JAZZ PIANIST, GEORGE KAHN HOLDS HOLIDAY FUNDRAISER
FOR PATH (PEOPLE ASSISTING THE HOMELESS)
NEW CATALINA BAR & GRILL, PERFORMANCE SET FOR TUESDAY EVENING, DECEMBER 20th, 2005


Photo: Jazz Pianist, George Kahn

George Kahn, returns to the new CATALINA BAR & GRILL with a holiday performance benefiting PATH: People Assisting The Homeless, Tuesday evening, DECEMBER 20TH, at 8:00 PM – 10 PM. George Kahn brings his “Make It Real Tour 2005” back to Hollywood, appearing with an all-star ensemble.  The dynamic Justo Almario, will perform on Saxophone; with session maven Karl Vincent on Bass, master trumpeter Ramon Flores and the fabulous M.B. Gordy on drums. Special Guest Vocalists, The Wright Combination will add their talents to this wonderful event. The Wright Combination has performed on stage and in studios with Liza Minelli, Vikki Carr, Patti LaBelle, Henry Mancini, Frank Sinatra, George Carlin, Carl Anderson, Dolly Parton and Telma Hopkins. “COMPARED TO WHAT”, George’s most recent CD release, hit #28 on the Jazz Charts, and is getting LOTS of airplay on local jazz station KKJZ as well as on radio stations across the country. The set will also include songs from George’s earlier releases “Midnight Brew”, “Freedom Vessel” and “Out of Time”. Come see for yourself why Alfredo Cruz calls George Kahn “…creative, entertaining, intelligent, sophisticated and stimulating.” The Catalina Bar and Grill is located at 6725 Sunset Blvd.  (just east of Highland Avenue - parking on N. McCadden Place). Dinner reservations suggested.  (323) 466-2210. There is a $15.00 cover, students with ID, $10.00.  Please bring a donation to give to PATH when you arrive.   Donations include NEW clothing, (including socks and underwear for men and women), blankets, toys, etc.  All profits will go directly to PATH  to help LA’s homeless.

 

Kate Moss is subject of four paintings by Stella Vine at London exhibit

Kate Moss is the subject of four paintings by Stella Vine now on show at a London exhibit, including one based on a tabloid photo that allegedly shows her preparing a line of cocaine. A portrait titled Must Be the Season of the Witch is based on a photo of the 31-year-old supermodel that was published in a London tabloid in September. Vine said Friday she usually bases her work on press photos. Moss entered the Meadows rehab clinic outside Phoenix, Ariz., after the photo was published. She left the clinic in late October and has resumed her modelling career. Two of Vine's other paintings of Moss are also portraits. One shows a wide-eyed Moss holding a champagne glass. Another, titled Holy Water Cannot Help You Now, shows her holding a cigarette in her hand as paint drips from her face. The fourth shows Moss waving from a window in the Priory clinic where she was treated for alcohol and drug problems in 1998. It also features her boyfriend Pete Doherty, ex-boyfriend Johnny Depp and other celebrities. Vine said she became interested in painting Moss because of the spirit she saw in her eyes. "She's like Mona Lisa; she may not be the most beautiful woman in the world, but something comes through her eyes. ... There's a bravery in Kate's eyes," the 36-year-old British artist said. Vine gained attention last year with her painting of Diana, Princess of Wales, with blood dripping from her mouth. It was sold to Charles Saatchi, one of Britain's most influential collectors of modern art. The paintings of Moss are on display until Jan. 1 at Hiscox Art Projects, an exhibition space located in the office of a fine art insurer in East London.

Shania talks about everything but perfume

For a girl who had to cook for herself at the age of five and sang with aspirations of one day being a backup singer for Stevie Wonder, being awarded the Order of Canada was not even part of Shania Twain's wildest dreams. "Yeah, (the honor) is overwhelming and I don't even believe it," Twain said, letting out a loud guffaw Thursday towards the end of a daylong media blitz in Toronto. "So, I'm pretty excited." Twain was in town to promote her new fragrance, Shania by Stetson. But when a reporter has less than 10 minutes with one of Canada's biggest stars, questions must be chosen carefully and quickly. Fragrance didn't make the cut. "We ran out of time, I don't know what happened, but I gotta catch a plane," she said, apologizing for ending an interview to get to the airport. She was flying to Ottawa where she'll receive the Order of Canada today alongside others who have made a difference to the country, including former B.C. premier David Barrett and athlete Catriona Le May Doan. Despite her international success as a country singer, pop star and spokesmodel for Revlon, Twain has not forgotten her less-than-humble beginnings. While she admits to having had a rough childhood in Timmins, Ont., where she basically raised herself, she won't get specific other than admitting sometimes going to bed with an empty stomach. "Hunger is one I can share comfortably . . . there are a whole host of problems that come with poverty," said Twain. Like almost any mom, she wants to protect her four-year-old son from just about everything bad. But she absolutely never wants her son to go through what she knew too well: wondering where the next meal is coming from. "I don't have any regrets," she said of her childhood, adding that a lot of times she simply couldn't depend on her parents -- not because they didn't want to be there, they just weren't always able to be there.

