Incredible photos of untouched landscapes around the world

By Jessica Allen - Sunday, April 21, 2013 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photographer Sebastião Salgado was high on a mountaintop somewhere between the town of Lalibela and Simien National Park in northern Ethiopia when he found out, via satellite phone, that Barack Obama had been elected President of the United States. When the 69-year-old Brazilian told the 19 Ethiopian men who accompanied him on the two-month-long, 850-km walk, they celebrated. “Obama would have never imagined how elated these people were in this corner of the planet,” he says, “because he won.”

The resulting 245 photographs of this trek, and the others Salgado took over eight years—travelling by boat, balloon, plane, car and foot in 32 different locations, still untouched by the sometimes-heavy hand of human progress—form Genesis, his latest exhibit, which opens May 4 at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto as part of this year’s Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival.

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Welcome to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Rush

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, April 18, 2013 at 7:06 AM - 0 Comments

Alex Lifeson, Neil Peart, and Geddy Lee, May 7, 1984 (CP)

The first time Maclean’s wrote about Rush was in our July 12, 1976, issue. Back then, Geddy Lee was 22 and the band’s music sent “teen-age fans into paroxysms of ecstasy.” But offstage, the three members were described as “recklessly normal.”

Not much has changed.

Rush’s fans are, well, unique. It was their ardour, after all, that persuaded the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to include Rush among its 2013 inductees. Tonight, Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters will present Rush at the Hall of Fame ceremony in Los Angeles 10:30 p.m.

In an interview earlier today in Los Angeles, the band reflected on the long-awaited honour and the company they will share in receiving it: “It’s a constellation and we’re one little spark of light up there,” said Neil Peart.

“You can’t help but think about your context and all that we’ve done together, and what it’s been like to be a band for all these years,” added Geddy Lee. “And to receive this nice pat on the back.”

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Man of Steel? Come on!

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, April 17, 2013 at 3:30 PM - 0 Comments

Well, that was pretty much a perfect way to spend three minutes.

The folks over at the Atlantic agree, too.

Earlier today they wrote, “We’ve been a little cold on Zack Snyder’s heavenly, heavily therapeutic Superman adaptation, Man of Steel,” referring to the already released wistful, Terrence Malick-like trailers, “but we’re starting to change our minds with the fabulous new trailer that debuted last night—hell, everyone is.”

As luck would have it, I recently re-watched the 1978 Superman, directed by Richard Donner, written by Mario Puzo and starring a then relatively unknown Christopher Reeve. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this film as a kid. It had everything: action, suspense, romance–and it was hilarious to boot! The music alone, by John Williams (obviously), was enough to send me and my brother into hysterics. I get goosebumps just thinking of it. And while it’s true that some of the special effects and set design haven’t lived up in the same way those from other films of the era have (when Krypton begins to fall apart, for example, you get the feeling the set is made of spray-painted light-weight styrofoam), they weren’t as distracting as I assumed they might be. (OK, the iridescent Krypton jumpsuits were slightly distracting. But Lex Luthor’s subterranean lair? Come on!)

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Dove’s new ‘real beauty sketches’ video leaves viewers divided

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, April 16, 2013 at 3:50 PM - 0 Comments

On Apr. 14, Dove posted a three-minute video to YouTube promoting their latest ad campaign. “Women are their own worst beauty critics,” they write. “Only four per cent of women around the world consider themselves beautiful.”

Dove, who also sells a deodorant that promises to reduce the unsightly discolouration of women’s armpits, goes on to say they “are committed to creating a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety. So, we decided to conduct a compelling social experiment that explores how women view their own beauty in contrast to what others see.”

The video features Gil Zamora, an FBI forensic artist, who sketches portraits of women based on the physical descriptions they give to him of themselves.  Zamora never sees them during the session.

