New video via abc.com!  Enjoy!

Also, what did everyone think of Tuesday’s episode of “Scrubs”?  Personally, I like Zach Braff but pretty much all of the sequences involving JD are getting old so I’m glad he’s leaving.  I really love everyone on the new cast though, so I’m excited to see an episode where they’re all prominently featured.

ALSO PSA: I read that “Scrubs” might not be renewed due to less than stellar ratings.  This can’t happen.  Dave’s awesomeness needs to stay on the air.  So please, stop watching online or boycotting it because it will “ruin your ending” and  watch the show.  It’s actually really funny.

I really love Hunter Parrish, although he’s one of those actors I forget about a lot because he never does anything to make he hate him like date someone who’s the equivelent of Satan/Lindsay Lohan, act pretentious, or say something stupid for attention.  But he’s starring Meryl Streep’s new movie “It’s Complicated” and I found this interview which I thought was fun, so enjoy!  He seems like such a nice guy.

Hunter Parrish won’t stop apologizing over the phone. “I’ve never done this to anyone,” he says when he calls a few minutes late for our interview.

“I keep getting cast as this bad guy, and I don’t know why,” he says. He’s referring to his bully to Zac Efron in last year’s 17 Again, and his beloved-by-critics Broadway bout in the hypersexual Tony-winning indie musical Spring Awakening. This month, he appears as son to Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin in It’s Complicated, a Nancy Meyers–directed dysfunctional-family film also starring Steve Martin and John Krasinksi. “I had a healthy fear,” he says of his heavyweight costars. “A respectful fear.” Gosh, even the guy’s fears are polite.

http://www.elle.com/Pop-Culture/Celebrity-Spotlight/Hunter-Parrish-Boy-Wonder

Proving that for some people there is no rock bottom, just a continous black hole, Amy Winehouse was arrested a few days ago after assaulting a theatre manager.

It wouldn’t be the holidays without a visit to ArtsBeat from Amy Winehouse. The Times of London reported that Ms. Winehouse, the British soul singer and perennial friend to bloggers in search of news items, was charged with assault after she was said to have attacked a theater manager at a pantomime show. On Saturday, Ms. Winehouse was attending a holiday performance of “Cinderella” at a theater in Milton Keynes, north of London, and was reportedly shouting out comments during the production — not an unheard-of practice in the tradition of British pantomime. But when the theater’s front-of-house manager, Richard Pound, asked Ms. Winehouse to move to a different seat, he said, she pulled his hair and punched him and kicked him. The police told The Times that Ms. Winehouse was arrested on Wednesday after making a voluntary appearance at the Milton Keynes police station with her legal adviser.

SOURCE

I love how people have been predicting her death since ‘08 and this lady is still kickin’ it and getting in brawls.  Girl is a SURVIVOR.

But seriously, it’s a shame that all of her talent is going to waste.  I remember being so blown away when I first heard “Back to Black” and I’m beginning to wonder if she’ll ever be able to recreate that.  That old saying is true, that you pretty much have to be crazy to make good art.

It’s the end of the year so everyone seems to be chomping at the bits to be coming up with as many “best” and “worst” lists as possible–and with it being the end of the DECADE, there seems to be ten times as many lists as usual.  Most of them haven’t been too exciting but (British) Vogue recently compiled a list of who they believe are the best dressed women of the year and I thought it was quite interesting.  You can OBVIOUSLY tell it’s British Vogue by the horrifying choice they picked for number one.

Seriously, Anna would never let that happen.

