Wednesday, January 31, 2018

In ‘Brave,’ Rose McGowan Exposes Hollywood Exploitation











Rose McGowan at the Women’s Convention in Detroit in October. CreditErin Kirkland for The New York Times

BRAVE
By Rose McGowan
251 pages. HarperOne/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.
If I had read Rose McGowan’s new memoir, “Brave,” in a vacuum, absent the feats of investigative reporting that took down the former Miramax head Harvey Weinstein, I would have thought it overwrought and paranoid. McGowan describes a life of almost ceaseless abuse, of falling into the clutches of one sadistic ogre after another as powerful forces conspired to crush her rogue spirit. “My life was infiltrated by Israeli spies and harassing lawyers, some of the most formidable on earth,” she writes on the first page. “These evil people hounded me at every turn while I went about resurrecting the ghosts that have made up my time on earth.” Come on — Israeli spies?





Of course, we now know: Yes, Israeli spies. In October 2016, McGowan posted three tweets accusing a “studio head” of rape, using the hashtag #WhyWomenDontReport. She was referring to Weinstein, who, it’s since been revealed, had paid her $100,000 for her silence about a 1997 encounter at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. As Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker in November 2017, shortly after McGowan’s tweets Weinstein hired several private security agencies, one run largely by veterans of Israeli intelligence, to try to stop the story of his longtime sexual predation from coming out. Agents were explicitly directed to spy on and undermine McGowan. “It was like the movie ‘Gaslight,’ ” McGowan told Farrow. “Everyone lied to me all the time.”

One of the greatest tricks that the patriarchy plays on women is to deliberately destabilize them, then use their instability as a reason to disbelieve them. Much of “Brave” reads like the diary of a woman driven half-mad by abusive men who assume no one will listen to her. In this case, the truth was finally — and, for McGowan, triumphantly — exposed, but reading “Brave,” I kept thinking about how many more women must be written off as crazy and crushed under the weight of secrets no one wants to hear.


Even before she met Weinstein, McGowan had been through hell. She was raised in the polygamous Children of God cult, though her family fled when its leadership started encouraging sex with children. She then spent years bouncing back and forth between her cruel father and her unreliable mother, who for a time dated a vicious man who McGowan says was later charged with sexually abusing his own daughter. McGowan did a brief stint in rehab during junior high school and later lived as an itinerant street punk. Eventually she made her way to Hollywood and was emancipated from her parents before she was old enough to drive. 

This bitter history clearly left a mark, and her book is furious and profane, wild and a little unhinged. “Very few sex symbols escape Hollywood with their minds intact, if they manage to stay alive at all,” McGowan writes early on. There’s no glamour in “Brave,” and very little joy; I’ve never read anything that makes being a starlet sound so tedious and demeaning.



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The book hinges on McGowan’s encounter with Weinstein, whom she refers to only as “the Monster.” Here, for the first time, she tells the story of what he did to her. It’s both disgusting and, if you’ve followed the Weinstein coverage, very familiar. She was summoned to a morning meeting in the restaurant of an exclusive hotel in Park City, Utah. When she arrived, the restaurant’s host directed her to Weinstein’s suite, saying he was stuck on a call. “I was certain we would be working together for many years to come, and we were here to plot out the grand arc of my career,” McGowan writes.

Instead, Weinstein pushed her into a room with a Jacuzzi and pulled off her clothes. “I freeze, like a statue,” she writes. As she describes it, he put her on the edge of the Jacuzzi, got in, and performed oral sex on her while masturbating. Her experience sounds similar to the one that the actress and director Asia Argento described to The New Yorker. Like Argento, McGowan says that she feigned pleasure in the hopes of bringing the event to a quicker conclusion. “He moans loudly; through my tears I see his semen floating on top of the bubbles,” she writes.

Afterward, McGowan writes, she was taken to a photo-op with Ben Affleck, her co-star in “Phantoms,” a movie she was promoting. Seeing her shaken and hearing where she came from, the actor said, “Goddamn it. I told him to stop doing that.” (It’s unclear what Affleck meant by that statement; he has never responded to the accusation that he knew about Weinstein’s abuse.) Others, McGowan writes, “counseled me to see it as something that would help my career in the long run.” Wanting to press charges, she spoke to a criminal attorney who told her she would never be believed.

