Langfield
Entertainment
88
Bloor Street E., Suite 2908, Toronto, ON
M4W 3G9
(416)
677-5883
langfieldent@rogers.com
www.langfieldentertainment.com
NEWSLETTER
Updated: August 10, 2006
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::HOT EVENTS::
Debut and Toronto Coach Sam Mitchell Presents the Karnival
Komedy Xplosion
Source: Debut Sports & Entertainment
LAUGH HARD! Join one of Canada’s fastest
rising urban comics, Jay Martin as he hosts the Karnival Komedy Xplosion. Presented by Debut Sports & Entertainment, the
show will feature Don DC Curry and Earthquake. DC Curry is best known for his memorable portrayal of
“Uncle Elroy” in the hits Next Friday and Friday after Next and
his reign as BET’s comedian of the year. Earthquake attracted fans
during his time on the Def Comedy Jam Circuit and BET’s Comic View.
Special guest hosts include Caribbean comedians Marc
Trinidad and Jean Paul. There will be two chances to catch this comedy extravaganza,
with shows on Friday, August 4 and Sunday, August 6, 2006.
Be sure to catch special performances by Juno award winning hip hop artist Choclair and the hot new Canadian
R&B artist Karl Wolf!
Choclair and Karl Wolf will perform Wolf’s hit that is currently burning up the
airwaves, “Desensitize,” and will also debut Choclair’s new single featuring
Karl Wolf, “Weekend.” Look out for Choclair’s much anticipated album,
“Flagship”, hitting stores this fall and be
sure to pick up Karl Wolf’s debut release “Face Behind The Face.”
FRIDAY, AUGUST 4 & SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 2006
DEBUT SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT PRESENTS KARNIVAL KOMEDY XPLOSION
*Featuring performances by Choclair & Karl Wolf*
**TWO PERFORMANCES**
Toronto Centre for the Performing Arts
5040 Yonge Street, Toronto
Friday, August 4, 2006
8:00 p.m.
Sunday, August 6, 2006
2:00 p.m.
Toronto Centre for the Performing Arts
5040 Yonge Street
Friday, August 4-, 2006 - 8:00 p.m.
Sunday, August 6, 2006- 2:00 p.m.
For event information please visit www.debutsports.com
Or call Kirk Brooks at (416) 213-0123 ext 555
To purchase tickets, please visit www.tocentre.com or
www.ticketmaster.ca
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::ISLAND
SOUL - AUGUST 4 - 7, 2006::
For the
full schedule, please click the logo above! All Island Soul events will
be held at 235 Queens Quay West, 416-973-4000.
Check out Island Soul at Harbourfront Centre!! Perhaps you’d like an alternative to the other Caribana
festivities and I can’t think of a better place! Now, look carefully as
there are some of our favourite people here including performances by legends Mighty Sparrow and Roy Cape as well as Blessed, Big Black Lincoln, Ibadan and
also food by Carl Cassell from Irie Food Joint. Not an
all inclusive list but only an indication of all the jammin’ going down at
Harbourfront Centre! Sample the Caribbean's finest artistic, cultural and
culinary offerings! Watch fire dancers, savour the flavour of roti and jerk at
cooking demos, then work it off to the island rhythms of reggae, soca, calypso
and at RastaFest! Island Soul features highlights from African Caribbean, Latin
Caribbean, French Caribbean, Chinese Caribbean and Rasta cultures...
::MUSIC::
Black Market
Harbourfront Centre Concert Stage
Friday August 4, 8pm
Led by master percussionist Robelcys Martinez, celebrated Cuban
timba band Black Market delivers high-energy Cuban dance music incorporating
classical, nueva trova, latin jazz, funk and soul music styles.
The Mighty Sparrow
Harbourfront Centre Concert Stage
Friday August 4, 9:30pm
This legendary Calypsonian has over 70 albums to his
credit. Able to sing any type of song - opera, pop, jazz, gospel and ballads in
several languages - he’s an 11 time Calypso Monarch and has won the King of
Kings Competition in Trinidad.
Blessed with special guest Lindo P
Harbourfront Centre Concert Stage
Saturday August 5, 8pm
In 2002, Blessed won a Juno for his break-out hit "Love
(African Woman)" and has become Canada's hottest reggae artist,
winning award after award including a second Juno in 2006. Past performances
include gigs with Kardinal Offishall, Lauryn Hill, Gregory Isaacs and Sizzla.
Lindo P is Toronto's "buzz"
artist to watch. Currently a member of the Black Jays, a group of top Toronto
urban artists led by Kardinal Offishall, he's also been a part of notable
reggae sound crews like Lone Star, Red Flame and Heat Wave, and has played with
world renowned DJ group Stone Love.
Tony Rebel
Harbourfront Centre Concert Stage
Saturday August 5, 9:30pm
A talented Rastafarianmusician and producer who didn't just smash the charts in
Jamaica, New York, Canada and Miami with his hits Fresh Vegetable & If
Jah (Is Standing by my Side), and his collaboration with Swade, but also
founded Rebel Salute, one of the most popular music festivals in Jamaica!
Aba Shaka and The Ark of The Covenant Sound with Superheavy
Reggae
Brigantine Room
Saturday August 5, 11pm
This one’s for the crate diggers! UK bred, Atlanta-based Imhotep aka Aba
Shaka is known as the “Keeper of the Ark” for his unmatched collection
of rare 1970s music and his selection, delivery and mastery on the turntables.
Alongside him the Superheavy Reggae Crew selectors unite fans of modern roots
and old time reggae with horn improvisations courtesy of I-sax.
Mika
Harbourfront Centre Concert Stage
Sunday August 6, 2pm
A leading figure in the contemporary Haitian Creole
movement and compas scene, his music blends influences ranging from Dominican
meringue to Trinidadian calypso and American jazz and swing. Now Magazine
describes his music as “the pop patois crossover joint Paul Simon would have
loved to make.”
St. James Town Youth Steel Orchestra
Pan Workshop
Brigantine Room
Sunday August 6, 4:30pm
The talented youths from the St. James Town Youth Steel Orchestra
teach you how to play the steel pan in this 30 minute one-on-one session. A
rare opportunity to try your hand at this amazing instrument!
Limited to 20 participants.
St. James Town Youth Steel Orchestra
Ann Tindal Lawn
Sunday August 6, 3pm
This steel band, composed of dedicated youths who practice
regularly in an after-school program, is a Caribana regular and a favourite at
festivals around Toronto.
Afropan
Harbourfront Centre Concert Stage
Sunday August 6, 3:30pm
Known as the "People's Band", Afropan Steelband is
Toronto's oldest and most successful community steelband. Led by Earl La Pierre,
these amazing musicians are Caribana's perennial "Best Steelband"
champions!
Pan Fantasy
Ann Tindal Lawn
Sunday August 6, 5:30pm
Formed in 1986 as part of a North York non-profit organization,
over the past 20 years the band has grown from an intimate group of players to
a collective of vibrant and versatile musicians who took 1st place in the 2005 Pan
Alive competition.
Big Black Lincoln
Harbourfront Centre Concert Stage
Sunday August 6, 8pm
::TOP
STORIES::
Alicia Keys To Headline Aids Benefit:
Concert In Canada
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(July 25, 2006) *In August, Alicia
Keys heads north of the border to
headline a star-studded benefit concert in support of HIV/AIDS prevention.
The “Unbreakable” singer/songwriter, already a staunch advocate of
efforts to combat AIDS in Africa, will perform Aug. 13 during opening
ceremonies for the International AIDS Conference in Toronto.
The program will begin at 7 p.m. at the Rogers Centre stage and
will end with a keynote address by Bill and Melinda Gates, whose charitable
foundation supports a variety of HIV/AIDS programs. Former president Bill
Clinton will also be on hand during the Aug. 13-18 conference, as well as Crown
Princess Mette-Marit of Norway, who is a UNAIDS special representative.
"These two events in one evening at the Rogers Centre — the
opening with the concert — promise to make this a memorable evening that will
bring even greater attention to the AIDS issue here in Canada and around the
world," said Andrew Pringle, board president for the Canadian Foundation
for AIDS Research (CANFAR), one of the organizations hosting the concert to
raise awareness and funds to fight HIV/AIDS. In addition to the
25,000 opening ceremony and concert tickets earmarked for conference delegates,
20,000 more will be sold to the public. Proceeds will go toward several
AIDS-related groups. Other acts on the bill include actor Richard
Gere, Blue Man Group and homegrown acts the Barenaked Ladies, Our Lady Peace,
Amanda Marshall and Chantal Kreviazuk.
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Alicia Keys, Richard Gere, Barenaked Ladies Among For AIDS
Conference In Toronto
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Vit Wagner, Pop Music Critic
(Jul. 24, 2006) An appearance by movie star Richard Gere and a concert
featuring R&B singer Alicia Keys, the Barenaked Ladies and others will be
part of the opening ceremonies for next month's International AIDS Conference in Toronto. The line-up for the Aug. 13 Time to Deliver
kick-off at the Rogers Centre, to be announced today, also includes visiting
acts, including Zimbabwean singer Thomas Mapfumo and DJ Tiësto of the
Netherlands, as well as performances by Blue Man Group and Canadian musical
artists Our Lady Peace, Chantal Kreviazuk, Amanda Marshall, Massari and the Red
Spirit Singers and Dancers. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton, who is also
attending the conference, will not participate in the opening ceremonies.
The list of guests also includes actors Sandra Oh and Olympia Dukakis.
"I am so looking forward to coming to Toronto to be with like-minded
warriors in the struggle against AIDS," said Keys. "It's quite
an honour to be asked to speak among such luminaries as (former) president Bill
Clinton and Bill Gates, and feel the power of so many committed people coming
together to yell at the top of our voices, Time to Deliver."
Keys performed at the 2004 Urban AIDS concert in Toronto. At that time, the New
York singer had just returned from a trip that involved visiting children in
Africa with AIDS. "I know the numbers. I know the tragedies. I've
seen it. It's changed my life completely," she said then. In
addition to the 25,000 tickets given to conference delegates, an additional
20,000 will be made available to the general public for the benefit
concert. Tickets, ranging in price from $35 to $150, are available at
Ticketmaster, 416-870-8000. The two-part program will begin at 7 p.m.
with remarks by Gere, Governor General Michaëlle Jean, Toronto Mayor David
Miller, UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot and Frika Chia Iskandar, an
Indonesian woman living with HIV/AIDS. It will conclude with a keynote
address by Bill and Melinda Gates, followed by a performance by Canadian opera
star Measha Brueggergosman and musicians from the Toronto Symphony
Orchestra. The concert is slated to begin at 9 p.m. Proceeds from ticket
sales will go toward the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research, the Nelson
Mandela Children's Fund Canada, the AIDS Committee of Toronto's Community
Partners Fund and the next International AIDS Conference, slated for 2008 in
Mexico City. The Toronto conference runs until Aug. 18.
ole and IB Entertainment sign Urban Co-Venture Agreement
Source: IB Entertainment
(July 21, 2006) TORONTO: ole and Ivan Berry, Chairman & CEO of IB Entertainment have entered into a
Co-venture where the two companies will partner to acquire urban song
catalogues and develop urban song writers. This is an evolution of the role
that Ivan Berry has played within ole for the past year and a half as ole’s
Senior Partner International. According to ole Managing Partner Robert
Ott, “Ivan has a fantastic reputation and network of relationships in the urban
music scene and beyond. We look forward to expanding our reach and presence in
urban music and we couldn’t ask for a better or more respected partner in this
endeavour.” The 3 year agreement will provide IB Entertainment with
the administrative and creative support of ole as well as a financial
investment in the writers that are signed to the co-venture. “This is an
opportunity where the time is just perfect for me to move into our new
relationship.” Ivan adds, “I’ve known Tim Laing and Robert Ott since the very
beginning of ole. It’s great working with a company that wants to win and that
has the size, speed and resources to make things happen. For me this is an
opportunity to devote full time to artist development with the support of ole.”
about IB Entertainment
Entrepreneur, artist manager, record label owner, talent development executive
and publisher Ivan Berry is a model of consistency and success in the music
business. The artists under his tutelage have sold millions of
records worldwide, and have collected numerous JUNO awards (Canada’s Grammy
equivalent), SOCAN Awards, MuchMusic Video Awards, Canadian Urban Music Awards
and certified Gold & Platinum plaques. Berry launched BeatFactory in
1982 and over the years provided a launching ground for many of urban music’s
most successful artists, executives, major label representatives and managers.
BeatFactory’s RapEssentials and GroovEssentials compilations set
the example for collaborative efforts in Canada’s urban music industry.
As Head of A&R and International for Sony BMG Canada from 2000-2004, Berry
was responsible for the development, recording and international marketing of
the label’s domestic roster, including artists such as Keshia Chanté, Wyclef,
Shawn Desman, Sloan, Rascalz, Treble Charger, In Essence, The Guess Who and
many more. Throughout his career Berry has signed more Hip-Hop and
R&B artists to record and publishing deals and has been responsible for
more international releases and worldwide record sales for Canadian Hip-Hop and
R&B artists than any other Canadian artist manager.
Berry has taught at well-respected post-secondary music institutions including
Harris Institute of the Arts and Durham College, and is in high-demand as a
guest speaker at various corporate/government events and industry conferences
around the world. Up until this point, Berry was Senior Partner
International of Ole, a Canadian-owned full-service music publishing company
based in Toronto, where he was aggressively acquiring publishing titles from
across the world. Currently, as Chairman & CEO of iB Entertainment,
Berry will continue to manage and develop the careers of Keshia Chante) Sony
BMG Canada / Epic USA), Rupert Gayle (BMG Publishing), Alonzo and others. He
will also be focusing on the acquisition of Urban song catalogues and the
development of Urban songwriters, through his new Co-Venture with ole.
This recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Urban
Music Association of Canada (2000) is truly an industry visionary, and lives by
his favourite mantra: “To take advantage of an opportunity, you must first
recognize it.” Ivan Berry can be contacted at ivan@ibentertainment.ca
about ole
ole is a multi-national, Canadian owned, full-service music
publisher founded by Robert Ott (former VP/GM BMGMP Canada) and Tim Laing
(former radio and TV producer and finance executive). ole boasts an experienced
team of some 18 industry professionals involved in acquisitions, creative
development and administration worldwide. The ole catalogue
includes over twenty thousand songs across all genres ranging from pop, to
country, to urban to rhythm & blues and soul. ole has completed some $23MM
USD in new acquisitions over the past year including purchases of the, Balmur,
Encore, Keith Follese, Dream Warriors, Frank Myers and David Tyson catalogs.
Recent cuts include the lead-off single "Shoes" by Shania
Twain from Music Inspired by Desperate Housewives, Jaheim’s ‘Daddy Thing’, Sean
Paul’s “Change the Game," "He Ain’t Even Cold Yet" by Gretchen
Wilson and Ronnie Milsap's "My Life." ole has concluded
worldwide publishing administration agreements with film and television
producers Nelvana, The National Film Board of Canada, Shaftesbury Films,
Arcadia Entertainment, Devine Entertainment, Lenz Entertainment, CCI, Breakthrough
Films, Amberwood Entertainment, Slanted Wheel and Mona Lisa and Suman out of
Europe.
ole also recently signed its first administration deal with Sound Of Pop, a
Toronto-based music publishing company, label and management firm whose clients
include Cadence Grace, London Apartments and J.C. Smith. ole is the
Canadian administrator for the prestigious Arc Music Group, a catalogue that
includes songs by Jerry Butler, Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley and
Otis Rush. The company has signed songwriters Gerald O'Brien, John
Wesley Chisholm, Ben Dunk, James Huff, Willie Mack, Scarlett and Derek Brin and
struck a co-venture deal with Last Gang Publishing -- a division of Last Gang
Entertainment -- bringing West Coast rockers Panurge, Murray Yates of Forty Foot
Echo and Kinnie Starr to the roster as well as Steven Dall. ole recently
announced another co-venture with Roots Three Music, which includes songwriters
Bruce Wallace, Chris Thornsteinson, Dave Wasyliw (of Doc Walker), Denny Carr
(The Road Hammers and Doc Walker). At ole the goal is to be the home for
the best songwriters, composers, management talent and intellectual property
investors and the first choice music source for creators in all media. The ole
website can be found at www.majorlyindie.com
T.S. Monk: Doing His Father Proud
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com - By DeBorah
B. Pryor
(July 24, 2006) *An interview with T. S. Monk is a journalists’ dream. No
likeness to pulling teeth here. This celebrity is not afraid to speak beyond
the realm of his latest project. He’s not overly cautious about stating his
opinion and being an old school-type-a cat, he actually appreciates being
“documented.” “I’m a guy that likes to talk a lot. I like to sing you a
song. I like to play like Art Blakey. I like to funk you like Bootsy Collins. I
like to do all those kinds of things.” In fact, this son of iconic composer and
pianist Thelonious Monk has but one small request: Please don’t call him “Mr.
Monk.” “When people just say ‘Mr. Monk’ I think of my father because he laid
down so much good karma for me. I’ve been treated so beautifully and
respectfully by people all over the world simply because of who he is that I
have to acquiesce: ‘That’s Mr. Monk’…Sometimes [this] takes people
aback...because the cat, Thelonious, was just so together on so many levels…the
good karma he left behind for me is absolutely priceless. It has followed me
every single day of my life; no matter where I’ve been in the world.” Now, with
his entrepreneurial eye resting on a unique collaboration with the alcohol
industry via its new beer brand, “Brother Thelonious” -- his ongoing duties as
the Chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute and a new CD on the way, the LAST
thing T. S. Monk wants to do is shut up. “I’m NEW school, old school.
You’ve got a lot of cats that cry the blues that they’re not documented; but when
you want to document them they ain’t got no time. It’s sort of silly. I grew up
under a generation of guys that didn’t get documented so I think it’s important
for us to talk as much as we can, particularly now, when the information is
moving into new mediums…if we don’t ensure that it gets there, it won’t get
there, and we know the results of what that can be.” As the direct descendant
and musical heir of “Mr. Monk,” TS (short for Thelonious Sphere) has been
involved in all aspects of his late father’s legacy since his passing in 1982.
He, along with the Monk family, and opera singer Maria Fisher established the
non-profit education organization “The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz” in
1986 with a mission to “offer the world’s most promising young musicians
college-level training by America’s jazz masters and present public
school-based education programs for youth around the world.”
The Institute, which encourages youth to use their imagination and [to] respect
cultural heritage, is located at the University of Southern California. This
performance-based program plans to become a model for the world of education;
offering a two-year, tuition free program that provides room, board and
stipends to gifted youth. TS Monk holds the position of Chairman for the
Institute, while jazz impresario Terence Blanchard serves as the program’s
Artistic Director. Now, in an unprecedented and to some, long
overdue move, the alcohol industry gives back to music via “Brother Thelonious”
– a beer brand that will be sold at major jazz clubs all over the world. The
ale, which bears as its logo a photo of Thelonious Monk, will donate $2 from
each case of beer to the Thelonious Monk Institute; an act that gives T. S. --
and no doubt many musicians -- a sense of sweet vindication. “I immediately
said to myself, hmmm, a piece of the bar, how interesting,” notes TS, who,
incidentally, is not a beer drinker but appreciates that the 'inside joke'
between musicians and club owners is a well-known one. “As a musician we
all know that when you work in clubs, you never get a piece of the bar. The bar
is a separate entity and we know one bottle of Johnny Walker Red turns into
sixteen drinks at five dollars-a-pop and the club owner will sell all sixteen
of those drinks and tell you that only four people came in to drink those
drinks and you get part of the door…so I thought, from my convoluted historical
perspective, [this is] very apropos.” He continues in all seriousness, “The
relationship between the alcohol industry and jazz has always been very, very
close since the very beginning. And I think that jazz has not benefited from
that relationship in as much as the alcohol industry has…But overall, I think
that the revenue that is billed nightly at alcohol and jazz clubs is… wonderful
if some of that revenue can be redirected towards jazz education; towards the
very artists that make it possible for [it] to be generated…I think my father
would approve of it. I think my mom would approve of it; and I think the jazz
community at large approves of it because...if I’m not mistaken, this is the
very first time an African American man has been the logo of a beer. So there’s
a historic component to it too.”
TS hopes that the age-appropriate hip-hop generation will take a liking to
“Brother Thelonious” too! “…You know Thelonious is synonymous with cool…and we
have a young generation that is continuously looking to be as cool as they
possibly can. I think that’s one of the reasons many of your hip hop artists
are so enamoured with the likes of Monk, Coltrane, Miles Davis…so this might
fit right in there…The important thing…as much as forty-percent is going to the
Monk Institute and…that’s a very, very different dynamic. I think that’s also
the dynamic that will play into people giving it a chance.” In the next
instalment read how T. S. Monk fought back against music piracy; his thoughts
on the P. Diddy’s of the world sampling his music and the elation he felt in
light of his father’s Pulitzer prize.
As a journalist the work of DeBorah B. Pryor continues to reach national and
international audiences. She has interviewed some of the entertainment
industry’s most prominent people and has traveled extensively throughout the
world. She presides over The Art of Communication: Public speaking for private
people, a 2-hour-workshop teaching self-empowerment in the workplace. She is a
freelance speechwriter and copy editor. For information on the upcoming Los
Angeles workshop or to schedule a private consultation, Ms. Pryor can be
reached at 818.247.2812 or via email at DeBorah@Dpryorpresents.com.
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Ryerson Grad's Short Trip To TIFF
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Bruce
Demara, Entertainment Reporter
(Jul. 21, 2006) Making a film about teen suicide may have saved Adam
Garnet Jones's life. At 14, the first video he
produced in near-primitive conditions gave him a voice and a sense of being
heard for this first time in his life. Ten years later, the recent
graduate from Ryerson University's film studies program has had his first
submission to the Toronto International Film Festival chosen to debut in the
Short Cuts Canada program. Only 38 films were selected among almost 600 across
the country. "I was a suicidal kid until I was 15," said Garnet
Jones, who was raised by a single aboriginal father and struggled with
accepting his sexual orientation. "But ironically enough, that (teen
suicide video) is what really turned everything around me in a lot of ways. I
made a lot of decisions about how I wanted to live my life and what I wanted to
do and one of those was making films for the reason that it was so fulfilling,"
he said. "I don't know that I was saying very much when I was that
old. But it was still more important than anything I had done up to that
time," he added. The 15-minute short film, Cloudbreaker,
about a lonely native 10-year-old boy (played by Patrick Vautour) who studies
ancient traditions in search of magic as a way to unleash his own inner power,
is strongly autobiographical. "Oh yeah, it's all about me," he
said, with mock braggadocio. "At that point in my life, I was all
conflict and it was a really hard film to write. It was about me and trying to
get to that place of being 10 years old and feeling really powerless. ... and
why I was feeling that way," Garnet Jones said. The magic ceremony
the boy conjures, using a variety of traditions — including his own — leads to
a vision where he is transformed into a wolf who is able to move the clouds.
Ben Murray, senior co-ordinator for Canadian programming for the festival, said
the film stood out for presenting a strong story and well-fleshed-out
characters combined with "a nice spirituality." "We're
looking for films that are strong on their own terms. Whether it's a $200,000
short produced with all kinds of grants ... or a low-fi digital piece that's
been done for 100 bucks, it's really the strength of the story," Murray
said. "Even though it's especially a native story, there's something
universal in this child's search for spirituality and his quest to connect to
that," he added. For his part, Garnet Jones said he's still reeling
after his producer Sarah Kolasky called to give him the good news.
"It's just been really alarming. A lot of me doesn't really know what this
means yet. But it's just a bigger stamp of success and acceptance than I've
ever had before. So we'll see what the future holds," Garnet Jones
said. As well as pursuing other opportunities in filmmaking, he is
determined to apply his skills in a social activist way. Earlier this
year, he oversaw a queer youth video project as part of the Inside Out Toronto
Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival. This summer, he is working with
aboriginal youth, another disenfranchised group, in the same medium.
"Queer youth and native youth in Canada have the highest suicide rates of
anyone and that's not an accident, that's not a coincidence," Garnet Jones
said. "(For them), the most important thing is the feeling that you're
being listened to.
::MUSIC NEWS::
Listen
And Learn At Beaches Jazz
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Ashante
Infantry, Entertainment Reporter
(Jul. 21, 2006) With the entertainment component well in hand, organizers
of the 18th annual Beaches International Jazz
Festival have expanded
the educational arm of the popular event. The free 10-day festival, which
features a primarily Canadian line-up and typically attracts 700,000 attendees,
is anchored by music-laden weekends along Queen St. E. in the Beach as well as
in the Distillery District (which is hosting PartiGras this weekend. On
weeknights, jazz enthusiasts can take advantage of the festival's largely free
workshops that have doubled in number since first being offered in 2004.
Some of the eight seminars, such as "Get That First Gig" and
"Jazz Composition for Small Ensemble," may seem more suited to
performers and composers, but that's not necessarily the case, said Bill King,
the festival's musical director. "You don't have to be a musician to
have a love for it, and want to sit and listen and see what they go
through," said King, adding people needn't be shy about asking
questions. "At the composition workshop, you just need the ability
to put ideas down. On the third day they will perform your piece; it doesn't
have to be anything sophisticated.''
The success of the workshop series is tied to the availability in Toronto of
experts — "the best of the best" — to run the lectures, added
King. Percussionist Rosendo "Chendy" Leon is leading the
workshop "Traditional Cuban Rhythms," which will showcase congas,
bongos and timbales while exploring the history of Cuban music and its forms,
such as son, bolero and mambo. Leon, 33, began playing drums at age 4. He
has worked with Jane Bunnett and Hilario Duran and taught at Humber College
since defecting from Cuba seven years ago. "The time signature and
instrumentation is different in Cuban music," he explained. "And it's
very syncopated while American jazz (is defined by) its swing."
Drummer Don Vickery, who has doubled as an official photographer at the Toronto
Jazz Festival since its inception, will co-lead the workshop "The Jazz
Camera's Eye." Participants will get access passes to photograph musicians
on stage at PartiGras and have their pictures critiqued afterwards.
"The challenge is trying to capture their energy," said Vickery, 68,
a Humber College music instructor who has kept time for such jazz greats as
Ralph Sutton and Jay McShann. "If you know music it's a bit easier,
because you know where they're going." Rule No. 1 is "never use
flash," said Vickery, who has shot greats such as Dizzy Gillespie and
Miles Davis. "It's really upsetting — best to work with the natural
light." A "traditionalist" who prefers to shoot on film
and in black and white, Vickery said he hopes to attract "people who love
jazz and are interested in shooting" to the digital workshop. The
three-session photography seminar costs $40 and begins tonight at the Toronto
Camera Club. You must register online on the festival website, on a first-come,
first-served basis. All the other jazz workshops are free and take place
Monday to Wednesday at Kew Beach United Church from 7:30 to 9. Registrations,
again, are online.
Here's a capsule of the music events on offer this year:
· Streetfest: Thursday to Saturday 7 to 11 p.m. The Beach party
gets into high gear with more than 40 combos performing at street corners and
storefronts along Queen St. E., which is closed to vehicles between Woodbine
and Beech Aves.
· PartiGras: Tonight through Sunday at the Distillery District.
Concurrent shows on three stages feature such artists as singers June Garber
and Heather Bambrick, and bassist Roberto Occhipinti with his orchestra. It
runs tonight 6-11 p.m.; Saturday, 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 6.
· Ovation of Jazz: Wednesday, 6 p.m. at Balmy Beach Club. Sample
foods from Beach restaurants and swing to the sound of the Brian Rose Orchestra
at a $75 gala for Toronto East General Hospital.
· Mainstage: July 29-30, 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The finale next
weekend at the bandshell at Kew Gardens includes five acts on both days, and
has a strong Latin jazz presence with the likes of Café Cubano, David Virelles
Quintet and Hilario Duran with his Latin Jazz Big Band.
For more information, call the Jazz Hotline 416-410-8809, or visit
beachesjazz.com.
Canadian
Musicians Find Inspiration, Creativity, Love In Paris
Source: Canadian Press, By Cassandra Szklarski
(July 24, 2006) TORONTO (CP) - It's often called the city of light, but these days
one might be tempted to call Paris the city of transplanted Canadian musicians. Several
well-known artists now call the culturally rich capital their home, including
underground favourite Feist and her producer Gonzales, crooner Sarah
Slean and hip-hop masher Buck 65. On occasion, the
Paris posse swells with troubadour visitors Ron Sexsmith, Hawksley Workman and
sexy electronic artist Peaches, who are said to join the resident gang whenever
in town. Rich Terfry, a.k.a. Buck 65, calls it a "weird Canadian
musical Parisian takeover." "There's an interesting little
Anglo musical community here, and it's become something that they're talking
about in Paris," Terfry says in a phone interview from his small Paris
flat. "I kind of feel like I'm part of something, part of some kind
of movement or something." Terfry says he leapt across the pond
about six years ago, after stints in Montreal, London and New York. He felt an
immediate connection to cosmopolitan Paris, long considered a haven for fringe
artists and writers seeking inspiration. "Maybe that's what people
call the joie de vivre over here, how people like to just really savour life.
. . . That really suited me somehow, and I thought this is a pace
that I can handle and really fell in love with it right away." The
small-town boy from Mount Uniacke, N.S., has settled in Paris and plans to
marry his French girlfriend, Claire. Slean, from Toronto, says Paris's
reputation as a creative hotbed was a strong draw for her. "Art is a
priority here, it has such deep roots and its value is respected,
acknowledged," she says by e-mail. "A lot of people from
Australia and America are looking for a more vibrant, culturally open life -
artists, designers, dancers, writers. In younger western civilisations, art is
still pretty tame and one-dimensional, which can be frustrating for those doing
something challenging or outside." Eclectic chanteuse Leslie Feist,
who grew up in Regina and Calgary, says she landed in Paris four years ago.
Chance encounters in Canada led to her signing with a French label and deciding
to record overseas.
"There was just a lot of reasons slowly surmounting to make Paris the
destination," Feist said recently by cellphone while travelling to a music
festival in Orillia, Ont. "I needed to live in Europe. I had been
touring there for a couple of years with Gonzales and I was finding myself
coming back to Toronto less and less because the tours were just dovetailing
into each other." She says her hectic touring schedule doesn't allow
her to revel in any sort of expat community, save for Gonzales, who lives a
block away from her. "You run into each other backstage at festivals
in Belgium more than planning to meet for breakfast near your house," she
says, adding that home has become an "elusive concept these days"
after 30 months on the road promoting her album Let It Die. When Slean
first arrived in February, it was Terfry who welcomed her with an unorthodox
tour. "He is a fine ambassador to Weird Paris," she says.
"When I first arrived he took me to a taxidermy shop."
"When Hawksley or Ron (Sexsmith) are in town, good times are had,"
she adds. Besides inspiring his creativity and his love life, Terfry says
Paris has been phenomenal for his career and that of his Canadian pals.
"People have taken a real strong interest in what we're doing, arguably
stronger then we've ever had at home, and that's probably the other half of the
big reason why we're here," he says. "The success of my touring
and the amount of people that come out to see me when I tour here in France as
compared to Canada, there's no comparison. It's, like, humongous over here in
France." His biggest show in Canada numbered a little over a
thousand people, he says, while in Paris he can command a room of several
thousand. Terfry says his first big European concert two years ago was an
eye-opener.
"I remember that day walking into the club and thinking 'well, this has
got to be some kind of a mistake, whose idea was it to book me in such a huge
place, this is going to be a disaster.' And then showtime, curtain came up and
sure enough, the place was packed, I couldn't believe it." Terfry
credits the Internet with building a fan base that stretches far and
wide. "I've seen that many times now going into countries where I've
never even had a record released and have a lot of people show up for a show,
and the only explanation I have for that ... is the Internet." Feist
agrees that technology has made it easier for today's artists to be bi-continental.
"It's definitely kinda easier to stretch your imagination, (and to have a)
living situation that isn't based in one place," she says. "Like this
summer, I'm crossing the Atlantic about six times to go back and forth, finish
my new album in Europe and to play the festivals over here. That, I suppose
five years ago, would have been hard for me to imagine." Slean, who
is set to release live material in the fall recorded with the Blue Spruce
String Quartet, says she expects to return to Toronto in September once her
lease comes up, but adds that many things will continue to lure her back to
Paris. "Serendipity is an unrivalled force here," she says.
"The beauty and meaningful magic of accidents is astonishing."
World
Music In Mission? Possible
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Tony Montague
(July 21, 2006) World music is huge in Europe, but in B.C. this
"umbrella"
genre -- which covers everything from Mongolian herding calls to Mexican reggae
-- remains marginalized. It's deemed too strange or exotic, and of little
commercial appeal. Even such superstars as Salif Keita or Youssou N'Dour are
rarely heard on the airwaves or in record stores. But thanks to people like Francis Xavier, things are changing.
As artistic director of the Mission Folk Music
Festival, Xavier has brought several of
the leading names in world music to this province for the first time. Three
years ago, he scored a major coup by signing Mariza, the new diva of Portuguese
fado, to perform at Fraser River Heritage Park (a one-hour drive east of
Vancouver). This year, he has put together the strongest world-music line-up in
the region since Seattle's WOMAD USA kicked the bucket in 2001. "I've an
eye and an ear for the music, and a passion that has developed over the
years," says Xavier, who has called Mission home since the early eighties.
"It comes a lot from my travels. I was away for 10 years, living in
Germany, Greece and the Basque country of Spain -- and travelling in
Scandinavia, Italy and Turkey. I met so many artists from Africa and Asia over
there as well. Europe is such a crossroads, and being there for a long time
broke down all my North American walls."
The big scoop this year is the B.C. debut of Sierra Maestra, one of the
greatest Cuban son bands. If you love the Buena Vista Social Club, you
won't want to miss these younger veterans -- especially as they're on the same
bill as Kékélé, a Congolese sextet fronted by four of the top vocalists
from Kinshasa's golden years of rumba. It will be fascinating to hear the
rhythmic crosscurrents flowing between Africa and the Caribbean. Also on
tomorrow's program are Armenian singer Mariam Matossian, Hawaiian
slack-key guitar and traditional dance group Hapa, and Gjallarhorn,
a young Finnish band that performs an innovative blend of ancient songs and
contemporary trance music. Scandinavia is well represented at the festival's
18th edition. In addition to Gjallarhorn, Xavier is introducing two top-notch
Nordic acts: Frigg, a fiddle-based band that draws on Finnish and
Norwegian folk traditions, and the trio of Ampron Prunni with Arto Jarvela.
One of the pivotal figures of Finnish music, Jarvela plays a keyed-fiddle known
as a nyckelharpa -- a magnificent instrument with sympathetic strings that
sounds like the happy offspring of a viola and a hurdy-gurdy.
"Canadian fiddle players who've never heard a nyckelharpa are in for a
treat," Xavier promises. "It's obviously a relative of the violin --
an ancestor, but with a very distinctive resonance. I want people to make the
kind of discoveries that can open up other cultures for them, and make them
think about their own. "One of my favourite sayings is, 'If you gaze
into a mirror, it can always remind you of what you look like, but when you
hear a song or piece of music -- no matter where it's from -- it can remind you
of who you are.' " The Mission Folk Music Festival starts today at 7
p.m. and continues through Sunday. Tickets are $38 per day, $65 for a weekend
pass. Fraser River Heritage Park, Mission, B.C., 604-257-0366, http://www.missionfolkmusicfestival.ca.
It's
The 'Tude, Dude
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Andrew Ryan
(July 21, 2006) PASADENA, CALIF. — Rock 'n' roll is still a vicious game,
except for the wide-eyed hopefuls who luck onto the Rock Star: Supernova
fast track. The reality series has condensed the usual years of struggle and
dues-paying into loud TV sound bites for convenient viewer consumption. Rock
Star is not about the music, it's about rock attitude, and turning total
unknowns into TV stars. And the Rock Star machine is even slicker when
viewed up close. Sometimes you have to discover these things for yourself. CBS
squired a handful of TV critics to the Rock Star taping last Sunday
afternoon. The taping was for the show airing this evening, a performance
episode in which all 12 finalists were closely scrutinized by the members of
Supernova -- a "supergroup" consisting of heavy-metal icons Tommy
Lee, Jason Newstead and Gilby Clarke -- who happen to be seeking a lead singer.
Rock Star: Supernova is the sequel to last summer's semi-hit Rock
Star: INXS, which found a singer for the 1980s Australian group. What was
once was pop is now metal. Rock Star is taped at the CBS studios in
Hollywood. Tickets are free, and the network can't keep up with requests.
There's no confusing the Rock Star followers with those lined up for The
Price is Right, which tapes around the corner. The Rock Star fans
are younger and most are dressed rock-star chic: jeans and T-shirts on the
males; miniskirt, heels and tank tops on the ladies. Some rock traditions
remain absolute.
The freezing-cold set is made up to resemble the Mayan Theatre, a legendary Los
Angeles rock venue, and the studio audience was already seated when critics
arrived. Except for the hundred or so people on the floor surrounding the
performance stage, who were receiving instructions from the warm-up host:
"The people around the stage should have the most energy of anyone,"
he told the crowd. "Put your hands on your heads or whatever; it looks
good on TV." The pep talk worked and the audience roared when host Dave
Navarro was introduced. They went wilder yet for the arrival of Supernova. Last
out was co-host Brooke Burns, who launched right into the show with a clip,
taped days earlier, of contestants squabbling over the song selection. Two
females fighting over Helter Skelter. Bad blood is thereby established.
And the victor went first. The stringy-haired contestant Patrice took the stage
to sing Helter Skelter, delivering the song in short screeching bursts.
The camera cut repeatedly to the other female singer, the one who lost the
fight. She looked angry. Navarro told Patrice: "Baby, you sounded
killer!" Navarro subsequently referred to the female Rock Star
contestants as "sweetheart," "sweetie" and, on a few
occasions, "man." The next singer was an unsure young fellow named
Josh, who nonetheless executed a near-letter perfect impression of the late
Kurt Cobain on Nirvana's Come As You Are. The judges seemed nonplussed.
"Don't forget these guys [Supernova] are going to be playing Wembley
Stadium, not a coffee house," Navarro said. Lee chimed in: "I want to
see you break shit!"
Rock-star attitude is an obvious asset on Rock Star.
The third contestant was a tawny bottle blonde named Storm who struck and held
a defiant rock-chick pose throughout her version of The Cars' Just What I
Needed. The performance was shambling and off-key, but the judges perked
up. Lee suggested Storm show more skin; Storm suggested Lee look her up on the
Internet. During a short break, Rock Star staffers kept the energy level
pumped by throwing T-shirts to the audience; the contestants danced, stretched
and preened in the contestant box, where they sat for the entire 90-minute
taping. The members of Supernova ran outside to smoke cigarettes. Upon return,
the taping resumed with a performance by Toronto-born Lukas Rossi, a slight
young man dressed in an all-black Edwardian-style suit replete with wide white
tie. Lukas wore ample eyeliner and his spiky hair boasted a skunk-like white
streak. Dude certainly looks like a rock star. The Canadian entrant performed a
heavy-metal take on the Rolling Stones' Let's Spend the Night Together,
and ran around the stage like a young Mick Jagger throughout the song. It was
the most electrified performance of the show, and the Rock Star panel
knew it. Navarro told Lukas he was arrogant, which was intended as a
compliment. Lee said: "You're raising the bar, and I'm raising the bar
stool!" Navarro added a proviso: "Dude, no matter what happens, at
the end of this show, you're getting laid." The second Canadian contestant,
Vancouver native Jenny Galt, came out near the end of the program. A tall
blonde, she stood directly in the Rock Star spotlight with, an enormous
acoustic guitar strapped around her thin frame, and sang the soulful ballad Drive
by the group Incubus. It was a credible performance, but Navarro spent most of
the appraisal time praising her knee-high white boots.
The closing act was the weird and very popular Dilana, a 34-year-old woman from
Houston by way of South Africa. She, too, has the look. Visually, Dilana is a
mix of Stevie Nicks and Axl Rose; vocally, she's a Marianne Faithfull
impersonator. Dilana sang a revved-up version of Zombie, a former hit
for the Cranberries. The audience went berserk; the judges were wowed. Each
judge told Dilana she made the song her own, compared with the original vocal
by Irish singer Dolores O'Riordan. Filing out of the soundstage, the non-paying
crowd looked exactly like any group of people leaving a rock concert: happy,
sweaty and a little drained. Those people went home, but the TV critics' field
trip included a bus ride to the Rock Star mansion for a post-show party
and a taste of that decadent rock lifestyle. Good rockin' tonight. The show's
rules dictate that contestants must reside in the mansion for the 13-week
duration. There's more room each week as the singers are knocked off one by one
and sent home. The mansion is hidden in a remote location, somewhere up a
hillside in West Hollywood, and the ride there took forever. On the way, we
discussed the show among ourselves and there was near-unanimous agreement that
the final two would be the strange Dilana and the Canadian kid, Lukas. Even the
American critics were knocked out by him. The mansion was, as expected, L.A.
huge. I'm not sure where contestants slept, but the place just went on and on.
The location doubles as a recording studio, and there was a swimming pool and a
performance stage in the living room -- standard rock-star accoutrements. The
party seemed to be sponsored by a vodka company, and there were cocktails with
tiny glowing light sticks in them. The Rock Star hopefuls wandered in
and I immediately sought out the Canadians, as anyone might do in a foreign
country. I chatted to both, and they are entirely different rock-and-roll
animals.
Jenny has sung in Vancouver rock bands for years, although she was working as a
waitress when the call came from Rock Star. She was still shaky from the
taping, but very polite and terribly sweet. And she was devastated. She seemed
convinced that she had bombed, even though Navarro liked her boots. "I'm
pretty sure I'm going to be in the bottom three," she said, referring to
the weekly ejection show, which airs tomorrow night. "I've just got to
turn it around and hope for the best. And I should probably lose the guitar;
they already know I can play guitar, right?" The other Canadian, however,
was a little more confident. Lukas kept on the eyeliner, smoked cigarettes and
displayed a rock-star attitude far beyond his years. "This is all bells
and whistles, baby," he said, gesturing somewhere in the direction of the
swimming pool. "All the grandeur of this doesn't really make sense to me.
I'd be just as happy in a sleeping bag, living on the street, just as long as I
can wake up and get on-stage in front of people, who really appreciate what I'm
doing. . . . It's rock and roll, that's the bottom line, baby." We may
have a winner.
Voice
Mail Mines Gold In Japan
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com - By Kevin
Jackson
(July 20, 2006) *Jamaica’s hottest male vocal group Voice
Mail has
mined gold in Japan with shipments of over 100,000 copies of its debut album
Hey. The album which features production work from a plethora of Jamaica’s
top music producers including Robert Livingston, Christopher Birch, and Donovan
Bennett, has been visible on the major music charts in Japan over the past few
months. The success of the album comes as good news for the group, which has
been making strides within the past two years with a handful of dance oriented
hits on the Jamaican and international reggae charts. ‘We are happy the way
things have been moving and we are just thankful for the support from our fans,
the media and our friends’, group member O’Neil said. Voice Mail will see the
US and international release of the album Hey on July 18, via VP Records. After
taking the stage at Red Stripe Reggae Sumfest, Voice Mail will head to the US
for a week to kick off the promotional machine for the album.
Additionally, Voice Mail’s gold certification comes on the heels of the group’s
signing with mobile provider bmobile. The group has been working with the
mobile brand for a while, and recently sealed the deal officially to promote
the brand via billboards, print and radio advertisements. ‘Voicemail and
bmobile have worked very closely together over the last year.
Their commitment, support, drive and positive energy is amazing and that alone
made it very clear that we wanted them to be a part of the bmobile family of
entertainers. As you know Beenie Man, Bounty Killer and Wayne Marshall have
been bmobile entertainers for almost three years and Voice Mail is a welcome
addition’, commented bmobile’s marketing guru, Tara Playfair-Scott. Voice
Mail member O’Neil commented ‘We are excited about working with bmobile.
This is long overdue. Words cannot express the way we feel right now’. He
added ‘We Voice Mail represents as vocalists and there is also the voice mail
which is a telephone feature. So I guess the collaboration with bmobile was
inevitable’. Apart from their upcoming performances at Red Stripe
Reggae Sumfest and bmobile Reggae Sunsplash, Voice Mail is also booked for the
ATI weekend in Negril. There are also forthcoming performance dates in
Bermuda, Canada and the US over the next few weeks.
About Voice Mail
Known for a string of hits including Wacky Dip, Weh Di Time, Do
What You Feel Like and the recent chart topper Get Crazy, Voice Mail emerged on
the scene some five years ago. The group currently consists of Craig Jackson,
Kevin Blair and O’Neil Edwards. They began as a quintet, but after losing two
of the original members they were able to regroup and consolidate their efforts
into the collective unit known as Voicemail. They bring their vanguard fashion
sense, energetic dance performances; R&B/Hip-Hop infused melodies and
chemistry to the stage and forefront of Jamaican pop culture.
WEMF
- A Different Spin
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Alexandra Shimo
(July 22, 2006) There are some momentous concerts that signal a sea
change. The July night in 1965 when Bob Dylan went electric is one example.
Paul Simon's 1987 African concert, which introduced world music to the masses
was another. And this weekend's World Electronic Music
Festival, while not in the same league,
is also one for the history books, at least for those in the electronic music
scene. On the surface, the festival appears to be a resounding success.
Thousands of teenagers have travelled from across Canada and the United States
to attend the three-day event. Clifford Price, a.k.a. Goldie (who is probably
better known for his minor role in the James Bond film The World Is Not
Enough than his prodigious turntabling skills), has flown in from London to
cut some tracks, as has drum & bass legend Groove Rider. Canadian music
maestros also have a sizable presence: Cajjmere Wray, Freaky Flow and Jelo are
all scheduled to scratch up a storm this weekend. But even while approximately
6,000 fans pack the festival campsite in Tweed, Ont., about 90 minutes east of
Toronto, the event is not what it was in its glory years. At its zenith around
1999-2000, it drew between 12,000 and 15,000 fans from France, Germany, Japan,
China and Latin America. Electronic giants such as Plastikman, Paul Oakenfold
and the Beastie Boys' Mix Master Mike wowed the sweaty masses and the World Electronic
Music Festival deserved its worldly title.
This year, the biggest names headlining the event are not even electronic music
artists. Bands such as Broken Social Scene, Mobile and controller.controller
have all signed on, and these rockers are about as large a departure from the
electronic genre as heavy metal is from pop. "We brought in indie rock
bands to make the festival more relevant in today's music culture," says
Ryan Kruger, president of Destiny Event Productions, which organizes the
festival. "Our numbers have fallen since they peaked at the start of the
decade, and we were just breaking even. The iPod generation doesn't just listen
to one type of music any more. If you listen to a kid's iPod, there is dance,
rock, disco, a bit of everything. The electronic dance scene is not the size
that it once was." Part of the decline is symptomatic of the falling
popularity of electronic music in general, says Alan Cross, an author and host
of the radio show The Ongoing History of New Music, which is syndicated
across Canada. A genre that has influenced artists as diverse as U2, The
Killers, Radiohead, Rihanna, Madonna and Missy Elliott, is finding it harder to
draw large numbers. "The electronic music scene really peaked in
1999-2000," Cross says. "A lot of the people who were into it then
have grown up and moved on."
Denise Benson, 38, who has been DJing since 1987, and spun at some of the first
raves in Canada, points to another explanation. "The cops started cracking
down on it in the late nineties," says Benson. "There was a lot
of negative media attention on the ecstasy use and illegal warehouses where the
parties were held. These all contributed to the implosion of the rave
scene." Electronic music also took another hit with the rise of
downloading programs like Napster, Cross says. These technological developments
allowed consumers to program music to their specific tastes, and genres of
music fragmented into niche subgenres, he says. Electronic music wasn't defined
by just house, techno and dance, but jungle, drum & bass, trance, ambient,
happy hard-core (hard-core techno) and gabba (aggressive, fast techno).
With the multiplication of genres, electronic bands found it harder to get the
same sort of penetration among music fans. Even when they hit the big time,
they didn't get the same numbers, nor become as much of a cultural phenomenon,
as when the Prodigy captured the world stage in the mid-nineties. "When I
was in school in Grade 10, there were 30 people in my class," says Cross. "Three
were country fans, five were pop music fans, and the other 22 were Kiss fans.
You don't see that kind of consensus any more. In the age of downloading and
Napster, the idea of the giant hit has eroded simply because everyone is free
to program something to their individual tastes. Everyone has their own tastes
and preferences, so it becomes more difficult for bands to please everyone. The
scenes are smaller, as people become more selective about which scenes they
choose to join. That's something that's endemic to all forms of music."
Those shrinking numbers mean even the most talented DJs on the Canadian scene,
such as Cajjmere Wray, who regularly wins national DJ competitions, are finding
it harder to support themselves. "It's a lot harder to make a living as an
electronic DJ than it once was," Wray says. "There is just so much
competition out there. Everyone wants to be a DJ, and they've all got their
different styles. It's not like when the Prodigy were top-of-the-charts. There
just isn't any hardcore electronic group that is able to do what they did any
more." For their part, the festival's promoters are putting a positive
spin on the change. They describe the new line-up as an exciting experiment and
a new beginning, rather than the end of an era. "We focused on
electronic music for the past 11 years and we are the longest-running
electronic music festival in North America," organizer Kruger says.
"But we have to grow to maintain relevance, and that meant introducing
rock. It is a departure for us, but in the age of iPods and downloads, you
can't just devote yourself to one genre of music."
The World Electronic Music Festival runs until tomorrow in Tweed, Ont. For
more information, call 416-631-8821 or visit http://www.wemf.com.
Peace,
Love And Dr. Scholl's
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Ashante Infantry, Entertainment Reporter
(Jul. 25, 2006) Bethel, N.Y.—Grey hair and polo shirts have replaced
bare feet and tie-dye at the site of the seminal rock concert of the 1960s, but
the rain hasn't gone away. Gloomy skies and torrential downpours marred
the inaugural jazz festival at the Bethel Woods Center
for the Arts — newly erected on the grounds
of the 1969 Woodstock Festival — but there was none of the mud dancing or
skinny dipping of yore. The upscale crowd that turned out for the two-day
jazz event this past weekend, mostly middle-aged couples and young families,
stayed dry in the 4,800-seat main stage pavilion on a plateau above the
original festival location. Those with tickets for the lawn, which can
accommodate 12,000, sought shelter under cedar-roofed huts that dot the
landscape. The 700-hectare property incorporates the dairy farm where
acts such as Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Janis Joplin performed for more than
400,000 flower children on that historic rainy weekend 37 years ago. And
as with Woodstock, Saturday's deluge didn't affect enjoyment of the
day-into-night concert, which featured jazz deans such as Jimmy Heath and George Benson. Sunday gave way to
brilliant sun and standout performances by Dianne
Reeves and Wynton
Marsalis. Although the turnout
was well below capacity at this, the fourth event since the $70 million centre
opened July 1, organizers were pleased with attendance; they aim to use the
site's legacy to kick-start growth in economically depressed Sullivan County.
"I don't know how anyone could possibly make money in this business, but
we don't want to," said local philanthropist-entrepreneur Alan Gerry,
whose non-profit Gerry Foundation funded the complex. "From the late
'50s through '60s this was a successful resort town," explained the
affable 76-year-old former cable TV magnate, attributing the area's decline to
the departure of New York City dwellers who retired to Florida or chose newly
affordable Caribbean vacations over the Catskill Mountains. He says
Bethel Woods — a two-hour drive from lower Manhattan — is the "key to
reintroduce the county to the world." The centre has a May-to-September
outdoor concert schedule of classical, pop, rock, country and jazz acts, with a
Woodstock-themed museum slated to open next year. Future plans include a
conference centre, health spa and inn, said Gerry. The artfully
landscaped grounds blend into the surrounding meadows and woods with ponds and
streams, winding stone walkways, and washrooms and concession stands built of
cedar and sandstone. It's an acoustic marvel with the sounds of the main stage
penetrating its furthest corners. The original Woodstock staging area is noted
by various markers. "This is a magical place," said Annelise
Gerry, 52, the developer's youngest daughter. As a 15-year-old living 15
minutes away, she sneaked off to the Woodstock festival without her parents'
permission and returned three days later. The centre has already hosted
sold-out concerts by the New York Philharmonic and the Grateful Dead's Phil
Lesh (who ventured down to the 1969 stage site to take pictures). The August
line-up includes the Boston Pops, the Counting Crows and Woodstock vets Crosby,
Still, Nash & Young. Although CSNY's show is tied to the Aug. 15-17
Woodstock anniversary, it can't get too wild, since local regulations limit
capacity to 30,000 and state legislation bans smoking in public spaces.
