The Pop Of King By Stephen King (the back page of entertainment weekly)

[Storyslinger]

You lucky bugger

[She-Oy]

Ya know, there are very few celebs that I would say anything to if I ever saw them...meaning, I'd just smile at them and wouldn't bother them. But if SK was ever to like be within touching distance, I'd have to say hello or something. Surely I wouldn't ramble on, but I'd have to say something completely stupid. LOL

**Although, I will say I wouldn't ask him for anything, just say hi.

[ZoNeSeeK]

Apparently King's been in Zone's part of the world!

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20056512,00.html

Yeah, our state is massive (quadruple the size of Texas), and largely uninhabited. The southwest corner of the state is what you'd call normal cities and towns etc and where 95% of the 2 million inhabitants live, and the rest of it would be exactly as he's described, except for the string of sea towns that follow the coast up and around the top end.

There are towns in the outback and desert areas but the climate can be very unforgiving and water is not in plentiful supply so these towns are mostly based around mining operations etc. There is little or no technology or comforts out there, as spending hundreds of millions on an infrastructure for maybe 30,000 people spread over such a huge area is a waste. Its funny, we (aussies) are pretty familiar with what the country looks like and most have seen some element of it or another on a holiday but not many would opt to spend weeks out in some backwater town - its expensive to get to aswell, most would rather spend the cash and go somewhere we consider exotic. The bush can be fucking boring

But the stars do look amazing though. You've never seen so many in your life - imagine what the sky would look like with no artificial light sources for hundreds of kilometers in any direction.

[Matt]

I bet its amazing

*sigh*

The only reason I would like it is the sheer solitude of the thing.

(with Dora of course)

[Randall Flagg]

Entertainment Weekly A History of Violence

[Darkthoughts]

That was a good one - food for thought from Uncle Stevie!

[sarah]

The Pop of King
Stephen King's Top Tunes of 2007
See which albums and songs the EW pop-culture columnist named as his favorites from the past 12 months

AVRIL LAVIGNE ''Girlfriend'' got more plays in Stephen King's house than Springsteen's ''Radio Nowhere,'' less than Wilco's ''Either Way''
Mark Liddell

By Stephen King Stephen King
The advice from my mother that I think of most often: ''If you can't say something nice, just shut up and smile.'' You might think of those words of wisdom, should you look for certain highly touted 2007 CDs below and not find them. In truth, your Uncle Stevie was disappointed with this year's new music, very disappointed indeed, and his year-end list reflects that. I could only find seven albums I wanted to mention, but there is a bright side: I've added my favorite songs of the year. Download 'em and burn your own CD, how about that? And if you think my list sucks, you can drop me a line on the message board. Or just shut up and smile. The latter option would probably be less trouble for both of us. Might I add, while I'm at it, that I'm haunted — as with the lists of movies and books that will follow in good time — by all the good stuff I may have missed? There's just too much out there, and life is too short. But now, with no further ado...

STEVE'S BEST ALBUMS OF THE YEAR!
7. Countrypolitan Favorites, Southern Culture on the Skids
Are you mourning Porter Wagoner? Still bumming over Buck (Owens, that is)? Here's the perfect cheer-up medicine: 15 old-timey country faves, dressed up in rockin' clothes courtesy of Rick Miller's surf guitar. Best cut is probably ''Engine Engine #9,'' with Rick Miller sounding eerily like the late great Roger Miller, but Mary Huff's upbeat take on ''Rose Garden'' (Lynn Anderson did the original) is also a marvel.

6. Revival, John Fogerty
A little uneven, and probably not his absolute best work, but still impossible not to turn up and dance to; this is straight-ahead old-school rock. Fogerty has stayed true to the swampy stuff he does the best, and on songs like ''Don't You Wish It Was True'' and ''Somebody Help Me,'' he hits that ole Creedence groove dead-on (and Fogerty always was Creedence).

5. Black Rain, Ozzy Osbourne
It's amazing that Ozzy can do this sort of thing at all anymore, let alone so well. Finest heavy metal record of the year; a true speaker-buster. Best track is the amazing ''I Don't Wanna Stop.'' Slipknot, eat your filthy little heart out.

