Vedder Heads West For Spring Solo Shows

Vedder Solo Shows

Eddie Vedder

Jonathan Cohen, N.Y.

Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder will embark on his first solo tour this spring, on the heels of his Monkeywrench/J soundtrack to the acclaimed film "Into the Wild." Dates begin April 2 in Vancouver; Liam Finn will open.

Vedder was uncertain about presenting the material live when he spoke to Billboard late last year. "I like the idea. It'll happen when it happens if it happens," he said with a laugh.

But he has since come around to the idea, perhaps encouraged by a well-received performance of "Into the Wild" music at a private party in Los Angeles in November.

"This will be an amazing opportunity for fans to see Eddie Vedder in such intimate settings," RCA Music Group VP or A&R/marketing Matt Shay tells Billboard.com. "Working with Eddie on the music from 'Into the Wild' has been an honor, and the tour will be a true highlight for all of us."

At present, it hasn't been announced whether Vedder will be playing the shows completely on his own or with help from other musicians. Ticket information, including pre-sale access for members of Pearl Jam's Ten Club fan organization, can be found at PearlJam.com.

Vedder's "Into the Wild" soundtrack has sold 243,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The track "Guaranteed" won the Golden Globe for best original song, while "Hard Sun" enjoyed success at radio, peaking at No. 13 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart.

Before Vedder hits the road, Pearl Jam is expected to regroup and start sketching out material for its next studio album. As previously reported, the band will also assemble to co-headline the Bonnaroo festival in mid-June in Manchester, Tenn.

There's other new Vedder music in the offing as well. His track "No More" will serve as the first single from "Body of War: Songs That Inspired an Iraq War Veteran," due March 18 via Sire.

Here are Eddie Vedder's tour dates:

April 2: Vancouver (the Centre)
April 5: Santa Cruz, Calif. (Civic Auditorium)
April 7: Berkeley, Calif. (Zellerbach Auditorium)
April 10: Santa Barbara, Calif. (Arlington Theatre)
April 12-13: Los Angeles (Wiltern Theatre)
April 15: San Diego (Spreckels Theatre)

Alicia Keys, Jordin Sparks Team For Tour

Alicia Keys

Jonathan Cohen, N.Y.

Alicia Keys will embark on a two-month North American tour April 19 in Hampton, Va., with support from 2007 "American Idol" winner Jordin Sparks. The run comes in support of Keys' latest J album, "As I Am," which has spawned two big hits.

First single "No One" logged time at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, while "Like You'll Never See Me Again" was a long-running chart-topper on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.

As for Sparks, debut single "Tattoo" peaked at No. 8 on the Hot 100 and is No. 16 there this week. Second single "No Air" featuring Chris Brown jumps 25-19 this week on the Pop 100; a Chris Robinson-directed video for the track will arrive in late February.

Here are Alicia Keys/Jordin Sparks' tour dates:

April 19: Hampton, Va. (Hampton Coliseum)
April 20: Philadelphia (Liacouras Center)
April 22: Pittsburgh (Petersen Events Center)
April 24: Chicago (Allstate Arena)
April 26: Columbus, Ohio (Value City Arena)
April 27: St. Louis (Scottrade Center)
April 30: Minneapolis (Target Center)
May 1: Kansas City, Mo. (Sprint Center)
May 5: Los Angeles (TBA)
May 9: Las Vegas (MGM Grand Garden)
May 10: San Jose, Calif. (HP Pavilion)
May 12: Phoenix (Jobing.com Arena)
May 14: Dallas (Nokia Theatre)
May 18: Houston (Toyota Center)
May 22: New Orleans (New Orleans Arena)
May 24: Tampa, Fla. (St. Pete Times Forum)
May 25: Miami (American Airlines Arena)
May 28: Atlanta (Philips Arena)
May 30: Greensboro, N.C. (Coliseum)
May 31: Cincinnati (U.S. Bank Arena)
June 3: Detroit (Joe Louis Arena)
June 5: Cleveland (Wolstein Center)
June 6: Toronto (Air Canada Centre)
June 8: Montreal (Bell Centre)
June 11: Boston (TD Bank North Garden)
June 13: Washington, D.C. (Verizon Center)
June 15: Baltimore (1st Mariner Arena)
June 17: Newark, N.J. (Prudential Center)
June 18: New York (Madison Square Garden)

Meet The Spartans (Movie Review)

Hollywood.com Says

There’s nothing funny here only sad. Sad in the sense that enough people will see Meet the Spartans to warrant a continuation of this franchise. And until that next spoof comes, there will not be a worse movie. It’s just not possible.

