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Blu-ray and DVD Review Round-Up: Films by Les Blank, Chris Marker, Terry Gilliam and more!
January 26, 2015 Dusty Somers	Leave a comment
Les Blank: Always for Pleasure
I'm not sure I can think of a more apt descriptor of Les Blank's films than "humanist." The 14 short- to medium-length documentaries included in Criterion's new box set are vivacious, warm and fascinating looks at some of life's most sensual pleasures. Not to be trite, but these are works that make you feel grateful to be alive and able to experience the world around you.
Over and over, Blank shows himself to be a master of distilling down the essence of a subculture into a brief but substantial package. Blank resists explanation — his films are defiantly free form, roaming from moment to moment — in favor of immersion, and one can't help but feel edified after living in one of his cinematic worlds.
Food and music are Blank's two constants in this collection of work. Even films that have a broader focus tend to incorporate these elements as part of the basic building blocks of culture, whether he's documenting Cajuns (Spend it All, 1971), a black Creole community (Dry Wood, 1973) or Los Angeles hippies (God Respects Us When We Work, but Loves Us When We Dance, 1968).
The music films explore blues guitarists (Lightnin' Hopkins in The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins, 1968, and Mance Lipscomb in A Well Spent Life, 1971), Creole Zydeco (Clifton Chenier in Hot Pepper, 1973), polka culture (In Heaven There Is No Beer?, 1984) and African-Cuban rhythms (Sworn to the Drum: A Tribute to Francisco Aguabella, 1995), among others. The sheer joy of the performances captured on film would be enough to justify these films, but each one feels like meaningful time spent with the artist in his environment.
As for food, well, it's rarely looked this good on screen before. Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980) and Yum, Yum, Yum! A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking (1990) aren't merely food porn (still, prepare to salivate); they're contextualizing tributes to the surrounding cultures.
All 14 films in the three-disc Blu-ray set have been granted 2K digital restorations, and the 1080p, 1.33:1 transfers are beautifully film-like, superb reproductions of the 16mm photography. All of the films feature uncompressed mono soundtracks, save for Sworn to the Drum, which has a lossless stereo track. Clean-up work has left these soundtracks crisp and clean.
As if collecting all these films in one place wasn't enough, Criterion has supplied at least one extra to accompany each film, including five additional short films, outtakes, an excerpt from forthcoming documentary Les Blank: A Quiet Revelation and extensive interviews with family and collaborators, including sons Harrod and Beau, editor Maureen Gosling and friend Werner Herzog. An extensive booklet contains film notes and an essay by Andrew Horton.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Criterion's Les Blank: Always for Pleasure Blu-ray rates:
The Criterion Collection/ 1968-1995 / Color / 1.33:1 / 563 min total / $124.95
Level Five (1996)
Icarus Films
Chris Marker returns to many of his favorite themes in Level Five, a characteristically dense and beautiful essay film that touches on the pain of loss and the role of memory in dealing with that loss. Can the past be changed if memories — both the intangible human memories and the tangible technological ones — are changed? In some ways, Level Five plays like a sequel to Sans Soleil (1983), with Marker again focusing on his beloved Japanese culture, this time looking closely at the tragedy of World War II's Battle of Okinawa, a precursor to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Marker adds a technological wrinkle, as a woman called Laura (Catherine Belkhodja) seeks to carry on her late lover's work by completing a video game about the conflict. She addresses him directly, peering into the camera in a series of monologues that dovetail with Marker's own observations about technology and history. Images of primitive computer graphics mingle with newsreel footage, and Marker's deft editing constantly creates fascinating juxtapositions between the future and the past that these images represent.
Though the film's philosophical underpinnings aren't easy to pin down, the dizzying imagery and the film's elegiac tone ensure Level Five is anything but dry, academic pondering. Marker again returns to referencing Vertigo (1958) at one point, and it's no stretch to say that his investigations into the ability to recreate, restructure and re-contextualize memories are every bit as moving and cinematically wondrous as Hitchcock's film.
Fresh off a theatrical run in 2014 that saw Level Five finally receiving a release in the U.S., Icarus Films brings Marker's masterpiece to home video in an essential DVD release. The variety of sources all look good in this nice transfer, and the DVD comes with a booklet with an extensive essay from Christophe Chazalon.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Icarus Films' Level Five DVD rates:
New Extra Features: *
Extra Features Overall: *
Icarus Films/ 1996 / Color and black & white / 1.33:1 / 106 min / $29.98
Kinetta (2005)
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has established himself as a filmmaker with an eerily alienating style with his most recent works Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011). His debut feature as a solo director, Kinetta, now getting its worldwide home video debut from intrepid UK label Second Run, is clearly those films' progenitor, examining similar themes in a less formally assured manner.
Like its successors, Kinetta deals with a close-knit community of people that's developed a series of odd rituals in order to relate to one another. Here, a hotel maid (Evangelia Randou), a plainclothes detective (Costas Xikominos) and a photo clerk (Aris Servetalis) pass the time by filming awkward recreations of murder scenes. This uncomfortable role-playing fills the void in what seems to be mostly colorless existences for these people, playing out in a vacation town during the off-season that might as well be an actual ghost town.
Unlike Lanthimos' later films, especially Dogtooth, which displays a Michael Haneke-like formal precision, Kinetta features mostly queasy handheld camerawork, fraying the nerves even more than the off-putting but inscrutable actions of the people on-screen, who are more types than actual characters. On its own, Kinetta might feel like a filmmaker valuing obliqueness for its own sake, but take in conjunction with his subsequent films, it fits into a discomfiting oeuvre of estrangement from reality.
Second Run's 1.85:1 transfer is quite strong considering its standard-def limitations, with a crisp image and a detailed reproduction of Lanthimos' almost colorless palette. Extras include a newly filmed conversation with the director and a booklet with an essay by critic Michael Ewins.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Second Run's Kinetta DVD rates:
Second Run DVD / 2005 / Color / 1.85:1 / 94 min / £12.99 / Region 2 (PAL)
Slaughter Hotel (1971)
Raro Video
Fernando Di Leo is better known for his gritty, violent crime dramas, but with Slaughter Hotel (La bestia uccide a sangue freddo), he serves up a thick slice of giallo-sleaze. Veering between jarringly disjointed and laughably languid, hardly anything here makes a lick of goddamn sense, even by standards of the genre. Still, there's something admirable about Di Leo's willingness to abandon sense and style from scene to scene. Frenetic barrages of canted angles will give way to elegant, gliding takes, while scenes juggle varying combinations of sex and death.
Klaus Kinski nominally stars as Dr. Francis Clay, the head of a mental institution that caters to rich women, most of whom are being treated for having a sex drive. But Kinski's presence is mostly a red herring, as he's not even in the top 10 of weirdest things in the film. Like most of the performances, Kinski's borders on medicated, as a series of brutal murders can barely arouse much of a reaction in anyone besides those being murdered (and sometimes, not even them).
The nudity, which approaches gynecological levels, is far more graphic than the violence — beheadings, impalements and slashes are more stolid than your average giallo. It's hardly an exemplary entry in either the genre's canon or Di Leo's filmography, but worth a look for enthusiasts of either.
Raro Video presents the film in a 1080p, 2.35:1 transfer that will do little to dissuade critics of the company's highly variable technical output. There are some things to like about this transfer, including the consistent color reproduction and strong levels of image clarity. Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of digital manipulation visible, from over-sharpening to heavy-handed edge enhancement. One scene features significant telecine wobble. Elements seem to be in good shape, but the transfer is merely watchable rather than anything commendable.
Two audio options are included, both in 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio. This disc defaults to an English dub, while an Italian dub is also offered. The original Italian track is far preferable, featuring sound that is much less tinny and harsh than the English track.
Extras include an interview with actress Rosalba Neri, a fairly in-depth archival making-of and a couple minutes of deleted scenes. The set also includes a booklet with film notes and essays.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Raro Video's Slaughter Hotel Blu-ray rates:
The Film (out of ****): **
Video Transfer: **
Raro Video/ 1971 / Color / 2.35:1 / 94 min / $29.95
Flaming Star (1960)
Movies starring Elvis Presley don't typically cause much excitement among cinephiles, but he proves himself to be a capably understated performer in Don Siegel's lean western Flaming Star, which opens with a couple of songs before turning into something considerably more sober.
Tensions are rising between white settlers and a Kiowa tribe in post-Civil War Texas, and Presley's Pacer Burton, a half-white, half-Indian man, finds himself torn as he's forced to consider loyalties to heritage, family and community. While his white father, Sam (John McIntire), and his Kiowa mother, Neddy (Dolores del Rio), just want to live peacefully, spates of violence on both sides threaten to ignite all-out war.
Siegel's film has a hair-trigger capability of turning suddenly violent, and he sustains that tension throughout. The film also manages a reasonably fair-minded portrayal of Native Americans, emphasizing the similar community aspects of both cultures while recognizing the vast gulf between them.
Presley communicates a sense of being rent in two with his sensitive, introverted performance. Any of his persona's braggadocio has been replaced with the wandering, unsure eyes of a young man forced to make a decision he's not sure he's equipped to make.
Siegel shoots the action sequences with a tough-minded precision, while he allows more room for the complex interpersonal relationships to play out on screen. That means less of a perfunctory sort-of love interest in Barbara Eden and more of the alternating clashing and bonding between Pacer and white half-brother Clint (Steve Forrest).
Twilight Time presents Fox's 1080p, 2.35:1 transfer of the film, which is an exceptionally clean and sometimes stunningly vivid high-def presentation. The image possesses excellent clarity and sharpness and the somewhat muted color scheme is still capable of displaying vibrant beauty. Audio options include a mostly useless 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track, which shunts some of the score to the surrounds and an uncompressed 2.0 track, which gets the job done fine in original mono.
Extras include Twilight Time's signature isolated score track, a commentary by Lem Dobbs and Nick Redman and the theatrical trailer.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Twilight Time's Flaming Star Blu-ray rates:
Twilight Time / 1960 / Color / 2.35:1 / 92 min / $29.95
The Zero Theorem (2014)
Terry Gilliam is a filmmaker of boundless imagination, which can sometimes result in overstuffed cinematic worlds in his lesser works. There's a fair amount of frenetically detailed production design in his latest film, The Zero Theorem, but it somehow feels cheap and insubstantial — a thinly realized knock-off of a Gilliam film instead of the real thing. The same goes for the ideas in Pat Rushin's script, which shamelessly borrows from Gilliam's masterpiece Brazil (1985), reshaping story and character elements into a discount version that sort of gets the broad strokes right but haplessly botches the details.
Christoph Waltz stars as Qohen Leth, an office drone in a futuristic society tasked with unlocking the meaning of life. Qohen toils under the watchful eye of superiors both nosy (David Thewlis) and aloof (Matt Damon), but his work is merely a distraction in his obsessive patience for a phone call that he believes will unlock the key to his own destiny.
Miserable and neurotic, Qohen gets glimpses of a happy life courtesy of Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry), a prostitute whose idyllic virtual reality experiences become a source of comfort. The artificial beach in these sequences brings to mind the fractured mental state of Jonathan Pryce's Sam Lowry in the bitterly ironic conclusion of Brazil, but with a half-hearted effort at incisive commentary. Similar broadsides on pervasive advertising and Big Brother surveillance just don't muster up much energy. Even the normally vibrant Waltz delivers a somnambulant performance that rarely brings any specificity to the character.
On the other hand, Tilda Swinton does appear as a rapping virtual psychiatrist, so it's not like the film has nothing going for it.
Well Go's Blu-ray presentation of the film features a roughly 1.75:1 transfer in 1080p. The image features rounded corners in an ostensible attempt to replicate vintage photography. Color reproduction of both garish and muted palettes is nice, and there are solid levels of fine detail to be seen throughout. The image is rarely super-sharp, but this seems to replicate the theatrical look. The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack isn't tested too often, but it offers a reasonably immersive experience when the material calls for it.
Extras include one big EPK chopped up into smaller chunks on the costuming, sets, visual effects and a general behind-the-scenes piece. The theatrical trailer is also included.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Well Go's The Zero Theorem Blu-ray rates:
The Film (out of ****): *1/2
Well Go USA / 2014 / Color / 1.75:1 / 111 min / $29.98
16mmA Well Spent LifeAlps (2011 film)Andrew HortonAris ServetalisBarbara EdenBattle of OkinawaBeau BlankBrazil (film)Catherine BelkhodjaChris MarkerChristoph WaltzChristophe ChazalonCostas XikominosCriterionDavid ThewlisdocumentaryDogtoothDolores Del RioDon SiegelDry WoodElvis PresleyEvangelia RandouFernando Di LeoFlaming StarGarlic Is as Good as Ten MothersGod Respects Us When We Work but Loves Us When We DanceHarrod BlankHot PepperIcarus FilmsIn Heaven There Is No Beer?John McIntireKinettaKlaus KinskiLa bestia uccide a sangue freddoLem DobbsLes BlankLes Blank: A Quiet RevelationLevel Five (film)Matt DamonMaureen GoslingMélanie ThierryMichael EwinsNick RedmanPat Rushinraro videoRosalba NeriSecond Run FeaturesSlaughter HotelSpend it AlSteve ForrestSworn to the Drum: A Tribute to Francisco AguabellaTerry GilliamThe Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' HopkinsThe Zero TheoremTilda SwintonTwilight TimeWell Go USAWerner HerzogWesternsYorgos LanthimosYumYum! A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking
Whatever Happened To Christopher Jones? (Part 1)
February 24, 2014 Peter Winkler	Leave a comment
"Christopher Jones, an heir apparent to James Dean who starred in such films as The Looking Glass War and Ryan's Daughter before quitting show business at the height of his brief but dazzling career, has died. He was 72," The Hollywood Reporter stated in his obituary on January 31, 2014.
I was touched by a shock of recognition and a sense of loss when this appeared on my Facebook page the next day, a feeling I rarely experience when reading about the deaths of far better known and more accomplished Hollywood figures.
I discovered Christopher Jones in the mid-'70s, thanks to a TV showing of Wild in the Streets. I was obsessed with James Dean at the time, and became transfixed by Jones, who seemed like the second coming of Dean and the answer to his fan's prayers. Only later would I learn that Jones had already abandoned his career by the time I became aware of him.
"He had excitement. He was a movie star," Quentin Tarantino said in a 1999 episode of E! True Hollywood Story. "He looked like James Dean, but Chris Jones didn't take himself seriously like James Dean. He had the same exact sensuality and appeal as Jim Morrison. He was a big comer at that point, as big as anybody!"
Christopher Jones exploded into stardom with the July 1968 release of American International Pictures' Wild in the Streets, where he played a 24-year-old rock star who manipulates the youth vote to become the President of the United States and sends everyone over 30 to concentration camps where they're force fed LSD. "If you were a teenager in 1968, chances are good you would have given up just about anything to run Wild in the Streets with Christopher Jones," the author of his website writes.
Jones quit acting after making only four more films after Wild in the Streets, becoming a charismatic enigma with a cult following. "Over the past 26 years, Jones has been the subject of so many rumors––that he was a drug addict, lived on the streets, became a hustler, had been confined in a mental institution––his disappearing act gave him, perversely, near legendary status among show-biz insiders," Pamela Des Barres wrote in her introduction to a rare interview with him in 1996.
When Playboy magazine's interviewer asked Jack Nicholson, "What is the downside of celebrity?" he said, "There is none." Yet Jones gave up stardom, its rewards, and a ready-made audience, prompting us to ask: whatever happened to Christopher Jones?
Christopher Jones was born William Frank Jones on August 18, 1941 in Jackson, Tennessee, the younger son of father J. G. Jones and mother Robbie Jones. Billy and his brother Robert lived above a grocery store where their father clerked for Billy's first three years. Robbie Jones, a talented artist plagued by mental instability, was committed to the state hospital in Bolivar, Tennessee in 1945, where she died in 1960. Jones had only one memory of his mother. "I can remember her picking me up once," he said, "but I can't remember what she looked like."
While Robert remained with his father, Billy was sent to live with his aunt after his mother's commitment. On her recommendation, their father sent his sons to Boys Town (then known as Gailor Hall) in Memphis, Tennessee, the orphanage where Billy resided until he was almost 16. Though he resisted such things as school uniforms and evinced no interest in academics, he displayed a talent for sketching that led Boys Town's executive director, Joe Stockton, to arrange an art school scholarship for Billy.
In 1988, Robert Duke told journalist Michael Donahue that he became best friends with Billy after older boys forced them to fight each other for their entertainment, "like dogs or chickens. It was kind of cruel and mean, but that's the way life was back then."
"When you're a long-term resident of an institution like that, you become institutionalized," Duke said, providing an insight into Jones' troubled personality. "You learn not to form relationships with people . . . You learn to be a loner. You learn emotionally not to become too vulnernable to relationships because they're transient in most cases. I think Billy Frank was typical of that pattern."
"Duke remembered Jones as moody, withdrawn and a loner," Donahue reported. "He didn't have many friends, and he idolized James Dean."
Dean became Billy's idol after a formative experience that influenced his ambition to pursue acting. Joe Stockton called Billy into his office one hot summer day. "I must have been 14 or 15 years old at the time and I was sure I was going to be punished for something," Jones later recalled. "Instead, the man handed me a copy of Life magazine with a photo of James Dean on the cover. After a long silence he said, 'You know Billy, you look just like this guy!' and as I studied the picture, he sat staring at me. I saw a resemblance, although I'd never seen a picture of James Dean before."
"Dean had a sophisticated subtlety about him and although people have always compared me to him, at the time I would have preferred to be thought of as more flashy, like Elvis," Jones said. "After seeing Love Me Tender [1956] and East of Eden [1955] at about the same time, I realized how brilliant James Dean was. I've always been torn between the two role models though."
Billy's fascination with Dean intensified after he read an article about his fatal car accident. "Sometimes I feel like James Dean's avenger . . . maybe I'm a continuation of the whole thing," he later said. "A piece of the puzzle's gone, because Dean was too wild and had an accident, but he was the real thing. Most people are afraid to die––and that's what makes you the real thing, whether you're afraid to die. Dean was something divine, like no actor before or since. I'm fascinated with death. That kind of death."
When Jones' star began ascending in the mid-'60s, stories about him made the inevitable comparisons to James Dean. Jones' story resonates with similarities to Dean's life as well as that of Cal, the character he played in East of Eden.
Dean's father sent his son to live with his aunt and uncle after the death of his mother from uterine cancer when he was nine. He felt like an orphan, and had a strained adult relationship with his father, who didn't support his ambition to be an actor.
