Angelina Jolie Has a Vital Voice

http://blog.nola.com/reneepeck/2008/04/a_successful_blend_of_modern_a.html
(Correct link)
Making it right
Global Green opens its first 9th Ward ‘green’ house
The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS - Before the launch of his Make It Right Foundation last year, Brad Pitt lent his name - and some cash - to a rebuilding initiative in the Holy Cross section of New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward headed by the environmental group Global Green USA.

This week - almost a year after a May groundbreaking - the first home built after Hurricane Katrina with environmentally sustainable materials was completed. It will serve as a model home and visitor center while other houses are constructed.

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Though Pitt hasn’t visited the home since its completion, Global Green president and CEO Matt Petersen said he’s sure Pitt will stop by eventually.
“He contributed significantly to this home being built,” Petersen said. “We’re deeply grateful for all that he has done.”

The sleek green-colored home is hard to miss among the blocks of flood-damaged homes that have largely gone untouched since Katrina struck in 2005. The poverty-stricken Lower 9th Ward was all but wiped out when a wall of water surged through a broken levee during the storm. Population has been slow to return but developments such as the Make It Right and Global Green housing programs offer hope that the neighborhood will re-emerge.

“We’re planning to be here for many years to come,” said Global Green’s Beth Galante, while touring the three-bedroom, two-bath model home. She said the organization plans to eventually relocate its office from the city’s downtown area to the Lower 9th Ward.

anustin @ 04/12/2008 at 11:08 am
anoble,i remember when we went to london for our company’s christmas party,3 nights and 4 days,never see the sun!!!!

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LOL - maybe that’s why they have so many pubs or is that why you didn’t see the sun - too many pubs.

noooooooo..anoble!its true though,they got a lot of pubs.lolz!

God always bless Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and their love union.

Yes @ 04/12/2008 at 1:19 pm
anoble @ 04/12/2008 at 10:35 am

Sorry to hear about your step dad
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Thank you, sweetie - how is your aunt? better?

http://www.nola.com/living/t-p/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1207977892227240.xml&coll=1&thispage=1
(In-depth analysis of Global Green House. Entire article at link)
GLOBAL GREEN HOUSE UNVEILS ECO-FRIENDLY DECOR
Saturday, April 12, 2008
By Renée Peck

Back in 2006, when we were rebuilding our house post-Katrina, the emphasis was on hurricane-resistant construction: SIPS panels and trusses, paperless drywall and borate barriers.

No one was talking VOCs or BLUwood, tankless water heaters or low-flush toilets.

My, how things have changed. If I had it do to all over again — and luckily I don’t, because who would ever go through all that again — I’d get not only a strong house, but also a green one. In the past couple of years, green building and eco-friendly decorating have come of age.

Global Green and Domino magazine show how comprehensively and affordably it can be done in a new house in the Green Village going up in Holy Cross. The project, you’ll recall, was designed by a New York architectural firm chosen competitively by a group that included actor/activist Brad Pitt. The Home Depot Foundation is the major underwriter. Ground-breaking was back in August; this week, crews were putting the finishing touches on things.

The two-story, 1,344-square-foot home is a combination of high style and easy living, a mix of cutting-edge innovations like a green roof and cisterns with such old-fashioned planet-savers as antiques and windows that open for cross ventilation. Modern and edgy, yet with a nod to the raised foundations and flow-through space planning that we’ve used to battle the heat and humidity here for centuries.

“A lot of people think that any green project has to be all crunchy and granola,” said Dara Caponigro, Domino style director. “Sort of like the decorating equivalent of Birkenstocks. But it doesn’t have to be like that.”

The Global Green house features the ultimate in green decor — from organic fabrics to salvaged-wood floors to furniture made of renewable materials from fair-trade countries that don’t use child labor. Yet it’s warm and homey, stylish without being cold.

Furnishings blend new and old: an eye-catching contemporary fixture from Design Within Reach hangs in the dining room; a distressed-wood desk from a local antiques store is tucked beneath the staircase.

http://blogs.mysanantonio.com/weblogs/travel/2008/04/a_tale_of_three_cities.html
A Tale of Three Cities

(Great article with pictures)

“There are three New Orleans, really,” Davis explained. “There’s the one where nothing ever happened — where we’re thriving even more than before. There’s the one that’s still a skeleton of its former self. And there’s the one in between, where one is crawling toward the other — every day, on every block, with every family.”

It felt strange to be seated on the bus, skirting the edge of the same Lower Ninth neighborhood where I had stayed last Thanksgiving week, right below the levee break at the Common Ground Collective — and, not coincidentally, right where Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation is rebuilding dozens of houses. I remembered the bitter words of one resident who recalled feeling like a zoo exhibit for all the tour buses. But I also knew that America needs to see this: miles and miles of what still, two and a half years later, looks like a war zone, interspersed with lonely outposts where people are slowly rebuilding their lives. America needs to see it, and needs to find a way to make it right.

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/view/34849/Angie-is-Bourne-winner/

(Article about a role being developed for AJ. I think her mgt team bought the rights)

ANGIE IS BOURNE WINNER
DAILY STAR SUNDAY
ABOVE: Angelina will play a super-spy
13th April 2008
By Rick Lyons

ANGELINA Jolie has landed her biggest film role yet… playing a foxy female super-spy.

Jolie is tipped to break box office records playing a Jason Bourne-esque babe operating for the UN in the murky world of arms trafficking and terrorism.

Her character will be based on real-life intelligence operative Kathi Lynn Austin – a genuine super-spy who worked undercover in Africa, South-East Asia and Central America.

As can be seen in our amazing picture Jolie, 32, will be seen in an action role in June as an assassin in Wanted – a film based on a popular novel.

