lifestyle SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

California State University revokes Bill Cosby degree

California university on Friday joined a growing that the Board of Trustees has voted to rescind a tion’s high standards and reputation. “The board took number of schools in stripping disgraced US degree.” action to revoke the previously awarded honorary Acomedian Bill Cosby of his honorary degree It said the board voted on the measure Wednesday. degree in order to maintain the prestige, reputation over the sex scandal engulfing him. “Cosby’s conduct Cosby, once one of America’s most beloved actors, has and credibility of the CSU,” it said. — AFP is contrary to the values of the California State seen his reputation destroyed as some 50 women University and inconsistent with the criteria and high have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault. standards that honorary degree recipients are expect- Last week, two other universities-Drexel in In this file photo, Comedian Bill Cosby performs ed to exemplify,” the university said in a statement. Philadelphia and Bryant in Rhode Island-rescinded onstage during ‘A Celebration of Paul “The CSU has been awarding honorary doctorate honorary degrees awarded to Cosby. CSU said it had Newman’s Hole in the Wall Camps’ at Avery degrees since 1963, and this is the first time in 52 years decided to follow suit in order to uphold the institu- Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center in New York. — AFP

Hou targets Golden Horse as stars gather

ome of the biggest stars in Asian cinema Outstanding Taiwanese Film-maker of the Year, gathered in today for this year’s for what organizers describe as his “achieve- SGolden Horse film awards, with ment and uncompromised perseverance”. The Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien shooting Golden Horse best actress category will see a for more glory after triumphing at Cannes. battle between Shu Qi of “The Assassin” and Taiwanese film-maker Ang Lee, Japanese actor star , who plays a Satoshi Tsumabuki and Korean actress Ha Ji- woman struggling to cope after her fiance is won were among the celebrities to grace the killed in a car accident in “Zinnia Flower”. red carpet at the awards, dubbed the Chinese- Best actor contenders include 25-year-old language “Oscars”. Hundreds of excited and Lee Hong-chi, who plays one of the sons in screaming fans braved the rain to see their idols arrive at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in downtown Taipei yesterday evening. This year’s awards list is dominated by , with around 40 percent of nomina- tions, one of the best homegrown showings in recent years when Hong Kong and China have outshone Taiwanese competitors. Arriving at the event, Taiwanese film director Chen Kuo- fu, who is also the chair of this year’s Golden Horse awards jury, said the country’s film industry had experienced ups and downs in recent years but that he was “especially happy and excited this year”. Hou’s “The Assassin” leads the field with 11 nominations for the awards. The movie’s nominations include best film, best director, best leading actress, best adapt- ed screenplay and best cinematography. Set in ninth-century China, “The Assassin” is a slow- burning minimalist movie with Taiwanese megastar Shu Qi playing a highly trained female assassin sent back to her home province to kill its governor, who is also the Justin Bieber performs on NBC’s ‘Today’ show at Rockefeller Plaza on Wednesday, Nov 18, 2015 in New York. — AP man she loves. “I’m really glad director Hou gave this opportunity to challenge myself,” Shu Qi said. Hou won the best director gong for the film at Cannes in May and has since said he is Taiwan director Hou Hsiao-hsien displays a hoping the movie will garner an Oscar. trophy after winning the Best Director dur- Justin Bieber’s album Also up for best film are “Thanatos, Drunk” ing the 52nd Golden Horse Film Awards in from Taiwanese director Chang Tso-chi a dra- Taipei yesterday. — AFP ma about two sons of an alcoholic mother and their dysfunctional lives; Hong Kong director “Thanatos, Drunk”, and China’s - Philip Yung’s crime thriller “Port of Call”; black- better known as a director-for his role as an smashes Spotify record and-white movie “Tharlo”, the tale of a shep- ageing street kingpin in the film “Mr. Six”. In herd by Tibetan director Pema Tseden; and addition to Hou, Chang Tso-chi and Pema ustin Bieber’s new album has smashed the anticipated “25,” which the music industry One Direction-whose fan base is seen as over- “Mountains May Depart”, a family saga from Tseden are among the favourites for the best record for first week streaming on Spotify, expects to be the best-selling album in years. lapping with Bieber’s-put out its own album Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke. Film critics have director award. Thirty-nine films were nomi- Jthe online music site said Friday. “Purpose,” But amid high confidence in sales, Adele’s label “Made in the AM.” Spotify said that “Made in the praised the strong field, but Hou is favorite to nated for the 52nd edition of the Golden Horse the Canadian pop star’s first album in three did not make “25” available on streaming serv- AM” also beat The Weeknd’s previous record win. “I’m not saying the other films are not Film Awards. While they are styled on the US years, was streamed 205 million times since its ices, which provide unlimited on-demand but did not match Bieber. Billboard, the pre- good-they are all good, but not good enough Academy Awards, the winners are decided by release a week earlier, with 77 million of the music. Streaming companies, led by Swedish eminent US sales chart, also expects Bieber’s to take on ‘The Assassin’,” Kelly Yang, a Taipei- a jury, along the lines of the Cannes film festi- streams in the United States. The figure was far site Spotify, have rapidly grown in size in recent “Purpose” to debut at number one and surpass based cinema critic said. val.— AFP above the previous first-week record set three years, although some artists have voiced con- “Made in the AM,” which One Direction has said Hou’s foray into ancient China tapped “fun- months ago by another Canadian, the R&B cern at their level of compensation. will be its last before a hiatus.— AFP damental human nature, which is universal”, The Weekend. Bieber released “Purpose,” on which the says Yang. “(He) tries to present abstract Zen Spotify announced the record the same day often-troubled 21-year-old reflects on life in the philosophy through his characters and does a that English singer Adele released her hotly public eye, the same day that British boy band brilliant job.” Hou will also be awarded Warhol, Pollock, Rothko on rare display in Tehran

