jess3 blogs,
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'8 Mile' Soundtrack To Include Cuts From Eminem, Jay-Z, Nas
With the first single, Eminem's "Lose Yourself," already getting heavy radio spins, the soundtrack to "8 Mile" has just wrapped up production.
Em, who stars in the movie and donated three new songs to the soundtrack, also produced much of the album, which includes Jay-Z, Rakim, Nas, Xzibit, D12 and Macy Gray. Em's Shady Records signees 50 Cent and Obie Trice are featured throughout the LP as well, highlighted by a posse cut with Marshall Mathers.
According to Em's management company, the artists on the LP kept their tunes in tune with the vibe and goings-on in the film. The Gang Starr track "Battle," for instance, which features DJ Premier scratching on the turntables, was derived from a scene in the movie where the Shady one squares off against another verbal gladiator. The "8 Mile" soundtrack is tentatively slated for an October 29 release.
spiralgradient.grd if you have photoshop you can use my gradient....
i made this in class today... its not finished, its gonna be a propaganda poster....
Redman, Method Man To Play Soldier Boys
It's been over 20 years since we've seen Goldie Hawn and Bill Murray suit up as hapless GIs in career-elevating roles in "Private Benjamin" and "Stripes," respectively. Now a couple of rap's most infamous smokers will see how high their careers can go as soldier boys.
Redman and Method Man have just inked a deal with Paramount Pictures and MTV Films to star in a yet-to-be-titled film that will find the MCs with the tattooed arms joining the armed forces.
"They're going to the military and get sent on a special mission," said James Ellis, one of the film's producers and Redman's manager. Brian Posehn, who wrote for Red and Meth's film debut, "How High," has been tapped to pen the movie's script, and Ellis said he hopes to ramp up production in mid-2003.
Before we see them throw down for Uncle Sam, Ellis said the lyrically lacerating duo will be on the big screen in a more familiar element as a couple of guys using rap to stack chips in "Ghetto Inc." The two will portray undercover DEA agents in another untitled movie that Donald Scott is currently writing.
"I think it's a race to the finish between that and the 'Ghetto Inc.' film," Ellis said about which movie would hit theaters first, "but the untitled DEA project is slated to be the first one. No directors have been named but that one is a joint production between Jersey Films and Native Pictures, the same people who produced 'How High.' "
Ellis said ever since "How High" hit theaters, he's been fielding calls from all over Hollywood.
"It's like nonstop from people who wanna do low-budget stuff with them, and now people are talking about doing sitcom ideas with them," Ellis explained. "Before 'How High,' [Red and Meth] were a little apprehensive about doing [TV], but now they're talking about doing it, but not in a traditional way. Kinda bringing a twist to it."
The duo have not forgotten about twisting words over murky beats, however — they are both working on solo albums. Ellis disclosed that the next Redman album is probably going to come out in late February or early March, with Method Man's album right behind it.
Cyclists ride past sheep near Cuerrar during the 127-mile stage 12 of the Tour of Spain cycling race from Segovia to Burgos, Spain, Thursday, Sept. 19, 2002. (AP Photo/Denis Doyle)
A Palestinian child carries a poster showing a hamburger, which has been altered, to include a dead Palestinian child Saturday, Sept. 21, 2002. The writing on the poster reads, "Let's boycott the American food." More than 400 Syrians and Palestinians gathered in downtown Damascus to call for boycotting American goods. (AP Photo/Bassem Tellawi)
Embattled Nirvana Track Surfaces Online As Hits LP Nears Release
Kurt Cobain fans are closer to Nirvana than they have been in years.
A studio version of the unreleased Nirvana track "You Know You're Right" has surfaced online in its entirety. The song, which was reportedly recorded in January 1994, less than three months before frontman Cobain took his own life with a shotgun in his Seattle home, is expected to a appear on the long-awaited Nirvana greatest-hits album (see "Nirvana Song 'You Know You're Right' May See Release By Year's End"), which, according to Courtney Love, is due by Christmas.
A Universal Music Group spokesperson, however, said that while the LP would come out, there was no specific release date.
By Monday morning (September 23), several Web sites were streaming or had otherwise made available "You Know You're Right," another bursting confessional by the tortured Cobain, akin to tunes such as "Rape Me" and "Stay Away," with Nirvana's trademark soft/loud dynamic best displayed in "Milk It," and a similar sentiment to "All Apologies."
Prefaced with atonal harmonics, Cobain moans the opening lines, "I would never bother you/ I would never promise to," while a harrowing, rumbling melody trudges along. The chorus, in typical Nirvana fashion, explodes with inarticulate rage as Cobain repeatedly holds his scream of "Pain" for a full four measures before slurring into the song's title. Squalling guitar lines pierce through the manic fuzz, twisting around each other to cascade into a noisy maelstrom by song's end.
Portions of "You Know You're Right" appeared online in May; and a live version was recorded for a 1993 bootleg, but the full, studio version remained buried until now. Cobain's widow/ Hole frontwoman Courtney Love performed a version of the song during her band's stint on MTVs "Unplugged" in February 1995.
If "You Know You're Right" winds up on the as-yet-untitled best-of collection, the song would be the first posthumous release of any previously unreleased Nirvana studio recording to be issued in the U.S.
On Friday, Courtney Love announced on the syndicated morning radio program "The Howard Stern Show" that the Nirvana greatest-hits set would be in stores by Christmastime. She added that she had settled her lawsuits with both the surviving members of Nirvana, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, over future business decisions regarding the group, and major-label conglomerate Universal Music Group. In the latter suit, Love made the claim that artists' standard seven-year recording contracts are unfair.
However, Love's publicist handling the UMG suit said the disagreement had not been officially settled but was close to a resolution (a hearing scheduled for September 17 was adjourned to October 1). Neither Love's lawyer on the Nirvana case nor her manager returned calls by press time.
Making Your Own Coffee Table Book
Remember when ordering prints online and posting photo albums on the Web were revolutionary? The latest rage in online photo sharing is creating your very own photo album, one that’s printed on glossy paper and hardbound like a real book.
The coffee table-style photo book, available from myPublisher.com, makes an ideal gift for family and friends. You choose the pictures, design the layout, select photo borders, and more in a book of 10 to 50 pages. It’s one of the coolest ways yet to share your digital photographs.
Getting Started
You must register and join to use the myPublisher.com service, but it’s free to build a book. You only pay when you place an order. To ensure maximum quality, before posting photos review the site’s uploading and scanning guidelines. Their suggestions help ensure that your pictures look their best. Only JPEG format photos are accepted. Any significant photo editing, color balancing, grayscale conversion, cropping, and so forth that you want to do should be done before uploading.
If you have prints from film that you’d like to include in a book, simply digitize them by using a flatbed scanner. If you don’t have a scanner, myPublisher.com offers a print scanning service. Print sizes must be between 2 x 3 inches and 10 x 12 inches.
As you place photos during the book ordering process, myPublisher.com automatically gauges whether the photo has sufficient resolution for the size selected. If the photo contains too few pixels for the chosen space, alternate smaller sizes are recommended to maximize printed quality. Like most things in photography, the quality of the final product rests on the axiom of garbage in, garbage out.
Release Your Inner Artist
Once your pictures are uploaded, the fun begins. You don’t have to be a graphics professional to create a beautiful book. The framing, layout, and text options are easy to use. Photo borders come in different styles and colors, and you can stylize each image by softening corners, blurring edges, creating ovals, and more. You can also mix and match layout types throughout the book; it isn’t necessary to stick with one look for all pages of the book.
You have two choices for building a book: you can go with a pre-built layout, or you can opt for a custom design. The pre-built layout is designed to be the quick and easy route to a finished book. As such, you’re presented with fewer options than if you take the customized approach. You can also build and store multiple book layouts. Regardless of what layouts or design options you choose, the cost of a book works out to about US$3-4 per page, with discounts for multiple copies ordered at the same time.
Before You Print
It’s critical that you preview your book before completing the order. This is your final opportunity to ensure the photos are exactly where you want them, the captions are free of typographical errors, that all borders are in order, and that the cover looks the way you envisioned. Even seasoned graphic designers are known to miss a thing or two the first time through, so preview carefully to prevent costly and disappointing mistakes.
If you want to take the book upmarket, explore some of the optional extras. They include a leather cover in place of the standard linen one. A book jacket and slipcase are also available.
Once your order is placed, myPublisher.com indicates it takes up to 10 business days to process, print, and bind your book, though you’ll likely see your order dispatched sooner than that.
TONY HAWK'S BOOM BOOM HUCKJAM
SKATE: TONY HAWK - Bucky Lasek - Andy Macdonald - Lincoln Ueda - Sergie Ventura
BMX: Mat Hoffman - Dave Mirra - John Parker - Kevin Robinson
MOTO-X: Clifford Adoptante - Mike Cinqmars - Ronnie Faisst - Dustin Miller
MUSIC: Social Distortion
November 10th at 7:30PM
MCI Center
Washington D.C.
Tickets go on sale to the general public Saturday, September 21st at 10:00AM,
stuff i made in my photoshop 2 class today... while i was bored... we were critiquing the autumn assignment.... member that one ??
the 2pac los angeles article PART 2
How Vegas Police Probe Foundered
By CHUCK PHILIPS, Times Staff Writer
LAS VEGAS -- Six years ago today, rap and film star Tupac Shakur was fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting on a crowded street a block from the Las Vegas Strip.
Despite the public setting and the victim's notoriety, no one has ever been arrested for the killing. Shakur's family, many of his followers and some black entertainers cite the case as evidence of a double standard in the justice system. Had a white celebrity been gunned down in the open, they contend, police would have found those responsible without delay.
Las Vegas police say their investigation stalled not for lack of effort, but because witnesses in Shakur's entourage refused to cooperate.
That, however, is only part of the explanation. A Times review found that police committed a string of costly missteps:
They discounted an incident, hours before the shooting, in which Shakur took part in the beating of a gang member in a Las Vegas hotel lobby.
They failed to follow up with a member of Shakur's entourage who witnessed the shooting and told police he might be able to identify one or more of the assailants. The witness was killed several weeks later in an unrelated shooting.
They did not pursue a lead about a sighting of a rented white Cadillac similar to the car from which the fatal shots were fired at Shakur and in which the assailants escaped.
Las Vegas homicide Sgt. Kevin Manning, who oversaw the investigation, defended his department's work. He said detectives fielded thousands of phone tips, interviewed hundreds of witnesses and chased numerous leads during a year when the homicide unit was besieged with a record 168 murders.
"Tupac got the same treatment as any other homicide here," said Manning. "But you know what? We can't do it alone. We rely on cooperative citizens to step forward and help us solve crimes. And in Tupac's case, we got no cooperation whatsoever."
The Times reported Friday that court documents as well as interviews with investigators and gang members, including witnesses to the crime, indicate that Shakur was attacked by the Southside Crips, a Compton gang, to avenge the earlier beating of one of their members. The Times also reported that the man who had been beaten fired the fatal shots.
The following account of how the Las Vegas police investigation went aground is based on the same sources and on interviews with Nevada police, six Los Angeles-area investigators involved in the probe and three independent gang experts.
Gang killings are extremely difficult to solve because there is usually little evidence and few witnesses are willing to talk. Shakur's associates were particularly unlikely to volunteer information. Like the rapper himself, many had criminal records and a deep-seated hostility toward police. To some extent, the feeling was mutual: Shakur first gained notoriety with lyrics depicting violence against police.
There was a deeper problem: Las Vegas police were slow to grasp that the roots of the killing lay in a feud between rival gangs in Compton, and were slow to act once they did realize it. To identify those responsible, police would have to take their investigation to Compton and develop informants within the gangs.
The Vegas cops were ill-suited to do that. They had little experience with gang investigations or gang culture. The Compton Police Department did have entree to the gang underworld. Its investigators had known many gang members since they were babies. They took their first mug shots. They testified at their trials. They visited them in jail. In return, they often got valuable information.
But Las Vegas police worried that the Compton investigators were too close to the gangs and their rap-industry patrons and might leak information. The Vegas detectives kept their distance from the gang squad, and their investigation quickly hit a dead end.
"How is a cop from Vegas supposed to go out to Compton and get a powerful street gang to cooperate in a murder probe?" asked Jared Lewis, a Modesto police detective who is director of Know Gangs, a group that presents seminars on gang homicides for police agencies nationwide.
"Gang homicide investigations are very complex," he said. "This was no easy case to solve, by any stretch of the imagination. I can understand why it ended up the way it has."
Sept. 7, 1996
On the evening of Sept. 7, 1996, Shakur and his record company chief, Marion "Suge" Knight, attended the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon heavyweight boxing match at the MGM Grand Hotel. Also in Las Vegas for the fight were scores of gang members from Los Angeles.
As he was leaving the hotel after the fight, Shakur attacked a man in the MGM lobby. Shakur's bodyguards and Knight joined in the beating. The victim was Orlando Anderson, 21, a member of the Southside Crips. Shakur and Knight were affiliated with a rival Compton gang, the Mob Piru Bloods. Shakur's bodyguards were members of the Bloods.
The Bloods had been spoiling for revenge against Anderson because he had beaten one of their members at a Lakewood shopping mall several weeks earlier.
Now, the attack on Anderson became the basis for another act of retaliation--this time against Shakur. The rap star was shot 2 1/2 hours later as he and Knight waited at a red light on a street teeming with tourists and other onlookers. The shots were fired from a white Cadillac carrying four Crips. Shakur suffered massive chest wounds and died a week later.
Immediately after the shooting, the assailants returned to Compton, where they bragged to their friends and girlfriends. The Compton gang unit was soon deluged with tips implicating the Crips and "Baby Lane," Anderson's gang nickname. Informants reported that Anderson had been seen brandishing a Glock semiautomatic pistol, the kind of weapon used to kill Shakur. Investigators passed this information on to Las Vegas.
