Summary Box Hovnanian Enterprises 4Q loss narrows

Posted on January 24, 2012, 8:43 am, by admin and received No Comments ».

MORE SIGNINGS: New home contracts rose 3 percent, while home deliveries fell 3 percent. Its backlog of homes under contract increased 19 percent.

OUTLOOK: Management says it isn’t projecting any improvement in the housing market for the next two years, but believes it can boost its revenue and move toward profitability by selling homes from newer communities, which it plans to add next year.

HOMING IN: Hovnanian Enterprises Inc. reported a smaller loss in the fiscal fourth quarter, aided by lower expenses and charges. The homebuilder lost 90 cents a share on revenue of $341.6 million.

Michigan School District Might Ban Two Books

Posted on January 19, 2012, 1:11 am, by admin and received No Comments ».

Plymouth-Canton Community School, a district near Detroit, has been wrestling with a decision to ban two books from its high school AP English program. A husband and wife objected to Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer winner “Beloved” and Graham Swift’s “Waterland,” Michigan Radio reports. Here are details about this debate.

* Matt Dame, a father of high school and middle school students, ran for school board in November. Dame and his wife Barb launched the campaign against “Beloved” and “Waterland,” saying they have no place on an advanced English required reading list.

* “Beloved” is described by Spark Notes as a fictional story based on a true account. It is often used in high school English classes, particularly for college-bound students. It is so-named because it is the word written on the tombstone of the main character of Sethe’s child, whom Sethe murdered to prevent the girl from enduring what she endured as a plantation slave. The baby’s spirit returns to haunt the home where she was killed.

* According to Plymouth Patch, the Dames object to “Beloved” because it contains references to sex and particularly forced oral sex and sex with cows as part of the description of the things slave owners did to their slaves. Barb Dame calls the references gratuitous, lacking in historical context and offering the reader nothing. She also points to the book’s Lexile score of 870, which makes it at fifth grade difficulty. The Dames also want it pulled because it takes God’s name in vain.

* The Dames objected to “Waterland” for its violent and sexual content. According to Book Rags, “Waterland” takes place in the fens of England. It involves a girl who finds herself pregnant and seeks an abortion to avoid persecution from harsh, restrictive male members of her family. The book deals with kidnapping and murder.

* At a public meeting last week, parents and teachers voiced their concerns. One parent likened book banning to a “slippery slope” that sets a bad precedent, reports Patch. Others said it showed lack of trust in teachers to best decide what materials were appropriate and educationally valuable. Parents were informed of the decision to include the books and enrollment in the class was optional, says Michigan Radio.

* Superintendent Jeremy Hughes pulled “Waterland” immediately from the assigned reading list, saying he was uncomfortable with it. According to the Plymouth-Canton Schools website, “Waterland” will undergo further discussion and review, but a date has not been set for that process.

Marilisa Kinney Sachteleben writes about people, places, events and issues in her home state of “Pure Michigan.”

Review Norwegian Wood gorgeous and heartbreaking

Posted on January 10, 2012, 11:43 pm, by admin and received No Comments ».

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) Longing plays a key role in Tran Anh Hung’s new film “Norwegian Wood,” and it’s an emotion with which fans of the Vietnamese-born director have some familiarity.

The filmmaker behind such beautifully crafted and emotionally powerful films as “The Scent of Green Papaya,” “Vertical Ray of the Sun” and “Cyclo” has made only five films since 1993, leaving his many admirers constantly wanting for more. (Especially those of us in the United States, where his fourth film, “I Come with the Rain” didn’t even get a release.)

The fact that there’s a new Tran film in theaters would already be noteworthy; that “Norwegian Wood” is also a visually stunning and moving piece of storytelling bolstered by searing performances and a standout score by Jonny Greenwood (”There Will Be Blood”) is icing on the cake.

