Mediaboss Marketing

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Nearly two years since mall owner Capri Urban Investors announced its intentions to completely overhaul Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, the $35 million upgrade is complete. The comprehensive makeover, which includes the addition of new state-of-the-art movie theaters, several restaurants and retailers, a new outdoor plaza and cosmetic improvements, has transformed BHCP into a top-tier shopping center in the heart of the Crenshaw community.

We made a commitment to raise the bar at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza two years ago, to ensure we are providing the amenities, services and quality experiences consumers have come to expect at best-in-class facilities across the country, said Ken Lombard, partner and president of Capri Urban Investors, LLC, the owner of the mall. We now have a gleaming new center and a line-up of quality retailers that this community deserves, and we look forward to announcing even more new restaurants and stores in the months ahead.

Since the renovation began, several new retailers have opened their doors at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza including Staples, which now occupies a brand new building adjacent to the mall. BHCP is also now home to the all-new Rave Cinemas 15, a modern multiplex featuring stadium seating, all-digital projection and seven RealD 3-D equipped auditoriums. It is the first Rave theater in California with Rave Extreme: the Big Screen Experience, which includes giant wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor screens, enhanced sound systems and digital projects. The theater has been wildly successful since opening in July 2011, often grossing among the top 100 theaters in the nation for family films.

The internationally acclaimed Debbie Allen Dance Academy, which moved from Culver City into a brand new building at the corner of Marlton and Santa Rosalia Avenues in 2009, continues to draw hundreds of young artists from across Southern California to Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza each day.

The mall now boasts several new dining options as well. In January 2012, well-known restaurateur Brad Johnson and Chef Govind Armstrong introduced restaurant Post & Beam to the local community. Featuring open-hearth cooking, seasonal ingredients, and herbs and vegetables from the restaurants own garden, Post & Beam is a unique sit-down restaurant in the neighborhood. The Los Angeles Times praised the new restaurant, calling Post and Beam a promising newcomer to the LA dining scene, serving real food, California in spirit with a sassy Southern accent.

Other new dining options at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza include Sbarro, Saffron Indian Cuisine, and Southern Girl Desserts, operated by co-owners Catarah Hampshire and Shoneji Robinson, who were recently featured on Season 6 of the Food Networks Cupcake Wars. In 2011, the first Buffalo Wild Wings in the City of Los Angeles opened its doors at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza.

We saw this as a great opportunity to grow with the community and be part of the transformation at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, said Hampshire. We appreciated that the mall ownership believed in our company and the vision we have. BHCP really goes above and beyond to support its tenants and we recognize that we will have a great support team to assist in our success.

The comprehensive upgrades have sparked investment from the malls anchors as well. Macys completed a multi-million dollar upgrade that included physical improvements to the store and the addition of new departments, fixtures and merchandise. Walmart is also undertaking significant renovations to enhance the shopping experience, adding features customers have long-requested including groceries, crafts and fabrics, and an expanded apparel selection.

Between the new Rave Cinemas 15 and the upgraded mall is a new 30,000-square-foot promenade that also serves as the featured new entry point for the retail center. The promenade features lush landscaping including dozens of mature trees, Bougainvillea and Japanese Boxwood plants, new lighting, as well as built-in seating areas. Project architects Omniplan and RAW International designed the new theatre and promenade to create a signature gathering area and entry point for the entire property.

Originally posted here:
$35 Million Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza Makeover Complete

Life after Saturday Night Live has been very good to some. Make a name for yourself on the long-running sketch comedy show and the sky can become the limit. From Eddie Murphy to Chris Rock to Will Ferrell (Anchorman 2), SNL has brought us some of the great comedic minds in recent history.

Andy Samberg, a recent SNL graduate, is the latest funnyman to find success through the popular TV series. In a summer that will already feature a co-starring role in the forthcomingThats My Boy (June 15)with fellow SNL alum Adam Sandler (watch the trailer), comes news that Sambergs post SNL career will now include a TV series with the U.K.-based BBC Three.

According to THR, Samberg will begin production this summer on the networks latest television series entitled Cuckoo. Samberg will play Cuckoo and it will co-star Welsh comedian Greg Davies (The Inbetweeners). Cuckoowas created and written by Robin French and Kieron Quirke.

