'Idol's' Allison inspired by Kelly Clarkson

Allison sublimation printer Iraheta's "American http://www.sycenturystar.com/ensjx/index.asp Idol" run ended Wednesday, but the 17-year-old says she's proud that she was the last girl standing in the competition.
Iraheta was eliminated from "Idol" this week after receiving the fewest amount of viewer votes, trimming the contestant pool to three: Danny Gokey, Kris Allen and Adam Lambert.
The Los Angeles native was the lone female on the Fox program for two weeks after Lil Rounds got the boot April 22, but she says there was nothing but love between her and the guys.
"People thought we'd be head-to-head the whole sublimation printer time and just fighting," Iraheta said Friday. "We were just really like a family."
"It got to a point where we could just mess with each other and help each other out." Iraheta would not take a guess as to who she thinks will wear the "American Idol" crown at the show's finale this month but did say she had a blast singing with fellow rocker Adam Lambert during their performance Wednesday of Foghat's "Slow Ride."
"That was, I have to say, on of the funnest moments I've had on the show," Iraheta recalled. "Offstage, me and him are really close. He's like my older brother."
The teenager also sublimation printer said she and Lambert may reprise the song during the "American Idol Top 10 Tour" when it kicks off this summer.
Iraheta says she began singing in Spanish as a child and then moved into hip-hop music and finally settled into rock. She has "stuck with" the genre and cites a previous "American Idol" winner, who is also known for her rock style, as an inspiration.
"I definitely have to say Kelly Clarkson ... opened the sublimation printer door for all of us," Iraheta said of the very first "Idol" winner. "She has been a definite inspiration to all of us and definitely to me."

Pete Seeger inspires generations at Jazz Fest

The 90-year-old sublimation printer performer http://www.sycenturystar.com/ensjx/index.asp is one of many featured at this year's New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Under blue skies on the main stage, with his grandson by his side, they close the set with the Woody Guthrie classic "This Land Is Your Land."
The voice isn't what it used to be, but the message is still as strong as ever. It was hard to tell who enjoyed the sublimation printer performance more -- Pete Seeger or the crowd.
CNN sat down with the folk singer and his grandson, musician Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, to talk about the 40th annual Jazz Fest, Preservation Hall and the generations Seeger has influenced. The following is a edited version of that interview.
CNN: What's it like coming here to Jazz Fest again, playing in the 40th anniversary, and seeing this crowd that loves you so much?
Pete Seeger: Well first of all, I think it's a fantastic job they've done here. Forty years, forty years. That's a tremendous achievement. And to sublimation printer keep it going year after year with new things and old things tangled up together.
CNN: And you got to go to Preservation Hall and record three tracks yesterday with that phenomenal band. What was that experience like?
Seeger: Oh thrilling. History!
CNN: Well, I think a lot of people would say that you two are history. I'm sure it was just a real honor for the band to be there as well.
Tao Rodriguez-Seeger: We recorded "We Shall Overcome," which we weren't really planning on doing. We just sort of walked in the hall, and they were in the back warming up, and I guess they were warming up on "We Shall Overcome" and we joined them.
And it just sounded so good. It was just this upbeat, party-tempo "We Shall Overcome" like I have never heard before.
And I feel like you only find this kind of thing in New Orleans. I love that you can combine a deep old meaningful spiritual with these kinds of carnival approaches to music.
Like Emma sublimation printer Goldman said: If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution. (laughs) And I just think here in New Orleans, we still have those traditions going.
CNN: You must still get a thrill every time you go on stage with your grandfather.
Rodriguez-Seeger: I do, yes. He doesn't ever do the same thing twice. We were writing up a set list in the back, and he strayed from it as he usually does. It's good; it keeps me on my toes. I have learned a lot from him.
CNN: You are such a humble person, but just talking to the people who are here to perform, you mean so much to them. So many of them learned at your feet, either literally or figuratively. What does that mean to you?
Seeger: I come from a family of teachers, and I was looking for a job on a newspaper and not getting one.
I had an aunt who said, "Peter, I can get five dollars for you if you come and sing some of your songs in my class." Five dollars? In 1939, you would sublimation printer have to work all day or two days to make five dollars. It seemed like stealing.
But I went and took the money, and pretty soon I was playing school after school, and I never did work on a newspaper. You don't have to play at nightclubs, you don't have to play on TV, just go from college to college to college, and the kids will sing along with you.
CNN: How important is it to have storytelling out there in this day in age?
Seeger: There's always a danger that you let the machine do it for you. And I think what we are going to see in the next few years, is people finding a way they can do something themselves. Whatever it is.
I put it this way: The agriculture revolution took thousands of years, the industrial revolution took hundreds sublimation printer of years, but the information [revolution] is only taking decades. And if you use it, use the brains God gave us, miracles are going to happen

Review: Downey a virtuoso in 'The Soloist'

A journalist -- Steve sublimation printer Lopez http://www.sycenturystar.com/ensjx/index.asp of the Los Angeles Times -- meets a homeless guy on the street playing Beethoven on the last two strings on a fiddle.
He's not performing for the public. If he has an audience in mind at all, it's the German composer -- he's placed himself in the shadow of Beethoven's statue in Pershing Square in Los Angeles.
The guy says his name is Nathaniel Ayers and that he went to Juilliard.
His story checks out, and Lopez writes it up: A prodigious musical talent grows up in the ghetto, earns a scholarship to Juilliard School to play the cello, succumbs to schizophrenia, flunks out and winds up -- 20 years later -- pushing a shopping trolley up and down Grand Avenue, playing violin for the birds. ("The pigeons clap when they fly," sublimation printer Nathaniel explains.)
Readers are moved. Someone sends a cello to the paper, and in delivering it, Lopez becomes embroiled in Nathaniel's life. This gift has strings attached, in more ways than one. Lopez wants Nathaniel to move to a community shelter. He wants him to take meds, to resume his lessons. He wants to fix him.
Hollywood tends to do this stuff too easily, equating mental illness with artistic or spiritual transcendence and most often trivializing both in the process.
Written by Susannah Grant ("Erin Brockovich") and directed by Joe Wright ("Atonement"), "The Soloist" isn't immune to the temptation, but it's smart enough to locate the cliché in the reporter's own sublimation printer need for healing.Lopez -- played by Robert Downey Jr. -- accepts the role of fairy godfather with some reluctance (and alarm when Nathaniel takes to calling his savior his "God"), but we note that his own house is scarcely a home.
His wife (Catherine Keener), also his editor, has gone. The kids are gone. Paintings are stacked against the walls. His belongings are in boxes -- not so different from the junk in Nathaniel's cart. Perhaps Lopez is the soloist here?
At any rate, Downey plays him like a virtuoso. In the normal way of things, this picture should belong to Nathaniel (Jamie Foxx). He's making beautiful music, wears a star-spangled wardrobe and flips between states of semi-autistic reiteration, periods of calm and fury.
Somehow, though, Foxx slips into a supporting role. That's not necessarily the actor's fault or even to the detriment of the movie, though flashbacks to his youth are relatively one-note.
Wright makes every effort to put us into Nathaniel's head, but these expressionist flourishes are only sporadically effective. Whichever way the screenplay may have been weighted, I suspect Wright saw what he had in Downey and let him carry it.
He's been sucking up the accolades for a long time now, and rightfully so, but until "Iron Man" most of Downey's best work has been restricted to supporting roles. (I'd pick out "One Night Stand," "Zodiac," "Wonder Boys" and "A Scanner Darkly.")
This time he assumes center stage through sheer focus. He's unerringly truthful, never showy, not the cynical snark he could easily caricature. Under sublimation printer Downey's influence, "The Soloist" becomes a movie about a concerned middle-aged white man learning what commitment means.
There are other good things: Wright, who also made "Pride and Prejudice," is a gifted -- if self-conscious -- stylist, and he seizes on downtown L.A. as if nobody had filmed there before.
More importantly, it's a film you find yourself listening to intently. He holds back the music for long stretches and makes it count. (In one ostentatious sequence set in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Beethoven's Third is rendered in a fantasia of abstract colors.)
Best of all, maybe, are the faces of the homeless Wright shares with us -- old faces, odd, asymmetrical, sometimes bewildered faces. Faces the like of which we don't see on movie screens too often, but vivid and painfully real in a way that -- for whatever reason -- eludes the heroic efforts of Foxx.
"The Soloist" doesn't sublimation printer muster much in the way of a grand finale -- nothing but a tentative bridge across the racial and class divide. Maybe even that gesture of solidarity smacks of Hollywood hokum -- Wright lays everything on a bit thick, even his restraint -- but at least this movie acknowledges the divide. It's worth seeing for Downey at his peak, and hearing for Beethoven, too.

PETA to Pet Shop Boys: Rescue Shelter Boys, perhaps?

Just because http://www.sycenturystar.com/ensjx/index.asp they named sublimation printer their new CD "Yes," does not mean that British electro-pop duo, the Pet Shop Boys, will agree to just about anything.
The band has turned down a request from an animal rights group to rename itself the Rescue Shelter Boys.
The organization, the People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals (PETA), sent a letter to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe acknowledging that its request, at first blush, might appear "bizarre."
But, by changing its name, the band could raise awareness at every tour stop of the "cramped, filthy conditions" that breeders keep animals in before selling them to pet stores, PETA said in its letter. Read how the Pet Shop Boys got their name
The duo, which has performed under its current name for more than 20 years, reproduced PETA's written request in full on its Web site.
The musicians said they were "unable to agree" to the request "but nonetheless think (it) raises an issue worth thinking about."
The animal rights group said it was pleased the Pet Shop Boys had drawn attention to the issue by posting its letter so prominently on the band's site. Talking about its campaign on a blog entry, a PETA staffer wrote:
"I think I may have to stick "West End Girls" on my iPod right now to celebrate."
"West End Girls" is one of the many hits the group has had in its long career.
PETA is no stranger to oddball campaigns. A recent one was aimed to re-christen fish as "sea kittens" because "who could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten?"

Kurt Cobain remembered 15 years after his death

The park bench facing http://www.sycenturystar.com/ensjx/index.asp Lake Washington is sublimation printer covered with flowers, poems, a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and graffiti.
"I miss your beautiful face and voice," one dedication reads.
"Thank you for inspiring me," says another.
"RIP Kurt."
Fifteen years ago Wednesday, at a house adjacent to the park, Kurt Cobain's dead body was discovered by an electrician.
The Nirvana frontman, 27, had sublimation printer committed suicide, police later ruled, killing himself with a shotgun while high on heroin and pills.
His death ended a battle with hard drugs and added Cobain to a long list of legendary musicians, such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, whose careers were cut short by their addictions.
Cobain's ashes were reportedly scattered in a Washington state river and a New York Buddhist temple.
Nirvana band mates Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl eventually formed other bands. Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, stayed in the limelight with an acting career and legal problems surrounding sublimation printer her own drug problems. Frances Bean, the couple's daughter, has largely lived outside the public eye.
What was unclear when Cobain died was whether the music Nirvana created would endure or fade away like the grunge craze it helped to inspire.
"At one point I thought, 15 years on, no one would really know who Kurt Cobain was outside of a group of diehard fans," said Jeff Burlingame, a Cobain biographer who grew up with the musician in Aberdeen, Washington, and knew him when he was a teenager who, without a place to sleep, crashed on mutual friends' couches.
But Nirvana's music endured, and Cobain even found fans in his sublimation printer hometown of Aberdeen, which he had derided as a small-minded town.
"The old-timers who were there when Kurt was around really took offense to some of the things he said about the sublimation printer area, so they had no real reason to honor him," said Burlingame, who co-founded the Kurt Cobain Memorial Committee.
A famous son is a famous son, though. Now, visitors arriving in Aberdeen are greeted with a sign that reads "Come As You Are," after a famous Nirvana song.
Cobain Memorial Committee members, who include Cobain's paternal grandfather, hope to establish a community center in the late rocker's honor that would give area youth a place to play music and pursue artistic interests.
A concert will be held Friday in Seattle to honor Cobain and raise money for the center.
When Cobain died, he left behind a fortune that was estimated in the millions.
Even more money sublimation printer poured in over time from the royalties from his songs. But a lawyer hired by Love, Rhonda Holmes, says most of that money is missing.
According to Holmes, Love recently discovered that "managers, assistants, CPAs, lawyers, people like that who were supposed to be entrusted with carrying for their well-being and finances basically looted the estate."
Forensic accountants are now trying to sublimation printer determine where tens of millions of dollars from Cobain's estate ended up and how it could be recovered, Holmes said

Ticket prices affect bands in tough economy

On a warm night in sublimation printer Atlanta, the progressive bluegrass string band Trampled by Turtles quietly unloads its instruments from a modest, nondescript white touring van.
Just another night, just another town for the band from Duluth, Minnesota.
The band is opening sublimation printer for another group, the Hackensaw Boys, at the 300-person-capacity Smith's Olde Bar. The band members are hoping to draw a few new fans in what's been a challenging economic environment. After all, for lesser-known bands -- especially ones that play progressive bluegrass, far from the watchful eye of the American pop charts -- it's often word of mouth that inspires music fans to come out.
"In Minnesota and the West, where we've been touring for longer, we've started to do well on our own," said the Turtles' lead singer and guitarist, Dave Simonett. "But the Southeast is new, the Northeast is new, so either we open for people or play for a much smaller crowd. It's almost town by town."
One thing that helps build the crowd this night is the ticket price: $15.Atlanta is a good music town, and on any given night, there are sublimation printer plenty of options for concertgoing dollars. Knowing this, Smith's co-owner Dan Nolan says the venue has made a conscious effort to keep both ticket prices and service charges as low as possible, reminding customers that they can always just walk up to the bar on any night and buy a future ticket without any extra fees.
For fans who don't want to drive to pick up tickets ahead of time, Smith's uses an online ticketing distributor. But it's a local firm -- Ticket Alternative. And that, says Nolan, helps as well.
"We did Ticketmaster years and years and years ago, and they were just a behemoth. Their fees were too excessive -- their fees were sometimes higher than the tickets," says Nolan. "So, we had to let them go."
However, Ticketmaster -- and their proposed merger partner, Live Nation -- are still the dominant companies in the industry. The idea the two sublimation printer might form one company has raised hackles in the business, not least because of those fees.
On the same night as the Trampled by Turtles show at Smith's, popular indie rock band Modest Mouse takes the stage at a larger Atlanta venue, a 2,500-person converted church called The Tabernacle, which is owned sublimation printer by Live Nation. Tickets for the sold-out show are $32.50 each, plus an additional $12.20 in service fees for those who bought in advance and online -- in other words, the majority of patrons, since the Tabernacle box office is open only on show nights. (The venue also charges fees at the box office.)
Live Nation handles ticket distribution as well as venue management at the venue.
Robin Taylor of Inland Empire Touring has been booking Modest Mouse for the past 11 years and is rather pragmatic about the industry. "With a band as big as Modest Mouse, you have to have a company that sells advance tickets. It's nearly impossible to avoid Live Nation venues in a band's career," she says.
She's not unsympathetic to the fans' fee burden. "Bands can sublimation printer reduce their ticket price all they want," she says, "but the ticketing companies that sell advance tickets are still charging the same prices, which is a big bag of bummer!"
The Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger plan has drawn criticism. The Justice Department launched an investigation sublimation printer of the proposed merger in February, which came just days after a protest by fans and lawmakers over Ticketmaster's pricing arrangements for a Bruce Springsteen show. Springsteen himself accused Ticketmaster of "in effect 'scalping' " the tickets. Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff apologized to Springsteen after that incident.
Neither Live Nation nor Ticketmaster responded to requests by CNN for comment about ticket pricing issues. However, Azoff told a U.S. Senate subcommittee, "[The merger] will give us greater flexibility in how we promote, market and sell tickets to events. It will give us a pathway to alternative pricing and fee structures. And we sublimation printer will be better able to develop new and innovative products and services that enhance the fan experience and make all forms of entertainment more accessible to everyone."
In the shadow of a possible Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger, Ticket Alternative has created a comfortable niche for its business -- venues that hold 3,000 and fewer, generally selling tickets for between $10 and $25.
Ticket Alternative president Iain Bluett says he's not seeing any slowdown in 2009, boasting that his shows are doing well despite the hurting economy.
"When you're spending $150 on a concert ticket, you're going to that one show and maybe another. But when you're sublimation printer spending $10 to $25 on a concert ticket, you can afford to go to three or four shows for that same amount of money," he says.
The company tries to keep service charges down, he adds, adding $2 to a $10 ticket, for example. "We need to make sure that our fee, including the service charge, is still advantageous for the customer to buy ahead of time, rather that waiting to buy it day of show," says Bluett.
There are venues that try to balance both sides. Atlanta's sublimation printer Variety Playhouse, which holds about 1,000, offers two ways to purchase tickets: through Ticketmaster and through its ticket club or on-site box office. The latter methods do not always charge fees.
"We've been independent for almost 19 years," says owner Steve Harris. "For us, it's really about the music, and to be able to run the operation the way that we feel, instead of having to have it all dictated from some corporate office far away."
There were plenty of fans at Smith's who, despite seeing a smaller show on this particular night, said that they'll still go to larger venues, despite the fees. After all, that's where their bands are playing. It's not that sublimation printer they aren't irked by the high prices -- they are. However, most said they can only shrug it off.
But others say they've changed their concertgoing habits given the economy. Smith's customer Eric Sandusky says, "I would prefer to give my money to a cover charge rather than Ticketmaster. I used to go to Widespread Panic shows all the time, but there's no point paying 50 bucks. I'd rather see a new band. I'd rather sublimation printer pay 15 bucks for a show at Smith's."

Review: 'Watchmen' lacks imagination

"Visionary" director Zack Snyder, as the sublimation printer marketing would have it, has filmed Alan Moore's "unfilmable" graphic novel by treating the comic book panels as his storyboard and his Bible.
Doesn't it bother anyone that this is about as far from the definition of "visionary" as it's possible to get?
The visionary sees what sublimation printer others do not see. Snyder -- whose previous films were a remake ("Dawn of the Dead") and another scrupulously faithful comic book adaptation ("300") -- is more in the line of a fancy photocopier, duplicating other artists' imagery with a forger's intensity.
A visionary transforms the world. Snyder slavishly transcribes what's set down 5 inches in front of his face.
Alan Moore, who has refused to have his name on the movie (ditto its Moore-based predecessors, "V for Vendetta" and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen") and who has declined all reimbursement to protest the entertainment industry's fundamental lack of respect for intellectual property, counts as a bona fide visionary.
His 1986 comic book is a landmark in the history of the form, a masterpiece of pop cultural angst, filtering Cold War nihilism and disillusionment through the inspired pulp idiom of mundane masked crimefighters and one genuine, possibly radioactive, superhero.
In Moore's alternative 1985, Nixon is still president, the U.S. having sublimation printer won in Vietnam. The Soviets are effectively neutered by America's not-so-secret weapon, Dr. Manhattan, a kind of quantum ghost in the machine capable of reconstituting matter (and nuclear warheads) at will. Moore's meta-comic switched back and forth in time with the same facility as Dr. Manhattan morphed between New Jersey and Mars, cutting between a doomsday conspiracy threatening to engulf the Earth and flashbacks relating the biographies of half-a-dozen "watchmen," a generation of intrepid masked avengers forced to hang up their capes and Spandex when public opinion turned on them in the late 1970s. (It's easy to discern the book's influence on subsequent films "The Incredibles" and "Mystery Men.")
With its parallel stories sublimation printer and virtuoso zooming and panning visual tropes, Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons' "Watchmen" always felt cinematic. You could sense Martin Scorsese and "Taxi Driver's" Travis Bickle in Moore's squalid New York and vigilante anti-hero Rorschach, but proposed movies by Terry Gilliam and Paul Greengrass failed to materialize, foundering on the comic book's sophisticated narrative chicanery.
The solution proposed by Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse is simply to ignore the problem and stick to the text. In fairness, this strategy has proved wildly popular in adaptations of the "Harry Potter" books, for instance, "Twilight" and "300." The fans seem to demand it -- just as there is sublimation printer now a common assumption that a longer, unexpurgated DVD edition is inherently superior to the shorter, tighter theatrical version.
"Watchmen" the movie provides ample evidence that more is more, but less might have been closer to Moore in spirit (that is, anarchic, witty and compelling). Clocking in at an exhausting 163 minutes even without some of the book's various subplots, the film forfeits momentum and suspense for a jerky succession of expository dialogue scenes, interspersed with occasional flashes of grotesque ultra-violence. It's all invariably filmed in Snyder's spasmodic, stop-go trademark style and accompanied sublimation printer by a jukebox score that ranges from Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen to Nena's "99 Luftballoons."
On the few occasions where the filmmakers do exercise their imaginations -- in a credit montage relating the glory days of the crimefighters Weegee-style, and in a neat improvement on Moore's climax -- the results are actually ingenious and sharp. iReport.com: Fan underwhelmed by "Watchmen"
But too many key scenes ring hollow, undermined by flat staging and tone-deaf treatment. One of them is the ridiculous sublimation printer moment when Dr. Manhattan's faith in humanity is restored by the revelation of ...
Well, see it for yourself, and then compare with the infinitely more nuanced passage in the graphic novel.
The considerable limitations of Swedish-Canadian actress Malin Akerman are cruelly exposed as Laurie, aka Silk Spectre II, and if Matthew Goode (playing Adrian Veidt) is the smartest man in the world, then we're really sublimation printer in trouble.
Jackie Earle Haley and his "Little Children" co-star Patrick Wilson fare better as, respectively, the angry reactionary Rorschach and mildly conflicted Dan Dreiberg, while it's hard to take your eyes off Billy Crudup's naked blue avatar, Dr. Manhattan -- for various reasons.
I guess an honest reproduction of a great comic book is better than the trivialization that often passes for adaptation, and in this case the material is so ingrained with audacious ideas the movie can't be counted a complete cop-out. But if sublimation printer it was really going to honor the original, "Watchmen" had to put the fear of God in us, to rekindle that prospect of imminent nuclear annihilation that haunted the Cold War world. And it had to remind us these rather sorry comic book characters were, as Moore insisted, more human than super.