LOS ANGELES, Jan. 16 (UPI) — Country music star Blake Shelton has been booked to perform at the People’s Choice Awards ceremony in Los Angeles Wednesday.
Confirmed to attend the fan-voted prize presentation are Kristen Bell , Ellen DeGeneres , Robert Downey Jr., Tom Hanks , Boris Kodjoe, Matt LeBlanc , Jennifer Lopez , Bill Paxton , Tyler Perry , Adam Rodriguez , John Stamos , Wilmer Valderrama and Kerry Washington .
The gala will air on CBS with The Great Indoors star Joel McHale hosting.

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© Source: http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/TV/2017/01/16/Blake-Shelton-to-perform-on-Wednesdays-Peoples-Choice-Awards-ceremony/3801484590729/
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It’s not the Lumberjack Quartet, just the JACK.
The name comes from the first letters of the first names of four string players who met at the Eastman School of Music and formed the quartet a decade ago. When the JACK came to Pasadena three years later to play an hourlong work by German composer Georg Friedrich Haas in the complete dark – ushers wore Army night goggles to help any audience members with sudden panic attacks – there was no question of the macho young quartet’s swaggering fearlessness, to say nothing of its focused intensity.
On top of that, the men displayed (when you could actually see them) a kind of lumbering nonchalance that made the quartet seem all the more amazing.
Back in town for different programs at the Wallis on Saturday night and REDCAT on Sunday, the JACK is no longer exactly JACK. The name’s the same, but half of the quartet changed this fall, with a new violinist and cellist. The lineup is now violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards and cellist Jay Campbell. But if JACJ wouldn’t have the same ring, the astonishing thing about the new JACK is that it does indeed have the same ring.
What felt slightly different was that the two nights contained little of the hardcore, flamboyantly difficult, mainly European avant-garde works the JACK had become known for. The one example was Xenakis “Tetras,” one of JACK’s signature wildly woolly party pieces, to conclude the Wallis program that was otherwise a fascinatingly quirky look at the string quartet, American style.
At REDCAT, JACK joined the Bay Area’s Lightbulb Ensemble for an experiment in combining a string quartet with a contemporary gamelan, exploring new uses for traditional Indonesian gongs and other beaten percussion instruments.
The JACK sounded wonderful at the Wallis. The stage in the roomy Beverly Hills hall may appear as large as a Mercedes showroom, leaving a small ensemble to appear a bit lonely, but JACK found the hall’s acoustic sweet spot, bringing impressive immediacy to both its ultrasoft and ultraloud playing.
The soft came first in Morton Feldman’s wispily delicate 1951 “Structures,” the early work of a composer who would later revolutionize American string quartet music by weaving elaborately textured musical fabrics that could last as long as six hours. Here, the JACKs captured the fleeting gossamer essence of music seemingly impossible to capture.
The toughness came next in two quartets by American women.
Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet, written 20 years before Feldman’s “Structures,” pronounced the 30-year-old composer (and stepmother of folksinger Pete Seeger) to be the next great American Modernist. The Great Depression, however, meant otherwise, as the politically engaged Seeger turned to protest music and domestic responsibilities.
Still, the JACK’s mastery of the smallest details in Seeger’s investigation of dissonant counterpoint and hazy clouds of string sounds left little doubt that not only is this the first major quartet by an American woman composer, but it is the crucial Modernist bridge between the string quartets of Charles Ives and Elliott Carter.
Julia Wolfe’s “Early That Summer,” written in 1992 when she was also in her early 30s, has some of Feldman’s DNA and much of Crawford’s politicized sensibility, though filtered through the Post-Minimalist sensibility of Bang on a Can (of which she was a founder). It is a piece that shakes with a tenacious tremolo that doesn’t, and JACK didn’t, let go.
The evening’s new work was Derek Bermel’s “Intonation,” inspired by Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man” and premiered by JACK as part of the New York Philharmonic new music Biennial in May. The score gives uncannily effective “voice” to the sounds of Harlem, be they a wheezing harmonica, a blues guitar sliding into microtones, throaty and gritty street talk or an absentmindedly strummed banjo, for which the JACK proved invariably masterful musical mimics.
The algebraic “Tetras” might appear a world away. But however much the Greek composer and mathematician looked for emotional escape in geometric abstraction, Xenakis also happened to be a noted underground freedom fighter in Greece during World War II and he made complex ferocity so physical that it becomes political. The JACK helped build its reputation on making Xenakis’ string quartets speak through their raw power, and the new JACKsters turn out be as good at this as were the old.
Unfortunately, no such light bulbs went off with the meet-up of JACK with Lightbulb the next night at REDCAT. In four works, three of which were created for the occasion, the string quartet was little more than a high-end accessory to a dozen percussionists attempting to find new uses for gamelan but lacking JACK’s cool and unpretentious virtuosity.
The most ambitious work, “Hydrogen(2)Oxygen” by Lightbulb leader Brian Baumbusch was nervous-making as the gamelan players performed with wincing worry on their faces as they moved in and out of rhythmic phases with each other (needing click tracks to do so) and clattered away producing massive metallic climaxes. Confidence builders, the JACK filled the air with stunning string harmonics.
Casey Affleck talks about the way Kenneth Lonergan uses everyday language to convey deep emotion in « Manchester by the Sea.  »
For her role as Jackie Kennedy, Natalie Portman says, « It’s not a fashion story, » but the clothes do tell a story.
Joel Edgerton talks about staying truthful to the real-life story of « Loving.  »
Director Nicolas Winding Refn and composer Cliff Martinez discuss their « Neon Demon » collaboration.
« Manchester By the Sea » director Kenneth Lonergan discusses writing a quiet character and working with actor Casey Affleck to bring him to life.
« Manchester By the Sea » director Kenneth Lonergan discusses writing a quiet character and working with actor Casey Affleck to bring him to life.

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© Source: http://www.latimes.com/la-et-cm-jack-quartet-review-20170116-story.html
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“Is it nostalgic?” asks Mia, the aspiring actor played by Emma Stone in the musical La Land . “Are people gonna like it?” She’s agonising over the play she has written but this is surely the voice of the writer-director Damien Chazelle asking these questions of his movie. To which the answers would be: “Duh!” and “On the whole, yes.”
Nostalgia permeates La Land right from the opening announcement that it has been shot in CinemaScope, the widescreen format that was prevalent in the 1950s. When Mia returns home, strolling past street murals of Chaplin and Monroe, a giant poster of Ingrid Bergman gazes down from her bedroom wall. And when she goes on a date with Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), it is to a picture palace with a light bulb-studded marquee.
Old Hollywood is as glorious and intimidating to these 21st-century lovers as it was in Pennies from Heaven when Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters danced in front of the flickering image of Astaire and Rogers, before entering the cinema screen themselves. Something similar happens in La Land when Mia and Sebastian drive up to the Griffith Observatory after watching Rebel Without a Cause ; it’s as though the movie has spilled over into real life.
Sebastian is Mia’s partner in nostalgia. He’s a pig-headed pianist who rhapsodises about jazz and dreams of owning a club but earns a crust playing easy-listening standards. He and Mia are at the foothills of their ambitions, not always certain whether they should go on climbing or settle for life at a lower altitude. La Land asks the same question as Chazelle’s previous film Whiplash : how do you keep your dreams alive without letting them kill you?
When modern directors tackle the musical genre, there can be an element of hostility present, as though they are slaying a dragon – or, more likely, a sacred cow. La Land is not volatile like Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York or Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. It’s a middle-of-the-road confection, pretty rather than deep, which never quite makes its own mark. It takes its melancholic mood from Edward Hopper and its eye-popping colours from Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The most original moments are minor ones: glitter thrown into a hairdryer creates a small silvery blizzard, a handbag matches a row of purple wheelie bins in a back alley.
What’s intriguing is that the film bestows on this stepping stone of a romance the sort of attention traditionally reserved for amour fou. It demonstrates, in a series of casually elegant dance duets beginning with a soft-shoe shuffle on a deserted back road in the Hollywood Hills, how Mia and Sebastian connect in their nostalgic reveries for the briefest of moments. Each time, they are dragged back to the present by the bleeps and blasts of the modern world – a ringtone, a smoke alarm, the chirp of an electronic fob.
The film is at its most convincing in those intimate exchanges between Gosling, with his melted eyes, and Stone, with her anime face. When it reaches for an ambitious, razzle-dazzle effect, such as in the over-complicated dance number in a traffic jam (shades of Fame ) and a poorly directed sequence in which the couple start flying like Goldie Hawn in Everyone Says I Love You , it comes across as merely ersatz. This is not, after all, a film of grand passions.
Nor is Chazelle at his most assured on a large canvas. He is an economical visual storyteller who can nail the small, telling moments. He explains in just two brief shots, for instance, exactly why Sebastian puts his ambitions on the back burner to tour with a band he hates. What Chazelle can’t always do is join up the dots to give the film momentum. After a lively scene introducing Sebastian’s sister (the excellent Rosemarie DeWitt), the picture rashly casts her aside, which is a mistake in such a long and underpopulated movie. It can’t rely, either, on the new compositions to whoosh it along, with the exception of a tentative piano number called “City of Stars”, which is first sung casually by Gosling as he strolls along a pier at night. The rest of the songs aren’t heartfelt so much as Heart FM; Magic rather than magical.
John Ogilby was a talented dancer with a bright future. Performing at White Hall Palace in February 1619, the 18-year-old leapt higher than ever to impress the watching James I and his queen. But then, crashing to the floor with a torn ligament, Ogilby never danced again. It was one of many misfortunes he overcame in a remarkable life. He went on to become a theatrical impresario, the deputy master of the revels in Ireland, a poet, a translator and a publisher of ancient classics. He even organised the public celebration of Charles II’s coronation. He was also an accomplished soldier, sailor and spy, as Alan Ereira reveals in this entertaining account of his “lives” and times.
It was a remarkable collection of lives for a man born in Scotland in 1600 and raised in poverty, the illegitimate son of an aristocrat. Yet Ogilby’s greatest achievement was to put Britain on the map when he was appointed “His Majesty’s Cosmographer and Geographick Printer” in 1674. His Britannia is the first detailed road atlas ever made. It opens with a map of England and Wales showing, he wrote, “all the principal roads actually measured and delineated”. It contains a hundred or so beautifully engraved plans of roads as winding ribbons sliced into sections. Rivers, forests, villages and bridges are included as landmarks.
Embracing the new science of measurement and experiment championed by the Royal Society, Ogilby’s surveyors used a wheel with a circumference of 16ft 6in and a handle that allowed it to be pushed along, as well as a clock face that recorded journey distances. With no universally agreed length of a mile, Ogilby chose 1,760 yards. Britannia led to the accurate measurement of almost 27,000 miles of tracks, paths and roads, though only about 7,500 are depicted in the atlas at one inch to the mile.
Britannia was published in September 1675. There were few who could afford it, at £5 (roughly £750 in today’s money), and it was too heavy to carry. Instead, travellers found their way around the country by following printed itineraries, with lists of the towns to pass through on any particular journey.
Britannia is not, as Ereira explains, an atlas of commercially useful roads of the day. The first journey is an odd one, from London to Aberystwyth, then a town of fewer than 100 houses and a ruined castle. Some of the roads chosen were no longer in use, while important routes such as those to Liverpool and Sheffield were left out.
But the choice of roads in Britannia begins to make sense as being those necessary for the royal mastery of the kingdom. The London to Aberystwyth road led to mines nearby. In the days of Charles I those mines contained lead and silver that helped the king pay his soldiers during the civil war. Britannia was a handbook, Ereira explains, for a conspiracy leading to a new kingdom under a Catholic king.
Ever since the start of the Reformation, Europe had been rumbling towards a religious war. When it came on the mainland it lasted 30 years and left millions dead. The subsequent Peace of Westphalia led to a new map of Europe, one of countries and defined frontiers instead of feudal territories with unclear borders and independent cities. England was not included in the peace but shared in its vision of separate sovereignty. This led to different results in different places. In France, the king became an all-powerful despot; in England it was the ruler who lost power as parliament emerged triumphant.
In 1670 Charles I’s son Charles II decided to throw off the restraints he had accepted as the price of his restored monarchy. He wanted to be the absolute master in his land. To achieve this, he entered into a secret treaty with the French king Louis XIV. Charles needed money, an army, allies to execute his plan, and detailed knowledge of the kingdom; Louis was willing to bankroll the venture as long as Charles converted to Catholicism. Britannia was a vital part of Charles’s strategy to assert military control: he would use it to help land and deploy the 6,000 French troops that Louis had promised him to assist his forces. The pact remained a well-kept secret for nearly a century, even though it soon fell apart when the French and British got bogged down in a war with the Dutch.
No matter. Ogilby died in September 1676 and in 1681 Charles II dissolved parliament for the last time during his reign. “ Britannia provided an extraordinary grasp over the business and administration of the 399 communities that it identified in England and Wales, and the crown took a grip on them all,” Ereira writes.
In this way, the atlas played a significant part in enabling the king’s revenue to grow by one-third within a few years. No longer needing financial help from Louis, Charles ruled by divine right, exercising absolute power until his death in 1685. The lesson of Britannia was that whoever controls the map controls the world.
Manjit Kumar is the author of “Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality” (Icon)

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© Source: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/film/2017/01/la-la-land-big-bombastic-musical-its-smaller-gestures-make-it-sing
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CLEVELAND, January 16, 2017 – In case you missed it, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame recently released the names of the organization’s upcoming 2017 Inductees:
In addition, the Hall of Fame is also honoring Nile Rodgers with an Award of Excellence.
The 2017 inductees will be honored this spring at the 32nd Annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, which will take place Friday, April 7, 2017 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York City. On-sale dates for tickets to the event will be announced this month.
A limited number of pre-sale tickets will be available for Rock & Roll Hall of Fame members in advance of the public sale date. To be eligible for the member pre-sale, you must have been an active Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member by December 31, 2016.
Back at the Hall of Fame HQ and museum in Cleveland, Ohio, a special exhibition highlighting the 2017 Inductees will open there on March 30.
For more information on upcoming events and exhibits, visit rockhall.com or follow the Rock Hall of Fame on Facebook , Twitter ( @rockhall ) and Instagram ( @rockhall ).

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© Source: http://www.commdiginews.com/entertainment/rock-roll-hall-of-fame-and-museum-announces-2017-inductees-76592/
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