Collection Your best choice in Music, Cinema and Literature U$ 8,00 • Vol. 34 • www.collectionmagazine.com December 2010
OAK TREE
Nicholas Sparks
P U B L I S H E R
How he turns his family’s loves and losses into wildly popular novels
Katy Perry She talks about her racy lyrics, risqué style, and being Mrs. Brand
Claire Danes The actress discusses balancing school with acting, and talk about her upcoming projects
Contents Music is all around us
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8
Lights? Camera? Action!
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14
The World of Letters
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Collection Editor in chief Yohanna Pinheiro Market Editor Tiffany Brandenburg Photography Editor Abi Porter Interns May Weng and Melissa Wiggins Copy Intern Ingrid Ostby Art Director Yohanna Pinheiro Contributers Gemma Booth, Chelsea Campbell, Lucy Hungary, Tanya Kechichan, Asli Kolcu, Meg Meldrum, Tamy Pepin, Saga Sigur, Tina Solberg Torstad, Valentina Vos, Kristen Weaver, Rose Apodaca, Allison Adato
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All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without permission from the publisher. The views expressed in COLLECTION are those of the respective contributors and are not necessarlly shared by the publisher. © 2010 OAK TREE publisher
Notes from the editors The year flew away and we’re already knocking on 2011’s door. More, we’re so close of our first birthday! And we are so thankful to every person that is a part of our history. To everyone who has read even one word of our magazine, to everyone who has submitted even one word, to everyone who has believed in our vision, to everyone who has provided guidance, to the thankless faces on our staff who have made this magazine possible, thank you. When we took on the daunting challenge of creating a a different cultural magazine, we imagined but also sometimes doubted the success that we have had thus far. Collection has been a labor of love. In this edition, we prepared a wonderful interview with Claire Danes and chatted a bit with Katy Perry. Those wonderful women are certainly people to be inspired of. Claire told us about her new movie, Terminator 3, and how it is to act beside Arnold Schwazennegger. Katy, with an amazing single to be released - that she sang a bit for us - shows that she doesn’t care to what people think. She really shouldn’t. Enjoy our news, reports and tips. They’re all specially for you. Again, we thank everyone who helped to make our little project into an amazing success. Here’s to an even more successful future. Happy Holidays!
OAK TREE P U B L I S H E R
President Of Administration Concil: Tanya Kechichan Executive President: Trevor Maguire Vice-Presidents: Arnold Cooper, Lisa Malloy www.oaktree.com
Yohanna Pinheiro and the crew
Enjoy, but please recycle. Printed on demand in the USA december 2010 | www.collectionmagazine.com
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Music is all around us
Ingrid Michaelson The folk singer had several songs featured in Grey’s Anatomy, performed on Last Call With Carson Daly and built a sizeable following through television exposure without the benefit of a record label By Daniel Warren | Hybrid Magazine
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ichaelson, a 27-year-old Staten Island native, took up the piano at the age of four and has a background in musical theater. She has only recently left a job as a children’s theater director to pursue music full time. Everything changed, of course, when Grey’s Anatomy offered her the kind of exposure independent artists rarely find. Michaelson had self-released her current record, Girls And Boys, just months before the show’s music supervisor asked to feature one of her best songs, the delicate and lyrically-inventive “Breakable,” on a TV show that has sparked innumerable water-cooler conversations over the past several years. But before you ask if success has spoiled 6
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her, or if she could be branded a “sell-out” for her willingness to expose her music through mainstream media (a claim that’s hard to pin on an artist who has no plans to allow a record label - or anyone else - to compromise her artistic freedom), let me stop your speculation: it hasn’t, and she is anything but. I saw Ingrid Michaelson perform at a local bowokstore on Cape Cod this summer, and I saw anything but a careerist or an entrepreneur. What I saw was a humble performer perfectly content to play a three-song acoustic set - which included poignant versions of “The Way I Am” and “Far Away,” two of the quietest and best songs from Girls And Boys - for a small crowd of appreciative shoppers.