ome of the world’s most expensive and rarely seen and Disaster” series sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $105 The international works went underground after Iran’s When it was publicly shown in Tehran in 2005, it was modern art, including works by the Americans million in 2013. The American artist Mark Rothko’s “Sienna revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini railed quickly taken down, reportedly on orders from the ministry SJackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, went on display Orange and Black on Dark Brown” oil on canvas and Irish- against “Westoxification”, denouncing Western moral and of culture and Islamic guidance. Jannati was not the minis- Saturday in a major exhibition in Iran. They are part of a born British painter Francis Bacon’s “Reclining Man with sexual depravity which he said had infected the Islamic ter at the time. Celant, an art historian, critic and former collection bought in the 1970s by dealers acting for Farah, Sculpture” are also on show. They are part of a joint exhibi- world. Many films were banned from cinemas in Iran as senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the wife of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who fled into tion also featuring 130 works by famed Iranian artist was music and many books. The Tehran museum did not acknowledged that works such as nudes were out of exile in 1979, heralding Iran’s Islamic revolution later that Farideh Lashai. A painter, writer, translator and visual artist, hold a major exhibition of foreign art until 1999, a decade bounds but said many others shouldn’t be. More cultural year. Ever since the themes of many of the Western works she died in 2013. after Khomeini’s death. exchanges could bring greater global prominence to have been considered too risque to be publicly shown and Iran was then under the reformist 1997-2005 govern- Iranian artists such as Lashai, he said. “For me, it’s very have spent much of the past 36 years languishing in stor- ‘First step’ ment of president Mohammad Khatami. The current exhi- important to start this kind of collaboration with Iran. This age in the basement of Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Iran’s Culture Minister Ali Jannati attended a preview on bition was jointly curated by Iran’s Faryar Javaherian and is a truly great international collection and it can help start Art. Among the 42 Western works featured in the muse- Friday night in a demonstration of official support from Italy’s Germano Celant, who said he was astonished at the a better connection between Iran and an outside audi- um’s three-month exhibition is Pollock’s “Mural on Indian President Hassan Rouhani’s government. Jannati told AFP museum’s collection. “Many of them I had only seen before ence.”— AFP Red Ground”, completed in 1950 and considered one of his that the Islamic republic’s recent nuclear deal with world as reproductions but here we have the real thing,” Celant best drip paintings. powers had opened up potential for international coopera- said, noting that the basement held around 300 original Five years ago, experts at Christie’s said that, were it put tion in art as well as business and other fields. “This is a first pieces in storage. Those include more than a dozen works on the market, it would fetch $250 million. Also featured is step and we hope to have more mutual cooperation to by Warhol, including his Mao series of the Chinese commu- Warhol’s “Suicide”, a 1963 acrylic of a man leaping to his showcase outstanding Iranian artists as well as displaying nist leader, as well as Bacon’s Triptych, part of which fea- death from a building. A similar work from Warhol’s “Death more works from our foreign art collection,” he said. tures two naked men lying on a bed.

An Iranian woman walks by a painting titled ‘Sienna, Visitors stand next to paintings (left to right) by Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon “Reclining Man Italian art historian and curator Germano Celant poses for a picture next Orange black on Dark Brown’ by American artist Mark with Sculpture” and American artist Franz Kline “untitled” during the opening ceremony of an exhibition to a painting titled ‘light in August’ by Dutch American abstract expres- Rothko during the opening ceremony of an exhibition of of modern art at Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art (TMOCA). sionist Willem de Kooning.— AFP Photos modern art at Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art (TMOCA) in the Iranian capital, on November 20, 2015.