In echoing the feelings of many of the family and friends of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103 at the compassionate release of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the man convicted of bombing Pan Am Flight 103, Kelly Homan Rodoski, Syracuse University '92, said "my heart is absolutely aching today."
The Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, Inc is thankful to Senators Frank R. Lautenberg, John F. Kerry, Edward M. Kennedy, Charles E. Schumer, Robert Menendez, Patrick J. Leahy and Kristen Gillibrand for their continued support as can be seen through their letter to Kenny MacAskill MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Justice of the Scottish Government. The letter expresses their belief that Abdel Basset al-Megrahi should remain in Scotland to complete his sentence. The full letter is attached.
Richard Marquise, a former FBI agent who investigated the bombing, wrote a letter to Lucy Adams at The Herald in response to her article Embarrassment to a nation or an act of compassion?. He shared his letter with the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 as well as allowed The Herald to print it as a letter to the editor.
Images from the 20th Anniversary Memorial Ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.
For the 20th Anniversary dinner program, we are preparing a slide show of the victims and/or their families. If you have pictures that you would like to submit, please contact slideshowphotos@victimsofpanamflight103.org. All pictures will be used solely for Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, Inc., including this web site. We request that you submit all photos by August 1, 2008.
Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 Board Chairman, Glenn Johnson, Jr. his wife, Carole, and VPAF103 Secretary Kathy Tedeschi were panelists at this years Family Assistance Foundation Symposium on April 8, 2008 in Atlanta, GA. This event was extremely valuable. It provided the opportunity to share and receive "real life" tips and information in dealing with a crisis from top experts in their field. Their panel discussion with what they have experience during the nearly twenty years since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Dec. 21, 1988.
"Today, the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 applaud Congress for adopting the FY08 State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations bill." The bill prohibits spending on U.S. foreign assistance to Libya until Libya honors commitments it made to the victims of Pan Am 103. It also requires the State Department to report to Congress every six months its efforts to bring justice to the victims.


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Check out the award-winning game...
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A gamified approach to understanding sustainability through the lens of the
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There are multiple approaches to the 2030 Agenda, but the one we would like to highlight is a one-of-a-kind board game named Save Terra. Save Terra is a gamified approach to learning about sustainability and the 17 UN Global Goals. It creates an exciting environment of competition and collaboration while simultaneously immersing the players into a world where sustainability is at the core.
The purpose of the game is to achieve all 17 Global Goals before time runs out or a worldwide crisis happens. To achieve the goals, players need to make the right lifestyle decisions and gain enough knowledge about the world around them. In the meantime, random and uncontrollable events will happen which may take them closer or further away from achieving the goals in time.
By playing the game, players will be exposed to noble sustainable lifestyle choices and information from ourworldindata.org about the current state of the world in the form of trivia questions. Players that make the right choices and guess the trivia questions correctly come closer to achieving the goals in time. All of these actions increase awareness about the SDGs and develops the player's empathy, understanding, and resourcefulness in the world around them.
Our board game won first place in the open innovation call for educational resources with the SDGs and it is truly the first of its kind! It stands out from the traditional board games by its ability to create an environment that fosters the development of social interaction, critical thinking, and effective decision making, learning new things is simply a bonus!

