BY MITCHELL FINK WITH LAUREN RUBIN

Monday, March 12th 2001, 2:20AM

Undefeated in the boxing ring, Laila Ali is now going for a knockout punch in the publishing world.

Muhammad Ali's daughter is trying to sell a book she calls "Reach!" a motivational and inspirational memoir that will include dish not only about herself but about her worldfamous father.

The 23-year-old fighter, who boasts a 9-0 record in the ring, does have some skeletons in her closet. According to the book proposal, which former William Morris agent Dan Strone has begun circulating for the Trident Media Group, the younger Ali will deal with how she went "from a mansion to jail to Juvenile Hall," when she was arrested as a minor for her involvement in a credit-card scam in Beverly Hills.

Apparently, she believes the time she later spent as a manicurist helped her turn to a more straight-and-narrow life: boxing.

Although Ali tends to bob and weave on the subject of her father in the proposal, she does say their relationship was complicated. Calling her family "dysfunctional to the max," Ali says she loved her father enough to tell him off whenever she wanted. She also didn't like being shlepped to Muslim mosques with him, and couldn't stand it that there were always so many people around the house.

The book is divided not by chapters but by rounds, 12 in all. Unlike her father, I guess, who could go 15.

Roger Maris' hometown of Fargo, N.D., almost struck out in its attempt to land one of the advance screenings of HBO's upcoming film about the late Yankee slugger, "61*."

The movie, which Billy Crystal directed for the cable channel, is slated to air beginning in late April.

Dr. John Leitch, medical director of the Roger Maris Cancer Center in Fargo, wanted to stage an event to honor "Fargo's favorite son," who broke Babe Ruth's single-season home run record in 1961 and died of cancer 24 years later, but the idea didn't initially go over well with one HBO exec.

According to Leitch, his E-mail request was shot down by a person in HBO's marketing department who said that while premieres of "61*" were being staged in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit and Tampa, Fargo was not in their plans.

"I envisioned it as a community event, not just a hospital fund-raiser," said the disappointed Leitch. "We've all benefited from the Roger Maris name, and we take pride in his accomplishments. But I guess HBO has other plans."

Other HBO reps, reached on Friday, say they'd be glad to send Leitch a print, though he cannot use it as a fund-raiser because of Screen Actors Guild regulations. They explained that he was turned down at first because the person he contacted was only handling the four premiere events.

"Of course he can have a tape," explained one of the higherups. "It was an obvious misunderstanding."

PEOPLE WHO DON'T NEED PEOPLE

Russell Crowe definitely has a pecking order when it comes to the magazines that regularly cover him.

As he walked the red carpet the other night prior to receiving the Male Star of the Year award at the annual ShoWest convention in Las Vegas, Crowe dutifully answered questions from a number of magazine reporters, including ones from Glamour and US Weekly.

Then came a query from a People magazine writer.

"Oh, you're from People?" barked Crowe.

"I don't want to [bleeping] talk to you guys."

"The Gladiator" star had calmed down sufficiently by the time he stepped to the podium to accept his award. He said, "I would like to thank DreamWorks - Spielberg, Geffen and Katzenberg - all according to height."

Three years ago, Macy Gray was a talent escort at the Grammys. Today, she's a Grammy winner.

Back in the days when she was showing people to their seats, Gray had a manager who believed in her enough to stick with her, hold her hand backstage before she went on to perform and eventually secure a music publishing deal for Gray at Sony.

That person was Lori Levy, but she's out of the picture today, pushed aside, say sources, when Gray found superstardom. It is a familiar tale in show business: The smell of big money attracts powerful people, who persuade creative types like Gray that the Lori Levys of the world simply don't have what it takes to get them to the promised land.

In Gray's case, she listened to the powers that be, and suddenly Levy was out, replaced as manager by Gray's producer, Andy Slater.

Levy sued for a piece of what is turning out to be a very nice pie. As I understand, the matter is now in the hands of a court arbitrator in Los Angeles.

Gray's PR reps did not return calls for comment.

Wendie Malick wants to come out of the closet - the age closet, that is.

The "Just Shoot Me" actress celebrated a big birthday on Dec. 13 and was all set to proudly have it written across the sky. Then she ran into producer Bruce Paltrow, who strongly advised otherwise.

"He said, 'My God you look great - how old are you?' " she says. "I told him. He said, 'Don't tell anyone.' But I said I was thinking of coming out about this. And Bruce said, 'What are you nuts? This is Hollywood! Don't tell anybody. You don't look it, you don't have to say anything.'"

Malick told Paltrow she would consider his advice. But in the end, she ignored it.

"Since then," she says, "I've looked around at the incredible women who have gone before me who have been letting [their age] go and really digging their lives and not being so obsessed with all this c--- you have no control over. That's what I want to be about. We've gotten insane about being terrified of growing older, and there shouldn't be that horrible stigma about growing older anymore. At some point you have to stop the madness."

So what is Malick's age now? Try the big 5-0.

"I feel pretty great," she says. "I still get mail from teenagers."

This date in celebrity history:

Â In 1955, jazz saxophonist and legendary bebopper Charlie (Bird) Parker died in New York City of heart failure. He was only 34.

Â In 1958, another great jazz artist, Billie Holiday, was given a year's probation by a Philadelphia court after pleading guilty to a narcotics-possession charge two years earlier.

Â In 1969, Paul McCartney married photographer Linda Eastman.

Â Five years later, "Wonder Woman," a TV movie starring Cathy Lee Crosby, aired on ABC. The next year, another "Wonder Woman" TV movie aired, starring Lynda Carter. Eventually, the concept turned into a series, first on ABC and later on CBS, with Carter remaining in the title role throughout.

Â In 1997, police in Los Angeles arrested Mikail Markhasev for the shooting of Bill Cosby's 27-year-old son, Ennis. Markhasev was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Only a couple of weeks ago, Markhasev finally confessed to the killing and apologized to the Cosby family for what he called "a great wickedness."

Summary: Undefeated in the boxing ring, Laila Ali is now going for a knockout punch in the publishing world. Muhammad Ali's daughter is trying to sell a book she calls "Reach!"a motivational and inspirational memoir that will include dish not only about herself but about her worldfamous father. The 23-year-old fighter, who boasts a 9-0 record in the ring, does have some skeletons in her closet. According to


Iraq's Shia clerics have warned top US civilian administrator Paul Bremer against blocking Islamic law.

Shia clerics havereacted angrily to Bremer's threat to use his veto if the US-appointed interim governing council proposes a basic law that challenges the spirit of Western-style democracy.

"Islam is the source of law, and so it should be in a Muslim majority country," said Abd al-Mahdi al-Karabali, who represents the Iranian Shia spiritual leader Ayat Allah Ali al-Sistani in the holy Shia city of Karbala, 110 kilometres (70 miles) south of Baghdad.

"The Iraqi people only can veto the legislation and nobody has the right to interfere in our constitution," he said.

The Najaf head of the main Shia party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, also warned against US intervention in the drafting of the country's legal code.

Iranian backed IGC members al-Hakim (L) and Jalal Talabani (C)

"I think that if one seeks to impose a solution other than what the Iraqi population wants, it would spark a crisis and none of the parties want this to happen," Shaikh Sadr al-Din al-Kubbanji said.

But Bremer's spokesman played down the rift between the provisional authority and the Shia, stressing the United States was not challenging the principle of Islam as one of the sources for the country's new legal code.The Iraqi Governing Council is charged with writing the temporary constitution, or fundamental law, that will govern Iraq until national elections are held.

Observers believe that some council members are pushing to implement Iranian style Islamic rule in the post-occupation era. This was triggered during Abd Al-Aziz al-Hakim's rolling presidency to the IGC last December.Abd Al-Aziz al-Hakim, who is a pro-Iran Shia cleric, passed the controversial decision number 137, according to which Islamic Sharia law would replace Iraq's civil law.

While British control in the south of the country has been praised, powerful Shia militias say they are behind it and trouble will loom unless their demands are met.

"If they (the coalition) are against elections, if the Americans don't want to hold elections, there will be problems"Abu Amar al-Mayahi, a Badr Brigade leader in Basra

Leaders of the Shia movements say they are merely waiting to exert a stronger presence in Basra and may even heed an anti-coalition call to arms should the UN report decide that snap polls are not possible.

"Until now the British haven't managed to secure anything without our help or the Iraqi police and other Islamic parties," said Abd Allah al-Faisal, general secretary of the Organisation of Islamic Bases (OIB).

A group of about 400 young men, drawn from the ranks of the poor and disenfranchised, the OIB is already one of the most feared groups operating in Basra. Al-Faisal said his men were successfully curbing smuggling and crime in the region and were waiting for the British to either quit or allow them a greater role.

"We haven't even started yet. It is like a football game; the coalition forces have put us on the subsbench and we're waiting for someone to take charge and change the team," al-Faisal said.

For the British, the Shia militias are a necessary evil in and around Basra, shoring up law and order until local police are fully trained.

"I think a factor here is that they were already here and they are not particularly posing a threat to us. We have got more important things to do such as trying to recruit and retrain police and deal with the terrorist situation," said Major Tim Smith, spokesman for the British-led multinational division, based in Basra.

Basra is calm but not over lack of basic needs

Under the coalition's model for Iraq, groups such as the Badr Brigade, an Iran-backed resistance force under Saddam Hussein, now emerging as a religious political party, will be disarmed and their militia absorbed into the police or army.

Abu Amar al-Mayahi, deputy chief of the Badr Brigade in Basra, is also growing impatient with the coalition as he moulds his new political group into a formidable force that he says will eventually engulf other regional Shia militias.

"If the British were working alone they would not have their reputation. It is our organisation and a few others who are creating the security, because we have a history and ability," he said.

"There is weak coordination between our work and the British, we want to work with them, but until now there is no response."

But Mayahi warns the current dividision between his men and the British could become a battleground if Sistani's poll demands are met.

"If they (the coalition) are against elections, if the Americans don't want to hold elections, there will be problems," he said.

"There were millions of Iraqis killed under the former regime. Iraqi people are waiting for a result and I know that to make happen what our leaders have requested, they are willing to pay with that number of lives again." he warned.


Mon Feb 7, 2011 4:20pm EST

(Reuters) - Joyce Kane lives with two women who pay rent, don't smoke and like her cats.

Kane, a 64-year-old divorcee, has been sharing her central New Jersey home with strangers for 10 years and depends on them for both income and company.

She is one of a growing number of seniors across the United States who live with paying guests in their homes and find that the lodgers are not only an economic lifeline but also an emotional anchor.

"In order to stay in my home after a divorce I needed additional income," said Kane, who has had seven sharers and describes it as a wonderful experience, and one she recommends to others.

"I've had some great relationships with the homesharers," she added.

In New Jersey, such partnerships are brokered by Homesharing, Inc., a nonprofit group that links homeowners -- often but not always seniors -- with people who can't afford to buy or rent their own homes and are willing to take a room or two in someone else's house.

The service is free, although the group accepts donations from participants. Both the homeowners and the people seeking a home are thoroughly screened and everyone is interviewed.

"Our rate (of success) is better than first-time marriages," said Renee Drell, executive director of Homesharing, Inc, one of many similar organizations across the United States.

Demand from both homeowners and those who want to live in their houses increases every year, and has accelerated with the economic downturn.

"What has been happening the last few years is that more people who are homeowners need this as other costs rise and their income remains stable," Drell explained. "And there is always the population that need this program, but it has increased in intensity now as people have lost their jobs. "

She has seen demand increase by about 19 percent from 1,610 clients in 2009 to 1,912 through November 2010. Those looking to move into someone else's home are often middle-aged women who have fallen on hard times.

"Mostly, it is single women aged 50 to 55 who are downsizing, and their reasons are usually financial," she said.

Patty Milano, 54, and her 80-year-old mother share the home of an 87-year-old woman named Helen, who asked that her last name not be used. Milano and her mother moved into Helen's four-bedroom suburban house late last year because they couldn't find an apartment they could afford.

Milano, who cleans houses when she can, is largely dependent on a monthly government check following the death of her husband, a former Marine. Her mother lives on social security payments.

They pay a combined $700 a month to live in Helen's house for two bedrooms, a shared bathroom and use of the kitchen.

Although Helen said the sharers' income is welcome, their company is what she values most.

"It really has some very healthy benefits," said Drell.

Summary: (Reuters) - Joyce Kane lives with two women who pay rent, don't smoke and like her cats.Kane, a 64-year-old divorcee, has been sharing her central New Jersey home with strangers for 10 years and depends


YANGON | Fri Nov 5, 2010 10:09am EDT

YANGON (Reuters) - Myanmar votes for the first time in 20 years on Sunday in a scripted election where military-backed parties are assured victory, but the poll is also stirring faint hopes of change in one of the world's most isolated states.

The carefully choreographed end of direct army rule, marred by complex rules that stifled major pro-democracy forces, enters its final stage in a largely two-horse race between two powerful army-backed parties running virtually unopposed.

The ballot, the first since a 1990 poll ignored by the military after its proxies were trounced, has been dubbed an "election of generals" and panned as the reclusive junta's formal transfer of power to itself.

"They will maintain the status quo and need only a small majority to do it," said Win Min, an exiled Burmese academic and expert on Myanmar's military. "Be sure that the generals want to win, and they want to win big.

The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) is the military's political juggernaut, fielding 27 incumbent ministers, top-heavy with recently retired generals and boasting 18 million members among the estimated 28 million eligible voters.

The USDP has dominated the campaign and will contest all 1,158 seats up for grabs. Its only real challenge comes from the National Unity Party (NUP), another vehicle for the military, running for 980 seats.

Twenty-five percent of seats in all chambers are reserved for serving generals. That means an army-backed party needs to win only 26 percent of the remaining seats for the junta's allies to have a controlling stake in the country's national legislature.

There are 35 other parties contesting places in a bicameral national parliament and 14 regional assemblies. None has fielded enough candidates to win or earn any real stake in politics.

Three opposition parties lodged complaints with the election commission on Friday, claiming hundreds of state workers were forced to vote for the pro-military USDP in advance balloting.

"We've heard of a lot of cheating and malpractice," said Thu Wai, chairman of the opposition Democratic Party (Myanmar).

"Some ordinary voters didn't get the chance to fill out the ballots themselves because someone had already done it on their behalf," he said.

The National Democratic Force, Rakhine Nationalities Development Party and the NUP also cried foul.

Danny Richards of the Economist Intelligence Unit said the election may appease Myanmar's key trade and political partners but would not be enough for the West to lift sanctions.

"It will cement the military's power but leave some space for the opposition, to give this system some credibility and secure the support of China and regional allies," he said.

"In essence, this dictatorship will appear more credible and democratic, but most people won't buy that."

Still, some analysts say it will create a framework for a democratic system that might yield changes in years ahead in a country bestowed with rich natural resources and located strategically between rising powers China and India.

"The elections, flawed as they are, could provide a catalyst," wrote Derek Tonkin, a Myanmar expert and former British ambassador to Thailand, in a newsletter. "Somehow the impasse has to be broken, and the West has run out of ideas."

The United States, Britain and some Asian governments have expressed concern about transparency and say the vote will lack credibility while an estimated 2,200 political prisoners, including Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, remain in detention.

The government has barred foreign journalists and observers and the election commission rejected outside help because it had "abundant experience in running elections." The Internet in Myanmar has been subjected to repeated failures in attacks believed orchestrated by the junta to control information.

The last, and only other election since 1960, was 20 years ago and won in a landslide by Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD). The regime ignored the result.

The NLD has boycotted this election because hundreds of its members are in detention. It appears to be leading a no-vote campaign to discredit the poll by informing voters of their constitutional right to abstain.

The military this week responded by threatening to stay in charge if voters shunned the polls.

(Writing and additional reporting by Martin Petty; Editing by Jason Szep and Robert Birsel)


They’re rich. They’re spoiled. They’re Persian.

Which means Bravo’s latest reality endeavor, “The Shahs of Sunset,” has Iranian-Americans up in arms over the stereotypes they claim it perpetuates. So much so, in fact, that petitions are circulating in Iranian communities to have the show yanked off the air.

The program, which premiered on Sunday night, follows a group of six Persian-American socialites in Los Angeles as they navigate love and life with what seems like bottomless checking accounts.

They are the children of the Iranians who escaped their country after the 1979 Iranian Revolution ended the reign of the Shah Reza Pahlavi.

The show is produced by Ryan Seacrest, who is also the executive producer of “Keeping up with the Kardashians,” and the various spin-offs of that venerable series.

Several petitions to halt the show have been circulated around the Persian-American community. One of them, “Protest Shahs of Sunset,” encourages signers to “help the Persian community by signing this petition to end 'Shahs of Sunset' and other such racist, exploiting television programming.”

Another, which has collected 500 signatures on Change.org, argues that the show promotes racial stereotypes. One signer of that petition, Shepard Jacobson, commented: “The show wants to present caricatures of Iranian-Americans. This is not entertaining. Rather, it is racist and only encourages others who do not know Persians in our American society to feed into the worst kind of stereotype, rather than showing a new generation of ambitious yet hardworking Iranian-Americans.”

The show’s focus does seem to be on the characters' frivolous sides. Golnesa 'GG' Gharachedaghi, who is being heralded as the next Kim Kardashian, is a 30-year-old trust fund baby who uses her father’s credit card to buy designer clothing and vehemently argues on the first episode that she does not like “ugly people.”

"Charge it to my Daddy" is one of her favorite sayings, and could end up being the series' tagline.

During the first episode she also adds, 'I am 30 years old, and my only paycheck is from my Daddy.”

GG nearly comes to blows with fellow cast member Asa Soltan Rahmati when Asa accuses GG of wearing clothes bought at H&M.

It was comments and scenes like those that caused some viewers to take to Bravo’s official message board to complain about the show after it aired on Sunday night.

“Due to the current political climate between the United States and factions in the Middle East, I cannot see the benefit of this show,” wrote one viewer. “I think it is rather tasteless of you to show how the rich from the Middle East can settle here to continue their lives of opulence where there are still many who still struggle to continue with their daily lives, here and there.”

Another viewer commented that the show was insulting to the Persian-American community.

“It's a shame that the premise of this show is specifically geared as a representation of Persian culture. There's not an ounce of humility and even general human decency shown here. And quite frankly, it's embarrassing to watch. I could understand how this could stereotype people from this background in a real negative way. I found myself really disliking these people by the end of the show.”

Not everyone agrees. "Shahs" cast member Mike Shouhed, a 33-year-old former high roller in the Las Vegas real estate market who claims to be looking for a woman he can bring home to his mother, told Fox411 that all of the petition makers and the haters on the message boards are simply jealous.

“The only reason people are petitioning is that they are 100 percent jealous that they aren’t on the show. All we are doing is hanging out and being ourselves,” Shouhed said. “People are intrigued to learn more about our culture instead of automatically associating us with negative portrayals like terrorism. It humanizes us in a way."

Despite the pilot proving to be more “Jersey Shore” meets “The Real Housewives” than a PBS documentary on how Persians live their lives in the States, some Persian-American advocates agree with Shouhed that good can come out of the show.

“A lot of the Iranian-American community is upset because the show does hype up negative stereotypes. You see materialism and superficiality at its worst,” says Nomar Elmi, the director of community outreach for the National Iranian American Council in Washington, D.C. “But the silver lining for me is that it will get people talking. Usually we are depicted as terrorists from the axis of evil. At least this is another side to the community. It isn’t the most positive or accurate, but it will get the American public talking.”

