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This week gives you a
special opportunity to win a Kirk Franklin CD! The first three people who can
tell me what the name of the new Kirk Franklin CD is entitled will win a free
copy, as well as a copy of Kirk Franklin's 'Rebirth of Kirk Franklin'. And
check out the new scoop on a show with lots of CanCon - Sex, Love and Secrets
below under TV NEWS.
Check out all categories - tons of Canadian content
in MUSIC NEWS, FILM NEWS, TV NEWS, THEATRE NEWS, and OTHER NEWS! Have a read and a scroll! This
newsletter is designed to give you some updated entertainment-related news
and provide you with our upcoming event listings. Welcome to
those who are new members. Want your events listed by date? Check
out EVENTS.
Want to be removed from the distribution, click REMOVE.
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::HOT EVENTS::
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Canadian Music Artists Join Katrina Fundraising Efforts HOT
Line-Up
Have
you wondered what you can do to help while watching the media coverage of the
devastating trail of Hurricane Katrina? This is your opportunity to
help those in need - come out on Thursday,
October 6th to Revival, 783 College Street at 8:00 pm
for one of the hottest musical showcases to support Habitat For Humanity's "Operation Home
Delivery" project to aid the rebuilding of the gulf
coast.
Syreeta Neal, one of
Torontos R&B divas (and daughter of Grammy-winning Kenny Neal), a native
of New Orleans has family members who lost their homes.
Syreeta returned to Toronto just days after surviving the challenges that the
hurricane left in its wake. Syreetas first order of business? To
put together a fundraiser with a plethora of her friends and family in a
musical showcase to help those left without a home.
The
goal is to raise funds for Habitat For Humanity's "Operation Home
Delivery" project. This division of HFH is a program where "sample"
houses are built and sent to areas in the gulf coast affected by Hurricane
Katrina. Volunteers then rebuild whole communities speedily in order to
assist impoverished families to start anew. Syreetas vision is to effect
change for the future of these people. With costs of $100 million
dollars to build 1,500 houses, the need for donations is great.
The
show will be hosted by Syreeta Neal
and one of the South's hottest producers Howard
M. (Master P., Lil
Romeo, C Miller, Faith Evans, Lil Wayne!). The confirmed line-up is:
Andrew Craig
Dane
DJ Carl Allen
Graph Nobel
James Bryan
Jeen O'Brien
Kayte Burgess
Jennie Laws
Melanie Durrant
Syreeta Neal
The Show
Wade O. Brown
Zaki Ibrahim
and more surprise special guests!
The
majority of the performers will be playing acoustically or
"unplugged" in an intimate setting. The range of varied performers
includes the genres of rock, R&B, dance and soul - all joining forces to
raise some funds. Anyone who wants to help heal through the
power of music and give what they can for the cause is welcome!
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 6
CONCERT FOR KATRINA RELIEF
Hosted
by Syreeta Neal and Howard M.
Revival
Lounge
783
College Street (at Shaw)
Doors
open: 8:00 pm
Showtime:
9:30 pm
Cover:
$10 before 10:00 pm, $15 after 10:00 pm
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::OPPORTUNITY::
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Foundations For Success In The New Environment
The
MMF Canada presents a management workshop in 5 Canadian Cities. All
MMF panels will be hosted by Michael McMartin (Hoodoo Gurus) &
Keith Harris (Stevie Wonder)
Vancouver, BC: Saturday October 1 Vancouver
Management Workshop at Tom Lee Music Hall (929 Granville Street
604-685-8471) with Allen Moy
Winnipeg,
MB:
Monday October 3 Winnipeg Management Workshop at Gas Station
Theatre (445 River Ave 204-284-9477) with Steve Warden
Toronto, ON: Wednesday October 5 Toronto
Management Workshop Club 279 (279 Yonge Street 416-362-3636) with
Brian Hetherman
Toronto, ON: Thursday October 6 (In
association with SOCAN) SOCAN Urban Music Panel - part of the View
Points Series - at Harbourfront Centre - Free admission! (For further
information call 416-973-4000 or visit www.harbourfrontcentre.com/viewpoints)
Montreal, QC: Saturday October 8 Montreal
management panel at The Green Room (5386 Boul. St. Laurent
514-602-8366) with Brian Hetherman
Halifax, NS: Wednesday October 12 Halifax
management workshop at Khyber Club (1588 Barrington Street
902-492-3278) with Louis Thomas
All
are welcome to attend these free seminars. For more info see www.mmfcanada.com or contact mmfcanada@look.ca
Daily Workshop Itinerary & Topics of Discussion:
10:00 a.m. 12:00 noon
*
different types of managers
*
role and duties of a manager
*
goals of the manager
*
management priorities
*
building a management team
*
finding the right manager/finding the right artist and establishing the
relationship
12:00 noon - 1 p.m.
*
lunch break
1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
*
networking
*
management contracts, fees and payments
*
the major label process/the independent alternative and owning the masters
*
new business models/old business models and the international marketplace
*
new revenue streams
3:00 - 3:15 p.m.
*
break
3:15 - 4:00 p.m.
*Q&A
from participants to panellists
4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
*
meet and greet/mingling
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CARAS
Announces Call For Submissions For The 2006 Juno Awards
Source:
2006 Junos
(October
3, 2005) TORONTO -- The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and
Sciences (CARAS) announces that
submissions are now being accepted for the 2006 JUNO Awards, Canadas Music
Awards. Early-bird applications for juried categories will be accepted until
October 26, 2005, with a final submission
deadline of November 16, 2005.
Submissions for categories based on sales will be accepted until January 9,
2006. All forms can be accessed at www.junosubmissions.ca or by calling 1-888-440-JUNO
(5866) (toll-free in Canada). In CARAS ongoing commitment to review all
category criteria, including voting methods and processes, the following
improvements have been made for 2006:
·
CARAS
members and JUNO Awards judges are now able to cast their votes online for
both the first round to determine nominees and then the second round to
determine winners.
·
Francophone
Album of the Year has been changed from a sales based category, to a jury
voted category. Two rounds of jury votes will determine nominees and winners.
Albums must be released between September 1, 2004 and November 16, 2005.
·
New
CARAS member and non-member submission rates have been introduced to
encourage CARAS membership and to further engage Canadian artists in the
Nominating and Voting process.
·
All
submissions must be completed on-line. In an effort to keep the submission
costs down, a penalty fee will be levied for incomplete submissions received.
While
certain categories such as International Album of the Year are determined by
sales, most category winners are determined by CARAS membership ballot vote
or by a panel of expert judges. For specific details on JUNO Awards
nominations and procedures, please visit the Juno Awards Web site at www.junoawards.ca. The Canadian Academy of
Recording Arts and Sciences/L'academie canadienne des arts et des sciences de
l'enregistrement (CARAS) is a not-for-profit organization created to preserve
and enhance the Canadian music and recording industries and to contribute
toward higher artistic and industry standards. The main focus of CARAS is the
exploration and development of opportunities to showcase and promote Canadian
artists and music through television vehicles such as the JUNO Awards.
For more information on the 35th annual Juno Awards, visit the Canadian
Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS) Web site at www.junoawards.ca. The 2006 Juno Awards will
air on CTV, on Sunday, April 2, 2006.
Sponsors for the 2006 JUNO Awards include FACTOR and the Government of Canada
through the Department of Canadian Heritage's "Canada Music Fund",
the Province of Nova Scotia, Halifax Regional Municipality, and Events
Halifax.
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::MUSIC NEWS::
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Stevie Wonder To
Release New Motown Album, A Time To Love, October 18
Source: Universal Music Canada
(October 4, 2005)
(Toronto, Ontario). On October 18th, Motown/Universal
Music Canada will release A Time To Love, Stevie
Wonders highly
anticipated new CD featuring 15 new Wonder songs. The new disc, one of
the premier Motown releases in recent years and ushering in an
exciting new era for the record label, is a dedicated effort by the legendary
artist to remind the world about the restorative power of love. A Time To Love is also available as a digital download, September 27, at all major online music
sites. Among the songs included on the new album are "A Time To Love," (featuring India.Arie),
"Your Love Cannot
Be Moved," (featuring gospel star Kim Burrell), "Positivity," (featuring Wonder's daughter Aisha Morris), and a host of other superstar collaborations, including
appearances by Prince, Narada Michael Walden, Sir Paul McCartney, who plays acoustic and
electric guitar on the title track; Hubert Laws, Mike
Philips, and En Vogue.
Wonder's open-arms embrace of the collaborative process and his adherence to
the musical philosophy that each project takes on a life of its own placed no
artificial deadlines on the long awaited album's completion, with the end
result proving to be well worth the wait.
"Stevie
always has impeccable timing," stated Sylvia Rhone, President of Motown, Executive
Vice President of Universal Motown. "The world is hungering more
than ever right now for the kind of message only he can deliver. I
speak for the entire Universal Music Group when I say nobody can illuminate
our greatest hopes, soothe our deepest fears, and put us on the musical high
road like Stevie Wonder." Wonder once again affirms such a
notion with the uplifting "Shelter In The Rain," an inspiring and timely anthem featuring
gospel legend Kirk Franklin directing the angelic chorus on a song
cited as a humanitarian ode of healing for victims and survivors of the
devastating hurricanes continuing to ravage the gulf coast. The single
will be specially serviced to Gospel and Christian radio stations, with net
proceeds from the song going to Stevie's charity organization The Wonder Foundation, which is earmarking the donations for Hurricane Katrina
relief efforts.
Stevie Wonder has remained one of the world's most
profound and influential artists for more than four decades. Winner of 21 Grammys and the prestigious Grammy Lifetime Achievement
Award, with
more than 70 million records sold, Wonder's received hundreds of honours
and awards throughout his career. A tireless humanitarian and
champion for political and social justice, Wonder was the pre-eminent force
behind the Martin Luther King holiday and USA For Africa, as well as helping
to raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic and the scourge of Apartheid in
South Africa. A leading voice in the fight against world hunger, Wonder
also led a "Charge Against Hunger" in conjunction with American
Express, which raised over $150 million dollars to feed nearly six million
underprivileged people yearly. Most recently, Wonder was honoured by
the United Negro College Fund's Evening Of Stars Tribute to the artist, for his
long-time work on behalf of the UNCF. On October 18th, Stevie Wonder
continues the special covenant he has with his fans with the release of the
eagerly awaited A Time To Love.
About Universal Music Canada
Universal Music
Canada, a unit of Universal Music Group, is Canada's leading music
organization maintaining an overall 36.5% year-to-date market share.
For further information on Universal Music Canada please visit www.umusic.ca.
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Luther Vandross: Always and Forever
Excerpt
from www.eurweb.com
- By Mr. Jawn Murray
(Oct. 4, 2005) For
those who saw Luther Vandross
funeral on television or
via the Internet, you know his send-off was, well, so amazing.
Everyone from Patti LaBelle to Usher and Aretha Franklin
were on hand to celebrate the life and legacy of Vandross and the impact his
music made on the world. Many of those same individuals have been
reunited again for the Vandross tribute CD, So
Amazing: An All-Star Tribute to Luther Vandross. The
collection features Vandrosss most memorable hits covered
by artists such as Fantasia (Til My Baby Comes Home"), John
Legend (Love Won't Let Me Wait"), Mary J. Blige (Never Too
Much"), Aretha Franklin (A House Is Not A Home"), Usher
(Superstar), Beyonce Knowles and Stevie Wonder ("So
Amazing"), Elton John ("Anyone Who Had A Heart" - duet
with Vandross's original vocals), Alicia Keys (If This World Were
Mine" - duet with Jermaine Paul), Celine Dion (Dance With
My Father"), Patti LaBelle ("Here and Now"), Jamie Foxx
(Creepin"), Babyface (If Only For One Night"), Angie
Stone (Since I Lost My Baby"), Donna Summer (Power of
Love") and Wyclef Jean (Always & Forever"). My
favourites are Fantasias church-tinged, Sunday-morning ready version of
"Til My Baby Comes Home; Legends soulfully-sensational arrangement of
"Love Won't Let Me Wait;" and Ushers fresh adaptation of
Superstar, a tune that allows Usher to showcase some real slick vocal
riffs. Other highlights include Franklins intricately-bluesy take on
A House Is Not A Home; Stones marvellously-modern arrangement of Since I
Lost My Baby; and Foxxs almost unrecognizable vocal interpretation of
Creepinhis ability to sound so different on every song he records is
astonishing.
Babyface
contemporizes If Only For One Night and Wonder sounds better than he has in
years on his duet with Knowles on So Amazing. One listen to Blige on
Never Too Much and you, too, will agree that she should never allow anyone
but Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis to produce her vocals. Its
great hearing her without annoying flat and sharp notes. While
this disc is full of great moments, there are some questionable ones as
well. What in the world was Wyclef thinking when he recorded Always
and Forever? This obfuscated reggae rendition of this classic
is ghastly. And since were talking sordid covers, Entertainment
Weekly put it best when they wrote: Donna Summer sinks Power of Love
into Euro-trash hell! Rod Stewart was slated to have a song on
this tribute album, but the track was rumoured to have been cut from this CD
because Clive Davis allegedly hated the arrangement. Artists
such as Heather Headley, Janet Jackson and Ruben Studdard
whose names were tossed around initially are noticeably absent as well. Overall, So Amazing: An All-Star Tribute to Luther
Vandross is a wonderful musical journey despite some turbulence (yes, you
Wyclef and Summer). Unfortunately, missing from the recording is other
Vandross favourites like Gladys Knight, Mariah Carey and Whitney
Houston. Heres an ideaand dont I always have one?for another
Vandross tribute album. Maybe some savvy label will do The Divas
Sing Luther CD and have Vandrosss favourite divas and some new ones
re-record his songs. Knight, Lisa Fischer, Martha Wash, Dionne
Warwick, Cheryl Lynn, Patti Austin, Natalie Cole, Tamia,
Whitney and Cissy Houston, among others, could bring life to this
concept all over again.
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Damian Marleys
'Welcome to Jamrock' Sets Record
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(Sept. 29, 2005)
With over 86,000 copies sold in its first week of release,
Damian Jr Gong Marley's new album Welcome to Jamrock broke all records for any reggae artiste,
as it debuted at number seven on this week's Billboard 200 pop album
chart. The young Marley's chart debut is without a doubt attributed to
his current Billboard R&B Singles and Hot 100 hit single Welcome to
Jamrock. That single was number 19 on the R&B singles chart and number 58
on the Hot 100 up to a week ago. Commenting on his latest charge's chart
success, Jerome Hamilton of Headline Entertainment, Marley's publicist, said
the chart debut was expected based on the success of the single. Νt was
expected and I am wonderfully impressed. It's going to be an outstanding
album, and I hope it grows from strength to strength. There are a lot of good
songs on the album," Hamilton said. Welcome to Jamrock, which debuted at
number 42 on the UK Album chart on the weekend, is Marley's third set. His
previous album, the Grammy-winning Half Way Tree, sold over 2,000 copies in
its first week of release four years ago. To date that set has sold over
91,000 copies. With Damian's album debuting at number seven on the main album
chart, it ranks him among an elite list of Jamaican reggae acts whose albums
have debuted or peaked in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200. His father, the
late reggae icon Bob Marley, peaked at number eight in 1976 with Rastaman
Vibration. Shaggy's multi-platinum album Hot Shot spent four weeks at number
one in 2001. Sean Paul's Dutty Rock peaked at number nine in 2003. The 86,000
copies registered by Welcome to Jamrock is the biggest first week burst for
any Jamaican reggae artiste. Some notable first week debuts and major
first week burst in sales over the years include: Lucky Day by Shaggy which
sold over 70,000 copies and debuted at number 24 in its first week of release
on the Billboard 200; Sean Paul's Dutty Rock, which debuted at number 26 with
62,000 copies in 2002 and went on to peak at number nine on the chart; Wayne
Wonder's 2003 album No Holding Back debuted at number 29 with 40,000 copies
sold in its first full week at retail.
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Reunited Fugees Single Hits Radio,
Group Preparing Album
Excerpt
from www.allhiphop.com - By Eben
Gregory
(Sept.
28, 2005) After nearly a decade, the Fugees --Lauryn, Wyclef and
Pras--have emerged from a New York studio with the brand-new single Take It
Easy. The new single is first taste of the eagerly awaited successor
to the super groups 1996 multi-platinum best-selling album The Score.
Take It Easy showcases all three members and is currently enjoying regular
rotation on radio
in the United States. Having been on hiatus for almost ten years, the
Fugees are now putting the finishing touches on the groups upcoming album
that is slated for release in early 2006. The album comes as a welcomed
surprise for the legions of fans that have been clamouring for a follow-up to
The Score. Certified 6x platinum by the RIAA, The Score has sold
more than 13,600,000 copies worldwide and was the best-selling album of 1996,
taking home two Grammy Awards: Best Rap Album and
Best R&B Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal (for "Killing Me
Softly With His Song"). Following the massive international
success of The Score, the Fugees went on hiatus with each member of
the group pursuing successful solo careers. Wyclef Jean,
the first Fugee to embark on a solo career, racked up seven RIAA gold and
platinum certifications for his solo albums--1997's The Carnival and The
Ecleftic: 2 Sides II A Book. Lauryn's 1998 debut solo album, The
Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, earned the artist five Grammy Awards
including Album of the Year and has been certified 8 times platinum by the
RIAA. Prakazrel Michel ("Pras") had a #1 R&B hit with his
1998 single, "Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are)," from the soundtrack of
Warren Beatty's "Bulworth."
The
Fugees gave the first intimation of a full-fledged reunion when the group
made a surprise appearance at a Brooklyn block party thrown by comedian Dave
Chappelle in September 2004. Earlier this year, Lauryn, Wyclef and Pras
took audience members, and television viewers, by surprise when the legendary
hip-hop super group appeared on-stage at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre as the
unannounced opening act for the 2005 BET Awards ceremony.
Fugees Add More European Dates
Excerpt
from www.eurweb.com
(Oct.
4, 2005) *The Fugees will take a
December concert swing through Europe on the heels of their newly-released
single, Take It Easy, the trios first in nearly a decade. The
tour kicks off Nov. 30 in Vienna and touches down in Finland, France, Sweden,
Norway, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom before wrapping Dec. 20 in
Switzerland. A U.S. tour has not yet been announced. As previously reported,
Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras Michael are currently in the studio
laying down tracks for a new album scheduled to drop in early 2006. Last week,
they released the single "Take It Easy" via Apple's iTunes music
store. Here are the Fugees confirmed tour dates:
Nov.
30: Vienna, Austria (Stadthalle)
Dec.
1: Helsinki, Finland (Hartwall Areena)
Dec.
3: Stockholm, Sweden (Hovet)
Dec.
4: Oslo, Norway (Oslo Spektrum)
Dec.
6: Hamburg, Germany (Color Line Arena)
Dec.
10: Italy (Milano Sabato)
Dec.
12: Paris, France (Bercy Arena)
Dec.
13: Manchester (Evening News Arena)
Dec.
14: London (Carling Apollo Hammersmith)
Dec.
19: Koln, Germany (Kφlnarena)
Dec.
