On November 20th, 1965 at 10:57 a.m., Allan Cosgrove, a dog walker and bonsai tree1 enthusiast, walked out of his apartment building on the outskirts of Decatur, Georgia on his way to his mother Eileen’s house. A small team of state workers fixed up the sidewalk concrete here several months beforehand, setting exactly 13 dowels of rebar before pouring the freshly mixed slurry, and smoothing it over with trowels. One of the state workers, Lassiter “Lucky” Jones, a father of two and adoring husband to Addie Mae, but something of the clown of his concrete-laying crew, thought it amusing to carve his initials into the concrete. “You shore is...
Angela Sarafyan has impeccable posture and her neck is long and majestic. As she sits to have a chai tea and pain au chocolat, she offers, “I got this for us to share.” She tucks a red leatherbound Il Bisonte notebook—for her thoughts, records, and creative writing—into her bag. This is her second refill notebook in just a few months. She is tearing a piece off the pastry when a ladybug lands on the table. Sarafyan’s large eyes widen even further, and she puts her fingers in front of the insect. She believes in luck. “You know what you can do?” she says, as she tries to encourage the ladybug onto her finger, “They say that you can make as many wishes as...
It astonishes the way some folks who’ve been prescribed stardom proceed onto the tightrope as such with completely unmarketable names. We don’t need to get into the mistakes—it’s no one’s fault but their own—but we can at least examine a handful of those that have worked: Angelina Jolie, Tom Cruise, Jude Law, all of whom edited themselves into the omnipresent namesakes they are today. Gabriella Wilde (née Gabriella Zanna Vanessa Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe)—a lanky, pouty-lipped, private, sweet, picture perfect ingénue, here in New York for a wave of press in the lead up to the recently released The Three Musketeers—has definitely honed a silver-...
In Gold We Trust Unless you’re wearing a homemade tinfoil helmet and listening to George Noorey’s late night talk show on the radio, with a burlap sack of gold bullion buried beneath the large amber stone in your turnip garden—unless you’re doing all of that—you’ve probably made an unconscious decision to trust the U.S. government with your currency. Everybody does. You walk around with a pocket full of green paper marked with Latin, pyramids, runs of numbers and letters, stoic faces, spiritual testaments, endangered species, and a single glowing eyeball. Or worse yet, you don’t carry cash. You trust your colorful slice of plastic that...
Crystal chandeliers float above Andrea Riseborough’s head like tiaras as she crosses the French café, moving slower than the jazz but faster than the trailing glances. She sits down in the burgundy booth, hair in a pinned bouffant, wearing a thin beige sports coat over a pink western blouse. A bolo tie and a rosary hang around her neck, but she’s neither a cowboy nor a Catholic. The British actress’ porcelain face can’t hide its disappointment when she sees the red flashing light from the digital recorder lying next to the saltshaker. She frowns at the dictophone as if it were a co-star breaking character. “It sort of takes the Truman-Capote-interviewing-Brando element out of...
Mary Elizabeth Winstead is here to get wasted. measuredly wasted, sure, but wasted nevertheless. Tonight, her swill-sidekick will be Emmy-friendly actor Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad, and their DD will be film director James Ponsoldt, who unites the two as drunken lovers in forthcoming drama, Smashed. It’s enviable “research.” But first, let’s talk about Winstead’s lead in The Thing, which did its thing through theatres last month. It’s not only an extraterrestrial arctic slaughter-fest wherein Winstead plays a parka-swaddled grad student eluding a transmutative, homicidal thing, but a prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece of the same title. Regards...
Natasha vita-more gazed up from a dormant volcano’s pit and felt she was inside her vagina. It was 1981, and she had just experienced an ectopic pregnancy in Japan. Subsequently, and perhaps prematurely, accepting a role in the film Sleeping Goddess, Waking Muse, Vita-More had set off to the gorgeous Hawaiian landscapes. Inside that pit, mourning her body and her baby, she heard the universe echo. Inspiring a revelation that human enhancements could be made through emerging technologies, Vita-More published the Transhumanist Arts Statement a few years later, a manifesto championing emotional freedom as a vital cog of the transhumanist’s life. Transhumanism is a...
