Showing posts with label Amber Heard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amber Heard. Show all posts

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Some of Fashion & Entertainment's "Tough Chicks in Luxury Packaging": Amber Heard, Jennifer Åkerman and Blake Lively; @AmberHeard, @jjakerman, @BlakeLively; Tuff Brud I Lyxförpackning




Terry Richardson: Behind the scenes with Amber Heard. http://nyti.ms/QKeiwL

Yes, Amber's smile above at 0:44 is pure perfection!


A friendly series of email flares sent up from both Park Slope and West End Avenue this morning alerted us to the exciting news:"Must-see Amber Heard photo essay in today's N.Y. Times "T" Magazine.
("T" being their Style magazine for those of you who are uninitiated.)
Immediately, we got to work and relayed the message via our 24/7 communication network...

This blog and its network of friends around the world thank our New York City friends who wish to remain anonymous for the thoughtful head's-up, and now have a must-buy Sunday Times print edition situation for the first time in quite awhile.
No promises, but we might have some photos here later in the day, after a coffee run later this afternoon from you-know-where.

Here's the basics:


The Well Rounded Amber Heard
By Kathryn Branch
August 17, 2012, 4:00 PM
The video of the behind-the-scenes photo shoot by Terry Richardson is at:
The last time I saw such a beautiful woman with a cute pet in a photo was... oh, that's right, this morning.

It came when I was checking my email and saw that well-grounded fave of the blog, LA-based blogger -LA Life- singer and Wilhemina NY model Jennifer Åkerman had just written about her latest magazine interview, with Uniprice Sweden, which she did while she's back in Sweden for a few weeks on vacation, and was photographed with her journalist sister's cat.

Her post: 
The actual interview and photo is titled, humorously in this case, Tuff Brud i Lyxförpackning
i.e. Tough Chick in Luxury Packaging, and is at:

This title is a reference to a very popular Swedish song by singer Lill-Babs in 1961, a song title that over the past 50 years has also gotten a life of its own as a saying or metaphor, usually as a positive. 
It helps, of course, that the word "brud" can also be used in Swedish for bride as well as babe and -wait for it- chick.

PontiacGrandPrix63 video: Lill-Babs - Tuff Brud I Lyxförpackning (1961)
Uploaded April 17, 2011. http://youtu.be/ECCIF55U-gU

What's old becomes new again in 2010 as Petter keeps it real with Lill-Babs watching from the dinner table.
You don't have to know any Swedish to see why this is both clever and funny, so watch the whole thing!  


YetAnotherStranger1 video: Petter Alexis Askergren sings "Tuff brud i lyxförpackning" on TV4 Sweden's "Så mycket bättre" (So much better) Full song! Uploaded November 14, 2010. http://youtu.be/dwWAR0-dfP8


Hon är en tuff brud i lyxförpackning. 
En tuff brud i snyggt fodral...

(She is one tough chick in luxury packaging. 
A tough chick in the attractive case...)

The best American pop culture comparison might be Ann-Marget in Kitten with a Whip, where the title of that 1964 film, co-starring John Forsyth, has been appropriated hundreds and hundreds of times for other purposes, especially as the title of an article in popular magazines of nearly every subject you can think of.

tonypatti video: Kitten With a Whip -Famous Someday -Ann-Marget and John Forsyth (1964). http://youtu.be/B9xrcZKvUUg

Jen's popular and oh-so-catchy song from last year with her band Bella Tech


Bella Tech - Summer Song
The Los Angeles-based band that features lead vocals by Jennifer Åkerman. http://youtu.be/0Q5x7NfbhP0

Here's the video for her newest solo single, from this summer, Silent Killer...


bellsoto video: "Silent Killer" - Jennifer Akerman, directed by Bell Soto, Uploaded June 2, 2012. http://youtu.be/iYtmjKodsUM


By the way, with the demise of the LA Times Magazine due to budget cuts at parent Tribune Company, one of the few places where yours truly could oftentimes find that delicious nugget of pop culture information that confirmed his intuition and sense of things in the entertainment universe while living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. and South Florida, I now have one less dependable, albeit-celeb-heavy, source of information. 
The news about this forced me to shed a tear of sadness.

Regular readers of the blog might recall they ran that excellent piece in their April issue that I linked to here in my post of April 11, 2012 titled, After Stieg Larsson, whom? April 2012 LA Times Magazine features stories on amazing Stockholm and some prominent Swedish crime novelists -and explains why you should be reading them!

Their cover subject for their last issue, in June, was also a favorite of this blog, the delightful Blake Lively.
http://www.latimesmagazine.com/2012/06/savage-beauty.html

I really did mean to bring this up when it was first announced, because it's quite a telling example of what's going on in the American economy right now, as advertising dollars migrate to non-print locales, but...