20: Zurich, Switzerland (Hallenstadion Zurich)
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Sounds Like Shaggy
Excerpt from The Toronto Star
- Ashante Infantry
(Oct. 4, 2005)
It's easy to dismiss Shaggy as a lightweight. The
Jamaican
reggae rap-singer growled his way onto pop charts with a hip-thrusting
persona and the facetious, libido-driven songs to match, most notably with
2000's "It Wasn't Me," which mocked infidelity and spurred 10
million worldwide sales of Hot Shot making it the most successful
dancehall reggae album ever. It's mostly more of the same on his new
record Clothes Drop, which includes the ambiguously wrought
"Ahead in Life" comprised of the performer reprimanding his, ahem,
private parts. But where one may hear superficiality or gimmick, the 36-year-old,
Kingston-born, Brooklyn-raised artist cites creativity and family
values. "You've never seen a parental advisory sticker on my
album," said Shaggy during a recent promotional visit to Toronto. Seated
in a downtown restaurant, the unruly curls, which inspired his nickname after
the Scooby-Doo character, are tucked into a snazzy chapeau. But Mr. Lover
Lover is as you'd expect: welcoming smile, elastic eyebrows and in case you
didn't quite catch the accent Jamaica bracelet on his wrist. "You
can write adult content without being explicit, it's called clever
writing," he explained. "If I didn't do that skit in the middle (of
"Ahead in Life") you would not know what I'm talking about, because
I have not said dick at any point in there. "There are two
meanings. It depends on how you think. My kids still don't get it. They don't
know what I mean, they just sing along with it." Still, the tune
contradicts the 1995 Grammy winner's later declaration that he wants to
produce "classic music." "I don't want novelty
songs," he said. "I want songs that people can play for years and
that I can tour on until I'm old. It took me two years to make this album. I
did 56 songs to arrive at 17." When it comes to legacy-building,
the former U.S. marine has a better shot with "Repent," a
politically drawn spiritual missive that urges listeners to "slow down
and pray" in light of current international conflicts.
"People might think that these world leaders are the problem, but we
elect them," he said.
"We are the board
of directors and we must be citizens of the world and not citizens of our own
backyard. I guarantee you that if half of the people in America used their
passports a little bit more and travelled to countries like Afghanistan,
Cairo and Dubai, Bush wouldn't have won and we wouldn't be in this
situation. "Bush won on scare tactics, because those people didn't
leave their trailer parks. CNN is not really what's going on there. I've been
to Abu Dhabi and Egypt, and you don't have more strip joints and parties than
in those places. "I was watching MTV once and I heard this
American girl complaining that she went to Afghanistan and was stoned because
she was wearing (short shorts). What you expect the people to do?
"That's like you inviting somebody to dinner at your house and they come
over in a bikini, in front of your family. Tell me you wouldn't be pissed
off. Well, me as a man might not ... but, nevertheless, you understand what
I'm saying. If we just understood each other's culture and respected each
other's culture, then we would get along much better." But getting
his message out, means selling records, and the poor showing of 2002's Lucky Day
put his abilities in doubt. "It was a flop," he acknowledged
without resignation, "not the content I think Strength of a Woman was one of the best songs I've ever written, but we had record
company problems. "I released the record in December and the
president (of MCA) got fired in February. Two months later they shut the
whole company down. "The last recording ever put out on that
company was a Shaggy record. I saved it the year before (with Hot Shot)
and it died on my project." Still, without a discernable hit, Lucky Day
sold 2.3 million copies worldwide; Sean Paul's Dutty Rock was the only dancehall reggae
album to outsell him that year but could not equal Hot Shot's success, Shaggy noted. That's why he's not concerned that Paul, and
King of Reggae scion Damian Marley, also have much-hyped and more hardcore
albums out. "At the end of the day I'm the man to beat. I don't
have competition ... it is competition in the sense where the record company
might want it to be a competition, but if you listen to the music, it's all
different styles ...
"Now, they
have the luxury of bringing dancehall to the mainstream in its authentic
form. Back when I started, I could not. I had to remix it, put R&B under
it. I had to put Marvin Gaye under "Boombastic" just to survive.
Now they can do it, that's thanks to artists like Shabba Ranks, because we paved
the way." But there's a personal cost to being a trendsetter,
notes the father of three on the song "Letter to My Kids," which
talks about "missing the warmth of your child's embrace."
"When you have downtime and you realize your kids are growing up and you
missed so much ... I missed soccer practice, ball games, graduations, because
I'm a slave to this music." And it's not only his parenting that
has been comprised. "I'm not against the union of marriage,"
he added, "I just think there is a time for everything. I've dedicated
my early years to doing what I want to do, and what I want to do is tour the
world and make music and play music. "If you dedicate your life to
one person from age 20 to 35, that's the prime of your life, what if it
doesn't work out? You never get that time back. Nobody should give that up
for another person. And you can say you trust but do you every really trust?
Do you ever really know what that person is doing? How heartbreaking is it
when you dedicate all your life to one person and get betrayed? I'm not
chancing it." Just as quickly we're back on the subject of
Shaggy's self-designated "feel-good music." "You want
the official explanation?" he asked in response to a question about the
name of his new disc. "There's the politically correct reason:
this album is like your wardrobe certain clothes put you in different
moods, like every track on this record. Lack of a better title would be Mood Swings." And the other meaning? "Well," he
began, eyebrow arched and lips curling slyly as he leaned forward, "I
wanted something that was just nasty and naughty and would just catch your
attention and once you say Clothes Drop you would just laugh and say
`Oh, My God! Shaggy again.' " And then he pressed back into his
seat, laughing, of course.
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Goaple To Perform At Roxy In Hollywood
Source: Sasha Brookner, Heliocentric Public Relations, SashaB310@aol.com, http://www.heliocentricpr.com
(Sept.
30, 2005) Skyblaze/Columbia recording singing sensation Goapele,
the Bay Areas princess of soul to appear in Los Angeles at The Roxy on
Saturday, October 1st and perform songs from her highly anticipated sophomore
album entitled Change it All. In an industry that advocates monotony,
Goapele, perhaps because of her cultural heritage, is a non-conformist. Her
exiled South African political activist father met her New York-born Jewish
mother and married while in Nairobi, Kenya. For a woman whose name means 'to
go forward' in Setswana, the South African language of her grandmother,
Goapele lives her name. The Bay Area native's debut effort, Even Closer was a
14-track masterpiece that she co-wrote and co-produced independently which
went on to sell an unprecedented 150,000 units. Now Goapele is back on the
musical scene with her highly anticipated sophomore effort, Change it All on
Skyblaze Recordings/Columbia Records set to be released December 27, 2005.
 "In
an increasingly crowded neo soul scene that's produced as many one album
curiosities as long haul career artists, Goapele has two assets working for
her; a voice as smooth as butterscotch and a sensibility worthy of it."
Nylon Magazine
Her debut, Even
Closer is a mix of jazz, funk and soul influenced more by male artists like
DAngelo and Prince than any of her spiritual soul sisters. Interview
Magazine
Even Closer is a
showcase for Bay Area singer Goapele distinct vocal sensibility; a balance of
steamrolling Chaka Khan power and yoga-girl suppleness thats full of
promise Rolling Stone Magazine
The dread-headed
beauty was influenced equally by music from Stevie Wonder, Etta James, Nina
Simone, Billy Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, Prince and Portishead as
she was by Miriam Makeba, Zulu Spears and Hugh Masekela.
Goapele trumps
her head-wrapped contemporaries by pouring her honey-husky voice over a gumbo
of hip hop, mellow vibes and piano ballads for a sound that resists
comparison Essence Magazine
Goapele has
performed and recorded with everyone from Michael Franti to Zion I, creating
a style that fuses underground hip hop, vintage R&B and jazz. Her
eclectic sound reflects the philosophical and musical strains -- from Miriam
Makeba to Prince that she was exposed to while growing up. Vibe Magazine
Goapele brings a
well-needed enigmatic presence to a mundane industry that is devoid of
innovative magic and fascination, but thick with semblance. Her signature of
throaty moans and nostalgic lyrical poetry evoke all things old yet somehow
manages to be refreshingly new.
Graced cover of
Bay Area's premier, San Francisco Magazine "Best of the Bay Area"
2003 issue and featured on the cover of San Francisco Bay Guardians end of
the year 2004 Music Issue
Goapele, 25 is a
petite songstress with a voice that can fill a stadium
She has been gaining
popularity here as an elegant romantic who weaves poetic narratives
The
introspective and airy vocals combined with sassy grooves make Goapele a bit
of an urban music anomaly. San Francisco Chronicle
Rolling Stone and
MTV say shes the #5 artist to watch
Erykah Badu votes
Even Closer as the most creative and innovative album for the 2003 ShortList
Music Project and says "Goapele you Shine!"
The Source
Magazine heralds Goapele as "The Bay Area's Best Kept Secret."
#1 Selling Album
in the Bay Area for weeks in 2004. Sway of MTV News affirms, Shes beating
out artists like 50 Cent and R Kelly in Northern California
Meshell
N'Degeocello, Shaquille O'Neill and Method Man refer to Goapele as "The
next big artist to watch"
Winner of 2003
San Francisco Weekly Award and Nominated for 2003 California Music Award
The poised
chanteuse delivers a testimony-driven, emotionally aching yet uplifting and
candidly charged classic cuts to soul music junkies who feign for organic
gutbucket vocals and raw bass lines. Goapele brilliantly experiments with
skillful compositions and heart wrenching harmonies, all with a smooth as
pearl delivery. The songs showcase the singer/songwriter's impeccable ability
to mix classic soul with rhythm and blues along with new-age funk, dripping
with sensuality. The multi-layered feel-good tracks effortlessly spirals her
superb lyrics and velvety voice around carefree bass laden beats instantly
garnering her respect for skillfully uniting hip-hop, jazz, R&B and
melodic soul.
Goapele's
eclectic sound and unparalleled live performances continue to draw in a
diverse range of fans including Prince, Rosario Dawson, Rodney Jerkins, Magic
Johnson, Stevie Wonder, Mos Def, Kanye West, President Gerald Ford and Talib
Kweli to name a few
"Her name,
Goapele is just as intriguing as her music. This arresting set organically
mixes R&B, hip-hop, jazz, and electronica in introspective, candid songs
that colorfully reflect this soulful sista's diverse range and life experiences.
Goapele's smoky, sensual voice is a beacon that shines on a set that wisely
steers clear of overproduction. While calling to mind such influences as Nina
Simone and Sade, this classic chanteuse-in-the-making is definitely her own
woman of substance." Billboard Magazine
"If you're
looking for someone who will touch your soul...look no further she touched
mine" Jazzy Jeff
Change
it All features production from Bedrock, Jeff Bhasker (E-40, The Game), Linda
Perry (Pink, Christina Aguillera), Sa Ra Creative Partners (Kanye West,
Erykah Badu, Jill Scott) and Mike Tiger (The Coup, Martin Luther) many of
whom contributed to making Even Closer a success. On Saturday, October
1st Goapele will appear at The Roxy (9009 W. Sunset Blvd.) in Los Angeles.
Doors open at 8pm and the show starts at 9pm.
www.goapele.com
www.goapelepress.com
www.theroxyonsunset.com
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Pharrell
Williams: Producer Discusses New Solo Project
Source: Sherry J. Bitting, sherryb@complex.com
(Oct. 3, 2005) NEW
YORK, NY Pharrell Williams has one of the most
recognizable voices in hip-hop and R&B, but he admits that he really
cant sing or rap. Hes only using his voice as a form of expression. I
dont really think I can sing. I dont really think I can rhyme. Im
just expressing myself," he says in the October/November issue of
Complex. "Im just saying whatever comes out of my mind, whatever
comes out of my mouth. Its more like a diary. Im at another point of my
life where Im trying to practice being non judgmental and being pro art.
Following are highlights from the issue:
On his ultimate legacy
My ultimate
legacy is gonna be my familymy mom, my dad, my girl
and then she becomes my
fiancι, and then my wife, and then my kids. When asked how close he is
to marriage, he replies, Its close, man. Its really close.
Theres definitely a girl that I love. Its close, man.
On managing a relationship as an entertainer
Its tough,
man. Doing what I do is not easy on a relationship; its very hard on
it. And a relationship is so delicate. Youd think itd be the
strongest thing in the world. This business is such a time-consuming
thing. So yeah. Theres definitely a girl that I love. She
hears my whispers. She knows my dreams. And she knows my heart.
On being a sex symbol
Thats not my
character. I be pretending that Im sexy. Its all in my
mind. Thats why it was perfect for my album title. I figured I
would do something a little more reflective of how I think, and the best
thing was In My Mind because in my mind Im all these thingsIm good,
Im bad, Im holy, Im horny.
On being a trendsetter
You gotta figure
out what side of the fence youre on. Like I said, a lot of n***as say they
set trends. Go ahead. Great. Good for you. Me, Im
just trying to escape them.
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Damon Dash Sells Stake In Rocawear For $22 Million In Cash
Excerpt
from www.allhiphop.com - By
EbenGregory, Nolan Strong and Remmie Fresh
(Sept.
27, 2005) Damon Dash is severing
business ties with formers
partners including Jay-Z and is selling his stake in Rocawear back to partners for $22 million
dollars. Rocawear was established in 1999 and has grossed over $500
million dollars since its inception. The move all but seals any further
business dealings between the two former Rocawear/Roc-A-Fella co-CEOs. Rocawear
was my point of view, a Harlem swagger," Dash told AllHipHop.com of the
sale. "They gave me $30 million and 75% of Team Roc. I'm real happy with
the deal. I got $22.5 million in cash and the rest in companies (like State
Property, Team Roc, Pro-Keds and other entities)." Rumours of Dash
making an exit from the Roc brand started to circulate shortly after Dash and
Jay-Z sold Roc-A-Fella Records in 2004, a venture which they established in
1995 By the late 1990s, Roc-A-Fella Records was raking in over $50 million
dollars annually, releasing hit records by Jay-Z, Beanie Sigel, Memphis Bleek
and others. In 1997, Island Def Jam bought a 50% stake in the label for $1.5 million.
The success helped launch Rocawear and Roc-A-Fella Films in
1999, Dash Films in 2001 and Armadale Vodka in 2002. The label was sold
back to Def Jam in 2004 amid rumours of a rift between Dash and superstar
rapper and co-CEO Jay-Z. The remaining 50% stake in Roc-A-Fella Records was
acquired for $10 million dollars, giving Island Def Jam, a unit of Universal,
100 % ownership of the label.
Roc-A-Fella
executives had renegotiated their deal with Island Def Jam several years
prior to selling the remaining stake for $20 million dollars, bringing the
total selling price of Roc-A-Fella to over $30 million dollars. Dash denied
rumours of hostile feeling towards his former business partner. When the
original Roc-A-Fella broke up, it was time for everybody to do their own
thing, Dash said. We ain't no bitch-ass n***as taking sides. All that shit
is petty and
s**t."
While the move marks the end of Dashs relationship with the Roc-A-Fella
brand, Dash is involved in several other high profile ventures. He holds
investments in the Tiret watch company, his film
production-company Dash Films, America magazine, State Property clothing, a
licensing deal with Pro-Keds sneakers and his record label, Dame Dash Music Group,
which is distributed by Island Def Jam. Now that I know the business world,
I don't need partners, Dash said. I got my own connects with the
bank."
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Beyonce Speaks To
Vanity Fair
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(Oct. 4, 2005) *A
simple No was Beyonces answer to Vanity Fair writer
Lisa Robinson when asked if she is secretly engaged to her boyfriend, Jay-Z,
as rumours have suggested. The same answer greeted the follow up question of
whether she is secretly married to the rap mogul, which has also been grist
for the rumour mill. When asked if she even knew that these rumours exist,
the 23-year-old singer replied: "No, I didn't . . . I'm not. But I'm
'engaged' and 'married' at the same time? (Laughter)" The full interview
is featured in the Vanity Fair music issue for November, due on newsstands
this week. In the article, Robinson calls Beyoncι "a supremely talented
singer, dancer, songwriter, producer and actress who started performing at
the age of seven and has, in just 16 years in show business, absorbed a
lifetime's worth of focus, determination and discipline." Beyonce
was photographed for the article in a gauzy, open robe at the Hotel Ritz in
Barcelona. Other topics broached by the singer were her appearances at
awards shows this year. Her performance of the Andrew Lloyd Webber song
from Phantom of the Opera at the Oscars? "It was a mess,"
she said. "My shoe wasn't snapped. And when I walked down those stairs,
not only was my shoe not on, my ear monitor wasn't on. So the song started,
and I'm thinking, 'Oh, my God, my shoe's not done, my monitor's not in, and
this is going to be embarrassing
I'm going to fall down the stairs.' "
And what about the
Cater 2 U lap dance on the BET Awards that left
Terence Howard a happy deer in the headlights? "Oh, God, it was
very sexy, but I'm very embarrassed about it. . . . I just go for it,"
she said. And what of the widely-held public opinion that her career is kept
on a tight leash by her manager-father, Mathew Knowles. "People
expect me to be a certain way, like a Diana Ross. And they expect my father
to be like Joe Jackson, because that's been the pattern when parents manage
children, she says. People think that he just controls everything and does
everything, but I actually control everything. People think I have the same
story as the Jackson Five, and I have a completely different story. I had a
very healthy, happy childhood. My mother made sure of it, and I love her for
it." Beyoncιs mother Tina Knowles reveals in the issue how tickled she
was to hear Chris Rock poke fun at her daughters name. "I
saw Chris Rock on TV and he said, 'Black people make 10 steps forward, and
then we take 12 steps back . . . after 'Roots' we had Kunta, and then what do
we do? We go and name our kids 'Beyoncι.' I just laughed because I'm sure he
thought it was a name I made up, like Tanifa or something. He didn't know it
was my [maiden] name."
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Nine Lives Of The Pussycat Dolls
Excerpt
from The Toronto
Star - Ben Rayner, Pop Music Critic
(Oct. 4,
2005) Another day, another girl group. But at least the Pussycat
Dolls are much less shy than most about flaunting where their
principle attributes lie. Before the Dolls franchise expanded to
conquer the pop singles charts with the late-summer smash "Don't
Cha" that's the one that begins "Don't cha wish your girlfriend
was hot like me?" it was, after all, a long-running Sunset Strip
burlesque revue (since moved to its own, eponymous lounge at Caesar's Palace
in Las Vegas). The revue was created by choreographer Robin Antin and
is known for intermittently restocking its ever-changing ranks with such
celebrity hotties as Carmen Electra, Christina Aguilera and Pamela
Anderson. No Doubt frontwoman Gwen Stefani, it turns out, is the one
who catalyzed the whole pop crossover during her own stint as a Doll.
