novembre 2017
Lil Peep, who over the last two years emerged as one of pop music’s brightest and most promising young talents, blending the urgency and dexterity of contemporary hip-hop with the raw, serrated sentimentality of emo, died on Wednesday night in Tucson. He was 21.
Sarah Stennett, the chief executive of First Access Entertainment, a company that worked with Lil Peep since last year, confirmed the death in a statement. Ms. Stennett said she had “spoken to his mother and she asked me to convey that she is very, very proud of him and everything he was able to achieve in his short life.”
A spokesman for the Tucson Police Department said Lil Peep was pronounced dead on his tour bus at approximately 9 p.m. He had been scheduled to perform at a club called the Rock. Detectives found evidence suggesting that the rapper died of an overdose of the anti-anxiety medication Xanax.
Lil Peep was born Gustav Ahr on Nov. 1, 1996, and was raised in Long Beach, on Long Island, the son of a college professor father and an elementary schoolteacher mother. He took his name from a childhood nickname given by his mother.
After leaving high school early — he eventually got a diploma — he moved to Los Angeles to begin pursuing music in earnest, posting first on YouTube and eventually on the streaming platform SoundCloud, finding a rabid following. He put out his first mixtapes in 2015, and last year he released two, “Crybaby” and “Hellboy,” which marked him as a potent, forward-looking synthesizer of styles with an uncanny knack for pop songcraft.
Hear Lil Peep on Soundcloud
Many of those songs were recorded in his bedroom when he was living on Los Angeles’s Skid Row. The months of making that music were, he said in an interview with The New York Times in April, an “absolute blur,” a stretch when he took to the microphone “when I was high enough to hear something and get inspired.” When he toured earlier this year, he recreated that bedroom on stage, using the actual mattress.
Lil Peep’s music — simultaneously cocky and desperate, filled with woozy singing and nimble rapping — made him one of the most promising artists in the current generation emerging from SoundCloud. In August, he released a new album, “Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 1.”
Lil Peep cut a striking figure: tall and gaunt; hair dyed pink or blonde; and wearing an elaborate array of tattoos, including the words “Get Cake Die Young,” and “Crybaby,” and an anarchy symbol on his face. He moonlighted as an occasional runway model.
“They tell me that it saved their lives,” he said, describing what his fans told him about his music. “They say that I stopped them from committing suicide, which is a beautiful thing.”
“It’s great for me to hear,” he continued. “It helps. It boosts me, because music saved my life as well.”
Widely considered as Africa's greatest storyteller, Chinua Achebe would have been 87 on Thursday.
In his honour, Google is changing its logo to a doodle, or illustration, portraying him. This is his story:
African novelist
- Nigeria's storytelling tradition. Born in Ogidi in 1930 to an Igbo family, Chinua was the studious son of an evangelical priest. He grew up listening to stories narrated in his community.
- In love with the library, Chinua completed English studies at the University of Ibadan in four years instead of the standard five.
- In 1961, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation and married Christie Okoli. They had four children together.
- European interpretation of African culture. To give African children better quality books, he co-founded in 1967 Citadel Press with renowned writer Christopher Okigbo to publish children's books.
- A voracious reader, Achebe was disappointed by non-African authors' ignorance about the continent and its people.
- Biafran independence. When the region of Biafra broke away in 1967, Achebe became a strong Biafran supporter. He later dabbled in political activism.
- On the desperate conditions suffered by Biafran refugees, Achebe wrote the following rhymes in "Refugee Mother and Child":
Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs
And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps,
Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there
Had long ceased to care, but not this one
And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps,
Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there
Had long ceased to care, but not this one
- Frustrated by corruption in Nigeria, Chinua emigrated to the United States in 1969 as a university lecturer. He returned to Nigeria in 1976 and worked as a professor of English.
- Car accident. In 1990 Achebe was in a crash in Nigeria that left him paralysed and in a wheelchair. In the same year, he moved to the US and taught at Bard College for 15 years.
- In 2009, Achebe joined Brown University as a professor of African Studies.
- Chinua died in Boston on March 21, 2013, at the age of 82.
Things Fall Apart
- Clash of civilisations. As a Nigerian novelist, Achebe portrayed the social disorientation that resulted from Western colonisation of Africa.
- In 1958, he published his first and most widely read novel, Things Fall Apart. The novel portrays the clash of cultures that took place when Christian missionaries and Western colonials encountered traditional African societies in the 19th century.
- The novel follows the life of Okonkwo, an Ibo leader and local wrestling champion. He is exiled and upon his return, finds his community has submitted to the influence of Western colonisers. Realising how much his life and his village have worsened, he hangs himself.
