Allison leaves ‘Idol’ with head high: ‘I stayed true to myself’
May 8, 2009
Q: Were you feeling pretty confident last night?
A: It was weird. I’ve been in the bottom three before. When it was down to me and Danny (Gokey), it was like, “It’s either him or me.” And it was me. I’m glad I got the opportunity to perform on that stage.
Q: The link between you and Adam (Lambert, when the singers dueted on Slow Ride) was amazing. Tell us about that whole pairing.
A: We thought about doing a duet for a while now. We kept saying: “We have to do one. It’s going to be fun.” When we saw that Slow Ride was on the list, we were like, “We should do that.” It was great. We’re going to do that on the (Idols Live) tour.
Q: Did you choose the pairings, or did the show?
A: We did.
Q: What do you think about going back to three (judges)? What does Kara (DioGuardi) add to the show?
A: Change is good and I love Kara.
Q: What was your favorite judges’ comment during the show?
A: I really liked that they would say that I was different, you know? I stayed true to myself. It’s been a long ride and I’ve been happy.
Q: It definitely seems you have a little-sister relationship with the guys.
A: It was so fun because they would pick on me. They ran with an argument. They would say “You stay out of this. You’re only 12 years old!” and I would be like, “Wah, wah,” and they would say, “Fine! Fine!” It was great because it was like a family. They would help me with song choice.
Q: Did you get any pranks pulled on you?
A: No, I got lucky (laughs).
Q: Did you have a parent stay in the Idol mansion? Did that cramp your style at all?
A: My mom stayed with me. Not really. She was very supportive.
Q: The constant comment from Simon (Cowell) …
A: Every week he’d say, “You’re boring. You have no personality.” I just thought it was the perfect time to stand up for myself and go: “I’m not who you say I am. You say I don’t talk enough, so yeah, I’m going to talk.”
Q: You’ve done singing in Spanish and English. Is that something you’re interested in doing in the future?
A: If I had the opportunity to go back to what I was doing, absolutely. I started singing in Spanish and it was great.
Q: How shaken up were you by blocked rehearsals (after a couple of accidents on the set)?
A: We didn’t know how to react. That day was just not going well. Things were not going the way they were supposed to. During each of our performances, we were all a bit shaky.
Q: Can you talk about working with Slash?
A: I was like, “Oh, my gosh! I can’t wait to meet him.” He’s been one of the best mentors we’ve had.
Q: If it’s any consolation, (Chris) Daughtry finished in fourth too. Did it cushion things for you that he was there last night?
A: He’s done so much and so well, and if he’s done well and he didn’t make it all the way to the top, that gives me a chance.
Q: You’ve gotten comments that had nothing to do with your singing. Did that bum you out?
A: Sort of. I’d think, “Come on, I’m singing here!” They look at how you can sell yourself as an artist. But I had fun with it, and that’s what matters.
Q: You were in the bottom three many times. Did that affect your song choice?
A: It really didn’t affect anything. I just thought, “If I’m in the bottom three again, I’m leaving on a good note.” I think that I did pretty good.
Q: Do you have to go back to high school?
A: If I take my GED test, I’m totally done. I was home-schooled, so I was doing a lot of things ahead of time.
Q: You really seemed to be pulling out all the stops for (the farewell performance).
A: I felt really great about it. This is my last time on here. Give it my all and leave on a good note.
Q: Did you regret your (last song)?
A: I don’t regret doing (Cry Baby) at all. I was just feeling it.
Q: What are you going to tell the people who voted for you?
A: They’ve got to vote for whoever they think is awesome. It’s so hard in the competition because everyone is so different.
Second racy photo of Carrie Prejean surfaces, threatens title
May 8, 2009
Pageant officials on Wednesday said they were “stunned” by the possibility of more racy photos of Miss California Carrie Prejean, recent Miss USA runner-up. Today, another topless photo of the beauty queen hit the Web.
The photo — which Prejean claimed in a e-mail to Keith Lewis, co-director for the Miss California USA pageant, didn’t exist — surfaced early Thursday on the same Web site that published the first topless photo of her, TheDirty.com.
In the e-mail, Prejean attempted to explain away the first photo, saying: “This was when I was 17 years old. I was a minor. It was when I was first getting into the modeling world, being naive, and young. I shouldnt [sic] have taken the photo of me in my underwear. There are no other photos of me. This was the only one I took.”
The new photo is similar to the first one. Prejean is topless, with pink underwear bottoms. Nik Richie, publisher of TheDirty.com, has indicated he possesses several more similar photos.
