20
Carlton Street, Suite 1032, Toronto, ON
M5B 2H5
(416)
677-5883
langfieldent@rogers.com
www.langfieldentertainment.com
LE NEWSLETTER
February 4, 2010
February is here and so is the wacky weather ... all good
though. Now, on the brink of Ontario's newest holiday, Family Day, held on February 15th, also is the
upcoming Chocolate Festival, oh, I mean, Valentine's Day. In a couple or not, tell someone you love them, if not
this specific day then another.
Here's one scenario: You've made all the plans for the
perfect Valentine's Day. You've reserved your favourite table at your favourite
restaurant. Once you arrive at the restaurant, everything is perfect: the
ambience, the food, the wine, the conversation. You decide to top off a
sumptuous meal with a decadent dessert and coffee. It's not yet 8:00 p.m. Now what? It's too early to
retire to the bedroom, and yet you don't want the magic to end. What to
do? It's time to CELEBRATE LOVE at Andrew Craig's Celebrate
Love 2010 concert! Due to popular demand, Celebrate Love comes to us for two nights: Saturday, February 13 and Sunday, February 14.
CELEBRATE LOVE is a night of excellence on every level - in the artists, the music selections
and venue. You MUST check it out - take someone you love but get those
tickets. This is historically a very successful concert.
Do you like gospel music? Well, then you need to
check out the Evolution of Gospel Music pictured below! Some superb talent and great theatre all in
one place this weekend! Get your tickets now. EGM was conceived and
directed by the powerhouse team of Juno award-winning Toronto Mass Choir (TMC) director
Karen Burke, gospel music producer Corey Butler, and singer/actor/producer Aadin Church (The Lion King, Miss Saigon).
TONS of hot news
below so get on to it!
To make sure you continue to receive your Langfield
Entertainment e-mail in your inbox (and that it is not sent to bulk or junk
folders), please add langfieldent@rogers.com to your address book.
This
newsletter is designed to give you some updated entertainment-related news and
provide you with our upcoming event listings. Welcome to those who
are new members. Want your events listed by date? Check out EVENTS.
::HOT EVENTS::
The Evolution of Gospel Music
Returns on February 5th and 6th!
Source: Karen Burke
(January 18, 2010) Toronto - On February 5th and 6th at 7 p.m. the spectacular musical production The Evolution of Gospel Music
(EGM) returns to relive the tale of a people thrust into a new
land and stripped of everything but their music. The EGM showcases five eras of
gospel using live music, drama and dance. It dynamically charts a triumphant
legacy that spans the early days of Negro spirituals through the turmoil of the
60’s, to the influence of gospel in today’s contemporary urban music landscape.
The production, which opened in 2009 to crowds of over 1,200 people, aired on
CBC Radio and is available online on CBC’s Concerts on Demand.
EGM was conceived and directed by the powerhouse team of Juno award-winning
Toronto Mass Choir (TMC) director Karen Burke, gospel music producer Corey
Butler, and singer/actor/producer Aadin Church (The Lion King, Miss Saigon). The
show will be lead by Burke, a Professor of Music at York University, and Butler
will lead the professional rhythm section.
A phenomenal cast representing some of the best Canadian gospel musicians,
actors and dancers will re-enact the voyage through the golden age of gospel,
celebrating the music of Thomas Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland and
other iconic artists. Powerful vocalists have also been assembled for the
front-line singers, including Marlene O’Neill, Amoy Levy and Peter Moncrieffe.
Guest artist Aadin Church will lead the journey, as a character called ‘The Traveler’,
along with onstage partner Karen Jules.
Toronto Mass Choir (TMC) will present The Evolution of Gospel Music at Global
Kingdom Ministries as a main feature of Black History Month and tickets can be
purchased online at www.evolutionofgospelmusic.com.
To meet a goal of positively impacting the local community they have partnered
with UrbanPromise Toronto, who believe “children and young adults have the
potential to achieve success, and with support they can reach their God-given
potential.” A portion of the proceeds will be donated to this cause. TMC is
also working with other local organizations to bring groups of youth to a
special matinee to provide an educational and uplifting experience for them.
About the Toronto Mass Choir
The Toronto Mass Choir (TMC) is a not-for-profit 35-member choir who have been
pioneers within the industry for more then 20 years, while paving the way for
some of the best gospel talent in Canada. They have performed at countless
award shows and venues, including The Ottawa Bluesfest, the Toronto Jazz
Festival, the Canadian National Exhibition, Roy Thompson Hall with the Toronto
Symphony Orchestra, and at the Gospel Music Workshop of America conventions in
Washington, DC, Atlanta and Detroit. TMC has released six albums with their
soulful style of calypso, ska and new sounds, with the fusion of jazz and
reggae, and have won multiple awards, including a Juno Award, two Gospel Music
Association Canada (GMAC) Covenant Awards, a Vibe Award, An Urban Music
Association of Canada Award and a Shai Award.
About UrbanPromise
UrbanPromise Toronto began in 1998 with the vision to see change in
government-housing neighbourhoods. Beginning with one small after-school
program for children UrbanPromise has grown into an organization that reaches
hundreds of children, youth and families in four communities across the city.
For information or interviews please contact Karen Burke at (905) 794-1139.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5 and SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6
THE EVOLUTION OF
GOSPEL MUSIC
Global
Kingdom Ministries
1250
Markham Road
Scarborough,
ON
Doors:
6:00 pm; Start: 7:00 pm
Advance
tix: $25; Door: $30
Tix
purchased at: www.evolutionofgospelmusic.com
See video
at http://www.evolutionofgospelmusic.com/youtube.php
Audio
clip, please go to www.cbc.ca HERE
Andrew Craig’s Celebrate Love 2010 :: Sunday,
February 14 at The Al Green Theatre
Source: Andrew Craig
Celebrate
Love
is, simply put, an evening of the world’s greatest love songs!
On Sunday, February 14, Canada’s first lady of jazz Molly
Johnson once again headlines a stellar cast of singers, including Gary
Beals,
Toya Alexis, Wade O. Brown, Suba
Sankaran, and more.
Producer, CBC broadcaster and impresario Andrew
Craig
co-hosts and musical directs the band, complemented by Lush, the fabulous
all-female cello quartet!
Featuring a unique blend of classic popular songs, rare musical gems from
across the planet, poetry and reflections, Celebrate Love is the perfect
Valentine's Day activity for people in all stages of love: from new love, to
unrequited love, to jilted love, to old love, to true love.
Celebrate Love moves to Toronto’s Al Green Theatre for 2010! Originally
conceived and produced in 2004, and again in 2008, Celebrate Love is well on
its way to becoming a Toronto institution.
Click here to purchase tickets to Celebrate
Love - Toronto’s premier Valentine’s
Day event!
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2010
ANDREW CRAIG’S CELEBRATE LOVE
2010
Al Green Theatre
Miles Nadal JCC
750 Spadina Avenue (southwest corner of Spadina & Bloor)
$45 adults, $40 seniors; $80 per adult couple; $75 per senior couple
8:00 PM
www.celebratelove.ca
::TOP STORIES::
Jewison Gets Lifetime Directing Honour
Source: www.thestar.com
- CBC News
(January 30, 2010) Filmmaker Norman Jewison became the first
Canadian ever to get a lifetime
achievement prize from the Director's Guild of America.
The guild honoured the best in film at a gala in Los Angeles on Saturday night.
With the honour, the 83-year-old Jewison joined the likes of Ingmar Bergman,
Akira Kurosawa, Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Clint
Eastwood, who have all been granted the accolade.
In the guild’s 73-year history, only 32 directors have been recognized with the
accolade.
Jewison, who maintains an office in Santa Monica, Calif., while also living
near Toronto on a farm, got his start as a children's show script writer at the
BBC before joining CBC Television as an assistant director for musicals,
comedy-variety shows, dramas and specials in the early 1950s.
CBS in New York City recruited him in 1958; there he directed variety shows
such as Your Hit Parade.
In 1962, Jewison directed his first film, Forty Pounds of Trouble, a
comedy starring Tony Curtis . He never looked back.
He followed that up with a few lighter movies and then moved onto drama with
1965's The Cincinnati Kid, starring Steve McQueen.
Jewison really hit the big time in 1966 with the cold war comedy The
Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, which resulted in four
Academy Award nominations, including for best picture.
Not ready to retire
Among his many acclaimed films are In the Heat of the Night, The Thomas
Crown Affair, Fiddler on the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar, A Soldier's Story
and Moonstruck.
The director says although the award is appreciated, it doesn't signal his
retirement, either.
"Just remember John Ford and Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder and John Huston
and Willy Wyler," Jewison told The Toronto Star. "They all kept
making movies after the world considered them obsolete."
Back in 1992, Jewison was made a Companion of the Order of Canada and in 1999,
he was given the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences.
In 2004, Jewison was appointed chancellor of Victoria University in the
University of Toronto, a position he continues to hold today.
He is also the founder of the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto, which provides
professional development for filmmakers, actors and producers in Canada.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/2010/01/30/jewison-dga-honour.html#ixzz0eVgz2TSD
Canadian Melanie Fiona Receives Grammy Nod After Years Of
Struggle
Source: www.thestar.com - By Nick Patch (CP)
(January 28, 2010) TORONTO — Five years ago, Melanie Fiona flew to Los Angeles,
determined to make her music dreams come true.
The Toronto native had the right sound - great range and a distinctive voice,
equally adept at expressing vulnerability and strength - and the right look.
All she needed to do was change everything.
"I met a lot of labels, executives and producers," Fiona told The
Canadian Press.
"They'd say: 'We love the way she looks, we love the way she sings.' But I
knew that the minute I worked with them or would have signed with them, they
would have tried to change me into someone else completely different.
"That was something that I didn't want to do."
As it turns out, her stubbornness paid off. The past year has brought the
26-year-old the sort of chart success and industry respect she was willing to
wait for, culminating in a nomination at Sunday's 52nd Grammy Awards.
She's up for best female R&B vocal performance for her heart-rending torch
song, "It Kills Me."
The Grammy nod was vindication, to say the least.
"It's like the best news I've ever received," Fiona says, her voice
cracking with enthusiasm.
"Oh my gosh, I instantly had flashbacks of just singing as a little girl
into my hairbrush in front of the mirror. I went directly there. Could I even
have imagined singing around my house and loving to sing would have me in this
position now, one day?
"It's just unbelievable."
It certainly would've seemed that way at many points during the past few years,
as time tested Fiona's resolve.
Fiona was born Melanie Hallim, the daughter of Guyanese immigrants. She had
been active in the industry since 2002, when she was briefly involved with
Toronto R&B girl group X-Quisite (she left before their first album was
released, though she earned songwriting credits).
Her original southern sojourn came amid worries her career would atrophy if she
stayed north of the border. But she didn't exactly move to L.A., either - in
fact, Fiona says she hasn't really lived anywhere the past five years.
How does she manage that?
"It entails crashing on people's couches, hotels, living out of your
suitcase," she said. "Just kind of being wherever you have to be,
from recording to touring. You have to be visible, you have to be where there's
a demand for you. ... I love travelling, I've seen and been to so many places
I've dreamed of going, which was the best part.
"And then of course I was tired of being all over the place and living
from the suitcase. That's hard on the clothes, and I hate travelling through
airports, and lugging bags around the world, but you know, it's a part of what
I gotta do."
Fiona forged ahead, dabbling in songwriting (she co-penned "Dem
Haters" for Rihanna and wrote for Kardinal Offishall) while continuing to
seek out her big break. She had opportunities, but nothing felt quite right.
"I recorded songs where I was like: 'I'm gonna do this to experiment, but
this is not who I am, it's not what I want to do,"' she explained.
"It was singing about things in music that I didn't really feel or relate
to, just to conform with what other people were singing about. I don't really
sing about superficial things or money, cars, and clothes.
"I didn't want people to focus on my appearance just so they would focus
on my music. I didn't want people to focus on my sexuality, or how sexy I can
be and sell sex just so they could pay attention to my music.
"I didn't want to have people dictate who I had to be."
Ultimately, she didn't have to.
In 2007, Fiona was discovered by Steve Rifkind - the hip-hop impresario
associated with acts including Wu Tang Clan, Akon and Big Pun - and soon, her
fortunes began to change. And it happened fast.
In the fall of 2008, Kanye West handpicked Fiona to open his European tour
("the best performing experience of my life," she says of the tour).
She also made friends with Jay-Z, whose Roc Nation group now manages Fiona, and
Roots drummer Questlove, who issued a mixtape with her last summer.
In February, she released her first single, "Give it to Me Right," a
feisty empowerment anthem that doubles as an aggressive come-on. Far more
confrontational than coy, the song married a brassy vocal performance from
Fiona with the classic backbeat of the Zombies' 1968 psychedelic single
"Time of the Season."
The song was written by Andrea Martin (no, not the SCTV actress but a
songwriter and producer who has penned tunes for Toni Braxton, Nelly and Leona
Lewis).
Martin said she was immediately taken by Fiona's talent.
"Finally a voice that's not only soulful, but ear-friendly," Martin
wrote in an email to The Canadian Press.
"Melanie is a definite addition to the world, she's truly a light that
brings life to every song she sings."
Martin produced and co-wrote much of Fiona's first album, "The
Bridge," which dropped in the summer.
Fiona recalls seeing the disc on a store shelf for the first time at an HMV in
downtown Montreal.
"I totally freaked out," she recalled. "I couldn't believe it. I
was jumping up and down. I was screaming. I was completely making a fool of
myself in the store.
"But I've been working for this my whole life, so now's not the time to be
cool, you know what I mean?"
Indeed, it was Fiona's work ethic that stood out to her collaborators.
"(Our sessions) ended up being really intense, for whatever reason,"
said Darren Lewis, one-half of U.K. production team Future Cut, who handled three
tracks on Fiona's album.
"I don't know how she did it. They had three or four studios set up, she'd
come to us and write, go somewhere else and write. She was doing 20-hour days
in that one week. She'd finish at 4, 5, 6 in the morning. It was incredible.
"And she was always the one there keeping the energy up. The two of us
were suffering jet lag and kind of falling asleep on the mixing desk. She was
still singing."
Lewis wasn't the only one who was impressed by Fiona. The New York Times said
"The Bridge" was "one of this year's best R&B albums, and
also one of the year's most promising debuts."
But major chart success still eluded Fiona - until the Grammy nomination came
in December.
Since then, "It Kills Me" - which Fiona calls gut-wrenching, "one
of those records that kind of grabs you by the throat and makes you pay
attention" - has rocketed to No. 1 on the Billboard R&B/hip-hop chart
in the United States.
Fiona says that she's particularly pleased that the Grammy nomination is
specifically for vocal performance, and not for songwriting or anything
external to her.
Others, meanwhile, aren't surprised.
"She's just got a real, old-school, killer R&B voice," Lewis
said.
"There's elements ... of her contemporaries, her idols, there's a flavour
of Mary J. Blige, there's a hint of Aretha (Franklin), but I think actually
what was good about (Fiona) was that she wasn't just a carbon copy of people
she loved. She took inspiration, which the best people do, but it's about
making it your own."
And Fiona says she isn't worried about winning on Grammy night.
"In my mind, it's already a victory," Fiona said.
"Being a part of history, of the 2010 Grammys, it's such an amazing
feeling. At this point, it's just about being there and hearing my name called
and seeing my face on the screen and being in the company of the amazing
artists.
"It's just an amazing feeling."
Neil Young, Michael J. Fox, Michael
Bublé: Grammy Honours Canadians
Source: www.thestar.com
- Ben Rayner
(February 01, 2010) Rock legend Neil
Young, Family Ties actor Michael J. Fox and crooner Michael Bublé
were the Canadian winners at this year's Grammy Awards.
Young claimed a trophy for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition package for
the first elaborately designed volume of his Archive collection. It was
the Toronto-born singer's first ever Grammy.
Fox, who was raised in Burnaby, B.C., picked up the prize for Best Spoken Word
Album for his reading of Always Looking Up, a memoir about his battle
with Parkinson's disease. Bublé won Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album for his
concert disc Michael Bublé Meets Madison Square Garden. The prizes were
given out during the non-televised portion of the Grammy Awards.
Young was feted on Friday night as the MusiCares Person of the Year, which
recognizes an artist's philanthropy.
Nominated Canadians who came up empty-handed included Toronto rapper Drake, and
rockers Nickelback and Beast.
Clara
Hughes' Untold Story: Wild Teen To Olympic Champ
Source: www.thestar.com - Randy Starkman,
(January 29, 2010) Clara
Hughes was in charge of buying the beer.
Just 13, she was the ringleader of a group of hardscrabble kids who partied in
the
stairwells of parking garages in the dead of Winnipeg winter. Already 5-foot-9,
she wore a lot of makeup and didn't even have to use fake ID to purchase a
couple of two-fours from a local beer vendor.
Extra Old Stock. It was their beer of choice because of the higher alcohol
content, certainly not for the taste. But it didn't stop there. Hughes also
experimented with drugs, regularly skipped school and ran away from home
several times. The downward spiral began after her parents split when she was
9.
The woman who will be unveiled Friday as the flag-bearer to lead the Canadian
team into B.C. Place Stadium for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics on Feb. 12 didn't
get there via the yellow brick road. She has forged gold out of sheer guts,
willpower and with some timely guidance along the way.
Her early days certainly didn't foreshadow a speed skater who would donate
$10,000 out of her own bank account to the humanitarian group Right To Play
after winning gold at the 2006 Turin Olympics.
"I look at that period of my life, I have friends from that time who are
severe alcoholics and have major social problems and life problems," said
Hughes. "I know a girl whose boyfriend killed her and then killed himself.
"When I see kids that are like that now, I think, `You don't know where
this can lead you. You're just wasting your life.' I was wasting my life. I'm
not proud of who I was. But at the time, I didn't care about anything. I think
I didn't have a value system because I came from a dysfunctional family. My mom
did the best she could with my sister and I, but we basically went wild after
my parents separated.
"Sport is definitely something that provided a value system for me, also
just a moral base that I didn't have. I didn't have a strong sense of right and
wrong. I just had a very strong sense of whatever I wanted to do at the time. I
didn't have respect for anyone or myself."
There would be an intervention, albeit not of the typical variety.
As a 16-year-old, Hughes was sitting in her mother's living room doing some
channel surfing and came across the broadcast of the 1988 Calgary Olympics.
There was a feature on legendary speed skater Gaetan Boucher, winner of two
gold and a bronze at the '84 Sarajevo Games, who was about to take his last
shot at the podium in the men's 1,500 metres.
Hughes was mesmerized. To her, it looked like Boucher was floating on the ice.
"I was just, `Omigod, I want to do that. That's what I'm going to do.
That's what I'm going to be. I'm going to be that one day,'" recalled
Hughes.
"At the time, I smoked a pack a day. I wasn't into really hard drugs, but
I was doing a fair amount of soft drugs and just partying a lot. I would run away
from home for the weekend. I just wouldn't come home. My mom would be so
worried about me. And I just didn't care. Then I'd show up when I wanted to
show up.
"And so there I was, this undisciplined, pseudo-amoral girl, young
adolescent, and this thing happened inside of me. I was like `I'm going to do that.'
I just knew. I KNEW."
The next day her mom was driving her to a friend's house and Hughes blurted out
that she wanted to go to the Olympics and be a speed skater. Her mother called
the Winnipeg Speed Skating Club and found out there was a spring training camp.
Hughes was inspired, but initially still regressed into her old bad habits.
Eventually, the desire to be a great speed skater outstripped anything else.
She went from failing school to becoming a straight-A student.
Hughes would also have the good fortune of encountering coaches who would
become her guides on an incredible journey that has seen her become the first
Canadian to win medals at both the Summer and Winter Olympics.
"I've been really lucky to fall in the hands of these incredible teachers
pretty much exactly at the time I needed their personality and what they had to
offer in my life," she said.
Her speed skating dream took a detour when she was recruited by Mirek Mazur, a
cycling coach in Hamilton known for his uncompromising approach. His
no-nonsense methods, which included Hughes logging 23,000 kilometres per year,
would give her discipline and a conditioning base that pays dividends to this
day. She also won two bronze medals in cycling at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
"I was so lucky that tough bastard came into my life when he did because
he challenged me," said Hughes. "He changed my life. He really did.
"He was just a drill sergeant and he was just, `Do it. Don't ask questions.
Don't think too much.' I went through a pretty long phase of that unconscious
competence with him where I didn't really think that much about what I was
doing, I was just a machine and I performed."
But she would eventually burn out and after a series of injuries quit cycling
briefly, only to revive her career under coach Eric Van Den Eynde in Quebec,
where she would settle in the Eastern Townships.
Van Den Eynde would help her develop a competitor's head and soul. He taught
her how to train herself, giving her the tools to understand how much she
needed to push herself and when it was enough.
"Eric makes you believe," said Hughes. "He lets you believe in
the possibilities and never limit yourself to one way. Eric really kind of let
me grow up and that was so crucial for me after having been told what to do for
so long."
But the lure of speed skating always remained for Hughes and she decided to
return to her first love after the Sydney Olympics. It was then she found her
next teacher, Xiuli Wang, a former Chinese speed skater who guides her to this
day.
"She's like this old soul," said Hughes. "She has so much wisdom
to pass on and she just passes it on in such a subtle way and that's what makes
it so beautiful. Sometimes she drives me crazy because she demands so much and
sometimes I can't handle that. And so we're human and we butt heads, but that's
just part of the whole process of appreciating her and learning from her."
But her greatest teacher, Hughes says, is her husband Peter Guzman. They met
through a mutual friend in 1996. The American-born Guzman, who became a
Canadian citizen last year, is a gentle soul, an adventurer who goes on epic
journeys on his bike, in a kayak and on foot. He's the kind of guy who will
spend a whole conversation asking you questions about yourself, never talking
about himself unless asked.
"Peter has introduced me to so many things," she said. "He's
helped me develop and grow as a human being and just been there as my support
and the love of my life and just my best friend. The most inspiring person I
know is my husband."
Her competitive spirit is hers alone, though, and will be one of the qualities
that should serve Canada well in its new flag-bearer. She's tough as nails, has
an incredible pain threshold and refuses to accept anything less than the best
from herself.
"It's frustrating to never be satisfied ... but it's good fuel for the
fire," said Hughes. "It makes me realize I will be competitive until
my grave. And I kind of like that. I'm not doing this because, `Well, I'm good
enough to go.' It's not good enough to be good enough. It's only good enough to
be the best that I can be and better than I ever have been. It's
exciting."
::TRAVEL NEWS::
Hawaii : Land of Lava
Source: www.thestar.com
- Claudia Capos
(December 07, 2009) VOLCANO, Hawaii–Daylight fades as we descend into the abyss of Kilauea Iki
crater. The rugged trail zigzags through dense Hawaiian jungle of
snaking vines and unfurling palm fronds. It is cloyingly humid. Our eyes and
lungs burn from the sulfur dioxide and other volcanic gases, or
"vog," that envelope most of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
After 40 minutes of hiking, we reach the crater floor, and the jungle parts to
reveal a landscape right out of Star Wars.
The hardened lava floor is jet black and broken into massive shards. Our feet
crunch and slide on lava gravel as we leap from one perch to another. Smoke and
steam rise eerily from crevices, much like incense burning on unseen altars to
appease the fiery volcano goddess Pele.
Here and there, green sprouts of grass and delicate flowering bushes lend
floral accents to the desolate landscape.
A half century ago, Kilauea Iki exploded and left behind the 120-metre-deep
lava lake. The collapsed crater is adjacent to the massive kilometre-wide
Kilauea caldera, one of two active volcanoes on the Big Island.
Today, it's among the dramatic natural features that draw thousands of visitors
to this captivating land of lava each year.
Lava seems to be ubiquitous on the island and comes as a surprise to first-time
visitors who expect to see mostly palm trees. The ancient Hawaiians used the
hardened rock to build temples honouring the gods. Their contemporaries have
turned the black lava flats along Queen Ka'ahumanu Highway on the Kona coast
into a vast canvas for writing their names and posting personal greetings in
white rocks.
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, established in 1916, is the best place on the
Big Island to get close to the lava. About 50 kilometres southwest of Hilo, the
135,000-hectare wilderness area is also home to native plants and wildlife
found nowhere else on Earth.
"One of my favourite parts was going down through the forest," says
Charity Dennington of Little Rock, Ark., who made the trek into Kilauae Iki
with her husband, Gary Schroeder.
"We saw an `io,' which is an endangered Hawaiian hawk, while we were
descending from the upper part of the crater," Schroeder adds. "It
swooped right down on us."
At the Kilauea Visitors Center, park rangers provide eruption updates and
safety information. A 20-minute video film and detailed exhibits tell the story
of Hawaii's volcanic origins and its lava-land terrain.
Geologists theorize that the Hawaiian Islands were formed one by one as plumes
of magma (molten lava) rose from a hot spot deep within the Earth.
Over time, each successive volcanic eruption formed an island that was slowly
carried away from the hot spot by the Pacific plate, which acted like a
conveyor belt. Today, Kilauea and Mauna Loa continue the island-building
process on the Big Island, the "youngest" in the Hawaiian island
chain.
But they are not the last. To the southeast, Lo'ihi seamount, an active
submarine volcano, is rising from the ocean floor, just off the coast of Hilo.
In time, it too may become another Hawaiian island.
During our week-long stay on the Big Island, we spend two days exploring the
park and experiencing its lava legacy. Our quest takes us to the Thurston lava
tube, an enormous, nearly circular conduit created long ago by a raging
underground river of molten lava.
We descend on concrete steps into the dark, dank passageway, which measures
roughly four metres high by five metres wide.
Small, dim lanterns light the way beneath wispy roots dangling from the
ceiling. Dripping water spatters our heads and creates shallow puddles beneath
our feet. Around us, black lava walls glisten with moisture and echo with
shouts of passing children.
To witness the devastating natural power of lava, we leave Crater Rim Drive and
head down Chain of Craters Rd. The narrow roadway provides glimpses of past
lava flows and defunct craters as it twists and turns on its 1,100-metre
descent to the Pacific coast.
The road dead-ends at a lava flow, just past the Holei sea arch. Along the way,
we come to appreciate the distinctive characteristics of the island's two
different types of lava. "Pahoehoe" lava appears smooth and ropelike,
while "a'a" lava looks chunky and more like large, jagged boulders.
The Kealakomo overlook, midway to the coast, offers a great view for a picnic
lunch.
To see lava flowing in real time, however, we leave Hawaii Volcanoes National
Park several hours before sunset and retrace our steps along Highway 11 to the
town of Kea'au.
From there, we take Highway 130 south toward Kalapana, or what's left of it.
The historic seaside town was destroyed after being buried under molten lava in
1990. From a distance, we spot huge plumes of steam rising high above the tree
line.
When the highway ends, we continue driving along a bumpy blacktop road posted
with signs warning of dangerous fumes and admonishing visitors to travel at
their own risk.
Around us, a thick black carpet of lava blankets the ground in all directions.
The only indications of life are a few rough-hewn houses and trailers that have
been erected on the devastated area.
After reaching a makeshift parking area, we make our way on foot along a roughly
demarcated path over the uneven lava flat to a roped-in viewing area.
A quarter mile away, steam bellows up as lava escaping from a vent on Kilauea
streams down into the sea. Visitors are no longer allowed to walk directly on
the hot lava rock. One park ranger told us that the soles of people's athletic
shoes often melted and had to be scraped off the rock using pancake turners.
The lava sound and light show doesn't shift into high gear until the evening
sky darkens into nightfall. Only then is the red-hot molten lava visible as it
explodes inside the steam clouds and bursts out into the rushing waves.
The crowd of lava-gazers erupts in "oohs" and "aahs" with
each exhalation of this fire-breathing dragon.
At the end of the viewing period, we join the procession that files unsteadily
out of the lava field, their bobbing flashlights resembling a sort of nighttime
vigil.
The spell is broken momentarily at the parking area where local artisans and
vendors have erected stands selling "Go with the Flow" T-shirts,
colour photos of spectacular lava bursts and lava-tube marbles – fitting
mementos of the evening's remarkable adventure.
::MUSIC NEWS::
Grammys Forgo Taste For Spectacle
Source: www.thestar.com
- Ben Rayner
(February 01, 2010) You'd think the past few, dire years would
have taught the music industry a sense of
modesty.
No, though, for Sunday night's Grammy Awards telecast, the theme seemed to be "go big beyond all
reason." Beyond all shame and good taste, too. But we kind of expect that
from the Grammys.
Blame Lady Gaga for the ludicrously garish spectacle, maybe. Whoever was
responsible for this 3 1/2-hour ear- and eyesore was obviously inspired to
extremes by the unstoppably hitmaking pop tart's oversized persona, as he or
she dreamed up an opener where Gaga came out (under)dressed like a superhero,
got thrown in a pit of fire and then emerged from beneath the stage with Elton
John astride a double-sided grand piano decorated with severed arms to duet on
"Your Song."
By the looks of things, that person got drunk on power once that performance
was greenlighted and went
totally Cirque du Soleil hogwild for the rest of the thing.
Seriously, did you see them dunk a nearly nude Pink in water and dangle her
dripping over the crowd during that Sapphic dance-pack assault on "Glitter
in the Air"? Oh, and they managed to exploit Michael Jackson's children
again along the way, too.
Sigh. At least they finally gave Neil Young a Grammy. But given the riot of
ill-conceived ideas spilling all over the stage last night – Beyoncé dropping
an utterly incongruous verse from Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta
Know" into "If I Were A Boy," anyone? Jamie Foxx and T-Pain
pretending to be opera singers? Andrea Bocelli and Mary J. Blige bludgeoning
all subtlety from "Bridge Over Troubled Water"? – it's probably a
good thing he didn't show up for the broadcast.
Young's was about as high-profile a Canadian win as we got this year. The Great
White North was all but
shut out, no doubt particularly disappointing to hometown fans of
Toronto rapper Drake, who lost in two rap categories.
Drake, a.k.a. Aubrey Drake Graham, did get to strut his stuff, though, and even
got props (rightful, just bizarre) from noted hip-hop authority Quentin
Tarantino for scoring two Grammy nods despite not yet having an album out.
The Grammy producers pulled out all the stops for the Toronto MC's performance,
too, matching him up onstage with hip-hop superstars Lil' Wayne and Eminem,
Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker and a full orchestra for a rather epic medley
of tunes that concluded with a much-cheered rendition of the posse cut
"Forever." Drake he took the stage to massive cheers and he's clearly
got the industry behind him.
Oh, well, Canada, at least Seal mentioned Leonard Cohen in passing. And you had
a Céline Dion sighting.
In 3-D, no less. She turned up with Usher, Carrie Underwood,
Jennifer Hudson and Smokey Robinson and a recording of Michael Jackson's
"Earth Song" to give the late singer a drippy salute. It concluded
with yet another awkward appearance by two of the children he fought so hard to
keep from the spotlight before his death. Probably a good thing Michael didn't
make it to the show, either.
CBS Defends Muting Lil Wayne, Em and Drake at Grammys
Source: www.eurweb.com
(February 3, 2010) *CBS has defended its decision to mute the mess out of Lil Wayne, Drake and
Eminem’s rap performance at the end of Sunday’s Grammy Awards telecast,
even though witnesses say the artists were doing a good job of censoring
themselves.
“We have great respect for artists’ creative freedom, but there are certain
things you can’t say, or sing, on television,” CBS spokesman Chris Ender told
the Associated Press.
The Los Angeles Times counted “at least 10 times” that the mute button was
pushed during their performances of “Drop the World” and “Forever”* with Travis
Barker and rock guitarists.
Grammy executive producer Ken Ehrlich told the newspaper that he himself played
no part in hitting the button. The network, he said, has “a responsibility to
standards and we have a responsibility to represent music of the moment … and
we can’t do a show that represents everything that is out there without this
being part of it.”
On its “Vulture” blog, New York magazine commented
“It’s all kind of bizarre Why were whole lines being cut to avoid one
profanity? Why was the music cut out along with the [singers]? Did the bleep
button keep getting stuck in the on position or something?”
The magazine then proceeded to print the censored lyrics. Click here to view: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/02/eminem_lil_wayne_and_drake_get.html
With Jann Arden, The Jokes Are As Good
As The Songs
Source: www.thestar.com - Nick Krewen
(January 28, 2010) Celebrity bitch-fight, eh
Jann?
It was during the Q&A portion of her opening four-night residency at Massey
Hall when
someone in the audience asked Alberta songbird Jann Arden if she would be appearing on this year's revival of Lilith Fair, the
all-female concert tour founded by Sarah McLachlan.
"Not that I'm aware of," replied the hostess, "I'm in the middle
of a bitch-fight with McLachlan."
Arden then proceeded to picture herself as a bitch-right foe against a
"celebrity Canadian chanteuse line-up" consisting of McLachlan,
Shania Twain, Céline Dion and Anne Murray.
" I could take Sarah," she deadpanned, "And I could kick
Shania's ass. And Céline hasn't eaten since March."
However, Anne Murray was a different story, Arden conceded.
"Anne Murray would kick my ass!" she said, as gales of laughter from
the willingly partisan crowd ricocheted throughout the building.
The improvised monologue might have felt awkward or out of place with another
performer, but when you're in for an evening with Jann Arden, you're not just
getting a talented singer and songwriter who is satisfied with parading her
proven hits: you're getting a raconteur, a hilarious comedienne and an earthy
gal pal that you would feel privileged to hang out with.
Of course, there's also the music, and the eight-time Juno winner (she should
be awarded a ninth just for being able to keep her balance in those knee-high
stiletto boots) delivered on well-chosen selections from 10 albums worth of
material that offered few surprises, much to the delight of her extended
family.
Fronting a six-piece band that included Bryan Adams' right-hand guitarist Keith
Scott, respected bass player Maury LaFoy and violinist singer Alison Cornell,
Arden bounced between intimate acoustic renditions of "Insensitive"
and "I Would Die for You" to spirited peaks like "A Million
Miles Away" and "Where No One Knows Me."
The ballad-heavy set also included the usual mixture of love and lament from a
woman who knows how to deliver melancholy mellowness when it comes to matters
of the heart, although the occasions in which she punched it up with unexpected
power and passion proved to be some of the most rewarding moments of the
two-hour-and-15-minute set.
Unfortunately, there were also too many pitch-challenged wavers, that usually
occurred during the show's softer moments, particularly noticeable during
Arden's tender cover of Janis Ian's "At Seventeen."
Not that anyone particularly cared or noticed: they were just happy to be
sharing the same space with the side-splitting lass.
Just don't bring Céline if you know what's good for you.
Quincy Jones, Lionel Richie,
Wyclef Jean and Superstar Artists Re-record ‘We Are The World’ to Benefit
Haitian Earthquake Relief Effort
Source: www.eurweb.com
(February 2, 2010) *LOS ANGELES, — Producer Quincy Jones and
singer/songwriter Lionel Richie, the
producer and co-writer of the iconic 1985 philanthropic anthem We Are The World, have
confirmed that they have teamed with producer/musician Wyclef Jean and
Grammy-winning producer RedOne and producer/musical director Ricky Minor in
association with Randy Phillips, President & CEO, AEG Live to record a
contemporary version of the song to benefit the Haitian earthquake relief
efforts on Monday, February 1, 2010.
The world premiere of We Are The World – 25 For Haiti will air during NBC’s
coverage of the Opening Ceremony of the Vancouver Winter Olympics on Friday,
February 12. Following the world premiere on NBC, it will air on other networks
throughout the world. This project was made possible through a contribution
from Visa.
Twenty five years after the original recording at Henson Recording Studios
(formerly A&M Recording
Studios) in Hollywood, Jones, Richie, Jean, RedOne, Minor and Phillips will
bring together a diverse group of contemporary superstar artists in the very
same recording studio to record the world renowned song originally written by
Richie and Michael Jackson.
In addition to recording the landmark song, Academy Award-winning
writer-director Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) whose own personal
efforts as well as those of Artists for Peace and Justice have already saved
countless lives in Haiti, filmed the session to create an accompanying video.
Both the contemporary version of We Are The World and the accompanying video
will be available for purchase through a consortium of on-line and retail
partners with all proceeds going directly to them earthquake relief efforts in
the country of Haiti through the We Are The World Foundation, a newly created
not-for-profit organization made up of board members Quincy Jones, Lionel
Richie, Wyclef Jean, Paul Haggis, Randy Phillips and Ambassador Louis Moreno of
the Inter-American Development Bank.
Commented Jones, “25 years ago, the entertainment industry showed the power of
community to help our fellow man when we recorded ‘We Are The World’ to bring
relief to those suffering from famine in Ethiopia. And while the need to
assistant Africa continues, today the country of Haiti is suffering
immeasurably from the destruction due to the recent earthquake and is in
immediate need of relief that will last long after the television cameras have
left. As artists, we have joined together on this 25th anniversary and in the
spirit of ‘We Are The World’ to help meet that
need.”
“What an unbelievable group of people who have come together to give their
voices, for a cause to start the healing of a people who have experienced
devastation of such magnitude,” said Richie. “We believe ‘We Are The World – 25
for Haiti’ can be the start of the healing process.”
“On January 12th, the people of Haiti were faced with a tragedy unlike anything
the country has ever experienced,” said Wyclef Jean, songwriter and cofounder
of the We Are The World Foundation. “Today, I am proud to be joined by so many
members of the artistic community that want to support the region and have
donated their time and talents to providing an effective way for the global
community to get involved with helping the Haitian population.”
“I’m thrilled Quincy, Lionel and Randy invited me to be a part of something so
wonderful in which we are standing side by side with Haitian artists and
community to help them rebuild their broken nation,” commented Paul Haggis.
Upon its original release, We Are the World quickly became the fastest selling
single in history and in the years that have followed, USA forn Africa has
raised and distributed more than $63 million in revenue from the sales of more
than 7 million units of the album, single and cassettes, plus nearly 2 million
digital sales and related merchandise. Just over half the total was spent on
emergency relief (food, medicine, and refugee services) and the balance was
used to support more than 500 different relief, rehabilitation and development
projects in 18 different countries in
sub-Saharan Africa.
“When first approached about re-recording ‘We Are The World’, it didn’t seem
like a great idea since the original version was so iconic,” said Randy
Phillips, President & CEO, AEG Live. “Then Haiti happened and that changed
everything. Quincy and Lionel decided that ‘We Are the World’ was created just
for emergencies like this. This recording will have a life of its own and keep
Haiti in the public eye at the same time raising much needed funds to continue
the healing, reconstruction and rebirth of this country,” Phillips added.
“In the 25 years that have passed since ‘We Are The World’ was first released,
technology has provided the means to make it a movement,” said Peter Tortorici,
CEO, GroupM Entertainment WW who will oversee all distribution and broadcast
opportunities while also serving as an executive producer on the project. “We
are honoured to provide our support to make ‘We Are the World – 25 For Haiti’ a
powerful global platform that show what the power of community can accomplish.”
This project was made possible through a contribution from Visa. The 25th
Anniversary recording will help further the spirit of activism around the 25th
Anniversary of We Are the World that was at the heart of the original song and
movement.
“We Are The World” – 25th Anniversary Recording For Haitian Earthquake
Relief Artists Roster:
Teen
Idol Justin Bieber's Secret? A Little Prayer
Source: www.globeandmail.com - Guy Dixon
(January 29, 2010) For
the benefit of millions of screaming young fans, not to mention
their ecstatic moms, let’s cut to the chase: What’s Justin
Bieber really like?
The Stratford, Ont.-raised teen idol, with his meticulously forward-combed
hair, is on the telephone from Atlanta. With the rasp of a typical 15-year-old,
he is as polite as in his myriad TV appearances on everything from MuchMusic to
The Ellen DeGeneres Show. There’s a constant rustle in the background;
others in the room are distracting him. He apologizes and moves closer to the
speakerphone.
Bieber is clearly still in the eager-to-please phase of his young career. If he
has hit the wall of teen cynicism, it doesn’t show. There seems to be no
brewing hubris, despite the fact that his debut album of tween-targeted pop, My
World, recorded under the wing of his mentor and business partner, R&B
singer Usher,
has already gone platinum in the United States (a million copies sold) and
Canada (100,000 copies) since its November release.
“Being famous was never in my mind,” he says. “Also, like, Stratford, Ontario …
a little town of 30,000 in the middle of nowhere? It was something I didn’t
think was possible. I owe everything to my fans and YouTube.”
He seems like merely an older version of the 12-year-old boy who belted out
R&B tunes on homemade YouTube videos, which wound up attracting millions of
viewers and ultimately got him his record deal. (To access those early videos,
search YouTube under “Justin singing.” Searching with the words “Justin Bieber”
will get you his more recent professional videos and TV spots.)
His single mom, Pattie Mallette, has said that she prayed for her son’s
success. One YouTube clip shows Bieber and his mother in an early appearance on
Full Circle, a weekly segment of the Christian TV program 100 Huntley
Street.
Atlanta-based manager Scooter Braun had scouted Bieber after seeing his YouTube
clips, and flew him down to meet Usher in 2008. Bieber auditioned for Usher,
but also, as the teenager puts it, he simply hung out with the superstar to see
how they gelled. “When I first met him, I had to sing for him, so that he knew
what I was about,” Bieber says. “But we just talked. He got to know me a little
bit. I got to know him. We watched a little bit of basketball. It was really
low-key. It was fun.”
Justin Timberlakewas
also interested in Bieber and also met with him, but the young singer decided
to sign with the man Billboard named last decade’s No. 1 Hot 100s Artist.
Bieber recalls this quickly, as if he has gone over it many times already. Our
conversation falls in the middle of two hours of back-to-back phone interviews,
which are in turn sandwiched between a doctor’s appointment and a rehearsal
with Beiber’s full band and dancers. The next day he will fly off to Los
Angeles to prepare for tomorrow’s Grammy Awards, where he’ll be a presenter.
That’s Bieber’s life now. When we talk, he has just returned from a publicity
trip to Britain, where he was accompanied by his dad and a team of handlers.
His parents are divorced, but Bieber is still close to his father, who lives in
Winnipeg.
Since returning to Atlanta, the fledgling star has been sequestered in the
studio, under orders (as one publicist put it) to work on My World Part II.
That follow-up disc is due in late March, a mere five months after his debut
album, following a time-honoured tactic from the dawn of pop music and teen
acts: Get the merchandise out quickly.
But Bieber sees it in more contemporary terms. “A lot of people nowadays, with
the Internet, they get really bored. … So putting two albums out, back to back,
keeps them wanting more. …It’s really important to keep these kids satisfied,
you know what I mean?”
It’s hard to put his success into perspective, he says. Imagine sudden fame at
15 – and, a month after cutting your first album, performing at a charity
Christmas concert in Washington, with U.S. President Barack Obama and his wife,
Michelle, looking on. “Things are definitely hard to describe,” he says. “But
everything has just been fun. My family is really supportive. My mom and my dad
are very supportive.”
His mother lives with him in a condominium community in Atlanta. She had been
working as a website designer before her son’s career took off. She now calls
herself “studio mom” on her Twitter page, but her son describes her
differently. “She’s definitely not a studio mom. She definitely cares about my
well-being, and me just being a good person more than a good artist,” he says.
“We have a lot of fun together on the road. We definitely get into arguments,
’cause I’m with my mom more than regular 15-year-old boys are. But we have a
really close relationship.”
As for Usher, says Bieber, “he teaches me to stay humble through this whole
process, because it can get shady, the business. You just gotta be humble.
You’ve got to be grounded.” When pressed, he doesn’t go into detail about what
kind of questionable characters he might have come across, insisting he has
managed to stay away from them, whoever they are.
Bieber has a five-album contract. The third disc of songs likely won’t appear
as quickly, he says, and may be an album of Christmas songs late in the year.
And what of the inevitable lure of branching out beyond music – to, say, even
something as low-key as Avril Lavigne’s ads for Canon cameras? “We’re working
on different opportunities right now,” he says. “There’s going to be stuff like
commercials and movie stuff coming out, but we’re just working out all the
deals right now.”
That’s all Bieber will divulge. And given how quickly his career is moving,
that could conceivably be all he and his handlers know with any certainty.
“Have a blessed day,” he says as our conversation winds up. An atypical goodbye
from a young performer marketed as just a regular, if highly gifted, kid.
Michael Bublé's Olympic Gig
Source: www.globeandmail.com
- By Kerry Gold
(February 1, 2010) Vancouver singer Michael Bublé's
international success has translated into a role as
ambassador for several foreign TV networks during the Olympics.
The 34-year-old, who last night won a Grammy, will appear in a one-hour special
called Michael Bublé's Canada on Australia's Foxtel network. He'll also appear
in Australian promotional clips for the Games, and in short vignettes with
Olympic athletes, in which he'll explain sports like curling. He's also
appearing on a German network, a Japanese network and in a segment for the
Today Show in the U.S.
His most challenging gig at the Olympics would be providing colour commentary
for one of the hockey games on Australia's Foxtel. As a minority owner of the
Vancouver Giants, his love of hockey is widely known in his hometown. He even
took a shot as guest radio commentator for a Canucks game last year.
Q: So what exactly do you do in Michael Bublé's Canada?
A: I've gone with a co-host and taken Australians through every province and
introduced them to the provinces and what makes them different and special, and
what you should see and do. I've taken them on a tour of Canada. When the
Olympics come, I'll go around Vancouver and take them around the city and take
them out to events and around to restaurants, parties, whatever.
Q: I'm surprised countries like Australia would have a big interest in hockey.
A: I think come Olympics time, the stakes are so high people tune in when they
otherwise wouldn't. I think they have an interest and they are probably
curious, too, about things like curling.
Q: How about your interest in hockey? What does it mean to you?
A: Well hockey is one of the things I live for. I put it up there with music
and food and family. It makes it even better when national pride is on the
line.
Q: Did you play much as a kid?
A: Yep, and I still play, and I love every aspect of the sport. I love how fast
it is, how beautiful it is. It's a wonderful team sport but with individual
greatness attached to it.
Q: As a commentator, what are the challenges? Is it hard?
A: [When doing the Canucks game] I began the game telling people on the radio
that I was just a fan, that I wasn't a professional. And while I got to do the
greatest thing in the world and sit in that booth and do colour, it also gave
me a brand new respect for ... how fast the game moves.
Q: But you're pretty quick with a retort on stage.
A: I tried to do play-by-play for two minutes, and I just sounded like I had
been drinking.
Leonard
Cohen Offers Thanks To Canada
Source: www.globeandmail.com - Nick Patch, The Canadian Press
(January 29, 2010) Los Angeles — With the Grammy Awards about to honour Leonard
Cohen, the 75-year-old Montreal legend decided to pay respect
to his home country during a party at the Canadian consul general's residence
on Thursday.
Cohen, clad in a dark suit with his trademark fedora shading his eyes, climbed
onstage alongside a group of other artists at the gathering – held annually in
honour of Canadian Grammy nominees – before making a brief speech to the cheers
of a grateful crowd.
“My great grandfather, Lazarus Cohen, came to Canada in 1869, to the county of
Glengarry, a little town in Maberly,” Cohen said.
“It's customary to thank people for the help and aid they've given. On this
occasion, because of the great hospitality that was accorded my ancestor who
came here over 140 years ago, I want to thank this country, Canada, for allowing
us to live and work and flourish in a place that was different from all other
places in the world.
“So I thank Canada for the opportunity that was given me to work and play and
flourish. ... Thank you, friends.”
While Cohen made only a brief appearance at the party, his presence carried
weight with the other attendees.
“It's nice to be up there with an icon,” said Steve Wood of Alberta powwow
dance group Northern Cree, nominated for a fifth time for best native American
album, who stood next to Cohen onstage.
Cohen will be honoured on Saturday with a lifetime achievement award from the
Recording Academy, which puts on the Grammys.
The celebrated musician and poet, oddly, has only ever won one Grammy and it
wasn't for one of his own albums. He earned a trophy for contributing vocals to
Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters, which won album of the year in
2008.
The group of Canadian Grammy hopefuls who attended the poolside party on
Thursday could then potentially match Cohen's tally at Sunday's 51st Grammy
Awards (Global, 8 p.m. ET).
Nominees in attendance included Montreal trip-rock band Beast and producer
David Foster, whose brief visit was long enough to brighten fellow nominee
Melanie Fiona's night.
“I was very excited to meet David Foster,” said the beaming Toronto singer,
who's up for best female R&B vocal performance.
“I got to meet him as soon as I came through the door.”
The showcase featured performances from Toronto hip-hop artist K'naan, St.
John's indie-rockers Hey Rosetta and Vancouver singer-songwriter Dan Mangan.
While Cohen might have been considered the guest of honour, it was producer
Daniel Lanois who was the life of the party.
Clad in a black leather jacket and snug jeans with a pair of sunglasses
obscuring his eyes, a smiling Lanois arrived toward the beginning of the party,
happily chatting with anyone who approached him. When asked by a reporter if
there were any stars he was hoping to meet at Sunday's gala, he shrugged and
said “Satan?” before laughing and clarifying that he was only joking.
Later, he hopped onstage unexpectedly for an impromptu after-show bonus
performance with his guests, country legend Emmylou Harris and singer Trixie
Whitley. It was one of the only moments during which a chatty crowd composed of
musicians, Grammy organizers, industry folk and journalists actually fell
silent.
And for Lanois's finale, he rode into the balmy night atop a motorcycle,
pausing to wave to a cluster of valets and party-goers who were lingering
around the driveway.
Lanois has won seven Grammys. He isn't directly nominated this year, but he
produced and co-wrote several tracks on U2's No Line on the Horizon,
which is up for three awards.
He says he thinks the Grammys are moving in the right direction.
“I think they're catching people on the rise rather than waiting for people to
get to the top,” he said.
“Because when we're on our way up, that's when we need the most help. So it's
nice when you can get someone complimenting you and encouraging you as you're
building your career.”
Meanwhile, Pierre Cossette wasn't far from the minds of many attending the
party. The Valleyfield, Que., native – considered by most to be the father of
the Grammy Awards – died in September.
A collage of photographs of Cossette stood next to the stage, along with a TV
screen looping a slide show of Cossette pictured with stars including Celine
Dion and Will Smith.
Cossette's wife, Mary, spoke in his honour.
“My very deepest gratitude and thanks for honouring my husband, Pierre
Cossette, who spent his life loving music and encouraging music of all kinds to
be written and recorded and produced and thereby making the world a happier
place,” she said.
“His greatest pride was his Canadian heritage.”
Neil Young: Musical Enigma
Has Many Faces
Source: www.thestar.com
- Ben Rayner
(January 30, 2010) Neil Young finally has his first Grammy Award, but it's not for his music.
Not overtly, anyway. Obviously, the man's storied singing and songwriting
career, now encroaching on its 50th year, has something to do with it. Still,
while Young will compete with his peers in a couple of Grammy categories – in
"best solo rock vocal performance" for the title track to last year's
Fork
In The Road album, and "best boxed or
special limited edition package" for his gargantuan Archives,
Vol. 1: 1963-1972 set – at the
awards ceremony in Los Angeles tomorrow night, the one trophy he'll have going
in is for a side of his life he keeps quiet about: his philanthropy.