Music is all around us Slow the Rain
1 Let Go
2005
2 Around You 3 Charlie 4 Porcelain Fists
On her first album, Ingrid Michaelson shows all her potential. Born with a genuine talent, she plays and sings simple lyricism and melodies taking the complex and making it serene and beautiful.
Girls and Boys
5 Morning Lullabies 6 Empty Bottle 7 Mosquito 8 A Bird's Song 9 I'll See You In My Dreams
1 Die Alone 2 Masochist
2006, Cabin 24
3 Breakable
The songs on Girls and Boys are an immediately appealing blend of pop song craft and vulnerable emotion. Michaelson has a accessible voice and presentation, and her piano-driven arrangements hit all the right peaks and valleys, calling on a delicate acoustic guitar, an overdriven electric, to highlight her alternately joyful and mournful melodies.
Be OK
4 The Hat 5 The Way I Am 6 Overboard 7 Glass 8 Starting Now 9 Corner of Your Heart 10
December Baby
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Highway
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Far Away
1 Be OK
2008, Cabin 24
2 Giving Up 3 Over the Rainbow 4 The Chain
The title track mixes acoustic instruments with handclaps, while “Giving Up” and “Keep Breathing” spotlight the singer’s talent for double-tracking her own harmonies. Girls and Boys (2006) may still be the definitive Ingrid Michaelson album, but Be OK proves her staying power.
5 Lady in Spain 6 Keep Breathing 7 Oh What A Day 8 The Way I Am 9 Can't Help Falling In Love 10
You and I
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Be OK (acoustic)
1 Soldier
Everybody
2 Everybody
2009, Cabin 24
3 Are We There Yet 4 Sort Of
The album’s best song, “The Chain”, has been a staple of her concerts, and appeared on Be Ok in live form. This version expands the song into a majestic sound collage before ending on Michaelson’s crystalline vocal. Everybody finds Michaelson confident and assured in both her singing and songwriting, expanding her sound, but maintaining her indie spirit.
5 Incredible Love 6 The Chain 7 Mountain and the Sea 8 Men of Snow 9 So Long 10
Once Was Love
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Locked Up
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Maybe
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A moment with
Katy Perry The provocative pop star talks about her racy lyrics, risqué style, and being Mrs. Brand. See our Katy Perry cover shoot here and flip through her most memorable red carpet moments By Rose Apodaca | Harper’s Bazaar
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trip away the pink and blue extensions, the bras rigged with whipped-cream cans, and other frills of her cartoonish persona and another side of pop star Katy Perry emerges: a sophisticated femme fatale. “A super power woman,” she faux growls at a bistro in the Los Angeles, Los Feliz. “I have multipersonality disorder — in a very
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good way, of course — when it comes to my fashion choices,” she says of her ability to slip from party girl to polish. “When I first started playing around with my look, it was more of a Dita Von Teese pinup thing.” But the burlesque look is too high maintenance. “Dita’s really dedicated,” she says. Today, Katy, 26, is wearing little makeup other than eyeliner, her black hair loose and a floweryike
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“
I’m kind of a good girl — and I’m not. I’m a good girl because I really believe in love, integrity, and respect. I’m a bad girl because I like to tease. I know that I have sex appeal in my deck of cards.”
