Celebrity
Humorously Morose Comedian Richard Lewis, Who Recently Starred On ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ Dies At 76
NEW YORK — Richard Lewis, an accomplished comedian known for addressing his neuroses in furious, stream-of-consciousness diatribes while clad in all-black, earning him the nickname “The Prince of Pain,” has passed away. He was 76.
Lewis, who revealed in 2023 that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, died at home in Los Angeles on Tuesday night after a heart attack, according to his publicist, Jeff Abraham.
Lewis, a regular performer in clubs and on late-night T.V. for decades, also played Marty Gold, the romantic co-lead opposite Jamie Lee Curtis, in the ABC series “Anything But Love” and the consistently neurotic Prince John in “Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men In Tights.” He reintroduced himself to a new generation opposite Larry David in HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” kvetching frequently.
“Richard and I were born three days apart in the same hospital and for most of my life he’s been like a brother to me,” he said in a statement. “He had the unusual combination of being the funniest and the sweetest. But tonight he made me cry, and for that I will never forgive him.”
Humorously Morose Comedian Richard Lewis, Who Recently Starred On ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ Dies At 76
Lewis was rated one of the top 50 stand-up comedians of all time by Comedy Central, and he appeared on G.Q. magazine’s list of the “20th Century’s Most Influential Humorists.” He donated his humour to charitable initiatives such as Comic Relief and Comedy Gives Back.
“Watching his stand-up is like sitting in on a very funny and often dark therapy session,” said the Los Angeles Times in 2014. The Philadelphia City Paper described him as “the Jimi Hendrix of monologists.” Mel Brooks has stated that he “may just be the Franz Kafka of modern-day comedy.”
Comedians went to social media Wednesday to express their sympathies, including Albert Books, who described Lewis as “a brilliantly funny man who will be missed by all.” “The world needed him now more than ever,” according to X, formerly Twitter. Bette Midler, Michael McKean, and Paul Feig paid tribute to Lewis, describing him as “one of the funniest people on the planet.”
Following his graduation from Ohio State University in 1969, the New York-born Lewis embarked on a stand-up career, refining his skills on the circuit alongside fellow newcomers Jay Leno, Freddie Prinze, and Billy Crystal.
He recalls Rodney Dangerfield paying him $75 to fill in at his New York club, Dangerfield’s. “I had a lot of amazing friends early on who believed in me, and I met some iconic people who really supported me and encouraged me to keep working on my content. And I never looked back,” he told The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colorado 2010.
“I am paranoid about everything in my life, even at home. “I don’t like having a rear-view mirror on my stationary bike,” he jokingly remarked onstage. He told Jimmy Kimmel, “This morning, I tried to go to bed.” I could not sleep. I counted sheep, but I only had six, and they all had hip replacements.
Unlike contemporaneous Robin Williams, Lewis let spectators inside his world of sadness, bringing his misery and pain to the stage. Fans compared him favourably to Lenny Bruce, the groundbreaking comic.
Humorously Morose Comedian Richard Lewis, Who Recently Starred On ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ Dies At 76
“I take great pains not to be mean-spirited,” Lewis told The Palm Beach Post in 2007. “I don’t want to accept true disadvantages that people must overcome without hope. I steer clear of that. That is not hilarious to me. Tragedy is hilarious to other humorists, but not to me unless you can make a useful point.
Billy Joel referred to Lewis in his song “My Life” when he sang about an old acquaintance who “bought a ticket to the West Coast/Now he gives them a stand-up routine in L.A.”
In 1989, at Carnegie Hall, he performed with six feet of yellow legal papers crammed with material and put together for a 2½-hour concert that led to two standing ovations. The night was “the highlight of my career,” he told The Washington Post in 2020.
Lewis told G.Q. His characteristic style arose by chance; he claims that his passion for wearing black stemmed from watching the television Western “Have Gun – Will Travel,” which featured a cowboy dressed entirely in black as a child. He also popularized the phrase “from hell”—as in “the date from hell” or “the job from hell.”