4. It's Not Big It's Large, Lyle Lovett and His Large Band
This is a terrific Texas swing album, but of course not everybody likes Texas swing (or even knows what it is). What makes it special is Lovett's vermouth-dry vocals and his equally dry wit. In the dry-wit department, check out ''All Downhill.''

3. Life in Cartoon Motion, MIKA
An incredibly accomplished debut, and a voice that bears an eerie resemblance to Freddie Mercury's. This one lived all summer on my car's CD player, especially ''Lollipop.''

2. Sky Blue Sky, Wilco
No audio tricks and/or experimentation this time, only a set of gorgeously simple tunes and class-A writing. Jeff Tweedy has never been sweeter, more controlled, or in better voice. Not a bad cut on the album. Even the cover art's beautiful.

1. Washington Square Serenade, Steve Earle
This is the prolific Earle's best album since he got out of jail (a statement that only seems perfectly rational when discussing rock & roll). It's what we called ''folk rock'' back in the day, but it's more than that; songs like ''City of Immigrants'' and ''Down Here Below'' (which concerns Manhattan's flying urban legend Pale Male) are paragraphs in Earle's love note to New York. On ''Tennessee Blues'' he bids a sad, not-so-fond farewell to the Guitar Town. (''Bound for New York City, and I won't be back no more.'') Of all the albums I heard this year, it's the only one that fulfilled my expectations on every level.

STEVE'S MIX '07
I don't think you need many explanations about this mix; the songs either explain themselves, or they don't. All I need tell you is that yes, they're all downloadable; yes, I heard them all for the first time in 2007, and most, but not all, are from this year; and yes, every one of them blissed me out. I played them over and over until my wife threatened to divorce me...or just stab me repeatedly with the kitchen scissors (and no jury in America would have convicted her). They are listed from the least played (about 12 times in the case of ''Radio Nowhere'') to the most played (which would be about 50, putting me squarely in stabbed-in-the-kitchen territory).

I know I'll get hazed about some selections (James Blunt?? Brad Paisley???), but my dear old mother also used to tell me that honesty's the best policy. This is as honest as I can be. So there. And let's hope next year is a little bit better.

18. ''Radio Nowhere''
Bruce Springsteen

17. ''1973''
James Blunt

16. ''Nothing Changes Around Here''
The Thrills

15. ''Girlfriend''
Avril Lavigne

14. ''Homo Erectus''
Ray Benson and Reckless Kelly

13. ''Bring It on Home to Me''
Tab Benoit

12. ''I'm Shipping Up to Boston''
Dropkick Murphys

11. ''Radar Gun''
The Bottle Rockets

10. ''Online''
Brad Paisley

9. ''Same Mistake''
James Blunt

8. ''Up in Indiana''
Lyle Lovett and His Large Band

7. ''Right Moves''
Josh Ritter

6. ''Wait for Love''
Josh Ritter

5. ''Crazy Ex-Girlfriend''
Miranda Lambert

4. ''Jericho Road''
Steve Earle

3. ''Get Your Biscuits in the Oven (and Your Buns in Bed)''
Kevin Fowler

2. ''Down the Road Tonight''
Hayes Carll

1. ''Either Way''
Wilco

[sarah]

Stephen King's Best of '07: Movies and TV

STEPHEN KING'S BEST OF 2007: MOVIES

10. IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH
Most of 2007's political movies failed because they were too angry to be anything but propaganda. This one, about a heartbroken father trying to discover the truth about his son, was tight, involving, and controlled. One of two great Tommy Lee Jones performances this year.

9. 28 WEEKS LATER
Scary as hell, one of the two or three best zombie movies ever (we'll see how I Am Legend stacks up). These folks may be brain-dead, but they're fast, and the movie-opening chase sequence is a tour de force.

8. THE LOOKOUT
Joseph Gordon-Levitt shines as the ex-big-deal hockey player trying to remember how to open cans of soup after a catastrophic car accident (for which he was responsible). When he gets caught up in a robbery, this class-A thriller becomes a tightly wound crime classic.

7. 3:10 TO YUMA
The best non-humorous Elmore Leonard adaptation since Mr. Majestyk. You expect Russell Crowe to be great — he's always good when he's bad — but the big surprise is Christian Bale (pictured). He doesn't outdo Gary Cooper for simple decency, but comes close. And you get to watch Russell Crowe wear that amazingly cool hat.