Katy Hudson, the pastors’ daughter who grew up in the lower-income end of Santa Barbara, than the international phenom she’s become. To the world, Katy sings radio-friendly anthems like “California Gurls” on one of the year’s best-selling albums, Teenage Dream, which features her naked on the cover with little more than a wisp of a cloud covering her bum. She’s marrying British comedian and actor Russell Brand, and her 2010 exploits include getting banned from Sesame Street for a cleavage-baring Giles Deacon outfit. Both Katy and Brand have been in the center of a supernova this year. “There’s no slowing down, my God, no,” she says. “We’re at the highest pace right now.” Katy and her big sister, Angela, her maid of honor, have just wrapped up the last meeting before the big day. “I’m up to my hairline in planning. It’s a lot, especially when you’re a woman of detail,” she says with a sigh. Not to mention the challenge of maintaining total secrecy. She and Brand often find themselves in Spinal Tap—worthy situations: “We go through kitchens, wear disguises.” The two met in 2009, thanks to a kissing scene in this past summer’s Get Him to the Greek that got cut. They reconnected later that year at the MTV Video Music Awards, and by New Year’s Eve, Brand was proposing under a blue moon in Jaipur, India. Katy caught wind of his plans. “I saw it on Google. The press was like, Sorry, Katy, if you’re seeing this, but ...” 10
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The two seem like they are from different worlds, but it clearly works for them. Brand, a recovering alcoholic and reformed heroin and sex addict, has made a career out of mining his hardpartying past for comic relief. He suffered abuse as a child and is estranged from his father—a far cry from Katy’s upbringing at Christian school and camp with her sister and younger brother, David. “We are like the Three Musketeers—actually the Three Stooges,” she says. “I feel really blessed because of where I come from.” Brand, whose sober and spiritual quest includes a friendship with the guru Radhanath Swami, fits right in, says Katy, who has an unmissable JESUS tattooed on her left wrist. “I always knew I wanted a great man of God, someone who was going to be an inspiration for people and also be a lovely husband and father,” she says. “We’re at different places in our lives, but we can still grow together. He’s thought-provoking, articulate, a real advocate. I also definitely wanted to have a laugh. I have all that in him.” He’s already made a mark on her life, literally: They have his-and-hers tattoos on their inner arms reading GO WITH THE FLOW in Sanskrit. His vegetarianism is another matter. “I unfortunately still crave chicken McNuggets and bacon, which is the meat candy of the world,” she says. The couple are decorating two new love nests: a place in New York and a vintage-Hollywoodstyle estate near Los Angeles’s Griffith Park, where
Music is all around us Katy Pery first started playing around with her look like Dita Von Teese.
they ride their bikes. Katy has already painted the three-car garage pink and turned it into a closet. “It looks like a stylist’s dream,” she says. “My friends love it. They never have to shop.” Brand is also inspiring some of that charttopping music. Katy wrote the ballad “Not Like the Movies” with him in mind. “The song is an encouragement to others. They don’t have to settle for anything besides spectacular,” she says.
The Success Spectacular is something Katy has been working for ever since she was discovered singing in church and began working on her first gospelrock album in Nashville at age 15. Two years later, she left Santa Barbara and headed to Hollywood. Katy adopted her mother’s maiden name to distinguish herself from Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn’s daughter, and hit the radar with 2008’s “I Kissed a Girl.” Despite their nice girl’s naughty streak, Mom and Pop Hudson have proven to be extremely supportive, even popping up in the video for “Hot N Cold.” As Katy explains, “My parents are very quirky, eccentric. They have their own world.” Such paradoxes in Katy’s tale both endear her to fans and enrage foes. “I’m kind of a good girl— and I’m not,” she says. “I’m a good girl because I really believe in love, integrity, and respect. I’m a bad girl because I like to tease. I know that I have
sex appeal in my deck of cards. But I like to get people thinking. That’s what the stories in my music do.” She is part of a new wave of pop stars—among them, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Fergie—who are reinstating the exuberant celebration of outlandish wardrobes, the wackier the better. But she says her fellow quick-change artists are more sisters than competitors. “We’re all unique. That’s why we all win and we all can exist. People don’t want just vanilla. They want 31 flavors. I couldn’t do what Rihanna does. I couldn’t do what Gaga does. They can’t do what I do.” I don’t have a Kate Moss body, but I’m very proud and happy with mine.” Yet, at 13, she pined for a breast reduction. “I had really bad back problems and was a little bit thicker.
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Lights? Camera? Action!
