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| Twilight sucks up People's Choice award nominations Vampire love affair leads race for public's votes with six nodsIt's unlikely to figure at next year's Oscars, but the Twilight Saga films, based on Stephenie Meyers's books about a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire, look set to triumph where it really counts. The franchise leads the nominations for the 2010 People's Choice awards, with six nods.Twilight is up for best actor, in the form of Robert Pattinson, who lines up alongside Brad Pitt, Hugh Jackman, Johnny Depp and Ryan Reynolds. The film also gets a nod in the best actress (for Kristen Stewart), onscreen team, breakout actor (Taylor Lautner), movie franchise and favourite movie categories.Star Trek, this summer's successful reinvention of the science fiction franchise, is in joint second spot with four nominations, including two for breakout actor for the new Kirk and Spock, Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto. X-Men Origins: Wolverine, thecritically-panned prequel to the Marvel comic-book series, also has four nods, including best onscreen team for Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Ryan Reynolds, Will.i.am, Dominic Monaghan and Daniel Henney.The nominations bode well for the box-office performance of Twilight follow-up New Moon, out in the UK on 20 November. The first film raked in $383m (£230m) internationally last year.The People's Choice gongs are decided by votes from the US public and have been running annually since 1975. Fans cast more than 18m votes online to select the nominees and will also choose the winners. The 2010 prizes will be conferred on 6 January.Robert PattinsonAwards and prizesStephenie MeyerFilm adaptationsBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Being Katie Price Katie Price attracts vicious attention in the press, but the fact is that an awful lot of people like her. Perhaps it's because – despite all the makeup and surgery – she is almost entirely without artifice. By Zoe WilliamsWhat did Katie Price expect from her stint on I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here? She, more than anyone, knows how this weird show works. She would have known that it's basically a popularity contest, with all the savagery of a high-school prom queen election, but none of the day-to-day insights. She must have been aware of her public image, a gaudy patchwork of overpaid (she was on £350,000 for the show, all the others were on £65,000), over-endowed, overexposed, over-easy, just . . . over. And yet, on she went, banging the drum for, er, independence and overpayment, apparently surprised that anyone hated her at all, let alone that they hated her so much they would make her eat bugs seven times in a row.I would say, and not just to cheer her up, that the people who engage seriously with reality TV, to the point where they will vote one way or another, are horrible people. Nasty, prejudiced people who hate women, who hate black women even more, but will take a break from their race hate to mete out weird punishment to women who get "above themselves". With Price, it's obvious why those who hate her, hate her. She is insufficiently humble. But what if you don't hate her? What if you sort-of love her? What are you supposed to do with that?Periodically, Katie Price – more often as Jordan, her breasty alter-ego – will be held up as a symbol, the apotheosis, maybe, of the direction that mainstream culture has taken over the last two decades. She appears to believe that fame is a reasonable pursuit for its own sake, like the aberrant modern children you hear about at the annual headteachers' conference. She has no particular talent (or so you might hear – she's pretty good-looking, so right off the bat she is as talented as, say, Orlando Bloom), and therefore embodies the something-for-nothing, I-want-what's-mine-even-though-it-isn't-mine, shrill grabbiness of nowadays. She colludes with – no, encourages – the commodification of her body, values it out by the pound to whoever pays the most in whatsoever state of undress, and this makes her a very neat icon of raunch culture, which nobody knows what to do with: are you Melanie Philips, and find it immoral, the lack of modesty, of purity? Are you Ariel Levy (New Yorker magazine, hot third-wave feminist), and find it a tragic betrayal of the women's movement? Don't know? Somewhere in between? Never mind – at least you're not Price. At least you don't embody all this.Well, she might embody these values, but I'm sure loads of other people do too. She might be a role model, a bad one – who cares? There's never any shortage of good-looking young women who people can give a kicking for not setting a good enough example to other good-looking young women.She has been singled out for this part because she's very durable, and you can trust even very clueless people, who don't read OK! magazine, to know who she is. But she is also unusual, magnetic. She has a sullen, determined intelligence; she doesn't seem like a straightforward celebrity, more like a fictional celebrity from an American dystopian novel. Alive with