Young was officially minted as the Recording Academy's "MusiCares Person
of the Year" Friday night at a gala dinner in L.A., an event that no doubt
had him squirming uncomfortably in his seat. Especially when such fellow
musicians as Elton John, John Mellencamp, k.d. lang, Sheryl Crow, the Red Hot
Chili Peppers, Wilco and his old pals Crosby, Stills and Nash got up and
started serenading him with his own songs.
He deserves the MusiCares honour, though. His quiet humanitarianism goes way
back. He's been a
crusader for environmental issues forever, and active with the
Cystic Fibrosis Foundation since his first son, Zeke, and then his second son,
Ben, a quadriplegic, were diagnosed with the disease. He's a frequent donor to
the Epilepsy Foundation, too, since both he and his daughter, Sarah, have the
illness. He co-founded Farm Aid with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp in 1985
to help save humble American family farms facing foreclosure, and still sits on
its board of directors. He's also one of the founders of the Bay Area's Bridge
School, an organization that assists and educates children with severe physical
and/or speech impairments, and stages a famed annual, all-star benefit concert
in support of the facility.
Young, of course, doesn't trumpet any of this. But the 64-year-old Toronto and
Winnipeg expat doesn't trumpet much of anything about himself. Neil Young, the
philanthropist, is just one of the many faces of a genuine rock `n' roll
enigma.
Those faces are why so many of us find Young such a compelling figure. So, as a
salute to Canada's most fondly regarded musical export, we present a few more:
ICONIC
FOLKIE
With his long hair, flannel shirts and acoustic guitar, the sensitive, socially
conscious Neil Young who drifted in and out of Buffalo Springfield and CSNY
during the late `60s and early `70s was the perfect poster child for hippie-era
folk.
His songs, however, really were folk music in another sense, notes author Bob Mersereau, whose 2007
book Top
100 Canadian Albums was "dominated"
by Young and topped by 1972's Harvest.
"His music is so understandable," says Mersereau. "You can
immediately start your own music life by playing Neil Young songs around the
campfire and everybody will love you for it. It's all Bs and As and Ds – it's
really easy to play Neil Young songs. "
Adds Nicholas Jennings, author of the Can-rock history Before
the Goldrush: "He launched a million
Neil wannabes. On every street corner in every major Canadian city in the early
`70s, there was a kid in a flannel shirt playing sad songs from Harvest
and After the Goldrush. I was one of them. He struck a chord with a generation then, but
the difference is he's continued to do that with successive generations."
Calgary rocker Chad VanGaalen, often compared to Young, sums up the appeal:
learning a Neil Young song is "a good way to learn rock 'n' roll
etiquette."
GUITAR
GOD
As we all know, Quiet Neil begat Loud Neil, the rancorous electric noisemaker
and Crazy Horse bandleader who answered punk with the seething Rust
Never Sleeps in 1979 and foreshadowed `90s
grunge with Freedom and Ragged Glory.
It's this Neil, he of the roaring feedback, 20-minute grind-downs and
brain-boggling one-note solos, who's enchanted thousands of other guitarists
with his intuitive, almost subconscious, playing style.
"Everything sounds broken down, like its going to fall apart any
second," says Mike Boyd of local roots `n' roll outfit the Hunting Horns.
"Nothing is ever precise, but it sounds perfect. That's exactly how I've
always wanted my playing to sound."
Indie guitarist Luke Doucet echoes the sentiment. "I spent thousands of
hours learning how to play `well.' I learned how to play slide in any key, how
to play 16th-note quadruplets at lightening speed, how to hear a slippery
country lick and immediately replicate it, how to play the pedal steel. I
learned to cop solos, verbatim and up to speed, by Mark Knopfler, Brian Setzer,
Mark Ribot, Chet Atkins and many others. All of these things so I could
communicate transparently and passionately through the guitar.
"Neil can do none of the above and yet his musicality and the flow of
expression, unobstructed and unaided, communicate so transparently and so
passionately as to defy reason. He has managed to clear all of the impediments
from his mind, like a master yogi. The man must meditate like Buddha."
TECHNOPHILE
Contrary to his homespun sound and image, Young has historically exhibited a
keen interest in new gadgets, technology and cool inventions in general.
He's been an early adopter of everything from eight-track recorders to modern
digital studio gear. He loves model trains enough to own part of the Lionel
company. The robotic Vocoder voices on Trans grew out of his experiments in electronic communication with his
paralyzed son. He helped develop an entire interactive, multimedia software
platform – dubbed the "Shakey Platform," after his filmmaking alias,
Bernard Shakey – so the Archives series would work the way he wanted, allowing his fans online
access to a vast, ever-expanding collection of photos, videos, audio interviews
and printed documents offered to complement the music as one listens to the box
sets. His environmentally themed Greendale tour in 2004 was powered entirely by biodiesel.
Lately, Young's inventing obsession has turned to creating the perfect,
zero-emissions vehicle – one that's still sized large enough to satisfy the
demand for, as he puts it, "a big, American car." To this end, he's
started the LincVolt project, which thus far has seen him and a team of
researchers convert his beloved 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible into a
hybrid vehicle that will, they hope, eventually require no fuel or oil at all.
CRANK
To love Neil Young is to occasionally be baffled, even angered, by Neil Young.
It's hard to think of a musician of his stature who has as consistently refused
to play to expectations. He followed up the smash success of Harvest
with three of his darkest records ever –
Time Fades Away, On the
Beach and Tonight's the Night – dubbed the "Ditch" trilogy because at the time Young
said he'd rather "drive for the ditch" than stay in the "middle
of the road" where Harvest had taken him. His random '80s experiments in rockabilly, country,
synth-pop, blues and other styles resulted in albums so unsuccessful that he
was sued by Geffen Records for not sounding like himself.
On the Greendale
tour, he and Crazy Horse played a bare minimum of hits while
members of Young's family and crew acted out a bizarre environmental pantomime
onstage. In 2006, disgusted that no younger musicians were publicly coming out
against the Iraq war, he rushed out a Bush-bashing screed called Living
With War highlighted by the tune "Let's Impeach the President."
Then he joined CSNY on the road for the Freedom of Speech tour, playing
virtually nothing but protest songs and sparking near-riots in some cities.
"It's an absolute refusal to bend," says Mersereau. "You cannot
move this man. He will do whatever he wants. He'll be politically charged when
he feels, he'll go against the flow when he feels. He's the ultimate rock 'n'
roll symbol for defiance and attitude, and for artistic pursuits."
ROLE
MODEL
Not surprisingly, Young's unwavering commitment to whatever whim he's feeling
in the here and now, and his willingness to sometimes screw up in public, has
made him a best-case scenario for artists looking to build musical careers of
their own in his wake. Jennings even goes so far as to call him a "moral
compass" for idealistic artists coming up behind him.
He's certainly the ideal model, agrees writer Jason Schneider, author of Whispering
Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music from Hank Snow to the Band.
"I think for Canadians especially, he's always embodied everything musicians
here want: the best of both worlds," says Schneider. "He conquered
America, more or less on his own terms, and was able to preserve his formative
years there through his ranch, his toy trains, and every other wild idea he's
ever had. I think that's basically what everyone wants, to be able to indulge
any creative impulse we get and have people admire us for it."
Exactly, says VanGaalen: "He's gone about his musical career in the way he
wanted to. For better or worse, he seems to have done it in his own way. He got
away with what he got away with, with very little compromise. Whether playing
with a band or working solo he always seems to have had a vision. There is no
compulsion to attach him to any particular label. He's always just been Neil
Young."
Lil Wayne's Crossover
Attempt: Gross And Hideous To The Senses
Source: www.globeandmail.com
- Brad Wheeler
Rebirth
Lil Wayne
Cash Money/Universal
(February 01, 2010) Strange happenings at Wayne Manor. The early reviews
for Lil Wayne's “rock
album” are in, and they are unanimously (and justifiably) damning. The
multi-platinum rapper's land grab into foreign territory has gone horribly
wrong, and not since Germany's belligerent rush into Poland has a crossover
attempt been so poorly received.
It's true the former Dwayne Michael Carter has made a loud, gross record: Rebirth
is hideous to the senses. The rap-metal of Lil Wayne's seventh album is a
turgid, riff-laden travesty – something like Limp Bizkit, but updated with the
annoyance of Auto-Tune abuse. Imagine Apple developing a new, unusable PC
platform, complete with Virus 3.0.
However, listening to the long-delayed album's first track, American Star,
you have to wonder what the prolific hip hopper is up to. Opening with
snarling, metallic guitar shreds – possibly played by Wayne himself, as the
cover art depicts the lounging dreadlocked one with an electric six-string on
his lap – our New Orleans-raised star paints an autobiographical picture of a
Deep South success story, about a “nigga with glory” who rose from “piss poor”
humbleness all the way up to his current high living.
Now, the “dope boy with a guitar” peddles bad, popular music back to the masses
like it's the worst possible crack cocaine. Prom Queen is sappy
high-school rock and Get a Life is snotty, bouncy pop punk. Is this just
poor imitation, or is it a sardonic comment on what silly white people like?
With its glaring keyboards and vocal sampling from the Scarface gangster
movie, On Fire revisits the worst styles of the 1980s. More than once,
the croaky, poor-singing Wayne adopts a British accent.
Drop the World, the album's lone elite track, features hubris-crazed
rap, an intense guest spot from Eminem and no Auto-Tune misuse. “I'm gonna pick
the world up and drop it on your fuckin' head,” vows the swaggering Wayne,
whose walls are closing in and whose rebirth involves leaving Earth while on
top.
Lil Wayne is supposed to enter prison soon on a weapons charge. Before he goes
away, the usually shrewd song-maker has dropped a dark, often ridiculous
bleep-you of an album on our heads. And I'm not sure I know the reason why.
Christopher ‘Deep’
Henderson: ‘Blame It’ On the Collabo
Source: www.eurweb.com
- by Kenya M. Yarbrough
(February 1, 2010) *Producer Christopher
“Deep” Henderson has something to smile about
today. The
songwriter’s collaboration with singer Jamie Foxx, “Blame It” took home the
Grammy for Best R&B by a duo or group last night during the 52nd Grammy
Awards.
The music man, who got his nickname “Deep” because his lyrics were so often
described that way, talked to EUR’s Lee Bailey about the track and his
willingness to create with a crew.
The track for “Blame It” was actually laid in 2007, just as Henderson made
Atlanta his home. The song itself was a bit of patchwork from an unknown
rapper, Henderson, and later rapper/producer T-Pain.
“There was a period for me where I wondered about the whole production thing,”
Henderson said thinking back at the beginnings of the track. “I’d actually
stopped doing tracks when I moved to Atlanta and just stuck to writing. I’d
almost got a track on Jamie Foxx’s album back then, “Unpredictable,” just for
writing, but the producers messed that up. That’s why I got back to producing.”
Henderson explained that as he made his way in Atlanta, he refrained from
revealing that he was also a producer, as well as a songwriter, so that he
didn’t appear as a threat to the production teams he was meeting with.
“I figured I was in a new area, so if I stick with the production flag now with
limited power, limited resources, limited new hits, then the ‘clickish’ nature
of that city wouldn’t allow me to gain a lot of resources and take advantage of
that city. I’d be new competition,” he said.
So, he let songwriting take the lead and along the way he learned what these
popular production teams were doing. He said that under that guise, most of ‘07
was creating a new sound.
“It was the first year that I didn’t have any placements,” he said referring to
actually selling a song, but he continued that he was able to take that time
off, and when he returned to the production scene, he came with one for rapper
Nelly, a hit with Jamie Foxx, and another one with Trey Songz.
“All of those were done in that period – ‘07. The songs are out now, but none
of these are ‘09-10 tracks. But the reason they can be so significant now is
that when I did them, I wasn’t following the radio. I was taking what the radio
was and adding my older school sensibilities of chord progressions,” Henderson
said.
“If you think about ‘Blame It,’ it’s one of those records that, now as it’s
imitated, sounds like it has the basic club beat, but the beauty of the track
is that in the middle of the club beat and those hard drums comes this change
that nobody saw,” he described. “And then the harmonies in the background are
me. It was really a lot of older school arranging behind a ‘clubish’ record
that went over well. Even though I did it in ‘07 it sounded new.”
In explaining his employment of his “older school” sensibilities, Henderson
referred to the playlist he’s created from downloads.
“I made a collection of my favourite songs and have them grouped into these playlists.
I could take a song like ‘Groove Line’ from Heatwave or ‘Living for the Love of
You’ by the Isley Brothers and figure out what I it is I loved about those
songs,” he said.
As it turns out, it was the chords changes of “Groove Line,” which the songwriter
said made him “feel good,” the lead keyboard of “Living for the Love of You,”
and the sliding keyboard of DeVante Swing/Jodeci are what inspired the hit song
“Blame It.”
“Something from the ’70s, something from the ’80s, something from the ’90s and
stuck it behind that snap cadence everybody seems to be digging, and that was
the track,” he said.
A completed track in 2007, Henderson said that he really believed in it and
really wanted the right song for it. He’d passed the beat to other songwriters
and attempted to lay down his own lyrics with it, too, but to no avail.
“Then one day I was collaborating with this kid that’s a rapper. He played some
of his stuff for me and he had this one song that was … well, was going to stay
in his basement,” Henderson said modestly. “But his hook said, ‘Blame it on the
Goose, gotcha feeling loose; blame it on the ‘Tron, gotcha in the zone, blame
it on the a-a-a-alcohol. It was a different cadence, it was different melody, a
different tempo and everything [from 'Blame It], but whenever someone plays
something for me I tell them what to work on rather than what is bad. I said,
‘That’s a hit hook.’”
Just a couple of weeks later, Henderson was in another writing session, looking
for words for the track, but he just didn’t like where it was
going.
“I said, ‘You guys should do something that it has a stutter with it like
a-a-a-a-a-ah.’ And then I said, ‘Wait! I know this song.’”
Henderson contacted the young rapper with the hit hook, had him take a listen
to the proposed collabo.
“He heard it; it met his approval,” Henderson said. “I said, ‘Hooks are worth
20% and you’re a co-writer on this song, but I said, ‘You don’t have to stop at
20, you can go ahead and write the rest of the song.’ He sat there frozen.”
As it turns out, Henderson sat with the young man attempting to squeeze out
more lyrics for the magical hook. He even tried to motivate him by coming up
with the first verses and even started laying down some harmonies, but the
rapper couldn’t really take it much further, so Henderson, wisely left the
second verse open and shopped the demo as is.
“Artists are very guarded. I (leave) the second verse open of a song for a Trey
Songz or an R. Kelly to want to finish the song. So it was actually a marketing
tactic,” Henderson said.
He also revealed that the auto-tune on (‘Blame It’) wasn’t necessarily a
choice. Because neither he nor the rapper were particularly good singers, they
used the vocal tool to stay in tune. The auto-tune sound was actually the reason
R. Kelly passed on the track before it came to Foxx who wanted to sound just
like the demo. Apparently another man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
T-Pain got on the remix session for the song and laid down his verse.
“When I heard T Pain’s voice, it almost made me want to go in and write another
voice. I almost wanted to outdo him then,” Henderson said. But now the song was
complete, packaged, and released.
The song topped the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart for 14 consecutive weeks
making it the second longest running number 1 song on that chart and
“Blame It” has sold over one million downloads, and helped send Foxx’s third
studio album, “Intuition,” into platinum status.
From the song, Henderson said that he’s become a very strategic, but unselfish
producer. After all, “Blame It” was a quite positive production of patchwork.
“I didn’t just do the record my way or the highway. It was such a big traveling
collaboration of a record. I learned that I do what’s good for the song,” he
said. “I’ve written songs that I haven’t done tracks to; I’ve done tracks to
songs I haven’t written; and I’ve written and produced songs in their entirety.
I don’t have anything to prove to myself as a songwriter. I just want a great
song. If you give me that magic word, you’ll be in the parentheses with me. I’m
not selfish about the parentheses.”
More on Chris “Deep” Henderson in Part 2. You can also get more info on
Christopher Henderson via his MySpace page.
This story waqs written by Kenya M. Yarbrough
How Gordon Lightfoot Wrote
'If You Could Read My Mind'
Source: www.thestar.com
- Victoria Ahearn
(February 02, 2010) An empty house, a broken marriage and a summer afternoon
served as the creative
spark for Gordon Lightfoot as he penned what would become one of his most iconic tunes.
The illustrious singer-songwriter says the words to "If You Could Read My
Mind," released 40 years ago, came to him in a couple of hours in a vacant
Toronto home that was up for sale at a time when he was experiencing marital
problems.
"I was of course going through some emotional trauma leading up to a
separation, so that of course manifested itself in that particular song on that
particular afternoon," Lightfoot, 71, said by phone from his Toronto home.
"I'll never forget the afternoon."
Lightfoot is recalling that day as he prepares to play a sold-out show at the
Toronto Centre for the Arts on Thursday, part of a concert series that's named
after the time-honoured track.
"If You Could Read My Mind," the series, is organized by the Canadian
Songwriters Hall of Fame, of which Lightfoot is a long-time member.
"I'm shy about accepting awards and honours, but I really appreciate the
fact that they're using my songs as a theme for their show," he said.
"I'm really happy about that."
The legendary troubadour from Orillia, Ont., will play in the series' inaugural
show, as will Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip (which has covered Lightfoot's
tunes), at the Toronto Centre of the Arts. Catherine MacLellan, daughter of the
late singer-songwriter Gene MacLellan, will also be featured.
Lightfoot and Downie will sit down with CBC Radio's Laurie Brown during the
show to chat about their songwriting methods.
The idea for the series' title "came from almost the continuation of that
lyric, `What a tale my thoughts could tell,'" said Dominic Denny,
executive director of the hall of fame.
"What we wanted to do was to conjure up the image of what is going on in a
songwriter's mind, what is it that they draw inspiration from, what are the
metaphors that they use, what are their experiences that drive these
songs?"
The story behind the making of "If You Could Read My Mind" – a song
that's been covered by the likes of Johnny Cash and Don McLean – was a typical
one for Lightfoot as he emerged from Toronto's Yorkville coffee-house folk
scene in the 1960s.
That empty home in the Forest Hill neighbourhood where he wrote the tune was
one of several that he'd scouted at the time so he could find lyrical
inspiration, he said.
"I would go in there with a chair and a table. I have a Quebec table here
that fits in the trunk of my car that I take with me – just the chair and the
table and the pad and the manuscript."
Lightfoot has said that his 2004 album Harmony will likely be his last.
Lightfoot suffered a ruptured artery in his stomach in 2002 and now has an
"inner abdominal binder" made up of muscle fibre from his leg.
He also wears a girdle-type device around his abdomen.
Nneka Is All Heart And No
Fluff On Stateside Debut Album
Source: By Melanie Sims, The Associated Press
Nneka, "Concrete Jungle"
(Decon/Epic)
Nigerian-born rapper and singer Nneka's U.S. debut, "Concrete Jungle" unfolds like a 12-track
wake-up
call - an unrelenting mishmash of horns, trumpets and, sometimes, steel drums.
"God is knocking at the door could you let him in?" the 28-year-old
asks on accordion-driven "Showin' Love." She summons "Jezebels,
Judases, bangers, bastards, prophets, men of God, prostitutes, popes, teachers,
lawyers, all you scholars, rulers, chosen few ..." to take a hard look at
what matters in life.
It's a challenge Nneka issues track after track. Even when her honeyed vocals
are poured over the swinging horns of "Uncomfortable Truth," Nneka's
message doesn't lose its bite. "Your system is a joke, no heart in it,
it's choking us to death," she sings.
She orders listeners to reflect on their addictions and worldly temptations on
the raucous, rock-inspired "Focus." And she seeks strength from a
higher power on "God of Mercy."
With a sure tone and steady intensity on the reggae-influenced
"Kangpe," Nneka gives a revolutionary tinge even to the old spiritual
axiom "God won't give you more than you can handle."
She delivers her messages unabashedly, perhaps, most strikingly on the
mellow-sounding "Africa." "Lied to us, blind us, they slaved us,
misplaced us, strengthened us, hardened us, then they replaced us. Now we got
to learn from pain. Now it's up to us to gain some recognition. If we stop
blaming we could get a better condition," she sings.
CHECK THIS TRACK OUT: Nneka's call for self-reflection is unrelenting, and
"Mind vs. Heart" is no exception to that mission. "What is the
mind without the heart? What am I without my shadow?" she asks over a
haunting beat.
The
Bloom Is Off This Rose
Source: www.globeandmail.com - Brad Wheeler
Guns
N' Roses
At the Air Canada Centre in Toronto on Thursday
(January 29, 2010) ‘Sorry about the
delay,” said Axl Rose, a late riser. Guns
N' Roses,
on the Toronto date of its Canadian tour, took the stage at 11:24 p.m. Salvos
of flames, starburst fountains and ear-bombing firecrackers accompanied Chinese
Democracy, a chugging, iron-riffed rocker with the line “all we've got is
precious time.” Later in the 180-minute, got-better-as-it-went-along concert, Rose
noted a local DJ had predicted that GNR would hit the stage sometime around 2
a.m. “So,” Rose rationalized, “I'm early.”
Welcome to Guns N' Roses, they've still got fun and games.
In 1988, Rose, singing affectingly about wanting to get it right, asked for
“just a little patience.” His fans gave it, and the volatile enigma has been
testing it ever since. The album Chinese Democracy, released late in
2008, was nearly a decade and a half in the making – whole empires rose and
fell, and mystifying cornrows appeared and disappeared on Rose's head in the
meantime.
At Air Canada Centre,
the 47-year-old front man was fiddle-fit and seemingly fine of mind. I have no
idea why he ran off stage during every 12-bar guitar solo, but he always did
come back. Rose had the Kid Rock/Mickey Rourke thing working for him,
especially with the handlebar moustache, shades and dark leather trilby.
Inconsistent would be the word to describe Rose's shrill scowling vocals. He
was weak of throat on Welcome to the Jungle and Live and Let Die,
and his band of B-actors – Rose is the sole remaining member of the original
Los Angeles crew – seemed to play to the level of their leader.
There were no riots, nor were there spaghetti incidents. Rose, who feuds with
iconic former guitarist Slash, was chatty: we learned that Led Zeppelin
guitarist Jimmy Page is a fan of Trailer Park Boys, and that Mike Smith,
the actor who plays Bubbles, regularly sends Rose texts.
Rose's voice improved as the show moved along. On the wistful November Rain,
the reclusive rock star sang “everybody needs some time all alone.” The band
picked up steam on the cowbell KISS knockoff Nightrain, and a four-song encoreended
with the satisfied crowd taken back to Paradise City.
The common complaint after the show was the surprising omission of one
graceful, sweeping beauty. At two o'clock in the morning, Axl Rose, a man never
in a hurry, had no time for Patience.
Guns N' Roses continues its tour in Ottawa tomorrow, Feb. 1 in Quebec City,
Feb. 3 in Moncton and Feb. 4 in Halifax.
'Simple Storyteller' Mounts
Verdi Jewel
Source: www.thestar.com
- John Terauds
(January 30, 2010) "Blingtastic," is how one critic
described the 15-month-old Welsh National Opera
production of Otello that makes its Canadian Opera Company debut on Feb. 3.
Its massive, colour-saturated, period-inspired sets and costumes are meant to
put the "grand" in Grand Opera.
But don't let the eye candy mislead you about director Paul Curran, who is anything
but grand.
"To actually take an opera like Otello and do it in period clothes is actually a brave step because my
attempt at this is to make it seem real, to make the characters seem
real," Curran says.
"I'm just a very simple storyteller. What I don't ever want to do is add
so many layers on top of the piece that you have to fight through six layers of
my crap until you get to what Shakespeare wrote."
The director mentions a German production that made him crazy. "It was
such a maze that I forgot the music and I forgot the text. That's not the experience
I go for. I think opera is visceral. I think opera is the whole thing. It's
about the experience."
In short, Curran has no use for anyone who tries to be clever.
"I don't need to prove my intellect to anybody," he says. "I
don't give a s--- what they think."
Curran's plain-spoken style is pure, working-class Glasgow, where he grew up in
social housing. He was 15 when he saw his first opera, Alban Berg's tragic Wozzeck. He went back several more times.
"Nobody told me it was a difficult opera," Curran says.
"Nobody mentioned that you're not going to like this, or you're going to
need to study this and this so that I would know what I should be looking for.
"If you like it, you like it; if you don't like it, you don't like
it."
Curran's parents kicked him out the next year, when they found out he was gay.
In a moment straight out of Billy Elliot, he landed on his feet as a dance student in London.
To help pay the bills, the aspiring dancer worked at English National Opera.
He was an usher during some of its most inspired days in the early 1980s, under
the influence of George Lascelles, the 7th Earl of Harewood.
"I saw every performance for four years, every night, including
rehearsals. It was the best apprenticeship I could ever have."
When the time came to consider his future after dance, Curran turned to
studying theatre in Australia. His classmates included Cate Blanchett and Toni
Collette.
"I was in a class with simply extraordinary people. We sort of knew we
were a little bit different at the time but now, 15 years later, we realize
that it was just outrageous."
After graduating, Baz "Moulin Rouge" Luhrmann hired Curran as his assistant director.
"It has been a very lucky, `right thing at the right time' journey,"
says Curran, who is in steady demand in both Europe and North America.
His most recent collaborations with the Canadian Opera Company have been Tosca, in 2008, and a powerful Lady
Macbeth of Mtsensk the season before.
Last year, he became artistic director of Norwegian Opera in Oslo.
Curran has seasoned international vocal and musical talents to work with in Otello.
The title role is being sung by British heroic tenor Clifton Forbis. Soprano
Tiziana Caruso is Desdemona. American baritone Scott Hendricks is the malevolent
Iago.