Prejean was named the first runner-up to Miss North Carolina in the Miss USA pageant April 19. Her response to a question during the pageant that she opposed same-sex marriage made her a media sensation, darling of religious conservatives and the target of embarrassing disclosures.
The photos, as well as Prejean’s many public appearances since the pageant, may constitute contract violations that could result in the loss of her crown.
Miss USA spokesman Roger Neal said this week it appears Prejean has run afoul of several sections of the 12-page contract that all prospective contestants were required to sign before competing in the November state contest.
The detailed document prohibits the titular Miss California from making personal appearances, giving interviews or making commercials without permission from pageant officials. In the last 10 days, Prejean has made televised appearances at her San Diego church and on behalf of the National Organization for Marriage, a group opposed to same-sex marriage.
The contract also contains a clause asking participants to say whether they have conducted themselves “in accordance with the highest ethical and moral standards.” As an example, it asks if they have ever been photographed nude or partially nude.
“As you can see from the contract, she violated multiple items,” Neal said in an e-mail to the Associated Press.
Who will decide Prejean’s future? A rep also told “Access Hollywood” that, along with pageant owner Donald Trump, “the decision [would be] made in conjunction with the Miss California USA Directors and the Miss Universe Organization.”
Meanwhile, Miss California runner-up Tami Farrell, 24, is easing into the media spotlight in case she assumes the crown. In an interview with E!, Farrell commented on the issue: “They asked specifically in her contract if she and done any racy photos. I believe it said on her contract that she said ‘No, I didn’t take any of those pictures.’ ”
Prejean has received at least one job offer based on the topless photos. Vivid Entertainment, an adult film company, has offered her a $1 million contract.
‘Resilience’ by Elizabeth Edwards
May 8, 2009
Let’s face it. Most people who pick up this short but surprisingly deep memoir by Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former presidential candidate John Edwards, are looking for one thing and one thing only — the dirt on his infidelity with videographer Rielle Hunter. And it’s here, though sparingly. In fact, the strength of this book lies in how little of it actually has to do with John Edwards’ caddish behavior.
That affair was, Elizabeth Edwards writes, a gut-wrenching addition to a life marked by tragedies sudden and inevitable, from the 1996 car-crash death of Wade, her oldest child, to the slow physical disintegration of her beloved parents; her discovery at a young age that her mother believed her father had had an affair, and — finally — the cancer that she has been battling since 2004 and that she expects will kill her.
The big question — one that Hillary Clinton also has faced — is why stay with him? For Edwards, the answer is clear. More than a romance, the marriage is a shared sense of purpose, of how to engage the world — a partnership that transcended fidelity. “[A]lthough I no longer knew what I could trust between the two of us,” she writes, “I knew I could trust in our work together.”
In the early part of “Resilience” the rage, hurt and sense of betrayal simmers just below the surface, discernible in subtle ways. She dedicates the book to her parents, and in the one-page acknowledgment mentions her children, her parents again, her brother and sister and a family friend and her editor. But not John Edwards.
But not as widely as the wound left when Wade lost control of his wind-buffeted car 13 years ago, which “flipped, and flipped, until all of the life of the boy was pressed from him. And from me.” In the months afterward the couple turned to each other for support and solace, stumbled through the darkness together and emerged into something of a permanent half-light, always in the shadow of the dead child.
Edwards borrows a metaphor from the father of another dead child she met through a support network, describing the family as a table with four legs. Wade’s death knocked one of the legs out and as the family struggled to balance the essentials of their lives on it, the table kept tipping over until they managed to reconfigure it into a three-legger. It was the same table, and the same family, but also different, adapted to a new reality and, with the birth of her two youngest children, a different configuration.
Edwards’ emotions are still raw after all these years, and the pain screams out, stretching the meditation on her son’s death a bit thin. “Get on with things,” you think as you read. But that’s Edwards’ point — she really can’t get on with things. “I don’t have to bury the memory to accept that I have buried the boy,” she writes. She borrows another metaphor. To continue to live, she must adjust her sails, so she does, her life carried off in a different direction.
Edwards ties that soul-shattering experience to her husband’s infidelity, seeing them both as shifts in the wind, crises in her life to be survived — the “resilience” of her title. But she cautions this is not a how-to book for coping. It is her story and her wistful desire to turn back the hands of time.
Her opening scene is of a doctor pronouncing her stricken father brain-dead and his fight to live on — which he did for those many years, though she wished for the family’s life before the stroke. She writes eloquently about the agony of life after Wade’s death, the stubborn refusal to sever such physical connections as his room, and the backpack that sat unmoved in a hallway for several years — and the persistent wish for their life before his death.