A rep for Bravo didn't respond immediately to a request for comment.

Summary: Iranian-American petitioners call Bravo's 'The Shahs of Sunset' racist


The Cambridge marketing firm HubSpot, which helps small and mid-size businesses reach prospective customers using social media, is announcing Monday that it has raised an additional $35 million.

The investors include Altimeter Capital, Cross Creek Capital, and, according to two people with knowledge of the deal, the Boston mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments. The new commitments will bring HubSpot’s total fund-raising to about $100 million since it was founded in 2006 by two alumni of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.

Chief executive Brian Halligan said HubSpot will be adding employees in Cambridge, where it already has 400 people, and will open a new office in Dublin in January and hire about 50 people there in 2013.

The new funds will also help with HubSpot’s other growth plans: acquiring small marketing companies. HubSpot previously bought two Cambridge start-ups, Performable and Oneforty, primarily for their engineering talent.

Those acquisitions, Halligan said, “really worked out great. We retained the key people on those teams, and they were people it’d be really difficult to hire on the open market.”

HubSpot makes software used by small and medium-size businesses to manage online marketing and social media on sites such as Facebook and Twitter and on popular blogs. The company has dubbed its approach “inbound marketing,” because it attracts customers who are already searching for a given company’s products or services.

In August, it released a new version of its marketing platform, HubSpot 3, which lets companies deliver more personalized messages to current and prospective customers and is intended to appeal to larger clients with longer, more complex sales cycles.

The company makes money from annual software subscriptions priced at $2,400 and up and says it has 8,000 customers in 56 countries. Halligan said revenue is running at an annualized rate of $60 million; in 2011 it reported revenue of $29 million.

HubSpot is also adding board members and executives with public company experience, including chief operating officer J.D. Sherman, who for six years was chief financial officer of Akamai Technologies in Cambridge.

HubSpot and Halligan declined to identify Fidelity as a new investor, and Fidelity declined to comment. But two sources with knowledge of the investment said Fidelity is one of the funders. The Boston financial giant has previously invested in promising private companies before they went public, most notably Facebook and Google.

Halligan said HubSpot has at least $8 million from its last fund-raising round, in March 2011, but decided to target another large round of funding because “we want to press on the gas a little harder and grow a little faster.”

Summary: The Cambridge marketing firm HubSpot, which helps small and mid-sized businesses reach prospective customers using social media, is announcing Monday it has raised an additional $35 million from funders including Fidelity Investments. The new commitment raises HubSpot’s total fund-raising to about $100 million since it was founded in 2006 by two alumni of MIT’s Sloan School of Management.


The US economy made slow progress in December as employers continued to hire cautiously while political leaders brought the nation to the edge of the fiscal cliff.

Employers added a modest 155,000 workers last month, not enough to lower the unemployment rate, which held at 7.8 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday.

Employers added an average of 153,000 jobs a month throughout 2012, about the same pace of job growth in 2011.

“It’s not a great number, but it’s not a bad number either,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight, a Lexington forecasting firm. “Businesses are still very cautious and were super cautious in December, mostly because of the fiscal cliff.”

Stocks rose modestly Friday. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 44 points to close at 13,435. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 7 to 1,466, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite added a point, closing at 3,102.

Health care employment added 45,000 jobs, and jobs at restaurants rose by 38,000 in December. Some of the biggest gains came in the struggling construction sector, which gained 30,000 jobs over the month, driven in part by rebuilding following Hurricane Sandy.

Sung Won Sohn, a professor of economics at California State University, said such gains are a sign that the economy continues to heal, even though he expects the pace of job growth to remain modest over the next several months and unemployment to remain relatively unchanged.

Sohn said he expects more discouraged workers who had given up job searches to resume looking for work, adding to the number of unemployed and keeping the rate higher. (The government only counts active job seekers as officially unemployed.)

An improving housing market and increased construction activity will also give the economy a lift after years of stagnation.

“They are no longer a drag on the economy and are a source of strength,” Sohn said. “The aftermath of the superstorm Sandy has been adding jobs as rebuilding continues.”

One out of 8 jobs was estimated to be related to housing during the last housing boom, including jobs tied to housing finance and mortgages, he said.

“The importance of housing in the economy should not be underestimated,” Sohn said.

Overall, the US economy has slowly improved since the housing market collapse and financial crisis of 2008. While the unemployment rate is at its lowest since the end of the recession in June 2009, it has remained relatively unchanged since September.

About 12 million Americans are looking for work unsuccessfully, and about 5 million of them, or 40 percent, have been looking for a job for more than six months or more.

As part of the fiscal cliff deal, Congress renewed federal emergency unemployment insurance benefits to help the long-term unemployed for the 11th time since the recession began.

But economists worried that political uncertainty continues to negatively affect business decisions, including hiring. Congress and the White House reached an 11th-hour compromise on the fiscal cliff that will raise taxes for most Americans but postponed acting on automatic federal spending cuts for two months.

That means more rancorous debate and uncertainty, a political pattern that has put businesses that rely on government spending in a state of perilous limbo. In Massachusetts, billions on defense and research spending are at stake unless Congress reaches another compromise.

Brian Bethune, an economics professor at Gordon College in Wenham, said he did not expect the spending issues facing Congress to weigh heavily on the economy, noting that the defense and nondefense spending cuts that will automatically go into effect unless Congress acts to account about $100 billion.

Congress is considering spending about half that amount in Hurricane Sandy relief funding alone.

“It’s good that we have some momentum starting off 2013, instead of a fade,” he said. “What’s key is a credible spending containment package that will play out over several years.”

Summary: The US economy made slow progress in December as employers continued to hire cautiously while political leaders brought the nation to the edge of the fiscal cliff. Employers added a modest 155,000 workers last month, but not enough to lower the unemployment rate, which held at 7.8 percent, about where it has been since September, according to the US Labor Department reported Friday. Employers added an average of about about 153,000 jobs a month throughout 2012, about the same pace of job growth in 2011.


The branding hits as soon as you leave Hong Kong International airport and spot two huge billboards heralding the Asian debut of the world's most prominent art fair, Art Basel. Amid a PR frenzy that drew the likes of supermodel Kate Moss and Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, it seemed that even the torrential rain and 18,000 lightning strikes across the territory hours before the VIP preview on Wednesday were just part of the city-wide spectacle.

There is much familiar about Art Basel in Hong Kong, which runs alongside the original fair in its namesake home city in Switzerland and a sister event in Miami Beach – not least the sponsors. Trolleys of Ruinart champagne stalk the aisles at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. A BMW "art car" brightly painted by Spanish artist César Manrique is displayed outside one entrance. Absolut ArtBureau, an offshoot of the vodka drink company, has commissioned an "art bar" by Adrian Wong, in which a Cantonese lounge singer performs with an animatronic band of multi-limbed manga-like creatures, evoking a mix of colonial kitsch and Blade Runner.

Art Basel's purchase of the previous Art HK fair two years ago led some locals to question whether Hong Kong's art scene was becoming a post-colonial venture for importing western art into Asia. With China now the world's second-largest art market after the US, and Asia home to more billionaires than North America, the attraction seems obvious.

In recent years, several top commercial western galleries have set up outposts amid the Louis Vuitton and Prada stores in the city's central business district, including American Larry Gagosian, the world's richest art dealer, in 2008 and London gallerist Jay Jopling's White Cube in March 2012.

At packed-out private views, both galleries brought out their big guns. White Cube showed the Chapman Brothers' macabre new installation, The Sum of All Evil, vitrines packed with thousands of miniature figures in violent torment; and Gagosian presented paintings by the late New York graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

But the wooing of the Chinese collectors and their vast wealth is a long, slow process. Most western galleries have yet to convince the big buyers of mainland China, whose taste for contemporary art remains patriotic, according to market analysts.

Graham Steele, director of White Cube Hong Kong, said: "The barriers are coming down, but not as fast as western dealers would like them to. There isn't the cultural momentum yet. The major Chinese collectors come to Hong Kong for Christie's or Sotheby's auctions of Chinese art."

US gallery Pace's Beijing branch, which explicitly declares itself an Asian gallery and runs a different programme from the US and UK branches, has found success by becoming a major dealer for Chinese contemporary artists. Its stand at the fair included work by Zhang Xiaogang, whose paintings have fetched multimillion-pound prices at auction.

Several British dealers said that Singapore, Taiwan and the Philippines, which are more familiar with western culture, were their most important markets in Asia. Australians are also major collectors. Ellie Harrison-Read, sales associate at Lisson Gallery, said: "Big names such as Anish Kapoor and Marina Abramovic, people who are familiar, sell well. Brand is very important here."

This seemed to be apparent in big sales of the fair's first day. London's Victoria Miro gallery sold a wall-sized painting by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama for £1.32m and White Cube sold a Gary Hume sculpture for £66,243, while 15 sculptures by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, depicting a cartoon version of the artist and his dog, sold for £89,428 each.

The local art scene, which has long felt overshadowed by the Chinese contemporary art boom, has mixed feelings about the influx of international dealers. Pui Pui To, director of 2P gallery, one of Hong Kong's few art spaces to represent local artists, said: "Now that the blue chip galleries have arrived, it's become much tougher for us to survive."

Spiralling rents have pushed younger galleries further from the city centre. Pui Pui To's gallery, which is showing in Art Basel, is on a backstreet in Sai Ying Pun in the city's western district. "The only brand names round here are McDonald's and KFC," she said.

However, she praised Art Basel in Hong Kong's director, Magnus Renfrew, who founded Art HK for supporting the local art scene through educational programmes and collaboration with non-profit, artist-run projects. Renfrew said that when he first arrived in Hong Kong it was referred to as a "cultural desert" with little audience for contemporary art: "Since the fair opened, the number of visitors has grown from just 19,000 in 2008 to 67,000 last year and the gallery scene is more sophisticated."

He believes that the current imbalance between the art market, which has long had a big presence in the territory with Christie's and Sotheby's auction houses, will change with the construction of the West Kowloon cultural district, which will include the M+ museum of visual culture, twice the size of Tate Modern, and 16 performing art museums. An outdoor exhibition of inflatable sculptures on the site, M+ mobile, which includes a giant upturned cockroach, a suckling pig you can walk into and British artist Jeremy Deller's bouncy castle version of Stonehenge, has drawn 130,000 visitors in just three weeks.

Lars Nittve, executive director of M+ and the founding director of Tate Modern, compared the exhibition to the sensation caused by Carl Andre's bricks when they first were shown at the Tate. "Really for the first time in Hong Kong it has provoked public debate about whether something that looks ugly can be art. Can you jump on art? Can art be fun?"

Harriet Onslow of Pearl Lam Galleries, based in Hong Kong and Shanghai, thinks there will be room for a wider range of galleries as the art scene diversifies. "Collectors are not going to decide against buying one of [the smaller galleries'] artists for HK$5,000 just because I've sold them something for HK$200,000," she said.

However the work of one of the local artists in the Pearl Lam booth suggests that Pui Pui To is not alone in her ambivalance towards the internationalisation of Hong Kong's art scene. Tsang Kin-wah offers a tongue-in-cheek critique of the art fair system in a text installation in which scathing comments in vinyl lettering spread across the floor like the tentacles of an octopus:

Onslow said: "It's about how fucking awful art fairs are and how it's no longer about the art but the fair. The text is etched on glass because that signifies how the art and the artist is disappearing."

Yet in the Deutsche Bank's exclusive VIP room another work by the artist, best known for painting words in English and Chinese in seemingly floral patterns, offers a more positive if rather cynical take, with the phrase "Making Art, Making Money" discernible in the grey text. It seems unlikely that Tsang Kin-wah at least will be disappearing any time soon.

Summary: The world-renowned Swiss fair has set up in Hong Kong on the long march to a bigger slice of Asia's massive art market


It's not really a gherkin. It's a pine cone, or perhaps a poplar. Anyway, Norman Foster and Partners' Swiss Re building is, as well as defiantly modern, resonantly classical. All that nonsense with Prince Charles and neo-Georgian conservatism, which has been getting away with opposing the classical to the modern, distracts from the formal beauty of the skyscraper that, rightly, won the RIBA Stirling prizeStirling prize on Saturday night.

I don't know what the Prince thinks of 30 St Mary Axe, as it prefers to be known. Perhaps he sees in it the ominous shape of a vertical zeppelin, menacing St Paul's. It has everything that used to be scorned by the British public: radical shape, industrial materials, imposing itself on a City skyline that some argue should be reserved for Wren and Hawksmoor. Laughed at when it was announced, instantly popular when (quickly) built, this is the first great skyscraper to be built in London.

It instantly exposes the banal ugliness of the NatWest tower or Canary Wharf. Because it has no British rivals, you have to go to New York to see how original Foster's tower is. It is comparable with the Chrysler building, the glorious art deco skyscraper built in Manhattan in the 1920s. But it has one over the Chrysler. Stripped of its glittering chrome crown, the New York City landmark would be straight-lined, regular, even ordinary. The gherkin, cone or conifer that expands as it rises, before narrowing again to a dome, does not have a single orthodox aspect. Its entire body curves at every point. It glitters and reflects all over, creating optical patterns that change with distance, and with the times of day. It is a masterpiece that opens new possibilities for world architecture. And it's in London, a city whose architectural history can best be described as sad. But then, architectural masterpieces are appearing all over the world nowadays.

The revolution began in Bilbao, when Frank Gehry's glistening, titanium-skinned mountain range of a Guggenheim Museum not only competed successfully with Frank Lloyd Wright's original Guggenheim in New York City but redefined what architects are capable of doing. The combination of digital design and new building materials enables architects to create shapes that were never possible before. Gehry's multifaceted, warped spaces finally achieve what architects dreamt of doing a century ago - translating cubist painting into real space. Daniel Libeskind does the same thing for expressionism: in early 20th-century German paintings by Ludwig Kirchner rapidly moving, jagged shards splinter the world in a way that communicates anxiety. Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin is the architectural equivalent.

Cubism, expressionism, futurism, surrealism - in trying to describe the proliferating originalities of contemporary architecture, you find yourself reaching for analogies with the great art movements of the last century. And that is why I am interested.

Delightful from a distance, 30 St Mary Axe is even richer as you approach past an ancient London church and see that wonderful inflation shimmying out of the earth. The triangular panels create a complex of colour and shade. At the bottom of the skyscraper, stone benches carved with classical epitaphs remind us that this, as much as the World Trade Centre site for which Foster failed to get the commission, is a place of memorial and pain, devastated by an IRA bomb. Cypresses, whose elongated curves are echoed here, were planted around tombs in the classical world.

Everyone talks about the "gherkin" as if it were weird and unprecedented, but it is not. Where other recent architecture has a lot in common with the extravagance of the baroque, Foster and his team have created a form that is manifestly in the classical tradition. The Swiss Re building is not irregular - it is regular; its expansiveness culminates in a dome that rhymes with that of St Paul's. Far from being a stranger on the London skyline, this is a shape that Wren, or Michelangelo, or any of the architects of the European great tradition would have recognised, admired and envied.

The building is surrounded, on a weekday lunchtime, with admirers. ArchitectureArchitecture fans from all over the world are here, taking photographs, begging the security guards to let them in to the lobby. I'm here for a different reason. Art, rather than architecture, concerns me. And this is the most satisfying new work of art I've seen in years.

It is modern and ancient; it is site-specific; it sculpts the sky. It is a monument and a mirror. It makes you see London in a new way. It does things that artists - people who are officially called that - have given up even trying to do.

The new architecture that announced itself to the world with Gehry's Guggenheim does not bear simply a superficial resemblance to the art of Picasso, or Kirchner, or Michelangelo. It really is doing things we once expected sculpture to do. It has obliterated the difference between architecture and art. More than that, it is filling the space contemporary art has abandoned. Walk from Foster's Bishopsgate masterpiece and over the formerly wobbly footbridge to Tate Modern, and you can contrast architecture's current creativity with contemporary art's refusal of the same.

Art has never, in history, been more talked about, venerated, and valued than it is now. The opening of Bruce Nauman's installation in the museum's Turbine Hall is a national event. But Nauman has left the hall physically almost empty, except for the speakers that relay his sound piece, a collection of statements sampled from his previous works.

Nauman, it says on a white placard against the grey wall, is one of the most revered artists in the world. And so he is, which makes the contrast between his art and that of Norman FosterNorman Foster all the more telling.

The respect that accrues to Nauman comes from his restraint, his refusal to add to the world. He is a pithy commentator, a Beckettian joker. But he is not someone who creates form. That old job of the artist is rejected by the art world that lauds Nauman. Don't get me wrong, and think I mean to equate Bruce Nauman with "modern art". Modernism never rejected imagination, poetry, or images in the way that this chewing wail of a work in the Turbine Hall does. It's not just that art now does not add new forms to the world, it is specifically praised and valued for not doing so. Which means that the only real sculpture of our time is being made by architects.

Architecture is art's last, best hope. Architects are escaping all the cliches by which art is entangled. In art, there is a perpetual, facile argument between ancients and moderns, conservatives and champions of the new. You have to either like Bruce Nauman or Raphael. There isn't really a cultural space that can contain the two: past and present are no longer on speaking terms. In the arcane discourse that museums of modern art have lost themselves in, both Raphael and Picasso are considered old hat. Show me someone who can see Picasso as a lame old conservative and I'll show you mental collapse. But that is the insidious message you are fed by the contemporary Kunsthalle.

This is the self-delusion of a bronze age. A hundred years ago, western art experienced its second renaissance. The two greatest periods in the history of art are 1430-1540 and 1860-1920. The creativity of modernism at the beginning of the 20th century will always stretch minds: cubist paintings will never be easy.

Art now deflects comparison with Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Malevich. What can you do? Critics and curators shy away from the history of modern art into a narcissistic relativism. According to this easy argument, Bruce Nauman challenges us, now, in a comparable way to how Picasso challenged people in 1907 when he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

It's nonsense. Picasso, for one thing, still looks hideous to many visitors to Tate Modern - that is, he's still new. Cubism has not been assimilated. And with Nauman, there's almost nothing to assimilate. It's all content - all ideas, expressed in words. Once you get the depressing message, you can move on.

Modernist art - all great art - threatens and delights formally, visually, spatially. This formal creativity is what artists have run away from into art whose melodramatic "content" will in future mean nothing to anyone. It will look as boringly prosaic as moralising Victorian paintings do to us. For art to triumph as art it must have the flame of formal abandon that is in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, or Matisse's Dance - or Norman Foster's erotic gherkin.

Why is architecture so much less hyped than art? The fact is that artists are more glamorous than architects. Building is a business, and even younger architects find it hard to accept that Foster, a business genius, is also an aesthetic one. Carping about him is rife in professional journals. It's easier to see how Daniel Libeskind is an artist. But even he has a global studio.

Art in 2004 revels in the lo-fi, the amateurish, the readymade. You can be an "artist", in the almost religious way Tracey Emin talks of being an "artist", with nothing but a pencil and paper or, yes, some dirty bedding; or, as in Nauman's case, a sound system. It gives us all hope. Architects are far more arrogant, capitalist types. Architects don't appeal to the romantic myth of the artist.