The conductor is Italian Verdi specialist Paolo Olmi – last here for the COC's
fall, 2007 production of Don Carlos.
This should make for a satisfying production of Giuseppe Verdi and librettist
Arrigo Boito's powerful, 1887 adaptation of William Shakespeare's great tragedy
of jealousy and vengeance.
It might even be "blingtastic."
Just the facts
WHAT: Otello,
by Giuseppe Verdi
WHEN: Feb.
3 to 28
WHERE: Four
Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Queen St. W. & University Ave.
TICKETS: $31-$292
@ 416-363-8231 or www.coc.ca.
A Miracle For Martha And The
Muffins
Source: www.globeandmail.com
- James Adams
(January 31, 2010) When it’s suggested to Mark Gane that “checkered” may be the best
word to describe
the career of Martha and the Muffins, the band he and long-time collaborator, now-wife Martha Johnson
formed more than 30 years ago, Gane shakes his head and laughs. “Well,” he
says, “that’s the polite way of putting it.”
Certainly the Toronto ensemble has had its ups and downs, side trips and
stalemates since a guitar-driven slice of sax-spiced, organ-flavoured Nuevo
Wuevo by Gane called Echo Beach lifted it to prominence in 1980.
Yet for all the caroming and careening − through media indifference and
their own ambivalence, bad management and no management, shady record deals and
no deals, genre shifts and personnel changes (in its early years there were two
Marthas, Johnson and Ladly, and as many as four or five Muffins, including
Gane’s brother Tim on drums) − Gane and Johnson have persisted. In their
consistently inconsistent way, they’ve created an estimable body of brainy
pop-craft that for all its stylistic tips o’ the hat (to Talking Heads, Roxy
Music, Chic, David Bowie and the Beatles) remains distinctively Muffins-esque.
Tomorrow, the duo releases its eighth album, a 12-track, self-produced effort
called Delicate − the first full-length, all-originals Martha and
the Muffins disc in 18 years.
That Delicate exists at all is something of a miracle. The group’s
penultimate recording, Modern Lullaby, while artistically satisfying,
was a commercial disaster that resulted in a crisis of confidence and a failure
of nerve. Of course, the Martha and the Muffins saga has been about flirting
with failure and playing improbable odds virtually from the get-go.
As Gane observed recently in the comfortable three-storey semi-detached
home/recording studio/ rehearsal space he shares with Johnson and daughter Eve,
17, “nobody in 1978 or ’79 thought it was going to last. It was all supposed to
be over in a couple of years ─ if that.”
Even the name, a riposte to the in-your-face monikers favoured by punk and New
Wave acts of the era (remember Nazi Dog and the Viletones?), was deemed a
place-holder until someone dreamed up something better.
Gane (pale, wispy, short) and Johnson (bigger, solid, responsible-looking) are
fiftysomethings now. Back then they were twentysomething “musical primitivists
with interesting ideas,” she a medical receptionist, he a painting student at
the Ontario College of Art, both on the prowl on Queen Street West.
As for Echo Beach, “well, it was the third song I’d ever written in my
life,” Gane noted with another laugh, “and the chorus only happens at the end.
How weird is that?”
Weirdly wonderful, it seems, since its three-minute, 32-second evocation of the
dreams and wishes of a bored office clerk/“romantic fool” wowed and wooed
listeners everywhere. Or as everywhere as you can get without including the
United States.
Gane and Johnson have written more and, frankly, better songs since. In 1984, Black
Stations/White Stations took M + M (as they renamed themselves, briefly and
to much confusion) to No. 2 on Billboard’s dance chart.
But 29 years after winning single-of-the-year honours at the Junos, it’s Echo
Beach that continues to (yes) echo across the universe ─ in cover versions, samples
and eighties hits compilations. Five years ago, CBC Radio ranked it the 35th
greatest song in Canadian pop history, just behind Hank Snow’s I’m Movin’ On
and ahead of Safety Dance by Men without Hats. Two years ago, it was the
name of a soap opera on Britain’s ITV, complete with a re-recorded version of
the song as title theme. There’s even an iris called Echo Beach. And an Irish
racehorse.
As the song’s 30th anniversary looms, Gane and Johnson are planning a
commemoration, its form as yet undetermined. A new interpretation? A
limited-edition something-or-other? A quirky documentary? More immediately
pressing, though, is the release of Delicate and two live Toronto dates ─ their first in five years ─ in support of the CD, which
has been in the works, on and off, since 2005. At least one of its songs, Even
in the Rain, can trace its origin to the mid-1980s
“A lot of stuff made it a very difficult album to make in some respects,” Gane
noted, including the death of his mother and the loss of a close family friend.
“Also, there were some health issues that we can’t really talk about right
now.” Yet through it all, “the music kept the project going.”
The omens seem good. They now have a manager (Graham Stairs of Popguru Sound
and Vision) and a publicist (Vancouver’s Killbeat Music) whom they like, and
they’re slowly but steadily releasing their back catalogue, to much acclaim.
The booklet for the new CD includes the admonitions “Stop Remembering” and
“Start Forgetting” which, for Johnson, represent a call to both the band and
listeners to “turn another page. ... Judge us on what we’re doing now, not on
what we did or didn’t do before.”
Gane admitted “there does seem to be momentum building.” But he’s careful not
to set his hopes too high. “Either it’ll go or it won’t.” Besides, as Johnson
remarked, “it’s always been about creativity and songwriting, not fame or
adulation.” Whatever happens, Gane observed with a chuckle, “we’re gonna rock
till we die."
Martha and the Muffins play Toronto’s Music Gallery, 197 John St., Feb. 5
and 6 at 8 p.m.
MUSIC TIDBITS
Prosecutors To Charge Jackson Doctor:
Report
Source: www.globeandmail.com
- Linda Deutsch and Thomas Watkins, The Associated Press
(February 02, 2010) Los Angeles —A law enforcement official says prosecutors
plan to charge Michael
Jackson's doctor with manslaughter rather than take the case to a grand jury.
The official told The Associated Press on Tuesday that prosecutors will file a
criminal complaint against Dr. Conrad Murray in court rather than go through a secret grand jury. The person is not
authorized to speak publicly about the case and only spoke on condition of
anonymity. The complaint would be the prelude to a public hearing in which a
judge would weigh testimony from witnesses to decide if there is probable cause
to try him on an involuntary manslaughter charge. Jackson died June 25 from an
anesthetic overdose. Murray maintains nothing he gave Jackson should have
killed him.
Shaggy Taps Sean Paul, Others for Song to Benefit Haiti
Source: www.eurweb.com
(January 2, 2010) *Reggae rapper Shaggy
and a group of Caribbean artists havet recorded a single to raise money for
earthquake survivors in Haiti. Titled “Rise Again,” the tune features Sean
Paul, Haitian musician Belo and soca singers Alison Hinds of Barbados and
Destra Garcia from Trinidad and Tobago. (Listen
below.) Shaggy said Tuesday the song, which he also penned, lets
Haitians know that “we are here for them.” It is part of a relief fund established
by mobile phone company Digicel. The 7.0-magnitude quake on Jan. 12 killed an
estimated 200,000 people in the island nation.
Gay Groups Target Grammys Over Buju Banton Nomination
Source: www.eurweb.com
(January 29, 2010) *Gay activist groups, upset over a Grammy nomination for
jailed Jamaican reggae artist Buju
Banton, are protesting the ceremony for
its recognition of an artist they said had “promoted the murder of gay people throughout
his career.” Banton, 36, is up for a best reggae album award for his “Rasta Got
Soul” CD. He’s currently sitting in a Florida jail awaiting trial on a cocaine
charge and will not be attending the awards show on Sunday. The Gay and Lesbian
Alliance Against Defamation and the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center took out
a full page ad in Hollywood show business paper Daily Variety, urging Grammy
organizers to use Sunday’s televised ceremony to denounce music “that promotes
or celebrates violence against any group of people.” Friday’s ad, in the form
of a letter signed by more than 20 gay, civil rights and anti-violence groups,
said that honouring “an artist such as Buju Banton, honours his extraordinary
hateful work.” The lyrics of Banton’s most controversial song “Boom, Bye Bye”
in 1988, call for the murder of gay men by shooting or burning. [Listen below.]
Banton was quoted late last year as saying he saw “no end to the war” between
himself and gay men. The Recording Academy has said that the Grammy Awards
honour musical achievement “regardless of politics” and that artists from many
different political and cultural perspectives have been nominated over the
years.
Erykah Badu Teases Video for ‘Amerykah
II’
Source: www.eurweb.com
(January 29, 2010) *Erykah Badu is releasing a promo video for the March 30 release of “New Amerykah,
Part II: Return of the Ankh,” her new album featuring production from 9th
Wonder, James Poyser, J Dilla and Madlib, among others. “At 3:33 pm Tomorrow .
Friday . The official leak … erykahbadu.com,” read a Twitter post from Badu
sent Thursday. Although Badu is based in Atlanta, the tweet wasn’t clear on the
time zone. According to Billboard, the teaser on her official Web site
will feature clips of the video for the album’s bonus track, “Jump In The Air,”
featuring Lil Wayne and Bilal. Last month, Badu announced that Universal Motown
pushed the release date of “New Amerykah” to March 20 from Feb. 23.
Milli Vanilli Biopic In The Works
Source: www.eurweb.com
(February 2, 2010) *A planned biopic on disgraced pop group Milli Vanilli is moving forward with full
blessings and assistance from surviving group member Fabrice “Fab” Morvan.
However – the lip-syncher, who, along with late group member Rob Pilatus,
fronted the Germany-based dance-pop outfit – is still bitter about the whole
Grammy debacle. In 1990, the group won a best new artist award for their album
“Girl You Know It’s True,” which went six-times platinum and spawned three No.
1 hits: “Baby Don’t Forget My Number,” “I’m Gonna Miss You” and “Blame It on
the Rain.” But soon after winning the Grammy, Morvan and Pilatus were spotted
lip-synching in concert. Producer Frank Farian later revealed that the album’s
lead vocals, credited to the duo, were those of other singers. The resulting
firestorm led the Recording Academy to revoke the award and Davis to delete the
master recordings from Arista’s catalogue. Their Grammy for best new artist was
promptly revoked — the only take-back in Recording Academy history. In an
article in USA Today, Morvan called the whole scandal a misunderstanding. “We
wanted to give the Grammy back,” he said. “We felt in our hearts that it would
be a good gesture to do that. But they made it look as though (the academy)
wanted it back. They could have come to my house and gotten it.” Read the full
USA Today article here.
Ugandan Artist Shot after Opening for R.
Kelly
Source: www.eurweb.com
(February 3, 2010) *A Ugandan reggae artist who was shot in the legs by local
police following an R. Kelly concert has decided to take legal action,
reports Uganda’s Daily Monitor. Bebe Cool, whose real name is Moses Ssali, was one of the opening acts at Kelly’s
“I Believe” concert held last Friday (Jan. 29) at the Lugogo Cricket Oval in
the country’s capital of Kampala. According to reports from eyewitnesses,
police entered the parking lot of a 24-hour shopping mall where an unidentified
couple was found having sex in a car. Witnesses say that a scuffle broke out
between police and individuals in the parking lot, which left Bebe Cool with
gunshot wounds in his thighs. Bebe remained in critical condition over the
weekend and the singer said he plans to press charges against police officials.
“Of course I’m taking legal action,” he told the newspaper. “I’ve already
talked to my lawyers and they are processing necessary documents to see to it
that the Uganda police are held responsible.” Below, Bebe Cool performs with 9Ice
at the Nelson Mandela’s 46664 Concert in South Africa.
:FILM NEWS::
After Lengthy Career, Plummer Finally Gets Oscar Nod
Source: www.globeandmail.com
- Gayle MacDonald
(February 3, 2010) After an exhaustive film
career spanning more than 100 movies over 55 years, the
veteran Canadian actor Christopher Plummer was
in bed, just waking up in his Florida vacation home, when he learned he had
been honoured with his first Academy Award nomination, for best supporting
actor.
“I guess the Academy figures they'd better do it now, before he croaks,” Mr.
Plummer joked in an interview Tuesday from Palm Springs. He was nominated for
his role as Russian writer Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station.
The stalwart of film and stage, who was born in Toronto and grew up in Quebec,
does not expect to take home the award next month. But the idea of leaving
Hollywood's Kodak Theatre empty-handed doesn't faze him.
“I don't think I'm going to win, and it doesn't matter,” Mr. Plummer said. “To
me, the honour is just being nominated.”
“I was in my bed, just getting up, when I found out the news,” said Mr.
Plummer, who is getting over a nasty head cold. “I am very pleased indeed.
Pleased for both Helen [Mirren, nominated for best leading actress] and myself.
After all, every little bit helps the movie.”
He added that he usually “avoid awards ceremonies like the plague. Unless
you're really nominated, I don't see the point in hanging around at them.”
But the Emmy- and Tony-winning actor will be there, among a number of Canadians
who are in Oscar contention at the 82nd gala on March 7. Others include
Kapuskasing, Ont.-born director James Cameron(whose Avatar
has nine nominations), Jason Reitman (his Up in the Air has six),
Vancouver couple Neil Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell (in the running for best
adapted screenplay for the science-fiction film District 9), Toronto set
decorator Gordon Sim (part of a team up for best art direction for Nine),
and Vancouver costume designer Monique Prudhomme (nominated for The
Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus).
Mr. Rietman, who co-wrote and directed Up in the Air, told QMI Agency
Tuesday that he is thrilled with his film's six Oscar nominations, but is most
happy because his father, producer Ivan Reitman, as co-producer of the movie,
shares in the best picture nomination, the first Academy Award nod of his
42-year career.
"Look, what makes this super special is my dad, sharing this with him,”
the 32-year-old Montreal native said.
Mr. Plummer, who is perhaps best known as Baron Von Trapp in The Sound of
Music, said he was approached to play the part of Tolstoy two years ago. He
jumped at it “because it's [a subject] that's hardly ever been done, certainly
never done as a feature film. ... I love playing rich and extraordinary
characters.
“And the fact that Helen was part of it made it more enticing. We had such fun.
It's so easy when you work with really talented people because they make it
look so easy,” said Mr. Plummer, whose other notable films include Murder by
Decree, The Silent Partner, The Insider and A Beautiful
Mind.
He is up against Matt Damon in Invictus, Woody Harrelson in The
Messenger, Stanley Tucci in The Lovely Bones, and Christopher Waltz
in Inglorious Basterds.
Mr. Plummer, who will return to Stratford, Ont., this summer to play Prospero
in The Tempest , added that he has no intention of resting on his
laurels.
“In fact, I'm busier than I've been in years,” said the great-grandson of
former Canadian prime minister Sir John Abbott.
In Vancouver, Ms. Tatchell drank to her best adapted screenplay nomination and
the other nods for District 9 – best picture, visual effects and film
editing – sipping a little Baileys Irish Cream with her coffee.
“I'm pretty much bouncing off the walls and the ceiling and everything else
today,” she said from her home near English Bay.
Other Canadians nominated included Dan Kaufman and Peter Muyzers, Bob Habros
share a nomination for best visual effects for District 9.
With a report from Marsha Lederman
Canadian Actress Picks Up Prize For 'Breakout Performance' At
Sundance Festival
Source: www.thestar.com
- Peter Howell
(January 31, 2010) Canada's newest movie star, Tatiana Maslany, is
amongst the cavalcade of prizewinners at the close of the 26th Sundance Film
Festival in Park City, Utah.
The Regina-born actress, 24, won a special jury prize for Breakout Performance
in World Cinema as a sexually rebellious 14-year-old in Adriana Maggs' Grown Up Movie Star,
which premiered at Robert Redford's 10-day fest. The awards were announced
Saturday night.
It was the first major onscreen role for Maslany, hailed as a major talent by
festival director John Cooper and industry journal Variety. She's best known to
Canadians from her cowgirl character Kit Bailey on CBC-TV's Heartland.
Other highlights of the Sundance awards included:
• Grand Jury Prize, U.S. Documentary: Restrepo,
an Afghanistan war drama directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington.
• Grand Jury Prize, U.S. Dramatic: Winter's
Bone, a coming-of-age drama directed by Debra Granik.
• World Cinema Jury Prize, Documentary: The
Red Chapel, a comic tour of North Korea by Danish mischief makers.
• World Cinema Jury Prize, Dramatic: Animal
Kingdom, a drama of the Melbourne underworld.
• Audience Award, U.S. Documentary: Waiting
for Superman, an investigation of the U.S. educational crisis.
• Audience Award, U.S. Dramatic: happythankyoumoreplease,
an ensemble New York relationship comedy.
• World Cinema Audience Award, Dramatic: Contracorriente
(Undertow), a ghost story set on the Peruvian seaside.
• World Cinema Audience Award, Documentary: Wasteland,
about artistic garbage pickers in Rio.
The complete list can be seen at www.sundance.org/festival.
Canadians did very well at the rival Slamdance Film Festival, which ran concurrently
with Sundance on the other side of Park City.
Snow and
Ashes by Quebec's Charles-Olivier Michaud, a mystery about a war
correspondence who awakens from a coma in Eastern Europe, took the prize for
Best Narrative Film.
Canadian Screen Rebel Creates Buzz At Sundance
Source: www.thestar.com - Linda Barnard
(January 29, 2010) Entertainment industry
paper Variety dubbed her a "major talent" and
Sundance director John Cooper has said she reminds him of another young
Canadian who found stardom at the Park City fest – Ellen Page.
To this, Regina-born Tatiana Maslany responds: "It's insane. I don't believe it, really."
The 24-year-old has her first major onscreen role in Newfoundland native
Adriana Maggs' often-disturbing Grown Up Movie Star. She plays 14-year-old Ruby, a wisecracking
small-town girl from The Rock eager to explore the power of her sexuality in
the midst of a family crisis. (The review is on page E3.)
The movie is screening in competition at the Sundance fest and thanks to her
performance, Maslany is garnering plenty of praise for the role she calls
"a gift."
She spoke to the Star on her cellphone as she trudged up Park City's
Main St. with the rest of the cast after a day of meeting with American press,
the falling snow adding to the "surreal" atmosphere for the young
actress best known to Canadians as cowgirl barrel racer Kit Bailey on Heartland.
Nobody could be farther from that character than the rebellious Ruby. Nor could
she be farther from who Maslany was at that age.
"I was super-nerdy and dressed like a boy and my brother and I would spend
summers making films in our backyard," Maslany laughed. "I had
friends who were like Ruby, but I was intimidated by them. Kissing boys was so
scary."
Ruby isn't scared of anything related to boys in Grown Up Movie Star –
or so she thinks. And Maslany is completely convincing as a girl 10 years her
junior. Did she know she could pull it off?
"I've played younger than myself since I started acting, but this age
difference was huge," she said.
But this was different. Ruby was younger in years, but far older in spirit and
Maslany had to find a way to portray both aspects of this wild child – while
looking the part.
"I auditioned her, and it was like, `Oh, she can act young.' And she just
got younger and younger looking," writer/director Maggs told the Star last
week.
"She's such a talented actress that she played the part in a way a younger
girl may not have been able to do. She took that character over. I just backed
off and let her do whatever she wanted to do."
Maslany insists otherwise, that Ruby was there waiting for her.
"Honestly the script is there, there's no denying the character. She's
right there on the page," she said
She played on Ruby's "brashness and a boldness," to get inside the
girl, Maslany added.
"She's incredibly intelligent and she lives in action, observing and
manipulating. Myself, growing up, I rebelled in some ways but nothing like
Ruby. She was so unbelievably daunting."
Unlike the impetuous Ruby, Maslany is laying some groundwork for her career.
"These are the kinds of films I love to watch. This is the kind of film I
want to make – character stories that are so intimidate and small and
personal," she explained.
Maslany said some audition opportunities have come out of Sundance – she
doesn't want to say more. And she is about to head to L.A. on a previously
planned trip to test the waters there and see what develops.
"This film has changed things for me and what I want to do with my
career," she said.
Cameron And Ex-Wife Bigelow In Best Picture Oscar Duel
Source: www.thestar.com
- Peter Howell
(February 02, 2010) Avatar and The Hurt Locker lead nominations for the 82nd Academy Awards with
nine nods apiece, setting up an epic battle of the multiplex vs. the arthouse
at the March 7 Oscars.
James Cameron's sci-fi adventure Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow's bomb-squad drama
The Hurt Locker both received Best Picture nominations amongst the kudos
announced Tuesday morning from Los Angeles.
The other eight Best Picture nominees, among an expanded field of 10, are A
Serious Man, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, Inglourious Basterds,
Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire, Up and Up in the Air.
If Oscar history is any indication, The Hurt Locker has the advantage, with
nods in the acting and screenplay categories that often point to glory.
Avatar's record-breaking $2 billion global box office, however, indicates much
broader appeal than does The Hurt Locker's impoverished $16 million take.
There are no real surprises in the Best Picture list — apart from the apparent
snub for Clint Eastwood's respected but coolly received Invictus — but the
expansion from five to 10 nominees for the first time since 1943 definitely
invited more mainstream contenders than usual.
It's the first time since 1997, when Cameron's Titanic led the awards with 14
nominations that two Canadians have squared off for Best Director: Ontario-born
Cameron and Quebec-born Jason Reitman. (The other Canadian in the running in
1997 was Atom Egoyan for The Sweet Hereafter.) But the more interesting contest
in that category is marital: Cameron vs. ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, who is
expected to become the first woman to win helming honours at the Oscars.
Adding to the strong Canadian contingent is writer/director Neil Blomkamp; the
South African-born Vancouverite earned an adapted screenplay nod for District
9, which is also up for Best Picture.
And the Canadian nominations weren’t limited to acting, directing and writing.
Toronto set decorator Gordon Sim is part of a team up for Best Art Direction
for Nine.
In the acting races, Maggie Gyllenhaal was a surprise Best Supporting Actress
nomination for Crazy Heart. As expected, Sandra Bullock was nominated for The
Blind Side. And the entire leading cast of Up in the Air — George Clooney, Vera
Farmiga and Anna Kendrick were also nominated.
Jeff Bridges garnered his fifth Oscar nod — he has yet to win — this time for
playing a broken-down country singer in Crazy Heart.
Otherwise, there were no real shockers amongst the other leading categories:
BEST DIRECTING:
Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker).
James Cameron (Avatar).
Lee Daniels (Precious).
Jason Reitman (Up in the Air).
Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds).
BEST ACTOR:
Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart).
George Clooney (Up in the Air).
Colin Firth (Single Man).
Morgan Freeman (Invictus).
Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker).
BEST ACTRESS:
Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side).
Helen Mirren (The Last Station).
Carey Mulligan (An Education).
Gabourey Sidibe (Precious).
Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia).
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Matt Damon (Invictus).
Christopher Plummer (The Last Station).
Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones).
Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Penélope Cruz (Nine).
Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air).
Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart).
Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air).
Mo'Nique (Precious).
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:
The Hurt Locker (Mark Boal).
Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino).
The Messenger (Oren Moverman, Alessandro Camon).
A Serious Man (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen).
Up (Bob Peterson, Pete Docter).
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:
District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell).
An Education (Nick Hornby).
In the Loop (Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche).
Precious (Geoffrey Fletcher).
Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner).
With files from Linda Barnard
The Hangover Could Join
Oscar Party
Source: www.thestar.com
- Peter Howell
(February 01, 2010) Oscar will be making friends and on his way to
making history when nominations for the
82nd annual Academy Awards are announced Tuesday morning.
For the first time since 1943, when Casablanca took the top prize, there
will be 10 nods for Best Picture instead of the usual five.
The little golden guy will have a far greater reach, embracing film genres
historically snubbed by the academy because they haven't been deemed
sufficiently arty or weighty. Expect Oscar love for the animated Up, the
feel-good The Blind Side and quite possibly the ribald The Hangover.
There should be a payoff in eyeballs for the March 7 Academy Awards telecast,
which is likely to attract more viewers than in recent years.
But these Oscars will be about far more than numbers. For the first time, a
woman is the odds-on favourite to win for Best Director. Kathryn Bigelow,
helmer of The Hurt Locker, is certain to get a nod, making her only the
fourth woman in academy history to receive a Best Director nomination.
She's now also most likely to win, having taken the Directors Guild of America
trophy over the weekend. Bigelow was the first woman in the guild's 62-year
history to win its top honours, beating her ex-husband James Cameron (Avatar)
in the process. Watch for a repeat at the Oscars, since the guild and Best
Director winners rarely differ.
The guild victor also historically points to Oscar's Best Picture winner, which
would make bomb-squad drama The Hurt Locker the logical box to tick on
your office pool ballot. But the Directors Guild has been less of an influence
lately on the nearly 6,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences, and sci-fi spectacle Avatar is just too big to overlook.
In the past week, Avatar surged past Cameron's Titanic (the 1997 Best
Picture champ) to become the most successful movie in history, and it will be
well past the $2 billion mark in global box-office receipts come Oscar night.
The academy loves a winner and loves making history, and thus will likely give Avatar
Best Picture while bestowing Best Director on Bigelow.
Oscar is also a sucker for sentiment, which is why you'll see nominations – and
likely eventual wins –for Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart and Sandra Bullock
in The Blind Side, both beneficiaries of a late surge in support.
Respected by their brethren and beloved by the public, there's a general
feeling that the gold rush is long overdue for these journeymen actors. This is
bad news for early favourites George Clooney (Up in the Air) and Meryl
Streep (Julie & Julia), but Clooney and Streep have won before, and
they'll at least have the honour of nominations.
Based on the above, plus a few other variables, here are my fearless
predictions for Oscar nominations scheduled to be announced Tuesday at 8:30 a.m.,
Toronto time. They are listed in order of likelihood of winning:
How 10 Best-Picture Nominees Change Everything
Source: www.globeandmail.com
- Rick Groen
(February 02, 2010) C’mon, The Blind Side – a compendium of gooey
clichés posing as a movie – is
actually in the running for the top cinematic achievement of the entire annum?
Of course, that was the populist intention when Oscar decided to stretch its
short list to novella length – not just five but 10 best pictures to choose
from. The charitably (okay, commercially) minded will proudly insist that such
expansion widens the talent pool. The less sanguine will fret that the pool is
in danger of being diluted, and the downright cantankerous, the slot occupied
by many card-carrying critics, will liken the whole thing to watering down
near-beer.
Turns out they’re all right.
To understand why, let’s ponder the list and do some quick culling. Judging
from the trophies handed out at previous, non-Oscar schmoozefests,
it’s easy to zero in on the core quintet of nominees, the flicks that would
have been included had the short list remained short. And they are: Avatar,
The Hurt Locker, Up in the Air, Precious and Inglourious Basterds.
Nor is it any coincidence that the directors of these entries – respectively, James Cameron, Kathryn
Bigelow, Jason Reitman, Lee Daniels and Quentin Tarantino – all earned
themselves nods in the best helmsman (and helmswoman) category.
Now you can have a healthy debate about the relative worth of this fivesome –
all have merits, all have flaws – and, such as it is, that’s the traditional
fun to be had in every Oscar ritual. In this case, the obvious David-and-Goliath
contest pits Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, an accomplished independent
taking us on a white-knuckle tour of Iraq, against Cameron’s Avatar, a
techno-rich blockbuster already amassing gazillions at the turnstiles. Even
better, the fracas enjoys some extra-curricular frisson from our knowing that
Ms. David and Mr. Goliath were once wedded in unholy matrimony.
Of the remaining five, the widening-the-pool crowd can look with justifiable
enthusiasm at an exemplary trio. Up might otherwise have languished in
the animated ghetto, and eminently deserves its promotion, further proof of our
topsy-turvy era, where adult films are awfully childish while kids flicks are
acting all grown-up. And both A Serious Man, a seriously black comedy
from the Coen brothers, and An Education, a nuanced coming-of-age tale
from a Nick Hornby script, deserve recognition in this or any year.
Much iffier is District 9. The dilution-theorists will point to it, a
merely entertaining aliens pic with allegorical pretensions, as a primary
exhibit in their decline-and-fall scenario. The box-office zealots will
maintain that there’s a measure of intelligence in this yarn, sufficient that
the film has earned the right to wear its “Oscar-nominated” label through the rest
of its pecuniary life. That’s at least arguable.
What isn’t is the inclusion of The Blind Side, one of those supremely
false true stories wherein a white Southern woman adopts a big homeless black
kid and soon transforms his refrigerator bulk into a football prodigy. Here,
the defence is only and purely commercial: This thing has made money and a
popular movie is by definition a good movie. How can it not be, when lots of
people want to see it, when it so obviously fuses the show and the business to
satisfy criteria as important as anything simply aesthetic?
To be sure, if the “best” in Best Picture is to retain any artistic meaning, The
Blind Side has no place in this parade. But, in truth, the dichotomy it
underlines, between art and commerce, is itself too easy and somewhat false.
For example, to return to David and Goliath, there’s a definite dose of art in Avatar
(Cameron is a knowledgeable thief of resonant archetypes) and there’s a strong
injection of commerce in The Hurt Locker (Bigelow repeatedly and
shrewdly mines the old ticking-time-bomb plot for ready suspense). Even,
especially, in great pictures, these lines are judiciously blurred, and,
despite the complaints from the cantankerous, maybe Oscar’s expanded list
allows us to better appreciate that long-standing tension.
Finally, a parting word about the cultural implications of these 10 selections,
what they say about how we live now. On the surface, war is a recurring trope (Avatar,
The Hurt Locker, Inglorious Basterds, District 9), as are the Obamaesque
themes of hope and inspiration (Precious, Up, The Blind Side).
Interestingly, though, by far the darkest messages are embedded in the
ostensible comedies. A Serious Man is near-nihilistic in its ending and Up
in the Air is a rom-com whose failed hero is left to continue his
successful executions – axing workers from their once-gainful employment.
Ironic, isn’t it? For escapism, go to the war zones – to Cameron’s bellicose
future, to District 9’s apartheid Africa, to Tarantino’s bombastic take
on the Nazis. But for relevance, for a real downer, travel the comic high road
and find tragedy in the laughs.
Edge Of Darkness: Mel Gibson Returns
With Edgy Role
Source: www.thestar.com - Bruce DeMara
Edge of Darkness
Starring Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone and Shawn
Roberts. Directed by Martin Campbell. 126 minutes.
At major theatres. R
(January 29, 2010) It's been eight years since we've seen Mel Gibson in front of the
camera in a major starring role instead of behind of it as director/producer.
In the interim, Gibson's public image has taken a seismic battering over
drunken anti-Semitic slurs and the very public desertion of his long-time
spouse for a much younger woman.
So, whether he likes it or not, Gibson comes into his latest film, Edge of Darkness, with a lot of baggage and facing the real
prospect of antipathy from once-adoring fans and jaded film critics.
The vehicle in which Gibson has chosen to return to acting has the kind of
tired, formulaic premise – a rogue father bent on revenge – which only adds to
the high-risk gambit for a major box office name whose star has been so badly
tarnished by personal missteps and misdeeds.
But Edge of Darkness has a couple of things going for it that contribute
towards Gibson's redemption, at least on the silver screen.
First, Gibson demonstrates once again that he really can act, as he
demonstrates in his portrayal of Thomas Craven, a veteran cop and widower with
little left to lose following his only daughter's brutal murder.
No longer quite so movie star handsome, Gibson's deeply lined features and
thinning mane complement a performance that is finely tuned and textured –
mournful, cunning, determined and explosive with rage.
The second factor is the script itself, a darkly taut and intricate political
thriller by screenwriter William Monahan.
Revised from a six-part BBC miniseries of the same title of more than 20 years
past, Monahan has thoroughly modernized the story, setting it in post-911
America, where the shadowy world of high-level intrigue and betrayal he creates
evokes such an air of plausibility, it's sure to unleash a deep sense of unease
and paranoia.
Martin Campbell, who directed the original BBC miniseries, draws solid and
intense performances throughout from the supporting cast. The versatile British
actor Ray Winstone is particularly fine as a veteran spook and fixer brought in
to help orchestrate a massive cover-up, a worldly, literate man whose lifetime
of moral ambiguity is put to a final test.
Despite its nearly two-hour running time, Edge of Darkness never feels
padded or drawn out, thanks to Campbell's breakneck pace, a surfeit of nasty
villains and a plot filled with plenty of unforeseen twists and turns.
With minimal sentimentality, it's a dark, harrowing and satisfying journey.
Interview: Shawn Roberts
Source: www.thestar.com
- Jason Anderson
(January 29, 2010) For some impressionable youngsters, early
exposure to the Lethal Weapon movies
instilled an unfortunate appreciation for the mullet hairstyle. But for Shawn Roberts, there were other
reasons to admire Mel Gibson.
"He was one of my childhood idols growing up," says the 25-year-old
Canadian actor, who plays opposite Gibson in Edge of Darkness. "I
learned how to fight watching him – `Ah ... that's how you throw a punch!' It's
hard to say exactly how much of an effect guys like Mel had on my development
as an actor or a person, but of course you sit there, watching action movies
with your dad, thinking, `That's crazy!' So to be part of it now is
incredible."
In the new thriller, Gibson plays a homicide cop who learns his daughter's
seemingly accidental death may be the result of a sinister conspiracy. Since Edge
of Darkness features Gibson's first leading role in eight years, it's a big
movie for the star. It's also a big one for Roberts, whose performance as the
daughter's boyfriend follows more than a decade of film and TV parts on both
sides of the border.
Roberts began acting while growing up in Stratford, Ont., where he was born in
1985. He got noticed in a school play by a friend's dad, a TV writer who
wondered if the young thespian was interested in trying out for a new series.
"I was 12 years old," says Roberts, "so auditioning for a TV
show was something I didn't even think really happened. The next thing you
know, I ended up booking the gig and I did four seasons on Emily of New Moon.
I got to learn on the job and kept going from there."
Stints on Canadian shows like Goosebumps, Degrassi: The Next
Generation and Falcon Beach followed. But it was horror fans who
first embraced Roberts due to his intense performance in 2007's Diary of the
Dead, a movie that gave him the chance to work with another childhood hero,
zombie king George A. Romero. (He also had a brief appearance in Romero's Land
of the Dead.)
Playing a bullying jock in last year's teen-movie flop I Love You, Beth
Cooper didn't prove to be Roberts' ticket to stardom but meaty roles in Edge
of Darkness and the fourth instalment of the Resident Evil franchise
could make this a breakthrough year. Understandably, he can't contain his
gratitude for Edge of Darkness' director Martin Campbell, as well as its
star.
"A week before we went to camera, I got to sit down with just Martin and
Mel," says Roberts. "We had two or three hours to talk about all the
material. Not only did I feel like this was going to be a great piece of work
but I'd be able to work with great guys, too. I had nothing to worry about. It
got rid of those butterflies for me so I could focus on the seven pages of
intense dialogue I had to do ... face to face with Mel!"
He admits that working on a movie like Edge of Darkness demands a
certain level of testosterone. "You can't show up and be half-assed,"
he jokes. "You have to be on."
Nevertheless, he was impressed by the confidence and professionalism of the
alpha dogs on set. "I've worked with people at different stages of their
careers and different success levels," he says, "and one thing I've
noticed about the guys at the top is they're so relaxed and calm – it's about
not having anything to prove except doing good work."
Perhaps Roberts will someday attain the same degree of calm assurance if his
latest projects pan out. The next test comes when he takes over the role of
Arthur Wesker, nemesis to Milla Jovovich's indefatigable heroine in Resident
Evil: Afterlife – he shot the film last fall while back in Ontario.
(Roberts splits most of his time between Vancouver and Los Angeles.)
"I basically get to play the ruler of the world," says Roberts,
laughing. "It was great to come onto a franchise that's done so well for
so long and to be a character that's so liked by all the fans – so liked but so
hated! And to be working with those people and fighting hand-to-hand combat
with Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter – that's another dream come true right
there."
Ludacris: The ‘Gamer’ Interview with Kam Williams
Source: www.eurweb.com
(January 30, 2010) *Christopher Brian
Bridges was born on September 11, 1977 in Champaign, Illinois
where he began rapping at the age of 9 and formed his first musical group a few
years later.
While in his teens, his family moved to Atlanta where he attended Banneker High
School before majoring in music management at Georgia State University.
He later worked at a local radio station as DJ Chris Lova Lova until adopting
the alias Ludacris to perform on
Timbaland’s track “Phat Rabbit.”
He subsequently launched his own career in 2000 with the release of the album
“Back for the First time,” following that up a year later with “Word of Mouf,”
and the rest is history.
The six-time Grammy-winner is not only a hip-hop icon, but also an
entrepreneur, philanthropist, restaurateur, pitchman, columnist, and of course
a gifted actor. He parlayed appearances on the NBC drama “Law and Order SVU”
into major motion pictures roles in such hits as the Academy Award Best
Picture-winning Crash and the critically-acclaimed Hustle & Flow.
As partners with Chef Chris Yeo in Straits Restaurant, Ludacris offers
Thai/Singaporean cuisine in the heart of downtown Atlanta. Plus, he has a
couple of online ventures: WeMix.com, a social networking site aimed at
showcasing and developing artists, and Myghetto.com, which serves as a MySpace
for the hood.
Keenly aware of the less fortunate, Luda established the Ludacris Foundation
which is already in its seventh year of operation. Thus far, the non-profit
organization has donated over a million dollars to organizations that assist
underprivileged children. The Foundation’s aim is to help kids help themselves
by using music and the arts to inspire them to develop goals and then work to
achieve them.
Here, Ludacris discusses all of the above, as well as his new film Gamer, a
sci-fi adventure co-starring Gerard Butler, Kyra Sedgwick, Terry Crews and
Amber Valletta.
Ludacris:
What up, Kam?
Kam
Williams: Hey, Luda, thanks so much for the time.
L: No doubt, man.
KW: So, what interested you in Gamer?
L: Man, in picking movies, I always look at all the elements before making a
choice, from reading the script to seeing who else is in it to who produced it
to who’s directing. The opportunity to work with Gerard Butler was definitely a
plus. I’ve been a fan of his especially because of the movie 300. And I also
wanted to work with the guys who wrote and were directing it, Mark Neveldine
and Brian Taylor.
KW: Yeah, they made Crank which was quite impressive, a non-stop,
adrenaline-fuelled, roller coaster ride.
L: Exactly. I made my decision based on that. In addition, I loved the role
they had for me, because I never want to be typecast. I love playing all sorts of
different roles.
KW: How would you describe your character, Humanz Brother?
L: I play the leader of a resistance group that’s totally against putting
computer chips in human beings’ brains because I think that’ll lead to the
taking over of mankind, period. So, I’m all about trying to get rid of this
technology, so we can live peacefully.
KW: Do you think a scenario like this has a chance of becoming a reality
someday?
L: Man, you never know. The possibilities are definitely limitless when it
comes to technology like this. We all embrace technology, but sometimes you
have to be careful.
KW: How’d you get along with the other members of the cast?
L: I loved working with this cast, especially with Gerard Butler. That’s how I
study and try to become a better actor. He’s extremely serious and focused.
KW: How do you divide your time between making music and making movies?
L: It’s hard, man, but you just gotta focus on one thing at a time. I give
whichever I’m doing 100% of my attention.
KW: Is there any truth to the rumour that comedian Katt Williams is your
cousin?
L: [Laughs] No, but that is my homey, though. Katt Williams is one thug. That’s
like my brother.
KW: Is there any question no one ever asks you, that you wish someone would?
L: Man, over the past ten years, I believe I’ve been asked every question you
could possibly ask. So, off the top of my head I can’t think of anything that
hasn’t been asked.
KW: The Tasha Smith question: Are you ever afraid?
L: I’m sure we’re all fearful of something. I’m afraid of God. You have to be
fearful of Him.
KW: The Columbus Short question: Are you happy?
L: [Chuckles] I am definitely happy, man. Of course, I wouldn’t say I’m always
happy. I don’t think anyone is. But for the most part, I’m living out my dream.
I’m doing what I have to do. My family’s taken care of. I’m financially
straight. So, damn right, I’m extremely happy.
KW: The Laz Alonso question: How can your fans help you?
L: Hey man, my fans already help me by supporting the things I do, and just by
understanding my changing and continued growth. So, the true fans are already
helping me out there.
KW: The bookworm Troy Johnson question: What was the last book you read?
L: I’m actually reading a book right now, “How to Win Friends and Influence
People.”
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671027034?ie=UTF8&tag=thslfofire-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0671027034]
KW: The Dale Carnegie classic. Music maven Heather Covington asks: What music
are you listening to right now?
L: A lot of different music. I have a Battle of the Sexes album coming out
soon, so I have to listen to all these unreleased tracks so that we make sure
we pick from the best of them to give to the true fans who support us.
KW: What’s the biggest obstacle you have had to overcome in life?
L: All the people who told me I couldn’t make it, and individuals who were
trying to step in the way of my becoming who I am.
KW: The Rudy Lewis question: Who’s at the top of your hero list?
L: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Mr. Barack Obama.
KW: How did you feel a year ago when President Obama said he was listening to
you on his iPod?
L: I really appreciated that.
KW: Have you spoken to him since he became President?
L: That’s confidential information.
KW: What is your favourite dish to cook?
L: Tacos. That’s about the only thing I know how to cook.
KW: The Flex Alexander question: How do you get through the tough times?
L: By realizing that I’m extremely blessed and extremely fortunate and that it
can’t be that damn bad.
KW: When you look in the mirror, what do you see?
L: I see a multifaceted Negro, an entrepre-Negro.
KW: One of your biggest fans, Hajar from Queens asks: Is it true you like big
women? She says she hopes so.
L: I don’t discriminate: big, small, skinny, tall, short, it doesn’t matter.
KW: Hajar also wants to know when your next album is coming out.
L: It should be out towards the end of the year. If not, it’s coming out on
Valentine’s Day of 2010.
KW: Leon Marquis wants to know if it’s true that you’re going to star in The
Richard Pryor Story.
L: I wouldn’t say that it’s untrue, but nothing is confirmed yet.
KW: Lester Chisholm asks, how can hip-hop artists assist young and old
transcend obstacles on whatever path they are on?
L: By embracing the new, by not being stubborn, and by being open to new
artists.
KW: Loony Larry Greenberg asks: What do you think of the Amish?
L: [LOL] Oh man, like I said, I don’t discriminate. I love ‘em. I respect
everybody’s faith and culture.
KW: How do you want to be remembered?
L: As a multifaceted individual and as an entrepre-Negro.
KW: Film director Hisani Dubose was really blown away by your acting skills.
She wonders whether you’ve been studying your craft?
L: I always study my craft. I’m passionate about what I do, so you have to
study.
KW: Tony Noel asks, what images and roles do you see for yourself in the
future?
L: As far as movies are concerned, I would have to say a diversity. But only
time will tell.
KW: Marcia Evans asks whether you’re still involved with AIDS awareness?
L: Yes, we’re still doing things through the Ludacris Foundation.
KW: She was also wondering how you’re enjoying your joint venture as co-owner
of Straits Restaurant?
L: I’m loving it, man. Coincidentally, we have a private dinner there tonight
as we speak. We’re coming up on our two-year anniversary, so I’m feeling good.
KW: Marcia asks whether you’ve mended fences with Oprah?
L: Oprah called me when my dad passed, and offered her condolences, so I would
say we are on good terms.
KW: Hey, brother, let me say I’m sorry about you losing your father.
L: Thank you, man.
KW: Marcia points out that you were doing charity work in South Africa. Are you
planning to do anything musically over there?
L: Yeah, when I was there we did a couple of things with some African artists.
And we’re still looking into trying to build a label over there and putting out
some music. So, I’m definitely involved somewhat.
KW: Thanks again for the interview, Luda, and best of luck with Gamer and your
many other ventures.
L: I greatly appreciate it, my friend. Thank you very much.
Ron Galella Goes From Hated Paparazzo To Pop-Culture Idol
Source: www.thestar.com
- Peter Howell
(January 30, 2010) PARK CITY, Utah - Paparazzo Ron Galella wants to make one
thing perfectly clear: he's
no bushwhacker, no matter what Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis used to claim.
"She said I jumped out of bushes, which was wrong," Galella says, his
hands waving wildly. "I jump into bushes to get the off-guard
picture."
Actually, there are a lot of things the garrulous Galella wants to make
perfectly clear. It's his moment, here at the Sundance Film Festival, where
Leon Gast's documentary Smash
His Camera is marking Galella's transformation from social pariah
into, at age 79, a beloved pop-culture idol.
"The only people who resent me now are people who are jealous," says
a smiling Galella, sitting alongside Gast for an interview in the sunny window
of Gallery Mar, a Main St. art gallery.
Galella is the original American paparazzo, back from a time when you actually
needed skill to invade people's privacy, before cellphones, Flip cameras and
TMZ.com made everybody a celebrity stalker. He shot with film, maximum 36
frames per roll, often having to change flash bulbs on the fly.
Galella's fast-grab and non-sanctioned photos of everybody from Jackie O to
Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley have grown in stature over his 50-year career.
They're now valuable cultural artefacts, the evidence of which is all around
Galella in Gallery Mar.
Dozens of framed prints of his work are on the walls behind him, priced at
between $1,400 and $2,700. He's made a good enough living from being a
paparazzo to afford a New Jersey mansion that someone in the film describes as
"looking like Tony Soprano's house." Galella lives – make that
presides – there with his wife of 30 years, Betty Burke Galella.
Life wasn't always so easy for Galella. His relentless pursuit of Jackie O and
her children in the 1960s and 1970s prompted her to sue him twice, resulting in
a judicial order that he keep a 75-yard distance from her. It almost put him
out of business.
Marlon Brando, another of Galella's pursuits, took a more direct path: he
sucker-punched Galella outside a restaurant in New York's Chinatown in June,
1973, resulting in five lost teeth and a broken jaw for the camera man. Galella
sued, receiving a $40,000 out-of-court settlement from Brando.
He has also had to endure taunts that he's "a leper," "a
creep" and "a monster," some of which are still being hurled at
him. Gast has both the pro and the con in his documentary.
The Oscar-winner filmmaker admits he was amongst the people who disliked
Galella when he first considered him as a documentary candidate.
"My view of him at first was totally negative, only because he had been
portrayed in the newspapers that he was the villain," says Gast, who
previously aimed his lens at Muhammad Ali for When We Were Kings, which won
the 1996 Oscar for Best Feature Documentary.
Yet Galella has also been praised by the late Andy Warhol as an expert at
showing "a famous person doing something unfamous." Magazine mavens
Grayson Carter and Bonnie Fuller also gush over Galella, arguing that he gives
the public what it really wants: "I think we truly are born with a gossip
gene," Fuller says in the film.
Dick Cavett said Galella was better than run-of-the-mill paparazzi because he
has a passion for his subject. He actually cares about the people he's
photographing, even if many of them are intensely annoyed by his presence.
Galella heartily agrees with that assessment. "Oh yes, passion!" he
exults. "I have a lot of drive and what drives me is curiosity. You want
to see these subjects, and how beautiful they are and how could you make a
beautiful picture of them. The challenge is there and you observe and
shoot."
He demonstrates in the film his methods for catch the famous off-guard,
techniques he has honed since he was an Air Force photographer during the
Korean War, snapping celebrity visitors for a military newspaper. Chief among
them is his shooting style: he uses a wide-angled lens so he doesn't have to
look through the viewfinder. It allows him to maintain eye contact with his
subject, and also to watch for flying fists.
He's still working, chasing the famous – Angelina Jolie and Taylor Swift are
his new favourites – but it's harder for him to keep up these days. He walks
with a noticeable limp.
Galella is not happy about how things have changed in the digital age, where
everybody has some kind of a camera and wants in on his action. "It's
terrible," he laments. "It's a sad scene now, all this gangbanging.
It's not good conditions to get great pictures. You need space. Photojournalists
have to move, be free to compose, get a good angle."
Still, he makes a darned good living. And many of his former enemies have
become his friends, or at least no longer his enemies. Sundance founder Robert
Redford told a long and affectionate anecdote last week about his efforts to
evade Galella's probing lens in the 1970s. Now Galella's film is world
premiering at Redford's festival.
Galella appreciates the love from Redford, but huffs about whom he'd rather
chase now. "I'd rather shoot Angelina Jolie than Redford."
Galella was best known for chasing Jackie O, who died in 1994. But the film
reveals that he took far more pictures of Elizabeth Taylor, simply because
"she got out more."
But Jackie O was by far Galella's favourite prey, and the subject of his
favourite photo, the one he calls "Windblown Jackie." It was taken in
1971 from the window of the taxi he was using to follow her as she went for a
walk on an NYC street. "I don't think she knew it was me," Galella says
of the photo. "That's why she smiled a little."
Jackie O never willingly smiled at Galella – she barely ever spoke to him – but
the lack of affection was very one-sided. Galella admits in the film that he
stalked her because he had no girlfriend at the time and "she was my
girlfriend, in a way."
That's the kind of creepy talk that can get a guy in big trouble. But Galella
keeps snapping away, having found his place within a society that has grown a
lot more tolerant of people like him.
"I love myself!" Galella says, roaring with laughter. "Everybody
should love themselves, not falsely, that's conceit. But we have to love
ourselves as individuals, accept ourselves as God made us. We're all born a
great talent. It's too bad most people die with it, they don't develop
it."
Kevin Smith's Toronto
Source: www.thestar.com
(January 31, 2010) Bloor
Cinema Aside from being an amazing venue to see offbeat fare,
my
sentimental-favourite movie theatre on the planet also acted as de facto
therapist couch for me during a mini Me-film-fest last year.
Roy
Thomson Hall My all-time favourite place in T-Dot, where I
"lay the podium down" via an ongoing conversation I've been engaged
in with the locals for years now. And just as Toronto's welcoming to every
out-of-town fat kid who rolls down Queen, the kind folks of Southern Ontario
have always seen fit to sell out these "shows." It's not an
overstatement to say this place probably saved my life last February, when I
bombed into town feeling completely irrelevant and over. I was born again on
this stage and I'd like to die on this stage (attention psychos: of natural causes).
Malcolm
Ingram's Apartment (Church and Wellesley) Malcolm is Toronto
to me (even though he hails from Oakville). I met him when Clerks was
invited to the 1994 film festival, and we've been besties ever since. If that
sounds gay, no worries: Malcolm's as gay as the day as long. His apartment is
located "on the corner of c--k & gay" according to him. Then, if
you're a dude, he might try to kiss you. Gotta be a thin dude, apparently, as
Malcolm's never tried to kiss me. *sigh*
The
Hockey Hall of Fame I like to roam the halls of the Hall,
weeping. It's a really moving experience. Took (actor/pal Jason) Mewes and
Malcolm once, and couldn't get past the relief mural outside without crying.
M&M were like, "Kev? You might be smoking too much weed ..."
Gretzky's
Restaurant This is like a mini, all-99 version of the HHOF for
me. My kinda eats in a Gretz-centric environment. Every time I'm there, I try
to pry the front door handles loose to take home. Instead, I settle for
Pierogies.
Silver
Snail I own a comic book store, so I can't plug a competitor –
even if the store is a country away. So I'll just say this: Silver Snail is the
best comic book store in the world. There: now I've set them up for failure
with impossible expectations. Who's f--kin' next?!?