a lust for money totally out of proportion to its material import, confident of her abilities beyond not just what they amount to, but what anybody's abilities could amount to, she strikes me as a cross between Alan Sugar and Damien Hirst. Only more of all that, and then some.I interviewed her once, in the house she shared with Peter Andre, when her son Harvey was five, their son Junior was nearly two, and she was pregnant with their daughter (Princess . . . I'm not even going to check the spelling of her second name. It's not a name, it's a Scrabble hand). The two dogs, whose custody is now contested, were in a crate in the hall. "Puppies!" I said, excited, and she looked at me, distrustfully. I honestly believe she thought I was talking about her breasts. "Oh, them," she said. "They're Pete's."We walked into her kitchen, where there were full-length photographic portraits of her and Andre, in their wedding outfits. It was all pink, pink, pink, like the wedding itself, which you'll no doubt remember had prancing white horses and such. It was a huge, lunatic confection of femininity, while Price herself is unnervingly hard-boiled, businesslike and canny. You could be watching Gordon Brown do a burlesque dance where he splashes out of a giant martini glass. She is relentlessly ambitious, tirelessly competitive. She was talking about cracking America."There are so many people who say I'm going to go to America and I'm going to crack this and there's always some bullshit story in the English press – 'I'm going to America, I've been offered this deal and that deal.' And most of it is in their dreams, it's a pile of shit. I don't think I've seen or heard of any of them. Like Jennifer Ellison was off to be a Hollywood actress. Shit. We're the only couple, me and Pete, the only couple . . . The only other couples I know are Tess and Vernon [Daly and Kay], Richard and Judy, but they only do presenting. Me and Pete, I do my modelling, my jewellery, we do our music." And then, in case I haven't got it: "They only do one thing – we do a wide variety of things."It's impossible to tell, a lot of the time, how she gets from one topic to the next, except for this bridge – you see those other people? They are shit. "I don't believe in just taking pictures with a group of disabled kids just to get my picture in the papers," she said, straight afterwards. "Which is what a lot of people do. Look at [boy band] McFly. They did a song all about the tsunami. Did [the money] really go to the people who needed it? Let me see, if any of those bands were to do a whole charity album. And dedicate the whole album to charity. Me and Pete are the only people I know who've done that."I'm aware that I'm not making her sound very likeable, but she is. She seems to me to be almost totally honest: a straight person, never sugar-coated, as arrogant in pursuit of her own interests as a charging hog, but not arrogant in any important way, not arrogant like a liar. When people talk about Posh Spice, and they try to sidestep the fact that she's basically a consort, that they're gossiping about a consort like it's the 50s, by calling her a "businesswoman". That is not so: lending your name to a perfume or an underpant, saying "yes" to something that makes a lot of money, is not what business regularly entails.Katie Price is a businesswoman. There are all these things you wouldn't be aware of, and there's no reason why you would be, but there's a business here: horsey books for 12-year-olds; autobiographies (you make a lot of money from books, she told me. She could live just off the books. I asked how much they were worth, and she said, "I don't talk about money, it's not attractive"); website after website; tits for the grown-ups; beauty tips for the other grown ups; ponies and bows for the children; hair products; underwear; bedding; more tits. Her life is a riot of money-making venture. When she was talking about world domination, I got this mental image of her as a Robert Crumb cartoon, sending off one breast to cover China, a leg to do America, carving herself up like an enterprise, a military magazine.I look at this entrepreneurial drive, this slightly resentful energy, and feel like it should be interpreted (deprived childhood? Nope. Used to be ugly? Not at all), but really, why? You don't interpret Warren Buffett. You'd never ask, "Why, Alan Sugar, why do you care about making more?" This eye for a deal, this zeal for money, it's what some people have as well as a pulse; it's what shows they're still alive.She has actually had a much more troubled decade than the bows and horses and cash and even divorce would have you believe. There are always veiled remarks in the tabloids about her oldest son, Harvey, who is blind and also on the autistic spectrum – you constantly see it reported in the tabloids that she went to such and such a place with the younger two, while Harvey was "with a nanny". It's totally bogus, all this: she seemed to me to have a perfectly normal, ideal family setup for a person with a job and three kids, one of whom has special needs. She has a nanny, but also her mother, I get the impression, practically lives with her, and