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Archive for the 'National cinemas: Hong Kong' Category
What a difference a day makes: CHUNGKING EXPRESS comes to the Criterion Channel
Chungking Express (1994).
Chungking Express is nearly twenty-five years old, and it remains as jittery and sparkling as it was in 1994. I saw it on laserdisc in the fall of that year and immediately cottoned to it–more keenly than to its mate, Ashes of Time (which I came to admire eventually). I saw it on the screen in spring of 1995 during my first visit to the Hong Kong International Film Festival. (It's unspooling, as Variety would say, as we speak, although I'm not there dammit.) That was also when I met Wong Kar-wai for the first and only time. I was asked to present him the Hong Kong Film Critics Society award for Ashes of Time. During the same visit, I was at the Hong Kong Film Awards when Chungking Express won for best picture, best director, best actor (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), and best editing (William Chang Che-wi).
The trip was a turning point in my life. Thanks to that visit and later ones, I met Li Cheuk-to, Ho Wai-ling, Jacob Wong, Stephen Teo, Athena Tsui, Law Kar, Bede Chang, Shu Kei, Michael Campi, Ross Chen, Yvonne Teh (of Webs of Significance), Chuck Stephens, Stefan Hammond, Grace Ng, Shelley Kraicer, Lau Sing-hon, Joanna Lee, Ken Smith, Lisa from Toronto, Ding Yuin Shan, To Kei-chi, Yau Nai-hoi, Johnnie To, Sam Ho, Fu Poshek, Peter Chan, Ann Hui, Dora Mak (from UW), Bérénice Reynaud, Wong Ain-ling, Frederic Ambroisine, King Wei-chu, Chris Berry, Bob Davis, and many more people who became good friends. In later visits I got back in touch with old friends turned expats–Patricia Erens, Mike and Melissa Curtin, Darrell Davis, Yueh Yu-yeh, Nat Olson (from UW, of Hong Kong Hustle), Mette Hjort, Paisley Livingston–and longer-term comrades like Tony Rayns, Mike Walsh, Gary Bettinson, and Peter Rist. The Fragrant Harbour, a crossroads of Chinese culture, became a central node in the only social network that matters to me: the non-virtual one. Not Facebook but Face-to-Face.
I think of Hong Kong often; I regret not being able to attend the festival in recent years; and I'm saddened when I reflect that Ain-ling and Wai-ling are no longer with us. Twenty-four years went by too fast.
Chungking Express was made during a gap in the filming of Ashes and proved that for once Wong could turn out a quickie. Andrew Lau started as cinematographer for the first story, but when he left to make his own film, Chris Doyle picked it up. Both made good use of that loose "free camera" style that now seems to be everywhere. I usually find it annoying, but here the ambiance and the players and the sheer look of the city win me over. There's also some peekaboo slit-staging.
The movie benefits from an ingratiating and eclectic score, drowsy voice-overs, and people who like to eat and talk about romance.
Chungking Express typifies everything that I love about Hong Kong and its people and its cinema. When I see that jet and that clothesline, I remember looking out the window of such a plane and wondering about the people I saw on the rooftops, scarily close. Staying at the Salisbury YMCA, I was a short walk from the Bottoms Up bar and Chungking Mansions. And when I finally stopped by the Midnight Express and realized that the California Café was just across the street, I realized how tricky Wong had been with cinematic geography. (I didn't get to the Midlevels escalator until later.) Chungking Express captures the careenng energy of this city, while warming it with a preposterous lyricism. Faye treats her salad squirters like marimbas, and those guys have to be the least tough cops in the territory.
I wound up talking about the film a lot. I taught it in courses and lectured on it elsewhere. It got a chapter in Planet Hong Kong and an analysis in Film Art: An Introduction.
Now it's the subject of an installment on our Criterion Channel series on FilmStruck. There I try to show how its narrative construction welds together bits that might otherwise seem disconnected. Seeing it a couple more times to prepare that commentary, I found still more to admire. In the Mood for Love is totally fine, and I'm a big fan of As Tears Go By and The Grandmaster, but Chungking Express is the one I'll watch any time, any place, anywhere. I like pineapple. I like bittersweet chocolate too.
Later this semester I get to meet a class to talk with them about this charming movie. For 75 minutes, I'll once more be in touch with a city, only partly imaginary, that for all its harsh edges is filled with flirtations, dead-end love affairs, good humor, and expired canned goods.
I hope you like it too. If you haven't seen it, what are you waiting for? You can play a clip from the installment on the Criterion website. With the original DVD release now out of print and pricey, FilmStruck is your best chance to see it on video.
Thanks as ever to Peter Becker, Kim Hendrickson, and Grant Delin of Criterion for the fun of making this installment. Our entire Criterion series is here.
For more on Hong Kong film, check this tag.
P.S. 28 March 2018: Midnight Express had a makeover after the film made it famous, as you see below, but it's now a 7-11. Nate Olson's Hong Kong Hustle site shows the result. Thanks to Miklos Kiss and Dan Balogh for updating us.
Tuesday | March 27, 2018 | Criterion Channel, Directors: Wong Kar-wai, National cinemas: Hong Kong, People we like | Comments Off on What a difference a day makes: CHUNGKING EXPRESS comes to the Criterion Channel
Venice 2017: Crimes, no misdemeanors
Outrage Coda (2017).
The period from 1985-1995 was a sterling era for world cinema. Whatever you think of Hollywood of that time (it wasn't as bad as they say), American independent film was flourishing then. On the global stage, things were even better, as witness the rising careers of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang Dechang, Jackie Chan, Tsui Hark, Abbas Kiarostami, and Wong Kar-wai. It was exhilarating to watch these and other directors turn out splendid work like City of Sadness, A Brighter Summer Day, Police Story, Project A Part II, Peking Opera Blues, Once Upon a Time in China, The Blade, Where Is the Friend's Home?, Through the Olive Trees, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, and more.
That's not all. In Hong Kong, John Woo was redefining the urban action film with the flamboyant, romantic A Better Tomorrow (1986), The Killer (1989), and Hard-Boiled (1992). In Japan, a standup comedian known as "Beat" Takeshi Kitano took over the helming of a crime thriller, Violent Cop (1989), and decided to continue directing, turning out not only the bored-hitman saga Sonatine (1993) but also the lyrical A Scene at the Sea (1991). Another Japanese filmmaker, Kore-eda Hirokazu, launched his career with the meditative, Hou-ish Maborosi (1995).
I loved these films, and still do. Woo and Kitano belong to an older generation (mine, actually), while Kore-eda is younger. None has gone away. All came to Venice 74 with murder on their minds.
Confessed, but to what?
The Third Murder (2017).
The Third Murder (Sandome no satsujin) is Kore-eda's first venture into the crime genre, and he brings to it the same steady humanism we find in all his work. I've elsewhere recorded my uneasiness with his current visual style. Unlike the grave, long-take Maborosi, his films of the last decade or so are pictorially conventional, even academic, with their big close-ups, needlessly sidling camera moves, and other features of intensified continuity. But he continues to take narrative risks, and his almost Renoirian willingness to see many moral and psychological points of view make every film fairly gripping.
The Third Murder begins abruptly. An unseen victim is bludgeoned and the body is burned. The killer is the man we'll come to know as Misumi. He's captured. Like 99% of people charged with crimes in Japan, he readily confesses. His lawyers face only the question of sentencing: Should they try to get him life imprisonment rather than execution? When one attorney, Shigemori, decides to investigate more closely, he peels back layers of uncertainty about the circumstances, the victim, and the motive(s). Like many a victim in crime fiction, this businessman needed killing.
Following conventions of the investigative procedural, the plot relies on secrets, viewpoint shifts that drop hints, twists that frustrate simple understanding, and flashbacks that make us question what we thought we knew. Shooting in anamorphic widescreen, Kore-eda produces some extreme framings reminiscent of Kurosawa's High and Low, one of the films he studied while preparing the project. Despite occasionally flashy moments, it's a soberly told tale, emphasizing characterization and social critique. By the end, Misumi acquires a weary, radiant dignity, while entrepreneurial capitalism and the justice system are revealed as compromised. (In this respect it recalls I Just Didn't Do It, 2007, by another 80s-90s director, Suo Masayuki.) In moving to the sordid terrain of the crime story, The Third Murder shows that Kore-eda hasn't given up his sympathetic probing of human nature and his praise for un-grandiose self-sacrifice.
Bullets to the head and elsewhere
Manhunt (2017).
Sober and un-grandiose don't apply to Manhunt (Zhuibu), John Woo's return to bloody brotherhood and outsize ordnance. After prestige Hollywood efforts like Windtalkers (2002), the nationalistic costume picture Red Cliff (2008-2009), and the ensemble-disaster movie The Crossing (2014-2015), Woo is back with what he does best: showing many people firing many guns, dodging bullets (bad guys have bad aim), diving for cover in slow-motion, floating through hazes of cordite, and instantly recovering from wounds that would finish off you and me. These characters also run endlessly, hop into the path of trains, overturn vehicles, and set loose unconscionable numbers of pigeons.
1990s Hong Kong directors could make cheap pictures look expensive; given bigger budgets, they made expensive pictures look cheap. Here that cheapness shows most in some video-generated shots that recall the bad old days of edge enhancement. But who has time to study such problems when you're smacked by a fusillade of 3000-plus shots in 105 minutes? Resistance is futile, and the pace doesn't relent. When the fights and pursuits pause, the dialogue scenes flash by in a flurry of cuts and unfortunate lapses into English. (Much of the soundtrack recalls the eerily dubbed voices on US videos of The Killer.)
You've got no time to worry much about all this after an opening that drops us straight into an ambush. Ultra-cool Du Qiu drifts into a bar and quotes yakuza movies before leaving the hostesses to slaughter the gangsters dining there. It does get your attention, and it encourages you to sit through the exposition showing Du as the trusted lawyer for a corrupt pharmaceutical company. He proceeds to be framed for murder and goes on the run. Meanwhile stalwart detective Yamura, charged with bringing Du in, begins to suspect that there's a bigger scheme afoot. Of course he is right.
This is all completely preposterous and continually enjoyable, with constantly startling action choreography and an overheated soundtrack that at one point breaks into Turandot. Here those damn pigeons don't just soar into the sky; thanks to CGI, they flap annoyingly into the middle of fight scenes, spoiling a punch or a gunman's aim. We have, besides our twinned heroes, one corrupt cop, one psychopathic son, one fairly mad scientist, two expert hitwomen (one played by Woo's daughter), a fleet of black-suited motorcycle assassins, and two docile women who acquire some non-negligible lethality. In the press conference, Woo emphasized his eagerness to create women warriors, and he hasn't stinted. There are hallucinatory images of a bloody wedding dress to enhance the feminine mystique.
Manhunt is a kind of palimpsest of Asian action movies. It's a remake of a 1978 Takakura Ken movie released to great popularity in China during the 1980s. Woo, in Hong Kong, had already succumbed to that actor's spell. What Alain Delon was to The Killer, Takakura is to this, and the steelly self-possession of Zhang Hanyu gives the film a solemnity amid all the flamboyance.
Woo has turned the Japanese original into a real Hong Kong movie, vintage 1992. It lacks the mournful homoeroticism of his prime-period work; these two men don't gaze moistly at each other, but fire quips and complaints in the Lethal Weapon manner. (The bonding is strongest between the duo of female killers.) Still, it's very welcome, with its proudly retro air and fanboy in-jokes. It earns the right to begin with a reference to a Japanese classic and conclude with a wink to A Better Tomorrow, as if that movie were the next link in a grand tradition. "Old movies always end this way," says one of the survivors of the carnage. I wish more new movies did the same.
Hitmen in cars getting shot
Compared to Woo, Kitano is brutally laconic. In Outrage Coda, except for one Wooish slow-mo massacre, violence is brusque, shocking, and over fast. In a film full of bland pans following yakuza cars here and there, the end of one panning movement bursts into shooting before you realize it's happening, and it ends just as suddenly. Kitano likes his confrontations, for sure, and sometimes there's a buildup, but mostly the blood just erupts, punctuating long scenes of gangster intrigue.
Here that intrigue involves three rival gangs, each with bosses capable of remarkable lip contortions: the Hanabishi yakuza family, its once-powerful subsidiary the Sanno group, and a gang of fixers operating in Japan and Korea under the auspices of boss Chang. Add in two cops, one ready to knuckle to corrupt superiors, the other raging against them, and you have the world through which Otomo (Kitano) and his sidekick Ichikawa move. Normal life, as it's commonly known, has no place here.
The action bristles with schemes, shifting alliances, double-crosses, faked deaths, and power grabs."Your methods," remarks one boss to a co-conspirator, "are increasingly more intricate." Remarkably, after an introduction humiliating the not-so-bright Hanaba during a sexcapade, Otomo isn't seen that much. Two-thirds of the running time are devoted to the machinations of the gangs and the cops. Otomo and Ichikawa swing into action rather late, their task being to chop through the knots of plot and counterplot.
The opening few minutes spread out the key motifs. A fishing scene displaying Kitano's characteristic love for boyish pastimes is interrupted by the discovery of a pistol. The credits sequence announces the importance of cars with gorgeous shots of Otomo being driven through neon-lit streets, his ride seen from straight down as lights play over it. Throughout, deals are struck or broken in cars, and one memorable execution makes creative use of a Toyota. Even that banal filler, shots of cars pulling up and disgorging their riders, gets played for variations: distant thunder when bosses arrive for a conference, abstract configurations when rival forces meet on a rooftop.
During the 1990s Kitano was one of those directors working with what I've called planimetric staging and compass-point editing. (Wes Anderson, Terence Davies, and others worked the same territory.) Characters face the camera in medium shot, and shots change along the lens axis or at 90 degrees to it. It's as if we were in between the characters. When I asked Kitano about the technique back then, he claimed that it was his effort at realism, capturing how people faced one another in conversation. He added that he didn't know how to direct a scene, and this was the easiest way.
I thought that his images' paper-doll simplicity suggested a naivete suited to Kitano's childish hitmen. Moreover, this rigorous, geometrical technique takes on special impact when presenting mobster shootouts. Instead of ducking for cover as Woo's heroes do, Kitano's stand up and keep blasting, firing straight out at the viewer in tit-for-tate exchanges. His unflinching framing, refusing Woo's camera arabesques, gives these encounters a ceremonial gravity, turning them into rituals of professional righteousness. Last man standing, indeed.
The face-to-face shootouts in Outrage Coda adhere to this style, and early in the film so do the conversations. Here is Otomo discovering Hanada in his masochistic rig.
But for many dialogue scenes Kitano has gone with more orthodox staging and shooting. We get over-the-shoulder shots for conversation, tight close-ups to emphasize character reactions, and even that commonplace of modern cinematography, the arcing movement around a speaker to pick up a listener in the background. These choices allow Kitano to expose the ripe performances of the two conspiratorial dons Nishino (Nishida Toshiyuki) and Nakata (Shiomi Sansei); their leathery skin, slip-sliding jaws, and shouted outbursts gain a lot from this treatment. Not that I'm really complaining. In a slightly longer film than Manhunt, Kitano gives us around 700 shots, less than a quarter of Woo's outlay. Each image carries a lot of weight.
Outrage Coda concludes a trilogy, and at the press conference Kitano said that he conceived this and Outrage Beyond (2012) as one continuous phase of the story. He wanted the series to finish. The ending of this installment will fuel much speculation about his next move, and he hinted that he might adapt a forthcoming novel, one that's a love story. He's done one before in A Scene at the Sea, and arguably in Kikujiro (1999). His fans, who mobbed him at the panel, are certainly ready for whatever he comes up with.
Thanks as ever to all those at the Venice Film Festival who made our stay so enjoyable. Special thanks to Peter Cowie, Alberto Barbera, Michela Nazzarin, Jasna Zoranovich, and our colleagues at the Biennale College Cinema endeavor.