The Battle for Facebook The Social Network isn’t some yawny visual aid on how the website grew from a few hundred users at Harvard in 2004 to a 2010 global reach of half a billion. The Social Network is a hard-charging beast of a movie with a full tank of creative gas that keeps it humming from start to finish (hell of a middle, too) by Peter Travers | Rolling Stone
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ure, it gives you the facts about how thenHarvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg (a never-better Jesse Eisenberg) made billions by helping technology win the battle against actual human contact. But it’s also about the nation of narcissists we’ve become, reshaping who we are on Facebook in the hope of being friended by other users who may or may not be lying their asses off. Bracingly smart, brutally funny and acted to perfection without exception, The Social Network lights up a dim movie sky with flares of startling brilliance. Director David Fincher (Fight Club, Seven, Zodiac) puts his visual mastery to work on the verbal pyrotechnics in the dynamite, dickswinging script by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing), and they both do the best and ballsiest work of their careers. The Social Network gets you drunk on movies again. It deserves to go viral. In the film’s wow of an opener, set in 2003, Sorkin speculatively places Mark at a campus bar, where he is driving his girlfriend nuts by avoiding eye contact, juggling a dozen topics at once and ignoring her reaction to virtually everything. She is Erica, and as played like a gathering storm by 12
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Rooney Mara, winner of the coveted title role in Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, she is steaming. It’s a setup for disaster: tech nerd versus the real live girl from Boston University he uses to unload on. Fed up with his condescension and his obsession with getting into one of Harvard’s elite “final clubs,” Erica calls him an asshole and splits. A shattered Mark returns to the dorm he shares with Dustin Moskovitz ( Joseph Mazzello) and Chris Hughes (Patrick Mapel), and, beer in hand, blogs out his festering rage, attacking Erica as a flat-chested bitch, hacking into photo files of female Harvard undergrads and ranking them on a hotness scale. Out of anger over being socially rejected, a social network is born. Who gets the credit/blame? There’s no doubt Mark is the CEO of a Facebook complex currently valued at $25 billion. But don’t forget his BFF, Brazilian student Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who provided the business plan and early financing. And then there’s the memorable Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler (both played by Armie Hammer, with Josh Pence doing duty as a body double). The Winklevi, as Mark calls them, are blond vikings on the Harvard
Jesse Eisenberg as the Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and Joseph Mazzello as Dustin Moskovitz, in ‘The Social Network’
rowing crew and, in their eyes, the originators of Facebook. They were the ones who asked Mark to help them build a Harvard computer-dating service. They all successfully sued for a piece of the pie they claim that Mark the Judas screwed them out of when he took his idea to Silicon Valley and global dominance. Not a drop of blood is spilled in The Social Network, but you can’t miss the scar tissue. As advertised, it’s a tale of sex, money, genius and betrayal. But can a script based on what Zuckerberg calls “fiction” dig out the truth? The film’s maverick producer, Scott Rudin, paraphrasing a line from Sorkin’s A Few Good Men, argues that “there is no such thing as the truth.” He has a point.
The Social Network Technical specifications
Directed by David Fincher 2010, 120 minutes Script: Aaron Sorkin, Ben Mezrich Producers: Kevin Spacey, Scott Rudin Gender: Biography, Drama, History Columbia Pictures United States
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All that is to know about
Claire Danes The actress discusses balancing school with acting, making T3, and her upcoming projects By IGN Staff | IGN Movies
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laire Danes has recently returned to acting with a string of smaller roles in remarkable movies. Even with her priority being college, she still appeared in an average of two films a year. In 2003, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines seems to be her major vehicle. Claire plays Kate Brewster, the girlfriend of John Connor.
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During a recent roundtable interview, Claire described her absence from the movie business to attend college at Yale. “I took three years off. I differentiated myself from the industry. Found my identity – sort of ... I haven’t graduated yet. I’m not legitimately educated yet, but maybe one day. I don’t know, we’ll see.” As an actor and a student, it would seem that if school ever became too tough or too routine, one
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Claire Danes in our living room. She’s a very responsable student
would long for the excitement of making movies. One wonders if Danes would think while she was studying that she could be making a movie instead. “ I hadn’t been free from adult responsibilities since I was 12, and I needed to experience that. I really needed to just be a kid again.” College is hardly ‘just being a kid.’ “It’s really hard, it’s really hard ... I was such a nerd. I was nerdier than most of the other students. My best friend would get so frustrated with me, because I was quite anal and would get so obsessive over papers and exams. I took it all so seriously. It was as if I was sustaining a 100 million dollar movie or something. It was difficult to imagine that the consequences of my erring in some way would not be so dire.”
