We’re still reeling over the death of Ingmar Bergman. Granted, both men were well up in years, but both on the same day…? It’s a lot for any true lover of film to take.
Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director whose chilly canticles of alienation were cornerstones of international filmmaking in the 1960s, inspiring intense measures of admiration, denunciation and confusion, died on Monday at his home in Rome, Italian news media reported today. He was 94. He died on the same day as Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker who died at his home in Sweden earlier Monday.
“With Antonioni, not only has one of the greatest living directors been lost, but also a master of the modern screen,” said the mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. His office said it was making plans for Mr. Antonioni’s body to lie in state on Wednesday, Reuters reported.
Tall, cerebral and resolutely serious, Mr. Antonioni harkens back to a time in the middle of the last century when cinema-going was an intellectual pursuit, when purposely opaque passages in famously difficult films spurred long nights of smoky argument at sidewalk cafes, and when fashionable directors like Mr. Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard were chased down the Cannes waterfront by camera-wielding cineastes demanding to know what on earth they meant by their latest outrage.
Mr. Antonioni is probably best known for “Blow-Up,” a 1966 drama set in Swinging London about a fashion photographer who comes to believe that a photograph he took of two lovers in a public park also shows, hidden in the background, evidence of a murder. But his true, lasting contribution to cinema resides in an earlier trilogy — “L’Avventura” in 1959, “La Notte” in 1960 and “L’Eclisse” in 1962 — which explores the filmmaker’s tormented central vision that people had become emotionally unglued from one another.
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One interviewer asked him to look back over his life. “In a world without film, what would you have made?” he was asked.
Ingmar Bergman left in the early hours of yesterday morning. Within a few hours, Michelangelo Antonioni had followed him through the exit door. It remains to be seen whether this signals the onset of some art-house apocalypse - some Biblical purge of revered European auteurs - but the omens are hardly encouraging. How are Godard, Resnais and Rohmer bearing up? Can we urge them to stay indoors, wrap up warm, and maybe put on some old DVDs. Anything to keep them out of circulation until the curse has run its course.
In the meantime I’m hunting parallels between Bergman and Antonioni, two men who are destined to be forever linked in death. Thankfully there are some obvious ones. Both were near contemporaries who came to epitomise the foreign-language film scene during its creative and commercial heyday in the 1950s and 60s. Both were regarded as rigorous, high-minded directors who typically chose to focus on modern man’s sense of alienation in a God-less universe. Both, to their detractors, could be aloof, portentous artists who made great demands of their viewer … and all in return for the revelation that we are all lost and lonely and doomed to die. Gee, thanks a bunch.
And yet these directors were very different too. If Bergman was the great high priest of the European art-house, then Antonioni was its puckish intellectual. His films were at once more playful and more spare than Bergman’s. L’Avventura and L’Eclisse are cerebral, teasing puzzle pictures. Blowup is a roguish, vogueish mystery play. Zabriskie Point offered a freewheeling, anthropological tour of an American counter-culture that - one suspects - never really existed outside of Antonioni’s head to begin with.
The legendary Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman died this morning at his home on the island of Faro. According to his daughter, Eve, the director of The Seventh Seal and Persona died peacefully in his sleep. He was 89.
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Such was Bergman’s stark, uncompromising vision that he found himself a byword for existential gloom, a man whose films offered a pitiless vision of a Godless universe. Yet while there is no denying the serious nature of Bergman’s work, the stereotype conveniently ignored the lush eroticism of films shown in films such as Summer With Monika, or the joyous comedy that runs through Smiles of a Summer Night or A Lesson in Love.
A frequent sufferer of depression, the director knew the importance of keeping his demons at arm’s length. “If I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage,” he said. “Lilies often grown out of carcasses’ arseholes.”
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In later years, Bergman rarely left his home on the remote Swedish island of Faro and earned a reputation as a recluse, a stern old magus locked away from all but his nearest and dearest. In the course of a rare interview in 2004, he admitted that his own personal favourites of his films were Winter Light, Persona and Cries and Whispers. However, he added that he now rarely watched any of his movies because he found them “too depressing”.
