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Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all. We always seem to be watching or reading about emotional crises among folk who live in a world of great fortune both in matters of luck and money; stories and fantasies about rock stars and film stars, sporting millionaires and models; jet-setting members of the aristocracy and international financiers.
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James Kelman
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Should we only portray the world we wanted to see? Should we consider certain stories “damaging,” and restrict them from a general audience, not trusting them to take in the story without internalizing the messaging? Hadn’t we all agreed that morality in art was bad? But art did cause damage, and I was affected by films I had seen when I was young, and I was ashamed when I watched an old film and saw racist depictions I hadn’t seen before, and I was glad to be ashamed. But did we all have to see ourselves in the presentations of types? Did I have to feel like every wife and mother was presenting an overarching narrative of Wife and Mother that reinforced or rejected my own experience?
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Julia May Jonas (Vladimir)
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Most of us are searching-consciously or unconsciously- for a degree of internal balance and harmony between ourselves and the outside world, and if we happen to become aware-like Stravinsky- of a volcano within us, we will compensate by urging restraint. By that same token, someone who bore a glacier within them might urge passionate abandon. The danger is, as Bergman points out, that a glacial personality in need of passionate abandon may read Stravinsky and apply restraint instead.
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Walter Murch (In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing)
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For all the talk about the merging of film and video game, and for all its inevitability, perhaps the secret of true convergence lies not in an external reality , but in an internal truth: What kids seek from video games is what we all seek from our own distractions--be they movies, radio, comic books, literature, or art: an escape from the mundane to the sublime, where our imaginations make of us heroes, lovers, warriors, and gods.
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Devin C. Griffiths (Virtual Ascendance: Video Games and the Remaking of Reality)
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So why does the world appear stable to you when you’re looking at it? Why doesn’t it appear as jerky and nauseating as the poorly filmed video? Here’s why: your internal model operates under the assumption that the world outside is stable. Your eyes are not like video cameras – they simply venture out to find more details to feed into the internal model. They’re not like camera lenses that you’re seeing through; they’re gathering bits of data to feed the world inside your skull." The Brain: The Story of You - David Eagleman
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David Eagleman (The Brain: The Story of You)
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As hard to believe as it may be for Americans brought up on wartime propaganda films and publications devoted merely to war technology and battles, World War II was largely the result of infighting between secret occult societies composed of wealthy businessmen that eventually led to international tensions that provoked open warfare.
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Jim Marrs (Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons & the Great Pyramids)
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Gentlemen. You are looking at the true Abraham Lincoln of Arabia. And in order to end our internal bickering - our civil war, if you will - I have solicited your aid.
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Leonard Leventon (Brethren: A Gripping Tale of Counter Espionage)
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Ford3 Harrison (b.1942), American actor. He became internationally famous with his leading roles in the science-fiction film Star Wars (1977) and its two sequels.
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Amazon Dictionary Account (Oxford Dictionary of English)
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the blink is either something that helps an internal separation of thought to take place, or it is an involuntary reflex accompanying the mental separation that is taking place anyway.
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Walter Murch (In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing)
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Even though we get a lot of people into the shop, only a small percentage of them buy anything. The best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there’s nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag they feel uncomfortable. You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible purchases in their head (‘If I don’t find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to do’), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have wasted looking for something that they don’t really want. I know that feeling well (these are my people, and I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a prickly, clammy, panicky sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling. You walk much more quickly afterwards, trying to recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international section of a newspaper, or go to see a Peter Greenaway film, to consume something solid and meaty which will lie on top of the candyfloss worthlessness clogging up your head.
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Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)
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Jeff Brown explores the phenomenon in depth in his film Karmageddon: “After my childhood, I needed the kinds of spirituality that would keep me from allowing the pain to surface…. I was confusing self-avoidance with enlightenment.”9
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Richard C. Schwartz (No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model)
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Stereotypes are the most reductive kind of story: They reduce others to single, crude images. In the United States, the stereotypes are persistent: black as criminal, brown as illegal, indigenous as savage, Muslims and Sikhs as terrorists, Jews as controlling, Hindus as primitive, Asians of all kinds as perpetually foreign, queer and trans people as sinful, disabled people as pitiable, and women and girls as property. Such stereotypes are in the air, on television and film, in the news, permeating our communities, and ordering our institutions. We breathe them in, whether or now we consciously endorse them. Even if we are part of a marginalized community, we internalize these stereotypes about others an ourselves.
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Valarie Kaur (See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love)
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Film and TV V.I.P, seeker of the peace, part time chandelier cleaner, a legend in his own time, oppressor of champions, soldier of fortune, world traveller, bonvivant, all round good guy, international lover, casual hero, philosopher, wars fought, bears wrestled, equations solved, virgins enlightened, revolutions quelled, tigers castrated, orgies organised, bars quaffed dry, governments run, test rockets flown, life president of the Liquidarian Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
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Billy Connolly (Billy Connolly Live)
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Even though he had lived in Monroe County his whole life, Walter McMillian had never heard of Harper Lee or To Kill a Mockingbird. Monroeville, Alabama, celebrated its native daughter Lee shamelessly after her award-winning book became a national bestseller in the 1960s. She returned to Monroe County but secluded herself and was rarely seen in public. Her reclusiveness proved no barrier to the county’s continued efforts to market her literary classic—or to market itself by using the book’s celebrity. Production of the film adaptation brought Gregory Peck to town for the infamous courtroom scenes; his performance won him an Academy Award. Local leaders later turned the old courthouse into a “Mockingbird” museum. A group of locals formed “The Mockingbird Players of Monroeville” to present a stage version of the story. The production was so popular that national and international tours were organized to provide an authentic presentation of the fictional story to audiences everywhere. Sentimentality about Lee’s story grew even as the harder truths of the book took no root.
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Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption)
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The Washington regime’s leading internal thesis-which has not changed since 1933-is that Americans must be “tolerant” of the alien elements (which now number roughly 50% of the population), since, after all, these aliens are “brothers.” “Brotherhood” is glorified on all public occasions, by all public officials, is taught in the schools and preached in the churches, which have been coordinated into the master-plan of the Culturally-alien Washington regime.
Newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television, films-all vomit forth the same “Brotherhood.” The “Brotherhood” propaganda is a ghastly caricature of the Christian idea of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, but there is no religious intent to the propaganda. Its sole purpose is to destroy whatever exclusiveness, national feelings, or racial instincts may still remain in the American population after twenty years of national leprosy. The result of the
“tolerance” and “brotherhood” campaign is that the alien enjoys a superior position in America-he can demand to be “tolerated.” The American can demand nothing. The tragic fact is that the attenuation of the national instincts has proceeded so far that one cannot envisage how a Nationalist Revolution would be even possible in America.
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Francis Parker Yockey
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Then as the decade made way for the new millennium, cable exploded with its own original content and film studios began to obsess over international box office sales. Somewhere along the line, we became unrelatable and invisible to the Hollywood system. Our images and diverse portrayals just weren’t worth the dollars and effort anymore. The images I had grown up with and grown so accustomed to seeing slowly disappeared, and it seemed to happen all at once.
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Issa Rae (The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl)
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Patriotism July 4 ALL “ISMS” RUN OUT IN the end, and good riddance to most of them. Patriotism for example. If patriots are people who stand by their country right or wrong, Germans who stood by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich should be adequate proof that we’ve had enough of them. If patriots are people who believe not only that anything they consider unpatriotic is wrong but that anything they consider wrong is unpatriotic, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy and his backers should be enough to make us avoid them like the plague. If patriots are people who believe things like “Better Dead Than Red,” they should be shown films of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, and then be taken off to the funny farm. The only patriots worth their salt are the ones who love their country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of Democracy, Communism, or anything like that but champions of the Human Race. It is not the Homeland that they feel called on to defend at any cost but the planet Earth as Home. If in the interests of making sure we don’t blow ourselves off the map once and for all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to some international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty. There is only one Sovereignty that matters ultimately, and it is of another sort altogether.
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Frederick Buechner (Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechne)
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General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the global media to film the unspeakable hell of the Holocaust. General Eisenhower feared there would come a day when there would be “Holocaust deniers” who would declare it never happened.5 Today, Iran's radical Islamic leaders, who have promised to wipe the Jews off the face of the map, are indeed Holocaust deniers.6 Sadly, their venom is gathering international support. From the tears and tragedy of World War II came the rebirth of the State of Israel in May
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John Hagee (Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change)
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A number of Chinese filmmakers, including Chen Kaige and Li Shaohong, imitated Zhang's visual style in the early 1990s by multiplying various erotic images of the oriental Other for global consumption. Consequently, these films, usually sponsored by multinational corporations and catering to the tastes of global audiences, can be perceived as following the same model -- the Zhang Yimou model. To a great degree, this model also marks the end of formal experiment for the Fifth Generation directors because they must adopt a much more conventional way of filmmaking in order to meed the demand of the global market.
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Tonglin Lu (Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China)
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Spectators learn to assign every shot a cause internal to the film's narrative. Jean-Pierre Oudart used the word suture to describe how fillms thus produce the impression of contiguous space by soliciting the viewer's unconscious cooperation. The classical Hollywood film follows the model of Velázquez's Las Meninas, a painting that envelops the space in which we viewers stand, yet erases us in the process.
In the classical Hollywood cinema, editing moves far too quickly and efficiently to let us savor this paradox. It solicits, even exploits, our psychic labor in knitting the film together and sells us back that labor as entertainment.
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Mal Ahern
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This is not the "relativism of truth" presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist's cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural relativism harder and harder to defend against its critics, marauding international corporations follow fair-trade practices, increasing right-wing demagoguery and violence can't be answered in kind, and the first black U.S. president turns out to lean right of center, the intelligentsia can see no clear path of action. Irony dominates as a "mockery of the promise and fitness of things," to return to the OED definition of irony.
This thinking is appropriate to Wes Anderson, whose central characters are so deeply locked in ironist cages that his films become two-hour documents of them rattling their ironist bars. Without the irony dilemma Roth describes, we would find it hard to explain figures like Max Fischer, Steve Zissou, Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Fox, and Peter Whitman. I'm not speaking here of specific political beliefs. The characters in question aren't liberals; they may in fact, along with Anderson himself, have no particular political or philosophical interests. But they are certainly involved in a frustrated and digressive kind of irony that suggests a certain political situation. Though intensely self-absorbed and central to their films, Anderson's protagonists are neither heroes nor antiheroes. These characters are not lovable eccentrics. They are not flawed protagonists either, but are driven at least as much by their unsavory characteristics as by any moral sense. They aren't flawed figures who try to do the right thing; they don't necessarily learn from their mistakes; and we aren't asked to like them in spite of their obvious faults. Though they usually aren't interested in making good, they do set themselves some kind of mission--Anderson's films are mostly quest movies in an age that no longer believes in quests, and this gives them both an old-fashioned flavor and an air of disillusionment and futility.
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Arved Mark Ashby (Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV)
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Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.
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Clayton M. Christensen (Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice)
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If our democracy worked as it should, we would elect wise women and men who made laws for the good of the people and enforced those laws.