Claire Danes as Kate Brewster in T3 Claire shared her feelings on returning to acting after her absence, “Three years had passed since I had acted, and I missed it. I missed it terribly. I assumed when I started school that I could make a movie every summer, no problem, like clockwork. And, I should have known better. Of course the industry doesn’t work that evenly. I would sign on for projects that were meant to shoot in July, and then they would postponed and they would bleed into the following semester, and then I’d take a semester off, and then the movie would collapse. It was difficult. Like, Natalie 16
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Lights? Camera? Action!
“
I was very committed to being a student while I was there. That really challenged my sense of self for a while, but I think in a really positive way, because I was very careful not to lament my choices in life.”
Portman hit gold when she was first in Star Wars, because it was very convenient – every other June, there she was, making a film.” One of the films that was put on hold while Claire was in college was the Jodie Foster project Flora Plum. “Yeah, there was the Flora Plum thing, where I trained for about a month and I had taken a semester off for that, and two weeks prior to filming, the financing collapsed. I discovered the day before classes started. So, I had to rush back to school, I didn’t have any place to live. I had to finagle my way into classes that were completely full. That was stressful, it was really stressful. But, yeah, my life was really fractured. I have this home in New York, I have a long-term relationship with my boyfriend, who’s from Australia, and I had this business that I had maintain. Even though I wasn’t actively shooting, there’s a lot of peripheral work.” Flora Plum is back on the radar now, and set tentatively for 2004. Ewan McGregor has told reporters that he was in it. The problem with the movie seems again to be that financing isn’t there, to which Claire agreed, “No, it’s not.” Claire’s boyfriend of six years is Australian rock star, Ben Lee. Currently at age 22, Claire was asked if she and Ben hadn’t changed a lot since they first began dating. “Yeah, we kind of raised each other in a way ... We’re not bored yet. I can’t really explain it.” And how does the long distance thing affect their relationship? “We follow each
other around. It’s a priority for both of us, I think. Our lives are quite erratic, and we provide a sense of constancy and consistency. Yeah, we’re each others anchors.” The next project Danes will be working on, “I’m making a movie right now ... I’m actually rehearsing for a film in London ... It’s called Compleat Female Stage Beauty, and Richard Eyre is directing it, and it’s with Billy Crudup, and Tom Wilkinson, and Rupert Everett and myself. It starts in the seventeenth century and it marks the change from when male actors stopped playing female characters, and I play the first actress of the British stage. But, I’m really terrible. I’m devoid of any talent ... It’s a comedy, sort of.” Questions are already being raised about the possibility of a fourth Terminator movie. If there were to be a T4, Claire would be a part of it, as her contract for T3 included being involved with T4. “Yeah, my lawyer was in a bit of a tiz. He pulled an all-nighter. I mean, I guess I’m available. I mean, I’m contractually obliged. Whoopee. It’s very ambiguous, the whole issue, whether or not we’re going to make yet another installment.” Danes was asked if it were only a contractual obligation, or if it is something she would like to be involved with. “I’d feel very comfortable if Jonathan decided to direct the next one, ‘cause I have a good relationship with him. It would depend on the script, but I think it’s up to the audience to decide if they want another one.”
