plus 3, Britney Spears, Madonna, U2, Bruce Springsteen Are Billboard Top Money ... - MTV

Britney Spears, Madonna, U2, Bruce Springsteen Are Billboard Top Money ... - MTV
Britney Spears - Federline Attacked By Dogs On Tv Show - Contactmusic.com
Design revolutionary: What Maya Romanoff puts on walls has long turned ... - Raleigh News & Observer
MURPHY'S HOME ON THE MARKET - PR Inside

Britney Spears, Madonna, U2, Bruce Springsteen Are Billboard Top Money ... - MTV

Posted: 01 Mar 2010 05:56 AM PST

Billboard magazine's fourth-annual Top 40 Money Makers list is topped by U2 this year. The Irish superstars raked in more than $108 million in 2009, mostly through their gigantic 360-degree tour — the most expensive rock production to ever hit the road — which is also destined to be the highest-grossing tour of all time.

In addition to being topped by the big three from the '80s — U2, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen — the list also features a number of younger acts banking major cash, among them Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, Kings of Leon and Taylor Swift.

Among the variables figured into the list were money earned from CD and digital sales, publishing royalties and all forms of streaming media, as well as touring from the first week of 2009 through January 3, 2010.

The top three included Madonna, who piled up $47.2 million from her Sticky and Sweet stadium/arena tour, licensing and merchandise as well as a lucrative 360 deal with Live Nation. Veteran rocker Bruce Springsteen took the #2 spot with $57.6 million through a combination of touring, more than 2 million digital downloads and hefty publishing revenues thanks to the fact that he writes all his own songs.

Britney Spears proved that touring is a girl's best friend by surging in at #5 ($38.8 million), raking in more than $36.4 million for her worldwide arena tour in support of 2008's Circus album, as well as money from more than 7.5 million downloads. The road was very, very kind to Pink as well, earning her the #6 spot ($36.3 million), with all but $1 million of that rolling in courtesy of her acrobatic Funhouse world tour.

The Jonas Brothers did all right for themselves, landing at #7 on proceeds of $33.5 million, $31.4 million of which came from their world tour in support of Lives, Vines and Trying Times. Miley Cyrus hit #15 with $21.2 million, with more than $4.3 million from CD royalties and $15 million from her Wonder World tour, while Beyoncé banked $23.6 million to land at #13, with $2.3 coming from CD royalties on I Am ... Sasha Fierce, as well as endorsements and touring revenue. Coldplay earned $27.3 million, most of it from their world tour in support of 2008's Viva la Vida.

Also earning big bucks was teen Taylor Swift, #21 with $17.2 million, whose touring only accounted for half her cash, which mostly came from CD royalties for her mega-selling Fearless. In fact, Swift's royalties were topped only by Michael Jackson's, which surged in the year of his death.

Jackson was just ahead at #20 with $17.3 million, from a combination of CD and ringtone royalties ($13.2 for albums, $255,000 for ringtones), as well as cash from "This Is It," the highest-grossing concert film of all time, earning more than $72 million at the box office.

Kings of Leon also crashed the list at #25 with $14.4 million, $1.4 million of which they earned for their breakthrough Only by the Night disc, which sold 1.2 million copies. Another $9.9 million came from their non-stop touring.

Green Day came in at #32 with more than $12.1 million, mostly from their 21st Century Breakdown album and more than $8.8 million in touring. Lil Wayne — who is headed to prison for a year on Tuesday — came in at #30 with $12.8 million, $10 million of which came from the highest-grossing hip-hop tour of the year, not to mention the most lucrative rap trek Billboard has ever tracked.

Among the other acts making the list: reunited jam giants Phish (#37, $9.9 million), greasepaint rockers Kiss (#34, $11.8 million), former Beatle Paul McCartney (#31, $12.2 million), road hogs the Dave Matthews Band (#17, $20 million), Elton John (#14, $22.1 million), Nickelback (#12, $23.6 million), Fleetwood Mac (#11, $24.7 million), Metallica (#10, $25.5 million) and AC/DC (#4, $43.6 million).

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Britney Spears - Federline Attacked By Dogs On Tv Show - Contactmusic.com

Posted: 21 Feb 2010 03:17 PM PST

BRITNEY SPEARS' ex-husband KEVIN FEDERLINE had attack dogs on his heels as he tried to lose weight on a U.S. reality TV show.

During one challenge on Celebrity Fit Club, which will air in America on Monday (22Feb10), out-of-shape and overweight Federline and three teammates were chained together as they crossed an obstacle course, while savage dogs hunted them down.

The gracious star agreed to help his pals through the course before competing it himself - and that meant he had to dash for the safety of a cage to avoid what he feared would be a mauling when one teammate struggled to get over a wall.

He says, "I see the dogs coming over the f**king hill... The dogs are maybe 20 yards away."

Federline failed to lock the cage on time and one of the dogs charged through the gate, leaving the dancer/rapper to fend the animal off inside.

But Spears' ex had nothing to worry about - as the raging beast jumped up at him, Federline realised the dogs had been muzzled.

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Design revolutionary: What Maya Romanoff puts on walls has long turned ... - Raleigh News & Observer

Posted: 02 Mar 2010 12:04 AM PST

But then, unwilling to put up with the ephemeral whims of now-it's-in-oops-it's-out fashion, Romanoff turned his tie-dye attention to outdoor art, draping Belvedere Castle in New York's Central Park with 150 yards of tie-dye panels and unrolling 48,000 square feet of hand-dyed canvas strips off the side of the Sun-Times building in Chicago.

Somehow, Romanoff found his way into interior design and started slapping tie-dye on the walls. Didn't stop at twisted, knotted, dyed cloth or paper either, once he discovered the canvas that is the wall.

He has put up mother-of-pearl, crushed granite and marble, and Swarovski crystals. He has papered walls in 18-karat gold. And braided hemp. And razor-thin slices of Paulownia wood, from the Chinese fig tree. And glass beads that shimmer like a lake at twilight.

"Extraordinary surfaces. Since 1969," goes the inscription of Maya Romanoff, the corporation, known in chic design circles around the globe for the last four decades for what it has done to the vertical planes that delineate our lives. Its logo, of two entwined lotus blossoms, is a touch of Zen that goes back to the beginning of this free-flowing enterprise.

One recent morning in what's called the Multifarious Room of the company's Skokie headquarters, Romanoff held court beside a conference table where even the doughnuts dazzled in a shimmering sprinkle of rose-petal-pink sugar crystals.

As has been the case for the last few years, Romanoff was folded into a wheelchair as he played the whispered raconteur.

"Once tie-dyed a woman," he tells you, without a hint of shock. "Came out great," he opines before moving onto another eyebrow-raiser. That being how, with 200 borrowed dollars in his pocket, he once roamed Pakistan for six months, sniffing out the world's best hashish. Found it, he lets on, but then seals his lips.

For some 18 years, Parkinson's disease has slowly, agonizingly, been robbing Romanoff of his balance, his gait, his grasp of even a breakfast spoon. The endgame of this neuromuscular killer is when the vocal cords begin to close, making speech an exercise in slow-drawn perseverance, and a barely audible one at that.

But the disease can't put a dent in the creative spark - and storyteller's wit - that is the 69-year-old's trademark.

"It's not an easy disease," says Romanoff's wife and business partner, Joyce, in a simple declaration that spoke volumes.

When clicking on a retrospective DVD, one that unspools Romanoff's story from a trek to Woodstock to Time magazine's declaring him "the visual star of the Windy Cityscape," his wife of 12 years says of the soundtrack, in passing, "You can hear his gorgeous voice." And you can't miss the longing for what was.

Maya Romanoff remembers finger-painting as a little boy, growing up in a somewhat gilded childhood, in the Belmont Hotel on the North Side. His father was a metallurgist by training, made plumbing fixtures for a living. His mother, "brilliant, crazy," her son calls her, was a socialite, a philanthropist, once had been a model. His bedroom walls, he recalls, were covered in toile; the floor, a checkerboard of simple squares in blue and red linoleum.

He studied anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley - fell in love with a painter and fellow student named Becky. They graduated in 1965, heady times indeed. Self-avowed searchers, the pair took off, traveled through Europe, India and North Africa.

It was in the marketplace at Gabes in Tunisia that Maya was transfixed by the ancient art of tie-dyeing, the swirl of kaleidoscopic color and unpredictable pattern that emerged from all the dipping of hand-spun cloth.

"It was like walking into the astroplane," the young Romanoff was quoted as saying at the time. (By then he'd dropped his birth name, Richard, and taken on the name Multifarious Maya, given to him by a Punjab holy man during travels through India; Maya, taken from Sanskrit, means "doer of many things." Eventually, he ditched Multifarious.)

But it wasn't till after coming home from Woodstock, in 1969, that Maya and Becky, by then his wife, took to the basement of her parents' home in Louisville, Ky., and tried their hand with a bottle of Rit, a slew of rubber bands and their first knotted-up T-shirt.

Trying to earn a buck after their world travels, the Romanoffs had loaded up their iconic Volkswagen van with peaches and chocolate cake to feed the hungry hordes at Woodstock. Romanoff now claims that he never saw a tie-dyed T-shirt there, but Becky did, and they drove home itching to experiment with what they knew was an ancient textile art.

Wasn't long before a Rolling Stones concert in Miami called their name, so off they drove with a VW van full of 180 tie-dyed shirts. They'd barely opened the sides of that old van before every last psychedelic shirt was sold. "Rained miserably," Becky Romanoff once recalled of the waterlogged rock scene. "We were the only people who didn't take a loss, except the ones who sold strobe candles."

Emboldened by their tie-dye triumph, they took on New York.

Albert Hadley, who at the time was partner to Sister Parish, the late doyenne of interior design in America who counted Jackie Kennedy among her highbrow clients, recalls how the Romanoffs, "hippies in flowing white robes," came wafting into the Upper East Side offices of Parish-Hadley on East 69th Street and Madison Avenue in June 1971.

