7days7nights.com Urban Blog

Pulp Fiction. The Star Warsprequels. Jurassic Park.Goodfellas.

Samuel L. Jackson has starred in some of the most iconic films in movie history, and he has the bank to back it up. His prolific resume, which includes more than 100 films, has yielded nearly $7.5 billion for Hollywood, according to The Guinness Book of World Records.

That impressive sum makes him the highest-grossing actor of all time, beating out the likes of bona fide box office kings such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, Will Smith and Matt Damon.

And despite amassing an impressive body of work that spans more than 30 years, Jackson has no intention of slowing down. He’s currently starring opposite Angela Bassett on Broadway inThe Mountaintop and has seven (!) movies slated for release over the next three years, including the highly anticipated comic book flick The Avengers.

SOURCE: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/entertainment/post/2011/10/jackson-is-highest-grossing-actor-of-all-time/1

*Celebrity party planners for Diddy, Jay-Z, Kanye, Mariah, etc. can earn between $250,000-$2 million per year. This brand of party planner is known as: Party Planner extraordinariness.

DIDDY’S PARTY SECRETS (BEHIND THE VELVET ROPE):

Stepping onto P Diddy’s yacht moored off the South of France is like stepping into another dimension. High heels removed – he won’t countenance any scuff marks on his plush cream carpets – guests are greeted by dazzling blue spotlights on the $33 million Maraya.

The mirrored walls make the boat seem unnervingly large. The guests (Beyoncé, Jay-Z, some random friends of Jessica Simpson) lounge on cream leather sofas. Up on deck outside, Naomi Campbell is bursting into tears. The ten-man crew, deed in pristine black, cater to their guests’ every whim.

On the top deck, a huge projector screen looms over the main dance floor, which vibrates to the strains of Diddy’s eclectic music passions – everything from Sinatra to Snoop Dogg. A heaving bar at the back of the 54m yacht dispenses a steady supply of champagne and vodka cocktails.

Inside one of the several private rooms, Lindsay Lohan is dressing for the evening. The cream throw pillows scattered around are emblazoned with P Diddy’s initials – SJC, which stands for Sean John Combs – and given that he has gone through more aliases than James Bond (Puff Daddy, Puffy, Sean John, Sean John Combs and Sean Puffy Combs to name but several), the seamstress must have been busy.

Resplendent in a sharp suit with black-trimmed lapels, which blends in seamlessly with the neutral decor of his surroundings, aviator sunglasses perched firmly on his nose despite the late hour, the man himself looks magnificent.

P. Diddy’s Cannes film festival parties are legendary – like all his parties. Oscar winner Jamie Foxx is adamant that ‘Diddy throws the best party you’ll ever see in your entire life. About 12, 14 years ago, I couldn’t get into the party, and then Diddy swept past me like this Cristal-Bentley tsunami. He’s a legend.’

And even though every day’s a party day for Diddy, the past few weeks in particular have been especially frenetic.

As well as his countless Cannes outings, Diddy recently hosted a lavish $2 million bash at the Californian mansion of billionaire Ron Burkle to celebrate receiving a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

And you wonder why this is the man Live came to when we wanted to find out how to host the perfect party.

Settling into one of his plush sofas, P Diddy takes calls intermittently on his BlackBerry – and then begins to explain why his parties are so memorable…

The top five ingredients for the perfect party are the people, the music, the amenities, the food and drink, and the lighting. It sounds easy enough, but it really isn’t.

You need to keep playing around with those elements to get them just right. For a great vibe you need to pay attention to every detail. You can’t put a price on a good party, but it costs a lot to throw a great one, which is why I often have mine paid for by sponsors.

The most expensive party I ever threw cost $2 million and was for my birthday. It was a black-tie affair with a huge orchestra. I’ve been organizing parties all my life. I like to come up with the concepts and I even draw sketches so that everyone has a clear idea of what I’m looking for.

Themes are a great idea for a party, because they help make them more exciting and bring everyone together.

The key is to get everyone to feel relaxed and open to enjoying themselves. I once threw a Black and White Ball [based on Truman Capote's legendary masked ball of 1966] and I have my special White Party every year, where guests have to dress in white.

Wearing white is not only sexy; it means everyone is unified both visually and emotionally. It puts everyone on the same level. At my ‘Harlem To Hollywood’ party [the Walk of Fame bash], the guests – including Victoria Beckham, Paris and Nicky Hilton, Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria and actor Derek Luke [who plays Diddy in a forthcoming biopic of rap artist The Notorious B.I.G.] – played croquet on the lawn.

It’s important for every party to have something interesting and unusual the guests can get involved in – it helps get people together and makes the event more memorable.

I liked the idea of croquet because it’s a very Gatsby-type activity and I take pride in being a Gatsby figure.