For more on John Woo's style of action cinema, see my book Planet Hong Kong. I discuss planimetric staging and compass-point editing in On the History of Film Style and several blog entries, notably the persistently popular Shot-consciousness (which has side notes on Kitano) as well as entries on Wes Anderson.
John Woo and Kitano Takeshi satisfy their fans.
Tuesday | September 12, 2017 | Directors: Kitano, Directors: Kore-eda Hirokazu, Directors: Woo, Festivals: Venice, Film comments, National cinemas: Hong Kong, National cinemas: Japan | No Comments »
Friendly books, books by friends
Moses and Aaron (1974).
When the stack of books by friends threatens to topple off my filing cabinet, I know it's time to flag them for you. I can't claim to have read every word in them, but (a) we know the authors are trustworthy and scintillating; (b) what I've read, I like; (c) the subjects hold immense interest. Then there's (d): Many are suitable seasonal gifts for the cinephiles in your life (which can include you).
Happy birthday, SMPTE
Starting off in 1916 as the Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, this peerless record of American moving-image technology has gone through many changes of name and format. It's now The SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal. Its back issues have been a treasure house for scholars studying the history of movie technology, and it has outdone itself for its 100th Anniversary Issue, published in August.
It includes survey articles on the history of film formats, cameras and lenses, recording and storage, workflows, displays, archiving, multichannel sound, and television and video. There's even an overview of closed-captioning. The issue costs $125 for non-SMPTE members, and it's worth it. Many libraries subscribe to the journal as well.
A highlight is John Belton's magisterial "The Last 100 Years of Motion Imaging," which includes twenty-two pages of dense timelines of innovations in film, TV, and video. They stretch back beyond 1916, to 1904 and the transmission of images by telegraph. John's article is provocative, suggesting that we might think of digital cinema as returning to film's origins in handmade images for optical toys.
Lucas predicted that digital postproduction brought film closer to painting, and for more and more filmmakers that prediction is coming true. I was startled to learn that 80% of Gone Girl was digitally enhanced after shooting.
Yes, sir, that's our BB
Die 3 Groschen-Oper (1931, G. W. Pabst).
During the 1970s, Bertolt Brecht's name was everywhere in film studies. He epitomized what an alternative, oppositional, or subversive cinema ought to be. Cinema, even more powerfully than theatre, was a machine for producing illusions. So in his name critics objected to happy endings, plots that tidied up reality, characters with whom we ought to identify, messages that masked the real nature of bourgeois society. Films made all these things seem part of the natural order of things.
The Brechtian antidote was, as people used to say, to "remind people they were watching a film." This was done by rejecting what he called the Aristotelian model and replacing it with the "alienation effect": a panoply of distancing devices like intertitles, characters addressing the camera, actors confessing they were actors, and a display of the means of cinematic production (including shots of the camera shooting the scene).
The promise was that once viewers were banished from the imaginary world of the film they would exercise their intellects and coolly appraise not only the fiction machine but its ideological underpinnings. Godard was the chief cinematic surrogate for Brecht, and La Chinoise (1967) became the big prototype of Brechtian cinema—unless you preferred the more austere version incarnated in Straub/Huillet's Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967) and their adaptation of Othon (1969). The ideas spread fast, helped by the user-friendly Brechtianism of Tout va bien (1972).
Brecht became part of Theory. In French literary and theatrical culture of the 1950s, his ideas on staging and performance had claimed the attention of Roland Barthes and other Parisian intellectuals. Godard was alert to the trend early, it seems; he had fun in Contempt (Le mépris, 1963) citing the two BB's (the other was Brigitte Bardot, bébé), and letting Lang quote a poem by his old collaborator and antagonist. By the time Anglo-American film theorists were ready for semiotics, Brecht was offering support. Didn't his anti-illusionism chime well with the belief that all sign systems were arbitrary and culturally relative?
My summary is too simple, but then so were many borrowings. Soon enough any highly artificial cinematic presentation might be called "Brechtian," though usually minus the politics. In the academic realm, Murray Smith's book Engaging Characters (1995) pointed out crucial weaknesses in the anti-illusionist, anti-empathy account. By then, the certified techniques were becoming part of mainstream cinema. Thereafter, we had Tarantino's section titles and plenty of movies breaking the fourth wall. Brecht might have enjoyed the irony of using the to-camera confessions of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) bent to support cynical swindling. Isn't The Big Short (2015) a sort of Hollywoodized lehrstück ("learning play")?
Brecht's writings should be read and studied by every humanist and certainly everybody interested in film. They're clear, blunt, and often sarcastic.
This beloved "human interest" of theirs, this How (usually dignified by the word "eternal," like some indelible dye) applied to the Othellos (my wife belongs to me!), the Hamlets (better sleep on it!), the Macbeths (I'm destined for higher things!), etc.
Now Marc Silberman, our colleague here at Madison, has completed a trio of books that make the master's work available. Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio includes essays, scripts, and the Threepenny Opera lawsuit brief. There's also Brecht on Performance and a complete revision of that trusty black-and-yellow volume dear to many grad students: Brecht on Theatre. The latter two collections Marc worked on with collaborators. All are indispensible to a cinephile's education. As Brecht imagined a bold political version of music he called misuc; can we imagine a cenima?
From BB to S/H
Speaking of Straub and Huillet, every decade or so somebody comes out with a book about them. This time we have to thank the admirable Ted Fendt, in the twenty-sixth volume in the series sponsored by the Austrian Film Museum (as well as the Goethe Institute and Synema). Like the Hou Hsiao-hsien volume (reviewed here), Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet is fat and full of ideas and information.
There are interviews, tributes from filmmakers (Gianvito, Farocki, Gorin), and Fendt's account of distribution and reception of their films in the Anglophone world. This last includes charming facsimile correspondence, with one Huillet letter pockmarked by faulty typewritten o's. As you'd expect, she is objecting to making a 16mm print of Moses and Aaron (1974) from the 35. ("No, definitively.")
Starting things off is a lively and comprehensive survey of the duo's careers by Claudia Pummer, with welcome emphasis on production circumstances and directorial strategies. The book wraps with a detailed thirty-page filmography and a substantial bibliography.
My thoughts about S/H are tied up with their earliest work, when I first learned of them. So I loved, and still love, Not Reconciled (1965) and The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach. I also have a fondness for Moses and Aaron, Class Relations (1983), From Today until Tomorrow (1996), and Sicilia! (1998). I find others out of my reach, and several others I haven't yet seen. People I respect find all their work stimulating, so I suspect it's really a matter of gaps in my taste.
Whether you like them or not, they're of tremendous historical importance. Without them, Jim Jarmusch and Béla Tarr, and of course Pedro Costa and Lav Diaz, would not have accomplished what they have. And especially in December 2016, we ought to find their unyielding ferocity inspiring. Remember them on Dreyer: "Any society that would not let him make his Jesus film is not worth a frog's fart." Brecht would have approved.
To the minimalism of Straub and Huillet we can counterpoint the maximalism of Oliver Stone, the most aggressive tabloid American director since Samuel Fuller (although Rococo-period Tony Scott gives him some competition). After two books on Wes Anderson, Matt Zoller Seitz has brought us a booklike slab as impossible as the man's films. Can you pick it up? Just barely. Can you read it? Well, probably not on your lap; better have a table nearby. Does its design mirror the maniacal scattershot energy of films like JFK (1991), Natural Born Killers (1994), and U-Turn (1997)? Watch the title propel itself off the cover.
The Oliver Stone Experience is basically a long interview, sandwiched in among luxurious photos, script extracts, correspondence, and the sort of insider memorabilia that Matt has a genius for finding. We get not only pictures of Stone with family and friends, on the set, and relaxing; there are bubblegum cards from the 40s, collages of posters and filming notes, maps, footnotes, and shards of texts slicing in from every which way. Newspapers, ads, and production documents are scissored into the format, including a Bob Dole letter fundraising on the basis of the naughtiness of Natural Born Killers. Beautiful frame enlargements pay homage to the split-diopter framings of Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and the shadow of the 9/11 plane sliding up a facade in World Trade Center (2006). When Stone had second thoughts about things he'd said, Matt had the good idea of redacting the interview like a CIA file scoured with thick black lines.
The whole thing comes at you in a headlong rush. Amid the pictorial churn and several essays by other deft hands, we plunge into and out of that stellar interview, mixing biography and filmmaking nuts-and-bolts. Matt gets deep into technical matters, such as Stone's penchant for rough-hewn editing, as well as raising some big ideas about myth and autobiography. There are occasional quarrels between interviewer and interviewee. Out of the blue we get remarks like "Alexander was not only bisexual, he was trisexual," which was not redacted.
The book's very excess helps make the case for Stone's idiosyncratic vision. Matt's connecting essays, along with the vast visual archive he's scavenged and mashed up, made me want to rethink my attitude toward this overweening, sometimes crass, sometimes inspired filmmaker. He now seems a quintessential 80s-90s figure, as much a part of the era as Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Stone emerges as a resourceful defender of The Oliver Stone Experience, articulating a radical political critique with gonzo verve.
Rhapsody in white
If lifting the Book of Stone doesn't suffice for exercise, try another weighty and sumptuous item, King of Jazz: Paul Whiteman's Technicolor Revue, by James Layton and David Pierce. Last spring the Museum of Modern Art premiered one of the most ravishing restorations I've ever seen, a digital version of King of Jazz (1930).
This period piece is in its own way as wild as an Oliver Stone movie. From its opening cartoon of Paul himself as a Great White Hunter bagging a lion, it's a virtually self-parodying account of how a black musical tradition got netted, trussed up, and caged for the swaying delectation of white audiences. (No need to mention the irony of the name of our King.)
Along the way we have some straight-up songs (including some by Bing Crosby) spread among extravagant dance numbers. The Universal crane gets a workout as well. The music is infectious, the performers sweating to please, and the restoration–coming, I hope, to your screen soon–finally shows what two-color Technicolor could do. This is the definitive version of a film too often known in cut versions with shabby visuals and sound.
The book is an in-depth contextualization of the film, the studio, and the tradition of musical revues, both on stage and in film. It records the production and reception, with rich documentation throughout. The story of assembling the restoration is there too, and it's a saga in itself. David is one of the moving spirits behind the online Media History Digital Library and its gateway Lantern. James is Manager of the Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center at the Museum of Modern Art. Their collaboration has given us both a lush picture book and a serious, always enjoyable piece of scholarship. Their book proves the value of crowdsourcing: funded by online subscription, it was self-published. In this and much else, it can be a model for film historians pursuing questions that commercial and university presses might find too specialized. The result is a model of ambitious research, writing, and publishing.
Visiting Radio Ranch
Gene Autry in The Phantom Empire (1935).
For about thirty years I've been arguing that one fruitful research program in film studies involves what I call a poetics of cinema: the study of how, under particular historical conditions, films are made to achieve certain effects. This program coaxes the researcher to analyze form and style, study changing norms of production and reception, and consider how filmmakers work in their institutions and creative communities, with special focus on craft routines, work methods, and tacit theories about the ways to make a movie.
A sturdy example of this approach has appeared from Scott Higgins. His Matinee Melodrama fulfills the promise of its subtitle: Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial. Scott has closely examined this widely despised genre, plunging into the 200 "chapterplays" produced in America between 1930 and 1956. They offer bald and bold display of the rudiments of action-based storytelling: "If Hitchcock built cathedrals of suspense from fine brickwork of intersecting subjectivities and formal manipulations, sound serials used Tinkertoys."
Scott traces production practices and conventions, focusing in particular on two dimensions. First, to a surprising degree, serials rely on the conventions of classic stage melodrama, such as coincidence and more or less gratuitous spectacle. Second, the serials are playful, even knowing. Like video games, they invite viewers to imagine preposterous narrative possibilities, not only in the imagination but also on the playground, where kids could mimic what they saw Flash Gordon or Gene Autry do.
Matinee Melodrama investigates the implications of these dimensions for narrative architecture, visual style, and the film and television of our day. Scott closes with analysis of the James Bond series, the self-conscious mimicking of serial conventions in the Indiana Jones blockbusters, and the Bourne saga, and he shows how they amp up the older conventions. "Like the contemporary action film generally, the Bourne movies participate in a cinematic practice vigorously constituted by studio-era serials. That is, they blend melodrama with forceful articulations of physical procedure in scenes of pursuit, entrapment and confrontation."
Poetics, frank or stealthy
The Red Detachment of Women (1971).
Scott's book acknowledges the poetics research program, and so, even more explicitly, does a new collection edited by Gary Bettinson and James Udden. The Poetics of Chinese Cinema gathers several essays that usefully test and stretch that frame of reference.
One standard challenge to the poetics approach is: How do you handle social, cultural, and political factors that impinge on film? I think the best way to answer this is to treat these factors as causal influences on a film's production and reception. More specifically, in the production process, what we now call memes function as materials—subjects, themes, stereotypes, and common ideas circulating in the culture or the filmmaking institution. In the reception process, they provide conceptual structures that viewers can use in making their own sense of the films that they're given. And such materials will necessarily include other art forms; films are constantly adapting and borrowing from literature, drama, and other media.
Both of these possibilities are vigorously explored in several essays in The Poetics of Chinese Cinema. For instance, Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh traces how Taiwanese and Japanese cultural materials are reworked by Hou Hsiao-hsien in his Ozu homage Café Lumière (2003). Peter Rist, a long-time student of Chinese painting, shows how Chen Kaige deploys cinematic means to revise landscape traditions to create a "Contemplative Modernism." Victor Fan shows how the Hong Kong classic In the Face of Demolition (1960) adapts and revises a mode of narration already established in Cantonese theatre. In a clever piece called "Can Poetics Break Bricks?" Song Hwee Lim considers how digital technology feeds into a poetics of spectacle, specifically around slow-motion techniques that were emerging in pre-digital filmmaking.
Tradition is a key concept in poetics, and the editors explore important ones in their own contributions. Gary Bettinson studies the emergence of Hong Kong puzzle films in works like Mad Detective (2007) and Wu Xia (2011). Are they simple imitation of Hollywood, or are they doing something different? Gary shows them to have complicated ties to local traditions of storytelling. Jim Udden focuses more on stylistics in his account of Fei Mu's 1948 classic Spring in a Small Town, remade by Tian Zhuangzhuang in 2002. By examining staging, cutting, and voice-over, Jim shows that the earlier film is in many ways more "modern" than it's usually thought and is somewhat more experimental than the remake.
