Saturday, November 24, 2007
Una reina del tenis: Chris Evert
Nos pasamos al deporte con un personaje internacional, nada menos que una de las mejores tenistas de todos los tiempos. Christine Marie Evert nació en Fort Lauderdale, Florida, en 1954. Hija de un jugador profesional, pronto se comenzó a entrenar y demostrar su destreza con la raqueta, y ya a la edad de 14 años batía records en los EEUU. A partir de 1971 pasó al circuito profesional y continuó con una carrera excepcional: primera jugadora en ganar 1000 partidos, incluyendo 56 consecutivos, 2 abiertos de Australia, 7 Roland Garros, 3 Wimblendon y 6 Open USA, además de 15 finales, jalonan el currículum de la eterna rival de Martina Navratilova. Además, su saber estar, su clase y su tranquilidad la convirtieron durante años en la favorita de un público que la eligió en repetidas ocasiones como deportista del año. Evert es amiga personal de la familia Bush, con quien comparte partidos de dobles, y una conocida simpatizante del partido republicano.Aquí sus donaciones económicas (para Sony Bono, por cierto).
http://www.newsmeat.com/sports_political_donations/Chris_Evert.php
Forme President George H. Bush is returning to the 2004 Chris Evert/Bank of America Pro-Celebrity Tennis Classic, set for Dec 4-5, at the Delray Beach Tennis Center in Delray Beach, Fla., defending his undefeated record as Evert's partner and as the event's only octogenarian.
Evert, who was a guest at former President Bush's recent 80th birthday celebration, praised his tennis skills. "You'd never guess he just turned 80! He's the feistiest competitor I konw on the court and definitely my first pick as a doubles partner", she said.
http://www.chrisevert.org/Former%20President%20Bush%20FINAL.pdf
AFTER all these years, there is yet another view of Chris Evert, competitor. This one comes from George Herbert Walker Bush, a retired public servant who used to invite Evert to play doubles with him. Rank, he was soon to learn, had few privileges.
" 'Bend your knees, cover behind me, get up to the net,' " he mimicked her orders. "As President, people would give me long putts, or if I put up a lousy lob, people would give me a kinder, gentler return. Chris Evert never understood that."
No, she did not. As Bush helped install her in the Tennis Hall of Fame yesterday, Chris Evert wore a red dress and one of her self-described "little smirks," admitting that she would move the most powerful individual in the world around a tennis court.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE4DE123AF934A25754C0A963958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
Forme President George H. Bush is returning to the 2004 Chris Evert/Bank of America Pro-Celebrity Tennis Classic, set for Dec 4-5, at the Delray Beach Tennis Center in Delray Beach, Fla., defending his undefeated record as Evert's partner and as the event's only octogenarian.Evert, who was a guest at former President Bush's recent 80th birthday celebration, praised his tennis skills. "You'd never guess he just turned 80! He's the feistiest competitor I konw on the court and definitely my first pick as a doubles partner", she said.
http://www.chrisevert.org/Former%20President%20Bush%20FINAL.pdf
AFTER all these years, there is yet another view of Chris Evert, competitor. This one comes from George Herbert Walker Bush, a retired public servant who used to invite Evert to play doubles with him. Rank, he was soon to learn, had few privileges.
" 'Bend your knees, cover behind me, get up to the net,' " he mimicked her orders. "As President, people would give me long putts, or if I put up a lousy lob, people would give me a kinder, gentler return. Chris Evert never understood that."
No, she did not. As Bush helped install her in the Tennis Hall of Fame yesterday, Chris Evert wore a red dress and one of her self-described "little smirks," admitting that she would move the most powerful individual in the world around a tennis court.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE4DE123AF934A25754C0A963958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
Saturday, November 17, 2007
La derecha maldita: John Milius
Desgraciadamente, ya hemos comprobado en numerosos casos cómo las ideas de centro-derecha han supuesto a muchos brillantes artistas el aislamiento y el desprecio de otros compañeros de profesión. El caso de hoy es paradigmático. John Milius pasa por estar considerado, incluso entre la crítica más situada a la izquierda, como uno de los cineastas más brillantes del Hollywood de las últimas décadas. Colaborador y referencia fundamental de Spielberg, Lucas o Coppola, "Conan el bárbaro", "El viento y el león" o "El vuelo del Intruder" como director, y "1941", "Apocalypse Now", "Tiburón", "Gerónimo", "Salvar al soldado Ryan", "Peligro inminente" o la serie de TV "Roma" como guionista, son algunos de sus títulos más conocidos. Sin embargo, su defensa de la libertad de armas, las limitaciones al intervencionismo estatal y su visceral anticomunismo lo convirtieron en una bestia negra para gran parte de la industria, sobre todo después de la gran polémica generada por "Amanecer Rojo", su película más reveladora en que plantea una invasión soviética de los EEUU en los años 80. Desde entonces, Milius ha llegado a ser calificado de fascista por sus mayores antagonistas por un lado, y a ser criticado desde las filas republicanas en que milita por el otro, y es que ante todo podríamos considerarlo políticamente como un espíritu libre formado en el liberalismo. En la actualidad sigue trabajando y pronto podremos ver su nuevo filme "Jornada del Muerte". Una curiosidad: John Goodman se inspiró en él para crear su personaje en "El Gran Lebowski".
