Category: people

Tempestuous soprano Angela Gheorghiu and turbulent tenor Roberto Alagna were once the opera world’s best-publicized love match, married on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House by then-mayor Rudy Giuliani. This weekend, their long-rumored separation became public via dueling statements to the press.

“As the house photographer for the Factory from 1964 to 1967, Mr. Finkelstein created spontaneous portraits not only of Factory regulars like [Edie] Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga but also of the artists and celebrities who drifted in and out of the Warhol orbit.”

Prince Philip said the quality of design had in some areas declined, and he picked televisions as an example. Harking back to an age when televisions were simple, he said: “To work out how to operate a TV set you practically have to make love to the thing.”

Usher Sylvia Bailey, 84, “has been taking the bus to and from her home in the Jersey Shore town of Union Beach to the Port Authority Bus Terminal for 50 years, and who knows how many thousand round-trips.”

“I live in Switzerland but I pay my taxes in France. I don’t know the exact extent of my fortune because I am not a businessman. For a gala concert, I get 60,000 euros. If I need money, I go to Abu Dhabi or Japan, where I can get 100,000 euros. I get 25 centimes for every CD sale, but I don’t get anything for DVDs or broadcasts or cinema transmissions. …. In the opera house, I get roughly 13,000 euros a performance.”

“Ken Kesey once said the problem with journalism was that it made a writer more of seismograph than a lightning rod, but he hadn’t considered Hilburn work’s as a sharp voice of demanding appraisal and something akin to a newsprint conscience for a community that measures merit in spun gold and platinum.”

“Opened in 2003 in a former garage in the East Village, Issue Project Room” – which Fiol founded, directed and steered to stability – “quickly established a place in the small circuit of downtown clubs and makeshift theaters that specialize in the fringes of contemporary music … [as well as] literary readings and art exhibitions.”

“The French culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, last night faced calls for his resignation over an autobiography published four years ago in which he described paying ‘young boys’ for sex while travelling abroad. Mitterrand was the first major political figure to leap to the defence of the film director Roman Polanski when he was arrested….”

“On the block … were more than 460 lots from the soprano’s home overlooking Central Park. With a standing-room-only crowd of fans competing against bidders on the Internet and telephone, the auction’s total of $519,075 exceeded the pre-sale estimate of about $253,000 to $378,000.”

“[B]lessed with an elegant bone structure, an endless supply of airy bons mots and an Unsinkable Molly Brown attitude, [she] broke into the movies in the early 1980s with small roles [in low-budget films] … From this less than promising debut she built an idiosyncratic career, appearing in advertisements for Louis Vuitton and Nike” and in numerous mainstream movies and TV series.