In the first few minutes of “Norwegian Wood,” we’re presented with two powerful images — first we see Kizuki (Kengo Kora) swim underwater in a public pool to embrace his girlfriend Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi), and then we see him put a hose through his car window to commit suicide. Kizuki’s death haunts the film, for its impact not only on Naoko but also on Kizuki’s best friend Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama).

Watanabe, our narrator, leaves his small town for college in Tokyo, where he soon crosses paths with Naoko. A budding romance ensues, but the memory of Kizuki is never far away. And while classmate Midori (Kiko Mizuhara) clearly enjoys flirting with Watanabe, she has a boyfriend, while Watanabe is clearly hung up on Naoko, whose fragile mental health keeps expanding the distance between the two of them.

Tran and his cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin create one stunning shot after another, whether it’s surges of protesters charging through the streets (the film is set in the late 1960s) or the beautiful,Wholesale Ed hardy, rolling hills of the countryside, where passing clouds turn the lush greenery into something more foreboding.

As with his previous films, however, Tran isn’t interested in creating a pretty coffee-table book — he’s a master of telling his story (he adapted Haruki Murakami’s bestselling novel for the screen) through images, and of using light and shadow to convey mood and emotion.

We see those hills, incidentally, both awash with foliage and covered in snow, and it’s a reminder of what a director can accomplish with locations when the shooting schedule allows him to return to them at different points in the year.

At its most romantic, “Norwegian Wood” is as swoony as Wong Kar-Wai at his most lovesick, but this is a rare romance where discussion of sex (and sexual dysfunction) occurs throughout without disrupting the tone. Naoko’s reticence to love again after Kizuki’s death, as well as her guilt over his having committed suicide in the first place, can be tied to her own body’s reactions to intimacy.

Kikuchi, incidentally, is the perfect star for Tran; her virtually-silent performances in “Babel” and “The Brothers Bloom” were no less captivating for being non-verbal, and while she’s got much more dialogue here than in those previous two films, she conveys volumes with her face.

“The Artist” may be a nostalgic reminder that silent films barely exist anymore, but Kikuchi has been proving for some time that she doesn’t need words to be a compelling actress.

The film really belongs to Matsuyama, who has the thankless task of playing a protagonist who’s completely committed to a love that is clearly doomed. He gives Watanabe’s yearning a clear-eyed resonance that keeps the character from seeming like a delusional doormat; we understand his actions and become the coxswain encouraging him to row faster, even when we can see the waterfall ahead.

Completing the central triangle is Mizuhara, whose Midori is clearly shielding her vulnerabilities with an outward mask of coquetry: When her father dies, she first asks Watanabe not to come to the funeral and then requests that he take her to a “very dirty” porno movie. That’s the sort of winsomeness that can be hard for audiences to digest, but Mizuhara makes this complicated college girl completely empathetic.

The first months of the year are generally considered a dumping-ground for movies that can be easily ignored during awards season, but “Norwegian Wood” is that rare January release that has a real shot of popping up on December’s Top Ten lists.

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Polish art student hangs own painting in museum

Posted on January 8, 2012, 6:49 pm, by admin and received No Comments ».

WARSAW, Poland Art student Andrzej Sobiepan didn’t want to wait decades for his work to appear in museums. So he took matters in his own hands, covertly hanging one of his paintings in a major Polish gallery.

By Wednesday, the young artist was getting plenty of attention after a nationwide TV channel reported on his stunt at the National Museum in the southwestern city of Wroclaw. He told reporters he hoped galleries would give more exhibition space to young artists as a result.

“I decided that I will not wait 30 or 40 years for my works to appear at a place like this,” Sobiepan told TVN24. “I want to benefit from them in the here and now.”

Sobiepan, a Wroclaw Fine Arts Academy student whose last name means “his own master,Cheap Ed hardy underwear,” said he was inspired by the elusive British graffiti artist known only as Banksy. His own painting is small, white and green, and partly uses swine leather to show a drooping acacia leaf.

On Dec. 10, Sobiepan put it up in a room with contemporary Polish art when a guard at the museum was looking the other way. Museum officials didn’t notice the new painting for three days.

