Grammy Award
A Grammy Award, or Grammy, is an award presented by The Recording Academy to recognize achievements in the music industry. The annual presentation ceremony features performances by prominent artists, the presentation of those awards that have a more popular interest; the Grammys are the second of the Big Three major music awards held annually. It shares recognition of the music industry as that of the other performance awards such as the Academy Awards, the Emmy Awards, the Tony Awards, the Game Awards; the first Grammy Awards ceremony was held on May 4, 1959, to honor and respect the musical accomplishments by performers for the year 1958. Following the 2011 ceremony, the Academy overhauled many Grammy Award categories for 2012; the 61st Annual Grammy Awards, honoring the best achievements from October 1, 2017 to September 30, 2018, were held on February 10, 2019, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The Grammys had their origin in the Hollywood Walk of Fame project in the 1950s; as the recording executives chosen for the Walk of Fame committee worked at compiling a list of important recording industry people who might qualify for a Walk of Fame star, they realized there were many more people who were leaders in their business who would never earn a star on Hollywood Boulevard.
The music executives decided to rectify this by creating an award given by their industry similar to the Oscars and the Emmys. This was the beginning of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. After it was decided to create such an award, there was still a question of, they settled on using the name of the invention of Emile Berliner, the gramophone, for the awards, which were first given for the year 1958. The first award ceremony was held in two locations on May 4, 1959 - Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills California, Park Sheraton Hotel in New York City, 28 Grammys were awarded; the number of awards given grew and fluctuated over the years with categories added and removed, at one time reaching over 100. The second Grammy Awards held in 1959, was the first ceremony to be televised, but the ceremony was not aired live until the 13th Annual Grammy Awards in 1971; the gold-plated trophies, each depicting a gilded gramophone, are made and assembled by hand by Billings Artworks in Ridgway, Colorado.
In 1990 the original Grammy design was revamped, changing the traditional soft lead for a stronger alloy less prone to damage, making the trophy bigger and grander. Billings developed a zinc alloy named grammium, trademarked; the trophies with the recipient's name engraved on them are not available until after the award announcements, so "stunt" trophies are re-used each year for the broadcast. By February 2009, a total of 7,578 Grammy trophies had been awarded; the "General Field" are four awards. Record of the Year is awarded to the performer and the production team of a single song if other than the performer. Album of the Year is awarded to the performer and the production team of a full album if other than the performer. Song of the Year is awarded to the writer/composer of a single song. Best New Artist is awarded to a promising breakthrough performer who releases, during the Eligibility Year, the first recording that establishes the public identity of that artist; the only two artists to win all four of these awards are Christopher Cross, who won all four in 1980, Adele, who won the Best New Artist award in 2009 and the other three in 2012 and 2017.
Other awards are given for performance and production in specific genres, as well as for other contributions such as artwork and video. Special awards are given for longer-lasting contributions to the music industry; because of the large number of award categories, the desire to feature several performances by various artists, only the ones with the most popular interest - about 10 to 12, including the four General Field categories and one or two categories in the most popular music genres - are presented directly at the televised award ceremony. The many other Grammy trophies are presented in a pre-telecast'Premiere Ceremony' earlier in the afternoon before the Grammy Awards telecast. On April 6, 2011, The Recording Academy announced a drastic overhaul of many Grammy Award categories for 2012; the number of categories was cut from 109 to 78. The most important change was the elimination of the distinction between male and female soloists and between collaborations and duo/groups in various genre fields.
Several categories for instrumental soloists were discontinued. Recordings in these categories now fall under the general categories for best solo performances. In the rock field, the separate categories for hard rock and metal albums were combined and the Best Rock Instrumental Performance category was eliminated due to a waning number of entries. In R&B, the distinction between best contemporary R&B album and other R&B albums has been eliminated, they now feature in general Best R&B Album category. In rap, the categories for best rap soloist and best rap duo or group have been merged into the new Best Rap Performance category; the most eliminations occurred in the roots category. Up to and including 2011, there were separate categories for various regional American music forms, such as Hawaiian music, Native American music and Zydeco/Cajun music. Due to the low number
Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival, a program of the Sundance Institute, takes place annually in Park City, the largest independent film festival in the United States with more than 46,660 attending in 2016. It is held in Salt Lake City, Utah, as well as at the Sundance Resort, it is a showcase for new work from international independent filmmakers. The festival consists of competitive sections for American and international dramatic and documentary films, both feature films and short films, a group of out-of-competition sections, including NEXT, New Frontier, Midnight and Documentary Premieres; the 2019 Sundance Film Festival began January 24 and ran through February 3. Sundance began in Salt Lake City in August 1978, as the Utah/US Film Festival in an effort to attract more filmmakers to Utah, it was founded by John Earle. The 1978 festival featured films such as Deliverance, A Streetcar Named Desire, Midnight Cowboy, Mean Streets, The Sweet Smell of Success. With chairman Robert Redford, the help of Utah Governor Scott M. Matheson, the goal of the festival was to showcase American-made films, highlight the potential of independent film, to increase visibility for filmmaking in Utah.
At the time, the main focus of the event was to conduct a competition for independent American films, present a series of retrospective films and filmmaker panel discussions, to celebrate the Frank Capra Award. The festival highlighted the work of regional filmmakers who worked outside the Hollywood system; the jury of the 1978 festival was headed by Gary Allison, included Verna Fields, Linwood G. Dunn, Katharine Ross, Charles E. Sellier Jr. Mark Rydell, Anthea Sylbert. In 1979, Sterling Van Wagenen left to head up the first-year pilot program of what was to become the Sundance Institute, James W. Ure took over as executive director, followed by Cirina Hampton Catania as executive director. More than 60 films were screened at the festival that year, panels featured many well-known Hollywood filmmakers; that year, the first Frank Capra Award went to Jimmy Stewart. The festival made a profit for the first time. In 1980, Catania left the festival to pursue a production career in Hollywood. Several factors helped propel the growth of Utah/US Film Festival.
First was the involvement of actor and Utah resident Robert Redford, who became the festival's inaugural chairman. By having Redford's name associated with the festival, it received great attention. Secondly, the country was hungry for more venues that would celebrate American-made films as the only other festival doing so at the time was the USA Film Festival in Dallas. Response in Hollywood was unprecedented, as major studios did all they could to contribute their resources. In 1981, the festival moved to Park City and changed the dates from September to January; the move from late summer to midwinter was done by the executive director Susan Barrell with the cooperation of Hollywood director Sydney Pollack, who suggested that running a film festival in a ski resort during winter would draw more attention from Hollywood. It was called the US Video Festival. In 1984, the now well-established Sundance Institute, headed by Sterling Van Wagenen, took over management of the US Film Festival. Gary Beer and Van Wagenen spearheaded production of the inaugural US Film Festival presented by Sundance Institute, which included Program Director Tony Safford and Administrative Director Jenny Walz Selby.
The branding and marketing transition from the US Film Festival to the Sundance Film Festival was managed under the direction of Colleen Allen, Allen Advertising Inc. by appointment of Robert Redford. In 1991, the festival was renamed the Sundance Film Festival, after Redford's character the Sundance Kid from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. UK-based publisher C21 Media first revealed in October 2010 that Robert Redford was planning to bring the Sundance Film Festival to London, in March the following year, Redford announced that Sundance London would be held at The O2, in London from 26–29 April 2012. In a press statement, Redford said, "We are excited to partner with AEG Europe to bring a particular slice of American culture to life in the inspired setting of The O2, in this city of such rich cultural history, it is our mutual goal to bring to the UK, the best in current American independent cinema, to introduce the artists responsible for it, in essence help build a picture of our country, broadly reflective of the diversity of voices not always seen in our cultural exports."The majority of the film screenings, including the festival's premieres, would be held within the Cineworld cinema at The O2 entertainment district.
