News: Burma Monks, Ryan Idol, Bloc Party, Swastika, Janet Reno

Study: Lack of sleep doubles heart disease death risk.

Flower power: cache of new species discovered in "Green Corridor" of Vietnam. "Scientists have discovered 11 new species of plants and animals in Vietnam, including a snake, two butterflies and five orchid varieties, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) said Wednesday."

Protest turns violent as Buddhist monks take to the streets in Burma.

Bravo's Andy Cohen checks in with porn legend Ryan Idol, who is about to take the stage as a bathhouse patron in Terrence McNally's The Ritz on Broadway: "I'm focusing on my career right now. I'm 41 and I have that deep desire to have genuine affections for people, whether male or female. Love has different degrees, from genuine affection to the unattainable thing we aspire to of absolute love. It doesn't come often but if you don't have other elements in your life in place you can't have love, so that's why I am focusing on my career. Don't go looking for it, I always say, it will find you when you least expect it."

Fury at Colorado State University over F**k Bush editorial.

Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke says the band's next record will be more introspective: "I think with this third record, its very much going to be a record about interior spaces. If 'Weekend In the City' was me complaining about going out and getting f***ed up, I think this is going to be a very intimate record about staying in and discovering aspects of yourself. And not in a grown-up, Coldplay/Snow Patrol way. "[It's to be about] human relationships, on a real kind of primal level. What it means to feel desire and what it means to actually feel close to someone, or what it feels to feel lament -- the passing of closeness between people. It's very much going to be a record about internal relationships."

Swastika discovered in New Jersey cornfield: "Investigators found that the most recent swastika appeared to have been hand-cut and covered an area of several acres. 'This should be in the past, and we should have learned from our mistakes, and to bring up something that brings back such awful memories, I think, is disgusting,' said Joe Pica, whose property is one of many that border the fields."

The big H's take the Big Apple: Jennifer Hudson arrives on set for Sex and the City movie. Whitney Houston hails a comeback...

Kevin Spacey meets with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez: "Neither Spacey...nor Chavez spoke to the press after the nearly three-hour encounter in the presidential palace in Caracas. They shook hands warmly on the red carpet as Spacey left after a dinner with Chavez...Chavez has said Venezuela hopes to produce its own films as an alternative to the "cultural imperialism" of Hollywood. Yet, Chavez speaks highly of some Hollywood films. He has also hosted recent visits by stars including Sean Penn and Danny Glover." (video)

New York City comptroller William Thompson tests the gay waters at mayoral fundraiser.

Janet Reno executive producer on three-disc anthology of music hailing America's history.

Bloc Party Security Says "Hey You" Before Headlocking Madonna

Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke told the Chicago Tribune that the thing that surprised him most about playing the recent Live Earth 2007 was that "super-huge fan" Madonna came to see them in their dressing room. Unfortunately, the trip to meet the band didn't turn out so well for Madge.

Said Okereke: "Our tour manager is this guy from Scotland that doesn't know much about popular culture and popular music. So when she came in, he alerted security and security dragged her out. They had her head in a headlock, and they were putting her out of the dressing room. It was really surreal, and everyone stopped speaking. And the only thing we could hear is Madonna cursing and saying she's gonna kill these guys. Yeah. She's really tough because of all that pilates that she does. She [got out] of the headlock quite easily. And some of her people came along and told the security guards off, but she was so pissed off at that point that [when] I went to tell her that I was a huge fan of hers she completely freaked out and told me to get the hell away from her. And that was all in the space of like 10 minutes backstage at Live Earth."