Museum director Mariusz Hermansdorfer told TVN24 on Wednesday that the action revealed some security breaches, but that he also considered it a “witty artistic happening.”

“It has shown that the young generation of artists, unlike their predecessors, wants to see their works in museums,” Hermansdorfer said.

The museum has kept the painting on display in its cafe. It will be offered for sale at Poland’s biggest charity auction on Sunday.

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Anselm Kiefer’s World of Devastation Is Captured in the Documentary Over Your Cities Grass Will Gro

Posted on January 5, 2012, 10:08 pm, by admin and received No Comments ».

If Pompeii hadn’t been excavated, if the towns and villages on the Western Front hadn’t been rebuilt after World War I, and if the site of the World Trade Center had been left as it was after 9/11, they might partially resemble the ruins Anselm Kiefer constructed in the South of France. Moving from Germany in 1993, Kiefer took over the 35 hectares of the industrial wasteland La Ribaute, near Barjac, and turned the atelier into a sprawling Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” consisting of 47 buildings, an amphitheater, bridges, caves, an underground labyrinth that invoke the guts of the Pyramids or the gas chambers of the Nazi concentration camps. In the concrete rooms, he installed artworks — twisted strips of metallic film, a dormitory cast in lead, a child’s garment decorated with shards of glass, and other totems of catastrophe.

Kiefer has since moved on to another studio in Paris, taking “110 trucks” of the art with him, but La Ribaute remains. He and his small team of workmen were filmed in their labors by the British director Sophie Fiennes, whose mesmerizing Cinema Scope documentary “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” appeared at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Playing at Film Forum in New York from August 10-23, it doubles as a post-biblical, post-apocalyptic prophesy about the eventual fate of the earth and a self-reflexive meditation on the artistic process. Reflecting Kiefer’s canvases, it is etched in the colors of lead,wholesale Ed hardy shoes, earth, ash, charcoals, blacks, and discolored whites.

Occasionally, a splash of blue — that of industrial drums — obtrudes, or the muted golds and greens of the surrounding foliage. Kiefer comments in the film that he’s pleased vegetation is reclaiming La Ribaute, but this scarcely admits a return to the Arcadian, as did an unrelated exhibition bearing the same name as the film that ran at London’s Hidde Van Seggelen Gallery this spring, featuring work by Piranesi, Friedrich, Brouwn, Janssens, Almarcegui, and others. In contrast, Kiefer’s studio is a theme park dedicated to the notions of destruction, decay, annulment, and eventual absence.

“Over Your Cities” begins wordlessly as the disembodied camera glides up, down, along, and around the eerie subterranean passageways — made of corrugated iron and cement, some interspersed with stalagmite-like columns — to the sound of Jörg Widmann and György Ligeti’s spectral music. Shards of pottery and glass, broken slabs of concrete and rocks proliferate. After nearly 20 minutes of immersion in this dead zone, Kiefer and his workmen appear — pumping water, making a plaster-like substance, smelting ore. Among the artworks they make in the film are an installation suspending miniature lead battleships (a tribute to Céline’s novel “Journey to the End of the Night”) and a painting of the Ardèche forest, the boles stripped bare and stained with ground cement. The latter work is reminiscent of Kiefer’s great “Varus” (1976), which deals with the birth and growth of German national consciousness via its inscription of the victory over the Romans in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD — Germany, year zero. Anselm’s Teutonic forests, influenced by Altdorfer and Friedrich, augur the Nazi horror.

At the center of the film, there’s a statically shot interview, conducted in La Ribaute’s library, between Kiefer and a German journalist who prompts the artist to ruminate on his ideas. Though we learn little about the historical or nostalgic influences on the Gesamtkunstwerk, Kiefer does refer to “The Odyssey,” the Kabbala (in reference to broken vessels), and Heidegger’s belief that boredom is useful in bringing about consciousness of one’s existence. Kiefer strongly believes in the importance of emptiness as a precondition for creating. “I fundamentally believe that through my work I can fill an empty room created in my childhood,” he says. “The space has not been filled yet things fall into it and take effect.”