That, though, is not the way things work. Greedy, power–mad billionaires spend money so that politicians such as George W. Bush can buy elections. Corrupt corporations such as Enron defraud old ladies and commit crimes. And they get away with it. They get away with it because most of us are so afraid of losing the security of our nice, normal lives that we are not willing to risk anything about those lives. We are either afraid to fight or we don’t know how. Or we believe that bad things won’t happen to us.
And so, in the end, too many people lose their lives anyway. In Nazi Germany, millions of men who acquiesced to Hitler’s murderous rise to power wound up marching into Russia’s icy wasteland—into the Soviet Army’s machine guns and cannon—to themselves be murdered. In America after 9–11, trusting teenagers who had joined the National Guard found themselves sent to Iraq on extended and additional tours. Our enemy killed many of them because we, citizens of the richest country in the world, did not provide them with body armor.
Grieving mothers protested the wasting of their sons’ lives. Nadia McCaffrey defied Bush’s shameful ban on the filming of U.S. soldiers’ coffins returning home from Iraq. She knew, as we all did, that this tyrannical dictum of Bush dishonored our soldiers’ sacrifice. And so she invited the press to the Sacramento International Airport to photograph her son’s flag–draped coffin.
Again, I am not comparing George W. Bush to Adolph Hitler, nor America to Germany’s Third Reich. What I do believe is that each of us has the duty to keep the Bushes of the world from becoming anything like Hitler—and to keep America from invading other countries with no just cause.
We will never, though, be able to stop corrupt politicians and corporations from doing criminal things until we stop surrendering our power to them. The more we fear to oppose them—the more we want to retreat into the supposed safety of our nice gated communities or downtown lofts—the more powerful people will conspire to ruin our prosperity and wreck our lives.
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David Zindell (Splendor)
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Great speech to the German Reichstag
Berlin, January 30, 1939
Once again I will be a prophet: should the international Jewry of finance (Finanzjudentum) succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war, then the result will not be a Bolshevization of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe. Thus, the days of propagandist impotence of the non-Jewish peoples are over.
National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy possess institutions which, if necessary, permit opening the eyes of the world to the true nature of this problem.
Many a people is instinctively aware of this, albeit not scientifically versed in it.
At this moment, the Jews are still propagating their campaign of hatred in certain states under the cover of press, film, radio, theater, and literature, which are all in their hands. Should indeed this one Volk attain its goal of prodding masses of millions from other peoples to enter into a war devoid of all sense for them, and serving the interests of the Jews exclusively, then the effectiveness of an enlightenment will once more display its might. Within Germany, this enlightenment conquered Jewry utterly in the span of a few years.
Peoples desire not to perish on the battlefield just so that this rootless, internationalist race can profit financially from this war and thereby gratify its lust for vengeance derived from the Old Testament. The Jewish watchword “Proletarians of the world, unite!” will be conquered by a far more lofty realization, namely: “Creative men of all nations, recognize your common foe!
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Adolf Hitler
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Pan, The House of Bernarda Alba, Transform Caithness: Hunter, Be Near Me, Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us, The Bacchae (also Lincoln Center), Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, Home: Glasgow, and Black Watch, which toured internationally and for which he won Olivier and Critics’ Circle awards. He was Associate Director of the Traverse Theatre from 1996 to 2001, Paines Plough from 2001 to 2005, the National Theatre of Scotland from 2005 to 2012, and was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University in the 2010–2011 academic year. JACK THORNE writes for theater, film, television, and radio. His theater credits include Hope and Let the Right One In, both directed by John Tiffany, Junkyard, a Headlong, Rose Theatre Kingston, Bristol Old Vic & Theatr Clwyd co-production, The Solid Life of Sugar Water for the Graeae Theatre Company and the National Theatre,
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John Tiffany (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Parts One and Two: The Official Playscript of the Original West End Production)
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It was in Cleveland that Magic Slim became the most successful pornographic film producer in America. His training center was a key link in a human trafficking supply chain stretching from the former Soviet Republics in Eastern Europe to the United States. Trafficking accounts for an estimated $32 billion in annual trade with sex slavery and pornographic film production accounting for the greatest percentage.
The girls arrived at Slim’s building young and naive, they left older and wiser. This was a classic value chain with each link making a contribution. Slim’s trainers were the best, and it showed in the final product. Each class of girls was judged on the merits. The fast learners went on to advanced training. They learned proper etiquette, social skills and party games. They learned how to dress, apply makeup and discuss world events.
Best in-class were advertised in international style magazines with code words. These codes were known only to select clients and certain intermediaries approved by Slim. This elaborate distribution system was part of Slim’s business model, his clients paid an annual subscription fee for the on-line dictionary. The code words and descriptions were revised monthly.
An interested client would pay an access fee for further information that included a set of professional photographs, a video and voice recordings of the model addressing the client by name. Should the client accept, a detailed travel itinerary was submitted calling for first class travel and accommodation. Slim required a letter of understanding spelling out terms and conditions and a 50% deposit. He didn’t like contracts, his word was his bond, everyone along the chain knew that.
Slim's business was booming.
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Nick Hahn
“
Once again the resistance the visual cortex displayed toward surgical excision suggested that, like memory, vision was also distributed, and after Pribram became aware of holography he began to wonder if it, too, was holographic. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram certainly seemed to explain how so much of the visual cortex could be removed without affecting the ability to perform visual tasks. If the brain was processing images by employing some kind of internal hologram, even a very small piece of the hologram could still reconstruct the whole of what the eyes were seeing. It also explained the lack of any one-to-one correspondence between the external world and the brain's electrical activity. Again, if the brain was using holographic principles to process visual information, there would be no more one-to-one correspondence between electrical activity and images seen than there was between the meaningless swirl of interference patterns on a piece of holographic film and the image the film encoded.
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Michael Talbot (The Holographic Universe)
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But there is also (though much of this is kept from us, to keep us intimidated and without hope) the bubbling of change under the surface of obedience: the growing revulsion against the endless wars (I think of the Russian women in the nineties, demanding their country end its military intervention in Chechnya, as did Americans during the Vietnam war); the insistence of women all over the world that they will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination—we see, for instance, the new international movement against female genital mutilation, and the militancy of welfare mothers against punitive laws. There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color. In the United States, we see the educational system, a burgeoning new literature, alternative radio stations, a wealth of documentary films outside the mainstream, even Hollywood itself and sometimes television—compelled to recognize the growing multiracial character of the nation. Yes, we have in this country, dominated by corporate wealth and military power and two antiquated political parties, what a fearful conservative characterized as “a permanent adversarial culture” challenging the present, demanding a new future.
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Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States)
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Lynum had plenty of information to share. The FBI's files on Mario Savio, the brilliant philosophy student who was the spokesman for the Free Speech Movement, were especially detailed. Savio had a debilitating stutter when speaking to people in small groups, but when standing before a crowd and condemning his administration's latest injustice he spoke with divine fire. His words had inspired students to stage what was the largest campus protest in American history. Newspapers and magazines depicted him as the archetypal "angry young man," and it was true that he embodied a student movement fueled by anger at injustice, impatience for change, and a burning desire for personal freedom. Hoover ordered his agents to gather intelligence they could use to ruin his reputation or otherwise "neutralize" him, impatiently ordering them to expedite their efforts.
Hoover's agents had also compiled a bulging dossier on the man Savio saw as his enemy: Clark Kerr. As campus dissent mounted, Hoover came to blame the university president more than anyone else for not putting an end to it. Kerr had led UC to new academic heights, and he had played a key role in establishing the system that guaranteed all Californians access to higher education, a model adopted nationally and internationally. But in Hoover's eyes, Kerr confused academic freedom with academic license, coddled Communist faculty members, and failed to crack down on "young punks" like Savio. Hoover directed his agents to undermine the esteemed educator in myriad ways. He wanted Kerr removed from his post as university president. As he bluntly put it in a memo to his top aides, Kerr was "no good."
Reagan listened intently to Lynum's presentation, but he wanted more--much more. He asked for additional information on Kerr, for reports on liberal members of the Board of Regents who might oppose his policies, and for intelligence reports about any upcoming student protests. Just the week before, he had proposed charging tuition for the first time in the university's history, setting off a new wave of protests up and down the state. He told Lynum he feared subversives and liberals would attempt to misrepresent his efforts to establish fiscal responsibility, and that he hoped the FBI would share information about any upcoming demonstrations against him, whether on campus or at his press conferences. It was Reagan's fear, according to Lynum's subsequent report, "that some of his press conferences could be stacked with 'left wingers' who might make an attempt to embarrass him and the state government."
Lynum said he understood his concerns, but following Hoover's instructions he made no promises. Then he and Harter wished the ailing governor a speedy recovery, departed the mansion, slipped into their dark four-door Ford, and drove back to the San Francisco field office, where Lynum sent an urgent report to the director.
The bedside meeting was extraordinary, but so was the relationship between Reagan and Hoover. It had begun decades earlier, when the actor became an informer in the FBI's investigation of Hollywood Communists. When Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, he secretly continued to help the FBI purge fellow actors from the union's rolls. Reagan's informing proved helpful to the House Un-American Activities Committee as well, since the bureau covertly passed along information that could help HUAC hold the hearings that wracked Hollywood and led to the blacklisting and ruin of many people in the film industry. Reagan took great satisfaction from his work with the FBI, which gave him a sense of security and mission during a period when his marriage to Jane Wyman was failing, his acting career faltering, and his faith in the Democratic Party of his father crumbling. In the following years, Reagan and FBI officials courted each other through a series of confidential contacts. (7-8)
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Seth Rosenfeld (Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power)
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A drone is often preferred for missions that are too "dull, dirty, or dangerous" for manned aircraft.”
PROLOGUE
The graffiti was in Spanish, neon colors highlighting the varicose cracks in the wall. It smelled of urine and pot. The front door was metal with four bolt locks and the windows were frosted glass, embedded with chicken wire. They swung out and up like big fake eye-lashes held up with a notched adjustment bar.
This was a factory building on the near west side of Cleveland in an industrial area on the Cuyahoga River known in Ohio as The Flats.
First a sweatshop garment factory, then a warehouse for imported cheeses then a crack den for teenage potheads. It was now headquarters for Magic Slim, the only pimp in Cleveland with his own film studio and training facility.
Her name was Cosita, she was eighteen looking like fourteen. One of nine children from El Chorillo. a dangerous poverty stricken barrio on the outskirts of Panama City. Her brother, Javier, had been snatched from the streets six months ago, he was thirteen and beautiful.
Cosita had a high school education but earned here degree on the streets of Panama.
Interpol, the world's largest international police organization, had recruited Cosita at seventeen. She was smart, street savvy, motivated and very pretty. Just what Interpol was looking for.
Cosita would become a Drone!