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The stories behind five photos from the Boston Marathon bombings

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, April 16, 2013 at 1:56 PM - 0 Comments

Carlos Arredondo

Carlos Arredondo appears to clamp the femoral artery of bombing victim Jeffrey Bauman with his hand (Charles Krupa/AP)

Carlos Arredondo, above in the cowboy hat, was captured in a number of photographs helping victims, many of whom had lost limbs.

He had been in the bleachers cheering on a team of five from Maine running for “Mainers” who’d died overseas fighting — including his son Alexander Arredondo.

After the blasts, Arredondo–with his friend Jon Mixon, a Vietnam War veteran, leapt from the bleachers to help. “When we got over there, it was just a pile of bodies—people with legs missing,” Mixon told The Portland Press Herald. “It was absolutely like a war scene. This was worse, because it was all innocent people, just defenseless. They were just lying in a pile, gunpowder all over them, burnt.”

Arredondo vaulted over a snow fence to get to the injured and used his clothes and a towel as a tourniquet. He and Mixon managed to get one spectator, who was missing both legs, into a wheelchair. ”I kept talking to him. I kept saying, ‘Stay with me, stay with me,’ ” Arredondo told the Press Herald.

Several publications have pointed out that the 52-year-old is also a famed peace activist and protestor of the Iraqi war, which claimed the life of his son. In a 2007 interview with the New York Times, Arredondo recounts learning the news:

“I just screamed,” he said. “I said ‘No, no! It can’t be my son.’ “

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The complete list of 2013′s Pulitzer Prize winners

By Jessica Allen - Monday, April 15, 2013 at 3:12 PM - 0 Comments

Since 1917, the Pulitzer Prizes have been honouring excellence in the fields of journalism and the arts across 21 categories. Twenty of these winners win a cash prize of $10,000, while the winner in the Public Service category of the journalism competition–which is always a news organization, rather than an individual–is awarded a gold medal. Winners will receive their awards on May 30th on the Columbia University campus in New York City.

Last year, there was no fiction prize awarded for the first time in 35 years when none of the three finalists received a majority vote from the judges. (2011′s winner was Jennifer Egan for A Visit from the Goon Squad.) This year, however, it looks like the judges could agree that Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son took the cake.

Here is the complete list of the winners this year (find the list of all the finalists here):

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Half of Justin Bieber’s followers are fake, report says

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, April 11, 2013 at 8:07 AM - 0 Comments

Justin Bieber used to have the most Twitter followers of anyone in the world. But a new report says more than 50 per cent of his followers are fake, which means that the 19-year-old Canadian pop star only has the second most Twitter followers of anyone in the world.

According to the website Social Bakers, which monitors and tracks social networks for social media stats and metrics purposes, only 17.8 million of Bieber’s 37.3 million followers are linked to real accounts. That means only 47 per cent of his followers are actual ‘Beliebers’.

“The company spots fake accounts by looking at the number of followers and seeing if genuine tweets have been posted, rather than spam,” says the BBC. “The data also considers fake accounts to continuously tweet buzz phrases such as ‘diet’, ‘make money’ and ‘work from home’.”

What does all this mean? It means that Lady Gaga, who Bieber overtook last year for the title of most Twitter followers, is back on top. After one takes into account the number of fake followers she has, Lady Gaga still has 19 million real Twitter followers compared to Bieber’s 17 million.

CNN announces new interview show hosted by George Stroumboulopoulos

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 4:22 PM - 0 Comments

CBC

CNN has announced that George Stroumboulopoulos will host a weekly interview program.

The show, still unnamed, will feature in-depth interview and musical performances in the same vein as the Canadian’s CBC talk show George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight.

Filming of the 10-episode series will be taped in front of a studio audience and will begin to air this summer on Friday nights during primetime.

“This isn’t the first time U.S. viewers have seen former MuchMusic VJ Stroumboulopoulos on their screens,” noted Deadline. “In 2006, he hosted The One: Making A Music Star on ABC. A ratings bust, the reality show was cancelled after two weeks.”

CNN is also planning on bringing back the political debate show Crossfire, which was cancelled in 2005 after a 23-year-long run, this June.