Through his work, Kiefer has been a provocative and consistent critic of the Third Reich, and there are enough installations and imagery at La Ribaute to have prompted a detailed discussion of Nazi atrocities and the devastation of war — fabricated dragons’ teeth adorn some of the artworks, the teetering concrete towers suggest Dresden and Berlin after the Allied bombing (as well as Ground Zero). When Kiefer and the workmen drop sheets of plate glass on the floor of an installation room, or strew glass around a warehouse, it’s impossible not to think of Kristallnacht. Kiefer has a crane mount one of his massive trademark lead books onto a huge canvas; other books are burned — connoting the Nazi repression and the death of knowledge.

Regrettably, Kiefer doesn’t engage with this. Instead, he speaks about man’s origins as a sea creature who longs to go “back to our happy, unconscious being as a single cell in the ocean,” and about scientific theories such as the Big Bang describing “our lack of knowledge. They describe our ignorance…. All the scientific and technological progress only tells me how incomplete I am and that I know nothing…. How inhuman I am, and how inhuman humans are.” Well, not entirely. Shortly after he delivers this humbling peroration, two small boys, the artist’s sons, enter the frame, playfully scooting behind their father.

After the interview, Fiennes returns to the construction outside at La Ribaute. Kiefer and one of his workers pour molten metal, like so much lava, down a small hill of earth. A huge mechanical drill bores holes in the earth that they fill with cement and plant with metal rods — one thinks of what might have lain under the Nazi Party rally grounds designed by Albert Speer — and erect one of many skeletal towers made from concrete modules. In one shot, a cement staircase rises for a few steps and then, having broken, stops abruptly. Whither did it lead?

Kiefer says the towers were influenced by the Jewish folkloric figure of Adam’s demonic first wife, Lilith, who was expelled by him from Paradise and dwelled in abandoned ruins, threatening that “over your cities grass will grow.” “I think that’s fantastic,” he remarks, sweeping the devastated past historical into the ghost towns of the future.

Watch clips from “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” below:

ONE: Raising the Painting

 

TWO: The Towers
 

 

THREE: Melting Lead  

 

Tags:

Anselm Kiefer’s World of Devastation Is Captured in the Documentary Over Your Cities Grass Will Gro

Posted on January 5, 2012, 6:40 pm, by admin and received No Comments ».

If Pompeii hadn’t been excavated, if the towns and villages on the Western Front hadn’t been rebuilt after World War I, and if the site of the World Trade Center had been left as it was after 9/11, they might partially resemble the ruins Anselm Kiefer constructed in the South of France. Moving from Germany in 1993, Kiefer took over the 35 hectares of the industrial wasteland La Ribaute, near Barjac, and turned the atelier into a sprawling Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” consisting of 47 buildings, an amphitheater, bridges, caves, an underground labyrinth that invoke the guts of the Pyramids or the gas chambers of the Nazi concentration camps. In the concrete rooms, he installed artworks — twisted strips of metallic film, a dormitory cast in lead, a child’s garment decorated with shards of glass, and other totems of catastrophe.

Kiefer has since moved on to another studio in Paris, taking “110 trucks” of the art with him, but La Ribaute remains. He and his small team of workmen were filmed in their labors by the British director Sophie Fiennes, whose mesmerizing Cinema Scope documentary “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” appeared at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Playing at Film Forum in New York from August 10-23, it doubles as a post-biblical, post-apocalyptic prophesy about the eventual fate of the earth and a self-reflexive meditation on the artistic process. Reflecting Kiefer’s canvases, it is etched in the colors of lead, earth, ash, charcoals, blacks, and discolored whites.

