Heath Heath Heath

[Meryl]

I didn't see him for rehearsal and when he came out of the lift he was so incredible I forgot my lines. He frightened the life out of me.

This made me laugh out loud!  Go, Heath! 

[ifyoucantfixit]

        




      Joker Poster taken from Heathbaby.com   

         This must have been what Michael Caine saw.

[mvansand76]

        




      Joker Poster taken from Heathbaby.com   

         This must have been what Michael Caine saw.

That doesn't look like Heath as the Joker at all!

 

[MaineWriter]

That doesn't look like Heath as the Joker at all!

 

I'll believe that one was found to be a photoshopped hoax quite a while ago.

L

[Penthesilea]

I'll believe that one was found to be a photoshopped hoax quite a while ago.

L

It's seems to be made by the same source as this one we talked about in August:

Someone has taken efforts to make them. I like the above one. It really looks scary and fitting to the total sociopath type the Joker is supposed to be. And I like the line "Not all jokes are funny."

[yb]

At least the one with "Not All Jokers are Funny" on the poster is made from a photo of Heath, the other one is a different actor.

[MaineWriter]

From the New York Post:

September 25, 2007 -- SORRY, Helena Christensen, but it looks like Heath Ledger isn't ready to commit. After breaking up with baby mama Michelle Williams, Ledger was spotted locking lips with the Danish pastry. Our spies, however, spotted him leaving the Beatrice Inn in the West Village early Sunday morning, looking for a fresh catch. "He wasn't drinking, but he was there with his friend," we're told. "The friend chased two girls as they were leaving and gave them Heath's address. He told them to meet at Heath's new apartment in SoHo." Ledger's rep did not return calls.

[Ellemeno]

This is an odd, very superficial article in today's New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/fashion/30brooklyn.html?ref=fashion

Brooklyn’s Fragile Ego-System

By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: September 30, 2007
IT wasn’t supposed to matter to Brooklyn. Heath Ledger, the crown prince of the borough’s celebrity aristocracy, apparently fled his fiefdom in Boerum Hill for Manhattan after splitting up with his girlfriend, the actress Michelle Williams.

“To each his own,” said Jay Wilkinson, 29, an actor who lives in the neighborhood, speaking just blocks from the house on Dean Street where Mr. Ledger had lived since 2005 with Ms. Williams and their daughter, Matilda. He echoed a theme expressed by many on blogs and in the streets after the breakup. We barely notice the stars among us. If we lose one, no big deal.

In that, though, lies a tale of arriviste anxiety. What if Brooklyn’s recent cachet as the locus for what’s next is little more than a thin and fragile crust of chic, hiding the insecurity of people who constantly measure the social currency of their ZIP code by Manhattan standards?

The number of trendy boutiques, bistros and music clubs in Brooklyn may have spiked in the last five years, but its infrastructure of cool still represents only a fraction of that found in Manhattan. Its new identity is moored to a finite number of shops, restaurants, luxury condominiums and, yes, celebrities. If even one leaves, a void is created. Could the borough’s new status vanish as quickly as it ascended?

In recent years, Brooklyn’s pool of second-tier celebrity mascots (John Turturro, Rosie Perez, Norman Mailer, Steve Buscemi) has swollen and taken on a level of movie-star glamour, thanks to recent home buyers like Jennifer Connelly and her husband, Paul Bettany, Adrian Grenier and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard.

These famous names, functioning as both symbols and selling points for the new Brooklyn, helped drive up property values, provided a focus for gossip in coffeehouses and dog runs, and instilled pride among the tide of newcomers who arrived — sort of by choice — from Manhattan and beyond.

“The dark secret of Brooklyn is that many of the people who are going there are going there because they can’t afford Manhattan,” said Douglas Rushkoff, a writer and former Park Slope resident. “There is a tension between people who are in Brooklyn for Brooklyn’s sake, for the diversity and the quality of life, and people who are pushed to Brooklyn unwillingly.”

The latter, he said, “use a single restaurant, or a celebrity-and-a-half, as their justification as to why it’s O.K. If one moves out, it’s a big deal.”

THE journalist and novelist Kurt Andersen, who lives nearby, said that the thousands of trend-conscious types who moved to Brooklyn in recent years have cultivated an extra layer of snobbery, maintaining not just the old New York indifference toward stars in their midst, but overlaying it with indie earnestness.