Las Vegas police had heard about the beating in the MGM Grand lobby and reviewed a security videotape of it. But they did not know who Anderson was or why the incident mattered. Manning, the homicide commander, issued a statement at the time saying, "Investigators have no reason ... to believe that the altercation has any connection to the shooting."
A week after the shooting, Compton gang investigators reviewed the videotape at the request of Las Vegas police. They identified the beating victim as Anderson, explained his gang affiliation and said the bodyguards seen flailing at him were Bloods.
"We told Vegas right then we thought the Southside Crips were responsible for the murder and that Orlando was the shooter," said Bobby Ladd, then a homicide investigator with the Compton gang unit and now a Garden Grove police officer.
Las Vegas police stuck to their position that the beating was irrelevant. Manning told an interviewer, "It appears to be just an individual who was walking through the MGM and got into an argument with Tupac.... He probably didn't even know it was Tupac Shakur."
Having ruled Anderson out as a suspect, Las Vegas police did not try to track him down for questioning or show his photograph to members of Shakur's entourage, a dozen of whom remained in Las Vegas for a week after the shooting while the rapper fought for his life in a local hospital.
Police also failed to retrieve additional security video that might have captured Anderson's movements after he was beaten. Security cameras are pervasive in Las Vegas, sweeping hotel lobbies, hallways, parking areas and other public places around the clock.
Crips gang members say Anderson and his accomplices passed in front of video cameras as they gathered at the Treasure Island and MGM Grand hotels to plot the killing and, later that night, when they picked up the white Cadillac in the valet parking circle outside Treasure Island.
Because casinos routinely tape over surveillance footage every seven days, the potential evidence was lost.
"Overlooking the gang fight at the MGM was a mistake," said Wes McBride, president of the California Gang Investigators Assn. A retired gang intelligence sergeant for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Operation Safe Streets division, McBride runs a gang training program for police academies.
"In gang culture, that fight was a killing offense," he said. "If you embarrass a gang member in public, they will retaliate with a vengeance."
Lou Savelli, a New York gang-unit sergeant and vice president of the East Coast Gang Investigators Assn., concurred.
"If a drive-by shooting happened in New York and we found out that there was a gang beating three hours earlier involving the murder victim, I guarantee that would be my No. 1 lead," he said.
Manning now says Las Vegas police may have misjudged the significance of the fight in the MGM lobby. In a recent interview, he said police discounted Anderson as a suspect based on information that he had been detained by hotel security long enough that he would not have had time to arm himself and organize the Crips' ambush of Shakur several hours later.
Manning said that information had proved incorrect. He declined to elaborate.
Working With Gang Members
Investigators say it takes special effort to develop a rapport with gang members. Because gang culture places a premium on respect, gang detectives will treat thugs and their families with great courtesy, even deference. In return, they sometimes provide confidential information that helps solve crimes.
That did not happen in the Shakur case.
From their first moments on the scene, Las Vegas police unintentionally alienated the witnesses most likely to be able to identify the rapper's assailants. After summoning an ambulance for Shakur, police ordered Knight, bleeding from a head wound, and other members of Shakur's entourage out of their cars at gunpoint.
"The police shoved guns in our faces and threatened us," said rapper E.D.I. Mean, who was in the car directly behind Shakur's. "They made us lie face down in the middle of the street. Even after they realized we were telling the truth, they never apologized."
Las Vegas police say they had no way of knowing at first whether Knight and the others were victims or suspects. After establishing that they were the former, patrol officers had them sit along a curb until homicide detectives arrived. That took nearly two hours.
Then Manning and his men ushered the witnesses one by one into squad cars and took their statements.
They were, Manning said, "extremely uncooperative." Knight, founder of Death Row Records in Los Angeles, summed up relations between the witnesses and the police during an interview with ABC-TV's "PrimeTime Live" two months later. Knight said that even if he knew who killed Shakur, he would not tell Las Vegas authorities.
"It's not my job," he said. "I don't get paid to solve homicides. I don't get paid to tell on people."
Las Vegas detectives were disgusted. "It's the typical gang mentality," Manning said. "Their best friend got shot and nobody saw nothing. The way I see it, if somebody tells me they don't want to talk, what's the point of calling them back over and over again? In this country, citizens have rights."
There was, however, one witness willing to help: a 19-year-old rapper named Yafeu "Kadafi" Fula. He had spent part of his childhood in the same households as Shakur and was particularly close to him. Fula, who was with Mean in the car behind Shakur's that night, told police he might be able to identify one or more of the assailants.
Fula was among the dozen or so members of Shakur's circle who remained in Las Vegas after the shooting, keeping vigil at University Medical Center, where Shakur was on life support. During that week, detectives made no attempt to follow up with Fula.
His only contact with police was confrontational. On Sept. 9, two nights after the shooting, patrol officers stopped a motorist outside the hospital. Fula and some other Shakur associates who knew the man protested and got into a scuffle with police. Fula was handcuffed and searched but not charged.
After Shakur's death on Sept. 13, Fula left Las Vegas, traveling to Atlanta and Los Angeles and then New Jersey, where his relatives lived.
Compton investigators, meanwhile, had assembled mug shots of a handful of gang members, including Anderson. They hand-delivered the photos to Las Vegas.
Manning said detectives called Fula's lawyer to set up a meeting with the teenage rapper so they could show him the pictures. Manning said the calls were not returned.
Police did not try to locate Fula on their own. By Nov. 10, it was too late. Fula was gunned down in a housing project in Irvington, N.J.
Potential Witnesses Dismissed
Early on the morning of Oct. 2, 1996, Compton police, FBI agents and members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department swept through Compton, arresting nearly two dozen gang members and seizing weapons and ammunition. Their aim was to stifle a gang war that had erupted after the shooting of Shakur.
Orlando Anderson was among those sitting in the Compton police lockup. He had been picked up on a warrant stemming from a gang killing six months earlier. The other gang members were being held on drug, weapon and other charges. Compton police believed that some of them were involved in Shakur's slaying or knew something about it.
Two Las Vegas detectives took part in the roundup at the invitation of Compton police. One of them questioned Anderson for about 20 minutes.
The visiting detectives brushed aside a suggestion that they question the other gang members. This stunned the Compton cops and sheriff's deputies, who thought the obvious thing to do was to use the threat of prosecution to try to extract information about Shakur's killing.
"We had a bunch of gang members in custody who knew exactly what happened with Shakur--some who we believed were in the Cadillac," said Ladd, the former Compton investigator. "Las Vegas expressed no interest whatsoever in talking to any of them. They barely even interviewed Orlando."
Anderson was released two days later; prosecutors had declined to file charges against him for the gang killing. Las Vegas investigators never spoke to him again. He was killed May 29, 1998, in a drug-related shooting at a Compton carwash.
Savelli, the New York gang investigator, said the arrests in Compton were a missed opportunity.
"The success rate on these kinds of homicides hinges completely on having informants inside of the gang," he said. "You lean on gang members with rap sheets for information about the crime. If you don't get the information the first time, you go back. You get in their face. Two. Three. Four times. Eventually they talk. But relentless follow-up is essential."
Manning said his detectives, operating outside their home state, lacked authority to interrogate the Compton gang members--that morning or later. Los Angeles authorities took issue with that assertion. They said that once local police invited the detectives to question the suspects, there was no legal reason for them not to do so.
Manning also said his detectives asked Los Angeles County sheriff's officers to question gang members on their behalf. Sheriff's investigators said they were not asked to interrogate the suspects about Shakur's killing. Rather, they said, the Las Vegas detectives asked them to pass on anything they learned about the case while questioning the gang members on the local charges.
Manning said he had no regrets about how his officers handled the situation.
"You can't just go in and push everybody aside and say, 'OK, we're taking over,' " he said. "Even if we did, do you think these guys are going to talk to us simply because we walk up and ask them to? Do you think we scared them so bad they would just puke their guts out and admit to everything?"
The White Cadillac
Two days after the shooting of Shakur, two Crips were seen in Compton driving a white 1996 Cadillac bearing a rental sticker. An informant told the local gang unit that the Crips had visited a car stereo shop whose owner also did bodywork. In Las Vegas, one of Shakur's bodyguards had gotten off a shot at the white Cadillac as it fled. The word on the street in Compton was that the Crips brought the car to the stereo shop to have the damage repaired.
Compton police relayed this information to Las Vegas investigators, who added it to their file.
The Compton gang investigators then canvassed every rental agency in the area to determine whether any had rented a white Cadillac that had been driven to Las Vegas around the time Shakur was shot. They found that a Carson agency had rented such a car to a man with possible ties to the gang underground. They took a photograph of the car and detailed their findings in a report.
Compton investigators say they gave this additional information to Las Vegas police.
Manning said his detectives never received it.
"We thought there was a possibility that we had located the Cadillac used in the crime," said retired Compton Sgt. Robert Baker. "It was a solid lead that should have been pursued."
Concerned About Corruption
Investigators say it was understandable that Las Vegas police would have concerns about cooperating closely with their Compton counterparts. Compton had a history of political corruption, and some Police Department figures had been alleged to have gang ties.
In 2000, after years of feuding with the police brass, Compton Mayor Omar Bradley and City Council members disbanded the department and contracted with Los Angeles County to provide police services. But at the time of Shakur's shooting, the gang squad was regarded as one of the finest in Southern California.
People familiar with the investigation say Las Vegas police were concerned that city officials were too cozy with Suge Knight, who grew up in Compton, contributed money to Bradley's political campaigns and knew members of the police force. Knight's security chief, Reginald Wright Jr., is a former Compton police officer whose father ran the gang unit.
Knight's name had figured in some of the speculation about Shakur's death. One theory was that Knight arranged the rapper's killing so he could exploit his martyrdom commercially. Las Vegas detectives worried that Wright's father and other officers might protect Knight or pass information to him. Knight's refusal to cooperate with them sharpened the Nevada detectives' suspicions.
To ease those concerns, Hourie Taylor, then Compton chief of police, removed the elder Wright from the Shakur investigation and replaced him with Baker. Nevertheless, Las Vegas investigators continued to keep their distance.
"The investigators with the best inside information about the Southside Crips worked in the Compton gang unit," said McBride, the former Sheriff's Department gang investigator.
"They were good investigators. But even if Las Vegas didn't trust them, what did it hurt to listen? It's not like Vegas had to give up anything. In my mind, if you aren't even close to solving the case, what do you have to lose?"
Though the investigation into Shakur's slaying has been dormant for years, some former Compton officers refuse to give up hope of catching some of those involved.
"I believe Tupac's murder could have been solved--and it still could be," said Tim Brennan, a Compton gang investigator now with the Sheriff's Department. "All the clues are right there. What the investigation lacked was input from detectives who understood the gangs involved and how they operate and who all the players are. I believe justice could still be served."
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http://www.directeminem.net/media/audio/other/my_name_all.ram
"my name f/ XZIBIT" hot track from xzibits new album Man vs Machine
http://www.directeminem.net/media/audio/other/lose_yourself_all.ram
"Lose Yourself" lead single from 8 mile soundtrack
http://www.trickology.com/soundcheck/stream.php?id=213&audio=eminemstimulate.rm
stimulate
Volkswagen of America Inc. on Friday, Sept. 13, 2002 offered the first official glimpse at its long-awaited topless Beetle. The 2003 New Beetle convertible features the same rounded looks as its hardtop siblings and uses the same four-cylinder engines, but with a fabric roof. "The New Beetle convertible follows in the footsteps of two of the highest-selling cabriolets in the world, the Volkswagen Cabrio and the original Beetle convertible of the '50s, '60s and '70s," the company said in a statement. (AP Photo/Volkswagen of America, ho)
Kansas City's catcher Brent Mayne argues with home plate umpite Jerry Crawford, while being restrained by manager Tony Pena, not shown, after Mayne was ejected for arguing balls and strikes during the third inning against the Chicago White Sox on Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2002, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Brian Kersey)
Mos Def, Erykah Badu, Roots Make 'Brown Sugar' Music
Mos Def, Common and the Roots have recorded new music for the soundtrack to "Brown Sugar," an upcoming movie set in the hip-hop industry in which all three acts appear.
Def contributes three versions of the film's title track — one with his and Talib Kweli's group Black Star — to the album, due September 24.
Queen Latifah and Mos Def have major roles in the film, while Common, the Roots, Method Man, Doug E. Fresh, Slick Rick, Dana Dane and other rappers make cameos.
"Brown Sugar," written by "Carmen: A Hip Hopera" scribe Michael Elliot, chronicles the lives of a music executive, played by Taye Diggs ("The Best Man"), and a music critic, Sanaa Lathan ("Love & Basketball"), who met and became friends the day both discovered hip-hop.
Magic Johnson is the executive producer of the film, which hits theaters October 11.
The soundtrack features Erykah Badu's new single "Love of My Life (An Ode to Hip-Hop)," which features Common and was produced by Raphael Saadiq.
Other highlights include a cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" by contemporary jazz singer Cassandra Wilson, Coldcut's remix of Eric. B and Rakim's hip-hop classic "Paid in Full" and Jill Scott's new "Easy Conversation."