Soon she heard that Weinstein was calling around town telling people not to hire her. “It seemed like every creep in Hollywood knew about my most vulnerable and violated moment,” she writes. “And I was the one who was punished for it.” Her film career was derailed.



McGowan would eventually find success playing one of a trio of witches on the TV show “Charmed.” She describes working on the show as a deadening experience, a “prison for my mind.” Her sense of martyrdom can be a bit much; she writes of feeling “robbed” by having to get married on TV before her real wedding. “Your entertainment comes at a cost to us performers,” McGowan writes. “You should know this and acknowledge.”

Yet it’s McGowan’s profound dissatisfaction with her profession — one she seems to have fallen into rather than pursued — that has given her the freedom to gleefully burn bridges. She loathes the entertainment business, describing Hollywood as a cult worse than the one she grew up in. Though she’s in her 40s, she sometimes writes with the grandiosity of an alienated adolescent whose mind was blown by “The Matrix.” “You may think that what happens in Hollywood doesn’t affect you,” she writes. “You’re wrong. My darlings, who do you think is curating your reality?”
For most adult readers, it won’t be much of a revelation that Hollywood trades in distortion and exploitation. But I hope “Brave” finds its way into the hands of teenage girls who may still look to actresses as they try to figure out how they’re supposed to be in the world, girls who aspire to the life McGowan once had. In the end, McGowan finds a measure of peace and redemption when she moves behind the camera, becoming a director and multimedia artist, subject rather than object. One of the lessons of her story is that being desired is no substitute for being powerful.


Michelle Goldberg is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.

NYTIMES


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Chris Floyd's best photograph / The Verve meet Dorothy, the Tin Man and Scarecrow


‘It was the first time I’d really been around northerners’ … Richard Ashcroft, Tin Man, Scarecrow and Dorothy, Las Vegas, 1994, by Chris Floyd. Photograph: Chris Floyd

Chris Floyd's best photograph: the Verve meet Dorothy, the Tin Man and Scarecrow

‘I was following the band round Vegas for a week and we ended up in this tacky casino with a Land of Oz in its foyer. Richard’s not afraid to ham things up’

Dale Berning Sawa
Wednesday 31 January 2018


I
t was July 1994 and I had flown into Las Vegas with a journalist to trail the Verve for a week while they played the Lollapalooza festival. I was naive and gung-ho, excited to be in America and going on a road trip.

We checked in to our hotel, met up with the band and went for dinner. I was in my mid-20s and starting to just about earn a living from photography, but none of the cheques had come through yet. So I barely had enough money for food. We walked around the Strip and ended up in the casino of the MGM Grand hotel, a tacky, gilded palace with a massive reproduction of the Land of Oz in the foyer.
Richard Ashcroft, the Verve frontman, is looking quite camp in this image. The thing about him, I realised later, is that he has two sides: the public Richard is serious, intense, extremely self-confident; and the private Richard is very funny and a brilliant mimic. When he tells a story, he’ll do all the voices. I always thought he’d make a good actor. He’s not afraid to ham things up.





I’m from the south, the home counties, and it was the first time I’d really been around northerners. I was fascinated by the band’s sense of style: cords, loads of brown, but still modern. Old-man clothes with a twist. And great haircuts. They introduced me to lots of good music too: Funkadelic, Parliament, 1970s American soul, the Stooges.
The next day, the Verve were playing the Sam Boyd Silver Bowl, not on the main stage but the second one, in the car park outside the stadium. Las Vegas in July is incredibly hot and they were on at 3pm. The crowd was sparse, only about 100 people, and when they came on, there was silence, save for that buzzing sound when bands first plug in their instruments. This kid standing near me – dreadlocks, no shirt, tattoos, long skater shorts – said: “Man, I can’t believe those guys are wearing cords.”
They looked so alien. But then they started playing – one of their early songs,Gravity Grave. It starts with just a bassline, a lolloping groove that perfectly suited the landscape and the weather. I was blown away. Whenever I hear that song now, it makes me think of the heat that day.




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Watch the video for Gravity Grave by the Verve



Since that summer, I’ve gone on the road with a wide variety of people. I spent five days following John Kerry in 2004 when he was running [for US president] against George W Bush. When you go inside the secret service bubble, you have to stay inside, from conference room to hotel to wherever, day in, day out. You have to learn when to back off, how to be a welcome presence, how to read the room. The greatest compliment you can get is if someone in a position of power says to other people in the room: “He’s OK.”


