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Final tribute to the King of Pop in LA on Tuesday
Updated: July 6 2009, 10:25 CET
LOS ANGELES: Friends, family and fans of Michael Jackson will be gathering in Los Angeles this Tuesday, together with many, many travelers, tourists and sympathizers to pay the King of Pop a last tribute. More than 1.6 million people registered to get two of the 17,500 tickets for Jackson's two-hour memorial service at 10 a.m. the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Another 6,500 tickets will be distributed for the Nokia Theatre overflow section next door. The event will be live-streamed on television and on the Internet, and there will be no funeral procession. The Jackson family will reportedly have a private funeral for the "Thriller" star on Tuesday morning before the public memorial service at Staples. Due to the massive demand and the popularity of Jackson, downtown L.A. is expected to receive a surge of people. More than 1,400 officers from the LAPD alone have been asked to volunteer for duty on Monday and Tuesday. The department didn't publicly reveal how many officers would be on duty that day though.
No tickets will be sold to the event, but organizers of Michael Jackson's T memorial service said that they will give away 17,500 tickets and will randomly draw names from people who register for the service to determine who will attend. The remaining 9,000 Staples Center tickets will go to the Jackson family, their friends and special celebrity guests.
At this point, most of the details of the memorial are still unclear, including whether Jackson's body will be at the memorial, but CNN reported that Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson has been invited to perform at the ceremony. Michael’s close friend Diana Ross has been asked to lead the memorial tributes to him. The Jackson family want her to perform his 1995 No1 hit You Are Not Alone. But the grief-stricken singer is worried she will lose control and break down in front of millions of people. Michael’s close friend Liz Taylor will read a eulogy at the ceremony. Other stars who will honour the star include Whitney Houston, Justin Timberlake and Stevie Wonder. They will take front-row seats at the memorial. Other famous guests for the two-hour spectacular are expected to include President Obama, Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Lionel Richie and Liza Minnelli. Jackson’s British-based friends Uri Geller, Mark Lester and David Gest will fly in for the occasion. Madonna, who launched her Sweet & Sticky tour, will not be at Tuesday’s memorial but is expected to record an on-screen message.
Los Angeles-based costume designers, Dennis Tompkins and Michael Bush, are set to design the suit the King of Pop will be buried in. According to Access Hollywood, Jackson worked with Tompkins and Bush for the last 20 years of his career and the duo was currently creating costumes for his This Is It comeback tour in London.
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Jazz Time in Montreux
Updated: July 3 2009, 12:48 CET
MONTREUX: Summertime is jazz time. All over the world jazz festivals are taking place and performers travel from one country to another. Today the 43th edition of the annual Montreux jazz festival opens with performances by amongst others
Marianne Faithfull, BB King, Lily Allen, Steely Dan, McCoy Tyner Trio, Jamie Cullum, George Benson, John Fogerty, Seal and Grace Jones. Founded by Claude Nobs in 1967, over the years the Montreux Jazz Festival has become an important event for music fans in Switzerland and around the world. Its stages have been graced by all of music’s greats, from Miles Davis to Ray Charles and from David Bowie to Massive Attack.
Among the other summer jazz festivals in July are:
Brussels: Summer Village Concerts (01.07-29.08.2009)www.themusicvillage.com
Copenhagen: Copenhagen Jazz Festival (03.07-12.07.2009) www.jazz.dk
Graz: Jazz Sommer Graz (09.07-01.08.2009) www.jazzsommergraz.at
Juan-le-Pins: Jazz a Juan (11.07-19.07.2009) www.antibesjuanlespins.com
Krakow: Summer Jazz Festival (05.07-31.07.2009)www.cracjazz.com
Nice: Nice Jazz Festival (18.07-25.07.2009) www.nicejazzfestival.fr
Paris: Paris Jazz Festival (06.06-27.07.2009) parisjazzfestival2009.net
Perugia: Umbria Jazz Festival (10.07-19.07.2009) www.umbriajazz.com
Pori: Pori Jazz Festival (11.07-19.11.2009) www.porijazz.fi
Rotterdam: North Sea Jazz Festival (10.07-12.07.2009) www.northseajazz.com
Stockholm: Stockholm Jazz Fesival (15.07-19.07.2009) www.stockholmjazz.com
Warsaw: International Jazz Festival (04.07-29.08.2009) www.jazznastarowce.pl
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Rome shows photograps by actress Lollobrigida
Updated: June 29 2009, 10:20 CET
ROME: This weekend the Palazzo delle Esposizioni opened her doors to ‘Gina Lollobrigida fotografa’ a retrospective celebrating actress Gina Lollobrigida’s 50 years of activity as a photographer. On show are 250 pictures comprising a representative selection of her activity, of her countless journeys and extraordinary encounters, illustrating her artist's talent in portraying the most varied localities, human affairs, and cultural and anthropological environments. Alongside her depiction of people and places, there is also a portrait gallery of celebrities from the world of show business, of politics, and of art and tradition.