But I’ve had all sorts of different activities before. I’ve had masquerade balls, and I’ve hired performers from Cirque du Soleil.

Something fun and entertaining ensures that your parties get talked about for a long time after they’ve ended.

I’ve thrown parties where there has been everyone from presidents to Michael Jackson to David Beckham to my relatives – even people from my ‘hood.

It’s important to invite a good range of people with varied interests – good conversationalists and dancers especially – and then just mix them up.

The best parties go on forever, because you don’t want them to stop. I’ve had times when I’ve started partying in New York and taken a jet to Miami to finish off, or started in Paris and then flown to London, or started in Ibiza and then jetted off to Sardinia.

Every year, me and a small, secret crew of people fly off to Ibiza for a week’s partying. It’s a mixed group – we call ourselves the Breakfast Club – and generally I’d say the best ratio for any party is two women to every one man.

No details must be overlooked – and that includes the invitations. I’ve done video invitations, musical messages – I’ve even sent out ones that have been drawn in glass and etched in black marble.

I threw my first party when I was 18, and back then when I was organizing huge parties I’d send out around 3,000 flyers.

Nowadays I think my best parties are the ones that are small and intimate, and if there are only about 20 people then it’s easier to focus on producing a really great and unusual invitation.

Normally I give people only about four or five days’ notice to weed out potential gate-crashers.
On the night of the party I like to lay on transportation for my guests – generally a classic black Cadillac with absolutely no alcohol in the back. It’s best to wait until they get to the venue before they start drinking.

For my Harlem To Hollywood party I laid on private jets, bringing people from Russia, London, Paris, New York and Africa.

I love the British and their sense of style – it’s very chic and clean and elegant and timeless to me. I love David Beckham’s style, and also the style of the Beatles when they were in their prime.

One day I will invite Prince William and Prince Harry. I met them at last year’s Concert for Diana and they told me they were fans of mine. They were great, down-to-earth people and I’d definitely feel comfortable inviting them to one of my parties now.

I have my own particular ritual for getting ready, which takes about two hours, but before I settle on an outfit, I like to try on lots of different ones, and I’ll have a long bath beforehand.

I may change twice in an evening and I’ll always have a spare outfit on hand if something happens to the one I’m wearing.

The dress code for the Hollywood party was ’sexy formal’, and I loved the outfit I eventually wore, which was a vintage white tuxedo jacket. I had a real ‘black Sinatra’ look going on.

Otherwise, I like to wear things from my Sean John line.

My clothing line is like fashion Viagra. While I’m getting ready I like to relax with a drink – vodka and lemonade – and listen to my music, usually some James Brown.

Then I’ll have a manicure and pedicure – and yes, I wax as well. Grooming’s very important and men owe it to women to make sure they’re well groomed.

I wax my privates. I’ll also wear my fragrance, Unforgivable Black. You can tell a lot by a man’s fragrance, and either you have good taste or you can smell like your grandfather. In everything I do, I visualize myself either putting clothes on or taking them off.

I feel like I have a certain type of energy when I walk into a room, and I feel it comes across to people, too. The right time to make an entrance is an hour to an hour-and-a-half into the party.

Sometimes you’ll go to a formal gathering where the time is very structured, and that’s fine, but I think the best parties are the ones that evolve from their own momentum and that start at 5am and finish days later. Those parties test your commitment and staying power and separate the weak from the strong.

I have a whole list of DJs that I use, but my top three are DJ Kiss, DJ D-Nice and DJ Cassidy – they can get any party going. But I can do my bit, too, if I need to make sure that everybody’s having a good time. I’m there to host the party and I’ll do it by any means necessary.

The best music to get a party going? You play any Michael Jackson and people are going to get up and dance – especially Rock With You – and you play Biggie and they’ll dance, too. The best songs to smooch to? Marvin Gaye, definitely. Here, My Dear or Distant Lover.

It’s a free bar, of course – you don’t need to bring your credit card or any cash when you’re partying with me.

I‘ll have plenty of Cîroc vodka on hand. That definitely helps to make the party, because it’s the smoothest vodka and that translates to people acting smooth.

Everyone thinks I drink champagne all the time, and there’ll always be some there – probably a Veuve, the best there is.

I’ve had tons of things happen at my parties, but I’ve never had a girl jump out of a cake – though it’s on my list of things to do. At one of my parties I did have a naked lady taking a champagne bath in the middle of the room.

Even the best party can have a lull, and when that happens I take care of things. If your party’s going through a slow patch, one of the best things to do is propose a toast – it peps people up instantly.

Sometimes you just have to let the guests know how fortunate they all are. Occasionally I’ve jumped up and sung New York, New York, which I consider to be one of my theme songs.

I send my guests away with a goodie bag – the best one had diamond watches. I also like to give away jewelry if possible. If any guests have too much to drink, I provide a car service to get them home safely.