“That just came out of my head one day, and I kept repeating it for whatever reason, similarly, with the black clothing. I felt incredibly comfortable from the early 1980s, and I never wore anything else. I’ve never looked back.
After quitting drugs and alcohol in 1994, Lewis published his memoirs “The Other Great Depression” and “Reflections from Hell” in 2008. The former is a compilation of frank, essay-style reflections on his life.
Lewis was the youngest of three siblings; his brother was six years older than him, and his sister was nine. His father died at a young age, and his mother suffered from emotional problems. “She didn’t understand me at all. My mother is responsible for my professional success. “I should have given her my agent’s commission,” he told The Washington Post in 2020.
“Looking back on it now, as a full-blown, middle-aged, functioning anxiety collector, I can admit without cringing that my parents had their fair share of tremendous qualities, yet, being human much of the day, had more than just a handful of flaws as well,” he writes in his book.
Humorously Morose Comedian Richard Lewis, Who Recently Starred On ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ Dies At 76
Lewis instantly discovered a new family while performing at New York’s Improv. “I was 23, and everyone was watching me, including Steve Allen and Bette Midler. David Brenner definitely took me under his wing. Driving home to my tiny dump in New Jersey frequently knowing that Steve Allen said, ‘You got it,’ that affirmation kept me going in a significant sense.”
In “Leaving Las Vegas,” he made a brief appearance, which led to his first significant dramatic part as Jimmy Epstein, an addict struggling for his life in the independent film “Drunks.” He portrayed Don Rickles’ son on one “Daddy Dearest” season and a rabbi on “7th Heaven.”
Lewis’ recurring presence on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” can be directly attributed to his connection with fellow comedian, producer, and series star Larry David. Both native Brooklynites, born in the same Brooklyn hospital, met and became rivals at the same summer camp when they were 13. He was cast from the start, fighting with David about overdue invoices and basic courtesy.
He is survived by his wife, Joyce Lapinsky.
SOURCE – (AP)
NEW YORK — Harvey Weinstein appeared in a New York City courthouse on Thursday as authorities considered California’s extradition request to serve his awaiting term for a 2022 rape conviction in Los Angeles.
The 16-year sentence Harvey received in 2023 for raping a woman at a 2013 Los Angeles film festival was put on hold while he spent time in New York after being convicted of rape in 2020. However, the Empire State conviction was reversed late last month, erasing the 23-year term.
AP – VOR News Image
Harvey Weinstein Is Back In Court As New York Considers California Prison Request.
According to prosecutors and defense attorneys, the hearing in Queens criminal court on Thursday morning, only days after Weinstein left a city hospital, was related to California’s request. Weinstein arrived at the hearing in a wheelchair and wearing a dark suit.
The 72-year-old remains in New York detention while Manhattan’s district attorney seeks to retry him. During a hearing last week, prosecutors stated that they could be ready as early as September and that at least one of the two accused victims was willing to testify again.
VOR News Image
Harvey Weinstein Is Back In Court As New York Considers California Prison Request.
In one case, the once-powerful former movie magnate is charged with raping an aspiring actor in 2013 and sexually abusing a TV and film production assistant in 2006. He rejects the charges.
New York’s highest court vacated Weinstein’s conviction, finding that the trial judge prejudiced him with incorrect rulings, including allowing other women to speak about charges he was not charged with.
The 2020 conviction was hailed at the time as a watershed moment in the #MeToo movement, which began in 2017 with a slew of complaints against Weinstein.
VOR News Image
Harvey Weinstein Is Back In Court As New York Considers California Prison Request.
Weinstein was sentenced to upstate New York state prison. Following the appeals court verdict, he was transferred to city custody and taken to Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital, where his publicist claims he was treated for pneumonia and other medical conditions. He was sent to the city’s Rikers Island detention complex on Monday.
SOURCE – (AP)
Celebrity
Fans Are Following Taylor Swift To Europe After Finding Eras Tour Tickets Less Costly There
LONDON — Thousands of die-hard Taylor Swift fans who missed her U.S. concert tour last year or didn’t want to pay high prices to see her again discovered an unusual solution: fly to Europe.
The pop artist is ready to begin the 18-city European leg of her record-breaking Eras Tour in Paris on Thursday, and planeloads of Swifties will follow Miss Americana across the water in the coming weeks. The arena where Swift performs reported that Americans purchased 20% of the tickets for her four sold-out gigs. The next leg of the tour, Stockholm, is expected to draw approximately 10,000 concertgoers from the United States.
A concert may seem like a weird reason to visit a distant nation, especially because fans can watch the Eras Tour documentary from home on Disney+. However, Expedia, an online travel website, claims that Swift’s fans’ continent-hopping is part of a bigger trend known as “tour tourism,” after noticing a tendency during Beyoncé’s Renaissance world tour.
Some North American fans who intend to fly overseas for Swift’s Eras Tour said they justified the cost by noting that tighter limitations on ticket costs and resales in Europe made Swift perform abroad no more expensive—aand possibly cheaper — than seeing her closer to home.
AP – VOR News Image
Fans Are Following Taylor Swift To Europe After Finding Eras Tour Tickets Less Costly There
“They said, ‘Wait a minute, I can either spend $1,500 to go see my favorite artist in Miami, or I can take that $1,500 and buy a concert ticket, a round-trip plane ticket, and three nights in a hotel room,” Melanie Fish, an Expedia representative and travel specialist, said.
Jennifer Warren, 43, of St. Catharines, a community in Ontario’s Niagara region, has had this experience. She and her 11-year-old son adore Swift but needed help finding reasonably priced tickets in the United States. Undeterred, Warren and her husband decided to arrange a European holiday based on where she could obtain tickets. The location turned out to be Hamburg, Germany.
“You get out, you get to see the world, and you get to see your favorite artist or performer all at once, so there are a lot of benefits,” said Warren, director of research and innovation at a mutual insurance firm.
The three VIP tickets she got near the stage eras tour— “I would call it brute-force dumb luck” — were 600 euros ($646) each. Swift then announced six November tour dates in Toronto, within driving distance of Warren’s house. “Absolute nose-bleed seats” are already selling for 3,000 Canadian dollars ($2,194) on secondary resale sites such as Viagogo, Warren added.
AP – VOR News Image
Fans Are Following Taylor Swift To Europe After Finding Eras Tour Tickets Less Costly There
Hardcore fans following their favorite musician or band on tour is not a recent phenomenon. “Groupie” first appeared in the late 1960s as a somewhat pejorative term for devoted rock band fans. Deadheads hit the road in the 1970s to follow the Grateful Dead from city to city.
More recently, according to Fish, music festivals such as Coachella in California and Glastonbury in England, as well as musical residencies in Las Vegas by Elton John, Lady Gaga, and Adele, have drawn visitors to places they might not have visited otherwise.
Since the coronavirus outbreak, travel and entertainment specialists have reported a pent-up consumer demand for “experiences” rather than tangible items. Some believe that music fans’ readiness to widen their fandom horizons is part of a larger societal adjustment.
“It does seem like it’s more than a structural shift, maybe a personality transformation we all went through,” said Natalia Lechmanova, the Mastercard Economics Institute’s top Europe economist.
As Swift travels around Europe, Lechmanova anticipates restaurants and hotels to experience the same increase that Mastercard saw within a 2.5-mile (4-kilometer) radius of performance venues in the cities she visited in 2023. According to the economist, the strong strength of the US dollar against the euro may also boost retail spending on apparel, collectibles, beauty items, and materials for the friendship bracelets fans exchange during the Eras Tour.
Former college roommates Lizzy Hale, 34, of Los Angeles, and Mitch Goulding, 33, of Austin, Texas, already had tickets to see the Eras Tour in L.A. last summer when they decided to try to obtain them for Paris, London, and Edinburgh, Scotland. They saw a concert trip to Europe as a replacement for a trip they planned to celebrate Goulding’s birthday in May 2020 but had to cancel due to the pandemic.