And she writes unsparingly about her “gift” to John Edwards — forgiveness — but also about the slow rebuilding of three decades of trust that vanished with the affair. After he confessed his infidelity — an incomplete confession, it turns out, that lived on until the public revelations a year later — she found herself again wishing for the past.
“All I wanted was my life back,” she writes. “I didn’t like this new life story; I wanted my old one. It felt so much like after Wade died — I wanted to turn back time so we could avoid the wind, avoid the woman, avoid the pain. Open a drawer and find my life again. But I would open a drawer and find my new reality instead. . . . I would look at a happy family picture and break down. I tried to write and could not. Even now it is hard to put it into words.”
But she managed and, in places, beautifully. Edwards emerged from her husband’s shadow in the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns on the power of her personality, and the sense that even though she knew how to stick to the talking points she was still her own person, such as in her support of gay marriage, willing to take her own stances.
And she does here. It’s a small book but a powerful one. And when you finish it you have not just a deeper understanding of Elizabeth Edwards but also a better appreciation for the strength of will it can take to survive.
Martelle is an Irvine-based journalist and author of “Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West.”
Kiefer Sutherland charged with assault
May 8, 2009
Actor Kiefer Sutherland has been charged with assault after he allegedly head-butted a fashion designer at a nightclub in Manhattan, New York.
He turned himself into police on Thursday after claims he attacked Jack McCollough at SubMercer in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
The actor, 42, who stars in US TV drama 24, will face a minor assault charge in court on 22 June.
He is currently on probation over a conviction for drink-driving.
The alleged assault took place at a party following Monday night’s Met Costume Gala, attended by A-list stars including Madonna, Justin Timberlake, Kate Moss and Victoria Beckham.
Jail sentence
Mr McCollough, who works for the Proenza Schouler fashion house, says he was head-butted after an argument with Sutherland.
US reports have suggested Sutherland confronted Mr McCollough after he bumped into actress Brooke Shields.
Police have said they may questions Shields over the alleged attack.
Mr McCullough says he was left with a cut nose.
In January 2008, Sutherland left jail in California after serving a 48-day sentence for drink-driving.
He was jailed after pleading guilty to being over the legal alcohol limit after leaving a party.
As well as being jailed, he was put on five years’ probation.
The Canadian actor, who rose to fame in films including 1987 teenage vampire movie The Lost Boys, is best known for his role as counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer in 24.
He also starred in Flatliners, with ex-fiancee Julia Roberts, and legal drama A Few Good Men.
‘Star Trek’ stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Bruce Greenwood, Zoe Saldana
May 8, 2009
After “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” the world needed a better franchise product, one that works with an audience rather than simply working it over. Here it is. The new “Star Trek” motion picture seeks to extend a lucrative brand with a young demographic. But it’s a real movie — breathlessly paced bordering on manic, but propulsively entertaining. Director J.J. Abrams‘ merrily assaultive reboot, heavy on the iPod- and iPhone-friendly close-ups even in the action scenes, is more “Star Wars” than “Star Trek,” with lots of mano a mano and serious threats to the Vulcan race. The blood boils hot in everyone’s temperament; even young Spock, the half-Vulcan played by Zachary Quinto, must struggle to keep his temper in line.
Haunted by the death of his starship commander father, James T. Kirk (played by Chris Pine), is goaded into signing up for Starfleet Academy where he becomes pals with “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban, doing DeForest Kelley, but wittily). The script by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman ping-pongs in the early going between Iowa and Vulcan, as Kirk’s and Spock’s destinies entwine. Eric Bana plays the vengeful Nero, and the plot issues have to do with the space-time continuum and alternate reality.
One always looks for the first “Wow! Cool!” moment in any “Star Trek” film. Here it arrives when Kirk and comrades dive into a space-jump to an enemy mining platform, from which extends a fearsome rod of fire. Industrial Light & Magic is responsible for the excellent effects, from the warp-speed whooshes to the teleportation swirls. Even with all the green-screen digital creations, when the youthful actors dash around the deck of the Enterprise or fend off aliens aboard the clawlike Romulan ship, you can tell the metal and plastic and steam and noise are real. Well, fake. But not digital-fake.
The film may not be memorable science fiction, but it’s an engaging pop diversion. If Abrams can learn to appreciate the value of an occasional medium shot, all the better.
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for sci-fi action and violence and brief sexual content).