It might seem that the "model" operas and plays of the Cultural Revolution, epitomized in The Red Detachment of Women (1971) would resist an aesthetic analysis; they're determined, top-down fashion, by strict canons of political messaging. But Chris Berry's contribution shows that they're amenable to close analysis too. Like Soviet Socialist Realism, they may be programmatic in meaning, but not in every choice about framing, performance, cutting, and music. Indeed, the fact that people both inside and outside China (me included) still find them pleasurable probably owes something to their "Red Poetics." And in true Hong Kong fashion, many filmmakers in that territory plundered those soundtracks with shameless, drop-the-needle panache.
I should probably add that I have an essay in this collection too. It's called "Five Lessons from Stealth Poetics," and it surveys things I've learned from studying cinema of the "three Chinas": Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Mainland. What attracted me were the films themselves, but in exploring them I was obliged to nuance and stretch the poetics approach. Readers of this blog know the trick: in talking about particular movies, I also try to show the virtues of the approach I favor. In other words, stealth poetics.
This is a good moment to pay tribute to Alexander Horwath, moving into his final nine or so months of directing the Austrian Film Museum. He has been a major figure in European film culture, through his inspired programming and leadership in publishing the books and DVDs issued by the Museum. We're very grateful for all he has done for us and for film historians around the world.
P.S. 11 December 2016: Thanks to Mike Grost for a title correction and John Belton for a name correction!
King of Jazz (1930).
Saturday | December 10, 2016 | Directors: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Film technique: Music, Film technology, Film theory, Hollywood: Artistic traditions, National cinemas: China, National cinemas: Hong Kong, National cinemas: Taiwan | No Comments »
Dragons, tigers, and two programmers
Yellowing (Chan Tze Woon, 2016).
It was Asian film that brought me to the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2006, when Tony Rayns asked me to serve on the Dragons and Tigers awards jury. Ever since, Kristin and I have been returning; Tony made VIFF North America's prime venue for cutting-edge Asian film. Name a major director from the region, and you'll find that Tony scouted his or her early work for Vancouver.
For some years now, Tony's co-programmer has been Chinese cinema expert Shelly Kraicer, who has been no less energetic in seeking out exciting new films. You can survey their track record by scanning our VIFF blog entries across the years.
Out of the many films in this year's D & T retrospective, here are five that I especially admire.
Genres redux
Across his career, Kore-eda Hirokazu has been a genre pluralist, but in recent years he seems to have settled into the shomin-geki, the bittersweet tale of lower-middle-class life. On the heels of Our Little Sister comes another family dramedy, After the Storm.
Once a prize-winning novelist, Ryota (the lanky, lantern-jawed Abe Hiroshi) is now a racetrack addict and a cheap detective not averse to shaking down high-school kids. After his father dies, and under the jaundiced eyes of his mother, he makes feeble efforts to reunite with his divorced wife and his baseball-playing son.
As usual with Kore-eda, everything flows in simple, unforced fashion, with every shot trimly composed and expertly timed. The emphasis falls on the actors, particularly as they're captured in mundane activities. Ryota's mother and sister are first seen writing thank-you notes to people who came to the funeral; he swills in fast food and throws away money on lottery tickets.
Ryota is one of Kore-eda's most objectionable protagonists. He uses his admittedly minimal surveillance skills to spy on his wife, and he tries to swipe a family scroll to pawn. In an American film, this unlikable loser would pass through an arc that makes him caring, sharing, and on the road to rehab. Instead, as in many Japanese films, the unhappy character relapses into childhood—here, curling up with his son inside a playground octopus during a typhoon. It's his effort to mimic a bonding moment with his father, but does it succeed now? Kore-eda isn't betting on it.
Altogether less tranquil is Godspeed, from the Taiwanese director Chung Mong-hung. Chung has given us the horror film Soul (2013), the well-received Fourth Portrait (2010), and the lively Parking (2008), which I reviewed at an earlier VIFF session.
Godspeed is a Tarantinoish excursion into the underworld. It alternates violent scenes of betrayal and reprisals with comic interludes involving a drug courier and the taxi driver he's hired to carry him to meet the bosses. The film is made with great panache, but for me what makes it noteworthy is that the driver is played by the great Michael Hui, dean of sour Hong Kong social satire.
Hui made his name as a television star before switching to films like The Private Eyes (1976), Security Unlimited (1981), and our favorite, Chicken and Duck Talk (1988). Godspeed revives Hui's comic persona, the tight-fisted, corner-cutting bargainer who isn't as clever as he thinks. As Old Xu, he reminisces about Hong Kong traffic and marital woes while trying to wangle a high fare from the phlegmatic, not overbright drug mule. Their misadventures—stumbling into a funeral, being stuffed into a car boot—serve as a counterpoint to the drug war escalating around them. No masterpiece, Godspeed is a beguiling exercise and a welcome return to a legendary and apparently ageless figure of Chinese cinema.
Mysterious, and fun
Another year, another stroll through Hong Sangsoo's garden of forking paths.
With compositions that are about as banal as they can be, the films don't aim to dazzle us pictorially. (Nice lighting, though.) The basics are really basic: Straight-on angles, fixed long take two-shots, simple come-and-go pans, an occasional and inexplicable zoom. These are his tools.
Dialogue and performance drive the action, which consists mostly of chance encounters and conversations in cafés, bars, restaurants, and bedrooms. His characters are students, artists, and film directors (usually fairly pretentious ones). Romantic hookups emerge, only to dissolve or play themselves out in parallel worlds, the whole presented in a "stacked" arrangement of modular scenes.
These scenic blocks display an obsessive, almost never mechanical, recourse to split viewpoints, recursive time schemes, mirror inversions, and whimsically varied replays. I've argued earlier that these permutations often test our faulty memory for exactly what transpired in a scene many minutes before, but it should be noted that sometimes, as in the last stretch of Oki's Movie (2010), he'll set the variations side by side.
Or maybe just side by side in your head. If the auteur theory didn't exist, it would have to be invented to account for the effect of Yourself and Yours. In any other movie, when a man recognizes a young woman in a café, and she says he's mistaken her for her twin, we might be inclined to take it as a brush-off. In a Hong movie, the scene makes us think back through all his other plots that have relied on doubling. So maybe this time he's found a new variation? Has he got an actual pair of twins who will circulate through the scenes, constantly being taken for one another?
Suffice it to say that the young woman (women?), repeatedly encountering three men who are attracted to her (them?), becomes (become?) the pretext for the usual Hong mockery of male vanity and insecurity. The lackadaisical painter Youngsoo is worried about his girlfriend Minjung, who drinks more than he'd like. Moreover, his friend reports that she's been seen with other men. Quickly enough, we spot her sharing drinks with an older man and a film director—who discover that they are old classmates. "This is mysterious," the director remarks, "and fun." None of the would-be Romeos notice that the lady in question is reading Kafka's The Metamorphosis.
Hong always has another card up his sleeve, and Yourself and Yours, while not as ingenious as his previous entry Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), is satisfyingly teasing. It also yields one of the most flagrantly self-indulgent trailers I know: faithful to the movie, but frustrating in just the right ways.
When college students en masse join a movement for social change, their positions tend to be vindicated in the long run. In the United States, students were right to support movements against nuclear proliferation, against racial discrimination, against American involvement in Vietnam, for women's liberation and LGBT rights, against the invasion of Iraq, and, right here in Wisconsin, against Republican union-busting and voter suppression. The same pattern can be observed around the world, in student protests in Europe, South America, and Asia. Elders deride students as naïve, but more often than not, student activists critical of the status quo get principled politics right.
Why? I suspect several causes, including the fact that many (not all) students are reading, thinking, and learning while the general populace trudges through the dull compulsion of everyday labor. College flings together students from many backgrounds and may open eyes about how other people live. (Right-wingers worry too much about liberal professors indoctrinating students. In my experience, students are more influenced by their peers than by the likes of me.) And of course the flexible scheduling of college days allows motivated students the time to engage in political action.
Whatever the causes, it's no surprise that in Hong Kong, the street protests running from September through December of 2014 were launched by young people. In August the mainland's Communist Party decreed that instead of direct election of the territory's Chief Executive, candidates would be chosen by a nominating committee comprised of businessmen and politicians sympathetic to Beijing. In effect, this guaranteed a puppet leader of the type all too familiar in the territory. Students responded by organizing actions similar to the Occupy movement in America. With surprising speed, civil disobedience and sit-down occupation spread through downtown areas of Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula.
Hong Kongers were long considered indifferent to politics, only concerned with scrambling to get ahead and make money. But the world had to notice when tens of thousands of students and ordinary men and women built vast encampments in the streets in front of chic shops and noodle restaurants. Wearing yellow ribbons and hard-hats, and armed with umbrellas to protect them against sun, rain, and tear gas, they were apparently ready for a long stay.
This epochal event in Hong Kong history is documented in Yellowing, a new film by Chan Tse Woon. It was made under the auspices of Ying e chi, a filmmaking collective that has been working since the propitious year 1997, when the British turned the territory over to the People's Republic. Although framed as a diary, it's basically a cinéma vérité account of moments and vignettes of the Umbrella Revolution. The voice-over narration is keenly personal, beginning with home-movie footage of Chan's childhood and youth, interrupted by his memory of repeated promises that democracy would soon arrive.
Loosely organized, Yellowing offers no systematic chronology of events à la a PBS program. It's defiantly local, a snapshot album for Hong Kongers who will recognize each phase of the movement. At the start, some gorgeous nighttime cityscapes are shattered by confrontations with police ("Police, retreat," the students chant) and conversations with student organizers in their down time. In the two hours that follow, we spend a lot of that time with young people like the ceaselessly beaming Rachel, who's now considering becoming a civil rights lawyer. We see one boy passing out wristbands reading, They can't kill us all.
Students set up tents, squat in pounding rain, organize English classes, and run supply chains across the vast areas of occupation. There are clashes with police and civilians. ("Your flesh and blood belongs to your family," a man charges.) Chan's camera captures, helter-skelter, assaults from cops and street gangs. There are camera duels, with police filming demonstrators while demonstrators film police. Chan's voice-over says that he thought his camera would protect him, but he still gets punched in the face. The occupiers practice tactical evasion and passive resistance, but there's no effort to heroicize them. Many are crying as police lead them away.
Despite the almost casual presentation, you realize how much these kids are risking. Many are poor, some are trying to hang onto a job, and nearly all realize that this will change their lives. "Even if we lose this fight, we'll lose together." As for the angry citizens wearing blue ribbons declaring support for authorities, the students are sympathetic: "Don't you think they need democracy too?"
The film circles back to the opening, with Daddy-cam shots of children. We hear Rachel writing in reply to a professor who had urged the students to give way for the sake of "security," and to stop being tools of "foreign subversion." The film lingers on her cheerful, polite suggestion that Mainland domination has replaced British colonialism, and that the children of the future deserve better.
Most of our politicians and all of our plutocrats will never know the sort of courage that these young people displayed with modest, good-humored tenacity. Unarmed—unlike the Y'all Queda fraidycats who occupied our Oregon wildlife refuge—these unprepossessing kids stood a very good chance of being brutalized by a government not known for recognizing the niceties of due process. You feel proud of the young people of Hong Kong while watching this heartbreaking, hopeful film. As often happens, the students were both righteous and right.
Not hope, fear
Ying e chi has often worked with theatres to show independent films, but Yellowing has been denied a theatrical release. Instead, Variety reports, producer Vincent Chui has arranged for guerrilla screenings. Five ticketed shows were held at the Hong Kong Film Archive, in order to qualify for this year's Hong Kong Film Awards.
The resistance to Yellowing doubtless owes a lot to the controversy surrounding another film, Ten Years (2015). It won astonishing success in local theatres. According to Maggie Lee in Variety, it cost only US$65,000 but earned nearly $800,000 before Beijing realized how subversive it was and blasted it as a "thought virus." Ten Years was nominated for a Hong Kong Film Award, which made the PRC cancel television coverage of the ceremony. When the film won the Best Picture prize, shock waves went through the film community, and it was denounced by producers and executives. It was soon cast out of theatres, but screenings continued in community centers, churches, and outdoor venues. It's slated for a DVD release soon.
Ten Years consists of five shorts linked by the premise of local life in 2025. In its dystopian portrayal of Mainland domination of Hong Kong, it's a fairly direct outgrowth of the Umbrella Revolution. But if Yellowing documents the movement's hope, this film exposes, as many commentators have noted, fear.
One episode, "Extras," dramatizes behind-the-scenes scenes political machinations as a sort of noir comedy. Two hapless thugs are hired to stage an assassination attempt that will arouse public support for a new security law. While the men rehearse their gun choreography, the puppeteers debate whether killing or wounding the targets would play better in the media.
Other episodes are more concerned with the cultural impact of Beijing's dominance of local life. "Season of the End" presents scientists searching rubble for signs of now-vanished Hong Kong life, shot in ominously clinical detail. "Dialect" presumes that Mandarin is becoming the official language of the territory, and we see a taxi driver struggling to cast off his Cantonese. "Local Egg" also centers on language. Here a shopkeeper is forbidden to use the word "local" because it suggests those political factions struggling to keep Hong Kong distinct, or maybe pushing it to become independent. In an echo of the Cultural Revolution, this episode shows schoolkids in uniform arriving with iPads to check shops' compliance with the list of forbidden words and retail items.
The most emotionally wrenching episode, "Self-Immolator," is a pseudo-documentary. Startling scorch-marks on the sidewalk are the traces of someone who burned to death in protest of government oppression. Through talking heads, a collage of demonstration footage, and some investigation, the film traces how a young man's hunger strike led to the mysterious self-immolation. Several candidates for the self-sacrifice are canvassed before, in a break with the documentary frame, the protest suicide is shown. In the conclusion, an umbrella is seen aflame, perhaps forming a requiem for the 2014 protests.
Ten Years is a good example of how a film can have social importance because of the moment at which it emerges. Along with Yellowing, it will be a lasting memorial to the struggles of Hong Kong people to introduce democracy to China.
Thanks to Tony and Shelly for all their work in setting up these screenings. In addition, Kristin and I are grateful to Alan Franey, PoChu AuYeung, and Jennie Lee Craig and their colleagues for making our VIFF visit so enjoyable and enlightening. Special thanks to Tallulah for cheerfulness and Lillooet for the waffles.
Thanks to our regular attendance at VIFF, we've discussed many of Hong Sangsoo's films; see the director category.
The development of the Umbrella Revolution is traced in this long New York Times story. Last August, accused student leaders got surprisingly light sentences. Some of the "localists" and Occupiers won places in the Legco elections and are expected to make waves.
Tony Rayns and Shelly Kraicer.
Tuesday | October 18, 2016 | Directors: Hong Sangsoo, Directors: Kore-eda Hirokazu, Festivals: Vancouver, National cinemas: Hong Kong | No Comments »


