Month: March 2017

It was 50 years ago today — almost — that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.

The English city of Liverpool is getting set to celebrate the half-centenary of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” one of the most influential albums by local heroes The Beatles.

The city announced Wednesday that it has commissioned 13 artists to create works based on the album’s 13 tracks. They include choreographer Mark Morris’ dance tribute to the title song, cabaret artist Meow Meow’s “outlandish procession” based on “Lovely Rita” and a mural by U.S. artist Judy Chicago inspired by “Fixing a Hole.”

There will also be a singalong by 64 choirs of the jaunty “When I’m Sixty-Four.”

The works will have their world premieres at venues across Liverpool between May 25 and June 16. On June 1 — the anniversary of the album’s release — the city will host a fireworks extravaganza by French pyrotechnic artist Christophe Berthonneau.

Tired of touring

By the second half of the 1960s, The Beatles had tired of touring. They played their last live concert in August 1966 and devoted their energies and creativity to the studio. “Sgt. Pepper” was recorded at London’s Abbey Road studios over five month in late 1966 and early 1967, and released on June 1, 1967.

Incorporating technological innovation and diverse musical influences — including Indian classical, English music hall and trippy psychedelia — it topped the charts in Britain and the U.S. and was instantly hailed as a rock ’n’ roll landmark.

‘“Sgt. Pepper’ pushed creative boundaries and we want to do exactly the same,” said Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson. “This is a festival which brings high-end art into the mainstream and gives it a Liverpool twist which is thought-provoking, sometimes cheeky and always entertaining.”
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A travel company is offering a chance for well heeled travelers to dive the wreck of the RMS Titanic.

Beginning in May of next year, Blue Marble Private says it will offer a chance for nine travelers to dive some 4,000 meters below the surface of the ocean to see the famous wreck.

According to the company’s website, customers will dive “in a specially designed titanium and carbon fiber submersible, guided by a crew of experts.”

“You will glide over the ship’s deck and famous grand staircase capturing a view that very few have seen, or ever will,” the company added.

Tourists will also “explore Titanic’s massive debris field, home to numerous artifacts strewn across the ocean floor, nearly undisturbed for over a century,” according to Blue Marble Private founder Elizabeth Ellis.

According to CNN, the first trip is already sold out. The price for the eight-day adventure? $105,129 per person, which is about double the price charged by Deep Ocean Expeditions charged when it brought tourists to the wreck in 2012.

Time to visit the famous wreck may be running out.

CNN reported that a 2016 study said “extremophile bacteria” will likely dissolve what’s left of the ill-fated ship within 15 to 20 years.

In the early hours of April 15, 1912, the “unsinkable” Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic while making its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City. On board were 2,224 passengers, more than 1,500 of whom died as the ship quickly sunk.

The wreckage was first discovered 32 years ago.
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Chuck Barris, whose game show empire included The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and that infamous factory of cheese, The Gong Show, died at 87.

Barris died of natural causes Tuesday afternoon at his home in Palisades, New York, according to publicist Paul Shefrin, who announced the death on behalf of Barris’ family.

Barris made game show history right off the bat, in 1966, with The Dating Game, hosted by Jim Lange. The gimmick: a young female questions three males, hidden from her view, to determine which would be the best date. Sometimes the process was switched, with a male questioning three females. But in all cases the questions were designed by the show’s writers to elicit sexy answers.

Future celebrities

Celebrities and future celebrities who appeared as contestants included Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Martin and a pre-Charlie’s Angels Farrah Fawcett, introduced as “an accomplished artist and sculptress” with a dream to open her own gallery.

After the show became a hit on both daytime and nighttime TV, the Barris machine accelerated. New products included The Newlywed Game, The Parent Game, The Family Game and even The Game Game.

At one point Barris was supplying the television networks with 27 hours of entertainment a week, mostly in five-days-a-week daytime game shows.

The grinning, curly-haired Barris became a familiar face as creator and host of The Gong Show, which aired from 1976 to 1980.

Patterned after the Major Bowes Amateur Hour show that was a radio hit in the 1930s, the program featured performers who had peculiar talents and, often, no talent at all. When the latter appeared on the show, Barris would strike an oversize gong, the show’s equivalent of vaudeville’s hook. The victims would then be mercilessly berated by the manic Barris, with a hat often yanked down over his eyes and ears, and a crew of second-tier celebrities.

Occasionally, someone would actually launch a successful career through the show. One example was the late country musician BoxCar Willie, who was a 1977 Gong Show winner.

Known as

He called himself “The King of Daytime Television,” but to critics he was “The King of Schlock” or “The Baron of Bad Taste.”

