#also the first movie sets up a story and resolves it intrinsically

[eerna]

which pjo movie do u think was better? i know the bar is in the earth's core with the pjo movies so one being better isnt really any different but i am curious

While they are Not Good, I UNIRONICALLY think there is a tier list, and it's

The Lightning Thief

Sea of Monsters

Like sorry but the Lotus Casino Poker Face Kesha drug trip was ICONIC and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. "It's like a high school WITHOUT a musical". Rosario Dawson as Persephone. That cleaning lady witnessing a bunch of teens carrying around a severed head, after which Grover profusely and honestly apologizes. Every watch party is filled with cheers, laughs, and woops because it's the definition of bad but fun. SOM can't compare, it has the My Songs Know What You Did In the Dark scene and that's it

#eernask #eernanon #eernask talk pjoverse #also the first movie sets up a story and resolves it intrinsically #while the second one for some reason has a wholeass TRILOGY ANNOUNCEMENT like did they REALLY think that would fly

[ameliarating]

I read through @pumpkinpaix‘s deeply thoughtful post about cultural appropriation and dismissal of Chinese cultural concerns (two related but distinct phenomena) in non-Chinese MDZS/CQL fan-spaces and should-be-obvious-but-painfully-is-not disclaimer: 

When it comes to these things, the voices that should be rising above the rest are the Chinese fans speaking out about what they’ve seen.

I’m only here because I feel I have what to say on this bit here: 

For context, we are referencing two connected instances: the conflict described in these two threads (here and here), and when @/jelenedra tweeted about giving Jewish practices to the Lans. Regarding the latter, we felt that it tread into the territory of cultural erasure, and that it came from a person who had already disrespected diaspora’s work and input.

Context

The Lans have their own religious and cultural practices, rooted both in the cultural history of China and the genre of xianxia. Superimposing a different religious practice onto the Lans amidst other researched, canonical or culturally accurate details felt as if something important of ours was being overwritten for another’s personal satisfaction. Because canon is so intrinsically tied to real cultural, historical, and religious practices, replacing those practices in a canon setting fic feels like erasure. While MDZS is a fantasy novel, the religious practices contained therein are not. This was uncomfortable for many of us, and we wanted to point it out and have it resolved amicably. We were hoping for a discussion or exchange as there are many parallels and points of relation between Chinese and Jewish cultures, but that did not turn out quite as expected.

What happened next felt like a long game of outrage telephone that resulted in a confusion of issues that deflected responsibility, distracted from the origin of the conflict, and swept our concern under the rug.

Specifically, we are concerned about how these two incidents are part of what we feel is a repeated, widespread pattern of the devaluing of Chinese fans’ work and concerns within this fandom. This recent round of discourse is just one of many instances where we have found ourselves in a position of feeling spoken over within a space that is nominally ours. Regardless of what the telephone game was actually about, the way it played out revealed something about how issues are prioritized.

(Big surprise, I’m going to talk about Jewish things and MDZS)

I haven’t read the fic in question, but I have certainly made many posts about Jewishness and the Lans, imagining certain traditional Jewish educational settings and modes of learning and argumentation as superimposed onto the Cloud Recesses. I’ve also written other posts, mostly for me and the three other people out there who would find it funny, imagining different sects as different Jewish sects - or at least, who they have most in common with.

Never was I imagining these characters or worlds to be actually Jewish, but, as people often do in fandom, I was playing around in the spaces, delighting in overlaps I found, out of a deep-seated wish that I could have anything like MDZS or so many of the other fantasy I loved with Jews.

I’m jealous. I’m so jealous. 

Here’s how I was relating to it: 

China is a country of billions with an immense media audience of its own, its own television, movies, books, comics, etc. The only Jewish equivalent could ever be Israel, very tiny, and while there is a lot of good Israeli television, books, etc out there, it doesn’t approach what’s available from China, and certainly none of it has broken through to be a fandom presence of its own, not even in Jewish only or Hebrew speaking spaces. And even when that happens, the creators don’t often draw on Jewish history and myth. (One example I can think of a show that does is Juda, a Jewish vampire show from Israel, but I know exactly one (1) person on tumblr who’s seen it.)

So I was treating MDZS the way I treat American media - as a playground. Since I can’t find Jewish stories, especially in fantasy, I’m going to play around with it in non-Jewish stories.

Here’s how I should have been relating to it:

There are so many people who, like me, have been hungry to find themselves and their stories and their magic in fandom spaces. They have a show that’s made it big. Is it fair to, even playing around in tumblr posts, set so much of that rich cultural context aside in order for me to find room for my own? 

In the U.S., at least, where I am, it’s not the same as doing the same thing with, say, The Lord of the Rings (where I wrote a fic making use of Jewish mourning practices and assigned them to the Beorians) or Harry Potter, because that’s taking a dominant culture which is all I usually ever see and make room for myself. 

In MDZS, especially in the English language fandom where the Chinese cultural context is never dominant and is often shouted over and overlooked, and where there just aren’t many other examples of media that made it big in the fandom, I am only making room for myself by shoving aside something else that barely has any room at all.

In many ways, I became the fan that frustrates me, that writes about Jewish characters celebrating Christmas, rather than the fan that I wanted to be, which gets excited about cultural overlap and similarities. I’m sorry and I apologize.

My first reaction was not to. My first reaction was to say it’s not the same. Because it isn’t the same. It’s never the same when minorities do things to each other. But even if that’s less destructive, in some ways it’s more painful, because that’s where we should be able to look to each other for solidarity. (Obviously this is in English language fandom - Chinese fans are not a minority in Chinese language fandoms!)

I do believe that there should be room to make silly posts about the Lans doing things that Jews do, because the Lans do do things that Jews do. When I made an edit where Lan Wangji was responding to Lan Qiren quoting in Hebrew from the Jewish prayerbook rather than the sect rule to distance from evil, I did that because he was saying the exact same thing. It was wonderful to me, that a Lan sect rule could be exactly the same as something I pray every morning.

That’s very different from when I wrote imagining the Lans as Jews which left no more room for the Lans as Chinese Buddhists. It’s those later things I apologize for and what I’ll be careful about in the future.

I do still want to return to something I said just above, however: “Because it isn’t the same. It’s never the same when minorities do things to each other.”

I worry, as I wrote in a separate post, about the tendency I see in anti-colonial, anti-imperialist spaces to look at Jewish practices and laws and culture and see it as an example of Western hegemony rather than as a survivor of it. Especially in a post that talks about the Chinese diaspora experience, where the very word diaspora was coined to describe the Jewish scattering across the globe and only much later was used for other cultures and peoples.

I don’t object to its now much more universal use as a word. It’s useful and it’s powerful and I believe it can be used to build solidarity. I do ask for, however, recognition that while Jews, especially in the West, might reproduce Western hegemony and use it against others, our own ethno-religious experiences bubbling up is not one of those reproductions.

In other words, when we erase, accidentally or purposefully, the Chinese cultural and religious contexts of characters in MDZS/CQL in our rush to write in Jewish cultural and religious contexts, we are doing harm as ourselves, not as representatives of Western/European/Christian hegemony. And in fact, what inspired us to write in our own contexts is that there are certain things (deference to elders, life carefully regulated by a series of laws about everything from interpersonal-ethical behavior to food habits to modes of speech, cultural horror regarding desecration of the dead, etc) we find in these stories that we don’t find in many Western stories that resonate with our own cultural background.

Which is not to erase the harm itself. I am sorry for it and I will do my best going forward to write about overlaps without erasing or replacing what is already there from the beginning and should remain so.

#my posts #too nervous to tag #but people may reblog #and if I'm wrong about any of it #please let me know

[rotationalsymmetry]

I posted that thing about playing soldier and The Revolution and the work of everyday living, right? Yeah, I’m pretty sure I did.

I want to throw in some caveats on that. Because I keep talking about anarchism involving a lot of “boring” work. But I also think, that there’s something important about making the work sustainable and fun or satisfying in its own right not too much of a grind, you know?

If your work of everyday living involves washing dishes, making sure you like the smell of the dishsoap and maybe put down a mat for your feet. (See, I can talk about dishwashing forever because when I wash dishes I tend to think about washing dishes and about how some people seem to genuinely believe that a dish left in a sink for long enough will just wash itself.*) Talking with friends while you work. Focusing on what you enjoy doing and find satisfaction in as well as what needs to be done. (People need to be fed, but also I do find tremendous satisfaction in preparing food communally.) Letting your sense of fun affect how you protest.

And it’s not like there’s anything intrinsically wrong about having fighter fantasies as long as it’s not preventing you from pulling your weight on the mundane stuff. I play war themed games and have all sorts of weird daydreams, fantasy is part of what makes life enjoyable.

There’s a Heinlein book — one of the earlier kids’ sci fi books, not one of the later adult sex books — where there’s some kind of test for something that involves being sent to an unknown planet with no warning and having to survive a few days or some such. And you’re not allowed to bring a gun. And of course that seems hardass at first, but later you find out it’s actually a protection thing: that people with guns and not much experience tend to stand and shoot at a threat when they should be running. When running is actually the safer option. It’s a thing to think about, you know? (Not in the sense that “not having a gun is always safer than having a gun” obviously, but in the sense of “are you making some inaccurate assumptions?”)

There’s an awful lot of problems that can’t be solved with violence or are better solved without violence, even when someone else is bringing violence into the situation. Being able to deescalate violent situations is an important skill, being able to resolve disputes between people basically on your side is an important skill, being able to recognize and deal with bullies and abusers is important and the vast majority of all that isn’t about guns, it’s about things like believing victims and knowing when information shouldn’t be shared and looking out for each other and knowing when to pull out your empathetic listening skills and when to set a boundary and knowing what your options are before the situation comes up....

It’s not so much that I’m saying violence shouldn’t be in your toolbox — it’s not my favorite tool, but there’s definitely some situations where all the other options you can see right there in the moment are worse — what I’m saying is your toolbox needs a lot of other tools. And there’s anarchist blogs on here that talk about other tools, and other blogs that talk about political stances and revolution and nothing else, and I notice that. Anarchism isn’t just a political position. If you’re doing anarchism, there’s skills, there’s tools, it’s not just you work out your belief system and that’s it. (Even if your end goal is armed revolution, there’s still a lot of things that need to happen to get people there, like organizing protests and supporting people who get arrested.)

I know age can make this complicated. When you’re young, doing the work (I’m saying “work” but I don’t mean employment) is either entirely on someone else’s terms or you’re not really allowed to do it, and disabilities known and unknown can throw a wrench into things. I look back on my 20’s and I’m like, oh, yeah, an ADHD diagnosis or someone who could walk me through doing things in ways that actually work for me would have been really helpful around then. It was relatively hidden when I was in school, the external structure and externally imposed deadlines compensated for how bad I was, and still am, at imposing structure on myself.

US media tends to have an awful lot of “solve problems with fighting” storylines, even when there’s also a “killing is bad” message. I don’t know how much of that is that people tend to just like fighting stories and how much of that is that the US military giving funding to action movies tends to shape how stories get told even in shows and movies that don’t get that funding. You are not immune to propaganda etc etc.

*There would probably be a lot more people willing to have resource-saving communal living situations past college if college students as a whole, and often older adults as well, weren’t so incredibly terrible at washing their own dishes.**

** by the way, there are patterns around how this tends to play out by gender. There’s exceptions too though. Two of the worst offenders I’ve known were both women, and one of the unsung heroes who picked up everyone else’s slack that I had the privilege of living with was a dude.

#political #anarchism #the revolution #violence #the work of everyday living #this is a bit rambly ah well #I get that the people who have found their work of everyday living groove #are less likely to post often here #but damn anarchist tumblr needs way less theory and way more how-to #I guess that means I should be posting more toolbox stuff #mlerph #long post

[cupidsbower]

The Last Jedi

I really enjoyed this movie a lot. No major spoilers until the cut.

When I saw The Force Awakens, I didn’t know what to expect of this new series, but after seeing it, I had a pretty clear expectation of what the rest of the series would offer:

A re-interpretation of the main themes of the original trilogy through a new generation of characters. This includes clever and sometimes ironic riffs on iconic moments.

Enjoyable action/adventure.

Engaging characters.

With that in mind, I had a couple of specific expectations for The Last Jedi. The main one was this: it would be a tragedy, have a negative story climax, and an ironic complication, all through the lens of the memories of The Empire Strikes Back.

And that is exactly what I got.

This was perhaps the biggest task in this new trilogy, especially as Empire is generally considered the strongest of the Star Wars movies. It’s a lot to live up to. How do you have a genuine negative climax, which can be intrinsically disappointing if you hit the wrong beats, but still remain true to the themes of Empire, do something new, and have a good amount of action/adventure and character development?

I really wasn’t sure how they’d pull this off, and I was careful not to get spoiled so I could watch the movie fresh and give it the best chance to work. I do have a few quibbles, but overall, the creative team did a really strong job of hitting all the right notes.

SPOILERS AFTER THE READ MORE!

SPOILERS!!!

I want to start with the story thread I thought was weakest, which was Finn and Rose going off to find a code-cracker.

This sequence didn’t add a lot to the overall plot of the movie, and the pace didn’t match up well with what was happening with the fleeing rebel fleet, or Rey and Kylo’s plotline. For that reason, it dragged in places. There was still a lot to like in this sequence -- I loved that the scoundrel (the ironic riff on Han Solo) ended up being a scoundrel through and through. I loved the payoff of the boy at the end, staring up at the stars. I liked both Finn and Rose. But that’s about it. The rest just felt like pleasant enough padding with no thematic goal, until they get to the First Order’s ship and the sneak-in-and-blow-it-up plan finally fails. Ha! I really loved that. And that’s when this plotline really started to bite; I just wish it had got there sooner, or the casino stuff had more teeth. That said, I didn’t want less Finn on the screen, I just wanted his role to have more depth. Where was his development, the questioning of what it means to be an individual, to make his own choices? Hopefully we’ll get to that in the final movie. I’m also kind of hoping we get Lando in the third movie, and maybe that tie-in everyone thought would be part of Rey’s story will end up being part of Finn’s -- a much better thematic match, as far as I’m concerned.

Other than that, I loved pretty much everything, but I think my favourite part was Luke, Rey and Kylo.

Luke has always been a pivotal role in this series, and my god was The Last Jedi clever in how it reinterpreted that. As a young man, Luke was completely sure of his own righteousness -- that is what helped save Vader. But that righteousness tends to wear away along with youth, when you see the price of your mistakes. Poe, making just that kind of hotheaded mistake in the fleet arc, seeing how it nearly cost everything, seeing how it was borne of good intentions, was a gorgeous and ironic contrast to Luke’s horror at the consequences of his actions.

But more than that, an older, more world-weary Luke flinching from Ben at just the wrong moment and so causing a flip to the dark side? Gorgeous storytelling. Just spectacular. That is so bitter. It’s the absolute antithesis of the “new hope” that Luke symbolised in episode IV. Luke rejected Vader and his dark power in Empire, and that was the heart of the negative climax, the thematic linchpin, the thing that made the movie so fantastic and unexpected. Of course Luke rejecting Ben and his dark power is what created Kylo, and it is the ironic dark heart of The Last Jedi. It’s not out of character for Luke (or Anakin) to react badly to someone they love when power is in the mix. The counterpoint of Rey rejecting Kylo’s power, but not rejecting Ben, sets up the act to come in the next movie beautifully.

I also loved Rey in this sequence. I thought the riff on Luke’s journey into the cave, with Rey’s hall of mirrors was fantastic. That sense of no family, no past she carries into the future, but just herself and what she makes of herself -- so creepy and lonely, but so thematically on point, especially in the way it contrasts with the Skywalkers.

Finally, I loved Kylo in this movie, which was an utter surprise. I thought he was just going to be a whiny white boy, and he is, but that’s actually what makes him so great, because it’s so knowingly done that way. The climactic scene between him and Rey was so damn clever -- a brilliant inversion of the “I’m your father scene” from Empire, with bitter ironies threaded all the way through it. I think it was the highlight of the movie for me. I didn’t think they’d be able to make Kylo interesting, but he’s actually the perfect bookend for this whole saga, a cracked double of Anakin, with the sandwich of Luke in between. The same flaw runs through all three of them, playing out in different ways. All the facets of white male privilege, and the way that nature/nurture acts upon them.

This is a much subtler playing out of the theme than I expected from this series, and I really, really like it.

The battle between Kylo and Luke was a satisfying resolution after that build up. The gorgeous little things -- the salt planet that looks like Hoth, the riff on Kenobi’s fight with Vader, the fact Kylo left footprints in the salt and Luke didn’t. But also the bigger things -- Luke letting Kylo be angry, using it to the Rebels’ advantage, but also just letting him have his moment of vengeance for Luke’s lack of faith. Luke’s failure as a teacher, just like Kenobi and Yoda before him. Kylo’s pettiness and lack of self-awareness, and his raging insecurity. The way Luke’s journey ended with him looking up at a setting sun.

Ahhhhh.

This film really was at its absolute best with the Luke, Rey and Kylo sequences. I’m very much looking forward to how that arc is resolved in the next movie.

Finally, there’s the fleet sequence, which I also enjoyed a lot. Let’s start with Poe. I loved two things in particular about his arc -- that Poe was wrongheaded from almost beginning to end, but that his need to test authority was admired by his commanders, even while his actions were castigated. They are the Rebels, after all, and what is a rebel but someone who questions authority?

Poe could have been another Kylo, just without the Force aptitude. But he wasn’t. He made a mistake, he eventually realised he made a mistake, and he wasn’t rejected for it, or backed into such a corner there was no way out for him but to break everything and flee into the night.

And the reason for that? Leia. General Leia and Vice Admiral Holdo. It is no accident that they are both women. They were tough, determined, forward-thinking, and compassionate. Binary thinking was not part of their command strategy. Where Poe was so sure of his rightness he didn’t listen to anyone else -- if he was right, everyone else was wrong -- Leia and Holdo demonstrated a more mature self-assuredness, one not threatened by the mistakes of youth, even while recognising it and dealing with it.

Poe’s lesson was one that Ben didn’t get the chance to learn, and it’s a lesson that will make Poe a better person, and a better leader.

I really loved Carrie Fisher and Laura Dern in this section of the movie, and could have watched about an hour more of them commanding the rebel alliance.

I’m glad they didn’t kill off Leia now. Apart from the fact it would have weakened the ending of Luke’s arc, I like that Leia is still alive out there in a galaxy far far away, that she’s the last survivor of the original trilogy, even though Carrie is gone. Still kicking ass, and taking names, as well as building bridges and leading the way.

In all, The Last Jedi was exactly the negative climax I expected it to be, but in a subtler way than I had hoped for, especially given that so much of the movie plays out in over-the-top action sequences. It was less overtly tragic than Empire, but far more ironic and bitter, which is fitting for 2017, which is a more ironic and bitter age than the 1980s. It was about the destruction wrought by male privilege, with a clever stripping away of heroism and nobleness from the tragic male figures, and a parallel investment in a more compassionate heroism in the women.

It was a good movie. I really liked it, and I have high hopes for the next one.

#star wars #the last jedi #spoilers

[impressivepress]

We Should Be Grateful Charlie Chaplin Made 'The Great Dictator' When He Did

Charlie Chaplin is understood to have confided to his friends that, had he known about the full horrors of the Nazi regime, he would probably not have got around to making The Great Dictator.

“There are things in our century that wipe away even the most poisonous smile from the face of the most passionate satirist,” wrote one of the 20th century’s foremost historians. He was referring to Karl Kraus, the great Austrian journalist-polemicist-satirist, whose book The Last Days of Mankind, written in the inter-war years, is a 20th-century classic.  When it came to lampooning National Socialism and Adolf Hitler, Kraus says, “nothing occurs to me”. A little later, he adds: “The word fell asleep when that world awoke.”

When the Holocaust became common knowledge, Chaplin must have also felt that his craft was inadequate to render Hitler’s world in any known cinematic genre – political satire or vaudeville, burlesque or tragedy. The Great Dictator was conceptualised and filmed when it was still possible to make fun of the Fuehrer.

Chaplin started shooting for the film in September 1939, just days after Germany invaded Poland. But he had been planning a movie on Hitler for years before that, and worked on his script through 1938-39. From Nazi newsreels, he had carefully studied Hitler’s mannerisms and the way he harangued large crowds. Chaplin also watched Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda documentary Triumph of the Will (1935) several times over to make sure that he knew Nazi rituals well enough; his incredible talent for mimicry did the rest.

The film shoot took a little over six months. By the time Chaplin sat down to edit and add the music tracks, Hitler was overrunning Belgium and Holland while France was gently nudging itself into surrender. When The Great Dictator released in the US in October 1940, London was being carpet-bombed by the Luftwaffe, Neville Chamberlain had already made way for Churchill as the British prime minister and Warsaw’s Jews were being herded into the first ghettos run by the Nazis. However, the tone of the film had already been set before the active hostilities began. A tragedy loomed clearly enough then, but few thought yet that it was the Armageddon.

