Rick Ross

Click here to download TV listings for the week of Oct. 7 - Oct. 13 in PDF format This week's TV Movies     SERIES Titanic: Blood and Steel: The 12-part miniseries about the ill-fated ocean liner continues (8 and 8:54 p.m. Encore). Iconoclasts:  Actor James Franco and performance artist Marina Abramovic are featured in the series' season premiere (8 p.m. Sundance). Frontline: The newsmagazine profiles President Barack Obama and his Republican rival, former Gov. Mitt Romney, in the season premiere (9 p.m. KOCE)

Here's a quote that recently resonated with Kanye West: "Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up. " Pablo Picasso said that. West found it on a poster somewhere, took a photo, and claimed it as a statement of purpose ? one of 20,000 or so he's tossed onto his Twitter account. It's possible to imagine West taking a break from his busy schedule of model-chasing, atelier shopping, Internet punditry and, oh yes, realizing his musical genius to actually contemplate the great Modernist's words.

Meek Mill's highly anticipated debut, “Dreams and Nightmares,” got off to a rocky start this week when he found himself in handcuffs before his album release party Thursday. According to the Philadelphia Police Department, the rapper from Philly - he's part of Rick Ross' Maybach Music Group - was detained by authorities when he was in a vehicle stopped by officers (they declined to release the cause). He was only detained, and not charged - still, it's a drag to be late to your own party because you were chained to a seat next to the drunk tank.

Just because hip-hop/R&B star T-Pain single-handedly -- albeit accidentally -- transformed the pop chart with his retro-futuristic sound, don't expect him to strangle the goose that laid the golden egg. That is to say, he isn't going to stop using a voice-distorting computer program called Auto-Tune any time soon. Not after employing the technology to create two hit albums and land a whopping 27 songs on the pop chart since 2005, most of them in collaboration with the multi-platinum-selling likes of R. Kelly, T.I., Rick Ross and Akon.

All the elements were in place for a by-the-numbers hip-hop album launch party. Flowing Champagne? Check. Well-heeled crowd of music industry grandees and boldfaced names? Check. Exclusive venue? Check. Gaggle of impossibly curvaceous naked women on display for all to ogle? Double check. Except this by-invitation-only "listening event" -- really, the first time multi-platinum-selling, Grammy-winning rapper-producer Kanye West's album "808s & Heartbreak" had ever been played in public -- deconstructed the very idea of what an album unveiling is supposed to be. With collaborator Vanessa Beecroft, he reassembled it all into something closer to the Renaissance artistic ideal of the sublime than any hip-hop-rooted pop offering has any right to be. Call it a listening party as social experiment.

The powerful narcotic popped up on the cultural grid around the turn of the millennium. A Texas producer-remixer named DJ Screw paid homage to its woozy, heavy-lidded high by dramatically slowing down beats and vocals to replicate the drug's sleepwalker euphoria. Among Southern rappers, the chemical mixture - called "sizzurp" on the street - soon became as ubiquitous as gold jewelry. This wasn't some exotic new hallucinogen. In fact, it was usually mixed with fruit soda and sipped from oversized plastic foam cups.

Brit­ish roots mu­sic band Mum­ford & Sons took the top hon­or for its album "Ba­bel" at the 55th Grammy Awards ce­re­mony Sunday. The night mostly dis­trib­uted hon­ors broadly to an ar­ray of young­er gen­er­a­tion acts in­clud­ing New York in­die trio Fun., Aus­trali­an elec­tron­ic pop artist Gotye, rap­per-R&B sing­er Frank Ocean and Ak­ron, Ohio, rock group the Black Keys. See the complete list of 2013 Grammy winners and nominees below. #story-body-text h2 { font-weight: bold !

Can you tell me why people write such sour letters about our Dodger announcers, and why Rick Monday and Ross Porter should have to read such wounding comments? Rick has a nice baritone voice, he knows baseball and I do not find him at all confrontational or surly. And what baseball fan hasn't swapped statistics with his buddies, as Ross does? To toss in a number of these adds a historical dimension to the play-by-play. I think we have fine announcers. MORTIMER CHAMBERS Los Angeles We're happy to see that other Dodger fans are picking up on Rick-a Monday.

The music in any Quentin Tarantino film is an adventure unto itself, a tradition that continues with “Django Unchained,” Tarantino's movie opening on Christmas Day. The soundtrack album was released a week ahead of the film itself, and Tarantino took time to walk listeners through the music in a Sirius XM satellite radio special, “Quentin Tarantino Unleashed,” that aired Dec. 14 on Little Steven's Underground Garage show, which Tarantino...