"I brought her in and she was actually our missing link," says
Carmit Bachar, the only "original Doll" remaining from the first
line-up created a decade ago, while she shares a few giggles with the rest of
the friendly Pussycat posse in a downtown hotel room. "She brought
her record label and they saw the idea and the concept and
(Interscope/A&M head honcho) Jimmy Iovine thought it would be
awesome." To avoid the outrage that inevitably erupts when the
music industry flaunts its own plasticity in such a blatant manner, then,
it's best to think of the Pussycat Dolls' fast-rising debut album, PCD,
as an original cast recording, of sorts, and of the young ladies themselves
as a dance troupe that happens to do some singing. Their singing,
however, often occurs in the presence of high-priced hitmakers like Busta
Rhymes, Cee-Lo, Timbaland, Diane Warren and will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas,
all of whom contributed material to the record. Lament the whole style-over-substance
thing all you want, but PCD is a huge global priority for A&M
Records (part of the Universal Music empire) this fall. The Pussycat Dolls
appear poised to haunt us all for months to come: a makeup and clothing line
exists, with lingerie and action figures to follow. The music frothy,
lightly bawdy dance-pop that professes "I Don't Need a Man," and
references male masturbation over samples from ELO's "Evil Woman"
on the tune "Beep" isn't grossly offensive, at least.
And
the Dolls themselves are a charming enough lot to actually merit the
"new Spice Girls" chatter, although it's unclear which musically
limited group would come out ahead in a straight-up battle of the
bands. Of the six, Nicole Scherzinger (formerly of the Popstars-created
girl group Eden's Crush) is generally credited with doing most of the vocal
work, although Bachar and Melody Thornton handle some back-up duties. The
rest former Miami Heat cheerleader Jessica and blonde doppelgangers Ashley
and Kim are rumoured to mostly serve as comely, acrobatic ballast.
"We put a lot of time into this album," says Scherzinger. "It
wasn't, like, a cookie-cutter thing. We wrote on this album with the
producers. We have our own clothing line and we eventually want to do movies
and dolls and stuff, but we always say music is our engine." The
dire fate of splintered girl-group ancestors, from the Supremes to the Spice
Girls, doesn't faze the Dolls, who've already spent two years in each others
company. "We heard a story about a girl group that was together
for years that broke up over a jacket," says Thornton. "The
thing is, we're so lucky to have this and we all really do fit like a
puzzle," adds Jessica. "We say that we're sisters because,
even if there's anything between us, we can work it out because that's how
family is. I think it would be really stupid if a fight broke us up."
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The Band Issues
Set Of Unreleased And Revised Songs
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Greg
Quill, Entertainment Columnist
(Oct. 5, 2005)
Robbie Robertson has become a master at
reconstituting the musical motherlode that made The Band one of the most
memorable and influential forces in North American pop culture of the 1970s.
The Toronto-born guitar legend and songwriter headed up Martin
Scorcese's massive, 1977 star-studded live concert documentary The Last Waltz, which was supposed to have been an elegant summary of The Band's
vast legacy. Four years ago Roberston shepherded the digital remixing,
repackaging and re-release of that concert on CD and DVD and oversaw its
massive promotion. "But there's more, there's always more,"
the 61-year-old Canadian rock icon said yesterday in a dark room at the back
of the ground floor bar of the Windsor Arms Hotel in downtown Toronto.
He was sitting a few blocks and a couple of light years from the Yonge
St. bars where he used to rip it up as a member of expatriate Arkansas
rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins' infamous band, The Hawks, in the 1960s.
The Band's latest repackaged chronicle a $130 boxed set called The Band: A Musical History, containing five CDs and one DVD of
material that has never been heard, or officially released, accompanied by
alternative and authorized versions of many of The Band's greatest hits.
There are also song sketches, live cuts and a 108-page illustrated booklet of
liner notes by York University music professor Rob Bowman, a
Grammy-award-winning musicologist. It pays a lot more attention to
those formative years than to the well-served and familiar Band repertoire
post-Music From Big Pink and the quintet's famous
association with Bob Dylan's radical move from acoustic folk to electric rock
in the mid 1960s. The boxed set, which resembles an expensive coffee
table book, is "stuff that happened, stuff that surfaced, stuff my
detectives (music archivists Cheryl Pawelski and Andrew Sandoval) found
buried in libraries, attics, basements, recording studios, mastering labs,
stuff I didn't even know had been recorded, or had forgotten about, or
thought had been lost and forgotten, Robertson says.
"The more they
found, the more inspiring this project became. People turned up old concert
footage, audiotapes, photographs. The writing was on the wall. This stuff
represented a special and unusual musical journey, and it deserved an
airing." The Band: A Musical History will be launched officially at
5:30 p.m. today at an autograph-signing session at the Manulife Centre branch
of Indigo Books at Bay St. and Bloor St. W. It's a painstakingly
detailed assembly of music that still resonates in Toronto's rock 'n' roll
corners, music made in 1961 with Hawkins and The Hawks, and a couple of years
later, as Levon & The Hawks, when the band took its moniker from the only
non-Canadian member, drummer and singer Levon Helm. Though the five CDs
cover The Band's entire musical life to the end of 1976, what they reveal of
the creative energy, imagination, innocent blundering, false starts and
almost perverse stoicism that fired Helm, Robertson, organist Garth Hudson,
bassist Rick Danko and pianist Richard Manuel into a cohesive unit is a dream
come true for music aficionados and Torontophiles alike. Coming on the
heels of the recent Scorsese TV documentary on the formative years of Bob
Dylan, No Direction Home in which Robertson was
conspicuous for his absence, prompting a wave of speculation on his
relationship with his former bandleader and colleague the arrival of The
Band's boxed set suggests there's no end to our fascination with the pop
culture of the 1960s and '70s. "The renewed interest in all this
stuff is just a good sign that good music has a long life," says
Robertson, his craggy features beneath a shock of badly dyed
blackish-reddish hair barely concealing the pretty face of the young guitar
ace who once ruled this town. "And the hills and valleys of this band's
life, all the rough edges and mistakes that are revealed here, only serve to
humanize the music. Seeing something out of shape take shape is a true and
valuable part of the process." His non-appearance in the Dylan
doc? Robertson shrugs it off as "not an issue. I just wasn't necessary.
Other than the concerts we did with him in 1966, the film was concerned with
the period that led up to our involvement with Dylan. "I've signed off
on this period for the time being. I'm not big on living in the past."
What the immediate
future holds for Robertson is overseeing the release of the memorable
soundtrack he compiled for Raging Bull, Scorsese's 1980 biopic of
boxer Jake LaMotta, a compilation that has never seen the light of day. He's
also writing another movie score for Scorsese, and helping Geffen Records put
the finishing touches and some bonus tracks on a packaged reissue of his
first two solo albums, Robbie Robertson and Storyville. "But my main focus
these days is on a Broadway musical about native North Americans," said
Robertson, whose mother was Mohawk. "I'm writing the music and lyrics,
and helping with the book, which is by David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly). The director is David Leveaux, who's behind the hit revivals of Fiddler On The Roof and The Glass Menagerie. "We're taking a
great deal of care with it. It's material that has to be handled with care
and respect for the native culture. I'd say it'll be up and running a year
from now." As for The Band, Robertson says, "There's plenty
left to know. But I'm through with it for now. I won't be the one who does
the telling."
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MUSIC TIDBITS
UMAC Nominees Announced
Last Tuesday, the Urban Music Association of Canada
(UMAC)
announced the nominees for the 2005 Canadian Urban Music Awards
at a press conference at the Toronto-Dominion Bank Tower in downtown Toronto.
The press conference was hosted by FLOW 93.5 on-air
personality and winner of the 2004 CUMA for Spoken Word
Recording of the Year and Media Personality of the Year, Jemeni,
and Canadian urban entertainment broadcasting icon and host of The
College of Musical Knowledge on Wave 94.7, Michael Williams.
Visit www.umac.ca
or www.umacmembership.com to see a list of
nominees and to check out photos from the press conference. The Canadian
Urban Music Awards show, which will be hosted by
internationally-renowned comedian Russell Peters, takes
place on Tuesday, November 29 at 7:30 pm at Toronto's Kool Haus.
This highly-anticipated event will be a 'who's who' of the urban world in
music, sports, film, and television. UMAC will present
once-in-a-lifetime artist collaborations featuring international and Canadian
artists.
Done Deal - Roots Break Left
Excerpt
from www.eurweb.com
(Oct.
4, 2005) *Its now official - The Roots
are part of the Def Jam family
after signing Friday with Def Jam Left, an imprint described by its president
Jay-Z as an artist-driven label with very low deals so people are not
pressured by first-week SoundScan [sales], so we can build
artists." The partnership comes after Jigga went public several
weeks ago with his desire to sign the Philadelphia-based group.
Meanwhile, The Roots are working on a new album entitled Game Theory, which
is said to include guests Blackstar, Talib Kweli, Mos Def and Saigon. Known
for their embrace of live instrumentation, The Roots have backed Jay-Z on
numerous concert gigs, including 2001s MTV Unplugged special. Roots
drummer ?uestlove also served as music director for Hovs 2003 Farewell
Concert at Madison Square Garden, the show captured in the 2004 documentary
Fade to Black.
Gospel EUR: Luther Barnes' 'Somehow, Someway'
(Sept.
29, 20050 Stellar Award Winner Grammy Nominee GMWA
Excellence Award Winner - Dove Award Nominee - As a recipient of a 2004
Stellar Award under his belt, the incomparable Luther
Barnes is back with his latest effort, Somehow, Someway. Accompanied with his beloved Red
Budd Gospel Choir, this long awaited project is just the latest installment
in the successful Luther Barnes brand in Gospel Music. A definite staple in
the Gospel industry, this celebrated balladeer is a prolific songwriter who
over years has turned out hit after hit! A trained professor of
music, his Red Budd Gospel Choir projects allow the opportunity for Barnes to
explore and present music that is not only beautiful and inspirational, but
also successful at bridging contemporary with traditional disciples. A talent
that has been superbly mastered by him, it has proven to keep his brand of
music in the forefront of todays ever-changing market. I am a big fan of
contemporary Gospel says Luther, but I will never completely separate myself
from the true roots of Gospel music. Someway, Somehow is wonderful
potpourri of selections layered with superb instrumentation. This project
will only propel Luther Barnes and his ministry to even greater heights.
Steve Harvey Preps National Debut Of Radio Show
Excerpt
from www.eurweb.com
(Sept.
30, 2005) *Fresh from his hosting duties at the 2005 BET Comedy
Awards, Steve Harvey is now
preparing for the national roll out of his new radio show via Premiere Radio
Networks. "The Steve Harvey Morning Show" was launched on
Sept. 19 on Inner City Broadcasting's WBLS-FM in New York. So far,
Harvey has been joined in the studio by such guests as Earvin Magic
Johnson, Reverend Al Sharpton, Deborah Norville and New York City Mayor
Bloomberg. Spike Lee is scheduled to appear on the show this morning.
To promote the program, the King of Comedy will co-host "Extra" on
Oct. 5, and hell be a guest on NBC's "Late Night with Conan
O'Brien" on Oct. 12.
Ms. Dynamite, Shystie, Other UK Rappers Starring In New TV
Drama
Excerpt
from www.allhiphop.com - By Bhavna
Malkani
(Sept.
30, 2005) UK female rappers Ms. Dynamite and
Shystie will take on leading roles
in a new televised interactive drama. The production will allow viewers
to vote on what happens in each episode via text messaging. The series is set
in South London's tower blocks and will include scenes of MC battles and the
UK thriving pirate radio scene - where many UK rap artists
derive from. "We decided it would be great if we could put together a TV
show, dealing with our culture that kids could relate to", Shystie
recently told The Guardian. "Black music and culture is always shown as
negative, we want to give it a positive twist" Other hip-hop stars
included to play in the six part series include Rodney P and the So Solid
Crew. The drama was developed to educate young artists about gun crime,
drugs and a variety of other issues that have been plaguing the country. The
viewer led drama is directed by 25-year-old Luke Hyams and will be aired on
Channel 4 in the UK later this year.
De La Soul To 'Take Back TV'
Excerpt
from www.allhiphop.com - By Tiffany
Hamilton
(Sept.
30, 2005) Hip-Hop veterans De La Soul have teamed up with
Fishbone, Suffrajet, Slum Village, Rich Medina, and others in an effort to
Take Back TV.
The Take Back TV rally/concert will take place in New York City and is
spearheaded by Current TV to empower young adults to become more creative in
selecting programming for the network. Current TV is the network
founded by former Vice-President of the United States, Al Gore. The
free performances and "Take Back TV" rally will be a public
outreach effort aimed at furthering viewer participation. The network is even
encouraging audience members to bring their own cameras to the
park. Following the New York City performance, the campaign will
travel to Philadelphia on October 20, for a performance at the North West
corner of City Hall. The New York City concert is scheduled to be held
in Central Park on October 6th and the concert starts at 9pm. Tickets are free
for both events. For more information and directions, log onto: www.takebacktv.com
Rapper Common Part Of Massive 'The Know Is Spreading' HIV
Awareness Campaign
Excerpt
from www.allhiphop.com - By Nolan
Strong
(Sept.
27, 2005) Common has teamed with
Viacom and The Kaiser Family
Foundation as the spokesman for 'The Know Is Spreading' campaign, which aims
to normalize HIV/AIDS testing as part of routine health care. Common,
whose uncle succumbed to AIDS, contributed four original spoken word
compositions to the campaign, which launched on Viacom properties CBS, UPN,
MTV, Nick at Nite, VH1, BET, TV Land, Comedy Central, Spike TV and Showtime today (Sept 27).
I've witnessed firsthand the effects of HIV/AIDS and realized the difference
self-love and support from the community can make, Common said in a
statement. I also know how much of an influence we as hip-hop
artists have on our audiences, so I wanted to share my self and my talents to
help open the eyes and hearts of young people to the importance of
testing." The campaign is also being launched simultaneously across 178
Infinity Broadcasting radio stations. Billboards in English and Spanish
and ads on buses and in bus shelters launched in the United States top
markets today as well. The campaign also includes artwork by The
Barnstormers, a collective of New York- and Tokyo-based artists, who
transformed a city block in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania into a temporary
canvas of artistic images that are featured in the national The Know is
Spreading PSAs campaign and website. For more information log on: http://www.spreadtheknow.com/
Ludacris Lands Show On XM Satellite Radio
Excerpt
from www.allhiphop.com - By Eben
Gregory
(Sept.
29, 2005) Ludacris, Atlantas Hip-Hop
giant, announced today that he has signed on to host a weekly music show
exclusively for XM Satellite
Radio, the nations leading satellite radio service with more than 5 million
subscribers. Disturbing Tha Peace Presents Ludacris Open Mic
will feature music
hand-selected by the artist, including songs from Ludacris vast personal
music collection, as well as special guests and interviews with other
artists. Ludacris born Chris Bridges, is one of the most recognized
names in popular music today and his new show is expected to increase his
massive fan base. This is the beginning of a great partnership and I
really look forward to growing with XM and their millions of subscribers,
Ludacris said. XM Satellite Radio is affording me the opportunity to expose our
audience to a wider variety of music and ideas. Starting his career as
a popular DJ on Atlanta's Hot 97, Ludacris has enjoyed enormous success since
his major-label debut in 2000. He has sold over 15 million records
worldwide. The addition of Ludacris to the XM artist family is a testament
to XMs commitment to create the best original music programming available on
satellite radio, states Eric Logan, executive vice president of programming
for XM Satellite Radio. Ludacris passion for and knowledge of music, along
with his remarkable talent as an artist, are a natural fit with XM.
The burgeoning actor, philanthropist and label executive has also
extended his achievements far beyond the confines of his own albums.
Disturbing Tha Peace Presents Ludacris Open Mic weekly music show
will debut in January 2006 on XMs uncut hip-hop
channel RAW (XM channel 66). In related news, Ludacris will be featured
on the October 6 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Fantasia Just Now Learning To Read
Excerpt
from www.eurweb.com
(Oct.
3, 20050 *Promoting her new book "Life is Not a Fairy Tale" on
ABCs 20/20 Friday, "American Idol" winner Fantasia Barrino revealed for the
first time that she is functionally illiterate and had to put on a front
during scripted portions of the Fox talent show during her run in 2004.
"You're illiterate to just about everything. You don't want to
misspell," Fantasia, 21, told "20/20." "So that, for me,
kept me in a box and I didn't, wouldn't come out." The singer admitted
to signing record deals and contracts that she couldnt read or understand,
and said the most heartbreaking part of the ordeal is not being able to read
to her 4-year-old daughter, Zion. "That hurts really bad," she
said, adding that her mother and brother have also struggled with literacy,
and she is now learning to read from a tutor. Also in her memoir,
which she dictated to a freelance writer, Fantasia reveals that she was raped
in the ninth grade by a classmate. She says she blamed her flirtation and
provocative attire for the attack. Later that year, the singer dropped out of
high school and became pregnant with Zion at 17.
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::FILM NEWS::
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Plot Line Fizzles In New Film Funding
Excerpt
from The Toronto Star - Martin
Knelman
(Oct. 5,
2005) Flashback to the 2005 Academy Awards: one of the few Canadians whose
name was called out during Oscar night at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood was
28-year-old Toronto producer,
Erin Faith Young. Her film, Hardwood a contender in the category
of documentary short told the tangled domestic story of a Harlem
Globetrotters player named Mel Davis, as told by his son, Hubert Davis, of
Vancouver. It was a miracle that Young and Davis (writer, director and editor)
were able to finance their 29-minute film, in which it is revealed that
Hubert was abandoned for years by his father, who in fact had two separate
families one in Cleveland, the other in Vancouver. And the miracle
was made possible through the Al Waxman Calling Card Program of the Ontario
Media Development Corp., which put up $40,000. The film was shown on TV
Ontario and PBS, and its Oscar nomination gave the OMDC the best publicity it
has had in years. But recently, the OMDC quietly scrapped the program
which had funded 49 films by young, unknown filmmakers struggling to get
started prior to its sudden demise. Why mess with a program that has
clearly been successful? "We have limited funds, and we had to
establish priorities," says Michel Frappier, CEO of the agency.
Translation: after a decade of being out of the business of funding feature
films, the provincial government's film agency is scrounging for money to get
back into the game. Last month Frappier & Co. announced a new $1.5
million fund for feature film production and development. It's a
one-year-only pilot project, an experiment. The money was scratched together
from various sock drawers including $250,000, secured by killing the
Calling Card program. According to Frappier, it duplicated help offered
by Telefilm Canada. In fact, Telefilm gives no direct support to short films,
although Bravo Facts and the Canadian Film Centre do. But why do away
with a program that works to make way for one whose future is dicey?
"It
was a thrill to be part of it while it lasted," says Sara Waxman, widow
of the man whose name was attached to the program, and who made his own
short-film calling card in 1967. Tviggy, about a Jewish model, played
across Canada with Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. "I have a
poster signed by all the young filmmakers who were in the last group to be
funded," adds Waxman. "It was wonderful to feel part of that. It's
too bad it has come to an end." The new $1.5-million feature film
initiative strikes some film-industry insiders as a desperation move by an
agency fighting for its existence. In fact, the agency has been adrift since
the mid-1990s, when the Mike Harris government took away its feature-funding
capacity and broadened its mandate. So now instead of being a film
agency, it is supposed to help book publishers, magazines, music and new
media. But its mandate has become so vague that hardly anyone can explain
what it does, and it has lost the confidence of the film industry.
