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NEWSLETTER
Updated: March 23, 2006
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::TOP STORIES::
Canadian Musicians Grumble Over Juno Line-Up
Source: Angela Pacienza, Canadian Press
(Mar. 20, 2006) With Coldplay and Black Eyed Peas among the scheduled
performers, this year's Juno Awards are fast becoming must-see TV for
music fans. Some musicians and industry folk, however, are uncomfortable
with the international line-up, arguing that homegrown artists should be the
focus — particularly at a time when Canada's music scene is being lauded around
the world. "A lot of people are talking about it. A lot of people
are very upset," said Fred Litwin, who runs Ottawa-based indie label
NorthernBlues Music. Trevor Larocque of Toronto's Paperbag Records didn't
attempt to hide his sarcasm: "Coldplay's playing I hear. They're an
amazing Canadian band." Some in the indie music sector feel the TV
component of the Junos has lost its focus, letting ratings and broadcaster CTV
dictate the content rather than the country's pool of talent. Entire
genres, such as roots, country and jazz, continue to be excluded from the
televised show, they say. "We would never be asked (to perform on
the broadcast). Blues is too much of a small genre. They have no commercial
interest in it," said Litwin. There's also the thorny issue of how
many CTV personalities, including Ben Mulroney and Canadian Idol faces,
will be included on the April 2 program. As it stands, about nine acts
get to perform and only a handful of the 39 Juno categories are awarded during
the TV broadcast. The rest are handed out during a dinner the night
before. "Our award isn't going to be presented (on TV) because
Coldplay and Black Eyed Peas have to play," lamented Marco Raposo of
Pocket Dwellers, which is nominated for best new group. Bringing in
international superstar acts isn't new for the Junos. In the 1980s, Tina Turner
and Crowded House performed. Last year, country hotshot Keith Urban was invited
as a presenter.
And producers haven't ignored homegrown talent. Indie performers
like Broken Social Scene, Bedouin Soundclash and Massari are all set to play.
As well, Halifax's cutting-edge rapper Buck 65 will compose and perform the
show's theme music. Other high-profile Canadian acts include Michael
Buble and Bryan Adams. Industry watcher Larry LeBlanc said the content
wasn't really an issue until bombshell actress Pamela Anderson was announced as
host. "The lightning rod is Pamela Anderson," said LeBlanc, the
Canadian bureau chief for Billboard magazine who's been covering the
Juno Awards for more than 30 years. "This is the year they didn't
need international acts. Pam's two breasts will do more for ratings than
Coldplay and Black Eyed Peas." But the show's executive producer,
John Brunton, said naysayers should look at the flip side. "It used
to be we had to beg Anne Murray and Gordon Lightfoot," he said. "We
couldn't get Canadians to the show. Now the show has grown up . . . we can
compete with everyone in the world." He said Canadians should be
proud to have a "world-class awards show" that attracts international
acts and press, and can compete against other programs like the Grammys.
"Can we not start behaving like a world-class country and not be shy about
sharing our stage with the biggest bands in the world?" he said. "The
small town thinking makes me insane." Labels lobby hard to have their
acts play at the Junos, given the show's enormous profile. A talent
committee made up of representatives from the industry decides who ultimately
gets one of the coveted performance spots, said Brunton, adding that organizers
consider all the genres, looking at what the "big story" of the past
year was.
He said the country's blooming independent music scene won out.
"Next year it might be an urban scene. (The Junos) really just tries to
reflect what the stories are in the Canadian music scene each year," he
said. While Raposo said he can understand the draw of international acts,
he insisted his seven-piece hip-hop funk outfit is just as entertaining as the
Black Eyed Peas. "We have enough talent in Canada that we could have
put on a great show," he said. Another option, says blues man
Litwin, would be to pair less commercially viable acts with mainstream
ones. At this year's Grammy Awards, for example, gospel artist Hezekiah
Walker performed with superstar Mariah Carey. At a past Juno show, Nelly
Furtado was brilliantly paired with aboriginal group White Fish Juniors.
Said Litwin: "They could be worked into the show if (the Junos) really
cared about different genres of music."
Drex Inkredible To Release Long Awaited LP
Source: Lola Plaku E-mail: lola@drexinkredible.com
(Mar. 20, 2006) Drex Inkredible is set to release the long awaited debut
solo LP on March 24th 2006. The album is being released on MixNuts
ENT, an independent record label based in Toronto, Ontario. The 16 track album
has been executively produced by Drex Inkredible himself, but it also features
production by notable names such as Tone Mason, Pro Logic, Big Sproxxx, Frank
Dukes and Soze, to name a few. Artists featured on the LP include Mayhem
Morearty, Theology 3, Rawluck, Chris Stylez and various others. The album
includes a DVD with 4 videos for the singles “Tell Em”, “The Newz”,
“Rip ‘Em Apart” and “Fuck Drex”. The first two singles are also
available on vinyl. Tell Em – Being the first single on the LP, this
track can be said to define the character of the artist. The track merges
experience with knowledge to form a strong message delivered to its listeners.
A reflection on the values society upholds for its individuals, “Tell
Em” gives an in-depth look at lifestyles bound by stereotypes. It complies
a storyline of individuals that have failed to realize their inner strength, as
well as those who have not permitted society to put boundaries on who they are
and what they can achieve. Using his own life as an example of
self-realization, Drex gives a chance to his listeners to understand his
lifestyle. Tell Em Remix feat. Mayhem Morearty – The remix version of
the original shifts the focus on to stereotypes casted within hip-hop by its
critics who claim its negative influence on today’s youth. The Newz – As
the second single to hit wax, this track is a representation of the music
industry in Canada. Proclaimed as a “Symphonic Boom Bap”, this single is an
attack on misconceptions and on the hardships musicians are faced with when
stepping foot in the entertainment industry. Drex Inkredible takes the approach
of the artist and of the critic in order to present a much more realistic view
of his opinions. If you want to hear real… “The Newz” is as real as it
gets.
Prince Grants E-Mail Interview To Billboard
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(March 20, 2006) *There’s always a catch when it comes to interviewing
His Royal Badness. Billboard magazine writes of a reporter approaching Prince's table during Universal Music
Group chairman/CEO Doug Morris' Feb. 8 Grammy afterparty to schedule an
interview – only to be shut down with a polite smile and the reply: “When
the time is right, we will talk.” Eventually, the right time rolled
around, not in person. The musician completed an e-mailed Q&A from
Billboard to promote the release of his highly-anticipated new album “3121,”
due tomorrow with appearances by new Prince protégé Tamar and legendary
saxophonist Maceo Parker. Billboard scribe Tamara Conniff writes: “The
likely reason for Prince's desire to write instead of talk might be so he can
use his signature Prince-isms: ‘2’ is ‘to,’ ‘b’ is ‘be,’ ‘c’ is ‘see,’ ‘eye’ is
‘I’ and ‘nrg’ is ‘energy.’ Appreciative of a platform to speak his mind, he
signs his e-mail: ‘Thanx 4 granting us this forum 2 holla from. Peace.’”
Here is Billboard’s Q&A with Prince:
Q: Why is making one-album deals a good business model for you?
A: This was the first agreement that was designed by us without the
clause/claws of the standard recording deal. The best business model is one
that is free-flowing, just like the music.
Q: What do your fans not know about you?
A: There's a lot that fans don't know about me. People tend 2 project on2
U whatever they want 2 c.
Q: What are your thoughts on the music business with the advent of mobile
and digital?
A: Music is a sound nrg wave that is best xperienced LIVE. Because eye
play music, eye have a different perspective on how it should b delivered. That
said, eye (am) not so sure a musician would have come up with the idea 2 sell
music in the digital realm.
Q: Do you see yourself as an innovator?
A: Innovator? It's not a word eye use, but we do try 2 introduce new
ideas or methods 2 business that more resemble the common-sense principles
taught in the Bible.
Q: What inspires you?
A: 2 c someone breaking free from the limitations of the world.
Q: Who are you listening to right now?
A: Musically, eye am listening 2 Tamar right now. She is a brilliant
writer and a kind soul. Her 1st album is coming out in May of this year.
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Farewell To 20 Years Of Celebrity Coverage
Excerpt
from The Toronto Star - Rita Zekas
(Mar. 18, 2006) This is it. Adios muchachos. After 20 years or so of
bowling for boldface, reporting on the comings and goings, nipping and
tuckings,
air kissing and kiss-offs, and assorted bad behaviour in the celeb petting zoo,
I am going into celebrity detox. It will entail a 12-step program. I will
avoid newsstands. I will hide in the bunkers. I will take refuge from the
bombardment of celeb mags, the In Touch, InStyle, Us, People and their
ilk that are so interchangeable, you can't tell the difference: they all chase
the same six celebs. Even fashion magazines have these same six on their
covers. When is it celebrity overkill? When the dogs of celebs start writing
their own books. I will channel surf past the infotainment shows — The eTalks,
Entertainment Tonights, the E-I-E-I-owes with clones of Mary Hart — and
wean myself from surfing the gossip sites. I will join a support group for
former readers of Entertainment Weekly. When I started out in this
beat with intrepid photographer Louie de Filippis, it was a celeb wasteland out
there in T.O. — a paparazzi-free zone. There were no autograph hounds stationed
outside the uptown hotels. No paps with video cameras prowled Yorkville shops,
boites and restaurants, stalking unwary boldface. Now it's open season on
celebs. Troops of hounds, amateur videographers and civilians with cellphone
cameras trip all over one another to tip off the infotainment shows. U.S.
paparazzi migrated up here to feed the pages of the celebrity glossies because
the boldface used to be lulled into a false sense of being able to go about
their business and pleasure unmolested. Not any more.
Gawker.com's "Stalker" feature just announced it will post locations
of celebrities on the Internet, complete with a locator furnished by Google
Maps, within minutes of each sighting. Jeez, I remember all the hoo-ha
when the location of Goldie Hawn's holiday house (cottage just doesn't cut it)
in Muskoka was featured on the front page of the Star. Martin Short and
Kevin Spacey tore a strip off me during the film festival's George Christy
lunch shortly thereafter (from which I was later banned), and I had nothing to
do with it. I was away that day, vacationing at Lake Joseph, one lake over from
where Hawn and Short have properties. Hawn complained that people were
pressing their noses against the kitchen window while she was washing
dishes. Oh, yeah. Like she washes her own dishes. Way back before
Toronto became Hollywood North, circa 1986, with the advent of Three Men and
a Baby (Ted Danson, Tom Selleck and Steve Guttenberg were all spotted
locally) and Switching Channels (Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner),
Toronto the Good was Pleasantville. When Suzanne Somers came to town to
shoot Nothing Personal in 1979, directed by George Bloomfield, uncle of
Maury Chaykin, it was a big deal. Traffic literally stopped. Now we have
everyone from Robert DeNiro to Sean Connery filming here and life goes
on. Heavyweights Elizabeth Taylor and Carol Burnett shot the TV movie Between
Friends here way back in 1982 and the only juicy gossip was the prop
department having to substitute fake food for the dinner spread because Taylor
would inhale the grub between takes. Yet no one cared that Taylor was camped
out at the King Eddie. Maybe her dog, Sugar, should have written a book.
I've been doing this for so long, I was there when the Toronto International
Film Festival was Festival of Festivals and the parties were still accessible
to fans and Canadian journalists. There were no doornazis with clipboards,
expensive haircuts, last year's Prada and colossal delusions of adequacy
barring you from covering your own festival. The festival's events
planner, Barbara Hershenhorn, could walk Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty back
to their hotel unmolested after the screening and party for Reds in
1980. In 1995, Tom Hanks could engage in a walking commentary with
journos along Cumberland St. while at the festival promoting his film That
Thing You Do. Those were the days of the Variety Club luncheons
preceding the Genies, Geminis or Junos inevitably held at the Royal York Hotel.
During one luncheon, a haughty Donald Sutherland snubbed one of the Landers
sisters (one was on Dallas, the other was on B.J. and the Bear)
when he was introduced to her. At least she had some TV Q, which is what
they called TV cred in those days. I recall being so green, I went up to Toronto
Sun columnist Sylvia Train in panic pleading, "Help! I don't know who
any of the Canadian actors are in the green room." Neither did she.
People still don't know.
What we still need, most of all, is a Canadian star system. We
don't have one, despite the proliferation of these new infotainment shows,
which tend to highlight Canadian actors who have left the country to make it
big in the U.S. of A. Jim Carrey doesn't need any more press. Neither does Mike
Myers, Keanu Reeves or, shudder, Céline Dion. But Tom McCamus does. So do
Randy Hughson, Kristin Booth and Sara Topham. And you won't see ET Canada chatting
up actors on a red carpet for Soulpepper. I was the first to interview
Mia Kirshner, who played the terrorist who did really, really bad things on 24.
Funny, she didn't look like a terrorist. She didn't even look like the
naughty schoolgirl stripper she played in Atom Egoyan's Exotica, the
reason for the interview. She looked sweet and demure. I assured Gloria
Reuben that yes, it was a good idea to do ER. I was first to
interview Emily Hampshire, who could be the new Rachel McAdams, whom I also
interviewed very early on when she was still a blonde. I interviewed Dean
McDermott way back when he was a loving father and husband, about a year before
dumping his wife for Tori Spelling. When Don Johnson and then-wife
Melanie Griffith were having dinner at the now defunct Mezza Luna while he was
in town shooting Guilty as Sin in 1992, I followed Griffith to the
washroom to find out if she washed her hands. She did. I also
checked her coat to see if it was real fur. It wasn't.
Years later in that same washroom, Farrah Fawcett told me it was her screwed-up
thyroid meds that caused her to babble incoherently on Letterman, all
the while babbling incoherently. Natalie Portman is doing press far and
wide for V for Vendetta, trying to debunk her academic goodie goodie
image by stating that while she doesn't do drugs, she's been known to have a
few cocktails. Flashback to a film festival party in 1998 at the Rosewater
Supper Club for her film Anywhere But Here. Portman wasn't drinking
water at Rosewater. The champagne was flowing. We had infiltrated the VIP area
courtesy of Portman's co-star Susan Sarandon's hairguy, who was a friend.
Suddenly, Portman executed this dainty little slump and had to be carried
upstairs and poured into a limo. She was so tiny, we could have flung her over
our shoulder ourselves. Star Gazing was first to break the story —
complete with photos — of Meg Ryan hooking up with Craig Bierko, after she
broke up with Russell Crowe. Ryan was here shooting the boxing film Against
the Ropes; Crowe and Bierko would play boxing rivals in Cinderella Man,
shot in Toronto. Star Gazing brought you accounts of Crowe misbehaving at
Hemingway's and biting his hulking bodyguard, Spud, on the ear during an
altercation. I even ran shots of Spud the morning after the night before.
Star Gazing brought you Colin Farrell dropping trou and Chad Michael Murray
visiting the Brass Rail peeler bar while still technically on his honeymoon with
Sophia Bush. Last week, this space broke the story about Sienna Miller
visiting T.O. and engaging in public affection with her latest squeeze, Hayden
Christensen. New York Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove has banned
the mention of Brad Pitt and Paris Hilton in his column. I don't ever want to
hear about professional victim Jennifer Aniston — hey, if Brad Pitt dumped me
for anyone, I'd be happy it was Angelina Jolie. Think about how Jane Fonda must
feel. She became aerobics queen to finance her husband Tom Hayden's senatorial
campaign and he dumps her for a woman with cellulite.
Okay, I cop to being the Pete Doherty of celebrity detox; I can't promise to
never type the dreaded words "Jessica Simpson" again. I'll be
transferring to the Star's Saturday Shopping, so check out that section
for the latest exclusives. And I won't be excluding celebs because as we all
know, they love to shop. But they prefer freebies. In these pages it will
be business as usual at Star Gazing. It will continue in its grand and glorious
two-page format every Sunday, only without moi. But the scoops will go on.
Celebrity Hits And Misses
Excerpt
from The Toronto Star - Rita Zekas
(Mar. 18, 2006) 10 things I won't miss about covering celebrities
1. Being forbidden by celeb handlers from asking personal questions.
2. Celeb handlers.
3. Celebs that lie to you, though catching them in a lie is oh so sweet. Kate
Hudson insisted that her mom Goldie Hawn was not at the 2000 film festival to
screen her daughter's film Almost Famous because she was in Los Angeles.
Gotcha! We caught Hawn at Bistro 990 drinking her way through the wine list.
4. Come-alive-for-$1.05 plonk and things on sticks during parties.
5. Celebutantes and their little dogs, too.
6. Sleep deprivation. Staying up way past my bedtime on school nights to stalk
stars.
7. Approach avoidance. Being denied access to stars in VIP areas and/or being
restricted to nosebleed sections behind barriers at the film festival.
8. Entourages. Why does Lindsay Lohan need a posse of 10 to talk about her
oeuvre?
9. My aching feet. Standing for 12 hours in stilettos is crippling.
10. Not being able to expense my shoes.
10 things I will miss about covering celebrities
1. Posing impertinent questions, such as asking Charlton Heston if he would
ever do drag. He was taken aback, huffed and puffed and said, "No, it
would hurt my career." I pointed out that Dustin Hoffman wore a dress in Tootsie
and he's still working. "I wouldn't be able to play Macbeth," he
countered. "But you could play Lady Macbeth," I said.
2. The adrenalin rush chasing down stars on dark streets at breakneck speeds.
Like shadowing Nicole Kidman to The Senator after she ditched her own premiere
of The Human Stain (nobody liked that one) to party with her To Die
For director Gus van Sant.
3. Crashing parties where I've been specifically barred. I pretended to be the
aunt of an employee to infiltrate Lauren Holly's stagette at The Big Easy.
4. Chris Noth. I conspired to sit beside him at Joso's one night and he agreed
to a fan shot with my pal and myself as long as I didn't publish it. Then everyone
else in the place wanted one.
5. Hanging out with folks at Bistro 990 (ciao, Fernando), Opus, Sotto Sotto,
Vaticano and Joso's waiting for boldface.
6. Working with Louie D.
7. Getting paid to read Vanity Fair and Hello!
8. Playing Name That Drug while reviewing celebs at awards ceremonies.
9. Getting great behind-the-scenes dirt on stars. Like their hygiene issues:
Barbra Streisand allegedly had a showering clause inserted into Nick Nolte's
contract for Prince of Tides.
10. My sources. Thank you so much. You know who you are.
Hope – Twista featuring Faith Evans
I listened to this track again this week and know that there's somebody
out there that could use this message - one of my all time favourite
tracks.
(OK, not Canadian but truly I find the words inspiring!) Check out the video HERE and the lyrics below.
[Twista talking]
Man, I know we had a lot of tragedies lately.
I just wanna say rest in peace to Aaliyah,
Rest in peace to Left Eye,
Rest in peace to Jam Master Jay,
And everybody lost in the Twin Towers,
And everybody lost period.
All we got is HOPE!!
[Verse 1 (Twista)]
I wish the way I was living could stop, serving rocks,
Knowing the cops is hot when I'm on the block, And I
Wish my brother woulda made bail,
So I won't have to travel 6 hours to see him in jail, And I
Wish that my grandmother wasn't sick,
Or that we would just come up on some stacks and hit a lick, And I
(I wish)
Wish my homies wouldn't have to suffer,
When the streets get the upper hand on us and we lose a brother,
And I
Wish I could go deep in the zone,
And lift the spirits of the world with the words within this song,
And I (I wish)
Wish I could teach a soul to fly,
Take away the pain out cha hands and help you hold them high, And I
Wish my homie Butch was still alive
And on the day of his death we had never took that ride, And I (I
wish)
Wish God could protect us from the wrong
So that all the soldiers that were sent overseas come home
We will never break, though they devastate, we shall motivate,
And we gotta pray, all we got is faith.
Instead of thinking about who gonna die today,
The Lord is gonna help you feel better, so you ain't gotta cry
today.
Sit at the light so long,
And then we gotta move straight forward, cuz we fight so strong,
So when right go wrong,
Just say a little prayer, get ya money man, life goes on!!!
Let's HOPE!
[Chorus (Faith Evans)]
Cuz I'm hopeful, yes I am, hopeful for today,
Take this music and use it
Let it take you away,
And be hopeful (hopeful) and He'll make a way
I know it ain't easy but that's okay.
Cuz we hopeful
[Verse 2 (Twista)]
I wish that you could show some love,
Instead of hatin so much when you see some other people comin up (I
wish)
I wish I could teach the world to sing,
Watch the music and have 'em trippin off the joy I bring, (shiit)
I wish that we could hold hands,
Listen instead of dissin lessons from a grown man, And I (I wish)
Wish the families that lack, but got love, get some stacks
Brand new shack and a lack that's on dubs, And I
Wish we could keep achieving wonders,
See the vision of the world through the eyes of Stevie Wonder, (you
feel me) (I wish)
And I hope all the kids eat,
And don't nobody in my family see six feet, (ya dig)
I hope the mothers stand strong,
You can make it whether you wit him or your man's gone, And I (I
wish)
Wish I could give every celly some commissary,
And the po po bring the heat on them priest like they did R. Kelly,
And I
Wish that DOC could scream again
And bullets could reverse so Pac and Biggie breath again, (shit) (I
wish)
Then one day they could speak again,
I wish that we only saw good news every time we look at CNN,
I wish that we could never get the blues,
Wish I could bring back the people that died, Eddy too
I wish that we could walk a path, stay doin the right thing
Hustle hard so the kids maintain up in the game,
Let's HOPE
[Chorus (Faith Evans)]
Cuz I'm hopeful, yes I am, hopeful for today,
Take this music and use it
Let it take you away,
And be hopeful (hopeful) and He'll make a way
I know it ain't easy but that's okay.
Cuz we hopeful
[Verse 3 (Twista)]
Wish the earth wasn't so apocalyptic,
I try to spread my message to the world the best way that I can
give it,
We can make it always be optimistic,
If you don't listen gotta live my life the best way I can live it,
I pray for justice when we go to court,
Wish it was all good so the country never even went to war
Why can't we kick it and just get em on,
And in the famous words of Mr. King "Why can't we all just get
along",
Or we can find a better way to shop and please, And I
Hope we find a better way to cop a keys, And I
Wish everybody would just stop and freeze,
And ask way are we fulfillin these downfalls and prophecies,
You can be wrong if it's you doubting,
With the faith of a mustard seed you can move mountains,
And only the heavenly father can ease the hurt,
Just let it go and keep prayin on your knees in church!!
And let's HOPE
[Chorus (Faith Evans) X2]
Cuz I'm hopeful, yes I am, hopeful for today,
Take this music and use it
Let it take you away,
And be hopeful (hopeful) and He'll make a way
I know it ain't easy but that's okay.
Cuz we hopeful
::MUSIC NEWS::
B.I.G.’S ‘Ready To Die’ Pulled From Shelves
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(March 20, 2006) *Sales of the Notorious B.I.G.’s
first album, “Ready to Die,” are about to come to a
screeching halt after a jury decided the
title track contains a portion of an Ohio Players song without permission. On
Friday (March 17), jurors found that Bad Boy Entertainment and executive
producer Sean "Diddy" Combs illegally used a part of the Ohio
Players' 1971 song "Singing In the Morning." Bridgeport Music and
Westbound Records, which owns the song rights, were awarded $4.2 million in
punitive and direct damages. This legal action is the latest in hundreds
of sampling lawsuits brought by Bridgeport Music and Westbound Records, which
also own song royalties by George Clinton and the Funkadelics. Most ended in
out-of-court settlements. "We've just been battling this for such a
long time," Armen Boladian, owner of Westbound and Bridgeport said.
"So many have been settled because companies didn't want anything to do
with it, and we knew we were right." There was no word on when and how the
ban on “Ready to Die” would be enacted. The defendants, Bad Boy Entertainment, Bad
Boy LLC, Justin Combs Publishing and Universal Records, are planning to appeal
the decision. "We think (the verdict) is without merit,"
defense lawyer Jay Bowen said. *Meanwhile, Biggie’s March 9, 1997 murder
remains unsolved, but, a fresh team of police detectives has been assigned to
look into the case, authorities said. "They are investigating it,
following up on the leads," Assistant City Attorney Don Vincent told the
City Council's Public Safety Committee on Thursday.