6. LITTLE CHILDREN
Todd Field's poison bonbon about bored young marrieds in the suburbs is as funny as it is sad. Kate Winslet is great — you'd expect that — and so is Gregg Edelman as her porn-addled husband. The unexpected treat is Jackie Earle Haley (pictured, with Phyllis Somerville) and his turn as the bewildered ''sex criminal'' who becomes the subject of neighborhood hysteria.

5. CHILDREN OF MEN
Like 28 Weeks Later, this is a near future you wouldn't want to inhabit, but you can't look away. And as the Ordinary Guy In Over His Head — in this case spiriting what may be the last pregnant woman on earth to safety — Clive Owen (pictured) makes a terrific old-school hero. This movie also contains the year's best line, delivered by Michael Caine just before he's shot: ''Pull my finger.''


4. BREACH
Tight, taut, perfectly paced. You expect Chris Cooper (pictured, right) to be great as the super-religious (but deeply amoral) FBI agent selling secrets to the Soviets; the pleasure comes when you realize Ryan Phillippe (left) is just as good as the agent assigned to bring him down. Their final locked stare was one of the year's classic moments.

3. THE LIVES OF OTHERS
It's about eavesdropping, but for once not about the people who are being listened to. This one is about the listener: party hack Gerd Wiesler, brilliantly played by Ulrich Mühe (pictured in background), who died much too soon. ''Peek not at a knothole, lest ye be vexed,'' my mother used to tell my brother and me; the moral of this story is ''Listen not at one, lest ye be changed.''

2. GONE BABY GONE
The second great film to come from a Dennis Lehane novel. What makes this special isn't so much the terrific performances by Casey Affleck (pictured, left), Michelle Monaghan (right), and Ed Harris (center), or the tight script; it's Ben Affleck's smart, heartfelt direction. He puts lower-middle-class Boston on the screen as it really is, and tells a story that could happen in any American city. You call that universality, folks, and it's rare. Particularly in Hollywood.

1. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
The Coen brothers have lately fallen on hard times, critically and commercially. This restores them to their proper place as great American filmmakers. No Country is the best modern-day Western since The Getaway, and one of the best adaptations of a major novel ever. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Javier Bardem doesn't steal the movie as psychopath Anton Chigurh. Tommy Lee Jones (pictured) doesn't quite let him, and his stalwart sheriff gives Christian Bale (3:10 to Yuma) something to shoot for when he grows up.





STEPHEN KING'S BEST OF 2007: TV

5. FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS
Didn't want to like it. Kept telling myself, ''This is soap opera, pure and simple.'' In the end, couldn't quite believe it. But those kids are way too purty.

4. DEXTER
The morals may be twisted, but the first season was much more fun than The Sopranos.

3. BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
It sagged in the middle, but picked up at the end. The best of Battlestar are the tough-as-nails women. Call them Space Grrrls.

2. DAMAGES
A Devil Wears Prada knockoff that turned into a great thriller. Glenn Close has replaced James Gandolfini atop my TV Bad Guys list, and Ted Danson made a terrific corporate sleaze.

1. LOST
Still the best. I rewatched the entire third season to make sure, and — yes — still the best. Heroes just doesn't have its mythic grandeur. People are reaching for the stars here. And maybe beyond. Really, there's never been anything like it.

[sarah]

[Patrick]

I am not a fan of year-end "best of" lists, except when it comes to Stephen King. I always enjoy hearing what he has to say.

Thanks for posting these, Sarah. I appreciate being able to reference them again since I mailed all my originals to Ari in Argentina last week.

[sarah]

The Pop of King
Stephen King: Your Movie and Concert Hall Hell

EW's pop-culture columnist asked you to tell him about your worst experiences at a cineplex or music venue -- and you had lots to share!




