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SNEAK PEEK: Inside Grammy Week Parties

kty — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:18:02 -0800

By Marisa Laudadio and Jessica Herndon
Nothing says Grammys like a good party – unless it's a week full of them. The biggest names in music and Hollywood are expected to turn out at a string of galas starting Wednesday and going until the wee hours after the awards show Sunday, and PEOPLE has all the details:

Grammy Night

Following the awards telecast from L.A.'s Staples Center on CBS, winners, losers and thousands of others head to the official Grammy Celebration next door, where Wolfgang Puck serves up the food. Across the street, Jamie Foxx will welcome more than 500 guests to his private party at the Conga Room at L.A. Live. Expect to see a mix of musicians and actors – Ke$ha, Nicole Kidman, Simon Baker, Pink and Carey Hart, Maroon 5, Common, director Ron Howard, Nick Cannon and Mariah Carey are expected – who will catch performances from Foxx's Grammy-nominated friends and will leave with Kipling Travel Bags stocked with goodies from Blue Microphones and Godiva. The EMI family will celebrate its 56 nominations with an after-party at the new W Hollywood. Guests including Katy Perry, Lady Antebellum, Keith Urban and Diana Krall will take home souvenir photos from the Samsung Mobile Lounge and can play DJ Hero on Xbox consoles around the party. To close out the night, Universal Motown Republic Group will celebrate its artists including India.Arie, Jay Sean, Drake and Kid Cudi at a cocktail party at the W Westwood, while Sony Music Entertainment hosts an intimate reception for its nominees. Meanwhile nominee Maxwell will be feted at the Mondrian. Also happening Grammy week:

Wednesday

Essence magazine honors nine-time Grammy winner Mary J. Blige at its Black Women in Music reception at the Sunset Tower Hotel, sponsored by Lincoln and featuring cocktails by Belvedere, with a guest list that includes Best New Artist nominee Keri Hilson, Jill Scott, Ne-Yo, Joy Bryant and Holly Robinson Peete. Taylor Swift will perform for honorees including Tim McGraw and Faith Hill at An Unforgettable Evening benefiting EIF's Women's Cancer Research Fund at the Beverly Wilshire. The Grammys will honor Placido Domingo at its Salute to Classical Music, and its Producers and Engineers Wing celebrates Chris Blackwell and the music of Island Records with Jimmy Jam, Quincy Jones and LMFAO at The Village recording studios.

Thursday

Colbie Caillat, The Fray and Jason Mraz are among the performers at the 12th Annual GRAMMY Foundation Music Preservation Project "Cue The Music: A Celebration Of Music And Television" at the Wilshire Ebell Theater. After Will.i.am – along with blink-182's Mark Hoppus, All American Rejects frontman Tyson Ritter and Grammy photographer Danny Clinch – take questions from the audience at the Gillette Uncut film series Q&A at the Grammy Museum, the Black Eyed Peas nominee heads to the Palladium to perform at the first annual Data Awards, a Dipdive.com and Blackberry-sponsored event honoring the DJ community. Fashion-conscious nominees Kings of Leon, who just launched their own clothing line, Pink, Silversun Pickups and comedian Russell Brand are expected at the John Varvatos for Grammy label T-shirts debut party at the designer's boutique.

Friday

The night's big-ticket event is the MusiCares person of the Year tribute to Neil Young. Following a reception and silent auction to benefit the MusiCares Foundation, more than 1,500 guests will be treated to tribute performances of Young's music by artists including Dave Matthews, Josh Groban, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Elton John and Sheryl Crow at the L.A. Convention Center. After the big show, insiders will head over to late-night parties like the 13th annual Friends and Family bash at Paramount Studios, and producer Tricky Stewart and RedZone Entertainment's 2nd Annual Pre-Grammy party, which is expected to draw The-Dream, Christina Aguilera, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Usher and more to hotspot Wonderland.

Saturday

The guest and performer list always remains top-secret at the Pre-Grammy Gala and Grammy Salute to Industry Icons at the Beverly Hilton. Presented by the Recording Academy and legendary music mogul Clive Davis, this year's event will honor Doug Morris, the Worldwide Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Universal Music Group. Last year guests included Paul McCartney, Prince, Diddy, Rihanna, Chris Brown, the Jonas Brothers and Taylor Swift. Before Davis's bash, the Green Music Group – a new coalition founded by artists including Dave Matthews Band, Linkin Park, Maroon 5, Willie Nelson and Sheryl Crow – will gather at Jane's House, while the Recording Academy will honor the artistic contributions of Michael Jackson, Bobby Darin and Leonard Cohen, among others, at the Wilshire Ebell Theater. Late-night, the Key Club hosts artists Estelle, Ledisi, John Legend and Keri Hilson at the annual Roots Jam Session.Watch the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards on Jan. 31 at 8 p.m. ET/PT, live on CBS – and catch up on all the news and style from the show on PEOPLE.com!