Degrassi-Land
(Epitome Pictures compound, near Eglinton and Victoria Park) This
is a world within a world. In Degrassi-Land,
I dispense aged, bearded wisdom to lesbian lasses and troubled teens, and I can
play hockey with Caitlin Ryan ... tonsil
hockey, that is! In Degrassi-Land,
I can be a god; a god who never gets served divorce papers from his wife,
because it's all just make-pretend.
Brantford
Hometown of the Gretzkys. Also home of one of the top-10 moments of my life: my
surprisingly limber performance in goal, after a 15-year absence, at the Walter
Gretzky Street Hockey Tournament. I will return here every June until I'm dead.
Eliot's
Bookshop (Yonge and Wellesley) Been there once, but it was
during a trip when I was expressly in town to look for old hockey books. This
place was like one-stop shopping with the library-like selection.
Eaton
Centre I've been here lots, but the most memorable time
would've been when Malcolm and I got really stoned, listened to "Chloe
Dancer" a hundred times, ate at Morton's Steak House, then wandered around
Eaton Centre, stoner-shopping. Never has one man made so many separate Peanut
Glosette purchases over the course of an hour.
Richtree
Market Restaurant (Yonge and Wellington – R.I.P.)
Very near HHOF. It was like a school cafeteria with fresh, good food. And you
could have 12 different styles of meal in one sitting. Thirty-six if you
digested there, then restarted. I've heard.
Southern
Accents (in the Mirvish Village) Excellent eats, always a seat.
One week, I ate there four nights straight. With two lunches.
Brass
Rail As much as I love Canada, it stands to reason that
affection would extend to Canadian ladies. Especially when they're naked. And
they always liked me for me. I'm certain of it. I once dumped hundreds of bucks
on lap-dances there. Oddly, it was for my wife.
Avatar Crosses $2-Billion Mark Worldwide
Source: www.globeandmail.com
- Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
(February 1, 2010) New York - Avatar is on the cusp of toppling the domestic box-office record after
leading all
movies for a seventh-straight week.
James Cameron's 3-D epic
earned $30-million (U.S.) over the weekend, and its domestic total reached
$594.5-million, according to studio estimates Sunday. That puts the film only
about $6-million behind the domestic record set by Cameron's Titanic in
1998 with $600.8-million.
Earlier this week, the 20th Century Fox blockbuster passed Titanic for
the worldwide box-office record. It has now crossed the $2-billion worldwide
mark with $2.039-billion, easily beating the $1.8-billion made by Titanic
.
“You have to do a double take when you see these numbers,” said Paul,
Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com, marvelling that Avatar
decreased only 14 per cent from the previous weekend. “James Cameron is the
king of the box office hold.”
So close to the domestic box-office record, Avatar could pass Titanic
, interestingly enough, on Tuesday – when Oscar nominationsare
announced. The film is expected to be nominated for best picture, as well as
numerous other categories.
Those nominations could mean an Oscar bump for Avatar , further
propelling its gross.
Whereas the sustained box-office performance of Titanic has typically
been attributed to teenage girls seeing the film repeatedly, the demographics
for Avatar are less clear. One draw for repeat business is surely the
3-D visual effects.
“It's everybody going repeatedly,” said Dergarabedian. “At first it was more of
a fanboy experience, and then the word got out.”
Analysts believe the lengthy run from Avatar is likely hurting the
business of other films.
Mel Gibson's revenge-thriller Edge of Darkness , debuted this weekend
with $17.1-million for Warner Bros., a respectable if slightly low total. Dan
Fellman, head of distribution at Warner Bros., called it a “solid opening.”
“On a normal weekend, we probably would have had the number one film,” said
Fellman, shrugging at the out-of-this-world competition from Avatar .
Edge of Darkness had been widely seen as a test to whether Gibson can
return to headlining a film, after eight years and damage to his image. The
last movie he starred in was Signs in 2002. Four years later, he made
anti-Semitic remarks during a drunken-driving arrest.
But Darkness has received mostly good reviews. Fellman said the studio's
data showed approximately 70 per cent of those seeing the film said they came
to see Gibson.
“It certainly marks an interesting return for Mel Gibson,” said Fellman. “When
this film plays out, I think his star will shine a little brighter.”
Also in its first weekend of release was When in Rome , the Walt Disney
romantic comedy starring Kristen Bell. It took in $12.1-million.
Many films will hope for a box-office boost from the Academy Awards after
nominations are announced Tuesday morning. The Oscar effect, though, may be
slightly different this year, since the academy has expanded best picture
nominees from five to ten.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theatres,
according to Media By Numbers LLC. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. Avatar , $30-million.
2. Edge of Darkness , $17.1-million.
3. When in Rome , $12.1-million.
4. The Tooth Fairy , $10-million.
5. The Book of Eli , $8.8-million.
6. Legion , $6.8-million.
7. The Lovely Bones , $4.7-million.
8. Sherlock Holmes , $4.5-million.
9. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel , $4-million.
10. It's Complicated , $3.7-million.
FILM TIDBITS
Saldana & Elba Star In ‘The Losers’:
In Theatres On April 9
Source: www.eurweb.com
(January 29, 2010) **An explosive
tale of double cross and revenge, “The Losers” centers upon the
members of an elite U.S. Special Forces unit sent into the Bolivian jungle on a
search and destroy mission. The group makes plans to even the score when they
are joined by the mysterious Aisha, a beautiful operative with her own agenda.
Working together, they must remain deep undercover while tracking the
heavily-guarded Max, a ruthless man bent on embroiling the world in a new
high-tech global war. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldana, Chris Evans, Idris
Elba, Columbus Short, Holt McCallany, Oscar Jaenada, and Jason Patric.
OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network Hooks Up
First Film: ‘Family Affair’
Source: www.eurweb.com
(January 31, 2010) *OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network acquired the rights to “Family Affair,” an
independent feature length documentary film written and produced by Chico David
Colvard. “Family Affair,” said to be an intensely personal
documentary that examines Colvard’s compelling family history, garnered great
attention at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival where it had its world
premiere.) According to a press release from OWN, the film is
autobiographical in nature. When filmmaker Colvard was ten years old boy, he
shot his sister in the leg. The act shattered his family. Some 30 years later,
delving into the past, he returns to visit his relatives and try to put the
pieces back together. “Affair” is the first film to join OWN’s recently
announced Documentary Film Club. The Doc Club was created to spotlight
cinematic documentaries that can inspire and entertain, and encourage emerging
creative voices to bring their stories to a mainstream television audience on
OWN. “OWN is about real life stories of self-discovery, inspiration and
transformation,” said Chief Executive Officer Christina Norman. “Family Affair”
is exactly that – a multi-layered, raw and provocative family story. I applaud
Chico Colvard for his bravery in creating a deeply personal film that shares
with us his pain, his anger and ultimately his transformation.”
Precious Star Noticed By Oscar But Not
Vanity Fair
Source: www.globeandmail.com
- Linda Barnard
(February 02, 2010) Oscar nominee Gabourey Sidibe graces the cover of the March
issue of Ebony, but
she wasn’t included in Vanity Fair’s annual list of up-and-comers known as
“The Hollywood issue.” The full-figured African-American actress wasn’t
included as a talent to watch for, nor were any other non-white actors.
Inclusion in the annual photo is a coveted slot for young Hollywood and seen as
a step up. But critics are complaining the future looks all white, slender and
decidedly preppy, judging from the VF photo, which included only women
this year. “Nine fresh, pale faces of Hollywood,” is how Entertainment
Weekly’s website EW.com described it. The cover features, from
left to right, Abbie Cornish, Kristen Stewart, Carey Mulligan, Amanda Seyfried,
Rebecca Hall, Mia Wasikowska, Anna Kendrick, Emma Stone, and Evan Rachel Wood.
Only Cornish, Stewart and the Oscar-nominated Mulligan fit on the cover proper;
the other six are inside the folded page.
Lee Daniels ‘Stoked’ Over Oscar Love
Source: www.eurweb.com
(February 2, 2010) *This morning’s six Oscar nominations for “Precious” has the
film’s director Lee
Daniels feeling pretty precious himself. “I am
stoked,” the best director nominee told the Hollywood Reporter. “I haven’t
moved. I’m in bed feeling like a stuffed pig, I’m just so overwhelmed with joy
and so full with excitement.” The filmmaker is looking forward to extending the
camaraderie he formed with the other directors he has been sharing panels with
through awards season. “["Up in the Air" director] Jason Reitman
texted me last night, ‘Are you going to sleep OK?’ ” Daniels said. “I’m like,
‘Yes, shut up, dude. I’m trying to sleep.’” Daniels becomes the second black
filmmaker to earn a directing Oscar nom after John Singleton broke the racial
barrier in 1992 with “Boyz N the Hood.” “It doesn’t even register,” Daniels
said. “When it’s down to a black person, it’s always a first of something.
Like, Jiminy Crickets! How many firsts are there?” “What it does is it makes me
think that it’s not just for little black kids hoping to dream, but for all
kids hoping to dream because what happens is they all see that anything is
possible — everything is possible,” Daniels said. As reported earlier,
“Precious” also received Academy Award nominations for best picture, best
actress (Gaborey Sidibe), best supporting actress (Mo’Nique), adapted
screenplay (Geoffrey Fletcher) and editing (Joe Klotz).
Video: Black History Month Spotlight:
Harlem Globetrotters
Source: www.eurweb.com
(February 2, 2010) *What do you know about the team they call “The Team That
Changed the World?” Did you
know that they not only were magicians of the basketball court, but they, arguably, were
the reason why the NBA has any black players today. Growing up, all we knew of
the Harlem Globetrotters is that they were phenomenal entertainers
on the basketball court. We never thought any team would be crazy enough
to actually try to play them because every time they did, they would make a
fool out of them. But, one instrumental game that opened up the basketball
association was the Minneapolis Lakers vs. the Harlem Globetrotters. (more…)
Chris Rock, Keenan, Harvey, Katt in
Showtime’s ‘Why We Laugh’
Source: www.eurweb.com
(February 3, 2010) *“Why We Laugh: Black Comedians on Black Comedy,” a film examining the history
and cultural influence of American black comedy, premiere’s tomorrow (Feb. 4)
on Showtime at 8 p.m. Directed by actor-producer-director Robert Townsend, the
documentary, which screened last year at Sundance, features interviews with
prominent scholars, politicians, cultural critics, and a host of notable
comics, including Bill Cosby, Chris Rock, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Steve Harvey,
and Katt Williams. [Watch
clip below.] “Why We Laugh” tracks the evolution of black comedy
from the character of Stepin Fetchit and minstrels in blackface to the
politically tinged humour of Dick Gregory, and from the television success of
“Good Times” and “The Jeffersons” to the big-screen accomplishments of stars
such as Eddie Murphy and Whoopi Goldberg. The film, executive produced by
Codeblack Entertainment, also turns a perceptive eye on the controversial career
decision of Dave Chappelle and the implications of corporate efforts to
capitalize on the massive success of Russell Simmons’s “Def Comedy Jam” and
Spike Lee’s “The Original Kings of Comedy.” “’Why We Laugh’ is a major
historical contribution to American culture,” said Codeblack executive
vice-president Quincy Newell. “This film is a tribute to the way one courageous
person with a microphone can change history.” • Codeblack Entertainment also
produces the All Star Comedy Jam franchise. The DVD of “Shaquille O’Neal
Presents: All Star Comedy Jam – Live from South Beach” is available now, and a
third instalment of the franchise will be filmed at the 2010 NBA All-Star Game
in Dallas with an airdate on Showtime later in the year.
::TV NEWS::
New Series Happy Town Has Canuck Flavour
Source: www.thestar.com - Bill Brioux
(January 28, 2010) PASADENA, Calif.–There is
a lot of happy talk about Canadian actors
from the producers of the new ABC mid-season series Happy Town.
That's because Happy Town was shot in Port Hope, Ont., and while big
international TV names like Sam Neill and Steven Weber are among the
headliners, there are plenty of Canadians in the cast.
The series, which will premiere in March or April, is billed as coming from the
same network that brought you Twin Peaks. That early '90s series, from
producer David Lynch, was one weird and spooky mystery tour, although a series
of baffling clues quickly left viewers confused.
"That was sort of the gold standard for spooky, small-town shows,"
says executive producer Scott Rosenberg, who admits "there is a lot of Twin
Peaks DNA in Happy Town."
Happy Town is supposed to be somewhere in northern Minnesota, but the
producers needed a location with a deeper production and talent base.
"A lot of TV shows shoot in Vancouver," executive producer Josh
Appelbaum told critics, but after "a bunch of concerns we ended up going
to Toronto. It's really, in its own weird way, untapped."
Appelbaum says many films are shot in Toronto, but too often as a stand-in for
big U.S. urban centres like New York.
"We were really able to explore the outer regions of Toronto, like Port
Hope," he says. "These are just places that no one's seen on
television before."
Even more important, says Rosenberg, was the opportunity to draw upon Toronto's
deep pool of acting talent. Beyond the nine series regulars cast out of New
York and Los Angeles (including New Zealander Neill), the producers had to fill
35 recurring roles with locals.
Appelbaum singled out Sarah Gadon as an example. The 22-year-old Toronto native
plays the key role of high school love interest Georgia Bravin.
"We never thought we'd be able to cast her," says Appelbaum, who was
looking for an actress who could walk a fine line between spooky and seductive.
The pilot for the series was shot last March, a chilly time to be on the
northern shore of Lake Ontario, recalls Neill. Like the others, he stayed in
Toronto during production and made the daily hour-and-a-half commute to Port
Hope.
Neill gained a reputation as quite a cook, whipping up meals for cast members.
Lost: The Beginning Of The End
Source: www.thestar.com
- Raju Mudhar
(February 03, 2010) Abandon hope to all who enter – or at least continue
reading – there will be plenty of
spoilers ahead, as we pontificate pointlessly about what we
learned from last night’s season premiere of the final season of Lost. What follows is
what my very random thoughts and reactions from this long awaited show,
including what I think are the three most important things said on last night’s
show.
As we begin, I’d like to start with a sum up by absolutely butchering Robert
Frost: “Two roads diverged in the jungle. I took both, and that has made all the
indifference.”
The long awaited post-hydrogen bomb reveal happens, and Jack and co. are back
on the plane. Oh no, not again. And not again was right, as the real news is
that this season’s gimmick is the flash-sideways or flash-parallel, which looks
to explore what happened if the plane landed in L.A. and our lovable castaways
all went on with their “sad…pathetic existences” as one seemingly, exceedingly
key character described it.
Which brings us to the first important utterance: “It worked,” which was said
by Miles, but came straight from a dead and buried Juliet. Of course, how would
she know? Oh, people, let’s not get bogged down by details or, you know,
clarity. It is Lost, after all.
Before we get to some of the specifics of the episode, let’s talks
ramifications. By showing the parallel lives of the characters, it really
lowers the stakes moving forward. The rest of the year will likely show
emotional payoffs for the main players, and gives the writers two different
realities to let people have their moments. My wife likened it to Sliding
Doors, a Gwyneth Paltrow movie I can happily say I have never seen, but
what it reminds me of – and I’ve been saying this for years – is several
episodes of Star Trek. And my long standing joke amongst friends is what
Star Trek can do with an episode, Lost can drag out things for
years. Which is kind of impressive, in a way.
I’m not willing to say that it’s a complete copout yet, but I do think it’s a
little bit too convenient for the creators, and even more confirms to me that
there’s no way they had this planned from the beginning. I subscribe to the
“they threw stuff up on the wall and see what stuck theory and then needed to
figure a plausible way out.” That’s what it felt like to me, but bless ‘em, if
there was one thing we can count on, they stuck to their long established
pattern of answering one question, but opening up a kettle of new ones that
still leave us groping.
So what else? Let’s see, we got to see plenty of our old – and some long dead
friends – Charlie, Boone, Rose and Bernard, the FBI dude after Kate all on the
plane. Claire showed up in a cab in the closing moments. Jack got to play
Doctor guy, Sayid got to kick down a door – even Arzt (!) from the memorable
got blown up real good dynamite scene from years ago – got a moment with
Hurley. It was all pretty much set up for their ongoing storylines, which other
than Kate’s high stakes getaway does look like we’re moving into full-on real
life mundane soap opera category. The larger implication though is that it’s
not really about the story, it’s all about the characters.
Obviously, the key thing here was the interaction between Locke and Jack, when
the second most important statement from the episode: “Nothing is
irreversible.” This could be the point of the whole side story. Who knows if
what lies down the road is a reset of the reset? Jack was speaking about giving
a consult to Locke, in the chance of attempting trying to operate on him, but the
other thing that this might explore, is that if the universe will work to bring
these people together on the mainland. That their connections are something
bigger, and perhaps they can undo some of the damages that they inflicted on
each other while on the Island.
Of course, back on the Island was where there was plenty of other stuff. Kate
waking up in tree. Jack and crew realizing they time shifted and that the Hatch
still exists. Sawyer digging out Juliet. Hurley getting a visit from Jacob, and
giving him instructions. Meanwhile, Ben realized he was played by the other
Locke.
And of course, the biggest reveal of the episode, that the Man in Black Locke
(shall we now refer to him as the Man in Blocke?) is really the black smoke
monster, and that he wants to get off the island. He wore black, so obviously,
he’s the real big bad around here, but more theorizing on that in a second.
As the Jack and crew take Sayid to the temple in the hopes of healing the man,
Lost went back into the frustration zone. We get to meet a bunch of new
characters, who we can assume are The Others – the flare that Richard Alpert
understood implies that they are connected – but come on, at this stage of the
game, do we really need a new pack of characters to add to the Island’s jumble?
I think the key here was the water that Oriental guy who doesn’t like the taste
of English of his tongue (oh come on, do we really need it to be that obtuse?)
sticks his cut hand into. I assume he was expected it to heal and when it
didn’t, something was up. Either way, they still felt it was a good idea to go
to submerge an almost dead Sayid into – just to make sure we could get rid of
the almost, part. Despite all the badness that he wrought over the years, he
was one of my favourites, so I was bummed when I thought he finally kicked the
bucket.
Which brings us to the third most important statement: “What happened?” said a
newly resurrected Mr. Jarrah, who as Soundgarden might put it, really was put
into his best “Jesus Christ Pose”.
And the answer is: I have no idea. But my probably wrong theory is that Sayid
is the resurrection of Jacob. And to get even wackier, if the Man in Blocke is
the airborne smoke monster, perhaps Jacob’s other incarnation is as a
water-based spirit whose job it is to keep ol’ Smokey on the Island.
Obviously, there’s a whole lot more that happened – Desmond on the plane!
Charlie saying “I should have died,” - with plenty of new questions, like, what
do the Others want to discuss with Jack? Is the Man in Blocke going to kill
everybody? Why didn’t he just start with Sun and Frank and other folks standing
around? Here’s hoping we get some answers.
Oh, and lastly, just how many commercials did the networks cram into those two
hours? I was out, so I got to watch it on my PVR, but it was obvious that they
were trying to cram in as many as possible. But then, it really was must-see
TV, and while I’m still not sure about plenty of things that happened and how
I’ll feel in the long run, I have to say it was really nice to have the Losties
back.
Young Artists Thriving With Online Talk Shows
Source: www.thestar.com
- Murray Whyte
(January 31, 2010) In the late hours of Wednesday evening at Show & Tell
gallery on Dundas Street West,
the five members of Team Macho – Chris Buchan, Jacob Whibley, Lauchie Reid, Nick Aoki and
Stephen Appleby-Barr, for those without a program – were cuddled up tight on a
weathered black leather couch.
Klieg lights blazed, cameras rolled, a cracked porcelain leopard sat on the
floor in front of them, and a standing-room-only crowd stared on as the five-man
team that has become nothing less than a superhero to the local independent
culture scene did its best to defy its terribly manly name.
For those who know them, Team Macho, a Toronto art
collective/works-on-paper-comedy-act, was doing what it was brought here to do
– good TV: A slathering of the ridiculous, a smidgen of the serious, and some
honest insight into their collaborative practice ("What we really try to
do," Reid says, "is take the preciousness out of art-making").
At Show & Tell, though, the occasion was reason for pause. Team Macho was
among the guests of Late Night in the Bedroom,
a local online talk show devoted to independent art and culture.
It is, as these things always are, the product of collective goodwill, borrowed
equipment and a spirited do-it-yourself sense that permits independent cultural
scenes simply to exist, if not flourish.
And it would be notable all on its own, if not for the fact that it's one of at
least two local online shows about art; the other, Artstars*, is a gonzo skewering of
sanctified art pretense by its ever-game host Nadja Sayej
They are, if anything, polar opposites – Late
Night is achingly earnest whereas Artstars* is brazenly
satirical – but both help to embody a burgeoning new reality: In art world's
closed circuit, where youth and enthusiasm are very often disadvantages to
career advancement, a growing community of do-it-yourself artists is not only
finding a voice and a community online, but broadcasting it to the world.
Joshua Brandt, 24, squirms a little when identified as Late Night's producer.
"Really, there are so many people that make it work," he says. When
he came home to Toronto after studying fine arts in Montreal, he was struck by
the dearth of places young artists could access. "We existed in a
community where the only place we could show was in small cafés," Brandt
says.
Five years ago, he helped launch Whippersnapper Gallery on College St. The
mandate was non-commercial, and next-generation focused: The space was only
available to artists under 30. It satisfied a pent-up hunger almost
immediately. "It's pretty exciting when you think there's a need for
something, you create it, and 700 people show up," Brandt says.
Five years later, Whippersnapper has shown more than 1,000 young artists. With Late Night,
they're pushing to the next step. "It's one thing to have an exhibit; it's
another to have one that has an impact on your career," Brandt says.
"The idea now is to focus on those things that we think deserve attention,
and create our own media around it."
Of course, young artists have always banded together, fuelled on the vapours of
mutual back-scratching and collective goodwill. Their reasons range from the
benefits of creative cross-fertilization to the practicalities of shared rent.
A small handful have embedded in the culture – gleeful subversives like the
Dadaists, Surrealists and Fluxus, or Canada's own Automatistes, have left an
indelible stamp – but for every one of those, hundreds, if not thousands, fade
away into the shadows, as though they never were.
In the past, independent publishing has given artists a small voice. In the
'70s, Toronto's own General Idea produced FILE
magazine, which became a forum for artists continentwide. But for a generation
raised on online communities, social networking and ready-made self-promotion
tools such as YouTube, there's an active push to shift power from art's gatekeepers
– dealers and institutions – to its makers. And unlike the past, the audience
is virtual, and limitless.
"There's always been DIY," says Reid, 28. "People have always
said `I guess I'll be a painter, I guess I'll be a sculptor,' but now, you can
say `I guess I'll do a talk show,' because with the technology being what it
is, you actually can."
The result, Reid says, is a rapid democratizing of the art world where silos
have always reigned. Tom Wolfe, in his contentious book on art, The Painted Word,
described a global art community that numbered in the mere thousands; the rest
of us watched their exclusive happenings from a distance.
No longer, says Reid. "Because of technology, people's attention to art
has changed so dramatically. "It's not just something you see in a museum
or a gallery, where you have to put up with the snooty gallery assistant and
feel intimidated. You can see whatever you want, whenever you want."
It also builds community in the most unlikely places "When we first put up
our site, we were getting hits from Vanuatu – places I didn't even know had the
Internet," Reid says.
For Lana Mauro, this is exactly the point. Mauro, 29, moved to Toronto from New
York three years ago. She opened 107 Shaw, a tiny gallery at that address – her
home – with a similar focus on young artists who would never get a chance at
more established places. "I just thought, `what will help this community
thrive?'" she said. Along with holding shows in the space Mauro and her
partner, Danny Fazio, started building a virtual presence. Now, they work with
like-minded artists in Berlin, Los Angeles and San Francisco, to name a few.
"Our community is so far-reaching, there's really no such thing as borders
anymore," she says. "It sounds cliché, but a young scene is so much
more exposed to art and culture around the world, that that's where they find
their community. And they're realizing: `Hey, we don't need to go to New York.
We can do that, too – right here.'"
Back at Show & Tell, host Carey Wass tries to wedge in a question while
Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, the frantic Toronto duo that star in the culty
online hit show Nirvana:
The Band, The Show, bicker frantically for the camera's benefit
like an old married couple on amphetamines.
The show, which is loosely about the pair's vain attempts to have their
original musical about Nirvana (the band) staged at the Rivoli (the show), is a
charming train wreck of fecklessness that Matt and Jay do their best to
duplicate ("Jay plays himself, I play a role," says Johnson.
"Basically, I assault him until he becomes his actual self").
All around, the packed crowd is riveted – laughter filling the room, almost on
cue. The show ends with a performance by local electro-pop band Everything All
the Time, and the room shifts quickly from talk show to dance party.
The show was a hit, the scene nothing short of culture-making, a community not
only gathered, but broadcast to the world Out There. Borrowed cameras safely
packed away, an effusive Brandt considered the possibilities. "Part of
what we do is a process of collective energizing," he says. "We're
always trying to connect with other communities, and expanding. There are so
many people working really hard to support the arts on our level. Who knows
where it can go?"
TV TIDBITS
'Boston Legal' Star Justin Mentell
Killed In A Car Accident
Source: National Post
(February 03, 2010) 27-year-old Justin Mentell, best known to the public for his role in
television show
Boston Legal, has been killed in a car accident in Hollandale, Wisconsin.
According to the BBC,
police stated that the actor "had not been wearing a seatbelt and was
killed when his car hit two trees on an embankment". Prior to
acting, Mentell was an accomplished speed skater, and a member of the US
National Junior team. Aside from his role in Boston Legal, Mentell also
appeared in Disney's 2009 animated film G-Force.