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On set of Terminator, she worked out with Schwarnegger
Danes and Nick Stahl in T3 Jonathan Mostow has talked about his decision to hire another actress for the part of Kate Brewster in T3, and then replace that actress with Claire at the last minute. Claire spoke briefly about how she became involved with T3. “I talked to Jonathan about it, then he was so inspired he went and hired another actress,” she joked. “Which is fine – she was too young.” Being hired at the last minute has some advantage, as Claire said, “It gave me some leverage.” Danes discussed what it was like to work with Arnold Schwarzenegger. “He was urging me to use his gym in a trailer ... Why didn’t I? I should have. To say that I’ve worked out with Arnold would have been really cool. My fondest memory is Ben’s nephew, Timothy, lives in Sydney and he had a Bar Mitzvah the summer that we were shooting, and I was meant to attend, but of course I couldn’t ... So, I asked Arnold to make a little videotape, wishing him happy birthday, happy Bar 18
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Mitzvah, and he did and he was so, so sweet about it. He said, “Happy birthday, Timothy. Happy Bar Mitzvah. I know you think you’re a man now, but you’re not a man. You don’t know what it is to be a man.” Then he blew up his muscles. That was really cool of him.” So the big question is, was he in his Terminator outfit when he did it? “Yeah, he had bullet holes and everything. So, all the other kids at the Bar Mitzvah were calling Ben’s sister saying, ‘So, how do we book Arnold?’” Claire’s boyfriend of six years is Australian rock star, Ben Lee. Currently at age 22, Claire was asked if she and Ben hadn’t changed a lot since they first began dating. “Yeah, we kind of raised each other in a way ... We’re not bored yet. I can’t really explain it.” And how does the long distance thing affect their relationship? “We follow each other around. It’s a priority for both of us, I think. Our lives are quite erratic, and we provide a sense of constancy and consistency. Yeah, we’re each others anchors.” Jonathan Mostow has talked about his decision to hire another actress for the part of Kate Brewster in T3, and then replace that actress with Claire at the last minute. Claire spoke briefly about how she became involved with T3. “I talked to Jonathan about it, then he was so inspired he went and hired another actress,” she joked. “Which is fine – she was too young.” Being hired at the last minute has some advantage.
Lights? Camera? Action!
Where to find her Stage Beauty Directed by Richar Eyre 2004, 110 minutes It’s the 1660s, and Edward ‘Ned’ Kynaston is England’s most celebrated leading lady. Women are forbidden to appear on stage and Ned profits, using his beauty and skill to make the great female roles his own. But King Charles II is tired of seeing the same old performers in the same old tragedies. Since no one will take him up on his suggestion to improve Othello with a couple of good jokes, he decides to liven the royal palate by allowing real women to tread the boards.
Evening
Directed by Lajos Koltai 2007, 117 minutes Overcome by the power of memory, Ann Lord (Vanessa Redgrave) reveals a long-held secret to her concerned daughters. Both are bedside when Ann calls out for the man she loved more than any other. But who is this ‘Harris,’ wonder her daughters, and what is he to our mother? She is tended to by a night nurse as she journeys in her mind back to a summer weekend fifty years ago, when she was Ann Grant (Claire Danes), maid of honor at the wedding of her dearest friend from college, Lila Wittenborn (Meryl Streep).
Stardust Directed by Matthew Vaughn 2007, 127 minutes In a countryside town bordering on a magical land, a young man makes a promise to his beloved that he’ll retrieve a fallen star by venturing into the magical realm. Now, in order to make good on his promise, Tristan will have to cross the forbidden wall, and enter a mysterious kingdom lit by unending magic and unfolding legends of which he will quickly become a part. In this fantastical realm known as Stormhold, Tristan discovers that the fallen star is not at all what he expected but a spirited young woman.