Biggie, born Christopher Wallace, was 24 when he was gunned down
following a party at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. His family
sued the city, alleging that the police department covered up the involvement
of rogue officers in the killing. Family members claimed Death Row Records
chief Marion "Suge" Knight orchestrated the shooting. The mogul has
any denied involvement. A federal judge declared a mistrial in
July. In January, the city was ordered to pay the family $1.1 million after the
judge ruled that a police detective intentionally hid statements by a jailhouse
informant linking the killing to two officers. A retrial is expected later this
year.
Aguilera Looks 'Back' On Upcoming Album
Excerpt from www.billboard.com
- Soran Baker, L.A.
(Mar. 17, 2006) Christina Aguilera receives musical assistance from an unlikely collaborator on her upcoming album, "Back to Basics," due
in
June via RCA. Gang Starr principal DJ Premier produced five songs for the
project, which finds Aguilera paying tribute to the music that inspired her:
soul, jazz and blues from the 1920s, '30s and '40s. "It was kind of
a shock because I was like, 'How the hell does she know about me?'"
Premier recalls of his first conversation with RCA about the album. "I'm
one of those guys that really doesn't expect pop artists to really be up on me.
My first question was, 'What does she know about me?'" It turns out
Aguilera was familiar with some of Premier's jazz-influenced work with Gang
Starr in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially the song "Jazz
Thing." "It had elements of Miles Davis and Billie Holiday and
little horn pieces," Aguilera says of the tune. "The way he combined
that, I was like, 'Hm. I bet he would get where I'm trying to go with this
record.' It was taking a chance. God knows if he would even do it because it
was kind of his first time, I think, even venturing into the 'pop' world. I
knew that it would be a different and new thing for him."
Aguilera says that her work with DJ Premier is new territory for both of them
and continues her legacy of taking creative chances with her music. Likely
single "Ain't No Other Man," produced by DJ Premier and Charles
Roane, clocks in at 127 beats per minute -- most pop and rap songs rarely
exceed 10 -- -and features energetic horn blares. Another song, "Thank You
(Dedication to Fans)," finds Premier slicing up pieces of Aguilera's first
hit, "Genie in a Bottle," and pairing them with voice-mail messages
from Aguilera's fans. These songs gave Aguilera the sounds she desired
and allowed her to fulfill another one of her mandates. "The thing that I
try to do with each record, I don't necessarily go to the main people that are
the No. 1 chart-toppers in music," she says. "I really like to go
left field, think a little bit out of the box and go with someone, maybe a
little bit more obscure, that I really respect. Not to say that Premier is
that, but just to say that I'm not going to go to the obvious person, say, the
Neptunes, Pharrell or Lil Jon. I really like to go someplace different that
people haven't approached."
The Very Best Of Peabo Bryson Available Now
Source: Holly Cooper, D.I.T. Public Relations, 917-597-3048, ditinc@aol.com
(Mar. 22, 2006) Fairfax, VA -- Peabo Bryson is recognized as one of contemporary music's premier male
vocalists and legendary soul
balladeer, with a career spanning nearly three decades. His musical repertoire
has earned many honours including an Oscar, multiple Grammy awards and numerous
Billboard top listings. Time Life has created a special 16-song CD entitled The
Very Best of Peabo Bryson available now in retail stores nationwide.
Bryson' portfolio of greatest hits includes Tonight, I Celebrate My Love, the
ever-popular hit duet with R&B legend Roberta Flack; Show and Tell; Let The
Feeling Flow; Can You Stop The Rain; Feel the Fire; Closer Than Close; the
Oscar and Grammy-winning A Whole New World from Disney's hit movie Aladdin
recorded with Regina Belle; and the Grammy-winning Beauty and the Beast
recorded with Celine Dion. His unprecedented international success
resulted in being the first artist in music history to have separate records
topping four different charts in 1992: "A Whole New World (Aladdin's
Theme)", which topped both the Pop and Adult Contemporary charts. During
this time, Peabo teamed up with Tony Winner Lea Salonga and recorded the song
"We Kiss In A Shadow" for the classical musical The King and I, which
was No.1 on the Classical Crossover charts; while saxophonist Kenny G's
multi-platinum "Breathless" which also featured Peabo on "By The
Time This Night Is Over" topped Contemporary Jazz charts.
"For the first time in Bryson's career, his timeless music is available on
one CD for his loyal fans and music enthusiasts to enjoy worldwide. The Very
Best of Peabo Bryson represents a blockbuster of greatest hits. He is the
undisputed master of romantic ballads. As spokesperson for Classic Soul Ballads
Collection on television, Peabo was seen by more than 75 million viewers and
instrumental in the 3 million CDs sold," states Mike Jason, Senior
Vice-President of Audio & Video, Retail at Time Life.. Bryson
demonstrates a passion for the music he writes and produces which is evident in
his live performance and continued sold out concerts. "My primary
objective when writing a love ballad is to share what I would like for others
to feel through music. When I perform Feel The Fire, Can You Stop The Rain, A
Whole New World, or my other favourites, I want my audience to recognize that
love is real," states Bryson.
ABOUT TIME LIFE, INC.
Headquartered in Fairfax Virginia, Time Life Inc. was founded in 1961 as one of
the world's largest direct marketers of audio and video products on CDs, DVDs
and VHS. The company sells music, videos, books and other products throughout
North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, and is the largest advertiser of
music products in Germany, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Time-Life sets
the standard in the direct response industry with its trusted brand and
pioneering new direct marketing techniques via phone. Time Life also sells over
the Internet and through major retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target, Circuit
City, K-Mart, Musicland and Best Buy to traditional CD outlets.
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Craig Northey: Musician Has A Lot Goin' On
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Victoria Ahearn, Canadian Press
(Mar. 21, 2006) Musician Craig Northey gets giddy when he talks about the first time he watched the hit
CTV ensemble comedy series Corner
Gas. That's because the former front man for the now-defunct alt-rock
group Odds
co-wrote the theme song at star Brent Butt's request, without ever having seen
the show. To Northey's pleasant surprise, the song actually meshed well
with the overall Prairie tone and humour. "It was fantastic and I
was calling everyone in the family, `Come here, quick! Come see Brent's show!'"
the father of three recalls about the time Butt sent him the demo in
2004. "A lot of the times you do things for multimedia, it hinges on
it being good and it's not what you wanted it to be. But I love Corner Gas."
Northey, based in North Vancouver, co-wrote the catchy jingle, called "Not a Lot Goin' On," with his musical
partner Jesse Valenzuela of the Tempe, Ariz.-based rock band Gin Blossoms, and
then fleshed it out for the duo's self-titled debut, Northey Valenzuela.
The 13-track album, which contains a recording with bluesman Colin James, was
released this month in Canada on the True North Records label. Northey
and Valenzuela, both singer-guitarists, met in the early 1990s when their bands
crossed paths on their journey to fame and fortune in Los Angeles, when they
"just had the promise of the future going," says Northey. After
an introduction through a mutual friend, the bands started touring together and
supporting each other's records in their home cities. Northey says the
Odds and Blossoms would often sleep "on the same floor" after gigs,
and he and Valenzuela started to form a strong friendship. "Jesse
and I bonded over this guy's giant record collection, one of the things that we
liked — Nick Lowe records, old soul music, you know — and stayed up late, listened
to records and became friends," he says.
When the Gin Blossoms broke up in 1997 (they reunited again in 2002), the
Northey-Valenzuela bond became even stronger as they started flying to each
other's homes to write songs. "We used to call the project, for a
while, Frequent Flyer, because we did it on air miles," says Northey,
recalling trips to Valenzuela's home in L.A. to cut tracks in his home
studio. Years later, however, they realized their back and forth
collaborations resulted in a hodgepodge of songs that didn't connect.
That's when things came full circle for Northey. He recruited his ex-Odds
mates Doug Elliott and Pat Steward, as well as Cowboy Junkies keyboardist Simon
Kendall, among others, to record the tracks with them. Northey says they did it
live off the floor in just eight days in North Vancouver. "We
thought it would be kind of a compounding process: the more mistakes we
allowed, the more interesting it might be," says Northey, who gave each
artist just one or two takes to record their parts. "It makes people
twitchy when they're listening to it because they can tell they might be able
to perfect it. But sometimes perfecting it doesn't make it any
better." The process was raw and "liberating," says Northey,
but it was a tough sell — until a Universal Music rep saw it on MapleMusic.com
and asked them to remaster it for wide release. Perhaps the Corner Gas
hype helped. "I'm hearing from fans of music I've made in the
past from England ... and places that the show's being sold and they're
freaking out, going, `I was watching the show and then I saw your name and I
heard your voice,'" says Northey. With "Not a Lot Goin'
On" chiming out of TV sets every week and a new album out, Northey seems
content, perhaps more so than a few years ago when he had, well, not a lot
goin' on.
Local Tributes To Shostakovich, Composer For Modern Horror
Excerpt from The
Toronto Star - John Terauds, Classical Music Writer
(Mar. 19, 2006) We know music can sound happy or sad. But can a sequence
of notes and chords speak to us about terror and dictatorship? Yes.
It was written by Dmitri Shostakovich. The talented, tormented Russian created a spare musical language
that embodies 20th-century Russia. To mark his 100th birthday on Sept.
25, musicians around the world have begun to commemorate this singular artist,
who died in 1975. Locally three such events are planned for this week
alone. But let's look back to his time first. On July 20, 1942, during
World War II, Shostakovich appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The
accompanying article starts off with an old Russian proverb: "When guns
speak, the muses keep silent." Then it does an about-face:
"Last winter, as he listened to the roar of German artillery and watched
the sputtering of German incendiaries from the roof of Leningrad's Conservatory
of Music, Fire Warden Shostakovich snapped: `Here the muses speak together with
the guns.'" When the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, under guest conductor
Stefan Sanderling, performs the Russian's Symphony No. 8 this week, his
music will slice through our emotional armour and pierce our souls. It may also
provoke us to think about freedom of expression and an artist's true
voice. Much has been written about Shostakovich and his rocky
relationship with the Soviet state and dictator Joseph Stalin. The
contradictory stories and arguments prove that words are irrelevant in a world
of propaganda, disinformation and fear of honest opinions. Shostakovich's
musical dots and squiggles contain all we need to know about him and Soviet
society.
The late conductor Kyrill Kondrashin said in 1980 that Shostakovich's music
"is inseparable from the events of his life. That is why, until now, it
spoke more to the hearts of audiences in his homeland than outside it. But we
may now speak of a renaissance of Shostakovich in the West, since the facts of
his life have become known here as well and have forced people to look at his
music with new eyes." Sanderling, 42, grew up in East Berlin, behind
the Iron Curtain. He has written a lengthy background essay on Shostakovich,
which he shares with musicians before rehearsals. He writes that nothing
"leads to greater misunderstanding than judging from the safe haven of
intellectual freedom works of art that were created under the conditions of a
dictatorship." There were times Shostakovich offended Stalin,
endangering his life. At other times, he was hailed as a hero of working
people. Stalin expected a victorious symphony from him in 1943, once the
Germans were repelled from Leningrad's periphery. Instead, the gun-fed muses
prompted him to write a grim work of death, war and dictatorship. In an
interview, Sanderling describes the Symphony No. 8 as "very
politicized, very personal music." He says this is Shostakovich's
"most complete symphony. There is not one note too few and not one note
too many." More importantly, "even an audience that doesn't
know the music realizes that something incredible has just
happened." The strength of this work, says Sanderling, is how it
captures the little ways in which a police state wears down the human spirit.
"The most horrible things that happened were the daily little things that
were done to you," he says of life behind the Iron Curtain. "They
were things that hurt your pride and dignity." Sanderling likens the
systemic oppression to a creek that, bit by bit, washes stones downstream.
History washed away the Berlin Wall, Warsaw Pact, Politburo and gulag. But the
music remains, its power undiminished.
Hawksley Workman Puts The Question To Fans In His New Album
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Brad Wheeler
(Mar. 21, 2006) A singer’s voice is lost,
concerts are cancelled, a butterfly turns moth. Hawksley
Workman, Canadian pop musician, is a colourful
flier sadly grounded. A bout of laryngitis destructs Workman's ability to
perform, and many shows have been postponed so far. It is, to say the least, a
distressing situation. "It's kind of like a plumber who loses his
tools," says Workman, on the road to Quebec City from Fredericton. My, he
is low then, seeing himself more as a pipe-fixing grunt than the fancy
performer he's well-known to be. He cannot be blamed for his depression. Where
a throat infection would less inhibit an ink-voiced bluesman or a
smoke-and-honey chanteuse, for an extravagant vocalist like Workman, the
affliction is major. I rely on my voice to give me my swagger," he says,
sounding a little gravely. "When I don't have three or four octaves
available to me I feel like the emperor without my clothes." More
literally, he's a singer without a band, touring the country only with a pianist.
"It feels like there's less to hide behind. The voice becomes all the more
important." Still, despite the situation, Workman rationalizes his malady.
"Even we rock 'n' rollers are mortal. We just forget it sometimes."
Judging by Workman's new album, the apocalyptically pastoral Treeful of
Starling, mortality is not far from the songwriter's mind. "One
certainty of living is that you're gonna die," he sings on the florid pop
of Hey Hey Hey (My Little Beauties), "So why not stand in awe of
it, instead of asking why." That is the album's question. Modern urban
society races forward at a breakneck pace -- a churning, blurry velocity that
won't allow for flower smelling. The world that is gets ignored for what it
could become.
"We seem to only trumpet the virtues of progress, and that progress is the
only way to mark the quality of our own existence," explains Workman, who
admits to Luddite tendencies. "It just seems to me that life moves
too fast to even live it any more. That things are just too tense to even exist
-- to even breathe a full breath." Workman, 30, slowed things down himself
a year ago. Since emerging as a flamboyant rocker in 2001 (with his striking
debut disc For Him and the Girls), Workman's ride had been a wild one.
He toured the world over, recorded three albums (including the Christmas-themed
Almost a Full Moon), and based himself among Toronto, Paris and his
hometown of Huntsville, Ont. He lived star-big, and it caught up to him. On
Jan. 2, 2005, Workman awoke from a "boozy haze" that had endured for
a couple of years. He found a house to rent in the California desert and flew
out within days. He ended up staying for six weeks, alone, "a real
hermitage." There he watched coyotes, woke up with the sun, got clean and
wrote the clever and melodic songs that appear on Treeful of Starling.
Musically the album is stripped down and not gaudy, though the piano-based pop
is hardly drab. Nicely quirky, it has, as one reviewer put it, an
"understated extroversion." Opening track A Moth Is Not a Butterfly
recalls Bob Geldof's theatrical I Don't Like Mondays. There's a
megaphone (perhaps once used by Roger Waters) on You and the Candles.
Lyrically, it's soberly reflective in its observation of the world's state now
and where things head. Workman sees a culture in decay and city-heavy societies
crumbling, with mankind longing for riches and progress instead of living for
the day. "The kind of prosperity that humanity is after these days, it
seems we have to be so fast to get to it, we don't live our lives while we try
to seek our fortunes." And so, Workman welcomes simpler times -- times
before clocks and nights that are brightened by candles. The singer whose
rendition of the Beatles' Revolution provided a soundtrack to a World
Cup soccer commercial, now wants a devolution. "Absolutely," Workman
asserts. "The only help for our evolution is devolution. That's probably
what the recording is all about." Workman is not slowing down himself --
at least not when it comes to making music. He actually recorded three albums
last year, including one darker record that came first, and one pop-like
collection that came last. Those two records will likely be released at some
point, but for now Workman sees Treeful of Starling as the right one to
go first. "I really wanted to have that be the record that stood for where
I was," he says. "It felt like I found my voice again." For
Workman, that is no small thing. Hawksley Workman is scheduled to play St.
Catharines, Ont., March 31; Victoria, April 2; Vancouver, April 3-4; Calgary,
April 6; Regina, April 8; and Saskatoon, April 9.
The Hampson Interview: Imogen Heap
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Sarah Hampson
(Mar. 18, 2006) Like a funky Mary Poppins, Imogen Heap drops in on the
scene, a vision of cheer amidst people who have seen too much of a
Canadian February. Six feet tall, her hair a high nest of messy tendrils
and big red flowers, her eyes shielded by oversized pink sunglasses, she sweeps
down the hall of the converted warehouse of Sony BMG in downtown Toronto,
publicists in tow, as though they are her charges for the day and not the other
way around. Her beige skirt is voluminous, with layers of crinolines visible
underneath, and over a fuchsia sleeveless, pleated blouse, she wears a fitted
raspberry-red morning coat, with a rounded swallowtail shape at the back.
Around her neck: a sparkly gold scarf. The palms of both hands are encircled
with partial gloves made of coloured lace. Her shoes: pointy and
cream-coloured. On one cheekbone, she has placed a shiny stick-on butterfly.
And yes, the bag she carries is large and overstuffed. Settled into a room, she
plops down onto a sofa, then leaps up again, to stand, in the centre of the
small space, her long, thin frame angled in a pose, holding her hands out and
turning them in small circles, in a gesture that says, 'What can I get for
you?' She means a refreshment, some strawberries perhaps or a piece of
pineapple that have been laid out on a side table against one wall. But she
appears capable of magic, of pulling a talking bunny from her bag, if that's
what you desired. She is a hostess to her own world, leading her visitors out
of any assumptions they may have and into an appreciation of her freshness.
Born outside of London, England, in a country that tolerates eccentricity,
celebrates it even, she is completely at ease with herself, free, a wild child
from some other universe, programmed on creativity and unaware of what
uncertainty or self-doubt might feel like. Even though she seems apart from the
mainstream, both in music (electronic pop) and in personality, she is deeply
engaged in it. In fact, much of her music is the soundtrack to popular culture
hits, such as The Chronicles of Narnia film and a handful of TV shows,
such as The O.C., CSI and Six Feet Under. "Yeah, I
like to dress up," she says blithely in a soft, breathy voice. "I
love colours. I love textures. I love mixing things together," she
continues, looking down at her costume, as if for the first time today, to
check what exactly she has put on. "For me, it's important. I like to get
up in the morning and feel, you know, the way I want my day to be. I want it to
be fun. I want it to be colourful. I want it to be different and exciting, and
maybe if I dress that way, maybe I think it will happen more," she says.
Her lean, patrician face offers a whimsical smile. But do not be fooled by the
impossible girlishness of being Imogen Heap. A smart, disciplined mind lies
behind the bouquet she presents. This Mary Poppins has a few instructions she
could hand out, but they're not about manners. They are business strategies for
how to get what you want in the recording industry. Heap, who is just 23, has
shrewdly guided her third and latest album, Speak for Yourself, in a way
that has everyone talking. A classically trained pianist who plays the cello
and clarinet, among other instruments, she has been recording music
professionally since 1998, when she made her first album, I Megaphone,
straight out of school.
Her love of electronic music, which in her hands is rich and warm, as layered
and textured as her surprising wardrobe, began at boarding school in Cambridge,
England, where she was sent when she was 12, after her parents split up.
"I didn't get on famously at the beginning with the girls and guys,"
she offers. "I spent all my time in the music school and I soon [found] a
little room with a computer. I loved this idea that you could come up with
something in your head. You could play it and you could hear it back right
away, and you could manipulate it and add to it." A year later, she
entered the Brit School in London, an avant-garde (and free) school for 14- to
19-year-olds, specializing in performing arts and technology. After her first
album, she teamed up with Guy Sigsworth, a celebrated producer who has worked
with Madonna and Bjork. Their collaboration was a band called Frou Frou, and
they signed with Island Records for their CD Details, released in 2003.
But she was unhappy, not with Sigsworth, but with working within the structure
of the music business. "There's always all this promise, and then you
watch it slowly die, another four years of work down the drain." The biggest
promotion of Details came from the single Let's Go being on the
soundtrack of the hit movie Garden State. She decided to go it alone.
She mortgaged her apartment to finance time in her studio. "I wanted to
make a record I was really, really proud of and do it completely on my own
terms. I was fed up with the stupid comments [from record executives] who would
have demo-itis and they'd come and say, 'Oh, it's not as good as the demo, you
know,' " she says, mocking their seriousness. Also, she chose not to work
with Sigsworth again so she could "find out what my real sound was."
She then had her agent submit a track, unsolicited, to the TV show The O.C.
They used the song Hide and Seek, an a cappella piece of her layered
voice, for the finale of season two in 2005. To maximize the broadcast's
potential, she made a short-term deal with iTunes through her own company,
Megaphonic Records, to coincide with the broadcast of The O.C. episode.
Within a week, the song had jumped to number 32 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart.
Record companies were at her feet. Heap retains the masters of her songs and
simply licenses them for distribution through the RCA Victor label. "The
deal is amazing," she offers. "It's really, really creative. It's not
to do with money or advances. I have 100-per-cent artistic control," she
says brightly. "I can do what I like." One example is her hiring of
Arno Salters, a Canadian director with Toronto-based Spy Entertainment, to make
her video for Goodnight and Go, a song on the album about a foolish but
fun sexual encounter. "I think it's important to understand the
business," she says in her light-hearted manner. "I've been at it 10
years now, and I do pick up a few things along the way. And I've always been
interested in it, only because the less you understand about it, the more
bitter you become because you don't understand why certain things have to be
done in certain ways." The sentences all rush out of her, quickly and
softly as wind. She gestures with her arms in a flighty, schoolgirlish way.
"And I didn't think it was rocket science," she adds. And where does
Heap get her best ideas for her songs and her navigation of the business? On
her bicycle, of course. She rides regularly from her studio to her home along
the south bank of the Thames. But no, it doesn't fly.
Grand Hustle/Atlantic Release, “King,” To Drop March 28
Source: Warner Music Canada
(Feb. 22, 2006) Grand Hustle/Atlantic recording artist T.I. has
announced details of his highly anticipated new album, “KING,” set to drop March
28,
as well as his big-screen debut in “ATL,” set to open March 31.
“KING” follows the breakthrough success of 2004’s RIAA platinum-certified
“URBAN LEGEND,” which spawned such smash hits as “Bring Em Out” and the Grammy
nominated “U Don’t Know Me.” “What You Know,” the first single from “KING,” was
#1 most-added track at both CHR/Rhythmic and Urban radio nationwide. The
single’s companion video, shot earlier this month in L.A., features cameos by
actor Mike Epps and Blink- 182/Transplants Travis Barker of
Blink-182/Transplants/MTV fame. Veteran hip-hop video director and
Atlanta native Chris Robinson not only directed the music video, but also the
upcoming Overbrook/Warner Bros. Pictures film, “ATL,” starring T.I. The
music video shows a day in the life of T.I., where he attends the premiere of
“ATL,” joins the film’s cast at the theatre, and then attends the after-party.
T.I. (Tip Harris) will make his acting debut in “ATL” as lead character
Rashad. The film tells the story of a group of four friends who have just
graduated from high school in Atlanta. “ATL” spotlights the city’s famed
Jellybeans skating rink, a popular hangout not only for the teens in the film,
but for both T.I. and Robinson as real-life teens growing up in Atlanta.
Songs from “KING,” including “What You Know,” “Front Back,” and “Ride Wit Me,”
which is the featured song in the film’s trailer, will appear in “ATL.”
The film is set for release March 31. Atlantic Records and Warner Bros.
Pictures are working closely together on both projects, partnering in field
marketing, advertising, publicity, and screenings. In conjunction with both the
release of “KING” and “ATL,” T.I. will make appearances at exclusive album
listening events and movie premieres in Houston, Dallas, Chicago, and Detroit
the week prior to the projects’ release dates. The rapper also plans to
make appearances at larger premieres in Atlanta and Los Angeles the week of March
27.
T.I.'s video for “What You Know” made its world premiere on BET's Access
Granted on February 15. In addition, T.I. appeared on BET’s 106
& Park on February 17, and will appear again on the show the day before
his album release, March 27. BET will also air several interviews with
T.I. on various shows, including BET Style and Rap City, all
airing in the next few weeks, as well as Hosted Saturday airing April 1.