"My mother died on me when I was a kid, and I used to cry on her grave and say, 'Why did you leave me?,'" Dean told Dennis Hopper. "And that changed into, 'I'm gonna show you! I'm gonna be great!'"
"I wasn't close with him," Jones said of his father. "He was six foot something––not like me––and looked just like Paul Newman, with ice blue, cold-blooded killer eyes. I went to live with him when I was 16 and he signed me into the Army." He didn't resent his father for casting him off. "No, I loved him. I love him still. Did you ever see East of Eden?" Jones said that he hated his mother for dying on him, evidently unaware as a child that she was alive but institutionalized. "That was a good reason to hate her. She shouldn't have died."
Jones escaped from Boys Town when he was 15, taking up with a married 18-year-old woman with two children in Memphis, Tennessee, who he said was the sexual aggressor in their relationship. "From then on, I expected it. Women liked me, probably because I didn't have a mother. I lived with my 18-year-old [lover]––she was separated from her husband––and then I just left her, up and walked out." He repeated this pattern with other women throughout his life.
His father remarried and fathered three children while his first two sons remained at Boys Town, only joining him for rare holiday visits. Jones attempted to reunite with his father after abandoning his teenage girlfriend, living with him until he enlisted in the Army when he turned 16.
Jones' life was rife with dysfunctional relationships and family tragedies. "My dad, who rode around on a Harley-Davidson, picked up a beautiful 18-year-old girl," he said. "They were very close, but he killed her on his Harley. Shaved the top of her head right off. When he died, in 1963, they buried him right next her to her."
If that wasn't enough, Timothy Roman, who Jones claimed was his son, fatally bludgeoned his mentally disturbed mother, actress Susan Cabot, in 1986." "I had only seen him once in my life," Jones said. "She had told him his father was an Englishman––Ryan's Daughter, right? [where he played a British officer]–– and that I was dead." Why? "We'd only been together three weeks. Then I sort of disappeared."
Though studio biographies claimed Jones stayed in the Army for two years before deserting, he went AWOL after only two days. He stole a car and drove to New Orleans, then headed to New York with a friend, making sure to include a pilgrimage to James Dean's grave and boyhood home in Fairmount, Indiana. Dean's aunt and uncle, the Winslows, who welcomed––or at least tolerated––visits from Dean's acolytes, must have done a triple take when they opened their front door and saw Jones, who bore a striking similarity to Dean. "I went up to his room. His jeans were laid out on the bad like he was coming back." For a moment, maybe the Winslows thought he had.
Acting was not yet a glimmer in Jones' mind. "I didn't know what I wanted to do," he said. "Someone who knew I was AWOL said, 'Turn yourself in. It'll catch up with you sooner or later.' So I did, and spent six months on Governors Island, close to the Statue of Liberty. It was . . . prison. A guard made a pass at me."
Jones found refuge with the head buyer for a local department store whose husband was in prison for selling marijuana. "She looked just like Marilyn Monroe. Man, was I in love!" He studied painting and sculpting with artist Edward Melcarth, working as his apprentice. He immersed himself in learning artistic technique, but was ultimately drawn to acting.
Jones met an actor who introduced him to director Frank Corsaro, a teacher at the Actors Studio who had been a friend and mentor to James Dean. He adopted his stage name of Christopher Jones (the same name as the captain of the Mayflower) and began auditing classes at the Actors Studio.
"He was a very on and off again student who had a kind of personal charisma," Corsaro recalled. "He drew very well. He was rather impecunious at the time so I gave him a scholarship of sorts. He was like Dean––he had very good instincts, he had a natural kind of sense of acting. As with Dean, he was not really ultimately as disciplined in the work. He took it as a measure that he deserved it, given his own sense of ease with acting but not as a committed student. Neither was Dean a very committed student at the Actors Studio. In fact, he did very little work there. He just picked up what he could and was in the right atmosphere and with Christopher it was the same case and that's where Shelley [Winters] kind of took an interest in him and she really gave him his boost."
Corsaro cast Jones as one of two Mexican cabana boys (James Farentino played the other) in his 1961 Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana, which initially starred Bette Davis. Every night after the show closed, Shelley Winters, who replaced Davis, got into her Jaguar and tooled around New York with Jones and Farentino, enjoying the nightlife. Sometimes they were joined by actor Alex Cord (christened Alex Viespi). Jones claims he and Winters had an affair. "Of course. She was all over me like a cheap suit." [In the second volume of her autobiography, Winters reveals her relationship with Cord, but never mentions having one with Jones.]
Jones got his first role playing a member of a street gang in an episode of the TV series East Side, West Side (1963-1964), starring George C. Scott. "He kept telling me to stand still," Jones recalled. "I kept fidgeting in the scene and Scott put his foot on top of mine when the director yelled 'Action!' So, I couldn't move during the scene."
While hanging out with Shelley Winters at Downey's, a New York restaurant that was a watering hole for the show business crowd, Jones implored her to introduce him to Susan Strasberg, the daughter of Lee Strasberg, head of the Actors Studio. Winters refused, telling him, "I don't like the way you treat your girlfriends." In her autobiography, she recalls Jones saying, "That's Susan Strasberg. I'm going to marry her." He told Pamela Des Barres that he said, "I'm going to fuck her."
He entered into a tumultuous relationship and marriage with Strasberg that she related in detail in her 1980 memoir Bittersweet. Strasberg recalled her first sight of Jones at Downey's. "We talked for a few minutes and she [Winters] introduced me to Christopher. He had medium brown hair streaked with gold, deep brown eyes, high cheekbones, and a bowed sensual mouth. He was wearing a shirt unbuttoned to the waist, skintight faded jeans, and although it was freezing outside, a lightweight leather jacket."
In Bittersweet, she describes a memorable incident that took place one time when she and her brother were joined at their parent's Fire Island beach house by Jerry and Marta Orbach, actor Richard Bradford, Frank Corsaro and a group of his students, including Jones.
"There was a thunderstorm that night. It was terrifying, yet beautiful. Christopher tore off his shirt and ran onto the beach into the pelting rain. 'I'm going swimming,' he called. 'You're crazy, come back inside . . . it's not safe,' we implored him. Instead, he began to do a rhythmic, erotic dance between the flashes of lightning. It was as if in the eye of the storm he became the storm itself. And, like it, appeared both beautiful and dangerous [emphasis added]."
According to Strasberg, Jones was envious of anyone who enjoyed a comfortable upbringing. "I grew up in a shack with outdoor plumbing and a coal stove," he told her. "Hell, in Tennessee that meant you were poor white trash." Jones once tried to bait Lee Strasberg into an argument. "They're out to destroy anyone who's too alive," he said. "But they can kiss my ass. I'll get them before they get me." He looked around at Strasberg's book-covered walls. "You can't learn anything about life from a book," he said. "Nietzsche said, 'We can only find freedom and happiness, without thought, without intellect, through pure will,' he paraphrased. "It's all a power play . . ."
"Christopher, here as in New York, didn't like my friends," she wrote. "Hell, they're too square and uptight, too intellectual," he said. She claimed that he convinced her to take mescaline and other drugs. "You've got to cut loose from all your tight-assed, conventional crap," he told her. "I wanted so much to be loved unreservedly, for myself, that I was willing to pay any price including subservience," she wrote. "But if I said no when something was offered, I became the enemy, and because I still desperately wanted to be accepted, even by people I did not care about, I never refused. After a while, I didn't want to. Alone at home or while working, I never took anything or missed it. The drugs were a bond between Christopher, myself, and our peers. My addiction was emotional, not physical. I had drifted onto a merry-go-round that did not stop. And as always, the only self-discipline I had left was in relation to my work."
Jones later admitted to hitting Strasberg and accidentally discharging a shotgun in their apartment, but he disputes her nightmarish characterization of their relationship, including her claims that he forced her to indulge in a drug-laden lifestyle. "She's lyin' like a dog," he told Pamela Des Barres. "She just wanted to be in with the scene. She's so square."
He told Des Barres that he sampled amphetamines, marijuana and LSD, but claims that he disliked their effects. "And I hated acid," he said. "I swear, I did not take drugs. The hippies were interested in that stuff. I was interested in Ferraris, women and clothes. I was mainly interested in fucking––and in becoming famous."
In late November1963, Jones and Strasberg accepted their friends Jerry and Marta Orbach's invitation to drive out to California. Strasberg supported Jones until he landed the starring role in the TV series The Legend of Jesse James, produced by Don Siegel. In his autobiography, Siegel, who directed the series' half-hour pilot, called Jones, "a disturbed young man," but did not elaborate. Jones' success exacerbated his rebellious behavior. One of the puff pieces printed about him headlined the quote, "I don't give a damn what anybody says about me." Publicists often plant these statements to give their client the appearance of integrity, but it fit Jones. He showed up late for a TV Guide interview about his TV series and off-handedly called it "garbage."
"Mr. Chris Jones, who plays the late Mr. James as if he were a three-way cold tablet comprising equal parts of the late Mr. James Dean, the present Mr. Marlon Brando, and a difficult teen-age girl," TV Guide's critic, Cleveland Amory, wrote in his review of the show. Jones' show generated an outpouring of fan letters from female fans, some explicit enough to shock his wife. The series, filmed at 20th Century-Fox, aired on ABC for only one season from September 1965 to May 1966, before falling victim to the ratings competition from The Lucy Show on CBS and Dr. Kildare on NBC.
While movie offers poured in for him, Jones' relationship with Strasberg deteriorated. She alleged that he alternated unpredictably between tenderness and sudden explosions of paranoid jealousy, when he would pummel her face and body with his fists, punishing her for the infidelities he imagined she engaged in. One evening in their apartment, after she tried to flee their moving car, he pointed the Colt revolver he played Russian roulette with at her and said, "I could shoot you." She closed her eyes and heard the report of his gun. The bullet tore apart her prized English Regency desk. "You have to learn to trust me," he told her.
Strasberg discovered that she was pregnant just when she had finally decided to leave him. The couple married in Las Vegas on September 25, 1965. She gave birth to her daughter, Jennifer, on March 14, 1966.
In August, Jones began making his first film, Chubasco (1968), on the Warner Bros. lot. One day, early into production, Strasberg received a frantic call at home from the film's director, Allen Miner. "Susan, Christopher is acting a little rambunctious with the girls we've been testing. He hit the last one when he kissed her. He is balking at doing the love scenes."
She reluctantly agreed to take the role. She divorced Jones after Chubasco was finished. He fought her for custody of their daughter. Strasberg claimed he harassed her enough to compel her to obtain a restraining order against him. Jones' tempestuous relationship with her set a pattern he was to repeat throughout the remainder of his life with other women.
Jones plays the eponymous character in Chubasco, a rebellious youth who agrees to straighten up and fly right by working as a spotter on a tuna boat. He eventually marries his pregnant girlfriend Bunny (Strasberg), the daughter of the boat's skipper (Richard Egan), in a sanitized Mexican whorehouse presided over by a madame played by Ann Sothern. Though Chubasco contains a scene between Jones and a benevolent judge (Edward Binns) that takes place in his office and another where he writhes in pain after injuring his hands that evoke similar scenes in Rebel Without a Cause, it's an unmemorable movie. "I didn't think it [casting Strasberg as his girlfriend] was too good of an idea and the movie wasn't that great, but it paid for a house with a pool in Beverly Hills," Jones said.
Jones next film, Wild in the Streets (1968) gave him his breakout role.
Next Time: Wild in the Streets, The Looking Glass War, Ryan's Daughter, and Jones's sudden and mysterious decline.
Peter Winkler is the author of Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel (Barricade Books, 2011).
Actors StudioAlex CordAllen CaseAllen MinerAmerican International Pictures (AIP)Bette DavisBittersweet (book)Boys Town (Gailor Hall)Christopher JonesChubasco (film)Cleveland AmoryDavid LeanDennis HopperDon SiegelE! True Hollywood StoryEast of Eden (film)East Side West Side (TV series)Edward BinnsEdward MelcarthElvis PresleyFacebookFrank CorsaroGeorge C. ScottJack NicholsonJames DeanJames FarentinoJerry OrbachLee StrasbergLife (magazine)Love Me TenderLSDMarta OrbachMichael Donahue (journalist)moviesPamela Des BarresPlayboy (magazine)Quentin TarantinoRichard EganRobert J. WilkeRyan's DaughterSharon TateShelley WintersSusan Cabot (actress)Susan StrasbergTennessee WilliamsThe Hollywood ReporterThe Legend of Jesse James (TV series)The Looking Glass WarThe Night of the Iguana (play)Timothy RomanTV GuideWarner Bros.Wild in the Streets
Blu-ray Review: "Khartoum" (1966)
January 30, 2014 Stuart Galbraith IV	Leave a comment
Though Criterion's reconstructed It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) understandably got all the attention, January 22nd actually saw the release to Blu-ray of two filmed-in-Ultra Panavision, presented-in-Cinerama roadshows. The other was Khartoum (1966), a much less successful but still interesting historical epic dramatizing Britain's equivalent to America's Alamo. Had the film been released in 1956 instead of 1966 it would likely be remembered as an intelligent, intimate epic when compared to the more common, mindless CinemaScope spectacles that dominated the 1950s. But, ten years later, David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) casts a long shadow. Khartoum can't help but invite comparison, and in every way is inferior. A mostly British production but produced, written by, and starring Americans, Khartoum today is remembered as one of the first of a long line of failed Cinerama roadshows (it earned $3 million in U.S. and Canadian rentals versus its $6 million cost), the beginning of the end for that company and that type of roadshow exhibition, as well as for historical epics generally. But Khartoum does have its good points: the basic conflict is vast and intensely personal at once; the second unit work by Yakima Canutt is often spectacular; in retrospect the events in 1880s Sudan anticipate the rise of Islamic fundamentalism a century later; and some of the performances are interesting, though star Charlton Heston's portrayal of Gen. Charles "Chinese" Gordon is maybe his least interesting within the genre. Twilight Time has licensed what originally was a United Artists release from MGM. The high-def results aren't as splendiferous as the extremely pristine and aurally spectacular It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World but still good, plus there's a smattering of interesting special features.
More than 10,000 British-led Egyptian troops are slaughtered by an army of Muslin fanatics, an army led by Sudanese Arab Muhammad Ahmad (Laurence Olivier), self-described Mahdi ("messianic redeemer") who believes Mohammed has chosen him to lead a crusade to spread radical Islam across the region. To set a very public example, he intends to murder the entire population of Khartoum, moderate Sudanese and Egyptian Muslims not allied with Ahmad and non-Muslims alike. Word of the massacre reaches pragmatic British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (Ralph Richardson). He's loathe to send British troops to Khartoum in order to save the thousands of Egyptians and Europeans stranded there, this in spite of Britain's close ties to Egypt (and its Suez Canal). Instead, he decides to unofficially dispatch celebrated war hero Gen Charles Gordon (Heston) to the region, believing that if loose cannon Gordon's mission to evacuate Khartoum with Egyptian troops fails, the British government will be absolved any liability or political fallout. Accompanying Gordon on this suicide mission is Col. J.D.H. Stewart (Richard Johnson), whose responsibility it is to try and keep Gordon in line. Formerly Governor-General of the Sudan who broke the slave trade there some years before, Gordon is hailed as a god-like savior upon his return but the situation is dire, with the Mahdi having cut Khartoum off from the rest of the world. A large British force is the only thing that can save Khartoum now, and that's not likely to happen. Khartoum's main point of interest is in the way playwright-anthropologist Robert Ardrey's screenplay essentially makes Gordon and the Mahdi two sides of the same coin: True Believers (the real Gordon a devout Christian cosmologist) who'd gladly surrender their lives for the Greater Good. The only difference seems to be that Gordon barely recognizes the dangers of such unquestioning devotion. The movie's best scenes are two brief meetings between Gordon and the Mahdi, meetings that didn't actually happen though dramatically justified here. Part of the problem with Khartoum is that Gordon pretty much remains an enigma, nor is this characterization helped by Heston's atypically reserved but still indulgent performance. The script, at least as far as one can make out in the final cut of the film, hints at Gordon's evangelism but not enough to present any real clear picture of the man. The screenplay also suggests Gordon as egotistical, cocksure, but charismatic, qualities similar to T.E. Lawrence. Some of these Heston gets across, but like the mid-Atlantic accent he affects, mostly Heston hedges his bets, more often than not playing Gordon as a stiff upper lipped, A.E.W. Mason-inspired British Empire stereotype. Further, much of Ardrey's script posits Gordon as the great white savior lording over adoring dark-skinned followers in "his" Sudan, especially in all the scenes involving Khaleel (Johnny Sekka), Gordon's devoted valet, he forever bemused by Gordon's faith and this strange Jesus fellow reads about in Gordon's Bible. (What the film does not mention is that Gordon reinstated the slave trade to Khartoum upon his return. I doubt that went down well.) Laurence Olivier's Muhammad Ahmad is another matter. Something like an extension of his controversial blackface performance as Othello, Olivier hides behind dark brown make-up, a thick beard, and flowing robes, affecting an inconsistent accent that, in his first scene addressing victorious troops, has the unintended comical effect of reminding viewers of Leo McKern's Swami Clang in The Beatles' movie Help! (1965). (I suspect that may have been the first scene Olivier shot; he dials back the accent considerably for the rest of the picture.) However, after 9/11 Olivier's performance can't help but remind contemporary viewers of Osama bin Laden, whose ambitions, fanatical beliefs, and terrorist strategies were starkly similar. In full make-up, Olivier even looks a little like bin Laden. Moreover, the British government's interests in the region likewise draw eerily similar comparisons to America's more than a century later. Another problem with Oliver's scenes is that all too clearly the actor never set foot outside a British soundstage. In all of the location scenes Olivier is clearly doubled, the effect similar to Fun in Acapulco, G.I. Blues and other Elvis vehicles where the actor is painfully absent in all the location scenes because "Col." Tom Parker refused to let his precious commodity travel abroad. In Khartoum, the flawless performances of the always-good Richard Johnson and Ralph Richardson outshine the two leads. Heston reportedly was happy with Basil Dearden's direction, and indeed his unimaginative camera set-ups don't help. The film has extraordinarily few close-ups, and the use of Ultra Panavision's extremely wide canvas is bereft of visual flair. Yakima Canutt's second unit work is far more interesting. The climatic moment of the picture, based on George W. Joy's famous painting General Gordon's Last Stand, is particularly disappointing and ineffectively edited.
