Sun-starved and winter-worn people swarmed to Seattle Center on Saturday, lured by lovely weather, live music, an excellent admission price and the good vibrations of a joyful crowd.
Children ran laughing and half-dressed through the Center Fountain, ponytailed men danced the marimba without care and young women with bare feet gave away free hugs and smiles at the 37th Annual Northwest Folklife Festival.
Thousands of people wandered the grounds, listening to headline bands on stages, gathering around sidewalk musicians, eating street-fair snacks and shopping at stalls offering tie-dyed clothing, silver jewelry and trinkets from around the world.
Jeff Astle, a Vashon Island worm farmer and woodcutter, went back and forth between the Mural Amphitheatre and the Fountain Lawn Stage most of the day in search of the music that moves him.
"I'd never danced before," he said about his introduction to marimba 20 years ago. "But I heard this and I said, 'Excuse me, I've gotta go dance.' "
Astle, who along with many others danced vigorously to Shumba Youth Marimba Ensemble and Mukana Marimba, said he has not missed one single day of the festival in two decades.
Another longtime festival fan, Sheena Grannis, was watching The Tallboys String Band near the Center House. Every year, she and her sister get a hotel room in Seattle so they can enjoy full-out the four-day event.
"I think it's absolutely the best in terms of quality and variety of music," said the Bellingham woman. "I love it. Where else can you pay $10 for an entire day of fantastic music?"
The festival is free, but $10 donations are requested. The cultural focus of this year's festival is "Urban Indians," with Tlingit totem pole carvings, a display of traditional powwow regalia, storytelling, music, gallery exhibits and dance throughout the weekend.
Upcoming music highlights include the "Just for Kids" showcase and "Indigenous & Indigenius Hip Hop" today; and "The Many Shades of Gospel Music" and "Bhangra and Bollywood" performances on Monday.
Appreciative crowds gathered around several musical groups playing off the path between Center House and the Fisher Pavilion.
Members of Sassparilla, an "insurgent blues" band from Portland, said they were playing offstage this year because they actually earn more money for beer and food that way, according to guitarist Gus Richmond.
Other members of the band are Pappy MacDonald on the harp; his son, Sweat Pea MacDonald, on the washboard; Franco Frantz on the percussive base; and Dr. Caffee on what she called the "junk drum set."
Similarly, Hail Seizures, an Olympia-based "acoustic hard-time punk" band made up of former Evergreen State College students, hit a sweet spot with listeners.
"Actually, I bought their album," said Zack Olson, a 19-year-old from Mountlake Terrace with dyed black hair and several piercings. "I think they're legit. They've got an original sound."
The band's energy, said his friend Bryce Owings, was "awesome."
Monday, May 26, 2008
Gwyneth Paltrow
Taking a break to look after her kids was a career risk, says Gwyneth Paltrow.
Nattering at the Cannes Film Festival, where her new movie, Two Lovers, debuted, Ms. Paltrow said she wasn't sure the movie industry would welcome her back.
"Hollywood is pretty cutthroat," she said, "and everybody's got a short memory, and there's always somebody younger or hotter or, you know, prettier or whatever. And I was very realistic about the fact that there might not be any more room for me."
Nattering at the Cannes Film Festival, where her new movie, Two Lovers, debuted, Ms. Paltrow said she wasn't sure the movie industry would welcome her back.
"Hollywood is pretty cutthroat," she said, "and everybody's got a short memory, and there's always somebody younger or hotter or, you know, prettier or whatever. And I was very realistic about the fact that there might not be any more room for me."
Cannes festival
CANNES, France - Being an American moviegoer at Cannes - at any international film festival, but especially Cannes - is like staggering out of Plato's cave into the sun. So this is how the rest of the world sees movies.
more stories like this
The Palm D'Or for the festival's best film will be awarded today, but perhaps the most weirdly instructive day was last Sunday. At midday came the worldwide premiere of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," the event toward which the glam-obsessed side of this famously conflicted festival had been heading at full steam for five days. In attendance was the cream of cinema royalty, men with names like Spielberg, Lucas, Ford, and LaBoeuf. The paparazzi and the fans lining the red-carpeted steps of the Palais de Festi vals screamed themselves hoarse. The movie? It was pretty good.
