Fan Fare
Entertainment behind the scenes
from Summit Notebook:
CFTC’s Gary Gensler just one of the “Little Monsters”
Christopher Doering found there is more to the CFTC chairman than markets.
When he's not scaring Wall Street and big banks to make sure they follow the rules, there's a chance the head of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is moonlighting as a "Little Monster."
The haunting moniker, used by American pop singer-songwriter Lady Gaga to describe her fans, aptly applies to the hard-working Gary Gensler who was among the thousands of fans who attended the popular performer's show in Washington last week.
"Do you want to know how Lady Gaga was?" he asked reporters at the Reuters Future Face of Finance Summit.
"It was terrific. It was really terrific," said Gensler. He did not go to the show with his three daughters, but shied away from identifying his concert-going companion(s).
from Photographers Blog:
Hatching a plan to cover Lady Gaga’s egg
I've covered all of the big Los Angeles based award shows and multiple Grammy Award shows, but I've never seen something like this. Was Babylon 5 making a comeback? Nope - just Gaga being Gaga.
I started to set up my equipment at my assigned spot on the 53rd annual Grammy Awards red carpet around 10:15am. My assignment was to cover red carpet arrivals with Lucy Nicholson photographing the show and Mario Anzuoni backstage photographing winners with their awards. Arrivals began at 12pm and lasted until 5pm. At about 10:45am we had a visit from an organizer saying that 1pm would be a bad time for a bathroom break. We started to ask questions and the answers were vague such as variations of "believe me you will want to be here, trust me." We began to deduct through cryptic messages that it was regarding Lady Gaga's arrival as that was everyone's best guess and it made sense after covering her in the past.
from Tales from the Trail:
Lady Gaga, WikiLeaks and :’(
Washington has been buzzing for days about Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old U.S. Army intelligence analyst at the heart of the investigation into the leak of a quarter-million State Department diplomatic cables by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
And then there's the Lady Gaga connection.
Manning said he listened to the flamboyantly-dressed singer's "Telephone" as he pulled the documents off a military server in Baghdad, according to a transcript of online chats Manning had with a former hacker, Adrian Lamo. The chats, which occurred earlier this year, were posted by Wired.com on June 10. Lamo confirmed details of the chats to Reuters.
from Photographers Blog:
Lady Gaga’s meat dress in hindsight
The biggest cheer at Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards came when DJ Deadmau5 played Led Zeppelin during a commercial break.
Oh yeah, the Meat Dress…
The only thing going through my head when Cher announced Lady Gaga had won Video of the year was… where is the boom camera?
Gaga keeps her “little monsters” screaming, but what’s next?
Lady Gaga’s fans, whom she often refers to as her “little monsters,” were out in force this week in her hometown of New York City. She enjoyed three sold out concerts and morning chat show “Today” said they had their largest crowd ever with up to 18,000 fans outside their Rockefeller Plaza studios for a performance on Friday morning.
On her second concert tour performing songs from two albums — “The Fame” and “The Fame Monster” — Gaga surely knows the money in music these days generally comes more from concert touring than album sales. On “Today,” she connected directly to her fans, from the “freaks” to the “New York City gay kids,” telling them: “you can be whoever you want to be, my little monsters.”
Sports stars outplay Lady Gaga in “Rush” for summer tix
Ahhh, summer is coming in North America, and that means summer festivals, concerts and numerous chances for music fans to take advantage of good weather and splurge their hard-earned dollars on watching their favorite singing stars. So who comes out on top as the most popular to see, as judged by ticket scalpers? Red hot Lady Gaga? Cool teen Justin Bieber?
Well, the pop stars’ egos might be bruised to learn that, not only is the Lady low on the list, Bieber’s not even there. Rather, sports stars are the tops, according to a Forbes.com survey of the highest-selling tickets offered by scalpers on website stubhub.com. Read the Forbes list here.
A bad bromance as “Glee” goes Gaga
Lady Gaga’s presence was stamped all over Fox’s “Glee” Tuesday night as the kids of New Directions explored their self-identity.
