Okay, I've had it....

I have watched American Idol for many seasons..... This year, it didn't really grab me. There are some contestants that I think are really great (like every year.) You know, you watch the judges give their opinions at the end of a performance and you know that some of it is for show -- especially Simon. But, I could always count on Randy Jackson to give relatively fair and objective feedback.

Since I haven't been watching much, I hadn't heard much about what the judges were saying this year. I knew that there were a couple favorites this year but that was about it. It wasn't until a local radio station commented on it did I start to pay attention. One of the best singers on the show is a young woman from Miami called Syesha Mercado. Syesha is such a powerhouse and I have rarely heard her make a mistake.

So I watched tonight, it's Mariah Carey day, and Syesha sang Vanishing, one of my favorite Mariah songs, back from the old days.....

Here is a clip of her performance:







And what did Randy say? "I was really scared when you decided to sing this song..... You did a good job, all things considered...."

What!?!?!? Maybe he just needs to clean out his ears or he has been listening to folks sing for too long....

And Paula is a joke. All she does is say that people did well, in the most inarticulate way possible. Oh, and that they look great....

And haven't you heard of this song before??? A song that most people don't know.... maybe most pre-pubescent teenagers......

Okay, I'm done..... :-)

big?

So, last night my parents and I had to opportunity to so see "big." No, not the movie, it is a collaboration between Andre "Big Boi" Patton of Outkast and the Atlanta Ballet. Click here to hear some of the tracks used in the performances.

I definitely felt like I was seeing something historic, something never done before.... It was basically a modern ballet performance, a hip hop concert, and a visual media display all in one. Very interesting concept. Reality, however..... I felt like I had ADD watching this thing! There would be dancing on this part of the stage and then Like Big Boi and Sleepy Brown performing on the other part of the stage and then some visaul art thing going on in the back....

Also, the performances were a bunch of vignettes that didn't seem to have much continuity between them. And while I knew the songs, my parents nor likely most of the regular Atlanta Ballet season ticket holders had no idea what the songs were saying. But, with that being said, none of us really had any idea what was going on in this thing. And a few of the vignettes just mysteriously disappeared from the program, maybe because of time, maybe because the performers were not there, ut it didn't seem to be a planned thing since they normally announce program changes and substitutions before the performance starts.

With all that being said, i guarantee this was the first time that the Ballet company performed to songs with the words "hamhocks" and "probation" in them. It also this performance definitely opened up the audience to a whole new demographic --again probably the first time that folks rolled up to the front of the theater for a ballet performance in a stretch Hummer limo or folks in the audience were wearing their best embroidered jeans and hoodies or dress from Wet Seal.

It definitely was a cool idea though. Even if the execution was a little rough. I am impressed that Big Boi himself was open and dedicated to the idea of exploring expression of his music in another medium.

The History

This clip gives you a little bit of the history behind how the idea to do the ballet even happened.



The Explanation

Here is an explantion of the concept of the ballet



Rehearsals

Check out some of the rehearsals (I actually like looking at some of these better just because you have the opportunity to see how the dancing works with the music, which is something that got lost in the real performance)






Janelle Monae performance....

Here is a clip to give you an idea of one of the better vignettes from the actual performance. It is interspersed with rehearsals and shots from backstage but you get the idea.....

Kids love raw fish!

When I was home for Easter, I was flipping through channels on Saturday morning and happened upon the cutest new cartoon --- Sushi Pack! The characters are based on a subject that is near and dear to both me and Brunsli's heart -- SUSHI!

In fact, Brunsli was the first person to introduce me to sushi when I went to visit her in undergrad and I have been a lover ever since. But I digress....

Now if you haven't see the Sushi Pack cartoon it is the cleverest thing.... There are 5 main characters, based on 5 different types of sushi and they use their wits and their emotions to save the world and educate young children. The Sushi Pack team lives in a Japanese restaurant with humans. Despite the superhero element of the story, violence is used only as a last resort.


The main characters include:

Ikura: Named after salmon egg sushi. He is very headstrong and charges in when it comes to helping his friends. He has the power to shoot sticky fish eggs. He's also terrified of bears!

Kani: An easily angered girl named after crab sushi. Her pigtails are tough crab claws, which she uses to give her foes a powerful pinch!

Maguro Maki: The calm, peaceful member of the group named after tuna sushi. She's in touch with her inner tuna, and enjoys meditation and Feng Shui. She can float, and has almost psychic powers.

Tako: The unofficial leader. Named after octopus sushi, he certainly looks the part! He has six long tentacle arms, and an eye patch. He would rather use his powers of shooting multi-colored ink to be a world renowned painter than to fight evil, and gets insulted when his paintings are called bad (which they are.)

