Erykah Badu Replaces Jill Scott at the 2010 Macy's Music Festival

It has been announced that Erykah Badu will replace Jill Scott at the 2010 Macy's Music Festival on Saturday July 31st. According to reports, Jill Scott canceled her performance at the festival due to an illness of a close family members.

2010 Macy’s Music Festival is at Paul Brown Stadium in downtown Cincinnati, OH. The 2 night concert features some of the biggest names and most exciting performers in R&B, jazz, hip-hop, and soul.

This year's line up:

Friday night July 30th: Charlie Wilson, Teena Marie, Melanie Fiona, Cameo and Jaheim. (starting @ 7:30pm)

Saturday night July 31st: Maze, En Vogue, Erkyah Badu, K'Jon and Raheem DeVaughn. (starting @ 7:30pm)
For information and to buy tickets click here

Cincinnati Reds Fan Arrested During Sold Out Game

Talon Powers a 26 year old man from New Carlisle, Ohio near Dayton was arrested during a sold out Reds game on Saturday. Powers apparently was so excited that he could not control himself and decided to jump down from the stands over the right field wall and into the outfield just before 10:00PM.

Powers was quickly subdued by authorities. I know fans were highly upset that the game had to be paused to get a hold of this out of control fan. He was charged with criminal trespass on place of public amusement which is a first-degree misdemeanor.

16,000 Plus Hopefuls Go For Idol Dream In Nashville

16,000 plus aspiring artists lined up and waited for their chance to audition for American Idol's season 10 this past weekend in Nashville, Tennessee. The goal was to get that gold ticket and the chance to go to Hollywood. This weekend alone, production assistants registered people around the clock for more than 49 hours, handing out wristbands for entry into Saturday’s auditions.

Although Idol's ratings have been declining, the show still has the power to get aspiring artists and others who want their chance in the spot-light to come out and audition.

Its not too late to try-out: Additional audition cities include New Orleans (July 26), East Rutherford, N.J. (Aug. 3), Austin (Aug. 11) and San Francisco (Aug. 19)

Cincinnati Native C.E. Morgan Lands On New York Magazine List

Cincinnati native C.E. Morgan lands on New York Magazine's list of "20 Novelists Under the Age of 40 Worth Watching in their Summer Fiction issue. The list includes 10 women and 10 men from places that range from Chicago to Ethiopia. Authors such as Nicole Krauss, and Jonathan Safran Foer made the list along with C.E. Morgan.

The 33-year-old author hit the literary scene last year with her first novel, "All the Living", about an orphaned woman who moves to rural Kentucky with her lover.

Editorial Reviews via Amazon.com:

From Publishers Weekly

Morgan's enchanting debut follows the travails of a young woman who moves to Kentucky with her bereaved lover in 1984. Aloma, herself an orphan from a young age, leaves her job at the mission school where she was raised to help her taciturn boyfriend, Orren, with his family farm after his family is killed in a car accident. Once at the farm, he retreats into himself and working the land, leaving Aloma to wrestle with her desire to pursue her dream of being a concert pianist. As her relationship with Orren becomes more collision than cohabitation, Aloma finds in a local preacher a deep friendship that complicates her feelings for Orren, who drags his feet on marrying her. Young Aloma's growing understanding of love and devotion in the midst of deep despair is delicately and persuasively rendered through the lens of belief—be it in religion, relationships or music. Morgan's prose holds the rhythm of the local dialect beautifully, evoking the land, the farming lifestyle and Aloma's awakening with stirring clarity. (Apr.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

This lyrical tale of grief and gruelling love on a tobacco farm takes place in the mid-nineteen-eighties but, if not for glimpses of linoleum and double-wides, might recall an earlier time. Aloma is an orphan who teaches piano at a mountain mission school; Orren is a “college farm boy” who glances at her sideways and “she thought that was wicked and could not help but like it.” When his family is killed in a car crash, Orren inherits their remote farm, and Aloma comes to live there, despite her dream of being a musician in the “real world.” Morgan is an expansive stylist, fond of rare words (“letheless,” “mortise”) and of the circumlocutions that can pass for plain speaking, but her pacing is shrewd. By the time the harvest is done, two lonely people are fused, if not consoled.

Copyright ©2008 The New Yorker

Morgan was also on the The National Book Foundation list "5 Under 35. Here is video of Morgan reading at the event:

5under3509 morgan from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.