A colossus of world cinema, Ingmar Bergman influenced a generation of film-makers who were inspired both by his effortless command of the medium and his high-minded sense of its moral and artistic possibilities. In 1988, Woody Allen hailed him as “probably the greatest artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”
So, Mr. or Ms. American Taxpayer, you think you have any say over what goes on in the house you paid for, and you pay to maintain? You and I may own the White House, but the Squatter-In-Chief won’t let you in unless you ditch those typical tourist clothes.
Specifically, according to CBS5, “The forbidden items include jeans, sneakers, mini-skirts, t-shirts, tank tops and absolutely no flip flops.”
The Catholic Church says it will not co-operate with any safe-sex campaign to educate 500,000 young pilgrims expected to flock to Sydney for Australia’s biggest religious event.
The NSW Department of Health will have to go it alone if it wants to develop and disseminate any messages about safe sex, including information on HIV and sexually transmittable diseases, which it provided for the Sydney Olympics in 2000, the Gay Games and the annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
The church has refused to promote health advice that contradicts its position on contraception. It has reasserted its opposition to condom use, argued that Catholics should postpone sex until marriage, and pointed to an “extraordinary low level of indiscretion” at previous events.
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The church’s “head in the sand approach” has drawn criticism from the Greens MP Lee Rhiannon, who described its position as dangerous and said it missed an important opportunity to send a message of lifelong safe practices to young participants.
The church said it encouraged young people to have a high level of self-esteem and respect for their bodies, sexuality, relationships, marriage and family life: “Organisers of previous World Youth Days testify to the extraordinarily high level of idealism amongst the young people who attend and the extraordinarily low level of indiscretion.”
Well then, there’s no problem, is there, if young people have an “extraordinarily low level of indiscretion.” There would be a problem only if they had a low level of discretion.
While volunteers passed out cups of Jell-O to the white-haired lunch crowd at a senior center, another group was distributing something that didn’t quite fit amid the card games and daily gossip — condoms.
“You’re giving out condoms,” 82-year-old Rose Crescenzo said with a wistful smile, “but who’s going to give us a guy?”
The condom giveaway is part of an effort by New York City’s Department of Aging to educate older people about the risks of contracting the virus that causes AIDS. After the condom giveaway, free HIV testing was offered.
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Dan Tietz, executive director of the AIDS research group, said HIV education is needed at senior centers, where the average age is more like 70, because “we know that people are still having sex well past 65.”
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And Crescenzo, who lost her husband of 62 years last October, did take the condoms.
”If I get a date,” she said, ”I’m going to use one of these.”
Parliamentarians in Indonesia’s remote province of Papua say they are considering a controversial bylaw to “tag” people infected with AIDS with microchips so they can better monitor their behavior and sexual activities.
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Indonesia has one of Asia’s fastest-growing HIV rates, with up to 290,000 infections out of 235 million people, fueled mainly by injecting drug users and prostitution.
Health authorities have warned that a failure to take prompt action in areas like Papua, where infections are 15 times the national average, could result in 1 million people infected with HIV within a few years.
Parliamentarians are likely to consider public opinion before discussing the draft bylaw with the local government and seeking to enact it. The proposal has already drawn protests from AIDS activists and health workers.
The Rev. Mark Sorvillo loved taking his parish’s money and spending it on himself. Trips to Rome, Venice, Paris. And $900 meals at New York restaurants.
In 1999, Sorvillo found someone else to lavish his parishioners’ collection-plate donations on — a male stripper.
Sorvillo — who pleaded guilty Friday to stealing nearly $200,000 from St. Margaret Mary parish on the North Side — gave cars, plane tickets and thousands of dollars in cash to James Sosnicki, a married Louisville man who stripped frequently at gay clubs in Chicago, law enforcement sources said.
Reached in Louisville, Sosnicki told the Chicago Sun-Times he paid Sorvillo back — and said their relationship was never sexual.
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Sorvillo resigned from St. Margaret Mary in February 2006 after parishioners caught him stealing from the collection bags. He had been under suspicion since threatening to close the church’s school because of the parish’s strained finances. An investigation revealed he skimmed more than $40,000 from collections, wrote checks from parish accounts to himself and his creditors, and charged more than $62,000 at Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s and Marshall Field’s to the parish. In October 2006, prosecutors charged him with felony theft.