In other Strombo-related news, the TV host recently confirmed that he will again appear alongside Oprah Winfrey for her upcoming spring Canadian tour.

Terroir symposium: Food nostalgia

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 9:03 AM - 0 Comments

I always imagined that the cabbage rolls my mom and her sister make–the best, in my books–hail from some recipe that my grandmother’s ancestors brought to Canada from Germany’s Alsace-Lorraine region some 150 years ago.

Nevermind that cabbage rolls and Alsace-Lorraine have little to do with each other. More importantly, it turns out the Vi Moffat, the English woman who lived across the street from my mom and her siblings in Strathroy, Ont., was the one who shared the recipe with my grandmother.

Memories can be tricky.

The 7th annual Terroir hospitality and food industry symposium on Apr. 8 in Toronto, was dedicated to the stories, memories and culture that surround food. The impressive roster of speakers, with nary a French, Spanish or Italian representative in sight–an observation that Scandinavian chef and author Trine Hahnemann pointed out as being indicative of the changing of the guard, so to speak, all had narratives swathed in nostalgic memories to share.

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Nora Ephron’s son to direct HBO documentary about his mother

By Jessica Allen - Friday, April 5, 2013 at 1:05 PM - 0 Comments

Jacob Bernstein, Nora Ephron’s son from her second marriage with journalist Carl Bernstein, will direct and produce a documentary for HBO about his mother, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The “intimate portrait” of the woman who was a jack of all writerly trades–journalist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, novelist and blogger–is called Everything is Copy and will be executive produced by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.

Ephron, who wrote the Academy Award-nominated screenplays for Silkwood and When Harry Met Sally and wrote and directed Sleepless in Seatle, You’ve Got Mail and Julie and Julia, among many others, passed away last June at the age of 71 from pneumonia, a complication arising from acute myeloid leukemia. Ephron first learned of  the condition in 2006 but kept it hidden for many years from both family members and friends.

Her son Jacob recently wrote a touching tribute in the New York Times called, “Nora Ephron’s Final Act” where he recounts his mother’s final moments and the innumerable way he’s missed her since.

And if you haven’t seen Ephron presenting Meryl Streep with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2006, you must:

Film critic Roger Ebert dies after battle with cancer

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, April 4, 2013 at 4:04 PM - 0 Comments

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

Film critic Roger Ebert, 70, passed away Thursday in Chicago after battling cancer since 2002.

Ebert reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years. In his obituary, the paper wrote that he was “without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic.”

He was also a beloved fixture on television for 31 years: In 1975 Coming Soon to a Theater Near You with Chicago Tribune movie critic Gene Siskel launched on WTTW-Channel 11.  Three years later the show moved to PBS and was retitled Sneak Previews. “The duo was on their way to becoming a fixture in American culture,” said the Sun-Times.

The paper noted that Ebert was considered a workhorse, sometime reviewing as many as 285 movies a year. He was also the author of 17 books, including three on The Great Movies, and two on films he hated, not to mention quite tech-savvy: his website has millions of fans and over 840,000 people follow him on Twitter.

• Here’s Jaime J. Weinman on why everyone who truly loves movies loves Ebert
• And here’s video of our film critic explaining why Ebert was number one in the business

In 2002, Ebert was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. In 2006 his lower jaw was removed during treatments, which left him unable to talk or eat.

On Tuesday, he wrote on his blog that he was receiving radiation treatment and that, in addition to writing about movies, he might also write about health: “I may write about what it’s like to cope with health challenges and the limitations they can force upon you. It really stinks that the cancer has returned and that I have spent too many days in the hospital. So on bad days I may write about the vulnerability that accompanies illness. On good days, I may wax ecstatic about a movie so good it transports me beyond illness.”

“He was a renaissance man whose genius was based on film but by no means limited to it,” wrote the Sun-Times, “and who had extraordinary impact on his profession and the world around him.”

He is survived by his wife, a step-daughter and two step-grandchildren.

