On a night when the theme of change and cultural fusion echoed in lyrics, performances and acceptance speeches, Colombian rocker Juanes who’s become a voice for social issues walked away as king of the Latin Grammys.
At Thursday’s Houston debut of the ceremony, the 36-year-old singer-songwriter from Medellin who started a foundation to help land-mine victims, swept awards in all five categories for which he was nominated, including record of the year and album of the year.
He also set a new record for total wins, bringing his total Latin Grammy trophies to 17.
“I can’t believe it. I am very, very happy, very grateful to life, to music, to God, to the Academy,’’ Juanes said after the awards, noting that he had trouble containing his amazement while accepting the awards.
Hollywood mermaid Daryl Hannah will be on board a militant conservationist group’s ship for a looming confrontation with Japan’s whalers in the Antarctic, the captain said last week.
“Daryl is joining our group,” Sea Shepherd captain Paul Watson said. “She’ll be on board — she’s joining us at the end of the month.”
Hannah, blonde star of Ron Howard’s 1984 mermaid fantasy Splash and more recently featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies, will be on the Sea Shepherd’s flagship the Steve Irwin for its annual joust with the whalers.
The ship was named after the Australian environmentalist and television “crocodile hunter” killed by a stingray in 2006.
While Hannah has been busy preparing to save the whales, fellow Hollywood luminary Lindsay Lohan has raised a few eyebrows after referring to President-elect Barack Obama as the country’s “first colored president,” using the outdated and derogatory term in a TV interview.
Describing her experience on Election Day on the show Access Hollywood, Lohan said: “It was really exciting. It’s an amazing feeling. It’s our first colored president.”
Interviewer Maria Menounos didn’t question the 22-year-old actress on her use of the term, which dates back to the period when blacks were legally discriminated against. Access Hollywood also didn’t cite her remark in its online story, but did post an “extended interview” video on its Web site that included the remark. A spokesman for the syndicated entertainment news program said in a statement on Wednesday: “We believe the word in question that Ms Lohan used was unintelligible.”
Moving from “foot in mouth” to “foot in someone else’s mouth”; Rapper Kanye West was arrested on Friday after a fracas outside a nightclub.
The 31-year-old star was detained early Friday after an incident involving a photographer outside the Tup Tup Palace bar in Newcastle, northern England, but was later released without charge.
On the other side of the Atlantic, things are also looking up for Britney Spears. Last year the troubled star was taking court-ordered drug and alcohol tests, had fired her managers, was losing custody of her kids, and some journalists were preparing her obituary. This week, she was caring for her children like any mother would when she rushed 2-year-old Jayden James to a hospital after a bad reaction to something he ate. As for her career, only one week ago she was on stage performing with Madonna and on the brink of an extraordinary musical comeback.
Last-minute show cancellations may be a thing of the recent past for Britney, but sadly not so for R’n’B singer Rihanna. The globe-trotting diva canceled a sold-out concert in the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Friday because of security concerns, event organizers said. Indonesia has been on alert in case of reprisals after three Islamist militants were executed early this week for their parts in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings that killed 202 people.
With six kids to watch over, Changeling star Angelina Jolie told the BBC she plans to fade away from acting to spend more time raising her family, but she stopped short of pledging to quit her craft for good. “I don’t plan to keep acting very long, I’m ready to do a few things now and fade away and get ready to be a grandma one day,” Jolie told the British broadcaster in an interview posted on the BBC Web site on Thursday.
In other news, a southern California dental assistant who admitted to stalking Miss Congeniality actress Sandra Bullock has been placed on three years’ probation. Marcia Valentine, 47, was arrested in April of last year after police said she tried to run down Bullock’s husband, motorcycle mogul Jesse James, outside the couple’s home in Sunset Beach.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby