Justin Timberlake Gets Obamas Singing Along During White House Performance

Justin Timberlake Gets Obamas Singing Along During White House Performance

While the singer donned his signature suit and tie, his White House performance was a pretty casual affair.

Over the past few months, it seems Justin Timberlake wouldn't be caught dead in an unpressed suit or tousled hairdo. The "Suit & Tie" singer has taken his now-inescapable lyrics to heart as he continues to promote his long-awaited return to music — rarely taking any stage not "pressed up in black and white." And when he took the stage mere feet away from President Barack Obama Tuesday night, he made sure his wardrobe was especially polished.

On paper, a performance at the White House seems like a pretty formal affair. But in video posted online, Timberlake got pretty casual during hissyrupy take on "(Sittin' On) the Dock of the Bay," even having the entire first family bobbing their heads and singing along.

His performance was part of the "In Performance at the White House: Memphis Soul," which celebrated the city's sounds of the 1960s and welcomed soul-inspired performers old and new — from legends like Mavis Staples and Booker T. Jones to newbies like the Alabama Shakes and "American Idol" finalist Joshua Ledet.

Despite the fact that he was onstage with 71-year-old guitarist Steve Cropper and that "they had to make us follow Mavis" in the lineup, the 20/20 Experience singer seemed quite at home among the crowd of Washington elites, whom he had feeling like they were really just watching the tide roll away. Before he closed out the Otis Redding classic in his silky smooth falsetto, Timberlake had no fear commanding the Commander-in-Chief to take it away. "Mr. President, everybody, come on," he told the audience, letting them sing the chorus before wrapping up.

Also in the crowd was Timberlake's wife, Jessica Biel. While she looked poised in a white dress and red lips, judging from her frenetic tweets earlier in the day, may not have taken the presidential affair so casually.

"I hugged POTUS. I hugged POTUS. I hugged POTUS," Biel tweeted Tuesday afternoon. Hours before his performance, Timberlake sat alongside Staples, Ben Harper, Charlie Musselwhite and Sam Moore for the first lady's "Soulsville USA" student workshop. More than 100 high school students were invited to The House to discuss what Mrs. Obama called "the rhythmic groove of Memphis soul."

"In Performance at the White House: Memphis Soul" will air Tuesday at 8 p.m. on PBS. The series started during President Carter's administration to celebrate every genre of American music. The previous special, last February's "Red, White and Blues," boasted a legendary lineup including B.B. King, Jeff Beck, Mick Jagger and Gary Clark Jr.


News Source : www.mtv.com

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'Ready for Love': Why didn't NBC's dating Franken-show hit?

'Ready for Love': Why didn't NBC's dating Franken-show hit?

 

NBC shuffled Smash offstage for this?