And here they are:

20- Beth Ditto (Singer)

19- Carla Bruni-Sarkozy (French First Lady)

18- Olivia Palermo (Reality TV star)

17- Anna Friel (Actress)

16- Georgia May Jagger (Model)

15- Angelina Jolie (Actress)

SOURCE

14- Michelle Obama (US First Lady)

13- Leighton Meester (Actress)

12- Lily Donaldson (Model)

11- Lady GaGa (Singer)

10- Kate Moss (Model)

9- Frieda Pinto (Actress)

8- Diane Kruger (Actress)

7- Sienna Miller (Actress)

6- Emma Watson (Actress)

5- Dannii Minogue (Singer/X Factor Judge

4- Cheryl Cole (Singer/X Factor Judge)

3- Sarah Jessica Parker (Actress)

2- Audrey Tautou (Actress)

1- Alexa Chung (TV Presenter)

What do you guys think?  Are you as shocked as me that ALEXA CHUNG is best dressed?

Bit of old news, but sigh.  Shocking absolutely no one, Manson and Evan Rachel Wood are back together as Manson confirmed in an interview to Metal Hammer saying: “Me being at my best is what I need to be…I think that has really paid off because I’m back with Evan.”

This really wouldn’t have bothered me so much if he hadn’t BRUTALLY MURDERED HER LOOK ALIKE in a music video and said that he wanted to kill her recently.  Evan’s one of my favorite actresses, but girl get some self-respect and dump the scumbag.

SOURCE

I remember seeing a preview for Paolo Pasolini’s controversial film, “Salo, o 120 dias de Sodoma” where one of the reviews said, “The best advice I can give for seeing Salo:  Don’t see it.”  I would say that’s pretty accurate.

If you don’t feel absolutely violated, disgusted, dirty, and depressed after watching it, then odds are you just don’t have a soul.  Salo takes just about every taboo and psychological disturbance possible and brings it out in the full open, making for the most horrific movie experience you will ever sit through.  

In short, “Salo” is the story of nine boys and girls kidnapped by a group of Facists in an Italian town and forced to be their personal wind-up sex toys.  The teenagers can’t escape; their families believe they are dead, there are guards at every door, and the government is the one controlling the sexual games.  Unlike a John Waters  film though, Pasolini’s film doesn’t wink at the subject of sex.  The nudity is not meant for titilation, it’s meant to disgust.  And there is almost an overload of it.  Sex is a constant theme of “Salo” and most of the time you feel the most horrid sense of dread watching it.  In one of the most disturbing scenes the teens have to act like dogs and are seen running up some stairs on all fours, some on leashes.  Once inside a large main room where most of the torture happens, the teens are forced to eat crap and even beg for it, barking like dogs.

This scene specifically reminded me of a documentary I had seen on Sundance on the subject of mind-control. The documentary focused on two main events in history–one was a social experiment conducted by a Yale professor that turned a basement of the university into a prison.  Fourteen students responded to an ad for the experiment and were then randomly chosen to be the prison guards and the prisoners.   At first, everyone was joking around and not taking it seriously but by the end of the first week, they weren’t playing anymore.  The students acting as guards really believed they were guards and actually started mentally torturing the students who were prisoners by making them do sex-acts and putting them in isolation for no reason other than because they had power and could do it.  The other issue it discussed was the controversy in Iraq when it was discovered that American soldiers were forcing Iraq prisoners to perform sexual acts on camera as a means for torture.  When taken in this context, Salo is even more horrifying than you ever imagined.  This isn’t just the work of fiction.  This has been going on right this decade, and we’ve been paying for it with our tax money.

As the movie progresses, the torture gets more sadistic.  A girl is added to a death-list for mentioning the name of God; another boy is added to the same list for wiping after going to the bathroom.  Every day the kids are shuffled into a room where a woman tells stories of her sexual conquests that are meant to sexually arouse  the kids so the guards and politicians can take them off to have sex with them.  Gender is not an issue as all of the guards are presumably bisexual; they wil screw anyone.  In another scene a contest is devised for whoever has the best butt.  The kids are taken into a room and told to get on the floor with bags over the heads where the politicians will come in and judge who wins.  The winner’s prize is death. 