there's a much younger sister who is very much part of the household. Joan Crawford (circa Mommie Dearest) she ain't.Before she met Andre, she spent six weeks in Hugh Hefner's Playboy – what, Mansion? Hutch? – and her mum lived in a hotel round the corner all that time, looking after Harvey. She herself plays down this prosaic aspect, this side of herself that is just a person in the world, making things work, even if that means weird arrangements where she'll go to the Playboy Mansion but only if her mum is round the corner. It's not very glamorous, I suppose. Maybe it dents the franchise. But it's not all celebrity blarney, her mother-shtick, some of it is difficult, even more difficult than a regular life, and can't be delegated. I think this shows in her; I think it's part of why people like her.But mostly, it's the lack of artifice. You ask why she does whatever she does, and the answer is almost always, Look at the money! Look at the cash on that deal! But the pride she takes in it, the raw celebration of achievement, the lack of dribbly integrity-speak, the vim . . . it adds up to something. There's something about her sense of purpose that is nearly awesome. I suppose you could say the same for Alan Sugar, for Damien Hirst. But I don't really feel it.Katie PriceI'm a Celebrity ...WomenZoe Williamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Bible tales are retold for the secular age Authors reimagine the nativity story for children to read and enjoyAsk any four-year-old why the shepherds followed that star and the answer is likely to be entertaining. "They brought Jesus food after a fairy came down and said to Mary, 'You are going to have a baby'," said one this weekend. "No, I think they took him the gold he wanted," corrected his six-year-old brother.Details of the events celebrated at Christmas can be rather blurred for young children, many of whom now spend as much school time studying Hindu, Muslim and Jewish customs and beliefs as they do the tenets of the Christian faith.But does it matter if the nativity story is passed down the generations? Some parents without strong religious beliefs often welcome the mixed-faith basis of their local primary schools, but are less pleased to find their children are missing out on stories that are still the most influential in western culture: the tales from the Old and New Testaments. Now there is a solution for troubled agnostic and atheist mothers and fathers. They can read their favourite parables to their children at bedtime, alongside Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan.A growing number of children's publishers are bringing out books that re-tell the stories of the Bible so that children can read them at home, away from an overtly religious context. This Christmas, acclaimed author Jeanette Winterson has taken up the crusade by bringing out her own, unorthodox account of the nativity story told from the point of view of the donkey in the stable. Christian publishing company, Zonderkidz, based in the US, has also produced a series of children's picture books based on Bible stories, such as Jonah and the Big Fish and The Lost Son. One book tells the tale of two shepherds, Jed and Roy, who make their way to the manger. While these colourful publications could be used in conventional Sunday school classes, they also fulfil an important cultural function for many parents."It is a really important to me that they know these stories," said Diane Reilly, an atheist and mother of two from Sussex. "It is as much a part of the culture in this country as any other story. Rather like Aesop's fables, they are just traditional touchstones."Winterson, whose Christmas book, The Lion, the Unicorn and Me, was published at the end of last month, was inspired by the same conviction that children should have access to stories that are central to the western literary canon. Many common English phrases, such as "to kill the fatted calf" and to "play the good Samaritan", rely on a knowledge of the Bible, as do many of the moral assumptions echoed in British society.In Winterson's nativity story, her donkey hero wins the chance to carry the pregnant Mary to Bethlehem by answering a tie-breaker question correctly. It is a book full of humour, but with an evident sense of wonder, too. At the birth of Jesus in the stable, trumpets sound and the donkey joins in. "I tipped back my head, and I brayed and brayed to join the trumpets. My nose was so high and the roof so low, that the angel's foot brushed me as I sang," recounts the donkey.The book, which has been described by critics as "a cross between the nativity and one of Rudyard Kipling's Just So stories", was prompted by Winterson's love of Christmas traditions and the telling of old stories, according to her publishers, Scholastic, and the author began to write it at a time of some personal grief, at the end of a six-year relationship. "I had split up with [former partner] Deborah Warner, and was feeling absolutely wretched," Winterson has explained. "It cheered me up."The author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit does not call herself Christian, but is "one of the faithful". Brought