The conservative advocacy group Family Foundation wants to see a drop in the state’s divorce rate. The group that lead the push to ban same-sex marriage in Virginia has formed a commission that will recommend public policies that could preserve traditional marriages.
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The panel will not try to curb all divorce, [Victoria Cobb, the foundation’s executive director] said. “There’s no question that some people are going to get divorced, no matter what,” she said. “But the law can provide speed bumps.”
In 2004 there were 3.7 divorces per 1,000 people nationally and 7.8 marriages per 1,000, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. That year in Virginia, there were 3.9 divorces per 1,000 people and 8.3 marriages per 1,000. “Everyone agrees there is a problem, and no one is attempting to solve it,” said Cobb, who was frustrated by the legislature’s failure this year to pass any of a half-dozen bills on marriage and divorce, including one promoted by her group.
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Cobb said she agreed with one point made by [opponents of the state’s constitutional same-sex marriage ban]: “Considering the high rate of divorce, heterosexuals haven’t done a very good job with marriage.” …
Not that it’s going to do a lot of good, for anyone. But if these gay-bashers actually succeed in getting any “speed bumps” to divorce in place, it will be enjoyable to sit back and watch Virginia’s straight population go ballistic for a change. Let ‘em see how it feels.
Buju Banton is the latest top Jamaican reggae superstar to renounce homophobia and condemn violence against lesbians and gay men.
His notorious 1990s hit tune Boom Bye Bye, which he has, up to now, continued to perform at concerts, encourages listeners to shoot gay men in the head, pour acid on their bodies and burn them alive.
Now Banton has changed his tune; joining three other world famous reggae legends to sign the Reggae Compassionate Act (RCA) statement…
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The agreement follows the three-year-long Stop Murder Music campaign, which resulted in the cancellation of hundreds of the singers’ concerts and sponsorship deals, causing them income losses estimated in excess of five million US dollars (£2.5 million).
“The Reggae Compassionate Act is a big breakthrough,” said Peter Tatchell, of the British gay human rights group OutRage!. Mr Tatchell is coordinator of the worldwide Stop Murder Music campaign. He helped negotiate the deal with the four singers. …
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“This deal is already having a huge, positive impact in Jamaica and the Caribbean. The media coverage has generated public awareness and debate; breaking down ignorance and undermining homophobia. Having these major reggae stars renounce homophobia is influencing their fans and the wider public to rethink bigoted attitudes. The beneficial effect on young straight reggae fans is immense,” he said.
This is probably the first time we’ve ever thought Peter Tatchell, of all people, was being too optimistic.
It would be nice to believe that these reggae artists (especially Banton, one of the most talented reggae artists since Peter Tosh) have seen the light, but you know it’s really only about money.
Tammy Faye Messner, the former televangelist and Christian singer who battled inoperable cancer, died Friday morning, according to CNN’s Larry King on Saturday night. He said the family had asked him to make the delayed announcement.
She was 65. “She died peacefully,” King said on CNN.
Messner was a guest on “Larry King Live” on Thursday. She said she couldn’t swallow food, and weighed only 65 pounds.
When asked if she was scared, she replied, “A little bit,” adding that she worried about her family.
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Tammy Faye told King she kept her Christian faith, instructing her doctors not to tell her how much time they believed she had left. “I don’t have any date written on me anywhere that says I’m going to die at any time, and so I just give it to the Lord,” she said.
Asked if she had a message for her fans, she replied: “I’d like to say that I genuinely love you, and I genuinely care, and I genuinely want to see you in heaven some day. I want you to find peace. I want you to find joy.”
This would be just another Republican - Baptist - minister - and - a - prostitute story, were it not for the apparent fact that the Republican - Baptist - minister in question got caught because he was such a shameless cheapskate.
KANNAPOLIS, N.C. — Former state legislator Coy C. Privette, a Cabarrus County commissioner and retired Baptist minister, was charged Thursday with aiding and abetting prostitution, authorities said.
Privette, 74, was charged with six counts of misdemeanor aiding and abetting prostitution by renting a hotel room and paying for sexual acts, according to State Bureau of Investigation Agent Kevin Canty. Tiffany Denise Summers, 32, of Salisbury, was charged with six counts of misdemeanor prostitution, Canty said.