"Together they unrolled textiles of great variety and beauty - cottons, linens, silks, some soft leathers and a variety of velvets. Some were rich and heavy, others gossamer thin," Hadley wrote in the foreword to a 1979 exhibition catalog.

"Each was more beautiful than the other, and each was a work of art. ... As one after the other of these were unfolded before us, here were glowing jewel colors, colors of fire, water, air and earth ... and yes, a rainbow! It was as though a modern Merlin had appeared before us to unfurl age-old techniques of textile design translated with utmost sensitivity and loveliness into what appeared an art form totally new, one which struck our own imaginations with delight."

As one critic of the time wrote, "They took New York by storm."

But, right off, they'd settled in Chicago, where after the Rolling Stones concert, they'd driven back to Maya's hometown to pick up a load of white T-shirts at Handelsman, a wholesale den on South Michigan Avenue that sold a particular brand of T-shirts with a ribbon through the collar.

In time, they set up shop in a Division Street walk-up where the kitchen stove was crowded with pots and pots of dye, and cloth draped everywhere, recalls Elita Murphy, an early and ardent client, and wife of noted Chicago architect Charlie Murphy. Initially taken by Romanoff's famed tie-dyed opera coat, which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Murphy couldn't get enough of all things tie-dye, so for her daughter's Sweet 16th she asked the Romanoffs to do an entire bedroom, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with a rainbow bed to boot.

Romanoff hung the room in tie-dyed velvet and silk, covered the floor in tie-dyed canvas. Inspired by a Zen poem, it was a tie-dye tropical garden, complete with flowing river, red lotus blooms and palm trees, billowing clouds above.

"He was a tad above the times," says Murphy, who now lives in Colorado. "When everybody else was getting shag carpeting, he was hanging tie-dye on the walls. I recognized him right away as a revolutionary."

It was while living on Division Street, walking through the alley on a dreary winter's day, looking up to see laundry flapping in the wind, that Romanoff got yet another big idea: dangling tie-dye swaths off buildings, bringing wind and flow and rainbow color into the hard-edged architectural equation.

So began the chapter that had him dyeing bolts of canvas by the thousands of yards, covering sides of buildings in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Miami.

Ultimately, though, it's inner space that has held his attention all these years.

"I consider myself a tool-maker for interior designers and interior architects," Romanoff once said. "That's where the life of society is, in private spaces."

And so, in the private and not-so-private spaces of a client list that reads like a spin through late 20th century pop icons - Donald Trump, Donna Karan, Quincy Jones, Britney Spears, Barbra Streisand, even the Sultan of Brunei - Romanoff's revolution has rolled on. And the needle never got stuck in the tie-dye groove.

The corporation has grown from a hippie couple with their sinks and stove-top pots of dye to 55 employees, many second-generation workers, sons and daughters who come to work in what has become one big family-like operation, in a state-of-the-art studio/factory where yoga classes are held just outside the workrooms.

Over the years, the Romanoffs have brought in artists who, along with Romanoff, mine the imagination and conjure secret techniques for affixing anything from precious metals to earthy bits of bark and mulberry, clay and crushed stone, to rolls and bolts and tiles that transform inner spaces to otherworldly.

Even now, Maya Romanoff, whose title is chairman and chief creative officer, is "the final arbiter, the last pair of eyes on every product," says Joyce, who in her 22 years with the company has masterminded her share of genius and been termed "midwife to Maya's vision." (Maya and Becky divorced in 1973; she now lives in France.)

Kara Mann, a Chicago interior designer deemed "of the moment" by InStyle magazine, says that when she unfurls a roll of Romanoff wall covering - be it the tortoise-shell tiles, or "Beadazzled" sheaves of caviar-size beads uncannily glommed onto paper - she watches as her "clients' eyes get big, then yours get big too. You think, 'Whoa, where on earth am I going to be able to use that?'"

But then, she says, you can't stop dreaming.

And so it has always been in the psychedelic world of Maya Romanoff, where the ancient art of sweeping thread through kaleidoscopic color has unlocked untold dreams.

And raised just as many eyebrows.

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MURPHY'S HOME ON THE MARKET - PR Inside

Posted: 02 Mar 2010 12:26 AM PST

2010-03-02 09:27:07 -

BRITTANY MURPHY's mother has put the house the actress died in on the mar ket for $7.25 million (=C2=A34.5 million), according to a U.S. report.
The 32 year old suffered a fatal cardiac arrest in her palatial Hollywo od Hills home in December (09).
The star's mother Sharon and widower Simon Monjack are struggling to co pe with their grief over the actress' death and have decided to move to N ew York, the filmmaker tells TMZ.com.
Murphy bought the house from Britney Spears for just under $4 million ( =C2=A32.5 million) in 2003.
It has also been confirmed that Monjack was left out of Murphy's will - she left her entire estate to her mother. The British director claims th e star's will states: "I am married to Simon Monjack who I have intention ally left out of this will."

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