Broadcasters around the world are shifting into their highest gear to cover Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding Friday.

LONDON -- As the big day draws near, it's not just the bride who may be feeling a little anxious.

With predictions are that it will draw the biggest audience in television history, broadcasters around the world are shifting into their highest gear for the royal wedding, and for the next few days London will become the focus of the world.

"Yes, we're moving to London. Where else would you be?" says Chris Hampson, NBC News' director of international news. "Everybody wants to be here. You can't sit in New York and tell this story. You have to be right in the thick of it."

And the thick of it is exactly where the world's biggest media organizations will be. Take a stroll down London's Mall toward Buckingham Palace, and the bland, tree-lined vista used mainly for bypassing the traffic chaos of Piccadilly has been transformed into a hive of pre-ceremony activity.

The traffic has been shut off, and behind the milling tourists and Japanese camera crews, two huge temporary media studios have been erected opposite either flank of the Queen's London residence. This media zone in Canada Gate will host more than 40 stand-alone studios with full play-out facilities for broadcasters including the BBC, ABC, Sky News, NBC, CBS and Al Jazeera English.

It is just part of a network of locations including Westminster Abbey, the Mall and Trafalgar Square that are host to a raft of specially erected broadcast locations.

"It's our biggest international technical build-out ever," said Hampson, who added that NBC and its sister networks including MSNBC and Telemundo, E! and Bravo began planning wedding coverage even before the royal engagement was announced in November. "We began to focus very early and had a team in London scouting locations and planning for months."

The result is a series of prime locations, including a prestige slot beneath Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square from which NBC will broadcast a special edition of Today on Friday kicking off at 4 am EST as well as four studios in the media village at Buckingham Palace.

It is also bringing over a host of anchors including Meredith Vieira, Matt Lauer, Natalie Morales and Al Roker.

NBC is far from alone in pulling out all the stops; ABC will have live coverage of the ceremony from London anchored by Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters, and the network will air a special edition of Good Morning America from London.

CBS is sending Katie Couric on what could be her swan song for the network. Couric will lead the main wedding coverage and anchor an hourlong news special at 8 p.m. Friday.

CNN will use its London squad as well getting as an insider's take from Piers Morgan, while Fox News is sending over around 50 staff including Shepard Smith and Martha Macullum.

Fox will piggyback on the feed from its sister U.K. network Sky News, which, like all the British broadcasters, is planning wall-to-wall coverage of the event.

Click here to read the entire article: The WEDDING

I'm Not Perfect; but MORE Perfect Than YOU!!!!

HEREEEEEEEE"S GRACE!!!!

by Leah Greenblatt

Lady Gaga may adore cult pop icon Grace Jones, but Ms. Jones won’t picking up her t-t-telephone calls any time soon.

The 61-year-old Jamaican-born model/actress/fashion radical, best known as a club performer, Warhol muse, Bond girl, hair maverick, and all-around fabu freakshow, was recently asked by London’s Guardian newspaper what she thought of the world’s current preeminent mistress of carcinogenic eyewear. Jones’ reply? “I really don’t think of her at all. I go about my business … I wouldn’t go to see her.”

And would they ever work together? “She did [ask], but I said no. I’d just prefer to work with someone who is more original and someone who is not copying me, actually.”

Mild-ish words, actually, from the woman who gave the world Strangé—and one wonders why she doesn’t call out her other obvious acolyte, Rihanna—but she can hardly be blamed for drawing the comparison.

As stated on The Future on February 5, 2010, Gaga’s genealogy has never been much of a mystery: She is unabashedly built from the DNA of many stars who came before her—including but not limited to Madonna, David Bowie, Roisin Murphy, Prince, Cher, Labelle, Freddie Mercury and of course the original cult-of-personality maestro himself, Mr. Warhol.

Like the recent M.I.A.-chugs-the-Lady-haterade episode, this one will surely be met by Gaga loyalists‘ insistence that the Lady is, like, ten billion times more amazeballs than Jones, who is just too jealous/old/All About Eve-ish to acknowledge her younger and more commercially successful rival.