One of the best parties I ever threw started out with 20 people and ended up with me and a lady, dancing to James Brown as we watched our shadows flickering against the wall. Your readers’ mouths would drop to the floor if they knew who. But that’s why I throw the best parties. When you get around me, you lose your inhibitions and let it go. And that’s what a great party is all about.

Source: Daily Mail

WASHINGTON — Got problems? Tell Barack Obama. He can help. He might even give you money.
On more than one occasion, the president has cut personal checks to struggling Americans who’ve written to the White House, according to an excerpt from a new book by Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow about the ten letters the president reads every day.
“It’s not something I should advertise, but it has happened,” the president told Saslow.
How many times has President Obama intervened on someone’s behalf, and with what kind of problems does he help? Mortgage payments? Medical bills? And when he wants to help someone out with a personal check, how does it work? Does he send a check signed “Barack Obama” directly to the individual in need, or does he send the money to a bank or company on the person’s behalf? Do people even know when Obama has helped them out, or does the help arrive anonymously through a lawyer?
The White House declined to answer any questions about the practice.

SOURCE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/21/obama-personal-checks_n_1019501.html

Dear Mr. President,

May Can I Get $20?

-LadySteele

Heidi Klum taking her boys to a Halloween party 10/15

Linda Evangelista and Gina Torres at Les Girls Annual event 10/17.

Mr & Mrs Kris and Kim Humphries front for the cameras Dine at SSTK in NYC 10/17

Stacy Kiebler and George Clooney Descendants premiere in Paris 10/18

Linsay Lohan arriving at court 10/19/2011

Mya @ Tongue & Groove-ATL…

Ryan Gosling hangs with Eva Mendes…

One day after hundreds of thousands of people around the world demonstrated against inequality and the domination of society by the banks, President Barack Obama invoked the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. to preach the “common humanity” of the oppressor and the oppressed.

Speaking at the official dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on Washington’s National Mall, Obama, clearly though only indirectly alluding to the growing protests, said of King: “It was that insistence, that belief that God resides in each of us, from the high to the low, in the oppressor and the oppressed, that convinced him that people and systems could change. It fortified his believe in non-violence. It permitted him to place his faith in a government that had fallen short of its ideals.”

To reinforce the point, Obama suggested that King’s legacy was the recognition that “any social movement,” to “bring about true and lasting change,” had to embrace “the possibility of reconciliation.”

The president continued: “If he were alive today, I believe he would remind us that the unemployed worker can rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing all who work there…”

This crude attempt to use the figure of King to promote a spirit of submission and illusions in the possibility of reforming the existing system speaks to the fear within the American ruling class that the anti-Wall Street protests express the growth of anti-capitalist and potentially revolutionary sentiment. Particularly disturbing and dangerous, from the standpoint of Obama and the class of oppressors he represents, is the fact that issues of inequality and social class have dominated the demonstrations, not the various forms of identity and life-style politics based on race, gender and sexual orientation that have been used for decades to block the emergence of an independent political movement of the working class.

The greatest fear of Obama and the US ruling elite is that the Occupy Wall Street movement portends the emergence of a far greater movement of the working class outside of the two-party system and all of its pro-capitalist agencies, such as the trade unions. They fear the reemergence of working-class struggle after decades in which it has been suppressed. This fear is entirely justified.

Hence Obama’s pretense of sympathy for the protests and his turn to pseudo-populist demagogy in recent weeks—always combined in one way or another with affirmations of support for the capitalist system.

In his speech at the King dedication, Obama made passing references to the economic crisis, unemployment and the growth of poverty today. He praised the courage of the civil rights militants who braved police batons, racist violence and prison during the anti-segregation struggles in the US South. He made no mention, however, of the hundreds of arrests of peaceful protesters carried out the day before by police across the country.

For Obama to posture as a partisan of the poor and oppressed is the height of hypocrisy. He has slavishly pursued the policies demanded by Wall Street since taking office, resulting in a more rapid decline in working-class incomes and a faster growth of poverty than under Bush, combined with bigger-than-ever profits and pay for the corporations.

There is something particularly obscene about Obama cloaking himself in the mantle of King, who, for all his political limitations, led a courageous mass struggle to achieve elementary democratic rights for African-Americans against the system of Jim Crow apartheid in the South. Barely two weeks before his King speech, Obama became the first US president to order the assassination of an American citizen—Anwar al-Awlaki—and publicly boast of its having been carried out.

Obama seizes precisely on King’s political weaknesses—his pacifism and rejection of socialist revolution—to try to prevent the emergence of a mass movement for equality and socialism today.

King courageously denounced the Vietnam War in 1967, breaking with the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson. He insisted that genuine freedom could not be achieved for blacks or anyone else in America so long as the United States was allowed to commit war crimes against people of other countries.