The pastoral setting of Bethel Woods will come to define its jazz festival,
said event producer John Schreiber, an award-winning New York producer of
Broadway shows, TV specials and White House events. "This place is
as much a destination as the artists, versus these amphitheatres that get
thrown up in the middle of nowhere and are excuses to pack 30,000 people in to
see a rock 'n' roll attraction," he said. The festival's stellar
line-up was curated by Grammy-winning jazz vocalist Reeves. "She
understands the older players and she's hip to the new younger players. What we
tried to do was program a mix of genres and generations, with the only
consistency being wonderful musicians," he added. Reeves, who
performed her own set and then returned for a sexy, show-stopping duet of
"Embraceable You" with Marsalis, said her aim was a line-up that
celebrated the diversity of jazz. "We wanted for the first one to have a
really broad taste in the music for people who would come for George Benson, but
maybe wouldn't ordinarily see the Jimmy Heath Quartet," explained the
singer. "Sometimes people just want to be surprised and they just
come without knowing who will be playing and that's the thing that I love about
it. "Next time, what I'd like to do in this venue that's in such a
natural beautiful setting, and given the historical Woodstock part to it, is
have jazz musicians from all over the world and blur the lines between
classical jazz and world music."
Dusk
Does It His Way
Excerpt from The
Globe and Mail - J.D. Considine
(July 26, 2006) Matt Dusk still remembers the day he went in to audition for the music
program at York University in Toronto. "I was listening to
Sinatra and Tony Bennett and Harry Connick. Those are my biggest influences,
for sure," he says. So, like any aspiring crooner, he wanted to show the
York faculty how well he knew the masters. "I basically sang these two
Sinatra songs verbatim, with every 'koo-koo' and all of that," he says.
"I was snapping my fingers on one and three, and doing all the wrong
things." He laughs. "I look back now, and -- how embarrassing! To
walk into a bunch of educated people, and sing that to them? "But the
teacher said, 'We think you've got a great voice. You can't sing jazz' --You
can't sing jazz worth shit, was the exact quotation -- 'but we're going to
teach you to be a singer.' " True to their word, his teachers did just
that, and four years later Dusk has a gold record under his belt (for the 2004
release Two Shots), and is touring behind his fourth album, Back in
Town. True, there's still a touch of Frank Sinatra about him, from his
suit-and-tie wardrobe to the ease with which his satiny baritone switches from
punchy swing phrasing to limpid balladry. But at 27, Dusk is clearly his own
man, and much rather do it his way.
Not that it's easy for a young crooner to find his own path in this day and
age. When Sinatra and Bennett were coming up, it was easy to find work as a big
band singer, and to hear the music develop as something fresh and new. But as
Dusk admits, for anyone his age, "your only reference is through
recordings." Dusk, however, is blessed with the training and skill to
manoeuvre past such obstacles. As a child, he attended St. Michael's Choir
School in Toronto, and learned to read music at an early age. "I started
when I was seven years old," he says. "I was an alto. And it's funny
for me, because I thought everyone read music. And then I started learning that
not only do most singers not read, most musicians outside of the jazz genre
have no idea what a chord is." Later, as an undergraduate, he was warned
off trying to learn tunes from recordings. "I was taught was that you have
to learn the melody and the lyric the exact way that the authors wrote
it," he says. "Most recordings are actually interpretations."
For Back in Town, Dusk took that start-with-the-basics approach a step
further. Where other contemporary big band singers like to dust off the classic
Nelson Riddle, Billy May and Quincy Jones arrangements used by Sinatra, Dusk
wanted to go for a sound that would be completely his. "I didn't want
anybody to say, 'What have we got here? On the Street Where You Live?
Yeah, I know that arrangement -- Count Basie with Joe Williams,' " he
says. "That's why I said, 'We're going to go out and get all original
arrangements.' " Not only were they new, but they were by some of the best
in the business, including Sammy Nestico, who wrote and arranged for the Count
Basie Orchestra. Although understandably proud of the fresh take those
arrangements provide on such chestnuts as Get Me to the Church on Time and
The Best Is Yet to Come, Dusk nonetheless insists that when singing jazz,
the horn charts, harmony, groove and even the melody itself take a backseat to
the words. "For me, jazz music has always been about the lyric," he
says. "I learned that through going to university. My teacher was Bob
Fenton, and he always said to me, 'It's not about the melody, it's about the
lyric. When you sing a song, you're telling a story. If you can make it pretty
with a vocal sound, well, good for you. But concentrate on the conversation.'
"That's one of my pet peeves with most jazz musicians," he adds.
"I don't agree with most instrumentalists about the way they solo, because
I've always been about the lyric. And if you look at some of the best, from
Chet Baker to Dexter Gordon to Louis Armstrong, when I hear them play their
solos, they're playing the way I'd sing it. "But if you were to ask most
instrumentalists today to quote the lyric, they would have no idea of what
they're playing." Matt Dusk performs tonight at the Mod Club in
Toronto, doors opening at 8 (416-588-4663).
Fast-Growing
South Asian Festival Moves To Exhibition Place
Excerpt from The
Toronto Star - Prithi Yelaja, Staff Reporter
(Jul. 26, 2006) For a South Asian event dreamed up in a Mississauga
basement, landing a major corporate sponsor and moving to a bigger venue are
signs of having arrived on the summer festival scene. The sixth
edition of Masala! Mehndi! Masti! launches today and runs through Sunday, rocking Bandshell Park at
Exhibition Place with artists performing everything from bhangra to Bollywood
hip hop to classical Indian kathikali and guzhals. What's
new, besides the more spacious venue, is that Rogers Communications has added
its name to the event as major sponsor, a coup for an ethnic festival.
Admission remains free. (All Hindi words, masala is an Indian mixture of
many spices; mehndi is body art created with henna and masti means
"fun.") Headlining the event is a British band that's hit it
big in Bollywood. Fusing their South Asian heritage with a western
sensibility, Trickbaby's sound defies categorization, says lead singer and
songwriter Saira Hussain, who grew up in northern England. The
five-member band's "khichdi" (mixture) of pop, reggae and R&B
uses guitar, bass, harmonium, tabla and drums to create what critics have
dubbed an "East/West soundclash." "There are moments when
it sounds more Eastern than Western and vice versa. It's not a brown thing or a
white thing. It's a music thing," says the 30-something Hussain.
"We're not sitting around with cultural chips on our shoulders. We've
embraced both cultures and are very positive about having a foot in either
camp."
They'll make their Canadian debut Friday night as part of BRITinvASIAN at
Masala! Mehndi! Masti!, billed as the largest South Asian festival outside
South Asia. The festival used to be held at Harbourfront. But with crowds
swelling to 100,000 last year, some from as far as California, the U.K., France
and New York, it had outgrown that location, says organizer Abhishek Mathur,
who runs M!M!M! each year with a core group of 23 volunteers, including wife
Jyoti Rana. "What tipped the scales in favour of moving was last
year on the busiest night, I heard several people on their cellphones telling
their friends, `Don't bother coming down. It's packed, there's no parking and a
45-minute line-up for food.' The sheer numbers of people would have turned it
into a negative experience and obviously we didn't want that."
Despite quadrupling costs with the move to Exhibition Place, where the
workers are unionized, Mathur didn't want to charge an entry fee. He felt it
would deter visitors, particularly people outside the South Asian community who
might otherwise drop in out of curiosity. "In terms of the evolution
of our culture, we're still at the level where we're reaching out to the
mainstream," he says. "The festival is a springboard for that, but
we're still not there yet." In what Mathur sees as an act of divine
intervention — "There's someone up there watching over us" — Rogers
approached him offering to be title sponsor. TD Canada Trust and State Farm
also signed on as sponsors. "If you add up their financial support,
it works out exactly to our production costs, so we break even," says
Mathur. "We're thrilled these mainstream brands recognize the economic
strength of the South Asian community is of great value to Canada."
Masala! Mehndi! Masti! also gets grants from Heritage Canada. And the
British Council, a U.K. arts agency, has helped send popular British artists of
South Asian descent to the festival, including Trickbaby.
The group had mainly been playing the U.K. club circuit until their performance
at the MTV awards in India in 2004, which caught the ear of Bollywood director
Rohan Sippy. He asked them to write songs evoking the gritty urban feel
of Mumbai for the soundtrack of his 2005 blockbuster movie Bluffmaster,
which rocketed the group to fame with desi fans all over the world,
including in Toronto. They've since toured Europe and the United States.
Other artists appearing at the festival include New Zealand-based comic
Tarun Mohanbhai, one half of the stand-up duo Those Indian Guys. Closing
the festival Sunday night with the "bhangra blast" will be Josh, a
Montreal-based Indi-pop group that sings in Punjabi and has toured with Nelly
Furtado. In between, the festival is packed with activities. There are
visual arts exhibits, including one on the sari, as well as yoga and Indian dance
workshops, and Indian food stalls. The Chillin' in Your Brown Skin
seminars are back, with a tented chai lounge set up for discussions on issues
ranging from sexuality to abuse. Mathur says he's already heard
complaints that Exhibition Place isn't as convenient or beautiful as
Harbourfront. But, "it's not that far down the road. With the
openness of the space, the greenery and the heritage buildings, it is a very
pretty setting," he says. "It's going to be awesome. In the
last 72 hours, we've slept maybe five hours. We're on the verge of collapsing.
Till the festival is over, we're running on adrenalin." For a full
listing of events visit: http://www.masalamehndimasti.com
Cohl
Famously Anonymous
Source: Canadian Press, By Cassandra Szklarski
(July 24, 2006) He started out as an 18-year-old strip club owner and today
commands the biggest grossing rock tours in music history. Michael
Cohl may very well be "the most famous man
you've never heard of," we're told in a TV documentary on the unassuming
Toronto promoter. From the Rolling Stones to Pink Floyd to U2 and Barbra
Streisand, Cohl has managed concerts for the biggest and the best, but little
is known about the private, shaggy-haired mogul who pushed the concert
experience — and ticket prices — to new levels. Cohl, however, claims
he's simply another music fan. "I was just a kid who would sit at
home and listen to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd," he
says recently from Milan, while on tour with the Stones. "To get to
know these people and to get to work with them and to do my bit ... it's like,
wow." The story of his remarkable career is outlined in a CBC-TV Life
& Times feature, airing tonight at 8. Through interviews with
music legends Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and an appearance by U2 singer Bono,
we're given a glimpse of a man who made his mark around the world, yet largely
managed to escape celebrity at home.
"He truly is a mogul," says director Barry Avrich, who has documented
the lives of Vanity Fair columnist Dominick Dunne, criminal defence
lawyer Eddie Greenspan and Hollywood studio giant Lew Wasserman.
"It's important for Canadians to know that there are people like
Michael Cohl, legends and heroes that have done so much and that are rarely
celebrated," Avrich says. "If you say to any American: `Did you
know that the man who controls the rock 'n' roll industry, the man who controls
the Rolling Stones, the man who the Rolling Stones don't make a move without
... operates out of Canada?' (That's) quite staggering." Cohl denies
suggestions he's a pioneer, saying his business strategy is simple.
"I add to the fire, I add to other people's ideas and at the same
time I'm able to execute and get them what they want and need."
Rolling
Stones Confirm New Concerts In Halifax, Regina, Vcr
Source: Canadian Press
(July 26, 2006) HALIFAX (CP) - The Rolling Stones have added a few Canadian dates to their A Bigger Bang tour.
The legendary rock group
confirmed on their website Tuesday they will play Halifax on Sept. 23, Regina
on Oct. 8 and Vancouver on Nov. 3. "We're going to play many cities
we didn't get to before and also return to some of our favourite places,"
lead singer Mick Jagger said in a statement. "We'll have a variety
of material ready so we can keep it fresh." Other added shows
include New York, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas.
According to the website, tickets for the Halifax and Regina shows are
set to go on sale July 31 (a pre-sale for select groups starts Wednesday). A
date for Vancouver ticket sales wasn't immediately available. Jagger also
provided a status report on bandmate Keith Richards, who suffered a head injury
in April after falling from a tree while vacationing in Fiji. Richards
needed surgery to relieve pressure on his brain. The accident forced a
nine-week hiatus of the tour. "Keith's fine, his head's better, he's
playing well and enjoying himself so we're all looking forward to this leg of
the tour." Added Richards: "I'm really happy that we got some
more gigs in America and Canada." "I'm feeling great and can't
wait to get there." Michael Cohl, the Toronto entertainment magnate
who is promoting the tour, said that ticket prices would be lowered for the
upcoming gigs.
"The return to North America is a celebration of the fact that the most
enduring rock 'n' roll band of all time is feeling and sounding better than
ever before and are ready to rock," he said. "To give more fans
an opportunity to see the band we're lowering the ticket prices on average 10
to 15 per cent and taking an additional (amount) off tickets for
students." The Bigger Bang tour began last August. The band has
already played before 4.5 million fans since it began. The Halifax
concert will be held at the Halifax Commons, a large park in the middle of the
city. The Regina show will be held at Mosaic Stadium at Taylor Field while the
Vancouver date will be mounted at BC Place Stadium. The band played to
tens of thousands of fans last summer in Moncton, N.B. The Rolling Stones
aren't the only aging rockers who will soon make their way across Canada.
Earlier this month the Who announced 17 North American tour dates this fall,
including Ottawa, London, Ont., Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and
Toronto. - On the web: www.rollingstones.com.
MUSIC TIDBITS
Canadian Musicians Record AIDS Single
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Canadian
Press
(Jul. 21, 2006) Canadian musicians have recorded a benefit single to
generate awareness about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa. Song for Africa features artists
including Ian D'Sa of Billy Talent, Ian Thornley of Big Wreck, Gordie Johnson
of Big Sugar, Kyle Riabko, Titcomb and Damhnait Doyle. It was released to
radio earlier this week. "With over 6,500 preventable deaths
happening daily due to AIDS in Africa, and an entire generation of children
being orphaned, it is time we shed some light on the matter," says
Winnipeg music producer Darcy Ataman, who co-wrote the song with Rob Wells,
Luke McMaster and Simon Wilcox. Proceeds from the project will go towards
helping Free the Children support a mobile health unit in Kenya. A music
video for the song will be played at the Aug. 13 opening ceremonies of the AIDS
2006 World Conference in Toronto.
Pharell Williams Reaches Back
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(July 21, 2006) *The artist/writer/super producer Pharell
Williams is going
back to the community and bringing gifts. The Star Trak executive is in
talks to build a computer resource center in his hometown, Virginia Beach, VA.
The economic development director for Virginia Beach, Don Maxwell, told The
Virginian Pilot that the demographics, cost, and size of the project are still
being figured out. But, Virginia Beach’s City Council may get to review
the deal as early as next month. In addition, Williams is also negotiating with
Apple and Microsoft to support the center and will utilize a local architect to
design the building. "One of these kids could be the next chemist
for Pfizer," Williams said referring to the health care giant Pfizer
Inc. HP has started a campaign entitled the “Computer is Personal Again”
and Williams has agreed to appear in the new spot. The campaign debuted
with rapper/mogul/Def Jam president Jay-Z and has featured Dallas Mavericks
owner Mark Cuban, U.S. Olympic, snowboarding gold medalist Shaun White and
television executive Mark Burnett (The Apprentice, The Apprentice: Martha
Stewart, On the Lot). All three spots will be available online prior to hitting
major television networks. We can also prepare for Williams highly anticipated
solo release “In My Mind” to drop July 25.
.jpg){kind=link}
Usher Ushering In Ticket Sales
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(July 20, 2006) *With little surprise from show producers, the box office for
Broadway’s “Chicago” has boosted thanks to the impending debut of
R&B/pop star Usher. The New York Post reported that ticket sales for the
production spiked as soon as it was announced that the singer would take on the
role of lawyer Billy Flynn in the Tony award-winning musical. Ticket sales have
risen 30% with the box office reportedly taking in as much as $100,000 a day.
"We weren't doing anything at all for the period he's going into the
show,” said “Chicago” producer Barry Weissler, “but that shot up immediately. .
. . It's not gigantic yet, but I'm pleasantly encouraged." Usher's run on
Broadway begins August 22 and is scheduled to end Oct. 1. However the New York
Daily News adds that with this response there is speculation Usher’s run will
be extended. “Chicago” currently features “Half & Half” star Obba Babatunde
as Billy Flynn. Previous actors who’ve carried the role are Taye Diggs, Wayne
Brady, Huey Lewis, George Hamilton, and John O’Hurley. “Chicago” plays
the Ambassador Theatre, located at 215 West 49th Street.
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Chuck D. Joins Urban League
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(July 20, 2006) *Chuck D. keeps fighting the power. His 1989 hit with public enemy “Fight
the Power” is the namesake for the upcoming Annual
Conference of the National Urban League luncheon. The conference, taking place
July 27-29 in Atlanta, will feature a number of sessions, workshops, and
luncheons focused on educating young, urban professionals. Other guests
and speakers for the event include singers Angie Stone and Gladys Knight,
comedian Paul Mooney, and Black Enterprise magazine’s Sr. VP and
Editor-in-chief Joseph C. Phillips, Star Jones, and Jesse Jackson, among
others. Topics, in addition to “fighting the power,” include "The Future
of Black and Brown: Diversity in America," "Beyond the Bling: A
Q&A on Money Management," and "Entrepreneurship 301." Plus,
the conference is hosting over 350 exhibits, a 3-day career expo, a benefit
concert on Thursday, a comedy night Friday, and an awards
gala Saturday. The Annual Conference of the National Urban League takes place
from July 27-29. For more information visit www.nul.org.
Janet Loves Jermaine
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(July 24, 2006) *While on her media tour, Janet
Jackson is letting it all
hang out...not like the infamous Super Bowl performance, but she’s telling fans
about what’s really going on in her life and how love has brought a new
perspective. The singer/actress gives many thanks to her long-time boyfriend,
producer Jermaine Dupri. "I always wanted to find love," she said. "Now,
that I found love, I'm in a different space now. Jermaine is drama-free. He's a
very giving person. The challenges have been all joy working with
Jermaine," Jackson said in an Atlanta news conference promoting her new
album “20 Years Old.” When asked about having a family, Jackson said: "I
would love to have kids. I never thought I would ever want any. But being with
Jermaine really changed my mind on all that. I don't mind adopting."
“20 Years Old,” hits stores on Sept. 26. Dupri produced a few
tracks on the album, but most go to long-time collaborators Jimmy 'Jam' Harris
and Terry Lewis, who produced Jackson’s “Control” 20 years ago – to which the
new album is named. Jackson is expecting to spill more about the new disc and
her relationship on “Oprah.” She’s the confirmed guest for Sept. 26, the date
the album drops.
Donnie Delivers 'Daily News'
Source: Juanita Stephens / J S Media Relations / jsmediarel@aol.com
(July 24, 2006) Singer/Songwriter Donnie
introduced himself to the world with his critically-acclaimed CD,
“The Colored Section.” This Fall, Donnie
will release “The Daily News” via SoulThought Records. Donnie’s music, a true
reflection of his personality, is bold, honest and unprocessed. He paints
a picture of life that shows the joy, pains and challenges facing the human
race. The first single, “911,” is a wake up call for America and will
give yet another perspective on the artist that USA Today described as "….
soulfully funky…. echoes the work of Stevie Wonder and Donny Hathaway but
is thoroughly contemporary." The video for “911” will be directed by
Joe Robert Cole, winner of this year’s screenwriting competition at the 2006
Vibe/Urbanworld Film Festival for “The Man Who’s Never Been Kissed.” Mr. Cole
was also a co-writer for the recently released movie ATL. Donnie will hit the
road on a pre-release CD tour in August delivering “The Daily News” to Atlanta,
Washington, DC, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York. For more,
visit: www.myspace.com/donniemusic
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Stevie Wonder Among Freedom Award Winners
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(July 26, 2006) *Stevie Wonder joins Doctors Without Borders founder Bernard Kouchner and civil
rights leader Joseph Lowery as recipients
of this year’s Freedom Awards, handed out annually by the National Civil Rights
Museum in Memphis. Wonder will receive the museum's Lifetime Achievement Award,
while Lowery – a co-founder with Martin Luther King of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference and co-founder of the Black Leadership Forum – will
receive the museum's National Freedom Award. Kouchner, a former minister
of health for France whose Doctors Without Borders sends volunteer medical
personnel to underdeveloped countries around the world, will receive the
museum's International Freedom Award. The awards banquet also
serves as an annual fundraiser for the museum and will take place on Oct. 17.
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Simmons, Chavis Named U.N. Goodwill Ambassadors
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(July 26, 2006) *Hip-Hop has now ascended into the halls of the United
Nations. Hip-Hop Summit Action Network chairman Russell
Simmons and HSAN president/CEO Dr. Benjamin Chavis were to be inducted
Tuesday as CISRI-ISP Permanent
Observer Missionaries to the United Nations Goodwill Ambassadors program.
CISRI-ISP is a new campaign that promotes awareness of extreme hunger and
malnutrition in various countries around the world. The organization, through
its Hip Hop 4 Peace Program, uses hip hop to draw
attention to the issue, as well as war, poverty and HIV/AIDS. "The
underlying goal of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network is to end poverty and
ignorance," Simmons said. "We're going to help save lives. We will
not be silenced in the face of the awful fact that more than 40,000 people die
every day from malnutrition and poverty. That is unacceptable to the hip hop
community." Chavis views the new role as a way to broaden HSAN's
domestic and global reach. "Hip-Hop culture is global and, as we
strive to take back responsibility, the life saving issues of ending poverty
and malnutrition are most urgent," said Chavis. "Our job is to wake
more people up to this reality. Being a Goodwill Ambassador is not just
ceremonial. We're rolling up our sleeves and look forward to working with the
United Nations on these issues."
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NY’S Lincoln Center To Honour Hype Williams
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
*Tonight at 8:30, New York’s Lincoln Center will present a 90-minute
retrospective touting the work of music video director Hype Williams. “Believe
the Hype: An Auteur Study of Hype Williams ‘The Best Who Ever Did It’” will be
featured in the Center’s Walter Reade Theater and provide an in-depth look at
Williams career – including collaborations with such artists as Busta Rhymes
and Missy Elliott. New York film critic Armond White will
host the event and Williams himself is expected to be in attendance, although a
tipster has informed EUR that the video director will not be able to attend
because of his “busy schedule.” In the past, Armond White has held
similar evenings honouring such video directors as Mark Romanek (Jay-Z’s “99
Problems”), Marcus Nispel, Ben Stokes, Marc Klasfeld, Dave Meyers (Ludacris’
“Stand Up,” Spike Jonze and Joseph Khan.
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::CD RELEASES::
July 31, 2006
Allen Toussaint, Southern
Nights, Water
Beyoncé, Deja
Vu, Sony
Big Mike, Keep
It Playa, BCD Music Group
Bo Diddley, Best
of Bo Diddley [Direct Source], Direct
Source
Bobby Womack, Best
of the Poets, Castle
Cham, Ghetto
Story [Remix], Atlantic
Cherish, Do
It to It [Rap Remix], Capitol
Chuck Berry, Best
of Chuck Berry [Direct Source], Direct
Source
Count Basie, Best
of Count Basie [Direct Source], Direct
Source
Dem Franchize Boyz, Freaky
as She Wanna Be, Virgin
DJ Morphiziz, The
Best of the Submissions, Vol. 3, Beatmart
Recordings
DMX, Year
of the Dog Again, Sony
E-40, U
and Dat [Single], Reprise / Wea
Fats Domino, Best
of Fats Domino [Direct Source], Direct
Source
Flipsyde, We
the People [Bonus Tracks] [Bonus CD], Universal
JT the Bigga Figga, Drop
Your Thangs, Oakland R&B
Kool & the Gang, The
Best of Kool and the Gang: Live, Direct
Source
Marvin Gaye, Best
of Marvin Gaye: Live [Direct Source], Direct Source
Marvin Gaye, I
Heard It Through the Grapevine [Fontana], Spectrum Music
Mike Shannon, Anthologie
1962-2006, Magic
Percy Sledge, The
Best of Percy Sledge [Direct Source], Direct Source
Rick Ross, Port
of Miami [Clean], Def Jam
Sean Paul, (When
You Gonna) Give It Up to Me, VP
Shawnie, The
Return, Vol. 2, Bungalo
Various Artists, Movie
Ska, Cutting Edge
Various Artists, Non
Stop Reggaeton Hits, Vol. 2, Machete
Music/Diamond Music
Various Artists, Rap
It Up [Box Set], Thump
Various Artists, Slammin
Reggaeton Super Videos, Machete
Music
Young Capone, What
It Iz [Single], Virgin
Young Dro, Best
Thang Smokin', Atlantic / Wea
::FILM NEWS::
Things Heading South In Hollywood North?
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Suzanne Ma
(July 23, 2006) Toronto, long known as Hollywood
North, seems to be losing some of its appeal.
Seemingly slipping away are the hot summer
days when hordes of American producers made the pilgrimage to the city to shoot
big-budget feature films and TV series. "It's a flat summer in Toronto,
there's no question about that," observes independent movie producer and
director Julian Grant. Grant worked on seven feature films in Toronto last
year; this year he'll work on just four. In all, Ontario is playing host this
summer to seven feature films, five movies of the week and seven TV series.
Only three of those feature films are big U.S. productions, one being Hairspray, starring John
Travolta, which is set to start shooting in August. The scarcity of ongoing
series, meanwhile, is especially unfortunate because such shows provide
regular, weekly work for film crews, actors and stunt performers.
"Dramatic and episodic programming is the bread and butter of the
craftspeople," notes Grant. "Unfortunately it's on a decline."
Donna Zuchlinski, director of film for the Ontario Media Development Corp.,
blames the high value of the loonie -- and the concerted efforts of many U.S.
states to offer competitive tax credits -- for Ontario's quiet summer.