If they do, they may be touching on some truth (sometimes, Strangé get cranké), but they’re missing the larger point: Gaga, definitively, could not exist without Jones, Madge, and Mercury, and she seems very much aware of that. In fact, she acknowledges them ad nauseum in her album liner notes and interviews and in, basically, the way she lives her outsized life-as-performance-art existence (bedazzled face crustaceans for brunch! Personal head planetarium for Ellen!) every day—if not in the fairly straightforward and markedly commercial (much more, at least, than Grace’s ever were) pop songs that anchor it all. I AGREE and I am the BIGGEST GRACE JONES FAN AROUND!!! Lil Mogul...

If progenitors like Jones are sometimes a little bothered that Gaga sails so easily down the far-out road they paved—and with a much fatter wallet tucked in her triangle pants—is that jealousy, or just humanity? I call it LIFE!!!

Revisiting PURPLE RAIN On The Big Screen (Thanks To Cool Classics @ The Colony)

As I reported a few posts back (“Hey I Finally Saw... ERASERHEAD!” 8/3/08) The Colony Theatre in North Raleigh has been showing a series of what they call “cool classics”. In the last few years they've shown 35 MM prints of modern movie milestones like THE BIG LEBOWSKI and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE as well as guilty pleasures such as THE GOONIES and GREASE. I was pleased as punch to see that Prince’s MTV inspired musical PURPLE RAIN was on the calender this month. I had seen the film before but on video a long time ago so the time is right to have a big screen re-appraisal and here it is:

PURPLE RAIN (Dir. Albert Magnoli, 1984)

Released almost 25 years ago, the theatrical debut of Minnesota’s funky wunderkind Prince defines “dated” - it’s washed in synthesizer sound, bathed in neon-lit smoke, and plods with drum machine timing. Like an Elvis or Tab Hunter vehicle reshaped for the 80’s, Prince plays “The Kid” a teased-haired guitar-strangling stage-hopping diva who one night playing at Minneapolis’ legendary 1st Avenue falls for a fresh off the bus, or more accurately fresh off running from paying a cabbie, sexy singing sensation named Apollonia. The Kid’s competitor Morris Day as himself (everybody but Prince it seems goes by their own name) also eyes Apollonia but she is taken for a ride literally by The Kid on his motorcycle across the countryside montage-style while “The Beautiful Ones” serenades them from one of the biggest selling soundtracks of all time. When on the verge of skinning dipping, Apollonia asks The Kid: “And you...what do you dream of?”, I quipped to my friend Jill that his answer should be - “better acting”.

This was the right way in which to view this movie with a plot so bare boned yet still extremely cliche ridden it’s ripe for ridicule. When the music isn’t blaring and the dance rhythms die down the players engage in melodrama with far from fleshed out conflicts. Prince’s, sorry The Kid’s parents (Clarence Williams III & Olga Karlotas) fight it out on the homefront as his audiences are dropping off at the club because of his risky experimentation (which makes for one of the soundtracks most excitably ambitious numbers “Computer Blue”). Apollonia seems to offer some sexy solace from The Kid’s stress but when she joins Morris’s band he goes ballistic and strikes her, which is crudely brushed off as part of his moody personality - and this is just after he gives him a lavish guitar as a gift! Moody and brooding seems to be the only notes Prince can or wants to play as an actor here. When The Kid steals Apollonia from a drunk Morris Day once again on his motorcycle in a dark alley, Day yells: “Motherfucker! You long-haired faggot!”, my friend Jill chimed in with “that may be the best line of the whole movie...he sounded like he really meant it!” I am inclined to agree though I think my favorite line was Day to Apollonia earlier in the film: “Your lips would make a lollipop too happy.”

With this MST3K-like riffing on the film debut of the artist formerly known as Prince who became an unpronounceable symbol but now is known as Prince again we could best enjoy the so called plot elements between the music video and concert sequences that really are this movie’s calling cards. The charismatic and extremely amusing Morris Day, who got some enthusiastic shout-outs at the screening we attended, appears to be the most fully rounded character but thats most likely from what he brings to the role and not whats in the screenplay which if I found out that there was more than one draft of I’d be royally shocked.

Somehow despite the hackneyed storyline, the atrocious acting, and time-worn editing, PURPLE RAIN shines stronger than other so called cult classics of the same era largely because of its stellar soundtrack. The climatic unveiling of the title song, with a melody and backbeat written in the film (but not in real life) by Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman of the Revolution, which annihilates the crowd at 1st Avenue as well as Day and his cronies is wondrous amped-up high gloss camp successfully disguised as devastating drama. To watch it and not smile seems as sinful as Prince’s usual song subject matter and just as naughty too.

More later...