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Nick Hahn
“
Neoliberal economics, the logic of which is tending today to win out throughout the world thanks to international bodies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and the governments to whom they, directly or indirectly, dictate their principles of ‘governance’,10 owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked, as such, to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies. It is the universalization of a particular case, that of the United States of America, characterized fundamentally by the weakness of the state which, though already reduced to a bare minimum, has been further weakened by the ultra-liberal conservative revolution, giving rise as a consequence to various typical characteristics: a policy oriented towards withdrawal or abstention by the state in economic matters; the shifting into the private sector (or the contracting out) of ‘public services’ and the conversion of public goods such as health, housing, safety, education and culture – books, films, television and radio – into commercial goods and the users of those services into clients; a renunciation (linked to the reduction in the capacity to intervene in the economy) of the power to equalize opportunities and reduce inequality (which is tending to increase excessively) in the name of the old liberal ‘self-help’ tradition (a legacy of the Calvinist belief that God helps those who help themselves) and of the conservative glorification of individual responsibility (which leads, for example, to ascribing responsibility for unemployment or economic failure primarily to individuals, not to the social order, and encourages the delegation of functions of social assistance to lower levels of authority, such as the region or city); the withering away of the Hegelian–Durkheimian view of the state as a collective authority with a responsibility to act as the collective will and consciousness, and a duty to make decisions in keeping with the general interest and contribute to promoting greater solidarity. Moreover,
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Pierre Bourdieu (The Social Structures of the Economy)
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Early in a career that began in 1912 when he was 19 years old, Romain de Tirtoff, the Russian-born artists who called himself Erté after the french pronunciation of his initials, was regarded as a 'miraculous magician,' whose spectacular fashions transformed the ordinary into the outstanding, whose period costumes made the present vanish mystically into the past, and whose décors converted bare stages into sparkling wonderlands of fun and fancy. When his career ended with his death in 1990, Erté was considered as 'one of the twentieth-century's single most important influences on fashion,' 'a mirror of fashion for 75 years,' and the unchallenged 'prince of the music hall,' who had been accorded the most significant international honors in the field of design and whose work was represented in major museums and private collections throughout the world.
It is not surprising that Erté's imaginative designs for fashion, theater, opera, ballet, music hall, film and commerce achieved such renown, for they are as crisp and innovative in their color and design as they are elegant and extravagant in character, and redolent of the romance of the pre- and post-Great War era, the period when Erté's hand became mature, fully developed and representative of its time. Art historians and scholars define Ertés unique style as transitional Art Deco, because it bridges the visual gab between fin-de-siècle schools of Symbolism, with its ethereal quality, Art Nouveau, with its high ornament, and the mid-1920s movement of Art Deco, with its inspirational sources and concise execution.
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Jean Tibbetts (Erte)
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that night she dreamed of employing an army of women cleaners who would set forth across the planet on a mission to clean up all the damage done to the environment
they came from all over Africa and from North and South and South America, they came from India and China and all over Asia, they came from Europe and the Middle East, from Oceania, and from the Antarctic, too
she imagined them all descending in their millions on the Niger Delta and driving out the oil companies with their mop and broom handles transformed into spears and poison-tipped swords and machine guns
she imagined them demolishing al the equipment used for oil production, including the flare stacks that rose into the skies to burn the natural gas, her cleaners setting charges underneath each one, detonating from a safe distance and watching them being blown up
she imagined the local people cheering and celebrating with dancing, drumming and roasted fish
she imagined the international media filming it- CNN, BBC, NBC
she imagined the government unable to mobilize the poorly paid local militia because they were terrified by the sheer numbers of her Worldwide Army of Women Cleaners
who could vaporize them with their superhuman powers
afterwards, she imagined legions of singing women sifting the rivers and creeks to remove the thick slicks of grease that had polluted them and digging up the land until they'd removed the toxic sublayers of soil
she imagined the skies opening when the job was fone and the pouring of pure water from the now hygienic clouds for as long as it took for the region to be thoroughly cleansed and replenished
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Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other)
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The Pakistani film International Gorillay (International guerillas), produced by Sajjad Gul, told the story of a group of local heroes - of the type that would, in the language of a later age, come to be known as jihadis, or terrorists - who vowed to find and kill an author called "Salman Rushdie" . The quest for "Rushdie" formed the main action of the film and "his" death was the film's version of happy ending.
"Rushdie" himself was depicted as a drunk, constantly swigging from a bottle, and a sadist. He lived in what looked very like a palace on what looked very like an island in the Philippines (clearly all novelists had second homes of this kind), being protected by what looked very like the Israeli Army (this presumably being a service offered by Israel to all novelists), and he was plotting the overthrow of Pakistan by the fiendish means of opening chains of discotheques and gambling dens across that pure and virtuous land, a perfidious notion for which, as the British Muslim "leader" Iqbal Sacranie might have said, death was too light a punishment. "Rushdie" was dressed exclusively in a series of hideously coloured safari suits - vermilion safari suits, aubergine safari suits, cerise safari suits - and the camera, whenever it fell upon the figure of this vile personage, invariably started at his feet and then panned [sic] with slow menace up to his face. So the safari suits got a lot of screen time, and when he saw a videotape of the film the fashion insult wounded him deeply. It was, however, oddly satisfying to read that one result of the film's popularity in Pakistan was that the actor playing "Rushdie" became so hated by the film-going public that he had to go into hiding.
At a certain point in the film one of the international gorillay was captured by the Israeli Army and tied to a tree in the garden of the palace in the Philippines so that "Rushdie" could have his evil way with him. Once "Rushdie" had finished drinking form his bottle and lashing the poor terrorist with a whip, once he had slaked his filthy lust for violence upon the young man's body, he handed the innocent would-be murderer over to the Israeli soldiers and uttered the only genuinely funny line in the film. "Take him away," he cried, "and read to him from The Satanic Verses all night!" Well, of course, the poor fellow cracked completely. Not that, anything but that, he blubbered as the Israelis led him away.
At the end of the film "Rushdie" was indeed killed - not by the international gorillay, but by the Word itself, by thunderbolts unleashed by three large Qurans hanging in the sky over his head, which reduced the monster to ash. Personally fried by the Book of the Almighty: there was dignity in that.
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Salman Rushdie (Joseph Anton: A Memoir)
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With the false claim that the Germans murdered six million Jews, mostly in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland during WWII, since the end of WWII, the world has been saturated with films, documentaries and books on the Holocaust. Anyone worldwide who dares to investigate the Jewish Holocaust claims, is branded an Anti-Semite and Holocaust Denier.
In our democratic world, a person who is accused of a crime is deemed innocent until irrefutable evidence proves them guilty. What has happened to democracy in Germany, Poland, France and Switzerland where people accused of Holocaust Denial are not allowed to provide any evidence that would prove that they are not guilty? In the Middle Ages, people accused of being witches, were also allowed no defence and were burned at the stake. As burning at the stake and crucifiction is not allowed in today's world, the best that the Jewish leaders and holocaust promoters can achieve is incarceration where no one can hear claims backed by years of very thorough research.
The Jewish success in blocking my book "The Answer Justice", their failed attempts to stop the book "Chutzpah" written by Norman Finkelstein whose mother and father were held in German concentration camps, the incarceration of revisionists Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf in Germany and David Irving in Austria: these are all desperate attempts to end what they call Holocaust Denial.
The English historian David Irving was refused entry to Australia in 2003 at the behest of the Jewish community (representing only 0.4% of the Australian population) thus denying the right of the other 99.6% to hear what David Irving has to say. Proof of Jewish power was the blocking of the public viewing of David Irving's film. The Jewish owners of the building locked the film presentation out which resulted in the headline in the "Australian" newspaper of: " Outrage at Jewish bid to stop the film by David Irving called "The Search For Truth in History" .
Sir Zelman Cowan who was Governor General of Australia and a man much reverred in the Jewish community, has stated in the Jewish Chronicle (London) that "The way to deal with people who claim the holocaust never happened, is to produce irrefutable evidence that it did happen". I agree 100% with Sir Zelman Cowan. I am quite certain that he and other Zionist Jewish (Ashkenazim) world leaders are aware that a United Nations or International forensic examination of the alleged gas chamber at No. 2 Crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, would irrefutably prove the truth to the world that xyclon B cyanide has never been used as alleged by world Jewry to kill Jews.
In 1979 Professor W.D. Rubenstein stated: "If the Holocaust can be shown to be a Zionist myth, the strongest of all weapons in Israels's propaganda armory collapses. The Falsification of history by Zionist Jews in claiming the murder of six million Jews by Germany, constitutes the GREATEST ORGANISED CRIME that the world has known.
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Alexander McClelland
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When we are sold perfume, we are accustomed to also being sold the idea of a life we will never have.
Coty's Chypre enabled Guerlain to create Mitsouko; Coty's Emeraude of 1921 was the bedrock on which Shalimar was built and Coty's L'Origan become the godmother of L'heure bleue, also by Guerlain.
Some people dedicate themselves to making life beautiful. With instinctual good taste, magpie tendencies and a flair for color, they weave painfully exquisite tableaux, defining the look of an era. Paul Poiret was one such person. After his success, he went bust in 1929 and had to sell his leftover clothing stock as rags. Swept out of the picture by a new generation of designers, his style too ornate and Aladdinesque, Poiret ended his days as a street painter and died in poverty.
It was Poiret who saw that symbolic nomenclature could turn us into frenzied followers, transforming our desire to own a perfume into desperation.
The beauty industry has always been brilliant at turning insecurities into commercial opportunities.
Readers could buy the cologne to relax during times of anxiety or revive themselves from strain.
Particularly in the 1930s, releases came thick and fast, intended to give the impression of bounty, the provision of beauty to all women in the nation. Giving perfumes as a gift even came under the Soviet definition of kulturnost or "cultured behavior", including to aunts and teachers on International Women's Day.
Mitsouko is a heartening scent to war when alone or rather, when not wanting to feel lonely.
Using fragrance as part of a considered daily ritual, the territorial marking of our possessions and because it offers us a retrospective sense of naughtiness.
You can never tell who is going to be a Nr. 5 wearer. No. 5 has the precision of well-cut clothes and that special appeal which comes from a clean, bare room free of the knick-knacks that would otherwise give away its age. Its versatility may well be connected to its abstraction.
Gardenia perfumes are not usually the more esoteric or intellectual on the shelves but exist for those times when we demand simply to smell gorgeous.
You can depend on the perfume industry to make light of the world's woes. No matter how bad things get, few obstacles can block the shimmer and glitz of a new fragrance.
Perfume became so fashionable as a means of reinvention and recovery that the neurology department at Columbia University experimented with the administration of jasmine and tuberose perfumes, in conjunction with symphony music, to treat anxiety, hysteria and nightmares.
Scent enthusiasts cared less for the nuances of a composition and more for the impact a scent would have in society.
In Ancient Rome, the Stoics were concerned about the use of fragrance by women as a mask for seducing men or as a vehicle of deception. The Roman satirist Juvenal talked of women buying scent with adultery in mind and such fears were still around in the 1940s and they are here with us today. Similarly, in crime fiction, fragrance is often the thing that gives the perpetrator away. Specifically in film noir, scent gets associated with misdemeanors.
With Opium, the drugs tag was simply the bait. What YSL was really marketing, with some genius, was perfume as me time: a daily opportunity to get languid and to care sod-all about anything or anyone else.
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Lizzie Ostrom (Perfume: A Century of Scents)
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When I spoke to you here the last time, my old party comrades, I did so fully conscious of victory as hardly a mortal has been able to do before me. In spite of this, a concern weighed heavily on me. It was clear to me that, ultimately, behind this war was that incendiary who has always lived off the quarrels of nations: the international Jew. I would no longer have been a National Socialist had I ever distanced myself from this realization.