A boy quits ‘Girls’ after butting heads with creator Lena Dunham

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, April 4, 2013 at 11:41 AM - 0 Comments

Actor Christopher Abbott has quit HBO’s Girls, the show that nobody watches and everybody talks about.

The New York Post reported today that Abbott, who played Charlie–the long-suffering on-again, off-again boyfriend of Marnie–abruptly left the show after butting heads with Girls creator and star Lena Dunham.

“They’ve just started work on Season 3, and Chris is at odds with Lena,” a source told the Post. “He didn’t like the direction things are going in, which seems a bit odd since the show put him on the map.”

In a recent New York Times profile on the boys of Girls, Abbott admitted that he’d never had a full-time job in New York City before Dunham cast him as Charlie. “I did odd jobs. I had a friend who was a carpenter, so I would help him sometimes.” He also seemed enthusiastic about the progression of his character–”I feel like in the first season his view of the world is quite small. So his world opens up a little bit more in Season 2.”–and about Dunham’s writing, saying that “it all comes from real-life situations. So she gave me a bit of back story on who the character is. She told me some stories about what this guy did in this situation, and that would feed so much of who that person is.”

Abbott’s rep confirmed the news adding that the 26-year-old actor is “grateful for the experience of collaborating with Lena, Judd [Apatow], and the entire Girls cast and crew, but right now he’s working on numerous other projects and has decided not to return to the show.”

One project includes working on the feature The Sleepwalker with his former co-star Brady Corbet of the critically acclaimed 2011 film, Martha Marcy May Marlene.

The Post also reports that Dunham has “shaken up the writing staff for the new season.” No word on how those writers will handle Abbott’s character Charlie, who was last seen in the Season 2 finale having sex with Marnie on a desk, exiting the show.

Podcast: Is Gwyneth Paltrow’s new cookbook all good?

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, April 3, 2013 at 1:10 PM - 0 Comments

Julia Belluz wrote about Gwyneth Paltrow’s new cookbook, It’s All Good Here, where she examined the medical risks of elimination diets. Here, Belluz discusses the differences between food allergies and food sensitivities and the science—from brain imaging to psychology—that explains why we buy into celebrity health advice.

Germany to Bieber: You have four weeks to pick up your pet monkey

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, April 2, 2013 at 6:37 PM - 0 Comments

Instagram

So far, this much is clear: Justin Bieber was recently given a tiny capuchin monkey. The gift may have been from record producer Mally Mall, who tweeted the first picture of Bieber with his new pet named “Mally”, or from music producer Jamal Rashid, as a birthday gift for the Canadian singer.

Then Bieber decided it would be a good idea to sneak the 14-week-old monkey into Germany, via his private jet, for the latest European leg of his Believe tour.

But after landing in Munich on March 31, custom officials seized little Mally when Bieber broke strict health laws by failing to produce the necessary documents that are usually required in most places when you try to bring a monkey into their country.

German authorities have given the 19-year-old pop star four weeks to pick him up or else Mally the monkey will be placed “in permanent care”.

The good news is that several zoos have offered to give Mally a home if Bieber doesn’t reclaim him in time. And if history–or TMZ–has taught us anything it’s that maybe Bieber won’t even bother to pick up Mally because last December he gave away his pet hamster named PAC to a random fan. That fan promised to take care of PAC but then Pac died earlier this month.

While Germany waits for Bieber to pick up his pet, Mally is being kept in quarantine in a German shelter. They said in a statement that the monkey should not have even been taken away from its mother until it was at least a year old.

But Darwin–also a capuchin monkey–seemed pretty independent at five months old when he was found wandering alone in a Toronto Ikea parking lot wearing a shearling coat and a diaper. Plus, Darwin is getting a book launch and has his own Twitter handle.

Wait: so does “Mally Bieber”–and he has nearly 34,000 followers compared to Darwin’s 7,500.

Since his European tour began, Bieber has had an Instagram meltdown, was kicked out of a nightclub on his 19th birthday, started a show in London nearly two hours late, collapsed on stage at another London show, fought with photographers and cancelled a show in Portugal.