Earlier in the morning of the same day, an Italian film called "Gomorra" screened as part of the main competition (Hollywood extravaganzas like "Indiana Jones" and "Kung Fu Panda" are quarantined in the "Out of Competition" category so they won't contaminate the art). Based on a runaway nonfiction bestseller in its native country, the film is a sprawling yet taut multi-character drama exposing the dominance of organized crime in every aspect of life in Naples. A glib way to describe it would be "The Godfather" as made by Robert Altman.
Directed by Matteo Garrone, "Gomorra" was instantly recognized as one of the finds of Cannes 2008, and what makes it special is that it doesn't resort to the standard crime-movie tricks. It feels newly observed, with characters at lower levels of Mafia enterprise - an aging bagman (Gianfelice Imparato), a tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo), a 10-year-old kid (Salvatore Abruzzese), the naive assistant (Carmine Paternoster) to a toxic waste disposal contractor - making the moral decisions that will define them. "Gomorra" isn't "entertainment" as most American moviegoers define it, and yet it's absurdly entertaining. It makes "The Sopranos" look like a cable show.
This is what Cannes is for, among other things: to remind the entertainment press that there are other stories to be told and other ways of telling them. (Our job is then to remind you.) These can be playful: Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale" is a family-holiday-hell tale given eccentricity and heft by a cast that includes Catherine Deneuve, her daughter Chiara Mastroianni, and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" star Mathieu Amalric; it unfolds like a novel and bleeds real blood.
more stories like this
The Palm D'Or for the festival's best film will be awarded today, but perhaps the most weirdly instructive day was last Sunday. At midday came the worldwide premiere of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," the event toward which the glam-obsessed side of this famously conflicted festival had been heading at full steam for five days. In attendance was the cream of cinema royalty, men with names like Spielberg, Lucas, Ford, and LaBoeuf. The paparazzi and the fans lining the red-carpeted steps of the Palais de Festi vals screamed themselves hoarse. The movie? It was pretty good.
Earlier in the morning of the same day, an Italian film called "Gomorra" screened as part of the main competition (Hollywood extravaganzas like "Indiana Jones" and "Kung Fu Panda" are quarantined in the "Out of Competition" category so they won't contaminate the art). Based on a runaway nonfiction bestseller in its native country, the film is a sprawling yet taut multi-character drama exposing the dominance of organized crime in every aspect of life in Naples. A glib way to describe it would be "The Godfather" as made by Robert Altman.
Directed by Matteo Garrone, "Gomorra" was instantly recognized as one of the finds of Cannes 2008, and what makes it special is that it doesn't resort to the standard crime-movie tricks. It feels newly observed, with characters at lower levels of Mafia enterprise - an aging bagman (Gianfelice Imparato), a tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo), a 10-year-old kid (Salvatore Abruzzese), the naive assistant (Carmine Paternoster) to a toxic waste disposal contractor - making the moral decisions that will define them. "Gomorra" isn't "entertainment" as most American moviegoers define it, and yet it's absurdly entertaining. It makes "The Sopranos" look like a cable show.
This is what Cannes is for, among other things: to remind the entertainment press that there are other stories to be told and other ways of telling them. (Our job is then to remind you.) These can be playful: Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale" is a family-holiday-hell tale given eccentricity and heft by a cast that includes Catherine Deneuve, her daughter Chiara Mastroianni, and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" star Mathieu Amalric; it unfolds like a novel and bleeds real blood.
Bette Bourne is between a Rock and hard place
There's a scene in City of Night, John Rechy's landmark gay novel, in which the narrator surveys the graffiti on a lavatory wall. Beneath the obscene drawings and offers of sexual favours are the words: “In the beginning God created fairies and they created men.”
If ever there was a fairy who lived up to this claim, it was Henry Willson. The so-called Fairy Godfather of Tinseltown, Willson was the Hollywood agent who created Rock Hudson. Now his tale is being told in a new play, Rock, written by Tim Fountain and starring Bette Bourne (pictured) as Willson.
For Bourne, it's a gay Pygmalion. “My character turns this gasoline attendant into the highest paid movie star on the planet. He takes a callow youth and turns him into Rock Hudson, who was the perfect, ideal man - or so everyone thought.”
Hudson's screen image was rarely straightforward, whether he was doing comedy in Pillow Talk or trying to disguise the ravages of Aids in Dynasty. But Bourne suggests that his manly screen image was weakened after he starred in Giant with James Dean in 1956.
“In that film was the person who ruined men like Rock Hudson,” Bourne says, “because from that point forward everyone wanted the boy who needed looking after. We wanted to nurse and cuddle James Dean, whereas previously we'd wanted men like Rock to do the nursing and the cuddling.”
