• Etta James says when she was ripping Beyoncé about singing "At Last" for the President, "I didn't really mean anything…"

"Even as a little child, I've always had that comedian kind of attitude." Sure, sure. [The Life Files via NY Daily News, ONTD]

• The Obamas were reportedly "stunned" by Etta James' remarks. [TMZ]
• The Times asks, re: Heath Ledger, "So how do you run an Oscar campaign for someone who is no longer with us?" [NY Times]
• Angelina Jolie will produce a film called Resilient, in which Mariane Pearl will interview five women who have overcome odds to bring change to their communities. That's right, Saint Angie has six kids and a movie to create, get out of her way. [MSNBC Scoop]
• Ryan Reynolds looks Photoshopped into waxy zombie territory on the cover of Men's Health. But good for him for running a marathon to raise funds for Parkinson's. [Socialite Life]
• Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil's divorce could get nasty: Blake Incarcerated is "compiling a dossier" of all the dudes Amy slept with and wants them to testify to prove that Amy was unfaithful during their marriage. What kind of fuckery is this? [The London Paper]
• Paris Hilton's brother Barron is being sued by a dude he struck with his car at a gas station a year ago. [TMZ]
• Apparently Kate Hudson's new guy, Aussie golfer Adam Scott, is better for her than Owen Wilson, because Owen would "point out her imperfections all the time" and Kate would always seen pictures of Owen with other women in magazines. Also: Adam is hot. [E!]
• Here's the Sarah Jessica Parker story from Bazaar. SJP talks about being Carrie Bradshaw: "I got to wear such incredible things, and you make such mistakes and there's such hits and great triumphs and there's incredible wrong, wrong, wrong. But it's so much fun." Oh! And she wore an Alexander McQueen dress to an SATC event in New York: "I actually had to cut myself out of that dress that night. My husband was out of town, so I was alone when I got home, and I couldn't unzip it. So…I got out the scissors." [Bazaar]
• Oh, God: Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman just signed on for a romcom called The Baster. They'll play best friends, but when he learns she's gonna get pregnant through artificial insemination, he replaces the donor's semen with his own. This is not a joke. [Hollywood Reporter]
• Here's Lily Allen dressed as a boy in a spoof of a chocolate commercial. [Daily Mail]
• In this article, Liv Tyler invites the interviewer back to her house and talks about the "sad parts" — empty spaces where her ex-husband has moved out. [Wonderland Magazine]
• Whoops! The BBC aired Christian Bale's infamous tirade without bleeping out the swearing. [The Star]
• Fantasia plans to get her high school degree — she dropped out of the ninth grade about ten years ago. "I've been talking about it for so long," she says. "I have a lot of young people who look up to me, like my 15-year-old brother and 7-year-old daughter. It's something that I really need to do and that I want to do." [Yahoo News via E!]
• Guy Ritchie: Seen singing show tunes in a gay bar. [Page Six]
• We've heard this before but here it is again: Lily Allen couldn't stay with her 45-year-old boyfriend because the sex was bad. [Mirror]
• Long interview with Justin Long, promoting He's Just Not That Into You. Guess what? He's not like his character. "I'm not good at reading signs - I don't like deciphering. I don't like to play the games, like 'When am I supposed to call?' " he says. [USA Today]
• Paul McCartney and Nancy Shevell are in luuuuuv. [Daily Mail]
• Eva Longoria and Tony Parker are selling their San Antonio home for about $900,000. Take a slideshow tour and check out the pretty pool and basketball court! [WSJ]
• Dev Patel, who has been nominated for a Best Actor Bafta, says of Slumdog Millionaire: "It has never claimed to be a documentary. It is a movie. It is entertainment. I spent five months out here filming and really got a chance to see the slums close up and I think the film depicts them accurately enough. Mumbai really is a city of extreme contrasts. If you step out of a five-star hotel here you can be facing a slum." [Telegraph]
• Speaking of Dev Patel, he and Freida Pinto were about to be on Tyra's show when a woman in the audience had a seizure. They signed a copy of the Slumdog soundtrack and slipped it to her as she sped off in an ambulance. Music heals, you guys. [Page Six]
• Soap operas are wiping out top stars because the economic downturn means they can't pay the actors. Days Of Our Lives lost four couples! [NY Post]
• Another day, another story about John Cleese's package. [Page Six]
• Kelly Cutrone, whom you may have seen on The City or The Hills, is getting a reality show based on her fashion PR company. Expect dramz! [Page Six]
• Blind item! "Which young magazine editor dispenses bags of blow to Hollywood starlets so they can be 'extra up' for the photo shoots he arranges?" [Gatecrasher]