Occasionally, a splash of blue — that of industrial drums — obtrudes, or the muted golds and greens of the surrounding foliage. Kiefer comments in the film that he’s pleased vegetation is reclaiming La Ribaute, but this scarcely admits a return to the Arcadian, as did an unrelated exhibition bearing the same name as the film that ran at London’s Hidde Van Seggelen Gallery this spring, featuring work by Piranesi, Friedrich, Brouwn, Janssens, Almarcegui, and others. In contrast, Kiefer’s studio is a theme park dedicated to the notions of destruction, decay, annulment, and eventual absence.

“Over Your Cities” begins wordlessly as the disembodied camera glides up, down, along, and around the eerie subterranean passageways — made of corrugated iron and cement, some interspersed with stalagmite-like columns — to the sound of Jörg Widmann and György Ligeti’s spectral music. Shards of pottery and glass, broken slabs of concrete and rocks proliferate. After nearly 20 minutes of immersion in this dead zone, Kiefer and his workmen appear — pumping water, making a plaster-like substance, smelting ore. Among the artworks they make in the film are an installation suspending miniature lead battleships (a tribute to Céline’s novel “Journey to the End of the Night”) and a painting of the Ardèche forest, the boles stripped bare and stained with ground cement. The latter work is reminiscent of Kiefer’s great “Varus” (1976),Cheap Ed hardy bags, which deals with the birth and growth of German national consciousness via its inscription of the victory over the Romans in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD — Germany, year zero. Anselm’s Teutonic forests, influenced by Altdorfer and Friedrich, augur the Nazi horror.

At the center of the film, there’s a statically shot interview, conducted in La Ribaute’s library, between Kiefer and a German journalist who prompts the artist to ruminate on his ideas. Though we learn little about the historical or nostalgic influences on the Gesamtkunstwerk, Kiefer does refer to “The Odyssey,” the Kabbala (in reference to broken vessels), and Heidegger’s belief that boredom is useful in bringing about consciousness of one’s existence. Kiefer strongly believes in the importance of emptiness as a precondition for creating. “I fundamentally believe that through my work I can fill an empty room created in my childhood,” he says. “The space has not been filled yet things fall into it and take effect.”

Through his work, Kiefer has been a provocative and consistent critic of the Third Reich, and there are enough installations and imagery at La Ribaute to have prompted a detailed discussion of Nazi atrocities and the devastation of war — fabricated dragons’ teeth adorn some of the artworks, the teetering concrete towers suggest Dresden and Berlin after the Allied bombing (as well as Ground Zero). When Kiefer and the workmen drop sheets of plate glass on the floor of an installation room, or strew glass around a warehouse, it’s impossible not to think of Kristallnacht. Kiefer has a crane mount one of his massive trademark lead books onto a huge canvas; other books are burned — connoting the Nazi repression and the death of knowledge.

Regrettably, Kiefer doesn’t engage with this. Instead, he speaks about man’s origins as a sea creature who longs to go “back to our happy, unconscious being as a single cell in the ocean,” and about scientific theories such as the Big Bang describing “our lack of knowledge. They describe our ignorance…. All the scientific and technological progress only tells me how incomplete I am and that I know nothing…. How inhuman I am, and how inhuman humans are.” Well, not entirely. Shortly after he delivers this humbling peroration, two small boys, the artist’s sons, enter the frame, playfully scooting behind their father.

After the interview, Fiennes returns to the construction outside at La Ribaute. Kiefer and one of his workers pour molten metal, like so much lava, down a small hill of earth. A huge mechanical drill bores holes in the earth that they fill with cement and plant with metal rods — one thinks of what might have lain under the Nazi Party rally grounds designed by Albert Speer — and erect one of many skeletal towers made from concrete modules. In one shot, a cement staircase rises for a few steps and then, having broken, stops abruptly. Whither did it lead?

Kiefer says the towers were influenced by the Jewish folkloric figure of Adam’s demonic first wife, Lilith, who was expelled by him from Paradise and dwelled in abandoned ruins, threatening that “over your cities grass will grow.” “I think that’s fantastic,” he remarks, sweeping the devastated past historical into the ghost towns of the future.