"It's hard to compete," she says. "Toronto used to double for
New York City or for Boston, but with some states making things so competitive,
most movies just decide to remain there."
Zuchlinski insists Toronto is still in business this summer, but
acknowledges that most of the productions currently under way are independent
U.S features and low-budget TV series. She adds that the OMDC is working hard,
with the help of its Los Angeles office, to market the province "right on
the ground in Hollywood." Still, some of those who work in the film
business question whether enough is being done. "A producer in L.A. was
just telling me he's getting a better discount at the dry cleaners than coming
up to Canada to shoot," says Toronto-based casting director Brian Levy of Powerhouse
Casting Inc. Powerhouse usually works on as many as eight projects each summer,
but Levy says his studios have only a couple of projects on the go right now.
It's a frustrating situation for those who for years depended on Toronto to
provide steady film work. Liise Keeling, a stunt performer based in the city,
recalls flying out to Vancouver last fall to work on the set of X-Men: The Last Stand. "Considering Toronto's
track record, it's a shame," she says. "I remember the days when
there was so much work [in Toronto] you'd have to clone yourself."
Keeling, who did stunts for a number of U.S. feature films in Toronto last
year, including The Sentinel, 16 Blocks and Cheaper by the Dozen 2, says morale among crews and performers in the city is the lowest
it's been in many years. "No one is on suicide watch just yet," she
says. "But it's discouraging -- especially when it's summer and it's
supposed to be the busiest time."
M. Night Shyamalan risked a lot when he
left Disney for Warner Bros.
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Jason Mcbride
(July 21, 2006) At the age of 36, M. Night Shyamalan has made eight feature
films that collectively have raked in more than a billion dollars at the box
office. You can attribute that commercial success to a number of factors:
Shyamalan's re-invigoration of tawdry horror and science-fiction codes; a keen
storytelling ability; a rare facility with actors; a canny marketing sense.
Cynics might belabour the final point, but it's undeniable that Shyamalan's
films have benefited greatly from the writer-director's ability to bend the
media to his will. Film reviewers have routinely stayed mum about the twists
and turns of his movies while fanning the great clouds of mystery that surround
his creative process. One secret, however, is gradually emerging among
both critics and audiences: Shyamalan is a pretty mediocre filmmaker, and he's
getting worse. Spoiler alert, indeed. A new book about Shyamalan, The Man
Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale,
chronicles in intimate detail the creation of the filmmaker's latest movie, Lady
in the Water. Shyamalan has a lot riding on the film, not the least of
which is his pride. As recounted in the book, written by Sports Illustrated's
Michael Bamberger, Lady caused Shyamalan to leave Disney, the studio
that had produced all of his films since 1999's The Sixth Sense. When Shyamalan
first delivered the screenplay for Lady -- the tale of a water nymph who
befriends a building superintendent reeling from a broken heart -- Disney
executives found it weak, confusing and laboured. A wounded Shyamalan, well
used to singular levels of creative freedom and reverence, jumped ship, taking
the project to Warner Bros.
Disney shouldn't worry. The movie is weak, confusing and laboured, and
it's certainly not going to restore Shyamalan's diminishing reputation. Once
heralded as a new Hitchcock, Shyamalan is looking ever more like a Spielberg
manqué, committed to the kind of wide-eyed magic realism the latter evinced in
early films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. Even
more so than Steven Spielberg, however, Shyamalan has romanticized childhood,
endowing it with an untenable capacity for wisdom, innocence and authenticity.
Shyamalan's overweening self-regard seemed to bloom shortly after the success
of The Sixth Sense. Unbreakable, the story of a security guard
(Bruce Willis) with superpowers, was about much more than comic books -- it was
a treatise on heroism and our lamentable capitulation to cynicism. 2002's Signs
featured another of Shyamalan's lugubrious protagonists: Mel Gibson's
ex-priest, haunted by the death of his wife and the immense crop circles in his
cornfields. It squandered its well-earned chills -- Shyamalan is usually a
competent craftsman -- in favour of a fuzzy discourse on the loss of faith.
It's one thing to make films imbued with the wonderment of childhood, but it's
another to make films as if you were a child. The Village, Shyamalan's
seventh feature, might have been written by an eighth-grader obsessed with The
Crucible. The increasingly infantile stories Shyamalan is telling provide
less respite or reward and more bafflement. If Shyamalan is ever going to live
up to his early promise, he'll have to grow up, too.
M. Night Shyamalan Says Spike Lee Saves Lives
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com - By Marie
Moore
(July 21, 2006) *So if we’re all just a group of people who don’t
believe in
ourselves, don’t believe in our purpose, we can’t build off each other.
-- M. Night Shyamalan -- Griots are a very important part of the African tradition. M.
Night Shyamalan's latest, "Lady in the Water," takes on the mantle of
storyteller. The Film Strip asked Shyamalan how important storytelling
was to him as a kid and if he read stories to his children. He said
storytelling was very important and he did read stories to his children, but
not as much as he should. "It was our last day in France," he
recalled, "and we were having dinner. One of my kids was like, 'Tell me a
story.' And I'm like, 'No, we’re just going to sit here and smell the lavender.
That's what we’re going to do.' And they’re like rolling their eyes."
Although Shyamalan has had much success with "Sixth Sense" with Bruce
Willis and "Signs" with Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix, he says his
most requested film is "Unbreakable" with Samuel L. Jackson.
"The struggle for me is that there are two realities," Shyamalan
points out. "There is a perceived reality. Let's say that that's a big
successful movie, and then there's the reality of it. Let's just pick
'Unbreakable.' There is a perceived reality of what happened to it and then
there is the reality which is that I cannot go anywhere without someone asking
me about the sequel to 'Unbreakable.' I can't walk out and go get a bagel. I
can't go anywhere. That is the most asked about movie of my career by far and
it's everywhere I go. I'm out swimming in the middle of the ocean and a couple
swims up and ask me if I'm going to make the sequel to 'Unbreakable.' 'We love
that movie,' they say." As in the past, Shyamalan continues to sing the
praises of Spike Lee. This time he begins telling the story of Harriet
Beecher Stowe and Abe Lincoln: "The idea of Harriet Beecher Stowe was what
really caught me, just caught me, and I said, 'Wow, this idea that you write a
book and somebody like Lincoln reads the book and other people in that time
period read that book and you’re creating change. Then someone who can make a
difference decides to do something about it. Harriet Beecher Stowe didn’t know
she was doing all that, she was just writing a book, but it actually opened
minds and created points of views … You will be part of a chain that you can’t
possibly know. It's very important that you keep acting, that you be proactive.
That you believe you have a purpose. If any one of us doesn’t do our little
link in the chain, the eventuality doesn’t happen. So if we’re all just a group
of people who don’t believe in ourselves, don’t believe in our purpose, we
can’t build off each other.
"I've told this story, but I'll tell it again. I'm in JFK airport sending
my grandparents to India and the flight was delayed, I went into a little
bookstore and on the rack was Spike Lee's book for his first movie, 'She's
Gotta Have It'. I got the book and I could not believe that you could just go
and make movies. I thought it was some tribe of people that did that way out
where you have no connections. So I decided to go make movies. I went to school
where he [Spike] went to school, all of that, blah, blah, blah. I went on to
make some movies, make some money. I put the money into a foundation.
"There is a lady in a village in India who really inspired me. She stood
up to these gang people that were raping and pillaging and all this kind of
stuff. I want to help those unfortunate people, help educate them and save
lives. Spike Lee saves lives. Literally, Spike Lee saves lives. Is he aware
that he saves lives? No, maybe now if I tell him, you know what I mean. But he
is a link in the chain. A link in the chain. That is very important. Literally,
somebody's gonna get money in their hands because he [Spike] wrote that book
and saves lives. They're going to get educated, learn how to sow and be able to
support their family. How do we know what part we're going in the chain?
Positive, empowering energy will create an incredible network of things.
How many people don’t believe in that, that they’re part of that inevitable
change of things. "My babysitter once left a book by mistake that she was
reading about how people are having a hard time making ends meet because their
cost of living is so high, and they’re not saving anything, because they’re
always renting. It’s called the “Nickel and Dime” book. So I went and I bought
a bunch of low income houses and built them up and gave them to families in
Philadelphia, because my babysitter was reading it, because her teacher had
assigned it to her, because the teacher was moved by this lady. Look at that
chain of events, you know what I mean? It’s just an empowering thing to be able
to hear, if you could, the beauty of the spiral of things that happen. If God
could tell you when you die, this is what you did, It would be so cool."
One Last Dance With The Devil
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Allan Thompson, Special To The Star
(Jul. 22, 2006) KINIHIRA, Rwanda—Against a stunning backdrop of verdant
hills checkered with terraced farm plots, banana groves and mud houses,
Roy Dupuis sits alone, quietly
transforming himself into Roméo Dallaire. The steely-eyed Quebec actor cast as the retired Canadian
general is practising his lines, murmuring unfamiliar military lingo that
wasn't part of his English vocabulary before taking the role of Canada's most
famous soldier for the film version of Dallaire's Rwanda genocide memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil.
Dupuis, whose most recent role was hockey legend Rocket Richard, is sipping a
can of Nestea and puffing Gauloise cigarettes. Finally, he gets up to stroll
across the set and chat with crew members, lamenting that he forgot to bring
the charger for his camera and won't be able to snap his own photos of the
scenery that so mesmerized Dallaire, whose tragic story inspired this
film. Squint your eyes just a bit and the handsome 43-year-old Dupuis
looks eerily like Dallaire, sporting a carefully groomed moustache, summer tan
uniform and authentic blue beret. Indeed, Dupuis is even wearing Dallaire's
original army nametag and decorations from 1994. Dallaire is
collaborating on this project — right down to a line-by-line review of the
script — and insisted on giving Dupuis the decorations to add
authenticity. He also gave Dupuis something of himself. "I
feel a real connection with this man. He opened up to me," Dupuis says
during an interview on the set, the first time he has spoken with media since
the gruelling shoot began in Rwanda a month ago. "I'm here because of
him."
In a chapel at the St. Jean military base near Montreal, Dallaire and Dupuis
talked for hours. "Mostly he talked and I listened. He was generous
because he wants this story told." "This is the first time I
accepted doing a movie without reading the scenario first," Dupuis says.
"It was mainly my meeting with this man that got to me on this. This story
should not die, it should be remembered so that maybe we could stop something
like another genocide from happening." Like others, Dupuis
acknowledges he barely noticed news of the Rwanda genocide in 1994. "I
recall hearing about it, that's pretty much it. Then basically when he started
talking about it, it was like, `Holy shit, what happened over
there?'" In this tiny central African country that witnessed the
slaughter of up to 1 million people when Hutu extremists set out to exterminate
the Tutsi minority and Hutu moderates, Dupuis and the rest of the production
team are visiting sites that are the virtual stations of the cross of the
Rwanda genocide. Cast and crew alike have been struck by the breathtaking
beauty of the country and the crushing poverty. Ragged bands of small children
line the roadway to every shooting location, calling out "muzungu"
(Kinyarwanda for "white man") and asking for empty water bottles to
reuse. Shooting in Rwanda has added authenticity — including the red dust
that covers nearly everything — but it has proved complicated and expensive.
The country has no film industry and none of the gear — cranes, booms or
complicated lighting equipment — required by major movie productions. On
this day, the set is a magnificent vantage point near a tiny village called
Kinihira, a spot that Dallaire regarded as his secret place. Amid the carnage
of the genocide, this is where the Canadian general who commanded a doomed
United Nations mission would retreat to "become human again."
And Dupuis says that is exactly the Roméo Dallaire that he intends to portray,
a human being, not a hero.
"In a sense it is a heroic role because he went — in French we say
`au-delà de lui-même' — farther than himself. But he did not succeed in what he
would have wanted to do, so that's why he sees himself as not being a
hero. "I'm not trying to play a hero. I'm trying to play everything
I feel about him, as a human being." Shake Hands with the Devil
is being produced by Laszlo Barna and Michael Donovan. The film will be
distributed next year in Canada by Seville Pictures. Donovan, who won an Oscar
for the Michael Moore documentary Bowling for Columbine, has spent the
past four years on the Dallaire project. The director, Ottawa-born Roger
Spottiswoode, says the movie will be a compelling, factual account of
Dallaire's Rwanda experience, all the more real for being shot on location.
Early plans to shoot in South Africa were quickly abandoned after Spottiswoode
visited Rwanda himself. "It is the story of a disaster for a country
and the personal disaster of a person who was put into a meat grinder and left
with very little," Spottiswoode says during a lunch break on the set,
pausing only to marvel at the spectacular scenery. "It's the story
of a great tragedy and a remarkable person ... It's a story that has actually
not been told before, even though people may think it has. I hope we'll get
past them thinking Hotel Rwanda is the only story." This is
the first feature-film depiction of Dallaire's story. The Hollywood production Hotel
Rwanda featured Nick Nolte in a composite character — a hard-drinking
Canadian colonel — that was loosely based on Dallaire, but was neither a
flattering nor accurate portrayal. Both Dupuis and Spottiswoode spent
hours talking to Dallaire about the film. "He was very, very clear
that this was not to be the story of a hero. He doesn't see it that way at all.
I said that I understood that but that I would do my best to make it a truthful
portrayal of him," Spottiswoode says. "But I can't alter the facts to
make less of him. "He was unable to prevent this happening, he
stayed here as a witness to these events and could not carry the burden later.
He's a sort of Shakespearean character," Spottiswoode says. The film
will also include difficult scenes of Dallaire's suicide attempts.
"I told him I was going to do it and I don't think he liked it very much,
but he didn't stop me. I don't know how much he will approve of what we are
doing. I hope his friends tell him that we got it right, but it will be painful,"
Spottiswoode says. "We have to sort of part company. I'm not making
it for him. I'm making it for other people. It's going to be kind of brutal in
a way and I hope it will be honest."
The script moves back and forth between Dallaire's time in Rwanda and the
period of his mental collapse and retirement from the military years later,
with the Dallaire character speaking to a therapist. Dallaire was
scheduled to travel to Rwanda early this month to visit the set, but cancelled
at the last minute. "He's tired, that's what they told us,"
Spottiswoode says. "To be honest, it was unimaginable to me that he could
ever come. How could you come back and see this being reproduced?"
One scene takes Dallaire through a village where there were so many bodies on
the road that he had to get out and remove them to drive through. In another he
encounters the body of a woman who has been brutally raped. "We're
just trying to be accurate and honest and not do a sort of Hollywood
movie," Spottiswoode says. "We're not changing events; we're
not doing heroic shots or heroic moments. We're not using movie techniques to
create a leading character. We're portraying somebody who went through a very
difficult time and doing it honestly."
Senior Officials Exit Alliance Distributor
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Gayle Macdonald And Shirley Won
(July 21, 2006) Mounting tensions, large egos, and a fractious board
meeting led to the sudden departure yesterday of veteran distributor Victor Loewy and two of his senior
executives at Canada's powerhouse distributor Movie Picture Distribution
LP. The film industry was shocked when Movie Picture Distribution's
parent, Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc., announced that Mr. Loewy, chairman of MPD, "stepped
down" while Patrice Theroux, MPD's chief executive, "has left the
business." No mention was made of the departure of Paul Laberge, the distribution
arm's general counsel. Sources close to Alliance Atlantis's senior management
and board said the three men vacated corporate headquarters Wednesday night --
two were fired, Mr. Loewy quit -- after a heated board meeting. That's when Mr.
Loewy was informed the Alliance Atlantis board had decided to terminate Mr.
Theroux and Mr. Laberge, without Mr. Loewy's involvement or knowledge. The
volatile chairman was incensed, accused the board of constructive dismissal,
and left a room of ashen-faced executives to figure out what to do with the
mess. Toronto-based Alliance Atlantis offered no explanation for the sudden
exit of the three executives. It said in a statement that the board had
concluded "a management change was necessary and in the best interest"
of the business. John Bailey, an independent board member of the company and
former CEO of the Famous Players cinema chain, was named interim chief
executive of MPD, replacing Mr. Theroux.
Alliance Atlantis vice-chairman David Lazzarato, who also serves as chief
financial officer of Alliance Atlantis, took over Mr. Loewy's spot as MPD
chairman. Units of the Movie Distribution Income Fund tumbled $2.20 yesterday
to close at $6.30 on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Shares of Alliance Atlantis
ended the day at $34.45, down 90 cents. "It's a concern," Raymond
James analyst Andy Nasr said. "It's a relationship business."
Alliance Atlantis spun off its theatrical, video and TV distribution operations
three years ago into MPD, in which it retains a 51-per-cent stake. MDP,
Canada's gorilla of distribution, has exclusive -- and extremely lucrative --
output deals with New Line Cinema, Weinstein Company, Focus Films, Miramax, IFC
and Remstar. New Line has a so-called "key man clause" written into
its contract naming Mr. Loewy. The normally chatty Mr. Loewy was tight lipped
when reached yesterday on his cellphone. "I have nothing to say," he
said. "The next step will be to make some arrangements that haven't been
made or even discussed."
But sources close to senior management at Alliance Atlantis and its board say
the slow unravelling of Mr. Loewy's relationship with company chairman Michael
MacMillan began in 1998 when Alliance merged with its much smaller rival,
Atlantis. Mr. Loewy's partner at Alliance, Robert Lantos, left to start a film
production company, Serendipity Point Films. Mr. Loewy stuck around to run his
baby, the distribution group. Mr. MacMillan is a buttoned-down family man who
prefers private dinner parties and avoids the limelight. Mr. Loewy is a flamboyant
man with caviar tastes. Friends say he doesn't keep his opinions to himself.
Still, the two men struck an uneasy truce, with Mr. MacMillan leaving Mr. Loewy
more or less alone to do what he's done best for 30 years: wheel and deal in
motion pictures. Fissures developed in the relationship when Alliance's movie
distribution arm was spun off as an income trust. And then last year, Alliance
Atlantis decided it wanted out of distribution altogether and put its stake in
MPD up for sale. Mr. Loewy and his crew needed no encouragement, and were off
running to find suitors. With Momentum Pictures in Britain and Aurum in Spain,
Motion Picture Distribution was expanding its reach, and Mr. Loewy was eager to
turn his company into an international player. Sources said that several U.S.
investment groups were interested, including Goldman Sachs of New York.
Mr. Loewy reportedly brought news of three or four serious suitors to the
board.
Although the company said last month the unit was no longer for sale, that subject
was reportedly before the MPD board again on Wednesday. Mr. MacMillan, who does
not sit on the board, was not in attendance. He also could not be reached
yesterday. Within minutes of the meeting kicking off, the directors asked Mr.
Theroux and Mr. Laberge to leave the room "because they have some
confidential information to discuss," the source said. Mr. Loewy was then
told that it was decided that Mr. Theroux and Mr. Laberge would be fired. Mr.
Loewy was seen to be furious at the board for making a decision about two of
his senior staff without his involvement as chairman of that group. He accused
his former colleagues of doing an end run and abruptly quit. Yesterday, in a
statement, Alliance CEO Phyllis Yaffe said: "We support the decisions reached
by the board of MPD." She added: "We would like to thank Victor and
Patrice for their important contributions to the partnership and wish them well
in the future endeavours." "They stepped off a cliff," said one
observer. "And with this public, it's gone too far for any of them to turn
back. Victor'll move on. He'll torment them. He'll take that constructive
dismissal position and use it to fight any non-compete conditions [Alliance]
might try to foist on him." In its news release yesterday, Alliance Atlantis
admitted "an output agreement with one of its principal suppliers may be
terminated at the supplier's option following Mr. Loewy's departure from the
business." Analysts say that lucrative partnership is a deal with New Line
Cinema that brought millions into Allianc's coffers with blockbusters such as The
Lord of the Rings.
Shadowboxer -- Lee Daniels Makes Directorial Debut with
Sadistic, Incestuous Snuff Film
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com - By Kam
Williams
(July 24, 2006) *Shadowboxer marks the eagerly-anticipated directorial
debut of Lee Daniels who was previously best known as the producer of Monster’s Ball,
the Jungle Fever flick for which Halle Berry won an Academy Award. Here, Lee
takes a page out of that steamy sex romp while tossing in tons of sadistic gore
to create a sordid crime drama that combines cruelty with carnality. Where
Monster’s Ball most memorable moments involved the nubile and nude Halle
rolling around in arms of the relatively-unappetizing Billy Bob Thornton, this
time it’s Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding, Jr. cavorting in his birthday suit with the decidedly-geriatric Helen Mirren. The problem is not
just that sixty-something Mirren is old enough to be Cuba’s mother, but that
she also happens to be playing his step-mother. And on top of
the Oedipal aspect of their liaison, her character is also wracked with pain
due to inoperable cancer. So, those open-minded enough to get past the incest
issue still might find themselves a bit bothered by the sight of virile,
muscular Cuba mating with a sickly senior citizen who looks like death sucking
on a Lifesaver.
Their ill-fated love story aside, Shadowboxer is otherwise a kinky,
killer-for-hire crime saga. Rose (Mirren) is a heartless assassin who has
raised Mikey (Gooding) to follow in her footsteps. As the movie opens, we find
Rose in failing health and agreeing to participate in one last rubout before
retirement. But when the mother-son hit team discovers that Vickie
(Vanessa Ferlito), the woman they’re supposed to murder is nine-months
pregnant, they have an instant change of heart and choose to save her instead.
This development doesn’t sit well with her husband (Stephen Dorff), the
sadistic crime boss who wanted his wife wasted. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse
game where Rose, Mikey, Vanessa and the baby attempt to hide under the radar by
renting a home in suburban Philadelphia, hoping the heartless hood never catches
wind of their whereabouts. Meanwhile, to pay the rent, Mikey continues to take
assignments from a wheelchair-bound angel of death (Tom Pasch).
While I won’t spoil any of the imaginative ways in which victims are tortured
before being eliminated, suffice to say it is certain to satisfy the blood lust
of those given to gruesome fare. That being said, Shadowboxer‘s Swiss cheese
plotline is riddled with too many holes to consider this flick as much more
than a snuff film. The cast of this high body-count affair
includes comedienne Mo’Nique and gravel-throated songstress Macy Gray, both of
whom do a decent job, despite being abandoned by a bizarre script. Strictly for
devotees of eroticized-violence or anyone who’s been fantasizing about Cuba
Gooding’s bod.
'Shadowboxer' Goes To The Mat
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com -
(July 21, 2006) *Lee Daniels, the producer/director who invited moviegoers to
“Monster’s Ball” and introduced them to “The Woodsman,” goes to the
mat with “Shadowboxer” in limited release this weekend. The film is about a female
assassin named Rose, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer and decides to carry
out one final job. Assisted by her lover – and stepson – Mikey, the two
change their plans when they find that their hit is a crime boss’ pregnant wife
and so begin a harrowing life on the run. “A lot of this is based
on my life. All of my movies are sort of therapeutic for me,” Daniels explained
about his new project. “In ‘Monster’s Ball’ I tried to understand the mind of a
racist. With ‘The Woodsman’ I tried to understand the mindset of a pedophile.
And I ended up empathizing with both. With this, I did it with killers.” The
film was written by William Lipz and is described as an emotionally-charged,
full-throttle film noir, which delves into the harsh underworld of organized
crime and the complex lives of trained assassins. The film stars Cuba Gooding Jr. as Mikey and Helen
Mirren (Elizabeth I) as Rose, with a supporting cast that includes Mo’Nique,
Macy Gray, Vanessa Ferlito, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (“3rd Rock From the Sun”).
The indie film didn’t start out that way, per se, for Daniels. “Shadowboxer”
was picked up by major film company Paramount, but the studio dropped the deal
due to some conflicts with Daniel’s casting. Daniels explained that what he saw
for the film wasn’t what anyone had seen or expected, in terms of how the roles
were interpreted. One battle he had over casting was that of the part of
Precious, a drug addict involved with a younger man – which went to
comedienne/actress Mo’Nique. “Everybody told me – the studio presidents – we
love Mo’Nique. She’s so funny, she’s so talented, but who would ever believe
that a good looking white man would be attracted to her,” he said about casting
the full-size black actress. “I was like, ‘You need to walk down the streets of
New York City and you need to get to the back of an AOL chat room and see what
real life is about. That’s the life that I know. My sister was overweight. She
had a chicken wing in one hand and a crack pipe in the next and she was able to
turn the head of many a good looking white man.” Daniels explained that the part
was written for a 23-year-old white woman, but anomalous casting is an art for
the young director. After all, he’s most often heralded for his commitment to
multi-dimensional representations of African-Americans. “It didn’t
interest me. I’d seen it, been there, done that,” he said about filling the
part of Precious with a young white actress. “I was excited to work with
Mo’Nique because it was her first serious role.”
What might surprise many is that Daniels had a big casting issue with the star
of the film, Cuba Gooding Jr. “I did not want to hire him,” he said
of the Academy Award-winning actor. “He lost me somewhere. Maybe it was ‘Snow
Dogs,' but it was somewhere in his work that I felt that he crossed over into a
place of unbelievability for me. So I wasn’t excited about working with him,
but I remembered…Cuba in ‘Boyz N The Hood.’ So I thought I could just get him
at a place of silence, of doing nothing.” And by do nothing, Daniels means just
pure, unpolluted acting. “[Cuba] has a tendency to raise his eyebrows,” Daniels
continued about one of the actor’s trademarks. “But what is brilliant about
Cuba Gooding Jr. is that he is an Oscar winner because he’s a maverick. He’s
like a Ferrari; he does exactly what you want him to do.” Daniels continued, modestly,
that he believes actors are as talented as their directors. This is the famed
director who did not want to cast Halle Berry in her Oscar-winning role in
“Monster’s Ball.” Fortunately, Daniels reflected on Berry’s very early work as
a crack addict in “Jungle Fever” and it was that glimmer that convinced
him she was right for that part. “If the director is directing you, and you’re
doing what the director tells you to do, then you should be good. I think Cuba
got to a place where [his acting] was directing the director.”
Nevertheless, Daniels directing and perfectionism was a blessing for Mo’Nique.
