8B = THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
THURSDAY, DEC. 13, 2001
ENTERTAINMENT
'90s band leaves out bubble gum
By Mandalee Meisner Jayplay writer
The problem with boy bands is that they always grow up.
Bryan Abrams of Color Me Badd,
however, doesn't think that's neces-
sarily a negative thing.
"Our music's definitely changed," he said in an interview from Oklahoma City, where all of the original Color Me Badd members are from. "It's a lot more live, and not as bubble gum."
With more emphasis on guitar and bass — and with a DJ added to the crew—Abrams said the band is "definitely moving in the direction of Usher, R. Kelley and Ginuwine," although Color Me Badd still performs its pop hits from the early '90s.
Abrams said that when the band sings and dances tomorrow at Abe and Jake's Landing, 8 E. Sixth St., people are guaranteed to be "shocked" at the new material — although hopefully pleasantly so.
"This will be one of the first shows we've done in a while, and we're really excited about trying out our new stuff." Abrams said.
The show starts at 10:30 tomorrow night.
Color Me Badd exploded onto the pop scene in 1991 after its hit single, "I Wanna Sex You Up," was featured on the soundtrack of the movie New Jack City.
The R&B pop quartet consisting of Abrams, Mark Calderon, Sam Watters and Kevin Thornton continued to pump out hit songs such as "All 4 Love" and "I Adore Mi Amor" into the mid '90s.
The group released Now and Forever in 1996 and Awakening in 1998, and both proved to be commercial failures.
Watters and Thornton both left the band to pursue other interests.
Now, the group's sound is evolving becoming more instrument driven and with the addition of new band members such as Ernie Calderon, brother of Mark Calderon, Abrams hopes to finalize a deal with a major record label by the end of this year.
"By this time next year, we'll have a record out," he said.
Abrams compares the evolution of the band's musical sensibilities with rap trio the Beastie Boys.
"They started out just rapping behind somebody else's beat, but then ended up making their own music," he said. "We're doing the same thing now — we're doing our own stuff."
Contact Meisner at 864-4810
Arts help inform about, escape tragedy
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — The poems are tapeed to church gates just outside ground zero. They are calling out to remind us, like a pleading chorus. "We must remember/so we can change" reads one couplet, typed out on plain white paper.
But at a nearby music store on a recent morning, Ian Joseph checks out a Julio Iglesias CD and tries to forget.
"Before Sept. 11, I liked hard-core music: reggae, R&B," says Joseph, 34, a technician who works at the rubble of what was once the World Trade Center. "But lately, I've been listening to slower music, classical musical. I want to relax."
In 2001, the arts proved a home for people both to confront the news and to escape.
Television especially reflected the split between learning and avoiding. Ratings were up for Nightline and other news shows since Sept. 11, but viewers also favored the fare they've spent years watching, like Friends and ER.
"There's evidence that people are watching TV together as a family, instead of going to their separate rooms," said David Poltrack, chief researcher for CBS.
Theater attendance slowed, dipping slightly from last year, but some shows continued to do well. Prime seats to The Producers, Broadway's hottest show, sold for as high as $480 as the musical's backers attempted to chase off scalpers.
But there was room, too, for
current events. The most anticipated play by year's end was Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, an off-Broadway production about Afghanistan written well before Sept. 11.
"Meaning can be extracted from even the worst calamities," said Kushner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Angels in America.
Publishing was the most turned-upside-down industry, as readers sought to learn about once-obscure subjects such as the Taliban and anthrax. Many titles were published by small companies such as Rutgers University Press, which found itself with a sudden best seller, Twin Towers, and then struggled to keep up with demand.
Mainstream publishers suf
fered the slowest fall in recent memory. Adults seemed uninterested in big commercial novels, with new fiction from such authors as Anne Rice and Stephen King selling well below expectations.
In music, the latest Creed and Britney Spears records coexisted on the charts with God Bless America, an album featuring Celine Dion's popular rendition of the song.
Americans also turned to soothing music such as A Day Without Rain, a year-old album by New Age singer Enya. The album quickly climbed the charts based on renewed interest in her single "Only Time."