- "The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others," writes Achebe.
- 100 best English novels. In 2005, Time magazine listed Things Fall Apart in its list of the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
- Things Fall Apart is still one of the most read books in modern African literature. The novel sold over 12 million copies and was translated into more than 50 languages.
- The book was followed by a sequel, No Longer at Ease, originally written as the second part of a larger work along with Arrow of God.
A child cannot pay for its mother's milkCHINUA ACHEBE, IN HIS BOOK THINGS FALL APART
Recognition
- 30 honorary degrees. Acknowledged as the father of modern African literature, Chinua was awarded 30 honorary degrees from universities around the world.
- Achebe also won many literary awards, from the inaugural Nigerian National Merit Award in 1979 to the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction in 2007.
- He won The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 2010. The annual prize is given to "a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life".
- Praised by Mandela. South Africa's anti-apartheid revolutionary leader Nelson Mandela called him a writer "in whose company the prison walls fell down".
- The current president of South Africa Jacob Zuma has described him as a "colossus of African writing".
- Literary critics have compared Achebe's eminence worldwide to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison and a handful of other writers.
Late last night, AT&T suffered a nationwide network outage that made it impossible for subscribers to make calls. This resulted in thousands of complaints on DownDetector yesterday evening, which were eventually acknowledged by the carrier in a tweet at around 8 PM ET. AT&T said that it was aware of the outage, and that anyone experiencing issues should repeatedly restart their devices until they were able to make phone calls again.
Although the issue appears to have been resolved, there have still been an abnormal number of reports coming in on DownDetector this morning, which might indicate that some users are still struggling to make calls. If you’re one of the subscribers still experiencing this issue, there appears to be a somewhat dependable solution.
As PhoneArena explains, the outage appears to be connected to Voice over LTE identifiers, which explains why older phones on 3G networks and users who made calls over WiFi were unaffected. The good news is that if you do own a newer smartphone, all you have to do is change a single setting to fix the issue, at least temporarily.
In order to get your AT&T iPhone back in working order until AT&T fully resolves the outage, go to Settings > Cellular> Cellular Data Options > Enable LTE and choose Data Only from the list. This will take you off of the LTE network, which should allow you to make phone calls again until AT&T fixes the issue. The same solution works on Android phones as well, but the process changes depending on which phone you’re using.
A police raid of a Quincy apartment where a 3-month-old baby was found turned up enough fentanyl to potentially kill hundreds of people, authorities said.
Police stormed the Copeland Street home Tuesday about 10:45 a.m. after a two-month investigation, breaking down the door when they heard “scurrying” inside, Norfolk prosecutor John Looney said.
Detectives seized about 57 grams of fentanyl in clear plastic bags on and under the coffee table, authorities said, along with 33 grams of cocaine, some prescription medications, and $2,688 in cash.
Quincy police Lt. Detective Patrick Glynn told the Herald 57 grams of fentanyl would have the potential to kill “hundreds.” He said fentanyl-related arrests in the city have more than doubled — from about 30 or 35 in 2016 to more than 70 already this year.
“It’s dramatically up when it comes to fentanyl,” Glynn said. “Any amount of fentanyl can be lethal and it’s being introduced into heroin, cocaine. We’ve even seen it being introduced into marijuana.”
Suspects Giovanni Bautista, 24, and Justin Reyes, 18, were ordered held on $250,000 bail each on charges of trafficking fentanyl and cocaine, along with other drug charges. A $10,000 bail was set for Jennie Rodriguez, 28, of Quincy, which her attorney said she posted.
Bail on California resident Luis Bautista, 27, and Christian Marrero-Santana, 22, who just moved to Boston from Puerto Rico, was set at $5,000. All five defendants face similar drug charges. Giovanni Bautista and Rodriguez are also charged with reckless endangerment of a child.
The Department of Children and Families was notified and placed the 3-month-old and an 8-year-old child of Rodriguez — who was not home at the time of the raid — in the custody of Rodriguez’s sister, Rodriguez’s defense attorney Paula O’Brien-Killion said.
All five defendants are due back in court Dec. 14. Giovanni Bautista’s bail was revoked on an open case out of Dedham for receiving a stolen motor vehicle.
Rodriguez’s attorney claimed her client knew nothing about the drugs stored by Bautista, who is the father of the infant. Luis Bautista’s lawyer claimed his client was visiting his brother and their sick mother. Marrero-Santana’s lawyer said his client was just crashing at the apartment after fleeing Hurricane Maria.
Attorney Kathleen Fay called Reyes, a junior at Dedham High School, a “good boy” and said he was not home during the raid. But Looney said police had already arrested Reyes nearby after a traffic stop and suspected drug transaction.