Watch clips from “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” below:

ONE: Raising the Painting

 

TWO: The Towers
 

 

THREE: Melting Lead  

 

Tags:

Perfume’s timelessness appeals to de la Renta

Posted on January 5, 2012, 6:39 pm, by admin and received No Comments ».

NEW YORK Oscar de la Renta takes longer to create that small, fits-in-your-hand bottle of perfume than one of his elaborate embellished ballgowns. It’s just the nature of the business.

The process is similar, starting with an inspiration that comes from the gut, quality materials and fine workmanship, but de la Renta says he’ll continue tinkering with a perfume until he’s fully satisfied. There would be no point in rushing when he has the luxury of time, he explains.

While de la Renta takes care to say that even with his clothing designs, he doesn’t follow or set, for that matter the “trends,” he still operates on the fashion calendar that dictates the grinding, grueling pace of five collections a year. (Add to that the children’s line the company just announced it’s launching.) There is always a hunger for “new” and a need to be relevant in the moment, he observes.

In the beauty business, however, there aren’t the same demands, so even though the hypothetical canvas is so much smaller, the process has few restrictions other than to create something lovely and lasting. “Fragrance I look at in a different way than fashion,” de la Renta says. “It’s so unbelievably intimate in a person’s life. When you discover the right one, it’s like getting married: You don’t change on a whim.”

His newest is Live in Love, a classic scent with notes of ginger, orchid, hyacinth, muguet and jasmine, set against a base of white woods and musk.

The house bought back its fragrance licenses three years ago (the licenses were owned by another company at the time) to give the perfumes more of a synergy with its fashion reputation as a top-tier label, explains Alex Bolen, company CEO (as well as de la Renta’s son-in-law). Each of the seven scents currently in production has to be elegance and luxury in a bottle, Bolen says.

De la Renta jumps in at this point in a joint interview to note that, however beautiful the bottle may be, it won’t sell a perfume. Neither will the packaging, name or ad campaign. The juice has to connect to the wearer on a much deeper level, he says, so much so that it becomes part of her identity.

“You shouldn’t change your fragrance when you don’t smell it anymore. That’s the wrong way to think about it. You shouldn’t be able to notice it. … That’s when a fragrance is a true success.”

Still, he says, he likes the stories of how the newest name and campaign evolved.

For the name, de la Renta was in his workroom in the heat of the summer and noticed the tattoo on the arm of one of the employees: Live in Love. “It was so obvious,wholesale Burberry, so extraordinary. It’s what I wanted to say. No one had used it, which was surprising, but that’s the secret of life sometimes the answer is so obvious.”

When it came time to introduce the fragrance to the public, he wanted to find the right spokesmodel. He laid out print ads of all the competition, stripped off the names, and took a hard look at whose image he could choose to stand out from the crowd. He saw only one that he wanted.

Back in the 1950s and `60s when de la Renta was starting out, the trend wasn’t celebrities; every designer who was anyone used an illustration of the chicest, most glamorous woman. That’s who he wanted again and that’s the raven-haired, pen-and-ink “model” who looks back at you underneath the tagline, “The new fragrance for women created by a man who adores them.”

He explains, “I want you to remember the fragrance, not be able to identify Penelope Cruz.”

This isn’t de la Renta being nostalgic for the good old days, though. In addition to the new children’s line and the presentation of his bold, colorful pre-fall collection this week, de la Renta is also the one who came up with the idea for a just-opened exhibit about the artist Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida at the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute in New York.

At age 79, retirement is a dirty word. He likes to quote a friend who says, “to rest is to rust.”

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How Gaga and Bieber could win the White House

Posted on January 5, 2012, 6:38 pm, by admin and received No Comments ».

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) With Twitter becoming indispensable for news and politics, the Washington Post has climbed aboard the speeding train, launching a new metric for tracking presidential candidates — @MentionMachine.