Though it benefited from both heavy promotion and having The Voice as a lead-in, the Peacock’s new dating show Ready for Love seems fairly dead on arrival. Its two-hour series premiere was the lowest-rated program in both the 9 and 10 p.m. time slots last night, earning just 3.8 million viewers and a 1.6 rating among adults 18-49. (To be fair, the show did beat Smash‘s last-Tuesday episode, which garnered 3.0 million viewers and a .9 demo rating.)
This makes Ready for Love the latest example of a truth that broadcast networks — especially NBC — may be reluctant to admit: Copying The Voice‘s format just doesn’t seem to work.  ABC tried with the little-watched Duets, which nicked its predecessor’s “mentors” gimmick, and The Taste, which built a show around a series of blind taste-tests; Fox gave it a whirl with the little-loved dating series The Choice; NBC itself first tried to cannibalize its biggest ratings success with Fashion Star, a competition now relegated to Fridays. It’s not enough to simply feature a panel of expert mentors (Ready for Love enlists a team of three professional matchmakers) and a judging process that’s at least partially blind (male contestants initially choose women without getting to see them): Those experts have to have chemistry, and those contestants have to be captivating enough to hold our interest even after the metaphorical chairs turn around.
Ready for Love, though, is more than just an unholy mashup of The Bachelor and The Voice. The fingerprints of several successful franchises can be seen smudging its surface: The shiny, shiny set and presence of a live audience recall game shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Deal or No Deal. Contestants get interrogated by their “mentors” while sitting together onstage like a group of reunited Real Housewives. Tough-talking matchmaker Tracy McMillan, while entertaining, may as well have been assembled from stray bits of Simon Cowell and Jillian Michaels’ DNA.
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So despite producer Eva Longoria’s claims that Ready for Love is a revolutionary program that will forever change the way women are humiliated on television — or something — its “innovations” are just recycled parts. And while those parts — the mentors, the live audience, the great glass elevators that transport contestants from the stage to a mysterious subterranean area called “the garden” — may help to differentiate Ready for Love from The Bachelor and other dating shows, they’re also precisely what prevents the show from connecting with audiences.
After all, The Bachelor has a format that can be explained in a sentence… and though its track record as a matchmaking service is iffy, to say the least, it’s stuck around for a staggering 17 seasons and shows no signs of slowing down. Ready for Love, on the other hand, employs a bunch of bells and whistles that make the show much more complicated than it needs to be — and end up seeming beside the point once you realize that neither the bachelors (the guy from Plain White T’s? Seriously) nor the contestants are all that compelling. Though I was happy to learn from it that as a woman, I shouldn’t bother speaking on a date unless it’s to say something “sexy, or sensual, or from [my] heart.


News Source : popwatch.ew.com

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Madonna to Sell Painting ‘Three Women at the Red Table’ to Support Girls Education

Madonna to Sell Painting ‘Three Women at the Red Table’ to Support Girls Education

 

A pop diva helps us kick off our Geo Quiz.
Madonna to Sell Painting ‘Three Women at the Red Table’ to Support Girls Educationto Sell Painting ‘Three Women at the Red Table’ to Support Girls Education has just announced plans to auction off a masterpiece painting she owns.

She says she’s doing it to raise money to support girls’ education in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

The cubist painting is called “Three Women at the Red Table.”

The cubist work is by French abstract painter Fernand Léger.

And when he painted it — back in 1921 — Léger was living in a Paris neighborhood on the left bank of the Seine.

Can you name it?

It’s where many Americans flocked after World War I, to be part of the artistic scene there.

And its name comes from a mountain where — according to Greek mythology — the nine Greek goddesses known as the “Muses” lived.

The Parisian neighborhood on the left bank of the Seine where Léger lived during the 1920's is Montparnasse.

The World’s Adeline Sire shares a couple of her father’s memories of the French abstract painter Fernand Léger and the other art world luminaries who used to hang out in Montparnasse.

“Fernand Leger means a lot to me, because my father who is an artist, studied with him right after World War II, in the late 1940s in Paris. In fact, my father met Léger for the first time at his studio in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris. Leger had lived there since about 1909 and Montparnasse was in those days home to many great artists like Chagall, Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris, and others.

At the time, abstraction was the thing in art, and Léger was a foremost abstract painter. Now this 1921 painting “Three Women a the Red Table,” my father says it’s interesting because it sort of marks the end of geometric abstraction, when human figures begin to reappear. And you can distinguish female bodies around a table in that painting.

My dad saw his revered teacher Fernand Léger for the last time in the early 50s, not long before Léger died. When my father told him that he had stuck with painting, Léger said to him “Well I hope it’s not abstract painting. Because we invented abstraction and it’s dead.”

As for Montparnasse, it’s still alive, the iconic restaurant La Coupole still stands, many artists spent time there, painters but also writers such as Hemingway, Henri Miller, Anais Nin. It was really the artist and writers’ hangout for many years. But don’t look for a nice loft or artist’s studio there because it’s not Bohemian territory anymore and those private cobblestone alleys covered with ivy only go to high bidders these days. In fact the kind that may be bidding for “Three Women at the Red Table” when it comes up for auction.


News Source : www.theworld.org

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