This innocuously irreverent faith-based cartoon re-imagines the nativity story from the perspective of the animals who witnessed Jesus' birth.
Though it probably could have gone without saying, “The Star” ends with a politely worded note to the effect that, while having fun and taking artist license, its creators strived to maintain the spirit and values of the greatest story ever told. Sure enough, “The Star” offers a playful retelling of Jesus’ nativity, as seen from the animals’ point of view, while keeping the necessary irreverence that entails to a benign minimum. As kid-friendly Christmas movies go, this one actually goes out of its way to remind what the holiday represents, which should please parents looking for something a little more sophisticated (but just barely) than the VeggieTales cartoons.
In the tradition of Robert Lawson’s appealing young-adult books “Ben and Me” (about founding father Franklin and his “good mouse Amos”) and “Mr. Revere and I” (in which Paul’s horse recounts his master’s famous ride), this CG co-production between Sony Pictures Animationand the Jim Henson Studio anthropomorphizes the various beasts who bore witness to important historical events — most notably Bo the donkey (Steven Yeun), Dave the dove (Keegan-Michael Key) and a loquacious sheep named Ruth (Aidy Bryant), although there are also the three wise men’s camels and a handful of other critters.
As it happens, Bo isn’t the only talking donkey the Good Book has to offer (in Numbers, Balaam’s ass also speaks), but apart from the trickster serpent who fools Adam and Eve in Genesis, animals typically don’t speak in the Bible. That means screenwriter Carlos Kotkin (who shares story credit with Simon Moore) must exercise his “artistic license” when trying to imagine what the animals in the manger were thinking on that very first Christmas.
Turns out, apart from two “bad dogs” (voiced by Ving Rhames and Gabriel Iglesias), the other creatures simply want to help, and though they talk an awful lot amongst themselves, whenever there are humans around, their agitated dialogue is amusingly reduced to little more than a series of agitated hee-haws and other barnyard sounds. When the film opens, exactly nine months before Jesus’ birth, lowly Bo has spent his entire life enslaved to a Nazareth miller. As it happens, the donkey’s true ambition is to join the king’s caravan — a dream he indirectly realizes by carrying the very pregnant Mary (Gina Rodriguez) into Bethlehem.
As in the Bible, the appearance of a new star in the heavens heralds the arrival of a new “king,” one whose prophesied arrival deeply threatens local tyrant Herod (Christopher Plummer), who dispatches an over-zealous soldier to hunt down his unborn rival. So begins an awkward kind of road-movie plot, in which Mary and her easily frustrated husband Joseph (Zachary Levi) travel cross-country while totally oblivious to the fact that a bloodthirsty Roman goon is fast on their trail.
Meanwhile, though Bo and his buddies don’t realize just whom they are protecting, they provide a first line of defense against this sword-wielding centurion — to the extent that “The Star” implies that Christianity might never have existed if not for the efforts of these valiant creatures. It’s a charming enough idea, especially for animal-loving kiddos, and one that puts considerably more emphasis on the menagerie that shared the manger with Mary and Joseph that night than virtually any of the classic nativity scenes artists have painted over the centuries (the vast majority of which feature no animals whatsoever).
While not exactly an original concept (in 1977, Rankin/Bass produced a stop-motion TV special called “Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey” with a remarkably similar plot), “The Star” delivers a fresh take on a story that its Christian target audience presumably knows by heart, emphasizing such qualities as faith, friendship and teamwork in the process. At the same time Bo and friends tag along with Mary and Joseph, three wisecracking camels (played by Tyler Perry, Tracy Jordan and Oprah Winfrey) accompany the three wise men, who are perhaps the only humans to have noticed the star — unless you count Mariah Carey, whose theme song is by far the most memorable of the Christian-rock soundtrack’s adult contemporary-sounding singles.
Like “Captain Underpants” earlier this year, “The Star” was produced on a budget far more modest than most big-studio cartoons, and the limitations are readily apparent, but probably not an obstacle to young audiences. Character designs are serviceable, but uninspired (apart from the Kristin Chenoweth-voiced mouse featured prominently in the first and last scenes), and director Timothy Reckart (an Oscar nominee for the terrific stop-motion short “Head Over Heels”) doesn’t even attempt the usual trick of relying upon gorgeous digital vistas and magic-hour lighting to cover the film’s shortcomings. Instead, he trusts in his voice cast and an amusing-enough script to keep audiences engaged, while putting the bulk of his faith in the fact that Christian moviegoers will support any film that embraces the spirit and values of the greatest story ever told.
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