INTERVIEW WITH ABIGAIL ROSEN (McGRATH)

I came to be in NYC during the 60's because I still lived at home. I was born there. My mother was the Harlem Renaissance poet, Helene Johnson, and she was raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Actually, she and her cousin Dorothy West, the Harlem Renaissance novelist and short story writer, were raised together as if they were sisters. They did not know that they were cousins until they entered the Girls Latin High School in Boston. They won a contest in Challenge, a literary magazine at the time, and the prize was a trip to NYC. Once my mom saw Harlem, she never looked back. Harlem was the place to be and my mom made a big deal about my being born in New York City. So when, almost nine months pregnant, she moved down south to everybody's consternation to have a child born in Harlem.

Of all the writers during this period, my mother was the only one to have a child, It is so strange that she should spend her youth during the flapper period in NYC when life was filled with wild abandonment and that I should spend mine during the so called hippy period in NYC - talk about wild abandonment! Like mirror reflections only the mirrors were Coney Island fun house mirrors. So, here we have a poet mom raising a child on her own, not in NYC as was her dream, but in Brooklyn as was her reality. We are talking educated poor here - think about it, how many wealthy poets do you know? It is easier to get a job as a meteorologist than as a poet.

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Fuck or Blue Movie

Fuck or Blue Movie was shot in October 1968 at David Bourdon's apartment in Greenwich Village. (FAW36) Although Viva and Louis Waldon do have intercourse in the film, they spend much of the time talking about the war in Vietnam, cooking food and taking a shower. The blue tint of the film was actually an error. Warhol had used tungsten (indoor) film but there was sunlight streaming into Bordon's apartment, resulting in the blue tint.

It was shown only at the Factory until the following year when all four reels that were shot were shown at a benefit for Film Culture magazine at the Elgin Cinema on June 12, 1969. (Ibid) Then on July 21 Warhol put it into the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre where Lonesome Cowboys had been playing but was dying "pretty quickly." (POP294) It was a shortened version (only the last three reels lasting 100 mins) and renamed Blue Movie to avoid the censors.

According to Variety, the film made three times what it cost in the first week of being shown. It was seized by the New York City police on July 31, and the theatre's staff arrested. On September 18, the New York Criminal Court ruled that it was obscene and fined the theatre's manager $250.00. Warhol reacted by publishing the film as a book through Grove Press. The book contained all of the film dialogue accompanied by stills from the film.

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Scarlett Johansson Is Flattered She Inspired 'I Kissed a Girl'

Some stars get fan mail. Scarlett Johansson got a platinum-certified single. When told that her lips inspired Katy Perry to pen her hit "I Kissed A Girl," Johansson, who recently married Ryan Reynolds, tells December's Allure, "That's flattering, but my lips are kind of taken." In fact, until Perry's melody was pointed out to her, "I had no idea [about the song]," says Johansson, 24. "I should get a cut!" Yet when the topic of how she met Reynolds, 32, comes up, Johansson cuts off the conversation. "Nobody knows.," she says. "It's private. It's our story." And while she won't reveal the details of their past,

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Paula 'Haunted' By Suicide

Paula Abdul is so freaked out by the suicide of her stalker in front of her Beverly Hills home last week, a friend of the "American Idol" judge says she won't go back to the "haunted house" even after hiring "healers" to cleanse the house of ghosts. "[Paula Goodspeed] was a deranged stalker who sent her death threats. Paula instructed guards to keep Goodspeed away from her at all costs," said a source. "She refuses to stay at home because she fears that the spirit of Goodspeed is haunting her house.

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Dancing with the Stars Episode Recap

Hey folks, it's the Dancing with the Stars semifinals! I'm just as excited as all of you are to see who makes the lucky trio of couples, so let's get straight to it. I have to admit that so far things have gone pretty much as I expected. No surprises whatsoever. I'm hoping that this week we can shake things up a bit, inject a little drama in the proceedings. I'm not suggesting anything Tonya Harding-inspired, but here's hoping for something shocking to happen so we can use that word on the homepage again! Read on to find out who made the final three...

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