But with the support of nearly 34 million Twitter followers, Bieber is bound to bounce back.

Much ado about Shakespeare

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, April 2, 2013 at 2:53 PM - 0 Comments

Coriolanus Act V, Scene III (Wikipedia Commons)

Turns out Shakespeare dodged taxes and deliberately tried to make a profit during famines, according to a recent paper published by Aberystwyth University academics.

The study brings to light 15 years worth of court and tax records that show Shakespeare bought grain, malt and barley, stored it, and then tried to resell it at inflated prices during times of famine.

“There was another side to Shakespeare besides the brilliant playwright — as a ruthless businessman who did all he could to avoid taxes, maximise profits at others’ expense and exploit the vulnerable — while also writing plays about their plight to entertain them,” Jayne Archer, a researcher in Renaissance literature at Aberystwyth University, told the Sunday Times.

One of the plays to which she is referring is Coriolanus–the last installment in Shakespeare’s Roman series–about war, conflict and social unrest where peasants revolt after wealthy merchants and politicians create–and to try make money from–a famine. (The play was not without controversy–it was even banned in France during the 1930s.)

So was Shakespeare, “a successful businessman and major landowner in his native Warwickshire who retired an extremely wealthy man,” as the Telegraph says, trying to cool his conscience by writing Coriolanus in the early 17th century?

The public may have to wait for the inevitable onslaught of Ph.D. theses that will be written in light of this new study for new psyche-related revelations on the man who Laurence Olivier once said was “the nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God.”

In the meantime, there’s this: Archer suggests the playwright cared more about providing for his family than he did his literary legacy: “In 1613, having ensured a . . . sustainable future for himself and his family, Shakespeare stopped writing,” she said.

Lena Dunham, Louis CK, Lorne Michaels win Peabody Awards

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, March 28, 2013 at 8:35 AM - 0 Comments

The 72nd annual Peabody Award winners were announced on March 27, 2013.

The recipients of the world’s oldest awards for electronic media were named in a ceremony in the Peabody Gallery on the University of Georgia Campus and they “reflect diversity in content, genre and sources of origination.”

Lena Dunham won for her HBO show Girls, described by the group as a “comedy-drama about the young and the feckless in New York,” while Louis CK won for his FX comedy Louie, a “serrated, boundary-testing take on being a single, showbiz dad.”

Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels picked up a rare individual Peabody for still discovering new comic talents, incubating ideas and nurturing careers” after 38 years as the show’s executive producer.

Documentary honourees include the Smithsonian Channel’s MLK: The Assassination Tapes, “in which rare archival footage was fused into a gripping reconstruction of the events surrounding the Civil Rights leader’s 1968 murder,” and Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, “an HBO film about the performance-art pioneer that’s as challenging and outrageous as she is.”

“Our list of Peabody recipients for 2012 demonstrates the range of superb work,” said Horace Newcomb, director of the Peabody Awards. “From local to national to international, from radio to television, broadcast to cable to web, the Peabody sets the goals for every type of media production. We’ll continue to do this, no matter how the world of electronic media develops.”

The Peabody Awards will be handed out in a ceremony hosted by CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley in Manhattan on May 20.

Find the complete list of winners here.

What is it about Spring Breakers?

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, March 28, 2013 at 7:55 AM - 0 Comments

In Anthony Lane’s recent New Yorker review of Spring Breakers, a movie about four college girls who rob a Chicken Shack restaurant in order to fund a Florida spring break, the film critic writes that two sorts of people will glorify the film: “Real revellers, randy for sensation, out of their heads; and, a block away, coffee-drinking Ph.D.s, musing on the cinema of alienation, too lost inside their heads to break for spring.”

I have a feeling that Lane may be bang on. Last week a friend saw a special screening of the film (it opens in Canada on March 29.) Afterwards she tweeted that a fight almost broke out during the screening when a man shushed some girls, who then called him a c–t. Afterwards, those girls chugged a two-litre bottle of cream soda and a 40 of vodka in the washroom.