"Brown Sugar" soundtrack track list, according to MCA:
Mos Def - "Brown Sugar (Extra Sweet)"
Erykah Badu featuring Common - "Love of My Life (An Ode to Hip-Hop)"
Angie Stone - "Bring Your Heart"
Black Star - "Brown Sugar (Raw)"
Jill Scott - "Easy Conversation"
Blackalicious featuring Lateef the Truth Speaker and KeKe Wyatt - "It's Going Down"
Mos Def - "Breakdown"
Rahsaan Patterson - "You Make Life So Good"
Cassandra Wilson - "Time After Time"
Eric B. and Rakim - "Paid in Full (7 Minutes of Madness - the Coldcut Remix)"
Hi-Tek featuring Big D and Piakhan - "No One Knows Her Name"
Mary J. Blige - "Never Been"
Mos Def - "Brown Sugar (Fine)"
Jully Black - "You Changed"
A tourist plays amongst the famous rocky landmarks known as the 'Devil's Marbles' in the Australian outback. Australia's tourism industry is facing a slump as visitors continue to stay away from its famous beaches and rust-red outback a year after the September 11 attacks. (Reuters/David Gray)
A giant pumpkin-pyramid towers in Ludwigsburg, Germany, Sept. 3, 2002. The 45-foot-tall pyramid is part of an exhibition showing some 600 different kinds of pumpkins. (AP Photo/Thomas Kienzle)
A Chinese worker installs a platform in Beijing's Tiananmen Square September 12, 2002 for the upcoming National Day celebration, which marks the founding of the People's Republic of China. (Reuters/Guang Niu)
Dirty South Pop: Timberlake Teams Up With Bubba Sparxxx
Blue-eyed soul met with blue-eyed rhymes recently when 'NSYNC's Justin Timberlake teamed up with Dirty South rap bumpkin Bubba Sparxxx.
In a collaboration no doubt facilitated by Timbaland, who's providing beats for both artists, Timberlake and Sparxxx recorded material for J.T.'s highly anticipated solo disc, Justified, due November 12.
Following back-scratching protocol, Bubba's management is hoping for a Justin-laced track for the buttermilk-fed rapper's upcoming album, which he hopes to have out early next year.
Timberlake, meanwhile, is already stoking the fire that is his highly hormonal fan base with Justified's first single, the Neptunes-produced club track "Like I Love You".
The Neptunes have split the album's production duties with Timbaland, P. Diddy and Mario Winans, but J.T.'s camp is quick to point out that Timberlake has been highly involved in the creative process, co-writing every song on the album.
In addition to the current single and the aforementioned Bubba-sparked track, other highlights include the Latin-spiced "Senorita" and a seductive ode to the ladies titled "Take It From Here."
the assignment and what i turned in......
Create 4 color magazine ad. Panel size is 4.5X7" but not a bleed. Artwork must be 300 ppi. Please use supplied supplied text and photos for imagery and enhance or composite any way you see fit. This is an ad for a poetry reading so please be sensitive to the material and find a way to keep it elegant. You do not need to use all text – it can be just be an excerpt; but you must include the poets name, time, store logo, etc…
Ad Must Include:
Poet: Yonala Riaksov
Book: Autumn
In store appearance:
7PM-9PM
November 24
version red
version white
New York Post reviewer Lou Lumenick said the movie (8MILE) is "a rousing Rocky with rappers (that has) astonishing crossover appeal." He also says the movie's climactic verbal battle scene between Eminem's up-and-coming rapper character and an opponent had the screening audience "on its feet cheering."
A U.S. Marine stands at a parade rest as the flag flies at half staff during a memorial ceremony Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2002, at the United States Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. Marines from the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade paid tribute to those who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001, by burying a piece of the World Trade Center and marking it with a specially made stone. (AP Photo/David Longstreath)
The U.S. flag flutters over ground zero at sunset Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2002 in New York, the day before the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
Eminem's '8 Mile' Gets Thumbs-Up From Fest Crowd
8 Mile, the semi-autobiographical drama in which rapper Eminem makes his movie debut, might just be as good as Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer (A Beautiful Mind) once boasted.
Playing to a packed house on Sunday night (September 8), director Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential) unspooled a "work-in-progress" version of the pic at the Toronto Film Festival. Tickets for the anticipated film were extremely difficult to come by, but apparently the around-the-block queue for seating was worth it.
New York Post reviewer Lou Lumenick said the movie is "a rousing Rocky with rappers (that has) astonishing crossover appeal." He also says the movie's climactic verbal battle scene between Eminem's up-and-coming rapper character and an opponent had the screening audience "on its feet cheering."
8 Mile also stars Oscar winner Kim Basinger, ER co-star Mekhi Phifer, and Don't Say A Word lead Brittany Murphy, and it opens nationwide November 8.
Eminem's Tour Bus Destroyed By Fire
Eminem's tour bus caught fire on Sunday (September 8). The two people aboard the bus, including the bus driver, escaped without injury. Eminem and his entourage were not aboard at the time of the blaze. The bus was en route to the final date of the Anger Management Tour in Auburn Hills, Michigan via Route I-94.
Sergeant Julie Busch of the Michigan State Police told LAUNCH the bus "caught fire for unknown reasons at about 1:30 p.m." Fire and police officials quickly rushed to the scene, but Busch told LAUNCH, "The bus was destroyed and became unusable."
Eminem does not have any other tour dates scheduled. Fans can see the rapper on the big screen in 8 Mile, which is due November 8. In the film, which is loosely based on his life, Eminem plays a Detroit rapper, "Jimmy Smith Jr."
Eminem & Company Close Out Anger Management Tour As Cameras Roll
The cameras were out for the final date of Eminem's Anger Management tour on Sunday (September 8) at the Palace Of Auburn Hills in Auburn Hills, Michigan. All of the performances by Eminem and his road partners were shot for a tour home video that should be released in the first quarter of 2003. An estimated 110 hours of behind-the-scenes footage was also shot during the tour and will be woven into the video.
Eminem took advantage of the cameras and expanded his show for the occasion. Although he performed the same 70-minute setlist from the rest of the tour, he brought on a variety of circus-like performances to go with his stage motif, including Uncle Sam on stilts, fire jugglers, a sword swallower, a dwarf, and two plus-sized women who cavorted with the dwarf during "Without Me."
With ex-wife Kim, who's attended several shows on the tour, watching from the soundboard, Eminem also brought all the other tour performers--including D12, rapper Obie Trice, and singer Dina Rae from his entourage--on stage for the finale and told his hometown crowd, "We knew the best would be m-----------g last. We knew Detroit would be the m----------g wildest, so we brought the cameras. I cannot thank you enough."
While Eminem was performing, his feature film debut, 8 Mile, was premiering Sunday as a work-in-progress at the Toronto Film Festival.
pics i made in class today... my first photoshop for intermediates class....
just color straws....
reservior dogz VS bruce lee
hign noon
A South American king vulture in an outdoor exhibit at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, shown Wednesday, Sep. 4, 2002 is under watch because of concern of infection by the West Nile virus according to the aviary's curator, James Majeur. The West Nile virus, first spotted in this country in a sick crow three years ago, has now attacked at least 111 species of birds, including the bald eagle and the endangered Mississippi sandhill crane. The quick spread has surprised and alarmed wildlife researchers.(AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)
A museum technican uses a damp cloth to clean the face of a statue of George Washington on the steps of Federal Hall in New York City, Sept. 5, 2002. and My interpertation
Aerosmith Honored That Eminem Sampled 'Dream On' For His New Album
Among those cheering Eminem's sweep at last week's Video Music Awards were the members of Aerosmith. The band, currently touring with Run-D.M.C. and Kid Rock, has a connection with "Slim Shady"--Eminem sampled the Aerosmith classic "Dream On" for the track "Sing For The Moment" on his latest album, The Eminem Show.
Aerosmith bassist Tom Hamilton tells LAUNCH that the Boston rock veterans were both surprised and pleased by the move. "We were really excited, you know, when we first heard that he wanted to do it, and it came out great," he says. "It kinda surprised me a little, in a really nice way. I figured that someone like that would probably be influenced by something more recent than 'Dream On.'"
http://www.freep.com/entertainment/music/xzibit6_20020906.htm
On Xzibit: Native Detroiter's raw, rugged sounds put him in company with fellow rappers Eminem and Snoop Dogg
BY KELLEY L. CARTER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Alvin Joiner, 26, sometimes cringes when he thinks of what his mother and father used to do when they found the rap music he tried to hide from them as a kid in Detroit.
Then he remembers what that punishment led to. And he laughs because it's what jump-started his rap career.
"My parents were Jehovah's Witnesses and they didn't particularly care for rap music," says Joiner, , who is known as Xzibit. "I would get my little headphones and sneak and listen to it at night. Every time they would catch me, they would get it and break my tapes. And I'd be mad. Eventually, I got sick of it. So I said, 'You know what? I can rap my own stuff and they can never take that from me.' "
So he did. He completed his first rap, "Down With Me," when he was 13, four years after his mother's death. He would sit in the lunchroom at his middle school and beat on the table, spitting his rap and hoping to pull in a crowd with his louder than life vocals.
He called himself Xzibit A, playing off his first name, but later dropped the A as his popularity grew.
A schoolyard gimmick turned into a professional gold mine.
On Sunday, as part of the Anger Management Tour, Xzibit will perform at the Palace of Auburn Hills with headliner Eminem, Ludacris, Papa Roach and Xzibit's label mates, the X-Ecutioners.
On the edge of superstardom (he recently was featured on MTV's "Cribs"), the rapper, who has been recording since 1996, will release his next CD, "Man vs. Machine," in October. It willfeature super-producer Dr. Dre and other rappers including Snoop Dogg and Eminem.
This all began with his youthful admiration for rap music, which became something to wrap his mind around while he tried to get past losing his mother at age 9.
Xzibit moved from an east side Detroit address to New Mexico shortly after his mom died. His father had remarried and the new couple wanted to start in a new place.
It was a confusing time for the rapper. He got into a lot of trouble -- fighting, skipping school -- and, when he was 14, he was sent to a state juvenile facility, where he spent the next two years.
"I was a brotha from the east side, going out there with some cactus -- I was like 'What the heck?' It was definitely a culture shock. But it was a strange time, man. There was a lot of uncertainty and a lot of long drawn-out hurt because my mother was special to everybody, especially my family," he says. "Everything happened real fast, real quick."
And so did his career.
At 17 he moved to California.
"I knew I could be doing something better with my life other than doing what I was doing. Everyone that I was involved with was either being hurt, put to death or put to jail. And I didn't see myself going like that," he says.
"It was a life decision. I wasn't in trouble when I went to California. I wasn't running from the law or anything like that. I just wanted something better for myself and something better for my life. I stepped out on faith, man, you know. That's exactly what it was. God smiled down on me because it could have went either way."
Xzibit went the way of music.
For years, he worked the L.A. underground hip-hop circuit and it was there he hooked up with Likwit Crew, a group that featured rappers such as Tha Liks, Defari and King Tee. In 1995, they went on tour and that led to Xzibit being signed to Loud Records. He released "At the Speed of Life" in 1996 and showed hip-hop lovers his raw, rugged sounds.
Getting the breaks
His bigger break came in 1998 with the release of "40 Dayz & 40 Nightz" which broke a BET Rap City record for the video single "What You See Is What You Get." That video held the No. 1 position for six straight weeks on the popular rap show.
Xzibit followed that up with a cameo on Snoop Dogg's "B Please," a popular tune that still is on regular airwave rotation.
That paved the way for his 2000 release, which he worked on with Dr. Dre. A certified platinum CD, "Restless" became his biggest-selling effort.
And it really put him on the musical map.
Next came collaborations with Eminem, De La Soul, Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, Erick Sermon and Korn's Jonathan Davis. On the current Anger Management tour, his cousin, Detroiter DJ Carl the Invisible Man, is touring with him.
Xzibit is proud of the work he's done up to now. But, he says, he's been saving his all for his next album, due Oct. 1. He says he wanted to give people time to get used to him before he pushed the envelope the way he wanted to.
"I feel like it's my most well-rounded material. It's got a lot of fun in it, too -- don't get me wrong. But I think the elevation of the music and the intensity of the music is what makes it my favorite album so far," he says.
The album also has a serious side. His mother was a writer, too. Before she passed away, she published a book of poetry.
"Missin' U," one of the songs on the album, which was produced by Ric Rock and features Andre Wilson, is a tribute to his mom, who was only 32 when she died.
KELLEY L. CARTER can be reached at 313-222-8854 and carter@freepress.com.
this dude performed with OutKast at the SMOKIN GROOVES concert.... check him out...
Music critics and celebrities adore CODY CHESNUTT, but he baffles most record companies. After 11 years, this eclectic rock 'n' roller is finally bringing his unique brand of funk to a record store near you.
www.vibe.com
Cody Chesnutt’s The Headphone Masterpiece is the greatest rock album you’ve never heard—an album with so much spiritual freedom and uncompromising vision that every major and minor label in the industry has passed on it.
Yet, like his Lord and savior, Jesus of Nazareth, Chesnutt, 32, has a fervent following. Disciples from Atlanta to Los Angeles have gotten hold of his elusive debut album and heard nothing but truth upon listening to its 36 tracks. They are wildly passionate about his music. They will punch you in your face for comparing Chesnutt’s singular style of rock to Lenny Kravitz’s. MTV caught wind of the growing hype and profiled Chesnutt, even though he had yet to release a CD. Sexy singers like Nelly Furtado and Kelis sing his praises. The Roots decided to pay homage and re-record Chesnutt’s ode to infidelity, “The Seed,” for their forthcoming album. “There’s so much posturing in hip hop when guys talk about women,” says ?uestlove of the Roots. “Cody’s not afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve, but he’s still got that Southern pimp shit with him.” Soon, with the September 24 release of Chesnutt’s double album on his own label, Ready, Set, Go!, the gospel that is The Headphone Masterpiece will be on every sinner’s lips and in their hearts.
I ain’t no rapper / Baby.” It’s an affirmation, spoken over a crackly instrumental like radio static. If that’s the case, what is he? Rock star, god, or, as his cousin and manager Donray Von likes to say, rock ’n’ roll mafia? “We made a decision back in the early ’90s to go this way,” says Von, 31, who runs Ready, Set, Go!, punctuating “this way” with a dramatic hand gesture to the left.