Goulding got VIP seats to one of Swift’s three Stockholm gigs. He, Hale, and two other pals planned a ten-day tour that included stops in Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
“As someone who enjoys both traveling and music, finding a way to combine the two is really special,” said Hale, expecting her first child.
The local economic impact of what the zeitgeist has dubbed “Swiftonomics” and the “Swift lift” can be significant. It’s no surprise that Singapore’s government signed an exclusive deal with Swift to make the city-state her lone tour stop in Southeast Asia earlier this year, sparking regional envy.
European governments have yet to acknowledge that their countries were not among the 12 chosen for the Eras Tour’s Europe leg, while some fans are surprised that Gelsenkirchen, a city with a population of around 264,000, is one of three German places that made the list
Airbnb announced Tuesday that searches on its site for the U.K. cities where Swift will perform in June and August — Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cardiff, and London — jumped by an average of 337% since tickets went on sale last summer.
Not to be outdone in identifying trends, the property rentals firm identified the demand as an example of “passion tourism,” or travel “driven by concerts, sports, and other cultural events.”
According to Stockholm Chamber of Commerce Chief Economist Carl Bergqvist, 120,000 visitors from 130 countries, including 10,000 from the United States, are scheduled to visit Sweden’s capital this month. Stockholm is the only Scandinavian destination on Swift’s tour, and airlines have increased flights from nearby Denmark, Finland, and Norway to bring fans to the May 17-19 gigs, he said.
Even though rates for the tour dates have soared, the city’s 40,000 hotel rooms are all booked, according to Bergqvist. He said that concertgoers are likely to spend roughly 500 million Swedish kroner, or more than $46 million, on the local economy during their stay, excluding the cost of Swift tickets and travel to Sweden.
“So this is going to be huge for the tourism sector in Sweden and Stockholm in particular,” said Bergqvist.
Nightclubs, restaurants, and bars are taking advantage of the opportunity to pander to fans by hosting Taylor Swift-themed activities such as karaoke, quizzes, and after-concert dance parties.
Caroline Matlock, 29, of Houston, saw Swift more than a year ago on the Eras Tour in Texas. She’s now making additional friendship bracelets and trying to learn a few Swedish words in preparation for the three-and-a-half-hour presentation in Stockholm. Swift’s friend proposed seeing her in Europe, and Matlock initially needed convincing.
“I said, ‘I only want to travel if it’s a nation I’ve never been to. “I’ve seen Taylor Swift,” she explained.
Their itinerary includes visits to Scandinavian destinations such as Oslo and Gothenburg. The event is the trip’s final night, and Matlock looks forward to meeting Swifties from other countries. “Americans tend to have a very obsessive culture, especially Taylor Swift-related, so I’m curious if the crowd will be more toned-down.”
It remains to be seen whether the music tourism trend will last as long and as strong as Swift’s and Beyoncé’s and whether it will spread to Billie Eilish, Usher, and other artists who have world tours planned for next year. Expedia’s Fish believes that other well-known singers performing in Europe this summer will demonstrate that planning a foreign trip around a concert is becoming popular.
AP – VOR News Image
Fans Are Following Taylor Swift To Europe After Finding Eras Tour Tickets Less Costly There
Kat Morga, a travel consultant in Nashville, is still determining. Morga watched Swift perform in Nashville last year and assisted two clients with school-aged children in booking European family holidays this summer, which included seeing Swift in concert. However, she believes that the complexity of navigating ticket purchases through language hurdles, currency conversions, international banking restrictions, and the danger of cancellations will limit the popularity of regular gig vacations.
“I think this is an anomaly,” Morga stated. “People aren’t going to spend $20,000 on a lavish family trip just because Taylor Swift is there. She’s a unique individual. “She’s unique.”
Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, owns Booking.com, Priceline.com, agoda.com, Kayak, and OpenTable, is even less excited about concert tours as a tourist promoter. The Swift Effect creates a “little blip” when the superstar visits smaller destinations, but for the global travel sector, “one star touring around does not make a difference,” he explained.
“It may only shift it somewhat. A person planned a week-long vacation in the Caribbean. Instead, that individual says, ‘Let’s go to the Taylor Swift thing,'” Fogel explained. “It does not increase it. “It just moves it from here to there.”
SOURCE – (AP)
Celebrity
9 Of 10 Wrongful Death Suits Over Astroworld Concert Crowd Surge Have Been Settled, Lawyer Says
Houston — Nine of the ten wrongful death claims brought following a deadly crowd surge at the 2021 Astroworld music festival have been resolved, including one that was scheduled to go to trial this week, an attorney said Wednesday.
The family of Madison Dubiski, a 23-year-old Houston resident who was one of ten people killed during a crowd crush at rapper Travis Scott’s concert on November 5, 2021, had scheduled the jury selection to start on Tuesday.
However, Neal Manne, an attorney representing Live Nation, the festival’s promoter and one of those being sued alongside Scott, stated at a court hearing Wednesday that just one wrongful death claim remained active, while the other nine had been resolved, including the one brought by Dubiski’s family.
AP – VOR News Image
9 Of 10 Wrongful Death Suits Over Astroworld Concert Crowd Surge Have Been Settled, Lawyer Says
During the court session, Noah Wexler, an attorney for Dubiski’s family, acknowledged that their case “is resolved in its entirety.”
The terms of the settlements were kept hidden, and attorneys declined to speak during the court session due to a gag order.
The family of 9-year-old Ezra Blount, the youngest child murdered at the concert, has filed the only wrongful death case that is still outstanding. Attorneys in the action were scheduled to meet next week to consider when Blount’s family’s lawsuit could go to trial.
“This case is ready for trial,” Scott West, an attorney for Blount’s family, stated in court.However, Manne stated that he and the lawyers representing the other defendants being sued were unprepared.
State District Judge Kristen Hawkins said she wanted to consider the Blount case at next week’s session, as well as prospective trials linked to the injury cases filed following the fatal concert.
Hawkins stated that if the Blount family’s lawsuit is unresolved, she intends to schedule it as the next trial rather than an injury case.
More than 4,000 litigants filed hundreds of lawsuits following the concert. Manne stated that over 2,400 injury cases remain pending.
GQ – VOR News Image
9 Of 10 Wrongful Death Suits Over Astroworld Concert Crowd Surge Have Been Settled, Lawyer Says
The notification that nearly all of the wrongful death lawsuits had been settled came after Dubiski’s trial was postponed last week. Apple Inc., which live-streamed Scott’s concert and was one of more than 20 defendants sued by Dubiski’s family, filed an appeal after a court denied its plea to be excluded from the case. The appeals court granted Apple a stay in the case.
In the days following the trial stay, Dubiski’s family’s attorneys reached an agreement with all of the defendants in the case, including Apple, Scott, and Live Nation, the world’s largest live entertainment organization.
At least four wrongful death claims had already been resolved and announced in court documents. However, Wednesday marked the first time lawyers in the dispute provided an update, stating that nine of the ten wrongful death lawsuits had been resolved.
In court filings, the attorneys for Dubiski’s family and the numerous other plaintiffs have argued that inadequate planning and a disregard for the venue’s capacity and safety were to blame for the concert’s fatalities and hundreds of injuries.
Texas – VOR News Image
9 Of 10 Wrongful Death Suits Over Astroworld Concert Crowd Surge Have Been Settled, Lawyer Says
The victims, aged 9 to 27, died from compression asphyxia, which an expert compared to being crushed by a car.
Scott, Live Nation, and the others who have been sued have refuted these allegations, stating that safety is their priority. They claimed what happened could not have been predicted.
Following a police inquiry, a grand jury declined to charge Scott and five others with the festival last year.
SOURCE – (AP)
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