I Hate Long Good-byes
Jul 31, 2011
Jul 24, 2011
Police: Singer Amy Winehouse Dies At Age 27
Amy Winehouse, the beehived soul-jazz diva whose self-destructive habits overshadowed a distinctive musical talent, was found dead Saturday in her London home, police said. She was 27.
Winehouse shot to fame in 2006 with the album "Back to Black," whose blend of jazz, soul, rock and classic pop was a global hit. It won five Grammys and made Winehouse - with her black beehive hairdoand old-fashioned sailor tattoos - one of music's most recognizable stars. But her personal life, with its drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders and destructive relationships, soon took over her career.
Police confirmed that a 27-year-old female was pronounced dead at the home in Camden Square northern London; the cause of death was not immediately known. London Ambulance Services said Winehouse had died before the two ambulance crews it sent arrived at the scene.
Singer and actress Kelly Osbourne, who helped Winehouse check into a drug addiction treatment facility in 2008, was one of many who grieved for the singer on Twitter.
"I cant even breath right now im crying so hard i just lost 1 of my best friends. i love you forever Amy and will never forget the real you!" she tweeted.
The singer's father, Mitch Winehouse, had arrived in New York this weekend to prepare for his U.S. performing debut Monday night at the Blue Note jazz club, but upon receiving news of his daughter's death was heading back home to London to be with his family, his publicist Don Lucoff said.
An ambulance could be seen parked beneath the trees outside her London home, and the whole street was cordoned off by police tape. Officers kept onlookers away from the scene.
Last month, Winehouse canceled her European comeback tour after she swayed and slurred her way through barely recognizable songs in her first show in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. Booed and jeered off stage, she flew home and her management said she would take time off to recover.
Winehouse was last publicly seen on at a London concert on Wednesday when she joined hergoddaughter Dionne Bromfield on stage. In that impromptu appearance, Winehouse danced with Bromfield and encouraged the audience to buy her album, before leaving the stage.
"I didn't go out looking to be famous," Winehouse told the Associated Press when "Back to Black" was released. "I'm just a musician."
But in the end, the music was overshadowed by fame, and by Winehouse's demons. Tabloids lapped up the erratic stage appearances, drunken fights, stints in hospital and rehab clinics. Performances became shambling, stumbling train wrecks, watched around the world on the Internet.
Born in 1983 to Mitch Winehouse, taxi driver, and his pharmacist wife Janis, Winehouse grew up in the north London suburbs, and was set on a showbiz career from an early age. When she was 10, she and a friend formed a rap group, Sweet 'n' Sour - Winehouse was Sour - that she later described as "the little white Jewish Salt 'n' Pepa."
She attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School, a factory for British music and acting moppets, later went to the Brit School, a performing arts academy in the "Fame" mold, and was originally signed to "Pop Idol" svengali Simon Fuller's 19 Management.
But Winehouse was never a packaged teen star, and always resisted being pigeonholed.
Her jazz-influenced 2003 debut album, "Frank," was critically praised and sold well in Britain. It earned Winehouse an Ivor Novello songwriting award, two Brit nominations and a spot on the shortlist for the Mercury Music Prize.
But Winehouse soon expressed dissatisfaction with the disc, saying she was "only 80 percent behind" the album.
"Frank" was followed by a slump during which Winehouse broke up with her boyfriend, suffered a long period of writer's block and, she later said, smoked a lot of marijuana.
"I had writer's block for so long," she said in 2007. "And as a writer, your self-worth is literally based on the last thing you wrote. .. I used to think, 'What happened to me?'
"At one point it had been two years since the last record and (the record company) actually said to me, 'Do you even want to make another record?' I was like, 'I swear it's coming.' I said to them, 'Once I start writing I will write and write and write. But I just have to start it.'"
The album she eventually produced was a sensation.
Released in Britain in the fall of 2006, "Back to Black" brought Winehouse global fame. Working with producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi and soul-funk group the Dap-Kings, Winehouse fused soul, jazz, doo-wop and, above all, a love of the girl-groups of the early 1960s with lyrical tales of romantic obsession and emotional excess.
