Apr 13
Before there were books we had storytelling. The popular image here is of people sitting round a camp fire telling tales of long forgotten lands. Yes, this must have happened, but storytelling was so much more than just tales beside the campfire. They were a way to pass down traditions, ensure that the culture was maintained and to warn and advise the young ones about the dangers in a wild world.
In our modern and largely safe world we have mostly forgotten the thrill of listening to a well told story.
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Apr 13
Well never know for sure how Michael Jackson would have wanted Cirque du Soleil to interpret his life and his discography. But we can hazard a guess.
The pop star, a firm believer in the power of jaw-dropping spectacle, would have liked it big.
“Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour,” a two-hour Cirque show devoted to Jacksons music and memory, stops at the Prudential Center and Madison Square Garden this week. And it arrives with the force and firepower of a small armada. Two hundred people tour with the show. More than 60 artists are involved in the production, including dancers, musicians, trapeze performers, acrobats and mimes.
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Apr 10
First lady Michelle Obama continues to take Hollywood by storm. She’s appeared with David Letterman, Jay Leno and Ellen DeGeneres in recent months — and Saturday she made her first-ever live appearance on Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards in Los Angeles.
Mrs. Obama presented “The Big Help Award” to country pop singer Taylor Swift for Swift’s work helping tornado and flood victims.
“I’m here because I’ve always felt an obligation to give back; to lift up others the way my parents, my teachers and mentors lifted me. And that’s something that our next honoree believes, too,” Obama said at the awards ceremony. Read full article…
Apr 08
In the 1980s, Debra Sharon Davis was a young woman working on her own as a journalist. She traveled with the Rolling Stones and also interviewed John Lennon’s close friend, the late singer/songwriter, Harry Nilsson, who shared some unknown insights about Lennon, including the fact that he struggled with bulimia.
Life moved forward and Davis filed away her notes. She got married at 20, divorced, raised two daughters as a single parent and moved on to other things, including working as a screenwriter and founding her own companies, the Westlake Village-based Davis Communications Group Inc.
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Apr 02
A kiss is still a kiss: Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in ‘Casablanca.’
Blaine is an American expatriate living in Casablanca. His establishment is a favorite watering hole and gambling den for refugees from the Nazis hoping to flee to the U.S.; officials from Germany and the controlling Vichy French government sympathetic to them; and all manner of crooks. Blaine, still bitter over being left standing in the rain by his lover at a Paris train station, is shocked when his ex-flame shows up at his place with her husband, Czech Resistance leader and concentration camp escapee Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid).
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” laments Blaine, who has to decide whether to set aside his feelings and help the couple escape.
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