Thursday, April 30, 2015

Flasback Who's That ...

'Let Me Love You' was a MONSTER radio smash for r&b singer Mario Dewar Barrett known mononymously as Mario, is an American R&B singer-songwriteractordancermodel and record producer.  "Let Me Love You" (2004), which won him two Billboard awards, as well as for appearing in the films Step Up and Freedom Writers. He has released four studio albumsMario (2002), Turning Point (2004), Go (2007), and D.N.A.(2009). At the end of the 2000s decade, Mario was ranked by Billboard #98 on their "Artist of the Decade" list.
Struggling to find his lane in the ever changing music Industry, unfortunately Mario hasnt garnered the success of his 'Let Me Love You' fame.

Feeling Duke ...

Duke Ellington ...a jazz master.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

When its 'us' rules change ...

On Monday evening, as Baltimore was rocked by violent and nonviolent protests alike, actor Jesse Williams, known for his role on “Grey’s Anatomy” and for occasionally weighing in on issues of race and police brutality, wrote what amounted to an essay on the history of rioting.

Here's some facts world ..

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Happy Birthday Carol Burnett ...

  1. Carol Creighton Burnett is an American actress, comedian, dancer, singer, and writer. She is best known for her long-running TV variety show, The Carol Burnett Show from 1967-1978 for CBS. 

    A trailblazing ICON!!!


Affirmation

Dear Heavenly Father,
Thank you for being so good to me, better than Ive been to myself and better than I ever deserve.  You are a rock and fortress in my life.  Because of you, I can do all things.  Please continue to guide, protect and direct my path.  Humble my spirit with patience and understanding.  Bring Calmess in me, when the going gets rough.  Bless my Family, my Friends and my Foes.  Continue to give me favor, mercy and grace.  I am merely a vessel to spread the word of you goodnes and mercy. For ALL the Blessings and the Lessons, in my life, I do give thanks. Amen-

This is the Day ..

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Missing You ...

13 years gone AND still missing Lisa Left-Eye Lopes.  Forever in my heart.

Left-Eye a SUPERNOVA


Happy Birthday Al Pacino


One of the greatest actors in all of film history, Al Pacino established himself during one of film's greatest decades, the 1970s, and has become an enduring and iconic figure in the world of American movies.

Pacino was born on April 25, 1940, in the Bronx, New York, to an Italian-American family. His parents, Rose (Gerardi) and Salvatore Pacino. divorced when he was young. His mother moved them into his grandparents' house. Pacino found himself often repeating the plots and voices of characters he had seen in the movies, one of his favorite activities. Bored and unmotivated in school, the young Al Pacino found a haven in school plays, and his interest soon blossomed into a full-time career. 

Happy Birthday Ella ...


Ella Fitzgerald Poster

Ms. Ella Fitzgerald is my ALL time favorite singer. KK

On Saturday, June 15th, 1996, an era in jazz singing came to an end, with the death of Ella Fitzgerald at her home in California. She was the last of four great female jazz singers (including Billie HolidaySarah Vaughan, and Carmen McRae) who defined one of the most prolific eras in jazz vocal style. Ella had extraordinary vocal skills from the time she was a teenager, and joined the Chick Webb Orchestra in 1935 when she was 16 years old. With an output of more than 200 albums, she was at her sophisticated best with the songs of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, of George Gershwin, and of Cole Porter. Her 13 Grammy awards are more than any other jazz performer, and she won the Best Female Vocalist award three years in a row. Completely at home with up-tempo songs, her scat singing placed her jazz vocals with the finest jazz instrumentalists, and it was this magnificent voice that she brought to her film appearances. Her last few years, during which she had a bout with congestive heart failure and suffered bilateral amputation of her legs from complications of diabetes, were spent in seclusion.

Happy (69) Birthday Mother


'You only get ONE ... I always love my Momma, she brought me in this world. A Mother's love is so special, its something that you cant describe, its the kind of love that stays with you, until the day you die'. I miss my Mother everyday of my life. I take ALL of her teachings with me, wherever I go. I am able to stand, because of her strength. Happy 69th Birthday Mother. Im forever missing you!!

