The civil trial against South Korean pop star and actor Rain is scheduled to begin tomorrow in US District Court.
Rain — whose real name is Jung Ji-hoon — and his producers are being sued over the performer’s abrupt cancellation of a June 2007 concert in Honolulu. Jury selection is scheduled to begin tomorrow and Rain could be called to testify as early as Wednesday.
Click Entertainment Inc alleges in the suit that Rain and his producers defrauded it of more than US$500,000 paid in licensing fees. Also, it is seeking additional damages for the cost of staging the event.
The concert was canceled just days before the scheduled June 15, 2007, performance, disappointing many fans who paid as much as US$300 for a ticket and flew from as far as away as Japan and South Korea. It was the first stop on the “Rain’s Coming” US tour.
Performances in San Francisco, Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles were also canceled. The Los Angeles show was canceled less than two hours before show time.
Concert organizers at the time said they called off the performances because of a copyright challenge from record company Rain Corp. A court later dismissed the case.
Michael Jackson, on the other hand, is certainly making it rain.
The Gloved One’s run of 50 comeback concerts in London starting on July 8 sold out around five hours after tickets went on sale, the promoters said on Friday.
The 50-year-old announced last week that he would return to the stage 12 years after his last series of concerts, although the original commitment was to 10 gigs at London’s O2 Arena.
That has now expanded to 50, ending on Feb. 24, 2010.
Hundreds of thousands of tickets went on sale to registered fans earlier in the week, and ahead of Friday’s general release hundreds of people queued at the O2 Arena to ensure they made it to the eagerly awaited shows. Many had camped out overnight.
Also on Friday came news that an arrest warrant had been issued for Lindsay Lohan. The US$50,000 warrant issued by the Beverly Hills Superior Court stems from her 2007 conviction for drunken driving, police said.
The 22-year-old Mean Girls star was arrested in May 2007 after crashing her Mercedes in Beverly Hills. She was arrested again last July after the mother of her former personal assistant reported that her car was being chased by a sport utility vehicle. Police said Lohan was at the wheel of the SUV and she was arrested in Santa Monica.
In connection with those cases, Lohan pleaded guilty to two counts of being under the influence of cocaine, and no contest to two counts of driving with a blood-alcohol level above 0.08 percent and one count of reckless driving.
A cool US$28 million dollars could get you living right next door to the Playboy Mansion, known for Playboy sex empire founder Hugh Hefner’s extravagant parties.
Hefner has put his family home up for sale, the Los Angeles Times has reported.
The two-story, 700m² English manor-style residence was built in 1929 and has five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a library and commons for staff. Some of the walls are hand-painted, and there is a hand-carved staircase.
The home sits on one hectare, borders the Los Angeles Country Club and has a pool. Hefner, who turns 83 next month, owns the house with his second wife, 1989’s Playmate of the Year. The couple are separated but have two sons, who are soon to head to college. Hefner has lived at the neighboring Playboy Mansion with three young women for the past several years.
A sexier sex symbol, Robert Pattinson, says he wasn’t prepared to film his first graphic scenes for the upcoming period drama Little Ashes. The Twilight actor portrays Spanish artist Salvador Dali as a young man. He tells GQ magazine’s April issue that he was uncomfortable as crew members watched and giggled during his steamy interlude with a male co-star.
“In a lot of ways, I was kind of crossing lines of what I thought I was comfortable doing,” he said. “I had to do all this naked stuff.” The British heartthrob says he wanted to try “something weird,” but the part was more difficult than he’d anticipated. Pattinson has found a way to take the edge off before: he took a quarter of a Valium pill before his Twilight audition.
Alan Livingston, an entertainment industry executive who brought “Beatlemania” to the US, died of age-related causes at his Beverly Hills home, the Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday. He was 91.
Livingston signed the Beatles in the 1960s while president of Capitol Records and also created the popular children’s character Bozo the Clown in the 1940s.
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