Of course all of this is just build-up to the main event.  The book of death that had been used for the past few weeks is finally put to use when the kids are led outside and tortured and murdered in the most brutal ways possible.  A girls nipple is burned; a boy’s tongue is cut off; another kid has his eye guaged out.  It’s telling that this is the only violent scene in the entire movie, and yet after everything that’s happened, you feel like you just watched the most gruesome movie ever made.

I feel like Salo is an important film for it’s message, and one that most everyone should see if you can handle it, but you probably won’t want to watch it more than once.  The acting is superb and the script is excellent.  There’s a real clausterphobia and helplessness watching it, knowing that nothing can be done to save these kids.   But once the film is over and you realize as I mentioned above, that things like this are still going on today, the real horror sets in.

As I’m sure all of you have heard, actress Brittany Murphy passed away yesterday.  While the circumstances involving her death are vague, there has been a ton of speculation on whether it was drug-related or brought on by an eating disorder.  Whatever it was, this one caught me completely off-guard.  Like Natasha Richardson, Brittany wasn’t even on my radar of celebrities who could die–I wasn’t even this surprised when MJ died. 

Brittany got her break starring alongside Alicia Silverstone and Stacey Dash in the hit, “Clueless” as transfer-student Tai and went on to star in movies such as ”Just Married”, “Girl, Interrupted”, “Spun”, “Uptown Girls” and “Don’t Say A Word.”  She was 32.

As someone who grew up watching “Clueless” (I was nine when I first watched it and am twenty now), this is all very strange.  You never think of someone so young who’s career you’ve watched forever dying.  I wasn’t really a fan, but one of my best friends loves her so I was always pretty conscious of what was going on with her movie-wise.  I hope whereve Brittany is now she’s found peace.  This will also be my last post on the topic, because like Michael Jackson, they’re probabaly about to hang her out to dry and I’d like to at least preserve her dignity on this site. 

Leave your thoughts in the comments, and RIP Brittany

To all of the fangirls flustered that James Franco had destroyed his looks by dying his hair black and growing it out, BEHOLD: James at the Brooks Brothers holiday celebration which benefited St. Jude.  (Yay, St. Jude! One of my childhood friends had treatment there until she passed away a few years ago and they really were a rock for her and her family.)

There are some more pictures beyond the cut, but the real reason for this post was for an interesting article James penned for the Wall Street Journal about why his guest appearance on “General Hospital” is considered performance art.  The article is a pretty interesting read, and he obviously knows the history of art (I recognize a lot of the pieces he mentions from my art history classes) and puts up a pretty good case for why his stint is performance art.  But what do you guys think?

Article can be read in it’s entirety after the cut, along with all the sources and more pictures.

 was recently treated to an early prototype of a dessert that Marina Abramović, the “grandmother of performance art,” created with the pastry chef Dominique Ansel. It’s a cylindrical pastry with a lychee center sprinkled over with chili powder and raw gold. I was instructed to kiss a napkin that had been printed with a square of gold powder that would transfer to my face before eating the dessert. This way the dessert would pass through a golden gateway before it was ingested. I did as told, then suggested to the chef that it needed more chili. Was this art?

I have been obsessed with performance art for over a decade—ever since the Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña came to visit my class at Cal Arts summer school. I finally took the plunge and experimented with the form myself when I signed on to appear on 20 episodes of “General Hospital” as the bad-boy artist “Franco, just Franco.” I disrupted the audience’s suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn’t belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain—and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate. Whether they did was out of my hands.

As Ms. Abramović told me over our dessert tasting, performance art is all about context. “If you bake some bread in a museum space it becomes art, but if you do it at home you’re a baker.” Likewise, when I wear green makeup and fly across a rooftop in “Spider-Man 3,” I’m working as an actor, but were I to do the same thing on the subway platform, a host of possibilities would open up. Playing the Green Goblin in the subway would no longer be about creating the illusion that I am flying. It would be about inserting myself in a familiar space in such a way that it becomes stranger than fiction, along the lines of what I’m doing on “General Hospital.”