We followed his traces over many years. In this Reich, probably for the first time, we scientifically resolved this problem for all time, according to plan, and really understood the words of a great Jew who said that the racial question was the key to world history. Therefore, we knew quite well-above all, I knew-that the driving force behind these occurrences was the Jew. And that, as always in history, there were blockheads ready to stand up for him: partly spineless, paid characters, partly people who want to make deals and, at no time, flinch from having blood spilled for these deals. I have come to know these Jews as the incendiaries of the world.
After all, in the previous years, you saw how they slowly poisoned the people via the press, radio, film, and theater. You saw how this poisoning continued. You saw how their finances, their money transactions, had to work in this sense. And, in the first days of the war, certain Englishmen-all of them shareholders in the armament industry-said it openly: “The war must last three years at least. It will not and must not end before three years.”-That is what they said. That was only natural, since their capital was tied up and they could not hope to secure an amortization in less than three years. Certainly, my party comrades, for us National Socialists, this almost defies comprehension.
But that is how things are in the democratic world. You can be prime minister or minister of war and, at the same time, own portfolios of countless shares in the armament industry. Interests are explained that way.
We once came to know this danger as the driving force in our domestic struggle. We had this black-red-golden coalition in front of us; this mixture of hypocrisy and abuse of religion on the one hand, and financial interests on the other; and, finally, their truly Jewish-Marxist goals. We completely finished off this coalition at home in a hard struggle. Now, we stand facing this enemy abroad. He inspired this international coalition against the German Volk and the German Reich.
First, he used Poland as a dummy, and later pressed France, Belgium, Holland, and Norway to serve him. From the start, England was a driving force here. Understandably, the power which would one day confront us is most clearly ruled by this Jewish spirit: the Soviet Union. It happens to be the greatest servant of Jewry.
Time meanwhile has proved what we National Socialists maintained for many years: it is truly a state in which the whole national intelligentsia has been slaughtered, and where only spiritless, forcibly proletarianized subhumans remain. Above them, there is the gigantic organization of the Jewish commissars, that is, established slaveowners. Frequently people wondered whether, in the long run, nationalist tendencies would not be victorious there.
But they completely forgot that the bearers of a conscious nationalist view no longer existed. That, in the end, the man who temporarily became the ruler of this state, is nothing other than an instrument in the hands of this almighty Jewry. If Stalin is on stage and steps in front of the curtain, then Kaganovich and all those Jews stand behind him, Jews who, in ten-thousandfold ramifications, control this mighty empire.
Speech in the Löwenbräukeller Munich, November 8, 1941
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Adolf Hitler (Collection of Speeches: 1922-1945)
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There was a small, strange moment during which I had this feeling that someone was filming me, which was ridiculous, but it was that specific—”there’s a camera on me”—and then some hard ancient pushed-down thing, a thing I’d felt or thought or feared a long time ago, something I’d since managed to sheathe in an imaginary scabbard inside myself, erupted through its casing like a bursting cyst. I had to really struggle to recover. Something was dislodging itself, as from a cavern inside my body or brain, and this situation seemed so divorced from waking reality that my own dimensions lost their power to persuade. I craned my great head and saw all that yellow-brown plastic catch the light, little pills glinting like ammunition, and then my brain went to work, juggling and generating several internal voices at once: someone’s filming this; this isn’t real; whoever Sean is, it’s not who I think he is; all the details I think I know about things are lies; somebody is trying to see what I’ll do when I run across these bottles; this is a test but there won’t be any grade later; the tape is rolling but I’m never going to see the tape. It is a terrible thing to feel trapped within a movie whose plot twists are senseless. This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.
I looked away; I looked away. Held myself steady for a second and then got back to the work of the cleaning, shaking free of the crazy feelings, and I felt the corners of my mouth, half smiling. Most people can clean their bathroom cabinets without waking up any traumatic memories. Not me, not yet, I guess. But as Dave the art therapist told me once when he found me sulking: it’s not so bad to be special. My journey, he said, was longer and slower. He looked me in the eyes, which impressed me, and told me that my good fortune was to learn what special really meant.
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John Darnielle (Wolf in White Van)
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Some viewed Chinese investors as the latest “dumb money” to hit Hollywood. It is no doubt true that financing movies is not the smartest way for any investor, from anywhere in the world, to earn the best returns. Others had a different theory—that some wealthy Chinese individuals and businesses were seeking to get their money out of China, where an autocratic government could still steal anyone’s wealth at any time, for any reason. Certainly Hollywood had long been a destination for legal money laundering. But those who worked most closely with the Chinese knew that the biggest reason for these investments was a form of reverse-colonialism. After more than a decade as a place for Hollywood to make money, China wanted to turn the tables. The United States had already proved the power of pop culture to help establish a nation’s global dominance. Now China wanted to do the same. The Beijing government considered art and culture to be a form of “soft power,” whereby it could extend influence around the world without the use of weapons. Over the past few years, locally produced Chinese films had become more successful at the box office there. But most were culturally specific comedies and love stories that didn’t translate anywhere else. China had yet to produce a global blockbuster. And with box-office growth in that country slowing in 2016 and early 2017, hits that resonated internationally would be critical if the Communist nation was to grow its movie business and use it to become the kind of global power it wanted to be. So Chinese companies, with the backing of the government, started investing in Hollywood, with a mission to learn how experienced hands there made blockbusters that thrived worldwide. Within a few years, they figured, China would learn how to do that without anyone’s help. “Working with a company like Universal will help us elevate our skill set in moviemaking,” the head of the Chinese entertainment company Perfect World Pictures said, while investing $250 million in a slate of upcoming films from the American studio. Getting there wouldn’t be easy. One of the highest-profile efforts to produce a worldwide hit out of China was The Great Wall, starring Matt Damon and made by Wanda’s Legendary Pictures. The $150 million film, about a war against monsters set on the Chinese historic landmark, grossed an underwhelming $171 million and a disastrous $45 million in the United States. Then, to create another obstacle, Chinese government currency controls established in early 2017 slowed, at least temporarily, the flow of money from China into Hollywood. But by then it was too late to turn back. As seemed to always be true when it came to Hollywood’s relationship with China, the Americans had no choice but to keep playing along. Nobody else was willing to pour billions of dollars into the struggling movie business in the mid-2010s, particularly for original or lower-budget productions.
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Ben Fritz (The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies)
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She was a good student, curious and self-possessed, a collector of details much like her dad. She’d become fascinated by films and filmmaking and the previous summer had taken it upon herself to seek out Steven Spielberg one evening when he’d come to the White House for a dinner party, asking him so many questions that he followed up with an offer to let her intern on a TV series he was producing. Our girl was finding her way.
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Michelle Obama (Becoming)
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...it is one thing for experimentation to take place: it is another for it to acquire critical mass – or, to use a different metaphor, for ripples to become a wave.
...
One sign was the emergence or re-emergence of an international audience that actually sought out artistically challenging films.
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Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s)
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Regardless of how successful the Fifth Generation and New Taiwan cinemas have been in the international film milieu, this (limited) recognition usually is based on two aspects: the formal or the exotic. Their works are praised as highly formally innovative (in other words, how well the have mastered the new-wave visual language of the West -- thus, our modernist language) or exotic (as revealing the mystery of an inscrutable Other). This may explain why in the United States, mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan cinemas are still perceived as a homogeneous entity called Chinese cinema, though they are products of the vastly different cultures of three geopolitically segregated regions.
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Tonglin Lu (Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China)
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According to Kim, 1998 was the turning point for Korean films entering the international arena. “In the fifty years up to 1997,” said Kim, “only four Korean films were screened at the Cannes Film Festival,” and even those were screened out of competition. “But in 1998, four Korean films were invited to Cannes.” What
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Euny Hong (The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture)
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The Director’s Chair is with Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc.), and Robert refers later to this quote from Francis: “Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.” ROBERT: “Even if I didn’t sell Mariachi, I would have learned so much by doing that project. That was the idea—I’m there to learn. I’m not there to win; I’m there to learn, because then I’ll win, eventually. . . . “You’ve got to be able to look at your failures and know that there’s a key to success in every failure. If you look through the ashes long enough, you’ll find something. I’ll give you one. Quentin [Tarantino] asked me, ‘Do you want to do one of these short films called Four Rooms [where each director can create the film of their choosing, but it has to be limited to a single hotel room, and include New Year’s Eve and a bellhop]?’ and my hand went up right away, instinctively. . . . “The movie bombed. In the ashes of that failure, I can find at least two keys of success. On the set when I was doing it, I had cast Antonio Banderas as the dad and had this cool little Mexican as his son. They looked really close together. Then I found the best actress I could find, this little half-Asian girl. She was amazing. I needed an Asian mom. I really wanted them to look like a family. It’s New Year’s Eve, because [it] was dictated by the script, so they’re all dressed in tuxedos. I was looking at Antonio and his Asian wife and thinking, ‘Wow, they look like this really cool, international spy couple. What if they were spies, and these two little kids, who can barely tie their shoes, didn’t know they were spies?’ I thought of that on the set of Four Rooms. There are four of those [Spy Kids movies] now and a TV series coming. “So that’s one. The other one was, after [Four Rooms] failed, I thought, ‘I still love short films.’ Anthologies never work. We shouldn’t have had four stories; it should have been three stories because that’s probably three acts, and it should just be the same director instead of different directors because we didn’t know what each person was doing. I’m going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again, if I knew they didn’t work? Because you figured something out when you’re doing it the first time, and [the second attempt] was Sin City.” TIM: “Amazing.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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A 2007 international study of 25,439 children’s TV characters found that only 13% of non-human characters are female (the figure for female human characters was slightly better, although still low at 32%).43 An analysis of G-rated (suitable for children) films released between 1990 and 2005 found that only 28% of speaking roles went to female characters – and perhaps even more tellingly in the context of humans being male by default, women made up only 17% of crowd scenes.44
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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With her strong GPA and merely quite good scores, busy athletic schedule, and character-building volunteer efforts, Portia Nathan’s application would have left this room with a fatal designation of Academic 3/Non-Academic 4, meaning that in the real world her scholastic skills were solid, but in Princeton’s supercharged applicant pool they were unremarkable, and that although she had been busy within her school community, she had not been a leader within that community (NonAc 3) or distinguished herself at the state level (NonAc 2), let alone accomplished something on a national or international scale (NonAc 1). NonAc 1’s, of course, were rather thin on the ground, even in Princeton’s applicant pool. They were Olympic athletes, authors of legitimately published books, Siemens prizewinners, working film or Broadway actors, International Tchaikovsky Competition violinists, and, yes, national judo champions, and they tended to be easy admits, provided they were strong students, which they usually were.
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Jean Hanff Korelitz (Admission)
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The memories do not dissolve. They cohere into captivating art films that play endlessly in the International Infidelity Film Festival of my mind.
