Kevin Jonas, the oldest sibling of pop group the Jonas Brothers and a former hairdresser have married at a French-style chateau in suburban New York. People magazine reported a heavy snowstorm bore down on Saturday’s wedding of 22-year-old Kevin Jonas and 23-year-old Danielle Delesea. Despite the weather, the couple told People that the wedding went on as planned. About 400 relatives and friends attended. Celebrity event planner Michael Russo created a fairy-tale forest theme that included heated white tents with 4.2m trees and crystals made to look like icicles.
It took more than a year, but Baltimore officials finally decided where to put a bust of rocker Frank Zappa that was given to the city by his fans in Lithuania. The eccentric musician’s statue will be erected outside a public library. Zappa never visited Lithuania, but his music was popular there among the avant garde. A Lithuanian fan club erected a Zappa statue in the Lithuanian capital, and last year donated a replica to Baltimore, the singer’s birthplace.
Baltimore’s public arts commission considered multiple locations, including the bohemian Fells Point waterfront, before deciding on the working-class Highlandtown neighborhood known for its Greek restaurants.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Carly Simon felt like quitting the music business last year after a once-promising relationship with a record label ended in a messy breakup. But she now feels reinvigorated after her son, Ben Taylor, pushed her to make an indie album, Never Been Gone, on which she revisits her most famous songs.
The 64-year-old singer-songwriter says the largely acoustic arrangements enabled her to reconnect with how she felt when she first wrote songs like her ironic first hit That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be or The Right Thing to Do before her producers added instrumental tracks.
She had been wooed by Starbucks’ Hear Music label which had successfully marketed albums by Paul McCartney and ex-husband James Taylor through its coffee houses. But just days before the April 2008 release of her Brazilian-flavored CD This Kind of Love, her first collection of original songs in eight years, Starbucks announced it was pulling back from the music business. Simon felt like her record had been “aborted” without the promised marketing push.
Fifty years after jazz legend Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, the US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to honor the landmark album’s contribution to the genre.
Davis collaborated on the record with saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb.
Columbia Records released the album in August 1959. The original album — only 37 minutes — had a huge impact that extended beyond jazz to other types of music, from rock musicians such as the Allman Brothers and Carlos Santana to minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
The unexpected collapse of the recall campaigns is being viewed through many lenses, most of them skewed and self-absorbed. The international media unsurprisingly focuses on what they perceive as the message that Taiwanese voters were sending in the failure of the mass recall, especially to China, the US and to friendly Western nations. This made some sense prior to early last month. One of the main arguments used by recall campaigners for recalling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers was that they were too pro-China, and by extension not to be trusted with defending the nation. Also by extension, that argument could be
Aug. 4 to Aug. 10 When Coca-Cola finally pushed its way into Taiwan’s market in 1968, it allegedly vowed to wipe out its major domestic rival Hey Song within five years. But Hey Song, which began as a manual operation in a family cow shed in 1925, had proven its resilience, surviving numerous setbacks — including the loss of autonomy and nearly all its assets due to the Japanese colonial government’s wartime economic policy. By the 1960s, Hey Song had risen to the top of Taiwan’s beverage industry. This success was driven not only by president Chang Wen-chi’s
Last week, on the heels of the recall election that turned out so badly for Taiwan, came the news that US President Donald Trump had blocked the transit of President William Lai (賴清德) through the US on his way to Latin America. A few days later the international media reported that in June a scheduled visit by Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) for high level meetings was canceled by the US after China’s President Xi Jinping (習近平) asked Trump to curb US engagement with Taiwan during a June phone call. The cancellation of Lai’s transit was a gaudy
The centuries-old fiery Chinese spirit baijiu (白酒), long associated with business dinners, is being reshaped to appeal to younger generations as its makers adapt to changing times. Mostly distilled from sorghum, the clear but pungent liquor contains as much as 60 percent alcohol. It’s the usual choice for toasts of gan bei (乾杯), the Chinese expression for bottoms up, and raucous drinking games. “If you like to drink spirits and you’ve never had baijiu, it’s kind of like eating noodles but you’ve never had spaghetti,” said Jim Boyce, a Canadian writer and wine expert who founded World Baijiu Day a decade
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