In those sort of situations, I’m looking for the relationship dynamics: how the people interact, how their body language might convey all this in a single image. And I’m also looking for anything funny or interesting that can can lift an image out of the ordinary. That’s what happened that day with the Verve. I managed to keep the mundane away.

Chris Floyd’s CV

Born: Welwyn Garden City, 1968.
Training: “I learned from photographers I assisted but apart from that I’m self-taught.”
High point: “My 2003 portrait of Paul McCartney being published by the New Yorker, alongside David Bailey’s 1965 portrait of him.”
Low point: “The feeling that comes after every shoot – that you’ve fallen short and produced mediocre work.”
Top tip: “Wisdom is just a very large collection of mistakes.”

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Rose McGowan's memoir Brave details alleged rape by Harvey Weinstein




Rose McGowan's memoir Brave details alleged rape by Harvey Weinstein
In the book, actor also recounts her fight against the ‘Hollywood machine’ and its misogyny
Sian Cain
Tue 30 Jan 2018

After years of publicly accusing Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of rape, the actor Rose McGowan has detailed the sexual assault she said occurred after their first meeting more than 20 years ago.
In her memoir Brave, published on 30 January worldwide, McGowan recalled first seeing Weinstein, whom she refers to only as “the Monster”, at a screening of her film Going All the Way during the 1997 Sundance film festival.
Then 23 years old, McGowan wrote in Brave that, after the screening, Weinstein allegedly summoned her to a meeting at a restaurant, which was later relocated to his hotel suite. McGowan described being shown to his room for what she believed would be a meeting to “plot out the grand arc of my career”.


Instead, she alleged, after a half-hour discussion about her career, he held her down on the edge of a jacuzzi and raped her. Later he allegedly called her and described her as “a special friend”.
“I felt so dirty. I had been so violated and I was sad to the core of my being. I kept thinking about how he’d been sitting behind me in the theater the night before it happened. Which made it – not my responsibility, exactly, but – like I had had a hand in tempting him,” she wrote. “Which made it even sicker and made me feel dirtier.”


Describing Weinstein as looking like “a melted pineapple”, McGowan said that immediately after the rape, she attended a photo opportunity for Phantom, another Miramax film she was in, where she allegedly told a co-star what happened. The co-star, who has previously been identified by McGowan as Ben Affleck, reportedly said: “Goddamnit. I told him to stop doing that.” Affleck has never responded to this allegation.
Many of Weinstein’s 80-odd accusers have alleged the disgraced media mogul asked them to visit him in various hotel rooms, where he’d either forcibly performed oral sex on them or demand it in turn. A spokesperson for Weinstein in the US told the Guardian: “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr Weinstein. Mr Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances.”


“Mr Weinstein obviously can’t speak to anonymous allegations, but with respect to any women who have made allegations on the record, Mr Weinstein believes that all of these relationships were consensual.”
Detailing her fight against “the machine, the manufacturers of myth, the gaslighters themselves, the sacred men of Hollywood”, McGowan detailed a troubled childhood while outlining her thoughts on misogyny in Hollywood and wider society.


Beginning with her childhood growing up in the polygamous cult Children of God in Italy, the actor detailed her family’s escape to America after some leaders began advocating child abuse. After becoming a teenage runaway, enduring a three-year abusive relationship, and being sporadically homeless, McGowan said this background was instrumental in her decision to not press charges against Weinstein.
“No work would land me back on the streets, and homelessness was a death sentence. I knew if I died I’d be remembered for revealing my rapist, but not for my achievements. I didn’t want his name next to mine on my obituary,” she wrote.



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1:36
 Rose McGowan: 'I have been silenced for 20 years' – video

Likening her career as an actor to being a sex worker, McGowan described her decision to shave her head as “a battle cry” against the pampering regime that she says once turned her into “the ultimate fantasy fuck toy by the Hollywood machine”.

She wore the infamous “naked dress” to the 1998 MTV Awards as “a reclamation of my own body after my assault”, she claims and, at one point, described keeping fake blood and wounds on her face after filming episodes of the witchery drama Charmed to see how the public would react to a wounded woman. “Nobody asked to help me. Not once. They would just avoid eye contact and look down at the floor,” she wrote.