Wasabi: The smallest, cutest, and speechless character of the Sushi Pack. A spicy ball of hot mustard, he can only communicate with squeally noises, and has the power to fly and shoot fireballs at foes. He is very sensitive, and gets upset easily.

Meet the characters here.


Then, there is also a band of "villans" who the Sushi Pack "battles" against, the Legion of the Low Tide.

Titanium Chef: Where there is bad sushi, there's a bad sushi chef. He's one mean catfish who not only orders the Legion of Low Tide to fight dirty and scheme evil plots, he also manages the sushi bar they live in.

Toro: A very fat tuna who isn't very smart. He's strong but gullible and usually just follows along.

Unagi: This mutated electric eel packs a ton of voltage. He's slimy savage with an eye for detail.

Mochi Mochiato: A frozen ball of rice coated ice cream who freezes her enemies in their tracks. She is candy coated, but cold as ice. She one time befriended Maguro and later Kani.

Fugu: A blowfish who can puff himself up to many times his original size. He's dead set on doing no good and has a eye with video functions.

Uni: An unstoppable sea urchin with a talent for scheming evil plots. He is one of the Sushi Packs biggest threats because he is seemingly unstoppable. He has the ability to morph.

Check the link below for some video clips from recent shows:

http://www.agkidzone.com/sp_videos.action

Apparently, this show is doing very well in CBS's Saturday morning Kewlopolis line-up.

Character descriptions courtesy of Wikipedia

What a difference a day makes....

Yesterday, I started my day at the County Tax Assessors office...

And the day just continued to be stressful, including some incidents at work (which actually were just more stressful given the day's tone.) It was just one of those days where nothing went quite as planned and you just want to crawl in bed and start over the next day....

And that is about what I did.

And this morning I vowed not to let the previous day's events shake me. And today was a good day. Work went well and I even got some face time with my Executive Director who I really haven't spoken to much at all since I started this job.

What a difference a day makes!....

Everyone is getting involved in the presidential race..

Jay-Z and Mary J Blige are in the middle of the Heart of the City tour, which is apparently wildly successful and making money hand over fist. (no wonder Jay-Z can't stay retired!) I had the opportunity to see Jay-Z on his first final tour and Mary as well as Puffy, Memphis Bleek and others joined him on stage at various times. He gives great concert!

At any rate, I was listening to an account of the concert and they were mentioning that in the middle of the show, Jay-Z put up a picture of George W. Bush and the crowd started to "Boo!"

Then he says, "It's time for a change!" and the picture is replaced with a picture of Barack Obama.

I have to say, I can not ever remember a time when so many popular entertainment and media figures, let alone black ones, were so outspoken and involved in the political process! It is rather inspiring....

Addendum:

And apparently, Jay-Z has been making calls for Obama. Listen here for the call that some voters in Ohio got the night before the presidential primary there.....

Please send good thoughts....

I was all set for a week of cheerful and pithy blog posts when I got some news that totally threw me for a loop.....

A good friend of mine recently went to New York for a couple months to perform before moving to Chicago to participate in a well renowned training program. He is a singer who's career is just now getting off the ground and I was so proud and happy that his dreams were starting to come true.

Monday, he called me with some earth-shattering news. A couple months ago he had suffered a bout of food poisoning (he thought) that he had never completely recovered from. Once he got up to New York and was covered by health insurance, he went to a doctor to check it out. She thought it might be gall stones or something and put him on a restrictive diet. Then a week or so later, he was feeling such intense pain that he went to the hospital and ended up being hospitalized for a couple days. At that point, he was told that he had gotten an infection from the food poisoning and it was causing intestinal swelling. After he got out he was to go for a follow up CT scan to double check everything.

Well, at his follow up scan, he was told that he had stomach cancer....... He has a biopsy scheduled for this week and that will give a better idea of what exactly he is dealing with but it was quite a blow! I did a little research online on stomach cancer and in some cases it can be beatable so I remain optimistic. He is such a nice guy and has worked so hard to get where he is in his career and things were really taking off for him, it just breaks my heart that it all could be threatened by this predicament.

So please, please send all the good healing thoughts and prayers you have his way. I hold out hope that he can beat this thing and be back on track towards his dream!

Picture from a recent performance

A little culture

This afternoon I went to see a Georgia O'Keefe exhibit . Actually, it was an exhibit of 6 female artists whose champion and benefactor was Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer and NY gallery owner in the early 1900s, who championed photography as an art form and eventually became Georgia O'Keefe's husband.

Surprisingly, the painting that I enjoyed the most was not painted by Georgia O'Keefe. It was instead painted by Georgia Engelhard, the niece of Stieglitz, who obviously studied the same style that O'Keefe did.

I love the colors , lines , shapes and shading. Take a look!

My Sunday evening theraputic TV....

With the addition of a new show to the Sunday line-up a few weeks ago, I have realized that 3 shows that I regularly watch on Sunday night end up being really theraputic for me and help put me in the right mindset for the week.

60 Minutes
I inherited my penchant for watching 60 Minutes from my parents. For as long as I can remember, they have watched the show every Sunday night. I used to sort of watch it as a kid and even thought it was interesting then. The mixture of insightful investigative new and one of a kind entertainment stories just make it great thought-provoking television. Plus, I really remember the pride and comfort I took at seeing Ed Bradley on the show each week.

Extreme Makeover, Home Edition

Okay, this show always makes me cry --- like a snotting, blubbering cry. I don't know what it is, but I always cry at happy things. Each week, the lives of a deserving family who has faced or is facing serious struggles, is dramatically changed by the grand gesture of a brand new home, tailored to their specific needs built in a miraculous 7 days. I am always inspired by the love and perseverance that these families have and how gratified they are to have their struggle recognized and their lives improved.

The Big Give
How can you not be inspired by a giving reality show. The participants are going around to different cities on giving challenges --- being given money and a set amount of time to find deserving people to help. Some gestures are big, some are smaller but you can never underestimate the impact an act of kindness can have on the lives of the recipient.

I have actually thought about doing some community service and giving some of my time to help others a lot lately. I had intended to do something while I was out of work but didn't get to it unfortunately. Eventhough I have less time now, there is so much that you can gain by giving of your time. I am going to work to integrate something like that into my regular routine. Stay tuned for what I arrange to do soon!

The Brunsli effect

I was reading a post by Cluizel where she was talking about feeling bad for not posting for a few weeks and I could empathize. I have also felt the same way when I didn't post any new blog posts for a while. But why do we feel guilty when living life gets in the way of posting regular updates on our blogs?? Don't we need to live life to be able to have something interesting and meaningful to write about? Who says we need to post something every single day or every few days?

I call this "the Brunsli effect." How do we live up to someone who just recently posted her 1001st post after about 3 years of blogging. That is almost 1 post everyday -- and most of them with pictures! I don't know about you, but a lot of times the pictures are what hold me up on posts. I have one post that I have been planning on writing for the past couple months but it has been held up by the fact that I have yet to get the picture that should accompany it off my phone.

How does she manage to do it? Anyone who has read her blog knows that she is not just sitting around the house. On the contrary, she has been completing a law degree at a top law school, shuttling up and down the California coast for work, and traveling to beautiful and exotic cities around the world. Does the fact that she does not have a TV make that much of a difference?

Seriously though, perhaps the guilty pang comes from a desire not to disappoint our readers. It really is nice to feel that you have an online community and support system to share your life with. And I think that we really should not underestimate the theraputic effect of blogging, modern day journaling. It is always good to get things off your chest and perhaps when we are stressed by life is exactly the time when we should be blogging more, not just to talk about what is stressing us but alternatively to concentrate on something else than the situations that are sapping our positive energy.

Just a thought....... (and while I did poke a little fun, Brunsli, you know I love ya! ;-)

My chartreuse thumb

So, since I have had my house, I have dipped my little toe into the gardening pool.... Well, basically I have only bought some hanging plants and attempted to plant some flowers in the rectangular containers on either side of my front porch.

When I bought the house, there were some pink Impatiens (just now learned how to spell their name) in the pots. Last year, I decided to try something new and bought these hot pink/magenta colored dianthus. They didn't quite end up looking like this picture unfortunately, thanks to a drought and some interference by a furry four-legged creature who likes to dig and bury her rawhide bones. The impatiens actually tried to come back and looked better than the dianthus so, I got the hint.

Today, I bought some more impatiens to plant for the year. They are sort of a purply pink. There were a lot of folks at the Garden section at Home Depot because it was such a beautiful day. But then, about 2pm, grey clouds rolled in, lightening splashed across the sky and it started to pour.....

So, about 8pm, when the rain seemed to have let up and it was still rather warm. So, I decided to get to planting since tomorrow is going to be a busy day. Things were going fine. I finished with one pot and then decided to go ahead and do the next one and got finished just in time, sort off. When the flash lightening and the big raindrops returned, I decided to call it quits. Hopefully, I can keep these growing and the dog away from them this year!