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The World of Letters
Writing Through the Pain Nicholas Sparks turns his family’s loves and losses into wildly popular novels, that please women at all ages and also men By Allison Adato | People
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is eight have-a-good-cry novels have collectively spent 156 weeks The New York Times bestseller list. His book signings sometimes run 10 hours long as fans queue up for his autograph (which he offers happily)—and advice (which he doesn’t). “I don’t like to give marriage tips,” says Nicholas Sparks, author of such heart-tugging fare as Message in a Bottle, The Notebook and The Wedding, its just published sequel. “There are people who are probably much better at marriage than I am— they’ve lasted a lot longer. I could probably learn from them.” Still, a visit to the New Bern, N.C., home Sparks, 38, shares with wife Cathy, 36, offers plenty of examples of how to keep romance alive-despite the passage of 14 years and five kids: Miles, 12, Ryan, 10, Landon, 3, and twins Marin and Lexie, 2. Nicholas would like six, but Cathy was done.” “We get up at 6 a.m., before any of the children, so we can eat breakfast together,” says Sparks. They also work out side by side three times a week at the local Gold’s Gym. “For some part of the day,” he says, “the marriage relationship has to be primary—it’s one of the best things you can teach your children. So we don’t feel guilty if we go for a walk, just the two of us.” Also helpful? Saying within earshot of Cathy,
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“The women in my stories tend to be like my wife—strong, confident, intelligent and putting family first.” Part of their compatibility, says Cathy, a former lending-company account executive, comes from their similar origins: “We both had very normal lives growing up—horses down the road, ice skating, sledding.” (She was raised in Manchester, N.H., he in Fair Oaks, Calif.) They are determined to create the same childhood for their kids. “My life is simple,” says Nicholas, whose only postwindfall indulgence is the use of a private jet. “I focus on my wife, my family and my work.” Spend time with Sparks, who wrote his first bestseller, 1996’s The Notebook, while still in pharmaceutical sales, and you see why he’s made his fortune not with pills but with touching tales featuring 26-year-old virgins, Wonder Bread and swans that appear at precisely the right symbolic moment. “Nicholas has an amazing talent of bringing the words on a page to life,” says Shane West, who starred in the film of A Walk to Remember last year. In fact, it may come as a surprise to dedicated readers that the protagonist of The Wedding has, by the end of the first chapter, forgotten his anniversary. (Don’t worry—the fictional husband more
Nicholas Sparks had 6 of his novels turned into movies
than redeems himself.) “I’ve always wanted to write about how a couple lost their connection, their passion,” says Sparks. Unlike his other books, The Wedding isn’t inspired by events in his own life. (Forget an anniversary? Never.) Over the last decade tragedies in his family have provided him ample, if unwelcome, material. “There was a period of years we suffered several personal blows,” says Sparks, who used his fiction to work through those difficult times. Message in a Bottle (which became a 1999 Kevin Costner movie) was a story of love after loss that he wrote when his mother, Jill, died in a 1989 horsebackriding accident, leaving behind Michael, her husband of 26 years. A Walk to Remember, in which the main female character dies young, came after the 2000 death from a brain tumor of Sparks’s sister Dana, just 33.
Fiction has become an emotional outlet for Sparks, who as a Notre Dame business school grad, decided to capitalize on the niche he saw in the love-story market, “He made a conscious decision about which genre to pursue, based on where the voids were,” says his brother Micah, 38, who runs a cabinetry business in Folsom, Calif. “Writing is an art,” says Nicholas, “but publishing is a business. I have to have a theme that appeals to a lot of people.” Evidently he does. Once again fans are lining up at bookstores to meet him. And Cathy, though proud, remains philosophical about the whole thing. “I find it interesting that women get all giddy and giggly,” she says. “He’s a great guy, but he’s just a man.” Allison Adato Michaele Ballard in New Bern and Kwala Mandel in Los Angeles
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Fiction
One of These Days By Gabriel Garca Marquez
Monday dawned warm and rainless. Aurelio Escovar, a dentist without a degree, and a very early riser, opened his office at six. He took some false teeth, still mounted in their plaster mold, out of the glass case and put on the table a fistful of instruments which he arranged in size order, as if they were on display. He wore a collarless striped shirt, closed at the neck with a golden stud, and pants held up by suspenders He was erect and skinny, with a look that rarely corresponded to the situation, the way deaf people have of looking. When he had things arranged on the table, he pulled the drill toward the dental chair and sat down to polish the false teeth. He seemed not to be thinking about what he was doing, but worked steadily, pumping the drill with his feet, even when he didn’t need it. After eight he stopped for a while to look at the sky through the window, and he saw two pensive buzzards who were drying themselves in the sun on the ridgepole of the house next door. He went on working with the idea that before lunch it would rain again. The shrill voice of his elevenyear-old son interrupted his concentration. “Papa.” “What?” “The Mayor wants to know if you’ll pull his tooth.” “Tell him I’m not here.” He was polishing a gold tooth. He held it at arm’s length, and examined it with his eyes half closed. His son shouted again from the little waiting room.