Chesnutt was once known as Antonious Thomas, a bare-chested, well-tapered crooner from Atlanta’s Chestnut Street. All six-pack and combat boots. “I was smoothed out, a Jodeci and R. Kelly mix,” he says. His single, “Young Dr. Feelgood,” released on a tiny indie label in 1991, was straight R&B—mindless sex, gospel runs, posing and primping. But even though he was half naked and unoriginal, his talent as a songwriter was evident. It wasn’t long before he decided to put his skills to better use.
Finally indulging in his lifelong rock ’n’ roll fantasies, Chesnutt relocated to L.A. with Von in 1992 and founded a band, the Crosswalk. They recorded Venus Loves a Melody, an album of powerful, socially conscious rock ballads. “I was listening to the second Brit invasion, early Oasis, Verve, Radiohead,” Chesnutt says. The best songs by the Crosswalk, “Brand New” and “16,” are about a recovering heroin addict and a victim of gang rape. The album isn’t as personal as The Headphone Masterpiece, but it’s a whole lot better than anything Creed has recorded in its entire career. Unable to come up with a marketing plan for the too-edgy Crosswalk, Hollywood Records unceremoniously dropped them, leaving the masters in Chesnutt’s hands. Then the band broke up, and he was left with no option but reinvention.
Chesnutt created Masterpiece in total isolation, in his small bedroom, with one microphone, an organ, a guitar, bass, and keyboard. His only monitor was a pair of Sony MDR-7506 headphones, so as not to wake his and Von’s ever-accommodating roommate, a dude named Phil. (The album is supposed to sound best when played through that particular headset.) In a period of intense introspection, Chesnutt rediscovered his faith in his musical calling.
“I woke up, went to the organ, and played these chords,” he says of “Serve This Royalty,” a majestic pimp anthem. “It felt like gospel.” On the song, he sings, “Thank you Jesus / For my mama / Thank you bitches / For my money….” From that cut to “Bitch I’m Broke,” then back again to a suite of songs about his wife and the joys of monogamy, Masterpiece is equal parts irony and sincerity, straight guitar rock and bass-driven funk. But always there are the simple and honest lyrics. “How was I supposed to know / That you could get inside me…that you and I / Would make so much sense from the start….” The album is everything that many roots and retro artists have reached for, pure and straightforward; yet it is thoroughly modern in its outlook, inventive and unsentimental, with both feet in the future.
Record companies have nixed the work mostly because they mistake the 36 songs for a demo and expect him to redo it, to add gloss where there is now grit. They’d like the drums rearranged, the vocals redone. “I refuse to re-record it—that defeats the purpose. What about the experience I had in my bedroom? To go back to the studio, I’d be chasing something,” says Chesnutt. “If you’re listening to it and you love it, then it’s already done what it’s supposed to do.” Look no further for your salvation; the master has arrived.
Here it is: The official LA TIMES new article on their own
investigations into the killing of Tupac Shakur:
Who Killed Tupac Shakur?
How a fight between rival Compton gangs turns into a plot of
retaliation and murder.
By CHUCK PHILIPS , TIMES STAFF WRITER
First of two parts
LAS VEGAS --The city's neon lights vibrated in the polished hood of the black BMW as it cruised up Las Vegas Boulevard.
The man in the passenger seat was instantly recognizable. Fans lined the streets, waving, snapping photos, begging Tupac Shakur for his autograph. Cops were everywhere, smiling.
The BMW 750 sedan, with rap magnate Marion "Suge" Knight at the wheel, was leading a procession of luxury vehicles past the MGM Grand Hotel and Caesars Palace, on their way to a hot new nightclub. It was after 11 on a Saturday night—Sept. 7, 1996. The caravan paused at a crowded intersection a block from the Strip.
Shakur flirted with a carful of women—unaware that a white Cadillac had quietly pulled up beside him. A hand emerged from the Cadillac. In it was a semiautomatic pistol, aimed straight at Shakur.
Many of the rapper's lyrics seemed to foretell this moment.
"The fast life ain't everything they told ya," he sang in an early hit, "Soulja's Story."
"Never get much older, following the tracks of a soulja."
Six years later, the killing of the world's most famous rap star remains officially unsolved. Las Vegas police have never made an arrest. Speculation and wild theories continue to flourish in the music media and among Shakur's followers. One is that Knight, owner of Shakur's record label, arranged the killing so he could exploit the rapper's martyrdom commercially. Another persistent legend is that Shakur faked his own death to escape the pressures of stardom.
A yearlong investigation by The Times reconstructed the crime and the events leading up to it. Evidence gathered by the paper indicates:
The shooting was carried out by a Compton gang called the Southside Crips to avenge the beating of one of its members by Shakur a few hours earlier.
Orlando Anderson, the Crip whom Shakur had attacked, fired the fatal shots. Las Vegas police discounted Anderson as a suspect and interviewed him only once, briefly. He was later killed in an unrelated gang shooting.
The murder weapon was supplied by New York rapper Notorious B.I.G., who agreed to pay the Crips $1 million for killing Shakur. Notorious B.I.G. and Shakur had been feuding for more than a year, exchanging insults on recordings and at award shows and concerts. B.I.G. was gunned down six months later in Los Angeles. That killing also remains unsolved.
Before they died, Notorious B.I.G. and Anderson denied any role in Shakur's death. This account of what they and others did that night is based on police affidavits and court documents as well as interviews with investigators, witnesses to the crime and members of the Southside Crips who had never before discussed the killing outside the gang.
Fearing retribution, they agreed to be interviewed only if their names were not revealed.
Revolutionary Upbringing
The slaying silenced one of modern music's most eloquent voices—a ghetto poet whose tales of urban alienation captivated young people of all races and backgrounds. The 25-year-old Shakur had helped elevate rap from a crude street fad to a complex art form, setting the stage for the current global hip-hop phenomenon.
Tupac Amaru Shakur was born in 1971 into a family of black revolutionaries and named after a martyred Incan warrior. Radical politics shaped his upbringing and the rebellious tone of much of his music.
His godfather, Black Panther leader Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, spent 27 years in prison for a robbery-murder in Santa Monica that he insisted he did not commit. Pratt was freed after a judge ruled in 1997 that prosecutors concealed evidence favorable to the defendant.
Shakur's stepfather, Black Panther leader Mutulu Shakur, was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list until the early 1980s, when he was imprisoned for robbery and murder. His mother, Afeni Shakur, also a Black Panther, was charged with conspiring to blow up a block of New York department stores—and acquitted a month before the rapper was born.
Shakur grew up in tough neighborhoods and homeless shelters in the Bronx, Harlem and Baltimore. He exhibited creative talent as a child and was admitted to the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he studied ballet, poetry, theater and literature.
In 1988, his mother sent him to live with a family friend in the Bay Area to escape gang violence in Baltimore. Living in a tough neighborhood north of Oakland, he joined the rap group Digital Underground and signed a solo record deal in 1991.
Shakur's debut album, "2Pacalypse Now," sparked a political firestorm. The lyrics were filled with vivid imagery of violence by and against police. A car thief who murdered a Texas state trooper said the lyrics incited him to kill. Law enforcement groups and politicians denounced Shakur. Then-Vice President Dan Quayle said the rapper's music "has no place in our society."
Shakur's recordings explored gang violence, drug dealing, police brutality, teenage pregnancy, single motherhood and racism. As his stature as a rapper grew, he pursued an acting career, drawing admiring reviews for his performances in "Juice" and other films.
But he never put what he called the "thug life" behind him.
During a 1993 concert in Michigan, he attacked a local rapper with a baseball bat and was sentenced to 10 days in jail. In Los Angeles, he was convicted of assaulting a music video producer. In New York, a 19-year-old fan accused Shakur and three of his friends of sexually assaulting her.
While on trial in that case, the rapper was ambushed in a Manhattan recording studio, shot five times and robbed of his gold jewelry. Shakur later said Notorious B.I.G. and his associates were behind the attack.
Shakur, convicted of sexual abuse, was serving a 4 1/2-year prison term when he was visited by Suge Knight, founder of Death Row Records in Los Angeles. Knight offered to finance an appeal of his conviction if Shakur would sign a recording contract with Death Row.
Shakur accepted the offer and was released from prison in 1995 on a $1.4-million appellate bond posted by Knight. Hours later, Shakur entered a Los Angeles studio to record "All Eyez on Me." The double CD sold more than 5 million copies, transforming Shakur into a pop superstar whose releases outsold Madonna's and the Rolling Stones'.
Two Fights
On Sept. 7, 1996, Shakur, still out on bond, traveled to Las Vegas to attend a championship boxing match between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand Hotel.
The sold-out arena was jammed with high rollers: Wall Street tycoons, Hollywood celebrities, entertainment moguls. The fight also attracted an assortment of underworld figures: mobsters from Chicago, drug dealers from New York, street gangs from Los Angeles.
Shakur arrived around 8:30 p.m. accompanied by armed bodyguards from the Mob Piru Bloods, a Compton street gang whose members worked for Knight's Death Row Records. Shakur and Knight sat in the front row, smoking cigars, signing autographs and waving to fans.
"Knock You Out," a song Shakur had written in honor of Tyson, blasted over the loudspeakers as the boxer entered the ring. Tyson flattened his opponent so quickly that many patrons never made it to their seats.
After congratulating Tyson, Shakur, Knight and a handful of bodyguards in silk suits headed for the exit. In the MGM Grand lobby, one of Shakur's Bloods bodyguards noticed a member of the rival Southside Crips lingering near a bank of elevators.
The Bloods and Crips have a 30-year history of turf wars: beatings, drug heists, drive-by shootings. The Crips dress in blue, the Bloods in red. When the two gangs aren't pushing dope or terrorizing citizens, they take pride in retaliating against each other.
The hoodlum standing in the lobby was Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson, 21, a Crip who had recently helped his gang beat and rob one of Shakur's bodyguards at a mall in Lakewood. Anderson had a string of arrests for robbery, assault and other offenses. Compton police suspected him in at least one gang killing.
After the beating of Shakur's bodyguard, Anderson had dared to rip a rare Death Row medallion from the man's neck—an affront to Knight's honor and a slight to the Bloods.
The Bloods had been fuming for weeks, waiting to exact their revenge. Now, unexpectedly, there was Anderson, standing before them.
Shakur charged the Crip. "You from the South?" he asked.
Before Anderson could answer, Shakur punched him. His bodyguards jumped in, pounding and kicking Anderson to the ground. Knight joined in too—just before security guards broke up the 30-second melee, which was captured by a security camera.
Shakur and his entourage stomped triumphantly across the casino floor on their way out of the hotel. They walked half a block down the Strip to the Luxor hotel, where Death Row Records had booked more than a dozen rooms. After dropping off Shakur and the bodyguards, Knight drove about 15 minutes to a mansion he owned in a gated community in the city's southeastern valley.
The plan was to regroup later at a benefit concert for a youth boxing program featuring Shakur and other Death Row acts. The midnight concert was to be held at Club 662, a nightspot just opened by Death Row. The club's name was an emblem of how gangs had infiltrated the rap business. On a telephone keypad, 662 spells "mob."
Planning a Retaliation
A bruised and shaken Anderson gathered himself off the floor in front of dozens of startled onlookers. MGM security guards and Las Vegas police tried to persuade him to file a complaint against his assailants, but he declined.
Anderson headed out to the Strip and crossed over a pedestrian bridge to the Excalibur Hotel, where he had checked in with his girlfriend. News of the beating swept through the gang underground. Before he reached his room, Anderson's pager was beeping with calls from his Crips cohorts, according to what he later told associates.
Anderson phoned his comrades and set up a meeting at the Treasure Island hotel. He changed his clothes and hopped into a taxi, heading for the hotel with the huge neon skull and crossbones out front.
Treasure Island had served as a Crips headquarters during boxing matches for years. The gang would rent a fleet of luxury vehicles, ride across the desert in a caravan, hand their keys to the valets and head to a block of rooms booked under fake names. Drug trafficking paid for all this.
The ritual had little to do with boxing. Many gang members never attended the fights. They came to party and bask in the post-fight revelry: the drinking, the gambling, the drugs, the prostitutes. Other street gangs followed suit, flying in from Harlem and Atlanta, taking over establishments up and down the Strip.
By the time Anderson's taxi reached Treasure Island, more than a dozen gangsters were holed up in a Crips-reserved room. Marijuana smoke clouded the hallway. Alcohol was flowing as Anderson opened the door. The gang was furious. The topic of discussion: Who gets to pull the trigger?
According to people who were present, the Crips decided to shoot Shakur after his performance at Club 662. The plan was to station two vehicles of armed Crips outside the nightspot and lie in wait.
The gang put in a call to a Crips hide-out in Las Vegas, a rented house used to stash drugs and firearms and shelter gang members on the run from crimes committed in Los Angeles. They told a man there to bring some backup weapons over to the hotel. Soon.
Killers for Hire
For the Crips, the beating of Anderson was an egregious affront warranting swift and fatal retaliation. Still, the Crips thought, why not make a little money while they were at it? They decided to ask Shakur's biggest enemy to pay for the hit.
The gang arranged a rendezvous with Notorious B.I.G. The Brooklyn rapper, whose real name was Christopher Wallace, hated Shakur and had been feuding with him for more than a year.
Once tight friends, the two entertainers now ridiculed each other at events, in interviews and on recordings. In one song called "Hit 'Em Up," Shakur bragged about having sex with Wallace's wife and vowed to kill him. The threats between the rappers and their labels, Death Row and Bad Boy Entertainment, escalated into a series of assaults and shootings—one of which resulted in the killing of a Death Row bodyguard in Atlanta in 1995.