"Back to Black" was released in the United States in March 2007 and went on to win five Grammy awards, including song and record of the year for "Rehab."
Music critic John Aizlewood attributed her trans-Atlantic success to a fantastic voice and a genuinely original sound.
"A lot of British bands fail in America because they give America something Americans do better - that's why most British hip-hop has failed," he said. "But they won't have come across anything quite like Amy Winehouse."
Winehouse's rise was helped by her distinctive look - black beehive of hair, thickly lined cat eyes, girly tattoos - and her tart tongue.
She was famously blunt in her assessment of her peers, once describing Dido's sound as "background music - the background to death" and saying of pop princess Kylie Minogue, "she's not an artist ... she's a pony."
The songs on "Black to Black" detailed breakups and breakdowns with a similar frankness. Lyrically, as in life, Winehouse wore her heart on her sleeve.
"I listen to a lot of '60s music, but society is different now," Winehouse said in 2007. "I'm a young woman and I'm going to write about what I know."
Even then, Winehouse's performances were sometimes shambolic, and she admitted she is "a terrible drunk." She acknowledged struggling with eating disorders and told a newspaper that she had been diagnosed as manic depressive but refused to take medication. Soon accounts of her erratic behavior, canceled concerts and drink- and drug-fueled nights began to multiply.
Photographs caught her unsteady on her feet or vacant-eyed, and she appeared unhealthily thin, with scabs on her face and marks on her arms.
There were embarrassing videos released to the world on the Internet. One showed an addled Winehouse and Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty playing with newborn mice. Another, for which Winehouse apologized, showed her singing a racist ditty to the tune of a children's song.
Winehouse's managers went to increasingly desperate lengths to keep the wayward star on the straight and narrow. Before the June concert in Belgrade, her hotel was stripped of booze. It did no good, and the concert was painful to watch.
Though she was often reported to be working on new material, fans got tired of waiting for the much-promised followup to "Back to Black."
Occasional bits of recording saw the light of day. Her rendition of The Zutons' "Valerie" was a highlight of producer Mark Ronson's 2007 album "Version," and she recorded the pop classic "It's My Party" for the 2010 Quincy Jones album "Q: Soul Bossa Nostra."
But other recording projects with Ronson, one of the architects of the success of "Back to Black," came to nothing.
She also had run-ins with the law. In April 2008, Winehouse was cautioned by police for assault after she slapped a man during a raucous night out.
The same year she was investigated by police, although not charged, after a tabloid newspaper published a video that appeared to show her smoking crack cocaine.
In 2010, Winehouse pleaded guilty to assaulting a theater manager who asked her to leave a family Christmas show because she'd had too much to drink. She was given a fine and a warning to stay out of trouble by a judge who praised her for trying to clean up her act.
In May 2007 in Miami, she married music industry hanger-on Blake Fielder-Civil, but the honeymoon was brief. That November, Fielder-Civil was arrested for an attack on a pub manager the year before. Fielder-Civil later pleaded guilty to assaulting barman James King and then offering him 200,000 pounds (US$400,000) to keep quiet about it.
Winehouse stood by "my Blake" throughout his trial, often blowing kisses at him from the court's public gallery and wearing a heart-shaped pin labeled "Blake" in her hair at concerts. But British newspapers reported extramarital affairs while Fielder-Civil was behind bars.
They divorced in 2009.
Winehouse's health often appeared fragile. In June 2008 and again in April 2010, she was taken to hospital and treated for injuries after fainting and falling at home.
Her father said she had developed the lung disease emphysema from smoking cigarettes and crack, although her spokeswoman later said Winehouse only had "early signs of what could lead to emphysema."