This perspective is important for understanding the satirical and political scope of Chaplin’s film. The ‘final solution of the Jewish problem’ was not only in the future, it had perhaps not begun to take shape as yet in even the most malevolent Nazi sensibility. Chaplin had set out to spoof the pompous bully who was absurd and arrogant, but not yet quite the hideous hangman history was to know him as. Hitler still regarded Mussolini with something of the awe that the disciple reserves for his mentor – this gave Chaplin the opportunity to flesh out a memorable love-hate-love relationship – and  Mussolini’s precipitous invasion of Greece, which annoyed Hitler no end, was not to happen before end-October 1940.

The Great Dictator can very well look a tad too light-hearted today; the fact that an uproariously funny story is being told around what can only be described as unmitigated evil can surprise its modern-day viewers. But it is undoubtedly a film true to its time.

And The Great Dictator is much more than a parody. It is a stirring denunciation of fascism’s core principles – xenophobia, intolerance, bigoted nationalism and anti-Semitism. It is funny, but its world is intrinsically violent. Hynkel is often nervous, even shy, but in the presence of his pretty secretary, his predatory instincts are aroused in a trice.  Holding her in a tight embrace, he digs his teeth into her neck with sudden vehemence, the whole act looking more like the tearing of flesh than love-making. The utter casualness with which he gives up his prey when the telephone buzzes suddenly makes the scene even more chilling.

Writing in Criterion, Michael Wood notes the effortlessness with which Chaplin shows us “how lethal the ludicrous can be”:

Nothing in the film is quite as frightening as the sight and sound of the ludicrous Hynkel casually ordering the execution of three thousand striking workers.

Chaplin plays around marvellously with this crossover between rollicking humour and unmixed horror. Wood has pointed out how the harmless barber waving a razor over the bare throat of a customer looks more murderous than Hynkel ever does in the film. But the masterly mixing of the strains of Johannes Brahms’ ‘Hungarian Dance no 5’ into this edge-of-the-seat scene adds that piquancy which is signature Chaplin.

Again, as the barber sets out on his first date with Hannah, the storm-troopers arrive to get him. A long shot shows the SS men approaching the couple from one end of the street. The barber stops dead, turns around and heads in the other direction nonchalantly, as though nothing was the matter. Another long shot captures another SS column closing in on him from the other direction. Now in panic, the barber scrambles for safety, running first this way and then that, and the camera pans back a long distance before an aerial shot shows him being swept up by an avalanche of burly SS men.

As masterful as the casual mixing of horror and humour is the blending of the ridiculous and the sublime in The Great Dictator. Gracefully, even tenderly, Hynkel performs the unforgettable balloon-ballet with Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’ playing softly on the soundtrack. But then he slips on to a tabletop, and goes on bouncing the globe-balloon off his behind, with loving care, a dreamy, enchanted look frozen on his face. When finally he tries to get both his arms around the balloon, it bursts with a scream in his face.

Again, as the fugitive Schultz plots Hynkel’s assassination while sheltering in the ghetto, a serio-comic drama plays out around a noble enterprise. Each of the ‘volunteers’ (Schultz smartly rules himself out right at the beginning) pledges himself to the great project, but is aghast when he finds the fateful coin in his pie. The scene  soon turns into a boisterous farce.

The Nazis hated Chaplin, because they found his humour irreverent, subversive – hardly the kind that promoted the ‘wholesome family values’ so beloved of Hitler. In his 1931 trip to Berlin, Chaplin proved hugely popular in Germany and, though the Nazis did not like his spectacular success in all his public engagements, there was not much they could do at that point.

After Hitler rose to power, however, things changed dramatically for Chaplin, as they did for many other popular artists, German and non-German. In 1935, Goebbels banned The Gold Rush in Germany, presumably because the film ran counter to wholesome family entertainment. Even before that, in 1934, Goebbels had authorised the publication of a slanderous little book titled The Jews are Looking at You which, among other choice epithets, described Chaplin as “a disgusting Jewish acrobat” (Chaplin was not Jewish, though). Chaplin had seen the book, and it is safe to assume that his resolve to make a film around Nazism hardened because of it.

Given this background, he could hardly have chosen to play a part in the film that was non-Jewish. And Chaplin being Chaplin, he decided to deliver the coup de grace by playing Hitler as well. It must have been with grim satisfaction that he wrote into one of the opening credits of The Great Dictator words that dripped with irony: “Any resemblance between Hynkel the dictator and the Jewish barber is purely coincidental”. Of course, Chaplin wanted his audience to not look at the dictator and the barber through the same eyes. He expected the audience to laugh right through the film, but he hoped that while the viewers would laugh with the barber for the most part, they would laugh at Hynkel with derision, loathing and worse.

The Great Dictator represented another momentous event: it was Chaplin’s first ‘talkie’. (Modern Times in 1936 had a character screaming at people from a giant TV screen for a few moments, besides the inspired nonsense of the tramp’s song at the cabaret. But it remained a silent movie otherwise.) Chaplin seems to be exploring the enormous potential of his new ‘device’ with great relish here. Hynkel’s public speeches are pure genius. He speaks a mock German that bristles with coughs, sibilants, gutturals and splutters, with occasional identifiable words like sauerkraut (pickled cabbage) and schnitzel (fried meat slice) thrown in with  gusto. It is pure gibberish delivered at an extremely, feverishly high pitch – so much so that the microphone itself cringes on its stem.

In another scene, Hynkel dictates an official note to a typist in a matter-of-fact manner. He is speaking aloud while she is taking it down on her typewriter. When Hynkel spouts a long, solemn sentence, she knocks out just a couple of letters. But when he offers only a monosyllable, she types furiously for several lines, clanging the machine as she works it intently. Hynkel looks on, amazed, but she remains completely unruffled, business-like. This playing-off of sound against meaning is an idea that could only have occurred to someone who was transitioning  from silent to talking films, but it is hard to imagine anyone else picturising it as brilliantly as Chaplin.

The film’s last sequence, of the barber speaking as Hynkel to his victorious troops, is an audacious piece of cinematic thinking. The speech’s content is perched on the edge of mawkishness, and as it begins to crescendo, it sounds very nearly shrill. And yet, in the end, Chaplin pulls it off magnificently. The barber hesitates, approaches the microphone apprehensively, and begins speaking haltingly. As he does that, the frame slowly sheds its sharp focus, becomes somewhat bleary, over-exposed, fuzzy. As his speech gains in passion and force, the speaker himself is no longer very real himself, and as Hannah looks up to the sky, the screen is bathed in a soft, other-worldly light. This is neither Hynkel nor even the barber speaking here, but Chaplin himself stepping in to deliver his own message as the creator of the movie. Come to think of it, this could have been the only way The Great Dictator could have concluded.

For years before the film was made, cartoonists had exploited the quite remarkable resemblance of Chaplin’s moustache with Hitler’s. Chaplin was, of course, all too aware of it himself (which is why he thought of casting himself as the dictator). He knew that, with the minimum of effort, his face could be touched up to look like Hitler’s. And he also knew that the similarities stretched beyond their physiognomy: they were born within four days of each other – Chaplin on April 16, Hitler on 20, both in 1889; and both rose from poverty and neglect to power and prominence.

Did these similarities trouble Chaplin? Many believe they did, Chaplin’s own son telling us they actually haunted his father:

Dad could never think of Hitler except with a shudder, half of horror, half of fascination. “Just think,”’ he would say uneasily, “he’s the madman, I’m the comic. But it could have been the other way around.”

Of course Hitler was not only a madman. Nor was Chaplin merely a comic. But in The Great Dictator, the intersection of insanity and laughter produced a memorable movie. Chaplin says he couldn’t have made the film except in 1938-39. We are grateful that he made it when he did.

~

Anjan Basu · 16. Apr 2019.

#film #Charlie Chaplin #adolf hitler #the great dictator #Film Review #the wire

[stephenremedios]

My experiments with Covid-19

Day 1 - 23rd September 2020:

Consistent with my morning routine, I returned from a game of tennis to discover that Dylan was feeling tired and fatigued after his morning soccer game with other kids in the community. He washed up and sat through his online classes. It was the third day of his first cumulative assessment. The boys had all begun their first term examination on Monday. It was a new experience for them, but they seemed to enjoy the new format much better! Aidan was of the view that the questions made him think more and write less. By lunch Dylan was spent. He went to sleep and woke up in time for dinner.

We all sleep in the same room, with Dylan at one corner and me on the other side. Aidan, Ethan and then Ray. I ended up giving his aching limbs a short massage as he struggled to go to sleep. He tossed and turned for a bit, but finally fatigue took over. Ray suggested I take his temperature. It was 98.1F

Day 2- 24th September 2020:

Dylan woke up feeling normal the next morning. We historically associate these bouts of fatigue and fever with a growth spurt. Dylan stood next to our Thomas height scale and I measured his height – he had grown 2 cm since the last time we had taken a reading, two months ago.

Known for being the paranoid person in the house, I insisted the boys take a break from soccer as a matter of abundant caution. I had a tennis date at 6:30 that I regretted – I was feeling fine, but I decided to play it safe. 

It was this same paranoia that had me list all the potential sources of infection when the pandemic first emerged. After looking at our lifestyle we decided to do away with a driver and a maid. We retained a gardener with the caveat that no one would work with him in the garden at the same time. We switched to shopping online to minimize exposure to many people in a mall or supermarket. 

These measures had been effective over the last six months so there was no reason to think we had contracted the dreaded Covid-19.

At about 6:00 in the evening I started to feel itchy at the back of my throat. I hadn’t had a cold or cough in over 7 months. Raynah suggested I do a Betadine gargle before I went to sleep that night, which I did. 

Day 3 - 25th September 2020:

I woke up with a high fever, intense body pain and a sense of having no energy whatsoever. It was a new feeling; unlike anything I had experienced before. It was like I had gone from a 100% to 5% in 24 hours. I woke up well past my usual wake time of 6:00 AM. The boys told me that their normal morning visit to Villa #10 to visit my mother and play with the kittens hadn’t fructified because she wasn’t answering the doorbell.

I proceeded to Villa #10 to see why she wasn’t answering the bell. Like the boys had reported, she wasn’t responding to the bell or to my calls to her window right below the garage. Spotty, the mother of the three kittens was pacing up and down the entrance of the house while the hungry kittens were scaling the curtains in desperation on the inside of the house. Clearly something was amiss. 

I used the duplicate key we have to the house to let myself in. Spot edged into the house before I could retrieve the key from the door. The kittens mobbed her desperate for their early morning feed. I made my way up to the bedroom.

Opening the door, I found my mother looking like she had been on an IV drip for the last week. She had a bad night too. We proceeded to exchange notes on our symptoms. We were both in awe of the speed of the onset and the extent of debilitation in such a short while. We agreed it was a bad flu.

