Category: people

On getting married: “You’re less likely to get divorced if you do it sensibly, but then you’d just die of boredom. So you should do it rashly.” On lap-dancing and porn acting: “It’s not any big deal. Good for you while you have it, you won’t be able to do it for long and then you can get a job as a typist or whatever.” On sex in old age (she’s 78): “Well, I think, yes, it’s part of being alive isn’t it? But it’s distasteful to the young.” On how much of what she tells journalists is true: “Ooh, about 60%”

“A lawsuit against Frank O. Gehry over an alleged agreement related to the proceeds from sales of jewelry designed by the famed architect was dismissed Monday by a Los Angeles judge. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Jane L. Johnson granted a motion by Gehry’s lawyers to throw out the case on grounds that Fred Nicholas, who helped bring the suit, never demonstrated that such an agreement was in place. … Gehry and Nicholas, both 80, had been friends for about half their lives.”

“[H]er name came up early in the episode, set in 1963, as the show’s ad executives were meeting with developers to discuss plans to knock down Penn Station to make way for the new Madison Square Garden. … After one of the agency execs reads from a Huxtable piece condemning the plans, one of the developers gives him a sour look. ‘Ada Louise Huxtable is as green as that folder,’ he retorts….”

Chopin composed here, George Sand wrote and Voltaire lived with his mistress. “But according to a group of furious Parisian luminaries, the Hôtel Lambert is facing ‘imminent disaster’ from the modernising zeal of its new owner, a member of the Qatari royal family.”

“In what now appears as a disastrous decision to raise funds, Leibovitz took a 24-million-dollar loan from Art Capital Group (ACG) — in effect a high-end pawn broker — in December 2008 using her own photographs as collateral. That debt is due September 8 and if she can’t pay up, she could lose her life’s work.”

A principal of New York City Ballet and London Festival Ballet during the 1960s, he co-founded the New London Ballet and later worked as a freelance choreographer. “He was especially known for evening-long productions that choreographically retold familiar stories from literature or opera” such as Anna Karenina, The Three Musketeers and Dr. Zhivago.

“Not many big-name movie directors deserve to be called artists. Among those who do, few take the label as seriously as David Lynch. The director of Mulholland Dr. and Blue Velvet has avidly pursued painting, photography and sculpture in between his idiosyncratic film projects. Starting Sept. 12, the master of weirdness will exhibit some of his recent works in [a] solo gallery show” in Santa Monica.

“Few Italians since Fellini have had such an impact in the United States” as the man his fans and courtiers know as “the maestro” – “from his flower-child-era film of Romeo and Juliet to his opulent productions at the Metropolitan Opera. As he himself is the first to note: ‘I am very much loved’.”

He was “a prolific and populist cultural critic who founded a literary journal, Raritan: A Quarterly Review, and … a founder of Library of America, the nonprofit publisher of American classics.”

“Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said it owns part of the $24 million loan to photographer Annie Leibovitz that led to the breach-of-contract lawsuit she faces, and offered to work with her to ‘resolve her financing needs.'” It said it has “proposed to Art Capital,” the creditor pursuing the suit, “that we terminate the current loan agreement with their affiliate so that we can work directly with Ms. Leibovitz.” Art Capital denied that Goldman Sachs had made such a proposal.