Our Daily Dead

Certainly we all need a wee bit o’ help from time to time with and about our chosen careers. Well that is the normal “we” actually as those who are Not One Of Us worry not.

With that ridiculous preamble now safely out of our ODDsystems we provide yet another episode in our continuing series of Self Help and Community Service Announcements.

Tis this, simply and without ornamentation: if you find that your once high flying career has you surfing the bar at the Holiday Inn instead of dancing [butt] cheek to [butt] cheek with Paris, why then no doubt you need to give your flagging career a new launch. We read that one of the surest means is the old bit of a strip for a nude photo shoot. At least according to photographer Motoji Takasu by way of the Mainichi Daily News. But then he does have vested interest in getting you naked so mayhaps his is just another pickup line.

And speaking of naked flagging careers, perhaps the excess exposure explains ol wassernames behavior recently, eh what?

But just think and consider (and ponder too if you are willing to go that far)! Once your career is again stratospheric you can give up some of those old haunts of yours…for example your gig at the Player’s Nightclub at Hobart’s St David’s Anglican Cathedral. Sure the setting is nice, but the tips are probably lousy (unless you finger the collection plates that is). Won’t you be happy to avoid all that leaping from pew to pew and dogma to dogma? We must admit however that we’ll miss your genuflecting.

Naturally if you never really had a career, but still need that another hit of your “Look At Me” drug you can take a cue from Heidi and Seal. Invite the media over for a bit of a bash to show off the nude pictures of you and the family. Surely one of those pics will work later as a donation to raise funds for someone’s school or hospital or church don’t ya think?

And then, when your career just seems like so much T&A we suggest politics. No not Bush politics (although we couldn’t resist that). Our sage advice? Chuck it all and move to Spain. Once there we urge you to consider, especially with your checkered background and vast experience, the position of Deputy Mayor for Economy.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Self Help, Community Service, Holiday Inn, Paris, Motoji Takasu, naked, dogma, genuflect, Seal, nude, T&A, politics, Spain

By way of the Courier News Online web site comes notice that Charlotte T. Reid, former pop singer and U.S. Representative, died at age 93. She once described herself has having five careers.

“She was a pop singer, a wife and mother, a U.S. representative, a member of the Federal Communications Commission and a businesswoman. Add to that a longtime Aurora icon, and key figure in the Fox Valley Republican Party.”

Reid, 93, died this past Wednesday, January 23, 2007. Born Charlotte Thompson in Kankakee, she lived most of her life in Aurora.

“The one thing about my mother is that she was as gracious and nice to everybody, whether it was the president of the United States or a janitor,” said Patricia Reid Lindner, one of Reid’s two daughters. Reid Lindner is a Republican state representative from Sugar Grove. “She always treated everybody the same.”

“That openness and ability to relate to people is what former Aurora Mayor Albert McCoy remembered about Reid on Thursday. McCoy was Aurora mayor from 1965 to 1977, and Reid represented Aurora and five northern Illinois counties for about five years of that time.”

“Reid also studied music and voice in Chicago, and was a featured vocalist with the NBC Radio show, Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club, which originated in Chicago. She appeared under the professional name of Annette King. She also sang on other NBC radio shows, like Club Matinee (1937-1946) and Sunday Dinner at Aunt Fannie’s. “

“Riding on the City of New Orleans,
Illinois Central Monday morning rail
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders,
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail.
All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields.
Passin’ trains that have no names,
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.”
~~ by Steve Goodman,
with perhaps the best known version by Woody’s boy Arlo Guthrie

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Charlotte T. Reid, pop singer, died, Kankakee, Steve Goodman, Arlo Guthrie

Here we go again Alex…we’ll take Music Producers for $500….From Pierre Perrone
at the Independent Online comes word that Colin Thurston, perhaps best know as the producer for Duran Duran, died on January 15. The cause of death is at present unknown.

“When the budding record producer Colin Thurston was taken to see Duran Duran in 1980, he wasn’t in the best of moods. He had just flown back from the United States and the jet-lag was catching up with him. However, as soon as they began playing ‘Girls on Film’, Thurston snapped out of his torpor. By the end of their set, he knew he had found the next band he wanted to work with. Producer and musicians sealed their partnership with a four-day session during which they aimed to record both sides of a single but actually completed half of Duran Duran, the group’s début album for EMI.”

“Issued in June 1981, in the wake of the Top Forty success of the singles ‘Planet Earth’ and ‘Careless Memories’, Duran Duran began a steady climb up the charts. The band’s good looks and emerging pin-up status did the rest. By autumn 1981 … Beatlemania-like pandemonium followed them everywhere, with teenage girls climbing over cars to try and reach their idols.”

Thurston was also an engineer on David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’ and producer on Human League’s ‘Reproduction’ and ‘Travelogue’, Magazine’s ‘Secondhand Daylight’ and Howard Jones ‘Human Lib’.

Over at the official Duran Duran web site bassist John Taylor says:

“Without Colin’s depth of vision, we would never have become the band we became. He will be remembered as an important musical stylist who was a major catalyst for the Eighties sound.”

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Colin Thurston, Duran Duran, died, Top Forty, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Human League, Howard Jones

From the Angry Ape web site (and others): Hip hop producer David Shayman committed suicide yesterday, January 23rd, aged just 27.

Shayman AKA Disco D had previously worked with such names as 50 Cent (on The Sky Mask Way), Nina Sky (Turnin’ Me On), Trick Daddy and Lil’ Scrappy.

According to various sources, Disco D had been diagnosed as bi-polar recently and was suffering from depression.

His loss has come as a great shock to the hip hop community, but fans can leave their respect at D’s MySpace page.

From the University of Michigan Living Music web site comes a bit more insight into Shayman’s past:

He was originally from Ann Arbor and attended the University of Michigan where he received his business degree in 2002. He recorded his first EP at age 17 and is known as one of the originators of Detroit Ghettotech — an urban hybrid of Detroit techno and electro, Chicago booty house and Miami Bass. He now lives in New York City where he has stepped into the commercial hip-hop, R&B and dance hall music production scene.

Paul: So how did you get the name ‘Disco D’?
Disco D: Someone took a picture of me, maybe when I was 15, I was trying to do a trick and I f**ked up and it looked like I was disco dancing. They e-mailed it around and said ‘Disco D’ cuz my name was David. And when I started DJaying, it was a distraction from my parents divorce, and I couldn’t think of a name and that was a nickname I had so that was it and it just stuck. It has nothing to do with music.

Read the rest of the interview over at the Living Music interview web site.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: David Shayman, suicide, Disco D, 50 Cent, Nina Sky, Trick Daddy, Lil’ Scrappy, bi-polar, depression, hip hop, techno, electro, R&B