Friday 22 August 2008
Causes For Sexual Dysfunction Change As People Age - Earlier Experiences With Multiple Partners And STDs Take Their Toll
Tuesday 12 August 2008
John Legend
Artist: John Legend
Genre(s):
Rock
Pop
Discography:
Save Room CDM
Year: 2006
Tracks: 4
Once Again
Year: 2006
Tracks: 13
Live at the House of Blues
Year: 2005
Tracks: 17
Get Lifted
Year: 2004
Tracks: 14
Neo-soul isaac Bashevis Singer and pianissimo player John Legend combined the naked as a jaybird fervour of coevals Cody ChesnuTT and the burning precision of D'Angelo. Born John Stephens, Legend was a baby prodigy wHO grew up in Ohio, where he began singing church ism and playing piano at the tender years of five-spot. Legend left field Ohio at 16 to go to college in Philadelphia, and it was thither that he number 1 found a larger audience. Not even out of his teens, Legend was tapped to present pianissimo on Lauryn Hill's "Everything Is Everything" in 1998. After complemental college, he fey to New York, where he began to ramp up a loyal next playacting in nightclubs and releasing CDs that he would sell at shows. He similarly became an desired sitting musician, performing and at one time in a while writing for a broad raiment of artists, including Alicia Keys, Twista, Janet Jackson, and Kanye West. It wasn't until West sign the lester Willis Young talent to his rude label that he adoptive the Legend name with 2004's Solo Sessions Vol. 1: Live at the Knitting Factory. Get Lifted, his starting time studio album, was released later in the year. On the force of long-suffering undivided "Ordinary People," the criminal record album reached the Top Five of the Billboard two century. This lED to three Grammy Awards: Best R&B Album, Best R&B Male Vocal Performance, and Best New Artist. Erstwhile Again followed in October 2006.
Wednesday 6 August 2008
Obama Camp Raps Ludacris' "Offensive" Rhymes
Talk about politically incorrect.
This week's cause propaganda has already seen John McCain's ode to Barack Obama, Britney and Paris. Now it's been raised a Ludacris.
Team Obama is blaring a unthreatening though all inappropriate insult track from the rapper targeting Obama's opponents, declaring the
ROY HARGROVE
Trumpeter Hargrove returns to his pop-bop roots without losing his funk feel, performing a commix of originals and standards that ar a staple of his quintet�s shows. Soulful dialogues with piano player Gerald Clayton highlight both the original ballads and covers, as Hargrove passionately pushes the lyricism to the liquid ecstasy. Download: �Strasbourg/St. Denis.�
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Take - movie review
Minnie Driver's Ana is all stillness and poise, but there is something tentative
about the depths of her eyes, the cool, sad look of a person who can see the cloud
of tragedy overtake her. She is balanced on the edge of a blade.
In Charles Oliver's terminally bleak Take -- a crime victim's tale about a mother's
worst nightmare, the violent murder of her young child in the heat and confusion
of a supermarket holdup and her obsession with confronting the murderer -- the smell
of desperation pervades the emotion of the film like a third character. In spite of
the sadness that befalls Ana over the course of this sorrowful film, Driver maintains
Ana as a regal presence in this kingdom of gloom. When Ana objects to her son, Jesse's
(Bobby Coleman) grade school principal informing Ana that her son will be shipped out
to a special school and is told after her protests, "I am sorry, but you no longer
have a choice in the matter," it is almost as if an underling is defying the Virgin
Queen.
Ana's counterpart is the hapless killer Saul (Jeremy Renner), her spiritual twin.
Saul inhabits the same blighted landscape of crumbling, worn-out homes, deadening
strip malls, and fetid rust, but Saul is weak and is buffeted by the forces of evil
and unable to cling to his dignity. His old, used car is infested by fast food wrappers
and cups -- the throwaway debris that is Saul's life. Inevitably, Saul is sucked
into a desperate robbery where he fatally confronts Ana and her beloved Jesse. The
tragedy that results shatters them both.
Oliver holds onto a melancholy, decimated atmosphere employing jagged flashbacks.
The color palette is desaturated, the colors of this world finally reduced to weak
duotones as the lives intersect at Saul's robbery. With a controlled cinematic style,
Oliver constructs the lives of his characters with inserts of objects and facial expressions,
pieces of captured time that tell the stories. As a formal exercise in pent-up and
unleashed emotion, Take is intense and difficult to watch. In particular is the climactic
robbery that the film leads up to, which is harrowing, stark, and surprising in its
unchained violence.
As a writer, though, Oliver lets the movie down. Saul's establishing scenes are pure
movie clich�s (the inciting point has a lowlife come to collect $2,000 from Saul
and is warned "If you can't pay, you can't pay" like a Neville Brand gangster from
a '50s film noir). Most egregious of all are a series of flashbacks with Saul (who is
awaiting his execution) and a well-meaning priest. The characters argue philosophical
points ("How does God chose who gets what plan?") as if the film suddenly becomes
an episode of the old Sunday morning religious show The Christophers. And please, let's not talk
about Minnie Driver's alternate-career music bleating out sporadically in the landscape.
The songs are as incongruous as Judy Garland singing "The Theme to Judgment at Nuremberg."
To make matters worse, the concluding confrontation between Ana and Saul comes across as
too pat and unconvincing, given the pure hell that Oliver has put his two characters
through before this moment.
Distractions these may be, but the film still retains power. Driver holds the film
together with her modulated intensity. When she pleads, after the horrific robbery,
insisting someone do something about her son, her control crumbles and she screams
to anyone who will listen, "But he's my son! He's my little boy" with all the powerless
desperation she can muster.
And Oliver, in a single brilliant shot, manages to capture the wretchedness of these
lives that is emblematic of the film itself. Shot looking out from the seedy storage
rental company where Saul works and looking out at Saul's dumpy car, the phone rings m
onotonously and unanswered in the office while Saul, in his car, keeps turning his
key in the ignition trying to get the battery to turn over. Finally giving up, Saul
leaves the car, slams the door, and smashes the window -- Saul taking out the dead-end fe
elings of his annihilated life on his dead-end car.
Eh, you can keep her.
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