Thursday 4 September 2008

Sixshot Bits: Brief News On Lil Wayne, Snoop Dogg & David Banner





Lil Wayne failed to appear in an Arizona court yesterday (August 27) for a hearing relating to various drug charges.


As reported earlier, Wayne was arrested and slapped with drug charges in Arizona after authorities found marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy and drug paraphernalia in a bus he was traveling in.


According to The Associated Press, Wayne's lawyer told the presiding judge Tuesday that his client failed to appear in court because of a medical condition.


The judge said that Wayne is not excused from the proceedings and he expects the rapper to appear in court in October.



HOLD UP!



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Monday 25 August 2008

Kate Moss - Moss Faces Teepee Investigation

British supermodel KATE MOSS has become embroiled in a row with neighbours over 2 Native American-style teepees which have been erected in her garden.

The catwalk star has been inundated with complaints from other residents after the two tents appeared in the grounds of her Oxfordshire, England home.

And her neighbours have taken the dispute to the local council, with officials vowing to launch an investigation into the matter.

Planning officer Kim Smith, from West Oxfordshire District Council, says, "We get had an e-mail complaining about the teepees and asking if they require permission.

"Our investigating officer will visit as soon as possible to establish precisely what the situation is.

"I really don't know the answer at this stage, because it is perfectly legal, for example, to put up a marquise in your back garden for a wedding."





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Friday 15 August 2008

BJOG Release: Stop Smoking If You Are Pregnant

�New research to be published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology examines the results of maternal smoking on nativity outcomes.


Previous studies have focused on the consequences of smoking during each pregnancy, in isolation. This new study analysed outcomes according to whether women continued to smoke in successive pregnancies, or managed to give up smoking after their first maternity. Previous pregnancy outcomes were compared to subsequent maternity outcomes in the same sample population.


244, 840 mothers from New South Wales, Australia who had two consecutive singleton deliveries over the period 1994 - 2004 were studied by Dr Mohammed Mohsin and Professor Bin Jalaludin at Liverpool Hospital in Sydney. The majority of women were between 25 to 34 years old and 87% had antepartum care by the 20th week of pregnancy. The interval betwixt first and second nestling was between 12 - 24 months in a third of mothers studied.


The proportions of mothers who smoked were 18.7% during the first pregnancy and 17.5% in the second gestation. Researchers plant that 72.7% of smokers in their kickoff pregnancy continued to mary Jane in their second maternity.


Preterm births were the result in 5.9% of all first and 4.9% of all second deliveries. The findings indicate that mothers wHO had a previous preterm birth were at an increased risk of a repeat preterm birth in the next pregnancy. Researchers found the risk of having a preterm birth in a subsequent gestation was increased for those who carried on smoking and was greatest for heavy smokers.


Low parentage weight (LBW) was seen in 5.2% of all outset and 3.8% of all second gear births. Continued smoking in the subsequent pregnancy was associated with the highest rate of LBW infants. Researchers ground that if a mother continued to smoke heavily during her second maternity, the betting odds ratio of a low birthweight baby (compared with babies of women wHO never smoked) was 4, compared with 2.1 if she gave up completely.


Others findings from the written report point to the increased risk of poor perinatal outcomes associated with smoke, namely; stillbirths and neonatal deaths. Researchers believe that smoking

Thursday 7 August 2008

Wellington big hit on the world stage

Wellington is now a music powerhouse, with its diverse bands and musicians not only when topping the Kiwi charts, but progressively scoring big overseas.



The Flight of the Conchords' debut album - which went as high as No3 in the American charts in its first week in May - has sold more than than 170,000 copies in the United States. The gross revenue figures are more than three times the gross sales for the top-selling album in New Zealand last year, Led Zeppelin's Mothership.


Flight of the Conchords continues to be a big seller in New Zealand, having kaput platinum with sales of more than 15,000. It is No6 in the charts, and the No1-selling comedy album in the US.


Wellington singer-songwriter Pip Brown, below the list Ladyhawke, has had extended media insurance coverage in Britain this twelvemonth - even though her debut album is non released till next calendar month. The Observer newspaper last month named her one of the 50 coolest people of the year.


There are too high expectations for new albums by The Black Seeds and Fat Freddys Drop this year, as both continue to soar upwards in Europe.


Before securing their Emmy-nominated television system series, Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie signed with Seattle-based independent record label Sub Pop, best known for Nirvana.


Sub Pop spokesman Gabe Carter told The Dominion Post the show's popularity had been a big hike to sales.


"As an indie rock mark, we don't sign things thinking that they're going to blow up. The label itself has a history of admiring New Zealand bands."