The 2013 Sundance London Festival was held 25–28 April 2013, sponsored by car-maker Jaguar. Sundance London 2014 took place on 25–27 April 2014 at the O2 arena; the Sundance London 2015 Festival was cancelled in an announcement on 16 January 2015. Sundance London returned to London from 2–5 June 2016 and again 1–4 June 2017, both at Picturehouse Cinema in London's West End. Inaugurated in 2014, Sundance Film Festival: Hong Kong took place from 22 September to 2 October 2016 and is scheduled again for 21 September to 1 October 2017, it is held at The Metroplex in Kowloon Bay each year. From 2006 through 2008, Sundance Institute collaborated with the Brooklyn Academy of Music on a special series of film screenings, panel discussions, special events bringing the institute's activities and the festival's programming to New York City. M
Sonja Sohn
Sonja Sohn is an American actress and director best known for her roles as Detective Kima Greggs on the HBO drama The Wire and Detective Samantha Baker on the ABC series Body of Proof. She is known for having starred in the independent film Slam, which she co-wrote, her role on The Wire led to her current work as the leader of a Baltimore community initiative called ReWired for Change. Sohn was born Sonja Williams in Georgia, her mother was Korean and her father is African American. Her parents met, she graduated from Warwick High School in Newport News. Before she was an actress, Sohn was a slam poet. While performing her work on stage, she was spotted by Marc Levin who offered her a role in his film Slam, she wrote lyrics and co-wrote the script for the film. It went on to win the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Film at the Sundance Film Festival. After debuting in Slam, Sohn appeared in minor roles in films such as Shaft and Bringing Out the Dead, she starred in independent films Perfume, G and The Killing Zone.
Through the five seasons of the HBO series The Wire, she held a starring role as Detective Kima Greggs. She struggled during the first season of The Wire and considered quitting as she had trouble recalling her lines, she has guest starred on many episodes of Cold Case as "Toni Halstead". She won the supporting television actress award at the 2008 Asian Excellence Awards for her character on The Wire, she had a supporting role in the Hollywood film Step Up 2: The Streets. In 2008-09, she was a guest star in the ABC series Brothers & Sisters, in 2010 she appeared in an episode of CBS series The Good Wife. In 2011, she was a guest star on the show Bar Karma, she played Detective Samantha Baker in the first two seasons of the medical drama television series Body of Proof with Dana Delany and Jeri Ryan, which premiered on ABC on March 29, 2011. On May 30, 2014, it was announced that Sohn would be joining season 2 of The Originals, in a recurring role as the witch Lenore a.k.a. Esther Mikaelson. Sohn made her directorial debut with the 2017 HBO documentary Baltimore Rising about the 2015 Baltimore protests and community organizing that arose in response to police violence.
Involved in political activism, Sohn took a break from acting in 2009 to concentrate on social issues. She is the founder and CEO of the Baltimore-based reWIRED for Change, an outreach program intended to communicate with at-risk youth involved in criminal activity; the program is run out of the University of Maryland School of Social Work and uses episodes of The Wire as a teaching tool, encouraging the participants to examine and query their lives and past actions. Other actors and writers involved with The Wire serve as board members. In 2011, she was presented with the Woman of the Year award from the Harvard Black Men's Forum; as of 2006, Sohn was living with her husband, Adam Plack, daughter, Sophia, 16, attending Baltimore School for the Arts. Sohn has Sakira, 20, who lived in New York at that time. Sonja Sohn on IMDb reWIRED for Change homepage. ReWired and Reading Liverpool Philharmonic, liverpoolphil.com. ReWired and Reading The Reader Organisation, thereaderonline.co.uk. Appearances on C-SPAN C-SPAN Q&A interview with Sohn, c-span.org.
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA plays a major role in developing and collecting modernist art, is identified as one of the largest and most influential museums of modern art in the world. MoMA's collection offers an overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, painting, photography, illustrated books and artist's books and electronic media; the MoMA Library includes 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs, over 1,000 periodical titles, over 40,000 files of ephemera about individual artists and groups. The archives holds primary source material related to the history of contemporary art; the idea for the Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, they became known variously as "the Ladies", "the daring ladies" and "the adamantine ladies". They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash.
Abby had invited A. Conger Goodyear, the former president of the board of trustees of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, to become president of the new museum. Abby became treasurer. At the time, it was America's premier museum devoted to modern art, the first of its kind in Manhattan to exhibit European modernism. One of Abby's early recruits for the museum staff was the noted Japanese-American photographer Soichi Sunami, who served the museum as its official documentary photographer from 1930 until 1968. Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Frank Crowninshield to join him as founding trustees. Sachs, the associate director and curator of prints and drawings at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, was referred to in those days as a collector of curators. Goodyear asked him to recommend a director and Sachs suggested Alfred H. Barr, Jr. a promising young protege. Under Barr's guidance, the museum's holdings expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing, its first successful loan exhibition was in November 1929, displaying paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat.
First housed in six rooms of galleries and offices on the twelfth floor of Manhattan's Heckscher Building, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the museum moved into three more temporary locations within the next ten years. Abby's husband was adamantly opposed to the museum and refused to release funds for the venture, which had to be obtained from other sources and resulted in the frequent shifts of location, he donated the land for the current site of the museum, plus other gifts over time, thus became in effect one of its greatest benefactors. During that time it initiated many more exhibitions of noted artists, such as the lone Vincent van Gogh exhibition on November 4, 1935. Containing an unprecedented sixty-six oils and fifty drawings from the Netherlands, as well as poignant excerpts from the artist's letters, it was a major public success due to Barr's arrangement of the exhibit, became "a precursor to the hold van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination"; the museum gained international prominence with the hugely successful and now famous Picasso retrospective of 1939–40, held in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago.
In its range of presented works, it represented a significant reinterpretation of Picasso for future art scholars and historians. This was wholly masterminded by Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, the exhibition lionized Picasso as the greatest artist of the time, setting the model for all the museum's retrospectives that were to follow. Boy Leading a Horse was contested over ownership with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1941, MoMA hosted the ground-breaking exhibition, Indian Art of the United States, that changed the way American Indian arts were viewed by the public and exhibited in art museums; when Abby Rockefeller's son Nelson was selected by the board of trustees to become its flamboyant president in 1939, at the age of thirty, he became the prime instigator and funder of its publicity and subsequent expansion into new headquarters on 53rd Street. His brother, David Rockefeller joined the museum's board of trustees in 1948 and took over the presidency when Nelson was elected Governor of New York in 1958.
David subsequently employed the noted architect Philip Johnson to redesign the museum garden and name it in honor of his mother, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. He and the Rockefeller family in general have retained a close association with the museum throughout its history, with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund funding the institution since 1947. Both David Rockefeller, Jr. and Sharon Percy Rockefeller sit on the board of trustees. In 1937, MoMA had shifted to offices and basement galleries in the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center, its permanent and current home, now renovated, designed in the International Style by the modernist architects Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, opened to the public on May 10, 1939, attended by an illustrious company of 6,000 people, with an opening address via radio from the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. On April 15, 1958, a fire on the second floor destroyed an 18 foot long Monet Water Lilies painting (the current Mone
Clint Eastwood
Clinton Eastwood Jr. is an American actor, filmmaker and politician. After achieving success in the Western TV series Rawhide, he rose to international fame with his role as the Man with No Name in Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy of spaghetti Westerns during the 1960s, as antihero cop Harry Callahan in the five Dirty Harry films throughout the 1970s and 1980s; these roles, among others, have made Eastwood an enduring cultural icon of masculinity. For his work in the Western film Unforgiven and the sports drama Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture, as well as receiving nominations for Best Actor. Eastwood's greatest commercial successes have been the adventure comedy Every Which Way But Loose and its sequel, the action comedy Any Which Way You Can, after adjustment for inflation. Other popular films include the Western Hang'Em High, the psychological thriller Play Misty for Me, the crime film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, the Western The Outlaw Josey Wales, the prison film Escape from Alcatraz, the action film Firefox, the suspense thriller Tightrope, the Western Pale Rider, the war films Where Eagles Dare, Kelly's Heroes, Heartbreak Ridge, the action thriller In the Line of Fire, the romantic drama The Bridges of Madison County, the drama Gran Torino.
In addition to directing many of his own star vehicles, Eastwood has directed films in which he did not appear, such as the mystery drama Mystic River and the war film Letters from Iwo Jima, for which he received Academy Award nominations, the drama Changeling, the South African biographical political sports drama Invictus. The war drama biopic American Sniper set box-office records for the largest January release and was the largest opening for an Eastwood film. Eastwood received considerable critical praise in France for several films, including some that were not well received in the United States. Eastwood has been awarded two of France's highest honors: in 1994 he became a recipient of the Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, in 2007 he was awarded the Legion of Honour medal. In 2000, Eastwood was awarded the Italian Venice Film Festival Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. Since 1967, Eastwood's Malpaso Productions has produced all but four of his American films. Elected in 1986, Eastwood served for two years as mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, a non-partisan office.
Eastwood was born on May 31, 1930, in San Francisco, the son of Clinton Eastwood and Ruth Wood. Ruth took the surname of her second husband, John Belden Wood, whom she married after the death of Clinton Sr. Eastwood was nicknamed "Samson" by the hospital nurses because he weighed 11 pounds 6 ounces at birth, he has Jeanne Bernhardt. Eastwood is of English, Irish and Dutch ancestry, he is descended from Mayflower passenger William Bradford, through this line is the 12th generation of his family born in North America. During the 1930s, his family moved as his father worked at jobs along the West Coast. Contrary to what Eastwood has indicated in media interviews, they did not move between 1940 and 1949. Settled in Piedmont, the Eastwoods lived in a wealthy part of the town, had a swimming pool, belonged to a country club, each parent drove their own car. Eastwood attended Piedmont Middle School. From January 1945 until at least January 1946, he attended Piedmont High School, but was asked to leave for writing an obscene suggestion to a school official on the athletic field scoreboard, for burying someone in effigy on the school lawn, on top of other school infractions.
He transferred to Oakland Technical High School and was scheduled in January 1949 to graduate midyear, although it is not clear if did. "Clint graduated from the airplane shop. I think, his major," joked classmate Don Kincade. Another high school friend, Don Loomis, echoed "I don't think he was spending that much time at school because he was having a pretty good time elsewhere." "I think what happened is he started having a good time. I just don't think he finished high school," explained Fritz Manes, a boyhood friend two years younger than Eastwood, who remained associated with him until their falling out in the mid-1980s. Biographer Patrick McGilligan notes that high school graduation records are a matter of strict legal confidentiality. Eastwood held a number of jobs, including as a lifeguard, paper carrier, grocery clerk, forest firefighter, golf caddy. Eastwood has said that he tried to enroll at Seattle University in 1951 but instead was drafted into the United States Army during the Korean War.
"He always dropped the Korean War reference, hoping everyone would conclude that he was in combat and might be some sort of hero. He'd been a lifeguard at Fort Ord in northern California for his entire stint in the military," commented Eastwood's former longtime companion, Sondra Locke. Don Loomis recalled hearing that Eastwood was romancing one of the daughters of a Fort Ord officer, who might have been entreated to watch out for him when names came up for postings. While returning from a prearranged tryst in Seattle, Washington, he was a passenger on a Douglas AD bomber that ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean near Point Reyes. Using a life raft, he and the pilot swam 2 miles to safety. According to the CBS press release for Rawhide, the Universal film company
Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German filmmaker, playwright and photographer. He is a major figure in New German Cinema. Among many honors, he has received three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature: for Buena Vista Social Club, about Cuban music culture. One of Wenders' earliest honors was a win for the BAFTA Award for Best Direction for his narrative drama Paris, which won the Palme d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. Many of his subsequent films have been recognized at Cannes, including Wings of Desire, for which Wenders won the Best Director Award at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. Wenders has been the president of the European Film Academy in Berlin since 1996. Alongside filmmaking, he is an active photographer, he is considered to be an auteur director. Wenders was born in Düsseldorf into a traditionally Catholic family, his father, Heinrich Wenders, was a surgeon. The use of the Dutch name "Wim" is a shortened version of the baptismal name "Wilhelm"; as a boy, he took unaccompanied trips to Amsterdam to visit the Rijksmuseum.