Twilight Time's 1080p Blu-ray of Khartoum sources superior 65mm film elements, made clear by the "in Cinerama" title card which would have been removed for 35mm engagements. Also intact are the film's original overture, intermission break, entr'acte, and exit music. At 136 minutes, this also seems to be the longest original cut of the film, which is missing several minutes in the original U.S. release, making it one of the shortest narrative roadshow releases. The image is strong throughout, with good detail and accurate, vivid color. The 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio lacks the directionality of the original 6-track magnetic stereo mix; it's not clear why MGM couldn't use those sound elements as they apparently still exist. Optional English subtitles are included. The disc includes an original Cinerama release version trailer, also in high-def; an isolated music track (DTS-HD mono, alas); an audio commentary with film historians Lem Dobbs, Julie Kirgo, and Nick Redman; and Kirgo's typically observant liner notes (she aptly describes Olivier as looking "like a bearded walnut," and rightly likens Khartoum's portrait of Gordon to the later Patton). Khartoum, then, is a deeply-flawed epic but also an ambitious, mostly intelligent one that, on Blu-ray, can at long last be assessed more fairly than decades of panned-and-scanned viewings on 13-inch TV sets allowed. That it aims so high and falls well short of its goal doesn't negate its many fine qualities, and Khartoum deserves the wider audience this handsome Blu-ray release allows.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Khartoum rates:
Movie: Good
Supplements: Audio commentary, Cinerama release trailer, isolated score track, booklet.
Deaf and Hearing Impaired Friendly? YES
Twilight Time 1966 / Color / 2.76:1 Ultra Panavision 70 / 136 min. / Street Date January 22, 2014 / $29.95 Starring Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier, Richard Johnson, Ralph Richardson.. Director of Photography Edward Scaife Music Frank Cordell Written by Robert Ardrey Produced by Julian Blaustein Directed by Basil Dearden
Basil DeardenBlu-rayCharles GordonCharlton HestonCineramaElvis PresleyGeneral Gordon's Last Stand (painting)Help! (1965 film)Islamic FundamentalismIt's a Mad Mad Mad Mad WorldJ.D.H. StewartJohnny SekkaJulie KirgoKhartoum (1966)Laurence OlivierLawrence of Arabia (1962)Lem DobbsLeo McKernMGMMuhammad AhmadNick RedmanOthello (play)Patton (1970)Ralph RichardsonRichard Johnson (actor)Robert Ardreysecond-unit productionTwilight TimeUltra PanavisionUnited ArtistsWilliam Ewart GladstoneYakima Canutt
Anyone for Dennis
January 8, 2014 Peter Winkler	Leave a comment
Success in Hollywood came remarkably easy for Dennis Hopper — but vanished just as quickly. It began on the day the teenage actor auditioned for the role of an epileptic in a television series called Medic. After a little small talk, he suddenly fell to the floor in a seizure. The casting director was reaching for the phone to call an ambulance when the 18-year-old jumped up and smiled broadly. The 32 other actors waiting in the corridor were sent home. Hopper had the role.
His screen performance — his body becomes rigid, he falls down and he even foams at the mouth — may not be authentic, but it reminded his grandmother of the day when as a little boy he discovered the intoxicating effects of mood-altering substances.
Hopper was born in 1936 in the Kansas dust bowl. His father went off to war — Hopper was told he was dead — and until he was 10 he spent most of his time on his grandparents' small farm. There were "wheat fields all around, as far as you could see. No neighbors, no other kids."
His grandfather owned an old tractor with a gas tank at the front where the radiator is usually found. The boy's curiosity led him to remove the cap and sniff. Breathing more deeply, he reeled from the petrol fumes. But he enjoyed it.
Nearly every day, he stretched out on the hood of the tractor, inhaled and lay on his back. The sky became animated; the clouds changed into clowns and goblins. One afternoon he overdid it. The tractor's grille and lights turned into the face of a terrifying monster attacking him. His grandfather pulled him away as he smashed at it with his baseball bat. The boy was so high he wasn't even aware of what he was doing until his grandparents explained it to him afterwards.
It set the scene for a turbulent life. Four decades later, after a chaotic acting career disrupted by too many rages and bad trips, Hopper was in a rehabilitation clinic, where a counselor wrote that "no character he had ever portrayed on screen, including the frenetic photographer in Apocalypse Now, came close to projecting the dazed, lunatic quality" of the man himself. Hopper once said he became an actor "because I hate my parents . . . I hated my home life, the rules."
His father was "a hard, totally secret man with no words," whose "death" had been a ruse to cover secret work with the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) in China. His reappearance after the war confounded the boy. "Now wouldn't that make you a paranoiac?" Hopper later said.
He claimed that his mother had been a swimming champion, whose Olympic ambitions collapsed when she became pregnant with him at 17. She took out her resentments on him. "She was wild, very emotional, a screamer and a yeller," he said. "My mother had an incredible body, and I had a sexual fascination for her."
His gateway to Hollywood was the southern California city of San Diego, to which the family moved when he was 13. At school he was the class clown, but he took acting lessons (to his mother's horror). He tried to escape his parents' disapproval by running away.
"I was a crazy kid, mixed up with a wild bunch — delinquents, I guess — but I got away from that in acting. I was into the general gang stuff. Petty theft and a lot of misdemeanors."
Stage work at the La Jolla Playhouse brought contact with Hollywood stars like Vincent Price, an art collector who introduced Hopper to the new Abstract Expressionist painters.
Hopper's role in Medic led to a rancorous audition with "King" Harry Cohn, the infamously coarse boss of Columbia Pictures.
Hopper claimed to have told the mogul to "go fuck" himself for criticizing Shakespeare.
But he promptly landed work in 1955 with Hollywood's hottest new actors, James Dean and Natalie Wood, on a film that became a cultural icon, Rebel without a Cause. Both stars changed Hopper's life. Dean dazzled him. Wood drew him into a world of debauchery (with painful consequences for her when she tried to start an orgy in a bath of champagne).
Wood's parents, Nick and Maria Gurdin, were Russian émigrés. He was an alcoholic carpenter.
Maria yearned for wealth and fame — and found it when a film crew visited their home town in northern California. She pushed four-year-old Natalie onto director Irving Pichel's lap. She charmed him by singing a Russian folk song and was rewarded with a brief walk-on role — prompting Maria to move the family to Hollywood, where she maneuvered her daughter into her first speaking role and a career as a child actress.
By the time Rebel Without a Cause was on the horizon, Wood was 16 — too mature to play children, yet too young to play leading roles against older male stars. Her home life was tough. Her father periodically erupted in drunken rages and chased his wife around the house with a butcher knife. Her mother banned anything that threatened her earning power as an actress — including relationships with boys her own age.
"I was a rather dutiful child," Wood said later in life, "and when my parents read the script of Rebel, they said, 'Oh no, not this one,' because it showed parents in a rather unsympathetic light, and yet I read it, and for the first time in my life I said, 'Oh, wait a minute. I have to do this!'" She identified with Judy, one of the teenagers from dysfunctional families around whom the film revolves.
Rebel's director, Nicholas Ray, then 43, was a bisexual, misogynistic womanizer addicted to alcohol, drugs and gambling. Wood showed up at his office looking how she thought a sexy, mature woman should look. Heavily made up, wearing the slinkiest dress she could find and perched on high heels, she threw herself at him.
It did little to change his impressions of her as a child actress, but she ended up in his bed at the Chateau Marmont hotel on the Sunset Strip. Ray had a poolside bungalow where he enjoyed afternoon trysts with pliable young actresses, most notably Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, another candidate for the role of Judy.
He agreed to give Wood a screen test with Hopper. It took place on a rainy evening and "by the time we were finished, Natalie and I both felt like wet, unhappy animals," he recalled.
Next day the phone rang in his apartment. A young girl's voice said, "This is Natalie Wood. I tested with you the other night on Rebel. Remember? It was raining?"
Hopper barely remembered the skinny little girl "because I tested with about 10 women that day. But she was really funny. She told me I was great looking, and she really liked me, and she wanted to have sex with me . . .
"In the Fifties to be aggressive like that as a woman was really amazing. It was an amazing turn-on to me, for one thing. But it was certainly contrary to any kind of movement, or idea, at the time."
Hopper picked Wood up at Ray's hotel, where she had spent the afternoon with the director, and drove up to a lover's lane to make out. He was about to go down on Natalie when she exclaimed, "Oh, you can't do that." Hopper said, "Why?" She said, "Because Nick just fucked me."
"I thought it was weird, okay?" Hopper recalled. "At the time I was 18 years old! I thought it was strange, I thought it was weird of her to be doing it . . . he was having an affair with a minor. It was illegal for me, too, but at least I was only a couple of years older."
Wood became Hopper's Hollywood tour guide, tooling around town in her pink Ford Thunderbird with him and Rebel cast member Nick Adams. They placed their hands and shoes in the imprints of the screen immortals at the entrance to Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Hopper became her surrogate for James Dean, who hadn't responded to her interest. The two young men looked similar and were both dedicated to the Method school of acting.
Wood and Hopper alternated between a search for seriousness and frivolity. Hopper said they watched foreign films, "trying to find another way of, like, working. We were very ambitious to change things." But they also thought of themselves as the logical successors to the great names of show business and began emulating what Hopper called "wild, crazed Hollywood icons."
Hopper said: "It was almost as if we were naive to the point: 'If people did drugs and alcohol and were nymphomaniacs, then that must be the way to creativity, and creativity's where we wanna be. We wanna be the best.' She [Wood] always wanted to be the best.
"We were always envious of the generations before us," he continued. "In the Fifties, when me and Natalie and Dean suddenly arrived, we all sort of felt like an earlier group of people who thumbed their noses at Hollywood tradition, people like John Barrymore and Errol Flynn, both of whom died as alcoholics.
"It seemed a romantic, a colorful way to go. I mean, we heard of the orgies that John Garfield used to have, the Hollywood roulette. It seemed wilder. So we tried to emulate that lifestyle. In a strange way we were trying to emulate some sort of past glory."
Hopper and Nick Adams rented a house in the Hollywood Hills, where, with Wood, they tried to be wilder than their notorious predecessors. "For instance," Hopper said, "once Natalie and I decided we'd have an orgy."
Among the guests was Hopper's high school friend Bob Turnbull, who recalled: "It was kind of a big event. She just wanted all kinds of guys doin' her."
Wood wanted a champagne bath, Hopper said, because, "I think she had heard that Jean Harlow or somebody had had a champagne bath. So Nick and I went and got all this champagne, and we filled the bathtub full of champagne, and we said, 'Okay, Natalie, we're ready for the orgy.' Natalie takes off her clothes, sits down in the champagne, starts screaming."
Why did she scream? "Well," Hopper said, "because it burned her pussy. Set her on fucking fire, you know." Hopper and the others raced the agonized Wood to the nearest emergency room, where she was treated for a "very expensive burn."
"Of course, she had other times, too, when Dennis, Nick and I would be enjoying her company as well," Turnbull said. "She was just a wild and crazy gal. She was just very friendly but oversexed. She was a very classy girl. She just had a whole different outlook on the morality of one's life. She was a nice person, very polite, just a very free-flowing spirit."
There was sexual jealousy between Hopper and Rebel's director. Hopper told Steffi Sidney, another friend, that he went looking for Wood at Ray's bungalow one evening and caught them having sex. "He told me about being in love with Natalie and what he was going to do, because Nick hated him," Sidney said.
Hopper said he visited the Chateau Marmont with a gun to confront Ray, who, fortunately, wasn't at home that night.
The anger extended to the film set: Ray tried to fire him and removed much of the dialogue from his part, a gang member called Goon. But it was on set that Rebel had its lasting effect on Hopper, as a result of his watching Dean at work. "I thought," Hopper said, "I was the best actor in the world — I mean the best young actor. Until I saw James Dean. He fascinated me. Dean completely disregarded any direction in the script. He would do a scene differently every time. It came straight out of his imagination, his improvisation."
Hopper tried to talk to him about his technique, but Dean preferred to stay in his dressing room, smoking marijuana and playing classical music. "I tried to get to know him. I started by saying, 'Hello.' No answer."
Hopper said he finally got Dean's attention by throwing him into the back seat of one of the cars used in the "chickie run" scene. Hopper enjoyed a student-teacher relationship with Dean, sharing peyote and marijuana. "He started watching my takes," he recalled. "I wouldn't even know he was there. He'd come up and mumble, 'Why don't you try it this way?' And he was always right."
The 24-year-old Dean was killed when he crashed his Porsche 550 Spyder on September 30, 1955, a month before Rebel was released. It is difficult to overstate the impact of his death on Hopper, who once spoke about him as if he were the love of his life: "I was with him almost every day for the last eight months of his life and then he died. I was haunted by the death of Dean, which had been the greatest emotional shock of my young life. He taught me so much. When he died, I felt cheated. I had dreams tied up in him, and suddenly that was shattered. The alcohol and drugs brought me temporary escape. That was the first major thing that really affected me . . . My life was confused and disoriented for years."
Dean's immediate legacy was a delusion that Hopper could wield the same power on set as his idol had done. To Hopper, it appeared that Dean dominated Nick Ray and called the creative shots on Rebel. Hopper, however, was not in Dean's league.
In 1957, he engaged in an epic battle with veteran director Henry Hathaway while filming From Hell to Texas. Following in Dean's footsteps, Hopper refused to do things the director's way. Hathaway finally broke his will when they spent all day shooting 87 takes of a 10-line scene. Hopper was effectively banished from Hollywood studio films.
Hopper married Brooke Hayward and worked sporadically in episodic television and low-budget films. He channeled his creative energy into photography and collecting Pop Art. He directed second unit footage of Peter Fonda on The Trip and the two collaborated on Easy Rider, which became the surprise hit of 1969.
Hopper, regarded by the Hollywood establishment as "a maniac and an idiot and a fool and a drunkard" before Easy Rider, suddenly became their hot ticket to the youth market. He had creative carte blanche to direct his next film, The Last Movie. He later recalled that making The Last Movie, a disastrous project filmed in Peru in 1970, was one long sex-and-drugs orgy.
"Wherever you looked," he said, "there were naked people out of their minds. There was a mountain of coke down there, and we went through it all. But I wouldn't say it got in the way of the movie. I'd say it helped us get the movie done. We might have been drug addicts, but we were drug addicts with a point of view and a work ethic. It was all about the movie. If we were going to take coke and fuck beautiful women, we'd do it on camera. The drugs and the drink and the insane sex, they all fueled our creativity. At least, that's my excuse. If you're gonna be that debauched, it's better to have a good reason."
Hopper spent over a year partying with a hippie entourage while editing The Last Movie at his new home in Taos, New Mexico. He married singer Michelle Phillips on Halloween in 1970. She ran away from him days later, accusing him of handcuffing her, calling her a witch, and firing guns inside his house. The Last Movie, an incoherent, pretentious mess, alienated audiences and critics and bombed, taking Hopper's career with it.
Hopper exiled himself to Taos, working occasionally outside the U. S. in films like Mad Dog Morgan, The American Friend, and Apocalypse Now.
The nadir came in 1982.
"I was doing half a gallon of rum with a fifth of rum on the side, 28 beers and three grams of cocaine a day — and that wasn't getting high, that was just to keep going, man," he said. "It was like a nightmare roller-coaster paranoid schizophrenic journey that was totally crazy."
Delusional, and convinced that the mob put out a contract on his life, Hopper performed an old rodeo stunt called the Russian Suicide Death Chair at a speedway in Houston to promote a retrospective of his art at Rice University. He sat on a chair wired with dynamite sticks and lit the fuse. He emerged from the explosion miraculously unscathed.
A German producer wanted Hopper for a film about a group of models captured by a South American drug lord. The money was more than he'd ever been offered. So he headed down to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where it was going to be made. The job became Hopper's entry to madness.
"What happened was my manager had called and said 'don't give him any booze,' so I couldn't get a drink and I started having hallucinations," he said. The three complimentary shots of tequila left for him in his hotel room sent Hopper over the edge. He later said they were spiked with LSD.
"I became convinced that there were people in the bowels of this place who were being tortured and cremated," he recalled. "The people had come to save me, and they were being killed and tortured, and it was my fault."
He escaped into the warm Mexican night but the hallucinations kept coming. He masturbated to a tree and thought he was creating a galaxy. Insects and snakes broke through his skin. He tore off his clothes and walked into the countryside. He saw mysterious lights and thought they were alien spaceships.
As dawn broke, Hopper wandered naked back to town, hurling rocks at oncoming cars. "When the police tried to get me dressed, I refused," he said. "I said, 'No, kill me like this! I want to die naked.'"
Some of the film crew managed to get him on a flight back to Los Angeles. "On the plane I was hallucinating, and I crawled out on the wing in midair," he recalled. "I decided that Francis Ford Coppola was on the plane, filming me. I had seen him, I had seen the cameras, so I knew that they were there. The crew started the wing on fire, so I crawled out on it, knowing that they were filming me. I was out there, and a bunch of stuntmen grabbed me and pulled me in."
Hopper woke up in a straightjacket in a psychiatric ward, surrounded by celebrities in straightjackets who were screaming. "I better stop drinking," he told himself. An antipsychotic drug gave him the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. It took him agonizing minutes to get food or a cigarette into his mouth.
He forswore alcohol but secretly continued using large amounts of cocaine — "half an ounce every two days, 2 days, three days at the most" — and then went totally crazy: "It's really amazing when the telephone wires start talking to you."
Hopper finally questioned his behavior. "I had built in such a strong endorsement for drinking and using drugs, because, after all, I was an artist, and it was okay for artists to do that," he said. "The reality was that I was just a drunk and a drug addict. It wasn't helping me create. In fact, it hindered me. It stopped me getting jobs. I dealt with the rejection by taking more drink and drugs. All alcohol and drugs got me was a lot of misery."
A year after Hopper sobered up, David Lynch, a master of the grotesque with a gift for infusing banal situations with the dread of imminent horror, cast him as gas-huffing psychotic drug dealer Frank Booth in his new film, Blue Velvet, without even meeting the actor.
Hopper called Lynch to assure him that he understood the role. "I am Frank," he told Lynch, which gave the director some pause. Hopper viewed the film as a love story, explaining: "I understood his [Booth's] sexual obsession. But I saw him as a man who would go to any lengths to keep his lady."
His inimitable performance became his signature role, eclipsing everything he had done before. It would prove to be both a blessing and a curse. Though he worked constantly afterwards, he became trapped playing endless variations of Frank Booth for the rest of his life.
Before his death at 74 from prostate cancer, he summed up: "Let's see, I guess, Easy Rider, Blue Velvet, a couple of photographs here, a couple of paintings . . . those are the things that I would be proud of, and yet they're so minimal in this vast body of crap — most of the 150 films I've been in — this river of shit that I've tried to make gold out of. Very honestly."
© Peter L Winkler 2014 Excerpted from Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel, published by Barricade Books. Available in hardcover, paperback, Kindle e-book, and audiobook editions from Amazon.com. Be sure to visit Peter's website: dennishopperbook.com
alcoholismApocalypse NowBlue Velvet (film)Chateau MarmontCIAcocaineColumbia PicturesDavid LynchDennis HopperEasy RiderElvis PresleyErrol FlynnFrancis Ford CoppolaHarry CohnHenry HathawayJames DeanJean HarlowJohn BarrymoreJohn GarfieldLove Me Tender (film)LSDmarijuanaMedic (TV series)method actingNatalie WoodNicholas RayNick AdamspeyoteRebel without a Causesex orgysubstance abuseThe Last Movie