text:
Název Zdeslavice má více sídel:
 Zdeslavice (Číhošť), část obce Číhošť v okrese Havlíčkův Brod
 Zdeslavice (Černíny), část obce Černíny v okrese Kutná Hora
 Zdeslavice (Chlístovice), část obce Chlístovice v okrese Kutná Hora

Externí odkazy

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
//  Copyright 2021 The KeepTry Open Source Project
//
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
// you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
// You may obtain a copy of the License at
//
//     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
//
// Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
// distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
// WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
// See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
// limitations under the License.
//

package sort.heap;

import java.util.Comparator;
import java.util.PriorityQueue;
import java.util.Queue;

/** LeetCode */
public class Leetcode407TrappingRainWaterII {
  static class E { // 'class' lower case
    int r, c, h;

    public E(int r, int c, int h) {
      this.r = r;
      this.c = c;
      this.h = h;
    }
  }
  // Get out the current water level cell, BFS to its unvisited neighbors:
  // record visited.
  // if the neighbor is lower,:
  //      sure it will keep water,
  //      assume it is filled water, update its level to current water level.
  // add the neighbors to the bounder circle.
  //
  // improvement: when visited neighbor is lower the current water level cell
  // continue BFS from there  to save the process of put it in circle and fetch it out again.
  public int trapRainWater(int[][] heightMap) {
    // as there is at least 2 element
    if (heightMap == null || heightMap.length < 3 || heightMap[0].length < 3) return 0;
    // at least is is 3x3 matrix
    int m = heightMap.length;
    int n = heightMap[0].length;

    boolean[][] v = new boolean[m][n]; // default false

    Queue<E> q = new PriorityQueue<E>((Comparator<E>) (a, b) -> a.h - b.h);

    int[][] nb4 = new int[][] {{0, 1}, {0, -1}, {1, 0}, {-1, 0}};

