text:
Magia Record: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica Gaiden surpasses 5,000 sales on fourth Blu-ray / DVD
Love Live! Superstar!! posts Sumire Heanna's video presentation
Kaifuku Jutsushi no Yarinaoshi: popularity increases in Japan
Gotoubun no Hanayome is preparing an original course?
All the emojis coming to Android and iOS this year
Get the 117 new emojis before anyone else
Why does the handshake emoji only have 1 skin color
Don't Miss! Emoticons that will arrive with Android 11
Sephiroth already has his place in the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate mural
Sword Art Online: Progressive could have a project in development
INA News
Home/Movies News/Alan Rickman's diaries to be published as a memoir in 2022
Alan Rickman's diaries to be published as a memoir in 2022
The actor wrote 27 volumes throughout his life, with the intention that one day they would see the light.
Four years have passed since Alan Rickman's death, but the pain between cinephilia and specifically the fandom of the Harry Potter saga remains indelible. The London-based actor passed away in 2016 of pancreatic cancer, putting an end to a long film career that ranged from memorable villains like Hans Gruber in The Die Hard to the must-see Severus Snape originally created by J.K. Rowling, passing through other unmistakable characters in Sense and Sensibility, Love Actually or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The Guardian now reveals that, since the 90s, Rickman kept a conscientious diary with the idea of publishing it one day, extending this to 27 volumes where he reflected on politics, cinema and personal experiences, as well as shared anecdotes from his filming and his career on the theatrical stages, where he came to represent Dangerous Friendships or Hamlet or Sherlock Holmes. It is a revealing treasure about an essential actor in British cinema, so the Canongate publishing house has committed to bringing together all 27 newspapers in the publication of a single book.
Its working title is The Diaries of Alan Rickman, and the idea is for it to hit bookstores in 2022. "It makes you compulsively read it and offers an incomparable insight into the daily life of an extraordinary actor," says editor Alan Taylor, while Rickman's widow, Rima Horton, blesses this decision: "They reveal not only actor Alan Rickman, but the real Alan. His sense of humor, his keen perception, his dexterity, his devotion to art ".
alan rickman alan rickman fans alan rickman movie Harry Potter Fans
'Aquaman 2': The petition to fire Amber Heard reaches a million signatures
'Earwig and the Witch': New movie from Studio Ghibli will arrive in 2021
Actor Geoffrey Palmer from ('Tomorrow never dies') dies at 93
More Than 50 Movies Will Come From Netflix Catalog From this July 1st: See the list
Vanessa Kirby goes for the Oscar for the trailer of 'Fragments of a woman'
Disney works on live-action version of "Hercules"
A young woman from Mongolia has the "second longest pair of legs" in the world
Jewellery that Lady Diana once wore (and where are they now)
Brave cartoon women from whom we can learn a lot
Unsolved mysteries that cartoons left us
Rebuttals of Iconic Scenes That Seemed to Make Sense, But Now We Find Absurd
How "Twilight" managed to go from being a second-rate girl's movie to one of Hollywood's best projects
Plants that are easy to care for and with which you can decorate your home
People Show Their Amazing Original Crochet Creations
Lovely birds that are as sweet and playful as children
See how actors and actresses from 90s and 2000s iconic TV series have changed
© Copyright 2021, All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy | Contact Us


text:
import xw from 'xwind'
import ButtonReact from '../components/ButtonReact'
import ButtonStyled from '../components/ButtonStyled'

const Index = () => (
  <div css={xw`grid justify-center items-center h-screen space-y-20`}>
    <div css={xw`space-y-20`}>
      <ButtonReact>@emotion/react</ButtonReact>
      <ButtonStyled>@emotion/styled</ButtonStyled>

)