In
its glory days, the Ontario Film Development Corp. established by David Peterson when he was premier in the
mid-1980s funded low-budget features and nurtured a generation of auteurs,
such as Atom Egoyan and Patricia Rozema. Lately, Queen's Park has been
more interested in luring Hollywood productions than in supporting indigenous
films. But the climate has improved since Dalton McGuinty's Liberals were
elected two years ago. It is thanks to McGuinty that Festival Centre, a new
home for the Toronto International Film Festival, is being funded. And in
last spring's budget, there was major funding for the Canadian Film Centre.
But someone has to sell Queen's Park on the urgency of helping Ontario
develop its own cinematic New Wave. So far, there's been no sign that OMDC is
up to the task. A one-time, $1.5 -million feature fund could backfire.
Like other provinces, Ontario does offer tax credits to domestic films
as well as foreign ones. But one big reason Quebec cinema is thriving is that
the PQ government pours $30 million into indigenous movies through its film
agency, SODEC, while Ontario does nothing. Before it can make a strong
case to the government, this agency needs to create a much stronger profile
and come up with a mission and a mandate. And it needs the sense not to
throw away a calling card that works.
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Snow Storms The Big Apple
Excerpt From The
Globe And Mail - By Sarah Milroy
(Oct. 5, 2005) New York has always had a mythic place in the
imagination of artists, particularly, perhaps, for Toronto multimedia artist Michael Snow.
Raised in Montreal and Toronto and schooled at the Ontario College of
Art, Snow spent the white-hot phase of his early career as a filmmaker and
artist in New York with his then-wife Joyce Wieland -- from 1962 to 1972.
During those scrappy years, he made many of his important early experimental
films and the lion's share of his Walking Woman pieces. With Wieland, he explored the galleries and
movie houses uptown and down, and after a while his name got around -- so
much so that, in 1976, he landed a one-man show of his photographic work at
the Museum of Modern Art. By then, though, he had returned home to Toronto to
join the gang at the Isaacs Gallery, and settle into the role of local
legend. Now, at 76, Snow will descend on New York again, although this time
it will be a somewhat more luxurious fall, attended by a venerating hush.
Starting this evening, a series of Snow's films will be screened at MoMA, including Wavelength,
La Rιgion Central, *Corpus Callosum and New York Eye and Ear
Control (several of which have been recently acquired for its
collection). Tonight at the museum, Snow is talking about his book works, and
in MoMA's media room, he will be showing a few installation works both new
and old, among them three Walking Woman pieces from his New York salad
days. Rounding out the presentation is his exquisite, more recent piece from
2002 titled Solar Breath (Northern Caryatid), a DVD projection that
documents the evocative movements of a wind-blown curtain at the end of day.
(Until Saturday, this last work is also on view in a small and insightful
exhibition titled Michael Snow: Windows at Galerie de l'UQAM in Montreal, an
exhibition drawing from all phrases of his career.) In addition to the MoMA
show, another New York accolade is in the offing. In the coming issue of the
venerated October magazine -- the art world's most rarefied clearinghouse of
ideas -- Snow is interviewed by editor Annette Michelson about his
music-making, and three scholars have contributed essays.
When I spoke to Snow last week in Toronto on the eve of his New York
trip, he was clearly delighted with all this, and a little taken aback. With
a little prompting, he could be induced to recall his first forays in the
city. "We were always very interested in what was happening there,"
he says, recalling his and Wieland's early days together as fellow animation
artists in George Dunning's Graphic Films studio in Toronto. "We found
out about New York through the art magazines, and I guess we went down there
two or three times a year." Wieland, he says, was initially the more
knowledgeable of the two when it came to film, and they soon became habituιs
of the underground scene, meeting many of the soon-to-be-celebrated
experimental filmmakers of the day. "We kept seeing this strange
bug-eyed guy at all the same screenings we went to," he says,
remembering the itinerant screenings that filmmaker, poet and curator Jonas
Mekas organized at venues all over Manhattan. "It turned out to be
Hollis Frampton." Soon they had formed a circle of like-minded souls.
"Then one day this guy called P. Adam Sitney wrote an article calling us
the Structural Filmmakers -- it was myself, Joyce, Ken Jacobs, Paul Sharits,
Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr. . . . That was it. We were a movement. Of
course, we were just a bunch of guys hanging out and watching each other's
films." Mekas was behind Snow's first big break in 1967. He notified
Snow of a film festival in Belgium, urging him to send his new film, Wavelength.
When Snow said he was too broke to make the new soundtrack that the piece
required, Mekas footed the bill. "He was more broke than we were,"
Snow says, "but he did it." The film won first prize: $5,000.
Still, there were ties to home. When Trudeaumania swept Canada in 1968,
Wieland and her friend, playwright Mary Mitchell, caught the bug from afar.
They decided to throw a party for the prime ministerial candidate, to
introduce him to Canadians in New York. The party was mostly artists. "I
was put in charge of the music," Snow says, "and I thought it
should be more than hip. At that time I was very interested in free jazz. I
knew it would be dangerous, but it really almost ruined the party."
Pierre Trudeau, however, was up for the commotion. "I introduced him to
the drummer, a guy called Milford Graves, and I said: 'He's the best drummer
alive today,' and Trudeau said: 'What about Max Roach?' I mean, here was a
guy who had opinions that were actually based on knowing something! I thought
to myself: You're elected."
As the United States descended deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam,
Canada seemed increasingly appealing. "They were spying on the people who
were at the anti-war demonstrations," he says. "They were making
their lists." By 1972, Snow says, when the couple finally let go of
their Chambers Street studio and moved home, "Canada was looking like
the more interesting place to be. It was starting to feel like New York was
old and Toronto was new." In the years since then, Snow's reputation has
continued to build in Canada and abroad. Since his 1994 Toronto retrospective
at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Power Plant, he has been increasingly
lauded in Europe, particularly in France, where he has had two major shows at
the Centre Pompidou, and has been named a Chevalier de l'ordre des arts et
des lettres. But the MoMA show has a special resonance. "Back in the
sixties, New York really was the centre of the art world, and now things are
much more fragmented," he says. "But still, I think it's
important." In a way, the city remains a kind of frame for seeing.
Snow's Solar Breath (Northern Caryatid), which appears in both the
Montreal and New York shows, explores another kind of frame. This is the kind
of deep, slow piece that can only be made by the well-ripened artist, and
it's a resonant revisitation of one of his favourite themes: the window. Over
its hour-long course, we watch the moving image of a simple white gauze
curtain in the two-panel window of his summer cabin, deep in the wilds of
Newfoundland. (Snow built the house himself 35 years ago, and he is still
building it today -- or, as he says, correcting himself: "I should say
I'm still repairing it.") On the left side, the glass is removed and in
its place is a bug screen -- not visible to the viewer but commensurate with
the plane of the image projected on the wall. The breeze of early evening
makes the curtain billow out, sometimes lifting it tantalizingly to reveal
the back yard and the hill beyond in all its emerald green glory, or sucking
it back against the screen in sudden and often startling ways, the fabric
crumpled flat against the screen for a few seconds before, once again,
releasing. (The caryatid reference in the title harks back to the classical
Greek sculptors and their love of drapery.) It's as if the world is breathing
in and out to its own mysterious rhythm, while we can hear, quietly in the
background, the sound of Snow and his wife of 24 years, Peggy Gale, sharing a
quiet supper together, the kind of little domestic ritual that shapes the
flow of time. Intelligent, spare and technically flawless, the work also has
a melancholy romantic tone that marks many of Snow's forays into the window
theme. One senses the longing for the world beyond the frame that you can
never know. "Windows, of course, are a metaphor for the eyes," Snow
says. "They are our windows within the physical flesh of the body. That
was part of the metaphor in Wavelength," he adds, referring to
the slow, 45-minute forward zoom of the camera toward a wall of studio
windows in his most celebrated film. "But windows are also about
concentration. When you are in three-dimensional space, you focus but you
miss an awful lot. Your attention has to be more or less in one particular
place. Windows say 'You are only allowed to see this.' Framing has to do with
that choice. It's about that process of selection."
Michael Snow's films will be screened at the Museum
of Modern Art until Nov. 30 (http://www.moma.org).
Michael Snow: Windows, organized by Martha Langford, continues at Galerie de
l'UQAM in Montreal until Saturday (514-987-8421).
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Not A Lotta Liotta, But A
Few Big Deals
Excerpt
from The Globe and Mail - By
Alexandra Gill
(Oct.
5, 2005) VANCOUVER -- Ray Liotta
opened the Vancouver International Film
Festival's 20th anniversary Film and
Television Trade Forum last Wednesday as the highly touted headline speaker.
Fresh from his Emmy win for outstanding guest actor in a drama series in ER,
but totally exhausted after working till 2:30 a.m. on the set of Dungeon
Siege, the Canadian-produced feature film based on the video game of the
same name, Liotta arrived at the new Vancouver Film Centre at 11:15 sharp and
promptly told organizers that journalists were not welcome. "He wanted
to speak frankly to filmmakers about his experiences," explains Trade
Forum producer Melanie Friesen, Martin Scorsese's former head of development.
"He was exceptionally good humoured for someone who had worked so late.
Hat's off to him for even showing up." Liotta is best known for his
portrayal of Henry Hill in Scorsese's Goodfellas (Hill is a real-life
snitch who lost his witness protection last month when he was thrown back in
jail for a drug conviction). So what did the actor and budding producer have
to say that was so secretive? He apparently talked about how he fell into
acting because a cute girl suggested he be in a play, how much he owed an
early acting coach, his wild times with Goodfellas' Joe Pesci and his
new film-production company, Tiara Blu. He didn't say much about Revolver,
the latest film from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels director Guy
Ritchie, in which he co-stars as a gangster called Dorothy Macha. The film
was blasted by British critics when it opened there two weeks ago, calling it
a "cinematic catastrophe" that made "[Ritchie's] last
disaster," 2002's Swept Away, "look like a classic."
So
there was nothing shocking said, no damning revelations? "No," says
Friesen. "But maybe there might have been if he had been asked any
shocking questions." Souvenir of Canada, a documentary based on
Douglas Coupland's book about Canadian artifacts and nostalgia, might be
coming soon to a theatre near you. The National Film Board co-production had
its Vancouver premiere in the author's hometown on Sunday night. The public's
response was almost as enthusiastic as at the film's world premiere in
Toronto, where audience members hooted and hollered and laughed at all the
right moments. "It was almost like a gospel concert," says the
NFB's Gerry Flahive, who co-produced the film with Media Headquarters' Robert
Cohen. After the Toronto screening, the producers were approached by six or
seven theatrical distributors who expressed interest. And although no firm
deal has yet to be worked out, the film's popularity is certainly a boon for
the NFB, which has never had an easy time getting its films out on the big
screen. Coupland, in the meantime, says he hopes the film (which screens
again on Oct. 11) signals a watershed moment for students across the country.
"The National Film Board movies, themselves, are astonishingly
boring," he told a local reporter. "But our relationship to them is
not. We all remember the sound of the AV cart with the squeaking wheel coming
down the hallway, and even though we knew that meant the next half-hour was
doomed, there is something to that memory." Is there a place for the
fusion of science and art? A sales representative from Harvey Weinstein's new
production, development and acquisition company thinks so.
Genome
Canada, the national funding and information resource body for genomics and
proteomics research, took a fair amount of flack for its financial support of
The Score, a delightful, groundbreaking musical drama about a
genetics-based cancer research lab that had its world premiere at VIFF on
Saturday and will be broadcast on CBC Television's Opening Night in
January. "They were told they shouldn't be supporting the arts, they
should be supporting science research," explains Michael Hayden,
director and senior scientist of Vancouver's Centre for Molecular Medicine
and Therapeutics. It was Hayden who originally commissioned Vancouver's
Electric Company Theatre to create the play on which the film was based. The
Score, which explores tricky ethical issues and universal themes about
identity, freedom and creation as it tells the story of a brilliant
geneticist racing to isolate a cancer-causing gene and draws parallels with
classical-music composition, was selected by Vancouver's Georgia Straight as
one of its Top 10 festival picks. Now Hollywood is interested, too. Leah
Mallen, who produced the film with Screen Siren Pictures Inc.'s Trish Dolman,
received a call last week from Mike Rose, a sales agent in the L.A. office of
the new Weinstein Co. who said he had heard "great things" about
the film, which screens again at VIFF next Wednesday afternoon. Harvey and
Bob Weinstein are, of course, the Hollywood mavericks whose Miramax studios
produced the Oscar-winning films The Hours and Chicago, while
reinvigorating the independent film industry by distributing and producing
controversial or fringe, low-budget movies that had been overlooked by
Hollywood (The Crying Game, The English Patient and Pulp
Fiction among them). They infamously clashed with Disney's chief
executive officer Michael Eisner after he refused to release Fahrenheit
9/11, Michael Moore's documentary, which was critical of U.S. president
George Bush. And after years of reported tension in their 12-year partnership
with Disney, the Weinsteins stepped down as co-chief executives of Miramax on
Sept. 30.
The
Score's
enthusiastic public and critical reception is sweet victory to Hayden, who
gave The Electric Company unfettered access to his students and colleagues,
interfering in the creative process only when something was factually
inaccurate. Much of the drama in the film, including a competition to clone a
gene and a sex scene between two scientists, is based on real events that
happened in his lab. "The arts are not a frill, they are essential to my
own scientific development," says Hayden, whose lab boasts a piano,
weekly salsa dancing lessons and quiet alcoves for art where researchers can
go to contemplate their problems and catalyze new ideas. "Everybody
thinks scientists are cold and rational. The truth is that nothing could be
more passionate than the search for scientific discoveries that break down
barriers and change paradigms of thinking. Working with these artists was
such an amazing experience that opened us up in ways we could never guess. We
found that we had so much in common."
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Tamyra Gray Steps Up, More...
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
- By Karu F. Daniels
(Sept. 30, 2005) The beautifully talented Tamyra
Gray has turned over a new leaf. And shes ready
to let the world see it. Best known as a finalist of the wildly popular TV
phenomenon known as American Idol (Season One), the Atlanta-bred
singer-songwriter and actress-on-the rise makes her feature film debut in the
music-based Rainforest/Screen Gems drama The Gospel, opening
nationwide on October 7. It was a little nerve-racking, she said
about her first big acting role, further explaining, because I had never
done it and I wasnt as confident as I was singing. But because I didnt know
what I was doing, I pushed myself like that much more. In the role of
a single mother dealing with her own issues and possible love interests of the
leading man, played by Boris Kodjoe,
Ms. Gray shines brightly on the big screen. As she should. Before becoming a
household name on Idol, the Takoma Park, MD native toiled in the
performance arts and subsequently was crowned Miss Atlanta, after becoming a
legend in her own right on the pageant circuit. So competition is nothing for
her. She just doesnt want anyone to pigeon-hole her. After leaving the show,
Ms. Gray was fortunate enough to get great perks that came along with the hit
series: she immediately acquired a manager, an agent and an acting gig on the
now defunct Boston Public. If it wasnt for the show I
wouldnt have been given that, she confided. I think eventually down the
line, I wouldve been given the opportunity to act but because of the show, I
was given it immediately. I think if things wouldve changed and I wasnt the
fourth runner up, I wouldnt have been able to do any of that. I wouldve
been forced to just do music. I think things happen the way theyre supposed
to happen.
Speaking of music, she also landed a record deal with Clive Davis
J Records. But that didnt pan out too well. I did hear that I was
difficult, she deadpanned. What happened was basically the songs that I
were given, and I think her album was great, are the same songs that are like
on Fantasias album. Can you imagine me singing a Baby Mama
song? If I wasnt on Idol, possibly I couldve gotten
away with it. But I was like Youre giving me these types of songs and
basically what youre setting me up for is to fail. If youre giving me that
song, thats not believable. Theres no way that somebody could relate that
kind of song to me and say thats who she is. What I was finding out
with J, she continued, it was more of a thing like Well, this works. This
is what weve been making records with with our Black artists. We want them
to be ghetto. This is whats selling. This is what the market says it
wants right now. This is what were going to give them. And I was like I
will flop. I will flop. If you flop coming out with your first album,
and youre on a major, and youve had the exposure and you were on the number
one TV show in the country, then basically people are going to look at
you say duh! I loved the thought of working with Clive Davis, she
continued. Its like if anybody is going to get me, hes going to get me
and it was just a big disappointment for me when that didnt happen. If
anything, I would say that Alicia Keys style would be more of the
style that I wanted to do. And there was an argument for that. Undeterred,
she released The Dreamer her very own opus on the American Idol
label 19 Entertainment. She also wound penning lyrics for American
Idol (Season 3) winners Fantasia Barrino and Diana Degarmo
on the low. They didnt know I wrote it in the beginning, she revealed.
It was kept a secret until they said yes.
From there she went on to light up Broadway in the musical spectacular
Bombay Dreams. Of that experience, the recently engaged
26-year-old down home girl offered: It was fun and t was different. I dont
think that I could be a Broadway star, in terms of thats all I do. But I
think its good because it helps me get more into acting, and learn more
technique. We had to rehearse for a month and learn more. So it was
great as far as honing my acting skills. I think I might be doing a new
musical thats coming out soon. In the midst of shopping for a new record
deal, Ms. Gray recently became the face of an international fashion campaign
for H&M, along with Queen of Hip Hop Soul Mary J. Blige. Shes
also up for a role in a forthcoming Las Vegas stage musical. And now comes The
Gospel. Who could ask for anything more? My goal was to get
exposure because I had been singing and trying to get a record deal since I
was 13, Ms. Gray added. At one point, she was being mentored by late TLC
member Lisa Left-Eye Lopes. All of her attempts at success on the
Atlanta music scene were not fruitful. However, the tide did really
turn for her when she made it to the finals of Idol.
You get discouraged but I wasnt giving up. Were glad she
didnt.
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Gina Torres On The Insanity Of Serenity
Excerpt
from www.eurweb.com
(Sept.
30, 2005) *This has to be a first a television series that was cancelled
after one season has been adapted into a feature-length film and is currently
the most eagerly-anticipated, critically-acclaimed sci-fi picture to hit
theaters probably since The Empire Strikes Back. Serenity, opening today with actress Gina Torres among the lead roles, is adapted
from Joss Whedons 2002 TV show Firefly, which also starred Torres as the
second in command on a space ship (Serenity) as it tries to survive a
galactic war some 500 years in the future. The show was cancelled by
Fox after one season, despite a deluge of rabid fans demanding the show be
given another chance. When its 14 completed episodes came out on DVD, stores
couldnt keep the discs in stock. Universal Pictures stepped in with the
no-brainer to adapt the popular series into a film, and suddenly the cast and
crew of Firefly found themselves back under the guidance of writer-director
Joss Whedon, and with a renewed sense of confidence. We all knew we
were working on a miracle, said Torres. And when you get up every
morning at 5:30 to get to set, or to drive out to the desert, knowing that
youre working on a miracle, it makes it that much easier. One of the
challenges of resurrecting a dead television series for filmgoers who may
have never heard of Firefly is unraveling the back story for new fans
without boring the old ones. Torres says that the characters histories
are cleverly revealed in the first 15 minutes, thanks to the writing wizardry
of Whedon the scribe behind TVs Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The
long-running Sarah Michelle Gellar series also enjoyed die-hard fans that
helped sustain the show during its early years. The undeniable common
denominator is the writer, whom Torres and the rest of the cast credit for
the films pre-existing following.