 

James Franco Interviews Artist Marina Abramovic

4:22Actor James Franco visits performance artist Marina Abramovic. He discusses her art and samples one of her edible creations.

Performance art is enjoying a moment of validation from the art world establishment. Next month, the Guggenheim Museum will showcase the work of Tino Sehgal, the Berlin-based artist whose “staged situations” have involved uniformed museum guards dancing around a gallery singing, “This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary!” The renowned art fair Art Basel Miami dedicated evenings to performances by visual artists, including Claire Fontaine, whose work consists of a Body Opponent Bag (BOB) punch mannequin that professional fighters will beat silly. The P.S.1 museum in New York’s Queens borough is in the middle of “100 Years,” a three-week-long series chronicling the past century of performance art, so all the oldies but goodies can be studied.

Minoru Niizuma/Courtesy Yoko OnoYoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece’ (1964)

When most Americans think of “performance art,” they probably think of its golden age in the 1970s and the early 1980s. That was the time when the artist Chris Burden was creating pieces that entailed being shot in the arm or crucified on a Volkswagen Beetle and Marina Abramović and her one-named partner Ulay were performing “Rest Energy,” a piece where they faced each other and held a taut bow with an arrow pointing at Ms. Abramović’s heart.

But performance art of this vein got its start as early as the 1950s, when art students started putting down their paintbrushes and cameras and turning to their bodies as instruments. Art critic Harold Rosenberg defined Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning as “action painters” and their canvases as records of a performance. Art was no longer to be viewed passively, but something to engage with. Hans Namuth’s 1951 film “Jackson Pollock 51″ shows Pollock improvising with his painting, making marks and then responding to those marks. Clearly, the process had become part of the art. It was only a matter of time before artists would start discarding the final piece altogether, like Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” (1965), where the audience was invited to cut Ms. Ono’s clothes, or Allan Kaprow’s “Fluids” (1967), where a team constructed an enormous ice structure, only to leave it to melt.

Performance art can seem pretentious, but it can also be quite mischievous and playful. Just as Marcel Duchamp rocked the art establishment in 1917 with his found urinal called “Fountain,” performance artists of the 1960s and 1970s presented entire practices and occupations as art. In today’s version, the artist Fritz Haeg packages lawn care as art—his ongoing series “Edible Estates” consists of designing and implementing ecologically productive front lawns. As Mr. Haeg said at a talk at Columbia University last month, “Being an artist is the one profession where you can wake up and say, ‘What do I want to learn about and participate in today?’ ” What could be more fun than that?

Becky Cohen; Courtesy of the artistGuillermo Gomez- Peña during a performance of his 1988 piece ‘El Border Brujo’

In her 1973 piece “Rhythm 10,” Ms. Abramović, the co-inventor of the lychee-and-gold pastry, recorded herself playing five-finger fillet, often cutting her fingers in the process. Then she played the recording back in front of a live audience and recreated the “performance” with the finger slicing put in the exact same place. Thus, the second time around may be a recreation of an act that already took place, but when she cuts herself the second time she still bleeds, and the past action is also taking place in the present tense. It’s trippy stuff.

Most performance pieces before the 1970s were not well recorded. All that remains of some works are scraps of various media. This wasn’t simply a result of oversight. Chris Burden never intended his early pieces to be filmed because he was concerned that the films would be seen as the work rather than as a record of the work. He was more interested in completing the act than getting the greatest number of people to see it. He worried that people would regard the film as the full experience when anyone who has watched a stage play on film knows, it is never the same as seeing it live.

The gulf between film and performance art has dwindled in the years since Mr. Burden crawled naked across glass. These days, contemporary performances often are staged for a camera and the record of the act becomes primary. The world of performance art has incorporated many of the materials and methods that it once shunned. Contemporary performance artists such as Matthew Barney, Paul McCarthy and Ryan Trecartin depend heavily on film and video to make their work. Mr. Barney relies on Hollywood special effects to achieve his elaborate costume and set design. And Mr. McCarthy’s ketchup-and-mayonnaise-loving elves and madmen would be hard to conceive without the precedent of Disney films.