Friendly fire: NYT hits Obama

Cassandra57 — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 18:50:21 -0700

* PUBLIC POST *
(Because I think this is important.)

Friendly fire: NYT hits Obama
By JONATHAN MARTIN | 3/22/09 7:10 PM EDT

The leading liberal voices of the New York Times editorial pages all criticized-and, in some cases, clobbered-President Obama on Sunday for his handling of the economy and national security.

It's not unusual for Barack Obama to take a little friendly fire from the Times. But it's perhaps unprecedented for him to get hit on the same day by columnists Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd-and in the paper's lead editorial. Their critique punctuated a weekend that started with a widely circulated blog post by Paul Krugman that said the president’s yet to be announced bank rescue plan would almost certainly fail.

The sentiment, coming just two months after the president was sworn in, reflects elite opinion in the Washington-New York corridor that Obama is increasingly overwhelmed, and not fully appreciative of the building tsunami of populist outrage.

Unlike with President Bush, the Obama administration is less apt to dismiss such commentary, at least publicly, as so much carping from an out-of-touch peanut gallery. These are voices that have been sympathetic, and at times gushing toward Obama, during the campaign and in his administration’s early days.

The president and his top aides read the Times closely and react quickly to its reporting and commentary. Tom Daschle, for example, withdrew from consideration as Health and Human Services Secretary amid back tax issues on the same day that the paper ran a tough front-page piece and editorial on what keeping Daschle would mean to the Obama brand.

So it likely caused some consternation this morning at the White House and at Camp David, where the president is staying this weekend, to pick up the Times and find:

-Frank Rich, who made a cottage industry of Bush-bashing, writing that until Obama “addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed.”

Recalling the Daschle episode and the public’s response to the image of a wealthy former senator not paying taxes on a limousine, Rich said that judging from their response to the AIG case “the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.”

Larry Summers, perhaps the president’s most high-profile economic adviser, came in for the worst of it.

“Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy," Rich wrote.

-Thomas Friedman, the paper’s highly-read foreign affairs columnist, turning his focus home to find the nation lacking “inspirational leadership.”

Friedman’s indictment was not limited to Obama, but he captured some of the concern about the president’s communications skills by writing that the president “missed a huge teaching opportunity with A.I.G.”

Instead of letting Congress react in its usual knee-jerk fashion to overcompensate for what it believes the public wants-what Friedman called letting them “run riot”-the president should have stepped up.

“He should have gone on national TV and had the fireside chat with the country that is long overdue. That’s a talk where he lays out exactly how deep the crisis we are in is, exactly how much sacrifice we’re all going to have to make to get out of it, and then calls on those A.I.G. brokers - and everyone else who, in our rush to heal our banking system, may have gotten bonuses they did not deserve - and tells them that their president is asking them to return their bonuses ‘for the sake of the country.’”

-The paper’s liberal editorial page and a frequent voice of opposition to Bush’s national security policies complaining about “confused and mixed signals from the [Obama] White House” on some of the same issues.

“Some of what the public has heard from the Obama administration on issues like state secrets and detainees sounds a bit too close for comfort to the Bush team’s benighted ideas,” penned the Times editorialists, carping about Guantanamo specifically, detainee policy more broadly and Obama’s reluctance to investigate Bush-era actions on “terrorism, state secrets, wiretapping, detention and interrogation.”

-Maureen Dowd, in her inimitable fashion, citing the take-charge First Lady digging a White House garden to wonder “if the wrong Obama is in the Oval.”

“It’s a time in America’s history where we need less smooth jazz and more martial brass,” wrote Dowd.

-Krugman, who is perhaps the most frequent Obama critic at the paper but also a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose analysis carries considerable sway in liberal circles, not even waiting for the administration’s bank plan announcement this week before panning it.

“It’s exactly the plan that was widely analyzed - and found wanting - a couple of weeks ago,” Krugman wrote on his blog. “The zombie ideas have won. The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system - that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank.”

The Princeton economist turned opinion columnist predicted: “This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work. What an awful mess.”

Christina Romer, the Chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, called Krugman’s critique “unfair” in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” and said their plan of partnering with the private sector was to ensure taxpayers didn’t shoulder more of the burden and they didn’t offer “just another hand-out to banks.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20325.html

And an extra bonus, just to prove that the honeymoon really is over:

‘Punch-Drunk’ POTUS Has a Hearty Chuckle at the Expense of the Recently Unemployed and Destitute

What the Heck Happened to "Hope and Change?"

Ordinarily a title like that would be far more attention-getter than accurate descriptor, but what else can we say when we see President Obama so shamelessly yukking it up at the expense of those suffering under his hapless, incapable “leadership” that a CBS reporter is forced to ask if his unseemly behavior is the result of being “punch-drunk”?

According to Politico:

President Barack Obama said he believes the global financial system remains at risk of implosion with the failure of Citigroup or AIG, touching off “an even more destructive recession and potentially depression.”

His remarks came in a “60 Minutes” interview in which he was pressed by an incredulous Steve Kroft for laughing and chuckling several times while discussing the perilous state of the world’s economy.

“You’re sitting here. And you’re- you are laughing. You are laughing about some of these problems. Are people going to look at this and say, ‘I mean, he’s sitting there just making jokes about money-’ How do you deal with- I mean: explain…” Kroft asks at one point.

“Are you punch-drunk?” Kroft says.

“No, no. There’s gotta be a little gallows humor to get you through the day,” Obama says, with a laugh.

The interview is Obama’s most detailed explanation yet of his view of the world economic crisis, and he makes clear that he’s afraid the nation hasn’t seen the worst of it – even invoking the possibility of a “depression” if a series of financial institutions collapse all at once.

“There’s gotta be a little gallows humor to get you through the day,” says the man who makes $400,000 a year but gets everything he wants for free anyway, who has his every whim catered to, who has his own plane and chopper, and who has never held anything resembling a real job, in the real workforce and economy, in his life - “with a laugh.”

Here’s a question: what the heck happened to the “Hope and Change” this man was supposed to bring to America with his accession to the White House? I suppose having a hearty chuckle on national television at those Americans who have lost their jobs, their incomes, and their savings in the last several months (with the bulk of the latter coming since the president’s swearing in a scant two months ago) is, in fact, a “change” from what every previous executive has done; however, something tells me rubbing America’s collective face in the current crisis isn’t exactly the brand of “change” that 53% who supported Obama voted for.

Further, what happened to the so-called “stimulus” and the omnibus budget, which, with their pork-barrel cornucopias of frivolous spending, were supposed to solve all of our economic woes?

“Change has come to America,” crowed Obama’s supporters on the day of his election.

It has come indeed. However, change in the form of an out-of-his-depth lightweight with nothing but tired, old revisitations of failed “solutions,” an utter inability to form a coherent, non-embarrassing sentence without a TelePrompTer, and jack-in-the-box laughter directed at those suffering most isn’t, by my estimation, the kind of change that Mr. Obama promised, or that America currently needs.

http://www.redstate.com/jeff_emanuel/2009/03/22/the-punch-drunk-potus-ha...

Christina Aguilera To be duet with Lucho Gatica?

dirrtyhoney — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 10:27:29 -0800

Christina is rumored to be duet with Lucho Gatica whose album due on March 25, 2008.

For several weeks followers of Lucho Gatica began to find ways to get first row at the ceremony of delivery of a star on the Walk of Stars in Hollywood.
And it seems that 2008 has come with a good star to the Chilean singer, one of the living legends of the bolero. Considered an idol in the music industry, Gatica has argued in interviews is the second Spanish-speaking artist best known in the world, after Julio Iglesias.

Interpreter of international successes as “Clock” and “La Barca” Roberto Cantoral “Bésame much,” Consuelo Velasquez. “Your acostumbraste me,” Frank Dominguez, “Only once” by Agustin Lara, “Cinnamon Skin,” Bobby Capó, among more than 120 international superéxitos, Gatica expects to launch soon álbun of duets with the participation of Julio Iglesias Juan Gabriel, Christina Aguilera, The Clash, Alejandro Sanz and other great figures of music.
The interpreter has lived in Mexico, Houston, Miami and Los Angeles, which has supported the career of his nephew Humberto Gatica, a leading music producers worldwide, working with figures like Celine Dion. Barbra Streisand, Cher, Julio Iglesias, Chicago, Lionel Richie, Gloria Estefan, Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin, Andrea Bocelli and Kenny Rogers.

Source: LD

What about: Christina Aguilera to be duet w/Justin Timberlake...well,that is awesome! ...

Tila Tequila Hearts Christina Ricci

justingirl1989 — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:48:40 -0700

Tila Tequila, the bi-sexual star of MTV's dating show A Shot at Love 2 with Tila Tequila, is eager to talk about love--specifically, her crush on Christina Ricci.

"I love Christina Ricci," she reveals to Extra. "She’s really hot and I think she looks kind of odd like me…I fell in love with her when I saw Black Snake Moon. She was naked in that one. I kind of drooled over her naked scenes…"

Last season on her show, Tila chose to date a man, boyfriend Bobby Banhart. When that didn't work out, the MySpace phenomenon took a lot of heat for the show being fake--something she says is totally false.

"People thought my show was fake… It’s real. People’s hearts got broken including mine and I just want everyone to know that sometimes things don’t work out, but that doesn’t mean it’s scripted."

Whoever Tila ends up with in the future, it's clear the MTV star wants to add kids to the mix, preferably one in particular--Angelina Jolie's son, Pax!

Tila tells Extra she'd love to have children in the future, saying, "I was wondering if I could adopt one of her [Angelina Jolie's] babies. I love Pax. He’s Vietnamese like me. I was thinking of retiring and adopting a few kids of my own. Moving to somewhere really far away from Hollywood."

Angie better lock up her kids! Tila's coming to get 'em!

http://www.okmagazine.com/news/view/7070