We resolved that the best way to fight it would be to sleep as much as possible, to allow the body to recover from this nasty bug. Aidan meanwhile complained of a mild cough but didn’t have any fever or any other symptoms. Dylan rebounded like he always does and asked if he could go and hit against the wall in the tennis court for a while. He settled for a game of indoor squash with Ethan instead. I slept 13.4 hours of the 20 hours I spent in bed that day.

Day 4 - 26th September 2020:

A much better night after two torrid nights. I had begun a course of antibiotics the previous night and my cough was on the mend. I woke up feeling much better. The tennis gang was starting a little later today given the overnight rainfall had rendered the courts unplayable at our usual 6:30 AM start time. 

A notification on my phone asked “Are you good to play @8:00”. While I fancied a few sets of low intensity doubles I decided to play it safe again. The conversation ended with advice to do steam inhalation to overcome the cough. 

Raynah woke up later than usual, with a slight fever and body ache. She didn’t have a cough though. She pushed through the fatigue rustling up a special weekend meal. I could smell the aroma of the meal from the bedroom as she rustled it up in the kitchen. I reassured myself that it wasn’t Covid-19. After all I hadn’t lost my sense of smell.

The boys do athletics and fitness classes on the weekends. Raynah and I decided it made sense to keep them back from classes. We deliberated on whether to send Aidan and Ethan since only Dylan had been ill on Wednesday. We decided it wasn’t worth the taking the risk no matter how insignificant it seemed at the time.

Day 5 - 27th September 2020:

I had a restless night, struggling to find any periods of deep sleep. My body was still fighting the infection and I was convinced that this was a strain of flu that I hadn’t experienced before. Ray continued feeling a little unwell so I let her sleep an hour longer and fixed the boys cereal for breakfast.

Later in the day we all came together to record a short concert for my sister’s son, Neil in the US. We had forgotten to call on the 26th (his birthday). We usually all jump on a call and sing LIVE! This time we would have to settle for a recorded message.

All in all it was an eventless day and it seemed like everyone on was on the path to make a quick recovery from the flu. If Dylan had indeed been the one that brought it in, then surely we should make a speedy recovery just like he did. 

Day 6 - 28th September 2020:

With the antibiotic kicking in, my throat was on the mend. It felt like my energy levels were inching back up. The fever was on a downward trajectory. The worst was behind us. Raynah continued to have mild flu symptoms and my mother hadn’t shown any signs of a fever the previous night. She had recovered sufficiently to make food for the ‘patients in #145’ she joked. Her main movements over the next 48 hours would be to deliver food to us since both Ray and I continued to be under the weather. Ray began to experience breathlessness when she climbed the steps that evening. I was concerned but concluded it was probably just the fatigue of having cleaned the whole house that day. The larger picture suggested that we were all progressing in the right direction.

We would have gone to sleep that night without having considered for a moment that we might be Covid +ve. 

We are early sleepers. Lights go out by 9:00 and everyone is usually asleep by 9:30 after some bedtime banter. A little past 8:45 PM Ray read out an email from the Ozone Kovid Kare team – The live-in help at one of the houses of the boys who play soccer with Aidan and Dylan had tested +ve for Covid (It is a separate matter that he turned out to be a false positive when he was re-tested!). 

In that moment, the odds of us having contracted Covid increased from 0% to 1% in my mind. It was now possible that the boy got it from his house help, Dylan got it from the boy, that my mom and I got it from Dylan and then the rest of the family got it too! (It is a separate matter that Aidan, Dylan, Ethan and all the boys and their families tested negative and we still haven’t figured out where we picked the virus up from).

It was playing out like the closing sequence of the movie Contagion in my mind! Dylan picking up the virus as he rubbed his nose after touching the ball while playing soccer. My mom inhaling the virus as Dylan recited a poem later that evening while he was doing his studies with her. Ray interrupted my rampant imagination. “What should be do now?” she asked.

Given that there was now a 1% chance that we might have Covid, Ray and I decided that we should get tested. We were still sure that it was just a flu since the only person still feeling a little ill at that time was me. I’m intrinsically risk averse, and most of my reading suggested that people were dying when they were taken to hospitals too late in their fight with the virus. To save time it made sense to get tested along with the boy’s family.

After a few late-night calls and assistance from the very resourceful Ozone Kovid Kare Team we were all set to get tested the next day along with the family whose domestic help had tested positive.

Day 7 - 29th September 2020:

Our hall room has furniture on the sides with a wide-open space in the middle. The boys have spent hours during the lockdown hitting shuttles and table tennis balls against this wall. A broken light fitting that we decided not to replace after it was repeatedly broken by the boys tells the story of many hours of fierce combat with the wall. The wall also doubles up as a green screen for Aidan’s live streams and as a film screen when we run home movies.

When the lab technician arrived in full PPE to do the tests, our hall room looked more like a operation theatre than the usual improvised squash court it normally is. Today that expansive wall framed a single chair under the lights in the center of the room. We took turns to sit down on this chair while the technician first sent a swab up our nostrils and then down our throats. The technician did a thorough job, swabbing both nostrils till tears were streaming down my eyes. For the throat probe, he went deep enough to stimulate an involuntary cramp in my neck. If you experience discomfort during the swab collection, chances are that it is being done effectively. The technician told us that it takes 24-48 hours to get the results and that we should expect a call any time after 4:00 PM on the following day.

The boys meanwhile recorded the proceedings on their iPads with great excitement, unable to comprehend the gravity of the situation. They demanded to be tested as well fearing that they were missing out on this once-in-al-lifetime adventure.

My sister in Oregon, US had been anxious. Her husband was up late and received the pictures of the testing event. He assured her that all was well and that we would have the results the next day.

My mother and Ray looked to already be on a recovery path. The boys were fighting with us to allow then to resume their normal morning soccer routine. We asked that they be patient and hold on for one more day. The results would be here tomorrow, and they could return to their normal routine.

As we went to bed that night, I apologized to Ray for not having done anything for her birthday! I joked that a -ve Covid test certificate might be the most original, unique, quirky and memorable birthday present she would every receive.

Day 8 - 30th September 2020

I had an unusually high fever the previous night and felt lethargic and was exhausted when I woke up. Despite multiple doses of paracetamol my temperature had hovered between 102F & 103F without any signs of going down. My resting heart rate had also jumped from a normal 56 bpm to 69 bpm. My body was still fighting this virus. My mom walked over in the morning to deliver a cake for Ray and to drop a card in the mailbox. We were keen that that we cut it in the morning and start the day on a positive note. 

Ray received a call from the laboratory at about 11:00 AM. He was very apologetic as he informed her that all three of us had tested positive, while the entire family of person who had initially tested positive were all negative! 

It took about a minute for the information to sink in. 

We were all Covid +ve. 

My first reaction was to suggest that we all get tested again… this couldn’t possibly be true. After all, the house help had gone from being +ve to -ve in 24 hours. It might well be the same with us.

We hadn’t discussed the plan in the event of testing positive, so the first big decision was to figure out how to get my mom to our house given we now knew she was positive. Would we have to get an ambulance? 

In the hour after the call to confirm our infection a variety of worst-case scenarios flashed through my head. I am wired like that. My mother and wife would be taken in an ambulance to a woman specific Covid Care Center. The boys and I would be whisked off to a gent only center. Our phones would be taken away. 

Given the shortage of beds in general, how would they have 6 beds if all of us took ill? How was it all that four of us were symptomatic and I had moderate to severe symptoms when most people seem to have been asymptomatic? From all the metrics that I was tracking I knew there was something wreaking havoc on my vitals. Was I going to be admitted? Was I going to need oxygen? Was I going to end up on a ventilator? Was I going to die?

My mother meanwhile decided she wanted to quarantine by herself. She is an iron willed woman and I wasn’t in any shape to have a disagreement with her. It was particularly difficult for me to have her spend the next 14 days in isolation because she was at the receiving end of an acrimonious accusation relating to the cake she delivered for Ray’s birthday that morning. I absolved myself of the guilt I was experiencing at not being able to be there for my mom and got on with more pressing matters.

I reined my thoughts in and determined that this crisis called for some affirmative action. With tremendous help from my assistant Freeda, we were signed up for a home care Covid Care package within 4 hours of our positive result being known to us. At 5:30 that evening we received all our medication along with a digital thermometer and Oximeter neatly packed in a box.

The magnitude of the disease stuck me when I opened the box and saw the number of pills within it. I have never ingested so many pills in a single sitting ever. We all began our course of anti-viral medication that evening. I struggled to sleep that night. It was a combination of fear and a difficulty with my breathing that kept me awake and restless. I discovered the next morning that my fever had been well over 101F for most of the night.

Day 9 - 1st October 2020

While Ray and my mom seemed to be making good progress, my downward spiral continued. The chills had returned, and I spent most of the day covered from head to toe in bed. I had read that sleeping in the prone position helps the lungs in the fight and recovery, so I began to experiment with that. From time to time, the pulse Oximeter would show an initial reading of 93 and 94 before deep breathing would bring it to a more acceptable 95 or 96. I would feel breathless after climbing the dozen steps to get to our bedroom.

My temperature remained high through the day hovering between 103 F and 104 F. I decided it might be a good idea to speak with another doctor.

The first thing that the doctor did after a barrage of questions and giving me a patient hearing was to assure me that I was not going to die! He said that he had seen over 2000 cases in his ward, and that there was no need to be alarmed. It seemed like a silly thing, but the conviction in his voice when he said it made me hopeful and positive. 

The second thing he told me was that all the current medication I was taking was 'candy’, and that none of it had cleared clinical trials. The medication was essentially in his reckoning, a placebo. It wouldn’t do any harm. It wouldn’t help either. He told me to continue my course of anti-biotics and use paracetamol to manage the fever.

That conversation left me hopeful and distraught at the same time. How could I be taking so many pills when there was no evidence to conclusively say they worked? We resolved to continue our medication and see how our bodies responded. 

Antivirals are dosed in an interesting way as I discovered. The first two doses are monster doses (1800 mg) and then it drops to smaller doses (400 mg). It does not help that these tablets are manufactured in 200 mg shots. It is quite daunting when you have to put down 9 of them! By 10:00 PM that night I had 4000 mg of the anti-viral in me and I wasn’t feeling any better. I was starting to feel worse.

Earlier in the day, Shanthi, a doctor resident in our Community offered her research and findings as an alternate way to combat and inhibit the progress of the disease. She referenced the work of Dr. Paul Marik and suggested that we add a few common medications that had proven effective in helping fight the virus in some trials. She cautioned of course that these weren’t 100% proven but reduced the odds of fatalities.

From where I was both physically and psychologically, I would have taken any medication that reduced the odds of my death by as little as 1%. We went all in. I was now on three prescriptions desperately hoping that one would work and that I would start to get better.