But I also think there might be a grey area, for people–like me–who haven’t quite made up their minds on this Bonnie and Clyde-like beach odyssey set in the bowels of contemporary America, or, for that matter, on the director, Harmony Korine.

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Justin Bieber’s neighbour says singer attacked him and why can’t he keep his shirt on?

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 at 8:47 AM - 0 Comments

Bieber at the airport in Lodz, Poland on March 25, 2013 (Tomasz Stanczak/Reuters)

Justin Bieber’s neighbour in Calabasas, CA accused the pop star of battery on Tuesday, March 26, reports TMZ.

The LA County sheriff’s department is investigating claims that the pop star attacked and threatened  a male neighbour.

At first, TMZ reported that the “intense” fight was over a party. Sources connected with Bieber’s security team told them that “the neighbour came on to Justin’s property and began screaming that while Justin was away [overseas] there were people at the house throwing loud parties.” These same sources insist there was no physical contact between Bieber and the neighbour.

But then another source from the neighbourhood told TMZ that the fight was over a Ferrari: “We’re told Bieber had the car delivered to his home last night on a flatbed truck … and this morning, he was racing the vehicle up and down the streets. The neighbour was furious about the deafening noise AND felt Justin was endangering the community by tearing through the streets at breakneck speeds.”

The Canadian singer arrived in Poland on Sunday night and performed on Monday night but TMZ reports that he was back home yesterday morning.

Did Victoria Secret’s bow to pressure and remove controversial underwear?

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 at 6:00 PM - 0 Comments

“What is sexy?” Victoria Secret asks on its Facebook page.

Little did they know that new underwear and apparel from their “PINK” line, like a lace-trimmed thong with “Call me” written across the front, might be too sexy according to those who believe that the lingerie mavens are targeting a younger audience than the college crowd they purport to market toward in their “Bright Young Things” campaign.

The difference in opinion surrounding “PINK’s” intended demographic–not to mention whether any woman really needs a pair of green-and-white polka-dot hipsters reading “Feeling Lucky?”–has sparked an online debate, from their Facebook page covered with hundreds of comments to petitions requesting that they pull their most recent campaign.

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Distant relatives of Richard III want the king’s bones returned to York

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 at 1:54 PM - 0 Comments

University of Leicester/AP

Last September a human skeleton was discovered in a parking lot over top of a Medieval monastery in Leicester, England. On Feb. 4,  those remains were confirmed to be Richard III’s. Now, a group of 15 living relatives of the king want his remains returned to York, where the monarch spent his youth.

“Although the last English king to die in battle perished almost 500 years before the European convention on human rights came into force,” reports the Guardian, “his distant relatives are claiming they were not consulted and that their rights have been breached.”

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Steven A. Cohen allegedly celebrates SAC lawsuit settlement by spending $155 million on a Picasso

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Wikipedia

Steven A. Cohen, one of the richest men in the U.S., has purchased Picasso’s Le Rêve from Vegas mogul Steve Wynn for $155 million, which is estimated to be the highest ever paid for an artwork by a US collector,  reports the New York Post.

What’s more, Cohen–whose hedge fund manages $14 billion in assets–was supposed to have purchased the painting back in 2006 for a  just $139 million. But the day after the deal was made Wynn accidentally knocked his elbow through the painting when he was showing it off to friends, including Nora Ephron, creating a six-inch tear in the canvas.

However in light of Cohen’s recent settlement involving two insider trading lawsuits with the government for $616 million–perhaps the the largest-ever settlement of an insider-trading action–”this was supposed to be a top secret sale,” a source told the Post.

Another source said that the timing is just a coincidence, and that Cohen has coveted this particular Picasso, which depicts the artist’s then 22-year-old mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, for some time.