@MentionMachine monitors Twitter and other media outlets for the number of times a candidate is mentioned, thus tracking his or her position in the national conversation. In other words,wholesale Ed hardy belts, forget about the antiquated metrics like polling or endorsements and go straight to the source.

And if Twitter endorses a Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber ticket? So be it.

In introducing the new app, the Post showcases all the ways it can be used to evaluate how engaged readers are with certain candidates.

“Growth in number of legitimate followers or a high recurrence of retweets are both indicative of growing grass-roots support,” the Post notes. “A spike in the number of times a candidate is mentioned on Twitter might signal an event that could alter a campaign.”

How can the reader see whether a candidates is experiencing a surge of support? There’s a toolbar on its campaign coverage page to show “scores” for each candidate, with each score representing the number of times that candidate was mentioned on Twitter in the past week.

One can also go in depth on a specific candidate, looking at the progression of mentions over different time periods. And what good would it be without the ability to compare candidates?

This is not the first time the Post has put some of its eggs in the social media basket. It launched the “Social Reader” for the revamped Facebook, enabling users to read their post stories from their profile rather than having to hop over to the Post’s site.

With its parent company coming off a ghastly fiscal year and an “uneasy” newsroom, these forward-looking measures have to help, right?

At the very least, they could signal progress. With eight out of the top 10 most followed on Twitter being women, the era of a female president may be just around the corner.

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Jennifer Hudson credits dead brother for comeback

Posted on January 5, 2012, 1:56 am, by admin and received No Comments ».

Jennifer Hudson surprised many when, just months after a family tragedy that saw her mother, brother and nephew murdered,Replica Ed hardy Kids, she returned to the stage to sing the Star-Spangled Banner at Super Bowl XLIII.

But as the “Dreamgirls” star and former “American Idol” favorite sees it, she didn’t have a choice — her murdered brother wouldn’t have it any other way.

Hudson appears on the January 8 edition of NBC’s “Dateline” to discuss the tragedy, among other topics, and tells the show’s Lester Holt that she heard her brother Jason’s voice, which urged her to undertake the comeback performance.

“I felt as though I had to,” Hudson tells Holt. “ust the same as I hear my mother’s voice in my head, I can hear my brother’s voice in my head. And he– they, like, everybody, it’s like, is she ever gonna sing again? Is she gonna– you know? And what was I gonna say to that– I could hear him, like, ‘Jennifer–’ he would always say, ‘Knock it off, Jenny,’ if I was cryin’ about somethin’ or if I was upset, discouraged, mad, ‘Jenny, knock it off.’ That’s what I hear in my head. And it’s like, ‘Okay, well, what they want me to do? I can either just sit here and mope around, or do what I know that would make them proud.’ And that’s what I did.”

During the interview, Hudson also reveals how she would have been on the scene at the time of the murders were it not for her fiance, professional wrestler David Otunga.

“I remember it like yesterday,” Hudson recalls. “I was literally pickin’ up my bags to walk out the door to go to my mother’s house. And he called me, like, ‘Can you come out here instead of going, you know?’ And I was like, ‘Okay, sure.’ And that one decision, that one thing, I wouldn’t be sittin’ here.”

Hudson’s mother, Darnell Donerson, along with her brother Jason, were found shot to death in Donerson’s Chicago home on October 24, 2008; Donerson was 57, and Jason 29. After a search, Hudson’s 7-year-old nephew, Julian King, was found in a parked car, after dying of what the medical examiner’s office determined to be multiple gunshot wounds. William Balfour, the estranged husband of Hudson’s sister Julia, pleaded not guilty to the murders and awaits trial in February.

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Oracle miss sparks Wall St fears of spending cuts

Posted on January 4, 2012, 6:53 pm, by admin and received No Comments ».

(Reuters) Oracle Corp’s dismal quarterly results sent shock waves across the technology sector as investors feared they may have overestimated the resilience of corporate tech spending in a deteriorating global economy.

