Why Every Star In The World Wants A Guest Spot On TV

“[Led] by current shows like Glee, 30 Rock, and Entourage, TV seems to be in a sort of guest-star golden age.” And it’s not just existing television celebrities like Neil Patrick Harris, Judge Judy or (occasionally) Oprah; it’s movie royalty such as Matt Damon, Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem. Even Al Gore has turned up on 30 Rock. Kevin Fallon offers five theories as to why the A-List is itchin’ to get onto the small screen.

The Bolshoi’s Born Choreographer

“Most ballet choreographers of any merit get the bug at school and work their way gradually up a ladder from elementary pieces for their classmates to the big stage. They are not supposed to spring virtually fully formed into the limelight, with a considerable talent attached. That, though, seems to be the uncommon case with the Royal Ballet principal man, Vyacheslav Samodurov.”

Staging A Sleep-In (Or, Rather, A Sleep-Out)

This weekend in Toronto, two “multimedia artists are staging Z’s By The C, a ‘radical crafting and public napping project,’ wherein people will be invited to decorate their own sleeping masks and then be given access to a ‘safe sleeping zone’ in an undeveloped patch of grass.” Says one of the artists, “‘We started doing this in Calgary, in 2008, and at first it was sort of terrifying for people, even though we provide a safe area for them.”

Christo, Jeanne-Claude, And An Environmental Impact Statement

The US Bureau of Land Management has just finished an Environmental Impact Statement for the artists’ project Under the River, in which a stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado will be covered by (what else?) fabric panels. And Christo is delighted: “The identity of our project is built in the permitting process. We were banging our heads and asking to have an environmental impact statement for such a long time.”