ODDITIES OF THE WEEK

$65.4-million US Powerball winner found dead in Kentucky home

NEWPORT, Kentucky-- A Kentucky woman who won a $65.4-million US Powerball jackpot with her husband five years ago was found dead at her home overlooking the Ohio River, where she had apparently been for days before anyone found her, police said. Virginia Metcalf Merida's son discovered her body Wednesday. Police were awaiting autopsy and toxicology results before announcing a cause of death. When the woman and her husband, Mack Wayne Metcalf, won the jackpot, they told lottery officials they were going their separate ways to fulfill their dreams. Merida planned to quit her job making corrugated boxes and buy a home. Metcalf, a forklift operator, wanted to start fresh in Australia. He never did. Metcalf died in 2003 at age 45 while living in a replica of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate built in Corbin, Ky. His death followed multiple run-ins with the law, including a child-support dispute from a previous marriage and a drunken driving charge filed before he hit the jackpot. Neighbors said Merida stayed out of public view until last December, when a body was found in her 465-square-metre, custom-built geodesic dome house. Campbell County deputy coroner Al Garnick confirmed the man died of a drug overdose. Official records of the case were unavailable because of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Merida used part of her winnings to buy a second home but when she tried to evict the resident, the renter sued. A hearing was scheduled Wednesday. Carol Terrell Lawson, who is still renting the home, said she never met Merida in person and only learned of the death after reporters began calling her.

Norwegian falls asleep on airline flight and ends up landing at starting point

OSLO, Norway  - It's not uncommon for airline passengers to doze off during their flight. But for 21-year-old Tor Martin Johansen, the snooze lasted through an entire round trip. Johansen fell asleep on a short flight from central Norway city of Trondheim via Roervik to his hometown of Namsos on Thursday. When he woke up, he was back in Trondheim. "I was really taken aback when I heard the cabin attendant say 'welcome to Trondheim' when I opened my eyes and thought I had arrived in Namsos," he was quoted as saying in Friday's edition of the Oslo newspaper Verdens Gang. When the commuter plane landed in Namsos, no one noticed the sleeping passenger, or reacted to the extra person on board compared to the passenger count. So the plane returned to Trondheim with Johansen still on board. "It is completely correct, unfortunately. It has never happened before," Richard Kongsteien, spokesman for the Wideroe airline, said by telephone. "Seen on its own, it's an amusing incident, but it is also a very serious matter." He said that the plane was on a commuter route with several stops and so was never emptied. However, he said ground personnel violated security regulations by failing to notice a mismatch between the passenger list, with 33 people, and the count of 34 people on board. "This will not happen again," he vowed. "Our passengers can rest assured that they can sleep soundly on our flights and be woken up at their destination." The airline gave Johansen a free ticket to his original destination.

Peanut-allergic Canadian teen dies after kissing her boyfriend

A Chicoutimi, Que., high school is in mourning after a 15-year-old girl with a food allergy died suddenly after kissing her boyfriend who had eaten peanut butter. Christina Desforges died earlier this week, after receiving the kiss during the weekend. A shot of adrenaline failed to revive her. She died in hospital Wednesday. "It's a very sad event. (Classmates) are feeling emotional and we had them meet with a psychologist," said school official Michel Cloutier. Health Canada estimates 600,000 Canadians have potentially deadly allergies. Approximately one to two per cent of Canadians -- perhaps eight per cent of children -- are allergic to peanuts and/or tree nuts. Nuts, milk, eggs and shellfish top the list, but peanut is the main cause of fatal food allergy reactions (anaphylaxis), said Ernest Seidman, immunology and food allergies researcher at Ste. Justine Hospital in Montreal. When someone comes in contact with an allergen, the symptoms of a reaction may develop quickly and rapidly progress from mild to severe to fatal, according to Health Canada. The most dangerous symptoms include breathing difficulties, a drop in blood pressure or shock, which may result in loss of consciousness and even death. Severe allergic reactions can occur quickly and without warning. Even trace amounts can be fatal, which is why food labelling is so crucial and why most schools have banned peanuts, Seidman said. People with a nut allergy can have an immediate anaphylactic reaction if they kiss someone who has recently eaten the offending substance, he added. Antibodies to the allergen provoke facial swelling, respiratory distress, bronchial spasms, a drop in blood pressure and hives. Just smelling "peanut vapours" in a poorly ventilated area can send someone into an asthma crisis, Seidman said. About 100 people in the United States die of food allergies every year, most from exposure to nuts. Canadian statistics are not available. "We presume that 10 people die of food allergies on a yearly basis in Canada," said Seidman. An autopsy is expected to reveal Desforges's cause of death .- By C. Feldman.

GLORIA LORING: HER LIFE, BOOKS, MUSIC AND STARDOM.