Fearing for his safety, a friend of Wallace's arranged for the Crips to supply bodyguards for the rapper whenever he traveled west. Over the years, the gang was paid to provide security for Wallace at casinos in Las Vegas, clubs in Hollywood and award shows in Los Angeles. Besides cash, Wallace gave the gang access to stars, groupies and the inner sanctums of the music business.
Wallace began flashing Crips gang signs and calling out to the homies at concerts, sometimes even inviting gang members on stage. Privately, he prodded the gang to kill Shakur—and promised to pay handsomely for the hit.
On Sept. 7, 1996, the Crips decided to take him up on the offer.
They sent an emissary to a penthouse suite at the MGM, where Wallace was booked under a false name. In Vegas to party, he didn't attend the Tyson-Seldon fight but had quickly learned about Shakur's scuffle with Anderson. Wallace gathered a handful of thugs and East Coast rap associates to hear what the Crips had to say.
According to people who were present, the Crips envoy explained that the gang was prepared to kill Shakur but expected to collect $1 million for its efforts. Wallace agreed, on one condition, a witness said. He pulled out a loaded .40-caliber Glock pistol and placed it on the table in front of him.
He didn't just want Shakur dead. He wanted the satisfaction of knowing the fatal bullet came from his gun.
On the Strip
It was a gangsta rap parade. Fans waved. Women flirted and asked for autographs. Photographers snapped pictures.
Knight was leading a caravan of at least five Death Row cars heading toward Club 662. Shakur and Knight turned heads as the convoy proceeded slowly north on Las Vegas Boulevard.
Around 11 p.m., police stopped Knight for cranking the black BMW's stereo too loud and not properly displaying its license plates. Shakur and Knight joked with the officers and talked them out of issuing a ticket. Then the BMW turned right on Flamingo Road and headed east toward the club.
Moments earlier, Anderson and three other Crips took an elevator down to the Treasure Island lobby. They walked out into the valet parking area.
Hovering under the hotel's skull-and-crossbones logo, the four Crips waited silently as the valet brought out a 1996 white Cadillac and opened the doors. They piled in and eased the sleek new sedan into traffic. A fifth Crip in an old yellow Cadillac met them at the curb and followed close behind. He rode solo, with an AK-47 assault rifle lying across the front seat.
The traffic in front of Treasure Island was bumper to bumper. Cars honked. Billboards flashed. Neon-lighted fountains trickled nearby.
The driver of the white Cadillac lighted a cigarette. Behind him sat Anderson. The Crip in the front passenger seat handed Anderson the loaded Glock from Notorious B.I.G. The four men discussed staking out the club where Shakur would perform.
After waiting at a stoplight between Caesars Palace and the Barbary Coast hotel, the Cadillacs turned onto Flamingo and headed east toward Club 662.
As they passed the Bally's hotel on the right, the driver saw a caravan of luxury cars ahead on the left. The vehicles, packed with Mob Piru Bloods and Death Row employees, were stopped at a red light across from the Maxim Hotel. The crosswalk was filled with tourists.
Leading the convoy was Knight's black BMW. Shakur was in the passenger seat. They were alone in the car, unarmed.
The Crips couldn't believe their luck. They decided to chuck their plan and strike immediately.
The Cadillac raced up on the convoy and pulled up beside the BMW. Shakur didn't notice. He was flirting with a carful of women in a lane to his left.
"I saw four black men roll by in a white Cadillac," said Atlanta rapper E.D.I. Mean, who was in the vehicle directly behind Shakur's. "I saw a gun come from the back seat out through the driver's front window."
Bullets flew, shattering the windows of the BMW. Shakur tried to duck into the rear of the car for cover, but four rounds hit him, shredding his chest. Blood was everywhere.
"We heard shots and looked to the right of us," Knight said. "Tupac was trying to get in the back seat, and I grabbed him and pulled him down. The gunshots kept coming. One hit my head."
In the chaos, neither Knight nor Mean could make out who had fired. The driver of the yellow Cadillac just behind the assailants never got a chance to fire his AK-47.
"It all happened so quick. It took three or four seconds at most," Mean said.
Then the white Cadillac screeched around the corner. A bodyguard near the back of the Death Row caravan fired at the fleeing sedan. In a ruse designed to confuse Shakur's entourage, the Crip in the yellow Cadillac chased the white Cadillac around the corner, as if in hostile pursuit.
Knight made a U-turn, his bullet-riddled BMW squealing around the concrete median. The Death Row convoy followed him back to the Strip, where he rammed his car onto a curb.
Las Vegas police were soon on the scene. After summoning an ambulance for Shakur, they ordered everyone else in the Death Row convoy out of their cars at gunpoint. The police forced Knight, who was bleeding from a head wound, to lie face down on the pavement.
By the time the detectives figured out that Knight and his caravan were victims, not suspects, the Crips had returned to their hotel rooms and gathered their belongings.
Staggering their departures to avoid attracting attention, Anderson and his fellow gang members hit the highway, each in a different car. Two younger gang members drove the white Cadillac back across the desert.
Interstate 15 moves fast at night.
It was still dark when the Crips disappeared over the California border.
Epilogue
Surgeons at University Medical Center in Las Vegas removed Shakur's right lung in an attempt to stop the internal bleeding. When his condition deteriorated, they put him on a ventilator. He died six days after the shooting, with his mother at his side.
Wallace returned to New York, where he recorded a CD called "Life After Death," which has veiled references to the shooting in several songs. According to the Crips, Wallace paid the gang $50,000 of the promised $1 million through an intermediary a week after Shakur died.
In March 1997, Wallace discussed his feud with Shakur during an interview with a San Francisco radio station. Asked whether he had a role in the rapper's death, Wallace said he "wasn't that powerful yet."
Three days later, Wallace was in Los Angeles for the Soul Train Music Awards and an after-party at the Petersen Automotive Museum. He was gunned down as he sat in his Chevrolet Blazer at a traffic light on Wilshire Boulevard. No one has ever been charged in the killing.
Two days after Shakur was shot, gang warfare erupted in Compton as the Bloods sought revenge on the Crips. A rash of drive-by shootings left three people dead and 12 injured, including a 10-year-old girl. Informants told police that Anderson had been seen brandishing a Glock pistol.
Las Vegas police interviewed Anderson once. They said they could not build a case against him as Shakur's killer because witnesses in the rapper's entourage refused to cooperate with them.
Anderson said he had nothing to do with Shakur's death. "If they have all this evidence against me, then why haven't they arrested me?" he said a year after the shooting. "It's obvious that I'm innocent."
Anderson was shot dead May 29, 1998, at a Compton carwash in a dispute police say was unrelated to Shakur's slaying.
The three other Crips who were in the white Cadillac that night in Las Vegas still live in Compton. None of them has ever been questioned by police about the crime.
Biggie Paid Gang To Kill Tupac, Report Says
The Los Angeles Times delivered a bombshell on Friday when it reported that the Notorious B.I.G. offered gang members $1 million to kill Tupac Shakur and provided the gun used in his 1996 murder.
The investigative report, which details the hours leading up to Shakur's fatal shooting, was written by Chuck Philips, who has covered the slaying extensively and spent more than a year researching the case. The Times piece places Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, in Las Vegas on the night of the shooting and details a meeting that allegedly took place between the East Coast rapper and several Crips.
Citing gang members who spoke only on terms on anonymity, Philips asserts that not only did B.I.G. agree to pay the killers, but that he also insisted they use his gun, a loaded .40-caliber Glock pistol that he then placed on the table.
"The revelation of Biggie was shocking to me," Philips told MTV News on Thursday. "When this came up, I was just, ... 'I don't believe it.' So I went about trying to disprove it in various ways with various sources and that's not what happened. What I ended up writing is what happened."
Philips reports that Orlando Anderson, a Crips gang member long believed by many to be Shakur's murderer, pulled the trigger. According to the article, Anderson and several other Crips planned the execution in retaliation for a beating Shakur, Marion "Suge" Knight and their associates gave Anderson earlier that evening after a Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand Hotel.
Biggie had been feuding with Shakur and, according to Philips, had told the Crips he wanted the rival rapper dead, so the gang members figured they might get Biggie to pay them for the hit. (Biggie's ties to the gang stem from allegations that his record label employed Crips as security guards, although Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, the rapper's best friend and head of Bad Boy Records, has denied it.)
"If you go back to my stories that I wrote prior to this, I never believed hardly anything about [the Biggie/Shakur] feud," Philips said. "People kept telling me it was serious, and I didn't believe it. But apparently it was."
Although Philips' article is also based on police affidavits and other evidence, he said the details about the Notorious B.I.G. are based entirely on his interviews with the gang members. "As far as I know, no police ever interviewed [Biggie] about this crime when he was alive or anybody [at Bad Boy] or people he knew," Philips said.
Attempting to independently establish that Biggie was in Las Vegas, Philips combed videotape footage of the boxing match at the MGM, the same hotel Biggie was allegedly staying at, but did not find the rapper. He also called B.I.G.'s mother, Voletta Wallace, whom he had befriended while investigating reports on Biggie's killing, to check the rapper's alibi.
After learning of the allegations Philips' story was making, she told the reporter she did not want to speak with him.
It is not in his report, but Philips noted Thursday that a few of his sources believed Biggie didn't really want Tupac to be killed and that he was simply talking the talk. "In the rap world, some people are real and some people aren't real," Philips said. "The people who did this murder are real, and the people who killed Biggie are real, and those aren't the only people they have killed. It's a different world. So when this thing went down, it was a matter of pride. He couldn't say, 'I didn't mean it.' "
In Philips' article, he noted that "a handful of thugs and East Coast rap associates" were with B.I.G. at the meeting with the Crips. When asked if there were specific names his sources mentioned, Philips responded: "Not that I'm willing to talk about."
Philips said at least one of his sources was in the meeting with Wallace, but he would not say if any were among the four Crips in the white Cadillac that executed the drive-by shooting he so specifically describes. "All I'm going to say is that I think I have very good sources on the story."
In the second part of Philips' report, to be published Saturday, the writer examines the police investigation of Shakur's murder. While Orlando Anderson has long been pinned for Tupac's murder by reporters, police never charged him. Two years after Shakur's death, Anderson was killed in an unrelated incident.
Philips' report also runs counter to a theory constructed by former LAPD Detective Russell Poole, whose ideas about the murders of both rappers are the subject of journalist Randall Sullivan's book "LAbyrinth."
Poole's analysis asserts Death Row CEO Suge Knight arranged to have his label's star rapper killed and that affiliates of the West Coast Mob Piru Bloods gang carried out the hit.
"LAbyrinth" suggests that Tupac intended to leave Death Row, an idea that his alleged conversations with a girlfriend and his firing of Death Row attorney David Kenner shortly before his death seem to substantiate. It also claims that Knight owed Shakur a substantial sum of money and points out that a bullet wound Knight claims he suffered in Las Vegas has never been verified by hospital or police records, or anyone other than Knight himself.
Poole was the lead detective investigating Biggie's murder, an assignment the highly decorated officer picked up not long after he had been looking into the shooting of sometime Death Row employee and LAPD officer Kevin Gaines. After conducting an exhaustive investigation, Poole concluded that Knight, an alleged hitman-for-hire named Amir Muhammed, and a group of rogue cops including convicted bank robber David Mack were all involved in the planning and execution of the murders of both Biggie and Tupac.
Poole eventually left the force, frustrated by what he claims was reluctance by the brass to follow up on his leads. It is his assertion, in Sullivan's book and a Rolling Stone article that preceded it, that several cops were associated with Death Row Records and street gangs and that his bosses simply did not want this information to come out.
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Galápagos Islands
1998
David Doubilet
“The local dragon, a marine iguana, grazes on green algae. But in warm water the plants become stunted and overgrown by brown algae, which the iguanas cannot digest. Many will die, their stomachs bloated like children of famine.”
—From “Galápagos Underwater,” April 1999, National Geographic magazine
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“Along streets resonant with the clip-clop of horses’ hoofs and the squeak of bicycles, life moves at a pace from decades past. An older couple watch the passing parade from their front door.”
— From “Cuba’s Colonial Treasure,” October 1999, National Geographic magazine
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“Hundreds of thousands of Hindus converge for Trichur Pooram, an annual festival in Kerala State.”
—From “India: Fifty Years of Independence,” May 1997, National Geographic magazine
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“With strong arms and obliging souls, Tahitians usher ashore French vacationers after a lagoon cruise on an outrigger canoe. But hospitality has turned to hostility among many islanders for whom the burdens of French rule outweigh the blessings.”
—From “French Polynesia: Charting a New Course,” June 1997, National Geographic magazine
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“Lacy breakers lap the coral reef that rings Bora-Bora, an ancient sunken volcano 165 miles [266 kilometers] northwest of Tahiti. With sugar white beaches edging its electric-blue lagoon, the island fits everyone’s image of a South Seas paradise—but not everyone’s pocketbook: Waterfront thatch huts go for up to [U.S.] $700 a night.”
—From “French Polynesia: Charting a New Course,” June 1997, National Geographic magazine
click for the wallpaper version...
“At dawn of a two-week lunar day, Edwin Aldrin strides across a small crater near one of Eagle’s foil-wrapped landing probes. Visor reflects his long black shadow, the solar wind collector, the Stars and Stripes planted by the moonwalkers, the white figure of Armstrong (who took this picture), and the buglike lunar module. A few hours earlier the two men had flashed the words that thrilled a waiting world: ‘Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.’ While Armstrong and Aldrin explore the surface, Michael Collin keeps lonely vigil in Columbia, Apollo 11’s command module orbiting the moon.”