The first earnings miss in a decade from Oracle, whose fiscal second quarter ended on November 30, drove its shares down more than 11 percent on Wednesday, destroying about $20 billion of market value. The shortfall from the No. 3 software maker also hit shares of many other technology companies, with VMware Inc, NetSuite Inc, and SAP among those suffering the biggest losses.

“Is this a preliminary example of what we could expect in January from Microsoft and other players? It raises an eyebrow that things may not be as hunky dory as we’ve been led to believe in terms of IT spending,” said Daniel Morgan, a portfolio manager at Synovus Securities in Atlanta.

The troubles at Oracle follow ominous reports from big tech names including Hewlett-Packard Co, Intel Corp and Texas Instruments Inc.

The disconcerting news on Tuesday was not limited to Silicon Valley, with U.S. industrial conglomerate Emerson Electric Co reporting a drop in orders for equipment used in big data centers. Emerson shares fell 5.4 percent to $46.97.

“Overall, we have seen in the last 60 days … a significant weakness in this whole electronics space,” said Emerson Chief Executive David Farr. “I don’t see that changing for the time being.”

The fourth quarter is the crucial period of the year for many technology companies because corporations tend to spend most heavily on information technology during that time in what is known as a year-end “budget flush.”

Oracle’s disappointing results could signal that companies won’t spend all the money that they still have budgeted for 2011 technology projects, said Howard Anderson, a lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, who regularly talks to CEOs of top-tier corporations.

“Confidence is not there,” he said. “We have a kind of rolling recession.”

Oracle’s quarter ended in November, but investors worried that the decline in business confidence could signal more troubles for peers whose quarters end in December. That includes arch rival SAP AG.

“The majority of deals in the fourth quarter are traditionally closed in the last two weeks of the quarter, so the delay of Oracle’s deals is a negative cross read for SAP,” said Silvia Quandt analyst Michael Busse.

SAP CEO Bill McDermott declined to comment on his business, saying the company was in a quiet period.

A slowing in tech spending would be troubling for the U.S. economy, which has had few bright spots in recent years.

“Since the technical end of the recession (in June 2009) we’ve been seeing double-digit growth in investment in technology. If Oracle is the canary in the coalmine, that would be something to worry about,” said Michael Goodman, director of economic and public policy research at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

“There’s a lot of concern about what the immediate future holds, so this may just be customers putting off investments they want to make until they feel like they have a better handle on what the future looks like,” Goodman said.

MIXED SIGNALS

U.S. companies have been sending mixed signals about their spending plans for 2012. A survey released last week by the Business Roundtable found that 16 percent of CEOs of large U.S. companies planned to cut their capital spending over the next six months, up from 13 percent who had planned cuts in the third quarter.

But other data released on Wednesday by the Equipment Leasing and Finance Association showed U.S. businesses signed up for $6.2 billion in loans, leases and lines of credit to fund capital expenditures in November, a 38 percent increase from the month a year ago.

Oracle’s stock fell $3.40 to $25.77, its lowest close since August, making it the biggest loser in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. It was the biggest one-day percentage drop in the stock since March 4, 2002, when Oracle last surprised investors with an earnings warning.

CEO and co-founder Larry Ellison, the company’s biggest shareholder,wholesale Burberry kids, lost more than $3.8 billion on Wednesday as the stock plunged, based on his holdings published in Oracle’s annual proxy filing.

The declines accounted for about 16 points of the 27.6 point drop in the S&P 1500 Software index, which suffered a 4.5 percent drop in market cap to about $511 billion. The drop in Oracle shares represents 68 percent of the decline in total market cap for the index.

(Reporting by Sayantani Ghosh in Bangalore, Maria Sheahan, Christoph Steitz and Marilyn Gerlach in Frankfurt and Nicola Leske, David Gaffen, Ryan Vlastelica and Nick Zieminski in New York; Editing by Richard Chang)

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