up in a strictly religious household, she has rejected the formality of the church. "I believe in God as highest value, and I believe in a connection between all living things – humans, animals, and the land. We cannot know if God exists, but we can know what it is to want more than materialism and pragmatism," she has said.Winterson is not alone in her take on the nativity this Christmas. Another author, Janet Duggan, a mother from Hertfordshire, has also written an account of events in the stable from the point of view of the donkey. Duggan originally wrote The Christmas Story as Told by Assellus the Christmas Donkey for her son when he was a child. Now, 20 years later, it has been published for other children."The nativity story is a lovely story, but it is getting a bit lost these days," said Duggan last week. "Children love the story and children love animals."ChristianityChristmasJeanette WintersonPublishingVanessa Thorpeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land by Thomas Asbridge and Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades by Jonathan Phillips | Book reviews Malise Ruthven admires two books that ask how modern conflicts have come to be clothed in the language of medieval holy warsThe historian Marc Bloch, who died a martyr's death when shot by the Nazis, observed that "once an emotional chord has been struck, the limit between past and present is no longer regulated by a mathematically measurable chronology". Although we are approaching the millennium of the First Crusade launched by Pope Urban II in 1095, the spirit of this archetypal conflict between a militant Catholicism and its rival faiths in Iberia, Southern France, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Baltic lives on. After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, George W Bush said: "This crusade… this war on terror is going to take a while." As Jonathan Phillips remarks, his incendiary comment was a propaganda gift to Osama bin Laden, who for years had been talking about Jewish-Crusader attacks on Islam.Thomas Asbridge makes the same point. How can it be, he asks, that this language of medieval holy war has found a place in modern conflicts, as if there were some "unbroken line of hatred and discord connecting the medieval contest for control of the Holy Land to today's struggles in the Near and Middle East?" He concludes that the crusades are a potent, alarming and dangerous example of the "potential for history to be appropriated, misrepresented and manipulated" for political ends. Together with Phillips, he points out that the Muslim idea of the crusade embodied in the Arabic term al-hurub al-salabiyya ("the wars of the cross") only appeared in the course of the nationalist struggles in the 19th century. The crusaders' Muslim contemporaries employed less emotive, more secular language: "the wars of the Franks",Both of these books take us back to the period in western history when belief in the afterlife was paramount. Philips describes a society "saturated with religious belief", where fear of damnation was universal. Ordinary life was fraught with eternal hazards. Practically every church contained frescoes or sculptures depicting the horrors of hell – devils gouging out the eyes of screaming sinners, living humans skinned and eternally roasted – contrasted with the peace, tranquillity, and safety of heaven for the saved. The Church's message was terrifyingly simple: there was no avoiding the consequences of sin. Urban II, an ambitious and ruthless Frenchman, launched the movement with a brilliant new formula: wipe the slate clean by going on the crusade. All the vicious and violent misdeeds that were occupational hazards for medieval warriors and their entourages would be cancelled. For the knightly classes the "neatest aspect of all is that they could continue fighting – only now their energies would be directed towards the enemies of God, rather than their fellow Christians".And who were these enemies of God? The obvious ones were the Saljuq Turks, who were moving into Byzantine lands. The ostensible excuse for Urban's appeal to arms was a request by the Emperor Alexius in Constantinople, whose territories in Anatolia (now eastern Turkey) were being taken over by these semi-nomadic invaders. These encroachments, however, had been going on for many decades without much bothering the papacy, while the holy city of Jerusalem, the scene of Christ's passion and site of his crucifixion and tomb, had been under Muslim rule for four centuries without scandal, with Christian pilgrims generally free to travel there.The first crusade, as Asbridge explained in an earlier account he published in 2004, was really about the consolidation and extension of papal power in the anarchic and faction-ridden lands of western Europe. Crusading redirected the energies of feuding warlords, "channelling their bloodlust beyond the borders of the Latin West for the 'good' of all Christendom". Philips underlines this point by giving much fuller treatment than Asbridge to the papally-sanctioned crusades outside the Middle East – against the Muslim states in Iberia, against pagans in the Baltic and