    // initial q
    for (int i = 0; i < m; i++) {
      q.offer(new E(i, 0, heightMap[i][0]));
      v[i][0] = true;
      q.offer(new E(i, n - 1, heightMap[i][n - 1]));
      v[i][n - 1] = true;
    }
    for (int j = 0; j < n; j++) { // 4 corners are ignorable.
      q.offer(new E(0, j, heightMap[0][j]));
      v[0][j] = true;
      q.offer(new E(m - 1, j, heightMap[m - 1][j]));
      v[m - 1][j] = true;
    }
    // calculate result
    int res = 0;
    while (!q.isEmpty()) {
      E e = q.poll(); // no pop method
      for (int[] nb : nb4) {
        int r = e.r + nb[0], c = e.c + nb[1];
        if (0 <= r && r < m && 0 <= c && c < n && v[r][c] == false) { // valid E
          v[r][c] = true;
          //  there is waters only when cur elevation is lower than the polled one.
          res += Math.max(e.h - heightMap[r][c], 0);
          q.offer(new E(r, c, Math.max(e.h, heightMap[r][c]))); // keep the water level
        }
      }
    }
    return res;
  }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Google, Nokia, Ericsson And Navigation's Next Frontier: The Great Indoors
Getting around inside unfamiliar buildings is about to get a lot easier.
By Kit Eaton 3 minute Read
Remember the last time you visited a new office building, airport, or university campus and were lost the moment you stepped away from the main doors? That's a problem that buildings like large hospitals try to fix with color-coded lines painted on the floor, complex signage systems, and other tweaks–usually very low-tech. Smartphone tech and intelligent mapping systems are about to change all that.
On Tuesday, Google introduced the latest version of its maps for Android, which will include detailed layouts for Ikea, Macy's, and 18 U.S. airports. Then yesterday, Nokia announced that it will be offering its own version of indoor maps using Bluetooth 4.0 as the technology. The race to map indoor space has begun–but with two very different types of technologies.
Bluetooth gets a bad rap thanks to those sci-fi-looking ear-bug headsets and the odd user behavior that goes with them. But the technology is powerful, simple, cheap, and it just got a lot smarter with the new Bluetooth 4 protocol. That was the starting point for a system that Nokia calls its Location Extension Protocol. It's similar to GPS, but instead of a precise set of radio waves being broadcast down to Earth from the stratosphere (which is why it's weak indoors–the signals don't penetrate far inside), Nokia's system links Bluetooth 4 with a sequence of locator emitters dotted along the ceilings of an indoor space. Using a triangulation method similar to GPS, the phone can then work out exactly where it is in three dimensions in indoor space. A pre-existing map of the space will still be needed in order to make the positinoning data meaningful to a lost conference attendee, but it's said to be precise down to about eight inches in position.
Nokia has spent billions of Euros on R&D, hoping this sort of breakthrough tech could give it a competitive edge. The firm is investigating all sorts of uses for the system, from gaming to true indoor navigation. The company has also been lobbying the Bluetooth Special Interest Group to agree on a standard for the system, in the hope that phones with it can go on sale by 2013.
But in the same way that GPS is almost useless without detailed maps of roads, indoor positioning systems won't be much use without detailed plans of buildings and structures–so that, for example, you know you're in Great Hall A and need to take the third corridor on the right to get to your destination. And that's where recent plans from Google plug into the story.
In much the same way that Google allows users of SketchUp to crowdsource detailed 3-D versions of important buildings and landmarks for its systems, it's now allowing users to add interior floor plans of buildings to Google Maps. It's a simple process, Google points out, that merely involves uploading "pictures of your floor plans, blueprints or directories" and then lining up the submissions with satellite images in Google Maps. The data is incredibly rich and enables Google to literally see inside the buildings whose facades it images in StreetView. For now the Google Maps 6.0 for Android edition is where they show up, but this is Google we're talking about, and it won't be long before the Maps are available elsewhere.
Not only is Google getting an army of interested users to do massive amounts of donkey work for it for free, but it's assembling a database of internal maps that it can thread into all sorts of future location-based services, including location-based adverts.
The pieces all have to come together to produce a useful product, but with other firms like Ericsson working on the problem (it recently released an Indoor Maps and Positioning API for Android) it won't be long before your smartphone also helps you navigate inside the building its GPS powers directed you to by car.
As to how this tech may evolve in the future, check out Microsoft's old Vision of the Future promo clip. It's indoor nav solution is powerful, compelling:
There's just one thing the video neatly sidesteps: All of the odd security, crime, and privacy-related issues that this sort of innovation is bound to stir up. If we freak out about Google taking an image of our streets, having the data-thirsty giant act as a repository of plans for all of our buildings is bound to be controversial.
Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.
I'm covering the science/tech/generally-exciting-and-innovative beat for Fast Company. Follow me on Twitter, or Google+ and you'll hear tons of interesting stuff, I promise. I've also got a PhD, and worked in such roles as professional scientist and theater technician...thankfully avoiding jobs like bodyguard and chicken shed-cleaner (bonus points if you get that reference!)
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How Dry January became a gateway drug for non-alcoholic booze marketing
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This moving film will make you rethink your use of fossil fuels
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How to turn the job you have into one you love
How to avoid feeling burned out when traveling for work


text:
Gardon peut désigner :
 le gardon, petit poisson d'eau douce ;
 le gardon galant, autre poisson d'eau douce ;
 le gardon, instrument de musique à cordes d'origine hongroise ;
 le Gardon, aussi appelé le Gard, rivière du sud-est de la France, formée par :
le Gardon d'Anduze,
le Gardon d'Alès.
 le Gardon, affluent de la rivière d'Ain.

Patronyme

 Bernard Gardon (né en 1951), footballeur français ;
 Olivier Gardon, pianiste français.

Voir aussi
 Ce terme est également utilisé dans l'expression « frais comme un gardon » (expression dans le dictionnaire).
Le Gardon appelé aussi Natrix maura vit dans le lac du Broc près de Nice

Homonymie d'hydronyme


text:
Home » Features » NOT HURRYING IT ALONG
NOT HURRYING IT ALONG
Casii Stephan slowly works her way toward pumping up music output
Posted on April 22, 2019 by medleyville in Features // 0 Comments
When Casii Stephan moved five years ago from Minnesota's Twin Cities area to Tulsa, Oklahoma, tapping into her new home's renowned sound — or any sound, for that matter — was probably the furthest thing from her mind.
Stephan had put her music aspirations on the back burner and was looking for what she categorizes as "a change of life" in Tulsa, not follow in the footsteps of Leon Russell, J.J. Cale and others. Little did Stephan know that her change of life there would include a return to singing, thanks to a persuasive friend she met at church.
Directed to an online stream of a Stephan EP, Amira Al-Jiboori recalls being struck by the "versatility in her voice, her vibrato and her soft subtleties."
"I knew that if she wanted to start [playing music] in Tulsa, no one sounded like her," adds Al-Jiboori, who now manages Stephan and also plays percussion in her backing band, The Midnight Sun.
"There's definitely that sound still there, the Tulsa Sound, but there's also other genres," explains Stephan. "There's a really good pop scene there, along with jazz-fusion. I think I'm unique in the area. I am more on the outskirts, but I've been welcomed in by the Tulsa Sound people and others."
Music is a part-time career for Stephan at this point, and her output since relocating to Tulsa has been a handful of singles. The latest is a good one: the gutsy, dynamic rocker "Letters," and she describes the recently released video for it as "abstract and a little creepy."
As for the song, she says, "It was written after a frustrating time with online dating — not getting responses, not being able to connect with someone."
Connecting with fans through more than a single at a time is in the plans for this year, as is a tour of Texas, where she performed in March as a South by Southwest showcasing artist.
"I've been told by people in the industry to not do an album until I'm ready to say something specific," Stephan says. "I'm just trying to figure out how to do music in a smarter way."
— By Chris M. Junior
Casii Stephan concert schedule (subject to change):
May 8: Tulsa Performing Arts Center — Tulsa, Oklahoma
May 14: The Shrine — Tulsa, Oklahoma
Casii Stephan in Austin, Texas, in March 2019. Photo by Chris M. Junior
Casii Stephan
SXSW 2017 PREVIEW:
MOLLY BURCH
THE HEART COLLECTORS
CLAIRE MORALES
Dutch band Taymir sets its sights on cracking new markets
SXSW 2018 PREVIEW: LISA MORALES


Aberdonians are top of the Scots when it comes to enjoying a tan, according to a poll.
Aberdeen came second only to Wolverhampton in the UK for people who say they feel better when bronzed.
In a survey by Virgin Holidays, 67 per cent reported that their mood is lifted by having a tan, compared to 75 per cent in the West Midlands city.
Glasgow was the only other Scottish city to make the top 10, taking seventh place with 58 per cent.
Virgin Holidays today trooped bikini and trunk-clad models through UK high streets, including Glasgow's Buchanan Street, to encourage shoppers to take advantage of its summer break deals by booking now.
The firm said it will this year promote responsible holiday tanning with a number of initiatives.
The survey of 2,000 people by One Poll was carried out between December 20 and 23.


Dragon Ball Z Abridged episode 8! Hilarious.
Cuz I wanna be wit chu.
Reviving this topic. Needs moar youtube fads.
!@#$% FUNimation, this is quite obviously the greatest DBZ dub of all time.
My favourite paordy video series. The most recent one.
Don't care if you've seen them both before >_>, they're HIL-ARious.
Seen the rum one before.
My best rated and most commented on video... Enjoy.
EDIT: Also I've been watching $00pah nin10doh!! It's a bunch of small parodies of nintendo games.
Duet with John Denver and Kohsetsu Minami for the song "Country Roads". It's a good song really and even though I didn't grow up in West Virginia I can relate to what it's like to be away from where you're from.
There are others, but that one's my favourite. Pretty great stuff.
Funny story: I have met and interviewed the guy behind this video for a local newspaper. He recently graduated from my university.