READ THE ARTICLE AND EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

She did it all with class, beauty, intelligence, style, talent, unique creativity, guts  and warmth. And she excelled in everything she accomplished. Grande Dame Loring is a published author, a national speaker, a world-class actress, an international celebrity, a star of the American cinema and television, a leading figure of the American theater and concert halls, a singer, a composer, a lyricist, a songwriter, a producer,  a certified yoga teacher, a member of Who's Who in America and The World Who's Who of Women and a  humanitarian.  This woman is almost 99.99% perfect. This is the kind of people who create and shape the greatness of a nation. This is the vintage of noble souls, warm hearts  and bright minds who  make the sun rise and  shine over the hills, the prairies and the faces of people we love...And this is the kind of human beings who  at every dawn, make the wild roses bloom in the valley and on the landscape of the human psyche.

 

 

 

IN MEMORIAM

Remembering John P. Davis: The Forgotten Civil-Rights Leader

“The older I grow, the more certain I become that Candide was wrong: Ours is not best of all possible worlds.” -John P. Davis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo: The late John P. Davis.

Civil-rights leaders, even those renowned in their lifetimes, are destined; it seems, to be forgotten by fickle publics. So it has proved with John P. Davis a Harvard-trained lawyer and activist intellectual. John P. Davis along with A. Philip Randolph was quite clearly the most important black leader and civil-rights leader in the thirties and the forties.  Despite the upsurge in Black Studies in the sixties, seventies and into eighties, there seems to be a tremendous gap between the era of Booker T. Washington, W.E. Dubois and the Harlem Renaissance and the 1954 Brown versus the Board of Education decision and Martin Luther King.  Well what happened during that gap was - John P. Davis and the National Negro Congress. On a whim, Davis attended President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first National Recovery Administration hearing and noticed, in disbelief, that no one represented the interests of African-Americans. He contacted his friend Robert C. Weaver, another Harvard University graduates, and formed the two-man Joint Committee on National Recovery in 1933, challenging Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.  The two were determined to become the first full-time lobbyists for civil-rights in American history. They traveled the back roads of the deep and dangerous - for a black man - south investigating lynchings, voting rights violations of black Americans, and the squalid working conditions of black agricultural, textile and factory workers.

They generated national front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post, when testifying before Congressional hearings that price supports are ruining black farmers and that the pending Social Security Act does not cover millions of black and white domestic and farm workers. Davis and Weaver also charged the Roosevelt Administration with refusing to forcibly back anti-lynching, anti-poll tax legislation and laws assuring black factory workers will be paid the same wages as white workers for the same or similar work.  “Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act - NRA- stands for Negroes Robbed Again,” Davis testified. The Roosevelt Administration offered them both high-level, high-paying government jobs. They refused the offers, continuing their civil-rights work. In 1935 John P. Davis, of the Joint Committee on National Recovery, called upon African-American organizations to unite forces and to work for the solutions of basic problems facing the Negro. The National Negro Congress (NNC) was the idea of Davis and his preocupative interest of the Negro problem was set forth in the pamphlet "Let Us Build a National Negro Congress." On February 14-16, 1936 in Chicago, 817 delegates representing 585 organizations and 5,000 observers responded affirmatively to Davis’ call: "Let Us Build a National Negro Congress." A diverse group, whose sponsors included Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph J. Bunche , and  philosopher Alain Locke of Howard University, A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, James Ford of the Communist Party, Lester Granger and Elmer Carter of the Urban League, Charles Houston of the NAACP and poet-activist Langston Hughes signed the National Negro Congress's call.

Davis lost Randolph as president and was at odds with the communist party.  He was very unhappy in 1942 and decided to leave the NNC at the beginning of 1943.  The NNC continued for another four years as a communist front organization without Davis and his connections.  When people read the history of the NNC, the read the way in which it ended. By the time it goes out of existence, the NNC is on the Attorney General’s list for subversive organizations.  Historians look back on the NNC as just another communist front organization. This may have been the case from 1943 to 1947, and may have been true for some of the NNC’s local councils from 1941 to 1947. However, the NNC was the most radical democratic civil-rights organization black America had seen in this century. As a result of cold-war scholarship and anti-communist scholarship in the fifties and the sixties, history was written such that the NNC was dismissed and as a result John P. Davis’ legacy was dismissed. Historian, Hilmar Jensen notes, there could not have been a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a Robert Moses or a Martin Luther King organizing in the south if there had not been a John P. Davis training a whole generation of young people in the NNC and its youth arm, the Southern Negro Youth Council in the 1930’s and the 1940’s. 

A lot of those young people became activist in the 1950’s and the 1960’s and marched with Martin Luther King and organized in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Many went to Washington, D.C and lobbied in the great tradition of John P. Davis.  Although they may not have known his name, his spirit is very much apart of what the civil-rights movement accomplished. John P. Davis’ career was marked by breadth of vision. He fought for African-American rights, seeing them as universal human rights. He firmly believed that what he did for his race served America, and that his service to America was good for his race. Recalling his dangerous trip to the Republican front lines during the Spanish Civil War, he affirmed his solidarity with the struggle for democracy everywhere, and at the same time, implicitly warned that democracy’s triumph is never inevitable. He was always proudly an American who dreamed the American dream of democracy. “The older I grow”, he concluded, “the more certain I become that Candide was wrong: Ours is not best of all possible worlds.”