On Thursday, this portrait of a brooding Heath Ledger, which was painted shortly before the Australian actor died in January, was voted the most popular painting in the 2008 Archibald Prize competition. The Archibald Prize is Australia’s top art prize for portraiture. Ledger posed for the portrait in December at Ledger’s family home in Perth, Australia.
Ledger, who was best known for his role as a conflicted gay cowboy in the 2005 movie Brokeback Mountain, died at th age of 28 in New York on January 22, 2008. Artist Vincent Fantauzzo, 29, had been friends with Ledger for many years.
The portrait features a bare-chested Ledger against a black background, looking straight out of the canvas with two other images of the actor at the sides whispering into his ears. Fantauzzo refused offers to sell the painting and said that he had spoken to Ledger’s family, who requested that the portrait be donated to the New South Wales Gallery in Sydney, Australia.
Senator Barack Obama won a clearly decisive 14-point victory over Hillary Clinton in the North Carolina primary on Tuesday and lost by less than two points to Clinton in the Indiana primary, an outcome that infused a huge boost of momentum to Obama’s candidacy as the Democratic nominating contest entered its final weeks.
The results from those two Democratic presidential primaries, the largest of the remaining Democratic ones, was assured to further widen Obama’s lead in pledged delegates over Hillary, providing him with new ammunition as he seeks to persuade the major Democratic leaders to coalesce around his campaign. He also increased his lead in the popular vote in winning the North Carolina Primary by more than 250,000 votes.
“Don’t ever forget that we have a choice in this country,” Mr. Obama said in his address in Raleigh, N.C., that carried the unity themes of a convention speech. “We can choose not to be divided; that we can choose not to be afraid; that we can still choose this moment to finally come together and solve the problems we’ve talked about all those other years in all those other elections.”
Barack Obama’s North Carolina Victory Speech
“We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be,” NBC’s Tim Russert declared on MSNBC last night after Obama had decisively drubbed Clinton in North Carolina, winning there by fourteen points, and ending up within less than two points of her in Indiana. Russert, NBC’s host of Meet the Press, declared that the Democratic presidential nominee is going to be Barack Obama.
The moment came shortly after midnight Eastern time, captured in a devastatingly declarative statement from Tim Russert of NBC News: “We now know who the Democratic nominee’s going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it,” he said on MSNBC. “Those closest to her will give her a hard-headed analysis, and if they lay it all out, they’ll say: ‘What is the rationale? What do we say to the undeclared super delegates tomorrow? Why do we tell them you’re staying in the race?’ And tonight, there’s no good answer for that.”
The impact of Russert’s statements was apparent almost immediately, starting with The Drudge Report, the online news billboard that is the home page to many political reporters in Washington and news producers in New York. It had as its lead story a link to a YouTube clip of Mr. Russert’s comments, accompanied by a photograph of a beaming Mr. Obama with his wife, Michelle, and the headline, “The Nominee.”
NBC’s Tim Russert: “We Now Know: The Democratic Nominee Will be Obama”
Music Audio: Josh Groban/You Raise Me Up:
Obama’s Strong N. C. Win May Now Assure Him the Nomination
Robert Downey, Jr: From Sam Taylor-Wood’s Crying Men (2002-2004)
Robert Downey, Jr: The Darker Years
It was a while in coming, but in 1996 the police officers who had stopped Downey noticed that he was carrying an unloaded .357 Magnum, along with small amounts of heroin and cocaine. Just a month later, he was cited for trespassing and being under the influence of a controlled substance after he mistook a neighbor’s house for his own and fell asleep in a child’s bedroom. His life rapidly turned into a series of court dates and drug relapses. In 2000, he was apprehended by police in a hotel room with cocaine and a Wonder Woman costume.
There were rehabs that did not work, followed by jails that did not impress, ending up in his having to serve hard time, twice, including a one-year stint in a state prison where he had to fight to find a place to stand. Just four months after Downey’s August 2000 prison release, he was arrested again, on a Thanksgiving weekend for alleged cocaine and Valium possession and being under the influence of drugs. The Valium charge was reduced to a misdemeanor in May 2001. Downey was sent back to drug rehabilitation and put on three-years probation after his July 16, 2001, no-contest plea to the November 2000 drug possession charges.
Elton John and Sam Taylor-Wood: Downey’s Return to Acting
It is usually reported that it was Mel Gibson who gave Downey his first post-rehab film break, in 2003’s The Singing Detective; as the producer, it’s reported that Gibson put up the insurance money for his friend. However, Downey’s real first acting job after being ordered into the drug treatment program in July 2001 came less than two-weeks later, thanks to Elton John and Elton’s friend Sam Taylor-Wood. When Taylor-Wood suggested to Elton the idea of having an actor lip-syncing to the song in the video for the single I Want Love, both Taylor-Wood and Elton thought Downey would be perfect, and the video ended up being a one-shot video centered on Downey.
The video consists of Downey walking around an empty, lonely building (actually, Greystone Manor in Beverly Hills) at the end of July 2001, lip-synching the song, I Want Love. It has been reported that Elton and Taylor-Wood arranged for Downey to be granted a one-day pass from rehab in order to do the filming. Looking back, Taylor-Wood described the experience as one where, “The whole process of making it involved such serendipity, everything just slotted into place really beautifully. Between Elton asking me to do the video and its airing on MTV was less than two weeks. It was an unbelievably fast turnaround.” The video also was included in Elton’s subsequent concert tour and was shown on a big screen onstage while he sang the song.
I Want Love: The Paradox of Love
I Want Love, the Elton John music video produced by Taylor-Wood, becomes an awkwardly painful statement from Robert Downey about the paradox of love. Noting that he is a man carrying the heavy and aching weight of self-destructive baggage, Downey’s desperate self basically says, “I want love, but I want nothing you do or say to affect me, I am who I am.” In its encounter with the other, the self wished to affirm its absolute independence, even though its need for the other and the other’s similar wish gave the lie to it.
I Want Love: Elton John and Robert Downey Jr. (2001)
Directed by Sam Taylor Wood
Pietà: An Icon of Exhaustion and Distress
Sam Taylor-Wood:
“Doing it [the filming of I Want Love] was fun. It was such a different experience, because I felt I didn’t have much to lose, it’s not a world I wanted to go on and make a career in. On that day, I think there were 16 10-minute takes before we found the right one. When we got the perfect take, we were all so excited, we didn’t want the day to end.
Afterwards there was still lots of film left. So we said, “Come on, let’s play, let’s make some things.” I’d just been to Rome and seen Michelangelo’s Pietà in St Peter’s. So I said, “Right, let’s do a Pietà.” There was something very natural about the process of doing that. He was exhausted, I was exhausted, but we were both quite elated. The Pietà video consisted of me propping him up. The whole experience of doing the music video and the Pietà, was a tremendous release.“
Why did Taylor-Wood decide to do a moving piece of Pietà rather than a still one? The Pietà, for instance, could have been a still. Taylor-Wood responded, “With that piece I wanted to see the struggle, to see the weight, so to speak. You can see the muscles in my arms and neck straining, and my breathing is really laboured. It’s silent, but you can see me heaving to keep him held up. I drop him a bit, and pick him up, and drop him again. You couldn’t do that in a photograph in the same way.”
In Pietà, the draped body of Robert Downey Jr, laid out like Holbein’s Dead Christ in the Tomb, is presented in a manner that is so matter of fact, so drained of real importance, that the idea of death asserts itself with the chilled subtlety of a business card dropped on a dinner setting. Why him, one might ask, and for that matter, why her? Why ask, would be her likely reply. Taylor-Wood has appropriated widely in the past, from Atlas to Roman orgy scenes (updated to the present day) to Hollywood movies.
Here, as elsewhere in her work, feelings of emotional and physical distress take the place of narrative.In Taylor-Woods’ hands, The Pietà becomes an icon of exhaustion and distress. Or obversely, exhaustion and distress become iconic, if only by association.
It is very important to note that after the filmings of I Want Love and Pietà with Sam Taylor-Wood, Robert Downey Jr. has never again gone to rehab, jail or prison.
Pietà: A World of Exhaustion and Distress (2001)
Sam Taylor-Wood: Crying Men
Prior to being diagnosed with cancer eleven years ago, Sam Taylor-Wood was the darling party girl of Young British Art. By the age of 42, Sam Taylor-Wood had become the British art world’s acceptable face: a mature artist with an A-list address book and, with her husband, Jay Jopling, a place at the new art establishment’s top table. Grown men have wept for her, but how woud they remember her? She could have sat for Modigliani. Her long face, the slim figure, the strong, bony hands echo the left-field sensuality and elongated elegance of his models. There are hints of it in her own self-portraits, especially the strangely balletic Self-Portrait Suspended, which was made after she had filmed and photographed members of Great Britain’s Royal Ballet. This is a forgivable display of narcissism; a creative work that is evoked by a dream of swimming in air can hardly be a legitimate source of public outrage in the art world.