There was an interesting episode when Norman Foster and his team were designing the footbridge connecting St Paul's cathedral and Tate Modern. It was reported that Foster wanted a sculpture by Anthony Caro to stand at the Tate side of the bridge. Tate director Nicholas Serota said no. Caro is one of the last modernists, his sculpture Early One Morning a three-dimensional abstract painting. He wouldn't sit well with Tate Modern, that's true. It seems the modernist tradition - which is also the Renaissance tradition - of optical form is not dead. It has moved across the river, and into the sky.

Summary: As Norman Foster's Stirling prize-winner demonstrates, some of the most exciting sculpture of our time is being produced by architects, writes Jonathan Jones.


There’s a rule of thumb that can come in handy when you hear about new planet discoveries from the Kepler space mission. If they’re talking about a handful of new worlds orbiting distant stars, it’s an actual discovery. If they’re talking about hundreds, it’s not actual planets but “planet candidates,” which haven’t yet been independently verified — a key step before scientists can claim they’ve genuinely found something.

But the latest announcement from the Kepler science team has just turned that reliable rule on its head. As of yesterday, astronomers knew of about a thousand verified planets beyond our solar system, the majority of them found with telescopes other than Kepler. Today, Kepler added an unprecedented 715 new ones to the list, nearly doubling the count of bona fide exoplanets known to science. “For years, I’ve trained myself to say ‘planet candidate’ rather than ‘planet’ most of the time,” said SETI Institute and Kepler scientist Jason Rowe in a press conference. “I have to change that.”

Of these new worlds, none is what NASA scientist Jack Lissauer calls “Earth 2.0,” meaning an Earth-size planet in an Earth-like orbit around a sun-like star. Just four of the planets, in fact, sit in their stars’ so-called habitable zones, where water could plausibly exist in liquid form on the surface. And in these cases, the stars are smaller and dimmer than the sun, while the planets are bulkier than Earth. But most of the new planets are between Neptune and Earth in size, confirming a trend of moderate-size planets that astronomers have been seeing for several years now — and giving them good reason to think that true twins of Earth aren’t at all uncommon.

The reason for such a huge leap in planet verifications is based on another trend astronomers have noticed: most of the planets they’re finding come not singly but in solar systems containing two, three, four or more planets. That’s not a huge surprise, given our solar system’s eight (formerly nine).

Lissauer and other theorists realized, however, that that fact gave them a way to vet planet candidates in wholesale fashion. The reason you need a double check at all is that Kepler finds new worlds by looking for a slight dimming as a planet passes in front of its star, blocking a tiny bit of the star’s light. Other astronomical phenomena can mimic that effect, though — most notably a pair of stars that orbit each other, with one passing in front of the other. So astronomers confirm candidates using other techniques — looking for the gravitational wobble the planet imposes on the star, for example — which have to be done one candidate at a time.

It would be much less likely, however, for something to mimic a swarm of planets passing in front of a star and dimming it, each with its own rhythm based on orbital distance. The risk of a false positive, in other words, is exceedingly low. All of the planets just announced are indeed multiples, with 715 worlds distributed among just 305 stars.

(MORE: Galileo’s Planetary Puzzle Finally Solved)

Verifying a huge number of new planets all in one shot is a big enough deal, but what makes it especially interesting is that so many of them are clustered very tightly near their stars — multiple worlds bigger than Earth but huddled in packs with orbits smaller than Venus’ or even Mercury’s. “So why isn’t Earth crammed close to the sun?” asked MIT astronomer Sara Seager, who joined the press conference as an independent commenter. One possible answer: these planets formed from a primordial disk of gas and dust much denser than the one from which we emerged. But that’s just speculation at this point. What’s clear, she said, “This just reminds us that planetary systems can be very different from ours.”

The fact that so many exoplanets are like mini-Neptunes in size is also a surprise that astronomers have been coming to grips with over the past few years. “We have none of these in our solar system,” said Seager, “so we don’t really know for sure what they’re made of.”

(MORE: A New Supernova Caught in the Act)

Much of that could become clearer with a new generation of space telescopes scheduled to go into orbit later in the decade. One is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, which will look for planet-induced dimming in bright stars, mostly close to Earth; another is the James Webb Space Telescope, whose huge mirror and powerful infrared-sensitive cameras will look for chemical signatures of life in the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets.

Kepler, meanwhile, will keep finding planets — not so much through new observations, since a malfunction last spring has left it crippled, but via the backlog of observations that still haven’t been analyzed. The new planets, said Lissauer, come from the first two years’ worth of Kepler data. That means a lot of planets are yet to come, including some with longer, more Earth-like orbits.

“Kepler,” said Seager, “is the gift that keeps on giving.”

MORE: 20 Breathtaking Images of Earth as Seen From Space

Summary: A major haul by the Kepler space telescope has astronomers cheering


With the presidential election fast approaching, Jenna is the one person who can influence its outcome. As the queen of the bums in northern Florida and her two million loyal Twitter followers, she could be the most important undecided voter anywhere. Jack finds Jenna first, but Liz isn't too far behind. Jack wants the nation to experience the first genuinely rich president, Mitt Romney. Liz is frustrated and wants four more years of the Obama Administration. Jenna isn't paying much attention to either one of them, but seeing an opportunity, she sets up a debate. Liz and Jack will present their case for which president would benefit her more- and that's whom she will endorse.

In the writer's room, Pete is excited about the first black presidential reelection. Frank doesn't buy it and exposes the real reason Pete is so enthused by the reelection. On the night of the 2008 Presidential Election, Pete shared a passionate kiss with Maria, a security guard at Rockefeller Center, as Obama was announced as the President of the United States. Hoping to recreate the magic of 2008, Pete invites Maria to the writer's election party. Unfortunately, she reveals that she has to leave before the election will be called. Pete, feeling determined, is inspired by President Obama's campaign slogan, "Forward!" and decides he will attempt to get the election called before Maria leaves.

Appreciating the importance of the election, Kenneth receives his absentee ballot from Stone Mountain. Tracy shares his enthusiasm, sort of. But Kenneth isn't so sure how to make informed decisions, so he asks Tracy for advice. Tracy suggests that he should fill the ballot out like any American, uninformed.

As the debate for Jenna's vote is about to start, Liz discovers that Jack's created an attack ad questioning Liz's friendship with Jenna. Outraged, Liz confronts Jack. Soon they're debating over Jenna's political identity. Jack argues that her continued aging, increasingly mean attitude and strong financials are convincing arguments for her being a republican. Liz reminds him that she is a role model for gays in America and is overly sensitive - both liberal characteristics.

Liz and Jack settle in behind their podiums with Jenna set up as the moderator. Liz begins and argues the liberal stance on reproductive rights and appeals to Jenna's emotional side by claiming that Mitt Romney will cut art education in schools. Jack spins the political point and suggests that without arts funding, there will be no new actresses for Jenna to compete with. Feeling desperate, Liz reasons that all the cool and young celebrities are supporting Obama; however, Jack counters by declaring she would be the only cool celebrity supporting Romney. Nodding in approval, Jenna asks for closing statements. Jack delivers an inspirational speech that is just nonsense. Afterward, Liz confronts Jack and attempts an emotional appeal regarding his childhood. It's no use; Jack is tired of her sentimental nonsense.

Later, Pete pleads to Nightly News anchor Brian Williams to call the election early. Brian, recognizing Pete's request is about Maria, refuses to call it and backflips away. Overhearing Pete's plea, Liz tells Pete to give up hope. Pete implores Liz and the other writers in the room to recognize the election's significance. Pete doesn't just want another kiss from Maria, he wants what the kiss symbolically represents: the feeling of hope that anything can happen.

Pete runs to catch Maria before she leaves. Heading out, Maria explains to Pete that she doesn't feel the same way she once did toward the presidential elections. There's been no change. Defeated, Pete comes to the realization that nothing really has changed in the past four years. Maria's boyfriend walks in to pick her up. He seems to bear some resemblance to Pete, except for his full head of hair, money and good looks. Pete realizes that there is still hope for change. Change is from within and not from a political star.

Down the hall, Jack reminds Jenna to tweet her endorsement for Mitt Romney. At the same time, a little girl approaches Jenna for an autograph, but Jack intercedes. He explains that Jenna is not the best role model. The little girl isn't after Jenna's autograph for personal reasons, but for financial ones, and Jack recognizes that she is a young entrepreneur. Unwittingly, in an attempt to explain why capitalism is thriving, Jack actually exposes its failures and, in the process, persuades the little girl to be more like Jenna. Jack is shocked as the little girl walks away.

Knowing she only has one chance left, Liz hacks Jenna's Twitter account and has Tracy tweet controversial tweets about dead celebrities. Feeling victorious, she walks into Jack's office. Not only has Liz committed a cyber crime, she also lowered her moral standards. Similarly, Jack reformed his own behavior and decided not to have Jenna endorse Mitt Romney. He doesn't want the youth of America to grow up in Jenna Maroney's America. It seems that the liberal and conservative have switched roles. Recognizing the folly of it all, Jack and Liz toast to their sentimental and manipulative behavior.

Summary: Realizing that Jenna could decide the Presidential election, Liz and Jack stage a debate to win her support and her followers.


David LaChapelle is running late. Though the term "running" doesn't quite describe it. "He's sleeping," says one of LaChapelle's assistants, peering at me languidly through those ironic-retro spectacles that seem to be de rigueur for arty types. "People are working on it." Working on what, I wonder? Getting him out of his pyjamas?