Within minutes of us confirming that we would go with Dr. Shanti’s line of treatment, her husband Pravin dropped off all the medication for the three of us in neatly labelled Ziploc pouches. We promptly took our first doses before going to bed that night.

That night was the toughest night. My body wasn’t feeling good at all. I had now lost a sense of smell and taste completely. Repeated bouts of coughing incessantly made me feel like throwing up all the time. I had no appetite. I had lost 4 kgs in the week since I first felt an itch at the back of my throat. I struggled to sleep in a prone position since it isn’t how I normally sleep. I considered what I might pack if my Oxidation dropped and I needed to get admitted the next day. I had carried an Oximeter to bed that night. I wanted to stay on top of my oxidation levels should they drop suddenly. 

I had read enough about a condition that afflicts some Covid patients called ‘happy hypoxia’ and it had scared me sufficiently to make me even more paranoid. I took my Oxidation over a dozen times through the night. On a couple of occasions, it began at 93, but with deep breathing in a prone position rose to 97 within the minute. I didn’t sleep much that night.

Day 10 – 2nd October 2020

I woke up feeling fatigued. I hadn’t slept much; my fever had been high, and my cough continued. The cough was particularly severe when I woke up and I would have these bouts where I would cough incessantly for 2-3 minutes. It felt like there was a significant amount of phlegm at the bottom of my throat, but the cough was a dry one. I also began to notice that I would feel breathless when I spoke a couple of sentences at a time. Raynah and my mother had stopped logging a temperature and their oxidation levels had been healthy throughout. It was particularly frustrating that the virus had singled me out for this special treatment.

 I remember counting the pills I took that morning. I had 6 before breakfast and 12 after. I was throwing the proverbial kitchen sink at the problem. After downing all of them, I returned to the bed to try and sleep. I forgot to have my paracetamol that morning. The BBMP came to test the boys that morning.

I woke up at about 2:00 in the afternoon sweating profusely. My head was dripping with perspiration like it might after a lung busting rally on the tennis court on a summer morning. I hadn’t taken medication and my fever had broken. Surely that must be a good sign.

At 4:00 that evening I received a call from the hospital. I expected it was our usual doctor checking on my progress. It was a psychologist. I have never spoken to a psychologist in my life up to this point so I am not quite sure what to expect. From everything I have seen in the movies, I expect to do most of the talking.

Her first question explores my anxiety levels. I tell her that I am extremely anxious given that all six of us contracted the virus and I was the only one who got a knock out punch. 

Her next set of questions explore my history of stress and hypertension. I assure that I don’t have any such conditions despite a family history of these ailments.

She offers me medication to handle my nightly ruminations as an SOS if I am unable to sleep. I am also advised to wear a rubber band around my wrist which I am to pull and release every time I notice I’m having negative thoughts.

I slept for the rest of the day and my fever dropped from its previous highs. I had recovered enough by the evening to enjoy a cup of tomato soup without fearing that I would throw it up.

Day 11 & 12 – October 3rd and 4th

Two very similar days. It felt like things were in the balance and could go either way. 

The boys test results came in, and miraculously all three tested negative. A large number of people in the community including all our primary and secondary contacts tested negative as well. I didn’t know what to make of this. From everything that I had read, it was well past 10 days since the boys first got infected. Given they were asymptomatic with the exception of Dylan’s one day sickness they were probably virus free by the time we tested them. That’s the only plausible explanation for their negative tests.

None of us wake up hoping to spread a virus. 

As a family we heaved a collective sigh of relief that we hadn’t inadvertently infected anyone else in the community. Looking back we are glad that we erred on the side of caution.

My fever continued to hover between 100F & 101F. I was measuring my blood oxidation almost every hour to stay on top of any potential drop. I had begun to take melatonin but that wasn’t helping me sleep any better. My respiratory rate had been closer to 19 per minute, above my normal 17 per minute rate in the run up to the sickness.

The cough continued though I was now regaining my sense of small and taste. My appetite also began to return in a big way and I had a hearty meal after a long time. It wasn’t that the food wasn’t tasty over the previous week, I just couldn’t get myself to eat more than the bare minimum to be able to take all my medication.

Day 13 to 18 – October 5th to October 12th

What a tremendous relief it was to wake up without a fever finally. I concluded that the body had fought the virus successfully. That closed one potentially dangerous chapter and opened another equally threatening one – would a cytokine storm follow? An excessive immune response can also do damage to your body in several ways. While the cytokine storm begins in the lungs it can quickly spread to other parts of the body leading to a variety of complications.

This period was also filled with anxiety waiting to see if there was any googly along the recovery path. While the fever was gone, the residual dry cough was now being treated with a steroid. The doctor’s view was that the lungs would take between 3 to 6 months to repair the damage the virus had done. I would have to do an X Ray a month later to make sure that the repair was headed in the right direction.

As a matter of abundant precaution, I continue to track my blood oxidation every few hours. I know for certain that I’m no longer Covid +ve, but I’m not out of the woods yet. A statin and a blood thinner will hopefully cut the risk of a heart attack and a stroke (both run in the family!). A battery of other supplements like Zinc, Vitamin C & D etc. will reduce the internal inflammation and help the body recover faster. The path back from this disease is a slow one and I’m learning to be patient with myself. In a strange way, I am more aware of every breath that I take.

Day 19 - Today 13th October 2020

I still haven’t accepted that the risk level we signed up for resulted in the whole family getting infected. Worse still, the failure to identify the source and the limited immunity that you have even after contracting it means that we live in fear of the family getting it again. Looking back, I ask myself what I would have done differently!

1.     We should have gotten tested earlier: It helped that we quarantined as a family as soon as Dylan experienced tiredness for a day, but we all should have gotten tested earlier. The assumption that our limited contact with the external world made it impossible for us to contract Covid was a wrong one. If anyone in the family gets a fever or cough going forward, we will test at once.

2.     We should have prepared better from a knowledge perspective: Raynah did a great job preparing for Covid. We have had the sanitizers, household disinfectants, plastic gloves, disposable masks etc. for over 6 months before we got sick. We weren’t prepared however with the right knowledge. It is very disorienting to get different directions from well-intentioned doctors and choose a course of action when you can’t look after yourself! We were very fortunate to have Shanti share literally the latest research (published on the 28th of September!)  in the US with us. We will have a small Covid medication kit at home updated for the latest clinical trials going forward.

3. We should have had a plan in the event of testing positive: I was in denial even after the test results came in. I still spend a lot of my waking time retracing everyone’s movements in the run up to the first instance of fatigue in the family. Thinking through what you will do should you test positive is easier when you aren’t positive. We have a plan of action should anyone test positive again in the family.

We are grateful that we didn’t infect anyone, and that the limited set of people we had contact with all tested negative as part of the contact tracing protocol. Without knowing for sure who got infected first and where the infection came from, there is no way of knowing anything for certain.

Having been through this ordeal, what advice would I offer you? 

Take this virus very seriously. For many it might pass without them even realizing that had it. For a few however it can literally mean a life and death situation in a matter of a week if you ignore it. Take all the precautions you can. I saw this Swiss Cheese analogy on the internet from Dr. Ian M Mackay that made a lot of sense to me. We took all the precautions but the virus still reached our respiratory tract!

As I lay awake one night struggling to breathe, coming to terms with the new prone sleeping position I asked myself what kind of gambler I might be if I was gambling with my life.

If someone gave me the chance to roll a wheel with a 2% chance of dying, would I take it?

 The answer is a resounding ‘No’!

 If there’s one piece of advice that you take away from reading this piece let it be this – go to great lengths to protect yourself and your family from this virus. The only thing you have any control over is the risk level you expose yourself to. Once you contract the virus you are pretty much at the mercy of the virus and no one can predict what happens next. It is entirely a matter of chance!

It can pass without you even noticing you had it. Ask Aidan and Ethan. 

It can knock you out for a few hours. Ask Dylan. 

It can be no more severe than a common flu. Ask Ray and my mom. 

It can leave you breathless, with damaged lungs and a residual pneumonia. Ask me. 

It can kill you. Ask anyone who has lost a friend or loved one to the disease.

The science is still approximate with new cocktails and regimes of medication being added to clinical trials every day across the world. Do everything you can to minimize the odds of getting the virus, cut every possible surplus contact. Mask up and maintain physical distancing.

#covidquarantine #covid_19 #covid

[oliverphisher]

K E Osborn

Australian author K E Osborn was born and raised in Adelaide, South Australia. With a background in graphic design and a flair for all things creative, she felt compelled to write the story brewing in her mind. 

Get Rocked? (The Next Generation Series) (Volume 2) by K E Osborn (2015-08-16) By K E Osborn

Writing gives her life purpose. It makes her feel, laugh, cry, and get completely enveloped with the characters and their story lines. She feels completely at home when writing and wouldn’t consider doing anything else. She wrote Get Rocked? (2015).

What are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? 

The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Secret Garden (HarperClassics) By Frances Hodgson Burnett

When I think of books from my childhood, this is the one that I always remember. It constantly sat beside me on my bedside table, and when it came out as a movie, I was so excited to see it. I loved it that much.

Fifty Shades of Grey – EL James

Fifty Shades of Grey (Fifty Shades, Book 1) By E L James

This series had such a significant impact on not only my career, but I believe the entire romance industry as it is now. Without this series paving the way for romance to be acceptable, I’m not sure I would have gotten into writing. Reading FSOG gave me the courage to write the stories brewing in my mind. I know I, and a lot of other authors out there, have a lot to thank EL James for.

Thoughtless – SC Stephens

Thoughtless By S.C. Stephens

This series is what dawned the rock genre phase I went through. After reading Thoughtless and loving the emotions it pulled from me, plus my love of music, I wanted to emulate that in my own stories. Now, I have four different rocker series published,and it all grew from reading Thoughtless. 

What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)?      

An ergonomic keyboard and mouse. Honestly, you need the best of everything when you sit at a desk for eight hours a day.

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? 

It has taught me to be resilient. When you think things aren’t going your way, or that nothing is ever going to get better, things will always have a way of working themselves out in the end. There will always be a fix to a problem. Or if there isn’t, worrying over it isn’t going to resolve it either. If it can’t be fixed, and it isn’t life or death, then you can’t continue to stress over it. If it’s not going to cause you financial strain, cause you medical issues or your imminent death–let it go. When you let things go, you can work harder, and you become more efficient. When you can do that, things naturally fall into place, and you become more successful.

Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by?

‘Just keep swimming’from Finding Nemo- is one I live by every day.

This author stuff is damn hard work. You need to push yourself every day to keep relevant, to keep up with the market, to just keep writing. So my motto has been for quite some time, to ‘Just keep swimming.’ Keep up the good fight and never give up, no matter how hard it gets, because in the end, I love what I do, and for every bad day there’s a dozen more that are great.