export default Index

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


It's been six weeks since I was fat-shamed. It wasn't even a blatant fat-shame, it was worse because it was disguised in a compliment. Why people do that I will never know–it's even worse that women do it to each other! It's also been six weeks since I've tried to turn my diet and physical fitness regimen around to amazingly great results!
I haven't been this happy about my weight in so long. It's not even just the weight itself as I haven't weighed myself since I started this journey, but more the feeling that I can fit my clothes without the feel of overflowing in certain places. I feel like I'm returning back to my old self of being healthier and happier. I never thought it would be possible, especially since I reached my 30s where they say your metabolism slows considerably. I can't be happier overall that I feel more at my best now than I've ever been in a long while.
Don't mind the face lol I had just woken up and was getting ready to head to the gym when I thought to try my old romper that is a size zero. I ordered it online but never got to use it as I was in denial that I was a size larger and had been for some time. I tried ti for the first time since I bought it and it fits! I don't recommend to drop down in size if it's not your healthy weight, but I had always been a healthy 105lbs for being a small person standing at under 5 feet tall.
I can't vouch for any one thing that I've been doing, but just researching ways to get healthy and putting in the effort to be conscious of what I eat and what I don't makes such a difference. I think the single most life changing part was the fact that I didn't just try to cop out by just going to the gym and barely changing my diet. Trying to be more fit involves healthier eating as well as more physical activity–both of which I did each of but never together.
Start small, but more importantly, START. You won't get moving if you never start, no matter how small.
Find a goal and use it! Mine started out as my wedding, but then evolved into just being my old, healthier, self!
Get some cute workout gear! This may sound vain, but sometimes a cute outfit can motivate!
Push yourself. I am not always up for working out but sometimes I push myself just to get out of bed and into my workout clothes. I don't give myself a chance to say no.
Research. Don't just start trying anything without researching it first! If you are a newbie to some of the exercise tips or health tips you have heard or read about, don't just try it but read about it and research it! Get more informed about what you do to your body and what you put into your body!
Keep track of your progress. Keep track of your progress, and don't get discouraged no matter how small it is. Progress is ongoing and it can only get better if you keep pushing! When I first started, I didn't see much progress and got tempted to stop, but I gave it more time and kept track of my progress and started to get more motivated by it! Use your progress to give you that extra push on those days you don't have much strength to go on.
Find your own rhythm. One important lesson that I've learnt is that everyone's body responds in different ways and what may work for one person may not work for another. It's important to find your own work-out routine ad rhythm because going by someone else's regimen may not necessarily work for your body or schedule. I work out half an hour about 3 to 4 times a week depending on what my schedule allows. I don't try to go beyond what i truly can't handle but I do try to push myself a little each time just to progress. You know best what works so work within that!
I hope my tips helped out and my little progress update gave some the motivation they need to start. It's not a brag, I don't want to make it seem like being skinny is what I'm trying to achieve. I also don't profess to be a health guru or an expert, if anything health and fitness seems to be an ongoing struggle and lifelong learning for me. I am trying to achieve my healthy weight for my height. I am trying to make myself healthier and make more healthier decisions and choices that may affect my family and when I eventually have kids. As long as you are happy with your weight and feeling healthy then that should be the primary concern!


text:
Netflix is Launching its Ad Supported Service in the US Today
After announcing an ad-supported plan in July, Netflix officially launches it in the U.S. today.
By Rachyl Jones • 11/03/22 10:47am
Netflix could earn billions from offering ads.
Netflix's advertising-supported streaming service will launch in the U.S. today (Nov. 3) at noon eastern time. The plan costs $6.99 per month, which is half the cost of Netflix's most popular plan and cheaper than other streamers offering ads like Hulu, HBO Max and Disney+, which will launch in December.
The company announced it would be adding a ad option in July after insisting for years it wouldn't adopt an advertising model. But Netflix could earn an additional $2.2 billion in annual revenue over the next five years, estimated Ampere Analysis, a London-based financial analysis firm. The ad tier is already available in Canada and Mexico.
Subscribers will view four to five minutes of ads per hour, which is less ad time than on traditional linear television but standard among streamers. Netflix is planning to crack down on password sharers early next year, and the ad tier may be an option for users who can no longer share accounts. The company expects the plan will appeal to new customers rather than existing ones looking to downgrade.
Filed Under: Business, Media, ad-tier, advertising, Netflix
SEE ALSO: Sam Bankman-Fried's Deceptions Allegedly Include Millions in Illegal Campaign Contributions

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
package org.multibit.hd.ui.fest.use_cases.standard.sidebar.tools.verify_network;

import org.fest.swing.fixture.FrameFixture;
import org.multibit.hd.ui.fest.use_cases.AbstractFestUseCase;
import org.multibit.hd.ui.languages.MessageKey;

import java.util.Map;

/**
 *
Use case to provide the following to FEST testing:

 *

 *
Verify the "tools" screen verify network wizard shows

 *

 *
Requires the "tools" screen to be showing

 *
 * @since 0.0.1
 *
 */
public class ShowThenFinishVerifyNetworkUseCase extends AbstractFestUseCase {

  public ShowThenFinishVerifyNetworkUseCase(FrameFixture window) {
    super(window);
  }

  @Override
  public void execute(Map<String, Object> parameters) {

    // Click on Verify network
    window
      .button(MessageKey.SHOW_VERIFY_NETWORK_WIZARD.getKey())
      .click();

    // Verify the "verify network" wizard appears
    assertLabelText(MessageKey.VERIFY_NETWORK_TITLE);

    // Verify Finish is present
    window
      .button(MessageKey.FINISH.getKey())
      .requireVisible()
      .requireEnabled();

   // Click Finish
    window
      .button(MessageKey.FINISH.getKey())
      .click();

    // Verify the underlying screen is back
    window
      .button(MessageKey.SHOW_SIGN_WIZARD.getKey())
      .requireVisible()
      .requireEnabled();
  }
}


Check out our new FOR SALE page on the Belmont Boatworks website! We will be posting all boats for sale around the yard and other nautical items that our customers wish to sell. We get many inquiries a day and we feel this will be an added convenience to all! If you have something to sell, let us know and we can put it up for you.