This week, Finn Hudson was caught in a bad bromance with Gleemate Kurt Hummel. It was a bad day for Finn as his homophobic prejudices toward Kurt surfaced upon hearing that he and his mother would be moving in with the Hummels and that he’d be sharing a room with Kurt, who has had a not-so-secret crush on him all year. Finn learned his lesson though after a lecture from Dad and came to Kurt’s defense (wrapped in a signature Gaga red rubber dress) just as Kurt was about to get a beating by football bullies who were not down with the Glee club’s new look: “If you want to switch it up, go from Gap to Banana Republic.”
Goodbye smiley Miley….
She’s been talking for months about carving out an edgier image after years of the pink and sparkly world she inhabited as “Hannah Montana”, but even so the new Miley Cyrus music video must have come came as a bit of a shock — at least to her millions of Disney Channel fans around the world.
E!Online has an exclusive first look at the music video here
With its black leather figure hugging bodices, sexy dance moves, and in your face lyrics, “Can’t Be Tamed” sees Cyrus going down the road trod by Britney Spears after her first couple of albums, and more recently by glam sensation Lady GaGa.
M.I.A. on Lady Gaga: Not as “weird” as she wants to be
Back in 2008, visual artist turned rap star M.I.A. was blowing up in everyone’s faces as the year’s hot new star, with her mix of killer hooks and political outrage. Then came 2009 and the rise of Lady Gaga, weird outfits, killer stage antics and all. Now in 2010, M.I.A., aka Maya Arulpragasam, is squaring off against Lady Gaga, aka Stefani Germanotta, in an interview with the British magazine NME.
“None of her music’s reflective of how weird she wants to be or thinks she is,” M.I.A. said in the interview. “She models herself on Grace Jones and Madonna, but the music sounds like 20-year-old Ibiza music, you know? She’s not progressive, but she’s a good mimic.”
Gutsy after Gaga – Meryl makes her mark in New York AIDS gala
By Jan Paschal
Even Meryl Streep gets stage fright, or so she joked to the
star-studded crowd at amfAR’s New York Gala. Streep,
a two-time Oscar winner and an Oscar nominee for best actress
in “Julie & Julia,” wowed the black-tie audience at the American foundation for AIDS research by singing
a capella solo — after Lady Gaga’s dramatic performance.
“It really takes guts to get up and sing after Lady Gaga ,”
Streep said, warming up the room full of A-listers, who braved
a New York blizzard to get to the gala on the eve of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week . “We’ve got the sacred and the profane right here.”
That was a nod to Lady Gaga’s star turn in a white bikini
at the white baby grand piano, which she played while
belting out a bluesy romantic ballad, with a few expletives. Streep sang an Irish song called “The Parting Glass” in
tribute to her friend, the late Natasha Richardson , the Tony
Award-winning actress and amfAR trustee, who died
last March after a skiing accident.
Streep’s clear contralto voice rang out over the hushed room
and prompted many to brush away tears, including Natasha’s
mother, the actressVanessa Redgrave , who is perhaps the
best-known member of Britain’s theater royalty.
Redgrave told Reuters that she had asked Streep to sing as
part of the gala’s tribute to her daughter, who had
raised millions for AIDS research over the past decade by
dreaming up events such as a charity auction of Oscar dresses.
“It was lovely, wasn’t it?” Redgrave said, adding that Streep
chose the song.
The event raised between $1.1 million and $1.2 million for
AIDS research, a record for a single amfAR gala, an amfAR
spokesman said.
Among the guests: The Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson , who
told Reuters she’ll be keeping an eye out for “a bit of madness”
on New York’s fashion runways; actress Zoe Saldana of Oscar-nominated film “Avatar “ in a
Louis Vuitton dress with a short full skirt and open back;
actress Sigourney Weaver of “Avatar” in a black turtleneck
evening look; actor Alan Cumming sans tux jacket, madly
working his BlackBerry after the house lights came up; actor James Gandolfini (late of “God of Carnage” on Broadway and HBO’s “The Sopranos”) and IMG Fashion’s senior vice president Fern Mallis , the woman
who runs the tents in Bryant Park, gamely snapping a
couple’s picture on their camera, as the evening wrapped up.