This isn't the first time that Bourne and Fountain have worked together. A decade ago he earned critical plaudits for his role as Quentin Crisp in Fountain's one-man play Resident Alien. “It was 1999, the year of Quentin's death,” Bourne remembers. “In fact, Quentin died on the night of the tenth performance at the Bush. He was a sweetheart. We got along very well.”
Like Crisp, Bourne is a “stately homo” who has enjoyed an unusual career. In the 1960s he studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama and performed on the West End stage under his given name, Peter Bourne. In 1969 he toured with Ian McKellen in a double bill of Edward II and Richard II. A year later he came out - and not just as any old theatre queen but as a radical drag queen.
He turned his back on straight theatre and joined a drag commune in Notting Hill. In 1976 he saw a performance by the New York gay cabaret troupe Hot Peaches. He toured with them that summer and a year later formed his own cabaret troupe, Bloolips. The company specialised in madcap celebrations of “queerness” - part pantomime, part sexual politics, all singing and all dancing. They continued for the best part of 20 years, producing fun-filled, pun-filled shows with titles such as Lust in Space, Get Hur and Living Leg Ends. The company finally disbanded in the early 1990s.
“I'm not a career person,” Bourne says. “I never had a plan. I just bob along like a buoy on the ocean, bumping into whatever comes my way.”
Still, he hasn't done too badly for himself. The last time we met was in his dressing room at the RSC, where he was playing Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing (he had previously played the part of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet). The day after this interview he was off to Paris to shoot scenes with Michelle Pfeiffer for the new Stephen Frears film of Colette's Chéri. “I loved his film My Beautiful Laundrette,” he says, “and the fact that those two actors didn't signal to us that they weren't really queer.”
My Beautiful Laundrette was released in 1985, the year that Rock Hudson died. Much has changed since then, but there are still no openly gay leading men in Hollywood. “Most of the people who are out now are what we used to call character actors,” Bourne says.
What about his role in Chéri? “I play a sort of old harridan queen who makes poisonous remarks.” How on earth will he get into character, I ask? He fixes me with a regal stare. “I never think differently about the way I approach characters,” he says grandly. “Whether they are based on real people or totally fictional, I always aim for the truth.”
If ever there was a fairy who lived up to this claim, it was Henry Willson. The so-called Fairy Godfather of Tinseltown, Willson was the Hollywood agent who created Rock Hudson. Now his tale is being told in a new play, Rock, written by Tim Fountain and starring Bette Bourne (pictured) as Willson.
For Bourne, it's a gay Pygmalion. “My character turns this gasoline attendant into the highest paid movie star on the planet. He takes a callow youth and turns him into Rock Hudson, who was the perfect, ideal man - or so everyone thought.”
Hudson's screen image was rarely straightforward, whether he was doing comedy in Pillow Talk or trying to disguise the ravages of Aids in Dynasty. But Bourne suggests that his manly screen image was weakened after he starred in Giant with James Dean in 1956.
“In that film was the person who ruined men like Rock Hudson,” Bourne says, “because from that point forward everyone wanted the boy who needed looking after. We wanted to nurse and cuddle James Dean, whereas previously we'd wanted men like Rock to do the nursing and the cuddling.”
This isn't the first time that Bourne and Fountain have worked together. A decade ago he earned critical plaudits for his role as Quentin Crisp in Fountain's one-man play Resident Alien. “It was 1999, the year of Quentin's death,” Bourne remembers. “In fact, Quentin died on the night of the tenth performance at the Bush. He was a sweetheart. We got along very well.”
Like Crisp, Bourne is a “stately homo” who has enjoyed an unusual career. In the 1960s he studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama and performed on the West End stage under his given name, Peter Bourne. In 1969 he toured with Ian McKellen in a double bill of Edward II and Richard II. A year later he came out - and not just as any old theatre queen but as a radical drag queen.
He turned his back on straight theatre and joined a drag commune in Notting Hill. In 1976 he saw a performance by the New York gay cabaret troupe Hot Peaches. He toured with them that summer and a year later formed his own cabaret troupe, Bloolips. The company specialised in madcap celebrations of “queerness” - part pantomime, part sexual politics, all singing and all dancing. They continued for the best part of 20 years, producing fun-filled, pun-filled shows with titles such as Lust in Space, Get Hur and Living Leg Ends. The company finally disbanded in the early 1990s.