• Paris Hilton chatted Fergie up about her wedding and honeymoon, but when Fergalicious walked away, Paris quipped to sister Nicky, "Ha, my engagement ring was bigger!" This paper points out: Yeah, Paris, but which one of you is actually married? [Gatecrasher]
• Russell Simmons has a juicy new squeeze, and she is a grapefruit heiress. [Gatecrasher]
• The new Gossip Girl plotline will be very similar to Anne Hathaway's love life: A hottie swindler will sweep Serena off her feet. [Gatecrasher]
• Jade Jagger is married, according to her Facebook status. Also, she started a music, fashion and art company called, uh, Jezebel. Her middle name. [Daily Mail]
• Will Val Kilmer run for governor of New Mexico in 2010? He says probably! "What I do for a living is listen. If I run, I'm going to be the next governor." [CBS News via AP]
• "I used to have claustrophobia inside the cinema because I didn't like it in the dark. I missed out on films as a kid. Now I'm better watching films on DVD with friends around than on my own. — Judi Dench. And! "The difference between theatre and cinema is that once you've done a film, it's over. With Nine, two days after I'd recorded my singing part, I did the performance I felt I should've done – in my bathroom." [Daily Express]
• "We haven't found any reason to stop yet. It's chaos at times, but there's such joy in the house. We have the capability to give a child a home and, let me tell you, it's selfish too because the reward has been extraordinary. [Twins are] just double the fun. It's surprising how soon their personalities have started emerging. But it's really important that everyone gets their individual time as well as group time together, and that's a big focus of ours. We were four before, and we got into our rhythms and it worked – but everyone's pretty well integrated." — Brad Pitt, on adding kids to his brood. [Mirror]
• "I've tried, but I'm just not into text sex. You only have a few lines to get your point across, and I don't like that. I also don't know who my text-sex partner is showing my messages to. I could be viewed as a text slut through no fault of my own." — Ginnifer Goodwin. [Gatecrasher]
• "Gigi is the closest I've ever come to playing myself. I've never been interested in playing someone so like myself. But I fell in love with her. I humiliate myself on a daily basis. I have been known to Google-stalk. I've certainly caught myself flirting in such a way that I feel nauseous afterward when I think of what I said. And I'm so guilty of the long linger." — Ginnifer Goodwin, on her character in He's Just Not That Into You. [USA Today]
• "You're pretending you're feeling the same emotion as when you wrote the song. I'm not trying to have pretend good sex, I'm trying to have good sex." — Duffy, on her tactic when filming music videos. [The Sun]
• "Angelina and I are together because we can enhance each other. I don't want to waste any time because I'm with company I really, really love." — Brad Pitt. [Mirror]
• "It's a great job, but it doesn't leave time for what's important, like having a family. I want to live in the country and have a walled garden with chickens and pigs." — Lily Allen, on being a pop star. [Mirror]
• "I was kind of seeing this guy and then it was over. So I texted my godmother in Jamaica and told her and as a joke I said, 'Maybe my next conquest should be Simon Cowell.' You know when someone is in your mind and you accidentally text them? He replied, 'Sorry?'" — Lily Allen, on accidentally propositioning Simon Cowell. [The Sun]
• "My son! My husband! Food! Oh, fashion? I don't know. A good bra?" — What Sarah Jessica Parker can't live without. [Bazaar]
• "I think pop culture has done a number on creativity, because for me to make that statement [that I'm into acting], I get the reaction: 'Really?' It's like, 'Yeah, why wouldn't I?' The opportunity is there. It's sort of like, I have a day job, and this becomes a hobby (that) I can plunge into with full creative eagerness." — Justin Timberlake, to Katie Couric. [MSNBC Scoop]
• "I stopped reading all fashion and trash magazines. I don't want to be influenced any more by what's in and what's out and what makes somebody cool or not cool. In the middle of the night I'd go and take a pee, and on the bathroom floor would be a magazine, and I found myself memorizing banal headlines like 500 Best Black Tops. So I read only books – A Farewell To Arms, it's a heartbreaker, oh god – and decoration magazines." — Liv Tyler. [Wonderland Magazine]
• "I have to say really, I feel better than I ever felt in my life. I did have a moment, though, over the weekend my first like huh… I don't want to [turn 40]. I found a really long gray hair and it kind of flipped me out. It's not my first but it's the fact that it was so long. I was like, 'Oh that's been there. How many others are there, and what does that mean? It actually brought me to tears slightly." — Jennifer Aniston, on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. [People]