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Courtesy of the artist/Sean Kelly Gallery, NYMarina Abramović’s 2009 piece ‘The Kitchen I—Homage to Saint Therese,

When New York’s Museum of Modern Art celebrated the opening of the performance-art retrospective at its sister museum P.S.1 last month, the band Fischerspooner put on a concert in the museum’s main atrium. Casey Spooner, a singer who contains great passion under his cool exterior, stopped the show and complained that the audience wasn’t engaging with the music enough. Later it was revealed that the complaints were all part of the act and the entire piece will later be presented as a film about a fictional musician.

The folks at “General Hospital” informed me that in three days of filming we backlogged enough material for 23 episodes. There will be one more step. After all of the Franco episodes are aired, my character’s storyline will be advanced in a special episode filmed in a “legitimate” New York gallery. One more layer will be added to this already layer-heavy experiment. If all goes according to plan, it will definitely be weird. But is it art?

—James Franco is an actor who appeared in “Milk” and the “Spiderman” movies. He is currently enrolled in NYU’s MFA filmmaking program and Columbia’s MFA program for fiction writing.

I hate watermarks.

sources: http://www.gettyimages.com/Search/Search.aspx?contractUrl=2&language=en-US&family=editorial&p=james%20franco&assetType=image&ep=3#1

http://www.welovesoaps.net/2009/12/james-franco-at-brooks-brothers.html

With less than two weeks ’til Christmas, I know most of you are scrambling to get as much shopping done as possible and you might be a little stumped as to what someone young, fabulous, glamorous, sophisticated, awesome etc would want (unless you fit into that description and in that case, please hide your credit card because you will love this list). So please, let me be your guide to some essential must-have books, films, and albums that every pop-enthusiast will adore you for.  And to make things easier for everyone, I’ve included links to the sites where you can purchase these gems–for the cheapest price possible.

Let’s begin!

MUSIC

The Veronicas are kind of an underground sensation for any lover of pop music.  They have a bit of a cult following, and sound just as good live as they do on tape–all of which you can witness on this CD/DVD set.  Filmed during their Australian string of Revenge is Sweeter tour dates, the DVD includes the full live performance and backstage footage.  Australian readers can purchase the set at their official site, and anyone else (including American, Europe etc) can purchas it  here.

Full of gorgeous melodies and startlingly heartbreaking lyrics, Neko Case’s “Middle Cylcone” was included on Rolling Stone’s album of the year list and is one I’ve had on repeat since I got it for my birthday a month ago.  Album can be purchased here.

Jeff Buckley kind of has a niche fanbase, but I’m obsessed with him so I had to include this goldmine on my list.  “Grace Around the World” is what every super fan NEEDS to own–seriously, this should be at the top of your list if you’re one.  Included in this set are 2 DVDs–one is the “Amazing Grace” documentary which is more about his influence on fans lives and what a great person he was than his actual life; the second is a collection of live performances mostly from ‘95 and a few from ‘94.  The special features on this disc are my favorite though because you have Merri Cyr’s tour diary which is basically home movies of Jeff on his first tour, some rare interviews and MOAR performances.  Also included is a CD of the performances from the second DVD I was talking about, and a fan pack full of postcards a, backstage pass replica, Jeff’s flight pass replica, and a few other goodies.  ALL of this can be purchased here.

Gaga’s “The Fame Monster”, and I’m not kidding when I say this, is the best pop record of the year.  No other artist has gone to the extremes this woman has gone to for their “art.”  And finally, the music is starting to mirror her antics.  It’s wild, brash, and at times very weird.  While it still remains to be seen if she’ll be the next Madonna (remember, people said the same thing about Britney at 23 and look what happened to her…) this record may be seen as the one that changed everything for Gaga years down the line.  CD can be purchased here.