What is one of the best investment in a writing resource you’ve ever made? 

The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi

What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love? 

My unusual habit is when I sit down to write first thing in the morning, I have to have a cup of tea. I feel like if I don’t have one, my routine isn’t in order, and I get up in the end and make one anyway. It’s a habit now, and something that’s kind of ritualistic for me. If I don’t have my cup of tea, I can’t start for the day.

Weird, I know.

In the last five years, what new belief, behaviour, or habit has most improved your life? 

Self-editing is a must before sending it to anyone. Never send a draft to anyone, unless you are happy with what it contains.

Also, trying to eat healthily and exercise (though this doesn’t always happen in a busy author’s day, unfortunately).

What advice would you give to a smart, driven aspiring author? What advice should they ignore? 

ALWAYS send your manuscript to a reliable editor. Don’t ever think you’re good enough to not have your book edited and proofread. No one is ever that good. They are there not only to find your grammar and spelling mistakes but to check a variety of things we can miss (like timeline issues, inconsistencies, etc.) Once you have found a good editor, never let them go.

Make sure you have an amazing cover artist working with you on your cover. After all, the cover is the first thing a reader will see. If your cover is subpar, it represents the writing inside. Think about that. Your branding is everything. You might be the next ‘big thing,’ but if your cover is average, readers will judge your writing based on that fact alone. Image is everything in this industry – so branding should be at the forefront of your mind. Readers need to be able to spot you in a sea of covers, so always having the same branding can help them find you more easily.

If you haven’t invested some money in your book with a great cover, compelling blurb, and sharp editing, then, unfortunately, you will get what you paid for in return.  You are a small business, and you will need to spend money to make money.

Ignore people telling you to take out loans to advertise on social media. Spend what you can afford. Obviously, the more you can spend, the better the return will be, but don’t fall into traps where you need to take out repayments to finance your advertising. That’s dangerous territory. Do what you can. If you can add a little extra into your marketing budget, I recommend it, but don’t blow the bank in a way you can’t manage.

What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession often? 

Selling books at $1.99, this is the dead zone of marketing. Readers don’t seem to buy books at this price. Maybe it’s because they don’t see value in a book at $1.99. Always remember, you are worth the price readers will pay for your books.  Never have a book at 99c unless it’s for promotional reasons.

Beware of stepping away from your brand and genre, always keep it in mind.  Even if it means having a pen name for a genre that is too far away from what you are known for.

In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to (distractions, invitations, etc.)? 

For me, I’m the opposite. I need to learn to say yes. I’m so busy working with my writing and on my author career that I never say yes to social invitations or distractions. I need to work on my work/life balance, and as of next year, I intend to focus on this more. I will be including work/life balance into my business plan to make sure I don’t overload myself like I have over the past few years. 

What marketing tactics should authors avoid?

As I mentioned previously, the $1.99 price point is a dead zone. Selling books at 99c – remember you are worth more.Free eBooks, unless you have a big deal with one of the large promotional companies and the book is the first in a series of books, so you can gain the on-sales from the free promotional book.

You should never release a book without a marking plan. Think about how you can make your book visible in the world of social media, and in any other way you can think of that will interest readers.  Think about the tactics you can make it known you have released a book.

What new realizations and/or approaches have helped you achieve your goals? 

I think when I decided to stick to writing to the market, I found my niche (MC Romance). I’m lucky that the genre I adore writing is also very popular at the moment, so when I write to the market, I find my sales and marketing methods tend to boost a lot higher than my other books.

When you feel overwhelmed or have lost your focus temporarily, what do you do? 

I tend to read. If I am having trouble thinking or with motivation, I go back to basics. Learn from my peers. See what they’re doing. What their stories are about. See how their writing flows. Try to pull inspiration from them. Then generally, that will pull my love back and get me back in the mood as it were.

Any other tips?

This industry isn’t easy.

Equally so, it isn’t for everyone.

You need to have a tough skin to be an author. Reviewers are tough. Editors are critical. But even worse are your own demons that continuously tell you you’re not good enough. But, if you can pull yourself through all that, there’s this bright light. A spark. That glimmer of brilliance that is your beacon of creativity, demanding her voice. If you can let her free and let her develop into a beautiful, dark, or angst-filled story, whatever it may be–then you’re on the right path. And let me tell you that path is a wondrous and joyful journey. If you can get to those two words- The End - that is the most powerful feeling in the world, and I wouldn’t give it up for anything. 

________

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source https://www.thecommunitywriter.com/blog/k-e-osborn

#Writing WriteMotivation WritingAdvice

[therelativelydispleasedhatter]

2017 DCI Show Idea:  Phantom Regiment “Bonfire”

As requested by @drumcorpshero​ (who provided this image above, damn son.) and since someone in DCI apparently listens to my ideas, a concept pitch for a Phantom Regiment show.  Based loosely on the graphic novel/movie V for Vendetta, this show would see the Regiment in a familiar role of an oppressed population that suffers under a ruler’s iron fist, but starts an uprising and overthrows the regime.  (Think Spartacus, Animal Farm, Propaganda, and RISE all wrapped into one.)

Reps include:

Fourth Ballet Suite by Shostakovich

Hellfire (from Hunchback of Notre Dame) by Menken and Schwartz

Fire of Eternal Glory by Shostakovich

Do You Hear The People Sing? (from Les Mis) by Claude-Michel Schoenberg

Fifth Symphony, Fourth Movement by Shostakovich

1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky 

Now that you have the basic idea, follow along with me as I lay this out one in detail.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  “Wow, Mike, you devilishly clever haberdasher, you’ve basically ripped off half of Phantom’s 1996 show.”  And you wouldn’t be wrong, but that’s half the point.  1996 was almost a love letter to Shostakovich, a composer who’s work, career, and in turn his very life was intrinsically tied to the Soviet regime who loved him almost as much as he despised them.  I feel that kind of spirit is perfect for this show.  But we’re working in some new stuff with that 1996 Phantom spirit, namely a fair bit of imagery that would fit in with V for Vendetta.

We open with a voice over: the famous bonfire night rhyme, “Remember, remember the 5th of November”

This voice over carries us through the pre-show where we see both the hornline and the Phantomettes in some super tattered looking clothing and everyone puts together some kind of big structure in the back corner of the field, sorta like what Cavies had in 2013.  (Spoilers: this is our changing tent.)

The show starts with the Shostakovich piece.  Sections should join in playing the opening strains of it once they’ve dropped off their part of the structure in the corner so by the time its all set up we have the whole hornline in and we can get a full blast.  Drumline would have a minibreak in this early part while choreography happens. (And maybe another song here?  Not sure.  Think of a good one yourself and see how it works.)  At some point, we cap it off with another big hit and we get a moment of silence... that is interrupted by a very quiet strain of “Do you hear the people sing?” 

In our story, that strain is the first instance of rebellion and the rulers authority (Maybe the drumline itself?  Maybe part of the Phantomettes?) starts lashing out at the crowd (ie- the hornline.)  Here’s where we start kicking into a higher gear with Hellfire and of course it all comes to a cataclysmic head when the structure is set on fire as the songs climax hits.  (stage fire, not actual fire.  We’ll find a way.)  

When the song is over, we find a body (probably a doll honestly) lying in the rubble.  An innocent life taken.  The ballad piece is the people’s hornline coming together to mourn this life and uniting in their resolve.  As we go, people disappear into the structure (but still play as much as we can.  We’ll just have the music coming from backfield with a haunting echo.)  Then when the climax hits, everyone comes out in full uniform, stylin and profilin like its 1996.  (But with some modern touches perhaps.)  

Also, (and this is an important one) everyone has their own version of the Guy Fawkes mask.  Now, I dont mean that everyone has a copy of the mask you can buy at any random Walmart or Books-A-Million.  No, they have their own, almost handmade version.  (Ideally, one that is cut so you can play with it.  So little more akin to the 1989 SCV phantom masks)  At some point in the season, the corps takes a day off of rehearsal and has a MASSIVE arts and crafts day where everyone makes their own version of the mask, complete with something that makes it uniquely theirs.  With this mask, we are saying that we are together in our cause, but we are always, always our own individual and any attempt to dismiss that by lumping everyone together in one group (bad dude’s one might say) is foolish. Everyone holds up their mask, and now, we start singing “Do you hear the people sing?” as everyone slowly puts on their mask.  

Now its closer time and we carry it home with a combination of the Fifth Symphony (when the riot begins) and 1812 Overture (when the people’s hornline take control.)  And our show ends by storming something.  Literally whatever you can get away with in the rules, do it.  Storm the front, storm the crowd, climb on shit.  Just as long as you can still blast the ending of 1812.  

Now, let’s imagine a world where this could actually happen. Baby powder be damned.  

#DCI 2017 show ideas #seriously read the whole thing #this would be killer on finals night

[mrmichaelchadler]

Bright Wall/Dark Room February 2019: A Love Story and a Tragedy - Second Lives and Lost Time in Doctor Zhivago

We are pleased to offer an excerpt from the latest edition of the online magazine, Bright Wall/Dark Room. Their latest issue celebrates the theme of "Time." In addition to Roxana Hadadi's piece below on "Doctor Zhivago," they have essays on "The Last Picture Show" and "Texasville," "La Jetee" and "Sans Soleil," the "Captain America" films, "Twin Peaks: The Return," "The Way We Were," "Springsteen on Broadway," "Mirai," "The Set-Up," and more. The above art is by Tony Stella. 

You can read our previous excerpts from the magazine by clicking here. To subscribe to Bright Wall/Dark Room, or look at their most recent essays, click here.

Some movies have been in my life so long that I have no memory of when I first saw them, except to know that they’re my parents’ favorite movies, and by extension, some of my own: The Sound of Music, Giant, Vertigo, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai. David Lean, the director of the latter two films, might be my parents’ favorite for the vastness of space he was able to capture in his lens, the intimacy of feeling, the way his characters often become trapped in situations of their own making.

Doctor Zhivago is the Lean film my parents return to most often, and the one that shatters me most thoroughly—a love story and a tragedy in equal measure, the elegantly lilting strings of a balalaika building upward and upward and upward until they are abruptly cut short. It makes me think of how my parents measure time: before the revolution, and after it.

*

Not the Russian Revolution, although that is the focus of Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, adapted from the novel by Boris Pasternak, but the Iranian Revolution—1978 through 1979. My parents weren’t living in Iran then; they had already gingerly stepped forward into their second lives in America. There had been a prospect of maybe going back to their homeland, to a place that they say feels different, looks different, is different from the United States; but that was no longer possible. There are places you can’t go back to, and questions you can’t ask, and people you can’t be anymore. Doctor Zhivago is about all of that, and watching the movie as many times as I have is mostly about trying to understand my parents’ lives, failing, and desperately trying over and over again. It’s about losing something, and unceasingly searching for it, and wondering if love is ever enough.