As The Gong Show and Barris’ other series were slipping, he sold his company for a reported $100 million in 1980 and decided to go into films.

He directed and starred in The Gong Show, a thundering failure that stayed in theaters only a week.

Afterward, a distraught Barris checked into a New York hotel and wrote his autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, in two months. In it, he claimed to have been a CIA assassin.

The book (and the 2002 film based on it, directed by George Clooney) were widely dismissed by disbelievers who said the creator of some of television’s most lowbrow game shows had allowed his imagination to run wild when he claimed to have spent his spare time traveling the world, quietly rubbing out enemies of the United States.

“It sounds like he has been standing too close to the gong all those years,” quipped CIA spokesman Tom Crispell. “Chuck Barris has never been employed by the CIA and the allegation that he was a hired assassin is absurd,” Crispell added.

Barris, who offered no corroboration of his claims, was unmoved.

“Have you ever heard the CIA acknowledge someone was an assassin?” he once asked.

Wrote a book

Seeking escape from the Hollywood rat race, he moved to a villa in the south of France in the 1980s with his girlfriend and future second wife, Robin Altman, and made only infrequent returns to his old haunts over the next two decades.

Back in the news in 2002 to help publicize “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” Barris said his shows were a forerunner to today’s popular reality TV series.

Born in Philadelphia in 1929, Charles Barris was left destitute, along with his sister and their mother, when his dentist father died of a stroke.

After graduating from the Drexel Institute of Technology in 1953, he took a series of jobs, including book salesman and fight promoter.

After being dropped from a low-level job at NBC, he found work at ABC, where he persuaded his bosses to let him open a Hollywood office, from which he launched his game-show empire. He also had success in the music world. He wrote the 1962 hit record Palisades Park, which was recorded by Freddy Cannon.

Barris’ first marriage, to Lynn Levy, ended in divorce. Their daughter, Della, died of a drug overdose in 1998. He married his third wife, Mary, in 2000.
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Paul McCartney’s “Flowers in the Dirt” box is as much an archeology project as a reissue, in which listeners can discover the bones of a landmark album that could have been made but wasn’t.

 

Two of the reissue’s three audio discs are devoted to McCartney’s songwriting collaboration with Elvis Costello in 1987 and 1988, which produced some 15 songs. Listening to the work, some of it first made available this week, it’s hard not to wonder why they didn’t make a duet album like Costello later did with Burt Bacharach. Instead, they decided not to alter their original plan.

 

The mythical disc could have started with “My Brave Face” and “Veronica,” two of each man’s biggest hits of the 1980s. And that was only the beginning.

 

“Looking back, you could say that,” McCartney told The Associated Press. “If we’d just done a few more of these demos, we could have made a crazy album. But we didn’t. That was as far as we got.”

 

McCartney initiated the partnership at the suggestion of his manager. The former Beatle was looking for varied sounds, styles and producers as he began work on a new album. McCartney and Costello worked for a few weeks in a room above McCartney’s studio in Sussex, England, where they’d write a song a day and immediately go downstairs to record it, sitting with acoustic guitars and singing together.

 

“There were many echoes, working with Elvis and working with John [Lennon], because I know Elvis is a big Beatles fan,” McCartney said. “He was a John fan, he wears glasses, he plays guitar right-handed.”

 

They’re all from Liverpool, too. McCartney worked with Costello as he did with Lennon, two men with acoustic guitars sitting across from one another. With McCartney left-handed, it felt to him like looking into a mirror.

 

“I think the key was not to turn up in short trousers with my Fan Club card sticking out of my top pocket,” Costello said. “I’d been asked to write songs in 1987, knowing what I know, having done what I’d done for that whole 10 years, which seemed like a long time then. Paul knows what he’s done and he knows I love him.

 

“That said, you’re bound to look up sometimes and think, ‘Bloody hell, it’s him!’,” he said.

 

In this week’s reissue, one disc contains nine of those 15 songs, recorded the day they were written. Another disc features the same songs produced by the two men later with a band added, primarily sung by McCartney since it was his album, after all.

 

To a certain extent, something is lost in translation.

 

Take the song “Tommy’s Coming Home,” for instance. Inspired fun with McCartney and Costello singing together, the tempo slows and the song drags in the full band version.

 

“I didn’t realize until looking back later that these demos had a special groove and a freshness and, I think on a few of the recorded versions, we lost some of that freshness,” McCartney said. “It gives an idea of the spontaneity of the writing. There’s a time that you regret that we didn’t just say, ‘This is it, this is good enough.’ Often when you don’t think you’re making the final record, you’re a bit looser … I think some of those performances are better than the ones on the record.”