Le Rêve isn’t the first expensive work of art the billionaire behind the firm SAC Capital Advisors has purchased. After he made his fortune, Cohen went on a fine art spending spree in the mid-2000s: “It’s estimated that Cohen spent $300 million on his collection in just five years,” according to the Associated Press. “He purchased Willem de Kooning’s Woman III for more than $130 million from entertainment mogul David Geffen. A mere $8 million landed a more obscure piece by British artist Damien Hirst — a 14-foot (4.2-meter) tiger shark submerged in formaldehyde.”

The purchase goes against reports that Cohen was considering selling some of the works from his impressive art collection after SAC Capital investors asked to withdraw $1.68 billion following the insider trading civil lawsuit.

Jesse James marries drag racer Alexis DeJoria

By Jessica Allen - Monday, March 25, 2013 at 6:32 PM - 0 Comments

Alexi DeJoria. (J Pat Carter/AP)

Chopper builder and reality TV star Jesse James married drag racer Alexis DeJoria in Malibu on Sunday, according to US Weekly.

“The couple, who got engaged late last year, married at the Malibu home of DeJoria’s father, [ John Paul DeJoria] co-founder of the Paul Mitchell hair care products line and Patron Spirits Company,” writes People. “They exchanged rings designed by jeweler designer Neil Lane.”

This is the fourth marriage for  43-year-old James. He divorced actress Sandra Bullock in June, 2010 after rumours of infidelities with Michelle “Bombshell” McGee–who refers to herself as the “world’s most notorious mistress” on her website–surfaced. He also broke off an engagement to tattoo artist Kat Von D. in September, 2011. That’s when she wrote on her Facebook page that James had cheated on her exactly 19 times.

Alexis DeJoria, 35 years old, began dating James about a year later.

Tilda Swinton goes on display in the name of performance art

By Jessica Allen - Monday, March 25, 2013 at 4:10 PM - 0 Comments

Actress Tilda Swinton might not have been the first person to fall asleep at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But she may have the best excuse.

On Saturday, Swinton performed her one-person art piece called The Maybe, which involved sleeping for eight hours in a glass box outfitted with a pillow and a water jug, on view for gallery goers.

The museum said in a statement that,“an integral part of The Maybe’s incarnation at MoMA in 2013 is that there is no published schedule for its appearance, no artist’s statement released, no museum statement beyond this brief context, no public profile or image issued. Those who find it chance upon it for themselves, live and in real-shared-time: now we see it, now we don’t.”

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Touring the Vatican’s inner sanctum, the Sistine Chapel

By Jessica Allen - Friday, March 22, 2013 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Frank Heuer/laif/Redux

Every day, some 20,000 tourists are corralled like cattle through the hallowed halls of the Vatican palace. Most breeze past artifacts that collectively form what is the most impressive collection of Western art in the world to reach the main attraction: the Sistine Chapel, whose 40-m-long vaulted ceiling Michelangelo, along with five assistants, toiled from 1508 to 1512 to paint. Once visitors squeeze through a set of wooden doors, they crane their necks and gaze 21 m up. No photos are allowed—and there is no talking, which apathetic guards enforce by way of bellowing, “Silenzio!”

For the 115 cardinals who gathered over two days in March to elect the 266th pope, though, the experience was decidedly different. They didn’t enter as the public does from the right of the altar, but from the original entrance, at the back of the papal chapel, which was finished in 1481 under Pope Sixtus IV’s watch. What’s more, this group had the splendid space—doors locked and the 12 windows sealed—all to themselves. Over the course of two days, they must have paused to cast not just their ballots but their eyes around the room. Did they overlook, as most tourists do, the series of wall frescoes painted by Renaissance artists such as Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, who taught Michelangelo to paint when he was just 13? Did they take notice of the 28 portraits of the first popes just above those and consider the weight of history? Maybe. But cardinals are, after all, human, and their gaze must have gravitated to the ceiling that stands as one of the most enduring pieces of art ever created: nine panels depicting scenes from the Book of Genesis set out in an elaborate architectural framework complete with prophets, sibyls, the ancestors of Christ and nameless nude figures.

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