“There’s an alterna-Brooklyn, ‘We’re cool cats’ attitude that probably reinforces that obligatory nonchalance,” he said. “There’s a part of me that thinks, in my smug, self-flattering way, that Heath Ledger must be a really cool guy if he lives here with me.”

But, he added, “if you happen to be eating on Smith Street and Heath Ledger walks in, who doesn’t glance?” For years, Boerum Hill was a charming, if lightly trafficked, stretch of brownstone-lined streets (and housing projects) tucked between Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope. Even many Manhattanites had never heard of it before 2005.

But post-Ledger, Boerum Hill was suddenly worthy of international mention. “Over the past year, the ‘Brokeback Mountain’ stars have become a familiar sight in Boerum Hill,” The Daily Telegraph of Sydney, Australia, wrote in February 2006. “Locals say they often see Ledger on his skateboard or walking to local cafes with Williams and their baby daughter Matilda.”

They became “Mr. and Mrs. Brooklyn,” said Dana Atherton, 26, a clerk at the Brooklyn Industries store on Smith Street, itself an emblem of the borough’s new identity.

As residents began to use cute, Manhattan-ish real estate acronyms like BoCoCa (referring to greater Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens) and, more playfully, NoGo (north Gowanus), Lucky jeans opened a shop on Smith Street, just down from American Apparel. “We always had old-timers and trendy couples,” said Lucinda Rosenfeld, a novelist who lives in Boerum Hill. “But the cute young girls on vintage Schwinns are definitely a new development.”

Celebrities contribute more than just luster to a neighborhood, said Roslyn Huebener, a founder of the Brooklyn real estate agency Aguayo & Huebener. Brokers, she said, routinely name-drop when taking skeptical clients on tours of economically emerging neighborhoods.

“It’s very reassuring,” she said. “Let’s say you’re going out to buy a condo or house, you think, ‘Oh my God, should I be paying that kind of money?’ But when you know these people are there, it validates that the value is going to continue.”

No wonder, then, that some residents sound a bit defensive over the implication that their neighborhood’s identity might be tenuously tied to a couple of movie stars.

“I don’t think it’s that big a deal,” said Mark Kincaid, a manager of Flight 001, a hip travel-oriented boutique in Boerum Hill, referring to Mr. Ledger's departure. He added, “a lot of people live in the neighborhood — people in the fashion industry, actors, editors. We just had Jonathan Hyde from ‘King Lear’ in yesterday.”

Other residents mentioned the presence of actors like Hope Davis, Emily Mortimer and her husband, Alessandro Nivola, as a hedge against any image depreciation.

But after gossip blogs speculated whether the neighborhood was over and ran photographs of a moving van — from Celebrity Moving, no less — parked by the couple’s wasabi-green house on Dean Street, some acknowledged that the locals would have to find a new sport in lieu of Heath-spotting.

“It’s like being in Kruger National Park,” Mr. Andersen said, referring to the South African game preserve, “and knowing there are only seven black rhinos.

“If you’ve seen one,” he said, “you’ve seen it.”

[Mikaela]

Wow, Clarissa. I'm totally with you in dubbing this Superficial. With a capital S. But thanks for posting it! 

If people in Brooklyn manage to build so much shallow ego around the relative fame and cool of their street and neighbourhood, and their anxiety levels spike to high heaven once one little thing changes that makes other shallow people think their place of living not-so-cool-anymore.... All I can say is, they're incredibly, unbelievably fortunate to have nothing else to worry about in their lives. But I bet it's the article writer who is this shallow, rather than most Brooklyn residents. At least I hope so.

The article, such as it is, also puts the lie to the frequently-before expressed view that in Brooklyn Heath and Michelle could live in peace and go relatively unnoticed about their day. Here it seems everyone's been on the highest alert to spot them and to brag about it afterwards.  Somehow I find that hard to believe.

[serious crayons]

The article, such as it is, also puts the lie to the frequently-before expressed view that in Brooklyn Heath and Michelle could live in peace and go relatively unnoticed about their day. Here it seems everyone's been on the highest alert to spot them and to brag about it afterwards.  Somehow I find that hard to believe.

I bet there's some truth, though, in the implication that there are two levels of acknowledging celebrities. The neighbors ACT cool -- they aren't going to jump up and down, or run over in restaurants to bug them -- but they aren't quite as oblivious as they like to pretend. I think there are very few people these days who don't get at least kind of excited about spotting celebrities. I know if I saw Heath walking down the street I would be paying more attention than I would to some other random pedestrian. And I'd sure tell people about it afterward.