VIA TheYBF:” Zoe Saldana just shot her first campaign as a Calvin Klein model. She’s promoting the brand’s new femalee Envy line and is involved in one of the biggest launches in Calvin Klein history.”

complex.com

Just when you thought the Entourage dudes had it all, along comes red-hot Dania Ramirez. Time to slap on the SPF!

Go behind-the-scenes with http://www.Maxim.com to see our August cover shoot.

Some Turtles have all the luck. Besides the friendship of his bros and a limitless supply of baseball caps, Entourage’s resident chauffeur turned entrepreneur gets to smooch Dania Ramirez. Joining the pantheon of babes who have appeared on HBO’s smash over the years, this smokeshow already made our sexy sonar beep uncontrollably with turns in X-Men: The Last Stand, The Sopranos, and Heroes. Now that she’s in our living rooms every Sunday night, facing the week ahead is a lot easier. Pick up the August issue of Maxim on newsstands now.

Just like back in January or so…these joints were shot by Mert & Marcus.

I’m not offended, this is clearly nothing close to my spiritual beliefs. This is only pop culture x fashion.
Source

Bebe presents… Kristen Stewart X Flaunt Magazine Issue # 109 (The Fashion Issue) from The Confluence on Vimeo.

A chic behind-the-scenes look at Kristen Stewart’s photo shoot with Flaunt Magazine presented by Bebe. The video is a taste of what her interview with Flaunt will explore. She opens up about inner beauty, the responsibility she has resulting from her roll as Bella, in the famed “Twilight” and a clean horizon in her future.

Out of Focus: KRISTEN STEWART

The actress stars in a shocking new rock biopic, carving out a niche of respect after years of teenybopper fare.

written by Gregg LaGambina

The courtyard looks like a wedding cake. Take a pickaxe to all this swept marble and you’d hit yellow sponge made from eggs, milk, and margarine. Perfect triangles of evergreen leap from topiary tubs, fountains make chlorinated arcs into shallow pools emptied of even a single tossed penny. And there in the distance is our misplaced plastic bride, truant from the cake top, a few layers down, slouched against a cream-colored column in a sunlit archway, exhaling Camel smoke. She is looking at the ground and looking everywhere at the same time.

“I knew it was going to be you,” she says cryptically, raising her head and stamping out the cigarette.

To be Kristen Stewart takes antennae. Offset from the scant groupings of hotel guests and khaki-panted walkabouts slowly roaming the manicured grounds, Stewart is hiding badly. Even if she were not that girl from Twilight, she’d be that girl over there from who-knows-where, in black jeans and a gray t-shirt, smoking and glowering and trying very hard not to look anyone in the eyes. With her invisible province breached by my approaching footsteps, her guard eases only slightly after an introduction.

Seated now near a new tree planted in freshly combed dirt, a nervous waiter takes drink orders and scurries off, all of his body language mutely bellowing “I know who you are!” Stewart is talking about Sean Penn. She knows him. She appeared in his film Into the Wild a few years ago and she just bumped into him out in front of the building. She had said, “What’s up?” He half-smirked and said, “Haiti.” They tried to linger, to smoke and talk, but in a matter of minutes, shutters were clicking, some paparazzi had gathered, and the conversation was abruptly over.

Now, freshly agitated, Stewart’s entire aspect is animated by nuisance. She winces with pain, clutching at her neck. “I must’ve slept on it wrong. Every time I look over my shoulder, it kills.” (Regardless, she’ll persist to peer behind her every so often with an audible start, turning back around with a grimace.) Everything has conspired and aligned here perfectly this afternoon for Stewart to generously, and without pause, talk shit about whatever topic merits her ire. Fame is always a good place to begin.

“If I could go to work every day and not have to be followed around by fucking fifteen gangsters trying to take my picture, willing to do anything for one… It’s not normal,” she says. “It’s funny how in America fame is placed so fucking high—above wealth, above happiness, above everything. It’s so not true. And I knew that before [I was famous]. It was so obvious to me. I don’t know how people can’t see that from an outsider’s perspective. My perspective is the same: it’s exactly what I thought it would be.”

The waiter returns with iced tea and soda, apologizing for interrupting, but wanting to let us know that the kitchen will be closing soon and if we want anything cooked, now’s the time to say so. Stewart politely declines, moving ice cubes around in her glass with a clear plastic straw. The waiter disappears like mist.