But I am sure my story will be insightful for you and the Virgo man you are interested in...You see, as a bright psychology student, I used to think I understood nature, personality, and the behavioral traits of a man in love...But I was so wrong...Because men can often be too mysterious, confusing and complex to read. And that may as well be the case with that Virgo man in your life, with all his unique personality traits.I never thought I would realize how he feels, even after he had gone quiet when I asked him what was going on in his heart...even though he didn't respond to my texts and calls and would not open up to me.I couldn't believe it, and I imagine he couldn't either, when one day I stumbled upon something that was strangely powerful yet subtle.Initially I was skeptical about it, but once I saw its magic, I naturally realized its power. And that is the science of Astrology.And in a moment you will see how Astrology can help you discover his inner psychology and the way his mind works, and why he does what he does. And you'll get all Virgo man traits easily decoded.You will see his special heart and special desires and his special ways of communicating. And this can make you finally speak his language and talk directly to his heart.And that's when your relationship will change for the best when you realize that you can be, in fact, a Virgo man's best match! Even tough your signs may not seem "perfectly compatible" at first.As it happened with me, just a few years ago, I could read a guy who is stone cold. I realized my man's deep desires and how he is really feeling about us and our relationship.And this realization completely turned our relationship around as we were getting closer and closer to walking down the aisle.And as I later discovered, I was doing almost everything the wrong way. Pushing him away, turning him off and closing his heart. Even when I just wanted what was best for us.Maybe you are thinking, "Is it really possible to get the Virgo man to chase you, and to miss you, even if he is pulling away? Even if the stars say a Virgo man is not your ideal match?"Frankly, I had my doubts too. They disappeared when I saw the magic of Astrology working with my own eyes.All of my worries and misunderstandings vanished like they never existed.It brought him back in my life like a magnet and saved our relationship. All because I could resonate with him, and really connect with him on a deeper level.To me, Astrology is a personal guidebook to navigate through life.Let me show you how you can really make that Virgo man you want...... so addicted to you, he actually yearns for you when you are not around...... so committed to you that he can't breathe without you by his side and in his heart.I urge you to use the magic held in the stars by reading this report word for word because frankly, you are here for a reason and not by mere chance — opportunity does not wait around.Hi, my name is Anna Kovach. And I am an devoted Astrologer, consulted and trusted by many women like yourself.Let me tell you this truth first, because there are no accidents and certainly not the fact that you have arrived here.Look, my dear friend, this page was hard to find because I don't go around sharing this page with many people, only those who may directly benefit from it like yourself stumble upon it. So the fact that you landed on this page today tells me that your stars are aligned (or, aligning) for something...I am not sure for what but since each action influences destiny, I believe you want to influence your destiny too, and maybe you want some guidance, specially for that Virgo man in your life.If that's the case, then luckily you have arrived at the most insightful website on the entire Internet. Because here you'll get answers to all of your questions pertaining the male Virgo, questions such as:And many more similar issues with Virgo men that may be troubling you at the moment.Here's the thing: a Virgo man can confuse you when you don't know how to connect and resonate with them.A Virgo man has a very bright side and a kind heart, like you... he is willing to make sacrifices for the greater good than, say, a Leo would be. He is a gem inside.But Virgo men have a dark side, too.They may not reveal their true emotions or reveal entirely different emotions when they have their doubts with a woman or a certain relationship situation.Virgo men simply do not admit their feelings easily...It could be that your Virgo guy picks up his cellphone to call or text you, but then being poor at managing his emotions, the poor soul will just set it down.So he could very well be into you, but due to one reason or the other he may not show it openly or he may pull back because he gets into an "analyzing" mode that Virgos are known for...Maybe you've done your best to pursue a Virgo man and given out all the right signals, but he just does not respond...Because of the fact that his way of communicating and interpreting signals is entirely different from yours (even if you are a Virgo woman).And when you understand this fact you have a strange confidence, and you attract him like a magnet, even if right now you don't currently see how.So if a Virgo man is not calling or texting you back, or he doesn't ask you out... for some unknown reason.Or, he doesn't give you the attention and the love you know you deserve.Or, he is sending off mixed signals or he has completely broken off... in any case you want to read this page word for word...Because by the end of my story you'll get everything you need to make him so obsessed with you, that he will come crawling on his knees begging you to make him your boyfriend... talking with you for hours, listening to your every word like a puppy and kissing you slowly and passionately...And all this can happen because...Because right here I want to teach you the right way to attract a Virgo man... which is by understanding where he is coming from.I'll teach you much more than just Virgo men likes and dislikes, or Virgo men pros and cons... because I'll show you how his inner psyche actually works.It certainly doesn't matter if he doesn't even notice you or that you two are incompatible, or you just want him back. Even if you're just looking to bring back the sparks into your relationship with the Virgo male you love... the secrets I'm about to reveal here can get you all that and much more...But I totally get you; maybe you are skeptical about the Zodiac, Astrology and horoscopes and they all seem strange.I too used to think that... Until I met my soulmate.Back in 2006, when I was a young college senior, I dated this amazing guy, Frank. He is a typical Taurus. It's an unbelievably fantastic story how