text:
Mr Mark Brett
Job: Managing Consultant MRes CITP FSITM FBCS FCIM MIISP SBCI MIET MEPS ITPC
Faculty: Technology
School/department: School of Computer Science and Informatics
Research group(s): Cyber Security Centre
Address: De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH UK
E: mbrett@dmu.ac.uk
W: http://www.dmu.ac.uk/csc
Mark Brett has over 25 years experience of Local Government, as a senior manager and consultant in local and central government. Mark worked for 15 years as a volunteer in the Metropolitan Police Service and as an Emergency Planning Officer.
Formerly the CIO London Connects. As a Programme Director within the London Resilience Team, he designed and implemented a Pan-London Emergency Management Extranet and Brokerage Centre, prior to 7/7.
Mark is the Programme Director of Socitm Futures and is a member of the Local CIO Council. Mark is the Technical Architect, within the Public Services Network Cyber Defence Team.
Mark is Programme Director for the National Local Authority WARP (Warning, Advice and Reporting Point), a CPNI supported programme, and is one of the Local Government representatives on the Cabinet Office CTO Council and its IA Domain.
Mark is a Chartered Fellow of the BCS and is Co-Chair of the National Information Assurance Forum. Mark is a CESG CLAS Consultant and was the National IA Advisor to the Local Government Association, having authored the Local Government Data Handling Guidelines.
Mark is providing executive support to a number of Local Authorities, in England & wales, to improve their Information Governance, through the introduction of the SIRO process. Mark provides leadership and strategic support to effectively understand information risk management to embed it into the organisations culture. Mark is SIA Licenced.
Mark holds a Master's Research degree in Strategic Management from London Metropolitan University and has recently began reading for a PhD in Information Governance at De Montfort University.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
<?php
/**
 * Created by PhpStorm.
 * User: karlvaniseghem
 * Date: 21/10/15
 * Time: 14:51
 */