In her first ever dramatic role, the actress called Daniels a genius. “We
trusted him to take us to a place that most people are afraid of in Hollywood,”
Mo’Nique said. Mo’Nique didn’t audition for the part. Daniels was set on her
and simply requested she meet the cast and crew in Philadelphia to begin
shooting. Fortunately, as Mo’Nique admitted, she had the inside track on the
character. “I knew her,” she said. “My sister is a recovering addict. So, when
I read that script, I knew Precious, hands down. I knew her movements, her
fears, and her insecurities because I lived with her.” Out of respect for her
sister, Mo’Nique called her upon accepting the role to caution her about
forthcoming press about her inspiration for the character. “I said to her ‘When
we start promoting this movie, people are going to know you.’ And she said,
‘Baby, tell the story and make sure you tell it well. Don’t bullsh*t it because
people need to know about this disease. Don’t dress it up.’,” Mo’Nique
explained. “I watched my sister go from a beauty queen to a dope fiend. You
watch Precious go from this beautiful, gorgeous woman to her nails aren’t done,
she’s in flip-flops, and her hair’s out of order. I think my sister will be
proud.” Now, with a serious role under her belt, is the fun-loving comedic
acting over for Mo’Nique? Hardly. She told the EUR that while this was her
first fully serious acting gig; she was not intimidated and is not particularly
en route to a career that’s 100% dramatic. “[The part] didn’t cause me concern
– I didn’t have anything to be concerned about. It did make me say, ‘Ooh look
out’ because it was a great piece of work and I was really appreciative to be a
part of it. Did it make me say, ‘Oh now I’m going to become a dramatic
actress?’ No, I’ll do whatever feels good and whatever looks good.” In the
meantime, “Shadowboxer” opens today, in selected theatres.
Where The Streets Are Packed With Stars
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Alexandra Gill, With a report from Suzanne Ma
(July 22, 2006) VANCOUVER — It's summer in Vancouver and the
Hollywood film industry is sizzling, despite the robust Canadian dollar and a
production drought that has nearly sucked Toronto dry. We don't mean to gloat —
and would certainly never gawk — but there are so many celebrities working on
the West Coast right now, you can barely swing a cocktail glass or shake a dog
leash without bumping into a few. Oh, look. There's little Danny DeVito diving
into a massive feast of king crab at Joe Fortes Seafood & Chop House. He's
here for Deck the Halls, a holiday family flick with Matthew Broderick
and Kristin Davis. And isn't it nice that Davis (the prissy miss from Sex
and the City) was able to spend some downtime with her new beau, Matthew
Perry, who was also in Vancouver to film a movie called Numb, about a
screenwriter who ends up bedding his shrink (Mary Steenburgen). Why, just the
other week, Davis and Perry were seen snuggling in the velvet room at Elixir
restaurant in the Opus Hotel. Sweet.
Related to this article
Stirring up a cross-town rubber-necking storm, clockwise from bottom left: Mark
Wahlberg, Jennifer Beals, Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Danny DeVito, Ryan
Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, Matthew Perry, Kristin Davis, Matthew Broderick and
Jean-Claude Van Damme. (Lori Langille/The Globe and Mail: Map courtesy of
www.discovervancouver.com; Photography by Getty Images and Reuters)
Then there's Rachel McAdams, now being spotted all over town with her
honey, Ryan Gosling. She's here to shoot a forties-era film called Marriage with
co-star Pierce Brosnan (who, word has it, was followed into a hotel washroom
last week by an annoying male fan; apparently, a few nasty words were
exchanged). Later this summer, we'll no doubt be running into Jessica
Alba, who returns for Fantastic Four Part 2. And Renée Zellweger, signed
to star in the horror flick Case 39. And Halle Berry, who's coming next
month to co-star with Benicio del Toro in a movie called Things We Lost in
the Fire, and who will in all likelihood be working out at Studeo55, where
she was a devotee while in town last year to shoot the latest X-Men
flick. The list just goes on and on. “We are fully booked, and there's
actually a shortage of space here for various productions,” says Paul Clausen,
director of operations for the British Columbia Film Commission. “Considering
the dollar is as high as it is, we thought it would have more of an effect in
terms of the number of productions coming to B.C., but things are really good
this year.”
In all, Vancouver has 12 U.S. feature films shooting this summer (down from 20
last year, but highly respectable nonetheless), as well as 13 television series
(up from seven last year) and eight movies of the week (there was only one last
summer). Take a glance at the national picture through a wide-angle lens and
the Vancouver film industry is looking extremely healthy, especially when
compared to Toronto and Montreal, which hasn't bagged a major U.S. production
in more than a year, and doesn't have any on the horizon until fall, when
Paramount Pictures rolls into that city to begin shooting a $100-million-plus
adaptation of the children's book The Spiderwick Chronicles. Vancouver's
hot summer season comes on the heels of a banner year for 2005, when B.C.
reaped near-record film-and-TV production spending, by local and international
producers, of $1.2-billion — up 50 per cent from 2004. Last year's numbers made
Vancouver one of the top three film-production regions in North America —
surpassed only by Los Angeles and New York — and bucked a national trend that
saw overall spending drop sharply.
So why is B.C. doing so well? Many industry observers say the province's
rebound and continued strong showing can be attributed to the tax credit for
foreign and domestic producers that the provincial government raised last year.
But Shawn Robins, communications director for the provincial Ministry of
Tourism, Sport and the Arts, says the tax credits (which were extended last
winter for another two years) are only one of many factors that give B.C. a
competitive edge. “They work to a point, but they're not the be all and end
all,” Robins says, pointing to impressive studio facilities, a large pool of
skilled workers, stable labour relations and an aggressive film commission.
“B.C. has been at this game for a long time,” says Robins, “and we have a very
deep, experienced industry with a lot of technical expertise.” Indeed, when
Twentieth Century Fox was looking for a location to shoot Night at the
Museum, a $100-million, special-effects-heavy adventure comedy starring Ben
Stiller, Robin Williams, Mickey Rooney and Dick Van Dyke, the cast and crew
were originally slated to go to Montreal. But the spring production was moved
to Vancouver to be closer to special-effects houses both here and in Los
Angeles. In all, B.C.'s Lower Mainland is home to five purpose-built studio
facilities, including the appropriately named 300,000-square-foot Mammoth
Studios in Burnaby, where the Fantastic Four sequel will begin shooting
on a 120,000-square-foot stage next month. “We have the best studio facilities
in Canada,” boasts Peter Leitch, president of Lions Gate Studios and chair of
the Motion Picture Production Industry Association of B.C. “We simply wouldn't
attract the level of production that we do if we didn't have them.”
Vancouver also has two big geographical pluses going for it: its relative
proximity to Los Angeles; and British Columbia's superb location possibilities,
including mountain ranges, ocean vistas and, in the interior of the province,
desert, ranchlands and lake country. “It's pretty cool when we can travel 30
minutes outside Vancouver and get into remote forests, farmland and all that
kind of stuff,” says Rino Pace, location manager on the Paramount Pictures
political thriller Shooters, which is using a semi-arid region near
Kamloops as a stand-in for Afghanistan. For his part, Mark Wahlberg, who plays
an exiled marksmen in Shooter, enjoyed one wilderness location at the
Grouse Mountain ski resort so much that he moved into a staff cabin for a
couple of weeks. (Maybe that explains why he hasn't been sighted very much
around town.) Labour stability has been another boon for Vancouver this summer,
especially with Montreal currently mired in a bitter dispute, between two
competing unions, that is being largely blamed for the city's stagnant industry.
Last week, negotiations between the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage
Employees (IATSE) and the Alliance Québécoise des techniciens de l'image et du
son (AQTIS) broke down yet again, as the two unions continued to fight over who
will represent the province's film technicians. In Vancouver, where labour
relations can be as fierce as the cat fight between Paris Hilton and Lindsay
Lohan, a unique arrangement between the unions representing many workers in the
film industry is a model of genteel civility. Last spring, the B.C. Council of
Film Unions (a joint group representing almost 8,000 members, from camera
operators to Teamsters, and which provides a one-stop-shopping bargaining unit
for the industry) hammered out its fourth four-year master contract. The only
wild card on the local labour front involves the Union of B.C. Performers,
currently facing a standoff with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television
Producers, which is seeking pay cuts for low-budget productions. Still, the number
of TV series filming in B.C. this summer — including Battlestar Galactica,
Blade, The L-Word, The 4400, Intelligence and Men
in Trees — has nearly doubled from last year. “Television is especially
important because it provides regular weekly work for local crews,” says
Robins, “and utilizes more domestic expertise in key production roles than
feature films, which come with more people attached to them.”
Of course, TV also brings in big names, including Jennifer Beals, the star of The
L Word, who has been sighted all over Kitsilano, dining at a Milestone's
chain restaurant, and pushing her baby girl's stroller at Shoppers Drug Mart.
Her co-star Cybill Shepherd has been hanging out in Yaletown, where locals have
witnessed her decidedly more upscale tastes: dining at Cioppino's, a swish
Mediterranean grill, and shopping at trendy Beautymark (until too many common
folk entered the store, that is, prompting her to flee). Allison Swan, a
freelance reporter for Star magazine and a native Vancouverite, says the pickings
are definitely ripe in the city this summer. “Vancouver is a great place for
star watching,” she says. “Yes, the actors are busy working, but when the work
is done, they can't resist coming out to play.” Yes, the stars do seem to enjoy
Vancouver — especially Jean-Claude Van Damme, who bought out the entire
penthouse floor of Coal Harbour's James Cheng-designed Shaw Tower for his
Canadian pied-à-terre. The Muscles from Brussels was certainly having a good
time with his dad and daughter during a recent dinner at Brix Restaurant &
Wine Bar in Yaletown. Maybe too much of a good time — his father apparently had
to cut the action star off after one too many postprandials later that night at
Elixir. Then there's Ryan Reynolds, a native Vancouverite. While chilling out
to the tunes at George Ultra Lounge, he was overhead by staff commiserating
about his allegedly former fiancée, Alanis Morissette. The relationship must be
improving, considering that local gossip hound Elaine Lui has just reported on
her website that the two lovebirds were seen frolicking on English Bay beach
last week. “They were kissing, surrounded by their dogs and still very much a
couple,” she wrote. Ah, a happy ending in Hollywood North. With all the good
news of late, what more could the local film industry ask for?
EUR'S Miami Vice Interview With Jamie Foxx
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com - By Kam
Williams
(July 25, 2006) *While Jamie Foxx was making the rounds last year
collecting his Oscar, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, NAACP Image and other
awards for Ray, somewhat overshadowed was his equally-deserving work in
Collateral. And most folks forget that for that picture, he worked with
four-time, Academy Award-nominee Michael Mann. Mann is a very gifted director
who coaxed Oscar-nominated performances out of Will Smith and Jon Voight in Ali
(2001), and out of Russell Crowe in The Insider (1999). So, it is of some
consequence, then, that Jamie and Michael have collaborated again to make Miami Vice, a big screen adaptation
of the high-octane, citrus-coloured cop series which enjoyed a five-year run on
NBC between 1984 and 1989. Here, Jamie reflects on recreating the role
originally played by Philip Michael Thomas, that of Detective Ricardo Tubbs, a
street-wise undercover crime-fighter partnered with Sonny Crockett (Colin
Farrell).
Kam Williams: In preparation for this role, do you think you got a real
sense of what it's like being a detective working undercover?
Jamie Foxx: We did this undercover thing where we're supposedly buying
drugs from this guy and somebody comes up on the side of the car and points a
gun to the back of my head. He said that's how easily it could go wrong.
KW: How did that make you feel?
JF: It was a little bone-chilling, when you think that gunplay is so prevalent.
It was a plastic gun, but it gives you a sense that, if that were to happen in
real life, your head would've been blown off. So, it's a dangerous game when
you play an undercover agent.
KW: How much did Detective Tubbs from the TV series influence how you
handled your character?
JF: The thing that I did do from Philip Michael Thomas is the swagger. I don't
know if I even got close to it, but he had such swagger. Like in the first
episode, when these guys walk up to the car and he pulls out a shotgun, and
says, "You guys want to get out of here?" To see that coldness, that
seriousness... When it came time to get down, he got down. That was the one
thing I tried to bring. And the style. I wanted Tubbs to have style in the movie.
Oswald Boateng supplied the suits for Tubbs, because I wanted him to look fly.
KW: What's the nature of your relationship with Trudy (the character played
by Naomie Harris), your love interest?
JF: That's a serious dynamic in this film, me being with a woman that I really
love, though I'm almost afraid to admit it. But to see her snatched from me
fuels my revenge, fuels the reason why I want to make sure I get this guy.
KW: Were you a fan of the TV series?
JF: Oh, yeah, Friday nights. It was just something that you'd never seen
before. You'd never seen in your face action like that, boat chases and car
crashes like that. You know what I mean? This was something else. It was like,
"What is this coming into our living rooms?" It was on the cutting
edge. The fly women. the actors. the guest stars... the music soundtrack. It
was hot, and where everybody wanted to be. So, now to see somebody rebirth
that, I think it's going to be hot.
KW: Would you describe this as a faithful adaptation, where you simply rely
on the original's formula?
JF: No, it's definitely a departure from the TV show. It's not the same thing.
Michael Mann is trying to create magic again, and make lightning strike twice.
But he's taking the spirit of the TV series and re-imagining it. You understand
what I'm saying?
KW: Yeah, is there a big burden in adapting a hit show to the screen?
JF: Obviously, with the success of Miami Vice on television, there's a heavy
burden to make Miami Vice - The Movie, the thing, the now, the new. So, we all
got our heads together in the trenches trying to make it something completely
special and different.
KW: Was director Michael Mann up to that challenge to somehow make Miami
Vice fresh?
JF: Michael Mann, that's his thing, finding places that aren't even on the map.
I'll never forget when I said, "Yo, I been to the 'hood," he said,
"You don't know the hood. I'll show you the hood." That's what makes
him that different, brilliant filmmaker, his being able to find those locations
that will shock you.
FILM TIDBITS
Toronto Film Fest Offers Five Bollywood Films
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Guy Dixon
(July 21, 2006) Toronto — Bollywood is set to make a strong appearance at the Toronto International
Film Festival come September, as the festival hosts five films from India,
including the love story Never Say Goodbye, set in New York. The film is
about two couples and their intertwining relationship, yet also includes big
song-and-dance numbers typical of Indian blockbusters, thereby creating a
Hollywood-meets-Bollywood style. Other Indian films at the festival include Kabul
Express, a drama with moments of humour about a fractured, post-Sept. 11
Afghanistan and A Grave-Keeper's Tale, about a woman cast out from her
community and labelled a witch.
Craig To Return For Second Bond Adventure
Source: Associated Press
(July 22, 2006) LOS ANGELES — The new James Bond hasn't even had
his first martini yet and he's already got another job. The producers
behind Casino Royale, this fall's return to action for agent 007, said Thursday that
new star Daniel Craig will reprise the role in a second Bond flick due out May 2, 2008.
“As we wrap production on Casino Royale, we couldn't be more excited
about the direction the franchise is heading with Daniel Craig,” producers
Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli said in a news release from Sony
Pictures. “Daniel has taken the origins of Ian Fleming's James Bond portraying,
with emotional complexity, a darker and edgier 007.” Craig was chosen last year
to replace Pierce Brosnan as Bond, the British super-spy who likes his martinis
“shaken, not stirred.” The 2008 release will be the 22nd film in the action
franchise, whose previous Bonds have included Sean Connery, Roger Moore and
Timothy Dalton.
Will Smith Takes Aim At Inner-City Violence
Source: Associated Press
(July 24, 2006) Philadelphia — Will Smith returned to his hometown to
participate in a march against violence Saturday. The actor and rapper said he
wanted to do something about violence in the city, which had 380 killings in
2005 and appears likely to top that number this year. "We're going to. . .
hopefully draw a little attention to the problem and get some solutions,"
Smith said as he walked with his wife, Jada
Pinkett Smith, in West Philadelphia, along
with local officials and members of the community. The level of violence last
week prompted the Philadelphia Daily News newspaper to call for the National
Guard to patrol city streets. AP
‘Bruce Lee’ The Movie: Lee Family To Produce New Film
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(July 24, 2006) *The family of martial arts legend Bruce Lee plans to
make his story into a movie. The announcement of the film came upon the 33rd
anniversary of his death on July 20, 1973. This will be the first Bruce Lee
bio-pic produced and supervised by Lee’s family. The film, tentatively titled
“Bruce Lee,” will be made by Chinese film house Beijing Jian Yongjia and will
be based on the upcoming biography penned by Lee’s brother, Lee Chun-fai. The
film company released a statement in regard to the upcoming film about how this
project will delve into the little-known facts and truths about the life of
Bruce Lee. "Bruce Lee died young, but stories about him haven't stopped
surfacing for 30 years. A lot of them were rumours fed by rumours and
exaggerated. Bruce Lee's family didn't make its opinions known because they
understood people's passion about Bruce Lee," the statement said.
Lensing for the film is scheduled to start early next year with a
green-lighted budget of $12.5 million. Media buzz has mentioned the name
Stephen Chow, a comedic actor and star of “Shaolin Soccer,” to play the role of
the legend. The book comes on Bruce Lee’s birthday Nov. 25, to be followed by
the movie, a series of films and documentaries, and TV shows. A native of
Hong Kong, Lee died at age 32 from swelling of the brain. He is known for films
in which he portrayed characters that defended the Chinese and working class
from oppressors.
De Palma Flick To Open 2006 Venice Film Festival
Source: Associated Press
(July 25, 2006) Rome — Brian De Palma's The
Black Dahlia will make its world premiere
at the prestigious Venice Film Festival on Aug. 30. The movie, starring Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank
and Josh Harnett, is based on James Ellroy's novel about the mysterious killing
of a fledging actress, nicknamed the Black Dahlia, in 1940s Los Angeles. The
festival runs from Aug. 30 through Sept. 9 at Venice's Lido. Last year's
festival saw the world debut of two much-discussed movies: Ang Lee's Brokeback
Mountain and George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. This year's
full program is expected to be unveiled this week. AP
Tyler Perry Secretly Runs Hollywood
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(July 26, 2006) *Madea brought her housedress and .22 pistol to
Hollywood and put the entire industry in a headlock as if it was her bothersome
next door neighbour, Brown. According to BusinessWeek magazine, Tyler Perry’s role as Madea in two
films adapted from his successful stage plays has placed him above all other
actors, including Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Johnny Depp and Adam Sandler, as
yielding the highest return on investments made by movie studios. The
distinction also gives Perry BusinessWeek.com's ROI (Return on Investments)
Award. Neither Perry’s "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" in 2005, nor his
"Madea's Family Reunion" earlier this year passed the $100 million
mark that signifies blockbusters, but each film cost under $6 million to
produce. You do the math. “As any first-year business student knows, a
return on investment is a measure of benefit a company gets for the money it
spends to do business,” explains BusinessWeek. “Expressed as a percentage or
ratio, it is derived by dividing the benefit of the investment (i.e. the
return) by the cost of the investment. In Hollywood terms, that's like trying
to catch water in your hand. Costs are hard to get and even harder to decipher
in the fantasy world of Hollywood accounting, while the returns are often
shared with everyone from producers who once worked on the project to actors
with enough pull to demand it.” In researching the ROI award, BusinessWeek.com
used published reports of cost estimates provided by the Web site IMDb.com and
applied the 2005 average marketing cost of $36 million a film. The
site adds: “We also applied the rule of thumb that a studio typically gets the
proceeds from approximately half the tickets sold at the U.S. box office and
the overall take from the box office is roughly one-third of the money a studio
earns after a film has gone to play overseas and becomes a DVD or movie on pay
TV.”
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::TV NEWS::
Awards Soothe Emmy Snubs
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Rob Salem
(Jul. 24, 2006) The 22nd Television Critics
Association Awards were presented last night here
at the Ritz Carlton Huntington Hotel, with My Name is Earl being named
Outstanding New Program and Grey's Anatomy Program of the Year. As
voted on by 200-plus members of the TCA, representing newspapers, magazines and
websites from across North America, the increasingly influential awards often
address the oversights of the annual Emmy selections. This year especially,
with the Emmys — despite a procedural overhaul — considered to be particularly
far off the mark. As a result, the TCAs tend to be very well-attended;
this year's ceremony, hosted by 24's Mary Lynn Rajskub, had several cast
members from Earl and Grey's on hand to celebrate their wins,
with Hugh Laurie in the House to accept his second consecutive award for
Individual Achievement in Drama, as well as Steve Carell, doubly honoured for The
Office as Outstanding Comedy and himself for Individual Achievement in
same. Lost was named Outstanding Drama for the second year
running. Aaron Sorkin and John Wells accepted the Heritage Award for The
West Wing, citing its cultural and social impact, and the association also
honoured comedy icon Carol Burnett for her Career Achievement. PBS's Frontline
took the News & Information category; High School Musical won for
Children's Programming; and Martin Scorsese's American Masters doc, Bob
Dylan: No Direction Home was named top Movie, Miniseries or Special.
NBC won the most TCA Awards this year, with four ... but they've got some work
to do on all but one of their new shows (Heroes) if they hope to make a
similar showing next season. Some highlights of the last few days of NBC
presentations:
Studio 60/30 Rock/SNL: The network's two Saturday Night Live-derived
series are as different as night and day. Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the
Sunset Strip is an hour dramedy, a prestige production with a kick-ass
cast, headed by Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford. The pilot, nonetheless,
feels occasionally strained. SNL's own SNL clone, the
half-hour sitcom 30 Rock, is produced by Lorne Michaels and writer/star
Tina Fey, and in its current form serves primarily as evidence of how hilarious
Alec Baldwin can be, and how annoying Tracy Morgan is. An underused and miscast
Rachel Dratch will have her role rewritten. Neither Fey nor Dratch will
return to the SNL mothershow, for which Michaels says he's planning the
usual on-air Update auditions, along with further cast and content tweaking.
Twenty Good Years: Another example of the personnel out-classing the
material, this high-concept sitcom quite brilliantly teams the over-the-top
hammy John Lithgow with the slyly underplaying Jeffrey Tambor as odd-couple
buddies — a doctor and a judge, respectively — reluctantly facing retirement.
Again, a disappointing pilot, but a cast and concept full of potential.
Heroes: This one rocks right out of the box: a superhero series for
smart people, and the answer to the question, "What if Mutant X had
actually been really, really good?" Subtly scripted, leisurely plotted,
slickly produced, evocatively and attractively acted. It's the old story:
ordinary folks around the world suddenly discover they have super-powers (an
invulnerable cheerleader, a psychic artist, a telepathic cop ...). You'll
recognize several of them: Gilmore Girls's Milo Ventimiglia, Judging
Amy's Adrian Pasdar, Alias's Greg Grunberg, and adorable über-geek
Masi Oka (Scrubs). It is already emerging as a sentimental
favourite.
Kidnapped: Yet another great cast, with Tim Hutton and Dana Delany as
the wealthy parents of a kidnapped young son, Delroy Lindo as the investigating
cop, Jeremy Sisto as a passionately dedicated freelancer and Mykelti Williamson
as the boy's bodyguard. There are an awful lot of serialized dramas this
season and, though this is potentially one of the better ones, there is only so
much "appointment television" that people will be willing and able to
commit to.
Friday Night Lights: Texas-set high-school football drama, produced, written
and directed by Peter Berg, based on his feature film. The only actors I
recognize are Kyle Chandler (King Kong, Grey's Anatomy) and
Connie Britton (Spin City, 24, repeating her role from the
original film). But then, I'm not exactly the desired demographic.
Carol Burnett Honoured By TV Critics
Source: Associated Press
(July 24, 2006) Pasadena, Calif. — Carol Burnett, whose long-running
variety show became a TV classic, has received a career achievement award from
the Television Critics Association. "Does this mean I'll never get another bad review?"
the 73-year-old actress-comedian joked Sunday as she accepted the honour.
Burnett went on to recount how The Carol Burnett Show, which aired from
1967-78, got started. A pay-or-play clause in her contract with CBS for 30
hour-long variety shows was about to run out and she decided to exercise it.
The network, she said, wasn't thrilled. A CBS executive told her that variety
was the proper domain of male stars like Jackie Gleason, Sid Caesar and Milton
Berle and suggested she consider a proposed sitcom titled Here's Agnes,
Burnett said. "I'm so glad I didn't do Here's Agnes," she
said, dryly. The variety show represented "the greatest years of my
professional life" and the TV critics' honour rightly belongs to the
show's cast and crew, she said. Burnett, also a singer, starred in a series of
musical specials with guests including Julie Andrews, Beverly Sills and Dolly
Parton and in three TV adaptations of the Broadway musical Once Upon a
Mattress, most recently in 2005. Earlier this year she was a guest star on Desperate
Housewives.
Also honoured Sunday were actors Hugh Laurie of Fox's House and Steve
Carell of NBC's The Office," who received awards for individual
achievement in drama and comedy, respectively. The group, which includes more
than 200 reporters and columnists working in U.S. and Canadian print media,
voted a heritage award to The West Wing. Series creator Aaron Sorkin
called the honour "an incredible compliment" to all those involved in
the White House drama that wrapped up its seven-year run on NBC last season.
Sorkin also called it a tribute to "the memory of the unforgettable John
Spencer," who played Leo McGarry in the series and who died of a heart
attack in December 2005 at age 58. Other TCA winners were:
— Grey's Anatomy, ABC, program of the year.
— My Name Is Earl, NBC, best new program.
— Lost, ABC, best achievement in drama.
— The Office, NBC, best achievement in comedy.
— Frontline, PBS, best achievement in news and information.
— High School Musical, Disney Channel, best achievement in children's
programming.
— American Masters: Bob Dylan — No Direction Home, PBS, best achievement
in movies, miniseries and specials.
Puerto Rican Teen Crowned Miss Universe
Source: Associated Press, By Beth Harris
(July 24, 2006) LOS ANGELES - An 18-year-old from Puerto Rico who hopes
to someday star in U.S. and Latin American films has been crowned as Miss Universe 2006. Zuleyka Rivera Mendoza shared
a nervous emotional hug with first runner-up, Kurara Chibana of Japan, moments
before the winner was announced, then clasped her hands to her mouth in
amazement as her name was called Sunday night. She beamed as the crown was
placed on her head. "I always had faith and confidence in myself,
but I never knew I was going to win," Rivera, speaking in Spanish from the
stage, said in her first remarks as Miss Universe. The winner, who is
from Salinas, on the Caribbean island's southern coast, said she would continue
the pageant's mission of promoting awareness and education about AIDS and HIV.