She left the hospital to perform at Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday concert in Hyde Park in June 2008, and at the Glastonbury festival the next day, where she received a rousing reception but scuffled with a member of the crowd. Then it was back to a London clinic for treatment, continuing the cycle of music, excess and recuperation that marked her career. –Yahoo Music
Winehouse shot to fame in 2006 with the album "Back to Black," whose blend of jazz, soul, rock and classic pop was a global hit. It won five Grammys and made Winehouse - with her black beehive hairdoand old-fashioned sailor tattoos - one of music's most recognizable stars. But her personal life, with its drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders and destructive relationships, soon took over her career.
Police confirmed that a 27-year-old female was pronounced dead at the home in Camden Square northern London; the cause of death was not immediately known. London Ambulance Services said Winehouse had died before the two ambulance crews it sent arrived at the scene.
Singer and actress Kelly Osbourne, who helped Winehouse check into a drug addiction treatment facility in 2008, was one of many who grieved for the singer on Twitter.
"I cant even breath right now im crying so hard i just lost 1 of my best friends. i love you forever Amy and will never forget the real you!" she tweeted.
The singer's father, Mitch Winehouse, had arrived in New York this weekend to prepare for his U.S. performing debut Monday night at the Blue Note jazz club, but upon receiving news of his daughter's death was heading back home to London to be with his family, his publicist Don Lucoff said.
An ambulance could be seen parked beneath the trees outside her London home, and the whole street was cordoned off by police tape. Officers kept onlookers away from the scene.
Last month, Winehouse canceled her European comeback tour after she swayed and slurred her way through barely recognizable songs in her first show in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. Booed and jeered off stage, she flew home and her management said she would take time off to recover.
Winehouse was last publicly seen on at a London concert on Wednesday when she joined hergoddaughter Dionne Bromfield on stage. In that impromptu appearance, Winehouse danced with Bromfield and encouraged the audience to buy her album, before leaving the stage.
"I didn't go out looking to be famous," Winehouse told the Associated Press when "Back to Black" was released. "I'm just a musician."
But in the end, the music was overshadowed by fame, and by Winehouse's demons. Tabloids lapped up the erratic stage appearances, drunken fights, stints in hospital and rehab clinics. Performances became shambling, stumbling train wrecks, watched around the world on the Internet.
Born in 1983 to Mitch Winehouse, taxi driver, and his pharmacist wife Janis, Winehouse grew up in the north London suburbs, and was set on a showbiz career from an early age. When she was 10, she and a friend formed a rap group, Sweet 'n' Sour - Winehouse was Sour - that she later described as "the little white Jewish Salt 'n' Pepa."
She attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School, a factory for British music and acting moppets, later went to the Brit School, a performing arts academy in the "Fame" mold, and was originally signed to "Pop Idol" svengali Simon Fuller's 19 Management.
But Winehouse was never a packaged teen star, and always resisted being pigeonholed.
Her jazz-influenced 2003 debut album, "Frank," was critically praised and sold well in Britain. It earned Winehouse an Ivor Novello songwriting award, two Brit nominations and a spot on the shortlist for the Mercury Music Prize.
But Winehouse soon expressed dissatisfaction with the disc, saying she was "only 80 percent behind" the album.
"Frank" was followed by a slump during which Winehouse broke up with her boyfriend, suffered a long period of writer's block and, she later said, smoked a lot of marijuana.
"I had writer's block for so long," she said in 2007. "And as a writer, your self-worth is literally based on the last thing you wrote. .. I used to think, 'What happened to me?'
"At one point it had been two years since the last record and (the record company) actually said to me, 'Do you even want to make another record?' I was like, 'I swear it's coming.' I said to them, 'Once I start writing I will write and write and write. But I just have to start it.'"
The album she eventually produced was a sensation.
Released in Britain in the fall of 2006, "Back to Black" brought Winehouse global fame. Working with producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi and soul-funk group the Dap-Kings, Winehouse fused soul, jazz, doo-wop and, above all, a love of the girl-groups of the early 1960s with lyrical tales of romantic obsession and emotional excess.