In the book, she also detailed her marriage to the director Robert Rodriguez, who she claimed used his knowledge of Weinstein’s alleged assault to punish her, particularly in a scene in the film Planet Terror, in which a character played by Quentin Tarantino attempted to rape her.
“I was in a backward world,” she wrote. “I was losing my grip on sanity.” Afterwards, in what McGowan intepreted as a cruel demonstration of power, Rodriguez sold the film to Miramax, Weinstein’s studio.


In a statement to Vanity Fair, Rodriguez said the Weinsteins had priority on his next project at the time, and that the scene was “in every draft of the script since the first draft was issued to cast and crew [and] if there was any objection to the scene there was plenty of time to address it. It was never brought up as being an issue.”
McGowan ends the book by calling for more women in producing and directing positions, and asks for the support of groups like the Screen Actors Guild to protect women and children, particularly the establishment of an anonymous tips line for victims of assault.

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J Balvin review / Colombian megastar continues domination on his own terms


J Balvin


J Balvin review – Colombian megastar continues domination on his own terms


Brixton Academy, London
The vocalist behind Mi Gente and a host of crossover Latin remixes does a London victory lap – and his caramel tones show him to be a lover not a fighter

Caroline Sullivan
Monday 29 January 2018

S
o happy that J Balvin songs are gaining popularity in Russia,” a fan in Moscow declared on Instagram last week. Her comment was promptly regrammed by Balvin for the benefit of La Familia – his 20 million followers – as if they needed any more evidence that the Colombian reggaeton superstar is galloping across international musical borders. José Álvaro Osorio Balvin to his intimates, the 32-year-old has benefited from a confluence of factors. Latin music spiked in popularity worldwide last year thanks to Luis Fonsi’s Despacito and Balvin’s own single Mi Gente, which in turn positioned Balvin – who happens to be photogenic and personable – as the man to make reggaeton a properly global concern.

He is qualified to do it. Balvin reworks the genre’s tropes, cutting back on the machismo and baring his emotions, and has fun with his presentation while he’s at it. His interest in fashion won him an ambassadorial role at New York fashion week last winter; tonight sees him in a sequined tracksuit that would have done Elton John proud in 1975.

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Balvin’s pivotal move, though, is linguistic. He speaks fluent English but refuses to sing in it, insisting – with growing success – that the rest of the world make the effort to understand him, rather than vice versa. Non-Latin artists are meeting him more than halfway, with Beyoncé and Pharrell Williams having sung in Spanish when guesting on his singles. Tonight, English is used sparingly, mostly between songs. “My name is J Balvin, from Medellín, Colombia!” is about the extent of it, and the large Colombian contingent are delighted.
This is a sharp-edged arena-show-to-be, with a scaled-down version of the smoke, sirens and other fillips he’ll undoubtedly employ with a freer hand once he moves into big venues. He opens with an oozy Safari; the recorded version features Pharrell, but his absence here allows us to be covered in the caramel of Balvin’s Latin trap. His 2015 remix of Justin Bieber’s Sorry is rejigged as blaring Hispanic EDM, and MC Fioti’s Bum Bum Tam Tam – remixed with Balvin, Future and Stefflon Don – is made over into a tense duel with Brazil’s Fioti, the only guest who could make it to south London.

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Syrup and caramel... J Balvin. Photograph: Burak Cingi/Redferns

By the time he slots in a cracking dembow-rap version of another big-name collaboration, the French Montana track Unforgettable, it’s clear Balvin is showing off. That’s understandable, though. If Brixton Academy is a victory lap, why not load the set with your famous friends – or at least their songs? They also delineate between Balvin the nascent A-lister and the other Balvin – the guy who strolls across the stage, analysing his romantic relationships to a degree that would embarrass his more laddish friends. In Ay Vamos, for instance, he’s riven with frustration: “We’re polar opposites, that’s why we like each other!”
His syrupy and languid voice and his easy delivery distinguish him from reggaeton’s typical brashness. There’s little of Daddy Yankee or, heaven forbid, Pitbull about him. Balvin is essentially a lover, not a fighter. It would be excellent if he manages to achieve what he calls “his dream” of global fame without extinguishing what makes him interesting.