Brown, 28, grew up in Masterton and formed Wellington rock band Two Lane Blacktop. For the past tense four years she has been based in Australia and Britain.


Speaking from London, Brown aforementioned she had been taken aback by recent coverage in the British media.


"Things are scarce getting more than and more than hilarious. It has been a slight bit strong for me to endure everything. It's kind of mounting up."


Brown recently performed at the Melt festival in Berlin which featured Bjork, Kate Nash and Franz Ferdinand.


The top-selling Fat Freddys Drop are likely to release their next album in November when they tour of duty Europe, including, for the first time, French cities outside Paris.


Spokeswoman Sarah Hunter said the band, which tours Europe annually, had become big in France.


"It had got Beatle-esque in Paris. They have never experienced anything like it. People were falling over themselves."


Hunter said the ring had postponed a short European

Friday 27 June 2008

Emmys Announce Ten-Show Short Lists for Best Series Awards

Clockwise from top left: Courtesy of AMC, Fox, HBO, ABC, NBC, and Showtime

Could this be the year The Wire finally gets an Emmy nomination? Could Mad Men break through? Is — gasp — Family Guy on its way to a Best Comedy Emmy? Maybe! The TV Academy's Website posted ten-title short lists for its Best Drama and Best Comedy nominations, well in advance of July 17's nomination announcement. The lists, after the jump.



Top Ten Comedy Series Finalists
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Entourage
Family Guy
Flight of the Conchords
The Office
Pushing Daisies
30 Rock
Two and a Half Men
Ugly Betty
Weeds

Top Ten Drama Series Finalists
Boston Legal
Damages
Dexter
Friday Night Lights
Grey’s Anatomy
House
Lost
Mad Men
The Tudors
The Wire

Other than the glaring absence of Cavemen, the happy surprise on these lists is, of course, The Wire, famously ignored by the Emmys all these long years. Will David Simon's prediction that the show will never win an Emmy be one last thing about his own show that Simon was wrong about? Or is this short list just the Emmys' way of covering their butts? After all, they didn't ignore The Wire, they put it in their Top Ten!

The lists are interesting in that you can pull from them groups of shows that would suggest a really exciting year at the awards (Family Guy, Conchords, Pushing Daisies, Weeds), or the opposite (Boston Legal, Grey's Anatomy, House, Lost). It's safe to bet that the actual nominees will be a mix of the boring and exciting. We'd make some predictions, but it's gonna be hard to type between now and July 17 with all our fingers crossed. It5'[s reqally nopt as easy as y6ou'd thinjk.

Top 10 Drama and Comedy Finalists Announced [Emmy.org]


Sunday 22 June 2008

Robin Spielberg

Robin Spielberg   
Artist: Robin Spielberg

   Genre(s): 
New Age
   Jazz
   



Discography:


Vanilla Sweet-Talks   
 Vanilla Sweet-Talks

   Year: 2004   
Tracks: 12


Dreaming of Summer   
 Dreaming of Summer

   Year: 2000   
Tracks: 12


Beautiful Dreamer   
 Beautiful Dreamer

   Year: 1999   
Tracks: 14


In The Heart Of Winter   
 In The Heart Of Winter

   Year: 1998   
Tracks: 9


Heal Of The Hand   
 Heal Of The Hand

   Year: 1998   
Tracks: 11


In the Arms of the Wind   
 In the Arms of the Wind

   Year: 1997   
Tracks: 12


Songs Of The Spirit   
 Songs Of The Spirit

   Year: 1996   
Tracks: 12


Unchained Melodies   
 Unchained Melodies

   Year: 1995   
Tracks: 14




Born into a melodic house, Robin Spielberg began piano lessons at the age of heptad; she besides played organ and violin while a baby. She attended Michigan State University and New York University, working extensively in each school's field department. After gradation, Spielberg began playing professionally, ofttimes at hotels in the New York area. That caper of course grew into a vehicle for her original compositions and later, a recording calling. She has released Heal of the Hand, Heart of the Holidays, Unshackled Melodies and In the Heart of Winter; Songs of the Spirit appeared in 1996.






Saturday 14 June 2008

Music Performance Fund in Peril

For 60 years, the Music Performance Fund, an unsung charity financed by a small fraction of record company sales, has paid the piper -- and just about every other kind of musician -- by helping to bankroll thousands of free concerts annually all over North America.

They have included Metropolitan Opera performances in New York's Central Park and a quartet led by a bassoonist who forged through icy waters in a small boat to play for Canadian villagers above the Arctic Circle.

Now, though, the popularity of music downloads and file-sharing via the Internet has eaten away at record company revenues. And as the industry has dwindled, so has the performance fund's ability to underwrite pro bono shows.





" 'Dwindled' is an easy way of saying it's gone to pot," said John Hall, the trustee who has managed the Music Performance Fund for most of the last 18 years.

At its peak in the early 1980s, Hall said, the fund got more than $20 million a year from record companies. Last year, the figure was $3.4 million. In 1984, the fund helped pay musicians' salaries for 55,000 free performances. Last year, there were 9,060. The organization's staff is down from 36 to eight.

Income from paid downloads, growing but still relatively small, is the music industry's hope for the future. But Web-generated sales are not in the agreement that governs the fund, negotiated between the American Federation of Musicians and the record companies.

Locally, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission has ended a partnership with the fund that dated back decades. Commission officials decided that the money, which comes with some bureaucratic strings and loss of hiring flexibility, had grown so scant that it no longer was worth the trouble.

The performance fund "is becoming a dinosaur," said Laura Zucker, executive director of the arts commission, a department of county government. She hopes the fund can "be creative" and find a way to regenerate itself for the Internet Age.

The arts commission's stake from the performance fund fell from $60,000 in 2000-01 to $32,000 in the current fiscal year, said Heather Rigby, the commission's public events coordinator. Next year, money from tax coffers will replace the fund's donation.

The city of Los Angeles' Cultural Affairs Department continues to tap the performance fund, but its annual grants have dropped from $52,500 to $30,500, forcing it to find other donors to make up the shortfall.

The Music Performance Fund gets 0.2% of what consumers spend on records, tapes and compact discs -- up to a maximum payment of about 2.2 cents per disc. The labels can exclude about 30,000 copies of each release before having to pay the charitable tariff, said Patrick Varriale, who monitors the agreement for the musicians union.

Fund's roots

The fund owes its existence to James Caesar Petrillo, the son of a Chicago sewer worker who learned the trumpet, rose to the presidency of the American Federation of Musicians and wrote a chapter in U.S. labor history by marshaling the nation's musicians for a strike that silenced most record companies from summer 1942 to fall 1944.

Recorded music had been steadily supplanting live gigs for the rank and file. After 1929, film soundtracks eliminated the job of silent-movie accompanist. Jukeboxes were knocking humans off barroom bandstands, and radio stations increasingly filled their music hours with cheap discs instead of costly live performers.

Petrillo declared that there would be no more recordings until musicians were taken care of, even rejecting an appeal from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to end the strike for the sake of wartime morale. The solution was the Music Performance Trust Fund, as it initially was known.

In November 1944, the Chicago Tribune reported that the record companies had agreed to ante up 2 cents per $2 record and a half a cent per 35-cent record -- or about $4 million a year -- to sponsor free concerts that would entertain the public and help put displaced musicians back to work. Other disagreements arose, leading to a second, yearlong strike, but in 1948 the fund began providing free concerts underwritten by record sales.

The musicians union expects to begin negotiations toward a new recording agreement this fall, and, as always, the terms governing the performance fund are potentially on the table. Trustee Hall wants the union to negotiate the fund into the Internet Age by insisting it receive a share of music downloads.

Thomas Lee, president of the musicians union, said he favors going to bat for the fund in negotiations, on the theory that more free concerts and music education will, in the long run, pay dividends by creating more music fans.

Getting folks on board

But recording musicians, who will help set bargaining priorities, may not go along. "Attempting to do anything [for the performance fund] without their approval or generosity of spirit would be difficult," Lee said, adding that many musicians may feel that "I'm looking out for me right now -- I've got a tough time making a living."

Rather than wait for the union to come through, Hall plans to hit the pavement this summer with his hand out. He said he is planning the fund's first fundraising campaign, aiming to bolster its grant-making and create a $10-million endowment.

The main points in his pitch: Few performing arts charities have a longer track record, and none reaches farther geographically or embraces a wider range of audiences and musical styles.

"We distribute 65,000 paychecks to musicians per year," he said. "There is no organization in the world that comes anywhere near us."

The partnership between the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Music Performance Fund ended in April -- at least for now -- atop a flatbed trailer that sufficed as a stage in a La Puente park. There, the Susie Hansen Latin Band closed an afternoon show by blazing through a salsa-inflected version of "Vehicle," a rock oldie from 1970 by the Ides of March. The musicians played for neighborhood folks, kids in baseball uniforms and an assortment of their regular fans, topping off a special event for the local Little League.

With the 10 members earning union scale, the gig wasn't as lucrative as most of the band's, Hansen said. But since 1980, first in Chicago and then in L.A., she had been happy to play for the Music Performance Fund.

"I can't tell you how many concerts we wouldn't have played" without it, she said. "I hope it doesn't mean the county stops having these concerts.

"It's a wonderful thing."

mike.boehm@latimes.com