The assistant explains that LaChapelle flew in from his home on the Hawaiian island of Maui yesterday and is still jet-lagged. This is why we've had to change the interview location at the last minute and congregate in the lobby of a chintzy five-star hotel just off Sloane Square in London. Besides, he's not that used to dealing with the press these days. LaChapelle, 48, announced his retirement from the fashion business six years ago to concentrate on art photography and has been fairly reclusive ever since. His fine art exhibits have included Deluge (a set of meditations on civilisation's tendency towards destruction), The Rape of Africa (Naomi Campbell as a bare-breasted post-Botticelli Venus) and the extraordinary Museum series (images of flooded art museums and semi-religious iconography). Today he is in town for the opening of an exhibition of his work.

It turns out I only have to wait half an hour before LaChapelle arrives with a flurry of apologies. "I'm so sorry," he says, shaking my hand. He is wearing a lumberjack shirt, the bottom half of which is printed with an image of three men in a boat. On his head, a small green hat perches on thick, brown curly hair. Around his neck hangs a silver necklace with a metallic pendant of Michael Jackson. He speaks in a soft voice at odds with his muscular frame and tanned, beefy arms.

He hates not being punctual. "I'm really not like that," he insists. "I'm not a diva." And he should know, given the number of divas he's had to deal with. During his time as a fashion and magazine photographer – one of the most pre-eminent of the past 20 years – he worked with them all, producing hundreds of theatrically executed, semi-surrealist images that have graced the pages of the world's most stylish magazines. Whereas contemporaries such as Annie Leibovitz sought to make their subjects beautiful, LaChapelle was all about concept.

He photographed the late rapper Tupac Shakur as a slave in a cotton field. Britney Spears was trussed up as a modern-day Lolita for the cover of Rolling Stone. Michael Jackson was given a pair of giant angel wings and pictured standing on a writhing red devil. The hip-hop star Kanye West was portrayed as Christ in a crown of thorns. "I was trying to rescue the idea of Christ from the fundamentalists," LaChapelle says now, as if this is the most natural thing in the world for a fashion photographer to want to do. He's done Hillary Clinton, Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga, Madonna, Pamela Anderson, David Beckham… He's been dubbed "the Fellini of photography". He once had to wait six hours to photograph Whitney Houston for the cover of her 2000 The Greatest Hits album.

"I was very used to people being late," he says, drinking a cup of black coffee. "It never bothered me. You know they're the star. [Houston] turned up at 6pm and we stayed until 9am. I knew she was on coke. I had to adjust the way I shot her because she couldn't keep her face still. She was really distracted but I knew that if I shot enough film… I kept shooting and shooting and finally we got that one shot of her."

Houston died in a hotel bathtub two days before we meet, so it is perhaps natural that the singer should be uppermost in LaChapelle's mind, even more so given that the exhibition he is here to promote explores questions of mortality. Earth Laughs in Flowers, which takes its title from a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem, consists of 10 lushly produced floral still-life photographs. At first glance, the images look like old master paintings. On closer examination, the flowers are surrounded by contemporary objects: burning cigarettes, plastic Barbies, an old mobile phone…

Striking as these images are, LaChapelle does not talk much about them. Instead, he contemplates the grisly fact that so many of his subjects have come to tragic ends – Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse (for whom he directed a music video), Alexander McQueen, and his muse, the stylist Isabella Blow. LaChapelle counted McQueen and Blow as close friends, and they took their own lives within three years of each other. Burning Down the House, LaChapelle's fantastical portrait of the two of them, taken in 1996 when McQueen was 27, now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

LaChapelle says that watching McQueen and Blow at work in an increasingly commercialised environment brought home to him "the pressure that artists who were working within that business world were under. Issy was truly an artist. I tried to get her to come to Maui the year before she ended her life. She started talking about suicide a lot more than she had previously. She was going to come, and I wish she had."

Two years shy of 50, and LaChapelle already feels like a survivor. He lived through the Aids epidemic in New York in the 1980s – for years he was too terrified to get tested after a former boyfriend, Louis, died of the disease. The letters L-U-I-S are tattooed in faded green-black ink across the fingers of his right hand. "That's a different Luis," LaChapelle says when I ask. "He was my manager, he worked with me for 17 years and died in the studio of congenital heart failure in 1999." How old was he? "Thirty-four," he replies, unblinking.

He goes on to tell me that his mother, Helga, a Lithuanian refugee who came to Ellis Island in the early 1960s, is currently undergoing chemotherapy for polycythemia – a cancer of the blood. He lost his father 10 years ago to melanoma, but says: "I thought my mum would live for ever because of the way she took care of herself. She was a vegetarian, she exercised and, God, she was a worker! She worked in a factory, a restaurant, a nursing home. She had no help raising three kids, she cooked food, she sewed her own clothes."

LaChapelle was always close to his parents. The family moved from Connecticut to the conservative town of Raleigh, North Carolina when David was nine, and at 15 he left school after being bullied about his sexuality. The family moved back to Connecticut when he was a teenager, and "I used to go to school dressed as a cowboy". The other boys threw milk cartons at him. At one point, it got so bad that he considered suicide: "I'd got hold of tranquillisers and liquor and I was going to cut my wrists." The only thing that stopped him was the knowledge that "if I killed myself, I was going to end my parents' lives".

Instead, LaChapelle ran away to New York and blagged his way in to Studio 54, where cowboy costumes were all the rage. After training at the North Carolina School of Arts, he got his first job on Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. What was Warhol like? "Very funny. He reminded me of my mother." In the evenings, he would hang out with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. A sojourn in London in the early 80s brought him into the orbit of Leigh Bowery and the ballet dancer Michael Clark and left him with an abiding love of all things British – he is obsessed with Adele and later does an unexpectedly hilarious rendition of a Catherine Tate Show sketch. "Am I bovvered?" he says in a terrible cockney accent. "Do I look bovvered?"

From Interview, he went on to get a job for Details magazine. "I've been making a living [through photography] since I was 18." Recently, he came across a list he'd written as a teenager of all the people he most wanted to photograph. "I think I've photographed everyone on that list." The one person he was most nervous about shooting was Muhammad Ali. "He was really a hero to me." When Ali came on set in 2003, "he was so kind to everyone, making everyone laugh. He stayed and signed every single person's picture. What a gentleman." Athletes, he says, aren't easy to photograph. Most of them don't get "it", whatever "it" might be. "Apart from David Beckham. David Beckham was great."

But success hasn't been easy. LaChapelle admits he has "workaholic" tendencies, partly because he suffers from bipolar disorder and is therefore prone to bouts of manic energy and sleeplessness. "I definitely think it has informed who I am. In a sense, I wouldn't trade it." He was sectioned for a brief period some years ago but currently the condition is under control: "Exercise is my magic bullet… and I have to be on meds sometimes. I've got a great doctor, finally." Travel poses a particular problem. "It's difficult [because] manic episodes can be triggered by sleeplessness." Suddenly it becomes clear why LaChapelle was late to the interview and why, when he speaks, he can sound lethargic even though his thoughts are so fast-paced and vivid.

At several points in our conversation he veers off into circuitous semi-philosophical discussions that prove almost impossible to interrupt. "I'm getting there," he says with an impish smile halfway through one 10-minute monologue. "I'm coming back to what you asked me." When I look at my notes later, they read like a series of esoteric bullet points: Taoism, religion, Jesus, death, birth, Adam and Eve, cell division…

His deep thoughts are perhaps surprising given that LaChapelle's photography has in the past been dismissed by critics as superficial and materialistic. Did that annoy him? "It did at the time, a little bit – and sometimes more than a little bit – but now, looking back, it's changing, and people are seeing things in the work today that they once weren't. With a little distance you can see that [the photographs] were about the choices America was making at the time. It wasn't condemning, it was done with humour and beauty."

In works such as Death by Hamburger (2001) or I Buy a Big Car for Shopping (2002), LaChapelle would do this quite literally: showing a woman flattened by an oversized piece of fast food, or a car crushed by a giant Coca-Cola can. They are not subtle pictures. And part of the criticism is based around the idea that popularity demeans artistic credibility.

From LaChapelle's perspective, he wanted "to convey what was, in my mind, a paradox about consumption, that sort of decadence, selling the idea that happiness was going to come with the next acquisition, the next hard-to-get handbag for some insane price. I was questioning those values that were distracting from what was going on."

For years LaChapelle was in high demand. He directed music videos for Elton John, Jennifer Lopez and Christina Aguilera among others, before branching out into feature films. His 2005 documentary, Rize, about a dance craze called "krumping" that grew out of the roughest areas of Los Angeles, premiered at Sundance.

But it was becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile his artistic desires with commercial reality. "It was really getting hard to get published. My concepts were too much for magazines." He did a shoot for Italian Vogue in June 2005, featuring models posing against a post-apocalyptic backdrop of dilapidated houses and sandbags. He had been thinking, he says, about the environment and global warming, and it seemed a natural progression, but by the time the magazine was printed in August, hurricane Katrina had struck.

"The editor rang me up and said, 'David, why have you done this? Please, it's too much. Just show the dress! People think the photos are about the hurricane.' She'd had letters and calls complaining about how we were exploiting Katrina, but I'd shot them two months before. I knew then that it was the last editorial I'd shoot."

Why? He looks out of the window. "I love fashion, beauty, glamour. It's the mark of civilisation," he says, after a pause. "We use fashion for status and to beautify and there's nothing wrong with that, but when it becomes completely unbalanced, then you're living a decadent life. And when that happens on a global scale, you're living in a decadent world. This mass obsession with owning things… I'm questioning those values." Later, he adds: "There were signs that I'd said all I had to say."

The people close to him, too, were concerned. An assistant noticed that LaChapelle had not had a single day off in 11 months. He took stock, slowed down and bought a former nudist colony in Maui, Hawaii, while on location for a Motorola shoot. The idea of being in the middle of nature appealed to him. "It's a very isolated part of Maui, way out in the middle of nowhere." For a while, he went "cold turkey. I took no calls. There is a tiny town nearby with one gas station and a general store where you can get phone reception. From there I'd call my mum and Fred."