T.I. will make an appearance on MTV’s TRL on March 27 as well as on DFX
that same week. MTV’s The Leak will feature “KING” from March 21-28, and
MTV News will soon feature interviews with the rapper filmed during his album
photo shoot last month as well as during the "What You Know" video
shoot. MTV2’s Sucker Free Sunday Countdown featured T.I. on
February 19 and T.I. will host Sucker Free Sunday on March 26. Fuse will
feature T.I. on both the Daily Download and Hip-Hop Confidential.
T.I. was recently nominated for a Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance
for his song “U Don’t Know Me.” He also walked away from the Second Annual VIBE
Awards with a win in the Street Anthem category for the same song.
This summer, T.I. will exclusively sponsor two teen girls on the
first T.I. Music Sponsorship with It’s Cool To Be Smart “Single Parent Initiative”
as part of his ongoing commitment to support the local Boys & Girls Club in
Atlanta.
For more information on T.I., visit www.trapmuzik.com.
Diva Unleashes Her Fiery Passion In Operatic Coup
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - John Terauds, Classical Music Writer
(Mar. 18, 2006) To get a top international diva to sing one of her signature
roles for your opera company is a major coup. To get her at the last
minute, to fill in for an unwell leading character, is a monumental stroke of
luck. Boston-born June Anderson made her Metropolitan Opera debut opposite Luciano Pavarotti in
1989. The dramatic coloratura soprano began her tour of leading roles on every
major opera stage a decade before that. And, when the curtain goes up at
the Hummingbird Centre on March 30, she will make her local opera debut in the
title role of the Canadian Opera Company's Norma, in a six-performance
run. The two-act drama, which premiered a La Scala in Milan on Boxing
Day, 1831, was not an instant hit. But it soon gained a steady following thanks
to its solid, female-centred drama coupled with gorgeous, melody-rich music by
Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835). The lead role has become a career
touchstone for the modern diva, including not-so-distant soprano legends Maria
Callas and Joan Sutherland. "I spent two-thirds of my career working
towards Norma," says Anderson during a break in rehearsals earlier
this week. Her strong, flexible voice and ringing top notes made her a natural
for what is known as the bel canto style. "Norma was
an arrival, a destination," she says. "Once I was there, I had to
figure out what to do next."
Some early-19th-century bel canto operas are a series of show-stopping
arias, with not much of substance in between. But Bellini's work stands as a
dramatic and musical whole. It also contains great arias, such as the infamous
"Casta Diva." "Norma spoiled me for so much other bel
canto repertoire," says Anderson. "In the beginning, bel canto
was my whole world and, with Norma, my world suddenly got
bigger." Now, at the age of 53, her passion for the opera is
undiminished. She has extended herself to sing works from other eras, including
a Paris production of contemporary German composer Hans-Werner Henze's 1966
opera, The Bassarids, last April. Asked about her favourite
production of Norma, Anderson pauses to think, then says that every
production she has done has had its highs and lows. "I prefer
productions that don't get in the way of anything," she concludes. She
tilts her head sideways. "I like productions like this, instead of
straight-on." Anderson is not pleased with the only Norma she
has recorded on DVD. The production, filmed for Italian television in 2001 by
director Carlo Battistoni, used an original manuscript by Bellini. According to
Anderson, its many faults included having "Casta Diva" set a whole
tone higher. "Bellini's first Norma, Giuditta Pasta, told him this
was impossible, and so it has been sung a whole tone down ever since,"
says Anderson. The Canadian Opera Company's effort is a remount, using
Allen Moyers' set and Anna Oliver's costumes. It is directed by François Racine
and conducted by David T. Heusel. The role of Norma represents a daunting
two-plus hours of singing. The character is a Druid high priestess with two
children who discovers that her lover, the Roman proconsul Pollione, is running
off with Adalgisa, a young novice priestess. The two women eventually
make an accommodation with each other, but not with Pollione. It all ends with
Norma and Pollione going up in flames on a great pyre. Anderson has been
singing in Europe since 1982 and keeps apartments in New York and Paris. But
she has no current or upcoming engagements in North America. "With the
exception of this Norma," she says with a big smile. Her
European reviews continue to glow about the quality of her voice and artistry.
This makes her surprise Toronto stop an even bigger vocal treat. The
Canadian Opera Company presents Bellini's Norma at the Hummingbird Centre on
Mar. 30, Apr. 4, 7, 9, 12 & 15. Info at http://www.coc.ca
Presenting A Fun Way To Jazz Up Your Sunday
Excerpt from The
Toronto Star - Richard Ouzounian
(Mar. 18, 2006) NEW YORK—If you're looking for a fun couple to spend Sunday
morning with, let me suggest John Pizzarelli and Jessica
Molaskey. Jazz fans know him as the
genial genius of the guitar and show-tune aficionados hail her as having some
of the most persuasive pipes around. They're husband and wife, but more
importantly, they're the hosts of a program called Radio Deluxe, which can be heard
locally on JAZZ FM 91 every Sunday starting at 9 a.m. "I'm a huge
fan of John and Jessica's," affirms Ross Porter, president and CEO of the
station. "They're natural entertainers with great comedic timing and
because of their pedigree, they're able to attract an impressive list of
guests." The guests are important, because Radio Deluxe is
something different — a loose-limbed combination of free-flowing talk and
fine-sounding music, all wrapped up in the persuasive personalities of the two
hosts. It's the kind of show that used to be on the radio years and years
ago, only not quite this good. Everyone from Margaret Whiting and Liza Minnelli
to Michael Bublé and Peter Cincotti (tomorrow morning's guest, by the way)
stops by to chew the fat and warm the airwaves. "We haven't found
anyone who isn't passionate about music," says Molaskey. You'd have to put
her and her husband on the top of the list. It's the kind of windy, rainy
day in Manhattan that makes everybody tense and we're all crowded into a tiny,
tiny office, but the atmosphere couldn't be more relaxed — thanks to
Pizzarelli, Molaskey and their daughter Maddie. "We've been kicking
this idea around for a while," admits Pizzarelli, 45. "We originally
wanted to do a cooking show. Kind of Playboy After Dark meets Molto
Mario on the way to Seinfeld." "I was going to wear
this retro hostess gown," recalls Molaskey, "and we'd have this
fabulous loft apartment. Tony Bennett would drop by and tell us his favourite
thing to eat was Mario Batali's gnocchi, and Tony would sing while Mario
cooked." They both laugh, then sigh.
"Fabulous idea," says Pizzarelli, "only nobody wanted to put up
the bucks to do it." But even though TV might have been
prohibitively expensive, radio was relatively cheap and so they found their
concept of music mixed with conversation moving to the airwaves, minus the food
and the fancy apartment. What they have is a band, some guests and an
insatiable curiosity for what makes people tick. "There's this great
old guard of music," says Molaskey, "who are still willing to tell
stories about the giants they worked with and we feel we have a responsibility
to document it." "And then," she continues, "there's
the younger generation, like these great guys you find playing in the Minor
Leagues." "Very nice analogy," nods baseball fan
Pizzarelli approvingly. Everything gets the lightest of touches from this
duo. They put their heads together and sing a theme song that never made it to
the air. "Swinging conversation, no real preparation/ It's all here on Radio
Deluxe," it goes. "I like them to be relaxed," is how
Pizzarelli describes his interviewing technique. "I start the tape rolling
as soon as they walk into the room. Before you know it, we're into it.
"Annie Ross once asked, `When are we gonna start?' and I said, `Hey, we're
almost done.'" Molaskey smiles. "John always has his guitar
around his neck. People will start telling a story and then just slip into song
and he'll accompany them. There's something so sweet about people singing like
that." "I let her do all the real work," grins Pizzarelli,
"and then I feel comfortable asking the dumb questions."
They're both proud to be part of what is frequently called "the revival of
the Great Popular Songbook," taking their place alongside Harry Connick
Jr., Diana Krall and the rest. "You know something," starts
Molaskey, "this is the quintessential North American art form. Good is
good and sooner or later things find their own level." And a
background in jazz is useful for doing unscripted radio. "We're just
riffing," explains Pizzarelli, "like we always do. You're constantly
in the moment. It's not about tomorrow or yesterday. It's about what you're
doing right now with the melody that's being played." Porter says
the format works. "Their show is very popular with our listeners," he
says. "I'm very pleased and not at all surprised." "I
think if I was at home listening to the show," giggles Molaskey, "I'd
want to be there." And she's right. Radio Deluxe with John
Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey is heard 9-11 a.m. Sunday mornings on JAZZ FM
91.
Paul Rodgers Does Creditable Job Of Fronting Queen
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Vit Wagner, Pop Music Critic
(Mar. 17, 2006) Let's be honest, if Queen had gone the Rock Star: INXS route
to find its new singer, there is no way they would have ended up with
Paul Rodgers. Surely, someone
younger and more marketable than a largely forgotten minor icon of the 1960s
and '70s would have emerged when all the votes were in. It's a good
thing, then, that Queen did not go down that road. Rodgers is no Freddie
Mercury, the charismatic crooner who fronted the '80s glam-rock mainstays until
his death in 1991. But the 56-year-old former singer for Free and Bad Company
is no wannabe, either. As a co-author of "All Right Now,"
Rodgers was responsible for one of the most enduring rock anthems ever to shake
an arena to its foundations, a song that 35 years after it was a hit brought
last night's nearly sold-out crowd at the Air Canada Centre to a state of
fist-pumping delirium. There aren't many tunes that could hold their own
as an encore number wedged between "We Will Rock You" and "We
are the Champions." If anything, it was the most potent of the three. It
didn't hurt, of course, to have Queen guitarist Brian May laying down the
licks. Too bad Rodgers never came close to equalling that high point
during his stint with Bad Company. Of the three songs from that outfit on the
set list, "Feel Like Making Love" and "Can't Get Enough of Your
Love" stood up passably well, but the eponymous calling card "Bad
Company," which featured Rodgers on the grand piano, was tepid by
comparison. Credit May and drummer Roger Taylor, the two surviving Queen
members who are part of the current sextet, for giving Rodgers his due. And
credit Rodgers, too, for knowing when to recede into the background.
Taylor, whose singing voice carries a vague resemblance to Rod Stewart's,
stepped out from behind the kit to deliver "These are the Days of Our
Lives," presented against a backdrop of documentary footage of Queen from
younger days. Earlier, he had lent his voice to "I'm in Love with My
Car," preceded by an obligatory drum solo that sounded, well,
obligatory. Likewise, May was allowed his own extended showcase of guitar
virtuosity. He also led a solo, acoustic sing-along to "Love of my
Life," dedicated to Mercury. "I never thought that this would
happen," May said. "This is a big bonus in my life. I hope it is in
yours, too." Unlike INXS, which doesn't even acknowledge late singer
Michael Hutchence in its shows, Queen stuck a plausible balance between
honouring Mercury and going forward without him — even if the new offering,
"Take Love," didn't exactly whet the appetite for an entire album
with other songs like it. For the most part, Rodgers successfully
navigated his way through "Fat Bottomed Girls," "Another One Bites
the Dust" and other Queen standards. No doubt, the test in the back
of everyone's mind was "Bohemian Rhapsody," which Rodgers managed
with more than a little help from Mercury. Fully half of the song was presented
with the band accompanying video images of their former singer in his operatic
glory. When Rodgers finally joined in, the transition seemed more fluid than
forced. In that sense, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was emblematic of an
unlikely reunion that came across as more natural than might have appeared
possible on paper.
Blunt Shares His Pain
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Greg Quill, Entertainment Columnist
(Mar. 22, 2006) When you're playing the high-stakes vulnerable romantic gambit,
complete with devastating Byronic sobs in every lyric and your
bleeding heart in plain view, the tricky bit is to make the sensitive-poet
angle seem real when you're out there in front of 2,500 devoted
believers. You don't ruin the spell, as British military
officer-turned-pop sensation James Blunt did last night at Massey Hall in his first local concert
appearance, by suggesting that the assembly — mostly well-groomed females in
their late teens through mid-30s — get naked in order to affirm their
approval. This crowd, as far as this witness to the first full Blunt
assault in Toronto could see, was too well behaved to take him seriously, or to
take offence. Instead, his fans continued to scream and sigh, flashed their
camera phones with increased fury and urged him to sing harder, louder, higher.
Blunt and his four-piece band could do no wrong, as long as his emotively
ragged falsetto was in gear and the ache in his soul was reflected in his
weary, watery eyes, his beggar-boy stance and plaintive voice. Every
generation needs romantic balladeers. Pop music, life itself, would be nothing
without them. And Blunt is the latest in a long line of tender and brutal
romantic manipulators. He has a heartbreaking way with words, the ability to
make the most preposterous declarations of undying love or fear of betrayal and
loss seem almost honest. His melodies are great soaring structures built around
ascending and descending chords thickly laden with the joy of passion at full
throb, and alternatively with the dark and sinister calamity of despair.
There are no half measures in any of these songs. And on record, Blunt pulls it
all off masterfully — so well, in fact, that from the get-go last night, every
young female voice in the audience seemed to be singing the songs along with
him, as if to offer strength to compensate when Blunt apologized for his worn
voice. "You're going to get a very raw version, the way I felt it
when I wrote it," he confided with appalling disingenuousness about 30
minutes into a 75-minute show, as he sat down at the piano alone to launch
"Goodbye My Lover" — arguably the most excessively sentimental pop
ballad since Dan Hill's "Sometimes When We Touch" — with its grand
melodramatic sigh of a refrain, "Goodbye my lover, goodbye my friend, you
have been the one, you have been the one for me ..."
The loneliness and pain he tried to convey didn't quite have the same meaning
with a thousand sobbing women singing along, but hey, this was a special
moment. Each voice seemed to be sharing Blunt's anguish in intimate
solitude, the way we all have at some time in our lives when pleasure and pain,
tears and rain are all the same — to borrow another gem from the handsome young
ex-soldier's collection — and find their meaning only in a trifling song.
They're not all trifles. One of the most forceful pieces last night was the
anti-war ballad "No Bravery," a big angry thing full of haunted
memories of a ravaged and empty Kosovo, some of them captured on video and
projected onto a screen upstage, over Blunt at the piano. That one song
contains all the rare elements James Blunt will need in his post-romantic
years.
MUSIC TIDBITS
Kanye West, Chili Peppers To Headline Lollapalooza
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail
(Mar. 18, 2006) Austin, Tex. -- Kanye West, the
Red Hot Chili Peppers and
Wilco are among over 120 acts to perform at this year's Lollapalooza festival. The lineup,
announced Thursday at the South by Southwest music festival, includes about
twice the number of last year's festival, when Lollapalooza was downsized from
a coast-to-coast tour to a weekend event in Chicago. Lollapalooza 2006 will
take place Aug. 4-6 in Chicago's Grant Park. Other acts include Common, Death
Cab for Cutie, the Flaming Lips, Queens of the Stone Age, the Shins, Iron &
Wine and the Raconteurs, the new band formed by Jack White and Brendan Benson. AP
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Richie Spice Currently On In The Street To Africa Tour
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
- By Kevin Jackson
(March 20, 2006) *With his latest hit Youths are So Cold making moves on the local
charts, singer Richie Spice and the other artistes from the Fifth
Element stables, are currently pulling in audiences on their In the Street to
Africa tour. The jaunt has so far made stops at the Ragga Muffins
Festival in California, the island of St. Marteen, Jacksonville and Orlando,
Florida, Atlanta, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia Beach, and
Massachusetts. Accompanying Richie on the tour are Spanner Banner, Etana
and Jah Penco. Richie Spice whose seven year old recording
Earth a Run Red topped the charts in 2004, has had numerous chart successes
within the past two years. His hits include Black like Tar, High Grade, This
Ghetto Girl, Righteous Youths, Operation Kingfish, Marijuana and Earth Alert
(currently riding the New York Reggae chart). A new album from Richie
Spice is expected later this year. His most recent album Spice in Your Life was
released in 2004.
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LeToya Rolls With Houston Hip-Hoppers
Excerpt from www.billboard.com -
Clover Hope, N.Y.
(Mar. 21, 2006) Original Destiny's Child member
LeToya Luckett will release her solo
debut July 18 via Capitol Records. "LeToya" features
appearances from fellow Houston artists Mike Jones, Paul Wall and Slim Thug, as
well as production by Scott Storch, among others. LeToya says of the
album's title, "It's the world's first time hearing me and getting to know
me as a solo artist, so what better way to get them to know me than call it
LeToya?" The first single, "Torn," is currently No. 53 on
Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. During her seven years in
the original Destiny's Child quartet, Luckett co-wrote several of the group's
singles, including "Bills Bills Bills" and "Say My Name."
The singer appeared on two of Destiny's Child's four studio albums: its 1998
self-titled debut and the 1999 follow-up, "The Writing's on the Wall"
(1999). In late 1999, LaTavia Roberson and Luckett both parted ways with
the group, after which Farrah Franklin (who departed after five months) and
Michelle Williams joined up. The resulting trio announced its split last June
during the European leg of their Destiny Fulfilled...and Loving It tour.
'Lost' Diana Ross Jazz Album Due In June
Excerpt
from www.billboard.com - Jonathan
Cohen, N.Y.
(Mar. 21, 2006) An album of jazz standards Diana Ross recorded more than 30
years ago will see the light of day for the first time this summer. Due
June 20 via Motown/UME, "Blue" was intended as a companion to the hit
1972 soundtrack to "Lady Sings the Blues," in which Ross portrayed
jazz legend Billie Holiday. However, Ross instead followed up the project
with the pop album "Touch Me in the Morning," which reached No. 1 on
the Billboard album chart. In its wake, "Blue" was shelved; the
master tapes were only recently discovered in Motown's vault, according to the
label. "Blue" was produced and arranged by longtime Ross
collaborator Gil Askey. It features such selections as Cole Porter's
"Let's Do It," Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen's "But
Beautiful," the Gershwin Brothers' "I Loves Ya Porgy" and the
Motown original "Had You Been Around," which was performed in
"Lady Sings the Blues" by Michelle Allar. Several other tracks
appeared in alternate form on the "Lady Sings the Blues" soundtrack,
while different takes of "Little Blue Girl" and "Smile"
wound up on "Touch Me in the Morning" and Ross' 1976 self-titled
album, respectively. "Blue" is rounded out by three bonus
tracks ("Easy Living," "He's Funny That Way" and Duke
Ellington's "Solitude") that were recorded during the "Lady
Sings the Blues" sessions but never released. Ross has not released
a new studio album since 1999's "Every Day Is a New Day."
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Streisand Eyeing Return To The Road?
Excerpt from www.billboard.com - Ray
Waddell, Nashville
(Mar. 21, 2006) Talk is heating up about a fall
tour by Barbra Streisand,
though published reports citing ticket prices that would top out at $1,500 are
incorrect, a source close to her camp tells Billboard.com. It does appear a
Streisand trek is in the works after two years of industry speculation that
Streisand would embark on her first jaunt since 2000. Sources say Rolling
Stones promoter Michael Cohl is in talks to produce the Streisand tour. History
shows that Streisand has not balked at exorbitant ticket prices, and that
consumers have not balked at paying them. Outside of a John Kerry
fundraiser in 2004, Streisand's last public performances were Sept. 27-28,
2000, at Madison Square Garden, two sell-outs that grossed $14.4 million.
Ticket prices for that show, billed as Streisand's farewell, were $2,500,
$1,275, $375 and $150, according to Billboard Boxscore. Streisand charged
the same prices for Sept. 20-21 shows that year at Staples Center, grossing
$12.6 million. Millennium sell-outs at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas
grossed $18.2 million, with tickets topping out at $2,500. Streisand has
previously been credited with shattering the glass ceiling on concert prices
with her 1993-94 tour, which sold out 22 dates with tickets as high as $350.
That outing grossed nearly $60 million. Streisand's manager, Marty
Erlichman, would not confirm any details of a tour, but did not rule it out.
"A tour is being explored, but nothing has been finalized, including
important aspects not entertained in the media speculation today," he
tells Billboard.com. "As soon as this is resolved one way or the other --
she may not go out -- the facts will be announced."
::FILM NEWS::
EUR Interview: Inside Denzel (The Inside Man)
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com - By Kam
Williams
(Mar. 21, 2006) *Born in Mount Vernon, NY on December 28, 1954, Denzel Washington was the middle child of
three children born to Denzel, a
Pentecostal preacher, and Lennis, a beautician. Denzel developed an interest in
acting while attending Fordham University, embarking on a career which need not
be recounted here. The two-time Academy Award-winner, who was named the
Sexiest Man Alive by People Magazine in 1996, currently commands $20,000,000
per picture. Here, he talks about his latest outing opposite Jodie Foster in
Inside Man, a cat-and-mouse crime caper directed by Spike Lee. Inside Man opens this Friday in
theatres in North America.
KW: How did you decide to do
Inside Man?
DW: Spike called me up. I read
it, and said, “Yes.” It’s as simple as that.
KW: How much research did you do
for this role?
DW: To be honest with you, I
didn’t do a whole lot of extensive research, because I just didn’t have the
time. I was doing a play on Broadway and had all of five days off before rehearsals,
so I’m not going to sit here and tell you I did a whole bunch of stuff. We hung
out with some New York City detectives. Part of the reason I liked the idea of
doing the film was because it’s very wordy. This guy talks a lot. And I was
getting good practice playing Brutus. So, it’s like, “Shakespeare Goes to the
Street.”
KW: What special training regimen
did you do to play this character, Keith Frazier?
DW: None. I ate. [Laughs] I felt
like he’s sort of settled in his ways, and has his routine, and is in over his
head. I was actually in better shape, and I sort of let myself go.
KW: How was it working with
Spike? I heard that he allowed you to improvise several scenes. Were you
comfortable with that?
DW: I actually started
improvising with Spike some 17 years ago on Mo’ Better Blues. That was the
first time I can remember really just setting a scenario and seeing what
happened. I remember this scene where we were just coming off stage, and then
we go backstage and I get into an argument with Wesley Snipes’ character. That
was one of the first times I sort of improvised. So, it all kinda’ started with
Spike many moons ago.
KW: How was the chemistry between
you and your co-star, Jodie Foster, another two-time Oscar-winner?
DW: Jodie’s cool. I like Jodie. I
like her a lot, and obviously, she’s a great actress. So, I was excited about
the opportunity to work with her.
KW: And how was it improvising
working with Chiwetel Ejiofor?
DW: Chiwetel is really an elegant
and good man, and a great actor. It was tougher for him, because I was just
riffing, and he has this accent. So, he didn’t know what I’m going to say, and
he was trying to learn how to speak American. He had to go back over to his
speech coach and figure out how to respond. So, it was more difficult for him,
but he’s a good man, so we had a good time together.
KW: What did you think about the
Academy Awards?
DW: I didn’t watch the Academy
Awards. I went to Tower Records and I was teaching my daughter how to drive.
KW: How did you feel about It’s
Hard Out Here for a Pimp being performed and winning for best Song?
DW: I didn’t watch the show, so I
can’t comment on what the show was about, but I’m happy for the people who won.
KW: A lot of black people feel
that the Academy only honours African-Americans for work which presents their
own people in a negative light. You played a corrupt cop in Training Day, Halle
Berry got naked in Monster’s Ball. And now that pimp song. Do you agree?
DW: I won the first time for
Glory. Wasn’t that positive?
KW: Yeah, but do you think there
might be any truth to the perception?
DW: I don’t know if there’s any
truth to it, but I think they have the right to feel that way. I don’t sit down
with all the voters, and poll them, and I can’t speak for what people think.
It’s not like we all get together for a Hollywood meeting to decide. To be
honest, I don’t know what people think. You’d have to ask individuals.
KW: How else can you explain it?
DW: I think sometimes you are
awarded something over here when you should have won over there. I don’t think
that’s new with me. I don’t think Scent of a Woman was Al Pacino’s greatest
performance, but that’s what he won for. If I had been in his shoes, would
people have said it was because it was race? You know what I mean?
KW: Yep.
DW: He’d been nominated eight
times. If that had been me, and I’d been nominated eight times, would people
say it was a racial issue? I think there’s something to be said for the “We owe
you one” issue. Plus, people like the bad guy. I certainly did. [Chuckles] I
enjoyed Training Day. That was one of my favourite parts. I liked it. I had a
good time.
KW: Out of all the roles you’ve
played, which one is the most like the real Denzel?
DW: Training Day. [Laughs again]
I love saying that. There’s no one part. I’m not those people, I just portray
those people. They affect you, and they all become a part of you. But I can’t
say I ‘m closest to any particular one. I’d like to think that I’m doing
something different from myself and not just trying to bring me to that
character.
KW: What are you working on now?
DW: I’m working now in New
Orleans with Tony Scott. We did Man on Fire together, and Crimson Tide. This
[Déjà Vu] is an interesting picture, technically.
KW: How so?
DW: It’s strange. It takes place
in different times. It’s like a reverse love story.
KW: What genre?
DW: I wouldn’t know what you’d
call it. But there’s some new technology that he’s using, and it’s wild.
KW: What’s it about?
DW: Without giving it away, I can
say that it takes place over four days and it moves around in time.
KW: What’s New Orleans like?
DW: It’s interesting. It’s a tale
of two cities. Downtown, most of the Garden District and the French Quarter are
pretty much intact. I mean they still have hurricane damage, wind damage, or
whatever. And then there’s the rest of the city, 80% of the city. Mile after
mile after mile after mile of empty homes.
KW: Have you spoken to folks out
there?
DW: Well, riding around, there
aren’t a lot of people out there to talk to. I like getting in my truck and
just riding around, but I try to leave people alone. What do you say?
KW: How are the people’s spirits?
DW: It seems like they’re trying
to put it together. I went to a basketball game the other night, the New
Orleans Hornets first game back in town. There was an energy there. It was like
a reunion of a lot of people who hadn’t even seen each other in a long time.
And then, of course, you have the hundreds of thousands of people who aren’t
back. So, I don’t what they’re going to do, but it’s going to take a long time.
KW: What’s on the horizon for
you, American Gangster?
DW: Yeah, that announcement ought
to be soon, but it looks like it’s a done deal, with Ridley Scott directing,
and me and Russell Crowe, this fall, here in New York.
KW: Which of your movies was your
favourite to make?
DW: I don’t pick one. I’m just
blessed to have traveled the world and to have had so many great experiences. I
think landing in Africa to make Cry Freedom had the greatest impact on me. It’s
been a great life, I’ve been very blessed.
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Freeman To Shed Light On 761st Black Panther Batallion
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(March 20, 2006) *“Do you remember ‘Glory?’ What was your reaction to it?” asks Morgan Freeman, preparing to answer a
question about an
upcoming film project that’s as close to his heart as his beloved home on the
Mississippi Delta. The actor’s query yields responses ranging from shame to
anger that “Glory” – the story of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, an all-black
unit who served with valour in the Civil War – had not been taught in history
books or depicted in film any sooner. Freeman uses the reaction to illustrate
his motivation for producing a project on the 761st Tank Battalion, the first
all-black armoured unit to enter combat during World War II. “They
were called up in late 1944 after General Patton had pretty much burned out
much of the mechanized portion of the 33rd Army and needed more tanks and men,”
explains Freeman. “Against General Eisenhower’s wishes, he called up this
group, and they were sent from England to France, attached to the 26th
Infantry, and fought their way to the Rhine River, where they were 183 days to
front. Go back and do some research and find out what that means.”
It means, 183 days fighting on the frontline without rotation. “In
spite of attempts by brass to keep them back, they were the first American
units to hook up with the Russians at the Rhine River, they had to steal
gasoline and ammo to get there, but they did it,” Freeman continues. “They were
the tip of the spear. You know how Patton was going through Europe? They were
leading the way.” Former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote a book about
the Panthers, entitled, “Brothers In Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank
Battalion, WWII’s Forgotten Heroes.” Freeman has been quietly shepherding a
cinematic version of their story for years. Right now, screenwriter Gregory
Allen Howard (“Remember the Titans”) is penning a screenplay, but the actor
admits: “It’s a struggle because there’s a lot to it.”
The 68-year-old Oscar winner is pleased to be at a level in Hollywood to be
able to get the story told, but cautions: “It’s a great position to be in if I
can pull it off. Stories only get told by people interested in telling them.
I’m interested in telling it, because it’s really part of our collective
history. If it falls to me, then it falls to me to try and succeed, and I’m
exalted. I’ll go to my grave having succeeded, having done what I needed to
do.” Freeman has two working titles for the project: “761st Black
Panther Battalion,” the nickname the unit gave themselves, and “Unsung.” He has
interviewed one of the unit’s survivors, Sergeant Johnny Holmes, at his home in
Chicago. “One interesting thing about combat veterans, they don’t
remember a thing,” says Freeman of his talks with Holmes, alluding to the
frustration he has encountered in getting the story to the screen. “Once the
moment is over, it’s like, what happened? It’s not there. It’s a blur. It’s
just a lot of vagueness because [in combat] you’re not thinking, you’re
totalling reacting. It’s all instinct. I’m beginning to understand that.”
He says the disconnect during combat was perfectly illustrated by Tom Hanks’
character in the film “Saving Private Ryan.” “He’d go into
this zone where he was just paralyzed and watching the mayhem, and then snap
out of it and start functioning,” notes Freeman. The phenomenon
could also apply to this interview, which sort of drifted away from its
original objective – the promotion of his new film “Lucky Number Slevin,” due
in theatres next Friday (March 31). The actor said his role as the mean-spirited
boss of a mob family was “no challenge, just fun,” further explaining:
“Challenge comes if you’re having to channel. Jamie Foxx channelled. Joaquin
Phoenix channelled. Phillip Seymour Hoffman channelled. David Straithern
channelled. That’s work. You gotta do research. You have to get inside and make
little things work, little tics.” No such “channelling” occurred in
“Slevin,” a comic thriller that follows a mob standoff between an African
American crime syndicate led by Freeman’s character, The Boss, and a Jewish
mafia outfit ruled by The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley). A case of mistaken identity
lands Slevin (Josh Hartnett) into the middle of their war.
That was about all the time spent on discussing the film before the subject
turned to the 761st tank battalion and other things, including his narration on
the Academy Award winning documentary, “March of the
Penguins.” “My arm was twisted,” he said of his initial
desire to do the project, which traced a group of Emperor penguins in Antarctica
during their annual 80-mile trek in harsh conditions to a breeding ground where
they pair up with mates and procreate. “A friend of mine asked me to do it;
said, ‘C’mon, listen, let me just send it to you. If you don’t like it, just
throw it away.’ So I saw [the French version] and thought, ‘My goodness, it’s
really quite good.’” Freeman marvelled at the fact that humans actually
survived the same treacherous conditions endured by the penguins in order to
get their miraculous story on film. The passion of French director Luc Jacquet
to document the annual march is a prime example of the actor’s philosophy on
the importance of bringing untold stories into theatres. Instead of blaming
Hollywood for an unwillingness to actively sniff out such topics as the 761st
Tank Battalion, or the Massachusetts 54th, Freeman points the finger in the
opposite direction. “It isn’t your responsibility to tell my story.
It’s not an active holding back [by Hollywood], it’s just negligence,” Freeman
affirms. “I’m the negligent one in my story. You want your story told, then
it’s up to you.”
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Haggis: As Canadian As Apple Pie
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Kate Taylor,
ktaylor@globeandmail.com
(Mar. 18, 2006) How to put this politely . . . Listen, all you drooling
wannabes with your noses perpetually pressed to the glass of the great candy
store
to the south, Oscar-winning filmmaker Paul
Haggis is not a "Canadian director." Or
if he is then WorldCom founder Bernard Ebbers, convicted of the largest
accounting fraud in U.S. history last year, is a Canadian telecommunications
executive. Both men settled permanently in the United States in their 20s and
built their careers there. Haggis has worked for years as a screenwriter on
various U.S. television series, was nominated last year for the script of the
Clint Eastwood boxing movie Million Dollar Baby and this month won the
best-picture Oscar for Crash, a film about car accidents and race
relations in Los Angeles. But the Canadian media's Sally Fields school of
cultural nationalism ("You like me!") insists he is "Canada's
Paul Haggis" or even "Paul Haggis of London, Ont.," as though he
hadn't been living for years in Santa Monica. You'd think the guy was Cindy
Klassen. Of course, Haggis tells Canadian journalists that he is a proud
compatriot: Many members of the large Canadian-born contingent now working in Hollywood
have fond memories of their original home and regularly identify themselves as
Canadians; they just can't make as good a living here. What would be really
surprising was if Haggis told Canadians he left a land so plagued with an
inferiority complex that some of its citizens are actually annoyed he didn't
mention Canada at the Oscar podium because he saw no opportunities here and
wasn't the least interested in making films at home. Indeed, the ironic retort
to critics of Canada's lacklustre record of producing its own popular
entertainment is that Canadians are great at making hit movies and smash TV
shows: Just look at what they are doing in Hollywood.
Haggis has speculated that his status as an outside observer in American
society helps him write his scripts, a theory that is also often put forward to
explain why Canada produces so many successful American comics. Canadians,
without any colourful accent or obviously identifying national traits, are very
good at disguising themselves as Americans. No matter how long he lives in New
York, Liam Neeson will be considered an Irish actor, while Canadians meld into
the crowd. Haggis's achievements reflect well on him; they reflect next to
nothing on Canada. While the Canadian media have gushed over Haggis's win,
opinion elsewhere is largely against him, because Crash beat out
sentimental favourite Brokeback Mountain, which many felt was the better
film. Last week, the American writer Annie Proulx, whose short story inspired Brokeback,
penned an anti-Oscar screed for the British newspaper the Guardian. She is not
the right person to say it, but of course all that she writes of the
shallowness, sentimentality and self-importance of the Oscars is true. On the
other hand, her argument about the politics of the best-picture choice is
hilarious: She accuses the aging and pampered Academy members of being out of
touch with American diversity. Yup, those doddering old white men can't be
trusted to recognize liberalism's flavour of the year and made the mistake of picking
the racial-tolerance movie over the gay-positive movie. Another person
who is peeved at Crash is Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, who
wonders why Haggis had to use the exact same title as his 1996 feature about
sexual perversity and car accidents. Meanwhile, he speculated to the Toronto
Star that his History of Violence did not win in the two categories in
which it was nominated because its ambivalence about violence, which it shows
as both pointless and thrilling, wasn't popular with jurors looking for movies
that were demonstrably anti-Bush and anti-conservative.
Wait a second . . . did I call Cronenberg a Canadian filmmaker? Well, yes, he
lives in Toronto and shoots here, making international movies in international
settings. Artists are free to make their personal career decisions and to adopt
whatever citizenship they choose, and there is not much point judging them for
that. Perhaps there is a commendable commitment in the decision to stay home,
or maybe it's actually just cowardice. Perhaps there's bravery in the decision
to try one's luck in Hollywood, or maybe it's only self-interest. The brain
drain is part of a geopolitical reality, but let's be honest also about the
reality of the achievements of those who went south and stop trying to hitch
some Canadian wagon to their Hollywood star.
Nostalgia, Sam Peckinpah Style
Excerpt from The
Globe and Mail - Don Irvine
(Mar. 20, 2006) No director made movies more
passionately than Sam Peckinpah, and aside from Orson Welles, no great filmmaker suffered more
at the hands of the studios for whom he plied his trade. Between 1961 and 1983,
Peckinpah made 14 feature films, many of which didn't make it to their first
release intact. He's usually thought of as a "lost" artist, robbed of
half his career by alcohol, personal demons and studio hacks. Yet as
Cinematheque Ontario's Toronto retrospective Bring Me the Films of Sam
Peckinpah makes clear, he gave us everything he had, and everything he had was
enough. The zeitgeist has been much kinder to Peckinpah, of late, than he ever
was to himself. In the past few years, the studios he worked with have
re-released virtually all his movies on DVD. More importantly, they've repaired
most of the damage they'd done to them as well. With the release next month of
a restored Cross of Iron, every one of Peckinpah's most important movies
will be available to the viewing public, more or less the way he'd intended us
to see them. At his peak, he was generous with his genius. Between 1969 and
1973, Peckinpah made The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Straw Dogs,
Junior Bonner, The Getaway and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Let's
put that in perspective: In the same amount of time it will have taken the
producers of the James Bond franchise to bring Casino Royale to market
this fall, Peckinpah made six extraordinary films. How could we have been that
lucky without noticing it at the time?
Watching them as a group today is an overwhelmingly nostalgic experience: The
passion Peckinpah had for both the western and the idea of the West leaps
through the screen from his heart directly to yours. Your emotions are held
hostage with no hope of being ransomed, because you're being kidnapped by a
kind of filmmaking that's gone forever. So it's very easy to develop a tendency
to look back at Peckinpah's westerns the way Peckinpah looked back at the fin-de-siècle
West. When you contemplate the Jerry Bruckheimers and the Michael Bays
currently cranking out films in the action-adventure genre, you may find
yourself identifying with Deke Thornton in The Wild Bunch. Surveying the
motley posse he's been saddled with to bring the "bunch" in, he spits
out: "We're after men -- and by God, I wish I was with them!" Unlike,
say, Howard Hawks, Peckinpah was not concerned so much with what a man does
when a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, but rather where a man can go if
he simply wants to be a man. For Peckinpah, manliness is more of a place on a
map than a state of mind. If, like Joel McCrae in Ride the High Country,
all you want is to enter your house justified, where do you build your home?
The answer, to most Peckinpah men, is somewhere within hailing distance of
Mexico: All of Peckinpah's most effective films feature Mexico as a background
motif; a source of inspiration and moral compass.
Peckinpah's men are outsiders, refugees from authority and compromise,
gun-toting Holden Caulfields laid low by middle age. They're people for whom
Mexico represents the only remaining frontier worthy of the name, the only
place that's both untrammelled and has in it the kind of people with whom you'd
want to share a bottle of whisky. It's where the Wild Bunch finds both paradise
and death, and it's where Billy the Kid refuses to run and is killed for it. Major
Dundee's Major Dundee goes there and nearly becomes Heart of Darkness's
Colonel Kurtz; and it's the place Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw are getting away
to in The Getaway. (Virtually every movie of Peckinpah's could probably
be called The Getaway.) When escape to Mexico is not an option, you get
something like Straw Dogs. Infamously described by The New Yorker's
Pauline Kael as "the first American film that's a fascist work of
art," 35 years later Straw Dogs looks more like the Paul Verhoeven
version of Home Alone -- a potentially defensible thesis about a
reasonable man's capacity for violence, done in by screenwriting straight out
of Basic Instinct. In the context of the films he surrounded it with
(the gentle Ballad of Cable Hogue on one side and the genial Junior
Bonner on the other), Straw Dogs is a bizarre artefact -- Peckinpah
besieged by his own demons with no frontier to escape to. It also marked an intrusion
of the modern into his work, as if he'd finally looked around and noticed Nixon
and Vietnam and he was never entirely able to shake it off. Thus, Pat
Garrett and Billy the Kid is as much about America in 1973 as it is about
New Mexico in 1881. Mutilated beyond credibility in its first release, the 2005
restoration allows it re-entry into the pantheon of Peckinpah's greatest
achievements, as the valedictory to the western that he was never allowed to
deliver in person. An even better and less sentimental distillation of all of
Peckinpah's themes than The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett is a
melancholy farewell to the West and the western, both for the director and for
cinema itself. Nobody makes westerns anymore at least partly because, in 1973,
Peckinpah saw to it that there'd be nothing left for them to say. But where is
a director to build his home, when he's just made the last western that would
ever need to be made? Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is, in effect,
the sight of a filmmaker tearing his guts out while coming to grips with the
answer. Apocalyptic, obnoxious, and sometimes downright campy, Alfredo
Garcia is the great Peckinpah Burnout Movie. In it, he pushes every
cinematic thesis he has ever developed past the point of credulity -- seemingly
over the edge of the earth. Jean Luc Godard tacked the words "Fin du
Film; Fin du Cinéma" to the end of his Weekend in 1967, and
they're words that surely could have closed Alfredo Garcia as well -- in
blood-red letters.
No other substantial filmmaker, except perhaps fellow cinematic wild man Samuel
Fuller, ever wore his guts so unashamedly on his sleeve or made so
career-destroying a movie. It's hard to tell at that stage whether it was a
matter of spiritual authenticity or temporary insanity. One thing is certain:
For Peckinpah, getting his vision onscreen didn't just matter, it was a matter
of life and death. And ultimately, with a few more indifferent movies -- and a
lot of help from whisky -- the struggle killed him. But we should resist the
urge to see Sam Peckinpah as a martyr. Film critic David Thompson saw
Peckinpah's screen work as a metaphor for its author's sufferings in Hollywood;
however, the truth is exactly the other way around. The studios did him in,
just as surely as the ranchers did in Pat Garrett, but Peckinpah used his
suffering at their hands to perfect the myth he put on screen. He wouldn't have
had it any other way. For us, his life represents the last of a line of men
stretching from Ride the High Country's Steve Judd through Pat Garrett
to The Wild Bunch's Deke Thornton. Sam Peckinpah was our last Western
hero. Bring Me the Films of Sam Peckinpah plays Cinematheque Ontario in
Toronto until April 9. For information: 416- 968-FILM or http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest
/cinematheque. Iron Cross will be released on DVD on April 18.
Tragedy At The Top Of The World
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Gayle Macdonald
(Mar. 18, 2006) IGLOOLIK, NUNAVUT -- It is not yet 4:30 in the
afternoon,
and the moon hangs high in a seamless, blue Arctic sky. But already they are
arriving at Ataguttaaluk High School in Igloolik. Women with chubby,
red-cheeked babies bundled into amautiks, the traditional Inuit baby
pouch, on their backs. Older kids pulled along in plastic toboggans. Men and
their spouses or offspring crammed onto snowmobiles, some of whom have made the
trek from Hall Beach, a community 75 kilometres south of this town, population
1,600, located at the top of the world. By 5 p.m., the gym is packed
with 500 or so friends and neighbours of Zacharias Kunuk, who is hosting the
first of three "family screenings" for his new feature film, The
Journals of Knud Rasmussen, which in September will have a starkly
different gala: its official world premier, when it opens the Toronto
International Film Festival. But this preview for his home community, held last
Saturday night, is what matters most to the weathered 53-year-old Inuit
director. And it's in keeping with a tradition Kunuk set with his first feature
film, the internationally acclaimed Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner,
which had its inaugural screening in this same gym in December, 2000. Within
six months, that film went on to scoop up the prestigious Camera d'Or at
Cannes, and wowed critics enough that both The Times of London and The Daily
Telegraph sent reporters to the set of Knud Rasmussen. The frigid temperature
(30 C below) does not faze these people, who came in droves -- some by prop
plane from as far away as Qaanaaq, Greenland; and Nunavut's capital, Iqaluit --
to watch Kunuk's latest cinematic creation, which explores the controversial
impact of Christianity, force-fed to the Inuit by zealous missionaries in the
1920s, forever altering (Kunuk would say crippling) his people's once-proud way
of life.
We're doing it for the people," says Kunuk, a soft-spoken man whose
English is halting, and who is far more comfortable conversing in Inuktitut.
"Otherwise, they will be the last people to see the film. One of my
friends left the seal hunt early so that he could get here before the show
starts," Kunuk, himself an avid hunter, adds proudly. Before the lights go
down, Kunuk and his audience will share a feast. Rachel Uyarsuk, a 101-year-old
Igloolik elder, who plays a shaman spirit in Journals (she was 20 when
the actual Danish ethnographer/ explorer visited her hometown), blesses the
food. Then the crowd, grabbing makeshift plates made of ripped cardboard boxes,
lines up for raw caribou and Arctic char. Families eat together on the
gym floor, using ulus (knives used to slice fat from seal skin) to carve
the meat into bite-sized portions for elderly parents and tots. They alternate
the main course with large bags of Humpty Dumpty chips, for sale in the
school's main hall, and Freezies, which cost $2. (The community's most needy
fill plastic grocery bags with the leftovers. One woman, six children in tow,
neatly tucks her remaining caribou into her white purse.) When it is time to
show the movie, a fuse blows, delaying things slightly. Then, at 7:20, the
lights go down (and up again three times during the performance thanks to
mischievous kids). Kunuk -- joined by his five children, as well as his
parents, Enuki and Vivi -- sits silently watching the crowd's faces. When the
credits roll less than two hours later, there is rousing applause. Some
say they liked Atanarjuat, based on an Inuit legend, better. Others
attest to being equally touched by this film, about the last great Inuit
shaman, Avva. But all say they were glad Kunuk took on a taboo topic:
shamanism, which the early missionaries dubbed devil worship, and which still
sits uneasily with some of the town's most religious Anglican, Roman Catholic
and evangelical residents. Like Atanarjuat, The Journals of Knud
Rasmussen was filmed entirely in Inuktitut (without subtitles), which made
it tough for an outsider to follow. But the startling images of the people
living on this unforgiving land in the early twenties -- shot with traditional
costumes and tools made painstakingly authentic to the time -- make it
abundantly clear that Kunuk has once again tried hard to make a movie that
reconnects a displaced people with their traditional values. With their
endangered past.
Igloolik is on an island 2,800 kilometres north of Toronto, near the
northeastern corner of Melville Peninsula, accessible this time of year only by
plane. My descent into Igloolik feels like falling into a white tunnel. Then
suddenly, out of nowhere, is a smattering of box-shaped wooden homes, built on
stilts because the frozen ground prevents the digging of foundations. The wind
leaves a pattern, like crocheted lace, on the snow. It's a place of crisp
blues, greys, whites, dark faces and pink skies. With over four millennia
of history, Igloolik (with a population of just under 1,300 people) ranks as
one of the most traditional of Inuit communities, and is a cultural hub of the
Arctic. But for all its historical richness, the people, by and large, are
poor. Suicide (especially among those under 20), alcoholism, drug use and
spousal abuse are rampant. The people live largely off of government subsidies,
and the town's lack of private enterprise means there's little incentive to
find work. For centuries, the frozen land demanded the Inuit people learn
how to adapt and survive. And yet the march of modernism (ATMs, cable TV,
snowmobiles, phones, electric heat, organized religion) means they are now floundering
in this ice-capped wilderness. Kunuk's 16-year-old production company, Igloolik
Isuma Productions (Isuma means "to think" in Inuktitut), located in a
ramshackle office on the island's shore, is one of the few success stories
here, periodically employing hundreds of local people as actors and film crew
while injecting several million dollars into the economy. In these parts, Kunuk
is a reluctant hero. But he's a hero with a mission: His goal, he says,
is to shake the Inuit, especially the young people, out of their colonial
complacency. His film, like the society he lives in, is a paradox of resiliency
and despair.
"Mind the smell of caribou," says Paul Irngaut, an employee of Isuma
Productions, which is sandwiched, ironically, between the Anglican church and
the Catholic St. Stephen and Our Lady of the Apostles. Knud Rasmussen's
costume coordinator, Michilene Ammaq, is just inside the steel doors, laying
out the film's traditional clothes, painstakingly made from animal fur, on the
wooden floor. She's trying to air them out before they go up to the high school
for the first screening, where they will be displayed on either side of the
giant screen. Her son, Todd, 8, shot his first polar bear yesterday, she tells
me proudly. Upstairs, Kunuk is hunched over a kitchen table at his computer,
checking e-mails. Around him, prominently displayed, are posters from his
various features and documentaries, as well as a wolf jaw and Isuma's
sexual-harassment policy. The shy filmmaker explains that his new film, shot in
the relatively balmy months of April and May last year, is the story of
explorer Rasmussen, who travelled through this area in the 1920s, chronicling
the conversion to Christianity of the great shaman Avva (played by local
resident Pakak Innukshuk) and his wilful daughter Apak (Leah Angutimarik). Like
Atanarjuat, the actors in Knud Rasmussen are largely people who
live down the road from Kunuk, with six Greenlanders and half a dozen Danes
thrown in. Kunuk says he still remembers the first time he saw a white man --
it was a priest in the 1960s -- who came to give him a vaccine. "My
parents still remember a world before the 'men in the dresses,' the
missionaries," says Kunuk, who did not live in a house until he was 9, and
dropped out of school after Grade 8. "Our film tries to answer two
questions that have haunted me my whole life: Who were we? And what happened to
us?" Born in a sod hut in 1957, and raised Anglican, Kunuk says he blames
the missionaries for upsetting the natural balance and rhythm of Inuit life.
"When the whalers came, nothing changed," says Kunuk, who is an
officer of the Order of Canada, and who co-directed Knud Rasmussen with
his long-time friend and business partner, Norman Cohn, a New York-born
videographer.
"The missionaries brought their beliefs, and laid the law on the
land," Kunuk continues. "They killed our spirit. No wonder people are
killing themselves. They feel hopeless, they feel lost. If you meet an Inuit on
the land, he is not at all what he is like in town. They are two different
people. Taima!" he sighs: It's done. The island of Igloolik
is flat tundra. There is one hill, on the edge of town, that serves as the
cemetery and the toboggan run for Igloolik's teeming mass of children. (Fully
60 per cent of the population is under 25). Scores of makeshift crosses have
been pounded into the frozen ground. The most recent inscriptions, carved by
knife into wood, are names like Lorenzo, Jamie, Mary, Joey and Caitlin. In one
straight line, there are a dozen graves, kids aged 12 to 19 -- all deceased in
the past two years. Charley Qulitalik, a 29-year-old cook at the
Tujurmivik Inn (one of his specialties is Arctic-char pizza), says his cousin
hung himself at his workplace two weeks ago. Qulitalik is not sure why the man,
just 20, took his life. "It's weird," he says, "but suicides
seem to go up after suicide-prevention seminars come into town." Dave
Kisilewich, a math and science teacher at the high school, who moved to
Igloolik from Edmonton in 1989, figures he's "got a whole classroom of
kids up on the hill. "Kids hang out in the street at night," he says.
"They hang out at the Northern [grocery] store until it closes at 9. They
go to the community hall, but it closes then, too. The siren goes off every night
at 10 to remind the kids to go home. School's really the only game in town, but
the dropout rate is high. There's nothing for them to do." Kunuk is both
perplexed and saddened by the high suicide rate among young adults. "My
movies are about hope, and we're going really slow, very slow, in trying to
reach them. Our elders always tell us, 'Your time will come, you don't have to
kill yourself.' But clearly, many have lost their ability to listen."
Kunuk's films, he says, have a message: "Take a look around. Appreciate where
you come from. Go out on the land, in the different seasons. You walk out there
in the middle of nowhere, and you know someone has been there before. A long
time ago. They leave traces. Maybe an inukshuk, too," he says, referring
to the man-shaped piles of stones used as landmarks. "There is beauty in
how the wind carves the snow, how the animals feed. With The Journals of
Knud Rasmussen, we want to see how much imagination people have."
Igloolik is ridiculously expensive. Milk sells for $14 a bag. Chips are $7.
Dried caribou in a bag is $60, and is located in the freezer next to Breyers
French-vanilla ice cream, which sells for $11.59 for a small tub. A solitary,
sorry-looking pineapple at the Northern store is $15. After the three weekend
screenings at the high school, the floor is littered with candy wrappers, pop
cans, Joe Louis cakes and pudding cups. It's hardly surprising that diabetes is
on the rise here. Cohn and Kunuk know that Atanarjuat, the
highest-grossing Canadian film of 2002, is going to be a hard act to follow.
With the new film, whose budget of $6.3-million was roughly three times that of
its predecessor, and which is now on a 56-community tour across the Arctic,
Cohn says they wanted to deal head-on with the modern-day challenges of the
Inuit. "Our first film was a classic love and revenge story set in
the mythic, apolitical past," he says. "Our second film is about how
people were colonized by Christianity and dragged into the 20th century."
One of Kunuk's own sons, he adds, is apathetic about the traditional ways of
living on the land. "I ask him to come caribou hunting with me," says
Kunuk. "I invite him, but he wants to watch TV." Cohn travelled to
Paris earlier this year to submit The Journals of Knud Rasmussen for
consideration at Cannes. Last week, after TIFF announced it would be the
Canadian festival's opening feature, Cohn says he withdrew the Cannes
submission. "We made a decision to do the opening night in Toronto as a
statement of how we see ourselves," he asserts, "as a new world, new
film industry, as opposed to an old world, old guard. The decision not to go to
Cannes was ours. Not theirs."
To make The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, Isuma Productions set up the
Siuraajuk base camp 75 kilometres east of Igloolik. The crew survived
blizzards, meagre meals (local hunters were hired to shoot lunch and dinner),
and the departure of the French-Canadian cooks halfway through production. The
interior scenes were shot 10 minutes outside of Igloolik, at a sod house.
A trip to that site lands me with frostbite on my face. After we return to the
Tujurmivik Inn, the hotel's oil runs out. Inside the hotel, the temperature
quickly plummets to below zero. Everyone walks around in boots and parkas until
the oil man -- an in-demand guy who works 24/7 -- shows up 90 minutes later.
The hardship, despair and routine desolation of life in this community seems a
world away as I prepare to leave under an indigo sky on Monday morning. A final
glimpse through a window of the tiny plane shows the snow-encrusted town bathed
in a golden sun, the light so bright on this blank white canvas, you have to
shield your eyes. In Kunuk's world, time has marched on, but this
morning, from the sky above Igloolik, somehow manages to seem like it's
standing still.
Natalie Portman Blows Up
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
- By Marie Moore
(March 20, 2006) Last week Natalie Portman, aka Queen Amidala from “Star
Wars,” showed her rapping skills on SNL. This week she will be seen
blowing up a London tunnel that ultimately brings down the British Parliament.
As the reluctant heroin in “V for Vendetta,” (Evey) Portman, is pulled
into V’s subversive web of intrigue when rescued from the hands of two
unsavoury characters by the masked man. The government, thinking Evey is an
ally of V (Hugo Weaving), makes life hell for her. This controversial,
cautionary political commentary is fodder for fiery attacks. The Film Strip
asked Portman if she is concerned about the public’s opinion of her. “I’m just
trying to do stuff that’s different all the time,” she explained. “Something
new and interesting for me that will hopefully be interesting for other people
to watch. I definitely want to make movies that people like. I mean, the point
of creating a movie is to interact with an audience and to give them some sort
of entertainment and some sort of feeling.” Emotions will run high as V’s wrath
wreaks havoc on the British bureaucratic regime because of its political
persecution and treatment of homosexuals. The acts of violence take on special
meaning in the light of the attacks that not only struck America on 9/11, and
other parts of the world, but the bomb that killed commuters who rode the
London transit system July of last year. Some of the rage Portman
expressed in the film was not hard to tap into. Her hair is still growing in
from being cut on camera, but it was an act of which she is proud. “I was very
focused on being where the character is at that moment, which is in a very
traumatic place with this violence being committed against her. We only had one
shot to do it because you can't go back and re-shave the head. We had several
cameras on and we had rehearsed the head shaving with volunteer guys from the
crew. But, for me personally it was a choice I was happy to make.”
There was just as much drama going on off the set as on. “The Matrix” media shy
Wachowski Brothers were unavailable to answer rumours that were running
rampant. In press materials on the film, one story mentioned that older
brother, Larry, left his high-school sweetheart and wife of nine years for a
dominatrix and liked to dress in women’s clothing. Then there was the
matter of two V’s. The first V, James Purefoy, it was reported was dissatisfied
performing behind a mask because it disguised his talents. Hugo Weaving, Agent
Smith in the “Matrix” movies, flew into action. The other matter involved Alan
Moore, the author of the graphic novel, that was illustrated by David Lloyd.
Unhappy with the film’s version, he distanced himself from the project and
refused have his name attached. Even Lloyd has misgivings in the
beginning. “When I was first sent the script, I was kind of disappointed
that it wasn't more faithful to the original, Lloyd revealed. “But the changes
they made were quite valid, and I think they kept the core of it completely… So
I think they did a fantastic job. “Allen had strong views about it. If
you check out the Internet, you know. Allen's not happy with most film
translations. Interesting thing about ‘League’ and also ‘From Hell’, they were
both made by people who weren't actually fans of the original product, which is
completely different in this case. And I was very optimistic and that optimism
has been justified. And Allen's viewpoint is his own and he's entitled to it,
but it's not mine.”
On the subject of all the politics and violence, Portman put it succinctly. “I
guess I'm politically aware, but I think I get sick of the news after a while
because I'm a pretty optimistic person. So I like to go back to personal joys
too.” “V” might be the most talked about film so far this year, but one
of the best films I’ve seen this year is “Akeelah and the Bee,” starring
Laurence Fishburne, Keke Palmer and Angela Basset. It’s an inspirational and
uplifting story about an eleven-year-old from south Los Angeles with a gift for
wards. The film opens in April and a must see.
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Shar Jackson: Fed’s Ex Talks
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com - By Kenya
Yarbrough
(Mar. 22, 2006) *Shar Jackson may have been a side note in the entertainment history books. She
may have become a one-point question in
a trivia game. But Ms. Jackson’s goal to move out of the shadows of TV stardom
and tabloids is clearly set in motion. Jackson is most recognized for her
co-starring role on the ‘90s Brandy-led television show “Moesha.” But what has
catapulted her to the front covers of super-market rags is the fact that her
ex, Kevin Federline, is Britney Spears’ new husband. Interestingly enough,
Jackson has remained CALM during all the Federline-Spears press. And has, in
her own words, ‘turned negatives into positives.’ And while the press has given
her life and career quite a bit of a publicity boost, it’s her hard work and
generosity that will make her a household name. In an engaging interview
with EUR's Lee Bailey, we learned that the 29-year-old actress, singer, and
mother of four has quite a few projects on hand: a philanthropic foundation, a
new album, a new television show, and that just the start. Jackson’s foundation
is quite appropriately titled – SHAR, which stands for Sharing, Helping And
Reconciling. The foundation’s focus includes inspiring young inner-city kids in
their own space and inspiring young mothers. “I was a teenage mom, and
normally I’m supposed to be a statistic,” she said. “You know, when you have a
child young, you can’t do anything you want to do. Once you’re a teenage mom,
everybody tells you your life is over. I’m not condoning being a teenage mom,
but it happens every single day. So I want to help and let these kids know that
it isn’t over. You can still be and do whatever it is you want in life. I’m
living proof of that.”
Jackson says the foundation is currently building a compound where they will
house young moms, give them parenting classes, and aid them in pursuing their
career and educational goals. Another part of the foundation is a program
called Sweet Dreams. “[This program] goes to inner-city kids’ homes
and we completely redecorate their bedrooms and in most cases, we give them a
grant for whatever they want to do in their life,” she said. Jackson said she
was inspired to do this program because of her own upbringing. “I grew up
in South Central Los Angeles. Although there was chaos outside, my Mom gave me
the freedom to paint my room and stuff and it became my safe-haven. So the
concept was something that me and my sister came up with.” (To send letters
regarding deserving kids, mail t 11432 South Street #512, Cerritos, CA 90703)
But enough of her sweet charity. The Shar Jackson that the public’s been
subjected to has not been an angel. Stories of a vendetta against her ex-man
and his new bride have bubbled up more than once. But Jackson shakes it all
off. She believes people will believe what they want to believe and giving
attention to negative press isn’t really worth her energy. Jackson even said
that she didn’t start paying attention to it until it affected her
children. “It wasn’t about enjoying it. It was about taking the negative
and turning it into a positive. I could have easily hid in a corner and let people
make up every story that they wanted to about what I was going through or what
I was feeling. Instead I just chose to say, this is what’s going on – take it
or leave it.” Nevertheless, Jackson had nothing but kind words about her famous
ex, when she spoke to us. “I’m proud of him. I’m happy that he set his mind to
do something and he’s going to do regardless of what everyone says and what
everyone thinks. I’m happy for him, and I’ve heard of few of his songs and I
like ‘em.”
Even though Jackson admits that K-Fed (who incidentally has never referred to
himself as K-Fed, until the press so named him) is no hip-hop head, she says
his “bad rap” is what came before any lyrics were laid. “He’s gotta get past
that negative stuff first before anyone will honestly listen to it. They judge
it before they even hear it. It’s like when Jamie Foxx came out with his first
album years ago. Nobody wanted to take him seriously because they were like,
‘Oh that’s the funny guy from ‘In Living Color.’ They never paid attention that
he had an amazing voice. And unfortunately it took them ten years and now
they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, did you know Jamie Foxx can sing?’” And the advice
she gives to Federline, isn’t anything she hasn’t relied on herself: “I tell
him to ignore all the negativity and stay truthful to yourself.” As a matter of
fact, Jackson has her own disc to deal with. Though most known for acting
credits, Jackson is also a singer. She was lead of a group called Impulse who
released a single on “The Princess Diaries” soundtrack. “I am working on my
album. I’m loving every minute of it. It was entitled ‘Overdue,’ but it’s been
changed. The new title was inspired by all the crap you’ve read in the
tabloids. Since there isn’t necessarily a genre created, I think, that includes
all the things [of my sound], we came up with our own. It’s called ‘dirty
edgy.’” In the midst of completing her album, which is expected to hit stores
this summer, Jackson is working on an ABC television show called “The Ex-Wives
Club.” The show, which is also co-hosted by famous exes Marla Maples and Angie
Everhart, finds people that have gone through separation or divorce and are
having a hard time getting back to themselves.
“It’s hard,” Jackson says from experience. “When you have your heart broken, it
can completely change the person that you are. If you don’t have a support
system behind you, you might not get through it. So, we’re that support team.”
At the end of a day of tabloid dodging, community goodwill, movie shoots and
recording sessions, Jackson said that it’s her family that keeps her focused
and grounded. “My family keeps me happy. My kids keep a smile on my
face. As long as I have my family foundation – my Mom, my sisters, my brother,
my kids – I’m good. Career-wise, I’m not limiting myself at all. God has a lot
of stuff planned for me, and I’m going to take advantage of it.”
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FILM TIDBITS
Tyler Perry Plays ‘Daddy’ With Lionsgate
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(Mar. 17, 2006) *Still riding high on the box office success of
“Madea’s
Family Reunion,” the movie’s director and star, Tyler
Perry, has inked a deal with Lionsgate for his
third film, “Daddy’s Little Girl.” Perry will write, produce and direct the Cinderella twist
about a young, beautiful, successful female attorney who falls in love with a
janitor and single father of three daughters. Despite strong objections from
the attorney's father, love triumphs in the end. Perry’s first two
previous outings with Lionsgate were the box office topper “Diary of a Mad
Black Woman” in 2005 and this year’s “Madea’s Family Reunion,” which earned $30
million in its opening weekend and held its No. 1 box office position for two
consecutive weeks. "I am so pleased to be working with Lionsgate
once again," Perry said. "They have continuously proven their
commitment to my film projects as well as their expertise at innovative marketing
and distribution campaigns time and time again." Reuben Cannon, who
produced both "Reunion" and "Diary," will join Perry again
as producer of "Daddy's Little Girl," which has been fast-tracked for
a June start and, like both previous films, is set for a February release.
Meanwhile, Perry’s first book, "Don't Make a Black Woman Take Off Her
Earrings: Madea's Uninhibited Commentaries on Life and Love," is due next
month via Riverdale/Penguin. He also recently inked a deal to distribute his TV
series "House of Payne" in first-run syndication.
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Keke Palmer Gets Her Closeup At ShoWest
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(Mar. 17, 2006) *It was all about 12-year-old actress Keke Palmer
Tuesday (March 14) at the annual ShoWest convention in Las Vegas. During
a ceremony marking her title as ShoWest Rising Star of the Year, the youngster
was lauded by the suits at Lionsgate for bringing her A-game to its upcoming
film “Akeelah and the Bee,” where she plays a middle-school student in South
Central Los Angeles who dreams of entering the Scripps Howard Spelling Bee.
Fresh from their Oscar best picture win for "Crash" a week earlier,
Lionsgate’s Releasing president Steve Rothenberg and Theatrical Films president
Tom Ortenberg were on hand at ShoWest to welcome exhibitors to a screening of
“Akeelah” at the Le Theatre Des Arts in the Paris Hotel. “Akeelah”
producer Sid Ganis described the 10-year journey of the project, which sprung
forth from an original screenplay by its director, Doug Atchison. Even after
the film's producers had scored powerhouse actors Laurence Fishburne and Angela
Bassett to play the adult leads, the project still depended on finding a young
actress with the chops to pull of the title role. During a nationwide search, a
tape of Palmer landed on the desks of the filmmakers, and the rest was
history. Palmer’s budding film experience includes roles in the TNT
original movie "The Wool Cap," a bit part in "Barbershop 2: Back
in Business" and a plum role as Madea’s foster child in “Madea’s Family
Reunion. “Akeelah,” due in theatres April 28, was produced in
association with 2929 Prods. and Starbucks Entertainment, becoming the first
feature that the coffee chain will promote in its outlets in exchange for a
financial stake in the picture.
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Della Reese Launches New Clothing Line
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(Mar. 22, 2006) *Actress, singer and ordained minister, Della Reese,
says it’s about time that fashions for plus-size women include the vibrant
colors and patterns she has used in her own self-designed creations for
years. "I want to give women the opportunity to have some
pizzazz also," said Reese, who will unveil her new line of clothing, Della
Reese Fashions, on the Home Shopping Network April 4. The collection
features cocktail, office and casual wear in a range of colors. The
74-year-old, who describes herself as 5 feet 2 inches tall and 200 pounds,
said: "It's very difficult for me to find anything with shape or color ...
some oomph. I like bright yellows, oranges, reds. I like purple and pink, not
just purple and purple and purple.”
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Ross in ‘PDR’
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(Mar. 22, 2006) *Evan Ross, star of the upcoming film “ATL,” has been cast in the Lionsgate
film “PDR” opposite Terrence Howard and Bernie Mac. The movie is based on the
true story of Jim Ellis (Howard), who organized a group of troubled black inner
city teens into one of the best swim teams in the country. Ross, the
17-year-old son of Diana Ross and her late husband Arne Naess, will play one of
the kids on the team. Clint Eastwood’s son, Scott Reeves, joins the cast as the
captain of a predominantly white rival swim team.
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::TV NEWS::
Teen Drama Degrassi Hits 100
Excerpt from The
Toronto Star - Vinay Menon
(Mar. 20, 2006) It's a milestone for both the characters and the
show. Degrassi: The Next Generation celebrates its 100th episode
tonight
(CTV, 8:30 p.m.) with a season finale that includes a first for the teen drama:
a graduation ceremony. Somehow, this coming-of-age ritual seems doubly
appropriate. In 2005, you see, the "Degrassiverse" celebrated a
quarter-century and expanded with its very own Big Bang: a CD compilation
(featuring Canadian artists such as Buck 65 and Sam Roberts); a hot-selling
DVD; popular books (including an illustrated history and the Official 411);
an upcoming series of character-extending graphic novels (Degrassi: Extra
Credit); Web-based minis (brief shorts available for download), and plans
for the students at Degrassi Community School to hit the big screen in a
feature that may corral director and superfan Kevin Smith. This season, Degrassi
was the top-rated Canadian drama, tipping past the vaunted 1 million mark while
averaging 746,000 viewers. In the United States, where it exploded into a cult
hit, Degrassi's blistering summer run on The N turned it into the
network's flagship series. "I can't explain the show's success, to
be perfectly honest," says Miriam McDonald, 18, who plays Emma Nelson.
"It's one of those things that people are just drawn to. We're not trying
to be a slick, over-produced American show. We just show things as they really
are." This emphasis on unadorned realism, a focus on teen
storytelling that neither condescends nor panders, has captured young
imaginations across the planet; Degrassi has been sold to more than 120
countries. Two years ago, Adamo Ruggiero, who plays Marco Del Rossi, was
in Los Angeles for an autograph session. Burly security personnel were needed
to keep the boisterous crowd, in excess of 6,000, from rushing the stage.
"I remember thinking, `Oh my God, this is surreal,'" says Ruggiero,
19. "At that moment, I really started to grasp how big the show had
become." Ruggiero makes an important observation: living as we do,
in the monstrous cultural shadow of America, Degrassi has inverted the
usual import-export relationship. "Kids in the states are screaming
for a Canadian show — and they know it's Canadian," he says. "They
want to come to Canada. They want to come to Toronto and talk about the CN
Tower. This is really important. I think our show has proved that our
television, our work, our culture can reflect back." A friend of
co-creator Linda Schuyler recently returned from a trip to China. Upon learning
the tourist was Canadian, a translator remarked, "Ah, Bethune, Degrassi."
So how does Schuyler, who executive produces with husband Stephen Stohn,
explain the show's success? "I always figure that's your job," she
says, laughing. "No, I'm thrilled by it. But I was so petrified when we
came back with The Next Generation. Much as I wanted to do it, I also
thought to myself, `Linda Schuyler, you must be crazy.'" After all,
her successful franchise — The Kids of Degrassi Street, Degrassi
Junior High and Degrassi High — was already scorched into the minds
of Canadian viewers. Why would she tempt fate with a new project that
might very well end in failure and leave a black hole in the Degrassiverse? The
short answer: she had more stories to tell. "We're always analyzing
drama in this country and saying, `How can we make it right?'" she says.
"It's like catching lightning in a bottle. But it's not just a question of
getting good stories." Yes, just ask producers of This Is
Wonderland or Godiva's, two excellent but underappreciated shows
that were recently cancelled. To this end, Schuyler credits CTV and The N for
providing all the things a successful TV show requires in these competitive
days: a good and consistent time slot, season orders of more than 13 to 15
episodes, and the strong arm of network publicity.
"There has been this confluence of great things and here we are able to
celebrate 100 episodes five years into it," she says, a landmark none of
the other Degrassi series can boast. Whereas many teen shows
eventually sell out, Degrassi continues to buy in to its set of
"founding principles." Point-of-view storytelling, on-camera realism,
age-appropriate casting and the fearless tackling of hot-button issues: date
rape, anorexia, cyber stalking, domestic abuse, school violence, drug abuse,
sexually transmitted diseases, teen homosexuality, to name just a few. As
Jimmy (Aubrey Graham) sardonically cracks in tonight's episode, the school is
"such a unique combo of shootings and gonorrhea outbreaks." Or, as
the New York Times noted in a lengthy feature last year, "(Degrassi)
confronts controversy in a way that American network television wouldn't dream
of." (See: the 2004 two-part story involving Manny's abortion that The N
never aired.) Looking ahead, Schuyler is contemplating a spin-off for the
older kids. But her focus, for now, is on Season 6. After tonight's graduation,
some new faces will undoubtedly arrive when school doors open in the
fall. "I talk about Degrassi as being that wonderful time in
people's lives where they have a foot in childhood and a foot in the adult
world," she says. "And that push-pull is the very thing that gives us
our drama."
Do We Want Our MTV Any More?
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Vinay Menon, vmenon@thestar.ca
(Mar. 21, 2006) According to the ads, the drought ends today. Which
means at precisely 6 p.m., when MTV Canada is officially (re)born, those disgusting commercials featuring
actors sucking on faucets, lapping at dishwater scum or wringing sweaty socks
into their parched mouths will come to a merciful end. The pre-launch
campaign, tinged with late-'90s irony, was making a point, even if it's a
questionable one: Canadians are thirsting for MTV. So after weeks of
carefully planned hype, the flip-past specialty channel talktv will trade its
obscure t! logo for one of the world's most powerful brands. Aside from
masochists and insomniacs, nobody will miss talktv, the CTV-owned station that
morphed into a dumping ground for decomposing reruns of Vicki Gabereau, The
Camilla Scott Show, The View and eTalk Daily. But will
anybody care about the latest incarnation of MTV Canada? Or will today's buzz
quickly give way to tomorrow's white noise? MTV's previous entree into
this country, on a digital station owned by Craig Media, was a bust. Few
watched the old MTV Canada because: 1. You needed a helicopter to reach it on
the digital upper tier and, 2. It rarely broadcast anything worth
watching. By sharp contrast, the newer, slicker version of MTV Canada
will devote resources to original production; seven new homegrown series are
already in the works. The network hopes to entice viewers with a
zeitgeist-grabbing mix of entertainment, lifestyle and reality programming.