“Feelings, insights, affections—it’s suddenly trivial now,” says the Bolshevik commander Strelnikov (Tom Courtenay), a man who used a revolution and a war to reinvent himself, to the poet Dr. Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif, gorgeous), whose writings are publicly outlawed by the Soviet regime and secretly admired by the Russian people. But that interiority is all Yuri has in a society that is controlled, watched, and surveilled. It’s all my parents had, too.

*

To be a first-generation American is to grow up realizing there are questions your immigrant parents absolutely won’t answer, parts of themselves they will never share. I know the bare sketches of my parents’ lives before they came to the United States, but I also know—intrinsically, maybe—what not to push. Maybe it’s a cliché to say an elementary school family tree assignment was an unexpected difficulty, but it was.

There were grandparents I didn’t know who had died, and aunts and uncles and cousins I would never know because they lived in Iran and couldn’t come visit us, and we couldn’t go visit them. A veil hanging over all of it, like the chadors and hijabs the Islamic government began to force all women to wear outside of the home after the Revolution. Iran’s women are fierce—they serve in the Iranian Parliament, have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the Fields Medal, practice jiu-jitsu in secret and win Olympic medals for taekwondo—but this mandatory covering is only one of many means of government control, of the diminishing of personal choice.

Everything I wanted to know about what my parents had gone through, what informed their decisions, what shaped their lives, was like picking at the edges of a scab, a wound not fully healed. The time to ask those questions never seemed right. Nothing about the Iranian Revolution seemed to work out like people wanted—not for people like my parents, or people like their friends, or people like the professors I had while studying Persian literature and film in college. They wanted freedom from monarchy and ended up with restriction through religion.

This is a culture that prized art and poetry and beauty (and wine!) for centuries, but not much of that was respected in the same way anymore. Not after the power grabs of the Iranian Revolution went the hardliners’ way, and not after the Islamic government consolidated authority throughout the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, and not after increasingly fraught relationships with the rest of the world in the 1990s and 2000s. All this despite cries from inside the country, despite bloodshed in the streets.  

Intellectuals disappeared, dissenters disappeared, writers and musicians and artists disappeared. My parents whispered their names. They hung their portraits on our library wall. And I rarely, possibly never, asked about them. Maybe I thought I couldn’t, or maybe I thought I shouldn’t. “Why dig deeper into my parents’ pain?” I rationalized then. “Why didn’t I care enough to ask?” I think now.

*

“We admire your brother very much,” says a dam worker to Lt. Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago (Alec Guinness) at the beginning of Doctor Zhivago, in the 1950s, when Yevgraf is searching for a woman he suspects is his half-brother’s lost daughter. “Everybody seems to—now,” Yevgraf says back in Guinness’s crisp, perfectly commanding voice, but not even he has a response to the man’s follow-up: “We couldn’t admire him when we weren’t allowed to read him.”

What you’re allowed to do and not allowed to do comes up often in Doctor Zhivago. Where you’re allowed to work, what you’re allowed to read, who you’re allowed to love. The story begins before World War I, in two different spheres of Russian life. First is the upper-class world of Yuri, a young man who was adopted as a child by a well-to-do old-money family and has since excelled at nearly everything he tries: graduating in the top three of his class from medical school, attracting national and international acclaim for his deeply felt poetry. And then there’s Lara (Julie Christie, resplendent): 17 years old, working class, determined to win a scholarship to university, the daughter of a seamstress catering to wealthy clients, preyed upon by the well-connected government official and despicably manipulative villain, Victor Komarovsky (Rod Steiger), who used to be a friend of her dead father’s.

Yuri has the empathy of an artist and the compassion of a healer. He sees his patients and is moved by their humanity, and when he meets Lara, he admires her resolve. It takes a certain kind of steadfastness to refuse a man like Komarovsky, whose obsession with Lara resulted first in an affair and then in sexual abuse, and that is what drives Lara for years afterward. When Yuri meets her again four years later, it’s on the Ukrainian Front during World War I, where he’s working as a field doctor and she has volunteered as a nurse. They’re each married—Yuri to Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), the daughter of the family he grew up with, and Lara to former labor organizer and political dissident Pasha Antipov (Courtenay), before he transforms himself into the merciless Strelnikov—but their love for each other is an undeniable thing.

When the dam worker learns who Yevgraf is in the beginning of Doctor Zhivago, he speaks of the titular man and “the Lara” with an air of wonder and reverence. Yuri’s most famous poems were about her, but also the uncertainty of living in a country in transition, with a past that now seemed unfathomably distant. “Wouldn’t it have been lovely if we met before?” Lara wonders, and the question nearly drives Yuri to insanity (“I think we may go mad if we think about all that”) not only because of the possibilities it holds but because of the reality that it never was. “I shall always think about it,” Lara replies, but her hope for the future is hollow. There can be no redemption of the past.  

Lean understands the hazy nature of time, framing Yuri and Lara together in shots with fuzzy edges, like a treasured memory slowly slipping away. Most importantly, he lets Christie and Sharif explore the rhythms of their characters as they fall in love. As Yuri, Sharif’s eyes glitter with tears nearly every time he looks at Lara. That rawness is reminiscent of the emotion that washes over his face during his first conversation with Komarovsky, when the man admitted to knowing Yuri’s father and complimented the way “he was devoted to your mother.” Yuri guards the memories of his parents with the same fierceness it took Lara to stand up to her abuser, and he understands what the passion he feels for Lara means.

And as Lara, Christie has the unwavering glare of a woman who knows she has been wronged, who has been conditioned to believe that men never stay, who remembers how her mother almost killed herself when she learned of her daughter’s sexual relationship with Komarovsky. She refuses Yuri’s romantic overtures at first, but who doesn’t desire to love and to be loved? When they meet again, she is stunned into silence, and then overjoyed. “Your letters were full of her,” Tonya had said to Yuri when he returned from the front, noting how often Lara came up in his correspondence home. His heart was full of her, too, and all of them knew it. Yuri, Lara, Tonya, trapped in a maze of love and loss of their own making, stepping toward and backing away from each other over years of time, as the country around them roiled and rebelled.

*

“Adapt yourself,” a volunteer for the Red Guard tells Yuri after his service at the front has ended. When he returns to Moscow, he learns his house has been partitioned into living space for 13 families. Soviet officials are watching his every move, concerned that his popular poetry is anti-Communist. Time has mutated Yuri’s home into a place where everything is forbidden—honesty, sincerity, kindness—and his family must eventually flee. “Your attitude is noticed,” one of those party members says to Yuri before Yevgraf steps in to warn his half-brother that Moscow is no longer safe for him. But when your country is unrecognizable to you, where can you go?

My parents returned to Iran to marry—my father in a creamy ivory suit and crisp leather shoes, my mother in a satin dress with knife pleats and a lace veil—but came back to the United States to live. They said their vows and made their promises in a place they loved, and then they left. What kind of bravery does it take to start over? What depths of fortitude? The kind that Yuri and Tonya drew on to relocate their family to the Russian countryside, to starting new lives in the desolate Varykino, where each winter encases their cottage in depths of ice? Or the kind that inspires Yuri to leave the Red Army after being captured and forced to be their medical officer for two years? The decision almost seems lackadaisical, just a man on a horse, watching other men walk away from him in a misty, snowy field, turning backward instead of forward. But the simplicity of that motion—one path taken, another refused—is the end of one life and the beginning of another.

Yuri’s choice is one in a series of many that demonstrate his love for Tonya, his love for Lara, and his love for his country—and yet each source of affection is, with time, also a source of suffering. He learns that Tonya and their children fled Russia while he was held by the Red Army, and is haunted by visions of them trudging through snow, leaving him behind. He discovers that Lara is in the nearby village Yuryatin, and although they renew their love for each other, they’re found by Komarovsky, whose obsession with Lara has continued unabated. “Who are you to refuse me anything?” Komarovsky snarls. But he divulges that the couple is in danger and helps Lara escape, providing transport for her—pregnant with Yuri’s daughter—to Mongolia, where they can live in secrecy.

But Yuri? “He’ll never leave Russia,” Lara says, and she’s right. Years after they part, Yuri dies of a heart attack, thinking he spotted Lara walking by on a sidewalk, unable to gain her attention from the inside of a passing-by train. It’s a moment of profound, devastating loneliness in a film that specializes in them. Yuri is a boy when we first see him at his mother’s funeral, imagining what her body looks like inside its wooden casket. That night, he peers out of an icy window, listening to frozen branches tapping against the glass, his only possession the colorful balalaika that was his inheritance from his mother—and that he never had the talent to play, but years later, his daughter with Lara does. As an adult, he’s a half-frozen man in tattered clothes, a vacant, haunted look in his eyes as he flees the Red Army as a deserter. And in his last moments of happiness with Lara, he’s a romantic who refuses Komarovsky’s offer of help because he can’t abide being assisted by a man like that.

Lean excels at pinpointing how Yuri is a man out of place, struggling to understand a country around him that is changing all the time. Alone when watching a workers’ march and the ensuing military slaughter of the protestors from the balcony of his family’s palatial home. Alone when following the fragmented rays of sunlight piercing through the trees of a quiet, foggy forest. Alone when facing off against a pack of howling wolves. And alone when wandering through a reclaimed estate turned into a makeshift hospital, the only other living thing inside the home a vase of sunflowers, their petals slowly falling.

In death, Yuri is all of those selves: the boy abandoned, the citizen disillusioned, the man overcome by love. When he collapses in the street, he is overwhelmed by other bodies running to his aid, while the one he wants to see so badly—the woman who could be Lara—keeps on walking, oblivious to his pain. I cry so frantically every time I watch Yuri die that sometimes I feel like I’ve stopped breathing: mourning the life of a man emblematic of an idealism long gone, and mourning the lives my parents could have had.

*

“Don’t you want to believe it?” Yevgraf asks Tanya (Rita Tushingham), a young woman he thinks is Lara’s and Yuri’s missing daughter, after he tells her the story of his half-brother and the woman he loved. “Not if it isn’t true,” she replies, and there’s such yearning to that statement: the desire to truly know something, to examine the ridges and contours of it, to feel how it fits into a part of your heart that previously was unfilled.

Doctor Zhivago doesn’t have a happy ending. Aside from Yuri’s death, there’s Lara’s disappearance (“She died or vanished somewhere in one of the labor camps, a nameless number on a list that was afterward mislaid. That was quite common in those days,” Yevgraf says), and the realization that maybe Tanya won’t ever accept the truth of her parentage. And there’s the truth, of course, that millions of other people died during that time in Russia’s history, that countless families were pulled apart, that so many people were sent away and never came back. Not that different from the Iranian Revolution and what happened afterward. Not really.