But Paramount Pictures are confident her next role in the film based on Austin’s life will be a blockbusting franchise.

The first film in the series centres on Austin’s bid to hunt down the world’s most prolific arms dealer – shadowy Russian Viktor Bout, known as “The Merchant Of Death”.
out, 41, has made millions shipping guns, ammunition, grenade launchers, missiles and attack helicopters from ex-Soviet states to warring African militias, the Taliban and al-Qaida.

He was tracked by the UN, the US Drug Enforcement Agency and British Intelligence before being arrested last month.

A Hollywood insider said: “This project has all the right ingredients. It will build on the super-spy concept of the Bourne franchise, which took secret agent movies to a new level.

“At the same time it will have one of the most beautiful women in the world as its lead.

“You have to conclude it will be a very good thing – both for the viewers and for Jolie’s career.”

http://www.boston.com/travel/getaways/us/articles/2008/04/13/in_high_spirits/?page=3
(Entire article at link)
We’re sitting across from the long wooden bar of French 75 in the heart of the French Quarter. It was January 2005 when Curtis, a native New Jerseyan then living in Maine, strolled into this bar, in town for the opening of the Museum of the American Cocktail, and realized that New Orleans was where he wanted to live. It wasn’t solely the legacy of the city as a great drink town, home to the Sazerac, Ramos Gin Fizz, and the annual Tales of the Cocktail festival. No, it was the merger of many of Curtis’s interests, from the various styles of distinctive New Orleans architecture like the shotgun and two-story double-gallery houses he bikes past, to the sounds of jazz heard everywhere in this city, from midday jams in the Quarter to the popular Frenchmen Street hangouts to neighborhood bars only a local could find.

Curtis is no idealist. He knows this city is in for a long, tough overhaul if it’s ever going to thrive. He had hoped that some neighborhoods like middle-class Lakeview, which was hit hard by the flooding, would have been leveled instead of letting a handful of homeowners back into a largely deserted community of overgrown yards and boarded-up windows. Yet the core of New Orleans, the French Quarter, Garden District, Uptown, Bywater, Bayou St. John, even the reemerging Ninth Ward (thanks to the generosity of Habitat for Humanity, celebrities like Brad Pitt and Harry Connick Jr., and hundreds of other anonymous volunteers), still feels vital.

#195 …miz bdj, can’t wait for this one.hope its true.thanks babe.

Thanks bdj

http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/355112.aspx

(Song a success on Idol gives Back. Video at link)

The eight finalists from season seven sang Darlene Zschech’s “Shout to the Lord” as they wrapped up the charity event.

Even more surprising, that performance became the number one downloaded from Wednesday night’s show. The finalists reprised the song on Thursday’s show.

http://entertainment.ie/DVD-reviews/The-Assassination-of-Jesse-James/5549.htm

(Great overlook movie. Buy/Rent on DVD)

The Assassination of Jesse James

Rent Now
The Assassination of Jesse James rated 4

View this trailer Watch Trailer

Obsessed with Jesse James (Pitt) from a young age, naive 19-year-old Robert Ford (Affleck) insinuates himself into his gang with the help of his older brother Charley (Rockwell), just to be in the great man’s presence. When a train robbery goes badly and some of his gang are captured, an increasingly paranoid James begins taking out his gang one-by-one and only Ford and Charley are treated with any kind of trust, which Ford uses to get closer to the celebrity villain. Adapted from Ron Hansen’s novel and directed by Andrew Dominik (Chopper), Assassination.. is an eerie, moody and tense-ridden western, despite the long running time. Dominik is obviously an admirer of the work of Terrence Malick (in particular, Days Of Heaven) and uses a poetic voiceover over sweeping prairie shots. The film is gorgeous to look at (cinematographer Roger Deakins can take another deserved bow), even if it spends more time in the bleak of winter than the summer plains of its opening shots, and it looks like we’ve got another auteur on our hands. Although director’s influence in never far away, this film is all about the performances and there’s not a duff one in sight. Pitt might be the big name in town but it’s really Affleck’s film, and who would have thought that Ben’s younger brother could produce a turn so commanding, heartfelt and confident? Despite the comment on contemporary fascination with the celebrity, Assassination.. is, at its heart, a love story; it’s no Brokeback Mountain, but there’s more than awe of James in the eyes of Robert Ford.

politico.com/news/stories/0408/9559.html

(Interesting article of power structure in Hollywood. Cute/paste link)

Think “Hollywood politics,” and you likely conjure up images of George Clooney speaking out about Darfur or Brad Pitt’s blueprint to provide housing for the New Orleans needy. Dozens of actors are known for their outspoken beliefs off screen as much as for their on-screen performances: Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin and Barbra Streisand to name just a few.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/chi-0612260045dec26,1,5816599.story?page=3
(Interesting article. Entire article at link)
CRISIS OF CULTURE IN NEW ORLEANS
Struggle to reclaim threads of past

Because of that, no one knows exactly how many tribes were still functioning in New Orleans when Katrina hit. The black Indians have long operated underground, in impoverished neighborhoods, mostly outside the view of the city’s power structure.

But longtime observers estimate that about 25 tribes, some with just two or three members, were functioning at the time of the storm, bringing the Mardi Gras Indian population to a few hundred, at best. For all the plush beauty of their suits, the allure of their rituals and the poetry of their names–Flaming Arrows, Blackfoot Hunters, Wild Tchoupitoulas, Fi-Yi-Yi–they had become an endangered species.

Since the storm, most have not returned.

Creole Wild West is “scattered out everywhere,” said Irving “Honey” Banister, Gang Flag of Creole Wild West, sitting in the mold-ridden New Orleans home of his mother, Littdell, the tribal queen. “I think I’ve got a contact with about six of them, but basically I couldn’t even tell you” where everyone is.