 

The two-man recordings “have a lot of charm and a good deal of cheek,” Costello said. “You can almost hear us laughing at loud at what I call, ‘the Mersey cadences.’ It’s in the blood. It’s in the water. It’s in him and it’s got to come out.”

 

Since both are strong-willed men used to being in charge of their music, you’d have to wonder whether the easy creativity of the songwriting sessions would have lasted through the grunt work of making polished recordings. The two dismiss the suggestion that there would have been trouble, or that they would have needed another producer to referee. Costello said it wouldn’t have been as much fun as producing it themselves.

 

The songs they wrote were dispersed between the two men, or left on the shelf. Four were included on “Flowers in the Dirt,” including the stately “That Day is Done” and the call-and-response “You Want Her Too.” Costello later recorded “So Like Candy” and “Pads, Paws & Claws.” Some demos creeped out through the years.

 

“My Brave Face” could have been as big as anything he and Lennon had written, McCartney said. His pride in some of the songs he had written without Costello is one reason “Flowers in the Dirt” took shape the way it did. But you can hear another reason between the lines listening to him talk. Perhaps he didn’t want to pull Costello into the weight of comparisons that he felt for all of his post-Beatles career.

 

“Because John and I had such a successful collaboration and all the work we did was when we were young, often your first output like that can be your best,” he said. “I wouldn’t say it worries me, or I wouldn’t continue to write. But I do get the feeling that it would have been very hard to come up to the standards of the ones I wrote with John, like ‘It’s Getting Better’ or ‘She’s Leaving Home.”’

 

Costello, for his part, doesn’t look back with regret at the album that never was. He points to McCartney’s reissue.

 

“You could say, ‘this is it,”’ he said. “There’s a whole disc of me and Paul singing together. What can you say about that?”
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A barber-turned-rapper has been crowned the winner of an Afghan talent show that offered its audience some relief from daily stories of insurgents and suicide bombs.

Sayed Jamal Mubarez, from Afghanistan’s long-marginalized Hazara ethnic minority, won viewers over with lyrics capturing both the hope and despair of young people living through a war against Taliban militants now in its sixteenth year.

Afghan Star, modeled on singing contests popular across the world, is in its 12th season on Afghanistan’s biggest private television network, Tolo.

This year’s edition stood out after a woman — 18-year old singer Zulala Hashimi from the deeply conservative east of the country — reached the final for the first time, defying widespread attitudes against female performers.

But Mubarez emerged the winner later on Tuesday, looking every bit the budding rapper with his tilted red baseball cap and razor-trimmed beard.

“I am so happy. … I would have been happy if Zulala had won it because in Afghanistan women are living in a restricted situation,” the 23-year old said after accepting his award at a television studio housed behind wire-topped blast walls in Kabul’s diplomatic enclave.

The sole breadwinner at his home in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, Mubarez said he discovered rap in Iran and spits lyrics while cutting hair.

The contest has been held inside a fortified compound for the last two series after the Taliban last year killed seven Tolo employees in a suicide attack on a staff minibus.

Newer musicians can struggle to make it big in Afghanistan, where the Taliban once banned music and many disapprove of Western-style popular culture, and artists often seek the safety and freedom of a life abroad.

Mubarez told Reuters he intends to turn professional if he can find financial support, and would otherwise return to his barber shop while rapping on the side.
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The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam welcomed home two paintings by the Dutch master Tuesday, more than 14 years after they were ripped off the museum’s wall in a nighttime heist.

“They’re back,” said museum director Axel Rueger. He called their return one of the “most special days in the history of our museum.”

The paintings, the 1882 “View of the Sea at Scheveningen,” and 1884-85 work “Congregation leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen,” were discovered last year by Italian police investigating suspected Italian mobsters for cocaine trafficking.

It wasn’t an easy find. The two paintings were wrapped in cotton sheets, stuffed in a box and hidden behind a wall in a toilet, said Gen. Gianluigi D’Alfonso of the Italian financial police, who was on hand at the museum to watch the ceremonial unveiling.

They were found in a farmhouse near Naples as Italian police seized some 20 million euros worth of assets, including villas, apartments and even a small airplane. Investigators contend the assets are linked to two Camorra drug kingpins, Mario Cerrone and Raffaele Imperiale.

“After years shrouded in darkness, they can now shine again,” Dutch Minister for Education, Culture and Science Jet Bussemaker said as an orange screen slid away to reveal the two paintings behind a glass wall.

Italy’s Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said last year the paintings were “considered among the artworks most searched for in the world, on the FBI’s list of the Top 10 art crimes.”