namespace Bakgat\Notos\Domain\Model\Identity;

interface GenderSpecification
{
    /**
     * @param $gender
     * @return bool
     */
    public function isSatisfiedBy($gender);
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Own your own boat slip on Lake Winnipesaukee's Meredith Bay. This is a unique opportunity to purchase a slip for your own boat now or perhaps purchase now and rent until you find your ideal boat, up to 28 feet in length and a 8.5 foot beam. Slip # 65 is a bow/stern tie at the end of the north pier at the Bay Shore Yacht Club. The Yacht Club offers a club house with full kitchen, bath/shower facilities, a fuel dock and more. Meredith Marina is right next door for those necessary, or non-necessary boating supplies. Slip #65 has been rented yearly by the current owner after selling his boat. Location is in a No-Wake zone. For 2018, the yearly Association fee was $1275, consisting of $775 membership fee and $500 for capital reserve account.


The DASUNG Paperlike and the Pixel Qi, say hello to a glare free screen.
Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) is a generic term describing vision related problems that result from looking at screens that have a backlight. Symptoms can be eyestrain, headaches, blurred vision, dry eyes, and neck and shoulder pain. Sol Computer offers products that don't have backlights, eliminating the main cause of CVS.
Text and graphics are sharp and clear while not glaringly bright.
Thanks to E Ink technology, you can work outside in the sunshine.
The worlds fastest E-Ink Display, perfect for word processing, tables, coding, web browsing and more.
A fast, paper-like 17 x 14 computer monitor that you can use to Browse, code, and write without harsh backlight. Ideal for those that suffer from Computer Vision Syndrome.
DASUNG's 3rd generation E-ink monitor Paperlike 3 has an HD retina display, high contrast, fine quality, paper-like, no blue light, no reflection, no flashing, excellent eye-saver.
A Pixel Qi Display with controller board that works as a monitor for those who need sunlight readability or who suffer from Computer Vision Syndrome. Ideal for playing video!