we met, but I'll save that for later.Before we crossed each other's paths, I was single for some time, so obviously I was excited to meet my Mr. Right and I'd have butterflies when he touched me and kissed me.He was perfect in every sense of the way that I wanted my man to be. He was tall, handsome, and caring.Everything was falling into place, and I was considering myself lucky to have found my soulmate.But I was unaware of a brutal trouble on the horizon. I just didn't see it coming...Surprisingly he started to grow apart because of the daily grind; the romance ebbed away.We started to have less eye contact. Confused about all this I even asked him what was wrong. But I didn't get any answer. Nothing I could use at least... he just shrugged it away and said it's nothing.I thought I should give him some space, and I shouldn't come across as clingy or needy. But that didn't work.I was not able to understand what was going on inside his mind... I was just not able to go beyond his words, into his soul to know what exactly he wanted.It seemed he desperately wanted to reveal something, but our minds were not tuned in. I was at the wrong place at the wrong time approaching things with the wrong tools.Suddenly he distanced himself and even though I thought I knew him, he came off as heartless and a commitment phobic lover.He wouldn't respond to my calls and text messages. He was always upset with me for no particular reason. He was showing his dark side driving me mad, but I didn't want to lose him.Some friends suggested that this is 'normal' guy behavior, and things will get better on their own. So I just waited...Then one cold day he called me and said things were not working out between us, and he wanted to break up. Saying some typical "It's not you, it's not me" type of stuff... how he is not ready for a serious relationship right now, but also something about how things aren't really working out between us and that was that. He just broke up with me, over the phone.My head spun, I lost my balance for a minute; I could not understand why... why is he doing this?I really felt he was the one for me. I broke into thousand pieces... I lost my world. Why was this happening to me? I really wanted to settle down and live happily forever with Frank... stupidly I thought he'll come back.But I ran out of luck when I saw him with another woman, and I wasn't making any headway. I cried all day and night for him foolishly waiting for him…And weeks passed by before reality hit me. He ain't coming back.I must live without him… I must live without his cute smile and witty jokes. I must live without his tight hugs and charming conversation. I must destroy all of his memory and photos... How could I do that?Probably my mom took pity on me and asked me to visit my roots, my native country, Romania.She thought new people and a new environment would change my mood. Earlier I wasn't agreeing to visit my native town due to Frank because I didn't want to leave him alone... but now I thought mom has a point.Getting over a break-up isn't easy. And after a long tiring trip, I finally landed there.At Vernesti, my aunt came to pick me up. And there she was looking so radiant, and I immediately felt a mountain of positive energy in her.During the drive back home, I was enthralled to look at the beautiful scenery along the way... but even as I enjoyed the ride, my aunt could spot a problem.She then asked me if something was wrong and initially hesitant, I revealed everything because she was so full of positive energy and empathy. It relieved me a bit to get it off my chest to someone who seemed to understand it.But then she just smiled and nodded as if there was something funny... It wasn't a joke, it hurts!"What sign is he?" She asked.She laughed out loud with an even bigger grin when I replied. I didn't come here to spend my time with an insensitive person... I'll probably have a tough time here.Then she revealed a small personality trait about Frank. It was true. And I was mad. Was she spying on me? Did mom tell her about this? Or, is it just a fluke, a coincidence.My jaw dropped an inch or two when she started off revealing more details about Frank, almost overwhelming me.What the heck is going on?Is she some psychologist, but how can she know all this without meeting Frank?Actually, I didn't know one thing about my aunt, and my mom never revealed it to me either. Astrology is very big in Romania. You can flip to any television channel or radio, and you'll get ad after ad for astrologers.And my aunt was a well-known astrologer too. She wasn't on TV there; I guess she didn't need to because she was doing very well without needing to advertise her services...And as I saw her house, which was more like a castle... I realized she was doing pretty well in her business. And in that castle, I was given a glimpse of the magic that would transform my life, forever, and give me what I sincerely wanted.My aunt had decades of successful experience in Astrology and her clients include couples wanting to get married, troubled couples, CEOs, celebrities and politicians... She was in demand. She was the one who influenced thousands of lives there...I realized astrology is not the junk you read in the newspaper horoscopes… It's a much, much deeper science.You must, of course, know the phenomenon of the tides... two important celestial figures in Astrology and our solar system i.e. Sun and Moon effortlessly move HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF TONS OF WATER sitting millions of miles away from Earth.Their influence is at play when we make important decisions about our future and our relationships. And it has an impact on both our personality and our future...Your horoscope could actually mean the difference between happiness or sorrow; between walking down the aisle together or being alone.Recently, it came in the news that the wife of America's most famous president Ronald Reagan is believed to have relied extensively on Astrology to guide her husband to peak after a great political fiasco.No doubt, powerful and intelligent people rely on this science. And Astrology is your best roadmap to life and relationships!Actually, your natal horoscope analysis by a qualified astrologer is simply the best psychological analysis you can get today because in an experiment in 1960 astrologers beat psychologists in predicting case histories.And that's when I started to study this craft.My aunt showed how my chart was interacting with his charts and making it all a challenging affair.She showed me how basically, as a Gemini woman; I am not very compatible with a Taurus man.And then as if she took me by the hand to give me a look into his mind, inside