Privette was arrested at his Kannapolis home at about 7:40 a.m. Thursday by agents with the State Bureau of Investigation, said Department of Justice spokeswoman Noelle Talley.
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Police said officers were investigating a forged check case, which led them to the prostitution charges. Privette on two occasions allegedly paid the prostitute with checks then reported those checks as stolen, officials said.
Talk about getting stiffed!
But here’s the real kicker: “Privette also serves as the president of the Christian Action League of North Carolina…” — an “affiliate” of what we consider the nastiest organization set up for the sole purpose of harassing homos: the American Family Association.
What will they find? His brain? His TANG discharge papers? His original Connecticut driver’s license and arrest report? A gram of coke? Rove’s hand and the string KKKarl uses to work his mouth…?
President Bush will undergo a routine colonoscopy Saturday and temporarily hand presidential powers over to Vice President Dick Cheney, the White House said.
Press secretary Tony Snow told reporters Friday that Bush will have the procedure done at his Camp David, Md., mountaintop retreat.
He last underwent colorectal cancer surveillance on June 29, 2002.
“As reported at the time and in subsequent physical exams, absent any symptoms, the president’s doctor recommended repeat surveillance in approximately five years,” Snow said. “The president has had no symptoms.”
Wal-Mart to test Bible action figures in 425 U.S. stores
BENTONVILLE, Arkansas - Wal-Mart said Tuesday it will test sales in some stores of biblical action figures whose makers say they are aimed at Christian parents who prefer their children play with Samson, David or Noah rather than with a comic book character or Bratz doll.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. spokeswoman Melissa O’Brien said the toys made by One2believe, a Valencia, California, company, will be offered in 425 of Wal-Mart’s 3,376 discount stores and Supercenters in the United States.
One2believe Chief Executive David Socha said his products were part of a “battle for the toy box” with dolls and figures that he said carry negative messages.
“If you’re very religious, it’s a battle for your children’s minds and what they’re playing with and pretending. There are remakes out there of Satan and evil things,” Socha said.
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The toys, based on biblical stories, include a 3-inch (7.5-centimeter) figure of Daniel in the lion’s den, a 12-inch (30-centimeter) talking Jesus doll and 13-inch (33-centimeter) Samson action figure. …
As… uh, amusing as these “Bible action figures” are, we were hoping they’d beat — for pure creepiness — the world-famous Jesus Sports Figures over at CatholicShopper.com. But they don’t; nothing gives us the willies like the psycho-eyed Jesus Sports Figures… except for those scary “modesty wear” sites, whose offerings make Laura Ingalls’ wardrobe look like hand-me-downs from a two-dollar hooker (and where, no doubt, the Duggar family must shop).
(Go ahead and click the CatholicShopper.com link — you know you want to!)
The effort is no doubt futile, but we’re warmed by the writer’s epiphany, and admire his honesty and courage to come out as a former gay-hater:
Dear Dr. Nsaba Buturo, Minister of Ethics and Integrity,
I understand where you are coming from in making homosexuals appear to be dangerous deviants that should be relegated to the dustbin of society.
In fact, your utterances about gays remind me of someone I once knew - me. You see, when I arrived in Canada in 1981 as a refugee, I came face to face with an alien culture that turned my life upside down.
At Queen’s University in Kingston, about two and half hour drive from Toronto, I became aware of an organisation called the Queen’s Homophile Association (QHA). When I asked fellow students what the organisation was about, I was told that it supported homosexuals, bisexual and transidentified individuals to live openly and positively with their sexual orientation.
I did not know what all those terms meant. Imagine my horrors when it was explained to me that members of QHA were young men and women who were attracted to their own gender rather than the opposite sex. I was thoroughly confused, disgusted, and very scared.
Nothing in my upbringing in Pamin-Yai village, west of Gulu town had prepared me for what I saw as an abomination to society. I was afraid that, alone in this twisted new world, I might become a victim of these strange people who could hurt, worse, make me a member of their group.
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… Interestingly, I cannot recall any headline about homosexual violence against heterosexuals. …
We’re still reeling over the death of Ingmar Bergman. Granted, both men were well up in years, but both on the same day…? It’s a lot for any true lover of film to take.
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