Wayne Newton Appeals For Official
Recognition Of His Indian Tribe
Source: www.thestar.com
- Raju Mudhar
(February 03, 2010) RICHMOND, VA. – "Mr. Las Vegas" Wayne Newton is asking legislators in his home
state of Virginia to grant state recognition to his Indian tribe. The
entertainer appealed Tuesday to the House Rules Committee to officially
recognize the Patawomeck, or Potomac, tribe, of which he is a member. Committee
members voted unanimously in favour of the recognition, which has been given to
eight Virginia tribes. The recognition allows the group to be known as a tribe
but does not grant sovereignty. Newton and Patawomeck Chief Robert Green said
it would validate their identity and help them protect sacred burial grounds.
Outside the meeting, women lined up to get autographs and kisses from Newton,
who began performing as a child in Virginia before becoming a fixture in Las
Vegas.
::THEATRE NEWS::
Sex,
Politics And Thesps On Wild Stage Romp
Source: www.globeandmail.com - J. Kelly Nestruck
Cloud
Nine
Written by Caryl Churchill
Directed by Alisa Palmer
Starring Ben Carlson, Yanna McIntosh, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Megan Follows At the
Panasonic Theatre in Toronto
(January 28, 2010) Need a reminder that Canada harbours many of the best stage
actors
on the planet? Go see Mirvish Productions revival of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine.
It's a parade of pleasurable performances, with some of the greatest thesps
from Ontario theatre's sensational Triple S – Stratford, Shaw and Soulpepper –
playing, and playing around, in roles you'd never expect.
In the first act alone, we get to see Ben Carlson, Stratford's recent
triumphant Hamlet, don an afro and trade races to play an African Uncle Tom;
Evan Buliung put on a dress to play a gentle Victorian housewife who dreams of
adventure; and Ann-Marie MacDonald conjure up a cross between Mickey Mouse and
Popeye to play an effeminate nine-year-old boy.
Then, in the second half, there's the Shaw Festival's David Jansen as one of
the biggest, most rambunctious five-year-old girls you've ever seen.
They're all marvels, as are Megan Follows alternating between a lesbian nanny
and a wicked widow; Yanna McIntosh at her imperious best as a Victorian
matriarch, and Blair Williams as a pair of comically confused men stuck in the
wrong era.
But while Cloud Nine bursts with highly entertaining high-calibre
performances, director Alisa Palmer's production doesn't entirely rain success.
Created with Britain's Joint Stock collective in 1979, Churchill's unorthodox
comedy examines sexual mores in two different eras. The first act, played as
farce, takes place around 1880 in British Africa, where colonial administrator
Clive (Jansen) struggles to impose moral order both outside and inside his
home. The natives are restless: His wife Betty – that's Buliung, unstintingly
sweet, but undeniably big-boned – wants manly adventure, while his son Edward
(MacDonald) secretly plays with dolls and his daughter Victoria actually is
one.
Clive's explorer friend Harry (Williams) is gay and in the closet, while
Edward's governess Ellen (Follows) is a lesbian who doesn't know what that is;
Harry's transgressive sexuality is a scandal that must be covered up, while
Ellen's hides in plain sight since no one has the words to describe it.
In the second act, history jumps forward 100 years, but the characters only age
25. Betty – now played by MacDonald – has left Clive and is discovering
self-reliance and self-pleasure. Edward – now played by Buliung – is a gardener
living with his rough-and-tumble lover Gerry (Carlson, sublime), while Victoria
(McIntosh) has grown into a woman who reads feminist texts, but is nonetheless
stuck in a constraining marriage with sensitive new-age guy Martin (Williams, a
stand-out among stand-outs).
Added into the mix are a self-described man-hating lesbian named Lin (Follows)
and her five-year-old daughter, Cathy, played with an exquisite lack of grace
by Jansen. This cast of characters now struggles to define themselves in an age
where the sexual empire has fallen and new rules have yet to arise.
Palmer's production could use a little more order imposed upon it. It suffers
from a looseness and inconsistency in style in the first act, where the acting
is all over the map from the subtle sadness of Buliung's Betty and Carlson's
Joshua to the virtuoso clowning of Williams and MacDonald.
Then there's Jansen, who plays Clive as too much of a caricature and never
fully inhabits him. This is unfortunate because he needs to be the anchor in
this satirical Victorian world, the baseline others react against; in his
absence, Betty's mother Maud, played with imposing reserve by McIntosh, steps
up to staunchly defend her society. (“Young women are never happy,” she says
dismissively of her daughter's complaints. “Then when they're older they look
back and see that comparatively speaking they were ecstatic.”) While the
first-half eventually becomes tiresome, the second act, which like the world it
portrays is more loosely structured, is quite wonderful with only MacDonald's exuberantly
unfettered Betty not entirely meshing. Palmer stages the musical moments
particularly well, and Churchill's songs have excellent new settings from Paul
Sportelli.
Thirty-odd years down the line, however, Churchill's sexual and gender politics
feel almost as distant as the Victorian ones she satirizes in the first act.
The connections she draws between sexual repression and political oppression,
patriarchy and imperialism, seem particularly simplistic today, when the
British military allows homosexual recruits to march in uniform in Gay Pride
parades and cites the defence of women's rights as part of the justification
for missions to Afghanistan and Iraq.
And what to think about the blurred line between male homosexuality and
pedophilia in the first act, and sexual liberation and incest in the second?
To her credit, Palmer doesn't steer her production away from the problems of
the play, which remains theatrically thought-provoking. Cloud Nine now
seems to be about the impossibility of ever imposing a coherent order on the
crazy bodily functions and mixed-up emotions within us. Can we ever fully
understand sexuality?
Know sex? Please, we're human.
Cloud Nine runs until Feb. 21.
26 Years Later, Melissa Gilbert Back On The Prairie In New Musical
Source: www.thestar.com - Bruce DeMara
(January 28, 2010) Melissa Gilbert is back on the prairie, only this time she's
singing.
Gilbert, best remembered as Laura, the middle daughter of Charles and Caroline
Ingalls on the television series, Little House on the Prairie, which premiered in 1974, is starring in the
musical adaptation of the beloved books created by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Three years ago, Gilbert was approached through her manager about starring in
the musical version to play the role of Ma by the musical's creators. She
nearly turned it down.
"I immediately screamed, `You're out of your mind, I'm not doing it, I
can't sing, I've never sung before ... this is a disaster waiting to happen.'
That seriously was my initial reaction," Gilbert says.
"My manager, Mark, who has represented me for 20 years at this point and
knows me as well as he knows anybody in the world, said, `Okay, breathe, we're
going to send you the music and I want you to read the script and then see how
you feel about it.' And he was right. I was so moved by the music and so
stunned by the book and how beautifully written it was and how the creative
team was able to compress ...the (original) books into two hours to create this
extraordinary musical," she recalls.
The thought of singing onstage "scared the crap out of me," Gilbert
says. "I had never sung before now. Even the youngest child in the cast
has been singing longer than I have."
But Gilbert said she saw an opportunity at a time in her career when, like many
female actors her age, "opportunities are drying up left and right."
"So for me to have a chance to do something new and create a new facet to
my career at 45 is a blessing I just couldn't ignore," Gilbert says.
Gilbert acknowledges that the musical's creative team chose her as the
"most-recognizable" cast members of the original series.
"I bring not only the legacy of the television show but because of that, I
bring the legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder, having been the first person to play
her," Gilbert says.
The two-hour musical will be familiar to fans of the series and the original
series of books, including Little House on the Prairie, published in
1935 and based on the Ingalls family's adventures on the frontier in the 1870s
and 1880s.
"All the significant moments that happened in the television series and in
the books – Mary's blindness, Laura and Almanzo falling in love, Nellie's blond
curls – are in the musical," Gilbert says.
Touring is a dramatic change for Gilbert, whose only previous experience with
travelling on the road was with her father, stand-up comic Michael Gilbert, as
a child.
Her career after the decade-long series included a stint as president of the
U.S. Screen Actors Guild and starring in close to 50 television movies, most of
them shot in Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal.
Gilbert began rehearsals last July and has been touring across the U.S. since
October with her youngest son, Michael, and the family dog in tow. Michael
plays three roles in the show, including little brat Willie Oleson.
The week is divided among travel, media interviews and multiple performances. Thursdays
are typically spent working on a local Habitat for Humanity project – she's
building in Scarborough at a 16-home site on Hainford Ave. Feb. 4 – followed by
a show.
"In the meantime, I walk the dog, I feed the kid, I make sure he gets his
homework done, I wash his underwear and my underwear – you know, standard mom
stuff," she says.
Just the facts
WHAT: Little House on the Prairie
WHERE: Canon Theatre, 244 Victoria St.
WHEN: Now until Feb. 28
TICKETS: $50-$99 at mirvish.com
Music Man Mitchell Marcus Plays Savvy Tune
Source: www.thestar.com
- Richard Ouzounian
(January 30, 2010) "Business before pleasure" isn't just
a catchphrase for Mitchell Marcus. It's wound up becoming
a way of life.
As the founder and artistic director of Acting Up Stage Theatre Company, which is currently presenting the Canadian premiere of the Tony
Award-winning musical The
Light in the Piazza, Marcus discovered that the best way to indulge
in the greatest pleasure of his life, musical theatre, was by working up a
strong business case to support it.
This is the sixth successful year for his company, which has produced such
winning shows as Elegies
and A
New Brain, but this year's entry is the biggest and – Marcus hopes
– the best yet.
The personable 27-year-old was a professional actor while still in his teens,
which meant, as he puts it, "I grew up to be your typical arrogant
18-year-old who said, `I've got a career already, why should I go to theatre
school?' while my wonderful Jewish parents were asking, `What are you going to
do with your life, anyway?'"
Marcus began by taking the Fine Arts/Cultural Studies program at York
University, and one course in Arts Administration "set my brain spinning
... You had to create a fictitious arts organization you felt would benefit
Toronto."
It didn't take a young man who felt "that I had already done Anne of Green Gables too
many times" to realize that what he thought this city needed "was a
place where people could see the smaller, more alternative, cutting-edge
musicals that the other theatres weren't producing."
He became so obsessed with this idea that, when he switched the next year to
the University of Toronto's Schulich School of Business, "I had my case
study to work on all ready!"
For the next few years, Marcus brought business acumen to his artistic dreams
and graduated not just with a career, but with a ready-made theatre company,
christened Acting Up Stage Theatre.
From the beginning, Marcus showed skill in connecting with the community,
cultivating donors and working on alternative means of contacting audiences.
And although, on the surface, it looks like a success story, Marcus is the
first to admit that "it's been a tough slog."
But he kept expanding, always presenting worthy, non-commercial shows with
ever-increasing casts. The only thing he really couldn't afford was a decent
level of physical production and the thrift-shop clothing, muslin scenery and
makeshift props were starting to hold him back from running a first-rate
theatre. "But we recently were very fortuitously awarded a three-year
strategic grant from the Metcalf Foundation, which we're using to raise our
production standards."
The presence of ace veteran designer Phillip Silver on this year's show is a
sure sign of how Marcus is moving ahead. "It's an uphill battle and I'm
still trying to wrap my head around where we go next, " he says, but he's
smiling as he says it.
The Light in
the Piazza runs tonight through Feb. 21 at Berkeley St. Theatre, 26 Berkeley
St. For tickets, call 416-368-3110 or go to www.lightinthepiazza.ca
The Light In The Piazza: Fall In Love With Love Again
Source: www.globeandmail.com
- Mark Selby
The Light in the Piazza
(out of 4)
Music and lyrics by Adam Guettel. Book by Craig Lucas. Directed by Robert
McQueen. Until Feb. 21 at Berkeley St. Theatre Downstairs. 26 Berkeley St. 416-368-3110
or lightinthepiazza.ca.
(February 02, 2010) There's a bright light shining down on Berkeley St.
For the open-minded and adventurous theatregoer, or for anyone who wants to get
caught up in a show
that celebrates the universality of romance – in particular, the
sensation and sentiment of first love – The Light in the Piazza, Acting Up Stage's most recent presentation of contemporary
musical theatre, is worth a visit, especially with Valentine's Day just around
the corner.
First, the music. Adam Guettel (grandson of Richard Rodgers, and composer of Myths
and Hymns and Floyd Collins) has composed a sweeping two-act
rhapsody; never has the innocence and discovery of first love been communicated
so exquisitely as the touching Act 1 finale, "Say It Somehow." It's
an ambitious but melodic score, drizzling with romanticism, that musical director
Jonathan Munro treats like the jewel that it is, leading the five-piece chamber
ensemble and the cast in glorious, unamplified beauty.
In the play, based on the novel and film of the same name, Margaret Johnson
takes her developmentally challenged daughter, Clara, out of their sheltered
American home on a sightseeing tour of Italy, where Clara discovers first love
and Margaret, through her interactions and asides to the audience, must
carefully evaluate Clara's happiness versus what she thought was best for her child.
Piazza challenges its audience to remain engrossed in a small, tender,
poignant story, even when Guettel's lyrics and Craig Lucas's libretto use
Italian liberally. However, Robert McQueen's direction ensures that you'll
comprehend everything even if you can't understand it.
Structurally, the show falters from a few unfulfilled moments, and the Act 2
opening, while comical, seems a bit of a cop out when one character breaks the
fourth wall.
As an ensemble, the cast as a whole is marvellous. Individually, though, there
seems to be a hint of restraint that prevents the show from reaching its full
potential.
Jacquelyn French is the impressionable Clara, radiant but seemingly holding
back from the burgeoning feelings inside. Jeff Lillico, as Fabrizio, the boy
smitten with Clara, is charismatically bashful, and together, the young couple
will make you fall in love with love all over again.
Patty Jamieson is Margaret, conflicted and confused but maybe a bit too calm as
Clara's and her own world change in the span of a few days. Meanwhile,
inadvertently stealing every scene he's in with masterful comic timing in
either language, is Juan Chioran as Fabrizio's father.
A flawed yet glorious achievement in style and class, treat yourself and your
significant other on a date to Italy without leaving downtown Toronto this
February.
::TECHNOLOGY NEWS::
For A Gamer, Ipad Exceeds Expectations
Source: www.thestar.com
- Marc Saltzman
(January 30, 2010) SAN FRANCISCO–Books, shmooks. Music? Meh. All I
could think about while sitting in
San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Wednesday was how games will
look, feel and play on the Apple iPad.
When I finally found out, I was more than satisfied.
First, let's take a step back. In case you haven't heard the news, the geniuses
behind the iPod and iPhone have just unveiled a brand-new device, the iPad, a
nearly-10-inch touch-screen tablet designed to download and read electronic
books and digital newspapers, surf the web, view photos and videos, play music,
read email, and more.
Think of this über-thin gadget as a giant iPod touch, as your fingertips do all
the navigating, along with tilting the device around to take advantage of its
built-in "accelerometer" sensors.
After spending a giddy 20 minutes with the iPad following Steve Jobs'
presentation, here's why I think it will be great for gamers:
Size matters: 9.7 inches is better than 3.5 inches. The great games already
available at the App Store look that much better on a bigger screen. Granted,
those designed for the iPad will offer better-looking graphics – such as the
modified ATV
Offroad racing sim from 2XL – but even older titles such as
PopCap's Bejeweled
2 look detailed and colourful on the iPad. With iPhone games, you
can choose to keep the original screen size with black around the window or
have the iPad double the pixels artificially (the latter is recommended).
Gameloft's N.O.V.A.,
a stunning sci-fi shooter, was a blast to play on Wednesday and it
took a crowbar to pry me away from it.
App Store support: Right out of the box, the iPad works with most of the
140,000-plus downloadable applications from the App Store, of which nearly
30,000 are games. This selection is far greater than offered by the two other
portable gaming devices put together, and the games cost a fraction of the price
of Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable titles (most games at the App Store are
less than $2). It might not be quite as portable as the DS or PSP but, if
you're facing a long flight or a lazy Sunday afternoon on the couch, I know
which device I would grab. Control freak friendly: Understandably, many gamers
prefer real buttons over virtual ones – and if you've played the new Grand Theft Auto:
Chinatown Wars on the iPhone, you know it can be a tad tricky to
control – but because the iPad is big enough to place on your lap, it doesn't
require you to hold the device and play at the same time, as is the case with
the iPhone and iPod touch. Also, you have more screen real estate to place the
virtual buttons where you like (as demonstrated in Electronic Arts' Need for Speed: Shift demo
for iPad). The "umph" factor: While it's not a full-blown computer,
the iPad does have a powerful 1 gigahertz microprocessor, fast 3D graphics
capabilities, plenty of Flash memory, integrated Wi-Fi (and, in some models, 3G
connectivity) and 10 hours of battery life.
The iPad is
slated for a late March launch, starting at $499 (U.S.). Stay tuned to this
column for Canadian pricing, games and accessories available at launch, and
other details.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories - Additions Mess With The Mood
Source: www.thestar.com
- Darren Zenko
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
PlayStation Portable reviewed
(also available: Wii, PlayStation 2)
$29.99
Rated "Mature"
(January 30, 2010) It's been spooky nights out here in the foothills of the
Rocky Mountains lately, eerie ice
fog hanging low over snowy pastures, the visibility on the highway more or less
approximating the draw distance of a PlayStation horror game circa 1999 ... so
I was already in the right mindset when I crawled under the covers with my PSP
and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, primed by winter's chill for the series' trademark atmospheric
psycho-terror.
Things start out in classic Silent Hill fashion, car trouble necessitating an excursion into the titular
demon-haunted town. Here, writer Harry Mason skids his station wagon off the
icy road, through a chain-link fence and into a junkyard, coming back to
consciousness to find his young daughter disappeared. Armed only with a
flashlight and a smartphone more connected to the spirit world than the
cellular network, Harry sets off to search for young Cheryl in the snowbound
city ... and in the howling depths of his own psyche.
So far, so SH. Your first clue that something new is happening with Shattered
Memories is when the game switches away from Harry's disturbing adventure
to the couch of a Scotch-sipping psychologist. Here, in a first-person,
conversational perspective, the line between "Harry" and the player
is blurred, the shrink asking questions, presenting questionnaires, assigning
tests, feeling out the player's matrix of moral/sexual/psychological
inclinations and inhibitions, all of which gets folded back into the game
itself to create a personalized hell for Harry/the player.
That's the theory, anyway. In practice, the changes players' responses in
therapy create in the game are largely cosmetic. That's not necessarily a bad
thing; this is atmospheric horror, after all, and what is atmosphere but
applied cosmetics? It certainly is an interesting angle, one I'd like to see
explored more deeply in future games, but the "therapy session"
mechanism is a little bit on-the-nose. If this is going to be a feature of the Silent
Hill series going forward, I'd rather have the psych testing more
closely integrated in the player's interactions with the town and townsfolk –
constantly cutting away to the couch strains the creepy Silent
Hill mood.
The mood is further strained by Shattered Memories' other new-for-2010 element, the nightmare chase sequences.
Running away from monsters is Survival-Horror 101, but Shattered
Memories breaks the fleeing out into its own discrete segments, almost a
kind of minigame. At fixed points in the game, the creepy music swells, the
scenery warps, freezes and frosts over, and you know it's runnin' time: a
panicked obstacle-course sprint with fleshy hug-monsters (their appearance
modulated by your psych profile) squealing at your heels.
It's pretty terrifying, in an adrenalin-pounding way, but the fact that the
chase segments are completely discrete works to kill the mood in the rest of
the game. As you/Harry explore Silent Hill, you know there's no danger anywhere unless the music and the ice
kick in; there's none of the "what's behind this door?" trepidation
that powers the horror experience, just a bunch of creepy set pieces. With the
arc of horror constantly subverted and the pressure constantly deflated, they
only gave me run-of-the-mill nightmares rather than the Silent
Hill-grade nightmares I'd been hoping to savour.
::COMEDY NEWS::
Wright’s Stand-Up Delivers On Deadpan One-Liners
Source: www.globeandmail.com
- Brad Wheeler
(January 31, 2010) There’s the perception that Steven Wright, like a
supermarket cashier, works one line
at a time. That not entirely accurate, though. At Toronto’s
Convocation Hall on Saturday evening (the first of two nights) the surrealist
stand-up comic at times delivered his offbeat observations in the form of
acoustic songs and fanciful anecdotes (often involving flabbergasted police
officers) in addition to his deadpan standalone mind-zappers.
But it is his one-liners for which the U.S. comedic legend is celebrated. The
following are a sample of the best we heard at Convocation Hall, where his
routine used much of the same material captured on his DVD Steven Wright:
When The Leaves Blow Away, recorded at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre in 2006.
Questions
What did Jesus do for Santa Claus, on his birthday?
What’s the youngest you can die of old age?
Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it that song?
A propos of nothing
Next week I’m going to have an MRI to find out if I have claustrophobia.
The universe is expanding. It should help ease the traffic.
A friend of mine has a trophy wife, but apparently it wasn't for first place.
Think about it
If heat rises, then heaven might be hotter than hell.
You never see any Indian midgets.
Hermits have no peer pressure.
Just plain funny
A friend of mine tried voodoo acupuncture. You don’t have to go to him. You’re
just walking down the street, and you’re like “Oh, that’s much better.”
One Christmas, my grandfather gave me a box of broken glass. He gave my brother
a box of Band-Aids. Then he said to us, "Now, you two share."
I like to confuse strangers. When they ask me what time it is, I say “No, I’m
not from around here.”
Arresting humour
I was once arrested for resisting arrest. “You’re under arrest.” “No I’m not.”
“You’re under arrest.”
I was arrested for scalping low numbers at the deli.
One time a cop pulled me over for running a stop sign. He said, "Didn't
you see the stop sign?" I said, "Yeah, but I don't believe everything
I read.”
Imagine that
Imagine what cell phones would look like if our ears weren’t so close to our
mouth.
Imagine the reading of God’s will. “And the oceans go to Phil.”
Exit lines
I just remembered, my mother told me never to talk to strangers. [Leaves
stage.]
[Upon returning] I’m insane. You think it’s a show.
::OTHER NEWS::
WinterCity Offers Many Ways To Beat The Winter Blahs
Source: www.thestar.com - Shauna Rempel
(January 28, 2010) It's year seven for the WinterCity
Festival, an annual two-week
celebration presented by RBC and the City of Toronto, usually held when T.O. is
in the deep-freeze doldrums.
As the city points out, WinterCity is actually three festivals for the price of
one (which, considering many activities are free, makes it one heck of a
bargain). There's the Winterlicious festival, featuring a prix fixe menu offer
at 150 participating restaurants and several other culinary events. The WOW!
performances and parties at Nathan Phillips Square count as Fest No. 2. And
indoor Warm Up! activities at various venues round out the trio.
This year's three-in-one festival is Jan. 29-Feb. 11. Full details at www.wintercity.ca. Here are some of the
highlights starting Friday:
The Flaming Lotus Girls will set Nathan Phillips Square aglow nightly
with dramatic, interactive fire and steel installations.
European theatrical troupe Compagnie Les Passagers creates massive
performances with scaffolding, pyramids, cables, ropes and nets. High above the
audience's heads, the actors will perform Time Is ... , inspired by
traditional and contemporary Chinese culture (Friday at 8) and Cosmogonia,
which recounts the Book of Genesis (Saturday at 8, Sunday at 7).
Tim Horton's Ice Breakers Skating Parties have a different theme each
night, starting with Friday's Chinese Lantern Festival at Nathan Phillips
Square.
David Buchbinder and friends are Tumbling Into Light (see photo)
with a multimedia concert that invites the audience to enter a magical sound
and light world at The Young Centre for the Performing Arts. (Sunday at 3 and
7:30 p.m., $20-$30 at 416-866-8666.)
Dance those winter blues away with the Bunch dance party for kids and
their parents at the Guvernment/Kool Haus complex. (Saturday, 2-5 p.m., $10-$12
in advance at 647-430-5599)
Catcher In The Rye Author J.D. Salinger Dies
Source: www.globeandmail.com
- Hilel Itale, The Associated Press
(January 30, 2010) New York — J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame
whose The Catcher in the Rye shocked and inspired a world he
increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.
Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author's son said
in a statement from Salinger's literary representative. He had lived for
decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.
The Catcher in the Rye, with its immortal teenage protagonist, the
twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold
War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club,
which made Catcher a featured selection, advised that for “anyone who
has ever brought up a son” the novel will be “a source of wonder and delight —
and concern.”
Enraged by all the “phonies” who make “me so depressed I go crazy,” Holden soon
became American literature's most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The
novel's sales are astonishing — more than 60 million copies worldwide — and its
impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining
expression of that most American of dreams — to never grow up.
Salinger was writing for adults, but teenagers from all over identified with
the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy, not to mention the
luck of having the last word. Catcher presents the world as an
ever-so-unfair struggle between the goodness of young people and the corruption
of elders, a message that only intensified with the oncoming generation gap.
Novels from Evan Hunter's The Blackboard Jungle to Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep,
movies from Rebel Without a Cause to The Breakfast Club, and
countless rock 'n' roll songs echoed Salinger's message of kids under siege.
One of the great anti-heroes of the 1960s, Benjamin Braddock of The Graduate,
was but a blander version of Salinger's narrator.
The cult of Catcher turned tragic in 1980 when crazed Beatles fan Mark
David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon, citing Salinger's novel as an
inspiration and stating that “this extraordinary book holds many answers.”
By the 21st century, Holden himself seemed relatively mild, but Salinger's book
remained a standard in school curriculums and was discussed on countless Web
sites and a fan page on Facebook.
On the Web Thursday, there was an outpouring of sadness for the loss of
Salinger, as many flocked together on social networks to relate their memories
of Catcher in the Rye. Topics such as Salinger and Holden Caufield were
among the most popular on Twitter. CNN’s Larry King tweeted that Catcher
is his favourite book. Humorist John Hodgman wrote: “I prefer to think JD
Salinger has just decided to become extra reclusive.”
Salinger's other books don't equal the influence or sales of Catcher,
but they are still read, again and again, with great affection and intensity.
Critics, at least briefly, rated Salinger as a more accomplished and daring
short story writer than John Cheever.
The collection Nine Stories features the classic A Perfect Day for Bananafish, the deadpan
account of a suicidal Army veteran and the little girl he hopes, in vain, will
save him. The novel Franny and Zooey, like Catcher, is a
youthful, obsessively articulated quest for redemption, featuring a memorable
argument between Zooey and his mother as he attempts to read in the bathtub.
Catcher, narrated from a mental facility, begins with Holden recalling
his expulsion from a Pennsylvania boarding school for failing four classes and
for general apathy.
He returns home to Manhattan, where his wanderings take him everywhere from a
Times Square hotel to a rainy carousel ride with his kid sister, Phoebe, in
Central Park. He decides he wants to escape to a cabin out West, but scorns
questions about his future as just so much phoniness.
“I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?” he reasons. “The
answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid
question.”
The Catcher in the Rye became both required and restricted reading,
periodically banned by a school board or challenged by parents worried by its
frank language and the irresistible chip on Holden's shoulder.
“I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked, or
shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of ‘The Catcher in the Rye.' Some
of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children,”
Salinger wrote in 1955, in a short note for 20th Century Authors .
“It's almost unbearable to me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf
out of their reach,” he added.
Salinger also wrote the novellas Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour — An Introduction, both featuring
the neurotic, fictional Glass family which appeared in much of his work.
His last published story, Hapworth 16, 1928, ran in The New Yorker in
1965. By then he was increasingly viewed like a precocious child whose manner
had soured from cute to insufferable. “Salinger was the greatest mind ever to
stay in prep school,” Norman Mailer once commented.
In 1997, it was announced that Hapworth would be reissued as a book —
prompting a (negative) New York Times review. The book, in typical Salinger
style, didn't appear. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbour Jerry Burt said the
author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished
books kept locked in a safe at his home.
“I love to write and I assure you I write regularly,” Salinger said in a brief
interview with the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate in 1980. “But I write for myself,
for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.”
Jerome David Salinger was born Jan. 1, 1919, in New York City. His father was a
wealthy importer of cheeses and meat and the family lived for years on Park
Avenue.
Like Holden, Salinger was an indifferent student with a history of trouble in
various schools. He was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy at age 15, where
he wrote at night by flashlight beneath the covers and eventually earned his
only diploma. In 1940, he published his first fiction, The Young Folks,
in Story magazine.
He served in the Army from 1942 to 1946, carrying a typewriter with him most of
the time, writing “whenever I can find the time and an unoccupied foxhole,” he
told a friend.
Returning to New York, the lean, dark-haired Salinger pursued an intense study
of Zen Buddhism but also cut a gregarious figure in the bars of Greenwich
Village, where he astonished acquaintances with his proficiency in rounding up
dates. One drinking buddy, author A.E. Hotchner, would remember Salinger as the
proud owner of an “ego of cast iron,” contemptuous of writers and writing schools,
convinced that he was the best thing to happen to American letters since Herman
Melville.
Holden first appeared as a character in the story Last Day of the Last
Furlough, published in 1944 in the Saturday Evening Post. Salinger's
stories ran in several magazines, especially The New Yorker, where excerpts
from Catcher were published.
The finished novel quickly became a best seller and early reviews were
blueprints for the praise and condemnation to come. The New York Times found
the book “an unusually brilliant first novel” and observed that Holden's
“delinquencies seem minor indeed when contrasted with the adult delinquencies
with which he is confronted.”
But the Christian Science Monitor was not charmed. “He is alive, human,
preposterous, profane and pathetic beyond belief,” critic T. Morris Longstreth
wrote of Holden.
“Fortunately, there cannot be many of him yet. But one fears that a book like
this given wide circulation may multiply his kind - as too easily happens when
immortality and perversion are recounted by writers of talent whose work is
countenanced in the name of art or good intention.”
From Inside The City, Giving Voice To An Outsider
Source: www.thestar.com
- Vit Wagner
(February 02, 2010) As a child in his native Trinidad, Rabindranath (Robin) Maharaj sometimes
imagined how life on the Caribbean island might be perceived by outsiders.
Years later, he came to see those flights of fancy as early indication of his
eventual vocation.
"I had no real idea I was going to become a writer," he says. "It
was just a game for me. I just liked pretending, daydreaming and imagining. I
grew up in a family where at one point there were 14 people living in one big,
old house, so this kind of fantasizing was one way of removing myself from the
commotion."
Now, 18 years after first coming to Canada to study creative writing at the
University of New Brunswick, the established Ajax-based author has published The
Amazing Absorbing Boy, a novel that describes how life in Toronto is
perceived by a disoriented young immigrant from Trinidad.
"I couldn't have written this book 10 years ago," says the
55-year-old in an interview. "If I had written it then, the setting would
have had the aspect of any great city. I wouldn't have understood Toronto as
well."
Maharaj ranks among an accomplished contingent of Trinidadian/Canadian writers,
including Neil Bissoondath, Andre Alexis, Shani Mootoo and Toronto poet
laureate Dionne Brand. The Amazing Absorbing Boy is his fourth novel and
first since 2005's much lauded A Perfect Pledge, nominated for both the
Rogers Writers' Trust and Commonwealth Writers prizes.
To this point, Maharaj's work, including three short story collections, has
focused mainly on his native, rather than adopted, land. The new book reverses
that emphasis. It tells the story of a comic book-loving, 17-year-old
Trinidadian boy, Samuel, who moves to Toronto after his mother's death to live
with his estranged, unwelcoming father.
The novel was partly inspired by the author's tenure as a writer in residence
at the Toronto Reference Library. "Immigrants use the library often. A lot
of them don't have access to books and Internet at home. They seem so
disconnected to the city. They walk around in a daze, without making eye
contact. It's almost as if they are travelling in their own little
bubble," he says.
With no help from his emotionally detached father, Samuel struggles to make
sense of his new world. He carries both a stranger's befuddlement and the fresh
insights of the engaged, active intellect of an outsider. "Part of
Samuel's skill or virtue is that he is able to change," Maharaj says.
"If there is a theme to the novel, it is that you can't adapt to a new
place without absorbing all of the little things – the good things and the bad
things, too – that surround you."
::DANCE NEWS::
Former Bad Boy Now A Prince
Source: www.thestar.com
- Michael Crabb
(January 30, 2010) Jiri
Jelinek was a bad-ass kid from a broken home. Ballet, unexpectedly,
turned out to
be his salvation.
The Prague-born Jelinek, 32, arrived in Toronto this month to become a
principal with the National Ballet of Canada. He makes his debut with the
company in March, partnering ballerina Xiao Nan Yu in Swan Lake.
But he'd never have reached this point if his single mom, who died when he was
17, hadn't put him in ballet school to keep him off the streets.
Jelinek initially remained unconvinced that ballet was such a great idea. He
got into plenty of fights at the Prague Conservatory and was repeatedly
threatened with expulsion. And ballet certainly wasn't enough to absorb all his
surplus energy. On the side, Jelinek started taking karate, "flirted
briefly" with aikido and moved on to kung fu before putting on boxing
gloves.
He only reluctantly abandoned this bruising pastime a decade later when boxing
injuries threatened his professional dance career.
Fortunately, Jelinek always had a few teachers pulling for him, and by his late
teens he realized it was time to get serious. He moved on from Prague to the
school of the Hamburg Ballet for a final year of intensive training – and was
again hauled on the carpet for bad behaviour by its boss, John Neumeier.
Jelinek began his career with the less-than-illustrious state ballet company in
Dresden before being hired a few months later by the National Theatre in
Prague.
By age 21, in his second season there, Jelinek was promoted to principal. It
was a rapid ascent the tall, muscular dancer modestly attributes to the fact
that he was the only one able to partner the company's biggest ballerina.
Jelinek, however, saw that if he stayed he risked becoming, as he puts it,
"the one-eyed king among the blind." If he wanted to dance in the
major leagues, he'd have to move on.
Jelinek's Prague colleagues thought he was crazy to take an entry-level corps
position in 2001 with Germany's Stuttgart Ballet, but he had a smart plan.
Stuttgart may not be a glamorous city, but its ballet company is among Europe's
most acclaimed. Canadian-born Reid Anderson, the troupe's artistic director,
soon gave Jelinek featured roles, and within three years promoted him to
principal.
Christian Spuck, resident choreographer in Stuttgart, is among several who have
created roles in their work for Jelinek. "I'll miss him," says Spuck.
"The National Ballet can feel very happy to have such a strong dancer in
the company."
By any objective standard, a move to Toronto might at best seem lateral,
perhaps even a step down from Stuttgart. The National Ballet of Canada
certainly dances at a high international standard, but nowadays rarely tours.
Compared with Stuttgart, a busy, much-travelled and hyper-creative company,
there are fewer opportunities at the National Ballet for Jelinek to get
onstage. So why did he do it?
As he approached 30, Jelinek explains, he began to survey the future and
decided neither Germany nor Stuttgart were places he and his then Prague-based
girlfriend – he and Aneta married last October – wanted to settle permanently.
Although he has yet to see the National Ballet perform, Jelinek had heard good
accounts of the company. He also has acting aspirations, so wants to work where
he can perfect his functional yet accented English.
So Jelinek cast his line in the National Ballet's direction, sending off a
prospecting package to artistic director Karen Kain. As it turns out, Kain had
attended a gala in Stuttgart and seen Jelinek dance.
"I circled his name in the program," recalls Kain, "thinking
ahead to ask Reid if I could invite Jiri to guest here when we performed (the
celebrated John Cranko ballet) Onegin."
Then Jelinek's application arrived on her desk.
Another of Stuttgart's leading men, Canadian Jason Reilly, was looking to
return home. Kain was happy to accept two tall, strong, versatile dancers, both
noted for exceptional partnering abilities.
Such an exodus, however, would have left too large a hole in Stuttgart's senior
male ranks, so it was negotiated Reilly would join the National Ballet last
July but Jelinek would remain until the end of last year.
As it happened, Reilly changed his mind and chose to remain in Stuttgart, but
Jelinek got to accompany the troupe on a fall tour to China.
Now, as Jelinek prepares for his local debut, he and his wife are settling into
their Queens Quay apartment and familiarizing themselves with Toronto's
attractions.
Jelinek is also a huge music fan and an active DJ. "Bono is God," he
declares.
::SPORTS NEWS::
Big Hockey News Day
Source: www.thestar.com
(February 3, 2010) Stunning news on two NHL fronts.
First, the Columbus Blue Jackets have in the last few hours fired head coach Ken Hitchcock and
replaced him with assistant coach Claude Noel. After making the playoffs last
season, the Jackets are 14th in the Western Conference, and Hitchcock's status
has been in question for weeks.
Still, it's a shocker, particularly with Hitchcock set to be one of Team
Canada's coaches at the upcoming Vancouver Olympics under head coach Mike
Babcock. Amazingly, it's the second time this has happened to Hitchcock in an Olympic
year when he was set to coach for Canada. The Dallas Stars fired him in late
January, 2002, and he went on to win a gold medal as an assistant under Pat
Quinn.
Meanwhile, reports from RDS and TSN today confirm Atlanta GM Don Waddell has
told star winger Ilya Kovalchuk to expect a trade, sooner as opposed to later.
Let the auction begin.
If the price for Phil Kessel was two firsts and a second, what could it be for
Kovalchuk, a 26-year-old forward with 328 career goals in eight seasons?
The difference is, of course, that Kovalchuk is an unrestricted free agent in
July, so this could just be a rental situation, with the KHL possibly looming
in the background with — allegedly — a $15 million-a-year bid.
Kovalchuk's never had much team success in Atlanta, but he did score the gold
medal winning goal for Russian the Quebec City world championships, and he's a
proven, money-in-the-bank 40- to 50-goal man, and a big power forward to boot.
The Leafs, in case you're wondering, won't be in this one. Don't have the goods
to make a deal even if they wanted to.
Boston, L.A., Chicago and Philly, among others, are all lining up with a bid,
but the price will be absolutely fascinating. Calgary, meanwhile, could be in
the mix, and a hard pitch for Kovalchuk would make the emphasis on quantity
over quality in two recent deals by Darryl Sutter make sense.
The best fit? Probably L.A., where the Kings have the players and the payroll
flexibility. But is this the right time for that team to make this move when they
probably can neither win the Cup nor guarantee Kovalchuk will play for them
beyond this season.
What about the Hawks? Might they be worried enough about Patrick Kane's
maturity to do a Kane-for-Kovalchuk swap just as the Thrashers and Senators
once combined on a Dany Heatley-for-Marian Hossa deal?
This story is going to heat up in a hurry.
Raptors’ Chris Bosh Headed To NBA All-Star Game
Source: www.thestar.com - Bill Brioux
(January 28, 2010) NEW YORK, N.Y.—Toronto
Raptors forward Chris Bosh is headed back
to the NBA all-star game.
Bosh and Utah’s Deron Williams, both Dallas natives, will take part in the
showcase event in their hometown, which will include seven first-time
selections.
Bosh was named to the all-star game for the fifth straight season, tying Vince
Carter for the most appearances in Raptors history.
“Just to be able to be an all-star year in and year out, that’s a special
feeling, but the fact that it’s in Dallas is kind of a bittersweet thing,” Bosh
said before the Raptors faced the New York Knicks. “Sweet because I get to play
in front of my home crowd and it’s bitter because everybody wants tickets.”
The Boston Celtics and Atlanta Hawks each had two players picked as reserves
Thursday for the Feb. 14 game at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington. Paul Pierce and
Rajon Rondo were chosen from the Celtics, while the Hawks are sending Joe
Johnson and Al Horford.
Rondo and Horford will both make their first all-star appearances, as will
Oklahoma City swingman Kevin Durant, Charlotte’s Gerald Wallace, Memphis
forward Zach Randolph, Chicago’s Derrick Rose and Williams, who played at The
Colony High School near Dallas.
Among those missing out were New York’s David Lee and Clippers centre Chris
Kaman.
Bosh, Pierce and Johnson are the only reserves on the Eastern Conference roster
with all-star game experience.
“There’s going to come a day that they don’t pick me,” Pierce said in Orlando,
where the Celtics are facing the Magic. “So every time I get a chance to make
it, it’s definitely an honour.”
The remainder of the Western Conference reserves were guards Chris Paul of New
Orleans and Brandon Roy of Portland, Lakers forward Pau Gasol and Mavericks
forward Dirk Nowitzki, who was picked for the ninth time and will represent the
home team.
“It is an honour to represent the Mavericks in my new hometown of Dallas,”
Nowitzki said. “I am always thankful for the opportunity to play in the
all-star game. We hope to put on a good show for our fans.”
The reserves were chosen by the head coaches from each conference, who weren’t
allowed to vote for their own players. They had to select two guards, two
forwards, one centre and two players regardless of position.
They leaned toward winning in the East, where the Celtics and Hawks have the
second- and third-best records behind Cleveland. That certainly helped Rondo,
who has been as important to Boston as any of its Big Three this season.
“I always thought I was (an all-star),” Rondo said. “For the coaches to think
so, it’s an honour. I try to play with the spirit and that tenacity every
night.”
Horford likely edged out Lee, who is averaging 19.4 points and 11.4 rebounds
for a Knicks team far below .500. Horford is averaging 13.6 points and 9.8
boards.
“It’s out of my control and Coach (Mike D’Antoni) always tells me to try to
control the things I can control and I think the overall message was that
nobody was taken off a team with a sub-.500 record,” Lee said. “So that means
one thing: We’ve got to get some more victories, and that’s what we’ll go after
right now.”
Also left out was a second Cleveland player behind LeBron James.The Cavs felt
point guard Mo Williams should have been selected — though he is injured,
anyway.
“Mo has (played well) for us as our second-leading scorer and we’re not going
to be represented by anybody except for LeBron. It’s tough but it’s out of our
control,” Cavs coach Mike Brown said. “We have the best record in the league
but there is nothing we can do about that. I don’t know what it’s going to
take.”
Rose and Wallace both have helped their teams surge to .500 records after
terrible starts, and Wallace was rewarded with the first All-Star selection in
Bobcats history.
“It’s truly an honour to be named to the All-Star team,” Wallace said. “This is
an amazing moment for me and for the Bobcats franchise, and I’m excited to be
the first player to represent this team in the All-Star game. I want to thank
all the fans who voted for me and the coaches who selected me to play in the
game.”
Voted to start by the fans in the East were James, Boston’s Kevin Garnett,
Orlando’s Dwight Howard, Miami’s Dwyane Wade and Philadelphia’s Allen Iverson.
The West starters are the Lakers’ Kobe Bryant, Victoria guard Steve Nash and
Amare Stoudemire of Phoenix, Denver’s Carmelo Anthony and San Antonio’s Tim
Duncan.
If any players are injured, commissioner David Stern would choose the
replacement.
AP Sports Writer Antonio Gonzalez in Orlando, Fla., and Tom Withers in
Cleveland contributed to this report.
CFL Asks Fans To Weigh In On Overtime
Format
Source: www.thestar.com - The Canadian Press
(January 28, 2010) Once again, CFL commissioner
Mark Cohon is asking for input
from Canadian football fans.
Last year, Cohon invited fans to chime in on potential rule changes. Now, the
CFL commissioner is petitioning fans for their input regarding the league’s overtime
format.
Presently, if a game is tied after regulation time each team gets to scrimmage
from the opposition’s 35-yard line until it scores or loses possession. Should
the score remain tied, the procedure is repeated at the other end of the field.
If the score remains tied after both teams have had two possessions, the game
goes down as a tie in the regular season. During the playoffs or a championship
game, the procedure would continue until a winner is declared.
“Some of our most exciting games last season, including one of our playoff
games, were decided in overtime, and that prompted some discussion among fans
about our format,” Cohon said in a statement. “We have tremendous respect for
the knowledge of our fans, and their dedication to the tradition and future of
our league, so we’d like to turn that informal overtime discussion into
specific ideas that our league can consider as it looks towards the 2010
season.”
Fans can send their ideas via email torules@cfl.ca by Feb. 15.
Serena Williams Ends Justine Henin's Comeback To Win Aussie Open
Source: www.thestar.com
- Dennis Passa
(January 30, 2010) MELBOURNE–Serena Williams loves a
good underdog story and understood that
most of the crowd was behind Justine Henin.
All that sentiment was put aside once she heard an insult from the stands, a
crack that went right to the heart of all athletes. Williams surged to a 6-4,
3-6, 6-2 victory in the Australian Open final Saturday, closing this chapter on
Henin’s remarkable comeback from retirement.
"I think everyone was for Justine tonight," Williams said. "But
you know what really helped me out? This one guy was like, 'You can beat her
Justine, she's not that good.'
"I looked at that guy and I was like, you don't know me," Williams
added, wagging her finger. "I think I won all the games after that because
that's totally rude."
Williams plopped on her back at Rod Laver Arena after capturing her fifth
Australian Open title, breaking her sequence of victories in this major in each
odd-numbered year since 2003. It also gave her more Australian titles than any
woman in the Open era and allowed her to match Billie Jean King’s career total
of 12 majors in singles.
Henin, in her first Grand Slam and only second tournament since she quit
suddenly in May 2008, had gone on a stunning run to win 20 of 22 points to even
the final at one set apiece and take a lead in the third.
With her right thigh and left knee heavily taped and hampered by a litany of
aches and pains, Williams had her backers in the crowd, sister Venus among
them.
But the knocks gave her the most motivation.
"That is a part of being me. Like hearing things like that inspires me to
work harder, do better," Williams said. "I feel like I have things to
prove."
Henin, unranked, fell one win short of emulating fellow Belgian Kim Clijsters'
amazing Grand Slam comeback at the U.S. Open last September. Clijsters beat
Williams in the semi-finals before taking the title at Flushing Meadows in only
her third tournament back from two years in retirement.
"It's been a very emotional two weeks for me," said Henin, a 27-year-old,
seven-time Grand Slam singles winner. "I thought it would never happen
again. It's been almost perfect. Just the last step, I couldn't make it."”
Henin slipped to 8-6 in her head-to-heads with Williams. But this was the first
time they'd met in the Grand Slam final. In the even-numbered years between
Serena's triumphs in Australia, Henin won the 2004 title, had to quit during
the 2006 final against Amelie Mauresmo and lost in the 2008 quarter-finals to
eventual champion Maria Sharapova. That was her last major.
Serena has now won three majors in 12 months, including Wimbledon and the
Australian in 2009. Her conversion rate in Grand Slam finals is 12 of 15,
second only to Margaret Court.
Serena teamed with Venus to successfully defend their Australian Open doubles
title Friday, their 11th Grand Slam doubles championship, and planned some
family celebrations Saturday night.
Another set of American siblings won the men's doubles. Twins Bob and Mike
Bryan combined for their fourth Australian Open title, a 6-3, 6-7 (5), 6-3 win
over Daniel Nestor of Toronto and Serbian Nenad Zimonjic.
Roger Federer and Andy Murray were to play for the men’s championship Sunday
night. Murray is hoping to end a 74-year drought for British men at the majors.
Federer, who has the record at 15 career majors, cracked that he thought the
drought had lasted 150,000 years.
Still the 22-year-old Scot has already achieved something no British man has
done in the Open era just by reaching two Grand Slam finals. His first ended in
a straight-sets loss to Federer at the 2008 U.S. Open. Murray is more confident
this time.
"I just feel physically more mature, mentally more mature," Murray
said. "Just a lot more experience in these sort of situations now."
He'll need every bit of that.
Federer is playing in his 22nd Grand Slam final and has won three of the four
he's reached at Melbourne Park.
Murray conceded that Federer is "probably the best tennis player
ever." But he wasn't indestructible, as shown by Rafael Nadal's five-set
win in the last Australian Open final and Juan Martin del Potro’s victory at
the U.S. Open last September.
"If I play my best, I think I’ve got a good chance against anyone,"
Murray said.
Williams said she'd tried matching Federer's numbers in the majors, but it
became too hard because the target keeps moving.
She was happy to join King in sixth place on the career list of women's major
champions, and doubts she'll get to Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, who
have 18 majors each.
King was at the stadium Saturday to take part in a ceremony honouring the
40-year anniversary of Margaret Court's season Grand Slam in 1970.
"Billie, we are tied," Williams said. "So I've reached my
goal."
Williams said she’d like to get to 13 by winning at the French Open because her
one title in Paris is the only one without a "twin."
In the meantime, she's trying to focus on the other achievements of King, who
has been active in equal rights for women in sports and all walks of life.
"To tie Billie Jean King is cool. But honestly, my whole thing is to do
what she did off the court," Williams said. "When I think of Billie
Jean King, I don't even think about tennis. I think about all the amazing
things that she's done. And that's what I want to do, with every aspect of my
life."
King is complimentary about Williams and her impact on women's sports. She
points to the 28-year-old player's greater maturity, mindful of Williams' U.S.
Open tirade that cost her a record fine of US$82,500.
Since then, Williams has set up a charity to raise money for her school in
Africa, with contributions to the Haiti relief fund and elsewhere.
"At the end of the day, I've moved on," Williams said. "One
moment doesn't make one person's career. It's all about the moments that you
put together. For the most part, that's it"
Harlem Globetrotters to Hoop On Ice
Source: www.globeandmail.com
(February 3, 2010) *The world famous Harlem Globetrotters will take their act to the ice next week as the
first professional basketball team in history to play a basketball game on
frozen water.
Their showdown against long-time nemesis, the Washington Generals, will take
place at Lasker Rink in New York City’s Central Park on Tuesday, February 9 at
12 p.m.
Five players from the Globetrotters, five players from the Generals, and one
referee will use custom made “ice cleats” for traction during the historic
game. Lasker Rink will set up two basketball hoops on both ends of the ice, and
the game will also include an official Globetrotters public address announcer
and scorekeeper.
The matchup is a precursor to the six shows the Globetrotters will play in the
New York City area from Feb. 12 through 15, with games scheduled for New York’s
Madison Square Garden, Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum and New Jersey’s IZOD
Center and Prudential Center.
The Globetrotters game on ice will add to a long history of playing in unique
settings around the world. The trendsetters of basketball played a game on the
roof of the Spectrum in Philadelphia in 2009, in addition to games on an
aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, in front of 75,000 fans at Berlin’s
Olympic Stadium, on beaches, on a tennis court in Bermuda, on the floor of
dusty bullrings, at the bottom of empty swimming pools, and at the Vatican in
Rome, among other locations, since the team was founded in 1926.
The Globetrotters are inviting local youth hockey players and schools to attend
the game as a reward for their hard work in the classroom and on the ice.
Admission to the “ice game” is by invitation only for local youth groups and
schools in the NYC area; interested program directors can email info@harlemglobetrotters.com
for more information.
• Fans can see the Globetrotters return to the basketball court—the traditional
hardwood version—at Madison Square Garden (Friday, February 12 at 7 p.m.), IZOD
Center (Saturday, February 13 at 1 p.m. and Sunday, February 14 at 1 p.m.),
Prudential Center (Saturday, February 13 at 7:30 p.m.), and Nassau Coliseum
(Monday, February 15 at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.).
• Tickets for all NYC games (excluding the ice game) are now available online
at www.ticketmaster.com
or the respective arena box offices. Individual ticket information can also be
found on the Harlem Globetrotters’ official Web site: www.harlemglobetrotters.com,
as well as info on group and scout tickets.
