Category: people

“[She] is being sued by an Italian photographer who says she used his pictures without permission. Paolo Pizzetti claims Ms Leibovitz used photos he took in Venice and Rome, and passed them off as her own in a 2009 calendar for a coffee company.”

“If [our sex symbols] do have the temerity to grow older, we expect them to be like Loren and segue seamlessly from sexpot youthfulness to granny glamour. We find it more difficult to fathom when, like Bardot, they choose to retire from public life … and refuse to care about the creeping onset of their decrepitude.”

“Art only flourished in the Renaissance because it was subsidised by the rich and the Church,” the collector points out. “Perhaps even in those days people were more fascinated by how much art fetched, than the art itself.”

“Some experts say filing for bankruptcy reorganization could be the best option for Leibovitz, 59, who has put up as collateral her three historic Greenwich Village townhouses, an upstate property and work.”

“A French filmmaker whose documentary about a violent street gang in El Salvador provoked controversy earlier this year has been found shot in the head. The body of Christian Poveda, 52, was discovered in a car in Tonacatepeque, a poor rural area 10 miles outside the capital San Salvador. … La Vida Loca (Crazy Life), Poveda’s latest film, focused on the hopeless and brutal lives of various fantastically tattooed members of [the] Mara 18 [gang].”

“Secret MI5 files released today show that the secret services intended [in the 1950s] to imprison Wanamaker in an internment camp ‘in the event of an emergency with Russia’, because of his communist sympathies. The Chicago-born theatre director and actor” — who’d “moved to Britain after he was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee” — “went on to raise millions of pounds to rebuild Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London….”

“The Americans for the Arts has announced the recipients of its 2009 National Arts Awards, which will be handed out on Oct. 5 at a ceremony in New York.”

“Entertainer and activist Bill Cosby returned to Detroit on Tuesday to help Detroit Public Schools emergency financial manager Robert Bobb take to the streets his message that city schools will get better. Wearing T-shirts that read: ‘Education is free! Get it now!’ the pair went door-to-door in a northwest Detroit neighborhood to support Bobb’s campaign to restore the schools and change the culture.”

“TS Eliot’s reputation as one of the past century’s most austere and solemn poets will be blown apart by a major new exhibition opening next month casting him in a far softer light: as a champion of lesbian fiction and compassionate father figure to struggling writers.”