Category: people

Dale Chihuly is the star of the modern glass movement. But now he’s suing a former employee who used to blow glass for him, raising questions about Chihuly’s artistic role in what has become Chihuly Inc.

Two years ago the Lithuanian government was trying to impeach the country’s president. “Soprano Violeta Urmana was asked to stand as a presidential candidate i”I said, ‘Are you kidding? I don’t belong to a party, either social democrat or liberal.’ ‘Oh, that’s better,’ they said. ‘But what about my singing?’ ‘You can sing, probably one or two times a year.’ My husband couldn’t sleep at night – he thought I shouldn’t do it – but just for one day, I was thinking, ‘Oh, for Lithuania, maybe I should.'”

Composer Ezra Laderman has been elected president of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. The 108 year-old institution, made up of 250 members including artists, architects, writers, and composers gives nearly one million dollars a year to artists, architects, writers, and composers. Laderman is only the sixth composer ever elected to this position.

Placido Domingo has pulled out a Robert Wilson production of Wagner’s “Die Walküre” in Paris. “Unfortunately, my timetable does not allow me to be fully devoted to such intensive work. Rather than performing an approximation of (Wilson’s) conception, it is my duty … to withdraw so that another singer, who will have more rehearsal time, can make that conception his own.”

An Australian woman tried to get another woman to stop talking on her cell phone during a movie in a theatre in Texas. Australian Pauline Clayton said “the woman stood up over her, started shouting expletives at her and then stormed out of the cinema, in the town of Webster, just outside Houston. A short time later two Texas police officers walked into the cinema and escorted Ms Clayton out.”

Amitabh Bachchan is one of Bollywood’s biggest stars. So when he got sick recently, it was very big news in India. “After Mr. Bachchan checked in, traffic near the hospital doubled. Dozens of television crews kept a 24-hour vigil; even the state-owned Doordarshan network reported on Mr. Bachchan’s illness 63 times in one week.”

“J. P. Donleavy, the American author who skyrocketed to international fame half a century ago with The Ginger Man, his debut novel, remains a cult figure in Ireland, the country that has provided the setting for much of his work.” He lives like a hermit on a palatial estate in the town of Mullingar, and rarely ventures out into the world. But a new film deal and the news that Donleavy, now 80 years old, may be about to sell his papers to a university, has the reclusive author back in the spotlight.

Nasdijj claimed to be a native American and wrote a memoir that drew raves. But in tracking down the author, it appears Nasdijj might not be who he says he is. Is Nasdijj the reinvention of a struggling white writer of gay erotica?

“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has been called the conscience of the [Russian] nation, but his reputation has risen and fallen as tumultuously as Russia itself since the collapse of the Soviet Union.” So what are the odds that the former exile would suddenly become the biggest TV star in the country he has spent his life critiquing?

The world may never see a better advertisement for 80 than Maya Plisetskaya. Gliding on to the stage at Moscow’s Kremlin Palace Theatre, at the end of a glittering gala on her actual birthday, the stunningly fresh-faced ballerina dances a lilting solo piece written for her by choreographer Roland Petit. And then, after a standing ovation from the 6,000-strong audience, she does it again.