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“He says you are, because he can hear you.” The dentist kept examining the tooth. Only when he had put it on the table with the finished work did he say: “So much the better.” He operated the drill again. He took several pieces of a bridge out of a cardboard box where he kept the things he still had to do and began to polish the gold. “Papa.” “What?” He still hadn’t changed his expression. “He says if you don’t take out his tooth, he’ll shoot you.” Without hurrying, with an extremely tranquil movement, he stopped pedaling the drill, pushed it away from the chair, and pulled the lower drawer of the table all the way out. There was a revolver. “O.K.,” he said. “Tell him to come and shoot me.” He rolled the chair over opposite the door, his hand resting on the edge of the drawer. The Mayor appeared at the door. He had shaved the left side of his face, but the other side, swollen and in pain, had a five-day-old beard. The dentist saw many nights of desperation in his dull eyes. He closed the drawer with his fingertips and said softly: “Sit down.” “Good morning,” said the Mayor. “Morning,” said the dentist. While the instruments were boiling, the Mayor leaned his skull on the headrest of the chair and felt better. His breath was icy. It was a poor office: an old wooden chair, the pedal drill, a glass case with
The World of Letters
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Without hurrying, with an extremely tranquil movement, he stopped pedaling the drill, pushed it away from the chair, and pulled the lower drawer of the table all the way out. There was a revolver. ”
ceramic bottles. Opposite the chair was a window with a shoulder-high cloth curtain. When he felt the dentist approach, the Mayor braced his heels and opened his mouth. Aurelio Escovar turned his head toward the light. After inspecting the infected tooth, he closed the Mayor’s jaw with a cautious pressure of his fingers. “It has to be without anesthesia,” he said. “Why?” “Because you have an abscess.” The Mayor looked him in the eye. “All right,” he said, and tried to smile. The dentist did not return the smile. He brought the basin of sterilized instruments to the worktable and took them out of the water with a pair of cold tweezers, still without hurrying. Then he pushed the spittoon with the tip of his shoe, and went to wash his hands in the washbasin. He did all this without looking at the Mayor. But the Mayor didn’t take his eyes off him. It was a lower wisdom tooth. The dentist spread his feet and grasped the tooth with the hot forceps. The Mayor seized the arms of the chair, braced his feet with all his strength, and felt an icy void in his kidneys, but didn’t make a sound. The dentist moved only his wrist. Without rancor, rather with a bitter tenderness, he said: “Now you’ll pay for our twenty dead men.” The Mayor felt the crunch of bones in his jaw, and his eyes filled with tears. But he didn’t breathe until he felt the tooth come out. Then he saw it through his tears. It seemed so foreign to his pain
that he failed to understand his torture of the five previous nights. Bent over the spittoon, sweating, panting, he unbuttoned his tunic and reached for the handkerchief in his pants pocket. The dentist gave him a clean cloth. “Dry your tears,” he said. The Mayor did. He was trembling. While the dentist washed his hands, he saw the crumbling ceiling and a dusty spider web with spider’s eggs and dead insects. The dentist returned, drying his hands. “Go to bed,” he said, “and gargle with salt water.” The Mayor stood up, said goodbye with a casual military salute, and walked toward the door, stretching his legs, without buttoning up his tunic. “Send the bill,” he said. “To you or the town?” The Mayor didn’t look at him. He closed the door and said through the screen: “It’s the same damn thing.”
Gabriel García Marquez is is a Colombian novelist, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
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