A self-styled "Zen anarchist", Milius is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association, an avid gun collector and a strong opponent of gun control laws. Milius had attempted to join the Army during the late '60s but was rejected due to chronic asthma. He ascribes his fascination with guns and the military to this fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_MiliusJohn Milius:
Occupation: Film Director
Party Affiliation: Republican
National Rifle Association Board of Directors, 1995-2001
http://www.nndb.com/people/583/000024511/
Rated R: Republican In Hollywood
Featuring interviews with admitted conservatives Drew Carey, Pat Sajak ("Wheel of Fortune"), Patricia Heaton ("Everybody Loves Raymond"), Ben Stein ("Win Ben Stein's Money"), director John Milius ("Red Dawn"), and rather shockingly, incendiary actor-auteur Vincent Gallo ("The Brown Bunny"), RATED R challenges viewers to re-think what they know about show-biz ideologies.
http://www.docurama.com/productdetail.html?productid=NV-NVG-9696
But Milius always felt like an outsider, “about to be kicked out.” He was not the good liberal saying all the right things. He didn't feel “normal to Hollywood, but they've always sort of held their nose and made deals with me as a writer. Which is sort of the way I've run my whole career-with the desperation of a train robber: If there is an opportunity, take it and do whatever you can.” [...]
“Many people own guns but consistently vote against them and never talk about them,” he told Fade In magazine. “I used to shoot with Spielberg and Zemeckis and Robert Stack. But no one else would admit they had any.”
Which is okay with Milius, who's always stood his ground.
“I've done violent films all my life,” he once wrote in an essay commenting on the Littleton High School massacre, “and I don't have any guilt. I follow a very strict moral code, and my movies follow that code. There are consequences for every action. Everybody pays the price for what they do. It's the people in the middle who are for oppression. I see all this victimization leading toward totalitarianism. We're willing to throw away the Constitution. People don't really care about their personal freedoms anymore, as long as they have cars and homes and cool clothes. [Soviet communist leader] Khrushchev said, 'We'll sell you the rope with which you'll hang yourself.' We're using our freedoms to inflict totalitarianism on ourselves.” [...]
Which is okay with Milius, who's always stood his ground.
“I've done violent films all my life,” he once wrote in an essay commenting on the Littleton High School massacre, “and I don't have any guilt. I follow a very strict moral code, and my movies follow that code. There are consequences for every action. Everybody pays the price for what they do. It's the people in the middle who are for oppression. I see all this victimization leading toward totalitarianism. We're willing to throw away the Constitution. People don't really care about their personal freedoms anymore, as long as they have cars and homes and cool clothes. [Soviet communist leader] Khrushchev said, 'We'll sell you the rope with which you'll hang yourself.' We're using our freedoms to inflict totalitarianism on ourselves.” [...]
Milius nods, “Yeah, yeah. I love it when people point out these. 'You're very inconsistent in your politics,' they'll say. 'You're not a good Republican. 
You're not a good conservative. You don't approve of George Bush's administration. You're pro-choice. And yet you're a militarist, and a gun fanatic, and believe in the Second Amendment. And consider yourself a Roman. I mean, how do you reconcile that?'”
Milius stares at me, a twinkle behind his spectacles, waiting for the set-up.
“Okay, how do you reconcile that?”
“I'm a screenwriter. What do you expect? I make it up as I go along.”
http://www.wga.org/writtenby/writtenbysub.aspx?id=2239
You're not a good conservative. You don't approve of George Bush's administration. You're pro-choice. And yet you're a militarist, and a gun fanatic, and believe in the Second Amendment. And consider yourself a Roman. I mean, how do you reconcile that?'”Milius stares at me, a twinkle behind his spectacles, waiting for the set-up.
“Okay, how do you reconcile that?”
“I'm a screenwriter. What do you expect? I make it up as I go along.”
