SATURDAY, AUGUST 28, 2010


KLMNO Celebritology Jen Chaney and Liz Kelly


POP CULTURE PULSE: CONAN O’BRIEN AT THE EMMY AWARDS


Sure, we’re curious to find out WETA


James Cameron, inset, has plenty to say about his rereleased “Avatar” — and earthbound matters.


Spilling on ‘Avatar’ and oil Three celeb-centric stories on our radar this weekend . . .


as part of the publicity blitz surrounding the theatrical rerelease of “Avatar,” reiterated his frustration that several government agencies, in his words, “pretty much completely ignored” recommendations made by a panel of deep-ocean academics and scientists he assembled in an effort to stop the oil flow. Cameron asserted, as he has in other interviews, that the so-called static kill that ultimately plugged the leak is identical to what he and his panel proposed. When asked if the episode has soured him on working with the government, he said, “It’s easy to just throw up your hands and walk away, but the reality is that we have to have policy-based solutions.” He added that as far as taking action on global warming and other environmental issues, “the leaders in Washington . . . can’t do anything without a mandate from the public, and right now they don’t have it.”


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Talking Na’vi and oil: James Cameron says he hasn’t given up working with officials in Washington despite his unhappiness with the government over the handling of the BP oil spill. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker, who chatted via telephone earlier this week


whether Michael C. Hall of “Dexter,” Jon Hammof “Mad Men” or Matthew Fox of “Lost” wins an Emmy Award at the big ceremony in Los Angeles on Sunday night. But the real man to watch will be Conan O’Brien, who has a shot at taking home a trophy in the outstanding music, variety or comedy series category for “The Tonight Show.” Yes, that would be the same “Tonight Show” Jay Leno reclaimed from O’Brien earlier this year, sparking Team Coco vs. Team Leno debates at dinner tables and on Twitter feeds throughout the country. If he wins, O’Brien has the opportunity to make a memorable statement about the whole debacle in his acceptance speech. And if he doesn’t, he still has that opportunity . . . in his much-read Twitter feed. It’s win-win, really.


If Conan wins, he’ll have plenty to say.


R BOOK WORLD


A soldier-poet, distilling paradoxes of war, peace


by Courtney Cook B


efore the film appeared, be- fore Kathryn Bigelow was a household name, before the


Academy Award, there was Brian Turner’s “The Hurt Locker,” a de- ceptively simple poem about a soldier exhausted by nights of mortar fire. “Nothing but the hurt left here,” writes Turner. “Nothing but bullets and pain / and the bled out slumping.” It’s one of the poems in Tur- ner’s 2005 collection, “Here, Bullet,” a book written by a young in- fantryman without politics and with eyes wide open. In his new collec- tion, “Phantom Noise,” Turner is the same sol- dier, with the same keen eye, but he is even more battle-weary. Tak- en together, these books are an unusual two-part portrait of a decade of war: its strength, its wounds, its fantasies of home and, as it happens, the strange beauty of a stubbornly foreign culture. Taken alone, “Phantom Noise” is an unsettling plunge into a returned soldier’s disloca- tion. Through images that recur again and again, from Iraq to a podium in Colorado, from a field hospital to a pristine day on Pu- get Sound, we go deep inside this soldier’s relief, grief and alien- ation. Here is the former warrior in


“At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center”:


EVAN AGOSTINI/ASSOCIATED PRESS on washingtonpost.com


Visit washingtonpost.com/celebritology for more celeb and pop-culture news. Send tips to celebritology@wpost.com.


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Goldberg is back home to be with her ailing mom.


appearing nightly in the London production of “Sister Act” — a musical based on her 1992 film comedy — has dropped out of the show, the Associated Press reports. The actress and “View” commentator flew back to the States on Friday after hearing that her mother had a stroke. Goldberg, a consulting producer on the show, had been scheduled to continue her role as Mother Superior until the end of the month.


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Whoopi Goldberg drops out of “Act”: Goldberg, who has been


“In da Club”? No, but definitely on Twitter: Just a few weeks ago, it appeared that no hip-hop artist could


ever bring the same level of self-important absurdity to Twitter that Kanye West managed to achieve. How wrong we were. The Twitter account for rapper 50 Cent, once fed by his management team, recently was taken over by the man himself. Until taking a brief break Friday, it was a non-stop flow of bizarre, inappropriate language, a photo of a woman’s rear end that led to the brief suspension of his Twitpics account and, so far, one dispute over doing chores at his grandmother’s house. (And we quote: “I can’t believe my grand mothers making me take Out the garbage I’m rich [Bleep] this I’m going home.”) A writer for the technology and culture blog Boing Boing confirmed with Twitter that, per 50 Cent’s management, the account has not been hacked. The good news is that 50 announced plans to resume Tweeting at noon Saturday. And in keeping with his bid for attention, that


announcement was accompanied by a photo of his face . . . superimposed on Osama bin Laden’s body.