his hidden thoughts and emotions... the things that he was not able to tell me or probably he didn't even realize were influencing his feelings towards me.This practical psychology gave me a sense of incredible power, instead of self-pity I transformed into a confident girl who knows how to handle a man.Armed with this secret weapon and some hope and confidence, I left for home...I didn't know if Frank had started dating any of the beautiful women who had their eyes on him... I just acted with the new knowledge. And then without any fuss, I called Frank.We had a smooth hour-long conversation, and I used some of my new understanding, and as he later told me, for the first time he felt as if I "got him."He was blown away by the way I handled the conversation, as if I knew what was going on in his mind, I could see beyond the words coming off his lips.And he understood something... he felt something... he realized it finally.In the end, he wanted to meet me for a drink.As he later revealed to me, he didn't know what caught him, but he realized the mistake he was about to make by letting me go.After almost two years of romancing, I finally thought it's time to settle down. My deeper understanding of his mental framework allowed me to press a few buttons in his mind, and I sent off new signals.Sure enough, he bent down on his one knee and pleaded me to marry him. My new astrological power allowed it to happen smoothly, effortlessly without me having to lift a finger. We just became an almost perfect fit.This is not to say our relationship was without challenges, but with my new knowledge, we were able to overcome it faster, smoother and better.It's not fortune telling, as some people wrongly think.It really just provides you with a map, a set of potentials, and it's your free will ultimately that has to take action on it with confidence.It can be your secret weapon to be at the right place at the right time.Then for the next few years, I felt a need to study the science deeply, and I revisited my old aunt so many times. I took advanced courses and seminars, diving into it under the guidance of the able mentors. I spent my time with masters who have devoted their entire lives to the study of this field.Gradually, it became a calling for me, and I started helping and consulting clients with relationship problems.As I interacted with many couples, men, and women, I saw many patterns.Women don't have to spend a fortune on expensive and cumbersome consultations with Astrologers, or relationship counselors or therapists. It can be made a lot simpler and more accurate by way of studying the signs of Virgo men.It was then I wrote my first book. It was a huge success. I received countless thank you letters from women (and men) who saved their marriages, and their relationships because of this new knowledge.At that time many women from around the world asked me for a specific guide to a Virgo man's mind.A lot of them were on the verge of breaking up... and I felt it necessary to help those women out. Knowing that I had to go through similar troubles and found help in the stars, therefor I felt it was my duty to pass on these secrets, in a way that can be put into practice and understood even by non-experts.And it was then I did a unique thing...I turned knowledge about Virgo men into a step-by-step book. It was a big challenge because Virgo men are unlike other men. Each Zodiac sign brings its own set of unique challenges and Virgo men can confuse you a lot.After working with hundreds of women dating a Virgo man, I finally cracked the code. I finally figured out and documented all the keys to a Virgo man's heart. The secrets contained within my book are, without a doubt, the keys to winning his heart, mind and soul.Wouldn't it be better to see through his actions, and words and understand what he really wants... and press all the right buttons to keep him engaged?You are right! He is a mystery, and it is hard to keep him interested, even harder than dealing with his commitment phobia...But believe it or not, Virgos make excellent partners (even in bed) you can snag. It's when you clear the shroud of mystery; you discover a gem that's been hidden from you all this time.You realize he is not as cold or detached as he seems. Once you talk in his language, he is actually very funny and open.And he is happy to be your puppy, attentive to your every word, looking into your eyes with sincere interest... and missing you when you are not around.All that is possible when you have the X-ray vision into his mind and give him what he really wants… based on the magic of Astrology.Skeptics turn believers when they unlock the magic themselves.Earlier this kind of extensive information was only available to some of my premium clients.But right now I invite you to this step-by-step, easy-to-follow roadmap to a Virgo man's mind.You will get all that you need to make him like you, love you… and lock his eyes on you, once and for all.Now with this guide comes a real power into your hands. It's so powerful that, in fact, it can even be dangerous.Because with this guide you can directly see through his flesh and understand his soul... the power to influence knows no boundaries when you use Astrology to make him dance on your fingers.That's it. If you use it ethically and responsibly, I invite you to try your Virgo man guide...DISCLAIMER: Virgo Man Secrets is a digital product. Image above is for visualization purposes only.'Virgo Man Secrets' is a step-by-step, done for you online program that will show you the primal level of the mind, body, and soul of a Virgo Man.It's your blueprint to increase the love, intimacy and emotional connection in your relationship with your Virgo man.Imagine his mind is a long maze. And at its center lies his heart. And you need to solve all the puzzles, cope with the challenges and open all the locks with right keys. And if you do that successfully you will get to his heart.Otherwise, you will go out of the maze or get lost in it, and go off of his radar. Either case you lose him.My �Virgo Man Secrets' is a one of a kind roadmap to look right inside any Virgo man's mind and reach his heart.You'll know and understand all the secret places and hidden pathways in his mind. You'll have the juice of practical Psychology, Astrology, and Sextrology… it's really like a bible for you if you want to read your Virgo man like an open book.And you won't find this information anywhere else, certainly not in the newspapers or magazines.Because I am not talking about the junk descriptions or the top 10 pros and cons you read online... because this is most comprehensive analysis of a Virgo man's mind, heart, and soul to date.