The whole "Rorschach Test" thing is getting a lot of press lately. You see in whatever those things you want to see. Britney is Bush, Angelina is Barack Obama, Barack Obama is Jesus Christ, Hillary Clinton is your mom, Hillary Clinton is your menopausal boss from hell. Nomani knows better than most that none of any of this is true, that it's more complicated than that.

I learned a few things I did not know from the Rolling Stone piece. I did not know that Kevin Federline's lawyers is a "former Israeli operative" who "penetrated the inner circles of Hollyood" in a way "not unlike counterterrorism" or that before he met Britney K-Fed's Chevy was repossessed. Or that the paparazzo who usually manages to get up front during her dramatic car chases is a former Death Row records executive. Or that once upon a time Britney Spears was a polite, well-mannered kid who did all her chores but she was driven to madness in part by two pivotal moments in her life: the trauma of the media mockery following her boob job, and cheating on Justin Timberlake with her choreographer. And there but for the grace of Harvey Levin go all of us?

Is any of this true? It is probably an oversimplification. Is the inspiring tale of Angelina's dramatic turnaround, from troubled self-mutilator estranged from her father to World's Best Person, also an oversimplification? No doubt. Do we tell ourselves stories in order to live? Are the stories in Us Weekly more dangerous than those in the Bible and the Koran? Am I really going to spend another hour I could have spent learning about, I dunno, the fallout of the Pakistani election on that question? I guess I just did.

I left the movie depressed. Depressed because I wanted to like Mariane Pearl because she had gone through so much and stands for so much and Angelina Jolie, of whom some of us here are a fan, is such a fan, but I had a feeling that the real life widow was the only thing standing between the world's most famous couple making a serious important film that could do for a mass audience what Control Room did for, you know, the NPR-listening choir. A Mighty Heart, in other words, had to be a bad book.

So I looked it up on the internet. Everybody loved it! She even had a co-author! Maybe I was stupid! (Duh!) Did I just not want to blame Angie?

So I bought it. I started reading it; I did not finish; my suspicions proved correct.

Mariane clearly, clearly, clearly loved loved loved Danny. To read the beginning part where she talks about how proud she is of him and how warm and perfect and wonderful he is is like reading some very precocious teenage girl's diary about how she imagines life with the man of her dreams is going to turn out. And who knows, teenage girls could love this movie. It could be the next The Notebook. But to the adults in the audience it seemed false, and immature, and dishonest. (I cannot speak for Kimora Lee Simmons.)

Like Daniel Pearl I worked for a distant bureau of the WSJ when 9/11 happened. (Unlike Daniel Pearl, I was not so much a great reporter.) Also, my distant bureau was Los Angeles. (Unlike Daniel Pearl, I mainly wrote about shoes.) My weeks after the towers fell were spent mostly in an eastern shitty suburb of San Diego called Lemon Grove, where two of the 9/11 hijackers had lived and worked and attended the odd strip club. The story was so impossibly big and important and terrifying-to-get-beaten on that they sent two of us down at first, me and an editor about twelve years my senior. I was reminded of this because in the first chapter, Mariane talks about how she went on almost all of her interviews with Danny, and interviewing subjects with a companion is really cool, especially, when they are the sort of people you don't actually relate to much, like this methhead we met whose neighbor followed a very fringe anti-modernity sect of Islam that had inspired him, it was revealed in family court, to skin his daughter's pet rabbit as punishment for playing with "idols" (Barbies).

Point being: people out there = weird. Situation = stressful. This editor = the only sane person with whom I communicated for weeks after this cataclysmic event.

"So did you ever think about, like, just giving your editor a blowjob in the car? Just to like ease the tension?"

That was the first question my friend Evan had when I returned. Evan used to work in porn, which might be why he's such a great reporter, because people don't get as creeped out when he asks shit like that. Some even answer honestly. I did not.

"He's married!"

But yeah, of course I had. We were all in this weird place with all these strange poor people (Muslims in America: not so affluent, a lot!) and all their weird skepticism and racist neighbors and meth fiend advocates and everything was really really really tense and all the editors back in New York were falling to pieces because their offices had been totally destroyed in the attack, and yes, for being with me through all of that I wanted to hump my editor, very much yes. He was the only remotely doable person I was going to happen upon.

It was not so easy to reconcile that with the righteous humanism with which I wanted to view the world, especially in the wake of 9/11, when suddenly my own country had experienced a tragedy on the scale of other countries and I wanted to believe that the world would share in our grief, that we were all grieving together, that out of tragedy ought to come some better understanding between us and our neighbors.

Also: The world was collapsing. Why all the thinking about fucking? Because I was human and horny and all this chatting up of poor crazy religious people was starting to feel really fake? Because I was human and I DON'T love everyone else in the universe equally, especially the ones who seem so unlike us? Or because in the movie version, there would be romance; in the movie version, there would be a Great Affair?

To read A Mighty Heart is to think Mariane Pearl is kinda in the latter camp without ever really have considered the question. In fact, to read A Mighty Heart is to think Mariane was actually writing the movie before her husband was even beheaded. I'm not saying she didn't love him sufficiently, but there's a scene in the movie in which someone wonders why she's not more weepy about things and it's because she can't help it, she's thinking ahead, about what it will mean, what sort of statement she can make out if it, how she can narrativize it. That's a common thing in a journalist, something she's so aware of she cops to it on the very first page:

It is the curse of all journalists, I suppose, to be writing a story even as you are living it.

That said, if anyone loves Mariane, Angelina Jolie seems to, because she manages to portray her in a way that is both accurate and gentle. We've all read about how they're friends. It makes me glad for Brad and the family that she spent all that time being crazy and fucked up. We bet she's a good mom. We hope she rubs off on Mariane.