PSYCHO Stephen King remembers watching Janet Leigh in the Alfred Hitchcock classic in a '60s haze and becoming convinced ''Norman Bates' mother was sitting behind me''
Everett Collection


By Stephen King
Stephen King




One night during my junior year at college, while high on considerably more than life (it was the '60s, so sue me), I took it into my head to go — by myself — to an Alfred Hitchcock retrospective playing in the Memorial Union. The film that night was Psycho, which I had seen before...but never with the entire world seeming to melt at the edges and change colors in the middle. Yet things were going along pretty well until the last 20 minutes, when I became convinced that Norman Bates' mother — in all her shriveled, eyeless glory — was sitting directly behind me and would soon reach out to stroke the back of my neck.
I remembered this a couple of weeks ago, when I happened upon Psycho playing on cable. Talk about flashbacks! It made me wonder how many others had had bad entertainment experiences — I mean really bad, the absolute pits — and so I put out a query on my website. I was deluged with replies. People have suffered all sorts of entertainment traumas. Many, as you would guess, have to do with that ever-popular combination of alcohol and rock & roll. Several end with forcible ejections from the human body, occasionally on some other concertgoer's head.
Teresa wrote about going to see Queen in 1978 (''Freddie Mercury was still alive then'') in a pair of satin pants that were all the rage. A drunk threw an empty bottle, bonk!, on poor Teresa's head while she was trying to work her way down to the front so Freddie could admire her groovy threads. She regrets the stitches, mourns the pants. Her sad conclusion: Blood doesn't wash out of satin.
Sometimes it's the talent who's out of control. Ayla wrote about going to see Hole in Adelaide, Australia. ''Courtney Love staggered on stage, played a few songs, then started ranting about being stung by a huge Australian bug. [She] stormed off stage screaming she was going to die.... Not cool.'' And Susan recalls a show where the always-inspired Billy Idol grabbed the drummer's sticks and began playing his own leather-clad crotch. Tasteful!
Bev writes about the night that Rice Stadium in Houston flooded while Pink Floyd was playing. The Floyd struggled on valiantly for an hour as various pieces of equipment shorted out, then David Gilmour announced to the crowd: ''We've run out of instruments that still work. Good night.''
And when Ariel went to see the punk band Die Toten Hosen (the literal translation, rather funny in itself: The Dead Pants), it turned out to be possibly the shortest concert in history. The drummer managed one riff before the stage collapsed and the entire band went down, clutching their instruments.
Many people seeking amusement have been traumatized at the movies. Brian writes about settling in to watch Deep Impact when a fellow fresh off the Appalachian Trail settled in right beside him. ''Every time he shifted his weight,'' Brian says, ''a cloud of death would puff from his Umbros [i.e., soccer shorts].''
David recalls going to see Shrek and winding up near a woman who had smuggled her Chihuahua in. ''I was ready to tell her to shut him up if he started to bark. He never barked. Instead he crapped like there was no tomorrow.'' All this and popcorn, too!
James waited in line three days for the first showing of The Phantom Menace. The good news: He got on TV, and local restaurants brought him food. The bad news: Twenty minutes into the showing, the projector broke down. ''Bummer!'' James writes. (But probably not as bad as actually seeing the whole movie.)
One memoirist remembers going to Love Story with her husband and feeling a weight settle on her shoulder halfway through the film. It was another man's head. She thought he had gone to sleep until the ''sleeper's'' wife gently moved him upright and the guy snapped awake. He'd been having a mild epileptic seizure.
Mary was taken to The Godfather at the age of 13. Her parents rarely went to films, but they'd heard there were ''some great Italian wedding scenes'' in The Godfather. There are, of course, but the one Mary remembers most vividly is ''Sonny banging the bridesmaid against the wall.''
My favorite movie story came from Kelly. She remembers the night when her grandpa Henry took her to see Alive. She was 12 at the time. This is the film about the rugby players who resort to cannibalism in order to stay alive after their plane crashes. ''This guy takes a knife (or whatever he had) and sliced a piece off a woman's rear end and eats it. My grandpa said (loud enough for the whole theater to hear): 'Damn! Wouldn't mind a piece o' ass myself!' I just about died of humiliation.''
I got hundreds more, and some stories are truly awful. Like Chad's. He writes, ''Last Tuesday I sat through an entire episode of According to Jim. Yes, I know...excruciating.''
Got stories of your own? Post them on the message board below, but keep them under 100 words. I can only stand so much horror.

[Bev Vincent]

Bev writes

That's me!

[fernandito]

(reads over it twice)


So it is!!!

[Brice]

It's good to see a few familiar names in SK's article.

[BillyxRansom]

"Don't be a sillykins"


i lol'd so hard.

[Bev Vincent]

Not exactly a Pop of King, but Steve has his summer reading list in the new issue (June 3, 2011)

[Bev Vincent]

Now online: My Summer Reading List