Los Angeles Times to discontinue LA, its Sunday magazine
The magazine, which came out monthly, will print its final issue June 3.
By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times
May 16, 2012|
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/16/business/la-fi-times-magazine-20120516

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@AmberHeard  http://twitter.com/AmberHeard



http://amberheardofficial.com/

@jjakerman http://twitter.com/jjakerman





Listen to Jennifer here: http://soundcloud.com/jennifer-akerman


Monday, September 19, 2011

After all the summer teasing & titillation, it's time to let the Bunnies come out to play: "The Playboy Club" premieres on NBC-TV tonight at 10 p.m.

NBC-TV video: The Playboy Club - Preview. Above, at 3:12, Amber Heard just being Amber Heard -in a word: captivating.

After all the summer teasing & titillation this summer, "The Playboy Club" premieres on NBC-TV tonight at 10 p.m. It's time to finally let the Bunnies out to play and the mid-Sixties Chicago seediness and music performances wash over us.

Mondays at 10 o'clock just got a LOT more interesting, as the Bunnies take on "Hawaii 5-0" and, starting next Monday night, "Pan Am."

I don't know about you, but I've missed seeing Amber Heard on the tube, having watched everything she was in, even when, as often was the case, she was its saving grace.
Since she has played the girl 'beyond her years' like nobody's business, it's going to be interesting to me to see how she plays the corn-fed small-town Midwestern girl, since part of her appeal has always been that you just don't know what she's capable of.

So often, writers in projects she was in had her use her beauty as a weapon with men and women to help her get what she wants -and to advance the narrative- knowing that people, esp. men, often can't help themselves when confronted by someone whose beauty is so incandescent.
Well, it's true.

Her sort of beauty is both hypnotic and dangerous, because rather quickly, things can escalate and the next thing you know, hypothetically, you realize you are infinitely more exposed to consequences while her character has split the scene in the fast car -with the loot.

That's usually when they'd inter-cut scenes of her getting away free as a bird and the police knocking on some poor guy's door, the latest person in a long line who was disoriented because he had chosen to fly too close to the sun that is Amber Heard.
Yes, there's a lot of Mata Hari in her.

Not that you were wondering, but I think that now that she's back on TV, she's now instantly vaulted into the ten most-beautiful women on the tube, scripted drama/comedy or news, as someone out there has just unceremoniously been kicked-out without even knowing it.

One thing is for sure, though, it's NOT Robin Meade of CNN who is falling thru the trap-door, as last week, I found myself watching more CNN in the morning than I have in years, since I'm usually tuned to Dan Patrick or Glenn Beck or Diane Rehm, and our old friend Robin is as stunning and personable as ever. http://mxp.blogs.cnn.com/

NBC-TV video: The Playboy Club - Welcome to the The Playboy Club
New Playboy Club Bunny Maureen (Amber Heard), already in a tight jam after a run-in with the Chicago Mob, tells club layer Nick Dalton (Eddie Cibrian) that she's no push-over: "You just don't know what I'm capable of."
See, just like I said.


NBC-TV video: The Playboy Club - Amber Heard describes her character, Maureen, the small-town girl who has left for the allure of the big city.

So, finally, a provocative new sexually-charged drama from 20th Century Fox TV andImagine TV that will be a welcome antidote to so much of what I see on TV and turn away from -dopey reality shows featuring people I want to stay clear of, drab family comedies...
And now that my Monday night favorites on TNT, "The Closer" and "Rizzoli & Isles," are off for a few months, my Mondays are now open for bid again.

South Beach Hoosier Time Machine Flashback: In the early 1980's, Playboy magazine, in its "Girls of the Big Ten" issue, in describing the appeal of the coeds at the various schools that made up the-then pre-Penn State athletic conference, coined the phrase that quickly became a complimentary metaphor (and template) forever after amongst my IU friends and I in describing whatever social scene we found ourselves in.

They described IU's wave-upon-wave of beautiful women on the Bloomington campus as
"corn-fed Kappa cuties."
Yes, the ultimate in girl-next-door sexiness.

And that moniker became the highest-ranking we could ever bestow on anyplace we found ourselves with more than the normal share of bright and attractive women.
And yes, as always, we gave extra-credit for being from the Midwest.

And a richly deserved appellation it was, too, as the Kappa Kappa Gamma house on Third Street in Bloomington was, like the Tri-Delt house and the Chi Omega house were for me, the home to some great loyal friends of mine who were smart, funny, thoughtful and community-minded. And yes, damn attractive.

(Jane Pauley remains the best-known IU Kappa alum, and the subject of a future blog post I'll share here again some day, which includes how a photo of me, literally at her feet while she spoke, made the front page of the independent school newspaper, the ids, the following day
At a Student Alumni Council-sponsored event at the IMU, she told some great revealing stories that had us laughing and shared some unhappy and poignant childhood memories that left many girls in the over-flow crowd with tears in their eyes. Jane Pauley REALLY REALLY knows how to tell a story!)


NBC-TV video: The Playboy Club -Meet the new Bunny Mother, Carol-Lynne (Laura Benati)

Photos of the marketing posters for Season One of The Playboy Club are here:





British Pathé video: Playboy Bunny Girls and The Playboy Club (Original 1960s Footage)