Word: englishes
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...celebrities sometimes seek a little polish for their memoirs. And in this case, well, let's cut a chimp some slack here: Cheeta's screen career, which stretched right up to 1967 (Dr. Dolittle), called for a mastery of physical performance - mime, slapstick, acro- and aerobatics - not of stage English. Even his leading man, Tarzan, rarely ventured much beyond "Aaaheeyaaheeyaheeyaheeyah" or "Jane not worry." Now though, at the age of 76, and living out the last of his days in a Palm Springs sanctuary, Cheeta has found the voice to match his remarkable story...
...long - most of his targets are dead, after all - Cheeta's comebacks have sharp teeth: Chaplin is a humorless "demi-ape"; Mickey Rooney gets pegged as "a cacophonous cartoon of glutinously faked ebullience" who basically stole Cheeta's act; and Rex Harrison ... well, frankly, his opinion of the gentlemanly English star who, as Dr. Dolittle, at least tried talking to the animals, is as mean-spirited as it is unpublishable on a family-oriented website. Far better is his elegant demolition of Mrs Fairbanks, who, he writes, was in truth "an absolute brick. I just didn...
Colin Cotterill owes a lot to hepatitis. In 1990, as an aid worker for UNESCO, he was dispatched to Laos to develop a curriculum for English classes. It was a bit of a Sisyphean assignment, since all the English textbooks in the country were written in German, a language virtually no one in Laos understood. On the flight from Europe, however, fate intervened. A doctor in the adjacent seat leaned over. "He said, 'You do realize you have hepatitis, don't you?'" Cotterill recalls. "I looked at myself in the mirror, and, by God, there were these big yellow tennis...
...Originally a Londoner, Cotterill was working as an English teacher in Australia when he first became interested in Laos - meeting refugees who had fled the communist takeover. One man in particular, a former Cabinet minister in the royalist government, later suggested a model for Dr. Siri. "They were more than cynical," Cotterill says of the émigrés. "They were really angry to be forced to leave what was then a good life. They'd saved money, had careers and sent their children to good schools. Then the communists moved in and suddenly this lifestyle was taken from them...
...that doesn't preclude intelligent synth pop. In 2007, he teamed with Shanghai singer-songwriter Jay Wu to release Synth Love, an album of songs sung in English. A solo album of danceable techno, Post Haze, is due out this month on China's Modern Sky label. "The whole independent music scene is growing slowly in China," he says. Some of its hottest acts, incidentally, can be seen at Antidote, a club night co-founded by B6 and dedicated to new electronica. "Local kids are getting used to parties that are outside of traditional Chinese culture, and most...