Fred is one of LaChapelle's many long-term collaborators and appears solicitously at various points during the interview to pour water and gently remind him that there are appointments he needs to attend. Each time Fred does this, LaChapelle insists he just wants to finish answering this one question. "Fred's been with me since he left high school," he says. "I like the consistency of having people in my life for a long time." It was Fred who eventually coaxed LaChapelle out of his self-imposed exile and persuaded him to start showing his work in galleries.

Despite Fred's entreaties, we carry on talking in the car on the way to LaChapelle's lunch meeting, and he tells me all about Christina Aguilera's five-day wedding in Napa Valley and how Auto-Tune signals the death of real music. But what about the use of digital manipulation in his own work – isn't that the same kind of thing?

"No, when I shoot, the image has to be there first. And photographs have always been manipulated – [Richard]Avedon retouched all his American west portraits. I could take a photo of you now and crop it to make it look a certain way. But, with me, the image has to come first. If you look at some of the film on my website…"

He's off again. By the time we get to the restaurant, Fred is looking anxiously at his watch. LaChapelle keeps talking. "Hey, do you want to come for lunch?" I can't, I say, there's another interview I have to do. "Just call them and say you'll be late," he says, smiling like a small boy. I make my apologies and he insists I at least take his mobile number so that I can let him know what I think of the exhibition.

He walks towards the restaurant table where a group of people in black clothes await him, seated around a starched linen tablecloth. I watch him go in his hat and his lumberjack shirt and I think he seems oddly detached from it all: a genuine man caught up in a superficial world.

David LaChapelle: Earth Laughs in Flowers is at Robilant + Voena Gallery, London W1, until 24 March, and also in Milan and St Moritz

Summary: For years David LaChapelle was the go-to photographer for the world's biggest stars. But in 2006 he ditched fashion for fine art. As an exhibition of his work opens in London, he talks to Elizabeth Day about death, divas and decadence


About 10 years ago, when the Hayward Gallery on London's South Bank was under threat of demolition, I ran a competition asking people to think of what we might do to improve the appearance of this seemingly friendless concrete brute. The design that instantly caught my eye was one that transformed the 1960s art gallery by covering it with trailing plants. It would be a kind of Hanging Gardens of London, a place of sweet-smelling flowers, birds and butterflies, for at least a part of the year.

Since then, a number of architects and landscape gardeners have taken up the idea of plants roving behind, before, above, between and below city buildings. No one, however, has done it as effectively or eye-catchingly as Edouard François with the "Flower Tower", a 10-storey apartment block in Paris's 17th arrondissement.

François has long observed how, given the chance, Parisians will cultivate the tiniest balcony, nurturing surprising greenery in this tightly packed, densely occupied city. He has formalised this hobby in the design of the Flower Tower - so much so that the entire apartment block appears, from the square it fronts and the new streets around it, to be one giant display of potted plants.

The building itself is as simple as most city apartment blocks. A four-square concrete structure, its apartments are gathered around and rise from a central lift core. Kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms face the cantilevered balconies that circumnavigate the building. But - and this is what makes the apartments special - embedded into those balconies are 380 giant concrete flowerpots. These are planted with bamboo, which not only grows quickly, providing natural sunshades for the flats and screens from prying neighbours, but also whispers and sings in the breeze.

The bamboo plants are fed and watered automatically through artificial stems running inside the metal balustrades of each storey. This ensures that when tenants are away, as Parisians often are in the height of summer, the bamboo will neither flag nor fail. And, of course, it makes life easy for residents day-to-day.

The result is a modest, urban home that fits comfortably into its city while offering the illusion of being by the sea. What the block shows is that it is possible to build thoughtful, practical, low-cost housing in city centres, getting nature to do a significant part of the work of turning these places into visual and even sensual delights.

François also demonstrates how speculative housing can be drawn powerfully into a world of imagination. He did this first some five years ago in a cheaper, prefabricated apartment block in Montpellier called the "Sprouting Building". In Montpellier, straightforward, well-planned apartments were tucked behind what appeared to be a very unlikely rock face, made of concrete covered in a mesh of steel cages filled with loosely compacted stones. Since it was built, however, this face has blossomed in the southern sun into an extraordinary vertical rock garden.

There was a rush to live here, for not only does each apartment enjoy a more or less enclosed rustic timber balcony - like a potting shed in the sky - but residents knew that, sooner or later, the wall would bloom, as indeed it has. In Paris, though, François has taken no chances on the vagaries of nature; by planting bamboo in pots, he has ensured that the building looked as he planned it to from day one.

Few architects in the world have used bamboo in quite the same way as François has in Paris. In China and other parts of the Far East, bamboo is used for scaffolding, even for very tall buildings; and there has been a long tradition of fronting seaside villas with bamboo screens. François, an architect trained in Paris and London, will know well such influential designs as Rudolph Schindler's house in Los Angeles, dating from 1921. In this case, the house is single storey and the bamboo sways above it. It is rare, though, to see bamboo used in this way in a city centre - especially in the design of a 10-storey building. That said, François's use of bamboo is not unique in Paris: think of Alexandre Chemetoff's inspired bamboo garden in Parc de la Villette, a Parisian landscape with jagged roots in deconstructionist philosophy masterminded by Bernard Tschumi.

The Flower Tower is not meant to be a witty or ironic building, yet it is rather funny to think that for centuries architects working in cities have tried very hard, and brilliantly, to formalise and codify natural elements like trees and plants into their buildings, in the guise of timber, stone, concrete and steel. Greek and Roman columns are tree trunks cultivated by classical architects, while the branches of trees are represented in both medieval and industrial-era Gothic tracery. Some of Gaudi's buildings can seem like giant vegetables, while entire ersatz trees can be seen, through computer-generation eyes, in the railway stations, bridges and museums designed by the flourishing Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava. François, though, is replacing such intricate, proud, age-old conceits with real trees, real plants and rock-flowers.

There are places where we will always long for magnificent artifice and nothing less than sheer stone, towering steel or even concrete will do. There are others where nature is more than welcome, particularly in the quieter, less expensive areas of cities, where the architecture, for reasons of economy, is wisely self-effacing. Mostly, blocks of flats in British cities, and even in parts of Paris, remain dismal things, monuments to the miserabilism that informed their charmless, matter-of-fact, nature-free designs. The design of François's Flower Tower shows what we might do with minimal reliance on expensive technology, and how we might spread a little greenery, and pleasure, through our cities for little cost.

Summary: It looks like a giant display of potted plants, it sings in the breeze - and it's one of the best places to live in Paris. Jonathan Glancey on an extraordinary block of flats.


10/20/2014 AT 03:15 PM EDT

Now, DirectTV is leaning on crowdfunding as a springboard for independent musicians with the

, providing a means for emerging artists to share their work and connect with fans.

, a pop group from Pennsylvania, as its first partner.

"As an artist, you dream of having your music on national TV," bandleader Connor said in a statement. "We are so humbled by the opportunity to be on such a unique platform and so pumped that millions of people will be able to hear our music and our story – that's really why we make music: to be heard."

So, how does it work? Viewers can pledge their support for their favorite acts online or by phone.

As for talent, NMC says that to be eligible for a profile on its website, musical acts must have at least 50,000 social media followers, a music video of broadcast quality and eight music tracks from which to cut an album.

Summary: DirectTV launched the New Music Channel on Monday with a pop group from Pennsylvania as its first partner


FORTUNE — We’re hearing a lot of talk these days about how Europe is staging a modest recovery that’s sufficient to save the euro. So I was surprised when one of the top international economists of the past four decades, and a former euro-fan, told me that he’s changed his view. “The chances are higher than ever that the what I call Teutonic Europe and Latin Europe will split into at least two currency zones,” says Robert Aliber, now retired from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, where I was privileged to have him as a teacher many years ago.

Pay attention to Aliber, affectionately known by his initials “RZA” to his students. He predicted the disaster in Iceland in mid-2007, when the experts at the World Bank and IMF were still asleep. “Iceland was suffering from a very high level of indebtedness and very large trade deficits,” recalls Aliber. “They got the money to pay the interest in the form of new loans.” For his foresight in Iceland, Aliber won plaudits from Michel Lewis in his bestseller Boomerang.

Aliber cites two factors for his growing pessimism on the euro. The first is the EU’s decision to keep Greece in the common currency at all costs. “That was a dreadful mistake,” says Aliber. Greece, he says, was highly uncompetitive as a euro-member from its entry at the start of 2001. “Greece fudged the data to hide its problems in order to join the euro,” says Aliber. “It used sham contracts to get lots of its debt officially off its books.” He says that when the inevitable collapse began in early 2010, the EU should have forced Greece to exit, “So that its prices, which were set too high at the start because of the fudged data and only got higher, would be reset.” A euro-escape would have made Greece’s exports and tourist industry far more competitive, and avoided what Aliber calls “A situation resembling our Great Depression.”

MORE: It’s time for European banks to shrink

The second force is what he calls “the pattern of imbalances” between the northern “Teutonic” and southern, or “Latin,” zones. Germany, Austria, Finland, and the Netherlands are all running big trade deficits by selling lots of cars and computers to their southern neighbors. France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal are running big trade deficits because their products are just too costly to compete with exports from the north. “The Latin trade deficits will not go away,” says Aliber. “France’s indebtedness will only increase. Germany has a vibrant export sector, France does not.”

In the past, he says, the solution to the competitiveness gap was devaluation. “France would devalue every 10 years to get its costs in line with Germany’s,” says Aliber. It’s worth noting that the rationale for the euro among responsible economists held that devaluation was a crutch, and that under the pressure of a single currency, France and Italy would be forced to restrain excessive wage and benefit growth to compete. It didn’t happen, instead those countries papered over their cost problem with big borrowings when times were flush in the mid-2000s. “High levels of housing expenditures and large fiscal deficits offset what would otherwise would have been high levels of unemployment,” argues Aliber. ”But you can only borrow so much, and then the lack of competitiveness became clear and led to the high unemployment that was inevitable.”

