LOS ANGELES — Oprah Winfrey says she’s sorry a media frenzy emerged after saying she experienced racism during a trip to Switzerland.
“I think that incident in Switzerland was just an incident in Switzerland. I’m really sorry that it got blown up. I purposefully did not mention the name of the store. I’m sorry that I said it was Switzerland,” Winfrey said, speaking at the premier of Lee Daniels’ “The Butler.”
In recent interview with “Entertainment Tonight,” Winfrey recalled a clerk at an upscale Zurich boutique refusing to show her a handbag. Winfrey said she was told she could not afford the $38,000 purse.
“I’m in a store and the person doesn’t obviously know that I carry the black card, and so they make an assessment based upon the way I look and who I am,” said Winfrey, who earned $77 million in the year ending in June, according to Forbes magazine.
“I didn’t have anything that said ‘I have money’: I wasn’t wearing a diamond stud. I didn’t have a pocketbook. I didn’t wear Louboutin shoes. I didn’t have anything,” said Winfrey on the red carpet. “You should be able to go in a store looking like whatever you look like and say ‘I’d like to see this.’ That didn’t happen.”
Riskless smoking is now cool and Bloomberg has a problem with it–proposing City Council legislation that would regulate the e-cigs like tobacco. In Blooomberg speak, regulation likely = taxation. E-cigs are lifesavers for those who want to quit and the marketing is so savvy, non-smokers are even willing to give it a try. If Mike has his way,
E-smoking New Yorkers will pay a lot more for their stop-smoking cure. I’m not the seeing the logic here, since Bloomberg is famously
anti-smoking.