Taylor-Wood’s acclaimed earlier experimental short film, Still Life, in which a bowl of fruit was filmed slowly rotting away, was about mortality and life’s inevitable transience; her later work, Crying Men (2002-2004), was a treatise on the theme of sadness. Her series of photographs in Crying Men attempted to capture the moment between the real and the unreal, the imitation and the authentic. By her use of celebrity actors as models, the viewer debates whether their tears of sadness (and therefore their emotions) are genuine. If the models had been anonymous, the question would never arise. Of course, the question is really a moot one; even if their tears were acting, the pictures can give a viewer the rare opportunity to touch upon the real sources of sadness from which professional actors may draw upon to perform feelings of unhappiness ad sorrow. It is a subtle challenge that is typical of Taylor-Wood’s increasing degree of maturity as a visual artist.
Robert Downey, Jr continued his working relationship with Taylor-Wood in this work, appearing as one of the celebrity actors in her Crying Men series of photographs.
Sam Taylor-Wood: Crying Men (2002-2004)
Chaplin is a 1992 semi-biographical film about the life of Charles Chaplin. It starred Robert Downey Jr., Dan Aykroyd and Geraldine Chaplin. The film was adapted from the books My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin and Chaplin: His Life and Art by David Robinson. It was produced and directed by Richard Attenborough. The original music score was composed by John Barry.
Although the film was criticized for taking dramatic license with some respects of Chaplin’s life, Downey’s uncanny performance as Chaplin won almost universal acclaim. Attenborough was sufficiently confident in Downey’s performance to include historical footage of Chaplin himself at the end of the film. The film’s tagline was “Everyone has a wild side. Even a legend.”
It was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Robert Downey Jr.), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration and Best Music, Original Score. Robert Downey Jr. also won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor.
Robert Downey, Jr Sings: Smile (Chaplin, 1992)
Robert Downey’s return from the brink is truly a fighter’s tale. Since getting clean in 2001, the man who was at one time referred to as the best actor of his generation, but also (in Time Magazine) as a “stark reminder of the strangling power of addiction,” has labored hard to show Hollywood that he deserved another chance.
And look at him standing there now, a great big movie star in a huge, blockbuster of a movie, The Iron Man, with not a trace of human frailty. It was only seven years ago that the only time you saw Robert Downey Jr. getting big publicity in our newspapers or on television came when he was being paraded and humiliated in public by the police after one of his many arrests.
Yet when it came time for Marvel Studios to cast the lead for a huge franchise film, Iron Man, it bet on Robert Downey. He is not only back in the game but at the very top of it. Downey’s saga easily can lead one to think: Isn’t this a great country, or what?
Robert Downey, Jr: Iron Man, 2008 (The Official Trailer)
Robert Downey, Jr Sings Smile:
The Many Faces of the Wonderful Robert Downey, Jr.
N. C. Jefferson-Jackson Speech: This is My Patriotism, These are My Values
At the North Carolina State Democratic Party’s Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Raleigh (NC) on Friday evening, the immense room exploded with energy when Barack Obama walked onto the stage after Hillary Clinton, who had received what observers have described as a far more tepid reception.
“This election is not about rich versus poor, or young versus old or black versus white,” he said, as supporters waved thousands of blue Obama campaign signs. “It’s about the past versus the future, and in four days, you can choose to turn the page.”
“My story is not possible except in the United States of America. I would not be here were it not for the fact that somebody, somewhere stood up for me. And because one person stood up, a few more stood up, and then a thousand stood up, and then a million stood up. That’s why Hillary Clinton can run for President. That’s why I can run for President…because somebody stood up. And the question now is: Will the Democratic Party stand up for the next generation? That’s my Patriotism. Those are my Values. Those are your Values. That’s what we’re fighting for in this election.”
N. C. Jefferson Jackson Dinner, May 2, 2008
Barack Obama: This is My Patriotism, These are My Values
Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin reported late Saturday that Hollywood superstar Tom Hanks is endorsing Barack Obama for President. The acclaimed actor and activist, who previously had given money to both the Obama and Clinton presidential campaigns, posted a compelling video on his MySpace page explaining his choice. The video is presented for you below:
Acclaimed Actor Tom Hanks Endorses Senator Barack Obama
For a second time last week, Obama played basketball in front of the television cameras, but this time it was with the big boys. Despite having held a late night campaign rally, Obama was up bright and early before 7:00 a.m., arriving at one of the hallowed grounds of college basketball, the home of the University of North Carolina Tar Heels. Obama headed to the court for a quick morning game, a five-on-five warm-up with the University of North Carolina basketball team.
Shooting Hoops: Basketball with the UNC Basketball Team
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