The thing is, she’s not ranting. She’s not dour, mean-spirited, or even complaining. All of this is like describing the clouds, or the leaves on the trees. They are things that exist in the world and she is talking about them. She’ll soon be 20 years old. One film almost three years ago made her the most famous teenaged actress in America and people twice her age write blurbs saying she should smile more. Or wear different shoes. Or get a new haircut. And she’s right. It’s all very fucking stupid.

“It’s very aggressive, too,” she says. “If fame is the optimum, ultimate position you could ever imagine yourself in, then you would just be the luckiest person in the world. So, anything could happen to them and you shouldn’t care. Why would you care or feel bad about a famous person? They’re famous! I really appreciate everything in my life, but that’s not why I started acting.”

In the gulf between Twilights Two and Three, Stewart is attempting to loosen the vice grip of franchise-driven notoriety by playing serious roles in smaller films. It’s an oft-played strategy of the recently fan-swarmed, but it’s no more or less calculated than the mania surrounding her as Bella Swan. It can’t be planned. It’s all dumb luck. If anything, it’s the largesse of the vampire fiends who’ve unwittingly allowed these other films to get made and maybe even seen.

In music-video director Floria Sigismondi’s feature debut The Runaways, Stewart takes on the creation myth of one Joan Jett in her earliest days as a pre-packaged punk rocker before she left and launched her celebrated career fronting the Blackhearts. Any stylist with a thimbleful of talent could’ve made Stewart look like Jett, but to fill in the fabled space of an already-made icon is something else. It takes acting and Stewart does her best in a middling film comprised heavily of the clichéd rise-and-fall melodrama seen before in countless other movies about the same thing. It’s all about mood and lighting and wardrobe and the slow-motion snorting of drugs. In short, it looks and feels like it was made by a music-video director.

Plus, it’s Dakota Fanning’s movie, really. All tarted up and lip-glossed as Cherie Currie, she makes any gent in the room old enough to use a razor squirm in their seats damply like Humbert Humbert (if they happen to recall she’s still a full year shy of her sweet sixteenth). But Stewart is good in it. Only a few minutes in and you’re thinking of Jett not Robert Pattison and his lovingly brandished fangs. And that’s no small feat considering the gluttonous market reach of those Twilight films that have befuddled even this waiter—who’s back now, by the way—hovering with a silver tray of freshly baked cookies.

“On the house!” he announces, and just as quick, flutters away like a bow-tied dragonfly.

But it’s Stewart’s other new film that might actually do the trick. In director Jake Scott’s Welcome to the Rileys, she plays Mallory, a street-nymph lap-dancer adrift in New Orleans until the well-intentioned James Gandolfini shows up and forces her to get her fucking shit straight like only James Gandolfini can. It played along with Runaways at this year’s Sundance and it was Rileys that surprised, inspiring even the beloved Roger Ebert to wax, “Who knew she had these notes? I’m discovering an important new actress.”

“That was awesome,” Stewart says of Sundance, glaring at the newly arrived plate of baked goods like it’s a shoe that fell from the sky. “It was the most satisfying experience to be able to sit in front of 300 people who had just seen the movie. Even more so with Rileys because that girl is so broken. I couldn’t get her out of me for a while. It was scary. To be able to talk about that with people who have just seen it, that was the most insane experience.

“I was so scared of going to Sundance,” she continues. “I thought everyone would write shit reviews. I thought everyone was waiting, itching to say that I should just go back to Twilight. And no one said that. I put so much into it. I would have died working on that movie. So if they did say those bad things, then I might as well just stop now. I got really lucky because those two movies happened to be so different [from Twilight]. I choose my work instinctually. I couldn’t have a plan. I would always fall short. What I do is so impulsive. Who knows what you’re going to connect with and then be able to live up to? I can’t just read a script and say it’s great because there’s a part for me, my age, perfect—I can’t live that life. You know what I mean? That’s just not me.”

Suddenly, an overweight older woman appears tableside, gesturing at the cookies. “Ooh! Do we get some of these too?”

“No,” the waiter says, matter-of-factly, seeming to appear from the same magical finger snap that borne them both.

“What makes these people so special?” the older lady smiles and winks conspiratorially at Stewart, who is holding her neck again, with a slight grimace, exploring the pinched nerve (or whatever it is) that’s been plaguing her usually keen ability to scan for these kinds of interlopers. We push the plate nearer to the woman and her eyes widen. Gratified, she waddles off, the sound of crisp oatmeal giving way to eager teeth.

This, apparently, has created an opening, as a mustachioed black man in a yellow polo tucked into smartly pressed trousers is clasping his hands nervously and awaiting his turn to talk. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to say that I’m just a really big fan. Is this your agent? I don’t mean to interrupt. I’m just a big fan. Hello.”