Before you see Reeve Carney as Spiderman on Broadway or pick up Carney’s debut album “Mr. Green”, get “Live at Molly Malones” to hear and see where it all started.  His voice is a little huskier, the music is a bit jazzier, and it’s all absolutely brilliant.  Standouts include “Amelie” (listen for Zane’s insane guitar solo) and the lovely “Think of You.”   This comes as a CD/DVD set and can be purchased here. 

BOOKS

For burlesque and glamour fans, Dita Von Teese’s “Stripteese” will be the perfect gift.  The book is actually packaged as three small flipbooks that features three of Dita’s famous performances including the champagne glass one.  The book can be purchased signed at Dita’s official site (click me) for $40 or unsigned here for $20.

One of the best books I read this year was “I’m With the Band”, written by legendary groupie Pamela DesBarres.  The book was originally published in the seventies and was subject to a great deal of controversey due to DesBarre’s unapologetic tales of sleeping with and befriending nearly every  rockstar of the sixties.  The book can be purchased  here.

“A Piece of Cake” is without a doubt, the most inspiring book I’ve ever read in my life.  I got it last year for my birthday and I still say it’s one of my favorite books.  Not for the faint of heart, “A Piece of Cake” is the memoir of Cupcake Brown who went through hell and back all before she was twenty–homelessness, prostitution, drug addiction, gang banging, a sadistic foster mother, and countless abortions–before she cleaned up life and became a lawyer.  Great for any fan of memoirs or the recent movie “Precious.”  The book can be purchased here.

FILMS

One of the best films about Gen-X and what can only be described as a snapshot of a generation, “Reality Bites” is just as honest and relevant today as it was fifteen years ago.  Basically anyone with an interest in the nineties or who lived through it will love this.  The 10th Anniversary Edition has some fab special featuers like Lisa Loeb’s video for “Stay”, a few features on the making on the film, a soundtrack doc, and much more.  DVD can be purchased here.

17 Again was the movie that proved Zac Efron could act, and is in general, a very fun movie.  Sure, it has it’s cliched happy ending and a few embarrasing slap-stick moments but the movie has a heart and Efron genuinely moves you in a few scenes.  Unfortunately the DVD comes with NO special features, but it’s still a must-have and can be purcahsed here.

Some critics dismissed “Whatever Works” as dated, but I found it to be a really charming movie.  Larry David can occassionally come across as one-dimensional, but Evan Rachel Wood and Patricia Clarkson shine as two ditzy southern women running away from their home to start a new life in New York City.  Any fan of David, Wood, or Woody Allen films will probably love this.  DVD can be purchased here.

Since Meryl Streep is the queen of movies right now, chances are most women (and some men) would love this.  The movie was quite a success with critics and audiences alike, and isn’t the least bit superficial or pretentious–just great fun.  DVD can be purchased here.

So today after about five excruciating days of waiting, my Murmurs CD FINALLY arrived in the mail!  (Yes, I was impatient…)  The reason I knew about them is because  one half of the band was Leisha Hailey, whose band Uh Huh Her is one of my all time favorites and who’s movie “All Over Me” is too amazing for words.  Their music took me a little while for me to get into because it’s pretty folk-y and they both sing at the same time in most songs the entire way through (not just choruses) which sounds kind of kitschy on first listen, but I’ve really grown to love the simplicity of it all.  And to be honest, I haven’t stopped listening to the album since I got it. 

Anyway, last week while I was browsing through YouTube I found this interview from ‘94 of Leisha and Heather Grody from their NYC apartment (love it) and it was so cute that I had to post it.  I also love Leisha’s pink hair here–she had it in “All Over Me” which is what made me love her so much, so I was thrilled to find out that many of their videos featured her fabulously pink hair too.  (What can I say, I like a girl with a cool hair color if it suits her) But watch and enjoy, and then go buy some Murmurs and Uh Huh Her music.  They’re sound is worlds apart, but absolutely lovely.