Firefly
had a short run and they found us anyway, says Torres of the fans. When the
DVD sets hit the stands, they were gone inside of 48 hours. That, to
me, just spoke to the fans and their commitment to us, and trying to make us
successful, which is unbelievable. They felt like they were
doing the right thing in keeping us alive. I think that speaks more to the
fact that there just wasnt a whole lot of quality programming on the air
that these people could jack into and enjoy. When they saw something
that was wonderful, that was unique, that was intelligent, that was
well-written, thats what they became attached to and committed to, and fans
of. And god knows we need fans of good television that are willing to fight
for it. I think we all feel blessed that they were willing to go to the
extremes that they did. Torres next big screen project is Five Fingers, a
film due next year that pairs her with husband, Laurence Fishburne in the
story of a Dutchman (Ryan Phillippe) who is abducted by a terrorist
(Fishburne) while in Morocco to set up a food charity. Both Torres and
Fishburne have worked together just once before, although barely, on The
Matrix Revolutions. On the opposite side of the budget scale, the
extremely indie Five Fingers offered the couple their first chance to work
closely together on screen. It was everything that we hoped it would
be, Torres said of the experience. Were two very strong people and
have strong convictions about work and character and approach. The fact that
we were able to come together and create something was wonderful. The fact it
was a low-budget movie and we didnt have a whole lot of time, and we were
all working towards the same end just made that whole experience better. As
for the temptation to discuss their characters during the husband-wife off
hours at home, Torres explained: Wed go home and run lines. Its not like
we were strategizing [about our roles]. It was just, Okay, we got 12 pages
to do tomorrow, lets go. It was a great experience and were looking
forward to repeating it on the right project. The couple just celebrated their
third anniversary on Sept. 20. Torres, the youngest of three children in a
Cuban American household, says of the off-screen relationship with her
husband: We always make time for each other, we support each other in the
projects that come up. We travel to wherever the other is and its good.
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Mr. Decent vs. Mr. Potty Mouth
Excerpt from The
Globe and Mail - By Sarah Hampson
(Oct. 1, 2005) Tender. Earnest. Insightful. Funny. Soulful, even. And
oh yes, horribly foul-mouthed when he is asked to be. Paul Reiser stars in
two
concurrent movies. He's proud of one but a bit embarrassed and defensive
about the other. He is featured in The Aristocrats, the surprise-hit
documentary of famous comedians gleefully telling their version of perhaps
the dirtiest, most obscene vaudeville joke. And he's the star (along with
Peter Falk of Columbo fame), writer and producer of The Thing About My Folks,
a tender and extremely moving father-and-son tale that he says is "so
much my baby, nothing else will be this personal in the future." Ah,
Hollywood. It's so unpredictable. Well, sometimes. They churn out the
look-a-like blockbusters, and then, sneaking up on the party like a bratty
seven-year-old, up pops the little indie films that no one thinks are going
anywhere. "People say to me, 'You made both these movies?' "
explains Reiser, 48, an affable Everyman presence in a dark jacket and a pair
of faded jeans. "[But] I didn't make The Aristocrats! A friend of
mine, Paul Provenza [the director] asked 'Would you do it?' and I said,
'Sure, that's a fun idea. Whatever.' It's not a career choice. It's not a
reflection of me." He stops his monologue momentarily, mid-sip of his
lunchtime gin and tonic. A thought has interrupted his flow. "[But] I'll
stand by it," he adds in a rueful tone of voice.
So is it strange to be revealed as a foul-mouthed comedian? "A
little bit," he says, cringing. "Listen," he continues,
clearly wanting to be finished with the topic. "I think you can safely
assume anybody who you look at, with the exception of maybe Billy Graham, who
acts socially appropriately, also, in certain circumstances, tells a dirty
joke." The two faces of Paul Reiser wouldn't be so noteworthy if it
weren't for the fact that he is imprinted on the cultural consciousness as
Mr. Decent, a guy who develops meaningful relationships the way other men
perfect their golf swing. In Mad About You, the NBC sitcom that ran
for seven years in the nineties and co-starred Helen Hunt as his wife, Reiser
played Paul Buchman, a painstakingly thoughtful husband. Co-creator and
writer of the popular series, he admits it was based on his now 17-year
marriage to Paula, a practising psychotherapist he met in Pittsburgh.
"She was a puppy, just 19. A waitress," he says. He was an unknown
on the comedy-club circuit, about to move to Los Angeles to try his luck.
They now have two young sons, Ezra and Leon. Reiser is sweet about the
harmony of his domestic life. Of their union, he says, "It works,
because I like to talk and she likes to listen." And on life with a
comedian and a therapist in the household, he quips, "Well, I'm not
always funny, and she's not always shrinking." He has also written two
books: Couplehood in 1994 and Babyhood in 1997. The Thing
About My Folks is a road movie about a middle-aged son (Reiser) and his
dad (Falk) who go off on a journey after the family matriarch (Olympia
Dukakis) leaves a note on the fridge saying she needs to be on her own after
nearly 50 years of marriage. Its framework is simple: a road, a car, two men
-- but the insights and lessonsabout love, family and marriage provide
complex detours. Reiser's film company is called Nuance Productions, and
rightly so. He understands the shadings of the heart. In his movie, he plays
his type: a kind, dutiful (and psychotherapied) son who is trying to
understand his parents and make them see how to love each other more fully.
It, too, is semi-autobiographical. "I'm not smart enough to write about
something that didn't actually happen to me," Reiser explains, laughing.
"It's not a plan. But I couldn't write a space movie if you put a gun to
my head."
But there's more to it than that. Reiser, who was born in Manhattan,
the fourth child of a health-food wholesaler, is that rare Hollywood breed
who wants meaning over money. "I do like things that matter," he
acknowledges. "Especially as you get older, you don't want to spend your
life blood on something that you don't believe in. So I couldn't imagine
doing a movie just for the money. If you need the money, of course you do it.
But just to go do it? Why? What is that movie offering out there?" Mr.
Decent, it turns out, is also Mr. Earnest. No wonder he's embarrassed about
being Mr. Potty Mouth. He is almost evangelical about the need for sweet,
heartfelt stories such as The Thing About My Folks. "I feel I am
on a mission to dismantle people's cynicism," he says fulsomely.
"There is such an emotional response to this film," he says,
explaining that he has personally attended over 100 screenings of it across
North America. "After people see it, they come up to me and start
talking about their parents. Suddenly, it's a Dr. Phil show. People
are healing around this movie. That sounds like a very pretentious goal and I
never set that goal, but I see that happening." The Christian right-wing
press have praised it, too. He started writing the film almost 20 years ago.
He had seen his father, who died suddenly in 1989, laughing over a
performance by Peter Falk in Neil Simon's The Cheap Detective. But he
struggled with what the story should be and kept abandoning the project.
"It wasn't that thought-out," he says, when asked if the impetus to
write it was the same 20 years ago as it was when he picked it up four years
ago and finished the screenplay in a matter of weeks. At the beginning,
"I think it was just 'Must kill the President,' " he jokes,
adopting a robotic voice of the inner consciousness. " 'Must write movie
with Peter Falk as Dad.' " After Mad About You ended in 1999,
Reiser decided to take it easy, be at home with his family and see what
projects "floated to the top." But then the terrorist events of
9/11 helped clarify his priorities. "It was this huge dose of 'Wow, this
could all go terribly wrong tomorrow.' There's only one thing that would make
me unhappy professionally and it was not doing this movie."
Another catalyst was a meeting with Falk. They knew each other
casually from encounters at award ceremonies. But then Reiser attended a
two-person play Falk was in. Afterward, he went backstage to say hello.
"I was complimenting him, and then he grabbed me by the shoulders and he
said, 'Listen to me. I love you. I love everything you do.' And I said,
'Well, that's very nice.' I hadn't told him anything about my screenplay at
that point," Reiser adds in a hushed storytelling voice. "And he
goes, 'Listen to me,' " Reiser explains, mimicking Falk's deep raspy
voice. " 'I love what you write.' " Reiser widens his blue eyes in
wonderment. "And I said to myself, 'Okay, there's not going to be a
bigger sign from God than Peter Falk, who knows nothing about this project,
looking me in the eye and saying, 'Go write it, dummy!' So I went home and I
wrote it." The film is his first original screenplay. Funny how
God wants to make movies these days. But Reiser's conviction had to be
zealous. "This is a movie that could easily not have been made."
All the studios turned him down. "There's no one in their 20s in it.
There's no sex. There's no action. I was like, 'Okay, but don't you think
there are other important things?' " In the end, he secured "a
couple of million" from private investors. Reiser is more writer than
actor or even comedian. On film, he is puzzling through things, decoding
people and relationships. Which is why, perhaps, he is slightly embarrassed
by the straightforward crassness of The Aristocrats. There's no nuance
to it. "That's a joke I wouldn't tell to 99 out of 100 people I
know," he admits. (Such is his desire to heal through film that he
sometimes wonders why comics tell certain racial jokes on TV. "I think
that doesn't help people. That hurts people," he explains.) But don't
think just because he craves meaning and can be more earnest than a right-wing
Christian zealot that's he one-dimensional. The bad boy is not completely
buried. He stops talking abruptly at one point during the lunch to listen to
the restaurant's piped-in music -- a swelling rendition of Puccini's aria Nessun
Dorma. "Oh," says Reiser, slumping in his chair and holding his
head in his hands. "That music either makes me want to cry or hightail
it to Vegas," he observes, before picking up where he left off.
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Boreanaz Keeps His Bad-Boy
Edge
Excerpt
from The Globe and Mail - By Jen
Gerson
(Oct.
3, 2005) After breaking through the bondage of Buffy and other
cult-classic space-channel sitcoms, David
Boreanaz is ready to take on the
world. At least, the world of feature film. "I'm going in the right
direction, I'm aiming for global domination now," he said. "It's an
amazing experience of transition that I'm going through." But long-time
fans who remember him as the lead of the gothic sitcom Angel and
romantic lead opposite Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
will delight in knowing that the actor has lost none of his bad-boy brooding
intensity in his most recent movie, the Canadian film These Girls.
Based on the play by Vivienne Laxdal, These Girls follows the
misadventures of three girls in a small New Brunswick town as they blackmail
local knife-toting tough guy Keith Clark into having sex with them. Boreanaz
plays Clark, a husband and new father who sets himself up for a physical and
emotional beating by having a dalliance with the girls, who are -- in true to
sex-farce-form -- his babysitters. "Where we were shooting brought out
the best in this character," Boreanaz said while soaking in the sun
recently on the roof of the InterContinental Hotel in Toronto. The shoot was
in a small rural town, and Boreanaz said he felt depressed being away from
his wife and child at the time. "When you're away from the goodness in
your life, it puts you in a place where you're lonely." He channelled
that emotion into giving Clark a sense of vulnerability. "Making him
likeable after all he did is difficult."
Raised
Catholic and versed in Buddhism, Boreanaz is an eclectic mix of spiritual
philosophies. He wears a rosary blessed by the Pope around his neck and
sports Chinese tattoos that translate into "soul" and
"fate" on his wrists. He said he met his wife, Jaime Bergman, by
noticing that she had the same tattoos in the same place. Sleeping with three
teenaged babysitters, even sexually voracious and manipulative teenaged
babysitters, follows in Boreanaz's typical bad-boy characters. But in real
life, the girls of These Girls said that he was every bit the
gentleman. He even took them out for dinner and talked about how much he
loved his wife before shooting the sex scenes. Holly Lewis, who plays Lisa
MacDougall, a Seventh Day Adventist who wants to lose her virginity before
being shipped off to a religious college, portrays one of the most awkward first-time
sex experiences on film. She said the comedy of the film eased any
discomfort. "That made it so much easier to do, because the sex was not
sensual," Lewis said. Amanda Walsh, who plays Glory Lorraine, a
character so naive as to inspire anger, said the comedy-of-errors style of
the film would allow them to poke at traditional female stereotypes and
sexual norms without drawing too much ire. "The plot is controversial,
but the plot was executed in a lighter way that cuts through that controversy,"
she said. Walsh's character falls in love with Clark and deludes herself into
believing that the two would have a future together. "He's an older man,
and it's hard to believe that what's going on in your head isn't going on in
his as well," she said. "It's messing with grown-up territory
in a childish and naive way." Caroline Dhavernas's Keira St-George
narrates the film, unapologetically reflecting on the characters' behaviour.
Meanwhile, Boreanaz hasn't given up the small screen completely. He's working
on the drama series Bones for Fox, although he adds that the workload
can be overwhelming. "An hour-long drama to deal with is a death
sentence in a way," he said. But he's also starred in two films, Mr.
Fix-it and The Hard Easy, which are currently in post-production.
So why doesn't he want to talk about Buffy? "I don't like
reunions. . . . I don't like to go back to the things that I've already
done," he said. "It's like after a meal is over, you don't go
picking up used napkins."
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Colin Firth: The Charmed Life Of A Late-Blooming
Heartthrob
Excerpt from The
Globe and Mail - By Liam Lacey
(Oct. 4, 2005) Colin Firth
has said that he feels lucky he didn't become a
"hunk" until he was 35 -- he had a few years to learn to become an
actor first. Tall, dark and somewhat brooding-looking, the 45-year-old actor
spent part of his early career at Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company and
went on to various film roles, typically playing naive young men. By the time
he was 35, when he married Italian film producer Livia Giuggioli, he had had
only had two girlfriends, including Canadian actress Meg Tilly, with whom he
had a son. Then, in 1995, he starred in the role of Fitzwilliam Darcy in the
BBC miniseries of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. (His brother
Jonathan said, "Darcy -- but isn't he supposed to be sexy?") But
the role of Darcy, and particularly a scene where he emerged wet from a pond
and earned the sobriquet the "male Ursula Andress," changed his
life. Then later, there were two more Mr. Darcys in Bridget Jones's Diary
and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and several other Darcy-like
brooding film roles. Darcy, says Firth, has been sexy for 200 years but he's
proud he made it convincing. He once said, "I have a kind of neutrality,
physically. I can be made to look a lot better, or a lot worse." His sex
appeal is indirect, the male equivalent of the prim librarian who, under the
right circumstances, may be persuaded to doff her spectacles and pull out her
hairpins.
On this particular late afternoon, the second last day of the Toronto
International Film Festival (TIFF), Firth was looking pleasantly rumpled,
wearing a sports jacket over an untucked shirt, faded blue jeans on long legs
and a lot of beard stubble. He was also bleary-eyed, not apparently related
to the glass of red wine in his hand, but to exhaustion. He flew in the
previous night from Tunisia, where he is shooting a sword-and-sandal epic, The
Last Legion, for the TIFF premiere of Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth
Lies. He has a car waiting to take him to the airport in half an
hour. Looking distracted, he put down the wine and asked a publicist for a
double espresso. I asked him if he was very tired. "A great
understatement," he says. "Very tired was about 8 a.m. this
morning." After so many roles where he has played superficially dark,
secretly nice characters, his part in Egoyan's film, based on Rupert Holmes's
show-business whodunit, as beloved fifties television entertainer Vince
Collins (with Kevin Bacon as the Jerry Lewis-like sidekick), is a departure.
There's bisexuality, drug and alcohol abuse, and nudity. Collins is an
unsavoury character who ends up a depraved Hollywood recluse. Were there any
second thoughts about taking on such a role? "Every job you take is a
spin of the dice to a certain point, but I've never seen a film by Atom you
can't respect. This film -- in the hands of someone who I didn't admire and
respect -- I'd positively know to keep away from. "But everything that
Atom has done is thought-provoking and investigative and lacking in crass
moral judgment. I thought it would be an interesting journey to take."
Firth wanted to do the role with an American accent instead of an Englishman
as Egoyan's script indicated -- but he was overruled: "I realized the
arguments for keeping with the script were too solid to ignore. We present
him as an archetypal Englishman of a certain kind, which makes the violence
and debauchery more shocking. It was much the same way as this biography of
Cary Grant that came out at the time we were shooting, which dealt with his
bisexuality and interest in LSD, which was only really interesting because it
wasn't our image of Cary Grant."
Firth thinks there may be some insulation from celebrity excess in
living in England: "Believing in your own publicity is a weakness that
can apply to anyone, anywhere. Tearing into all the favours that fame can
bestow on you without any kind of sense of putting the brakes on -- that can
happen anywhere. You only have to look around and see how much drugs,
alcoholism and suicide there are among people who have got it all. I think
[in England] we're protected by our famous sense of irony to some extent.
There is a tendency to debunk, so it's a little harder to get above yourself.
Even though we have an ancient aristocratic system and there still can be
found people who take status and titles seriously, the prevailing feeling is
there's not very much respect for an actor who has to have a bigger trailer
than another actor. It's very difficult to sustain on an English set without
becoming laughable." Of course, it's also true that some of the greatest
acting in England takes place in the relatively modestly paid and mean world
of the theatre, where actors like Firth learn their craft: "I've always
been taught that without resistance, you can't develop -- whether it's your
muscles or your voice or your acting ability. It's a tragedy really when creative
people get so rich and famous that people open doors and smile all the time
and give them everything you want. Now I've worked in America a lot of times
and by far the majority of actors [there] are very well-grounded, [with]
enormous senses of humour and very professional. But I've seen star
behaviour. It's not even the star's behaviour, but watching it being connived
at by people around them: not rolling their eyes, not questioning, not
laughing when they hear something particularly pompous, all of which is
destructive to the person who's being fawned on." Perhaps another reason
for Firth's perspective is that he comes from a family that didn't place fame
and wealth as the pinnacle of value. Three of his grandparents were Methodist
missionaries, a denomination that emphasizes the importance of serving
others. Both his parents were academics -- his father taught history and his
mother comparative religion: "I suppose I could be thought of as a black
sheep, but there's a line of consistency. We're all involved in things that
aren't exactly tangible -- preaching a sermon isn't quite the same as
hammering nails and building something. We all stand up and tell stories to
people in a way." Recently, Firth became a director of Progreso, which
has opened two London coffee shops in a planned-for English chain, half-owned
by OXFAM and intended as a challenge to Starbucks and other luxury coffee
chains. The difference: Progreso profits go back to coffee-grower co-ops in
Ethiopia, Honduras and Indonesia, or to help other coffee-growers. Firth has
lobbied the World Trade Organization about fair-trade practices, personally
invested money to set up the Progreso chain, bought shares for producers,
travelled to Ethiopia and even served behind the counter.
The experience has forced him to deal with the social value of
celebrity: "The whole business of celebrities and causes is full of
paradoxes. Who the hell wants to listen to someone preaching to them about
poverty who comes from a life of privilege? And I say, well then, stop
reading here because I don't want to bore you. "But organizations who
want to help people are tracking down celebrities and their endorsements like
gold dust because they've discovered it's one of the most effective ways to
create change . . . My own solution was I couldn't be just another celebrity
spokesman. I got directly involved and understand the system from one end of
the chain to the other, and I've become better educated and I think, in many
ways, it has fundamentally changed me." Spoken like a true Methodist
celebrity hunk.
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Little Magic In New Potter Film For Winnipeg Group
Excerpt
from The Globe and Mail - By Terry
Weber
(Oct.