“Thanks,” says Stewart, manufacturing a convincing benevolence, slightly smiling even.

The man stands there a moment or two longer, a small infinity that makes everything slow down to an awkward standoff. He finally backs away, bowing almost, and returns to his own table. [Later, the waiter will whisper to me, “Sorry about that. We’ve been having problems with him lately.” Meaning what, I’ll never know, and leaving all sorts of odd scenarios in the mind’s eye to fill in the blank left by the word “problems.”]

“He was nice, at least.”

“He was nice,” she concedes. “He didn’t ask for a picture. That’s good, because then they go and Twitter them and then the paparazzi know where I am and they drive to my location and it gets crazy. Twitter fucks me over every day of my life. Because people go, ‘I’m sitting next to Kristen Stewart right now’ and then they show up. I see people on their phones and I just want to take these cookies and throw them. It’s like ‘Get off your fucking phone and get a life!’ I get so mad. It’s like you’re trampling on someone’s life without any regard. And it’s rampant. Everyone can do it now. Buy a camera and you’re paparazzi; get a Twitter account and you’re an informant. It’s so annoying.”

So, we’re back to the beginning, talking about this again. Perhaps it’s unavoidable sitting out here in the sun in Beverly Hills where half the people are famous and the other half are asking them for handshakes (or interviews). Or a fucking cookie for Christ’s sake. Might as well embrace it.

“Have you ever punched anyone in the face?”

“No!” she says, laughing slightly. “I’ve hit people, but I’ve never clocked someone.”

“People think you smoke a lot of pot.”

“People say that all the time. People are like, ‘She’s on crack. She’s a dopehead.’”

“How do you muster the strength to even leave the house?”

“You just go into the mode of ‘Don’t give a fuck.’ Otherwise…” And that word just hangs there. Otherwise what? Someone gets punched? Cookies get thrown? The more obvious question becomes: Then why sit here and listen to questions and pose for photographs to go along with your answers? How can you possibly justify complaining after participating?

“Right,” she pauses. “I don’t have an answer for that. I guess people just want you to be so over the moon for the position you’re in that you have no principals, you have no sense of the world around you, and you’re living in a celebrity fantasyland. Is that what they want?”

I shrug. I might even nod.

“Well, I don’t want to be that and they can continue to talk shit. But that’s just scary.”

No, what’s scary is that a grown man (at least twice her age) got up from his table to tell Kristen Stewart that he’s a big fan. A fan of what, exactly? Assuming he’s referring to the films she’s appeared in—and it’s probably safe to bet he’s only seen the pair of Twilight installments—what does he want in exchange for his hello? A story, probably. Something to tell someone else that adds a discernable ounce of worth and weight to his own life, tipping the scales ever-so-slightly in his favor. Or something like that. But if I were him and he could hear what I was thinking right now, I’d tell me to fuck right off. (Or something like that.)

But the fact is, this young woman sitting at this table (the one where a cookie has gone missing) is engaging and charismatic and smart and pretty. The precision of her disdain and general enthusiasm for shit-kicking is infectious. She makes you want to root for her. Sure those high school vampire flicks can be mocked easily and often, but you’re a liar (or lack an essential levity in your life) if you weren’t entertained at least by their overwhelming eagerness to entertain.

But most of all, every time she looks over her shoulder and winces, you wince too. The vigor with which she’s clutching on to any semblance of authenticity is something you’d like to help her to keep too. Yeah, sure, she’s mostly that girl from Twilight, an idea she rightfully loathes, but an actual thing for which she seems grateful. If Welcome to the Rileys is evidence of anything, she’ll be more than that in time. That is, if a world full of fluttery waiters, cookie thieves, and dumbstruck fanboys trapped in adult bodies don’t beat down her will. Ah, fuck it. I’m a fan now too. Sorry. Throw me on the burning pile with the rest of them.

“Yeah, I definitely act differently. I’m definitely overcoming a lot of it. The only insecurity I’ve developed is just being overly paranoid about everyone looking at you when they’re not,” she admits, grabbing at the pain in her neck again, arresting herself from the unending urge to look around. “I used to love getting out and tripping around, but now I have to look at the ground. Otherwise, you’re inviting interaction every thirty seconds which is impossible to manage. But that’s not everywhere. I can still go places. It’s not sad, it just sort of is.