text:
Essays · Historical & Epic · Memoir · SF & Fantasy
The Wizard of Oz at 80: Archive of a Rust Belt Girl
Amy Kenyon
Screenshot: Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz, the film, turns 80 this year, 2019. To celebrate, we present Amy Kenyon's striking analysis/memoir, which explores growing up a "rust belt girl" in postwar Detroit in the shadow of this seminal work, and much more.
MGM's The Wizard of Oz has reached 80 years. Yet to borrow freely from an image once given by Michel Foucault, if an archive is made up of elements that shine like stars, some brighter than others, then my bright star – the place/time from which I can best see the Oz constellation – is not 1939, the year of the film's release, but 1956, the year of its first television broadcast.1 And in perhaps my first archival fortuity, the 1956 broadcast was hosted by Ford Star Jubilee, a Ford Motor Company-sponsored CBS series. I was born in old Henry's home town of Dearborn in 1954.
1956: Bright Star of Obsolescence, Anachronism, Nostalgia, Cultural Politics
I have no memory of 1956, the year of the first broadcast, but from that time until 1980 (with the exception of the MGM Children's Matinees in the early 1970s), Oz belonged to television, where it drew large audiences at every annual showing.2 We might say that the ascendancy of "television Oz" marked "cinema Oz" with a cumulative (year upon year) obsolescence. What might it mean that my bright star, the inception of my archive, was also a death star, a process of cultural forgetting? For the artist Tacita Dean,
obsolescence is a state of normality. Everything that excites me no longer functions in its own time. The one thing I have noticed is that so often I am attracted to things conceived in the decade of my birth. I court anachronism.… and I wonder if the objects and buildings I seek were ever, in fact, content in their own time, as if obsolescence was invited at their conception.3
Like Ray Bolger's Scarecrow pointing this way and that along the yellow brick road, Tacita Dean's comment suggests a few possible directions. If Oz as television broadcast was "conceived in the decade of my birth" (and like Dean's stated predilection for all things '60s, this may partly explain my attraction to it), it was also an anachronism. We baby boomers, cross-legged on the floor beneath our small screens, did not know or think about 1939, the year of the film's release. (Nor, unsurprisingly, were we aware that the film was not the first adaptation of its original source material, L. Frank Baum's 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I knew nothing of the Oz books until I reached adolescence.) We never thought we were seeing something out of its own time and space. We could not guess that the small-screen Oz of 1956 foretold a success that would soon dim the big-screen Oz of 1939.
Nor could we imagine a yet larger mapping or, to draw from Dean again, the differences in how Oz "function[ed] in its own time" and ours. For example, we were too young to grasp that these two key Oz dates were separated by historical trauma. Our parents first watched the film on the eve of a world war (my father was 14 when the film was released; four years later, he was in France). What did my father think when the film came into our living room in 1956? What were his memories? As I write, I imagine him standing behind me, both of us turned to the small screen. I imagine him saying, "Ah but I saw this film before. I can never again watch this film with the innocence of not knowing what was to come. I can never again allow such innocence." My father would not have said such things. If he thought such things, I can't know. Yet over the years, there was evidence that the war (together with the Depression) weighed upon my parents' decisions and worldview. Nearly every father on our block had been to the war, yet we were oblivious; we were the children busily not thinking about it. In the expected order of things, we were doing what children do – thoughtlessly superseding the generation before us.
Finally, we could not have guessed that within a few decades of our own childhood, the baby boom over, our rampant nostalgia for the birth decade would be interrogated by the first chroniclers of postmodernity, most notably Fredric Jameson, who remarked that "for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire – not merely the stability and prosperity of a pax Americana, but also the first naive innocence" of the counterculture.4 Jameson cited American Graffiti (1973) as the first of a number of "nostalgia films" seeking to "recapture the mesmerizing lost reality" of the postwar period. In this context, if we consider the iconic place in popular culture conferred to The Wizard of Oz by the annual broadcasts, it comes as no surprise that baby boomer writers and filmmakers would later cite the film in their works and commentaries.
The preceding generation (see, for example, Gore Vidal, Alison Lurie, Ray Bradbury, and Henry M. Littlefield) wrote mainly about the Oz books, exploring L. Frank Baum as author – his storied themes and devoted readers – as well as the series' subversive possibilities in relation to capitalism, populism, and feminism.5 John Updike was a crossover here: in a New Yorker piece about Baum written for the centenary of the book's publication, Updike identified himself as belonging "to the generation more affected by the movie than by the book" under a subheading that claimed "the movie is the main road to Oz."6 It is as though the great chronicler of Cold War America had one foot in the year 1900 with Baum, and the other in 1959 with Rabbit Angstrom.
Writing in 2000, Updike noted the appearance of a "sub-genre" of works that would draw on Oz – "the products, presumably, of Oz-besotted children now aged into postmodern creators freed from fear of copyright infringement." And certainly, writers born later tend to give equal importance to, if not privilege, the film. Geoff Ryman's Was (1992) and Gregory Maguire's Wicked (1995) are the works of authors born in 1951 and 1954 respectively. Maguire has described the annual broadcast as a "national ritual when we baby boomers were kids."7 Michael Chabon references the film regularly in his fiction. In an essay titled "The Movie That Changed My Life," author Terry McMillan recalled her identification with Dorothy as year after year, she watched the film in a chaotic household in Port Huron, Michigan.8 But perhaps the most telling evidence of how television empowered the film version of The Wizard of Oz came from Carol Billman, a children's literature scholar. In a comparison of film and book published in 1981, her starting point was the realization that her students (having grown up with the broadcasts), came to the book after the film. For Billman, the film "transcends its original in popular culture." It has become "the authoritative work to which all other tellings of the story, even the original one, must answer."9