“He kept a lot to himself,” Yevgraf says of Yuri, and I think of my parents. Of the lives they had before they met each other and before they married and before they realized the Iran they were born into was no longer theirs. Of all the things they keep hidden away, even now, even after they’ve lived the majority of their lives outside of a country they still call home. Of all the family they can’t embrace again. Of all the time they can’t get back.   

I realize in my adulthood that maybe this is why my parents hold Doctor Zhivago so close to their hearts. Maybe they see Yuri and Lara in themselves: people who were denied a country and a way of life. “People will be different after the revolution,” the man who was once Pasha Antipov tells Lara. “It takes a while to get used to things, doesn’t it?” Yuri’s adoptive father says to him. Both were right and both were wrong, and that duality—the inescapably forward movement of time, and how people and places and identities are lost to the past, destroyed and mourned—is the aching tragedy of Doctor Zhivago.

from All Content http://bit.ly/2SsEZC5

[karolwhitacre6-blog]

The Inspiration Of Melvin Gordon.

Most economic experts agree that advances in robotics as well as AI over the next few years are most likely to cause substantial job losses. Intrinsic motivation has been explained by Fritz Heider's acknowledgment concept, Bandura's service self-efficacy 2, as well as Ryan and Deci's cognitive examination theory. Encouraging employees in reliable and non-threatening methods is often easier stated than done for mid-level executives, specifically when they're not obtaining any type of responsible leadership from above. Wildlings Leisten - pass away Grundform des Schuhs - basiert auf einer anatomischen Fußform mit einer natürlichen Weite, pass away sich an einem kräftigen, gesunden Kinderfuß orientiert. Carrot is the first app from Innopage, which develops e-publishing jobs for customers consisting of the Hong Kong federal government, Samsung Mobile and the City University Press. If you have any concerns regarding wherever and how to use just click the following page, you can contact us at our internet site. We had an idea about, and have actually now validated, Intel's newest acquisition: Kno, the education and learning start-up that began life as a hardware organisation and also later on pivoted into software application-- specifically via applications that let pupils review interactive variations of digitized books. Appears I'm not alone, either; other Fitbit customers have actually reported inaccurate distances in Fitbit's on the internet forums. Nevertheless, it is also essential that social employees comprehend that although a theory might seem to fit" to a service-user, this does not always suggest that this is the correct" understanding of that service-users life. An unrevealed applicant made an application for a summertime teaching fellowship on Wall surface Street with a short but sincere letter. You can obtain all the incentives included in Mr. Dashboard's task, which includes a complete set of Mr Dashboard's six motivational cards, six pieces of wall surface art, 6 mugs, secret diary for seven days, a walk on Hampstead Heath and a beverage in the club with Dash, as well as Mr Dashboard's video. Additionally, take into consideration running some examination advertisements on Facebook targeting the demographic that would certainly discover the product helpful. In addition, all of the social media sites and also the Kickstarter web page will certainly additionally help to resolve our fans' inquiries or troubles. Naver, the company behind newly listed Line, straightened itself with Golden Gate Ventures, while YC Resources (Yahoo Japan) purchased Monk's Hillside Ventures, but KK Fund targets a much earlier stage than those 2. To alter an actions an employee have to be inspired to do so. By discovering the individuals needs and also apply positive and adverse supports to the group motivation can and also will certainly enhance and also the success of that task will certainly have durable impacts on the success of the group. Graduating Orgasm Laude in Organisation Management from Lynn College, Boca Raton, and also with a comprehensive personal history in angel financial investment as well as entrepreneurship, he brings a wealth of professional experience and enthusiasm to Andromium. Remote and also dispersed workforces have actually taken off, and also it's expanding harder for IT to fulfill the consumer-level expectations of an iPad-wielding workforce. The most essential component to becoming effective is having inspiration, claims Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. A blockchain is a distributed data source that maintains a persistently creating run-through of info records that can not be modified. Comprehending precisely just what you desire is not the same as recognizing just what you do not want. Treatment letters need to be utilized to give the recruiter a need to read your Curriculum Vitae, reveal why you desire the job as well as highlight your viability for the duty. A newest research says substances located in turmeric, red grapes, berries, and also apple peels could eliminate prostate cancer cells. These are but a few of the tactical mechanics of a gamification experience, however the secret sauce" depends on exactly how the general experience encourages certain high-value habits. Neuro-Linguistic Shows (NLP) is a technique to understanding human habits and experience with the study of the brain. Our remarkable storyboard musician, Meagan Moynagh, reveals us August's capability to see sound waves! Therefore, this Kickstarter task - Mr. Dash's inspiration - is not completion of Dashboard's motivational tale. After bumming it around for 5 months doing odd jobs. . Yet these have been concentrated primarily on closing offers as well as have stood beyond the day-to-day application experience of the customer. Well, the key to be successful in communicating effectively, (as it happens to be for most of points!) can be located in just how well we prepare and also plan our course to growth. Psycho therapists have recommended various concepts of inspiration, including drive concept, instinct theory, as well as humanistic theory. For today among the greatest apps in that space, RunKeeper, launches a brand-new apple iphone application for what it calls Life Monitoring" called Breeze. Not just are there inconsistencies with just how the stories of the two stories play out (or can play out), the idea that Gilligan & Co. would finish five periods of white-knuckle tv with a tribute to a 20-year-old Tarantino movie appears like a bit of a stretch. Some may not comprehend major depression as well as why it is hard for individuals that suffer. Während der eine sich durch Wettbewerb angespornt fühlt und Höchstleistungen bringt, wirkt Druck beim anderen hemmend. Add expansions and apps to your computer from your phone. It's far safer to pitch your letter to make sure that it's comprehensible to a more comprehensive readership.

[vitalmindandbody]

With ‘Orange Is the New Black’ season 4, drama becomes formulaic

Orange Is the New Black has become a slowly molding piece of bread. Its unpleasant to chew and swallow. Andwhats the point?

Once upon a time, we were hooked on the super binge-worthy Netflix show, based on the memoir by Piper Kerman about her year in a womens prison. Season 4 lands in our queue today, and who knew a show about an upstate New York women’s prison would hook Americans?

The prison dramedy setup created a fun formula. Everything has to take place either in the prison, is part of an attempt to get out of prison, or exists in a flashback of the past. Any possible stories about the future can be only fantasieshere the women are cut off from the outside real world.

Its been a perfect structure for creating conflicts, because the most interesting things happen between diverse women who would not normally mix. Hence, viewers are thrust into a world full of candid though at times surface-level dialogues about race and class, as well as unforeseen friendships, surprise romances, and prison-specific hierarchical conflicts.

That used to be enough.

In season 4, Piper (Taylor Schilling) is meaner and more of a badass at the prison because of her prison fame, panty-laundering business, and the fact that shes been burned by friends and lovers alike. She becomes a lone wolf. Alex (Lauren Prepon), whom we last saw in a harrowing cliffhanger, gets into other types of trouble. The guards and new warden Joe Caputo (Nick Sandow) deal with ramifications of the new corporate prison system. And there are of course some key lines about systemic racism from quite a few of the characters. Theres more narrative backstory for other peripheral characters, but there are so many people that its hard to keep track of everyone, let alone care. In terms of narrative structure, it feels like a lot of the dramatic conflicts have already been resolved. So, what else is there to do at Litchfield?

A celebrity named Judy King (Blair Brown), a curious combo of Martha Stewart and Paula Deen, rolls into Litchfield. We get more backstories, and there are new romances in the prison. A Bill Cosby one-liner even finds its way into the pop culture-obsessed dialogue. But whats keeping us hooked that hasnt already been resolved? If Orange Is the New Black is to continue its must-stream vitality, it needs to make us care again. Weve become the Litchfield prisoners, complacent with the system, robotically binging until its overor hoping for some drama that will also shift the shows trajectory.

In season 3, the romance died down between Piper and Alex. Piper became very involved in her prison-specific business. Thats when audiences began to drown in origin stories, because the writers room couldnt count as much on that high-stakes romance. At the end of season 3, we saw a dramatic finale with an attempt at breaking out but not reallythe women escape through a hole in the fence, and merely go for a swim.

Season 2 ended in a similar way, with Miss Rosa (Barbara Rosenblat), a cancer sufferer, driving away in a stolen prison van, hitting and killing the manipulative Yvonne Vee Parker (Lorraine Toussaint) on the way. We are somehow satisfied by these end-of-season breakouts; wanting the prisoners to have some sort of future in the real world. But we also accept that if they do they will no longer be a part of the show. This is where the possibilities inherent in this type of prison narrative start to feel more limiting. People get out or stay in; there is no in-between.

This limited structure can be linked to the prison film genre, as described by David Wilson and Sean OSullivan in their book Images of Incarceration: Representations of Prison in Film and Television Drama. They note that movies about prison encourage us to identify with the prisoners and in our hearts we want them to win. But with our head, when they lose, we perhaps accept that this is the way it must be.

And so it is with OITNB. Except that in this show, we end up identifying with practically every character prisoner or guard and also accept that winning doesnt necessarily mean getting out of prison or beating the system. Winning could be overcoming a drug addiction, which happened with Nicky Nichols (Natasha Lyonne). It could be getting proper mental healthcare, which is what we hope for Suzanne Crazy Eyes Warren. Either way, winning takes place within the context of the prison.

More contrived is the queer romantic intrigue in this show, which seems to be aligned within strict film tropes like Catholic girls boarding schools. Think 1931’sGirls in Uniform (1931). In it, a young woman named Manuela is sent to a strict all-girls boarding school, and falls in love with her teacher. We see the dynamics and consequences of queer love in an all-women environment, and the ways it is reprimanded, punished, and seen as immoral. These types of dynamics transfer even to the present-day OITNB. The lesbian sex may be more porn-like and less punishable for being queer in and of itself, but its still punishable because, behind bars, prisoners shouldnt be touching.

Look, the show has done a lot for rising stars. Uzo Aduba (Suzanne Crazy Eyes Warren) won an Emmy for her performance. Actors like Samira Wiley (Poussey), Danielle Brooks (Taystee), and Adrienne C. Moore (Black Cindy) bring vital person-of-color narratives into the mainstream. There is a believable and beautiful trans narrative in Laverne Cox, the very smart and complex character of Galina “Red” Reznikov (Kate Mulgrew), and serious butch bad-assery with Boo (Lea DeLaria). But despite all of the great things that have come out of OITNB, the plots have gotten weirdly repetitive, character reveals less engaging, and romantic intrigue getsblas. Season 4 fails because it is less about the shows intrinsically interesting characters and their situations, and viewers are left with the glaring limitations of setting the series in prison.

Screengrab via Netflix US & Canada/YouTube

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