"I want to tell those people there's always problems in life, but
there's always possibilities to improve things," she said. Also
finishing in the top five were second runner-up Lauriane Gillieron of
Switzerland, third runner-up Lourdes Arevalos of Paraguay, and fourth runner-up
Tara Conner of the United States. In her pageant biography, Rivera
explained what made her different from the other contestants.
"Physically, I have been told by modelling agencies and friends that I
represent the consummate Latino look," she said. ``Everything in my face
expresses our heritage, our music and the wonderful mixes of races that we
are." Rivera is the first winner from Puerto Rico since Denise
Quinones in 2001, and the fifth overall in the pageant's 55-year history.
The field of 86 was actually narrowed to 20 last week during preliminary
judging in the contest's swimsuit, evening gown and interview categories, but
finalists weren't announced until Sunday's show was under way, allowing all 86
to be introduced to the television audience. Lia Andrea Ramos of
Philippines was chosen most photogenic in an online vote by the public. Angela
Asare of Ghana won the congeniality award in a vote by all 86 contestants.
Chibana, who carried the impressive looking Samurai sword, won the award for
best national costume. "They were probably afraid not to pick Miss
Japan or she would use that sword," quipped Carson Kressley of TV's Queer
Eye for the Straight Guy, who provided commentary along with 2004 Miss USA
Shandi Finnessey. Opera singer Vittorio Grigolo and Latin singer Chelo provided
musical performances. The pageant began with the top 20 finalists' names
being announced early in the show. Then their scores were discarded and
competition began again, with the field gradually narrowed throughout the
night. As soon as the final 20 had been selected, they immediately
strutted across the stage in skimpy two-piece bikinis for the swimsuit
competition. After being narrowed to the final 10, the competition moved
to evening gowns, with the smiling contestants walking across the stage to
music provided by Grigolo.
The winner travels the world for a year on behalf of charities and pageant
sponsors. Last year's winner, Natalie Glebova of Canada crowned Rivera
with a diamond-and-pearl-studded headpiece valued at $250,000 US.
"My year as Miss Universe has meant more to me than I can
express," said Glebova, who began her reign with a trip to South Africa
where she publicly took an HIV test. "I have travelled the world on
behalf of various HIV/AIDS organizations, promoting education, research and
legislation, and I walk away from this experience feeling like I truly made an
impact." "Access Hollywood" host Nancy O'Dell and
actor-singer Carlos Ponce were emcees of the 55th annual pageant, broadcast
live on NBC. The celebrity judging panel included actor James Lesure of
Las Vegas; Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry; actress Bridgette Wilson
Sampras; Sean Yazbeck, newest winner of The Apprentice; former Dallas Cowboys
star Emmitt Smith; anchor Maria Celeste Arraras of Telemundo's Al Rojo Vivo;
Claudia Jordan, briefcase model on Deal or No Deal; fashion photographer
Patrick McMullan, and 2003 Miss Universe Amelia Vega. The pageant was
last held in the United States in 1998, when the show originated from Honolulu.
Miss Puerto Rico Crowned Miss Universe, Collapses
Source: Canadian Press, By Bernie Woodall
(July 24, 2006) Forty minutes into her reign as Miss Universe, Miss Puerto Rico Zuleyka Rivera Mendoza collapsed during a post-pageant news conference and was rushed
offstage on Sunday night. Pageant officials immediately said the lithe 5-foot-9
18-year-old was all right and had fainted. "She's OK. She's fine,"
pageant representative Lark Anton told Reuters. "She got dizzy. It's very
hot up here. Her dress is tight - as you could see it was beaded and heavy. She
passed out." Anton said Mendoza "had plenty to eat today," when
pressed for the beauty queen's condition before she fainted at the center of
the stage at the Shrine Auditorium, where she had become the 55th Miss Universe
before an international television audience less than an hour earlier. Mendoza
attended the pageant's Coronation Ball after recovering from her collapse,
according to guests including Donald Trump, co-owner of the Miss Universe
Organization. "Yes, she's fine," Trump said as he left. The Puerto
Rican beauty queen was named Miss Universe 2006 over runner-up Miss Japan,
Kurara Chibana, 24. Second runner-up was Miss Switzerland Lauriane Gillieron,
21. Rounding out the top five were Miss Paraguay Lourdes Arevalos, 22, and Miss
United States, 20-year-old Tara Conner.
The youngest of the five finalists, Mendoza appeared radiant as she waved to
photographers several minutes before collapsing. Most of the press had left by
the time she fainted. Having lingered on stage, Mendoza was leaning on some
assistants when her face fell to her chest, her new tiara atop her head.
Tottering on high, spiky heels, she appeared to lean in this fashion for about
10 seconds and, at 8:38 p.m., collapsed in the arms of pageant assistants. She
was rushed offstage while the organizer of a post-pageant press conference
called for aid. "Is there a nurse in the house? Can a nurse come to the
stage," said the announcer, who was not identified. Within a minute, Anton
said Mendoza was fine and had merely fainted. During her news conference,
Mendoza said she would carry out the work of the Miss Universe Organization,
which is to work to help those with HIV/AIDS. The Miss Universe contest was
held at the fabled Shrine Auditorium near downtown Los Angeles. It was a
homecoming of sorts. The first Miss Universe pageant was held about 25 miles
away in Long Beach, California, in 1952. Ending her year as Miss Universe was
Canadian Natalie Glebova, who was born in Russia.
TV Critics Give `T-Bag' A Hand
Excerpt from The
Toronto Star - Rob Salem
(Jul. 26, 2006) He may be a slimy, sociopath little weasel, but he
knows when to keep his mouth shut. Rob
Knepper is in fact an absolute
sweetheart, a 46-year-old character actor from Fremont, Ohio, with a lovely
wife, Tori, and an adorable toddler, Ben, both of whom are travelling with him,
and 20 years worth of diverse TV credits, from L.A. Law to Murder She
Wrote to Star Trek to Carnivale. And films, including Good
Night, and Good Luck. But to the viewing public at large — and the
cluster of gushing critics who now surround him — he is "T-Bag,"
a.k.a. Theodore Bagwell, the man we have come to love to hate as the baddest of
the bad on Prison Break. With the surprise-hit serial drama's
second season set to start on Fox Aug. 21, the network has followed its preview
press conference here with an informal poolside dinner with the attending cast
— tablecloths for the occasion an entirely appropriate prison-issue orange.
Or rather, formerly appropriate ... as we know, at the end of last
season, eight of the inmates of the fictitious Fox River prison finally,
successfully, made their break for freedom. Which means this season the
prevailing motif will switch from Escape from Alcatraz to a kind of
multiple take on The Fugitive. With Knepper as the one-armed man.
Fans will also recall that the duplicitous T-Bag lost a hand to the vengeful
mobster Abruzzi in last season's cliffhanger finale. Knepper is unable to
even get near the buffet table, inundated with questions about T-Bag's fate: Do
they re-attach the hand? Does he finally exact his revenge? Do they find D.B.
Cooper's $5 million? Why is his spiky hair now white-blond?
Knepper isn't saying. He knows we don't really want to know. "I'll
say the same thing to you that I say to my wife when she wants to know what's
going to happen next Monday night," he grins. "I say, `I don't want
to give you your Christmas present too early.' "People have been
desperate ... more than any other show I've worked on, people want to know
what's happening. It's a constant thing for us. And it's hard to not give you
that present. But at the same time, you'll thank us, because when you watch it,
you'll go, `Ah!'" (Okay, we'll give you one little spoiler: no one
will confirm this, but actress Sarah Wayne Callies is still prominently listed
on the second-season cast list, which means it is fairly safe to assume that,
appearances to the contrary, the dishy doctor Sara Tancredi is not yet quite
dead.) With the boys now out on the lam, the show has opened up beyond
the grey walls of its former Chicago prison location to the wide-open spaces
and urban places of Dallas, Tex. And, hot on their collective tail, an addition
to the cast, William Fichtner, freshly sprung from the cancelled Invasion
to play a single-minded FBI agent.
TV TIDBITS
CTV's Ben Mulroney appointed national ambassador for UNICEF
Canada
Source: Canadian Press
(July 26, 2006) TORONTO (CP) - Ben Mulroney, host of CTV's
Canadian Idol and ETalk, has been appointed as a national ambassador for UNICEF
Canada, the network and children's agency announced Tuesday. Among his
responsibilities will be to serve as spokesperson for this year's
trick-or-treat for UNICEF campaign. The Halloween campaign will see Canadian
children raising funds to help give kids in Malawi, in southeastern Africa, the
chance to go to school. Mulroney will also go on a field trip to Malawi.
Mulroney, who interviews high-profile celebrities and covers red carpet
events for ETalk, holds degrees in law and history. His father is former Prime
Minister Brian Mulroney. "When UNICEF Canada approached me with this
opportunity, I jumped at the chance," he said in a news release.
"I am committed to doing whatever I can to help UNICEF in its work
to restore childhoods and build futures for children around the world."
Other high-profile Canadians on the UNICEF spokesperson roster are CTV
Newsnet anchor Kate Wheeler, Olympic gold medallist Beckie Scott and former
prima ballerina and producer Veronica Tennant. UNICEF Canada began in
1955 in support of UNICEF's work for children in 155 countries and territories
and build awareness among Canadians about issues facing the world's children.
Its trick-or-treat for UNICEF campaign raises over $3 million a year.
On the Net: http://www.unicef.ca
Tina Fey Signs Off From Saturday Night Live
Source: Associated Press
(July 24, 2006) Burbank, Calif. — Tina Fey is leaving the anchor chair at
Saturday Night Live. Fey says she's quitting the
show after six seasons as head writer and co-anchor of the Weekend Update fake
news segment to focus on her new NBC prime-time series, 30 Rock.
"The new show's going to take a lot of time," Fey said while
appearing on Friday night's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Fey, 36,
first joined Saturday Night Live as a writer in 1997 and became head
writer in 1999. Fey plays the head writer of a fictional late-night sketch show
in 30 Rock, a show she developed for NBC that also stars Alec Baldwin. AP
::THEATRE NEWS::
Actor's Good Buddy Saves Holly Musical
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Richard
Ouzounian, Theatre Critic
Buddy
By Alan Janes, Rob Bettinson and Buddy Holly. Directed by John Mueller. Until
Sept. 17 at Stage West, 5400 Dixie Rd., Mississauga. 905-238-0042
(Jul. 21, 2006) If you're going to produce Buddy, then the first thing
you
need is a terrific guy to play Buddy Holly. Fortunately, the production
that opened last night at Stage West in Mississauga has just that in Christian
Bellsmith. Not only is he an excellent singer and guitarist, but he
radiates that beaming boyish charm and incandescent love of performing that
made Holly such a star in his all-too-brief career. The rest of the show
soars when it sings and slumps when it speaks, but that's more the fault of the
cardboard biographical book by Alan Janes and Rob Bettinson than the
performers. Holly's life was amazing for how much happened to him
professionally and how little took place personally. Born in 1936 in
Lubbock, Texas, he grew up wanting only to perform. Together with two hometown
buddies, he formed a band called The Crickets that broke through the then
narrow conventions of country music to crash through to the other side, into
full-blown rock 'n' roll. So persuasively funky was Holly's sound that
when he made his debut at Harlem's Apollo Theatre, the management was stunned
to discover he was actually white. In one year, Holly had 15 hit records
(notably "Peggy Sue" and "That'll Be the Day") and was on
his way to superstardom, when he perished in a tragic plane crash on Feb. 3,
1959, on his way to the next tour stop after playing a concert in Clear Lake,
Iowa. Also killed were two other pop stars of the day, Ritchie Valens and
J.P. Richardson, a.k.a. "The Big Bopper."
Years later, Don MacLean would call it "the day the music died" in
his iconic song, "American Pie." That hit provided a sad coda
to a shockingly brief career, but aside from that fact — and a few routine
music-business squabbles — there wasn't much of interest take place in Holly's
life. Janes and Bettinson try to patch the musical numbers together with
a series of tired devices: radio interviews and disc jockey reports. The scenes
don't exactly flow into each other and the clunky staging of John Mueller
doesn't help matters. Some of the cast (John Devorski and Kent Sheridan)
know how to put some meat on the dramatic bones they've been given, but players
in a lot of the smaller roles overact mightily, thinking it will help. It
doesn't. Fortunately, most of the show is music, especially the last half
of Act II, which recreates that final concert in Clear Lake. When
Bellsmith and the boys are rockin' and rollin', everything is just fine and
there's plenty to enjoy. Stephen Foster is awesome as Jerry, the drum-playing
Cricket, and Melanie Phillipson provides strong keyboard licks. Jon-Alex
MacFarlane captures the sexual energy of Ritchie Valens when he does "La
Bomba," while Jim Soper has the perfect outsized energy to bring the Big
Bopper's novelty hit "Chantilly Lace" back to life. But in the
end, it's Bellsmith who carries the evening. With his thick-framed black
glasses, goofy grin and total sincerity, he wins you over time and again.
From the sweetness of "Everyday", through the bitter edge of "That'll
Be the Day", he lets you glimpse the Buddy Holly who hid inside his
songs. And when the entire company joins in for a joyous celebration of
"Johnny B. Goode," you may want to disagree with MacLean. The
music didn't really die; not if there are people around to play and sing it
like this.
Livin' La Dolce Vita
Excerpt from The
Globe and Mail - Scott Deveau
(July 26, 2006) Toronto's most cutting-edge theatre can apparently
be
found in Vancouver, Montreal and St. John's -- at least, according to an
Italian theatre festival taking place early this fall. Every year, the Teatro della Limonaia,
a theatre company based outside Florence, claims to select the works of one
city to feature at its Intercity Festival. In the past, the annual festival has featured cities such as
Budapest, Berlin, Sao Paulo and Paris. This year, the festival decided to
showcase Toronto. "The most successful editions are cities we don't know
well. Like when we came to Montreal [in 1992], we didn't actually know were
Montreal was," said the festival's artistic director, Dimitri Milopulos,
speaking from a refurbished lemon orchard in Sesto Fiorentino, where the
festival is held. "We just fell in love with Canada." Mr. Milopulos
led a four-person team to Toronto this past November to troll texts, talk to
people in the theatre community and see as many plays as possible.
"When we go to a place, we don't care about who is well-known or who
is not. We just care about the quality," he said. "What we want to do
is open a window here, to show what's happening in Toronto." What the
company actually found for Intercity Toronto 2006 was a smattering of
Torontonians -- and a handful of out-of-towners. The festival bill includes
such local content as a play directed by Dora Mavor Moore Award-winning David
Ferry and readings of pieces by Judith Thompson and Antonio Salvatore, but it
also includes work from Vancouver dancer Peter Bingham, St. John's director
Jillian Keiley and Montreal playwrights Rick Miller and Daniel Brook.
"When we give a name to a festival, in this case, Toronto, we just see the
city of Toronto as a mirror of the country," Mr. Milopulos said, adding
that this year's festival is intended to reflect English theatre in Canada,
much as Montreal's was meant to reflect francophone theatre. This umbrella
approach is not unique to Canada, Mr. Milopulos said. When the festival
showcased Moscow, one of the most successful plays actually came from St.
Petersburg. Nevertheless, it is a little uncomfortable for the non-Torontonians
who have been selected to participate.
Ms. Keiley, artistic director of Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland, was working in
Toronto when the Italian company visited and asked her to develop a play with
an all-Italian theatre troupe. The working title is The Hole That's
Remaining -- "or whatever that is in Italian," she said. Ms.
Keiley will be heading to Florence to work on her play in September, before the
festival opens on Oct. 4. When Teatro della Limonaia first approached her
to participate in the festival, Ms. Keiley told the company that she couldn't
do it because she wasn't from Toronto. She was worried she would take heat from
the local theatre community. "They said, 'Yeah, we know, but we're never
going to do Intercity St. John's,' " she said. "I knew I'd be
crucified, but I couldn't say no." Mr. Ferry, whose production, The
Last Days of Judas Iscariot, won five Dora awards last year, was selected
after Mr. Milopulos's team saw the play in the Distillery District. He was
asked to direct Alias Godot, an absurdist comedy by 27-year-old Toronto
playwright Brendan Gall. The play, which speculates that Samuel Beckett's Godot
was actually held up by dirty New York cops, has never been performed in
English, let alone in Italian. Mr. Ferry has just gotten back from Italy, where
he went to cast the play despite not knowing any Italian. He attended the
auditions with a translated copy of the work to accompany the original English
text, struggling to follow both scripts while trying to watch the auditions.
But his apprehensions were dispelled after casting for the play was complete.
It was a hoot," Mr. Ferry said. "Actors are actors," he added.
"In the end, with my Italian colleagues, I would go back over the audition
notes and ask their opinions. And we were on similar wavelengths the whole
time. "For an artist," Mr. Ferry continued, "when someone
from another country recognizes your work and says, 'We really want to work
with you,' it's very exciting."
::OTHER NEWS::
Toronto And London Deliver A Plan To Give The Urban Arts A
Booster Shot
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Val Ross
(July 24, 2006) At noon today, when Toronto Mayor
David Miller and
Ontario tourism minister Jim Bradley turn up in the gleaming precincts of the MaRS (Medical and Related
Sciences) Centre adjacent to Toronto General Hospital, it won't be to tell the
nation about some breakthrough in avian flu or nanotechnology. Instead, these
worthies, joined by such non-medical figures as the City of Toronto poet
laureate Pier Giorgio di Cicco, are gathering to hail a well-known but
underutilized steroid for the soul of urban Canada: creativity. The
prescription the report's authors are officially unveiling is a 40-page
document, Imagine a Toronto. . . Strategies for a Creative City. Its
recommendations could be applied as easily to Vancouver or Halifax, and they
arrive at a key moment in strenuous nationwide efforts to pump hundreds of
millions of dollars into new theatre, gallery, museum and concert spaces. But
even if our cities do a heroic job of building and paying for all this, without
the right long-term policies to attract and make space for artists, audiences
will dwindle, patrons will move away and the buildings will stand idle. And if
cities can't also support talent in 21st-century creative industries like
video-game development, biomedical imaging or software design -- well,
depression, urban decay and slow death loom. So the argument goes. The
Strategies for a Creative City report, two years and $600,000 in the making, was
developed in partnership with Creative London, a parallel English project. The
team that put it together went to see what's going on in Barcelona, Berlin, New
York and San Francisco (Toronto put up $150,000, as did two Ontario provincial
ministries; the rest came from the London Development Agency). The report words
its prescription as a challenge to "Imagine a Toronto" -- as in,
imagine a city that offers people under age 20 free access to museums and
galleries. Imagine a city that pumps money into music, dance, filmmaking,
theatre and creative writing classes in grade school. Imagine a city that keeps
open community centres and public schools at night and on weekends, turning
them over to local artists and inventors to work on anything from photography to
fashion.
There's policy-wonkish advice, too, such as creating a mortgage investment fund
for creative industries, establishing a design commissioner, or offering tax
credits for firms that hire designers. Says team member Helen Burstyn, chair of
the Ontario Trillium Foundation, "There's no reason a city can't do for
design what Toronto has done for film." If a city were to adopt such
recommendations, the report's authors say they could rejuvenate a listless
local economy, stimulate a region's ability to attract and retain innovators,
inject growth hormones into home-grown talent and build strong, sturdy
communities. These prescriptions echo the thinking of American urban guru
Richard Florida (author of The Rise of the Creative Class), which isn't
surprising: He and the new report's project director, Meric Gertler, have
collaborated before. In 2002, they ranked North American cities in terms of
their "Bohemian Index" (openness, tolerance, ability to attract
immigrants, artists and entrepreneurs, and the percentage of the work force in
arts-related pursuits). Vancouver came first, with Toronto and Victoria behind
-- far ahead of Montreal and U.S. cities. While researching this latest report,
Gertler (a professor of geography and scholar at the Munk Centre for
International Studies at the University of Toronto) confirmed those earlier
observations. The overheated U.S. real-estate market is hurting many artists
now. Not only can artists and musicians not afford to live in San Francisco,
even teacher-headed households are now priced out of 98 per cent of the area,
says the July 16 San Francisco Chronicle, which also reported, "Sky-high
housing prices empty cities of all but 'fauxhemians' . . . trust-fund hipsters
and those who fund their bohemian lifestyles through corporate jobs they can't
stand." New York has the same problems. "Obviously there's a huge
critical mass of creative activity there, but it shows what not to do,"
says Gertler. "They're letting escalating real-estate costs force artists
to flee to the boroughs." Even though New York supports a large department
of cultural affairs, he says, there's no city-wide strategy to protect the
supply of living or studio space. Such affordable corners as artists can still
find are tenuous. One New York developer bought derelict buildings in a forlorn
corner of Brooklyn known as DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass)
and offered space to artists for free -- but only so that they could serve as
settlers in cultural outposts until he was ready to convert the spaces to
high-end residential use.
Gertler's impressed by the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Centre, "an
incredible old building on the Brooklyn waterfront that has filled up with
people like carpenters working on opera sets, and displays for department-store
windows. But the Brooklyn waterfront has been rezoned to permit large-scale
resident development. Greenpoint is the last bastion." American cities
offered other lessons in what not to do. "In the late 1970s,
California imposed radical caps on property tax," notes Gertler,
"with the result that for 30 years public schools were underfunded, and
arts education cut. A generation of teachers didn't even know how to teach the
arts." Finally Silicon Valley's genius nerds, who played music and
devoured sci-fi in their spare time, grew alarmed. With private funding from
high-tech dynasties such as the Hewletts and Packards, the Cultural Initiative
Silicon Valley launched a five-year scheme to bring back classes in dance,
music and art. Europe is a richer source of inspiration than the U.S. The
London government's "creative hub" strategy targets down-and-dirty
neighbourhoods such as Brixton and Whitechapel, setting up incubators for local
businesses and real-estate information centres, and promoting locally made
work. "It shows the importance of a non-market intervention," says
Gertler. With its revitalized waterfront and fizzing art-gallery scene,
Barcelona is another model city. But its real lessons are about how a catalytic
project, such as the 1992 Olympics, can align right-wing business leaders and
left-wing city politicians to work together -- something that could and should
happen in Vancouver. In Toronto, the process of creating the Strategies for a
Creative Citydocument has been a catalyst. Its 17-member leadership team was
chosen to include media, the province, the city and the private, academic and
non-profit sectors. "You need multi-stakeholder buy-in -- the last thing I
wanted was to write a report that would gather dust," Gertler says.
Toronto's Graffiti Tag-Of-War
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Alwynne
Gwilt, Entertainment Reporter
(Jul. 22, 2006) On an average Toronto morning, two groups of people are
removing graffiti from walls, but for opposite reasons. In the colourful
alleyways near Spadina Ave. on Queen St. W., a crew of volunteers is hard at
work priming the walls for this weekend's Style
in Progress event, which will bring more
than 100 graffiti artists back to these alleys to repaint the surfaces in their
eclectic styles. Meanwhile just a few blocks away, at Bathurst St. north
of Queen, Kirk Chapman is priming up for a day of hard work, which also
involves painting over graffiti. The difference? Chapman works for Goodbye Graffiti, a
company whose sole purpose is to clear the city of graffiti. It claims to be
able to get the paint off of any surface, without harming the building, a
promise that has gained the franchise more than 700 customers since starting
about three years ago. And unlike the artists preparing for this year's
festival, Chapman hopes these bricks will stay free of spray paint.
"In a way it's a very thankless job but it's gratifying that when you see
the graffiti come down, you see the way the building —
especially older, historic buildings — should be," says Chapman. On
this morning he's got a daylong job ahead of him, removing tags — or artists'
spray-painted names — from 36 metres of brick wall at 216 Bathurst St. Dressed
in white painter-style overalls, large green rubber gloves on his hands, he
dunks his wire brush into the bucket of amber goo and begins working the
substance into the faded paint. But Chapman — who grew up in the 1980s
when graffiti was gaining ground — says he's not opposed to all styles.
"The piece work that is actually done well I don't mind," he says
while the
now peachy-orange chemical fizzles and begins breaking down the paint's
binders. One of the owners of Goodbye Graffiti's Toronto franchise, John
Kalimeris, is also on site. He's not as lenient as Chapman. "I was
one of the masses where you're just so used to seeing it that you don't pay
attention to it; now all I see is graffiti," says Kalimeris, the sunshine
reflecting off his Ray-Bans. "It's a crime; they're putting vandalism on
property without permission." On the opposite wall is a mural done
by a community centre. This artwork is different, he says, since it beautifies
the city. "(Murals) hide ugly graffiti ... but then in comes the
night time and out come the taggers to destroy (them)," says Kalimeris,
whose company is now busy enough to run four trucks on two shifts. A
Toronto bylaw, which began to be seriously enforced just over 18 months ago,
makes it clear that a property owner or occupant must keep their building
graffiti-free. Murals may be exempted, with prior approval.
"Graffiti should be taken off a building as soon as you notice it,"
says Fernando Aceto, a co-ordinator with municipal licensing and standards for
the city. "They (taggers) just want to advertise their works and their
name; even if they get a day, that's great for them." But even Aceto
concedes that graffiti removed today will probably resurface tomorrow. And even
if business owners are okay with the artwork, they have to pay for the removal
— the $1,000 bill for the work at 216 Bathurst will be added to the owner's
property taxes. "(If an owner) says, `I want it left there,' then
he's really doing a disservice to the community who don't want it there,"
says Aceto.
Not surprisingly, the artists and organizers involved in Style in Progress
believe the city has gone too far. "It doesn't make any sense to say
what you can and cannot have on your wall; it's your wall, it's your building,
you should be able to do what you want," says Janna Van Hoof, organizer of
the event. "They're defining what is art, which is totally not a place for
the city." Van Hoof says that the bylaws might ultimately be
counterproductive. "The problem is every time they take away legal
wall space, more wall space that isn't legal gets hit." The bylaw
has created a culture of fear among building owners, she says. "Now
they're fearing the city is going to fine them" if they allow artists to
spray-paint outdoor walls, she says. "We've lost a lot because of that
bylaw." Style in Progress organizers would love to keep last year's
art intact but are forced to paint over them because they haven't been able to
find another space to hold their event. To do that would require getting
approval from the city and affected businesses. "If there was
another place in the city where we could get a hundred writers to paint, it
would be like a community transformation project, it would be great. But not
with that bylaw and not with people instilling fear," says Van Hoof, who
has seen the alleyways between Portland St. and Spadina Ave. painted over four
times. Artist Angel Carrillo, 30, remembers the days when doing legal
artwork wasn't so hard. Most artists had personal relationships with business
owners who allowed them to use their walls for work. "Nowadays
people have to wait for events to get a green light to paint and when you do
that, when you close doors like that, you're going to have guys that find a way
around it," says Carrillo, who has been painting street art since 1995.
