How will Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign be remembered? Predicting history is a fool’s errand but it seems like a safe bet that Cruz will go down as the Republican candidate so openly distasteful that he made Donald Trump seem palatable.
"For me, acting is torturous, and it's torturous because you know it's a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That's beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great — well, that's absolutely torturous."
Kimberly Walker loved SpongeBob SquarePants.
At long last, a little chicken-fried class may be coming to roost in the New Orleans metropolitan area. Some descendants of Popeyes Chicken founder Al Copeland are hoping to commission a tasteful memorial statue of their patriarch in a local park in Metairie, Louisiana. That's "tasteful" not as in "The national World War II memorial is understated and tasteful," but as in "Mmm, this Popeyes Bonafide® fried chicken sure is taste-ful and also featured in this garish memorial statue."
I'm still not wild about incorporating live performance but it still works.
Yesterday two photojournalists, Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, were killed in the besieged Libyan city of Misrata, while covering the intense fighting there that has claimed so many lives. Their accomplishments as journalists are matched by few. They also cared deeply for the people whose stories they told.
People can't help themselves from twittering about celebrity deaths. But when a literary figure dies, it tends to inspire a particular brand of not-totally-selfless grief. Or they just get totally bizarre.
2009 has been a year of surprising, untimely celebrity deaths. Brittany Murphy's sudden death this morning is no different. Here, we take a look back at her very diverse roles throughout the troubled actress's extensive career.
Paul Newman, actor and dedicated philanthropist, died yesterday at the age of 83 after a long bout with cancer. The Method trained actor learned his craft at Yale and the Actors Studio and went on to become one of Hollywood's most enduring screen icons, starring in over 65 films such as Cool Hand Luke, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler and Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. However, it wasn't until he recreated his storied performance as "Fast" Eddie Felson in 1986's The Color Of Money that he collected his first Academy Award; he collected nine nominations across his career and also was awarded with the Jean Hershholt Humanitarian Award at the 1994 Oscars (as pictured). And just two years ago, he won an Emmy for his work on Empire Falls.Newman will likely be remembered as much for his philanthropic contributions as he will for his storied acting career. As a result of the success of his Newman's Own brand of salad dressings, popcorn and pasta sauces, he donated more than $250 million to various charities —including the Scott Newman Center, devoted to anti-drug education— over the course of the last twenty-plus years. We leave you with what is one of our favorite on-screen moments of Newman's acting career, the legendary "No man can eat 50 eggs" scene from Cool Hand Luke.
Harper's has made available online eleven essays by David Foster Wallace following the postmodern writer's suicide last week. Bloggers have rounded up other DFW work available online, including his Times profile of Roger Federer and 2000 Rolling Stone profile of John McCain. There are also videos, including the writer's appearances on Charlie Rose (other) and these moments collected by the LA Times. All told, the world is left with a reasonably extensive sampling of the writer's work available at the click of a mouse — at least enough to draw in new readers and perhaps even convince them to attempt his daunting masterpiece, Infinite Jest. [via Daring Fireball, Wonkette, LA Times]
Nine days before comedian George Carlin's death, he gave a wide-ranging, two-hour interview to Jay Dixit of Psychology Today. It was originally intended as a 350-word Q&A for the back page of the magazine but today, in the aftermath of Carlin's passing, was published online at much greater length. In the interview, Carlin talks about how he collects and sifts through potential material, the advantages of being an older comedian, how hallucinogenic drugs enhanced his work and life, his extensive use of computers and whether his act is "angry." But most interesting, perhaps, are the parts of the conversation where the rough-and-tumble performer opens up about how his career is tied to his relationship with his Mom, who raised Carlin and his brother alone amid the Great Depression:
The death of the quintessential TV listings magazine is a shabby affair. The rumor we floated yesterday-that editor-in-chief Ian Birch and other staff are being laid off-appears indeed to be true. The new owners, Macrovision, is thought only interested in the TV Guide's online and electronic program guides; the print edition is loss-making and may be shut down if a buyer can't be found, according to Deadline Hollywood. The magazine-which could not cope with the proliferation of programming in the 1980s and 1990s and further lost relevance when viewers began to use the program guides supplied by their cable provider-will not be mourned. But let's at least pay some respect to its history.
In preparation for Sunday's Oscars, Vanity Fair is eschewing the traditional "Who's gonna win?" ballot sheet and opting instead for a "Who's gonna get snubbed?" tally card for the inevitable In Memoriam celebrity death montage. Is it ghoulish? Is it funny? Is it neither? It's neither, isn't it? Either way, our money's on Suzanne Pleshette. For everything. Whatever that means.[VF]
A crucial part of the mourning process for a network forced to euthanize a hopelessly enfeebled, Nielsen-sick primetime child is the speedy removal of its web presence, a compassionate measure that stops heartbroken programming executives from obsessively surfing over to the show's page in hopes a message promising "ALL NEW EPISODE THIS SUNDAY AT 10 PM! " will magically appear.