“I really love what I do. It’s just a different life,” she concludes, pressing fingers deeper into the tendons above her shoulder blade. “I get defensive and that has probably perpetuated people’s idea of me never smiling. I kind of shake my leg too, so people think I’m always uncomfortable. I understand why people say I’m such a negative Nancy. I can’t pretend. I’ve always been involved, very personal. I like to write too. Acting and living and writing: it’s all one and the same. It’s just consideration for other people and yourself.”

“Part of your wanting to act, to write, comes from your interest in other people?”

“Yeah, me being one of them!”

Kristen Stewart smiles. She finally drops her hand from her neck, looks up, and smiles. There’s no one around. The restaurant’s closed. There’s no one here to tweet or text. Anyone with a real camera is likely chasing Sean Penn down some nearby hallway. But goddamnit if the woman didn’t just smile and no one was here to see it. We both look around and silently decide the conversation might as well end here.

“Well, I won’t put you through any more pain.”

“Yeah, that was awful,” she says, standing up to leave.

A smile and a joke? There’s no one else left here to ask. Where is that fucking waiter when you need him?

Jacob Bernstein, of The Daily Beast reports, ‘Uma Thurman stopped a $30M Ponzi Scheme’

Today’s criminal complaint against financial adviser-to-the-stars Kenneth Starr contains several anonymous clients who were allegedly defrauded by him and his firm. The identity of clients and victims alike has become an instant guessing game in New York and Hollywood.

As reporters scramble around the Manhattan courthouse trying to piece together this fast-moving story, sources familiar with Starr and his clients have filled in some of the blanks: “client number two” in the criminal complaint is an “actress” who marched into Starr’s offices on April 26 demanding to know where $1 million of her money had gone. Within a day, the money had been returned to her, but the feds allege that it was not her money being paid back to her. Rather, it was the money of “client number three”—a former talent agent executive and his wife.”

The actress is none other than Uma Thurman, according to several sources close to her. The talent agent is strongly believed to be Jim Wiatt, the former head of William Morris—and another client of Starr’s firm—according to other entertainment industry insiders, though the Daily Beast could not confirm this. Read The Rest at The Daily Beast

AND..

Arthur J. Samberg & hedge fund firm Pequot Capital Management cough an easy 28 Million to settle the Insider Trading case. ..

By Svea Herbst-Bayliss and Rachelle Younglai

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Defunct hedge fund firm Pequot Capital Management and its former chief executive officer, Arthur Samberg, have agreed to pay $28 million to settle insider trading allegations, U.S. regulators said Thursday.

The Securities and Exchange Commission accused Pequot and Samberg of using inside information from a Microsoft Corp employee whom they were in the process of hiring.

Separately, the SEC brought an enforcement action against the former Microsoft employee, David Zilkha, for allegedly tipping off Pequot and Samberg. Zilkha has 20 days to respond.

The settlement follows a protracted congressional and SEC investigation into Pequot, which invested $15 billion at its peak and ranked as one of the most successful hedge funds.

U.S. senators had accused the SEC of closing the Pequot investigation and firing an SEC enforcement employee because the probe got too close to a powerful Wall Street banker.

Samberg surprised investors and employees last year when he announced plans to shut down his lucrative business, saying he was preoccupied by the reopened investigation.

The settlement comes as U.S. regulators crack down hard on insider trading and seven months after former hedge fund firm Galleon Group’s founder was arrested.

“We are continuing to hold hedge fund managers accountable when they engage in insider trading,” David Bergers, the head of the SEC’s Boston office, said in a telephone interview.

According to the SEC complaint, Samberg sought information from the former Microsoft employee, Zilkha, who had accepted an offer to work at Pequot.

“I’m not as impressed with our research on msft. Do you have any current views that could be helpful? Might as well pick your brain before you go on the payroll!!” Samberg wrote in a February 2001 email to Zilkha confirming that he sent out the offer letter, according to the SEC complaint.

In April, while Zilkha was employed at Microsoft, Samberg e-mailed Zilkha and said he owned some Microsoft shares despite indications that the company could reduce its financial forecasts, and asked Zilkha for any “tidbits.”

Zilkha told Samberg that he would get back to him on “MSFT ASAP.”

Zilkha got information that Microsoft would meet or beat its quarterly earnings estimates and then passed that information on to Samberg, the SEC said.