But aren't we already swimming in this kind of stuff? What is this drought you
speak of, MTV Canada? When MTV hit the airwaves in the summer of 1981,
with The Buggles' "Video Killed The Radio Star," the song was a
harbinger of a dawning cultural and media revolution. MTV was fresh,
brash, cheeky, raw, edgy. About 16 years later, when Bart Simpson scrawled
"I No Longer Want My MTV" on a blackboard, music videos had driven
bored youth toward a thousand new diversions. The MTV brand survived. But
it needed an overhaul. These days, MTV's most popular shows are all about
the young and the beautiful, the aspiring rich and the hopefully famous, as CTV
demonstrated Saturday night by giving Canadians a preview of the neuron-zapping
8th & Ocean, Gauntlet 2 and Real World: Key West.
While some Canadians may still associate MTV with music, that's no longer true
in any real sense. With the birth of MTV2 a decade ago, the main network
slowly reinvented itself and, a few years later, the suits arrived at a
bottom-line conclusion: young viewers would rather watch Jessica Simpson crack
stupid about the origins of tuna than watch Madonna gyrate for three
minutes. Of course, MTV can still air music as it pleases, whether it's a
controversial Eminem video, a Coldplay concert or the countdown madness of the
wildly popular Total Request Live. MTV Canada doesn't have this
luxury, at least not on the specialty service, which remains bound by talktv's
existing regulatory licence. (MTV Canada is for viewers who want to talk
about music, not actually watch or listen to music.)
This, in part, explains today's launch strategy, which is all about — jargon
alert! — cross-promotion and brand leverage. It's a good thing there isn't a
Top 40 hit titled, "Multi-Platform Content Distribution" because MTV
Canada would undoubtedly have licensed it for marketing purposes. Here's
the thing: once you penetrate the corporate boilerplate, there are some nagging
questions. CTV has already brought MTV hits such as The Osbournes, Newlyweds
and Punk'd across the border, so should its new programming block known
as "MTVonCTV" really excite viewers who are likely more interested in
CSI, Lost, Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy
— shows that have made the network No. 1? And since those with broadband
access can already download content from countless music and entertainment
websites, should we get too hot and bothered by MTV Overdrive, or a mobile
service, or video-on-demand? Advertisers may swoon over the promise of
multi-platform opportunities — and indeed, MTV announced yesterday it has
already inked deals with 23 sponsor partners — but will young viewers have time
for this new array of shiny distractions? And does CTV risk its own market
share by devoting resources to this new adventure? But when MTV Canada
launches today, from inside the Masonic Temple, there will be only one question
that truly matters: does Canada want its MTV?
Not Your Average Science Geek
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Deirdre Kelly
(Mar. 18, 2006) A basketball hoop hangs from the back of the door,
and
there are heart stickers and glitter pens on hand for visiting children. The
espresso machine, still warm from the morning's first hit of java, glistens on
a wooden shelf. It's a typical homey scene, except that this is not a home.
It's a science lab. And not just any science lab, but the Toronto base of
an international research initiative, the $105-million Structural Genomics
Consortium -- that's the study of human DNA, to the likes of you and me --
where history is being made amid baseball bats, hardware-store catalogues and
dust-covered books with titles like Elements of Medical Mycology and Biological
Ultrastructure . Overseeing the work that goes on at this hotbed of
scientific inquiry, and similarly cast against type, is Aled Edwards -- a
world-renowned biotechnologist. As much as his goal is to break the ordered
code of human proteins in order to advance an understanding of life, the senior
University of Toronto scientist is also determined to dispel the myths that
cast his profession in a false, even frightening light out there in the world
at large. Just say "white lab coat" to him, or suggest Albert
Einstein was a nutty professor, and 43-year-old Prof. Edwards -- who is dressed
in chinos and a red McGill sweatshirt, a souvenir of his alma mater -- is
likely to lecture you on the perils of having a narrow point of view. That's
his mission: "To dispel the notion that scientists are out of touch with
reality, that we play with test tubes and do bizarre things." To
this end, Prof. Edwards has attached himself to the television series ReGenesis,
which enters its second season tomorrow night on The Movie Network. He is the
show's academic consultant, the one who ensures there is scientific fact in the
science fiction that drives the weekly show, which follows a team of
crackerjack scientists as they battle biohazards and viral plagues. "I
thought putting science on television would be fun, and kids would think it's
cool," the father of three teenagers explains.
"We all agreed that as much as possible, given that it is fiction, we
would stick with real characters [and] depict real scientific interests. The
point is to show that scientists aren't super-human. They make mistakes.
"Experiments don't always work. There can be confusion over how to
interpret the data. The media portray science as cut and dried, but for most
scientists at the cutting edge there is no right or wrong. There are just
differences of opinion." One of the first things Prof. Edwards addressed
-- of course -- were the lab coats worn by "scientists" on the
series, and then he took on the weird-coloured fluids the set designers had put
into test tubes, in an effort to make the research look
"authentically" scientific. "I hate that!" Prof. Edwards
blurts, his grey-blue eyes flashing. "The driving force, between artists
and creative types, is colour and light. But a lab should be a lab. We don't
care how blue anything is." As a result of such lobbying,
actors portraying scientists on the series now dress in casual clothes, not
unlike Prof. Edwards,' and the liquids in the test tubes glow less brightly.
But finding the right balance between factual accuracy and compelling drama can
sometimes be difficult, says head writer Tom Chehak. "I always like to start
off with the farthest premise you can think of," explains Mr. Chehak, who
wrote for several other science fiction series, including Alien Nation,
before helping executive producer Christina Jennings develop ReGenesis last
season. "Sometimes we come up with things that Aled is resistant to, and
then we explain to him the emotional value we're going for. He'll either guide
us, or he'll just nix the idea entirely because it isn't plausible. It's back
and forth like this, until our dramatic sense is satisfied -- along with Aled's
scientific sensibilities." One idea that "just kept going
south," as Prof. Edwards explains it, emerged from the writers' fixation
on radiation and radioactivity, specifically regarding changes in the human
body that might occur as a result of exposure to radioactive materials.
"Radiation, if you want to cause mutations, only affects the germ line --
that's science-speak for sperm and eggs. And so [changes occur] only in babies
and not in adults," he continues. "It took a lot of time, until we
found the right approach," one that matched the writers' interest in
radioactivity with the scientific reality -- articulated by Prof. Edwards --
"about what radiation and radioactivity is."
Ironically, Prof. Edwards has sometimes come up with ideas that the ReGenesis
team has considered too "out there" for their viewing public. A case
in point involves what Prof. Edwards calls the "fruity fruit fly"
phenomenon, a discovery (rooted in experiments done on fruit flies) enabling
scientists to isolate the gene that causes homosexuality in humans. "We
call it the gay gene." Prof. Edwards mentioned the idea last year, after
reading in a scientific journal that by changing a gene in the brains of fruit
flies, scientists were able to make them change their sexual behaviours.
"The females acted like the males and performed the courtship dance --
just by altering a single gene." Prof. Edwards is visibly excited as he
tells this story, kneeling on his office chair and spinning around in circles.
But the ReGenesis team passed on the idea for last year's inaugural
season. Prof. Edwards assumes it was too contentious: "The ethical issue
is being able to modulate sexual orientation with a pill. What are the
ramifications on society? Do you force people to take it?" What a
difference a year makes, however. After giving more thought to the
controversial concept, Mr. Chehak and Ms. Jennings decided to explore the theme
in three new episodes meant to combine good drama and good science. Exactly
what the good doctor ordered. "There's dramatic tension and there's
scientific tension," says Prof. Edwards, "and they feed off each
other. And if the viewers feel that tension, then they're getting it, they're
liking it, and hopefully, they're also asking questions. 'Can that really
happen? Is that real?' "And if that goes on, then it means they're
starting to get curious. And that's the whole point -- to make people think and
question. You just want people talking about science again, in a way that's
good."
After Nine Years, Canadian Tire Has Retired Its Relentlessly
Handy Pitchman
Excerpt from The
Toronto Star - Richard Ouzounian
(Mar. 18, 2006) "Aren't you the Canadian
Tire Guy?" asked the waitress as
she came over to the table. "Yes I am," said Ted Simonett. "I mean,
yes I was." For the 52-year-old actor, those last two words will
come to mean a world of difference. It was just over a week ago that he was
officially told his role as the handy husband on a series of 125 Canadian Tire
commercials for the past nine years would cease to be. "In
truth," he confesses, "I expected this to have happened a long time
ago. After all, I was the unwanted guest in people's homes for nearly a
decade." During that time, he saw himself morph from a virtually
unknown stage actor to one of the most visible faces on this nation's media
landscape. That's all well and good. In fact, it's what every performer
dreams of. But what they don't expect to happen is that the recognition will
start out as acclaim and wind up as derision. Simonett saw things change
from where people used to happily wave at him on the street to the point where
he won one newspaper's poll as "The Most Annoying Canadian," beating
out Ben Mulroney. "It's like being lowered into a wonderful warm
pool," is how Simonett describes it, "full of very happy, well-fed
barracudas. But suddenly the barracudas start to get a little hungry and you're
dead meat." Even that sensation, Simonett insists, "has been
largely restricted to the media and a certain amount of 416 cynicism. To be
totally honest, in all the years I've been doing this, only three people have
ever come up and insulted me to my face. Hundreds and hundreds of others have
had nothing but nice things to say." None of this is what the Kingston-born
performer could have envisioned at 16, when he decided to put down the
saxophone in his high school band and play the leading role of Harold Hill in The
Music Man instead.
He was instantly hooked on acting, studied at York and Queen's universities and
then went off to England. To get into the union, he worked as a stage manager
with the English National Opera, moving on to make his professional debut in The
Rocky Horror Show. After three years, he came back to Canada and
started a period of nearly non-stop stage work. "I characterize
myself as a light comic actor," he suggests modestly, "and that fit
perfectly with all the cabarets and dinner theatres that flourished in Toronto
during the 1980s." In 1983, while starring in a production of Cabaret
at the St. Lawrence Centre, he met dancer/choreographer Madeline Paul, to whom
he has been married since 1991. Simonett did his fair share of TV and
film work and was even flown to Los Angeles to audition for the role in Moonlighting
that later made Bruce Willis a star. But in the 1990s, the kind of
theatre Simonett excelled at started drying up. When work grew scarce, he
exploited his penchant for photography and set up a kind of cottage industry
providing headshots for fellow actors' resumés. Then, in 1997, he was
asked to audition for a single commercial for Canadian Tire. "I
remember it well," he chuckles. "I was selling Robo-Grip Pliers. I
remember thinking at the time how funny that was, because I am at best a
reluctant handyman." To this day, Simonett has no idea why he was
picked other than the possible reason that "I had a beard then and so did
Bob Villa, who was very popular." That one commercial led to three
the following year, then more and more, until finally "they officially put
me under contract." Simonett noticed a slight shift in tone at that
point. "I stopped talking directly to the camera and started
interacting more with my neighbours, which is one of the things that some
people later said seemed to bother them." But at first, all was bliss.
Simonett began to be recognized everywhere he went "with the amazing
exception of Canadian Tire stores. I'd go shopping there and my picture would
be everywhere, but no one would say anything. I guess it's like they expected
to find me there."
If there was any backlash, it kept fairly under the radar until last
fall. Then, in its Oct. 31 issue, Maclean's magazine devoted its
cover to "The Age of the Wuss," with a grinning picture of
Simonett. "We had no idea it was coming. My wife was at the dentist's
that morning when their copy of Maclean's was delivered. That's how we
found out ..." It seemed to release the floodgates and suddenly the
media were full of people ranting about how much they hated "the Canadian
Tire Guy." "I knew they didn't really mean me personally,"
he reasons, "just the character I was playing. You try to take it all with
a grain of salt. But it still hurts." Despite rumours to the
contrary, it wasn't that magazine cover, nor the subsequent venom it unleashed,
that led to the commercials being cancelled. "That was in the works
for a long time," he insists. "We knew the spring before that we
probably would be bringing it all to an end soon. We were on the air for nine
years. Good God, I completely understand that." Financial worries
aren't a big part of Simonett's picture because "I was more than fairly
compensated for the work I did. However, if this was America, I'd be set for
life, which I'm not." In the future, he'd like to get back on the
stage again. "I recently emceed a friend's CD launch and it was the
first live performing I'd done in five years. I was petrified, but it was so
much fun." He laughs. "Don't you think a lot of theatres would
do well if they cast me as the villain in one of their productions?"
Looking back at it all, Simonett calmly declares that "if I were asked to
do it all again, knowing everything I know now, I'd still sign on for it.
"I had a whole career before and I hope I'll have a whole career after,
but I think I will probably be the Canadian Tire Guy for the rest of my
life."
::THEATRE NEWS::
Restyling Hair, The Musical
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
James Adams
(Mar. 21, 2006) With less than two weeks to go before CanStage's
production of Hair officially
opens in Toronto, we're being told in advertisements that we need the
"American Tribal Love-Rock Musical" "now more than ever." But did we even need it in the spring of 1968 when, after
stints off-Broadway and in a discotheque, the debut show migrated to New York's
Biltmore Theater for what would turn out to be a smash four-year run? Hair's
supposed timeliness this go-round has to do, one imagines, with the American
boondoggle in Iraq and, tangentially, the KandaHarper-coated rhetoric that has
accompanied our deployment of troops to Afghanistan's dusty killing fields. In
the days leading up to the previews that started yesterday, James Rado, one of
the three creators of the original, was busily tweaking the CanStage show, and
no one is going to be surprised if some of that fiddling heightens the
parallels between the Vietnam War, which served as a major animus of the
original Hair, and our present-day involvements in faraway lands. Of
course, it won't be the prick of relevance but the anesthetic of nostalgia --
what CanStage calls "recapturing your spirit of hope," those once
"golden living dreams of visions" -- that will be the primary motivation
for most ticket holders to this Hair revival. Truth be told, yours truly
thought Hair was a mistake almost from the get-go, when I was 18 and
therefore the very target of Hair's siren songs. It was a mistake from a
hippie perspective because it sought success on Broadway -- Ethel Merman! Al
Jolson! Carol Channing! -- when Broadway was an irrelevancy, something to be
ignored, not wooed or embraced. Hadn't no less a saint that Bob Dylan told us:
"There's no success like failure?" A mistake from a New Left perspective
because Broadway as an institution, as a myth-making mystification machine, had
to be abolished, not simply reformed by putting everyone in sandals and
headbands instead of dancing shoes and top hats. It was also a musical mistake.
Like most Sixties' kids, my first hints of Hair were the hits on AM
radio -- the Hair theme, Good Morning, Starshine, Aquarius/Let the
Sunshine In, Easy to Be Hard -- all of them performed by such astonishingly
lame pop artists -- the Cowsills, Oliver, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Fifth
Dimension, Three Dog Night -- that even now I reel with shame at ever having
been moved enough to sing along to the "Gliddy glub glooby / Nibby nabby
noopy" chorus of Starshine.
Back then, I even thought Tommy by the Who was a mistake. To my mind, a
"rock opera" was a contradiction in terms. While rock could be
operatic and a rock album could carry a "concept," it could not be an
opera. No, sir. That was the Old World of Verdi and Wagner, Mozart, Berg and
Strauss. Rock was something spontaneous, unruly, as-yet unformed, separate,
"electric folk music for the mind and body," to paraphrase Country
Joe and the Fish. Tommy felt like kitschy overreaching, a bloated bid
for formalistic seriousness by a misguided Pete Townshend and, as it turned
out, an anticipation of a far worse horror: Jesus Christ, Superstar.
Sometimes art is more interesting than life. Hair, however, appeared at
a time when the reverse was true, or, to be more precise, when the art of life
and the life of art seemed magically intertwined, convulsive and rich with
possibility (however illusory). No one now would ever think of putting the Hair
soundtrack in a time capsule of artefacts from the last 50 years. No one, that
is, except perhaps a curator at the Richard Nixon Library, because even in its
heyday Hair wasn't so much a potent distillation or snapshot of the era
as a sort of one-stop shop for Moms and Dads and suburbanites out for a taste
of "youth culture" before they returned home to vote the Nixon-Agnew
ticket. Having immersed my 55-year-old self in things Hair(soundtrack,
playbills, movie, reviews, memoirs and so on) for the last 10 days, the whole
enterprise still feels as musty and fusty as it did when I was a teen and my
ears and eyes were telling me that Hair was going the way of Oklahoma!
and My Fair Lady, except faster. What's worse: Listening to Frank Mills
the other day got me thinking good thoughts about . . . Bye Bye, Birdie.
Will a similar dismay afflict those young 'uns who visit CanStage? Will they
see a Hair piece as phoney as Mom's blond streaks and Dad's rug? Or will
they find something inspiring and empowering, revelatory and revolutionary, not
just a mixed-up, mushed-down Reader's Digest condensation of hippiedom, with a
raft of barely hummable sort-of rock songs powered by outdated lyrics that rely
heavily on catchphrases and rhyme-y list-like streams of words?
One of the first Hair revivals was the movie Hair, which came out
seven years after the Broadway production folded and 12 years after its
off-Broadway inauguration . I say "the movie Hair," rather
than "the movie of Hair," because the former, with a rewrite
by Michael Weller, bears little resemblance to what people originally saw in
New York or on stages in London, Los Angeles, Paris, West Berlin and dozens of
other cities, including, in 1970, Toronto. There's general agreement the movie
isn't very good. But one of its strengths relative to the 1968 play is that it
actually has a semblance of a plot, with a sort of Tale of Two Cities twist
at the end. It also has blessedly fewer songs, the performances of which (with
a couple of exceptions) are lacklustre and uninvolving, not least because
director Milos Forman just couldn't seem to find a lyricism in his
cinematography to synchronize with Twyla Tharp's choreography. Seeing the movie
now, you realize its best moments, in fact, are the small, non-musical ones:
Claude's departure from his rural Oklahoma home for military service in New
York; Berger's confrontation with the hosts of a debutante ball he and his
hippie amigos have crashed; Hud's flight from the responsibilities of caring
for his girlfriend and their two-year-old son; Nicholas Ray's irony-laden cameo
as a sourpuss colonel sending his boys off to Vietnam (Ray, of course, having
been the director of Rebel without a Cause). Yet even though the film
has more spine and coherence than the musical, it is as anachronistic today as
it was upon its theatrical release in 1979. Sometimes a work of art is so much
of its time that it comes to epitomize that time for the ages. Other times a
work of art is too much of its time and, despite its adherents' claims of
timelessness and universality, it ossifies into artefact, novelty, something
for the scrapbook. Or the scrap heap. Thirty-nine years after Hair's
debut, CanStage is giving audiences perhaps the defining chance to either write
its obituary or experience its resurrection. Hair runs in previews at
Canadian Stage's Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto until March 30 and has its
official performances March 31 through June 17. Meanwhile, James Adams has a
full head of hair and bumper stickers for the Grateful Dead and the MC5 on his
car. The Review section will be sending him to a hippie reprogramming centre
this spring.
Color Purple Has Power Of Sincerity
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Richard Ouzounian, Theatre Critic
(Mar. 22, 2006) Her name is the first thing you see on the marquee as you walk
up Broadway. "Oprah Winfrey presents The
Color Purple." She's
not starring in it, didn't write it and only put up 10 per cent of its
production cost, but ask anybody who the most important person connected with
this show is and they'll tell you. It's Oprah. No one had to think
twice about why Winfrey would lend her platinum-coated name to the musical
based on Alice Walker's novel. Not only did she play one of the leading roles
in the 1985 Steven Spielberg film version, but the whole project taps directly
into the theme of black female empowerment that she's built her empire
on. Publishers have known for years that a Winfrey recommendation can
send book sales through the roof, but cynics were anxious to see how much sway
her appeal would have on Broadway, where a single orchestra seat costs over
$100. The musical opened to ho-hum notices in December, but that hasn't
mattered. The box office is selling close to $300,000 (U.S.) worth of tickets a
day, the advance is sitting at $22 million and it's playing to near-capacity in
one of Gotham's largest houses. A seven-month run in Chicago has been
announced for the fall, with a national tour to follow. And it's all a
tribute to the power of "O." On a Saturday afternoon, walking
towards the Broadway Theatre for the sold-out matinee of The Color Purple,
I can instantly see her influence on the audience lining the street to get
in. It's not unusual for an afternoon theatre crowd to be mostly female,
but it is a rare thing in New York for it to be black as well.
A survey done by the League of American Theatres and Producers during the
2004-05 season rated the average audience for a Broadway show as being 3.8 per
cent black, despite the high-profile appearance that year of Denzel Washington
in Julius Caesar. The production office of The Color Purple says
black people make up about 50 per cent of the audiences, although on this
afternoon it seems closer to 75 per cent. But Winfrey's drawing power
transcends race. Scott Sanders, the show's lead producer, said her involvement
has attracted a number of first-time theatre-goers to the show. He added that
many people of all races have been inspired to visit New York for the first
time just to see The Color Purple. Inside the theatre, the
difference in the atmosphere is tangible. These people aren't in their seats
just to be entertained or to be trendy. Rather, they are there to be
emotionally engaged. When the lights dim and the story of poor, oppressed
Celie begins to spill across the stage, they spontaneously shout out their
feelings as fate deals her blow after blow. The arrival of the life-affirming
Sofia (Winfrey's role in the film) is a signal for them to erupt with joy. Her
song about how women should refuse to accept male abuse ("Hell No!")
receives a tumultuous roar of approval. (It's not a coincidence that "Hell
No!" T-shirts sell briskly in the lobby at intermission.) In the
middle of all this, I'm almost tempted to check my critical faculties at the
door and just go along for the ride. But, keeping a cool head, here's how
the show looks to a middle-aged white male. Marsha Norman's book does a
capable job of keeping the narrative moving, but Act I seems like a Cole's
Notes synopsis as Celie hops from disaster to disaster. There's also some
ill-advised choreography by Donald Byrd in the "African Homeland"
sequence early in Act II that doesn't ring true. Yet somehow, as the
story reaches its healing conclusion, an amazing thing starts to happen. The
power of the characters and their message get to you. Even the score, which had
seemed wanly generic, begins to pack a punch. And by the time the amazing
LaChanze, as Celie, welcomes everyone in her life to the final picnic, you'd
have to be made of titanium not to have tears rolling down your face.
Pick away all you want at the flaws in The Color Purple — it has
sincerity and integrity, and the two qualities win out in the end. The
Winfrey name may bring the people into the theatre, but the show itself is what
has them leaving on a cloud. It's a combination that can't be beat.
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It's Showtime: Michael Therriault
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Michael Posner
(Mar. 22, 2006) A funny thing happened to Michael Therriault on
his journey to Middle-earth. When he auditioned for The Lord of the Rings
producer Kevin Wallace and his creative team last summer, the Stratford-trained
actor had been reading for the part of Frodo or one of the other Hobbits. Then,
on the spur of the moment, he also asked to read for Gollum, the deformed
wretch who haunts Middle-earth in search of the one ring. According to
Therriault, he read two lines and then had to stop. " 'Sorry,' " he
told the assembly. " 'That was horrible.' I was so embarrassed." But
something in those two lines clearly registered. During callback auditions for
Frodo, director Matthew Warchus asked him to have another go at Gollum.
"They asked me to describe Gollum in a sentence," Therriault, 32,
said last week in an interview, "and I said he's like someone not at home
with his soul." Then they gave him 15 minutes to work up a physical
presentation of that idea. By the end of the day, he pretty much had the role.
"His absolute focus and precision of movement meant that you were
instantly engaged right from the moment he went into character," says
producer Wallace, recalling that audition. "Michael is very courageous,
very conscientious and pushes the boundaries. It was self-evident to everyone
in the room that he has that extra quality -- a combination of intelligence,
imagination, and the vocal and physical abilities to realize his
objectives."
On the eve of the world premiere of the most expensive stage production in
history -- the $28-million The Lord of the Rings opens tomorrow night at
Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre -- this may sound like a producer's
standard hyperbole. But having been fortunate enough to see LOTR's first
preview performance, it's clear that if the show has a star -- over and above
the sheer spectacle of its production -- it's Gollum. Moreover, when it comes
to Therriault, it's very difficult to find comment that is significantly
different. Thus Richard Monette, the Stratford Festival's long-reigning
artistic director: "He's astounding. And so versatile. He can do Henry VI
and he can do Ariel [The Tempest] and he can do Andrew Aguecheek [Twelfth
Night]. He'll come to rehearsal with a dozen different ways of doing
things, readings, stage business. And there's absolutely no ego with
Michael." Thus Stratford veteran William Hutt: "I first saw him as
Mordred in Camelot in 1997, and he was electrifying." On the basis
of that performance, Hutt later told Monette he wanted Therriault to play Ariel
to his Prospero in the 1999 production of The Tempest, and urged him to
tackle Oscar Remembered, a one-man show -- directed by Hutt -- about
Oscar Wilde. Thus John N. Smith, who directed Therriault in his first major TV
role, as Tommy Douglas in the recent CBC-TV miniseries, Prairie Giant:
"The kid is so talented. And a phenomenally hard worker. He was so well
prepared. He was watching rushes from the first day."
My own nephew, actor Rami Posner, who spent four seasons with Therriault at the
festival, calls him "a triple threat. He can sing, dance and act and do it
all well. He's the most human, genuine person I've encountered in the industry.
I challenge you to find someone to say a negative word about him. And there is
no harder working actor. He lives, eats and breathes theatre." Because
rehearsal time at Stratford was always at a premium, Posner and a few other
actors formed what they called the Fight Club, otherwise known as the After
Hours Club, returning to the theatre in the evenings to continue working on
their roles. "When Michael heard about that, he asked if he could join.
But whereas we used to go home and eat something and then come back, Michael
would stay and rehearse by himself until we arrived, and then after we left at
10, he'd stay and continue working." The hard work has clearly paid
dividends: Seven seasons at Stratford, in increasingly prominent,
skill-stretching roles. His Dora Award-winning performance as Leo Bloom in the
Toronto production of The Producers. The plum part as Douglas in Prairie
Giant. And a five-month sojourn on Broadway as Mottel the tailor in Fiddler
on the Roof, opposite Harvey Fierstein and Andrea Martin. In preparing for
Gollum, Therriault naturally read J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy, and used
descriptions of Gollum to lay down the basic physical construct of the
character. But he also -- while appearing on Broadway -- sought out
modern-dance performances, went to the Lincoln Center dance library and made a
binder of images that conveyed the same emotional impact as Gollum, and later
hunted down tapes of the experimental British dance company, DV8. It's a tired
cliché to suggest that someone was born for the theatre, but in Michael
Therriault's case, it almost seems true. Growing up in Oakville, Ont., son of
working-class parents -- his father drove trucks and later worked on the line
at Ford, his mother worked with seniors -- Therriault says he knew he wanted to
act and sing as early as elementary school. By Grade 6, he says, he had started
phoning around on his own, looking for a dramatic-arts school.
When he discovered the Etobicoke School of the Arts in Toronto, his parents
were sceptical: It was an hour and a half away in Toronto and they couldn't
afford it. But his grade-school principal was so impressed with the young
Therriault, he arranged for the board of education to pay a full scholarship,
including tuition and transportation costs. "I think I remember saying to
my parents, 'I'm going. I have to go.' They couldn't say no." Later, his
mother encouraged him to go into modelling. " 'Mom,' I said, 'have you
seen what models look like?' 'But you're so handsome. You look like Gene
Wilder.' 'Mom, Gene Wilder used to scare me as a child.' " On graduation,
he enrolled in Sheridan College's performing-arts program and soon won an
audition to Stratford. (The only other jobs he's held were as busboy and wait
staff at the CN Tower, the Second Cup and the Golden Griddle, from which he was
fired after a week.) At his callback audition, he performed Mordred's song -- The
Seven Deadly Virtues. "It was okay and they said, 'Thanks, Mike.'
" But then [choreographer] Tim French, who had seen me in a summer-stock
show stood up and said, 'Wait a second. Michael, I'd like you to do that again
and do it this way.' I don't think I'd have gotten the part if he hadn't said
give it another try." In his early years at Stratford, the critics were
pretty tough on Therriault. "I stopped reading them," he says.
"It was really hard. You know when you're not hitting the mark." But
Monette and Hutt, he says, never lost faith. "If it weren't for them, I
don't know if I'd have a career. They just believed in me. When The Miser
opened in 1998, I got ripped apart. Richard calls me at home and immediately
offers me the part of Ariel for the next season. And he'd say, 'You should do
this, it would be a real stretch for you.' " It was Hutt who pushed him,
reluctantly at first, to tackle Oscar Remembered. Again, Therriault
says, not a critical success, "but for me a giant learning curve and in
that respect a huge success." Therriault says he often felt inferior at
Stratford because he had not attended the National Theatre School; at times, he
contemplated leaving the festival and going back for more training. "You
know, we often box ourselves in as actors and as people. But that's such a
dangerous thing to do. You're just not giving yourself enough credit."
Despite his success, Therriault leads a Spartan, almost monastic existence.
When he changed apartments once, friends offered to rent a truck and move his
furniture. "Unnecessary," he told them. "I don't have any
furniture." He bought his first bed when the landed his role in The
Producers. He recently rented a furnished condo in midtown Toronto, but
concedes that he's been living out of a suitcase for the past couple of years.
When he lived in New York doing Mottel, he rented a flat in New Jersey and took
the shuttle bus into Manhattan for his eight performances a week.
Therriault says he can't see beyond the end of his 18-month commitment to The
Lord of the Rings. The seven-month rehearsal process has been exhausting,
and he feels ready for opening night. "Bill Hutt told me once that for
actors, it's all just play, and the audience is allowed to peek in if they
want. That's very freeing. To think, 'I'm just going to indulge myself like a
little kid and not worry too much about whether they like it or not.' I'll try
to remember that on opening night."
Theatre Is No Lame Bird
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Richard Ouzounian, Theatre Critic
(Mar. 22, 2006) It was supposed to be "one brief shining moment," but
it went on for 47 years. When the Hummingbird Centre closes for 20
months of renovations next year, its CEO, Daniel
D. Brambilla, revealed yesterday that the last show to
play there will be the one that opened the building: Camelot. Back on the
night of Oct. 1, 1960, it was Richard Burton who played King Arthur in the
Broadway-bound musical. On June 25, 2007, Michael York will be starring as the
monarch of the Round Table. "I like the idea of one era ending the
same way it began," said the expansive Brambilla. "Think of it as curtain
going up, curtain coming down." And when the new era of the
Hummingbird Centre begins, what can the people of Toronto expect to find?
Last November, Brambilla outlined to the Toronto Star his plans
for a $75 million, 40,000-square-foot multicultural and tourism facility that
would be joined to the 49-storey condominium tower Daniel Libeskind has
designed to soar over the existing theatre. At this point in time,
Brambilla still isn't 100 per cent certain he can get all the permits and money
he needs in place by the December deadline for the project, but he seems
decidedly optimistic and surprisingly calm. "Look, when I came here
three years ago, everybody thought this theatre was finished. The opera and
ballet were moving out, people thought the place was a white elephant, Mel
Lastman and his boys wanted to tear it down."
Brambilla wipes the past away with his hand. "That's all gone now. I've
got a clean canvas to work with. Everything is possible. "We've
turned the story around from almost demolishing a historical building to not
only saving it but making it prosper." The 55-year-old ex-New Yorker
was best known as a tough show business lawyer and a member of Garth
Drabinsky's Livent team before coming to the Hummingbird in 2002, and he still can
play that card when needed. "I'm treating this like a business.
We're a not-for-profit charitable organization, but I don't think of it that
way. I want to be aggressive." And he revealed the depth of that
aggression when he announced he would be bringing in the Radio City Rockettes
for next year's Christmas show, adding a major new competitive attraction to a
holiday landscape previously dominated by the National Ballet's
Nutcracker. "They're coming for 84 performances over seven weeks and
the advance sales are huge. Huge! I couldn't be happier. Yes I know it's called
The Nutcracker Killer in every other city it's ever been in. Before I announced
the idea, I had the ballet in here and said `I'm bringing the Rockettes in, and
I want to see if we can work together. I want this theatre to thrive, but not
at your expense.'"
Brambilla admits he's got "the hardest job in Toronto, trying to raise $60
million by December." (The other $15 million comes from the developer for
the right to build the condo tower.) "But even if the full plan doesn't
materialize, we'll be able to run the theatre and run it well."
Brambilla's agenda is to de-emphasize the traditional programming of the past
and look closely at Toronto today. "The whole push out into the
multicultural community is where this building is going. It's the wave of the
future." He addresses the fact that "for many years this was
where the white establishment went. This was the home of the opera, the ballet.
Now we're inviting people of all races, all colours, to bring their shows here
to his iconic building ... we're going to build a new, exciting centre for this
city together." Sure, you could call it a crazy idealistic dream,
but then, come to think of it, so was Camelot.
::OTHER NEWS::
Eric Idle Is Happy To Be The Keeper Of The Monty Python Flame
Excerpt from The
Globe and Mail - Michael Posner
(Mar. 20, 2006) Of the six original members of the
Monty Python players,
arguably as seminal an influence in comedy as the Beatles were in music, it has
fallen mainly to Eric Idle to keep their brand of anarchic insanity alive. After
a decade of brilliant mayhem, the group effectively dissolved in the
mid-seventies, and Graham Chapman (he died in 1989), John Cleese, Michael
Palin, Terry Jones, and Terry Gilliam found new ways to amuse themselves. So
did Idle, but he also found time to produce Python books, Python video games, a
couple of international tours exploiting Python sketches and, as of last year,
the hottest show on Broadway, the Tony Award-winning Monty Python's Spamalot.
"Nobody else really wanted to do funny, I found," said Idle, 63 this
month, explaining how he had become the undeclared custodian of all things
Python. "And I still like doing it. It makes me laugh. I like this shit.
It's why I got into this business. I also got deflected into movies, but I
found myself asking: 'Why am I doing this, when what I really want to do is
write and perform?' " Idle was in Toronto this week to promote the touring
production of Spamalot, which will open at Toronto's Canon Theatre in
July. He wasn't initially sure how his fellow Pythons would react to the
notion of a musical -- each member has a veto right over anything involving
Python material, as well as a royalty on revenues.
It was the one thing that wasn't a given," he said. So he took the risk,
wrote the book, developed the songs with long-time collaborator John Du Prez,
recorded them and sent them off to his former colleagues. "And we had one
of those songs that takes the piss out of Broadway. You know, 'Once in every
show there comes a song like this. . . . Oh, where is the song that goes like
this? Where? Where is it?' And that just got them, because it's a very Python
kind of thing. It turns the focus back onto itself. That's the Python key: to
mock the form in which it lives." Still, it took 17 hard rewrites of the
script before Idle and director Mike Nichols were content. "Mike was very
insistent about fidelity to the form -- that it couldn't be just a series of
sketches, but had to have a real storyline and characters." Born in
England's Durham County, Idle lost his father, an RAF officer, at age two, the
result of a New Year's Eve car accident. At seven, his mother dispatched him
for 12 years to a private school in Wolverhampton, a place where "you
either learned to laugh or went mad." At Cambridge University, he was
quickly invited to join the Footlights Club, where he met Cleese and Chapman.
"It saved my life, I think," Idle says. "Every weekend, we'd go
off and do cabaret -- fully scripted shows with songs. No improv. Improv is for
people who can't write or have no memory. We were from the old-fashioned
school, where we actually try to get funny and then do it again even
better." The comedic philosophy that emerged to form the core of the
Pythons derived in part from Cambridge sketch-writing wit, and in part from the
surreal groups like the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, an art college group that wrote
songs like My Pink Half of the Geranium. "Then Gilliam came along
from America and he was in another space, a sort of Harvey Kurtzman cartoony
world. And then we plugged together. So there isn't a sensibility in Python -- there's
really six different sensibilities."
Recently, for a new PBS show and DVD, each of the surviving members was asked
to choose what they regarded as the group's best sketches. With the exception
of the classic fish-slapping dance, "none of us chose the same things.
Cleese thinks that anything he did not write is not funny. That's his basic
rule of life." Some people might have been sceptical about the appeal of Spamalot
-- too many in-jokes that only Pythonistas would get. Idle wasn't. The fact
is, he says, "there aren't any boondocks anymore. "Because of
television, everyone is au fait. Everyone watches Jon Stewart or
Letterman. They know what the box office grosses are. It was always my basic
goal that people who had never seen Python, understood Python or even hated it
be able to come to the show and enjoy it." Spamalot was a hit from
the moment it opened in Chicago in 2004. "We did worry about the Broadway
audience, especially on opening night. Because the people there are
celebrities, and they don't really laugh in case it affects their facelifts.
But we'd never had less than a standing ovation, every night."
Idle himself says he might be tempted to join the cast at some point, but he's
not keen to do the requisite eight shows a week and won't do it until his
daughter, now in 10th grade, goes to university. From his first marriage, he
also has a son, an acupuncture healer in Australia. "He has a sense of
humour, yes, but it's hard to be the child of a Python." Although he is
based in Los Angeles, has appeared in several movies (The Adventures of
Baron Munchausen, Nuns on the Run and Dudley Do-Right) and
written several of his own, Idle is not particularly enamoured of the film
world. "I think it's all shit, really, the movie industry. It's never been
less than shit. "We [the Pythons] were very fortunate in the beginning
because we gained total control of the films," he recalls. "We wrote
them. "When we sold The Meaning of Life to Universal, we
refused to give them the script. We gave them the budget and a 10-line poem
that I wrote. We said, 'What are you going to do -- give us notes? Tell us how
to write a Python film?' We had the best of it. The rest of it is just
listening to people who are opinionated and unqualified."
Gay Gamers' Reality Check
Source: Jose Antonio Vargas, The Washington Post
(Mar. 18, 2006) WASHINGTON—Only in an online role-playing game: a man playing
as a woman, a husband and wife playing as a lesbian
couple, a transsexual showgirl playing as a magical mage. In the
swashbuckling fantasyland that is World
of Warcraft — with
more than 6 million players, each forking up $14.95 (U.S.) a month — you can
take on a whole new identity. That's the beauty of it. Total escapism. Or
so Sara Andrews thought. Lately, she's been the most talked-about figure
in that robust but little-known subculture within games: gay gamers.
They're the players — of all ages, many of them out, some closeted — who serve
as the antidote to the stereotypical image of the young heterosexual male video
game player. They have built online communities like Gaymer.org and Gamers.experimentations.org,
to name just two. They also foster gay groups within online role-playing games
such as City of Heroes, Star Wars Galaxies and World of
Warcraft, aka WoW. The question is — why? What does being gay have to do with
gaming? Isn't the whole point to leave behind one's identity in a realm of pure
fantasy? Should the rules of conduct online mirror the rules of real
life? Andrews says yes. "To many gamers online, `gay' or `homo' ...
are used as general insults. And they feel like they can type them in over and
over again because they're on their computers and I can't see them in
person," she says. Andrews, 25, is a transsexual showgirl at Play
Dance Bar in Nashville by night, and a spell-casting mage online on her days
off. "Being gay, I can't help but get (ticked) off and react. I didn't
leave the real closet to be forced back into the virtual closet.''
The answer Andrews and others are learning is that their virtual worlds can
simply be an extension of the world they're living in. Online worlds, in
fact, are as complex as real ones. Within World of Warcraft, there
are numerous "guilds." They are not unlike high school clubs, and
last year, Andrews started one akin to a Gay-Straight Alliance. She named it
Oz. In late January, Andrews was trying to recruit new members to her
GLBT-friendly guild: gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender. ("Why do we have
gay clubs? Because a lot of men dancing with other men would get ragged on in
straight clubs, right? Same thing for online games," she explains.)
Repeatedly, she wrote in general chats within the game: "We are not `GLBT
only,' but we are `GLBT friendly!' " Then one of the game's
moderators, interpreting the game's "terms of use," cited her for
"Harassment-Sexual Orientation.'' "Advertising sexual
orientation" was inappropriate, said a spokesman for Blizzard, the
California-based company that owns WoW. Many people are offended at the
mere sight of the word "homosexual," the company noted.
Furthermore, "we do feel that the advertisement of a `GLBT friendly' guild
is very likely to result in harassment for players that may not have existed
otherwise," Blizzard wrote Andrews. To many gay gamers, Blizzard's
stance amounted to the U.S. military's "don't ask, don't tell"
policy. "The idea that sexual orientation doesn't belong in games is
absurd. It's in movies, it's in music, it's on TV," says Alexander
Sliwinksi, a gaming columnist for In Newsweekly, the gay weekly paper in
Boston.
Chris Viccini, a graphic designer in Atlanta who started Gaymer.org in May 2003
and plays WoW, was confused. "What message was Blizzard trying to
send?" asks the 35-year-old. "That gay people aren't welcome in the
game?'' Things exploded online. Lots of very heated chatter in gaming
forums, gay and straight alike — from Gaymer.org, the biggest of the online gay
gaming sites, to Kotaku.com, the blog site for the hardcore gaming set, to
Slashdot.org, the one-stop shop for geekdom, to Mmorpg.com, the go-to-site for
millions of online role-playing gamers. An articulate bunch who haven't
met a link they haven't sent in an e-mail, these gamers had lots to say.
Word spread. Gays? In games? Gay guilds in games? "It looks
like the real world and the virtual one are growing closer together on a daily
basis. Prepare to start paying your WoW property taxes any day
now," a gamer wisecracked on Mmorpg.com. On Slashdot.org, another
gamer wrote: "Gay people have a tendency to bring their own persecution
down upon themselves. `LOOK AT ME!!!!! I'M GAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!' Then they
wonder why people think they are (jerks).'' Over at Kotaku.com, a gamer
who calls himself "Webimpulse" got so frustrated reading all the
postings: "The kind of bigotry I'm seeing on here has just killed any
chances of me ever renewing my World of Warcraft subscription. Blizzard
used to be cool.'' A lawyer at Lambda Legal, a gay rights group, got
involved. Blizzard apologized to Andrews and promised to conduct
"sensitivity training" for its more than 1,000 game moderators.
The game's "terms of use," says Lisa Jensen, a spokeswoman for
Blizzard, are currently in review. "It was quite a wake-up call for
us. It wasn't anticipated at all. It kind of spiralled out of control,"
Rob Pardo, the lead designer of WoW, says of the continuing online
imbroglio. "It erupted over us not having a stated policy dealing
with sexual orientation within the game.'' Questions abound from gays and
straights. Identity in online role-playing games — whether you're playing a
rogue, a shaman, a warlock or a paladin — is elastic, elusive,
ever-changing. But is it possible to avoid bringing a part of yourself to
it?
"The reason that being gay is relevant to gaming is because gaming
nowadays enables people to construct and reconstruct their identities,"
says Sherry Turkle, the author of Life on the Screen. An MIT professor
who studies the culture of online identities, she is sometimes referred to as a
"cybershrink.'' "We're at a transition point in how we view
these online games. We're so used to the dichotomy: real life, game life.
"But these online games," she continued, "are at a place
somewhere in between. "It's not just a game. They spend hours there.
They have friends there. They have a life there.''
Gerard Dure: A Master At His Craft
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com - By Deardra
Shuler
(Mar. 21, 2006) Gerard Dure has
put 14 years into his hair salon located at 635 West 125th Street. One
immediately sees the Asian and Egyptian
artwork and interior design that has obviously been lovingly constructed when
entering the salon. Even his staff is diverse. The mural ceilings
bear out Gerard’s creative flair. Twenty years in the beauty business
gives credence to the fact the Gerard Dure Salon has a Master at the helm; who
is a master at his craft. A colourful child at birth, Gerard is the
offspring of multicoloured diversity. His mother is Irish and Black and
his father is Haitian/Dominican. Born in Brooklyn, Gerard attended musical
school at the First All Children’s Theatre. He attended the High School
of Music and Art, later known as LaGuardia Performing Arts High
School. At 14, Gerard performed at the Alaska Repertory
Theatre. He completed high school in Columbus, Ohio and then armed with
endurance and talent returned to New York at age 18. Determined to forge
a career in show business, Gerard won talent contests at the Apollo Theatre and
garnered several musical awards. Money was often scarce so Dure
occasionally found himself a vagabond, staying in the homes of friends and even
at a homeless shelter. Few knew of his financial straits because Dure
always kept up appearances when auditioning for singing gigs. At 19, his luck
turned for the better when he found himself doing a stint with Eartha Kitt who
selected the budding actor to accompany her on stage. As a result, he
caught the eye of hairdresser extraordinaire, the late and great Teddy
Jenkins. Jenkins was in high demand by celebrities because he had the
rare skill of mastering both makeup and hair. He even knew special effects
makeup. Jenkins offered Dure a job as his assistant. “I had no intentions
of becoming a hairdresser. I wanted to sing and only saw hair as a temporary
job between show biz gigs. Yet, doing hair came natural to me.
Teddy started getting me bookings and I found myself making mad money,”
recalled Mr. Dure. “I learned a lot from Teddy and I began to excel at
makeup as well.”
Before he knew it, Gerard was doing hair and makeup for people like Queen
Latifah, Evelyn Champagne King, Bernadette Peters, Eartha Kitt, Chaka Khan,
Angie Stone, Lil’ Kim, CeCe Peniston, Denyce Graves, Toni Braxton, En Vogue and
Tyra Banks, etc. “At 19 years old I was the key hair and makeup person for the
show Black and Blue on Broadway. I even toured the world with Meli’isa
Morgan. The tour was great because I didn’t have to spend money so I
saved a lot. I toured Europe, Japan, and throughout America.
Ultimately, at age 21, I decided it was time to get an apartment where I
continued to do hair. Eventually, I found a warehouse on 125th Street
that was a real fixer-upper. It didn’t have electricity or water and was
filled with debris. I saw it had potential and eventually made it into
the salon I own today,” said Gerard whom Barbara Walters tapped to profile on
her ABC Network show, “The View.” Gerard combined fine arts and the art
of hair care over the years, experimenting and developing products and a hair
weave method, which eventually resulted in his flat hair weave technique.
He became a sensation and was featured in hair magazines throughout the world.
“I have never viewed myself as a celebrity, so I was surprised when I received
worldwide attention. God has blessed me and I view each success as a miracle,”
stated the grateful stylist. These days, Dure is in the process of
writing a book on beauty. “It’s my first book so I am anxious to get it
right. I plan to call it “All About Beauty.” The title is
self-explanatory because it will be like a beauty bible. I cover
nutrition, exercise, skincare, hair care, fashion, diet, and everything
pertaining to health and beauty. I advise black people in particular
about staying away from the 3Ss -- starch, sodium, and sugar and instruct them
on the best ways to eat healthy and exercise. A good diet of healthy
food is really something people should incorporate into their lives as a
permanent way of life. My book will be loaded with common sense
information that anyone can apply,” promised the hairdresser to the stars.
