Category: people

“[T]his week, as the great and the good turned out at La Scala opera house in Milan for the opening of a new version of Carmen, many wondered why the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was not in attendance.” Turns out he was at the movies, taking his own bow.

“A shopkeeper from Bethlehem who was branded a terrorist in Sacha Baron Cohen’s film Brüno is seeking $110m (£67.5m) in damages. Ayman Abu Aita is suing Baron Cohen, US talk show host David Letterman and others for libel and slander according to a lawsuit filed in the District of Columbia federal court last week.”

“To countless generations of Bible readers, Jeremiah has been a prophet – indeed, the Hebrew prophet par excellence, his very name a synonym for warning, chastising, and exhorting. To [David] Rosenberg, however, the person (or people) who wrote this book is primarily a poet, whose ‘main form is the prophet’s oracle’ – much as we might say that Shakespeare’s main form was the sonnet.”

“Hrdlicka’s sculptures, drawings and paintings are known as much for their artistic subtlety as their controversial themes. His religious works, in particular, drew protest from believers who considered them blasphemous.” Perhaps his best-known piece is Memorial Against War and Fascism, a “cast iron sculpture of a prostrate figure covered by barbed wire [located outdoors] in downtown Vienna.”

“Wearing white Aran sweaters, the Clancy Brothers, joined by a fellow Irishman, Tommy Makem, won fans with musicality, sentimentality and irreverence, not unlike the Smothers Brothers a few years later, though without their penchant for patter.”

The uninhibited comedienne, considered the front-runner for Best Supporting Actress for playing the mother in Precious, invites two African-American former Oscar nominees onto her BET talk show and asks them (very frankly) about the process of campaigning to win the statuette.

Because he spends so much time on the road, “his workout is a blend of whatever he feels like doing and is [dependent] on available equipment. But Mr. Gunn will always try to perform a series of strength exercises for about 20 minutes a day five times a day.”

“Malcolm Wells, an iconoclastic architect who tirelessly advocated environmentally responsible design and who promoted the idea of earth-sheltered architecture — that is, buildings at least partly underground –” championed “what he called gentle architecture, something that would, as he put it, ‘leave the land no worse than you found it.'”

“All that was on my mind was that the pain was increasing and I needed help. The medical assistants then uttered the magic words, ‘You are having a heart attack but will be okay. An ambulance is on the way.'”

“Surely it is possible for a classical composer or performer to attain celebrity without surrendering to celebrity culture. Such a canny virtuoso might even persuade a terminally distracted Balloon Boy nation to pay attention to a forty-five-minute symphony. Right now, all eyes are trained on the twenty-eight-year-old Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel.”