Using the information, Samberg traded Microsoft’s shares on behalf of funds managed by Pequot and reaped more than $14 million in illegal profits, the SEC alleged. Read The Rest VIA CNN Money

The Superficial Sums It Up:
On not being open anymore in interviews – except apparently this one:
“Trying to be lighthearted and have a sense of humor and engage in some sort of satire sometimes. It did backfire to a certain extent, and it became too exhausting. I still have the same sense of humor, but I have no desire to express it, really, anymore, because I’ve always been fucked for doing so.”

On not being clingy:
“I could go days, weeks without talking to another human being,” she says. “I could probably go months and be perfectly satisfied. Easily. It’s the opposite of being needy, but at the same time, I don’t know if I would want to be in a relationship with someone who required as much alone time as I require.”

On plastic surgery:
“I would encourage anyone to first speak with a therapist, to try and figure out where this want comes from, because a lot of times it’s not related to your teeth or your nose or your chin — the surgery is not going to alleviate that insecurity for you,” she says. “If, then, you feel, ‘This is something that I want to do’, then do it. It’s amazing that we have the technology to do the stuff that we do.”

On not using public restrooms or silverware at restaurants:
“Every time someone uses a bathroom and they flush, all the bacteria is shot into the air,” she says. “Putting my mouth where a million other mouths have been, just knowing all the bacteria that you carry in your mouth? Ucch!”

On refusing to cook for herself:
“I’ll starve to death before I’ll cook for myself. I think I could survive a week without eating.”

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"Experts, Fire Back !" -Chris Barclay]]> http://chrisbarclay.com/blog/archives/2124/feed 0 http://chrisbarclay.com/blog/archives/1961 http://chrisbarclay.com/blog/archives/1961#comments Mon, 10 May 2010 07:53:51 +0000 Chris Barclay http://chrisbarclay.com/blog/?p=1961

I think Alicia Keys could play Lena Horne, looks wise she might be a good match. VIA Wiki..” Oprah Winfrey stated to Alicia Keys during a 2005 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show that she might possibly consider producing the biopic herself, casting Keys as Horne.”

Let me post the BIO of another one of our Queens, Lena Horne. May Her Soul Rest In Peace and her Family heal with God Speed. Was she in The Talented Tenth ? Do the knowledge, word to W. E. B. Du Bois.
___________________

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American singer, actress and dancer.
Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood where she had small parts in numerous movies, and more substantial parts in the films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather . Due to the Red Scare and her progressive political views, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to get work in Hollywood.

Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March on Washington, and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs as well as television, and releasing well received albums. In the early 1970s, her husband, son and father died within a period of twelve months. Horne announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than three hundred performances on Broadway, and earned her numerous awards and accolades. Horne recorded sporadically following the show, but no longer made public appearances.

Horne left school at age 16 to help support her ailing mother and became a dancer at the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City. In two years at the Cotton Club she appeared with such entertainers as Cab Calloway and eventually starred in her own shows. In 1935 she joined the Noble Sissle orchestra under the name Helena Horne. Horne was married from 1937 to 1944 to Louis J. Jones. In the early 1940s she was hired to sing for Charlie Barnet’s orchestra. She was discovered by producer John Hammond, and soon after she performed in a solo show at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

In 1942 Horne moved to Los Angeles, after which she appeared in such movies as Cabin in the Sky (1943), Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956), and The Wiz (1978). Her role in the film Stormy Weather (1943) included her rendition of the title song, which became her trademark. A remarkably charismatic entertainer, Horne was one of the most popular singers of her time. One of her albums, Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria (1957), was a long-time best-seller, and her first featured performance on Broadway—in the musical Jamaica (1957)—won her a New York Drama Critics’ Poll Award in 1958.

Though primarily known as an entertainer, Horne also was noted for her work with civil rights and political organizations; as an actress, she refused to play roles that stereotyped African American women. She was married to Lennie Hayton from 1947 until his death in 1971. Her one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music (1981), garnered many awards, including a Drama Critics’ Circle Award and a special achievement Tony Award. In 1984 Horne received a Kennedy Center honour for lifetime contribution to the arts, and in 1989 a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement.

__________

Now understand, this tidbit was via Wikipedia x BIO and does her no justice. Like I said, do the knowledge…I just dropped tidbits so you can understand that knowledge of her greatness is out there.

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"Experts, Fire Back !" -Chris Barclay]]> http://chrisbarclay.com/blog/archives/1961/feed 0 http://chrisbarclay.com/blog/archives/1561 http://chrisbarclay.com/blog/archives/1561#comments Sat, 24 Apr 2010 01:32:40 +0000 Chris Barclay http://chrisbarclay.com/blog/?p=1561

She still got it ?

In my opinion, indeed she does ! Good Job S_M

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