Cathar heretics in southern France.The outcome was a configuration of politics, religion and culture that we now take for granted: failure in Outremer (today's Middle East), where the Latin kingdoms were doomed to extinction, being reliant on continued provisioning from western Europe; but success in Iberia, where the crusading ideology revitalised the Spanish Reconquista. As Asbridge explains in a masterful conclusion, the huge distances involved in mounting military expeditions or even maintaining regular contact with Levantine kingdoms situated thousands of miles away proved insuperable once the Muslim East had rallied to the cause of defeating the Frankish intruders.The other major contest between Latins and Muslims ended in Christian victory because of Iberia's proximity to the rest of Europe. But ideology was also crucial, as Phillips makes clear: Castilian and Catalan rulers had fought Spanish Muslims for decades with the limited objectives of advancing their territorial holdings and securing commercial privileges; but after Pope Eugenius III launched the Second Crusade in 1145, the Iberian campaign became overtly religious, with Christian rulers securing the full array of papal indulgences and other spiritual rewards.Religious fervour added heroism to the conflict, but also cruelty. Both writers enliven their narratives with blood-curdling details culled from Muslim and Frankish sources: the decapitated heads of prisoners paraded on spikes to humiliate and enrage the enemy; battlefields where dead horses resembled hedgehogs from the quantity of arrows sticking into them; winter sieges where the people "tormented by the madness of starvation, cut pieces of flesh from the buttocks of dead Saracens, which they cooked and ate insufficiently roasted".But there are also heartening examples of respect and even collaboration across the religious divide, with instances of tolerance and decency that belie images of "medieval" fanaticism. Asbridge has no doubt that the conflict was between the Franks and Levantines, rather than Christians and Muslims. "One fact is clear: in the Latin East, the primary division was not between Christians and Muslims but between Franks (that is to say, Latin Christians) and non-Franks (be they eastern Christian, Jewish or Muslim)."The papacy's real agenda was revealed in the Fourth Crusade, when the crusaders sacked Constantinople in a campaign to install a short-lived puppet regime intended to extend papal rule over the eastern branches of Christendom. In the words of a Byzantine witness, the Franks thought nothing of violating nuns, "tearing children from mothers and mothers from children, treating the virgin with wanton shame in holy chapels, viewing with fear neither the wrath of God nor the vengeance of men". Another Greek writer contrasted the brutality of the westerners with the humane treatment the Muslim hero Saladin accorded to the people of Jerusalem, which he reconquered in 1187 (before it was again lost to Islam, briefly, in 1229).Asbridge suggests, however, that for all his energy in uniting Islam (which he achieved by suppressing the brilliant civilisation that had flowered in Egypt under the Shiite Fatimids), Saladin had "neither the will nor resources to complete the conquest of the Palestinian coastline". It would be left to the much more ruthless and fanatical Mamluk Sultan Baibars, who held back the Mongol invaders at Ayn Jalut in 1260, to create the conditions leading to the final exit of the Franks from Palestine in 1291.Yet despite all the battles and sieges, commerce continued unabated. The Spanish Muslim traveller Ibn Jubayr, who visited the Levant in the early 1180s, found the Muslims of western Galilee living in farms and orderly settlements alongside the Franks. He even suggested that his co-religionists were more likely to be treated with justice by a Frankish landlord than by one of his own faith. The military order of the Templars, who occupied the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, allowed Muslims to pray individually in the al-Aqsa mosque, while even in the heat of battle a knight might be allowed the dignity of answering a quiet call of nature before returning to the fray.Both of these books contain compelling narratives that resonate inescapably with contemporary events. Each of the authors has published previous books – Asbridge on the First Crusade, and Philips on the disastrous Fourth. Both play to their detailed knowledge the sources, without appearing to repeat themselves. If a common message can be gleaned through the mayhem of distant battles, it is that fragments of human decency can survive the furies inspired by contested symbolic appropriations of a jealous Abrahamic god.Malise Ruthven's books include Islam in the World (Granta) and Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford)HistoryReligionChristianityguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Erich Segal, ‘Love Story’ Author, Dies at 72 Mr. Segal was a Yale classic professor turned popular writer whose first novel, “Love Story,” became a staggering commercial success if not quite a critical one when it appeared in 1970. feeds.nytimes.com |