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Harrison Scott Key (How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told)
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But traveling faster than light would require infinite energy; it is possible on paper, not in practice. More recently, physicists have theorized other ways that physical travel into the past could be achieved, but they are still exotic and expensive. A technological civilization thousands or more years in advance of our own, one able to harness the energy of its whole galaxy, could create a wormhole linking different points in the fabric of spacetime and send a spaceship through it.8 It is an idea explored widely in science fiction and depicted vividly in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. But all this is academic for our purposes. For Gleick, what we are really talking about with time travel is a thought experiment about the experiencer—the passenger—in a novel, disjointed relationship to the external world. We can readily perform feats of “mental time travel,” or at least simulate such feats, as well as experience a dissociation between our internal subjective sense of time and the flux of things around us and even our own bodies.9 According to Gleick, part of what suddenly facilitated four-dimensional thinking in both popular writing and the sciences was the changing experience of time in an accelerating society. The Victorian age, with its steam engines and bewildering pace of urban living, increased these experiences of dissociation, and they have only intensified since then. Time travel, Gleick argues, is basically just a metaphor for modernity, and a nifty premise upon which to base literary and cinematic fantasies that repair modernity’s traumas. It also shines a light on how confused we all are about time. The most commonly voiced objection to time travel—and with it, precognition—is that any interaction between the future and past would change the past, and thus create a different future. The familiar term is the grandfather paradox: You can’t go back in time and kill your grandfather because then you wouldn’t have been born to go back in time and kill your grandfather (leaving aside for the moment the assumed inevitability of wanting to kill your grandfather, which is an odd assumption). The technical term for meddling in the past this way is “bilking,” on the analogy of failing to pay a promised debt.10 Whatever you call it, it is the kind of thing that, in Star Trek, would make the Enterprise’s computer start to stutter and smoke and go haywire—the same reaction, in fact, that greets scientific claims of precognition. (As Dean Radin puts it, laboratory precognition results like those cited in the past two chapters “cause faces to turn red and sputtering noises to be issued from upset lips.”11) Information somehow sent backward in time from an event cannot lead to a future that no longer includes that event—and we naturally intuit that it would be very hard not to have such an effect if we meddled in the timeline. Our very presence in the past would change things.
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Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
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For example, I learned that it was my right under international law to be told why I was being arrested, but the night the military took me from my home, I wasn’t told why. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel also ratified in 1991, says that all persons, including children, should be given reasons for their arrest at the time of their arrest. Another violation occurred when the soldiers posed with me, a minor, while taking my picture before leading me into the police station. They had no right to humiliate me like that, nor to film my arrest and publish the video without my parents’ permission. And then there was the interrogation. Banning my parents and my lawyer from being with me and putting me in a room alone with men and no female officers were all clear violations. The way the interrogators shouted at me, threatened me, and sexually harassed me by commenting on my appearance in order to coerce a confession were all breaches of the Convention Against Torture. The fact that I was held so long in pretrial detention was another violation.
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Ahed Tamimi (They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom)
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I am not anti-venture capital. I am anti-everyone-thinking-venture-capital-is-the-only-way-to-start-a-tech-company.” The dream of being picked from a sea of wannapreneurs, anointed as a “real” founder, and handed buckets of money is alive and well in Silicon Valley and other startup hubs around the world. Except there’s something wrong with seeking this narrative . . . It’s lazy. It implies that you need someone else’s permission to build your company. That you’re not a real entrepreneur until an investor tells you that you are. Or maybe you like having an excuse not to ship, and a never-ending quest for funding is a pretty good excuse. There’s a reason the most common piece of advice I give aspiring founders is: Build your business, not your slide deck. Instead of waiting for a basket of money to fall into your lap, go build your business. If you were an author, I would tell you to stop asking publishers for permission and go write your book. Andy Weir (author of The Martian) didn’t wait for approval; he wrote an international bestseller that’s been made into a film starring Matt Damon.
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Rob Walling (The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital)
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On the eve of America’s entrance into World War II, Walter Brennan embodied fundamental decency and democratic virtues that made him indispensable to Cooper’s signature Everyman roles. Brennan’s performance in Sergeant York (September 27, 1941) foreshadows the country’s emergence from isolationism into a reluctant, then confirmed internationalism. Although Brennan received an Academy Award nomination for his work in Sergeant York, his low-key style is barely mentioned in later accounts of the film, which focus on Gary Cooper as Alvin York, a backwoods Tennessee conscientious objector who overcomes religious objections to war to become the nation’s greatest war hero. Brennan’s Pastor Pile persuades York to fight for his principles, to abide by the law and register for the draft, and then to serve in the army after he is denied conscientious objector status.
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Carl Rollyson (A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan (Hollywood Legends))
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It’s not just Africa’s movie and music industry that is booming. African literature, led by the Young Lions, or rather, Lionesses, is seeing a revival, too. I mentioned Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her TED Talk about Africa’s “Single Story.” But Adichie, 37, is best known for writing, and her novels Half of a Yellow Sun (now a film directed by fellow Nigerian novelist Biyi Bandele) and Americanah, winner of the United States’ prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award in 2013, are international best sellers. Adichie is able to write in an authentic African voice and yet still connect with huge numbers of readers in the West. I have been told about other young African women who are taking the literary world by storm such as Zimbabwean NoViolet Bulawayo, who was long-listed for Britain’s Man Booker Prize, and her countrywoman, international trade lawyer Petina Gappah, a finalist for the United Kingdom’s prestigious Orwell Prize in 2010. These talented women are part of a confident, new, global Africa.
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Ashish J. Thakkar (The Lion Awakes: Adventures in Africa's Economic Miracle)
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January 26: Marilyn is invited to attend the Foreign Press Association’s First Annual International Film Festival at the Club Del Mar in Santa Monica and creates a sensation by wearing an Idaho potato burlap bag designed for her by Billy Travilla.
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Carl Rollyson (Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events)
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There have been several attempts to create functioning hoverboards, some of which have been reported about in internationally renowned news outlets like the New York Times, but it seems that true hoverboarding like Marty does on film is not going to become a reality anytime soon.
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Caseen Gaines (We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy)
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A court case in 2009 (Nicola Vetta vs London Dreams) established that an intern had the right to the national minimum wage, even though she had agreed to work for the film company on an ‘expenses only’ basis.
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Guy Standing (The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class)
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Never meant to be more than a B picture entertainment produced on the Universal International backlot and at the Iverson Ranch (a five-hundred-acre family property often used for location shoots), it is one of those unexpected surprises that make you want to know about everyone who had a part in creating such a diverting picture. The film has no single star, but rather an ensemble of superb actors: Vincent Price (Tracy Holland), hamming up it as a ham actor, and Eve Arden (Lily Martin) playing an aging and acerbic stage star.
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Carl Rollyson (A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan (Hollywood Legends))
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It was in this environment of entrenched racism that America’s first minstrel shows appeared, and they began attracting large audiences of European immigrants, native Whites, and sometimes even Blacks. By 1830, Thomas “Daddy” Rice, who learned to mimic African American English (today called “Ebonics”), was touring the South, perfecting the character that thrust him into international prominence: Jim Crow. Appearing in blackface, and dressed in rags, torn shoes, and a weathered hat, Jim Crow sang and danced as a stupid, childlike, cheerful Black field hand. Other minstrel characters included “Old darky,” the thoughtless, musical head of an enslaved family, and “Mammy,” the hefty asexual devoted caretaker of Whites. The biracial, beautiful, sexually promiscuous “yaller gal” titillated White men. “Dandy,” or “Zip Coon,” was an upwardly mobile northern Black male who mimicked—outrageously—White elites. Typically, minstrel shows included a song-and-dance portion, a variety show, and a plantation skit. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, blackface minstrelsy became the first American theatrical form, the incubator of the American entertainment industry. Exported to excited European audiences, minstrel shows remained mainstream in the United States until around 1920 (when the rise of racist films took their place).15
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Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
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The “Lost Day” film and the comments by Putin and Medvedev have revealed a great deal: that the invasion of Georgia in August 2008 was indeed a preplanned aggression and that so-called “Russian peacekeepers” in South Ossetia and Abkhazia were in fact the vanguard of the invading forces that were in blatant violation of Russia’s international obligations and were training and arming the separatist forces.
The admission by Putin that Ossetian separatist militias acted as an integral part of the Russian military plan transfers legal responsibility for acts of ethnic cleansing of Georgian civilians and mass marauding inside and outside of South Ossetia to the Russian military and political leadership. Putin’s admission of the prewar integration of the Ossetian separatist militias into the Russian General Staff war plans puts into question the integrity of the independent European Union war report, written by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini that accused the Georgians of starting the war and attacking Russian “peacekeepers,” which, according to Tagliavini, warranted a Russian military response.
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Павел Фельгенгауэр
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Dalla festa del nonno ai mulini ecco il catalogo delle spese folli Secondo Confcommercio si buttano 82 miliardi l’anno C’è chi ha uffici in Nicaragua e chi paga corsi di merletto Nella foto a sinistra le «mutande verdi» acquistate dall’ex governatore del Piemonte Cota. A destra Franco Fiorito, in passato capogruppo Pdl nel Lazio, condannato a 3 anni e 4 mesi di reclusione Mattia Feltri | 752 parole Nel cassetto è rimasto un vecchio servizio dell’Espresso, giugno 2000. Un po’ più di quattordici anni fa e comunque non era una primizia: vi si leggeva, già con un margine di scoramento, dei 410 milioni (di lire) spesi dal Molise per commissionare alla Pontificia fonderia Marinelli la campana col rintocco adatto alle celebrazioni giubilari, oppure dei 65 stanziati dal Lazio a sovvenzione della festa del nonno di Ariccia, dove qualche notorietà la si deve alla porchetta più che al vecchierello. Poi c’erano i dieci milioni della Calabria per la cipolla rossa di Tropea, e avanti così, ma non era soltanto un festival dello strano ma vero: la Sicilia tirò fuori quattro miliardi per la valorizzazione dei mulini a vento e sei per l’individuazione di spiagge libere. Da allora i quotidiani e i periodici e la tv d’inchiesta coprono gli spazi e i momenti di noia con servizi di questo tipo, che hanno il pregio di essere infallibili; in fondo sono il modo superpop di cogliere l’attimo carnevalesco e, attimo dopo attimo, di spiegare come le Regioni siano in grado di sprecare 82,3 miliardi di euro all’anno, secondo lo studio presentato a marzo da Confcommercio. Vi si dice, fra l’altro, che il Lazio ne butta oltre undici, la Campania dieci abbondanti e la Sicilia - record - è lì per toccare quota quattordici. Il mondo è pieno di resoconti di questa natura. Il sempreverde è l’articolo sulle sedi di rappresentanza delle Regioni, con l’aneddoto strepitoso delle ventuno sedi regionali a Bruxelles, tutte indispensabili a mantenere il filo diretto fra Bari e l’Ue, Cagliari e l’Ue, Genova e l’Ue; piccolo dettaglio: le Regioni sono ventuno, ma Trento e Bolzano ritennero doveroso farsi una sede per provincia. Ai tempi di Giulio Tremonti si venne a sapere, con molta fatica e qualche approssimazione, che queste sedi sono 178 sparse nel mondo, il Piemonte ne ha una in Nicaragua e un’altra a Minsk, il Veneto in India e in Vietnam, la Puglia in Albania, le Marche a Ekaterinburg, dove ci fu l’eccidio dei Romanov e altro non si sa. Ha provato a metterci mano anche Carlo Cottarelli, il commissario alla spending review, e gli raccontarono (ne scrisse il Fatto) di quel consigliere regionale della Basilicata che voleva aprire a Potenza un ufficio di rappresentanza della Regione, e nonostante la Regione Basilicata abbia sede a Potenza. Insomma, se c’era un affare su cui si raggiungeva l’unanimità della nazione, era questo: le Regioni sono il tombino dei nostri soldi. Eravamo andati a vedere le consulenze distribuite in splendida allegria, i consulenti piemontesi sulla qualità percepita dagli utenti delle reti ferroviarie, i consulenti friulani sulle biblioteche nel deserto della Mauritania e su un corso di merletto, quello umbro sul monitoraggio delle tv locali. Siamo andati a verificare che la Valle d’Aosta (Regione e altri enti locali) ancora lo scorso anno aveva 493 auto blu, una ogni 260 residenti, mentre il Molise ne aveva 368 (tre soltanto a Montenero di Bisaccia, il paese di Antonio Di Pietro) ed era l’unica Regione, insieme col Trentino, che nel 2013 aveva aumentato anziché diminuito il parco macchine. Nel settore, una specie di bibbia è il divertente libro di Mario Giordano (Spudorati, Mondadori) che al capitolo sulle Regioni racconta che la Lombardia ha tirato fuori 75 mila euro nell’osservazione degli scoiattoli e cifre varie nel sovvenzionamento della Fiera della Possenta di Ceresara, dell’International Melzo Film Festival, della festa Cià che gìrum, del gemellaggio Pero-Fuscaldo. E la Lomb
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Anonymous
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In this one-eyed picture of the country’s recent history there is little room for Communist espionage. The U.S. never faced any kind of internal security threat—in the eyes of most of these authors, the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss are seen as innocent victims of an FBI frame-up. The meticulous examination of these cases by Ronald Radosh and Allen Weinstein, who started out as critics and doubters of the government’s case only to be overwhelmed by the massiveness of condemnatory evidence discovered by them, is dismissed an unconvincing. Books and film documentaries that argue for the innocence of Hiss and the Rosenbergs are praised no matter how flimsy their factual base.24
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Guenter Lewy (The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life)
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Andrew Stanton says, adding that on each of his own films, he has made a point of doing this on a smaller scale, separate from the official Braintrust. “Here are the qualifications required: The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. I don’t care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most trusted lieutenants: If they can help you do that, they should be at the table.