—From “First Explorers on the Moon,” December 1969, National Geographic magazine
Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates and Academy-Award winning film director James Cameron (R) demonstrate Windows Media 9 Series platform in Los Angeles, September 4, 2002. Gates announced the immediate public beta release of the platform. Windows Media 9 includes innovations such as high-definition video at six times the resolution of DVD, the first 5.1 channel surround streaming audio and a faster, more television-like experience. REUTERS/Jeff Christensen
www.napster.com
Napster Is Dead
It appears Napster has run out of lives.
On Tuesday, the landmark file-sharing service's Web site, which 18 months ago was providing its free software to millions of new users a week, posted the words "Ded Kitty" over its infamous cat logo.
Earlier in the day, a U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware, blocked the sale of Napster to its chief investor, Bertelsmann AG, citing a lack of evidence that the agreement was brokered in good faith.
Judge Peter J. Walsh ruled there was a conflict of interest in the purchase, particularly "divided loyalties" from Napster CEO Konrad Hilbers, a former Bertelsmann executive.
The court, with support from the music industry, also accused the German media giant of thwarting other companies to bid on Napster by valuing its bid at $92 million, nearly four times its estimated worth.
In Bertelsmann's proposed purchase, however, it would only pay about $8 million for the company, because it had already invested $85 million into Napster.
Hilbers and Napster founder Shawn Fanning were among 42 employees laid off Tuesday from Napster, which has been down since July 2001. Two workers will stay on to handle a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing that is expected to happen Thursday, and will liquidate the company's assets, including their brand name.
"Napster is disappointed with the bankruptcy court's decision not to approve the sale of the company's assets to Bertelsmann," Hilbers said in a statement. "As with most startup technology businesses, Napster's technology is of little value without the talented team that created it, so it is an occasion of loss on many levels."
Napster, which Fanning launched as a freshman at Northeastern University in 1999, rocked the music industry the following year and has since provided a blueprint for dozens of illegal copycat peer-to-peer services that are now a legitimate threat to record labels.
Although it was a friend to millions of music fans around the world, it was the foe of several artists, including Dr. Dre and Metallica, who filed lawsuits against the company.
The five major record label conglomerates also sued Napster and filed motions in the bankruptcy case, objecting to the sale of the company to Bertelsmann.
Passenger punches flight attendant
CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (AP) -- A US Airways Express flight turned back to Charlotte on Tuesday after a passenger punched a flight attendant who spilled water in his lap.
Robert Quarture, 32, was arrested when the plane returned to Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. He was charged with attacking a flight attendant.
According to an FBI affidavit, Quarture punched the attendant in the stomach shortly after the plane bound for Birmingham, Alabama, took off Tuesday morning.
US Airways spokesman Dave Castelveter said 22 passengers were aboard the 50-seat regional jet, with a crew of two pilots and the lone flight attendant.
The male flight attendant was taken to the hospital as a precaution, then released.
Children slashed in S. Korea knife attack
SEOUL, South Korea (CNN) -- A man wielding a knife and claiming to be driven by voices urging him to kill, slashed and injured at least 10 children at a church preschool in Seoul.
The injured children, ages 3 to 5, were taken to the hospital for treatment, police said on Wednesday.
There was no immediate information on the extent of their injuries, but a police spokesman said he didn't think any of the injuries were serious.
The suspect, a 53-year-old jobless man, was arrested 30 minutes after Wednesday's attack in the South Korean capital's Gunja neighborhood, the Yonhap news agency reported.
Yonhap reported that the knife assault took place as 45 children and three adults were eating lunch in the church cafeteria.
The man told police that he heard voices on Tuesday night telling him that he would be killed unless he killed others, the report said.
"He said he was haunted by somebody else who tried to kill him. We are investigating him now," an investigating police officer was quoted as saying.
Want Fries With That McDonald's Room?
They forgot to supersize the shower.
Otherwise, McDonald's, with its two new Golden Arch Hotels in western Switzerland, may have found the formula for serving up beds along with burgers.
I tried one of the hotels -- outside the picturesque town of Estavayer-le-Lac -- during a visit to Swiss Expo.02, the national fair in the lake district of western Switzerland. (The Expo, which runs through October, has brought dramatic architecture, including the much-publicized "blur building," to four cities in the region.)
Encouraged by Expo officials to begin my visit in Biel, a city known for watches (Rolex and Swatch are based there), I made a reservation at the Golden Tulip hotel, part of a usually reliable Dutch chain. But my drab, un-air-conditioned room, which faced a lightwell, wasn't worth the $250 per night I was paying.
Although the breakfast was delicious -- one of those buffets that satisfies every imaginable craving -- I decided to try someplace different.
I didn't know how different until, on the drive to Yverdon-les-Bains (another Expo location), I spotted the Golden Arch Hotel, a yellow building with all the appeal of a roadside warehouse. I was wary, but later that day, exhausted from sightseeing and still without a place to stay, I called and made a reservation. I was given a price of about $120.
My companion and I arrived at the hotel about 10 p.m. Since it was late and we would be leaving early the next morning, $120 suddenly seemed like a lot. "Do you have a better rate?" I asked the woman behind the desk. She left to confer with a colleague, and then told me that since I hadn't guaranteed my reservation, she could give me the post-9 p.m. walk-in rate of about $55. (Remind me never to guarantee a reservation again!) Breakfast, she told me, was available for $9 each; I purchased a pair of breakfast coupons.
For $55, we weren't expecting much. But the room, though garishly painted (picture Ronald McDonald's rec room, mostly yellow and red), was exceedingly cheerful. Large windows, excellent air conditioning and comfortable furniture made the room seem like a bargain. Better yet, at the touch of a button the beds (twins pushed together) adjusted to every conceivable position. Plus, there was Internet access, via the TV, with a wireless keyboard -- so I could lounge in bed and answer e-mail. (At the Golden Tulip, Web access was via a public terminal in the corner of the lobby.) There were subtle reminders that we were in a McDonald's hotel, including headboards shaped like the Golden Arches, but I found them witty rather than cloying.
The bathroom was well-designed, and the shower, a capsule of frosted glass projecting into the bedroom, was positively futuristic. But from the inside, with water steaming it up, the glass tube was claustrophobic.
Needless to say, in this temple of efficiency, our wake-up call came right on time. We headed down to breakfast and discovered that the ground floor of the hotel was the closest thing we'd seen in Switzerland to a mall: a deli, a cheese shop, a travel agency, a cute Italian restaurant and -- of course -- a McDonald's lined a wide hallway down the center of the building. Our coupons entitled us to choose from the breakfast menu at McDonald's.
Although we had the option to eat on a terrace, with views of the Swiss Alps, we were dejected. From the very first bite of my Egg McMuffin, the illusion was shattered. We had gone to sleep in a hip new hotel, and woke up in a McDonald's.
-- Fred Bernstein
Golden Arch Hotel, Estavayer-le-Lac, Switzerland, telephone 011-41-26-664-8686, www.goldenarchhotel.com. Rates start at about $105 a night, single or double occupancy.
Italian Recipes for the Family That Eats Together
Ziti al Forno
(Baked Ziti)
(8 to 12 servings)
Carmela's baked ziti is a hit with Father Phil, who enjoys it with Carmela and a few too many glasses of Chianti in front of the fire (though the red pepper flakes that Father Phil likes in the pasta are missing from this recipe). The recipe includes Sunday Gravy, a staple that was a part of many a Sunday meal in the Italian home. In a traumatic flashback, Tony recalls his mother, Livia, frying meat for her gravy -- "red lead" as Tony calls it.
-- From "The Sopranos Family Cookbook" by "Artie Bucco," Michele Scicolone and Allen Rucker (Warner Books, 2002).
1 pound ziti
Salt to taste
4 to 5 cups Sunday Gravy (recipe follows) With Meatballs
1 cup freshly grated Pecorino Romano or Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
1 cup ricotta
8 ounces mozzarella, cut into small dice
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
In a large pot, bring at least 4 quarts of water to a boil. Add the ziti and salt to taste and cook, stirring frequently, until the ziti is al dente (tender yet firm to the bite). Drain the ziti, transfer to a large bowl and toss with about 3 cups of the Sunday Gravy and half of the Pecorino. Gently stir in the meatballs from the Sunday Gravy. Spoon half of the ziti mixture into a 31/2-quart baking dish (a 9-by-13-by-2-inch baking dish works well). Spread the ricotta, mozzarella and half of the remaining Pecorino evenly over the top. Pour 1 cup of the remaining Sunday Gravy sauce evenly over the top. Top with the remaining ziti mixture. If the mixture looks dry, pour another cup of the Sunday Gravy over the top. Sprinkle the remaining Pecorino on top. Cover the dish with foil. (The ziti can be refrigerated for up to 12 hours at this point. Remove the dish from the refrigerator about 30 minutes before baking.)
Bake the ziti for 45 minutes. Uncover and bake 15 to 30 minutes longer, until the center is hot and the sauce is bubbling around the edges. Cover loosely with foil and let rest for 15 minutes before serving.
Per serving (based on 8): 729 calories, 45 gm protein, 53 gm carbohydrates, 37 gm fat, 143 mg cholesterol, 16 gm saturated fat, 1,043 mg sodium, 3 gm dietary fiber
Sunday Gravy With Meatballs
(Makes about 8 cups)
For the sauce:
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound meaty pork neck bones or spareribs
1 pound veal stew meat or 2 veal shoulder chops
1 pound Italian plain or fennel pork sausages
4 garlic cloves, peeled
1/4 cup tomato paste
Three 28- to 35-ounce cans Italian peeled tomatoes
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
6 fresh basil leaves, torn into small pieces
For the meatballs:
1 pound ground beef, or a combination of beef and pork
1/2 cup plain dried bread crumbs
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon very finely minced garlic
1/2 cup (about 2 ounces) freshly grated Pecorino Romano or Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh flat-leaf (Italian) parsley
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus additional for the pan
For the sauce: In a large deep pot over medium heat, heat the oil. Pat the pork dry and add it to the pot. Cook, turning occasionally, until nicely browned on all sides, about 15 minutes. Transfer the pork to a platter.
Brown the veal in the same way and transfer it to the platter.
Place the sausages in the pot and brown on all sides. Transfer them to the platter.
Drain almost all of the fat from the pot. Reduce the heat to medium-low, add the garlic and cook until golden, about 2 minutes. Remove and discard. Add the tomato paste and cook, stirring, for 1 minute.
Add the tomatoes and their juices to the pot and season with salt and pepper to taste. (Before adding them to the pot: For a smoother sauce, use a food mill to puree the tomatoes and their juices. For a chunkier sauce, use a knife or blender to chop the tomatoes.)
Return the pork, veal and sausages to the pot. Add the basil, increase the heat to medium-high and bring the sauce to a simmer. Cover the pot partially and cook, stirring occasionally, for 2 hours. If the sauce becomes too thick, add a little water.
While the sauce is cooking, make the meatballs.
For the meatballs: In a large bowl combine the ground beef, bread crumbs, eggs, garlic, cheese, parsley and salt and pepper to taste and, using your hands, mix together thoroughly. Rinse your hands with cold water and lightly shape the mixture into tiny balls the size of small grapes. You should have about 12 dozen mini-meatballs. (If you wish to make meatballs to serve over pasta rather than include in Baked Ziti, shape the mixture into 2-inch balls.)
In a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat, heat the oil. Add the meatballs and cook, turning as necessary, until browned on all sides but not cooked through. (Do not crowd the skillet; may have to cook in batches.) It may be necessary to add additional oil to keep the meatballs from sticking. Transfer the meatballs to a plate; they will finish cooking later.
After the sauce has simmered for 2 hours, add the meatballs to the sauce and cook, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens, the meatballs are cooked through and the larger meats are tender, about 30 minutes.
To use in Baked Ziti, use a slotted spoon to remove the meats from the sauce. Use the meatballs for the Baked Ziti. Reserve the pork, veal and sausage for a second course or for another meal or dice and add to the Sunday Gravy that remains and reserve both for another meal.
Per serving (based on 8): 673 calories, 44 gm protein, 18 gm carbohydrates, 47 gm fat, 205 mg cholesterol, 16 gm saturated fat, 1,231 mg sodium, 3 gm dietary fiber
Saffron Risotto Cakes
(Makes about 18 cakes)
The Italian family weeknight meal often makes the most of what is at hand, and cakes or fritters are a delicious way to deal with leftover risotto. In this recipe, the Scotto family starts from scratch, to make them a worthy accompaniment to baked chicken or a roast.
-- From "Italian Comfort Food" by Marion, Rosanna, Anthony Jr. and Elaina Scotto (Regan Books, 2002).
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus additional for frying
1 shallot, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
2 cups uncooked Arborio rice
2 cups white wine
4 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup sweet peas
3/4 cup (about 3 ounces) mozzarella cheese
1 cup (about 4 ounces) grated Parmesan cheese
4 tablespoons butter
2 pinches saffron threads
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
About 1/4 cup flour
In a heavy stockpot over medium heat, heat 1 tablespoon of the oil. Add the shallot and garlic and cook until softened and golden brown, 2 to 3 minutes.
Add the rice and wine, increase the heat to medium-high and cook, stirring constantly, until the wine has reduced by half, about 10 minutes. Slowly add the stock and cook, stirring constantly to make sure rice does not stick to the pan, until the rice has absorbed most of the liquid, about 15 minutes.
When the rice is almost but not quite cooked through, add the peas, mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses, butter, saffron and salt and pepper to taste. Cook, stirring, until the rice becomes creamy, about 5 minutes.
Transfer the rice to a nonstick baking sheet and, using the bottom of a flat spatula, spread the rice out to a depth of about 1/2 inch. Set aside to cool for 1 hour.