“I'm not a career person,” Bourne says. “I never had a plan. I just bob along like a buoy on the ocean, bumping into whatever comes my way.”
Still, he hasn't done too badly for himself. The last time we met was in his dressing room at the RSC, where he was playing Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing (he had previously played the part of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet). The day after this interview he was off to Paris to shoot scenes with Michelle Pfeiffer for the new Stephen Frears film of Colette's Chéri. “I loved his film My Beautiful Laundrette,” he says, “and the fact that those two actors didn't signal to us that they weren't really queer.”
My Beautiful Laundrette was released in 1985, the year that Rock Hudson died. Much has changed since then, but there are still no openly gay leading men in Hollywood. “Most of the people who are out now are what we used to call character actors,” Bourne says.
What about his role in Chéri? “I play a sort of old harridan queen who makes poisonous remarks.” How on earth will he get into character, I ask? He fixes me with a regal stare. “I never think differently about the way I approach characters,” he says grandly. “Whether they are based on real people or totally fictional, I always aim for the truth.”
Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal hot date
JAKE Gyllenhaal has laughed off rumours that he is about to pop the question to longterm girlfriend Reece Withersoon.
Despite efforts to keep their romance under wraps, reports are rife that the hot Hollywood couple are getting engaged soon, sparked by insider reports that the pair are head over heels in love and ready to take the next step. A source close to Reese told the American issue of OK magazine the relationship was "very serious". “They’ve been talking marriage for a while. They’ll be formally engaged any day now. They want to spend the rest of their lives together.” The Brokeback Mountain star's producer friend Ryan Kavanaugh told US press that the actor is head over heels, saying recently: "I just think he loves her. "He has obviously had his fair share of dating. "I think eventually you come to a place where you know what you want and seeing what we saw on the set, he was certainly completely devoted to her and really loves her." But Gyllenhaal's spokesperson Carrie Byalick dispelled speculation, telling OK!, "There are no current wedding plans." Last week the Legally Blonde star , 32, was photographed on a romantic picnic date on Malibu beach with her hot Hollywood boyfriend , 27. Witherspoon wore a blue bikini for the beach outing which doubled as a day out for the pair's dogs - Jake's German Shepherd Atticus and her pug Coco. Witherspoon has two children Ava, 8, and Deacon, 4, from her previous marriage to actor Ryan Phillippe. The two broke up in October 2006. The actress started dating Gyllenhaal the following March after they met on the set of their film Rendition. The pair have been inseperable since. The hot twosome were recently spotted grabbing some lunch out in Los Angeles, California, looking so happy together. Gyllenhaal has never been married before.
Witherspoon commands an asking price of between $17 million and $22.5 million a film, making her the highest paid actress in Hollywood, according to The Hollywood Reporter's latest list of highest-paid actresses.
Despite efforts to keep their romance under wraps, reports are rife that the hot Hollywood couple are getting engaged soon, sparked by insider reports that the pair are head over heels in love and ready to take the next step. A source close to Reese told the American issue of OK magazine the relationship was "very serious". “They’ve been talking marriage for a while. They’ll be formally engaged any day now. They want to spend the rest of their lives together.” The Brokeback Mountain star's producer friend Ryan Kavanaugh told US press that the actor is head over heels, saying recently: "I just think he loves her. "He has obviously had his fair share of dating. "I think eventually you come to a place where you know what you want and seeing what we saw on the set, he was certainly completely devoted to her and really loves her." But Gyllenhaal's spokesperson Carrie Byalick dispelled speculation, telling OK!, "There are no current wedding plans." Last week the Legally Blonde star , 32, was photographed on a romantic picnic date on Malibu beach with her hot Hollywood boyfriend , 27. Witherspoon wore a blue bikini for the beach outing which doubled as a day out for the pair's dogs - Jake's German Shepherd Atticus and her pug Coco. Witherspoon has two children Ava, 8, and Deacon, 4, from her previous marriage to actor Ryan Phillippe. The two broke up in October 2006. The actress started dating Gyllenhaal the following March after they met on the set of their film Rendition. The pair have been inseperable since. The hot twosome were recently spotted grabbing some lunch out in Los Angeles, California, looking so happy together. Gyllenhaal has never been married before.
Witherspoon commands an asking price of between $17 million and $22.5 million a film, making her the highest paid actress in Hollywood, according to The Hollywood Reporter's latest list of highest-paid actresses.
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