The movie industry sought a balance between the real and the unreal. The fantasies Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
and The Lord of the Rings beginning trilogy were major holiday releases, but at the same time, 20th Century Fox accelerated the opening of Behind Enemy Lines, about a jet pilot stranded in hostile territory. Sony Pictures moved up the release of Black Hawk Down, about a 1993 battle between U.S. soldiers and Somali warlords that left 18 Americans dead.
Hollywood initially avoided any close reminders of Sept. 11, postponing Arnold Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage, a terrorist thriller that had been scheduled to come out in the fall.
But enough time has apparently passed, so Warner Bros. now plans to release the film Feb.8.
Questions raised about reporters carrying guns
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — From his perch near Tora Bora, Afghanistan, Fox News Channel correspondent Geraldo Rivera seemed more agitated by a question about carrying a gun than by the mortar rounds that just exploded nearby.
"I refuse to address that issue," said Rivera, speaking into a satellite phone. "It's been blown way out of proportion. It makes me sound like a tabloid talk show host goes to war. It's so unfair."
Yet Rivera's decision to bring a gun into a war zone where eight journalists have been
killed has raised questions about whether it's a proper—or wise — thing for a reporter to do.
Many reporters say that carrying a gun is risky because soldiers would be less likely to believe a claim that someone is a journalist, making him or her a potential target.
"If the word gets out that a journalist is carrying a gun, it makes it difficult for everyone," said Peter Arnett, a former war correspondent for The Associated Press and CNN.
Rivera, speaking on Fox News Channel last week, said that "if they're going to get us,
it's going to be in a gunfight." But when asked specifically by an anchor whether he had a gun, he was reluctant to talk about it, finally nodding yes.
He's traveling with two guards who have five guns between them, Fox spokesman Robert Zimmerman said. Rivera isn't necessarily carrying agun in most situations, but has one readily available, he said.
"There are eight journalists already dead," he said. "I almost got killed last Thursday and, believe me, it wasn't because of a story in the New York Post that I was carrying a gun. This is a very dangerous
place.
"That makes me feel ill, that suddenly it's become an issue that I'm putting journalists at risk," he said. "That's complete bull."
NBC forbids its correspondents from carrying firearms. ABC won't discuss its security arrangements. CBS and CNN said none of their personnel carries weapons, but it isn't a formal policy.
Even if the journalists themselves are not armed, many news organizations — including The Associated Press — have hired armed guards for their personnel in particularly
dangerous areas of Afghanistan. Expensive news equipment is considered tempting to thieves.
Rivera and Fox News Channel have both been outspoken in support of the U.S. wareffort.
Rivera, who left his CNBC talk show because he wanted to cover the war, has talked about killing Osama bin Laden if he had the opportunity.
"I haven't had a shower in two weeks and I have to defend whether I'm carrying a six-shooter?" he said. "It's just ridiculous."
He's less willing to talk about his own personal security.
Caroline Kennedy publishes mother's poems
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK — Forget that big museum show about her clothes. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassi's real legacy was words.
"She really did believe in the power of words," Kennedy told 120 listeners, many of them junior high and high school students, at the Countee Cullen
So said Onassis' daughter, Caroline Kennedy, during a reading yesterday from her new book, The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Regional Library in Harlem.
Although Onassis worked as an editor at Viking Press and later at Doubleday, Kennedy said most people think of her mother primarily as a style icon.
"When many people think of her, they think of her style and her image," she said. "But those are just the starting point for me. So I really wanted to share with people, now that she's become a part of history, some of the things that I know were what really made her special."
The book, published by
Hyperion, is a selection of Onassis' favorite poems, edited and introduced by her daughter.
Kennedy read some of them yesterday, including part of Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright," which the poet read at her father's inauguration. It begins, "The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years before we were her people."
She also read from Langston Hughes “Let America Be
America," in which Hughes rails against injustice and declares, "O. yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath — America will be!"
Kennedy said Countee Cullen, the Harlem Renaissance poet for whom the library branch is named, had been among her mother's favorites, and she read two of his poems.
She said her grandmother, Rose Kennedy, was the most patriotic person she ever knew and loved Henry Longfellow's
"Paul Revere's Ride."