In his final years, he increasingly saw the fight for racial justice as part of a broader struggle for economic security and equality. His call for a “Poor People’s Campaign,” together with his opposition to the Vietnam War, made him a marked man, especially when he went to Memphis to support a bitter strike by sanitation workers. The FBI’s relentless campaign of spying and harassment of King ended only with his assassination in Memphis in April of 1968.

The hypocrisy of Obama—who has continued and expanded the wars of Bush and is threatening new wars against Iran and other countries—claiming the legacy of King is brazen.

By the time of King’s death, the limitations of his reformist perspective had already brought the civil rights movement to a crisis point. It must be added that the domination of the labor movement by a right-wing, pro-capitalist bureaucracy was a crucial factor in the movement of millions of African-American workers for democratic rights falling under the leadership of middle-class figures and preachers such as King.

Instead of the end of Jim Crow apartheid in the South becoming the starting point for a struggle against the capitalist system as a whole, it became the occasion for a sordid deal between the American ruling class and a privileged layer of the black upper middle class. President Nixon expanded the use of affirmative action policies to cultivate a small layer in the black population who were allowed to enter the political and economic establishment.

Meanwhile, the mass of African-American workers and the working class as a whole suffered a steady decline in living standards, which has been vastly accelerated since the Wall Street crash of 2008.

Obama is the apotheosis of this process: a right-wing, militarist, pro-Wall Street African-American president. His elevation—like that of figures such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice under Bush—is not some consummation of the struggle of black people for civil rights, but rather the result of an attempt by corporate interests within the Democratic Party to use Obama’s skin color to obscure their reactionary policies.

Obama, in fact, did not come out of the civil rights movement, or any tradition of social struggle. Educated for the most part in private schools and given entry into Columbia University and Harvard Law School, he was groomed from an early age by wealthy interests in Chicago to serve American imperialism and US big business, which he was done unswervingly, becoming a multimillionaire in the process.

Now he dispenses doses of religion and cheap moralizing to oppose the development of socialist consciousness in the emerging movement of the American and international working class. He preaches reconciliation and harmony while pursuing a ruthless policy of class war at home and abroad.
Leon Trotsky, in his brilliant essay Their Morals and Ours, published in 1938, opposed all such attempts to politically disarm the working class and prevent it from ruthlessly and consciously prosecuting the class struggle in defense of its interests. As he wrote: “A slave owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains—let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
This author also recommends:
“Forty years on, some lessons from the life—and death—of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
[7 April 2008]
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/apr2008/king-a07.shtml

Happy Birthday Shaffer Chimere Smith, Jr. aka Ne-Yo aka My Baby!!! One of the few artist that’s truly 1 in a million! <3

You deserve way more Grammy’s than that! Hopefully one day the world will remember and appreciate what good music is! -LadySteele YES I AM A STAN!

see more videos here: http://www.rantsofsteele.com/site/?q=node/187

Happy Birthday to one of the most powerful military entities in the world who also has the world’s best ground troops (SEALS) and arguably the world’s greatest PILOTS????!!!

CNO’s Birthday Message

CNO\’s B-day Message

LadySteele supports the Troops!

NOMINATIONS FOR THE 2011 AMERICAN MUSIC AWARDS

POP or ROCK MUSIC

Favorite Male Artist

Justin Bieber

Pitbull

Favorite Female Artist

Adele

OneRepublic

Favorite Album

Adele/21

Rihanna/Loud

COUNTRY MUSIC

Favorite Male Artist

Taylor Swift/Speak Now

RAP/HIP-HOP MUSIC

Favorite Artist

Nicki Minaj/Pink Friday

SOUL/RHYTHM & BLUES MUSIC

Favorite Male Artist

Chris Brown

Rihanna/Loud

ALTERNATIVE ROCK MUSIC

Favorite Artist

The Black Keys

Mumford & Sons

ADULT CONTEMPORARY MUSIC

Favorite Artist

Adele

Katy Perry

LATIN MUSIC

Favorite Artist

Jennifer Lopez

Pitbull

CONTEMPORARY INSPIRATIONAL

Favorite Artist

Third Day

ARTIST OF THE YEAR

Adele

Taylor Swift

Sprint New Artist Of The Year

POP/ROCK

LMFAO

Wiz Khalifa

There you go folks! The pictures are my predicted winners!

Yup! Mimi did it on ‘em! Mariah beat out Beyonce ($300 million) Lady Gaga ($150 million) and even Hip Hop Moguls Jay-Z ($450 million) Diddy ($475 million) to earn her title…How? Well not only does Mariah write/Co-write her songs, she also owns her masters and is worth a reported $500 million!

Check out www.celebritynetworth.com for more details!