4, 2005) Winnipeg folk singers The Wyrd
Sisters don't see the magic in the new Harry Potter movie. The
group has issued a
statement of claim seeking $40-million plus punitive damages from three
divisions of the Warner Brothers empire, singer Jarvis Cocker of the British
band Pulp, and Johnny Greenwood and Phil Selway of Radiohead. The three
real-life rockers reportedly appear as a band bearing the
same moniker in the forthcoming Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Despite the risk of incurring the wrath of Potter diehards worldwide, the
group wants to block the distribution of the film in Canada until the fracas
is settled. The veteran Winnipeg singers either want the name of the group in
the movie changed or they want the studio to help them establish a new
identity to differentiate them from the film's fictional characters. The
latter, their lawyer Kimberly Townley-Smith says, would be a tough go,
considering that the group has been performing under their current name for nearly
two decades. "It's a difficult transition, they've been around 15 years,
they're pushing 50, it's difficult to do that," she told
globeandmail.com. The Juno-nominated band, she said, would prefer that the
studio change the name of the group in the movie. If that doesn't happen, the
group's ability to perform and win new fans because the name would be too
closely associated with the film. "If they don't do that essentially
can't play any more," she said.
Ms.
Townley-Smith said the group was first approached by the studio in June about
the name conflict, at which point the scenes had already been shot. The two
sides are now in discussions. She would not discuss the negotiations or the
likelihood that an amicable settlement would be reached. "We're still
talking," she said. The next legal step would be to seek an emergency
injunction in an Ontario court seeking to bar the film slated for a
November release from being shown in Canada. No date has been set for that
hearing. She said there is precedent in Canada in which injunctions have been
granted over trademark conflicts. In the movie, a group reportedly named The
Wyrd Sisters play at the Hogwarts Yule Ball. In the book, the group was
called the Weird Sisters. Chart Magazine has reported that Warners has said
the band in the film doesn't have a name and they do not intend to use the
Wyrd Sisters handle. On the Internet Movie Database Web site, the Mr. Cocker,
Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Selway are all identified simply as band members in the
film's credits. However, press reports late last year about the casting of
the group in the movie referred to the fictional band as The Wyrd Sisters.
Warner has served the group with a notice of its intent to defend itself in
the case. News of the suit triggered a backlash from some Radiohead fans and
prompted members of Winnipeg's Wyrd Sisters to post their own response, in
which they asked for understanding. "We share the same mandate and
philosophy that Radiohead does, and we certainly do not mean them any harm,"
the group said in a posting on its Web site. "I think that if the
Radiohead fellows really knew what was going on that they'd be as appalled
and horrified as we are." With a report from the Canadian Press
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Reeves Plays Man Behind The Molars
Excerpt from The
Toronto Star - Richard Ouzounian, Entertainment Reporter
(Oct. 5, 2005) If you were searching for someone to play a New
Age
orthodontist who advises his patients to "think about their power
animal" in times of crisis, who would you cast? Keanu Reeves? Dude
excellent! That's what writer-director Mike Mills did with his quirky,
coming-of-age comedy, Thumbsucker,
opening Friday. Not only did Reeves' presence provide the box-office
clout that finally allowed this indie film to get made after nearly five
years in development, but his wryly comic performance as Perry Lyman, man
behind the molars, has been earning him some of the best reviews of his
career. "It's a wonderful film and I loved doing it," declared
Reeves to a roundtable of journalists during the recent Toronto International Film Festival.
"To go to work on something one has a feeling for, and believes in?
Like, man, that's a very good day." Reeves is legendarily one of
the most difficult interviews around, a guy who'll never answer a question
with two syllables when one will do, but something's a bit different this
time out. His affection for Thumbsucker is obvious, even when
asked what made him sign on for a film that could only pay him a tiny
fraction of his usual $15-million salary. "The writing, the
humanity, that shined right through. And I liked my character. He has some
ideas about life and he comes to a place where he knows less, but knows more
at the same time." He offers just the hint of a smile. "I know
more about acting now than when I started. It may not seem like it, but
that's the truth." One of the writers around the table suggests
that Reeves' portrayal of Dr. Lyman as the Neo of Novocaine was a sly form of
self-parody. "You mean it wasn't just funny on its own?"
sarcastically asks the man who became a superstar with the Matrix
trilogy. "You're asking me if it was a history of me as an actor? I'm
not saying." No wonder. It's been a long up-and-down road for
Reeves over the years. Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1964, he wound up in
Toronto with his mother after his parents divorced.
Hockey claimed his interest during his teen years (his goalie nickname
was "The Wall"), but he soon drifted into acting, making his
professional debut in the 1984 Theatre Passe Muraille production of Brad
Fraser's Wolfboy. After some more local stage and TV, he moved
to Hollywood, drawing positive attention for his serious work in films like River's
Edge. But it was as stoner Ted Logan in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
that he first became a popular favourite. But after that, his career
discovered valleys. For every hit like Speed, there was a bomb like Johnny
Mnemonic. And if he made it big in The Matrix, he tanked just as
badly in Sweet November. The issue of quality control in his
career startles him into speaking with sudden clarity and eloquence.
"Look, I try to be selective if I can. I'm at the mercy of the
things that are offered to me. I'm not one of those people who can snap their
fingers and bring a picture to life. Writers have to write something,
producers have to want to produce it and directors have to want to cast me in
it." He chuckles. "Someone once wanted to know if I had a
career plan or if I just took it day by day. I asked, `Isn't there anything
in between?'" Still, he must be doing something right Reeves has
some interesting films on the horizon. He describes the upcoming The Lake
House as "a dark romance" in which he stars opposite Sandra
Bullock with a screenplay by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Proof,
David Auburn. He also worked with Richard Linklater on the futurist
fable A Scanner Darkly and he's in talks to star as Johnny Stompanato
opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones as Lana Turner in Adrian Lyne's retelling of
the lurid 1958 Hollywood murder. He also seems to be turning his back
on some of the trashier material that smirched his reputation in past years.
He's asked about the possibility of there being a Constantine 2 and he
tersely ends the topic by snapping, "Not from me.
"I'm 41 years old now," he says, explaining himself. "I
feel things differently. Yeah, I know it's a clichι, but this is an
enriching, deepening time for me and I want to take advantage of it."
He admits that coming to the film festival brought things full cycle
for him. "The first film I ever saw here was Blood Simple,
just after my 20th birthday. I wanted to be part of this business, but I
didn't even know how to get in the door. I used to just love to go to as many
movies as I could. That was an incredible thing for a kid to be able to do.
"Then, four years later, I was at the festival with my first film,
The Prince of Pennsylvania and I was like `Wow, it's really happening
for me.' "I guess I still feel like that every time I come
here."
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FILM TIDBITS
We Remember: Actor-Comedian Nipsey Russell Dies
Excerpt
from www.eurweb.com
(Oct.
4, 2005) *Nipsey Russell who used
to be all over the TV through his
frequent appearances on variety, talk and game shows, has died. He was 80.
Russell, a veteran entertainer who performed on stage and screen, scored his
first major TV role as Officer Anderson in the 1960s TV show "Car 54,
Where Are You?" He also often appeared on shows such as the Dean Martin
Show, the Tonight Show, Laugh-In and Fame. On the variety programs, Russell
performed short poems, earning him the nickname "the poet laureate of
television." In 1985, Russell, an erudite, witty comedian, helped
make TV history by becoming one of the first black game-show hosts with NBC's
Your Number's Up. Alongside Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, Russell played
the Tin Man in the 1978 all-black movie musical The Wiz, a remake of The Wizard
of Oz. At EUR press time, no information on survivors or services had
been released
Charlize Theron Gets
A Star On Walk Of Fame
Excerpt
from The Globe and Mail
(Oct.
1 2005) Los Angeles -- Oscar-winner Charlize
Theron's career came full circle Thursday when she received a star
on the Hollywood Walk of
Fame only blocks from where she was first "discovered." "I had
big dreams when I came here, but this is an incredibly amazing gift. . . .
Two cherries on top of the cake," Theron told a cheering crowd at the
star's unveiling. Surrounded by family and friends from her native South
Africa, Theron recounted how at 18 an agent found her in line at a bank on
Hollywood Boulevard. Her mother had pushed the tall, beautiful star to move
to Los Angeles to pursue film acting. Initially a model, and then a
ballerina, the future movie star danced for New York's Joffrey Ballet before
rising through the ranks in Hollywood. Theron, 30, starred in such movies as The
Cider House Rules, and The Italian Job. But it was 2003's Monster
that cemented her status and earned her an Oscar and Golden Globe. AP
Usher In A Role To Die For
Excerpt
from www.eurweb.com - By Marie Moore
(Sept.
29, 2005) Since fall has arrived with a chill in the air in many parts of the
country, there are a lot of good reasons to come in from the cold. In a
reversal of roles, Usher stars as a
bodyguard. Remember when Kevin Costner was hired to guard a singers body
(Whitney Houston) in "The Bodyguard"? With In the Mix, which was
originally called "Dying for Dolly," Usher is hired to protect a
mob boss daughter. When Darrell (Usher), New Yorks hottest DJ, saves Frank
Pacellis life, his reward is to watch over the dons daughter, Dolly
(Emmanuelle Chriqui). As the sparks start to fly between Darrell and Dolly,
the heat is on. Will Usher be pushing up roses instead of bringing them? Find
out Nov. 23.
Tupac's Screenplay 'Live 2 Tell' Coming To Big Screen
Excerpt
from www.allhiphop.com - By Nolan
Strong
(Sept.
28, 2005) A screenplay that late rapper Tupac Shakur wrote while
locked away in prison is finally coming to the big screen.
Shakur penned the script for Live 2 Tell while incarcerated at the
Clinton Correctional Facility in 1995. Live 2 Tell centers around the
inner-city struggle of a drug kingpin who decides to leave the drug game
behind. The screenplay was written during a turbulent period in the slain
rappers life. Shakur had just been sentenced to four and a half years in
prison, after a woman claimed Shakur forced himself upon her on a nightclub
dance floor and later, a hotel room. Shakur was paroled when Marion Suge
Knight posted Shakurs $1.4 million dollar bail in exchange for recording
three albums on the Death Row Records imprint. Live 2 Tell was acquired by
Insomnia Media Group, which will start production on the film in March
of 2006. Shakur was gunned down in a hail of bullets on the Las Vegas strip
in 1996 in a brazen shooting after a Mike Tyson fight. Shakurs mother, Afeni
Shakur, will serve as producer of the film. In 2003, Ms. Shakur told
AllHipHop.com of her plans to bring the screenplay to the big screen. We
have every intention of putting that movie on the
screen, Ms. Shakur told AllHipHop.com. It's a story of redemption and
education." Insomnia Media Group acquired the rights to the screenplay
from Ms. Shakur. Casting for the film has not yet started.
Mike Myers On Drums
In Keith Moon Biopic
Excerpt
from The Globe and Mail
(Oct.
3, 2005) Los Angeles -- In a piece of casting news that has set the
mouths of Hollywood executives watering, Mike
Myers has signed up to play the Who's legendary drummer Keith Moon. The role marks Myers's first
on-camera (as opposed to voice-over) role since family hit The Cat in the
Hat opened in North America in 2003. The band's front man Roger Daltrey
is producing the project with Spitfire Pictures' Nigel Sinclair, with whom he
has spent more than a decade developing the story. AP
Mario Gets High
Excerpt
from www.eurweb.com
(Oct.
3, 2005) *Singer Mario has been
cast in the film Untitled Music High
Project for Touchstone Pictures, reports Variety. The film follows a
rebellious teen (Channing Tatum) who must do community service at a
performing arts high school, then joins the cast of a show after he falls in
love with a dancer (Jenna Dewan). Mario will play a student who befriends
Tatums character. The school principal will be portrayed by six Feet Under
Emmy-winner Rachel Griffiths. The film began production in Marios hometown
of Baltimore on Sept. 12.
Saint Ralph, Lives of the Saints win DGC Awards
Excerpt
from The
Globe and Mail
(Oct.
4, 2005) Toronto -- It was a blessed night at the fourth-annual Directors Guild of Canada Awards on
Saturday, as two saintly works took home the hardware. Michael McGowan won
for outstanding achievement in direction in a feature film for his
teenage-marathoner film Saint Ralph, while Jerry Ciccoritti won in the
television film or miniseries category for Lives of the Saints. Ken
Finkleman took home the TV series award for his work with The Newsroom,
while the late Daniel Petrie Sr., director of Fort Apache, the Bronx,
was posthumously honoured with the guild's lifetime achievement award. Staff
Phifer To Play Green
Excerpt
from www.eurweb.com
(Oct.
4, 2005) *E.R. star Mekhi Phifer
will direct and star in a biopic of R&B
legend Al Green, reports MTV News.
"I've already met with Al Green... I've always been an avid, avid fan of
Al Green, his music, his legacy, and I just really wanted to portray it to
the world, said Phifer. Al has full confidence, and he's like, 'Just do me
right.' We're just creating the story that we're going to show to the public,
because obviously he's still alive. So it's just finding the right story that
has the most impact. The film is expected to follow Green's rise to stardom
in the 1970s and his decision to walk away from the business and become a
preacher.
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::TV NEWS::
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Sex, Love & Secrets - Canadian Content
A
new drama hits our television sets on Tuesdays
at 9:00 pm on the UPN
network - and there's tons of Canadian content on board! First of all,
the director is David Straiton (North
Shore, Cold Case, Las Vegas to name a few directorial TV credits).
Then there are two Canadian actors, Tamara
Taylor (Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, CSI: Miami, Six Feet
Under) who transplanted from Toronto to LA. Also in the cast
is the zany Lucas Bryant, (Queer
as Folk, Odyssey 5 and The Playmakers) originally from Elmira,
Ontario and now LA.
I
watched the show on Tuesday and I must say, this is an exciting new show
with characters that you'll want to see again and what happens to them.
When's the last time you could say that? UPN is committed to the airing
of eight shows. If you want to see this show continue and I think you
will, PLEASE lend your global support! Log in to UPN HERE
and scroll to the lower left to CONTACT US and then choose the show
and enter your comment.
**Set in the small, hip neighbourhood of
Silver Lake, on the outskirts of
Hollywood, this fresh, edgy, new drama explores the intimate and often
complex relationships of a tight-knit group of friends finding out who they
are and what they want in life, in the new drama SEX,
LOVE & SECRETS.
A
musician at heart, Hank (James Stevenson), the sexy lead singer of
the nouvelle-punk band 'Modern Apes,' has come to a crossroad in his personal
and professional world. He is ready for some significant changes in order to
make that life-long commitment to his girlfriend, Rose (Lauren German). And while she loves Hank,
Rose is preoccupied with her
job as a celebrity journalist and finds herself in emotional turmoil when an
ex-boyfriend comes back to haunt her. Making matters worse, she is being
tormented by the sexy Jolene (Denise Richards), a pushy publicist, who has
her eye on Hank.
As
the endearing drummer of the band, Hank's buddy Coop (Omar Benson Miller) always puts his friends
first. But as the ultimate wingman, he has a hard time getting the girl.
Quite the opposite for their
friend Charlie (Eric Balfour), the
charming playboy who uses his position as a hairdresser to woo women, but
can't be tied down to just one. Rounding out the group is Nina (Tamara Taylor), a bright, ob/gyn who has
been so career-driven that she has no social life to speak of. After
stumbling upon an online ad, she meets the eccentric and mysterious Milo (Lucas Bryant), and uncharacteristically
agrees to let him move in as her new roommate.
These
twenty-somethings have become a family sharing everything, but as in any
family, the need to protect each other can often compel these friends to keep
secrets that sometimes do more harm than good.
Starring
Denise Richards and Eric Balfour
See a
video clip HERE.
**Source: www.UPN.com
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TV TIDBITS
Melissa Etheridge Working On A Sitcom For ABC
Excerpt
from The Toronto Star
(Oct. 2,
2005) NEW YORK (AP) Melissa Etheridge
says she's working
on a sitcom. The show, still in development with the ABC television
network, is about "what my life might have been like had I not left to
find my fame and fortune, and stayed in Kansas and became a teacher and been
gay and dealt with life there," Etheridge told Time magazine.
The two-time Grammy winner says she doesn't want to rely on touring to make a
living, and a television show would allow her to ``be home for
dinner." Etheridge, who for much of last year was fighting breast
cancer, is releasing a greatest hits album and DVD this week. Etheridge
won a 1992 Grammy for best female rock vocal performance for Ain't It
Heavy and a 1994 Grammy in the same category for Come to My Window.
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::THEATRE NEWS::
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Crystal Hits It Out Of The Park
Excerpt
from The Toronto Star - Richard
Ouzounian, Theatre Critic
700
Sundays
Written
and performed by Billy Crystal. Directed by Des McAnuff. Until Oct. 9 at the
Canon
Theatre,
244 Victoria St. 416-872-1212.
(Sep. 30,
2005) You won't find a better show in a month of Sundays. Billy
Crystal began the North American tour of his smash hit, 700 Sundays, at the Canon Theatre last
night and if you're tempted by the few remaining tickets, better grab them
soon. Simply put, this is a piece of theatre that has it all: laughter
as well as tears and superb entertainment in addition to considerable food
for thought. The title stems from the one day each week that Crystal
got to spend with his hard-working father, Jack, before his untimely death
when young Billy was only 15. If you do the math, they only had 700 Sundays
together. And although Crystal tells us this fact early in Act I, it's
not until Act II that the tragic event, with all of its familial
repercussions, comes to touch the evening with grief. Until then, it's
been about as raucous a good time as you can imagine. Crystal recreates the
fun-loving "brisket and bourbon" atmosphere he grew up in on the
Long Island of the 1950s and '60s. His dad was a jazz promoter, so it's
not surprising, for example, that the first film Billy ever saw was while he
was sitting on the lap of Billie Holiday. (For the record, the film was Shane
and during the final scene, Holiday assured Crystal that "he ain't ever
comin' back.") Crystal is in fine form, leaping around in those
manic comic vignettes he executes so well. When sex drives him as an
adolescent, his penis suddenly acquires a voice of its own not unlike Darth
Vader's. But when he has to play a titanium-hipped aunt at her daughter's
lesbian wedding, the impression is equally uncanny. Then Act II lets us
know that death can come when you least expect it, striking down your father
in a bowling alley just after you've had a fight with him, without the chance
to say "I'm sorry" or even "goodbye".
Crystal
is extremely moving in this passage, as he is later when he describes the
emptiness that haunted him after his father's death as he shares the once
joyous house with his grieving mother. But the laughs eventually come
back in full force (you have to see him imitate Donald Trump struggling to
maintain his hairdo in a windstorm). And there's also some searing
political humour. ("In 1964, we had a president from Texas we really
didn't trust and a war we really couldn't win. What's changed?")
What becomes more apparent as this seemingly casual but carefully crafted
show comes to its conclusion, is that Crystal takes a ride on his celebrity
and what we know about it to give us a deeper insight into the man
underneath. And, with typical generosity, he opens up the doors so that
we share in his experiences. The use of Crystal's old home movies could
have been cloying, but it isn't, partly because of the skilful way they've
been handled by Des McAnuff (whose invisible direction is a joy throughout)
and also because, as Crystal tells us, "we have the same five relatives;
they just jump from album to album." The moral of it all rests in a
story Crystal tells us about one year when his father kept working on his
batting skills long past summer until he finally learned how to hit
"curveballs in the snow." 700 Sundays shows that
Crystal has certainly mastered the art of taking whatever life throws at him
and hitting it clear out of the park.
Crystal's Family Tale Is
All In The Telling
Excerpt
from The Globe and Mail - By Kamal
Al-Solaylee
700
Sundays
Written
and performed by Billy Crystal; Directed by Des McAnuff
At
the Canon Theatre in Toronto
Rating:
***½
(Oct.
1, 2005) Quiet please, there's a man on stage who saw his first movie
sitting on Billie Holiday's lap, back in 1953. A man whose family business
was the legendary jazz record label Commodore, where Holiday first recorded Strange
Fruit, and whose uncle was none other than producer Milton Gabler. That
the same man would go on to great success in TV (Soap and Saturday
Night Live, not to mention Grammy and Academy Awards telecasts) and film
(When Harry Met Sally, City Slickers, Analyze This, among others)
matters little in this show. He's not holding court to indulge in a career
retrospective -- after all, only diehard fans would want to know the
behind-the-scenes details of such turkeys as Mr. Saturday Night or The
Princess Bride -- but to tell a story of growing up Jewish outside New
York in the 1950s and early 60s. It's a world of "jazz and Jews, brisket
and bourbon" that seems too fabled to be true, but he has ample archival
evidence to support it: home movies, family photos, record sleeves and
newspaper clippings. The man, of course, is Billy Crystal and the
heart-warming, supremely funny show he has brought to Toronto's Canon
Theatre, after a record-breaking, Tony-winning run on Broadway, is 700
Sundays. It looks like a one-man show and a standup routine, but while it
incorporates elements of both, 700 Sundays is as rich a dramatic story
as any playwright (say, Neil Simon or Richard Greenberg) could muster. The
show is as New York as a Gershwin tune, a Woody Allen movie or a baseball
game, but its iconography and sentiments transcend space and time. Even if
you've never set foot in Yankee Stadium or Grand Central Station, it's hard
not to know what they mean to the mythology of both Crystal and New York.
The
title is not as easy to figure out immediately but refers to the approximate
number of Sundays Crystal spent with his father before he dropped dead of a
heart attack in a bowling alley. Crystal was only 15 then and the experience
of losing his father at such a young age still haunts the 57-year-old star,
himself a grandfather now. The psychological repercussions are explained in therapy
speak in the more sentimental and occasionally emotionally manipulative
second act of this three-hour show, but by then the commanding Crystal has
earned the right to take his story wherever he wants. (Which he does, ending 700
Sundays on the tear-jerking story of his mother's death a few years ago.)
All the swear words, talking penises and George Bush-bashing aside, 700
Sundays is fundamentally a family show. When Crystal says his family is
full of characters, he is not joking, so to speak. Here's a small sample: a
grandfather who taught little Billy filthy jokes and unleashed his inner
comedian; an eccentric uncle who could crack jokes at a shiva (Jewish
mourning); an aunt, now living in Boca Raton, Fla., whose only daughter gets
married in San Francisco to a gentile girlfriend - a "lesbyterian
wedding." As he mixes past and present, it all seems to flow so
naturally from Crystal's mouth (and other parts of his extremely fit body)
that you almost forget this is a tightly structured piece of theatre. Director
Des McAnuff has worked very hard at making 700 Sundays feel like a
casual evening and even harder to avoid the performance trap of "An
Audience with . . ." which many of these celebrity vehicles tend to be.
Pauses, party pieces and the odd improvised line are constant but never
distracting reminders of the expert theatricality of 700 Sundays. In
the end, it all goes back to Crystal himself, who proves that no matter how
grand a story you have, the telling is the crucial part of storytelling. He
is a consummate stage performer who has learned from the greats of comedy and
jazz. For a few nights in every North American city he's touring this fall,
he'll be sharing his art, family history, Yiddish jokes and Blue-state
leanings with a few thousand strangers. Both artist and audience are very
lucky to be in each other's company. 700 Sundays continues at Toronto's
Canon Theatre until Oct. 9 (416-872-1212).
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We Remember: Playwright August Wilson Dies Of Liver Cancer
Excerpt
from www.eurweb.com
(Oct.
3, 2005) *August Wilson, the
Pulitzer prize winning playwright, died Sunday in Seattle. He was 60. Wilson
was diagnosed with inoperable
cancer of the liver in June and given only months to live. In spite of
that prognosis, Wilson continued working in his Seattle home on the revisions
of his final play in the monumental series "Radio Golf," which
opened in Los Angeles this summer and recently closed. Wilson is the winner
of two Pulitzer Prizes, a Tony Award and seven New York Drama Critics' Circle
Awards. The Virginia Theatre on Broadway will be renamed in his honour on
Oct. 17. Wilson, a Pittsburgh native and a high school dropout, won the
Pulitzer for "Fences" and "Piano Lesson" and the best
play Tony for "Fences." His other works included
"Jitney," "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" and "Seven
Guitars." It was Wilson's plays that helped the careers of actors
Charles S. Dutton, Laurence Fishburne, S. Epatha Merkerson and many other
black actors. Wilson was diagnosed with liver cancer in June by his doctors
in Seattle. The disease proved too advanced for treatment, according to the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which broke the story of his illness. "It's not
like poker; you can't throw your hand in," Wilson told his hometown
paper in August. "I've lived a blessed life. I'm ready," he said.
Wilson is survived by his third wife and two daughters. At EUR deadline time,
funeral services were pending.
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THEATRE TIDBITS
Spacey In Spotlight
Source:
Associated Press
(Oct.
5, 2005) LONDON -- Kevin Spacey
launched his second
season in charge of the Old Vic last night, stepping onstage in Shakespeare's
Richard II. The Oscar-winning U.S. actor became artistic director of
the London theatre in 2004. His first season produced solid box-office
returns -- but decidedly mixed reviews. "The stakes are high for every
production he's going to do there -- because of who he is, because the
theatre is so high profile," said Terri Paddock of Theatregoer magazine.
"And given that the first season had such a mixed reception, people are
going to be looking . . . very closely." Announcing the new season last
month, Spacey said the first season "was only the beginning of our
commitment to deliver a challenging and entertaining program, with writers
and productions never before seen on the London stage."
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::OTHER NEWS::
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Oliver Jones, Znaimer win
Governor-General Awards
Source: Canadian
Press
(Sept.
29, 2005) Montreal Jazz legend Oliver Jones
and TV producer
Moses Znaimer are among the
recipients of the Governor-General's
Performing Arts Awards, while singer k.d.
lang has won the National Arts
Centre award. The four other recipients of the 2005 performing
arts awards, which are given out for lifetime artistic achievement, are
acclaimed choreographer Peter Boneham, actress Jackie Burroughs, Quebec
playwright Marcel Dube and singer and poet Raymond Levesque. "The
artists that we are honouring today have become known thanks to their
movements, their presence, their words, their rhythms and their images,"
newly appointed Gov.-Gen. Michaelle Jean said in a statement. "Their
works and performances have enriched our human experience and our cultural
heritage." The awards, which were announced at a ceremony in Montreal on
Thursday, will be handed out in Ottawa on Nov. 4. Each recipient will receive
a cash reward of $15,000 and a commemorative medallion. Lang won the National
Arts Centre Award for exceptional achievement over the past performance year.
Gail Asper, a community leader and a fervent arts advocate, is this year's
recipient of the Ramon John Hnatyshyn Award for Voluntarism in the Performing
Arts. The award is named after the former governor general who died in
December 2002. Created in 1992, the Governor-General's Performing Arts Awards
are administered by the GGPPA Foundation, a private not-for-profit charitable
organization.
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Canada Leads Fight For Culture Rights
Excerpt
from The Toronto
Star - Graham Fraser, Toronto Star
(Oct. 4,
2005) OTTAWABacked by unusual unanimity from the provinces
and Canada's artistic community, Canadian
Heritage Minister Liza Frulla heads to Paris to push for a
successful vote on the UNESCO convention on cultural diversity. It is
intended to allow sovereign countries to protect, promote or subsidize their
cultural productions despite rulings by international trade tribunals.
The convention, which has been endorsed by 53 of 58 members of the United
Nations cultural organization's executive, has been strongly opposed by the
United States. The U.S., which has consistently fought guarantees for
films that might put restrictions on Hollywood, as well as subsidies for film
production and magazines, has argued that UNESCO does not have the authority
to enact the convention, and that it would interfere with the free flow of
ideas. The international agreement formally the Convention on the
Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions has been
the result of an international campaign waged in close collaboration by the
federal government, the Quebec government, a coalition of English-speaking
and French-speaking cultural groups and, more recently, Ontario and
Manitoba. "The strategy we have pursued all these years has paid
off," Frulla said, describing how Canada had conducted "a
well-orchestrated diplomatic offensive" to win international support for
the convention. Frulla said the cultural sector represents $35 billion
in the Canadian economy, and 650,000 jobs. She was accompanied by
Ontario Culture Minister Madeleine Meilleur, Quebec Cultural Affairs Minister
Line Beauchamp and Manitoba's Eric Robinson, Minister of Culture, Heritage
and Tourism in a striking display of federal-provincial solidarity.
"This
convention is crucial to Ontario's and Canada's cultural diversity,"
Meilleur said, adding Ontario's cultural sector contributes $6.6 billion to
the province's economy, and employs 45,000 people. The campaign for such an
international convention began in 1998, but it gained momentum when Canada
was forced to back down in its attempt to protect the Canadian magazine
industry. Scott McIntyre, a Vancouver publisher who is co-chairman of
the Coalition for Cultural Diversity, said that the international convention
is an extraordinary achievement, but warned that the vote had not yet
happened. "We're not quite there yet. Many things can happen in an
end game," he said. Coalition members predicted that the opposition
would continue to the last vote. "We have a neighbour to the south
which is relentless in pursuit of its interests as it sees them," said
John Thomson of Magazines Canada. "We have to be equally
relentless." Last week, Dana Gioia, a member of the U.S.
delegation to UNESCO, complained that the convention defines culture in
purely economic terms, and as a national characteristic.
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Celebrity: Some Assembly Required
Excerpt
from The Toronto
Star - Anne Kingston, Special To The Star
(Sep. 25,
2005) It was a stellar week for entertainment news in Canada. So much
to report: Kiefer Sutherland presented an Emmy to William Shatner. A memorial
service was held for Peter Jennings, who's still identified as Canadian in
this country even though he lived in the United States for years and became a
U.S. citizen in 2003. Oakville's J.D. Fortune was named the new lead singer
for INXS, the Australian band revitalized by the reality show Rock  Star:
INXS.
And David Cronenberg's new movie, A History of Violence, had its Los
Angeles premiere. All of which was zealously reported by the Canadian
branch plant of the celebrity-journalism complex, a division that's in
expansion mode. This month, eTalk Daily, which airs on CTV, and Sun
TV's Inside Jam! faced new competition with the arrival of CHUM
Television's Star! Daily and Global's Entertainment Tonight Canada,
an Entertainment Tonight franchise same format, similar graphics and
the same familiar theme song. Produced in Canada, the new show shares footage
and archives with the 25-year-old mother ship but promises a "unique
Canadian spin." Next month, Weekly Scoop, an operating
division of the Toronto Star, joins Canuck confrere Inside
Entertainment on newsstands, offering what its publisher, Kathryn Swan,
refers to as the "editorial pillars of celebrities, style and
entertainment with a Canadian twist." One might rightly ask at
this juncture whether the very notion of "Canadian celebrity" is an
oxymoron. After all, on the planet known as "celebrity," adjectival
qualifications don't exist. Tom Cruise is never referred to as an
"American" celebrity, nor is Penelope Cruz called a
"Spanish" star. Jim Carrey may forever be mentioned as
"Scarborough-born" in Canadian reportage, but he's a child of the
global celebrity village now. The notion of "celebrity" in
Canada has always been a far lower-wattage production, achieved by those who
remain politicians and their scions, national newscasters and authors with
international reputations. Budding actors don't make the cut, until they've
received American benediction at which point it's inevitably too late for
local celebrity anyway. But that hasn't prevented our media from being
swept up in franchised celebrity mania be it on Canadian Idol, an
offshoot of American Idol, now franchised in more than 40 countries
like McDonald's, or on ET Canada.
Though
derivative, the boom in entertainment news also reflects a profound,
long-term shift. It's the extreme one could argue, the purest form of
"post journalism," in which news and current affairs have become as
much the product of public relations and publicity as of journalistic
investigation. In July, the U.S. Audit Bureau of Circulation revealed
magazines devoted to celebrity experienced the largest leaps in circulation
during the past six months: InTouch was up 49.7 per cent, Us Weekly
rose 23.9 per cent and Star's paid circulation rose 20.9 per cent.
Meanwhile, readership of newsweeklies was flat to down. But it remains
to be seen how much celebrity news the Canadian market can sustain. Arguably,
the recent influx of celebrity journalism presumes that there is an even
bigger appetite for such fare north of the border in that we already receive
a steady stream of it from the United States. Purveyors of Canadian
entertainment journalism claim that readers and viewers are driving the
trend. "We have to do a big celebrity story every month because readers
demand it," says Rita Sylvan, editor of Elle Canada. Sheryl Crow
graces this month's cover, but celebrating Canadian talent is part of the
magazine's mandate. Its first issue in March 2001, Sylvan notes, included a
profile of Elisha Cuthbert before she became famous on 24. Ever
heedful of CRTC Canadian-content requirements, producers of
entertainment-news shows say their role is to manufacture "Canadian
celebrity." "Our job is to create stars and market product
made in Canada," says ET Canada executive producer Zev Shalev.
Jordan Schwartz, executive producer of eTalk Daily, echoes the
sentiment. "We're Canadian first. We have to stand up and wave the
flag," he says. "We're always looking for the Canadian story
who's up-and-coming both here and internationally." But is it
possible to be up-and-coming both locally and internationally? The desire
clearly exists to elevate Canada's stature from celebrity farm league. At the
same time, pressure to present more familiar famous faces persists. According
to Swan, there's a void in the market for Canadian English-language celebrity
publications. She says Weekly Scoop's "focus will be on `A'-list
international celebrities." Canadian celebrities will be covered, she
says, provided they have the international acclaim of Mike Myers, Rachel
McAdams or Kiefer Sutherland.
But
the number of Canadian A-listers is limited, which leaves the shows playing
the angles. On ET Canada, celebrity Cancon rears itself in segments
such as "Best-dressed Canadians at the Toronto International Film
Festival" and the testing of viewers' "EQ" with questions such
as "Who was the first Canadian actor to win an Emmy?" (The answer:
Raymond Burr.) The emphasis remains on Canadians who, like Burr,
achieved fame south of the border. America remains "the show," a
point made on an ET Canada promo for an interview with Eugene Levy,
who's starring in a new Hollywood movie with Samuel L. Jackson: "Thanks
to his success in American Pie, Eugene's in the big league now,"
it trilled. What makes the big league "big," of course, is a
market approximately 10 times the size of Canada's. "Celebrity is
born out of frequency of exposure, be it the result of scandal or
talent," notes Michael King, CEO and creative director of Kontent
Publishing, which produces Inside Entertainment. "In the American
market, exposure is so much higher. Someone out of a backwater can become a
celebrity on a reality-TV show. Take the same scenario with Canadian Idol and
no matter how deserving that person might be, they aren't going to be
recognized walking down the street in New York." Thus, all that
these programs can hope to do is to stoke celebrity and celebrity pride
within the Canadian marketplace and pray it radiates south. On ET Canada,
young Canadian actor Melissa Elias, who appears on the Global made-in-Canada
program Falcon Beach, was thrust into the spotlight when she was given
a makeover and filmed attending her first Toronto film festival party. In a
similar vein, eTalk Daily sent rising rhythm-and-blues singer Julie
Black to cover the Emmys.
Both
were shrewd moves. Given that "celebrity" has become a prefix as
in celebrity stylist, celebrity trainer or celebrity photographer mere
proximity to luminaries confers fame. Thus, George Pimentel, acclaimed as
"Toronto's most famous celebrity photographer" in a recent Toronto
Life profile, is now being asked for his autograph. And
entertainment-news presenters like ET's Mary Hart and Ben Mulroney,
who hosts both eTalk Daily and Canadian Idol, themselves are
catapulted to celebrity status. A generation ago, the famous-from-birth
Mulroney might have taken his law degree and entered politics. Today,
covering entertainment news provides a higher public profile. The rise
of entertainment news can be traced to the very structural and economic
shifts that brought the decline in old-school investigative journalism the
growth in PR and the reduction in media resources for news gathering, both in
staff and funds. Increased competition between an ever more concentrated news
media has also reinforced the importance of controlling access to news
stories. This argument is eloquently made by the Australian cultural
critic Graeme Turner in Ending the Affair: The Decline of Television
Current Affairs. Turner, a professor of cultural studies and director of
the Centre for Critical Studies at the University of Queensland, traces the
convergence of entertainment and journalism. "Under the pressure
of marketplace competition, journalism has increasingly opted to define
itself, in effect if not always explicitly, as a form of entertainment rather
than information," he writes, citing assessments that between 70 per
cent and 80 per cent of newspaper content now originates in media releases
from public-relations firms and government agencies. Hence the arrival
of the hybrid known as "infotainment," programming that delivers
information in a way that's considered entertaining, with a focus on celebrity
and human-interest stories. The entertainment-news format, in which the
exclamation point is the preferred punctuation and the tone is relentlessly
upbeat, provides the ideal symbiotic quid pro quo access in return
for promotion. Thus, we see Paris Hilton on the current cover of Vanity
Fair, promoting the new season of her reality show, The Simple Life,
as well as her own promotability. Celebrity journalism, choreographed
as it is by publicists, in turn, provides a glossy, unthreatening,
ad-friendly climate in which the line between advertising and content
virtually vanishes. On one page, Halle Berry advertises mascara for Revlon; a
few pages later, she is photographed at an awards show with a gushing account
of what's she's wearing. Which one is more the advertisement is up for
debate.
The
resulting vertigo can have a narcotic effect, a fact purveyors of celebrity
news acknowledge. Weekly Scoop's Swan refers to celebrity-news
magazines as providing escape, "a break from the busy hectic lives and
stress of their predominantly female audience." Elle Canada's
Sylvan likens celebrity fixation to soma, the pleasure drug in Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World, described as possessing "all the
advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects." The
product is tailored to whet consumer impulse, be it for a movie, a TV show, a
CD or celebrity-anointed jeans. ET Canada recently devoted a segment
to expensive baby gear $1,150 bugaboo strollers, $220 teddy bears and the
like taking the viewer inside a Toronto children's clothing store where
famous mothers like Courtney Cox drop hundreds of dollars. Weekly Scoop,
too, plans to cover style and beauty from "a celebrity
perspective," says Swan, showcasing products available in Canada in a
style section titled "Scoop this Look." Advertising itself
becomes the subject of news coverage, as it did when Entertainment Tonight
reported on Sarah Jessica Parker filming her Gap ad campaign. When the
stakes are high enough, marketing is elevated to art. Consider the commotion
surrounding Nicole Kidman's four-minute commercial for Chanel No. 5, directed
by Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann. Martin Scorsese's moody,
meditative television ad for American Express, which expressed a love for New
York City, received widespread media attention that benefited both Scorsese
and American Express. The corollary, of course, is that non-commercial
art becomes subordinate to those who create it, a fact apparent in the recent
coverage of the Toronto film festival, which focused on celebrity-spotting
rather than cinematic content. Creation of "cultural
product," as witnessed in the assembly-line churning out of new Idols
around the world, also springs from an economic imperative. Specifically, the
trend to downloading music has forced the music industry to recast singers as
"entertainment" stars. It's no longer enough to record music; one
must be able to move between television, music and other cultural venues.