"It's just a waste of money, a waste of energy (and) it's not a
solution." Both Van Hoof and Carrillo hope the events organized for
today and tomorrow — including today's party at Yonge and Dundas featuring live
graffiti demonstrations and breakdancing — will allow people to see that most
graffiti is about the art, not about gang-related turf wars that give artists a
bad name. "If it was gang related," Van Hoof says, "we
wouldn't be able to have over 100 graffiti writers painting peacefully
together."
Emily Giffin - Living On A Tight Schedule
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Sarah Hampson
(July 22, 2006) Emily Giffin loves deadlines. One was her 30th birthday.
At the age of 29, she was working as an associate in the New York law office of
Winston and Strawn, but wasn't happy. So she quit, moved to London, and started
to write a novel. The year was 2001. "I was turning 30 the following year,
and I had this sense that if I didn't do this now, I never will," she
says. She gave herself a deadline: one year to complete a manuscript. She did
it, and the result was the best-selling Something
Borrowed, a chick-lit tale about
Rachel, a Manhattan lawyer who has an affair with her best friend's
fiancé. Giffin never looked back. Last year, with the sequel, Something Blue, which took the
perspective of the best friend, Darcy, Giffin was counted among the top three
selling authors of women's fiction, alongside Sophie Kinsella (she of the Shopaholic
novels) and Jennifer Weiner (In Her Shoes, Good in Bed). Something
Borrowed has also been optioned as a movie.
Giffin's third novel, Baby Proof, released this summer with an impressive
initial print run of 300,000, has reached No. 1 in Canada and is rising on The
New York Times bestseller list. Another easy summer read about love, family and
the inner emotional landscape of hairpin turns and murky swamps, it concerns
Claudia Parr, who marries her true love, Ben, only to discover that he has what
she doesn't -- an urge to have a baby -- even though they had both decided that
they would remain childless.
Giffin's deadline has been a book a year. A driven personality, fit and tiny in
her jeans, cotton camisole and pointy shoes, the 34-year-old is completely
present and unfailingly polite. She aims to please, whether it's an
interviewer, a reader or an editor. She regularly responds to readers who
e-mail her. "One of the major reasons I write commercial fiction is to
connect with readers," she says. "It does wonders for writer's block
when you get up in the morning and get e-mails from people who say how much
they identified with your work."
She didn't even let a pregnancy with twins stop her. When she was writing Something
Blue, she didn't dare tell her editors she was pregnant. "I didn't
want them to fear that I'd miss the deadline," she says. She wrote a good
portion of the book in the hospital, where she had to stay on bed rest for over
a month at the end of the pregnancy. "I wrote it lying on my side with
nurses telling me to put away my laptop," she confides with a laugh. The
twins, identical boys, were born six weeks early at five pounds each. Being
deadline-oriented means she loves a sense of accomplishment, she acknowledges.
But it hasn't always served her well. "Going to law school was done more
for the sake of achievement rather than passion," she confesses.
"I had this stellar transcript [of grades from Wake Forest University in
North Carolina], so what do you do with that? You don't travel through Europe
and meander and write. You go to the top law school [at the University of
Virginia] because that's what you can do." But even law didn't erase the
desire (and discipline) she has to write. While working full-time for the law
firm, she wrote a coming-of-age novel, Lily Holding True, in her spare
time. "I wrote at night and on the road. As a junior lawyer, I had to go
to a lot of unglamorous places, so I took my laptop and wrote whenever I could."
It took three years to complete. She actually set off for London hoping that a
publisher would accept it. But her agent at the time sent her an e-mail dashing
all hope. "The agent was very mean-spirited. She wrote, 'they all rejected
it,' without capitalization, without punctuation. I was devastated."
But Giffin's determination won out. "I printed out the e-mail, and saved
it," she states. "I thought, 'Okay, I tried to write a book and it
didn't work out, so I can either pack it up or I can try to write another one.'
" Commercial success was not on her mind, Giffin says. "If I had, I
would have tried to write a legal thriller." She didn't even think about
chick-lit. "I didn't have marketing and pretty covers and publishers and
reviewers in mind when I wrote [Something Borrowed]. I wrote with the
door closed. I wrote the story I wanted to tell." Not that she minds the
genre. "I think that chick-lit is just a way of saying that these books
are relationship-driven and they are about who we are as sisters and friends
and lovers and professional people trying to conquer our fears and tap into
what we want and taking risks to get what we want." Still, for all her
determination and drive, Giffin says that her writing process is highly
"inefficient." She never has an outline and doesn't know how the
story will unfold. She simply begins with a general concept. For Baby Proof,
it was the question of whether there's a deal-breaker in true love. Then she
"gets into the head of my protagonist, getting to know her, what she is
about, what she wants, what is her conflict. Relationships form. Everything
evolves. And it is the relationships that drive the plot." That process
sometimes sends her down the wrong path. She worked on Baby Proof for
almost three months with Claudia being the one who changed her mind about
having a baby. "But it was flat. And it became more interesting to me when
it was Ben who changed." She threw out more than 100 pages of work and
started over.
Giffin writes for four hours a day in the morning. Currently living in Atlanta,
where her husband, Hartley (Buddy) Blaha, is president of corporate development
at Newell Rubbermaid, she has a nanny come to the house four days a week to
look after her boys, now 2½ years old. On the other days, she writes in her
attic office while the children nap. "I try to stay with the characters. I
don't like to leave them for three days at a time. I lose them." The last
five years have been a whirlwind. When she moved to London, she and Blaha were
dating, but not engaged. He followed her there, found a job, and halfway
through the year, moved in with her. They got engaged, married and promptly had
children. With three bestsellers to her name, she is working on her fourth. But
Giffin can laugh about her need for control and how she has had to learn to let
life take its twists and turns just as her novels do. "I was, like, 'We're
not having sex in March because we're not having a baby born during the
[Christmas] holidays,' and I also thought that pregnancy with identical twins
is sort of freakish. So what happens? I get pregnant in May with a due date in
February, the egg splits, and they come on New Year's Eve!" It's unclear
whether she managed to deliver them before the midnight deadline.
Emily's story
Born in Baltimore, Md., Emily Giffin has one older sister. Her father
worked as an executive with Sears, so the family moved around a lot, later
settling near Chicago. Her mother is a librarian. They divorced when Giffin was
in college. "It was a friendly divorce," she says. "It would
have been better if my family were more maladjusted; then I would have had more
to drawn upon." She always wrote as a child. From Grade Five until she was
25 years old, she kept a daily journal. "I never had to hide it or lock
it, because it was so mind-numbingly dull," she says. She still writes in
a journal, but not every day.
Montreal-Born David Altmejd Talks About The Ideas Behind His
Body-Part Art
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Alexandra Shimo
(July 25, 2006) Among those who pull any weight in the art world, David Altmejd, next year's Canadian
representative to the Venice
Biennale, considered the most
prestigious international art event, brings to mind the story of Lot's wife.
Not that viewers are debilitated when they see the sculptor's dark, disquieting
pieces, but they can be immobilized nevertheless. "When you see his work,
you are literally stopped in your tracks," said Bruce Grenville, senior
curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery and one of the three jurors who chose
Altmejd to represent Canada. "You are forced to look at it and wonder.
There's a richness and depth that you hope for in a lot of artists, but is very
rare. They are just these wild configurations of a strange biology, geology,
architecture. I find them unsettling and unpredictable. They are almost
indescribable." Altmejd (pronounced Alt-MAID) is not an artist for the
faint of heart. The Montreal-born sculptor has created giant figures of dead
and decaying werewolves, with jewellery set in the wounds. A tangle of bones,
fur, hair and crystals woven together to create seductive, powerful creatures.
Paws and skulls and other indistinct body fragments covered by a synthetic
pastel of fake fur. Mirrored surfaces, fake birds and gaudy bits of jewellery
prevail. The effect would be kitsch, if it wasn't so deeply terrifying. "I
think I'm tapped into my own self-consciousness," Altmejd said from New
York, where he was visiting friends. "I make decisions in my art based on
my intuition. I go beyond what is conscious and controlled. Some people see my
work as dark and morbid, but I see it as more post-apocalyptic. I'm more
interested in what grows out of death than death itself. Energy and life is
always more palpable when it's growing on top of something that is dead."
The curator of Canada's entry for 2007 Venice Biennale, Louise Déry, said these
contradictions and tensions are important reasons why Altmejd was chosen.
The Biennale draws close to one million people every year. Last year, 70
countries showcased their best artists over the six-month exhibition. In
Canada, curators submit work and a jury from the Canada Council awarded Altmejd
the honour last week. "He is able to create something we have never seen
before," said Déry, who is also the director of the Gallery of the
University of Quebec at Montreal. "The werewolves convey life out of death,
in a romantic way. Even if they are bizarre, these incomplete bodies, they are
really beautiful and brilliant." Bizarre is probably an understatement.
Sometimes body bits are missing from these creatures, and in others, fake
flowers grow from their crevices. But while it shocks, it also allures and even
seduces the audience. Altmejd's touch with the glittery, if rotted, flesh is so
precise and careful that audiences are drawn in, even while they are repulsed.
Altmejd has attracted notice from around the world. At 32 years of age,
he has exhibited at the Istanbul Biennale (2003) and the Whitney Biennale
(2004), the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Guggenheim and Whitney collections and
this year's Art Basel in Switzerland. However, the Venice Biennale will be one
of his biggest challenges to date, he said. "It's very difficult to
represent a whole country, but it's extremely exciting. The Venice Biennale is
the most prestigious art event in the world. There are so many people who are
going to see it. It's a lot pressure, but I transform that pressure into
adrenaline and excitement."
Altmejd grew up in downtown Montreal, in the ethnically diverse Côte-des-Neiges
neighbourhood. Little of his external circumstances resonate with the
disturbing and grotesque creatures that he creates. His family life was happy,
stable and balanced, he said. His mother is a Catholic French Canadian and a
professor of sociology at the University of Quebec at Montreal. His father, a
Polish Jew, works in the import-export business. He is close to his younger
sister, who lives in London and works in jewellery design. But beneath the
happy exterior, Altmejd said, he felt lonely and isolated. He was shy and
introverted. Often, he felt more like an observer, rather than a participant in
the everyday activities of high-school life. "I felt very connected to
reality, but I still considered myself an observer," he said. "I
think part of it was that I'm gay. But even if I hadn't been gay, I still
probably wouldn't have felt like everyone else. I enjoy being separate from the
crowd, outside the mainstream." Altmejd said he wants his sculptures to
have a powerful sexuality and a physical presence. Sculptures should have a raw
physical power and draw us to them, like we are attracted to those whom we
love, he said. His thinking and development have been shaped by artists
who share his fascination with the dismembered body, such as Kiki Smith (who
taught him at Columbia University, where he received his master of fine arts in
2001), Robert Gober and Matthew Barney. David Cronenberg, who shares his
fascination with death, violence and decay, is another hero. "Cronenberg
talks about how the movies become like bodies that start making their own
choices. I feel that is happening in my sculpture. There are things that I
don't understand until after the fact."
Having seen the space at the Venice Biennale, Altmejd plans to shape his
lycanthropic vision to the space inside the Canadian pavilion. The snail shape
and large glass windows reminded the artist of an aviary, and he decided to
combine his trademark werewolf figures with an ornithological theme. The space
will be filled with stuffed birds, figures of men with bird heads and birds
feeding off the dead werewolves, he said. "We are breaking the mould by exhibiting
David," Déry said. "For the last 10 to 15 years, Canada has chosen
more established artists to represent it at the Venice Biennale. David is not
as established because he is only 32 years old, a young artist. But his
werewolves are very mature and developed. They can be seen as metaphors of
being, divided between good and evil. It is our own destiny we see there, and
it strikes a chord with today's youth."
Montreal-Born David Altmejd Talks About The Ideas Behind His
Body-Part Art
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Alexandra Shimo
(July 25, 2006) Among those who pull any weight in the art world, David Altmejd, next year's Canadian
representative to the Venice
Biennale, considered the most
prestigious international art event, brings to mind the story of Lot's wife.
Not that viewers are debilitated when they see the sculptor's dark, disquieting
pieces, but they can be immobilized nevertheless. "When you see his work,
you are literally stopped in your tracks," said Bruce Grenville, senior
curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery and one of the three jurors who chose
Altmejd to represent Canada. "You are forced to look at it and wonder.
There's a richness and depth that you hope for in a lot of artists, but is very
rare. They are just these wild configurations of a strange biology, geology,
architecture. I find them unsettling and unpredictable. They are almost
indescribable." Altmejd (pronounced Alt-MAID) is not an artist for the
faint of heart. The Montreal-born sculptor has created giant figures of dead
and decaying werewolves, with jewellery set in the wounds. A tangle of bones,
fur, hair and crystals woven together to create seductive, powerful creatures.
Paws and skulls and other indistinct body fragments covered by a synthetic
pastel of fake fur. Mirrored surfaces, fake birds and gaudy bits of jewellery
prevail. The effect would be kitsch, if it wasn't so deeply terrifying. "I
think I'm tapped into my own self-consciousness," Altmejd said from New
York, where he was visiting friends. "I make decisions in my art based on
my intuition. I go beyond what is conscious and controlled. Some people see my
work as dark and morbid, but I see it as more post-apocalyptic. I'm more interested
in what grows out of death than death itself. Energy and life is always more
palpable when it's growing on top of something that is dead."
The curator of Canada's entry for 2007 Venice Biennale, Louise Déry, said these
contradictions and tensions are important reasons why Altmejd was chosen.
The Biennale draws close to one million people every year. Last year, 70
countries showcased their best artists over the six-month exhibition. In
Canada, curators submit work and a jury from the Canada Council awarded Altmejd
the honour last week. "He is able to create something we have never seen
before," said Déry, who is also the director of the Gallery of the
University of Quebec at Montreal. "The werewolves convey life out of
death, in a romantic way. Even if they are bizarre, these incomplete bodies,
they are really beautiful and brilliant." Bizarre is probably an
understatement. Sometimes body bits are missing from these creatures, and in
others, fake flowers grow from their crevices. But while it shocks, it also
allures and even seduces the audience. Altmejd's touch with the glittery, if
rotted, flesh is so precise and careful that audiences are drawn in, even while
they are repulsed. Altmejd has attracted notice from around the world. At
32 years of age, he has exhibited at the Istanbul Biennale (2003) and the
Whitney Biennale (2004), the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Guggenheim and
Whitney collections and this year's Art Basel in Switzerland. However, the
Venice Biennale will be one of his biggest challenges to date, he said.
"It's very difficult to represent a whole country, but it's extremely
exciting. The Venice Biennale is the most prestigious art event in the world.
There are so many people who are going to see it. It's a lot pressure, but I transform
that pressure into adrenaline and excitement."
Altmejd grew up in downtown Montreal, in the ethnically diverse Côte-des-Neiges
neighbourhood. Little of his external circumstances resonate with the
disturbing and grotesque creatures that he creates. His family life was happy,
stable and balanced, he said. His mother is a Catholic French Canadian and a
professor of sociology at the University of Quebec at Montreal. His father, a
Polish Jew, works in the import-export business. He is close to his younger sister,
who lives in London and works in jewellery design. But beneath the happy
exterior, Altmejd said, he felt lonely and isolated. He was shy and
introverted. Often, he felt more like an observer, rather than a participant in
the everyday activities of high-school life. "I felt very connected to
reality, but I still considered myself an observer," he said. "I
think part of it was that I'm gay. But even if I hadn't been gay, I still
probably wouldn't have felt like everyone else. I enjoy being separate from the
crowd, outside the mainstream." Altmejd said he wants his sculptures to
have a powerful sexuality and a physical presence. Sculptures should have a raw
physical power and draw us to them, like we are attracted to those whom we
love, he said. His thinking and development have been shaped by artists
who share his fascination with the dismembered body, such as Kiki Smith (who
taught him at Columbia University, where he received his master of fine arts in
2001), Robert Gober and Matthew Barney. David Cronenberg, who shares his
fascination with death, violence and decay, is another hero. "Cronenberg
talks about how the movies become like bodies that start making their own
choices. I feel that is happening in my sculpture. There are things that I don't
understand until after the fact."
Having seen the space at the Venice Biennale, Altmejd plans to shape his
lycanthropic vision to the space inside the Canadian pavilion. The snail shape
and large glass windows reminded the artist of an aviary, and he decided to
combine his trademark werewolf figures with an ornithological theme. The space
will be filled with stuffed birds, figures of men with bird heads and birds
feeding off the dead werewolves, he said. "We are breaking the mould by
exhibiting David," Déry said. "For the last 10 to 15 years, Canada
has chosen more established artists to represent it at the Venice Biennale.
David is not as established because he is only 32 years old, a young artist.
But his werewolves are very mature and developed. They can be seen as metaphors
of being, divided between good and evil. It is our own destiny we see there,
and it strikes a chord with today's youth."
A
Good News, Bad News Issue
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
James Adams
(July 25, 2006) The United States is "a paper tiger," Chairman Mao
once observed, and nowhere is this more evident than in the decline and
semi-fall of the U.S. magazine business in this country. True, as a recent
study by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows, Canadian
periodicals continue to occupy only about 15 per cent
of the rack space in any decent Canadian newsstand, with U.S. titles taking up
most of the remaining 85 per cent. But in the past quarter-century, the total
number of these titles purchased by Canadians has dropped by 30 per cent, while
the average circulation per American title has been slashed in half, to 13,243
in 2005 from 26,303 in 1983. It's a decline that has become especially
noticeable in the past five or six years. And it has resulted in higher
percentages of sales for domestic publications. Indeed, in a presentation last
December to the Ontario government's budget secretariat, Magazines Canada, the
association representing more than 300 commercial titles, proclaimed that "roughly
50 per cent of all magazine sales in Canada" can now be attributed to
Canadian periodicals. Just last month, the Audit Bureau of Circulations
released a survey of circulation numbers for more than 500 U.S. magazines
available in Canada. Comparing results from the first six months of 2005 with
those from the same time period in 2004, it discovered that 90 of the 150 top
U.S. titles experienced drops in what the industry calls its "Canadian
spill." While it would be nice to report that Canadian magazines are
picking up the resultant slack and, to mix metaphors, increasing their share of
the periodical pie, that is not entirely the case. According to Magazines
Canada, the circulation of Canadian periodicals has increased more than 45 per
cent since 1995 -- proof for Gary Garland, Magazine Canada's director of
advertising services, that, even in the face of overwhelming American numerical
superiority, "Canadians do like to read Canadian-based magazines, if the
quality is there and they can get their hands on it easily." At the same
time, he added, Canadians are "actually producing new magazines of
interest to Canadians in categories that were traditionally U.S.-led, and
taking business from them."
However, as a Statistics Canada analyst noted recently, "magazine
circulation in general has been going down in Canada," regardless of a
publication's country of origin. A recent report by Hill Strategies Research on
cultural spending here by consumers (as opposed to advertisers) found that,
from 1997 to 2003, magazine-buying was largely flat, the median dollar value
being $705-million. In fact, adjusting for inflation, spending on magazines by
Canadian consumers declined by almost 6 per cent in that period. This is not
altogether unexpected. Magazines, at least those printed on paper and delivered
to readers via the mail and newsstand -- what Web devotees call "off-line
enterprises" -- are "old media," while this is an age when, in
the words of Jerry Brown, the PricewaterhouseCoopers executive responsible for
the firm's Canadian entertainment and media advisory practice, "media
consumption is being driven more and more by consumers' desire to have access
to the news, music, TV and videos they want, when they want it, where they want
it, and in a format that suits the situation they are in at that time." In
general, Canadians are spreading their purchases of Canadian magazines over
more and more titles. In 1998-99, Statistics Canada reported, 229 individual
"general-consumer" periodicals were being published here. In 2003-04,
the total was 324, a 41-per-cent increase. However, the total annual
circulation of Canadian general-consumer magazines in that time increased by
less than 18 per cent, to roughly 305 million from 259 million. Last year, all
of the top-five Canadian periodicals by circulation -- Reader's Digest,
Chatelaine and Canadian Living (all of which are monthlies) and the weekly
Maclean's and TV Guide -- collectively suffered a 17-per cent decline in total
subscription and single-copy sales relative to 2000. The situation looks even
more ominous if you look at American titles in Canada. Take National
Geographic, traditionally a big performer here. In 2000, the ABC reported, it
had a paid circulation of 510,871 in Canada, most of it typically in home
subscriptions; by last year, the total was 374, 516 -- a 27-per-cent decline.
This from a magazine that 15 or 20 years ago boasted a circulation upward of
800,000 in Canada alone.
Meanwhile, how about Playboy? The glossy that made Hugh Hefner a billionaire
has gone decidedly, well, soft at the age of 53. Thirty years ago, it wasn't
unusual for Playboy, with its mix of sex, Sartre, stereos and sports cars, to
have a Canadian circulation of more than 500,000. Last year, its circulation
here was just 61,235 (most of it coming from newsstand purchases), down from
119,089 in 2000. That's a drop of almost 50 per cent. One of Playboy's biggest
competitors, Maxim, the so-called "premier lad mag," is hurting, too.
In 2000, a mere three years after the launch of its U.S. edition, the monthly
edition was reporting an impressive circulation of almost 240,000, but last
year, the ABC says, that number was just under 149,000, a decline of about 38
per cent. Playboy spokeswoman Martha Lindeman noted that her magazine's
circulation drop in recent years has been the result of some of the same
factors that have hurt other American magazines, including (until recently) the
weakness of the Canadian dollar relative to its U.S. equivalent, increased
mailing costs (unlike their Canadian counterparts, U.S. periodicals don't have
access to the Publications Assistance Program overseen by Canadian Heritage and
Canada Post) and the GST. Indeed, in 1999, Playboy decided "to suspend our
direct-mail subscription marketing in Canada," Lindeman said, meaning that
it no longer actively seeks at-home subscribers -- whereas in the U.S.,
"more than 20 per cent of our subscriptions are generated via direct mail,
so you can see the effect that decision had." Of course, there have been
silver linings in this dark cloud. In 1998, Cosmopolitan had a healthy
circulation of about 163,000 in Canada. Two years later, its monthly
circulation was 219,117, and last year it reached almost 260,000, with more
than 95 per cent of that attributable to newsstand sales. This was 100,000
copies more than O, The Oprah Magazine's circulation in Canada in 2005, and
116,000 less than the top-ranked National Geographic. (By way of comparison,
Star Magazine, the gossipy weekly for which Toronto-born Bonnie Fuller assumed
the editorial directorship in 2003, had a circulation of close to 150,000 in
Canada in 2000. Five years later, it had dropped 20 per cent, to 120,574, after
hitting 128,000 the year before when Fuller remade it as a glossy and upped its
cover price.) As a counterpoise to the success of Cosmo's unrelenting diet of
"passion polls" and "hot sex workout tips," the purchase of
more serious U.S. periodicals appears to be on the rise here, although not
astronomically so. Harper's, for example, had paid circulation of 26,406 in 2005,
up more than 10,000, or 60 per cent, from 2000. Similarly, The New Yorker
weekly gained more than 4,000 subscribers and single-copy buyers in that same
period, to report a 2005 circulation of almost 20,000. The influential
newsweekly The Economist, its North American edition also published out of New
York, has experienced even more impressive and steadier growth, seeing its
Canadian circulation of 43,123 in 2000 climb to 55,538 in 2005.
Magazines by the numbers
Top five U.S. magazines in Canada by paid circulation for six months ending
June, 2005
1.
National Geographic (monthly) 374,516
2.
Cosmopolitan (monthly) 258,209
3.
People (weekly) 198,404
4.
Woman's World (weekly) 185,858
5.
Prevention (monthly) 174,186
Top five Canadian magazines by paid circulation for six months ending June,
2005
1. Readers Digest (monthly) 923,162
2.
Chatelaine (monthly) 645,044
3.
Canadian Living (monthly) 527,694
4.
Maclean's (weekly) 382,890
5. TV
Guide (weekly) 304,822
Source: Audit Bureau of Circulations
OTHER TIDBITS
We Remember Dorothea Church
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(July 25, 2006) *Dorothea
Towles Church, the first successful black
model in Paris and a pioneer who made it possible for women of color
to model at major European fashion houses, died July 7 at St. Luke's-Roosevelt
Hospital in New York. She was 83. Her death was confirmed by
Michael Henry Adams, a curator at the Museum of the City of New York where
Church is among those to be featured in an exhibition called "Black Style
Now" opening on Sept. 7. Born July 26, 1922, in Texarkana,
Tex., Church was the seventh of eight children in a farming family and
eventually broke down racial barriers in an industry that preferred white
models to represent beauty. During the 1950s, Church work the runways for such
designers as Christian Dior and Elsa Schiaparelli. Church also studied
biology at Wiley College in Marshall, Tex. She had plans to study medicine, but
when her mother died, she accepted the invitation of a rich uncle to live with
him in Los Angeles. She completed a master's degree in education at
the University of Southern California.
Docks Nightclub Fights Liquor Ruling
Excerpt from The
Globe and Mail - Oliver Moore And Jennifer Lewington
(July 26, 2006) The Docks
entertainment complex is refusing to lie down
in its fight with neighbours irate about noise from the nightclub. Residents of
the nearby islands, who say they have been subjected to years of house-rattling
music, celebrated with champagne Monday upon receiving the news that the club
had been stripped of its liquor licence. But club lawyer Nicholas Macos said
that an appeal of the decision was filed yesterday in Divisional Court.
The appeal could take months but the club is also seeking a stay that
would allow it to serve alcohol in the interim. The application for the stay
will be heard on Friday. The appeal is based in part on whether complaints from
neighbours, which the lawyer said is the traditional local test, should be
applied to a bar such as the Docks, which attracts people from all over. He
said the club is getting support from patrons and he has been hearing voices of
concern from other entertainment promoters worried they might be next.