He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf. However, he dropped out of university studies and moved to Paris in October 1966 to become a painter. Wenders failed his entry test at France's national film school IDHEC, instead became an engraver in the studio of Johnny Friedlander, in Montparnasse. During this time, Wenders became fascinated with cinema, saw up to five movies a day at the local movie theater. Set on making his obsession his life's work, Wenders returned to Germany in 1967 to work in the Düsseldorf office of United Artists; that fall, he entered the "Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München". Between 1967 and 1970 while at the "HFF", Wenders worked as a film critic for FilmKritik the Munich daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Twen magazine, Der Spiegel. Wenders completed several short films before graduating from the Hochschule with a feature-length 16mm black-and-white film, Summer in the City. Wenders began his career during the New German Cinema era of the late 1960s, making his feature directorial debut with Summer in the City.
Much of the distinctive cinematography in his movies is the result of a productive long-term collaboration with Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller. Some of his more successful and critically acclaimed movies—Paris and Wings of Desire, for example—have been the result of fruitful collaborations with avant-garde authors Peter Handke and Sam Shepard. Handke's novel, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick was adapted for Wenders' second feature film, The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty. Handke co-wrote the script for Wings of Desire and Until the End of the World, both featuring Solveig Dommartin. Wenders has directed several acclaimed documentaries, most notably Buena Vista Social Club, about Cuban musicians, The Soul of a Man, on American blues, he has directed a documentary style film on the Skladanowsky brothers, known in English as A Trick of the Light. The Skladanowsky brothers were inventing'moving pictures' when several others like the Lumière brothers and William Friese-Greene were doing the same.
Alongside Buena Vista Social Club his documentaries on Pina Bausch and Sebastiao Salgado, The Salt of the Earth received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. He has directed many music videos for groups such as U2 and Talking Heads, including "Stay" and "Sax and Violins", his television commercials include a UK advertisement for Carling Premier Canadian beer. Wenders' book, Emotion Pictures, a collection of diary essays written while a film student, was adapted and broadcast as a series of plays on BBC Radio 3, featuring Peter Capaldi as Wenders, with Gina McKee, Saskia Reeves, Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton and Ricky Tomlinson, dramatised by Neil Cargill. Wenders was collaborating with artist/journalist and longtime friend Melinda Camber Porter on a documentary feature about his body of work, Wim Wenders - Visions on Film, when Porter died – the film remains incomplete. Wenders is a member of the advisory board of World Cinema Foundation; the project was founded by Martin Scorsese and aimed at finding and reconstructing world cinema films that have been long neglected.
He serves as a Jury Member for the digital studio Filmaka, a platform for undiscovered filmmakers to show their work to industry professionals. In 2011 he was selected to stage the 2013 cycle of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival, a reflection of his capacity to produce imaginative tributes to great works of art; the project fell through when he insisted on filming in 3-D, which the Wagner family found too costly and disruptive. While promoting his 3-D dance film, Wenders told the Documentary channel Blog in December 2011 that he has begun work on a new 3-D documentary, this one about architecture, he has said that he will only be working in the 3-D film format from now on. Wenders admired the dance choreographer Pina Bausch since 1985, but only with the advent of digital 3-D cinema did he decide that he could sufficiently capture her work on screen, he will stage director debut for Georges Bizet's opera Les Pêcheurs de perles starring Olga Peretyatko, Francesco Demuro, conducted by Daniel Barenboim at Berlin State Opera in June 2017.