Multimedia
flexibility allows such performers to grease the wheels of convergence at a
time of increasing media-entertainment concentration. Cross-ownership is
rife. To cite two examples, BellGlobe Media owns CTV, home of eTalk Daily and
American Idol, as well as The Globe and Mail newspaper; CanWest
Communications counts among its assets newspapers across the country,
including National Post, which distributes Inside Entertainment,
and Global Television, which airs ET and ET Canada.
Entertainment-news producers avow they can't afford to alienate audiences by
ignoring other networks' programming. But there's little question
infotainment provides a cross-promotional conduit, particularly when access
is exclusive. Last week, eTalk Daily devoted a segment to the
CTV program Corner Gas, noting that Ben Mulroney would appear on a
future episode. Last season, it had an "exclusive" on-set visit
with the CTV-aired West Wing when the show was filmed in Ontario.
Similarly, in its Emmy coverage, ET Canada gave Shatner, the star of
Global's Boston Legal, a lengthy interview in which he mentioned a
time change for the program. That show also broke last week's biggest
Canadian entertainment news that reality-TV guru Mark Burnett is
contemplating a Canadian franchise for his Global-aired Survivor
series. What a coup and what an opportunity to spawn a new slate of
Canadian "celebrities" ready to be consumed by the very machine
that created them. Columnist Anne Kingston is the author of
"The Meaning of Wife."
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As Good As It Gets
Excerpt
from The Globe and Mail - By
Michael Posner
(Oct.
3, 2005) Its official title is Town House,
but in Hollywood they're
already calling Tish Cohen's novel
About a Girl. In Hollywood, of course, everything can be reduced to concept
and pitch -- what's the fewest number of words you can use to describe a
film? Ideally, you should be able to describe it in a way that instantly
connects it to another film already made. Preferably, a successful film. About
a Boy was a Hugh Grant vehicle, based on the Nick Hornby novel of the
same name. It did $127-million (U.S.) at the box office, which is nothing at
which to sneeze. About a Boy is about Will, a thirtysomething
womanizer living in London with too much money (he lives off his late
father's music royalties) and no ambition. A charming cad, if you will. He
meets a single mother with a 12-year-old son, Marcus, who gradually worms his
way into Will's frozen heart. Town House, Torontonian Cohen's first
novel, is about a teenage girl (think Dakota Fanning) who gradually worms her
way into the life and frozen heart of her next-door neighbour, Jack Madigan
(think John Cusack), a thirtysomething Bostonian who is the sole heir of his
late father's rock-music royalties. How hot is that? Well, hot enough that
Fox Studios optioned the book even before Cohen's New York agent, Daniel
Lazar (no relation to the legendary Swifty), had found a publisher. Director
Ridley Scott's company has already been assigned to produce. Then, the option
in hand -- Fox's offer reportedly blew away several competing bids -- Lazar
held a best-bid auction for publishers last Thursday. The winner was Harper
Collins, a division of Rupert Murdoch's Fox empire. The business types would
no doubt call that synergy. No numbers were reported, but Lazar said it was
"a nice amount of money for a first novel."
Cohen
herself said she was "thrilled" by the results. "I'm thrilled
with Harper Collins. They really get the book and want to put effort into
promoting it. And I'm very happy with the number." To be fair, Cohen's
novel is not precisely Hornby's plot transplanted to North America. Her hero,
already divorced and living with Harlan, his teenage son, suffers from an
acute case of agoraphobia. He hasn't left his lovely townhouse in years. The
royalties are in decline, the bank is threatening foreclosure, and his
ex-wife wants custody of the son. Jack's challenge: "Outwit the bank's
adorably determined real-estate agent, win back his house, hold the
neighbours at bay, keep his son at home -- and perhaps find a way, finally,
to simply step outside." Cohen, 40, says the book is about "the
comedic complexities of being human." Flattered to be compared in the
same breath to Nick Hornby, she has managed to do what many people only dream
and talk about: Use her available spare time (she's married with two young
boys and lives in suburban Richmond Hill, north of Toronto) to write a book
that a) would get published and b) might pique the interest of a Hollywood
studio. In an interview this week, she said she had the idea for the book in
her head and wrote the entire first draft in 3½ weeks last January, working
from the moment she dropped her kids off at school in the morning until they
came home, and again in the evenings. When it was done, she sent the
manuscript to various agents, seeking representation. She would have been
content, she said, to have found a Canadian agent, but no one was interested.
But Daniel Lazar, an agent with Writer's House in New York (it also
represents Ken Follett, V. C. Andrews, Nora Roberts and a couple of other
scribes who have sold a few books), thought Cohen's work had merit. He had it
sent both to publishers and scouts -- readers for studio executives. The latter
quickly spotted its movie potential. Town House was not, technically,
her first novel. She had produced an earlier one that she said is still being
worked on.
In
the meantime, she's well embarked on her third, Crossing Newbury,
about a group of people in the art world who move from chaos to clarity. Born
and raised in Toronto and Los Angeles, Cohen is the niece of Paul Sills, an
actor, improv artist and teacher who was part of Chicago's Second City troupe
for many years. (In fact, the company was largely founded by Sills's mother,
Viola Spolin.) Cohen studied business at Ryerson University, but soon found
herself doing contract editing work. "I always loved writing," she
says, "but until about three years ago I did not have the confidence to
attempt it. But when I started to write, I knew immediately that I could do
it. Even if the work was rejected, I still knew this was for me." But
not, it now appears, only for her.
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Homegrown Scoop Targets Celebs In Canada
Excerpt
from The Toronto Star - Antonia
Zerbisias
(Oct. 3,
2005) Just when you were thinking grocery checkouts would collapse under the
weight of Jessica Simpson's boobs, Jessica Alba's butt and Jennifer Aniston's
broken heart, along comes Weekly Scoop
to pour maple syrup over all this celebrity trash. But will it serve up
enough dish about Britney, Bennifer and Brangelina to stick around?
Launching today, the celebrity glossy, published by Torstar which owns the Star,
is the first-ever English-language Canadian glossy celebrity weekly. However,
unlike its long-established hebdo counterparts in Quebec, it will
focus mainly on Hollywood and international stars, rather than local
personalities. Which is good business but bad culture. One reason
Quebec movies and TV shows do better than English-language Cancon is because
there's star-making machinery at play down the 401. Here? Not so
much. Weekly Scoop's Canadian content comes from A-list celeb
sightings in the Great White North where the stars shoot movies, attend film
fests, ski at Whistler, cottage in the Muskokas or Laurentians or just
hang. There's plenty of material, at the end of a summer that saw
Canada finally recover from the SARS crisis that had previously sent
Hollywood North south. Thanks also to the Toronto International Film
Festival, which just wrapped up, Scoop had no trouble filling its
first issue with glitterati captured on the streets of Toronto and
Vancouver. As for Canadian stars, unless they're internationally known
like Rachel McAdams, they don't stand much of a chance.
So
this week there's a story on new Canadian Idol Melissa O'Neil and a
picture of Cheryl Hickey of Global's Entertainment Canada, and pages
on the latest movies from David Cronenberg (A History of Violence) and
Atom Egoyan (Where The Truth Lies). There's not much more. From
the cover, the only way to tell Scoop is Canadian is by the giant
headline about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's current stay in Edmonton. It
teases "Wedding Bells in Alberta? Or is Brad just the babysitter?"
(Okay, if you must know: Brad looks "glum" while Angelina is
partying up a storm. It would appear that Jolie used her kids as
"emotional flypaper" to lure Pitt away from Jennifer Aniston.) An
American magazine would never mention Alberta on its front. The other
tell-tale Canadian sign is the cover price: There's only one. It's an
introductory deal of $1.99, marked down from $3.79, well below U.S.-based Star
or People, which charge $4.79. "The cover is critical: It
has to intrigue them and catch their eye at the checkout," says
publisher Kathryn Swan, whose 20-year career in magazines was most recently
capped at Rogers' MoneySense. The cover is so important because
celeb magazines rely on newsstand sales, not subscriptions. There's a high
ratio of editorial content to ads in all these books. This week's Scoop
has only nine pages of ads. "I would say we're pretty much on
target," Swan says. The rest of the debut issue is composed of 91
pages of celebrity style, gossip and partying, with pointers to where stars
wine, dine, shop and stay while here. If readers want to "scoop their
look" the fashion pages reveal where the products are available north of
the border. As a magazine junkie frustrated by not being able to find
the goods in Toronto 'hoods, I have to welcome that. "It builds a
closer connection with the readers," says Swan, adding that research
shows 88 per cent of us would opt for a Canadian magazine over a U.S.
offering, if given the choice. Which is why Swan is confident that Scoop
can scoop out a place in the crowded celeb mag market, the fastest growing
segment in the trade. That while sales of newsweeklies, business periodicals
and men's mags have flattened out or dropped. "There has been a 15
per cent year over year increase in (celebrity magazine) sales," says
Swan.
According
to U.S. Audit Bureau of Circulations figures for the first half of 2005, Time
Inc.'s long established People was up 1.3 per cent to 3.8 million,
with 183,000 selling in Canada. Bauer Publishing's three year-old In Touch
grew 49.7 per cent to 1.12 million, with some 99,000 reaching Canadians.
Wenner Media's Us Weekly's total numbers rose 23.9 per cent to 1.67
million, while enjoying a circulation of 74,000 in Canada. Meanwhile American
Media Inc.'s racier Star saw total circulation jump 20.9 per cent to
1.42 million, with 120,000 of those selling here. Those numbers don't
count the very high "pass-along'' rate that these mags enjoy, as any
trip to the health club or hairstylist will reveal. The market is so
juicy that even England's OK! magazine jumped in last month to squeeze
out some of the action, with publisher Richard Desmond boasting that he'll
kill the competition. (Word is, he's committing suicide with his overly
genteel material.) Swan, for her part, has an initial print run of
100,000, and a circulation target of 65,000, which may not be all that
ambitious considering she's landed more than 13,000 "pockets'' where
magazines essentially rent prime checkout display. That means retailers
think it's going to move. As for Scoop's target audience, it's a
demographic of heavy celeb mag readers, mostly women aged 18-49. That older
group would explain Scoop's relatively polite tone, not as bitchy as
other mags in its category. Now the question is, can Scoop stand
out among all the other stalkerazzi rags? Swan says she has a million dollar
ad campaign in the works to raise awareness of Weekly Scoop.
She's going to need it. Late last week I lined it up alongside People,
Star, In Touch, Us, OK!, the National Enquirer
and even the newly redesigned celeb-oriented TV Guide, now dubbed Inside
TV, and it was virtually indistinguishable, except perhaps for the curl
in Jolie's pillowy lips. That's both bad and good. Bad because
it has to differentiate itself in order to build an audience in a market
where the U.S. competition is essentially dumped after recouping its costs in
its home market. Good because, although Weekly Scoop doesn't
have the economic edge of the dumped competition, it's still the same kind of
celebrity trash. For more Zerbisias go to http://www.thestar.blogs.com
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The Outrages Fester Inside The Jester
Excerpt
from The Toronto
Star - Malene Arpe
(Oct. 2,
2005) The voice of reason is tempered. Comedian Bill Maher doesn't hector. He calmly
explains that, "George Bush won the election based on stopping boys from
kissing." Then the conversation gets around to religion.
When asked what he thinks about the London Tate Museum's recent decision to
remove John Latham's creation "God is Great" for fear it might
offend Muslims, the comedian offers that it may be a good idea because,
"we know how they get when they're upset." But it's not a cheap
punch line; it's merely a way into one of his favourite subjects.
"It reminds me of the story earlier this year when people did die in
Pakistan because somebody had flushed the Koran down the toilet and we had a
giant brouhaha in America about it, and some people were blaming Newsweek magazine
and Newsweek went all mea culpa about it, and others were blaming
whoever flushed the Koran down the toilet," he says. "And I
said, you're all crazy! The elephant in the room is religion. The idea that
people would die because a book got wet. It's a book! It got wet! That's not
reason to kill people; that's what we have to get to or the world is not
going to progress from being run by superstition and silly thinking. But, of
course, who's listening to me ..." Some of us would like to
listen, but unfortunately Maher's new show Real Time with Bill Maher is
not available here. Sharper and funnier than now-dead Politically
Incorrect, the weekly show has not been picked up in HBO-less Canada.
However, transcripts are available at http://www.billmaher.com
and Maher himself could come to Toronto's Four Seasons Hotel to promote the
(read-in-less-than-two-hours) book New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid
Observer. It contains his no-holds-barred thoughts on and rules for
everything from strippers (whom he likes) through George Bush (whom he
doesn't like) to Brazilian waxes (nope) and gay marriage (yep).
"New
Rules" is a popular segment on the show and translates perfectly to
subway/bathroom reading material. The book's new rule about hurricanes? Name
them something scary, like "Ludacris," and people will get out of
the way. The book was written before the recent calamities, so what about
Katrina? "Katrina? Katrina is a stripper name. They may as well
have named it Jade or Onyx." It's this kind of unsentimental
observation that makes Maher who's sitting down for an interview at the
Four Seasons before jetting back to L.A. after a stand-up gig in Hamilton a
reliable BS detector. Hot topic of the week? British model Kate Moss
and her blow habit: "You're firing a supermodel for doing cocaine
at a party? I thought that's what a supermodel's job was ... I've never been
a fan of cocaine. All it seems to make you do is want more cocaine. If you
want to be edgy and nervous, go to work. But I'm also very libertarian about
it and I think all drugs should be legal." On a recent show, Maher
tackled topics ranging from Supreme Court nominee John Roberts whom Maher
is sure is gay because an old photo shows him posing rather flamboyantly with
a platter of food, to the morning-after pill and trying (in vain) to get
conservative guest P.J. O'Rourke to come out and say whether he's for or
against it. But, it's not all serious subjects given a comedic spin; it's
also just weird observations. On the "New Rules" segment,
Maher had this to say about fortune cookies: "New Rule: The
fortunes in fortune cookies have to be fortunes. `You surround yourself with
good friends' is not a prediction. It's a compliment. Quit kissing my ass,
cookie! If I'm going to sit through a plate of MSG-laden, twice-cooked
kitty-cat I want a real fortune like, `That meal you just ate is going to
give you cancer.'" Why are fortune cookies, mostly so, um,
unfortunate, I ask.
"My
theory about that is we live in the most litigious society ever; perhaps
somebody sued. I know it sounds ridiculous, but maybe somebody sued because a
fortune cookie said `it's a good day to invest in stocks.' I mean if you can
sue McDonald's for the burning coffee ..." But back to God and the
folly of man. "We live in very troubled times and we need to think
our way out of them; we cannot `faith' our way out of them. In America we
hear nothing but `faith.' Every politician has faith, `I'm a person of
faith,' `we are people of faith.' They say it like everyone else should just
back off and admire it. Faith to me means the suspension of rational
thinking. This is not a virtue. "I do what I can. I scream and
yell about religion and how silly it is, but I don't think I've ever changed
anybody's mind about it. But there are more irreligious people than ever. In
America we always hear about the fact that it's becoming more theocratic, and
that certainly is true. "What is less widely reported is that
between the 1990 census and most recent census the number of people who
describe themselves as having no religion doubled, from 7 per cent to 14 per
cent. That I would describe as gospel. Because gospel means good news."
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OTHER TIDBITS
New California Law Targets Paparazzi
Excerpt
from The Toronto Star
(Oct. 2,
2005) SACRAMENTO, California (AP) Paparazzi
who commit assault in their pursuit of celebrity photographs could be hit
with hefty civil penalties in California under a new law. The law would
allow people who are victims of paparazzi assaults to file lawsuits seeking
up to three times the damages they suffered. The plaintiffs could also ask
for punitive damages and a court order requiring the photographer to give up
any income earned from the pictures involved. Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger signed the bill Friday. It goes into effect Jan. 1.
Several celebrities have been involved in accidents while being pursued by
photographers. In May, actress Lindsay Lohan received cuts and bruises after
a photographer rammed his van into her car. The photographer faces charges of
assault with a deadly weapon. "This bill hits the paparazzi where
it hurts: the wallet," said assemblywoman Cindy Montanez who proposed
the measure. "Money is their motivation, so taking away their
money will be the solution." She said the bill would protect
Hollywood stars as well as bystanders who might be injured in chases
involving paparazzi. Actress Scarlett Johansson had a minor crash in
August while being followed by paparazzi, and Reese Witherspoon said she was
chased by photographers who she believed were trying to force her from the
road in April. No charges or injuries resulted from either case.
Schwarzenegger was involved in an incident in 1998 involving paparazzi who
used their cars to surround the then-actor's vehicle as he and his wife
picked up their child from school.
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::SPORTS NEWS::
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Garnett Goes High Tech
Excerpt
from www.eurweb.com
(Oct.
4, 2005) *Minnesota Timberwolves forward Kevin
Garnett has
announced the official opening of the first Kevin Garnett 4XL Tech Center at
Washburn High, a Minneapolis public school serving 1,300 students. A
partnership with Best Buy, local nonprofit Achieve!Minneapolis and the NBA,
the state-of-the-art learning center is stocked with state-of the-art
computers with high-speed Internet access and leading-edge software. Students
using the center will join Garnett's Web-based 4XL program, which provides
high school and college students with career-relevant skills and guidance to
augment the traditional classroom setting. "The 4XL program provides the
online roadmap that all kids need to achieve their goals," Garnett said.
"It is critical that we give them the best technology to help create a
top-quality learning environment in their schools." 4XL delivers its
skills development and career guidance curriculum to students via personalized
e-mail; gives students access to online mentors, scholarship and internship
opportunities, and college search tools all provided by online job search
company Monster; and offers business immersions that exposes students to
professional environments. Best Buy will provide ongoing technical support
for the center through its Geek Squad service. Achieve Minneapolis will
provide college and career counsellors for Washburn students using the
center.
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::FITNESS::
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7 Simple Steps To Weight Loss
(Oct.
3, 2005) Weight loss, or more specifically, weight management, demands a
multi-faceted approach. From eating only at scheduled times (versus
overeating when stressed) to using a favourite treat as an incentive, latest
research suggests losing weight can sometimes be more psychological than
physical.
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::MOTIVATION::
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Motivational Note: Expectancy
In
order to be a success, you need to cultivate a positive mental attitude.
Every day you need to develop a positive outlook and a positive expectancy .A
positive outlook is to look for the good situations rather than the bad.
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