The southern countries now lack the currency tool to compensate for the gap between their own excessive labor costs and the strong productivity growth that’s lowering or flattening the wage bill per auto and lathe in Germany. Hence, says Aliber, Europe faces a single option to saving the euro. “German prices would need to rise more rapidly than French and Italian prices over a number of years to bring the cost of competing exports from the north and south into line,” says Aliber. He says it’s feasible if Germany allowed wages to grow at around 3% a year, far above today’s increases. That would cause culture shock and perhaps political turmoil, but, he says, the economics would work.

MORE: A sobering gut-check for the market

If that doesn’t happen, says Aliber, the euro will fracture. “The unemployment rate in southern Europe will become so high that some politicians will say, ‘This isn’t tolerable’ and will push to leave the euro.” He’s not guessing on the timing but says it will take years. The exception is Greece — Aliber thinks its exit is inevitable no matter what Germany does but confesses he’s thought that for four years. “Greece could go very quickly,” says Aliber.

I agree with Aliber that the renewed optimism on the euro defies both the dreadful numbers, and the economic strait jacket that somehow must be lifted. We learned on Thursday that unemployment in the eurozone rose for the 9th consecutive quarter, to an all-time record of 12.2%. When a central authority with powers over vastly different economies sets the values of their currencies, and hence the prices of their exports at levels that are drastically wrong, the end game is the devastation we’re now witnessing. It can be avoided only by the solution Aliber advocates. The world is watching.

Summary: Greece's ills and growing imbalances between Northern and Southern Europe prompt Robert Aliber to make a surprising about-face.


Worcester native Eddie Mekka attended the Boston Conservatory before Broadway and Los Angeles beckoned. Best known for his TV role as Carmine Ragusa on the 1970s sitcom “Laverne and Shirley,” and for his appearance as Madonna’s boyfriend in the film “A League of Their Own,” Mekka returns to the Boston area to appear as Moonface Martin in the North Shore Music Theatre’s production of the Cole Porter musical “Anything Goes,” which runs June 3-15.

Q. How long has it been since you performed in your home state?

A. It’s taken me 30 years to get back. I’m lousy with directions. But I did perform in Ogunquit [Maine] in “Fiddler on the Roof” with Sally Struthers a few years ago, so I got close.

Q. Is it difficult to switch back to performing onstage after so many years on TV and in films?

A. I started onstage as a singer and a dancer, so I’m comfortable onstage. It was harder to adjust from stage to TV. I was acting for the back row, and [director] Gary Marshall told me to pull it back to Cleveland. But I’m glad I was trained in the theater because I think TV makes you lazy. You can always do another take in a film or on TV, while onstage you have to deliver 100 percent all the time. I was lucky to learn a lot about comic timing from Gary, which added a lot to the character of Carmine Ragusa, the “Big Ragoo.”

North Shore Music Theatre, Beverly 978-232-7200. http://www.nsmt.org

Q. On TV, you had time to develop the character of Carmine Ragusa, Laverne’s boyfriend, over a season. Is it harder to develop a character within the two hours of a musical?

A. It’s hard to make audiences forget that I was on “Laverne and Shirley,” but it’s my job to play the part I’m given, bring as much of myself rather than Carmine into the part, and let the audience decide.

Q. What made you interested in the role of Moonface Martin in “Anything Goes”?

A. It’s a great show with great music. Moonface Martin, also known as Public Enemy No. 13, is a wonderful part for a character actor, which is what I am. He’s the comic relief, and it’s not a big role but it’s memorable. I get to sing the number “Friendship,” and I do some dancing, which I love. I’m a dancer in the Gene Kelly style: an athletic tap dancer. And this show lends itself to that style.

Q. Did you get many chances to use your singing and dancing skills on TV and in the movies?

A. I got to do a great jitterbug number with Madonna in “A League of Their Own.” And on “Laverne and Shirley,” because I love to sing Tony Bennett, we worked in a recurring bit where, whenever Laverne is mad at Carmine, all he has to do is sing the line from the Tony Bennett song, “You know I’d go from rags to riches . . .” and she forgives him.

Q. It’s been a long time since “Laverne and Shirley.” Would you like to do another sitcom?

A. I’d love to, but I’m waiting for the reality show fad to fade. I am in the midst of moving back to the Los Angeles area after being based in Las Vegas, where I did a nightclub act called “Eddie Mekka, With a Little Ragoo on the Side,” where I sing some Louis Prima, Frank Sinatra, and show some clips from “Laverne and Shirley.”

I’ve been doing a lot of regional theater, both musicals and plays. I just finished a Neil Simon festival in Utah where we performed “The Sunshine Boys” and “45 Seconds From Broadway,” and right after “Anything Goes” I start rehearsals for a production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Q. Are there any roles you’re eager to play?

A. I love playing Tevye in “Fiddler.” I play him like an older, grumpier, and slower Jackie Mason. I’d also love to perform in a musical about Tony Bennett, because that’s a great story and great music. And, I’m hoping to return to the North Shore Music Theatre to play the innkeeper Thenardier when they do a production of “Les Miserables.”

Summary: Worcester native and “Laverne and Shirley” star Eddie Mekka returns to the Boston area to appear as Moonface Martin in the North Shore Music Theatre’s production of the Cole Porter musical, “Anything Goes,” June 3-15.


Fiona Tan's videos and photographic works could leave you with sea legs, wobbly and uncertain of the ground beneath your feet. They span numerous continents and lifetimes, exploring the ever-shifting sands of culture, identity, memory and time. Her video portraits and collections of other people's snapshots give us lives in transition, be that photos of pre-war German schoolgirls found in a street market, or her own footage where subjects, including American prisoners, contemporary Berliners and Indonesian kids, are asked to stand still for the rolling camera.

Then there are Tan's haunting video installations, weaving dream worlds from documentary, personal stories and grand-scale geopolitics. Disorient, part of her exhibition for the Dutch pavilion, when she represented Holland at the 2009 Venice Biennale, conjured an east that was by turns fantastic and destitute: from silks and pickled snakes gathering dust in curious bazaars and men hauling an old car chassis through an arid mountain range, to western soldiers in occupied territories. Narrated with extracts from Marco Polo's 14th-century tome detailing his travels in the mysterious, rich and sometimes barbarous east, it merged western fantasies of exotic, faraway lands with colonialism and its aftermath.

Born in 1966, Tan's interest in displacement begins with her own history. Born in Indonesia, to a Chinese-Indonesian father and an Australian mother, she was raised in Australia and moved to Holland in her late teens. Yet as her work often underlines, displacement of one kind or another is part of everyone's life. Furthermore when you try and aim a camera at who we are, it slips away into a fog of generic poses.

The fifth and final instalment of Vox Populi, her collections of other people's family photos, is currently on show at the Photographers' Gallery. Focused on Londoners, it features hundreds of images in categories like sleeping, bath time and children doing funny things. We might feel a pang of nostalgia for the toddler in a field of 1970s-yellow daffodils or smile with the woman in a sari, knee deep in the brown waves on a dull English beach, but what can we know of them, beyond the grins struck at birthday parties or days at the sea? It's an extraordinarily rich portrait of a city, full of intimate hints at the unknowable intricacies of other people's lives.

Why we like her: For Rise and Fall, her two-channel video pairing age and youth, where an older woman seems to recall flashes of her younger self. The waters of Niagara Falls rush downwards in streams of white foam and glassy jade currents, like the flow of time, which only her memories can reverse.

Up and away: For one of Tan's early works, Lift from 2000, she took to the air with the aid of a giant bunch of red balloons.

Where can I see her? At the Photographers' Gallery, London, until 30 September.

Summary: Skye Sherwin: Tan's haunting video portraits and collections of other people's snapshots span countless continents and lifetimes


05/19/2015 AT 08:40 AM EDT

of his iconic show after seven seasons?

"I had spaghetti bolognese [with wife Linda at the Chateau Marmont], and then I went home and looked at my phone and saw all these messages of love from people," Weiner, 49, told PEOPLE Monday at the 10th Annual Global Women's Rights Awards at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.

"I didn't go online or anything, and I just sort of fell asleep holding my phone with my wife at my side."

The writer/director's experience watching the finale itself, however, wasn't so quiet.

"I celebrated with a live audience of about 1,600 people, and they were dressed up and we were in this incredible theater downtown. And it was preceded by this live reading with a lot of really great actors with one of the scripts from the first season which Jason Reitman did," Weiner said. "Then I got to hang out with the crew, the actors, my friends, my family."

He added: "It was a tremendously emotional experience to feel the audience react to the show. It always gets a lot of laughs when you're in a group, which is a lot of fun, but this was a life moment, and strangely, afterward I felt better than I've felt in months!"

Weiner said he's most proud that his female characters served as voices for women of the 1960s and '70s, whom he called "pioneers."

"I was raised by a strong woman. I have two powerful, professional older sisters. My wife is a powerful, professional woman. And I have four sons, so I haven't been able to pass that much on – except the fact that [as a man] you'd better listen, and you'd better not act like you're in the majority, and you'd better perceive the world as a human being and not in terms of gender," he said.

"I've seen the attitude towards sexism change, and change back, and change back again," he added. "And I'm thrilled that the show got to be an important part of a conversation about inequality, about America being a better place, about men's voices not being more important than women's voices, and about picking the best person for the job, and recognizing the fact that we have some abstract bias against what really is 51 percent of the population."

Summary: He calls the end of his show "a life moment" and said he's proudest of his female characters