As for cinema and Oz, there was much publicity given to a 2018 study published by two computer scientists showing The Wizard of Oz to be the film most cited or referenced by other (Western) films. Following an exercise in quantification far removed from film studies, Oz was – in numerous news reports – summarily declared the most influential film ever made.10 For those of us who grew up with the broadcasts and later watched films made by fellow boomers, this did not seem surprising. From at least the 1970s onwards, Oz-tracking in film and popular culture has been a relatively easy pastime. Joel and Ethan Coen are, together with David Lynch, probably the boldest pilferers, and Joel Coen's quip that "every movie ever made is an attempt to remake The Wizard of Oz" is well known. Less cited is his remark during a 2009 interview that "We have The Wizard of Oz in every movie we do, but O Brother [Where Art Thou?] is a full-blown Wizard of Oz movie." To which, Ethan added, "That one was a remake. I'm surprised we weren't sued."11 In Wild at Heart (1990), Lynch drew on Oz's influence as surrealist road movie, describing the 1939 film as "a beautiful, emotional, fantastic dream" and recalling that nods to Oz also occurred in Blue Velvet (1986), "Dorothy was a name in Blue Velvet, and we also realized that Dennis Hopper is from Kansas. And I love the red shoes that Dorothy wears. In Wild at Heart, it crept in in a few places, and was there in a big way for the ending."
Sidney Lumet's The Wiz (1978) proved a productive reworking of the Oz story for a postwar cultural politics of race. With a score that drew on gospel, blues, and soul, the stage play treated slavery and its more immediate aftermath, whereas the film updated that material to the post-civil rights period. In a piece marking its 40th anniversary, Gerrick D. Kennedy described The Wiz as a "rite of passage" for black viewers, one with "an aesthetic firmly rooted in black culture" and which anticipated recent developments in black American cinema:
"The Wiz" is foremost a story of racial liberation, and an early piece of Afrofuturism – the combination of science fiction, fantasy, magic realism and ancient African tradition that critiques historical events or envisions a black future, inspiring such recent groundbreaking films as "Get Out" and "Black Panther.…"12
The significance of Oz to LGBT culture and politics predated the baby boomers and the film. Both Vidal and Lurie underscored not only the books' promotion of female empowerment but the signal transgender moment: the revelation that Princess Ozma had been changed into a boy (Tip) by the witch Mombi. Initially alarmed by the news, Tip eventually decides to transition back "just to see how it seems, you know." As Ozma again, she expresses her hope that "none of you will care less for me than you did before. I'm just the same Tip, you know, only …" "Only you're different!" said the Pumpkinhead; and everyone thought it was the wisest speech he had ever made." In current LGBT readings, Oz tropes are sometimes dismissed as a generational fixation associated with the baby boomers. Certainly, there is no denying the persistence of Oz in the discourses of that generation as it came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet even as recently as 2015, Gay Times called it the "quintessential gay film" and dispensed with the synopsis on the grounds that, "Seriously, if you need a plot summary of The Wizard of Oz then you have no business being here" – before providing a detailed look at gay readings of the film (and Judy Garland).
To return to my archival moment of 1956. Of course, neither the past (pre-war cinema Oz) nor the future (the cumulative effects of the television broadcasts and the seeping of Oz tropes into a culture that would soon be called postmodern) were available to the kids of '56, when we first saw The Wizard of Oz. Such knowledge might come later with the discovery that the experiences and memories of our parents ran fault lines through our postwar families. But it was not only the slow reveal of these pasts that might come to trouble us. Ever so gradually, we would learn that for many Americans growing up during the period, the fifties weren't all they were cracked up to be. In retrospect, it is the sense of collective naiveté attached to my earliest remembered time and place, most visibly its unquestioned and unquestioning whiteness, that seems most shocking now. For me, perhaps the first questions came in July 1967 as we stood on our suburban porches and watched the yellow sky above Detroit where whole streets were burning. There was a curfew, but my mother said that in our subdivision we were "safe as houses." And though accurate on the surface of things, this was a telling remark, and not only because "look what happened to Dorothy's house," but because there in that not-so-distant yellow sky was the first indication that the safety of the pax Americana was not on offer to everyone. There were estrangements closer to home too, in those beguiling spaces; there were people who one day would need to leave. The streets and playgrounds where I spent so many charmed hours were culpable geographies in ways that I could not yet grasp or articulate. But after the long hot summer of 1967, and rather like Dorothy at her first glimpse behind the curtain, a suspicion began to take hold that important truths had been rendered invisible. The fifties kids were becoming the sixties kids.
And now, finally, there is the aging of my generation to compound the doubts of a lifetime. The resistance to age is acute in baby boomers, perhaps especially those of us who grew up watching Oz and assuming we could reset that experience year upon year without feeling the influence of outward changes. As our powers fade and we sense our own obsolescence, previous certainties fade too, even the certainty of the annual broadcast, now lost in this era of post-network television. We receive small occasional reminders of these cultural shifts. At a party a few months ago, I met a young woman from Kansas. She was generation Y or Z as people born after the early 1980s and into the 2000s are called. "Dorothy!" I said upon hearing of her birthplace. The name sprang without warning, though she was not called Dorothy. She smiled indulgently and said, "I get a lot of that. And the state of Kansas still boasts about its Oz connection, but you know I have only seen the film once or twice and it doesn't mean much to me." And there, she pierced my baby boomer heart.
All of these pasts and futures are packed into the bright star of 1956. That is what archives do. They encourage us to swell the moment with knowledge and meanings gathered later and elsewhere. But none of these pasts and futures came to trouble us at the time. We believed Oz was born when we were born. Oz's time was our time and its space was our space, the television screen.