They are now back on display at the museum before being taken to its conservation studio for repair, although they suffered remarkably little damage as thieves who had clambered up a ladder and smashed a window to get into the museum in 2002 ripped them out of their frames and fled.

“It is not only a miracle that the works have been recovered but it’s even more miraculous almost that they are in relatively unharmed condition,” Rueger said.

The museum director was on vacation when the call came last year from Italian authorities who believed they had recovered the paintings. He didn’t celebrate right away; he’d had calls like this before.

“I was hopeful but also a little hesitant because over the course of the years we had multiple occasions when people phoned us, contacted us, claiming that they knew something about the whereabouts of the works and each time it was false, the trace went cold,” he said. “So … the way has been peppered with disappointment.”

But museum experts dispatched to Italy to check the authenticity of the works quickly turned Rueger’s doubts into delight.

“It was something we had secretly been hoping for for all those years,” he said.

The two small works are not typical of Van Gogh’s later and better-known works, but are still vital pieces for the museum’s collection, Rueger said.

The Scheveningen seascape, with a fishing boat and rough sea under a typically gray, cloudy Dutch sky, is one of Van Gogh’s earliest works and the only painting in the museum’s collection painted during his time in The Hague. It suffered a missing rectangular chip from the bottom left-hand corner.

The painting of the church in Nuenen portrayed the village where his parents lived.

“He had painted as a gift to his mother, so it’s a very personal and emotional connection,” Rueger said.

Rueger said the paintings are now back for good at a museum which is home to dozens of works by Van Gogh, whose paintings fetch millions of dollars on the rare occasions they come up for auction.

“The security, I can assure you, is of Triple-A quality now so I’m very confident that everything is safe in the museum,” he said.

 
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Japan’s cherry blossom season kicked off on Tuesday, when the Japanese Meteorological Agency confirmed the flowers were in bloom in Tokyo.      

Despite the drizzling rain, agency officials counted more than five flowers blooming on a sample tree at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, and confirmed that the cherry blossom could therefore be considered in bloom.

      

Visitors were busy taking photos of the cherry blossom flowers, but trees were still looking rather bare.

       

The beginning of the cherry blossom season in Tokyo came before anywhere else in Japan, and about five days before the average date.

       

The flower tends to first bloom in southern Japan, where the climate is warmer.

       

The flowers are expected to reach full bloom in about a week.

 
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Actor George Clooney has startled an 87-year-old fan in Britain by showing up at her assisted living facility with flowers and a card to wish her a happy birthday.

 

The 55-year-old popped in for a chat and a picture with admirer Pat Adams on Sunday at the Sunrise of Sonning Retirement and Assisted Living Facility in Reading. Linda Jones, a worker there, posted a picture of herself and the beaming pair on Facebook.

 

Jones wrote: “The lady in the picture, loves George Clooney and mentions everyday how she would love him to meet him, especially as he lives so near to where I work.”

 

A letter was sent to Clooney asking if he could make a “dream to come true.”

 

Clooney owns a home near the facility in Berkshire.

 
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A group of celebrities led by Hollywood actor Ben Stiller has joined a social media campaign to send food and water to Somalia through Turkish Airlines.

Last weekend, the group raised more than $1 million online in less than 24 hours. Stiller said in a Twitter message posted Monday that the money has been used to purchase 60 tons of food that the airline will fly to Somalia next week. 

Somali diaspora youth groups have been spearheading a similar movement online, following warnings from the U.N. that more than six million Somalis are at risk of severe malnourishment and starvation because of drought. 

Celebrities got involved at the urging of French Snapchat star Jerome Jarre, who launched a movement called Love Army for Somalia last Wednesday.

After the group began raising donations online, they convinced Turkish Airlines to help deliver one immediate aid shipment to Somalia’s most vulnerable people, prompting the airline to create a Twitter hashtag, #TurkishAirlinesHelpSomalia.

Celebrities who have made donations include American football quarterback Colin Kaepernick, NBA player Wilson Chandler, YouTube star Casey Niestat and Scottish record producer Calvin Harris.

“And Jerome wants to keep this thing going, because he believes we can raise a lot more money and do a lot more good and really make a dent in what’s going on over there,” Stiller said Monday.

Total donations had risen to more than $1.8 million as of Monday, according to the “Love Army for Somalia” site on GoFundMe, a social fundraising platform.

“For the first flight, we will buy the food in Istanbul, as a thank you to our Turkish friends that support the movement!” said a message on the page. “Later on, we are hoping to learn how to buy food directly from local businesses in Somalia. We want to support the Somalian economy.”