Hazel Caroline ... I Love You!l

Friday, April 24, 2015

Boom Grant Hill ... Owner!!!


The NBA’s 2015 eastern-conference winning Atlanta Hawks have been for sale since September of last year, when their co-owner Bruce Levenson came forward about a racially charged email that he’d sent two years earlier. At the time, the NBA was still reeling from the former Los Angeles Clippers owner David Sterling’s remarks and actions which were also racist in nature. According to NBA.com, Levenson’s email was uncovered during the team’s internal investigation of general manager Danny Ferry, who made racially derogatory comments about potential free agent signee Luol Deng during a conference call with the ownership group.

Zach Harper of CBS Sports tweeted the teams official statement announcing the sale of the Hawks Wednesday night. According to the release, the group that comprises the new ownership is made up of billionaire Antony Ressler, who made his fortune in private equity; 18 year NBA vet Grant Hill, who won Rookie of the Year during the 1994-95 season and was a seven time all star; private equity investor Richard Schnall; Spanx Inc. founder Sara Blakely, and her husband, Jesse Itzler who is a co-founder of Marquis Jets.

In a team release obtained by Bloomberg Business, Ressler says “We are honored and thrilled to have been chosen to become the new stewards of the Hawks, we are incredibly excited by the Hawks’ success and wish them luck in the playoffs.” Bloomberg Businessspoke with sports consultant Marc Ganis, the founder of SportsCorp Ltd., about Ressler and his purchase – “This is a guy who has done his due diligence and is coming in with the intent on running a great franchise. He wants to run a basketball team because he wants to run a basketball team — not because he wants to be a real estate or media mogul” said Ganis. This is Ressler’s second recent attempt at owning an NBA franchise after bidding unsuccessfully for the Los Angeles Clippers, which were sold for $2 billion last year to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

The Atlanta Hawks have played very well despite dealing with issues surrounding the sale of the team, and most recently, the season ending injury sustained by forward Thabo Sefolosha, which he claims was at the hands of the NYPD. The team has won two games in a best of four series against the Brooklyn Nets, and play game three on Saturday.

Happy Birthday Shirley ...

Always a "Term of Endearment" ... Born on April 24, 1934, in Richmond, Virginia, Shirley MacLaine grew up with sibling Warren Beatty and went on to Broadway. In the mid-1950s, she started working in film, with a decades-long career in classics like Can-Can, The Apartment,Sweet Charity, Irma La Douce and Terms of Endearment, for which she won an Oscar.  Happy Birthday Shirley MacLaine!!! 

Ciara (Cici) is KILLING it!!!

Future was Dumb, Dumb, Dumb!!!

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday goes out to actor Derek Luke. In 2002 he won the Indepedent Spirit Award for his film-debut in 'Antoine Fisher'.  Currently 'Luke' can be seen in FOX's highly successful 'EMPIRE' series, playing Taraji P. Henson's love interest.

Derek Luke ...


Happy Birthday 'Babs' ...

Barbara Streisand ... One & Only!

TGIF

Never compromise who you are, for the sake of others.#TGIF

Thursday, April 23, 2015

FRAUDULENT ...

Stacy Francis use to be a member of singing  group 'Ex-Girlfriend', she has a baby from Minister Noel Jones.    She DID get slapped by Whitney Houston!!  That's where the truth ends.


Francis claims to have been a finalist on the X-Factor, NOT true.  She was seen stalking Whitney Houston around at Kelly Price's Grammy Party.  She claimed after negative publicity, from that party, she lost her record deal, hmmm WHAT record deal? She's on a quest to be the next Pop 'superstar' at 44 years old.  Nothing is sweet and innocent about Francis.  Who you see her as on R&B Divas, is who she really is, a sh*t starting poser. Francis HAVE A SEAT!!

Flashback Who's That???

  1. Regina Belle came on the scene with her debut solo Lp 'All By Myself' in 1987.  She was a savings grace for Columbia Records soul music division.  At the time every major record label was trying to find a 'Whitney Houston' who was at the Top of her game.

    Regina Belle was born July 17, 1963.  She is an American singer-songwriter and actress.  After graduation, she studied opera at the Manhattan School of Music. At Rutgers University, she became the first female vocalist with the school's jazz ensemble.

    She is notable for her Grammy award winning duet with Peabo Bryson, "A Whole New World" for the Disney's 1992 animated feature film Aladdin.


    During hey Columbia heyday, Belle scored three #1 singles and three Gold selling albums.  She has recorded a total of 9 albums, two were remakes most notably her 'Lazy Afternoon' recorded in 2004 and produced by the late George Duke.  Leaving Columbia records and switching to MCA, she got lost in the shuffle, music was taking a change, and MCA wanted her to go in a new direction.


    These days Belle is a Cancer survivor and is known as a Pastors wife, she married  John Battle in 1991. Battle played 10 years in the NBA with the Atlanta Hawks and Cleveland Cavaliers. He is now a pastor in Atlanta, Georgia. Belle and Battle have five children.   Belle vocal pipes are 'still' in peak form, she will go down in the history books, as one of the best, to ever do it.

You Kids ... Cry Me A River

Ariana Grande lashed out at Big Sean almost immediately after their breakup by staging Justin Bieber's come-from-behind stage embrace ... so claim sources close to the couple.

Sources closely connected with them tell TMZ ... Sean claims it was him who broke off the relationship because she was "immature."

Sources say the downfall of their relationship started in February, when he made the most important appearance of his career at the House of Blues in West Hollywood. Everyone showed --Kanye, Bieber, JLoChris BrownJay ZA$AP RockyTygaKylie and Kendall -- everyone EXCEPT ARIANA. We're told she needed to get ready for the Grammy's the next day, which he found extremely selfish.

Sean also traveled to see her "10 times more" than she went to see him. He claimed once she demanded that he blow tens of thousands of dollars to take a private jet to see her. Sean, who grew up poor, felt she was a spendthrift ... a sign of immaturity.

But the crowning blow was just after the breakup. They were still talking and the door was slightly open for a reconciliation, when Bieber jumped onstage in L.A. and grabbed Ariana from behind. Even though Ariana pushed Biebs away, Sean believes it was all calculated -- NOT by Bieber but Ariana -- to hurt him.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Dr. Dre trumps Aftermath

Dr. Dre has been battling Death Row Records over the past year over unpaid funds from the online sales of The Chronic and he has come out victorious.

According to Billboard, U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder ruled that Dr. Dre is entitled to be paid more royalities from the digital sales of his 1992 debut album than what he has been getting. The album can still be sold digitally, but Dre will now receive 100 percent of the monies from digital sales.

“For years, Death Row Records forgot about Dre when they continued to distribute his music digitally and combined his hits with weaker Death Row tracks in an attempt to elevate the stature of their other artists,” Dre’s lawyer Howard King wrote in a statement. “We are gratified that the federal court has unambiguously declared that Death Row has no right to engage in such tactics, and must hold all proceeds from these illicit distributions in trust for our client.”

The Aftermath CEO filed the lawsuit last year against WIDEawake/Death Row for improperly selling The Chronic online and using his music on compilations without his permission. Now they can only sell the album in the format in was in before he left the label in 1996, which is cassette, CD, 8-track and vinyl.

As Dr. Dre celebrates this win, Death Row Records’ former CEO Suge Knight sits in jail facing murder, attempted murder and hit-and-run charges.

Othello, Lydia and Claire

Hollywood Royalty - Thespians James Earl Jones, Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad. Can you just imagine how good their Coffee Table talk would be; sharing Iconic stories and theories.

An ICONIC moment in history!

Did You Know ...


Many folks have called Michael Jackson many things ranging from the greatest of all time, to the worst, but one thing he definitely should be called is one of the REALEST stand-up guys in the music industry. Word on the Old School curb is that when MJ bought the publishing rights to the Beatles catalog, he was unaware that the Beatles owned ALL of the rights to Little Richard’s publishing, which then meant that MJ acquired all of the rights to Little Richard’s publishing. As soon as Michael found that out, he immediately GAVE Little Richard ALL of his publishing rights back because he believed that Little Richard deserved to be compensated for his hard work after having been disrespected by his record label for so many years prior to.

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Little Richard’s net worth is $40 million, so we’re sure those publishing checks had a lot to do with that.

As we all know, most soul artists were not getting paid what they were worth back in the day and Little Richard was caught up in that mix. So it’s beautiful thing to have had an artist like MJ in the music game who was willing to reach back and uplift the greats who paved the way for him.

One thing about Micheal is that he was not as soft spoken as we may have thought and he was NOT one to be tested on any level!

Battle-stations STAND or FALL

'Pick your Afro Daddy ...' The battle between Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West goes a little something like this.  Author, activist, erstwhile rapper and former Barack Obama surrogate Cornel West became the president’s First Hater (at least from the left) shortly after inauguration, because of Obama’s betrayal – whether of progressive principles, or West personally, has never been clear. When West was criticized for his fierce Obama attacks by progressive colleagues and friends, he turned his enmity toward his critics, particularly African Americans he saw defending the president on MSNBC: most notably Rev. Al Sharpton, Melissa Harris-Perry and Michael Eric Dyson.

But while folks on the multiracial left have been puzzling over and lamenting West’s ad hominem haymakers at former friends for years now, when Dyson struck back this week in the New Republic, he came in for a lot of “how could yous?” — even from some of West’s critics.

West’s peculiarly personal and vicious denunciations of Obama – from the pages of Salon to the David Letterman Show — are legendary. He famously called the president “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.” He claimed Obama is afraid of “free black men” and is more comfortable with “upper-middle-class white brothers and Jewish brothers.” Later he got worse, claiming Obama’s drone policies made him “a global George Zimmerman.”

When African-American friends defended the president, he went in on them. West called MSNBC’s Perry “a liar and a fraud,” claimed Sharpton was the “bona fide house negro of the Obama plantation,” and attacked “the Michael Dysons and others who’ve really prostituted themselves intellectually in a very, very ugly and vicious way.”

It’s true that as Dyson’s TNR piece bemoans the nasty ad hominem nature of West’s attacks on Obama, as well as on him and his colleagues, he gave almost as good as he got, first praising West as “the most exciting black scholar ever,” then charting his intellectual decline. “His greatest opponent isn’t Obama, Sharpton, Harris-Perry, or me,” the Georgetown scholar’s article concludes. “It is the ghost of a self that spits at him from his own mirror.”

Dyson is now being attacked for doing to West what West did to Obama: acting at least partly out of a sense of betrayal and hurt. One difference is, Dyson owns it, laying it bare in the piece. He admits his decision to break with West is fueled by pain and confusion, and having had enough – in his case, enough personal insults, as well as insults to colleagues and friends and the president the author both admires, and pushes, in his own way, to be better. “Our lost friendship is the collateral damage of his war on Obama,” he writes. Dyson makes the case that the issue isn’t how West has treated him, but how he’s helped set back left-wing politics in the age of our first black president.

I sat down with Dyson at Salon’s offices in New York on Tuesday, in between his many other interviews, as text message alerts pinged from his phones and he tried to sort through the personal and political lessons of his relationship and unraveling with West, mentor turned tormentor. He seemed pained by the criticism he’s faced, but defiant, asking of his detractors, “Where were all those people when West was wilding out unchallenged saying horrendous things?” 

Im team Dyson on this one. KK 

Happy (78) Jack Nicholson

'Wait til they get a load of me' Happy Birthday Jack Nicholson!!!  Born John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson (born April 22, 1937) is an American actor, film director, producer, and writer. Throughout his career, Nicholson has portrayed unique and challenging roles, many of which include dark portrayals of excitable, neurotic and psychopathic characters. Nicholson's 12 Academy Award nominations make him the most nominated male actor in the Academy's history.

Nicholson has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice, one for the drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and the other for the romantic comedy As Good as It Gets (1997). He also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the comedy-drama Terms of Endearment (1983). Nicholson is tied with Walter Brennan and Sir Daniel Day-Lewis as one of three male actors to win three Academy Awards. In 1988 Nicholson won a Grammy Award for Best Album for Children for The Elephant's Child. He is well known for playing Frank Costello in the Martin Scorsese-directed crime drama The Departed (2006), Jack Torrance in the Stanley Kubrick-directed psychological horror film The Shining and the Joker in Batman (1989).  Today Nicholson is semi-retired.