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Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar)
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For the first time I saw that political resistance can be very sexy. – Director Fatih Akin at the Cannes International Film Festival, 2007
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Anupama Chopra (100 Films to See before You Die)
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Despite these supposedly stringent controls, however, the system was hampered by one major factor: during the mid to late 1950s, the Soviet film industry began expanding at an almost exponential rate, epitomised by the international success of Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1957.
This resurgence owed a lot to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, at which Khrushchev denounced Stalinism, thereby precipitating the ‘Thaw’ that initiated the most liberal cultural climate in the Soviet Union for 30 years. The film industry thrived as a result. In 1955, 65 features were produced; by the early 1960s, this had risen to over 100 per year. Cinemas likewise doubled in number, from 59,000 in 1955 to 118,000 in 1965. Aside from Kalatozov, other directors rose to prominence
between the late fifties and mid sixties, such as Elem Klimov, Larissa Shepitko and Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, and the only two Soviet directors Tarkovsky professed to admire, Otar Iosseliani and Sergei Parajanov.
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Sean Martin (Andrei Tarkovsky (Pocket Essential series))
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What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? The biggest one is that international audiences won’t see films about people of color. It’s particularly insidious, but it’s reflective of a broader issue wherein Hollywood accepts conventional wisdom that is more convention than wisdom without interrogating whether there’s any evidence to support those assumptions. What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? Try everything you think you might want to do professionally before accepting whatever backup plan you have in the back of your head but are very much hoping to avoid.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
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Habana Eva" released in 2010, Habana Eva is a funny Romantic comedy. Eva works as a seamstress in a sweatshop where she dreams of becoming a fashion designer with her own a room. Her love is her longtime partner Angel, a charming yet lazy islander. Her dream of marrying Angel fades when she meets Jorge, a handsome and wealthy Cuban raised in Venezuela who returns to Cuba, with a more ambitious project than taking photos of Eva for a book. Eva who has been living with her aunts falls for him and has to decide which of the two men she will want to marry. Directed by Fina Torres, starring Prakriti Maduro as Eva and Juan Carlos García as Jorge and Carlos Enrique Almirante as Angel. Venezuelan produced and filmed in La Habana, Cuba. Habana Eva film won the Best Picture award at the New York International Latino Film Festival on August 2, 2010.
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Hank Bracker
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Jeff Brown explores the phenomenon in depth in his film Karmageddon: “After my childhood, I needed the kinds of spirituality that would keep me from allowing the pain to surface…. I was confusing self-avoidance with enlightenment.
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Richard C. Schwartz (No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model)
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What people know
As everyone knows, Directors spend their time behind the camera while Actors stand before it.
Where do Producers fit in? They don’t. They fly above the camera, observing everything, and making sure the business of making the film realistically gets “Mission Accomplished.”
And if not, they swoop down like eagles to take care of it, in a bear sort of way, sometimes biting like sharks while trying to be gentle and kind at the same time… if possible.
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J.D. James (ABOVE THE CAMERA A Film Tale... Take One: What does an International Film Producer do in the most shenanigan driven, smoke and mirrors filled, fun business in the world?)
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Many esotericists and gnostics took the perceived metaphysical statements about the gods and archetypes and internalized them into the individual psyche, thus psychologizing them. Alchemy was done this way too, and the alchemical process comes to symbolize instead an inner, progressive realization of godhood.
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Jay Dyer (Esoteric Hollywood: Sex, Cults and Symbols in Film)
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The day before I'm supposed to be meeting Caroline for a drink, I develop all the text-book symptons of a crush: nervous stomach, long periods spent daydreaming, an inability to remember what she looks like. I can bring back the dress and the boots, and I can see a fringe, but her face is a blank, and I fill it in with some anonymous rent-a-cracker details - pouty red lips, even though it wax her well-scrubbed english clever-girl look that attracted me to her in the first place; almond-shaped eyes, even though she was wearing sunglasses most of the time; pale, perfect skin, even though I know there'll be an initial twinge of disappointment - this is what all that internal fuss is about? - and then I'll find something to get excited about again: the fact that she's turned up at all, a sexy voice, intelligence, wit, something. And between the second and the third meeting a whole new set of myths will be born.
This time, something different happens, though. It's the daydreaming that does it. I'm doing the usual thing - imagining in tiny detail the entire course of the relationship, from first kiss, to bed, to moving in together, to getting married (in the past I have even organized the track listing of the party tapes), to how pretty she'll look when she's pregnant, to names of children - until suddenly I realize that there's nothing left to actually, like, happen. I've done it all, lived through the whole relationship in my head. I've watched the film on fast-forward; I know the whole plot, the ending, all the good bits. Now I've got to rewind and watch it all over again in real time, and where's the fun in that?
And fucking... when it's all going to fucking stop? I'm going to jump from rock to rock for the rest of my life until there aren't any rocks left? I'm going to run each time I get itchy feet? Because I get them about once a quarter, along with the utilities bills... I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.
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Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)
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Convinced that a persistent negative emotional state had contributed to his illness, he decided it was equally possible that a more positive emotional state could reverse the damage. While continuing to consult with his doctor, Cousins started a regimen of massive doses of vitamin C and Marx Brothers movies (as well as other humorous films and comedy shows). He found that ten minutes of hearty laughter gave him two hours of pain-free sleep. Eventually, he made a complete recovery. Cousins, quite simply, laughed himself to health. How? Although scientists at the time didn’t have a way to understand or explain such a miraculous recovery, research now tells us it’s likely that epigenetic processes were at work. Cousins’s shift of attitude changed his body chemistry, which altered his internal state, enabling him to program new genes in new ways; he simply downregulated (or turned off) the genes that were causing his illness and upregulated (or turned on) the genes responsible for his recovery.
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Joe Dispenza (You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter)
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leaving her country was not easy for my mother i still catch her searching for it in foreign films and the international food aisle
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Rupi Kaur (The Sun and Her Flowers)
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It’s not, at least as I have internalized it, about perfectionism at all costs (something Roone wasn’t especially concerned about). Instead, it’s about creating an environment in which you refuse to accept mediocrity. You instinctively push back against the urge to say There’s not enough time, or I don’t have the energy, or This requires a difficult conversation I don’t want to have, or any of the many other ways we can convince ourselves that “good enough” is good enough.
Decades after I stopped working for Roone, I watched a documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about a master sushi chef from Tokyo named Jiro Ono, whose restaurant has three Michelin stars and is one of the most sought-after reservations in the world. In the film, he’s in his late eighties and still trying to perfect his art. He is described by some as being the living embodiment of the Japanese word shokunin, which is “the endless pursuit of perfection for some greater good.
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Robert Iger (The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company)
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With Bob Dylan, Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, and convicted Watergate lawyer Charles Colson proudly declaring to be 'born again,' Newsweek and Time called 1976 'the Year of the Evangelical.' The most famous 'born-again' Christian in the United States that year, however, was president-elect James Earl Carter.
That same year, Francis Schaefer wrote How Should We Then Live, explicitly arguing that proliferating pornography, accelerating abortion rates, prohibition of prayer in public school, and other examples of 'secular humanism' were the work of Satan. It was the mission of evangelical Christians to save the country from Satan by taking back their government. Schaefer was central in bringing evangelical Christians to politics, but he was a reclusive intellectual theologian living on a mountaintop in Switzerland. His clarion call would not have been distributed so extensively without an infusion of money from Nelson Bunker Hunt. The rotund international oilman bankrolled a documentary adaptation of How Should We The n Live. A phenomenal success, the film convinced thousands of evangelical Christian that a culture war was afoot, and they had an obligation to take the fight to Satan by abandoning any past reluctance to engage in politics.
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Edward H. Miller (A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism)
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At least that was Ivar’s reputation. The truth was more complicated. A large portion of the dividends recently paid by Swedish Match and Kreuger & Toll came from cash raised by International Match in America. In other words, the dividends paid to old investors came from proceeds raised from new ones. That pyramid approach, which had elements of Ponzi’s scheme, couldn’t last forever, and Ivar knew it. Nevertheless, Ivar really was making money, a lot of it, from match operations throughout the world. Unlike Charles Ponzi’s postal reply coupon scam, Ivar’s profits were real. Swedish Match made and sold billions of boxes of matches every year. Kreuger & Toll built landmark buildings throughout Europe. Ivar had real investments in real businesses, ranging from matches to real estate to film. No one could fake that.
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Frank Partnoy (The Match King: Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century)
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John and Paul, who once made music together with such passion, excitement and brilliance, had found it harder and harder to get on together as the sixties drew to a close. Their musical ideas and tastes were diverging as Paul went on writing ballads, like “Hey Jude,” while John wrote raw and challenging songs like “Hey Jude”’s B side, “Revolution,” commemorating the international student riots of 1968. The Magical Mystery Tour film had been their first project after Brian’s death and Paul had organized it; John had backed off. Although they’d gone on to write several more songs together and even make another film, Let It Be, the pleasure had gone out of it for them and it was clear to me from 1967 that they would eventually go their own ways.