The personalities portrayed include Indira Gandhi, Fidel Castro, Henry Kissinger, Maria Callas, Liza Minelli, Yuri Gagarin, Neil Armstrong, Grace Kelly, Paul Newman, Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn. The retrospective is completed by some of Lollobrigida’s most famous photographic compositions depicting children and animals, collected together and published in a book entitled ‘The Wonder of Innocence’ (1994).
Recently renovated and housed in one of Via Nazionale's monumental buildings, Palazzo delle Esposizioni is one of Rome's largest galleries for temporary exhibitions. It was constructed in 1883 by Pio Piacentini to house the Quadriennale d'Arte, an art exhibition that took place every four years, but the plans immediately caused heated controversy. People were not impressed with the way Piacentini had laid out the space, or the monumentality of the entrance or, and this was the most negative aspect, the lack of windows in the exterior walls -- the internal rooms receive their illumination from sky lights.
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The King of Pop is no more
Updated: June 26 2009, 10:13 CET
LOS ANGELES: The King of Pop, Michael Jackson (1958-2009), died yesterday at the age of 50, shortly after going into cardiac arrest at his rented seven-bedroom estate in Holmby Hills in Los Angeles, which he was renting for $100,000 a month. Jackson's death was confirmed outside the hospital by his brother Jermaine, who once performed alongside Michael as a member of the Jackson 5, a family act that began in the steel mill town of Gary, Ind., before making it big in the music industry. Jackson had come to Los Angeles to rehearse for 50 sold-out concerts at London's O2 Arena, a run of shows that was scheduled to kick off July 13 and had been dubbed ‘This Is It.’
The concerts, financed by a pair of billionaires, were to have been the start of an ambitious career revival designed to begin wiping out Jackson's staggering debt -he owed at least $400 million and would have earned $1 million a night - and return the singer to cultural relevancy. Those close to the singer hoped it would serve as a trial run for a lengthy world tour, new album, Michael Jackson museum and Las Vegas stage show, according to news reports. Jackson, however, had publicly protested that he was not physically ready for shows, which sold out almost instantly. The opening dates had already been pushed back.
Jackson started singing at the age of eight as a member of the Jackson 5, the family band that included his brothers Jermaine, Jackie, Tito and Marlon. It was the start of a long and turbulent career that peaked with the release of 1982's "Thriller," which holds the title of the best-selling album of all time.
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Classical music and robots in the spotlights in Zurich
Updated: June 22 2009, 11:55 CET
ZURICH: Since last Friday the Swiss city Zürcher Zurich celebrates the Zürcher Festspiele 2009. This years edition of the annual festival features a combination of opera, concerts, dance, drama and art, presented in various venues. Among the highlights is the Opera House’s Festival Première devoted to Mozart’s ‘Così fan tutte’, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst. The Tonhalle is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy , engaging great conductors, soloists and choirs. Furthermore the Schauspielhaus presents Peter Stein’s production of ‘Der zerbrochene Krug’ starring Klaus Maria Brandauer, and the German artist Katharina Fritsch presents her sculptures at her first comprehensive retrospective at the Kunsthaus.
And Zurich has more to offer. Next Friday the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich opens her doors to the exhibition ‘Robots From Motion to Emotion’ about the relationship between reality and fiction today and the emotional effect of robots, which is generated by characteristics of form and functional capabilities. On show are about 200 exhibits ranging from historical automata to robots in the household, in industry, in medicine and in the military to toy robots, or, in other words, everything that is to be understood under the term robots, what they look like, where they are used for and what they should be able to accomplish in the future. The exhibition raises the question of why robots are accepted or rejected and what characteristics determine the relationship of people to machines.
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