Standing in aisle 16, the hammer and anchor aisle, I bust a 50 pound box of double-headed nails open by accident, their oily bright shanks


and diamond points like firing pins


A SELECTION OF NOTABLE READER COMMENTS FROM THE PAST WEEK .. .


f SAID IT: YOU


Headline: “Honorary Oscar recipient Jean-Luc Godard cannot be tracked down by the Academy.” Comment: “Hurry up, Jean-Luc. We learned our lesson and are not going to spend all night waiting for Godard.” — byoolin1


Headline: “Intruder arrested after attempt to break into Paris Hilton’s house with a pair of knives.” Comment: It was all a misunderstanding. He thought he was at Padma Lakshmi’s house and always dreamed she’d notice him and say, “Pack your knives and go.” — td_in_baltimore


Networks take their own routes to rally march from C1


O’Reilly’s evening program to dis- cuss it. “Fox and Friends” direct- ed viewers to Beck’s Web site. The rally’s organizers — the


Beck-affiliated 9-12 Project and Mercury Radio Arts — have told the National Park Service in their permit application that they ex- pect 300,000 people to attend. That figure would place it among the largest demonstrations in the Mall’s history, although some have doubted that the rally will draw anything close to it. None of the cable networks would say on Friday how much time they will devote to the Beck and Sharpton rallies, or how they will describe Beck’s and Palin’s af- filiation with Fox. Fox News says it won’t pre- empt its regular two-hour bloc of business news programs on Sat- urday morning for coverage, al- though Michael Clemente, Fox’s senior vice president of news edi- torial, left open the possibility of giving some coverage to the Beck rally during brief news “breaks” during the morning. Beck and Pa- lin are scheduled to speak be- tween 10 and noon. “We’re treating it like so many


events that happen on the Mall and draw a big crowd,” he said, comparing it to anti-abortion marches and the Million Man March. He added, “It will be judged on the merits, by what people say, how many people are there and by how the crowd re- acts to what’s said.”


from M-4s and M-16s. Here is the returned soldier,


nagged by the specter of Amer- ican torture, in “Sleeping in Dick Cheney’s Bed”:


Cheney’s hands


like a preacher’s delivering me deeper into the truth, with a gasp of air, a flash of light, to be plunged back down


the way he offers midges and blood worms and rusty scuds


to the cloudy river, running 1400 cubic feet per second, until I cough up the fictional and beg for the heartland’s fluid clarity, salvation, the charity of forgiveness, anything.


Then, in the same poem, the soldier’s own guilt rises up:


what does it say about me, that the Pinot Grigio tasted so good on my tongue ...


that I can return to Cheney’s room after midnight,


strip my clothes off to curl in the bed


where he too has slept, the sheets a sublime reprieve


for my tired frame, the night a perfection of sleep.


PHANTOM NOISE By Brian Turner Alice James. 93 pp. $16.95


These poems work a bit like the bomb blasts that echo through them, breaking down as- sumptions, unearthing shards of insight that help explain why, when it comes to war, we are so much at odds with ourselves. Turner is, of course, in the strong company of other contemporary soldier writers. “Ka- boom,” Matt Gallagh- er’s half comic, half heart-breaking hour- by-hour account, boasts a subtitle that says it all: “Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War.” There’s also “Lone Survivor,” Marcus Luttrell’s best- selling, knuckle-biting exemplar of bravery


and humanity in Afghanistan. But it’s a civilian, Rory Stewart, author of “The Places in Be- tween,” to whom Turner is closest in tone. Both men write with un- usual detachment. In Turner’s “Unearthed by Wind,” for exam- ple, death pairs easily with beau- ty:


When the winds drive south from Anatolia,


down through western Iraq and into the Kuwaiti borderlands, the dunes shift in waves, an ocean


cresting in a swirl of dust the camels traverse at nightfall. The wind presses on, curving


over parietal bones, smoothing them


like river stones where no water runs —


grain by grain an entire skull


emerging, its hourglass sockets


staring out at the world once more.


This is a writer who is less war- rior than observer, someone whose curiosity, knowledge and tenderness allow insight into landscapes and people that terri- fy the rest of us. He’s a guy who does his re- search, too. The endnotes of “Phantom Noise” reference an- thologies of Iraqi poetry, both contemporary and dating as far back as A.D. 646, and he quotes Iraqi prophets, political leaders, news reports and local languag- es. There’s even a note about an Iraqi cookbook, Nawal Nasral- lah’s “Delights from the Garden of Eden.” It’s hard to think of a better


way around ideology than poetry like this. Turner shows us soldiers who are invincible and wounded, a nation noble and culpable, and a war by turns necessary and abominable. He brings us closer to our own phantom guilt and speaks the words that we both do and do not want to hear. bookworld@washpost.com


Cook is a freelance writer from New York.


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TIM SLOAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES


‘RESTORING HONOR’: People camped out a day before Glenn Beck’s rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Friday.


MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines said his network will have reporters doing live hourly re- ports from both rallies during the morning. He declined to say whether


Beck’s employment on Fox News would be mentioned. CNN spokeswoman Edie Emery said her network will cover both ral- lies “like we’d cover any other po- litical news event,” but also would not comment on how its report- ers will refer to Beck and Fox. The “Restoring Honor” rally is described by its organizers as a celebration of “our heroes, our heritage and our future” that “pays tribute to America’s service personnel and other upstanding citizens who embody our nation’s founding principles of integrity, truth and honor,” according to its


Web site. The event will feature a “Lincoln Memorial Re-dedication Ceremony.” In addition to Beck and Palin,


speakers include baseball super- star Albert Pujols and St. Louis Cardinals Manager Tony La Rus- sa.


When Beck announced the


event last fall on Fox News and his syndicated radio program, he promised to unveil “The Plan,” a 100-year outline designed to “save the country.” But the focus of the event quickly changed, with Beck opting for an event that would raise money for a Tampa-based group called the Special Operations Warrior Foun- dation, a philanthropy that as- sists the families of fallen or in- jured special-forces personnel. farhip@washpost.com


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