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Cynthia Lennon (John: A Biography)
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I myself would like to see more explicit attention paid to the losses experienced due to the Japanese occupation in the Pacific during World War II, and for this history to be as much in dialog with Western culture as the war in Europe and the Holocaust has been, both in film and art, as well as in classrooms and in literature. Not only do I think it's important for the Western survivors of the internment camps like my father to be acknowledged and their trauma addressed, but the vast majority of Japanese forces' victims in World War II were millions of Asians, and with the singular focus on the Nazi occupation, I think there's a great deal of Eurocentrism in our Western understanding of the Second World War. It's important that we address this, because an attitude in the West of regions we deem as less important can lead to events such as the Rwandan genocide in 1994, during which the Western world turned a blind eye and the United Nations refused to send aid as an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered. As long as we continue to divide the world according to our "us and them" mentality, I believe these tragedies will continue. This is not just about politics, because when we talk about politics we are talking about people.
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Mieke Eerkens (All Ships Follow Me: A Family Memoir of War Across Three Continents)
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It is also particularly characteristic to study how the current world war was triggered by the same international forces. One of the most effective thread pullers was e.g. the half-Jewish Bullitt, director of the Jewish film company Laski Corporation which is controlled by the large Jewish banking house Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York, one of the major banks that in 1917 financed the Bolshevik revolution.
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Vidkun Quisling
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In the spring of 1935, an editor at the New York publishing house Macmillan, while on a scouting trip through the South, was introduced to Mitchell and signed her to a deal for her untitled book. Upon its release in the summer of 1936, the New York Times Book Review declared it “one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer.” Priced at $3, Gone with the Wind was a blockbuster. By the end of the summer, Macmillan had sold over 500,000 copies. A few days prior to the gushing review in the Times, an almost desperate telegram originated from New York reading, “I beg, urge, coax, and plead with you to read this at once. I know that after you read the book you will drop everything and buy it.” The sender, Kay Brown, in this missive to her boss, the movie producer David Selznick, asked to purchase the book’s movie rights before its release. But Selznick waited. On July 15, seeing its reception, Selznick bought the film rights to Gone with the Wind for $50,000. Within a year, sales of the book had exceeded one million copies. Almost immediately Selznick looked to assemble the pieces needed to turn the book into a movie. At the time, he was one of a handful of major independent producers (including Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, and Walt Disney) who had access to the resources to make films. Few others could break into a system controlled by the major studios. After producing films as an employee of major studios, including Paramount and MGM, the thirty-seven-year-old Selznick had branched out to helm his own productions. He had been a highly paid salaried employee throughout the thirties. His career included producer credits on dozens of films, but nothing as big as what he had now taken on. As the producer, Selznick needed to figure out how to take a lengthy book and translate it onto the screen. To do this, Selznick International Pictures needed to hire writers and a director, cast the characters, get the sets and the costumes designed, set a budget, put together the financing by giving investors profit-participation interests, arrange the distribution plan for theaters, and oversee the marketing to bring audiences to see the film. Selznick’s bigger problem was the projected cost.
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Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
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Our revenue was three hundred billion dollars last year alone. My father built it from the ground up when he took over a small newspaper in New York in the seventies. Then he bought more papers, both domestic and international, then a television station, then a cable network, then a film studio. It grew from there. We’re now considered one of the most successful and influential businesses on the planet.
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J.T. Geissinger (Liars Like Us (Morally Gray, #1))
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In the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past. As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention. It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences. The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation”1 to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction.
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Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
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In the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past. As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention. It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences. The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation”1 to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction. In the film, one of the heptapods sacrifices its life to save that of Louise and her team members from a bomb planted by some soldiers, even though it clearly knows its fate well in advance. Their race even knows that in 3,000 years, humanity will offer them some needed assistance, and thus their visit is just the beginning of a long relationship of mutual aid in the block universe. At the end of the film, Louise chooses to have her daughter, even knowing that the girl will die.
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Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
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This method of telling the story compels the reader to consider how they internalize and interpret the tales they love, and how memory tinges the way a story is told.
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Kristen Lopez (But Have You Read the Book?: 52 Literary Gems That Inspired Our Favorite Films (Turner Classic Movies))
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The Times ad marked a seminal intersection in the history of cancer. With it, cancer declared its final emergence from the shadowy interiors of medicine into the full glare of public scrutiny, morphing into an illness of national and international prominence. This was a generation that no longer whispered about cancer. There was cancer in newspapers and cancer in books, cancer in theater and in films: in 450 articles in the New York Times in 1971; in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, a blistering account of a cancer hospital in the Soviet Union; in Love Story, a 1970 film about a twenty-four-year-old woman who dies of leukemia; in Bang the Drum Slowly, a 1973 release about a baseball catcher diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease; in Brian's Song, the story of the Chicago Bears star Brian Piccolo, who died of testicular cancer. A torrent of op-ed pieces and letters appeared in newspapers and magazines.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
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So my generation fell into the trap, internalizing the either/or as we thought of ourselves as ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ and falling victim, once again, to the terms by which our sex had been conveniently divided for so many years. To the degree that sex was the equivalent of the self, surrender to sex was to lose oneself, whereas abstinence would insure its safeguarding, if not its salvation (viv).
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Molly Haskell
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Each of us is a massive composite figure. We are constantly filtering a barrage of sounds and visual images. Newspapers headlines scream to gain our attention. The radio blasts out its top forty. Billboards proclaim the newest film stars. Fashion magazines tell us how to dress and act. Each day sprouts its insider news tidbits. Each news day the media mashes another international or domestic crisis into our mental pulp and soufflés the macramé of political scandal or social untidiness into edible sound bites for us mentally to digest. Inside each of us resides shavings from this visual and electronic onslaught. An unseemly deluge of external stimuli shapes our ego formation.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Mrs. Church settled a blanket over him and told the footmen, “Take him up to the master bedroom. Softly…no jostling. Treat him as if he were a newborn babe.”
After counting in unison, the footmen lifted the stretcher. “A babe that weighs fourteen stone,” one of them grunted.
Mrs. Church tried to look stern, but the corners of her eyes crinkled briefly. “Mind your tongue, David.”
Kathleen followed behind the footmen, swiping impatiently at the film of tears over her eyes.
Walking beside her, the housekeeper murmured consolingly, “There, there. Don’t distress yourself, my lady. We’ll soon have him patched up and as good as new.”
Although Kathleen longed to believe her, she whispered tightly, “He’s so bruised and feeble--he might have internal injuries.”
“He didn’t seem so feeble as all that, a moment ago,” the housekeeper observed dryly.
Kathleen turned scarlet. “He was overwrought. He didn’t know what he was doing.”
“If you say so, my lady.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
There is the documentary Sensitive: The Untold Story and the feature film, Sensitive and in Love. There have been twice-a-year HSP Gathering Retreats, frequent international research conferences, and numerous seminars and webinars for the public on the subject in the U.S. and Europe, plus YouTube videos, books, magazines, newsletters, and websites, and all sorts of services exclusively for highly sensitive persons—most good and some, well, not as good.
”
”
Elaine N. Aron (The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You)
“
Fundamentals of Esperanto
The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one
sitting.
Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj
& the accusative, -on
Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative
friend & friends.
Ma amiko is my friend.
A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in
Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in
Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the
International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with
its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth
branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA,
has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where
young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings
by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home
Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old
Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first
feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto.
Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space
on board the Voyager spacecraft.
-
Esperanto is an artificial language
constructed in 1887 by L.
L. Zamenhof, a polish
oculist.
following a somewhat difficult period
in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the
railway platform just outside
Warsaw where I had missed
my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit
& dark glasses pushed a cart
piled high with ripped & weathered volumes—
sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing
musical scores & outdated physics textbooks,
old copies of Life, new smut,
an atlas translated,
a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics,
a guide to the rivers &
mountains, thesauri, inscrutable
musical scores & mimeographed physics books,
defective stories, obsolete sex manuals—
one of which caught my notice
(Dr. Esperanto
since I had time, I traded
my used Leaves of Grass for a copy.
I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough.
There’s a man from Quebec in my head,
a friend to the purple martins.
Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows.
All purple martins are dying or dead.
Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest
these creatures feel the same levels of doubt
& bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity.
While driving home from the brewery
one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program
about purple martins & the next day he set out
to build them a house
in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything,
let alone a house,
not to mention a home
for somebody else.
Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting.
Never piped sugar water through colored tubes
to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded
with strong, tired hands.
Never dismantled the entire affair
& put it back together again.
Still no swallows.
I never installed the big light that stays on through the night
to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights,
never rested on Sunday
with a beer on the deck surveying
what I had done
& what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx
while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers.
I have never collapsed in abandon.
Never prayed.
But enough about the purple martins.
Every line of the work
is a first & a last line & this is the spring
of its action. Of course, there’s a journey
& inside that journey, an implicit voyage
through the underworld. There’s a bridge
made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers;
a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors;
a digression on shadows;
That’s how we finally learn
who the hero was all along. Weary & old,
he sits on a rock & watches his friends
fly by one by one out of the song,
then turns back to the journey they all began
long ago, keeping the river to his right.
”
”
Srikanth Reddy (Facts for Visitors)
“
Four years earlier, Weissmuller had been the first to break the one-minute barrier in the 100-meter freestyle. (That he would later go on to play Tarzan in MGM’s blockbuster films and become an international movie star of the era is also worthy of note.)
”
”
Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim)
“
The second kind of nutriment is sense impressions. Our six sense organs — eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind — are in constant contact (sparsha) with sense objects, and these contacts become food for our consciousness. When we drive through a city, our eyes see so many billboards, and these images enter our consciousness. When we pick up a magazine, the articles and advertisements are food for our consciousness. Advertisements that stimulate our craving for possessions, sex, and food can be toxic. If after reading the newspaper, hearing the news, or being in a conversation, we feel anxious or worn out, we know we have been in contact with toxins. Movies are food for our eyes, ears, and minds. When we watch TV, the program is our food. Children who spend five hours a day watching television are ingesting images that water the negative seeds of craving, fear, anger, and violence in them. We are exposed to so many forms, colors, sounds, smells, tastes, objects of touch, and ideas that are toxic and rob our body and consciousness of their well-being. When you feel despair, fear, or depression, it may be because you have ingested too many toxins through your sense impressions. Not only children need to be protected from violent and unwholesome films, TV programs, books, magazines, and games. We, too, can be destroyed by these media. If we are mindful, we will know whether we are “ingesting” the toxins of fear, hatred, and violence, or eating foods that encourage understanding, compassion, and the determination to help others. With the practice of mindfulness, we will know that hearing this, looking at that, or touching this, we feel light and peaceful, while hearing that, looking at this, or touching that, we feel anxious, sad, or depressed. As a result, we will know what to be in contact with and what to avoid. Our skin protects us from bacteria. Antibodies protect us from internal invaders. We have to use the equivalent aspects of our consciousness to protect us from unwholesome sense objects that can poison us.