Gerard plans to write more books, however the popular and gifted beauty Meister
has no intentions of stopping there. He is creating “’The Look’ with
Gerard Dure,’” a TV show that should hit airwaves by July 2006. “I found
I enjoyed television after working on the program “Life and Styles,” featuring
Kimora Lee Simmons. “I was a guest beauty advisor on “Life and
Styles.” In fact, I was the only Black makeup and hair artist on
television doing this. I started to wonder about that. I saw that
white hair consultants could come in and get the permanent jobs simply by
advising while I was actually doing the work.” Dure remarked. “These
white advisors didn’t know how to do hair or apply makeup, they merely gave
their opinions. I decided why not create my own variety show and make it
something no one has ever seen before. My dream is to expose people to
all of the beauty secrets that lie within my heart. I plan to have a
whole lot of unique and innovative things on my show that will blow people’s
mind. It definitely won’t be the average standard faire. It will be
original. My style has always been to create something new and different
and my show will be proof of that.” Interested parties can learn more about
Gerard Dure at: www.gerarddurenewyork.com
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York University New Hall Worthy Of Accolade
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - John Terauds, Classical Music Critic
(Mar. 21, 2006) The physical renaissance of Toronto culture isn't just
happening downtown, as visitors to the gala-concert opening of York
University's Accolade Project fine-arts facility and
inaugural arts festival witnessed last night. Far north of the longest
shadow cast by the Royal Ontario Museum or the Four Seasons Centre for the
Performing Arts sits the university's now-complete Faculty of Fine Arts, all
bright and shiny in its new digs. Most inspirational of all, it went from
blueprints (by Bregman + Hamann Architects-Zeidler Partnership) to unlocked
doors in less then three years. And, eschewing grand architectural
pronouncements, it delivers the essentials: room for students to learn, to
practise and to perform in bright, airy, friendly, clean spaces. A case
in point is the Recital Hall in what is called Accolade East. The
building has a 325-seat auditorium with proscenium stage to house theatre and
dance (there's even an orchestra pit with elevating floor) as well as a
500-seat cinema/lecture hall. This means each space could be tailored to
specific acoustic and physical needs. The concert space could therefore
be designed specifically for making music. From the vantage point of
either the main-level seats or the three-row balcony, the space is a success —
and a testament to how much you can do with the simplest of architectural
elements. The room starts with the ideal "one box" form, which
places the music in the same space as the audience. The sound is shaped
by floor-to-ceiling convex, cream-coloured plaster pillars that are
approximately two metres wide. The stage is a hollow box covered in hard maple.
And things that can buzz and vibrate, like the exposed catwalks, are clad in
acoustic panels.
To adjust the sound, many of the plaster pillars contain double doors that
swing open on large hinges. The floors are bare concrete, as are the main
structural columns. The seats are tastefully padded in grey cloth. The
overall effect in the tall yet intimate room is of a sober focus on the
artistic tasks at hand. The sound is clear and direct, if not
particularly warm. High frequencies (high notes) are occasionally piercing in
their directness, while low frequencies (bass notes) are more muted. The
sheer variety of music — much of it new — produced on the stage was testament
to the enthusiasm of the faculty and students for their new quarters. CBC
Radio Two In Performance host Andrew Craig, himself a York music
graduate, hosted the evening, which included a couple of hundred student
choristers and over a dozen York alumni or faculty on stage at various
times. Music department head Michael Coghlan's Accolade Fanfare for
Five Trumpets blew the audience's hair backward in a suitably exuberant
opening gesture. The evening ended with the world premiere of Eclipse,
a concerto for piano, 10 instruments and voice by York alumnus David
Mott. Written in three movements that weave into each other, and
conducted by professor Mark Chambers, Eclipse was a showcase for the
considerable talents of Christina Petrowska Quilico at the piano. It also
attempted to fuse musical styles and ethnicities into a new kind of sound, in
much the same way as the mixture of backgrounds is changing the face of Toronto
society and culture. There was a buzz of anticipation in the
scarlet-painted lobby before the gala began, and there were even wider smiles
afterward, as everyone involved last night realized that this particular piece
of Toronto's cultural renaissance couldn't have turned out any better. The
Accolade Fine Arts Festival of music, dance, theatre and visual arts runs to
Sunday in all of the building's public spaces. More information at http://www.yorku.ca/accolade.
Toronto Gets Its Joie De Vivre On
Excerpt from The Toronto Star - Martin Knelman
(Mar. 22, 2006) The spirit of old Hogtown —
a place where having a good time was officially frowned on — may finally be
buried on the night of Sept.
30 and into the morning of Oct. 1. Those are the dates of this city's
first Nuit Blanche, details of which will be announced with gusto by David
Miller, our party-animal mayor, at a media conference today. On that
particular Saturday night and Sunday morning, the civic duty of Torontonians
will be to stay up all night celebrating contemporary art in three designated
city arts zones. This all-night freebie culture crawl — from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. —
has been conceived as an occasion to be sleepless in Toronto. For the
benefit of the unilingual: "Nuit Blanche" is French for White Night.
(Literal translation: a phenomenon of nature in places like the Arctic where at
a certain point in the year the sun never sets.) Actually, the full name
of the event is Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. That first word, which needs no
translation, represents the sponsor contributing some money to showcase this
city's cultural treasures. Scotiabank thus enters the populist art field less
than a year after breaking into an exclusive culture club now rebranded the
Scotiabank Giller Prize. Toronto's dusk-to-dawn festival is frankly
patterned on an event enjoyed annually by more than 1,000 Parisians. The Paris
event, which began in 2000, includes free all-night programs at the Louvre and
the Pompidou Centre, as well as a Latin music festival at Les Halles.
Toronto's version — organized by the arts and culture division of city hall
under its Live With Culture program — focuses on three hyperactive arts zones:
· Queen St. W. from Dufferin to Trinity Bellwoods Park, where
the curator will be cultural consultant Clara Hargittay.
OTHER TIDBITS
New Book Tells How Rap's Shot Callers Got On Top
Source: Rose Carrano / Rose Carrano Public
Relations / 646-638-2181
(March 16, 2006) New York, NY -- Thunders Mouth Press, a division of Avalon
Publishing Group, has released "Hip-Hop,
Inc.: Success
Stories of the Rap Moguls." The title
examines the rise of the rap music industry from obscurity in the South Bronx
to a worldwide sales phenomenon. It shows how a few street-smart, savvy
entrepreneurs parlayed growing success on the music side into lifestyle empires
that spread across fashion, films, beverages, restaurants, finance, and
technology. In just two decades, rap music co-opted the mainstream music
industry and created one of the most enduring, global success stories in
American music history. At the heart of the hip-hop music industry are its
brilliant entrepreneurs. These guys may not have an MBA, notes co-author Dr.
Richard Oliver, but they have innately figured out most of the principles we
teach at the classroom. Especially when it comes to product line extensions and
cross-promotion, they are relentless. To the casual listener, hip-hop music may
seem unsophisticated, says Tim Leffel, the other co-author of Hip-Hop, Inc.
When you really look at the people running these companies, however, you find
entrepreneurs who are as savvy as any well-known CEO. "Hip-Hop,
Inc." reveals the strategies and success stories behind Bad Boy, Def Jam,
Roc-A-Fella, No Limit, Aftermath, Death Row, and all the extending product
lines that came with them. It looks at the new generation of moguls coming up,
especially in the exploding southern rap scene, and lays out the path to riches
many of them are following. The book is distributed by Publishers Group West
and is available now in bookstores and at online book retailers. For more
information on the book and authors, visit www.hip-hopinc.com.
Kerry Washington Hired As Face Of L’Oreal Paris
Excerpt from www.eurweb.com
(Mar. 21, 2006) *Actress Kerry Washington has been scooped up by
L'Oreal Paris to become the spokesperson for its new HIP (High Intensity
Pigments) cosmetics collection, designed “for women who love color.” "It's
really exciting for me to be one of the faces of L'Oreal and to be working with
a company that has historically represented so many different kinds of women
with different kinds of skin color," says Washington. "One of the
main reasons I was so attracted to working with L'Oreal is because of their
slogan, 'Because I'm Worth It'. L'Oreal is so much about supporting women,
helping women feel good about themselves, and it's great to feel like I can be
a part of that." Washington, whose film credits include “Save the
Last Dance,” She Hate Me” and a star-making turn in “Ray,” will begin appearing
in print ads for the HIP line later this year. "Kerry Washington is a
rising star with acknowledged talent, who has won the admiration of many women
with her acting ability," declared Youcef Nabi, International General
Manager of L'Oreal Paris. "We can't wait to see her magnificent eyes light
up our newest ad campaigns." Kerry was also seen in this past
summer's “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and
“Fantastic Four,” directed by Tim Story and based on the Marvel comics
superheroes. The Bronx-born 29-year-old will next be seen in the Wayans
Brothers' comedy “Little Man,” due in theatres July 5, and “The Last King of
Scotland” opposite Forest Whitaker, due in the fall.
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::SPORTS NEWS::
Smith: Nothin' but (Inter)Net
Excerpt
from The Toronto Star - Doug Smith, Sports Reporter
(Mar. 21, 2006) If Antonio Davis is done, and it sure looks like that's the
case for this year at least, how is he to be remembered? The veteran
Raptor second-go-round centre is on the shelf with a bad back and some personal
things to work out and it will be a shock to all if he ever puts on a Toronto
uniform again. So, then, what's his eulogy? There are three
choices:
· The guy who played Dikembe Mutombo with one wrecked shoulder during the
greatest two-week stretch in Raptor history. He gave away about four inches and
20 pounds, was injured from Game 1 to Game 7 and still played.
· The guy who played himself in to precisely the trade he wanted by not
playing hard, making no bones about his desire to leave and forcing then-general
manager Glen Grunwald into making a bad trade.
· The guy who almost single-handedly carried Toronto into the playoffs
against the Pistons in 2002, helping them overcome an injury to Vince Carter in
the last month of the season and get into the post-season despite that injury
and the (lack of) coaching from Lenny Wilkens.
Says here that two out of three wins.
Davis may have engineered a sorry departure — and his comments about our
educational system didn't help, that's for sure — but on the whole, he did more
good for the franchise than bad. The haters out there, and there are
many, will complain about the contract he got, his departure, his wife, his
return, his body language but there is no doubt that he is, today, the best
centre the Raptors have ever employed and he was an integral part of the best
success in franchise history. If he never plays here again — and it's
95-5 he won't in Toronto, although he'll probably get a one-year deal somewhere
next fall — he's done enough that he should be appreciated, rather than
castigated, as he leaves.
FUTURE RAPTOR?: Here's a name to think about as the draft rolls around.
Andrea Bargnani.
You don't think general manager Bryan Colangelo, with his varied and serious
connections in Europe and specifically Italy, hasn't been paying close
attention to the 7-foot forward for years? The disinformation campaign
around the draft is about ready to begin in earnest — although the last day
that GMs officially tell the truth is usually Lottery Day — so it should be
mentioned now that Bargnani is, at the moment, the apple of the Raptor
eye. Another guy to look at closely: Duke's Shelden Williams. He's a
beast, and if the draft does go just four deep - LaMarcus Aldridge, Rudy Gay,
Adam Morrison and Bargnani - Williams is a logical Raptor pick at No. 5.
IT'S A CONTRACT SPORT: Mike James tells people Monday that money is
going to be an object is his decision where to sign this summer, as we figured
all along. Well, he didn't exactly say it out loud but read those quotes again:
Cash Will Be King.
Okay, how much?
Does he get the full mid-level exception of somewhere near $5.5 million a year
to start (which is what all that teams that are over the cap will be able to
pay him), or does he get more. There are general managers in the league
that I've talked to who think a deal that starts about $4.5 million a year,
goes out over four years with only half the final year guaranteed makes
sense. I still think the Raptors, if indeed they want to keep him, will
have to offer at least the mid-level exception because some team out there will
give it to him. It's going to come down to years on the contract that
make the difference, I think, and that should be a scary thought. I know the
Raptors have new management in place, but history is they give one year too
many (Jerome Williams, Antonio Davis, Alvin Williams, Nate Huffman, Vince
Carter, the list is almost endless).
And the question is: In four years, when the Raptors hope to be good, and
legitimate Eastern Conference contenders, where does a 34-year-old Mike James
fit in? Tough call, Mr. Colangelo.
THAT WAS THEN: We're in New York tonight and it brings back memories of
the last time the Raptors were here. It was the middle of the second
quarter the game before the all-star break and the lads were up 12 and the
Sixers were losing to the Spurs. A guy turns and says, "hey, if the
Raptors win this and the Sixers lose to San Antonio, Toronto's only 3 1/2 games
out of the playoffs going into the break." My, how times have changed,
eh? Raptors blew that one, Sixers ended up beating the Spurs and the season is
pretty much history. All it'll take now is a 16-game winning streak to
finish the season and the Raptors will finish four games below .500.
Guess anything's possible.
FEUDING RAPTORS: List time
Watching the zaniness unfold around the Knicks, where Stephon Marbury and Larry
Brown kept slagging each other all last week, got me to thinking about the
zaniness that's followed The Heroes Of The Hardcourt over the years. Ended up
with a Top Five feuds.
Darrell Walker vs. Tracy McGrady
New Year's Eve in Washington (just before the Gladys Knight concert sans Pips),
Walker suggests McGrady smarten up or he'd be out of the league in three years.
Tracy's response: Something close to a yawn. No wonder the kid ended up playing
the Raptors like a fiddle on his way out of town.
Alvin Robertson-Carlos Rogers
Always wondered if they found Rogers strangled in a ditch somewhere how they'd
explain Robertson's fingerprints on his neck. Robertson was the old vet; Rogers
the, um, loquacious kid who just didn't get it. A terrible mix.
Rafer Alston-Jalen Rose
The night in Charlotte where the spent an entire game ignoring each other and
not passing the ball to one another was among the most embarrassing moments
ever. So much so that players went out of their way to talk about it with
writers.
Hakeem Olajuwon-Lenny Wilkens
Signing The Dream might not have been the brightest idea ever, signing him to
play for a coach he didn't like from the time the two spent together with the
1996 American Olympic team was silly. Money-hungry Olajuwon never brought it
up.
Butch Carter-Just About Everyone At The End
Day before Game 3 of first playoff series vs. the Knicks, about four
players in the alcove of the practice gym, calling out their coach. Next day,
they all show up wearing headbands because they know how much that bugs their
coach.
MAIL BAG
Q: Given (Bryan) Colangelo's history and his newly given control, do you
think any player is untouchable? He may be the person who has the guts to trade
the likes of Bosh or Mo Pete, even if it is unpopular at the time — but he may
have something bigger in mind! What are you thoughts?
Edwin Frondozo, Toronto
A: Yeah, I think dealing Bosh or Peterson would sure make him
unpopular. And rightfully so.
Seriously, there is no reason to blow this thing up and that's what that would
be, an explosion. Besides, I'm not sure there's a 21-year-old in the league
that I'd trade Bosh for; and since his salary next year will still be from his
rookie deal, there's no way they could get anything good in return. Unless
Miami wants to trade Dwyane Wade or Cleveland wants to part with LeBron James.
You can never say anyone's untouchable, but Bosh is as close as it gets.
Q: Why is everyone giving Joey Graham such a hard time? Since when are
rookies supposed to come out of college as superstars? When Kobe Bryant came
into the league, he was barely averaging 8 points a game. Steve Nash only
averaged 3.3! Why is everyone disappointed in his play? HE'S A ROOKIE!
Mike Walterson, Halifax
A: I don't think anyone's disappointed with Graham compared to other
rookies, but his wildly inconsistent play — and effort — was cause for concern
in the middle of the season. He seems to have finally got it over the last 10
days or so and that's a promising sign.
If Graham ends up being a solid rotation player on a playoff team, that would
be about what everyone expected when he was drafted.
One guy connected to the team said this week they'd finally figured out how to
get Graham to stop thinking and start playing and I think that sums up what was
so disappointing about him at times this season.
Q: What is your take on Hoffa? He was a consensus mid-late 1st round
pick back in 2004 draft, so while the Raptors selected him high at 8, it's not
like the rest of the experts thought he would be around in the 2nd round. When
I watch him live at games warming up, taking shots, he seems to genuinely have
"decent" skills for a big man. Sure he has zero hops but he's a huge
body who can pass, shoot from 12-15 feet in, and hustle. Have the super
critical Raps fans just shot his confidence? (It seems like he plays as
if he is afraid to make any mistakes or miss any shots). If he was drafted to a
team where he was playing low pressure back up minutes behind a proven centre,
would we see a different Araujo emerging now? After all the abuse he's taken
here in T.O and not once complaining publicly about all the heat he takes, I
hope he can turn it around and prove a few nay-sayers wrong.
A. Jarvis, Milton
A: Oh, good, a chance to riff on Haffa. It really doesn't matter whether
he was drafted No. 8 or No. 18 or No. 28 for all that matter, the flaws in his
game are far too serious to overcome. Araujo is, by all accounts
including mine a nice guy who works hard and tries and wants to get better but,
really, that's no big deal. The facts are indisputable. He fouls too
much, is too slow afoot, really doesn't have the basketball IQ to play regular
minutes in the league and isn't getting any younger or quicker. I know the fans
have been hard on him, and so has the media, but that's too bad, it's a tough
league where you have to perform at a high level every night. Maybe in another
situation he's okay, somewhere where he can be the 11th man on a playoff team;
I don't see any upside for him in Toronto.
Renegades Rescue Plan In Doubt
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
David Naylor And Allan Maki
(Mar. 21, 2006) Despite league assurances that progress was being made in the Ottawa Renegades salvage operation, the prevailing
mood in the
Canadian Football League last night was one of deep concern. Club officials remained largely in the dark about what
league governors would hear in a telephone conference call concerning the club.
The call was planned for this afternoon, but has been delayed until tomorrow.
Wright was expected to detail a plan whereby majority owner Bernie Glieberman
would accept some of the estimated $6-million in losses for the 2006 season,
perhaps as much as $3-million. The rest of the Renegades' deficit would be
covered by the league. That could end up costing the eight other franchises
$400,000 to $600,000 each. But a team source yesterday said discussion among
the clubs had revealed an overwhelming consensus against funding Ottawa to any
degree. Funding is a tough sell among governors who have grown impatient with
the Ottawa situation in the past 1½ years and are hesitant to throw what many
argue would be good money after bad.
Wright, who returned from vacation on Sunday, met with Glieberman and also
spoke with minority partner Bill Smith by phone. The league office issued
a statement claiming "significant progress was achieved in establishing
clarity and identifying options for 2006 and beyond." Three years ago, the
CFL operated both the cash-starved Toronto Argonauts and Hamilton Tiger-Cats,
but, because those were midseason bankruptcies, the league was only on the hook
for half the season and therefore less money. In this case, the Renegades would
have to be funded from training camp through 18 regular-season games. Ottawa is
currently functioning with a bare-bones staff with no ability to sell tickets
or sponsorships as the team twists in the wind. The lack of infrastructure
makes running the Renegades more akin to a start-up operation than a takeover.
One source estimated losses for such an operation could reach as high as
$8-million. While many club officials were once confident that Ottawa could be
salvaged for the coming season, most have become far less optimistic. It is
believed that the league and commissioner Wright only became aware of the
severity of the problem in recent weeks, which explains why the CFL is now
faced with a difficult decision so close to the opening of training camps, two
months away.
There has been talk the CFL may consider suspending the Renegades for 2006.
That's a tactic used by the National Lacrosse League to avoid folding a
franchise. However, the nature of building a competitive CFL team would render
any future team starting from scratch a tough sell in a market already
suffering from four losing seasons. Even if the Renegades can be saved, this
recent episode is expected to be a blow to Wright, who is entering the final
year of his contract. Under his tenure as commissioner, one-third of the CFL's
teams have succumbed to financial woes and turned to the league for assistance.
Governors David Braley of the B.C. Lions and Robert Wetenhall of the Montreal
Alouettes wanted a new commissioner hired when Wright's contract expired last
year. Instead, Wright was given a one-year extension.
Graham Knows Seeds Of March Bear Fruit In June
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
Michael Grange
(Mar. 21, 2006) The subplot of basketball in March is
how it affects what happens in June. March Madness -- also known as the U.S.
National
Collegiate Athletic Association men's basketball championship -- provides
talent evaluators for National Basketball Association clubs a chance to see the
best of the college ranks compete under the most trying of circumstances.
Inevitably, reputations are born and the hype grows so that by the night of the
NBA's draft on June 28, it seems that half of the clubs in the first round are
poised to take a player who will take them to the playoffs based on what they
did in March. Toronto Raptors rookie forward Joey
Graham has found out the hard way that
things don't unfold quite so neatly, and that all those college players
competing their hearts out in March won't necessarily hear their names in June.
Moreover, even those called in June are likely to find themselves struggling
come November, when the NBA's regular season starts. "Are some guys going
to be in for a shock?' Graham said the other day. "Yeah, some guys are
going to be in for a shock. What are there, like 400 players in the NBA? Do the
math. It's not for everyone." However, Graham's play for the Raptors in
March is going a long way toward justifying what happened last June. That was
when the Raptors made him the 16th pick in the 2005 draft based in part on his
strong showing in the NCAA tournament last year, when he led the Oklahoma State
Cowboys to the round of 16. This year's version will get under way on Thursday.
Graham is enjoying what is easily his most productive four-game stretch of his
rookie season as the Raptors visit the New York Knicks tonight. He's averaging
10.8 points on 56.3-per-cent shooting, along with five rebounds and 1.5 steals
a game.
The numbers compare favourably with his season averages of six points and three
rebounds a game. Graham resists the suggestion that a light bulb has simply
come on over his head. Instead, he says, all the struggles that came before
this stage, when many wondered whether the considerable athletic gifts
harboured in his 6-foot-6, 220-pound body were forever to be hindered by doubt
and hesitation, have contributed to a slow realization of what he needs to do
to succeed in the NBA. "You can't really just wake up one day and just
say, 'I'm going to play awesome today,' " he said. "You know, I had
to learn. I had to figure some things out." Perhaps the most important
thing was to spend less time trying to figure things out on the floor and more
simply doing what his speed, strength and leaping ability made possible.
"When I started being a whole lot more aggressive, I think, a lot of good
things started happening," he said. "Going to the boards a lot
harder, running the wing a lot harder, playing better defence -- just knowing
and picking up on things." In the Raptors' win over the Milwaukee Bucks
last Friday, Graham came down the floor in the first half, took off well
outside the key, the ball a grapefruit in his oversized hands. In college, a
thunderous dunk was likely seconds away, but in the pro ranks, someone just as
fast and with plenty of savvy had the temerity to plant himself in front of the
rim, drawing a charge. After a quick talking to from Raptors veteran Darrick
Martin during the next timeout, Graham had another chance on a break a few
moments later, only this time he pulled up for a comfortable jump shot over a
helpless defender.
Graham has made and will make his share of mistakes, but appears to be learning
from them. "Some guys, it just takes longer," Raptors coach Sam
Mitchell said. "He's not the biggest, fastest, strongest guy on the court
any more, at his position. . . . So now you've got to learn how to play
basketball. Now you've got to learn how to adjust. I would say like a lot of
rookies, he was just tentative." For now, it appears that the hesitancy
has been shed. On a team with plenty of scoring options, Graham has realized
that his best contribution is flying in from odd angles to compete for
offensive rebounds and using his strength to hold off bigger men on the
defensive boards. He may not be getting plays called for him, so if he wants
his touches, he can start with deflections and steals. And just like all those
starry-eyed college kids playing for their futures in March, Graham is playing
for his, too. The Raptors can extend his contract after next season if they choose,
or they can use their draft pick this season on a player at his position they
think will give them more of what they're looking for. Such is the cycle of NBA
life. Once again, what he does this March will affect what happens in June.
"I've got to finish out the rest of this season strong to show [general
manager] Bryan Colangelo and the coaches that I can handle the
responsibility," he said.
Canada Wins Swimming Gold
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -
JAMES CHRISTIE, Globe and Mail Update with Canadian Press
(Mar. 21, 2006) Melbourne, Australia — Canada won its
first gold medal in a world's swimming event in eight years Tuesday when Michael Brown of
Perth, Ont., charged to the wall to win the 200-metre breaststroke in record
time at the Commonwealth Games Brown won a three-way race with Australians
Jim Piper and Brenton Rickard, who had led for the first 150 metres. Brown's
time of 2 minutes 12.23 seconds is a Game's record. Rickard was timed in 2:12:24
and Piper in 2:12:26. "I touched the wall and when I saw that I was first
it was overwhelming," said Brown. "I hadn't had the best meet going
in. Until today actually, I felt pretty bad in the water." Brown was
third heading into final 50 metres but swam a strong final leg to claim
Canada's first swimming gold since the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, where Canadians won four races. "It's a pretty phenomenal
feeling after feeling the way I did earlier in the meet," said
Brown. The former record was set by England's Nick Gillingham at the
Victoria Commonwealth Games in 1994, 2:12:54. Brent Hayden of Mission, B.C.,
and Andrew Hurd of Oakville, Ont., each won silver while the women's
4x100-metre medley team took bronze on the final day of swimming at the Games.
That gave Canada one gold, eight silver and seven bronze at the meet,
surpassing its goal of 12 medals.