Story
To say that Meet the Spartans is a spoof of 300 is to suggest that there is some semblance of a storyline mocking that the 2007 blockbuster epic; I refuse to give it that much credit. Rather, this movie is a lame-ass excuse to randomly throw jabs at pop culture and, in extreme emergencies, “advance” the “plot”--which only really makes fun of 300’s subtexts, not its story. It all starts in ancient Sparta, where a young Leonidas (Sean Maguire) is groomed to defeat the evil Xerxes (Ken Davitian, “the fat guy from Borat,” which is essentially how the movie introduces him) and the invading Persians (led by Method Man). But really, Spartans is all about the atrociously unfunny parodies that litter its not-brief-enough 80 minutes: Transformers, Stomp the Yard, Happy Feet, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, Ugly Betty, Anna Nicole, Britney, Paris, homosexuality, bodily functions--they’re all spoofed here! A truly groundbreaking concept, indeed.

Acting
Formerly up-and-coming British actor Maguire (England's EastEnders) must’ve thought a lead role, no matter how bad the movie, would beget bigger jobs in the near future. Oops! Didn’t he ever hear of Adam Campbell, the like-minded bloke whose biggest role since headlining Date Movie was last year’s Epic Movie? In short, actors looking to break out should not be tempted by crap like this. It’s the same story: Maguire can obviously act, but he makes a complete fool of himself in the process and now must give his career time to recover. He only bears a slight physical resemblance to the actor he’s parodying, Gerard Butler (when heavily bearded), and otherwise spends the movie uttering the worst possible lines when not subjecting himself to scenes so mortifying that they’re like some kind of Fear Factor for Actors. Elsewhere, the usual D-listers pop up for a shot at regaining quasi-relevance. Carmen Electra, now a veteran of this franchise--lucky her!--plays Leonidas' wife and is leaned on for nothing more than her hotness. Which is more than can be said about everyone else, from a clearly desperate-for-work Kevin Sorbo (Andromeda) as one of Leonidas’ ‘yes’ men, to Method Man, whose heretofore-horrible film résumé just got worse.

Direction
Whereas Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s Scary/Epic/Date Movie spoofs might’ve bore the “this probably wasn’t as easy to come up with as it seems” tag, Spartans looks like something from a script they found in the garbage can at a middle school: Not only is it pure trash unworthy of being released, but the “jokes,” if you will, were seemingly written by and for 13- to-14-year-olds. Not one second of the movie is even implicitly deserving of a snicker; instead, it’s actually antagonizing to watch, as Friedberg and Seltzer bombard us with scene after scene of the shallowest material ever committed to celluloid. This is the absolute dreg of cinema, the lowest of the low, not to be confused with “lowbrow,” which would be an unfair compliment in this case. Spartans even fails miserably in trying to make fun of the few pop-culturisms that deserve it, and the least the writer-directors could’ve done was hire actors who physically resemble the celebs they’re spoofing! Friedberg and Seltzer are just utterly allergic to originality: Obviously you don’t expect the story to be original, since it’s all a rip-off to begin with, but they can’t even spin any of it into a single original gag. And they're so lost during the few non-spoof scenes that they resort to the dreaded pratfalls. Seriously, these dudes make Uwe Boll look like Orson Welles.

Hidden children 'serious problem'

Schools can often pick up on children's problems

MPs and voluntary organisations have said there is a serious problem of children in need slipping "under the radar" of social services.

Many do not get help because they are not known to the authorities or keep their problems from them, MPs heard.

The Commons children's select committee heard that homeless youngsters, those in care, young carers or trafficked children were most at risk.

Schools and GPs could do more to help, children's charities told the MPs.

Labour MP Fiona Mactaggart, who chaired the committee, said: "We have a pretty clear picture that this is a not a small scale problem, that it's a serious problem.

"The view of all our witnesses is that there is a key issue of professionals being able to connect with young people and listen to them and give them a voice."

'Particularly cruel'

Kathy Evans, policy director at The Children's Society, told the MPs there were concerns about two groups of children - those in touch with social services who were going to school or the GP but whose needs were not being spotted, and those who were disengaged from services.

"We have a lot of questions about how do we helpfully and ethically but proactively seek to find out whether there are any problems at home for children," she said.

Groups of children who might have hidden needs could include gypsy or traveller families, young carers or refugees and disabled children placed away from home, she said.

John Reacroft from the charity Barnardo's said children living in temporary accommodation often moved frequently and slipped "under the radar" of services.

If you are homeless your needs are increasing as a family but your access to services can often decrease

John Reacroft Barnardo's Children might end up out of school and without access to GPs, community support or day centres, he said.

"It's particularly cruel because if you are homeless and in temporary accommodation, your needs are increasing as a family but your access to services can often decrease because many families are housed very long distances from where they originated."

Mr Reacroft said there was a particular problem when local authorities moved a homeless family out of their area into private accommodation in another.

Local authorities now had a responsibility to pass on details of people being moved into another area - but that did not mean they would then get the support they needed, he said.

Another key factor in children slipping through the net was fear, the committee heard.

Children were afraid that telling anyone about their family problems might lead to its being broken up and their being taken into care, said Kathy Evans.

Box of chocolates

Schools and GPs were often in a good position to pick up on family problems but did not always do so, said Dr Jo Aldridge, director of Young Carers Research Group at Loughborough University.

"School is critical here. There used to be people who were more obvious in schools - educational welfare officers. They now seem to have much bigger case loads and who is there to deal with the welfare of the children?"

"A lot of teachers don't see that as their role or feel uncomfortable."

Dr Aldridge said some teachers needed more training on how they should respond if they found out a child was caring for a parent at home or had a parent who was mentally ill.

Good News: Bad News Arrives Quickly

Good News: Bad News Arrives Quickly

IT has not been a great year so far for Enfield High School. Beyond the two snow days the school district has racked up, students at the high school, in northwestern Connecticut, received an unexpected extension on their holiday break when a pipe burst on Jan. 1, letting water pour in for hours before the break was discovered. The school was closed for three days, reopened, then shut down again the next week, when the main electrical box caught fire, possibly as a result of the flooding.
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In each case, Superintendent John Gallacher checked the damage, then immediately went into emergency-notification mode. That meant activating the school’s hot-line phone number, notifying local radio and television stations and sending out school cancellation notices to the high school’s e-mail chain list, which reaches about one-third of the 950 students’ households. During the latest cancellation, Dr. Gallacher said, “only three or four kids showed up not knowing we were closed.”

“It’s not the most high-tech system,” he acknowledged, “but this is a small-town suburb with a close-knit school community. I’m sure the 300 people who got the e-mail notice picked up their cellphones and called their friends.”

But in this day of heightened security and ready alert, Enfield is the exception rather than the rule.

Since the 1999 school massacre that left 14 students and a teacher dead at Columbine High School in Colorado, followed by the Sept. 11 attacks and the shootings at Virginia Tech last April, schools across the region have been revising their emergency-notification and emergency-planning systems. Long gone are the days of parent phone chains, except perhaps in the smallest communities. In their place, school districts are investing thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade their methods of dealing with an emergency.

In Old Bridge, N.J., the Police Department’s Office of Emergency Management started looking into improving the schools’ emergency-response system in 1999. Officials came up with a plan that Capt. Robert Bonfante said first had to be sold to the Board of Education and the Town Council and then took three or four years to fully activate.

“After Columbine and 9/11, the parents were very upset,” Captain Bonfante said. “They wanted the schools shrink-wrapped. I’m sure Osama bin Laden is not coming to Old Bridge for one of our schools, but we recognized we needed an improved safety system for the kids.”

Considered a forerunner in New Jersey for school safety management, the Old Bridge program serves 15 public schools and 9 private ones in this Middlesex County town.

The system includes aerial and internal photography of all the schools, walkie-talkies for some 70 teachers and administrators who are assigned to the emergency planning committee, doors numbered with reflective tape on both sides, and constant updating of emergency numbers for students and their families.

Increasingly, the Internet has become the main tool to let parents know when school is canceled or to distribute any other notice that needs to get out quickly. Virtually every school district has a Web site, which usually has school-closing links that provide updates during inclement weather and emergency situations.

Most schools also request parents’ e-mail addresses at the start of the year, which some use to create an e-mail database that can be readily activated to send urgent or routine notices. But keeping this data current can be a full-time job, so many school districts have placed the task of notifying parents in the hands of companies that specialize in such instant communication.

Nearly every school district in Westchester, Putnam and Rockland Counties in New York uses either Connect-ED, based in California, or K-12 Alerts, based in White Plains, to handle parent notifications. So do many districts on Long Island and in New Jersey and Connecticut.

Using information provided and regularly updated by parents, K-12 Alerts’ Triple-Play service uses voice mail and text and e-mail messages to notify thousands of students, parents and staff members in a matter of minutes.

T. Gregory Bender, president and chief executive of K-12 Alerts, said that he came up with the idea after 9/11. Noting that 30 percent of cellphone numbers and e-mail addresses change annually, Mr. Bender said his goal was not only to provide schools with an efficient, updated means of instant communication, but also to save money and resources.

“Districts are really getting our mission,” he said, “to increase communication, lower costs and save some paper and maybe some trees.”

K-12 Alerts and Connect-ED charge districts on a per-student basis, typically $4 to $5 per student per year for unlimited use.

Some districts, like Bellmore-Merrick in Nassau County, which began using the Connect-ED system this year, limit its use to emergencies. Other districts say that the more they use the system — for sending out notices of meetings, fund-raisers and other announcements that might normally be mailed home — the more they are recouping the cost.

In Danbury, Conn., the superintendent, Sal Pascarella, said that regular use of the system also helps keep information current.

“If we only wait for the big incident, the data is not accurate,” he said. “The more you use it, the more conversant you become with it.”

W. L. Sawyer, the new superintendent of the Mount Vernon school district in Westchester County, views its instant-notification system as a way to communicate with families, not only with what he calls negative messages, like school closings, but also positive ones, like reminders that students should get a good night’s sleep before test days.

Since instituting the K-12 Alerts system last fall, Dr. Sawyer said, he had used it at least 10 times for systemwide messages and daily for calling the parents of students who were absent. He said it had helped introduce him to the community.

“I’ve gone into stores and a parent will say, ‘Yeah, you were talking to me last night,’ ” Dr. Sawyer said.

Britney's dad given power to sack management

Britney Spears Pic: PA Photos

James Spears already has rights over singer's affairs

Britney Spears' father has been given power to fire her business management, it has emerged.

James Spears has already taken control of the singer's affairs this week, a right he will hold until at least Thursday (February 14). And now, according to court documents, he has been given the right to fire Howard Grossman.

Court commissioner Reva Goetz also said that Mr Spears was entitled to see all of the management's "documents, records and assets relating to Britney Spears," reports the BBC.

However, Mr Grossman has not divulged whether he has been fired by Mr Spears, commenting: "My reputation speaks for itself."

Spears was admitted to a Los Angeles psychiatric ward on January 31, but she left on Wednesday (February 7), against the wishes of her parents.

Simmons: 'The internet killed music'

(Sunday February 10, 2008 09:30 AM)

Kiss star Gene Simmons has blamed internet downloads for destroying the music industry - insisting there will never be any more legendary bands like The Beatles.

The 58-year-old rocker is convinced illegal downloading has forced record labels to conform to a new way of working that will eventually put them all out of business.

Simmons, who is known for his entrepreneurial skills, insists there is now less opportunity for talented new bands to find recognition because the internet is swamped with wannabes.

He says, "The very same people that love the music the most have slit its throat and they're surprised it's dying. 'How come my new band can't get a shot?' 'Because you killed it, bitch.'

"Every day college kids who probably love music more than anybody are the same people slashing the record industry's throat by file sharing and downloading. It's the saddest thing for new bands. Doesn't affect me or Kiss. We can continue to play stadiums and do very well, and we release DVDs.

"But there isn't a chance for a new band to become the next Beatles or Kiss because there isn't the infrastructure to do it."

(from http://uk.news.launch.yahoo.com)