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Employees saved us from difficult times
The 5,500 crore rupees conglomerate, Suguna Holdings, started with seed money of Rs.5000 in poultry business during the 1980s faced difficult times in 2000, but made an astounding recovery after employees of Suguna Poultry raised Rs.12 crore and gave it to the company.
B Soundararajan, Managing Director, Suguna Holdings, with The Weekend Leader - VIT Amazing Entrepreneur Award at VIT Vellore (Photos: H K Rajashekar)
"The employees took the risk, because they had faith in the company," remarked B Soundararajan, Managing Director, Suguna Holdings, addressing students of VIT Business School after receiving The Weekend Leader – VIT Amazing Entrepreneur Award at VIT Vellore last week.
Suguna Poultry, later rechristened as Suguna Foods, registered rapid growth, and today is the flagship company of Suguna Holdings, contributing 98 per cent of the group's revenues.
Dr. S K Sekar, Dean, School of Mechanical and Building Sciences, VIT, presented the award to Soundararajan, who was one among the top entrepreneurs featured in The Weekend Leader's Amazing Entrepreneurs series.
Dr. S K Sekar, Dean, School of Mechanical and Building Sciences, VIT, presenting the award to Soundararajan. Also seen are P C Vinoj Kumar, Editor, The Weekend Leader and Dr. Kalyani Rangarajan, Dean, VIT Business School
Felicitating Soundararajan, Sekar said the Suguna success story was inspiring and urged the students to become entrepreneurs.
Soundararajan made a PowerPoint presentation on his entrepreneurial journey and revealed that in 2010 he had planned to exit from the business, handing over the reins to his brother G B Sundararajan.
But his brother prevailed upon him to reconsider his decision. Soundararajan then travelled to the US and UK and studied the best business practices there.
Soundararajan during an interaction with the students
He came back enlightened and with a clear vision to diversify the business. The result was the creation of Suguna Holdings, which was formed with the mandate of looking at multiple businesses.
The group has stakes in poultry feeds and vaccines, assets management, and gold and iron mining.
Sravanthi, MBA first year student, receiving the 'best question' prize from Soundararajan
As MD of Suguna Holdings, Soundararajan does not involve himself in operations of the group's businesses, but is focused on exploring new opportunities.
"In the Middle East, there are families running as many as 30 businesses," said Soundararajan, who has set himself a target of starting one new business every year.
Soundararajan at the customary selfie session with the students
Soundararajan later interacted with the students in a lively Q & A session that was moderated by The Weekend Leader's Editor, P C Vinoj Kumar. Kalyani Rangarajan, Dean, VIT Business School, also addressed the students. – TWL Bureau
'People are the most important assets of any company'


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Home » Optimizing the Performance of Thermal-Processing Operations with Integrated Software Solutions
Heat TreatingIndustrial Gases & AtmospheresProcess Control & Instrumentation
INDUSTRIAL GASES/COMBUSTION
Optimizing the Performance of Thermal-Processing Operations with Integrated Software Solutions
Fig. 1. Pusher carburizing furnace
Fig. 2. UBQ universal batch quench IQ furnace
Fig. 3. UBTC universal batch transfer car
Fig. 4. Screen shot of HMI in calibration mode
Justin Bunzeluk and Michael Coburn
KEYWORDS captive heat treating / commercial heat treating / industrial furnaces / maintenance management system / process control / software
Whether captive or commercial, the heat-treat operation faces a tougher challenge for productivity/profitability than other departments of manufacturing.
Computerized Maintenance Management Systems
Remote Diagnostics™ (or RDX) is one of the computerized maintenance management systems designed to increase furnace uptime and productivity through analysis of and reaction to equipment performance data. Data is gathered from the furnace PLC, allowing the customer and AFC-Holcroft to interrogate the furnace data via web conference.
By examining the data, a team of furnace experts can diagnose potential recurring issues and recommend corrective actions. Through this process, the equipment OEM can help customers target the most common causes of unplanned downtime and take steps to remedy them. Real, data-driven reliability and maintainability information gathered supports continuous improvement efforts, which can lead to both process and product advancements.
Remote Diagnostics™ – How It Works
Remote Diagnostics™ (RDX) starts with the acquisition of the furnace's operational and historical data as stored in the HMI from the PLC or else transferred from the PLC to an RDX unit. The data can be collected manually by the customer, by the OEM through remote login or by automating the transfer of data through nightly transmission. Once the data is acquired, it can be filtered by date, time, occurrence, alarm ID, events, and whether these events occurred "in auto," "in manual" or "in burnout" mode.
Charts and graphs are developed to help visualize and Pareto the data, displaying occurrences with blue bars that show their frequency and red lines that denote the length of time over which the occurrence transpired. Various items can be excluded in order to filter out unwanted noise.
This allows the team of furnace experts to drill down into certain occurrences, such as an alarm for "Tray too long in furnace after recipe complete." This leads to dialogue with the customer, usually via web conference, which allows the OEM to reconstruct the cause and effect of a particular event. This can then lead to the diagnosis of recurring problems or alarms, the need for targeted maintenance, and/or action items to improve the efficiency and productivity of the customer's furnace.
Consider a typical fastener manufacturing plant, where heading and threading machines can be turned off for the weekend or for a long holiday, thus saving energy. Not so for the heat-treat operation, where energy is required constantly to keep the furnace hot. Add to this scenario the time and money associated with maintenance and repair.
If a heading or threading machine goes down, it can be worked on immediately provided the necessary spare parts are available. Again, not so for the heat-treat operation, where furnaces can run at temperatures in excess of 1600°F and do not cool down quickly in order to be accessible for immediate inspection and repair. For these reasons, most heat-treat operations prefer to run 24/7 with only minimal, annual downtime planned for in the production schedule. Therefore, downtime is expensive, uptime is optimal and integrated software solutions can help.
Improving Uptime by Targeting Downtime – Some Examples
RDX Saves Commercial Heat Treaters More Than $100,000 per Year
Mike Coburn, sales engineer at AFC-Holcroft, details one customer's experience. "Our customer, a commercial heat-treat operation, was running parts through a two-row pusher furnace (Fig. 1), and they kept experiencing regular crashes because the trays were jamming up in the furnace. The operators felt that since it was an older furnace, the crash was just a part of the regular day-to-day business. They knew that the root cause was that the trays had grown out of spec and beyond the usable life expectancy. Prior to purchasing new trays, the customer asked us for a review and for some assistance."
Upon examination, the RDX data revealed the extent of the crash and recovery impact on the operation's productivity and helped the customer to quantify this loss of time. Recovery costs were estimated to run over $20,000 per quarter/per pusher row. As a solution, the customer chose to invest in new tray positioners, which not only extended the useful life of the existing trays but also eliminated the costly downtime.
"The ROI for this customer was less than three months," Coburn said. "The customer knew that they had periodic problems, but they had not realized the magnitude of the problem in dollars and time until they saw the RDX data summarized.
"AFC-Holcroft has a history of success stories working with customers through Remote Diagnostics where those customers have realized significant savings and improvements to both their production time and profitability."
RDX Data Revealed the Absence of a "Handler Load Advance" Fault
"The prox sensor was proven true," said Coburn. "The hardware was OK. The fault was triggered in manual mode. The absence of the expected 'Handler Load Advance' fault lead to a much faster diagnosis of the problem. The PLC was evaluating the prox's 'true' position instead of a value stored in the managed bit. The managed bit preserved status between scans, so the PLC program was changed back to the original standard and the tray stoppage problem was eliminated. Without seeing the RDX data, troubleshooting for this customer would have taken a lot longer than turned out to be the case."
RDX Team Gets at the Root Cause after Months of Guessing
"A commercial heat-treat customer found that the transfer car (Fig. 3) on their batch equipment line was stopping for unknown reasons," Coburn said. "We made multiple visits to the customer to inspect the equipment and even brought in a sub-supplier to diagnose the controls. Our team suspected at least one of the following as the culprit: PC fault, bad OPC I/O signals and/or even potential network issues."
When the RDX data was obtained, the RDX team analyzed the offending alarms. There were high-alarm occurrences for both "Car has tray, no data" and "Car has data, no tray." So the team reasoned through the conditions for both alarms.
The root cause turned out to be that when the mechanical plunger on the transfer car jiggled, it intermittently failed to make prox switch "true." Identifying the plunger as the root cause, it was reinforced to correct the issue. The collective team's review of the RDX data succeeded where prior efforts had failed.
Supplier as Doctor/Consultant
Remote Diagnostics is a mutually beneficial process between the equipment OEM and the customer that promotes the continuous improvement of product and operational process. In some cases, a customer may not even know that their furnace is not operating at peak performance levels and that they have become "accustomed" to the way their equipment functions. Like a doctor or a consultant, the OEM can identify and evaluate the events or "symptoms" and then recommend remedies or "cures."
Other Computerized Maintenance Management Systems developed by AFC-Holcroft include:
Maintenance Module™
Calibration Mode ™
Engineering Optimization Program™
Calibration Mode™
Calibration Mode will assist with a more in-depth analysis of the machine by collecting information on the different mechanisms and devices to ensure a proper functionality of the furnace. Calibration Mode is a set of diagnostics based on a thumbprint taken when the equipment or software is first commissioned. It takes approximately 60-90 minutes to run the Calibration Mode recipe, and it will display every completion of the steps through the recipe with a "done" message on the screen or leave a blank/fail indicator displayed.
Calibration Mode also offers the ability to change the original setpoints upon determination of the system's needs (Fig. 4). This means that all information setpoints are available to be changed through a password-protection screen for the benchmark (original) values to be set based on the behavior of the machine components. In addition, the information from the last run of Calibration Mode will be left on the screen until the next test is performed so one can go back and look at the information to reference the machine's condition at the time of the previous test. These are just a few reasons why running Calibration Mode while on a shutdown is a good idea.
Yearly Checklist
AFC-Holcroft strongly recommends that a furnace and quench be shut down completely at least once a year for a complete system inspection. This practice has the potential to catch problems before they cause costly downtime. A yearly shutdown is the ideal time to run AFC-Holcroft's Calibration Mode to obtain current annual readings to compare with the benchmark values.
All graphics were submitted by AFC-Holcroft.
Justin Bunzeluk is a guest writer from AFC-Holcroft 49630 Pontiac Trail, Wixom, MI 48393; tel: 1-248-624-8191; fax: 1-248-624-3710; e-mail: sales@afc-holcroft.com; web: www.afc-holcroft.com.
Michael Coburn is a guest writer from AFC-Holcroft 49630 Pontiac Trail, Wixom, MI 48393; tel: 1-248-624-8191; fax: 1-248-624-3710; e-mail: sales@afc-holcroft.com; web: www.afc-holcroft.com.
Optimizing Thermal-Processing Operations with Predictive Maintenance
State of the Thermal-Processing Industry 2017
Free Webinar Examines Thermal-Processing Solutions to Achieve Sustainability Goals