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Bloc Party Frontman Kele Okereke Steps Out of the Closet [tr]

Bloc Party Frontman Kele Okereke Steps Out of the Closet

In a revealing interview with Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke, the Guardian notes that two tracks on the band's upcoming release, A Weekend in the City, seem to explore an interest in gay issues ("Two songs, 'I Still Remember' and 'Kreuzberg', seem to explicitly explore homosexuality. The former is about a crush between two schoolboys ('We left our trousers by the canal') The latter is about gay promiscuity.") and takes the opportunity to ask the vocalist, who also plays guitar for the band, whether this is a sign of the singer being open to talking about his sexuality, which up till now has been something he has avoided:

"During the many interviews Bloc Party conducted during 2005, as their debut album Silent Alarm went from critical rave to million-selling commercial hit, from Mercury nominee to NME's Album of the Year, the subject of whether Okereke is or isn't gay was the pink elephant in the room. In a musical form that is usually beerily, boorishly white, male and heterosexual, Okereke was a refreshingly different kind of indie icon. The possibility that he was not just unusual but unique - a black, gay role model for indie kids - meant that for many fans the focus seemed necessary rather than just prurient. Nonetheless, just as he hated being reduced to 'black guy in indie band', he refused to be drawn either way on his sexuality."

Okereke says: "I think I'm going to have to [talk about it]. With the first album I didn't think it was essential to the experience. I didn't want to have to talk about it in a tabloid way. It wasn't there in the songs, so why did people need to know? But yeah, there are songs on this record that do feel like they're about desire, longing. So yeah, I am gonna talk about that."

One of the gay-themed songs on the album, "For England", is an exploration of bullying which also touches on the death of gay barman David Morley and the sick phenomenon of "Happy Slapping" in which violent acts are captured on camera for sport. Morley's killers fatally beat him and captured it all on their cell phones. Said Okereke: "The whole idea of happy slapping ... Filming you causing pain to someone, for your own amusement - that really repulsed me. That song is about the fear I have about what could happen on a night out. I have the feeling that it's only a matter of time."

Another track, "I Still Remember", deals with an unspoken sexual desire between men — heterosexual men. Norman B., of SlowCode, who tipped us off on Okereke's coming out, offers it up on his site:

Okereke explains "I Still Remember": "I can't tell you how many times I've been propositioned by straight boys...Yeah, yeah. It happened a lot before all this [the band] started happening. This is probably a contentious issue, but I swear that I could always see it in people, in the way that guys would need to be touching other guys. You could see there was something they couldn't say aloud. And I saw it when I was at school. And I guess 'I Still Remember' is an attempt at trying to confront that. I don't think that my sexual impulse is that bizarre or foreign. [But] the way that it's supposedly discussed in mainstream culture is [that] it's a crazy thing. But I know from my own experiences a lot of heterosexual boys had feelings or experiences when they were younger. And that's not really ever spoken about, that un-spoken desire. Not two gay boys, but the idea of two straight boys having an attraction, or there being an attraction that's unspeakable - that was the idea of that song. When was the last time you heard an interesting pop song that actually tried to give you a different perspective on desire? I didn't talk about it when I did interviews for the last record because it wasn't an area really reflected in the music; I didn't talk about race for the same reason. Why was that still a discussion point? The only reason it was a discussion point was because of the racial prejudice that exists in the mainstream media."

Okereke's cautious coming out is colored by the "definite homophobic bias-slash-persecution" he sees from the music press regarding out gay people. Said Okereke: "It's not something that I'd be inclined to talk about ... It isn't black and white. It isn't clear-cut. Britain has always had a love/hate relationship with gay public figures. They're treated as funny and inoffensive and camp. But then when a seemingly heterosexual person seems to display an inclination for the other team it becomes this real hounding situation. You're allowed to exist if they're [sic] seen as a kind of sub-class. Something ineffectual, a comedy Kenneth Williams character."

But he tells The Guardian the difference he could make to a young kid (as an indie rock icon of Nigerian heritage) just might trump those worries:

"I guess that's the only reason [to speak out], isn't it? To speak to young people in their impressionable formative years - and say something that could help them make sense of their lives. Lessen the sense of alienation and isolation that they might have. I think that's something that definitely ... I'd be proud of. That we could say that there are alternative ways of behaving, of living one's life."

A Little Britain [slowcode]
21st Century boy [the guardian]