”
”
Thich Nhat Hanh (The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation)
“
White supremacy posits that because White people are the most beautiful and talented, they should be the faces that we see in magazines, on television, and in film; because they are the most intelligent, their books and theories (the “classics”) should be the focal point of our educations; because they are the most authoritative, they should be the people in charge of . . . well, everything. White supremacy tells us that what is White is universally right and that any departure from the norm is a deficiency to be remedied. And because the majority of US Whites live, work, and worship in social isolation from people of color, they rarely have the opportunity for the kind of meaningful cross-cultural exchange that might occasion them to question their internalized sense of superiority. What limited cross-cultural engagement they do have (such as on mission trips) occurs in the context of such an enormous power imbalance that it usually affirms, rather than challenges, their cultural comfort.
”
”
Chanequa Walker-Barnes (I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation (Prophetic Christianity (PC)))
“
This session showed intriguing objective evidence for a mind-matter interaction effect, but an unusual subjective event also happened that is worth mentioning. For this session, knowing that the planned participant was a highly experienced meditator, I decided to have it filmed for future reference. I asked two videographers to shoot the session as it unfolded. They set up their cameras and started filming, the meditator prepared himself mentally for about ten minutes, then signaled that he was ready to begin. I started the experiment and it proceeded without incident until about halfway through the session. Then for a few seconds I felt strangely disoriented, as though all my mental activity suddenly stopped. I shook off this odd sensation, and the disorientation soon passed. The session ended, I thanked the meditator, and he left. Then I spent a few minutes discussing the session with the two videographers as they gathered up their gear. I didn’t attribute much meaning to that moment when my mind was strangely suspended, but I’ve learned that when studying effects that span the subjective-objective gap, it’s important to pay attention to internal states. So I mentioned it to the videographers, and they were both taken aback. It turns out that they had independently experienced the same phenomenon. We had all shared a moment when our minds seemed to go blank. At this point I didn’t know yet whether the objective evidence collected during that session was significant or not. When I found that it was, I contacted the meditator, who by then was back at his ashram in India. I asked if he felt that he was being successful in doing something during the session. He said yes, but that it took until about halfway through the session before he figured out how to do it. As an anecdote, this episode doesn’t count as scientific evidence. But it’s still interesting that the experiment obtained objective evidence of a mind-matter interaction effect at precisely the same time that three people unexpectedly felt something strange occur.
”
”
Dean Radin (Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities)
“
This session showed intriguing objective evidence for a mind-matter interaction effect, but an unusual subjective event also happened that is worth mentioning. For this session, knowing that the planned participant was a highly experienced meditator, I decided to have it filmed for future reference. I asked two videographers to shoot the session as it unfolded. They set up their cameras and started filming, the meditator prepared himself mentally for about ten minutes, then signaled that he was ready to begin. I started the experiment and it proceeded without incident until about halfway through the session. Then for a few seconds I felt strangely disoriented, as though all my mental activity suddenly stopped. I shook off this odd sensation, and the disorientation soon passed. The session ended, I thanked the meditator, and he left. Then I spent a few minutes discussing the session with the two videographers as they gathered up their gear. I didn’t attribute much meaning to that moment when my mind was strangely suspended, but I’ve learned that when studying effects that span the subjective-objective gap, it’s important to pay attention to internal states. So I mentioned it to the videographers, and they were both taken aback. It turns out that they had independently experienced the same phenomenon. We had all shared a moment when our minds seemed to go blank. At this point I didn’t know yet whether the objective evidence collected during that session was significant or not. When I found that it was, I contacted the meditator, who by then was back at his ashram in India. I asked if he felt that he was being successful in doing something during the session. He said yes, but that it took until about halfway through the session before he figured out how to do it. As an anecdote, this episode doesn’t count as scientific evidence. But it’s still interesting that the experiment obtained objective evidence of a mind-matter interaction effect at precisely the same time that three people unexpectedly felt something strange occur. The Michelson interferometer experiment suggested that an observed optical system does behave differently than an unobserved system, and in a way that’s suggestive of the quantum observer effect. In other words, we—like others before us—had once again found evidence for a direct mind-matter interaction. This was interesting, but it wasn’t enough. What we wanted to know was whether mind-matter interaction effects were consistent with the notion that consciousness “collapses” the quantum wave function. If it turned out that this was the case, then the most successful physical theory in history might contain the seeds of psychokinesis within it.
”
”
Dean Radin (Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities)
“
In our conversations, Pakistanis would lament about how their film talent did not get adequate opportunities to realise their true potential due to government policies. Thankfully, Bollywood has helped out. If Pakistanis like Salma Agha, Javed Shaikh, Fawad Khan, Humaira Mallick, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan or Adnan Sami have got the international adulation they so richly deserve, it is only because Bollywood provided them the necessary platform to do so.
”
”
Prabhu Dayal (Karachi Halwa)
“
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"In 1968, young Ruby Russell loses her father while touring an underground cave. She recalls the moment his hand left hers, and nearly twenty years later, his disappearance remains a mystery. Ruby has reinvented herself as Eleanor Russell, married the man of her dreams, and is acting in a feature film. But as her new life begins to go awry, the mystery surrounding her past and present collide in a well-crafted and head spinning twist that I did not see coming. Ruby Falls is a skillfully plotted page turner!" --Wendy Walker, national bestselling author of "Don't Look for Me"
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Royce's prose is taut and propulsive. Ruby Falls inhabits a hallucinatory Hollywood where fact and fiction mingle freely and even the smallest acts can feel ominous..an enjoyable pastiche with plenty of twists and turns." --Kirkus Reviews
"Imaginative, unique, spine-tingling, and just the right amount of eerie, Ruby Falls is what a reader wants a psychological thriller to be." --Sandra Brown, New York Times bestselling author
"Ruby Falls will sweep you headfirst into the life of Eleanor Russell, an actress setting up house in the glamorous Hollywood Hills with her handsome new husband, Orlando. Secrets abound in this bang of a book, a haunting tale sure to give readers chills. A stunner with some serious Gothic vibes." --Kimberly Belle, internationally bestselling author of "Dear Wife" and "Stranger in the Lake"
"A tribute to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, this unnerving story about a Hollywood starlet haunted by her past will captivate you right up until the shocking ending. A must-read for anyone who loves an expertly plotted thriller with multidimensional characters." --Emily Liebert, USA Today bestselling author of "Perfectly Famous"
"In 1968, young Ruby Russell loses her father while touring an underground cave. She recalls the moment his hand left hers, and nearly twenty years later, his disappearance remains a mystery. Ruby has reinvented herself as Eleanor Russell, married the man of her dreams, and is acting in a feature film. But as her new life begins to go awry, the mystery surrounding her past and present collide in a well-crafted and head spinning twist that I did not see coming. Ruby Falls is a skillfully plotted page turner!" --W
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“
I flew home with Iran Air, which gave me six and a half hours to truly appreciate the impact of the international sanctions first hand. The scratchy seat fabric, cigarette-burned plastic washbasins and whiff of engine oil throughout the cabin reminded me of late seventies coach travel, which was probably the last time these planes had had a facelift. I tried to convince myself that Iran Air had prioritised the maintenance of engines and safety features over the interior decor but I wasn’t convinced, especially when the seatbelt refused to budge. The in-flight entertainment had certainly been spared an upgrade, consisting of one small television at the front of the plane showing repeat screenings of a gentle propaganda film featuring chador-clad women gazing at waterfalls and flowers with an appropriately tinkly soundtrack. The stewardesses’ outfits were suitably dreary too. Reflecting Iran Air’s status as the national carrier of the Islamic Republic, they were of course modest to the point of unflattering, with not a single glimpse of neck or hair visible beneath the military style cap and hijab. As we took off, I examined my fellow passengers. Nobody was praying and as soon as we were airborne, every female passenger removed her headscarf without ceremony.
”
”
Lois Pryce (Revolutionary Ride: On the Road in Search of the Real Iran)
“
The gallery context of Scotch Myths puts the objects on display in an interrogatory framework in a way that their presence in souvenir shops does not. Similarly, the exhibition catalogue explicitly poses the correct questions and reinserts the objects into a history spanning the mid-eighteenth century to the present day: James Macpherson (1736-96), Ossianism; European Romanticism; Walter Scott (1771-1832), the appropriation of Scott and Scotland by Europe and America; the internal reappropriation by Scotland itself of earlier external appropriations, via the emergence of Kailyard; Scottish militarism in the context of nineteenth-century colonial wars, both World Wars and beyond; the dissemination of the ensemble of images and categories of thought within successive practices and technologies - literature, lithography, photography, the postcard, the music hall, films, television. It is one thing to see the imagery of Tartanry/Kailyard in its so-called natural habitats of the souvenir shop or the wall of a Scottish home; it is quite another thing to see it reproduced on orange crates from California.
”
”
Colin McArthur (Cencrastus No. 7: Winter 1981-82)
“
Sami Abouzid
Singer | Songwriter | Music Producer | Author | Publisher
Profile:
A versatile and accomplished artist with over two decades of experience in the music industry. Sami Abouzid is a singer, songwriter, music producer, and music arranger who has established himself as a creative force in both the music and literary worlds. Renowned for his original compositions and innovative soundscapes, Sami is also a published author with a passion for storytelling.
Professional Experience:
Founder & CEO
White Horse Records (2003–Present)
• Established an independent record label to promote original music and artistic innovation.
• Managed all aspects of production, marketing, and distribution for multiple projects.
Band Leader
Romantic Star (2003–Present)
• Formed and led the band, releasing music that resonated with audiences worldwide.
• Released debut album Romantic Dreams, featuring the hit song “Vanessa,” which gained airplay on multiple U.S. radio stations.
Soundtrack Composer (2013–Present)
• Transitioned into the world of soundtracks, starting with Isabella in 2013.
• Composed, arranged, and produced 657 original soundtracks, known for their emotional depth and cinematic quality.
Music Artist (2001–Present)
• Released 54 albums and 50 singles available in stores worldwide.
• Composed, arranged, mixed, mastered, performed, and produced all his music independently.
Books Authored:
• Love, Life, and Music – A reflection on creativity and personal experiences.
• Scarlett Johansson Forever – A tribute to art, passion, and inspiration.
• Arabic Poetry – A collection of poetic works exploring love and emotion.
Skills & Expertise:
• Music Composition, Arrangement, Mixing, and Mastering
• Songwriting and Lyric Creation
• Soundtrack Development for Film and Media
• Publishing and Record Label Management
• Literary Writing and Poetry
Notable Achievements:
• Pioneered a new era of music with over 700 compositions, soundtracks, albums, and singles.
• Gained international recognition with music featured on major radio stations in the U.S.
• Successfully bridged the gap between music and literature, creating a lasting artistic legacy.
”
”
Sami abouzid
“
when I started scoring films, the toughest parts of the creative process were spent trying to scrape away all of the unnecessary thoughts running around in my head—from internal feelings of unworthiness to external voices that verbally told me I wasn’t good enough. I had to keep chipping away at all of those thoughts until there was absolutely nothing left but the truth—that is, my soul and the message it wanted to communicate. Having tried it myself, I don’t think you can write or create anything worthwhile if you suppress your instincts and emotions. You’ve got to be sitting deep in truth in order to create truth.
”
”
Quincy Jones (12 Notes: On Life and Creativity)