In an interview with Christiane Amanpou
Saul Williams
Saul Stacey Williams is an American rapper, singer-songwriter, slam poet and actor. He is known for his blend of poetry and alternative hip hop and for his lead roles in the 1998 independent film Slam and the 2013 jukebox musical Holler If Ya Hear Me, featuring Tupac Shakur's music. Williams was born in Newburgh, New York, is the youngest of three children in his family, he attended Newburgh Free Academy, where he wrote his song "Black Stacey". He graduated from Morehouse College with a BA in acting and philosophy moved to New York City, where he earned an MFA in acting from New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts. While at New York University he became part of the New York café poetry scene. Williams has lived in Brazil as an exchange student from 1988 to 1989. By 1995, Williams had become an open mic poet. In 1996, he won the title of Nuyorican Poets Cafe's Grand Slam Champion; the documentary film SlamNation follows Williams and the other members of the 1996 Nuyorican Poets Slam team as they compete in the 1996 National Poetry Slam held in Portland, Oregon.
The following year, Williams landed the lead role in the 1998 feature film Slam. Williams featured as both a writer and actor in the film, which would win both the Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize and the Cannes Camera D'Or. Around 1998, Williams was breaking into music, he had performed with such artists as Nas, The Fugees, Christian Alvarez, Erykah Badu, KRS-One, Zack De La Rocha, De La Soul, DJ Krust, as well as poets Allen Ginsberg and Sonia Sanchez. After releasing a string of EPs, he released the LP Amethyst Rock Star with producer Rick Rubin in 2001. In September 2004, he released his self-titled album to much acclaim, he played several shows supporting Nine Inch Nails on their European tour in summer 2005, has supported The Mars Volta. Williams was invited to the Lollapalooza music festival around that time, the Chicago stage allowed Williams to attract a wider audience, he appeared on the Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero, supported the group on their 2006 tour of North America. On the tour, Williams announced.
This collaboration resulted in 2007's The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!. The album was available only from its website until a physical CD was issued, featuring new tracks and extended album artwork; the first 100,000 customers on the website had the option to download a free lower-quality audio version of the album. The other option was for users to pay $5 to support the artist directly and be given the choice of downloading the higher-quality MP3 version or the lossless FLAC version; the material was mixed by Alan Moulder. It was Reznor who said, after his own recent dealings with record labels, that they should release it independently and directly to the audience. In early 2008, a Nike Sparq Training commercial featured Williams' song "List of Demands". In a November 2008 interview with Wired.com, Williams talked about his forthcoming projects: "There's one album that I'm waist-deep into. I'm aiming to finish it up next month. Trent wants to work on a sequel for Niggy that I think would be cool, I have an album and new songs demoed at home that I'm ready to go into the studio and lay down.
It's a complete reflection of. Williams showcased the album at London's Hoxton Bar Kitchen on January 26, 2011. Livemusic interviewed Williams on the evening and made a subsequent film, produced by artist Alex Templeton-Ward; when Williams was asked what the point of poetry was, he said: "I'm making this up, I have no idea but here we go. I think that it would be to express, to share, to explore. For me, poetry offers some what of a cathartic experience. I am able to move through emotions and emotional experience you know, break-ups, difficulties in all the things that I may face, whether, with an industry or a loved one or whomever, there needs to be an infiltration process, like you have a window open over there; that is the purpose of poetry: it is the window that opens, that allows some air in, some other insight, some other possibility so we can explore all that we feel, all that we think but with the space to see more than what we know, because there is so much more than we know. If I didn't open myself to the possibilities of the unknown I would be lost."
Williams' fifth album, MartyrLoserKing, was released on January 29, 2016. In March 2018, The Kills released their cover of Williams' "List of Demands" and Williams opened for The Kills' sold-out performance at the Regent Theater in Los Angeles on August 13, 2018; as a writer, Williams has been published in The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, African Voices, as well as releasing four collections of poetry. As a poet and musician, Williams has toured and lectured across the world, appearing at many universities and colleges. In his interview in the book Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, Williams explained why he creates within so many genres: "It's not that I balance those arts out, all the different arts balance me out. So, that there is a certain type of emotion, more accessible through music than poetry... some things are meant to be written, some are meant to be sung, some things are meant to be hummed, some things are made to be yelled, so that's just how life works."In January 2009, he released NGH WHT – The Dead Emcee Scrolls with The Arditti Quartet, a reading of