Social media is used by virtually all types of businesses to market their products and services. It also provides a place for interaction between brands and customers.
For customers, social media is the best way to connect with brands. It is where they can get a quick response and direct access to information about a product or service. However useful it is to both businesses and customers, social media isn't always the ground for happy comments and grateful consumers. Sometimes, users go to a brand's social media page for the sole purpose of complaining about a product or service. And when that happens, account managers panic.
This article tackles the different ways companies can address unfavorable comments on social media - a few do's and don'ts to turn negative social media into positive PR.
DO respond to complaints you receive via social media. By responding, you're showing your customers that you are listening to them and are acting on their concerns.
DO consider taking complex issues out of the spotlight. Social platforms may not be the best place to resolve it. Offer to continue the conversation by means of a more appropriate medium (by phone, e-mail, or an existing online support forum).
DO respond quickly and with care. Replying promptly makes your customer feel that you think they're important; and you're also giving the commenter less time to complain again. That is why it's necessary for companies to have dedicated staff to monitor their social media accounts every day.
DO think of the bigger picture and the effect public complaints will have on your business. A good way to make sure your customers are happy with how you have addressed and handled the situation is by following up with them.
DO inject a little humor into your responses. Surprisingly, it's the brands that are often bullied and trolled on social media. Why not rise to the occasion with a witty and inoffensive joke? A clever and funny video apology or meme also does the trick. Turning the issue into something fun and entertaining is another way to pacify irate customers and at the same time shows the audience what a good sport and good humored brand you are.
DON'T delete comments and get defensive. Deleting customer complaints and negative comments or becoming excessively defensive only infuriates customers and intensifies the issue. Gather your thoughts and review your response before hitting the send button. You are representing the company, so it's best to do it well and display professionalism.
These are the standard ways of responding to customer complaints on social media. The ideal world for a social media marketer would be one where everyone - from customers to prospective customers - engages positively. But, as in the real world, mistakes happen and customers get agitated and complain. Whether it is the straightforward approach or a response with humor, the one thing you can't do is ignore the issue and hope that it will just disappear.


text:
Q: Automatic License Plate Recognition with PHP I want to know if i can capture the text from a number plate using PHP. If it isnt possible, is there any examples that i can use to implement it and merge it with a PHP application?