"They feel that the Docks is probably as diligent as any facility,"
Mr. Macos said. "If it can happen to us, it can happen to them."
Indeed, Mayor David Miller said yesterday that noise is a "huge
topic" across the community. "Everyone deserves to live in a quiet
neighbourhood," he told reporters at city hall. "Every time I
have a phone-in show, people call in about noise in nightclubs." Mr.
Miller said the decision of the provincial Alcohol and Gaming Commission
"sends a strong message to liquor-licence holders that it is a privilege
[to have a licence] and you have to follow the rules. "We are a big city,
and noise and quiet matter to people, whether it is on the waterfront or
elsewhere. It isn't an issue in one neighbourhood; it is an issue around the
city." This week, council is expected to debate calls to strengthen
existing noise bylaws. Councillor Kyle Rae, who is among those trying to
tighten up bylaw changes made last year, said they have to reflect the reality
that residential and commercial neighbourhoods coexist. He added that some recent
changes, such as a rule that permits loudspeakers to be played at 7 a.m.,
"are not in the best interest of residents."
::SPORTS NEWS::
7 Questions - Steve Nash Dishes The Dirt
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Brad Wheeler
Born Feb. 7, 1974, in Johannesburg. Emigrated to Victoria at age 2. Earned a
basketball scholarship in 1992 to Santa Clara University, where he dribbled a
tennis ball around campus to perfect his handling skills; graduated with a
degree in sociology. In 2005, signed a six-year, $66-million (U.S.) contract
with the Phoenix Suns. Captured MVP honours in 2005 and 2006. Renowned for
sweaty mop of hair (now shorn). Linked romantically to Gerri Halliwell and Liz
Hurley, and more recently (and erroneously) to Nelly Furtado, who mentions
Nash's name in her current single, Promiscuous. Heads the Steve Nash
Foundation, dedicated to assisting underserved children. Married to Paraguayan
wife, with twin daughters.
(July 21, 2006) 'Why not?" basketball star Steve
Nash demands,
his
rising snarl red-lining against a feeble cellphone connection. We were
discussing the ugly tradition of sport-field banter known as "trash
talk," and I had suggested that the wholesome Canadian wasn't one for
making jivey insults. After he seemingly took offence, I haphazardly tried to
dribble myself out of an insinuation "Oh, it's just that you're so, um,
well, you know. . . ." Just as I was about to say something very
wrong, Nash let me off the hook. He was just having a little fun. "No,
you're right," he says, "I don't really talk that much out there. And
I don't really encounter much of it, either." What the two-time NBA MVP
does encounter is respect -- for his performance off the court as well as on.
And don't let him fool you. When asked about a certain hoop-dreaming superstar
musician, mild-mannered Nash dishes the dirt as superbly as he serves up those
b-ball bounce passes.
You're a big English soccer fan. If you could trade in everything you've
gained from basketball to suit up just once for Tottenham Hotspur, would you do
it?
The easy answer would be yes, just because the grass is always greener. I love
playing basketball, but the one thing about soccer is the fans. It's a totally
different atmosphere than American sports or the NBA. The tradition there,
being so vocal -- with the singing and the chanting -- it gives you goose
bumps. It's the one thing I wish I could experience.
You were in Germany for some of the World Cup matches. What do you make of
the apologists for Zinédine Zidane, the head-butting Frenchman?
It's a tribute to how much respect he has from people, around the world. Off
the field, he's a terrific human being, very humble. And he's probably one of
the top three players to ever play the game.
Sounds like you're an apologist too.
I give him a lot of leeway. The things that must have been running through his
head: There's 10 minutes left in his career; 10 minutes to win a World Cup.
With all the pressure, I think emotionally it was probably too much at the
time. For a passionate, creative player like that, he was on the edge,
regardless of being provoked.
Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner you used to play for, said some
unflattering things about you on the David Letterman show. He had a chance to
sign you two years ago, but didn't.
I think he grossly underestimated me -- I hate to say it, but it's true. He's a
non-stop talker, so I don't pay attention that much to what he says. But I take
it as a compliment if he was talking about me on Letterman, on his small
segment. If my name came up, I must have had some sort of impact on him.
Recently, Time Magazine had nicer things to say about you, naming you one of
the 100 most influential people in the world.
It's hard to believe that's accurate when I'm having a hard time getting a
dinner reservation. I'm kidding, but I just shake my head sometimes at the
perception -- and perhaps whatever part of it is true. Because I still wake up
every morning and think of myself as a normal person, as an underdog even. To
be pointed out or highlighted under those terms is overwhelming to some extent.
So, that's the kind of thing I take in briefly, and then forget about.
What are you listening to these days, and what kind of music would we hear
in the Suns' locker room?
Let's see . . . the last songs I downloaded were by Brazilian artist Seu Jorge,
but my tastes are pretty broad. In the locker room, it's mostly hip hop, which
I like. But I really don't care, because when I'm walking around there, I'm not
really thinking about music.
You've probably met a lot of musicians, some of them who claim to have
'game.' Are any of those guys any good at basketball? I heard Prince has some
talent.
Really? I heard the opposite. My agent, Billy Duffy, played basketball at the
University of Minnesota right around the start of Prince's career, and he used
to play pickup ball with him. So, as for Prince, in Billy's words, "Not a
really good player." [Laughs.] I'm sure he's gonna love me for throwing
him under the bus there.
Saturday night, Steve Nash, with in-game host Nelly Furtado and music by the
Bedouin Soundclash, presents the Steve Nash Foundation Charity Classic at GM
Place in Vancouver.
Sportsnet Fights To Catch Up After Shakeup
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail, whouston@globeandmail.com
(July 25, 2006) Jody Vance threw a party a few days ago, and what a giddy
gathering it was. "There were toasts, high-fives and hugs," a guest
said. Why was Vance, the former Rogers Sportsnet anchor, and her guests, several of whom were Sportsnet staffers,
in such good spirits? Partly because of a major shakeup at the network this
month. Rick Briggs-Jude, the head of production, was removed from overseeing
Sportsnet News. His responsibilities are now limited primarily to hockey and
baseball. Scott Morrison, the head of Sportsnet News, was terminated. And so
was his No. 2, senior producer Jeff MacDonald. We reported a year ago on morale
problems in the newsroom. As a consequence of the articles, Rogers conducted a
management survey in which staff were invited to critique superiors. The
results apparently shocked senior executives at Rogers. Hence the changes,
which were applauded by some staff, as well as by Vance, who left in 2005
because of difficulties with Morrison and MacDonald. Also assisting Morrison
and MacDonald out the door were the audience figures for Sportsnet News, which
continue to lag behind those of TSN's SportsCentre. So far in 2006, TSN is
averaging 133,000 viewers for its SportsCentre at 10 p.m. EDT; Sportsnet is at
91,000; and the Score, 36,000. On July 11, Sportsnet's president, Doug
Beeforth, sent out an internal memo in which he articulated his vision of the
future. It involved making Sportsnet News "more youthful and energetic,"
an objective that seemed reasonable, but was ridiculed by some in the media.
Targeting a younger audience isn't silly, but without a plan, the notion is so
vague as to be meaningless. Complicating the matter is the fact that fewer
young males are watching television these days, and even fewer tune into
sports.
By all means, strive to be cool. But the only real way for a network to improve
the audience for its sportscast is to produce the best show in the market and
give it wall-to-wall promotion. What does Sportsnet have in mind? A dinner-hour
overhaul will include expanding the show to one hour from 30 minutes in some of
the regions, certainly in Ontario, where it will air from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. It's
been reported that Hockey Central will be cut back to one show a week, but that
picture is wildly distorted. Hockey Central will be folded into the 60-minute
Sportsnet News during the week. On a busy hockey day, Hockey Central could make
up as much as 15 to 20 minutes of the 60-minute show. David Akande, the
network's vice-president of content, says the hope is for Sportsnet News to
become more entertaining through increased analysis and commentary.
"Credible information and analysts is the cost of entry if you're going to
be a source in the sports landscape," he said. "The trick, if I can
call it that, is we're going to provide more than that. The trick is to get
into the opinion and create a forum for opinion." 2010 World Cup More than
a year ago, Sportsnet boldly grabbed Canadian TV rights to the World Cup of
2006. The acquisition gave the regional network the opportunity to promote
itself as Canada's World Cup destination and pull in huge national audiences.
What did it do? It turned around and gave up its exclusivity by sharing the
rights with TSN and CTV. True, the audiences were huge, thanks in large part to
the involvement of TSN and CTV, which pulled in a record 2.84 million viewers
for the final.
Still, there was a sense Sportsnet had missed a golden opportunity. It should
have kept the rights and increased its profile. There were two good reasons for
Sportsnet's sharing the World Cup with TSN-CTV. The monster audiences met and
surpassed advertising projections. Most important, Sportsnet protected itself
for the future. Because of Sportsnet's spirit of sharing, TSN-CTV has agreed to
team up with the network as co-bidders for the rights to the World Cup in South
Africa in 2010. A rights deal is expected to be announced in four to six weeks.
Michael Landsberg will interview receiver Terrell Owens today and tomorrow on
TSN's Off The Record. Owens was kicked off the Philadelphia Eagles last season
for knocking his quarterback, Donovan McNabb. He signed in the off-season with
Dallas Cowboys. Sportsnet drew 608,000 for the opener of the series between the
New York Yankees and Toronto Blue Jays last Thursday, the second best Jays
audience of the season. The season opener (Minnesota Twins) is tops: 648,000.
Argos Running On Empty
Excerpt from The
Toronto Star - Morgan Campbell, Sports Reporter
(Jul. 25, 2006) First Ricky Williams, now John Avery. Yesterday
morning, as Williams recovered at home from a Sunday night operation to repair
a broken left forearm, his replacement in the Argos' backfield limped out of
practice with an ice pack lashed to the back of his left leg. Avery, who
moved from the practice roster to the first string when Williams broke his arm,
joins a long list of Argos starters injured this season. Receiver Tony
Miles still has a sore hamstring and didn't practice yesterday. Quarterback
Damon Allen, who broke his right middle finger in the season opener, worked
with the starting offence yesterday for the first time since his injury, but
isn't assured of starting this Saturday against the B.C. Lions. Without
Allen, the Argos went 2-3, and even considered signing 43-year-old NFL retiree
and former Argo star Doug Flutie as a backup. So far, the team has no
plans to recruit Gil (The Thrill) Fennerty to fill its backfield void, but head
coach Michael (Pinball) Clemons grew concerned with Avery's health the moment
he noticed a hitch in the running back's stride. "Something happened
early in practice, so we wanted to have him go to the doctor to make sure it
was okay," Clemons said. "I want to know (what's wrong). I don't want
to be fooling around." Avery entered training camp as the team's top
running back, but Williams' arrival in late May bumped him to the practice
roster. Williams didn't attend yesterday's practice. His agent, Leigh
Steinberg, said the back has spoken twice to his NFL club, the Miami Dolphins,
and that Williams plans to play out the season when he returns. He also said
Williams' contract with the Argos assures the Dolphins he'll return to Miami
next season, but that Toronto doesn't owe the Dolphins any money or an early
return if Williams is hurt.
"The disappointment is that Ricky thought the team was turning the
corner," Steinberg said. In Miami, Dolphins head coach Nick Saban
issued a brief, polite written statement wishing Williams a quick recovery.
"We're very supportive of Ricky and the season he's having in
Canada," the statement read. "We feel certain this setback will not
affect his future as a football player." Clemons, who found a bright
spot in Williams' arm injury —"(the Dolphins) won't have to worry about
his knees," he said — is also optimistic about his other running backs.
"Adversity really gives you an opportunity for a hero to appear,"
Clemons said. Canadian running back Jeff Johnson knows the hero role
well. He played it last October when Avery hurt his hamstring. After
spending the first 15 games of the regular season on special teams, Johnson
gained 159 all-purpose yards in his first start as an Argo. The next week, he
collected 197 rushing and receiving yards and was named the CFL's offensive
player of the week. "You do always have to be ready for it,"
said Johnson, who scored a touchdown while subbing for Williams last Saturday. "Know
your assignment, know your alignment and when the ball comes to you, get ready
to do something with it."
Pinball Accentuates Positive After Bad Break
Excerpt from The
Toronto Star - Morgan Campbell, Sports Reporter
(Jul. 24, 2006) Argonauts head coach Michael
(Pinball) Clemons has a message for the Miami
Dolphins: At least it's just a broken arm. On Saturday night in
Regina, running back Ricky Williams broke his left forearm when he put his hand
on the turf to break his fall at the end of a three-yard gain. He left the game
during the second quarter of the Argos' 26-23 win over the Saskatchewan
Roughriders. Williams, on loan from the Dolphins while serving a
year-long drug suspension from the NFL, is out indefinitely. Speaking at
the Argonauts' Mississauga practice facility yesterday, Clemons said if he were
in Miami's position, he'd focus on the positive while Williams sits out.
"This is football, this is what happens," Clemons said. "For
that length of time (the Dolphins) don't have to worry about his knees."
Argo president Keith Pelley said the Dolphins' concerns about injuries
delayed Williams' signing in the spring, but confirmed that Toronto owes Miami
nothing if Williams suffers a serious injury in the CFL. Clemons wouldn't
speculate about how long Williams' recovery would take, and said the team would
have a better idea after this Saturday's home game against the B.C. Lions.
Pelley said team officials are scheduled to meet with doctors today.
As of yesterday afternoon Clemons hadn't talked to Miami head coach Nick Saban
about Williams' injury, though Pelley said the two teams' training staffs had
already spoken. Saban was unavailable for comment yesterday. Dolphins
spokesman Harvey Green said the head coach has been out of town and will return
to the office today as the Dolphins, for the second time in three years,
prepare to open training camp without Williams. Clemons said he has no
regrets about how the Argos have used Williams so far this season. In five
games Williams has rushed for 231 yards on 57 carries. He had carried four
times for 17 yards when he broke his arm Saturday. Clemons said Williams
hasn't whined about his playing time, and didn't even wince when he broke his
arm. Nor has he moped about the prospect of being sidelined. "He's
got an extremely optimistic outlook and he's looking forward to getting back in
the game," Clemons said. "All of this makes us extremely proud of the
decision we made to bring him up here." Williams himself still
hasn't spoken publicly about his injury, though Argo media relations staff say
he was available to reporters after the game. Clemons said Williams will
probably speak to the media after Wednesday's practice. He also expects Williams
to show up every day this week. "He's no different from any other
player," Clemons said. "When they're hurt, they're here and they're
getting treatment. "That's our expectation, that he'll be out to
help and support and even be our cheerleader." With Williams
injured, Clemons said former starter John Avery will dress for this Saturday's
game.
Raptor Sets Sights On Global Domination
Excerpt from The
Toronto Star - Doug Smith, Sports Reporter
(Jul. 26, 2006) As the United States tries to reclaim its spot as
the top
basketball country in the world, Chris Bosh wants to make sure they do it in an emphatic way. "Not
one win, but win in a dominant fashion," the all-star Raptors power forward said
yesterday after making it through the first round of tryouts at the U.S.
training camp in Las Vegas. "We are going to put aside the
stereotype of NBA players." To the surprise of no one, Bosh was one
of 15 players named yesterday to the team that will continue training next week
for the world championship which begins in Japan in late August. USA
Basketball, trying to return to global dominance after a third-place finish at
the Athens Olympics and a shocking sixth-place result at the 2002 world
championship in Indiana, has chosen a group of young up-and-coming NBA stars in
its final group of candidates. Bosh joins LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony,
Dwyane Wade, Shane Battier, Bruce Bowen, Elton Brand, Dwight Howard, Antawn
Jamison, Joe Johnson, Brad Miller, Gilbert Arenas, Amare Stoudemire, Kirk
Hinrich and Chris Paul as the 15 who will fight for 12 spots on the world
championship team. The Americans, who originally invited 25 players to
try out, yesterday cut Shawn Marion, Luke Ridnour and Adam Morrison from this
group; fellow NBAers Kobe Bryant, Chauncey Billups and Michael Redd have
already withdrawn from consideration for this summer although they remain in
the mix to comprise the 2008 Olympic team. Bosh, 22, is among the
youngest players on a young team. Only the 35-year-old Bowen and Jamison and
Miller, each 30, are out of their 20s on what will be among the youngest squads
at the Aug. 19-Sept. 3 worlds.
"Our strength has got to be depth, this is a very young team," head
coach Mike Krzyzewski said on a conference call yesterday. "We've got guys
who are 21, 22, I mean Dwyane Wade is only 24." Bosh, who seems a
lock to make the final squad and solid bet to play in the 2008 Beijing Games,
said the preparation so far has been more about acclimating the players with
each other than establishing a specific style of play. "It's been a
different experience," he said in a telephone interview. "We've had
more time to gel in this system and learn about each other and get used to the
talents of everybody." The makeup of the American teams that failed
in Athens in 2004 and Indianapolis in 2002 was roundly criticized after the
fact for being too dominated by stars rather than players willing to play
complementary roles. Bosh knows the stereotype of an NBA player — more
concerned with touches, shots and marketing opportunities — runs counter to the
teamwork and sacrifice needed to beat the best countries in the world.
"No one takes it personally, but it's out there and we want to show
it's wrong," he said. Aside from winning a world championship — and
gaining an automatic berth to the Olympics — Bosh said he's using this summer
to get in the best shape of his career. Having suffered through a
season-killing 1-15 slump to start the last Raptor season — a hole the team
never had a chance to get out of — he realizes the importance of getting off to
even a mediocre start.
And playing every day against the likes of Stoudemire, Howard and Brand has him
more ready than he's ever been. "I don't think you can get a better
summer workout." After a break, the Americans will reconvene in Las
Vegas next week for their final training period. They will play a series of
five exhibition games in Vegas and Asia before finalizing the roster for the
world championship. Of the players left off the 15-man team, Marion is
suffering from a mild knee injury, Ridnour was ostensibly beaten out by Hinrich
for the third point guard position and Morrison was too inexperienced given the
competition he was up against.
Pioneer Of Women's Hockey Sues For Compensation
Excerpt from The
Toronto Star - Lois Kalchman, Special To The Star
(Jul. 26, 2006) KINGSTON, ONT.—It is no exaggeration to say that
Rhonda Leeman Taylor
has given her life to hockey. Now she wants it back. But once given,
gifts are hard to reclaim. Taylor is learning and living that painful truth
every day. "I never thought hockey would blindside me," the
53-year-old Taylor says, alternately standing and sitting uncomfortably in her
lawyer's office in Kingston. "I lived and breathed hockey until I
got hurt. It was my life. I am just blown away as a player who has followed the
Hockey Canada rule book that I am sitting here today in this situation."
Taylor is sitting here, shifting restlessly, because of an on-ice
collision 2 1/2 years ago that she says has cost her her job and left her
in constant pain. It has also forced her to flip-flop roles: Instead of
building women's hockey she is effectively suing it.
Twenty-five years ago, Taylor was a pioneer of women's hockey, helping grow a
game that is now part of the Olympics. She was the first woman to have a
vote on the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (now Hockey Canada) board of
directors. She was chair of the first two women's national championships, in
1982 and '83, and was the Ontario Women's Hockey Association's first
development co-ordinator. She was once nominated to the Hockey Hall of Fame in
the builders' category, but the hall has yet to admit a woman. All that
work is now cruel irony for Taylor. On Jan. 24, 2004, Taylor's days of
playing hockey five times a week came to an abrupt end. She was playing
in a non-contact recreational game in the Stone Mills Women's League at the
arena in Tamworth, a village 50 kilometres northwest of Kingston. "I
was going for the puck as it rebounded off the goalie," says Taylor.
"I got it and shot it all in one motion. It went over the goalie's left
shoulder. The next thing I knew I was airborne." A player on the
other team had dived in front of Taylor as she shot, upending Taylor and
sending her crashing head first into the end boards. "People were
talking to me on the ice. I could hear them but I couldn't respond,"
recalls Taylor. "I stayed on the ice and thought I had rung my bell.
I went back to the bench. We were short players and I went back out for a
couple of shifts." Two days later, Taylor's head was still throbbing
and her hips and back hurt. She went to the Hotel Dieu hospital emergency ward
in Kingston and was told she had muscle damage. At physiotherapy she was
diagnosed with a concussion. Within a month she was incontinent and nauseous
from constant pain, which had spread to her legs. Four months later,
Taylor was admitted to the Kingston hospital where she had a laminectomy —
spinal surgery to remove bone impinging on her nerves. Taylor says the
injuries forced her to give up her $65,000-a-year job as a regional director
with HR.com (a human resources company), and ended her days of competing in
triathlons and her dream of kayaking in every province in Canada.
They also forced Taylor and her husband Al to sell their house and construct a
smaller, wheelchair-accessible abode. Taylor limps and occasionally stumbles
when she walks now, and the couple fear that if her condition worsens she will
require a wheelchair. "This has wrecked our whole life," says
Al. The Taylors expected that Hockey Canada's insurance would help with
their medical bills and lost income. It provides a $1 million payout for
players who become a paraplegic or quadriplegic. But Taylor is neither of
those. So, even though she says she is in constant pain — "From the waist
up, I'm literally one big muscle spasm" — and her job is gone, Taylor
qualified only for the maximum special medical costs payout of $5,000 from
Hockey Canada. "It's a fairly serious injury and it's
unfortunate," Glen McCurdie, the senior director of insurance and member
services for Hockey Canada, says of Taylor's plight. But McCurdie says
Hockey Canada consciously chose not to broaden its insurance coverage because
costs would "soar." A member of Hockey Canada's insurance
committee says current annual insurance costs are $16.15 per player, but to add
coverage for so-called neurological deficit would be "prohibitive"
even if the organization could find an insurer to underwrite it because there
are no figures on which to base a risk assessment.
"There are no benchmarks for this type of injury," says Sam
Ciccolini, who has sold insurance in Woodbridge for 40 years.
"Everyone responds differently to a neurological deficit ... Nobody
wants to take a chance on the unknown." Taylor is thus in an
unpleasant grey area — her pain is intense enough to awaken her at night, but
not serious enough to trigger extensive compensation. "The only
option is to sue the other party if they feel there is negligence," says
McCurdie. After pouring so much into hockey and getting so little back,
that's what Taylor is doing. She is suing the player who slid into her, Nancy
Murphy of Napanee, for $1 million in the hopes of triggering Murphy's personal
liability coverage in her home insurance policy or through her hockey
insurance. "We are claiming it was negligent and careless under the
circumstances," says her lawyer, Chris Clifford, a former draft pick of
the Chicago Blackhawks. "It was a dangerous defensive move that ought not
to have happened." Murphy refused to comment when approached about
the lawsuit. Taylor's statement of claim cites a fractured vertebra,
calcified cysts, loss of concentration, arm, leg and hip weakness, plus
sleeplessness and depression. None of the allegations has been proven in court.
The accident and fight for compensation have been excruciating for
Taylor. They have cost her her health and her place in hockey. It's unclear
which causes her more agony. Says Al Taylor: "You can see the pain
in her face."
SPORTS TIDBITS
Sports Bits: Woods Explains The Tears
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(July 25, 2006) *Tiger
Woods’ emotional British Open win Sunday
was followed by a press conference with reporters, during which the golfing
legend explained that his tearful breakdown came from realizing his late
father, Earl Woods, would never again witness his victories. "I miss my
dad so much," Woods told reporters. "I wish he could have seen this
one last time. …I was pretty bummed out after not winning the Masters because I
knew that was the last major he was going to see. And finally to get this one,
it's just unfortunate that he wasn't here to see it." Woods won his 11th
major title Sunday and his first since his father’s May 3 passing. He broke
down as he hugged his caddie, Steve Williams, then sobbed uncontrollably in the
arms of his wife, Elin. “I'm kind of one who bottles things up a little bit and
moves on, tries to deal with things in my own way,” said Tiger. “But at that
moment it all came pouring out and all the things my father has meant to me and
the game of golf."
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::FITNESS::
Mistakes Are Stepping Stones
By Liz Caravia, eDiets.com Guest Columnist
On your journey toward mastering both sport and life, make it a
point to become aware of your weaknesses as well as strengths. Awareness of our
downfalls or weaknesses enables us to improve and become stronger. Awareness
breeds confidence and satisfaction. But it can also sometimes be unpleasant,
like an addict's realization that "I am a drug addict." It may be hard to admit, and even painful,
but it delivers us from illusion and empowers growth. In Pilates or in any mind
body discipline, you not only learn how to exercise your body and mind in a
whole different manner than you have ever experienced before, but learn how to
think with your whole body. Learning is
a process of refining errors to the point where they no longer prevent you from
attaining a desired goal. Even the perfect "10" routines of Olympic
skaters and gymnasts contain errors, but they are small enough to be
irrelevant. Smaller errors actually bring you closer to mastering the exercise,
one small step at a time.
Proper execution in any mind-body discipline requires relaxation, even during
the movements that require great physical strength and mental focus. In the
face of this demand to relax AND let go, you will begin to notice tension in
areas of your body that you may have never noticed. At first you may think the
training is making you tense. In fact, you may become more tense than
ever. Shortly and most assuredly, you
will come to realize that you are only becoming aware of tension that you have
always carried. This awareness, while troubling at first, will allow you to
move beyond any tension you carry in your body that may show up as
"tension headache, muscle aches, back aches and this in turn will open the
door to your learning Dynamic Relaxation.
One of the essential components that I teach you to apply in everything
you do. Not just exercise. I hear this a lot from clients while training with
me. It usually occurs after months of training consistently at least 2-3 times
a week.
They say, something like:
"I am getting worse at this. What is wrong with me. I did great last week
and now I can't seem to execute or trigger the right muscles in order for me to
do what you are asking me to do." What I tell them is this: This feeling
that you are 'getting worse' is a sign of growing awareness.
When writers are able to read their last draft and see their weaknesses, their
writing progresses. Awareness in sport, relationships, in any learning, often
entails a momentary drop in self-esteem, a dent in self-image. But this willingness to clearly see and
acknowledge our many mistakes, to temporarily make a fool of ourselves, opens
the door to body mind training and mastery.
When we feel like we're "getting worse," we are finally ready
and on our way to getting much better.