"Back to Black" was released in the United States in March 2007 and went on to win five Grammy awards, including song and record of the year for "Rehab."
Music critic John Aizlewood attributed her trans-Atlantic success to a fantastic voice and a genuinely original sound.
"A lot of British bands fail in America because they give America something Americans do better - that's why most British hip-hop has failed," he said. "But they won't have come across anything quite like Amy Winehouse."
Winehouse's rise was helped by her distinctive look - black beehive of hair, thickly lined cat eyes, girly tattoos - and her tart tongue.
She was famously blunt in her assessment of her peers, once describing Dido's sound as "background music - the background to death" and saying of pop princess Kylie Minogue, "she's not an artist ... she's a pony."
The songs on "Black to Black" detailed breakups and breakdowns with a similar frankness. Lyrically, as in life, Winehouse wore her heart on her sleeve.
"I listen to a lot of '60s music, but society is different now," Winehouse said in 2007. "I'm a young woman and I'm going to write about what I know."
Even then, Winehouse's performances were sometimes shambolic, and she admitted she is "a terrible drunk." She acknowledged struggling with eating disorders and told a newspaper that she had been diagnosed as manic depressive but refused to take medication. Soon accounts of her erratic behavior, canceled concerts and drink- and drug-fueled nights began to multiply.
Photographs caught her unsteady on her feet or vacant-eyed, and she appeared unhealthily thin, with scabs on her face and marks on her arms.
There were embarrassing videos released to the world on the Internet. One showed an addled Winehouse and Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty playing with newborn mice. Another, for which Winehouse apologized, showed her singing a racist ditty to the tune of a children's song.
Winehouse's managers went to increasingly desperate lengths to keep the wayward star on the straight and narrow. Before the June concert in Belgrade, her hotel was stripped of booze. It did no good, and the concert was painful to watch.
Though she was often reported to be working on new material, fans got tired of waiting for the much-promised followup to "Back to Black."
Occasional bits of recording saw the light of day. Her rendition of The Zutons' "Valerie" was a highlight of producer Mark Ronson's 2007 album "Version," and she recorded the pop classic "It's My Party" for the 2010 Quincy Jones album "Q: Soul Bossa Nostra."
But other recording projects with Ronson, one of the architects of the success of "Back to Black," came to nothing.
She also had run-ins with the law. In April 2008, Winehouse was cautioned by police for assault after she slapped a man during a raucous night out.
The same year she was investigated by police, although not charged, after a tabloid newspaper published a video that appeared to show her smoking crack cocaine.
In 2010, Winehouse pleaded guilty to assaulting a theater manager who asked her to leave a family Christmas show because she'd had too much to drink. She was given a fine and a warning to stay out of trouble by a judge who praised her for trying to clean up her act.
In May 2007 in Miami, she married music industry hanger-on Blake Fielder-Civil, but the honeymoon was brief. That November, Fielder-Civil was arrested for an attack on a pub manager the year before. Fielder-Civil later pleaded guilty to assaulting barman James King and then offering him 200,000 pounds (US$400,000) to keep quiet about it.
Winehouse stood by "my Blake" throughout his trial, often blowing kisses at him from the court's public gallery and wearing a heart-shaped pin labeled "Blake" in her hair at concerts. But British newspapers reported extramarital affairs while Fielder-Civil was behind bars.
They divorced in 2009.
Winehouse's health often appeared fragile. In June 2008 and again in April 2010, she was taken to hospital and treated for injuries after fainting and falling at home.
Her father said she had developed the lung disease emphysema from smoking cigarettes and crack, although her spokeswoman later said Winehouse only had "early signs of what could lead to emphysema."
She left the hospital to perform at Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday concert in Hyde Park in June 2008, and at the Glastonbury festival the next day, where she received a rousing reception but scuffled with a member of the crowd. Then it was back to a London clinic for treatment, continuing the cycle of music, excess and recuperation that marked her career. –Yahoo Music
Jul 17, 2011
Jul 10, 2011
Pics by Gitty Images
Cosmetics (make-up) can artificially alter one's natural appearance so that a plain & homely face can be made to look pretty. However, make-up also camouflages a person's true appearance; therefore, a made-up look is deceiving. . .deceitful. . .fake!