A: What's you're looking for is called OCR (optical character recognition).
You can try this to see if it fits your needs.
If willing to pay, you also have this option.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


The artwork and sign work turned out beautifully. Everyone in the company I dealt with was extremely nice and helpful. Their prices were very fair. I would definitely recommend them if you need any type of sign work.
Fastsigns was completely fair and actual installed the decals for my golf cart earlier than expected. Communication was a key and they exceeded all expectations. I also thought the price was great and well within my budget. Thank you!
The team was friendly, helpful and quick. I had a number of revisions to the original request, and each was met promptly. Once my final projects were done, I was very pleased with the quality and the design. Great stuff!
Great company to work with. We bid the business out and they came back with the most competitive pricing with a very quick response. Owners and staff are both a pleasure to work with.
I was extremely happy with the timeliness, professionalism and follow up of Fast Signs. I would recommend them for sure!


text:
Band director Bob Ratcliff watches the Garage Band practice in the recording studio on Nov. 7. (Photo by Emma Boersma)
Recording studio well-used, but not to full extent
Nihal Gulati November 11, 2019 44 views
0 Comments44 views7 min read
The Connor Burns Memorial Studio — it's a complete recording facility next to the French room, yet some students don't know it exists.
The studio had its grand opening on Jan. 25, 2018, after two years of construction. Burns' father, Steven Burns, donated the recording equipment as a tribute to the seventh grader, a big rock 'n' roll fan who passed away in March 2015.
Steven Burns raised the money and received help from other parents, including Chuck Hansen, who owns a recording studio in Sacramento. Along with the maintenance department, they soundproofed the room and installed the equipment.
The studio is well-used, although often not the way it was intended. It's mostly used as a rehearsal space, according to band director Bob Ratcliff. Both the Garage Band and the A Cappella Club use it as such.
Senior Larkin Barnard-Bahn, founder of the A Cappella Club, said she enjoys using the studio as a rehearsal space since the orchestra room and Multipurpose Room are often in use.
"It's soundproofed, which is great for A Cappella rehearsals — no one can hear us screech," Barnard-Bahn said.
The band also uses the studio when instrument groups split up to practice, and it hosts private lessons, such as After School Enrichment's (ASE) piano instruction.
But groups also use it to record.
The Garage Band has recorded several tracks, including "Teen Spirit," "Pressure" and "Immigrant Song."
The Garage Band's cover of "Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, available along with its recordings of
"Pressure" by Muse and "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin on the Country Day Vimeo account.
Some of the Garage Band's recordings have been posted on the school Vimeo site, Ratcliff said.
Ratcliff also helped the A Cappella Club record "Time After Time" in May, using a high-quality microphone connected to GarageBand (the default recording program included with all Macs) on his laptop.
"We recorded a song in order to have a permanent record of what we'd done," Barnard-Bahn said.
An excerpt from the A Cappella Club's recording of "Time After Time," arranged by Kirby Shaw. (Recording courtesy of Larkin Barnard-Bahn)
However, for maximum sound quality, a recording engineer is needed — and no one on campus is trained to use the board that adjusts sound before it is fed into a computer.
"I can operate the board to a certain extent — I can get sound through the board," Ratcliff said. "But when you're actually recording something, there is a lot more involved than just getting sound through the board."
For the recording to be high quality, the sound needs to be equalized through the board, keeping the high, low and mid frequencies balanced. If not, the sound of the instruments isn't full, Ratcliff said. There is also the matter of controlling the left and right audio inputs, so the sound varies directionally when you hear it.
Recording engineering is a four-year degree and involves not only using the board, but also the advanced software to mix and master the raw tracks.
The Garage Band hired a recording engineer student, Sarah Joy Sy, from California State University, Sacramento. With her help, the group recorded "Immigrant Song" on the weekend of Nov. 18, 2018, "Teen Spirit" on the weekend of Dec. 1, 2018, and "Pressure" on the weekend of May 19, 2019.
Because no one on campus is trained to use the soundboard in the Connor Burns Memorial Studio, the Garage Band hired a recording engineer student, Sarah Joy Sy, from California State University, Sacramento. (Photo by Emma Boersma)
"It was a long, arduous process because you record tracks individually," junior Elijah Azar said. "You have the rhythm section record their part for the song first, and then the backgrounds and then the melody or vice versa."
Azar said he admired the advanced capabilities of the studio. "The soundboard was very impressive; the microphones were very good. The recording engineer was also extremely kind and very experienced."
Sy, the recording engineer, used the same equipment that the school owns when she studied recording engineering, according to Ratcliff.
"She was willing to work with us, and we actually offered her a job here, to maybe teach a class on it or work with our band. She hasn't taken us up on it yet," he said.
Even after the tracks are recorded, the songs are not quite done. Ratcliff and the students still have to mix and master them at Ringgerstudios (4917 Concordia Dr., Elk Grove), which can take almost twice as long as recording them, Ratcliff said.
When the A Cappella Club recorded, however, it didn't use a recording engineer.
"It was difficult because we would have had to record on a date that was good for every single member in the group, as well as (Sy), so we decided it would be much simpler if we didn't fully use the equipment," Barnard-Bahn said.
According to Barnard-Bahn, the audio came out well.
Senior David Situ also uses the recording studio for his Octagon podcasts, which feature various topics such as astrology.
"It's the easiest way to get good audio in a controlled setting," he said. "Everything's already set up; I can just use the microphones that are there, the cables and the board to get nice clean audio. A lot of other places will have background noise, or the mics won't be in the right setting."
While Situ does not use the soundboard, musicians do, and the school has no personnel trained to use the equipment. Additionally, Ratcliff said having a recording engineer at the school could significantly help music students through classes on how to remix and enhance sound.
"The slot of recording engineer is a hard one to fill because of the expertise and degree of training required," head of school Lee Thomsen said. "As future hires are made, the school will be keeping an eye out for people who can fill this position."
—By Nihal Gulati
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Sensible plain black shoes – no trainers, high heels, boots or open toe sandals.
On health and safety grounds we do not allow children to wear jewellery in our school. The exceptions to this rule are earring studs in pierced ears and a watch. Children must remove or cover these items during PE and games to prevent them from causing injury.
No makeup or nail varnish should be worn in school.
The school does not permit children to have extreme haircuts that could serve as a distraction to other children and are not in keeping with the ethos of the school. This includes patterns shaved into the hair, unnaturally dyed/streaked hair, excessive use of hair products and styles such as spikes, tufts and Mohican haircuts. The definition of an extreme hairstyle is at the discretion of the Executive Headteacher/ Head of School.
All uniform should be named. Lost property will now be collected, any named items will be returned to their owners, and any un-named items will be kept in containers under the archway to the Foundation playground/Year 5 and 6 entrance, accessible from the main playground. Lost property still unclaimed after each half term will be sold or donated.