"When I was a child she was so old that I thought maybe she had even seen Paul Revere," Kennedy said.
Kennedy said poetry was an important part of her family's life when she was growing up.
"For each holiday or birthday John and I would have to pick out a poem that we liked for my mother," she said. "She pasted them all into a special scrapbook which I still have and which my own children like looking at now."
Weekly Specials
Tear this out and pin it up all week so you'll never miss a special!
$2.50 16oz. dom. bottles
ASTROS
CADILLAC RANCH
Coco Loco
$1 big beers &
$1double wells
$2.25 Dos Equis pints
EMERSON BIGGINS
$3 premium draft,
$3.50 frozen Margaritas
$2 domestic bottles
$.75 draws, $1.50 dom liters,
$2.25 almost anything,
$3.75 pitchers
$2.50 16oz. dom. bottles
HARBOUR LIGHTS
$2 Wells
$1.50 u-call-it, DJ & dancing,
2 for 1 margaritas
$2.50 pitchers, $2 wells,
retro night $1 anything
2 for 1 Margaritas Great Specials
World Class Dance Party World Class Dance Party
$3 Biggin's size Labatts draws
$1.50 Miller High Life bottles,
$3.00 22oz. Rolling Rocks
$2.00 Boulevards
$3.00 Coronas
$1.50 big beers,
$2.00 wells
$3.00 Biggin's size Shiner Bock
$4.75 Biggin's size margaritas on the rocks
$1 Busch & Miller HI Life canes, $1.50
$1.50 dollars, live music
$1.75 premier draws
JACK FLANIGANS
JAYHAWK CAFE
JET LAG LOUNGE
$2.00 Rolling Rock longnecks
OLD CHICAGO
RAOUL'S VELVET ROOM
$5 pitchers, choose winning team = free dinner buffet
$2.00 well drinks
$1.50 Bud/Bud LT. pints
$2.75 Long Island Ice Tea, free pool
$2.50 imports
$3 Biggin's size Bud Lt.
$2 Mexican Beers
SET EM UP JACK'S
$1 anything
No Cover for Ladies
1. 75 dom. bottles, $3.25 micro beer liters, $3.75 premium liters
$2.99 big beers
$1.50 Bud / Lt bottles,
$2.00 180 & Bacardi
$2.00 Bud & Bud Light pint draws
$1 Capt. Morgan, Retro $3 Stoll drinks Dance Night, $2.50 Big Beers 105.9 Lazer Dance Party $2 domestic bottles, $3 $2.00 pints, $1.00 refills, Captain/Jim Beam drinks $1.50 wells
$6.95 margarita pitchers
$2 Coronas, $.50 tacos
$1.50 big beers, $4.00 20oz
Long Island ice Teas
NASCARpart during $2.50 16oz Bud & Bud Lt race, $16 16oz buds Bud/Lt bottles
$1.50 import drafts
$2.50 20 oz. Coors Lt
$2.00 Boulevard draft pints
$2.50 20 oz. Miller Lt
2 for 1 on most drinks
$2.00 Red Bull & Vodka
Simplexity
$2 Smirnoff Ice / Twisters
Bobby Keys
$2.50 Jackaritas, $3.50 S.
Hurricanes/Dancing
$5 pitchers Bud & Bud Lt
$2.00 pints domestic and micros
Import night $2.00 import and micro beers
$2.00 house wine, balls,
domestic beers $3.00 Martinis /
Cosmopolitans
$2 Margaritas and Coronas,
$1.50 25 oz. big beers 2 for 1 burgers and $2.00
domestic big beers
Karaoke!
$3 premium bottles, $2 75 call
drinks, $4 double calls
$2 big beers
$.25 wings
$1 anything!
$2.00 Boulevard pints
JET LAG LOUNGE
$4 32oz Bud & Bud Lt,
$2.25 Rolling Rock and Captain Morgan drinks
$2.00 double calls,
$2.00 domestic bottles,
$.30 wings
Check out Kansan.com for more drink, food and entertainment specials with profiles of Lawrence's bars and restaurants.
1