Using a 3-inch cookie cutter lightly dusted with flour, cut out round risotto shapes. The risotto that's left on the sheet when you're done cutting out the rounds can be gathered together to make additional risotto cakes.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
In a saute pan (preferably nonstick) over medium heat, heat the remaining 2 tablespoons oil. Add some of the risotto cakes, being careful not to crowd the pan, and cook, adding more oil if necessary, until they are golden brown, about 4 minutes per side. (You will need to cook the cakes in batches.) Repeat with the remaining cakes. Return the cakes to the baking sheet and bake until warmed through, about 5 minutes. Serve immediately.
Per serving (based on 2 cakes): 924 calories, 30 gm protein, 105 gm carbohydrates, 32 gm fat, 70 mg cholesterol, 16 gm saturated fat, 966 mg sodium, 3 gm dietary fiber
Ricotta Pie
(8 servings)
Beware of Carmela bearing her ricotta pie. She approaches her neighbor, Jean Cusamano, with the hope that Jean's twin sister, Joan, will write a letter of recommendation to Georgetown University for Meadow Soprano. When Joan balks, Carmela shows up at her office with the pie and a look that means business. The letter is written.
Carmela also uses the pie to comfort. She brings some to Livia at the retirement home. "I can't eat that, it's got cholesterol," snarls Livia. "I made it with low-fat cheese," says Carmela, patiently.
-- From "The Sopranos Family Cookbook" by "Artie Bucco," Michele Scicolone and Allen Rucker (Warner Books, 2002).
For the pie:
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 cup fine graham cracker crumbs (about 3 crackers)
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
15-ounce container ricotta cheese (preferably whole milk)
2 large eggs
1/2 cup heavy (whipping) cream
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
For the topping:
20-ounce can crushed pineapple in syrup
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
For the pie: Spread the butter over the bottom and sides of a 9-inch springform pan or pie pan. Add the crumbs, turning the pan to coat the bottom and sides. Set aside.
In a large bowl, stir together the sugar and cornstarch. Add the ricotta, eggs, cream, lemon zest and vanilla and beat until smooth. Scrape the mixture into the prepared pan. Bake for 50 minutes, or until the pie is set around the edges but still slightly soft in the center. Transfer to a wire rack to cool to room temperature.
For the topping, drain the pineapple well, reserving 1/2 cup of the syrup. Set aside.
In a medium saucepan, stir together the sugar and cornstarch. Stir in the reserved 1/2 cup pineapple syrup and the lemon juice. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, just until thickened, about 1 minute. Add the reserved drained pineapple and stir to combine. Remove from the heat; set aside to cool slightly.
To serve, spread the pineapple mixture over the pie. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour before serving.
Per serving: 310 calories, 8 gm protein, 35 gm carbohydrates, 16 gm fat, 105 mg cholesterol, 9 gm saturated fat, 93 mg sodium, 1 gm dietary fiber
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
This Is Family Style?
Memo to The Sopranos: Pass the Pasta And Mind Your Manners
By Jeanne McManus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 4, 2002; Page F01
WHEN NEW JERSEY MOB BOSS Tony Soprano pulls up his chair to the head of the table, hunches over his plate and spears and pokes his pasta unremittingly with a fork, he sets in motion the crazy dynamic of that dysfunctional dinner table. In the charged atmosphere of the Soprano dining room, a new and frenzied spin is added to the phrase "family style."
Though most cultures embrace the ritual of a family dinner (whether or not they actually practice it), the Italians have made it an art form. "Family style" at its most basic dining-table definition means that the food is put on platters and brought to the table, not portioned onto plates by the cook in the kitchen. But equally important as the substance -- pasta, meatballs, chicken, all lifted easily from the platter -- is the style, which emphasizes sharing, nurturing and communication.
"Family food in Italy -- or anywhere -- is not about sustenance, but about nourishment, comfort and togetherness, that you were taken care of at the end of the long day," says Micol Negrin, author of "Rustico: Regional Italian Country Cooking" to be published in October by Clarkson Potter.
But why should there be peace, solace, comfort, sharing or nurturing at the Soprano table? After all, this is a family where food triggers panic attacks (Tony and meat), where food is used to extort (Carmela brings a ricotta pie and extracts a letter of recommendation for her daughter to Georgetown University), to seduce (Father Phil likes his ziti) or as a weapon (Junior smashes Roberta with a pie, Gloria throws a steak at Tony's head). And, above all, hogs and humans are slaughtered in the same butcher shop. (It pays to know your purveyors.)
The show returns to HBO for its fourth season on Sept. 15 with every promise that the feuding will continue if not escalate.
Have Italians been curing prosciutto for 2,000 years only to watch their way of life portrayed as some 21st century indigestion-inducing dinner-table knockdown on cable TV?
"What disturbs me about the Sopranos is the lack of decorum," says John Mariani, whose newest book with Galina Mariani is "The Italian-American Cookbook" (Harvard Common Press). "I never heard language like that at the table, especially from children. I don't care where these people come from, Italians don't talk that way."
Sometimes it's the simple four-member unit: paterfamilias Tony, materfamilias Carmela, daughter Meadow and son AJ. Sometimes it's the extended family. In any configuration, when they gather together to eat, they draw battle lines, fight across generations, fuel rivalries and shout obscenities. Someone runs from the table in a rage.
And Now, a Cookbook
To accompany the return of the show, Warner Books has created "The Sopranos Family Cookbook," a fictional compilation of memorabilia, inside jokes and photographs of that loveable family that lives in the nouveau mansion on top of the hill in North Caldwell, N.J.
The cookbook includes recipes for Carmela's famous ziti and ricotta pie and an "interview" of the fictional character Carmela by another of the series characters, Artie Bucco (owner of the torched Vesuvio Ristorante and then, inevitably, the Nuovo Vesuvio Ristorante). In their conversation, Carmela emphasizes the importance of her role in the family meal.
"ARTIE: Carmela, you are a woman who is monetarily comfortable, why don't you have someone come in and help with the meals?
"CARMELA: You know, that never crossed my mind. First of all, I don't like strangers in the house, nor does Tony . . . I love to cook. Call me old-fashioned, but I think cooking is one way -- maybe the best way -- of communicating to my family that I love them."
But let's go to the videotape:
• Season 1, Episode 7 ("Down Neck"): In the first view of the family in the dining room, Tony, Carmela, Meadow and AJ are joined by Livia, Tony's mother, and Uncle Junior, Tony's uncle. AJ has been suspended from school for stealing sacramental wine and showing up drunk for gym class.
To Tony's horror, Livia rats on her own son, telling AJ about Tony's childhood misdemeanors (stealing a car); Tony and Uncle Junior squabble. AJ mutters something. Carmela, provoked, metes out AJ's punishment along with the family meal: no TV, no Nintendo and he has to visit Livia at the retirement home. AJ runs from the table.
• Season 1, Episode 9 ("Boca"): With Livia and Uncle Junior again at the table, there's a testy conversation about Meadow's soccer team. Meadow runs from the table.
• Season 1, Episode 12 ("Isabella"): Livia does her guilt trip, accusing Tony of selling her house only to send her to a "glue factory" (the retirement home). Tony runs from the table.
Granted, this is a dysfunctional family in extremis. But for healthy or even less than perfect families, are the noblest of intentions -- to share, to eat together, to communicate -- likely to fall apart at the emotional breeding ground that is the dinner table? Is it worth the effort to gather together or do little rifts widen? Or can a group meal help to patch things up, to make the family stronger?
"For the Sopranos, the big meal of the day is a mirror," says Harvey Ruben, clinical professor and director of continuing education of the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. The family dinner "reflects the pathology of the family. Food may be there in bounteous portions, but there's skewed communication, not a sharing of thought and feelings, but fighting and arguing."
There are other major-league mistakes that grind away at the Soprano family core. According to Norman B. Epstein, a family therapist, psychologist and professor in the department of family studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, "It's probably best to avoid conflictual topics. Call a family meeting for those, but don't do it at the dinner table."
But in the Soprano home, "no boundaries are honored by anyone," says Epstein, "so that plays out at the meal. Someone leaves the table, and no one goes to bring that person back into the fold."
Whose Family Style?
Michele Scicolone, a respected Italian cookbook author, sat down and watched all three seasons of the show before she began to create the recipes for "The Soprano Family Cookbook." The experience made her think not just about the ingredients, but about the essence of family style.
"Family-style food is not the food you see in Italian restaurants," says Scicolone, the author most recently of "Italian Holiday Cooking" (William Morrow, 2001). "Not to say it's necessarily humble, or easy to prepare, but family-style food has a simplicity about it. And I wondered why I hadn't used these kinds of recipes in some of my other books. Maybe because family style comes to people naturally. It was nice to look at the recipes I had taken for granted."
Scicolone's grandparents were from Naples; growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, she recalls that the table was the place for lively discussion. "There was no other place where you could discuss everything, and be free and open."
"Family style? We didn't think about it or call it that, it had no special name," says local chef Roberto Donna. "For us, it was instinct," says Donna. He is sitting with his visiting relatives -- his mother, Anna, sister Loredano Porasso and her husband, Silvano -- in the Laboratorio at Galileo, his downtown Washington restaurant, a few hours before the dinner crush arrives. It's not the family table in Donna's home town of San Raffaele Cimena, outside Torino in the Piedmont region of Italy, but you get the picture.
In Italian, the four interrupt, gesture, tell stories about each other, briefly defer to Anna who is folding napkins for the dinner service, then interrupt their interruptions.
Were there arguments at their table? "Arguments? Oh, yes," assures Donna. "We argue about anything. It's normal for Italians: Everyone has his own opinions."
Born in Milan, author Negrin learned early that the family meal was the big thing of the day. Her mother would say "Butto la pasta!" -- "I'm throwing the pasta in the water" -- and that, says Negrin, "was the signal that everyone should wash their hands and go sit down and wait for dinner. The focus was on food and then, as a result, conversation. There was never a TV playing in background. The meal was a time to talk, catch up, share."
In the just published "Italian Comfort Food" (Regan Books), the Scotto family chronicles the cooking of five generations of family. "We never got to the table to argue," says Marion Scotto, matriarch of the family that runs the Fresco by Scotto restaurant in New York City. "There was laughter, good wine and music." And the key to this harmony? "Politics and money were never discussed."
The model of the family meal at its best, perfected by the Italians, among other cultures, may not be practical in America today. Overworked parents, overscheduled kids, carpools, traffic and the ease of ordering takeout all conspire against a nightly or even a weekly assembling.
Real Italian Style
Lynne Rossetto Kasper is the author of "The Splendid Table: Recipes from Emilia-Romagna, the Heartland of Northern Italian Food (William Morrow, 1992) and "The Italian Country Table: Home Cooking From Italy's Farmhouse Kitchens" (Scribner, 1999). In the course of researching her two books, she spent months in the Italian countryside, sitting at family farm tables, sharing meals.
"I saw in people's lives a system in place. Four generations of family lived in proximity to each other."
Food was passed, there was generosity, even if it was only polenta and greens. (And she adds with a tone that means business: "Heaven help you if you don't show up.")
The land that they farmed together and the work that they shared fused them. "Even in the 'Godfather' movies," says Kasper, "family style meant trust. Who else can you trust? Part of that came from the idea that you all work together. Who has more of a vested interest in the business than your own family?"
In "The Italian Country Table" Kasper observed that at the center of every Italian village was the bell tower of the church, the campanile. "Within the sound of those bells is the land, home, family and the only people to truly be trusted."
For families scattered far and wide today, family style can be jarringly translated, as it is in the stereotypical and falsely convivial Italians in the Olive Garden restaurants' TV commercials. The chain's ads show Italian Americans entertaining their Old World relatives in settings that America knows dot shopping centers, eating meals that have been compared to fast food. "We celebrate family in a place that wants to run up the bill," bemoans Kasper, who admits she wants to "heave something" at the television when the commercials appear.
What hope is there of keeping alive the tradition of the family meal? "We've left the place where the bell tower rang," says Kasper. "So friends become family. They're like cards that we shuffle. We lose some, we leave some behind, but they are still there. I can't imagine getting together that isn't at the table. We've created family style, but in our own way."
Most of us will never know firsthand how a real-life mobster and his family eat, nor will we likely buy sausage at Satriales. But the extremes laid out by the Soprano family table make one thing clear to any viewer, of any ancestry, from any family: There's more to a good meal than food.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/tennis/2002/us_open/news/2002/08/27/kournikova_tennis/
Lack of success tarnishes Kournikova's marketability
LONDON -- Anna Kournikova’s fading fortunes on the tennis court could hurt her off-court earnings as well.
The Russian 21-year-old is one of the most recognizable and photographed stars in tennis thanks to her blonde looks and figure-hugging outfits.
Sponsorship deals with Adidas, Omega watches, Yonex tennis equipment and Berlei lingerie have made Kournikova one of the wealthiest players on the women’s circuit with career earnings totaling more than US$40 million.
But the vital statistics of Kournikova’s career tell another story.
On Monday Kournikova crashed to her fourth first round defeat in Grand Slam competition this season, losing 6-3, 6-0 to 17-year-old Indonesian Angelique Widjaja.
Since making her debut on the WTA Tour in 1995, Kournikova has failed to win a singles title. She is currently ranked 37th in the world, having previously climbed as high as eighth.
Of the US$10.6 million that dropped into her bank account last season just US$334,000 was earned on court.
Now, Adidas, which reportedly pays US$2.4m a year to be associated with the Moscow-born star, is rumored to be unhappy with Kournikova’s form.
Phil Holland, news correspondent with sports business experts Sportcal.com, believes the game could soon be up for Kournikova as a marketable asset.
“What you have to bear in mind us that sponsors have paid a lot of money to endorse her and the idea is that she produces something in return,” he told CNNSI.com.
“Grand Slams are where they want to see their stars. They don't want to be associated with over-paid stars who are earning top cash but not performing.”
