Winehouse: kick drug habit or die

Amy Winehouse's father has said that the troubled singer will die if she does not stop taking drugs.
In an interview with the Sunday Mirror newspaper, Mitch Winehouse said his 24-year-old daughter had developed the incurable lung condition emphysema.
He told the newspaper: "The doctors have told her if she goes back to smoking drugs it won't just ruin her voice, it will kill her. The doctors have said that if she had continued the way she was going she could have ended up an invalid - she wouldn't have been able to breathe.
"She's got emphysema. It's in its early stages, but had it gone on for another month they painted a very vivid picture of her sitting there like an old person with a mask on her face struggling to breathe."
Winehouse added: "With smoking the crack cocaine and the cigarettes, her lungs are all gunked up. There are nodules around the chest and dark marks. She's got 70% lung capacity."
The singer was hospitalised last week after fainting at home and Winehouse said his daughter had vowed to kick her drug habit and had begun a rehabilitation programme.
He said: "If she doesn't go back to drugs, then she can lead this magnificent life. We are praying that that's what Amy really wants. She seems resolute."
Winehouse called on drug dealers to help his daughter's recovery by refusing to supply her with crack cocaine and said he didn't want her "hanging out with her mates like Pete Doherty either".
He said the star could still perform at this weekend's Glastonbury festival because work has helped keep her away from drugs in the past.
"If she hadn't done recent shows in Moscow and Portugal she could have been dead by now," he said. "She abstains and regulates her drug use when she has to do a show."

Australia to lure tourists with film epic

CANBERRA (Reuters) - An epic Australian outback movie starring Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman will spearhead a new tourism campaign designed to recapture the country's "mojo" and lure more visitors Down Under.


Titled "Australia" and directed by flamboyant home-grown director Baz Luhrmann, the A$130 million ($122 million) film follows an English aristocrat (Kidman) who inherits a sprawling property and falls in love with a rugged drover (Jackman).


With sweeping Outback scenery and set in northern Australia on the eve of World War Two, "Australia" will see Kidman and Jackman take 2,000 cattle overland and caught in the wartime bombing of Darwin by the Japanese.


"This movie will potentially be seen by tens of millions of people and it will bring to life little-known aspects of Australia's extraordinary natural environment, history, and indigenous culture," Tourism Minister Martin Ferguson said at the weekend.


Tourism Australia will kick off an international marketing campaign to coincide with the film's planned release in November, Ferguson said. The epic was tipped to bring the biggest boost to tourism since Crocodile Dundee in 1986.


Some cinema critics have predicted the film will be an amalgam of Australian cliches.


But tourism industry officials are hopeful the movie epic will kickstart the country's tourist arrivals which have stagnated since the 2006 Sydney Olympics.


The film, Luhrmann's first film since Moulin Rouge in 2001, has been shot on location in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia, the Northern Territory capital Darwin and the tropical city of Bowen.


Australia's government recently dumped the controversial A$180 million "Where the bloody hell are you?" tourism campaign featuring a bikini model, which was banned in Britain and Canada. 

Kid-friendly Marley cover stirring it up

'Three Little Birds' sung by Elizabeth Mitchell





PBS Kids Sprout, the digital cable channel aimed at children, this week began running a campaign featuring a cover of Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds."
The campaign includes three spots, print and outdoor and is meant to serve as a rallying cry akin to MTV's "I want my MTV" of years ago. PBS Kids Sprout, which launched in 2005 and is part owned by Comcast, is in 38 million homes.
The song is performed by Elizabeth Mitchell from her album "You Are My Little Bird."
This is not the first time the Marley family has been involved in commercial ventures aimed at children, said Ziggy Marley, one of Bob's children and head of the Marley estate.
"It's less about the regular marketing of things and more about the philosophy that kids have an open mind," he said. "From the marketing point of view, my father's music is kid friendly music.
Other Marley projects focused on children in the past have included books, and such films and TV shows as "Shark Tale" and "Dora the Explorer."

Pylon

   
Artist: Pylon

   Genre(s): 
Rock
   

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Discography:


   
 Gyrate Lp By Scompensato - If You Like The Au Pairs

   Year:    
Tracks: 11

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Despite failing to touch the commercial success or cross-cultural impact of their Athens, GA ,compatriots R.E.M. and the B-52's, Pylon's influence on the city's legendary music scene proved exactly as marked -- the group's propellent, angular jangle pop reasoned resonated non only if through and through the Athens originative community simply throughout the American pop tube of the eighties, and though more heard-of than actually heard, their office as elderberry bush statesmen of the alternative rock explosion is unassailable. Borrowing their name from the William Faulkner novel, Pylon was founded by guitar player Randy Bewley and bassist Michael Lachowski, University of Georgia artistry students divine by the likes of Television, the Ramones, and Talking Heads; the brace soon sublease pattern blank space in a studio loft rented by local creative person Curtis Crowe, wHO cursorily signed on to dally drums. After auditioning a series of vocalists, the band finally settled on cuss UGA pupil Vanessa Briscoe, whose typical yip style ideally complemented the music's notched guitars and warriorlike rhythms. The quartette made its live debut in March 1979; that summertime, the B-52's became the darlings of the New York scene thanks to their breakthrough hit "Rock Lobster," and their success paved the path for Pylon to make their own Big Apple debut, with Philadelphia and Boston appearances following ahead the school year resumed. Pylon's debut individual, "Cool," appeared on the dB label in early 1980, earning strong critical notices and rising as a major resistance dance strike; that summer, they issued their debut LP Spiral, too opening for the B-52's in New York's Central Park. Pylon toured on a regular basis ahead up to -- and in the wake of -- their soph movement, 1983's Bite, just dissatisfied with the finished LP, and as well demoralized by an stillborn circuit in support of U2, the band dissolved. In their absence, Athens emerged as the nexus of the American resistance thanks mostly to the snowballing success of R.E.M., wHO regularly cited Pylon as a major influence on their music; in fact, when in 1987 Rolling Stone named R.E.M. "America's Best Band," drummer Bill Berry argued the honour actually belonged to Pylon, even though the radical had disbanded four eld earlier. Their posthumous notoriety, in tandem with the impendent press release of dB's Hits compilation, convinced Pylon to reform in 1988; after opening for R.E.M. on their William Green enlistment, they too recorded a new album, nineties Chain. With Bewley's decision to leave the card, however, Pylon once again called its quits, playing their terminal show at Athens' notable 40 Watt Club on November 22, 1991.