Turkish Airlines was the first carrier outside East Africa to establish regular service to the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

Turkey has become one of the most prominent donors in Somalia, eclipsing many traditional donors both in quantity and quality of its assistance.

Likewise, Ankara has become a major trading partner with Somalia, particularly in the construction, transportation and service sectors, according to a report by Heritage Institute for Policy Studies, a Mogadishu-based research group.
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An 18-year-old female novice singer and a 23-year old barber-turned-rapper are the unlikely finalists of a televised talent contest providing Afghans a welcome distraction from the daily bloodshed in their country.

The two are vying to become the next “Afghan Star.” This year’s season is the most tradition-breaking yet in a deeply conservative country where the Taliban once outlawed music and Western-style popular culture is widely frowned upon.

Originally due to be broadcast live, the final will instead be pre-recorded following a wave of Islamist attacks in Kabul, with the winner announced on Tuesday night.

Finalist Zulala Hashimi, from a militant-plagued province in the east, quit school and overcame resistance from relatives unhappy with her singing publicly. When Hashimi auditioned, she was one of only two women out of three hundred contestants.

“I showed people that a woman can do it. I ask every woman to make an effort to reach this point,” she told Reuters, her mother by her side between rehearsals at a television studio protected behind blast walls and Kalashnikov-wielding guards.

Wowing audiences with bright traditional outfits and jewel-encrusted tiaras, and off-stage sporting brown-rimmed Ray Bans, Hashimi’s songs in Pashto and Dari have won her thousands of fans, who vote by text message and on Facebook.

Up against Hashimi is Sayed Jamal Mubarez, a barber from the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif who spent several years in Iran, one of thousands from Afghanistan’s Hazara minority that sought refuge across the country’s western border.

Having ditched his shalwar kameez in early auditions for jeans, a zipped black jacket and a “Street Swagg” baseball cap, Mubarez said he discovered rap in Iran and has been writing his own lyrics ever since.

“My parents are illiterate, but when I was singing they were encouraging me, so I believed that I could win people’s support,” he said backstage. “But I never thought of being a finalist.”

Inside a compound

Afghan Star, now in its twelfth season, is produced by the private television channel Tolo. Tolo’s reporting has earned it the wrath of the Taliban, who last year killed seven Tolo employees in a suicide attack on a staff minibus.

The contest was moved to inside a compound in Kabul’s city center.

Obaid Juenda, a judge on the show who now lives in London, said the percentage of women auditioning had fallen sharply to five percent amid the deteriorating security.

Juenda hoped the show gave contestants a springboard for a career, but in a country where opportunities for public performances are limited, past winners have faded into obscurity.

“There isn’t an industry here. We have too many people here who love female singers but we can’t sell our music legally. They can’t perform in public,” he told Reuters.

Hashimi said she had received nothing but support so far.

“Right now I don’t have any problem,” she said, her eyes darting nervously to her mother.  “If in the future there are some challenges I’ll try to cope with them to fulfil my dreams.”

 
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A 59.60-carat diamond known as “The Pink Star” is returning to auction next month and could fetch a record $60 million, three years since it was sold for even more – only for the buyer to pull out of the deal.

The diamond was presented by Sotheby’s in London ahead of the auction in Hong Kong on April 4.

In November 2013, a Geneva auction of the stone fetched a world record $83 million but the buyer, New York-based diamond cutter Isaac Wolf, could not pay up and defaulted.

However, after some more successful auctions of colored diamonds in recent years, the auction house said that now was a good time to try again.

“The last few years we’ve had colored diamonds perform extremely well, many new records been created at auction for the colored diamonds, pinks and blues mainly, so we thought it was a good time to bring it to the market,” David Bennett, worldwide Chairman of Sotheby’s Jewelry Division, told Reuters.

In 2015 the “Blue Moon of Josephine” sold for $48.5 million in Geneva. At 12.03 carats, it set a price-per-carat record.

“The Pink Star” is the largest Internally Flawless Fancy Vivid Pink diamond ever graded by the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), the auction house said, yet the sparkling stone is still small enough to fit onto a ring.

Sotheby’s said that the mixed-cut diamond was initially mined by De Beers in 1999 in Botswana as a 132.5 carat rough diamond before being cut and polished.

Its refined form is now set to be the most valuable polished diamond ever offered at auction.

“The extraordinary size of this 59.60-carat diamond, paired with its richness of color, surpasses any known pink diamond record in history,” Bennett said.

Bennett said the current record for a pink diamond was held by the “Graff Pink”. At 24.78 carats it is half the size of The Pink Star and was sold in Geneva for $46.2 million in 2010.

 
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