BBC Three described SambergsCuckoo character as a slacker full of outlandish, New Age ideas. The network which usually targets the 16-34 year old demographic detailed the basis of Cuckoos storyline by saying:

When Ken (Greg Davies) and Lorna (Helen Baxendale) collect their daughter (Tamla Kari) from the airport, theyre horrified to learn that shes returned from her gap year with more than just a henna tattoo and braids in her hair. At the arrival gate, she promptly introduces them to her new husband, Cuckoo the squared-jawed, self-appointed spiritual ninja who is now their son-in-law.

Along with Cuckoo, Samberg will also keep busy this year, and next, with the releases of Hotel Transylvania, The To Do List (2013 release), and the sequel to Grown Ups(also a 2013 release), which will once again reunite him with Sandler, along with other SNL alumni like Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider.

Hotel Transylvania

Who will be the next cast member of Saturday Night Live to find super-stardom? That is a question we will have to wait and see before we find out the answer but for now, its Andy Sambergs time.

Cuckoowill air later this year on BBC Three.

Excerpt from:
Andy Samberg to star in BBC Three’s ‘Cuckoo’

Spanish 10-year bond yields jump past 6.8pc, a 13-year high, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel warns that any funds for the country will be tied to reforms of its banking sector.

Spanish bond yields hit euro-era high of 6.83pc Merkel: Spain must reform banking sector in return for funds Cyprus 'asks Russia for 5bn loan' Osborne: most difficult decision was cutting 50p tax rate Fitch: Spain will 'significantly' miss deficit targets UK manufacturing falls by more-than-expected 0.7pc

= Latest =

20.46 That's it from our live blog this evening. We'll be back tomorrow. Log (Xetra: A0B9YJ - news) on to our financial crisis page for more.

Goodnight.

19.35 More from Mr Tsipras's news conference, where, according to AFP , he refused to take questions from the foreign media:

A process of peaceful revolution is underway [...] On Monday, the forces of internal corruption and global usury will stop writing (bailout deals) because our people are about to write history.

Alexis Tsipras gives a press conference at the in central Athens on Tuesday (Photo: AFP)

18.51 More fighting talk from Greece's leftist leader. Alexis Tsipras has insisted that Greece's bail-out deal would be "history" after Sunday's vote. He told reporters:

The bailout deal is already in the past. It will be history for good on Monday.

See the rest here:
Debt crisis: as it happened, June 12, 2012

Grange Hill's kids asked Britain to "Just Say No" to drugs more than 25 years ago, but it seems their plea fell on deaf ears. One in three adults in England and Wales have used illicit drugs in their lifetime, according to the latest British Crime Survey, with almost 3 million adults breaking the law to pop a pill, roll a joint, inject heroin or snort a line of cocaine, among other narcotics, in the past year alone.

But long before Zammo Maguire brought the issue of addiction to mainstream children's TV, drug use in the UK was well under way. As Harry Shapiro, rock journalist and author of Waiting for the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music, says, there have always been "tipping points for drugs down the decades": in the 1950s, when there were only a reported 317 addicts to "manufactured" drugs in Britain, the idea of the alcoholic was born; a decade on, the counterculture's cherished LSD was perceived as such a threat that, in 1966, two national newspapers urged the government to outlaw it.

By 1979, cannabis use had peaked; the "heroin epidemic" hit Britain's cities in the 1980s and the Trainspotting generation was born; the rave scene and designer drugs of the 1990s followed and the Home Office estimated that 1.5 million Ecstasy tablets were being popped every weekend in 1995, the same year Leah Betts died four hours after taking the drug, and her haunting image made front-page news. By the noughties, the UK was branded "Europe's cocaine capital" by the UN, with the number of users rising by 25 per cent between 2008 and 2009, peaking at 1 million. k

The addiction psychiatrist and founder of the Global Drug Survey, Adam Winstock, has defined the current decade as one of "unparalleled choice", and while cocaine, Ecstasy and cannabis remain Britain's most popular drugs, new "legal highs" and other synthetic drugs are appearing on the market at the rate of one a week, warns the EU's drug agency, which says 10 per cent of Brits have tried them.