Kournikova has been accused of allowing her off-court commitments to become a distraction and at Wimbledon in June her image suffered a further blow when she lost her temper in an interview with a BBC reporter who suggested she needed to re-focus on her game.
“She’s going on TV but not for the right reasons,” says Holland.“The interview at Wimbledon was uncomfortable for all concerned. If you’re a sponsor you want her to be successful.”
At 21, it may be too soon to say that Kournikova’s best tennis is behind her, but after six years on the circuit the Russian is more the fading veteran than the rising starlet.
Meanwhile there are plenty of upcoming players -- such as Austria’s Barbara Schett, Slovakia’s Daniela Hantuchova and American Ashley Harkleroad – with aspirations to usurp Kournikova as the glamor girl of women’s tennis while adding winning results to the equation.
Ironically, Holland believes Kournikova’s financial success could limit the earnings potential of the young stars coming through behind her.
“Somebody like Justine Henin is playing good tennis but in terms of marketability she's not quite up there,” he says.
“On the other hand somebody like Barbara Schett is getting a lot of attention for her looks but if her tennis is of the same standard as Kournikova's -- although it’s probably better -- she's not going to get the same amount of attention.
“Nobody is going to jump into deals with tennis players simply because of their looks. It's case of once-bitten, twice shy.”
As for Kournikova’s tennis career, a period away from the spotlight could be the key to getting her game back on track.
“If she wants to perform she needs to re-consider what she wants to achieve,” says Holland.
“That might mean stepping down to lesser tournaments, getting back to basics and thinking about a change of coach. It worked very effectively for Andre Agassi a few years ago.”
Baron Davis of the United State reacts after slam dunk against New Zealand on a break-away in the fourth quarter of a game in the second preliminary round of the World Basketball Championships in Indianapolis, Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2002. The US defeated New Zealand, 104-62. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
'NSYNC's Kirkpatrick Offers Peace Plan In Eminem/ Moby Beef
Chris Kirkpatrick didn't get his ass kicked, and he seems a little bummed about the lack of attention.
The 'NSYNC singer, for whom Eminem prescribes a whoopin' in "Without Me," said the solution to the Em/ Moby beef that flared up at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards is for the two of them to forget about each other and focus on him instead. Click here for the complete 2002 MTV VMA Winners List.
"I was [seated] in between them," Kirkpatrick said backstage afterward. "I just was quiet, I didn't want to get involved."
The uncomfortable face-off occurred while Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (see "Triumph The Insult Comic Dog Poops On Eminem, Timberlake") was interviewing Moby in the audience and started talking about the electronic artist's well-known feud with the Detroit rapper. As Triumph tried to take the issue to Eminem, Em and fellow rappers Obie Trice and Proof made it clear they wouldn't be talking to the hand (puppet).
"I love Eminem, I love Moby. Why can't we just be friends?" Kirkpatrick said. "They should just make fun of me."
But his lack of involvement in the night's most tense moment wasn't the only missed opportunity he was lamenting after the show. 'NSYNC were up for Best Pop Video and Best Group Video for their remix of "Girlfriend" featuring Nelly, and their "Gone" clip was vying for Video of the Year, but the group left with nothing.
"This sucks. It was the worst [VMAs] yet," he said. "We didn't win anything. As joking as we make it, it kind of hurts when you go away empty-handed. You want to win. Everyone says, 'It's just an honor to be nominated,' but that's so not true. You want to win."
Still, he got to see bandmate Justin Timberlake perform live for the first time, which he called "unbelievable". "I'm just right behind him usually. Now I get to sit in front of him and watch. It was a good time. He's got a great thing going."
www.moby.com
Moby Responds To Eminem's VMA Attack, Praises 'Dog-Puppet'
Moby has addressed being dissed by Eminem at last week's Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall (August 29) in his online journal..
"The truth is I honestly, in all sincerity, thought that the whole Eminem thing was done in some semblance of humor until Eminem called me a p--sy (that was off camera) and then threatened to beat me up," wrote Moby in his online journal. "Ah well."
Moby added, "I think that Eminem is talented and interesting, but I'm kind of stunned at the anger that he has for me, seeing as I'd never met him up until that night."
He capped off his entry, "...and I love 'Triumph The Insult Comic Dog,' and I was more concerned for Triumph's well-being. If Eminem wants to pick on someone, fine, pick on me, but don't dis the dog-puppet. Triumph the dog-puppet is my hero."
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20010726/3511296s.htm
Hookups starve the soul
By Laura Vanderkam
The scene: my college dorm's basement bathroom on a Sunday morning early in my freshman year. As hungover girls crowded around the sinks, I caught a friend's eye in the mirror. What happened when she left last night's party with a boy neither of us had ever seen before?
''Oh,'' she said with a knowing look, ''we hooked up.''
No, not planes refueling in midair. Hookups are when a guy and girl get together for a physical encounter and don't expect anything else. They've all but replaced dating at most colleges, according to a study being released today by the Institute on American Values, a non-partisan family issues think tank. Only half of the women interviewed had been on six or more dates during college; a third had been on no more than two.
As a new college graduate, I can attest to this. I've had as many dates in my first 2 months in the real world as I had during my whole college career.
Lest you think college students are all libertines, hooking up doesn't mean having sex, although it can. The term includes all of the bases, and the ambiguity is intentional. Modest types can imply that less happened than did, and braggarts can hint at hitting a home run. Hookups are defined by alcohol, physical attraction and a lack of expectations in the morning.
While the study found that only 40% of the women interviewed admitted to hooking up, the practice pervades college culture. Dates and, for the most part, love affairs, are passé. Why bother asking someone to dinner when you can meet at a party, down a few drinks and go home together?
I hear the traditionalists clucking. Sex without commitment. Sounds like a male plot, right? But women are going along.
Some blame the sexual revolution. Some blame co-ed dorms and alcohol abuse. I blame something else. Hookups are part of a larger cultural picture. Today's college kids are the first generation to have had their entire childhoods scheduled. To them, dating is simply not a productive use of time.
Author David Brooks used the phrase ''Organization Kid'' in April's Atlantic Monthly to describe what he discovered at my alma mater, Princeton. After a lifetime of shuffling from soccer practice to scout meetings and piano lessons, today's college kids no longer want to spend hours debating the nature of good and evil, he noted. Once obsessed with getting into increasingly selective colleges -- and now obsessed with getting great grades and even greater jobs -- they no longer have hours to spend wooing a lover.
''I was amazed to learn how little dating goes on,'' Brooks wrote in the magazine. ''Students go out in groups, and there is certainly a fair bit of partying on campus, but as one told me, 'People don't have time or energy to put into real relationships.' ''
But 20-year-olds still have hormones, so they hook up instead. They stumble home together late Saturday night, roll around in bed, then pass out. The next morning, it's as if nothing happened.
Hookups do satisfy biology, but the emotional detachment doesn't satisfy the soul. And that's the real problem -- not the promiscuity, but the lack of meaning.
People who don't bother with love affairs cut themselves off from life's headier emotions. What about Scarlett O'Hara's passion, or Juliet's? What about the mad jealousy of Dostoevsky's Dmitry Karamazov or even the illicit pleasures of Lady Chatterley and her lover? No great art will be inspired by the muse of Milwaukee's Best or a tryst that both parties are trying to forget.
In the same way, the Organization Kid's lack of soul-searching doesn't bode well for future poets and philosophers. Dostoevsky's Ivan wouldn't have had time to dream up the Grand Inquisitor if he spent his youth being carted from one sport to another and his early 20s obsessed with the perfect lab report.
Parents want the best for their kids -- but some also want the perfect kid. Somewhere along the way to achieving these perfect children through structured activities, overachieving parents stunt the growth of their children's souls. Too much supervision creates kids who'd rather hook up than fall in love, who'd rather get the right answers on tests than ask the larger questions.
It's too late to bring back the dormitory mothers, curfews and traditional morals that forced courtships in the past. But the Organization Kid culture can be changed. If parents stop rigidly scheduling their children's lives, and if they no longer teach that life is only a series of concrete goals to be met and then exceeded, then there will be more real lovers and truth-seekers in the future -- and fewer hookups.
Neptunes' Pharrell Trumpets Jay-Z, Justin Projects, Addresses Beyonce Rumors
No more asking the Neptunes to make carbon copies of their previous hit songs: The famed production duo are commanding and receiving leeway to approach each project with their own distinctive perspective.
"Everybody is letting us do what we wanna do," half of the squad, Pharrell Williams, said last Wednesday in New York. "The most important thing is not having any real constraints and making sure something works for the artist and not doing something just to do it or to make money and just to have a song for an artist."
Justin Timberlake is on the long list of performers giving the team elbow room. They got together for his debut solo LP, Justified, which is due out in November.
"We did seven joints on there," Williams said. "Justin's album is incredible because of the amount of musicality he gave us the room to bring to the project. It's a whole other level."
And while the industry is buzzing about the Neps' work on the baby-faced singer's first single, "Like I Love You," people are also chattering about the collaborating going on between Pharrell and Beyoncé Knowles. However, it's not the Neptunes-produced "Work It Out" that is the source of most of the lip service — it's the rumored romance between the Destiny's Child singer and the 'Tunes frontman.
"Beyoncé is a talented person, but as far as those rumors, they are just rumors," Williams insisted. "You know what happens, you work with an artist that's beautiful and they automatically say something's going on with me and her. She's very much into her career and I couldn't tell you about her love life. I don't know her on that level. Girls, I'm still single. It's a cute rumor, but it's not true."
Whether or not you believe the talk about his love life, Williams has had a halfway decent track record over the past few years when it comes to churning out hits, so maybe people should start taking his word when he talks about a smash he produced with his Neptunes cohort Chad Hugo that hasn't even surfaced yet. Even if he isn't saying much.
"The new Jay-Z stuff, I got some crazy beats, man," he said about hooking up in the studio again with Jigga for the upcoming Blueprint 2 LP. "It's crazy material, man, it's gonna be classic, classic material. I can't really talk about what the songs sound like or how many [I produced], but it's incredible."
Jay and the Neptunes are both part of the Sprite Liquid Mix Tour and have been working while on the road. The Neps, who are performing under their N.E.R.D. moniker, have found time to put in work on their second album as well.
"We're three songs into the new N.E.R.D. project," the group's third member, Shay, said last week. "In the back of the tour bus we got a studio."
When the Sprite opportunity reared its head, the Virginian trio could not turn down the chance to say thanks to their fans.
"We wanted to interact with the people who bought the album, who are fans of the Neptunes' production as well as N.E.R.D.," Shay explained. "So we felt like we owed them at least to come to their town and perform for them live. It's been going good. It's a well-rounded show."
http://www.guerrillanews.com/white_america
Eminem Releases Controversial New Video
Eminem did not give critics nearly as much to bitch about with his new album “The Eminem Show,” as he did in the past. That is about to change. Eminem has made a video for the album’s third single, “White America.”
The video, which compliments the song very well, features images of an animated Eminem hanging himself in front of his computer, a school being shot up, teenagers pissing on the White House lawn and tearing up the constitution. While Eminem is obviously making a statement much like he did in the song, most won’t see it that way. Since the release of the video, he has already been compared to Charles Manson.
While some may watch the video and know what points he is making, the fear is many of Eminem’s fans won’t. Eminem has a very large fan base and a lot of his younger audience wmay interpret things the wrong way. Expect to hear a lot more on this.
www.girlsgonewild.com
Snoop Dogg Says Wild Girls Should Be Filmed
The release date of the Snoop Dogg hosted Girls Gone Wild Doggy Style has been pushed up two weeks to September 3. The 60-minute VHS and DVD package priced at $9.99 was taped during Mardi Gras 2002 in New Orleans.
Snoop recently told LAUNCH why he decided to participate in the popular adult series. "Well, when girls go wild, you need to film them," he said. "And they decided to film them, and they had me there present, so it's doggy-style Girls Gone Wild. And it's a good thang because that tape has been blowing up for a little bit of time now, and for me to be able to put my input in on it, is a good thang. You know, the owner, and the inventor of that, Joe Francis, is my buddy. My personal friend. My millionaire, I mean, billionaire buddy."
Girls Gone Wild Doggy Style purchasers will receive as a free bonus Girls Gone Wild Spring Break 2002 that was taped in South Padre Island, Texas; Panama City, Florida; and Mexican cities Cancun and Puerto Vallarta.
Infomercials promoting Doggy Style will air daily from September through December.
Last year, Snoop Dogg released the successful Hustler Video Doggystyle that received two AVN Video Awards: best music, and top-selling tape 2001.
Eminem is also working on a Girls Gone Wild segment due out next year.
Cleveland Indians Answer Logo Suit
The Cleveland Indians have asked a federal judge to stop the Indian Motorcycle Co. of Gilroy, Calif., from using a script logo similar to the team's logo.
The team made its response Monday to a lawsuit filed by the company two months ago in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
The club said it has long used a script logo of the word "Indians" that is protected by trademarks. The images are "famous and well-known," the club said.
The motorcycle company's use of its script "Indian" logo without a motorcycle reference would confuse consumers, the team said.
The club appealed to the court to dismiss the motorcycle company's lawsuit, which asked for a ruling that its use of the Indian logo would not be confusing.
Motorcycle company officials could not be reached for comment. A message seeking comment was left at company offices after regular business hours Wednesday.
The cover of the Rolling Stones' "40 Licks," a double-CD retrospective that is to be released Oct. 1, 2002, is seen in this undated handout photo. The CD, which includes four new tracks, will include 40 songs including classic hits such as "Brown Sugar," "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "Miss You." The album will coincide with the Stones' fall tour, which is set to kick off Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2002, in Boston. (AP Photo/Courtesy of Virgin Records)
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