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Masterchef enjoys best Thursday, Seven wins the night.
July 3rd, 2015 By David Knox 7 commentsFiled under: News,
Thursday was another night with Sport causing disruption, as Seven runs staggered schedules but managed to win the night.
TEN's MasterChef enjoyed its best Thursday all season. 1.16m tuned it to watch Amy leave the kitchen. The premiere of Zoo was badly written, but drew 586,000 viewers.
Nine's revamped Inside Story, now trimmed to 30 minutes with sympathetic stories, improved on Top Gear with 699,000 viewers.
Seven network won with 29.7% then Nine 25.4%, TEN 23.1%, ABC 17.0% and SBS 4.8%.
Seven's night was Seven News (923,000 / 727,000), Million Dollar Minute (540,000), AFL (474,000 in 3 cities) and Home and Away (417,000 in 3 cities). Movie: White House Down was 309,000 in 3 cities and Border Security International was 306,000 in 3 cities.
Nine News (1.13m / 1.0m) was best for Nine then A Current Affair (879,000), Inside Story (699,000), Hot Seat (670,000) and Helicopter Heroes (465,000). The Footy Show was 281,000 in 2 cities. Movie: Argo was 140,000 in 3 cities.
MasterChef Australia topped the night with 1.16m viewers for TEN. The Project was 683,000 / 509,000, Zoo premiered with 586,000, TEN Eyewitness News was 580,000 and Law & Order: SVU was 348,000.
ABC News (767,000), The Checkout (612,000), 7:30 (562,000), Blood + Thunder: The Sound of Alberts (543,000), Antiques Roadshow (362,000) and Dirty Laundry Live (350,000) made up ABC's night.
On SBS ONE it was Heston's Great British Food (196,000), Italian Food Safari (155,000), Luke Nguyen's United Kingdom (150,000), SBS World News (134,000), Shane Delia's Spice Journey (133,000), and a double episode of Dig (100,000).
Gem's New Tricks (286,000) topped multichannels. On ONE Darren & Brose premiered with 43,000.
OzTAM Overnights: Thursday 2 July 2015
Tags: 7:30, A Current Affair, ABC News, AFL, Antiques Roadshow, Blood + Thunder: The Sound of Alberts, Border Security: International, Darren & Brose, Dig, Dirty Laundry Live, Helicopter Heroes, Heston's Great British Food, Home and Away, Hot Seat, Inside Story, Italian Food Safari, Law & Order: SVU, Luke Nguyen's United Kingdom, MasterChef Australia, Million Dollar Minute, New Tricks, Nine News, SBS World News, Seven News, Shane Delia's Spice Journey, TEN Eyewitness News, The Checkout, The Footy Show, The Project, Zoo
snucklepuff July 3, 2015 5:55 pm
I will watch Zoo again, i will not make the mistake of watching live! Surely the adverts were longer than Zoo itself?
I will be recording and watching the next day with my family.
I am a Masterchef addict, watch on 20 min delay and never see an advert
Mimsy Itonia July 3, 2015 4:56 pm
I should have known that when Ten said Zoo was starting at 8:30pm, they actually meant 8:50pm. That is not cool. I ended up falling asleep anyway, though. Book was awful, was hoping the TV show would be better.
Secret Squïrrel July 3, 2015 11:19 am
Blood + Thunder was excellent again last night. After that it was catch-up TV for me.
Angela July 3, 2015 1:00 pm
Yes, loved it.
Especially enjoyed the rare footage of Bon and the boys in high spirits, running around the UK streets and the snippets of interviews with Bon that I haven't seen before.
Wild as he was he sounded like a really friendly, lovely guy.
Hope to see more of these Aus music docos on the ABC in the future -they always do them so well….
killy06 July 3, 2015 11:00 am
How do those figures for Darren & Brose compare to what ONE would usually do with Blokesworld in that timeslot?
David Knox July 3, 2015 11:06 am
Not sure. Too detailed for me to fuss over, sorry. You could try asking the boys on their Facebook.
No problem. With my limited knowledge and the limited promotion it recieved those figures sound ok for a multi channel in an 11pm slot. With the progression of the show and word of mouth, let's hope they increase for the boys. Very likeable and plenty of room for growth.


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TV Shows » I Hate My Teenage Daughter »
FOX Hates 'I Hate My Teenage Daughter,' Removes It from Schedule
One of the great mysteries of this TV season is the fact that I Hate My Teenage Daughter has NOT been canceled yet. However, the show has been far from a success, and today FOX announced that it is officially pulling the low-rated sitcom off its schedule immediately.
The show aired Tuesdays at 8:30pm as part of FOX's two-hour comedy block, but the latest episode was the show's lowest rated ever, with less than 3 million viewers. To be fair, all of FOX's Tuesday comedies (Raising Hope, New Girl and Breaking In) were down on March 20, but I Hate My Teenage Daughter seems to be the scapegoat. In its place, FOX will air repeats of Raising Hope for the next two weeks before Glee returns on April 10.
The disdain FOX has for I Hate My Teenage Daughter has been obvious since the start. Here's a look at five moments in the show's programming history that point to just how much FOX hates this show.
FOX Sets Series Premiere for Day Before Thanksgiving
When FOX first announced its fall schedule, I Hate My Teenage Daughter was the last new show to premiere, scheduled for Wednesday, November 23 at 9:30pm following The X Factor. First, launching the day before Thanksgiving, when everyone is traveling, is an awful time slot. Second, it was being paired with an untested new reality series. Third, FOX tried the whole "90-minute singing competition followed by a sitcom" structure last season with American Idol and Breaking In, and it failed so badly that FOX canceled the comedy (only to bring it back from the dead later).
FOX Pushes the Premiere
In a smart move, but still one that isn't particularly respectful, FOX later delayed the series premiere to November 30.
FOX Takes the Show Off Until Spring
After just four episodes in November and December, I Hate My Teenage Daughter was pulled off the schedule and FOX planned on keeping it off the air until the spring when it would be paired with 90-minute performance episodes of American Idol. Taking a new show off the air for four months is clearly not a good sign.
FOX Creates Two-Hour Comedy Block
The entire concept of a two-hour comedy block on Tuesday nights was foolish because FOX didn't have an established hit to help launch it. New Girl was successful, but not nearly enough to hold up an entire evening of programming. So instead, I Hate My Teenage Daughter was thrown in at 8:30pm following Raising Hope, which is hardly a strong lead-in. And now the show has already been pulled from this block.
FOX Pushes the Show Until Summer
Remember how I said FOX planned on airing I Hate My Teenage Daughter after American Idol this spring? Well, FOX later remembered how poorly that idea worked last year, so they scrapped it before it even started, instead saying that the show will air sometime in the summer.
All of this adds up to the fact that I Hate My Teenage Daughter is the red-headed stepchild of FOX. I'm genuinely not sure why the network doesn't just cancel it and be done, but I guess since they already filmed a bunch of episodes, they feel obligated to air them at some point.
Not that it matters, because the constantly declining ratings prove that the executives at FOX aren't the only ones who hate I Hate My Teenage Daughter.
By John Kubicek | Senior Writer, BuddyTV
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Estes Park Colorado Condo Rentals offer variety, ideal location, and great value. From studios for the intimate getaway to five bedrooms to accommodate a family vacation, there is something for everyone and every type of budget. Enjoy a range of amenities in the privacy of your own abode. Discover ideal Rocky Mountain National Park Condos here.
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Wildlife wander on the grounds, Fall River rushes past - this is the best Rocky Mountain vacation spot. One or two bedroom condo suites available.
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Surrounded by national park land, this is a scenic spot to settle in for your vacation. One, two or three-bedroom condos or an authentic cabin available for your rental.
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If you work in a home-based business, have mobile workers, are just beginning a startup, often work with freelancers and entrepreneurs, or are a freelancer or entrepreneur, work hubs are definitely worth looking into if you need an office space – but only on occasion.
If you work in an environment where office space is not constantly needed, but is still occasionally needed, shared office or desk spaces are by far the most cost effective and business minded way to go. It's cost effective because you don't have to pay for your desk, office, or workspace when you don't need it.
It's environmentally effective because office buildings won't stand empty because those who own them don't need them at that time – instead, it allows people to use an office space or desk when they need one, and to not have to worry about having one or paying for one when they don't need it.
Chances are, if you're the type of business person who would find a work hub, shared desk space, or shared office space useful and beneficial, there's likely one close by, as they're growing in popularity. In addition to being local (which cuts down travelling costs for your business), they also typically have the supplies you'll need to get business done, such as reliable, fast internet, fantastic quality printers, quiet, private areas for meetings, and maybe even free coffee! Most work hubs, shared desk spaces, and shared office spaces also typically have extremely reasonable, flexible prices, with no long-term contracts or commitments – meaning you're free to use the space when you need it, how you need it, and to not have to worry about affording it or up keeping it when it's not useful to you.
Here at Rent Our Spaces, we work hard to find you the perfect office space for you needs in London. When we combine our experience, contact, expertise, and your expectations, you're sure to walk away overjoyed with the space you've chosen – whether it's long term or short term. All of our offices are clean, and come with everything you need to run your business the way you want: Wi-Fi, phones, and even hot desks for rent if you need them.
To start finding and using the perfect office space or desk space for the needs of you, your business, and your clients in London, contact us at Rent Our Spaces with the details of your property portfolio and your office requirements, and we'll work hard to find you the perfect space to suit your needs. If you're the owner of a building looking for tenants and businesses to rent to, we will work diligently to ensure that you find tenants for your office that are high quality, worthy individuals or businesses.
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