The Home Affairs Committee is currently exploring government policy and sanctions regarding drugs, and earlier this year heard the comedian, actor and renowned former user Russell Brand tell them that there remains a "wilful ignorance" about just what fuels Britain's addiction. Admitting that his life had been blighted by excess, Brand added that drug addiction was primarily "an illness".

Do others agree? We asked those who have been affected by each decade's drug of choice since the 1950s. Some credit them with opening up their world; others nearly had their lives destroyed; while the rest took them for fun. But what they all agree is that if Grange Hill's motto is falling on deaf ears, Britain needs to find new ways of broaching the conversation.

1950s Alcohol

James McPherson, 76, from Glasgow, had his first drink in 1952. Six decades later and after suffering blackouts, broken bones and hallucinations as a result of his alcoholism, he says he thinks he has his relationship with the substance under control.

"I had my first drink at 17; it's what everyone did. As far as Glasgow was concerned, all the fathers seemed to drink at the weekend. There didn't seem to be many drugs in Glasgow then I never saw anyone with hash. Maybe in London, but not where I was.

"Pubs used to shut at about 9.30pm, so people would throw down a couple of whiskeys at the last minute. It's a wee bit different now, I don't see that many drunken people nobody can afford to drink seven days a week and the pubs are open all day.

Read this article:
The seven ages of drug addiction: The highs and the lows by those who experienced them

Andrew Dreskin, the CEO of the online-ticketing firm Ticketfly and an old-guard rave supporter, remembers a time in the sepia-toned days of the early aughts when dance acts were a tough sell for talent buyers.

"It was a very lonely world for the last nine years buying electronica acts," he said at a panel on "Circuit Breakers: Breaking EDM Artists" at the EDMBiz conference Wednesday. As a founder of the electronica-heavy Virgin Mobile FreeFest and the head of the indie-ticketing firm, he's on the front lines of the changing booking climate for dance acts. "There were like four of us back then. Now there's inflated guarantees, and we're all fishing in the same pond. But it's great."

Joel Zimmerman, the panel moderator (and as the head of Global Electronic Music for William Morris Endeavor, he's arguably the most influential figure in electronic artist management today), got his drift. "If there was a movie about bidding wars in EDM, I'd probably be Darth Vader," he said.

Zimmerman's line got hearty laughs, but it underscored the welcome challenge that this panel tried to address -- with so much money and interest sloshing around electronic dance music right now, how do you break and establish an artist for the long term?

The panel also included publicist Alexandra Greenberg, VP of MSO (who handles Deadmau5 and other EDM clients); Neil Jacobson, senior VP of A&R at Interscope; Stephanie La Fera of Atom Empire; Oliver Luckett of the Audience and Michael Satsky of Provocateur. All of them debated that central question from different strategic angles, proving that a genre's success doesn't necessarily mean a clear path to fame and fortune.

One avenue, according to Satsky, is to target those already versed in fame and forutune. "There wasn't a niche for electronica within high-net-worth individuals," he said. His Provocateur club in New York's Hotel Gansevoort took a high-end, female-centric approach to nightlife that he then applied to organizing VIP packages in the electronica scene -- peaking on Swedish Hosue Mafia's "Masquerade Motel" party last year. "We were like, 'Let's use our Rolodex and get them in.' We knew they would become obsessed with this music. The talent is sustainable; it has been forever. But we said, 'Here's an experience. Everyone in here is someone you want to get along with, and it's a raging party.' We built that mdoel into the Swedish House Mafia show, and it was a huge success."

For Greenberg, the climate of EDM reminded her a lot of the anything-goes jam band days, where fan word of mouth counted for much more than any top-down campaign.

"I read this book about marketing the Grateful Dead recently, and it totaly applies to EDM today," she said. "At Deadmau5 shows, kids were outside selling posters that they had made."

Jacobson, who works in a more traditional end of the label infrastrcture, emphasized that for all the shifiting tides in marketing EDM, the old virtues of musicianship and songwriting still very much applied.

"It's all about the melody and lyric," he said. "Music's primal; it's not going anywhere. There's a difference between songs and production, and I want to find magical songs." He also had more faith than the rest of the panel in the traditional benchmarks of pop success: "Radio and mass-market placements are still really important. Those things can't be ignored."

Continued here:
EDMBiz 2012: How to break an artist in the wild west of EDM