At the moment, we are looking for new moderators. Our current staff is doing a great job, but we need more of them. We want to provide the best service for our players, and we hope that some of you might wanna help us with this.
If you think that you have what it needs to become a moderator, and have some free time to spend, you should give it a shot. You should have a bit of experience as a moderator, and at least 13 years old. If we feel that you have what it takes, we can make exceptions.
If there are any questions, send us a message on discord or the forums.
We wish you good luck and hope to see one of you joining our team.
This month has been very excited for us and I would like to tell about some changes/improvements and upcoming updates for the GoliCraft server.
We have decided to make Seasons instead of a reset when it requires the most. This is for making the gameplay less boring and to help and make a good start for new players joining GoliCraft. We will also try to do massive changes on for example gameplay or add new features to the game mode every season.
We have a lot in the storage. Things we want to develop and release. So, so much! Sadly we can't expand too much because of the lack of players required to have fun and playing together.
This will be just amazing! Before your name, it will say  meaning you are in level  on the GoliCraft network. You can obtain XP needed to rank up by almost everything on the server. This system will be just great and will release soon.
Quests are sort of challenges with prices. When you finish quests for example: "Get 500 Kills" you will receive Golets and of course XP to rankup your Network Level. This is why Network Levels needs to be released before Quests. On Survival and SkyBlock the rewards will be Money, Golets and XP.
To kick off survival season 10, you can now purchase the new Reset Bundle.
With this, you will get a quick head start, and you're ready to start grinding mobs, and mining with the new Trench Pickaxe.
This bundle also comes with a money pouch, spawners, sell Wands, Harvester Hoes, Sorting Wands and more!
Go to (http://store.golicraft.net/category/1234722) and check it out!
Hello, lovely GoliCrafters! I will write this thread on Norwegian because I want EVERYONE to understand what I'm talking about.
Factions! Factions er et perfekt claiming system for både å spille avlene eller med en stor vennegjeng/clan! Factions er navnet på claiming systemet og serveren blir derfor IKKE FACTIONS. Factions handler om raiding og slikt noe Survival ikke byr på.
Likt som Bedrock Claim og Spade Claim så må du kjøpe blocks for å kunne claime mer. Dette vil selvsagt også bli mulig med Factions. Når du claimer så claimer du med POWER som du har. Jeg vil gjøre at det blir mulig å kjøpe POWERS in-game med spill penger. Du kan også tjene POWER av antall medlemmer, drap og spilletid. Selvsagt ikke så mye, men litt.
Nei. Det er ikke mulig å overclaim hvis du har mer Power enn faction som har claimet. Det er selvsagt lov å raide de som ikke har claimet sitt land.
Ja dessverre. Vi vil kun gjøre det mulig at hver faction har 1 claim. Dette er for å lage det mer kompetitiv og team gameplay. Hvis dere er uenige med dette så kan jeg selvsagt endre, men jeg tror det blir kulest og best slikt.
Okay guys. This is my first season with SkyBlock and I need time to try out and find out whats best. Recently allot of you have complained about not making enough profit on the farms. I would like to try out this season with experimental sell prices (allot higher) and see how it goes.
WHY? This will make the gameplay more fun. When you have allot of money to buy spawners you will just upgrade and purchase more and more. I would like to try out this method.
SkyBlock is coming to GoliCraft on the 7th of October, and it will be awesome. So be ready, 7th of October 6 PM CEST for an experience you will never forget.
We are happy to announce that moderator applications are back up. The reason for this is that we've seen a growth in the player count, and to make everyone satisfied with their support, we need to have enough moderators to give you the best player experience. If you think you have the competence to moderate a server, offer much time to the job, talk to other people and be a person anyone can go to, this is the job for you.
If you need help or if you're having a struggle thinking of what to put in your application, I strongly recommend you checking out this (click) thread.
But keep in mind: All applicants that aren't 13 years old or older will be denied without exception.
Good luck with your applications, and we look forward to working with some of you in the future.
Hello GoliCrafters! As you've probably already seen, LootWars season 1 has started, and the game is on. With that being said, season 1 brings a lot of cool new futures, such as a new map, new loot, KOTH, and a new ranking system.
Season 1 will also be a competition, and the player with the most kills will win a 30$ GoliCraft store coupon, the second place will win a 10$ coupon, and third place will win a 5$ coupon. If the game mode becomes a big success, the winner prizes will raise, and maybe you will stand on the top as the winner of LootWars season 1.
UHC FFA has been on GoliCraft for a very long time, but sadly got removed. We are now happy to say that it will be playable on GameSwitch for a limited time, so play it while you can!
Hope you enjoy the updates, and hopefully, we will get back to you with another update soon.
Sadly @Beeenjamin has come to the conclusion to quit as Administrator here at GoliCraft. He have made allot of changes, helped with so many things and was so trustable. 3 good months m8! Very happy that you was a part of the Administration and couldn't think about anyone better that time. Now you have got new interests and I'm happy on your side. Good luck further and thank you. Well deserved VIP.
Also @S0lrike quited some days ago. He joined when i took the stunt to change to International. That was the time I needed most motivation and with him we've fixed up the systems that failed at GoliCraft, took decisions together and created so much good and fun. And it's more to come but that aren't really prioritized atm. (The gamemodes are more important) So without him im not sure if I had succeed with all the work being done to release a bugfree server and more. He was my helping hand and was very helpful. Not just helped him me, but he was really a good friend with me and everyone else on the server.
Hello there! My name is Nora, also known as N0raa. I'm one of the new administrators here on Golicraft.
I've been playing here for about 3 years now, and this is the place where I have recieved all the experience and knowledge I have today. Through this time I've seen a lot of changes on the server, and now I want to be a part of the changes that will come in the future.


Kitchen : Color Classic Design Set Ideas White Units Examples Flooring Best For Floor Kitchens Leyland Future ~ Kioscopedia Inc.
Published at Friday, September 14th, 2018 - 10:18:45 AM. Kitchen. By Aiglentina Julien.


text:
Awesome Photos of Stephen King Posing With His Beloved Cats From the 1980s
"Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire." ― Stephen King, Pet Sematary.
h/t: vintag.es
Horror, fantasy, and science-fiction author Stephen King has written 49 novels, nine collections of short stories, and five non-fiction books. He is also well-known for the many films based on his work, including The Shining (1980), Stand by Me (1986), and Pet Sematary (1989).
The 1985 film Cat's Eye (1985), written by King and based on his stories "Quitters, Inc." and "The Ledge" features a mysterious cat protagonist throughout the three-chapter anthology.
Despite once writing in a short story that "it might be that the biggest division in the world isn't men and women but folks who like cats and folks who like dogs," it seems that the King family does in fact keep both cats and dogs as pets.
Angelina Jolie at 1995 Marcel Indik Photoshoot
Black Model Recreates Famous Fashion Campaigns To Highlight Lack Of Diversity In Fashion Industry
Photographer Captures Photos Of Empty Budapest During The Coronavirus Quarantine
Ohio Youth Of The 1970s – Lovely Photos Of Long-Haired Teenage Girls In Dayton From 1974-75
Incredible Winning Images of The Nature Conservancy Australia 2021 Photo Contest
A Look Back At Playboy Bunny Girls
13 Inspiring Winning Photos Of The 2021 International Photography Awards
Titanic Artifacts To Go To Highest Bidder At 100-Year Anniversary Auction: Who Will Buy $189 Million Collection?
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These Portraits Show How People Are Just Like Their Pets
7th Annual Focus on Nature Photo Contest Winners
Dramatic Underwater Portraits That Are Reflective Of Overcoming Troubles In Artist's Life
Incredible Vintage Photographs From The Gibson Archives Of Ships Wrecked On British Coasts
This Travel Account Will Make You Feel Like A Kid Again
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"Just Another Day In L.A.": Photographer Captures Fantastic Aerial Shots Of Los Angeles
Walking with Giraffes
Candice Swanepoel for Muse, Summer 2012
Fascinating Black and White Pictures of New York Street Life in the Late 1960s
Hong Kong's Human Battery Hens: Claustrophobic Images Show How Slum Families Squeeze Their Lives Into The Tiniest Apartments
Lovely Vintage Photos of Rock Stars Posing With Their Kitty Cats
The Russia You'll Never See On Postcards Through The Lens Of Photographer Alexander Petrosyan
The Best Photos From The B&W Child Photography 2015 Photo Contest
Photographer Teemu Jarvinen Captures The Night Around Asia And The World
Internet K-hole: the Best Photo Blog You've ever Seen!
Beautiful 'Then And Now' Pictures Of Women From London's '80s Subcultures
Photographer Stijn Hoekstra Captures Empty Amsterdam During Curfew
Cool Old Photos Show What School Looked Like In The 1970s
Beautiful Black And White Portrait Photography By Daria Pitak
1980s, cats, pose, stephen king


text:
Q: Django:IntegrityError: UNIQUE constraint failed: backend_newuser.email I made custom user model in django. After creating one superuser succesfully I am unable to create new super user, it gives the error above, I don't understand the reason behind this.

models.py

from django.db import  models
from django.utils import timezone
from django.contrib.auth.models import AbstractBaseUser,PermissionsMixin, BaseUserManager

class CustomUserManager(BaseUserManager,):
        def create_user(self,email,password,user_name,about,**other_fields):
         email=self.normalize_email(str(email)); #for example ignore the case sensitivity
         user=self.model(email=email,user_name=user_name,about=about)
         user.set_password(password)
         user.save()
         return user;

        def create_superuser(self, email,user_name,password,**other_fields):
                other_fields.setdefault('is_staff',True)
                other_fields.setdefault('is_superuser',True)
                other_fields.setdefault('is_active',True)

                if other_fields.get('is_staff') is not True:
                    raise ValueError('super  user must be assigned to is_staff= True')
                if other_fields.get('is_superuser') is not True:

                    raise ValueError('Super user must be assigned to is_super_user=True')
                return self.create_user (self,email,user_name,password,**other_fields)

class NewUser(AbstractBaseUser,PermissionsMixin):
        email=models.EmailField(max_length=255,unique=True)
        user_name=models.CharField(max_length=32,unique=True)
        about =models.CharField(max_length=512,blank=True)
        is_staff=models.BooleanField(default=False)
        is_active=models.BooleanField(default=False)
        objects=CustomUserManager();
        USERNAME_FIELD='email'
        REQUIRED_FIELDS=['user_name']


Family Promise, the leading nonprofit engaging communities across the country to address family homelessness, continues to evolve as it celebrates 30 years transforming lives and empowering families as a national organization. That change starts at the top, and Family Promise recently announced several leadership changes to their National Board of Trustees.
Kevin Barrett, current Trustee and former CEO of Altegra Health, has been elected Vice Chair of the Board, replacing Cassandra A. Hardman, CEO of Hardman Johnston Global Advisors.
Five longtime Trustees have retired from the Board at the expiration of their terms: Cary R. Hardy; Robert W. Parsons, Jr.; Sig Huitt; Edwin J. Hagerty; and Cassandra A. Hardman.
Dan Tinkoff, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, has been elected as a Trustee.
Regular transitions are welcome and necessary to ensure that the Board continues to grow and evolve over time. However, rather than lose all of their considerable institutional memory and experience, it is common for some trustees to remain connected with the organization in an advisory capacity. As such, Cary R. Hardy and Robert W. Parsons have accepted seats on the Family Promise Emeritus Board and will continue to provide valued counsel to the organization.
Dan Tinkoff joins the Board as a leader in McKinsey's Global Pharmaceuticals & Medical Products Practice, working extensively with management teams and boards to help them optimize performance. His experience with advanced data and analytics will be invaluable to Family Promise's strategic planning process moving forward.
Family Promise is pleased to welcome Kevin and Dan to their new positions and to give sincere thanks to the retiring members for their continuing commitment and generous support of our mission to effect change in the lives of the thousands of children and families we serve nationwide.


text:
United Nations Security Council resolution 1627, adopted unanimously on 23 September 2005, after recalling previous resolutions on the situation in Sudan, particularly Resolution 1590 (2005), the Council extended the mandate of the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) for six months until 24 March 2006.

Observations
In the preamble of the resolution, the Council expressed condolences on the death of John Garang de Mabior, and commended Salva Kiir Mayardit for his efforts in the peace process. It welcomed the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement by the Sudanese government and Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) and urged the parties to meet their obligations under that agreement.

The resolution determined the situation to remain a threat to international peace and security.

Acts
The mandate of UNMIS was extended with an intention for further renewals if necessary. The Secretary-General Kofi Annan was requested to report every three months on the situation, including efforts by UNMIS to support the African Union Mission in Sudan. Finally, troop-contributing countries were instructed to take appropriate action to prevent sexual exploitation by UNMIS personnel.

See also
 African Union Mission in Sudan
 United Nations–African Union Mission in Darfur
 International response to the War in Darfur
 List of United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1601 to 1700 (2005–2006)
 South Sudan
 War in Darfur

References

External links

Text of the Resolution at undocs.org

 1627
2005 in Sudan
 1627
September 2005 events

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia