Story By: Morning Edition
Actor Demian Bichir is a superstar in his home country of Mexico, but he is relatively unknown in the United States. In his Oscar-nominated role in A Better Life, he plays an undocumented worker scraping by as a gardener in Los Angeles. A single father, he lives in fear of being deported and losing his son to gang life.
Jonny Lee Miller will play Sherlock Holmes in a US TV update of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective stories.
The British Trainspotting star will play the sleuth in a pilot episode of proposed CBS show Elementary, to be set in contemporary New York.
If the pilot is picked up, a series will be made in time for the autumn.
Last year, Miller appeared on stage with Benedict Cumberbatch, star of the BBC's acclaimed Sherlock update, in the National Theatre's Frankenstein.
The Danny Boyle production led to them being named joint winners of the best actor prize at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards.
Last month, the creators of the BBC's Sherlock confirmed a third series would be made, with Cumberbatch returning as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Watson.
Miller already has a number of US TV credits under his belt, having played the title role in legal drama Eli Stone and a recurring character in the fifth season of Dexter.
Dexter, about a police forensics expert with a sideline in serial killing, will begin its seventh season in the US later this year.
Yet it may face some stiff competition this autumn from Hannibal, a newly commissioned drama based on Thomas Harris's Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter.
The NBC series, which will focus on serial killer Lecter and FBI agent Will Graham in the early stages of their relationship, will be written and executive produced by Bryan Fuller, of Pushing Daisies fame.
It is not yet known who will play Lecter, previously played on screen by Sir Anthony Hopkins – who won an Oscar for the movie Silence of the Lambs, Scots actor Brian Cox and France's Gaspard Ulliel.
At the end of the Second World War, the United States, the emerging superpower, took some time to realise that it had been fooled by Joseph Stalin’s USSR. The two countries fought Nazi Germany together, but after the victory, the USSR grabbed as much territory as it could and refused to concede any to its allies.
After the war, which had thrown the whole of Europe into confusion, the US continued its wartime diplomacy as it held the view that Stalin had abandoned centuries of Russian history and was working towards peaceful coexistence with the rest of Europe and the US.
At this crucial moment, the State Department asked its Moscow embassy to comment on a routine speech by Stalin. The ambassador happened to be away, so the deputy ambassador, George F. Kennan, took the opportunity to write the now-famous Long Telegram, in which he demolished his government’s assumption that the USSR was friendly, arguing effectively that the Bolsheviks had taken Russia’s deep distrust of the outside world, to which they had added their own global revolutionary doctrine.
But Kennan went a vital step further and predicted that the USSR and the Communist Bloc would collapse of its own accord, unable to manage the vast territories it had acquired, nor the command and control economy that it was building. But he had no doubt that the US was facing a serious enemy: The Soviet leadership controls vast natural resources and "the energies of one of the world’s greatest peoples", Kennan wrote. This will "undoubtedly be the greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced".
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Newark: Pop star Whitney Houston’s funeral will be Saturday in the church where she first sang as a child.
The owner of the Whigham Funeral Home in Newark said Tuesday that the funeral would be at the New Hope Baptist Church there.
The 48-year-old Houston died last Saturday at a hotel in Beverly Hills, California. Officials said she was underwater and apparently unconscious when she was pulled from a bathtub.
Her body was returned to New Jersey late Monday.
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The reunited Beach Boys will celebrate sunshine and summer at the 2012 Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival with the Red Hot Chili Peppers (right), Radiohead (below), Phish and Bon Iver.
The always eclectic four-day festival also will include Skrillex, Foster the People, The Avett Brothers, The Shins, The Roots and Alice Cooper. Bonnaroo will be held June 7-10.
The line-up has something of a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. Several acts had notable nights at the Grammy Awards. The reunited Beach Boys line-up of Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston and David Marks made their live debut at the awards, joined on stage by Foster the People.
Bon Iver won best new artist, Skrillex took home three trophies and two-time Grammy winners The Civil Wars are scheduled to play just a few weeks before singer Joy Williams’ baby is due. The Chili Peppers will play Bonnaroo as new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame members.
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New York: Some were confused, others offended by Nicki Minaj’s over-the-top performance at the Grammy Awards on Sunday, but the singer-rapper doesn’t understand what all the hubbub is about.
"I don’t know what is the big issue?" she asked.
The 29-year-old said her five-minute live rendition of her songs "Roman’s Revenge" and "Roman Holiday," which included dancing priests, an exorcism and levitation, was just a part of a movie she’s writing.
"You know how people write plays and movies? That’s what I did. I wrote that and I gave the world a tiny little preview of what was to come. And so I have to perform it on the set in which it would be in the movie, right?" she said.
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Story By: by Y. Roman Lojko
Doldrums’ “Lost in My Head” is jam-packed with strange beats, voice manipulations and bouncy, colorful ideas.
Song: “Lost in My Head”
Artist: Doldrums
CD: Empire Sounds EP
Genre: Pop
It’s easy to take fast, instantly accessible, pretty-looking Internet for granted, but there was a time when only patient geeks and bored kids labored through dialing up their ISP for access, then spending minutes at a time waiting for single pages to load. Those most dedicated spirits unlocked unimaginable corridors of strangely styled information, and each of them heard the same establishing-connection modem noises before getting lost in a whirl of communication.
Doldrums opens “Lost in My Head” with those iconic noises, then proceeds to expose any listener curious enough to make it through the beeps to a low-fidelity, derelict dance freakout. It’s jam-packed with voice manipulations, strange dance beats and other bouncy, colorful ideas â all from a skinny kid from Toronto named Airick Woodhead. As Doldrums, Woodhead creates the perfect soundtrack for surfing the Internet in his parents’ basement at 3 a.m. in the ’90s â though load speeds back then couldn’t catch up to the song’s tempo, the exhilaration felt after several hours of surfing in a daze is just as hectic as “Lost in My Head” sounds.
The song closes Empire Sounds, Doldrums’ first EP, and shows as much exploratory promise as the Internet did back then. Here’s hoping Doldrums 2.0 will also continue to develop and advance in quality, depth and style.
Rocco takes the lead
After getting noticed in the award-winning film Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa, Rocco Nacino has scored another lead role in his second indie project, The Lam-Ang Experiment, a film based on the folk epic poem Biag ni Lam-Ang.
Nacino speaks to tabloid! about the breaks he’s getting recently, and what else is lined up for him this year.
Another lead role in an interesting project. How do you feel?
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Story By: by NPR Staff
According to Sloboda, that little vocal dip in there on the word “you” â that’s the key to triggering an emotional response in a listener.
“Our brains are wired to pick up the music that we expect,” says Sloboda. So when we’re listening to music, our brain is constantly trying to guess what comes next. “And generally music is consonant rather than dissonant, so we expect a nice chord. So when that chord is not quite what we expect, it gives you a little bit of an emotional frisson, because it’s strange and unexpected.”
When Adele bounces around the note on “you,” there’s a tension that is then released, Sloboda explains.
“The music taps into this very primitive system that we have which identifies emotion on the basis of a violation of expectancy,” he says. “It’s like a little upset which then gets resolved or made better in the chord that follows.”
All Things Considered host Melissa Block put Sloboda’s theory to someone with a bit of insider knowledge about Adele’s song: Dan Wilson, who co-wrote “Someone Like You” with Adele.
Wilson says he first heard of the term appoggiatura in the Journal article. “[The article] sort of talked about how Adele and I had used this secret trick about putting appoggiaturas in, but I didn’t know what that was.”
He has another theory about the song’s roiling emotions.
“A good song allows us, the listeners, to walk through the songwriter or composer’s thoughts and emotions as they wrote the song,” he says. “That’s why when you listen to The Replacements, you get this kind of giddy drunk feeling, probably because they were drunk when they recorded and wrote their song.”
“With Adele, we wrote this song that was about a desperately heartbreaking end of a relationship, and she was really, really feeling it at the time, and we were imaginatively creating,” Wilson says. “That walked her back through that experience. And when you and l listen to that song, we walk through her shoes through that heartbreaking experience â but it’s in our imagination. And so instead of being devastating, we’re like children play-acting. We get to have an imaginative experience.”
“Hey, if I had a scientific method for making a heartbreaking hit, I would do it every day,” Wilson says with a chuckle. “But it’s not so easy.”
They get along well enough to be called friends after bonding in Macau for the Zee Cine Awards, and now Ranbir Kapoor has made a special request to Shahid Kapoor to join him on a world tour in August.
Shahid is trying his utmost to adjust his dates to accompany Ranbir.
Confirming these developments, Ranbir’s father Rishi Kapoor, who will also be the tour’s producer, said: "Shahid and my son have become good friends. He is likely to join us. The rest of the details are still being finalised."
Shahid earlier had to opt out after his next film, directed by Maneesh Sharma, got delayed because of the director’s back problem. But then, something unforeseen happened and Ranbir and Shahid got close in Macau.
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