A new blog takes a step into the light. The premiere of Dark Bistro should be a fascinating venture into the power of visualization and self development. With insightful and knowledgeable reviews of popular culture, we want you to experience better ways to relate to self and others.
 
Want to improve your life? Learn to recognize which angels in our culture are using the arts to point the way. They hide signs within their arts. We identify them and their love for all humanity.
 
Find your way at Dark Bistro.

FreshPlays is no more. And I personally want to thank every visitor (over 120,000). But we are ready to improve. And to do so we must re-brand this blog.

This fall will see the debut of Dark Bistro, Seth Fine’s newer and better blog.

Details to come.

Laurence Fishburne has officially come on board “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” succeeding William Petersen on the CBS crime drama.

Fishburne, who will first appear in the ninth episode of the show’s upcoming ninth season, will play a former pathologist who is now working as an itinerant college lecturer, teaching a course in criminalistics. His focus is on understanding criminal behavior, how and why people commit acts of violence — which happen to be tendencies he disturbingly sees within himself.

In the course of a murder investigation, he comes into contact with the CSI team and ultimately joins the Las Vegas Crime Lab as a Level-1 CSI.

“This has been months in the making,” said “CSI” executive producer Carol Mendelsohn. “We have been talking about the character we wanted to create and pursuing our dream casting, which is Laurence Fishburne.”

Exec producer Naren Shankar added…

It was easy to tell the Hollywood Scientologists from the Memphis music people as they passed the gantlet of television cameras and entered the suburban Memphis megachurch to pay tribute to Isaac Hayes. They were on the whole paler and skinnier and showed rather more cleavage than is considered properly funereal here in the South.
 
The Memphians, on the other hand, tended toward vintage dresses and dark three-piece suits with expertly origamied handkerchiefs and matching ties.
 
Then there was the soul royalty, like Bootsy Collins, who wore a get-up involving wide pinstripes, a kerchief, and rhinestone-coated sunglass lenses with peepholes in the shape of stars, and the actual royalty, like Princess Naa Asie Ocansey of Ghana, who wore gold and red African finery and managed to get surprisingly low to the ground when she danced.
 
But there were also thousands of regular people, wearing regular clothes, who poured into the sanctuary of the Hope Presbyterian Church.
 
For a superstar known for his slick image and “bedroom baritone,” as one speaker called it, Mr. Hayes was deeply involved in the workaday life of his hometown, where he recently appeared on a billboard with a local congressman, Steve Cohen, who was fighting off a challenger. The billboard read, “Can you dig it?”
 
Mr. Hayes was also involved in literacy programs…

Don Cheadle puts a sympathetic face on Islam and its followers in the upcoming indie film “Traitor,” as a devout Muslim who makes it clear it is against his religious doctrine to kill another.
 
“I think that’s one thing most people don’t know,” says the esteemed, Oscar-nominated actor, who plays a renegade U.S. Special Operations officer whose political allegiances are in direct odds with his allegiance to his faith in the feature. “Traitor” also stars Guy Pearce and Neal McDonough.
 
He adds, “Putting people in dangerous situations and having to sacrifice lives is something his superiors may require, but it’s something that his faith prohibits him from doing and speaks directly against.”
 
Providing a counterpoint to the stereotypical view of Muslims who claim glory in killing in the name of Allah was what compelled Cheadle to not only star in the Aug. 27-premiering international thriller, written and helmed by first-time director Jeffrey Nachmanoff. Cheadle was passionate enough to take on a producing role as well…

Anyone who claims that talents as singular as Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin would have prospered even without the intervention of Jerry Wexler may be right. But it is irrefutable that Wexler, who died Friday of congestive heart failure at age 91, was president of Atlantic Records when it and its subsidiaries were the most significant labels in rhythm and blues — the ones for which Mr. Charles, Ms. Franklin, Otis Redding and many other notable artists did their best work.
 
As a producer, Wexler made records to capture moments born of preparation and spontaneity. “Jerry would say, ‘We all feel good about it tonight, but let’s see how we feel in the morning,’” Aretha Franklin told me when we spoke on Saturday afternoon. He coaxed Ms. Franklin to join Atlantic and helped liberate her from Columbia Records, where her career had faltered. In his autobiography, “Rhythm and the Blues,” Wexler wrote, “My idea was to make good tracks, use the best players, put Aretha back on piano and let the lady wail.”
 
“He provided the vehicle to allow me to perform and express myself,” Ms. Franklin told me…

We chose to review this book because presidential hopeful Barack Obama has been carrying it around the world with him in recent weeks, and it makes sense to review any new book that could therefore be this influential.
 
It is a surprisingly thoughtful and clear, readable work on the current and future status of America as a superpower. It is emphatically not anti-American, or even pro-American, although the author is a Indian-born US citizen living in New York…