The photographs in glossy magazines of famous fashion models and movie personalities are classic examples. Above are several pictures to prove it.
Betty Ford, Former First Lady, Dies At 93
Ex-president George H W Bush said: "She was a wonderful wife and mother, a great friend and a courageous first lady. No one confronted life's struggles with more fortitude or honesty, and as a result, we all learned from the challenges she faced."
During and after her years in the White House, 1974-77, Mrs Ford won acclaim for her candour, wit and courage as she fought breast cancer, severe arthritis, and the twin addictions of drugs and alcohol. She also pressed for abortion rights and women's rights. While her husband served as president, Mrs Ford's comments weren't the kind of genteel, innocuous talk expected from a first lady, far less a Republican one. Her unscripted comments sparked momentary squalls in the press and dismayed President Ford's advisers, who were trying to soothe the national psyche after Watergate. But to the scandal-scarred, Vietnam-wearied, hippie-rattled nation, her openness was refreshing. And 1970s America loved her for it.
But it was her Betty Ford Center, which rescued celebrities and ordinary people from addiction, that made her famous in her own right. "People who get well often say, 'you saved my life', and 'you've turned my life around,'" she recalled. "They don't realise we merely provided the means for them to do it themselves and that's all." The Betty Ford Center – although most famous for celebrity patients such as Elizabeth Taylor, Johnny Cash and Lindsay Lohan – has served more than 90,000 people.
She would build an enduring legacy by opening up the toughest aspects of her life as a public example. In an era when cancer was discussed in hushed tones and mastectomy was still a taboo subject, Mrs Ford shared the specifics of her breast cancer surgery. The publicity helped to bring the disease into the open and inspired countless women to seek breast examinations.
Her most painful revelation came 15 months after leaving the White House, when she announced that she was entering treatment for a long-standing addiction to painkillers and alcohol. It turned out the famously forthcoming first lady had been keeping a secret, even from herself.
After she and her husband had retired, she went to work on her memoirs, The Times of My Life, which came out in 1979. But the social whirlwind that engulfed them in Washington was over, and Mrs Ford confessed that she missed it. She would later describe herself during that period as "this nice, dopey pill-pusher sitting around and nodding."
"As I got sicker," she recalled, "I gradually stopped going to lunch. I wouldn't see friends. I was putting everyone out of my life." Her children recalled her living in a stupor, shuffling around in her dressing gown, refusing meals in favour of a drink. Her family finally confronted her in April 1978 and insisted she seek treatment. She credited their "intervention" with saving her life. "I was stunned at what they were trying to tell me about how I disappointed them and let them down," she told the Associated Press in 1994. "I was terribly hurt – after I had spent all those years trying to be the best mother and wife I could be. Luckily, I was able to hear them saying that I needed help, and they cared too much about me to let it go on," she said.
She entered Long Beach Naval Hospital and underwent a tough detoxification, which became the model for therapy at the Betty Ford Center. She helped to raise $3m, lobbied in the state capital for its approval, and reluctantly agreed to let it be named after her. Her efforts won her a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honour, from the first President Bush in 1991. In 1999, Gerald and Betty Ford were both awarded Congressional Gold Medals.
Mrs. Ford was a free spirit from the start. Born Elizabeth Bloomer on 8 April 1918, she fell in love with dance as a girl in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At 20, despite her mother's misgivings, she moved to New York City to learn from her idol, Martha Graham. She lived in bohemian Greenwich Village, worked as a model, and performed at Carnegie Hall in Graham's modern dance ensemble. After returning to Michigan , where an early marriage to a furniture company representative ended in divorce, she met Gerald Ford, a lawyer just out of the navy. When he proposed in 1948, she said later, she had no idea that he was planning a political career. –The Independent
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