Cars and Roads
Growing up in the rust belt during the peak years of the auto industry, I already inhabited the realm of planned obsolescence (the "annual model change") without knowing what it meant. I was a Ford brat, born to a father who would work for the company all his life, first as showroom salesman, later as corporate guy at Ford headquarters. Only months before the 1956 broadcast of The Wizard of Oz, my father obtained his first mortgage. For a 30-year term at 4 percent interest, he purchased a newly built brick house priced at $11,950. We moved from Henry Ford's Dearborn to Garden City, a rapidly growing box house suburb less than 20 miles west of Detroit.
Ray Kenyon, c. 1956. Author's collection.
The move to Garden City sounded the last of three booms to my archive: baby boom, automotive boom, suburban boom. The GI Bill (1944) had introduced a new form of veterans' compensation in the provision of long-term, low-interest mortgage loans. The construction industry was the immediate beneficiary and soon began adopting Fordist mass-production strategies. The Levitts, perhaps the best known of the postwar developers (Levittowns), perfected an assembly-line approach to house-building that at its peak meant the completion of 35 houses per day, the equivalent of a new house every 15 minutes. Between 1950 and 1970, America's suburban population doubled, and the 1970 census showed (for the first time) more suburbanites than city-dwellers or farmers.13
In the land of the Big Three – Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler – the sprawling suburbs were nothing like the Emerald City; nor did they conjure the Kansas plains. But if the yellow brick road led to the Wizard, we had Ford Road to take us to Dearborn and the Ford Rouge Plant (once the largest integrated factory in the world) as well as the Glass House (Ford corporate headquarters). The Glass House, also a creation of 1956, represented a moment described by columnist George Will as the "peak of American confidence" when "America was at the wheel of the world and even buildings seemed streamlined for speed."14 "If ever oh ever a Wiz there was," his assumed name in those parts was surely Henry Ford.
Ford Headquarters, Dearborn, Michigan, 2007. Photo by Dave Parker. Reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, under GNU Free Documentation License.
If we stayed on Ford Road past Dearborn, it took us to the edge of a buzzing Detroit with its skyscrapers, department stores, movie palaces, and baseball stadium. Part of the Michigan state highway system since 1930, Ford Road (the M-153) runs for some 25 miles. That's not very long in the scheme of things, but it is Garden City's main east-west thoroughfare. As a child, I knew our strip of it – the section where we held homecoming parades, the town cinema with its Saturday matinees of Elvis movies, the Big Boy diner where we went on Sundays after church (God was a chocolate milkshake); and the site of Kmart's first discount department store, which opened in 1962.
I knew those local stops, but Ford Road was more interesting. To be allowed to walk there was the nearest we came to adventure. From a child's perspective, the road stretched beyond the town lines, ending somewhere unknown near the horizon. I saw the stream of traffic moving east or west away from our town. Nobody looked to be staying. Standing there in my sneakers, too young to drive, perhaps I sensed some relation to the history of the automobile, but I couldn't yet see how cinema might project its light and shadows onto that relation. I had not, for example, met Joseph Cotten's early automobile inventor in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), perhaps film's most bittersweet study of the automobile and social change:
Nor had I discovered the gangster movies of the 1930s where the getaway car, together with the tommy-gun, appeared as the modern technological paraphernalia of crime. Unlike the western (which dealt with the American past), the thirties gangster films spoke to an American present, that is, the period in which they were released. This is what terrified film censors at the time. I had not yet learned about Prohibition, the Depression or bootlegging – ostensibly the social reference points for those films. To take a small but colorful example connecting both real-life gangsters and cinema to my rust belt setting, I had no idea that Clyde Barrow, whose thirties persona would be reshaped by the sixties sensibilities of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), had sent the following note from Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1934:
Mr. Henry Ford, Detroit, Michigan
Dear Sir, While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove [sic] Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got ever [sic] other car skinned and even if my business hasn't been strickly [sic] legal it don't hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.
Yours truly, Clyde Champion Barrow
Equally, I knew nothing of Hollywood genres, how they could preempt historical reality to operate on the American psyche. It would be years, for example, before I would read Robert Warshow's early work on the gangster film in which he would argue that the gangster genre was less about the real existence of gangsters than about the evolution of the genre in relation to the ideological project of the American Dream. For Warshow, the classic gangster films delivered rise-and-fall narratives and a critique of American notions of success and individualism that restored tragedy – as an experience of art – to our official culture of cheerfulness and optimism. The gangster was a "tragic hero" because he embodied and expressed "that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and demands of modern life, which rejects 'Americanism' itself."15
Finally, I didn't realize that The Wizard of Oz was giving me an early, and annually repeating, exposure to the genre (or subgenre in the view of some scholars) that would come into its own with my generation: the road movie. Oz was not the earliest road movie, and it appeared alongside a prestigious group in the pre-war/wartime period: Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937), John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels (1941). Yet writing of these four films in their recent study of the genre, Jose Duarte and Timothy Corrigan emphasize the rupture of the war and the lasting changes it would bring to the road film:
Although the central trope of "being on the road" characterizes all these films, the extremely restless energy and existential crises that would become a salient part of the genre arise out of the wreckage of the Second World War and its resonances through the 1940s and 1950s.16
I would add that whereas those other films belong to a particular historical moment in classical Hollywood cinema, television turned The Wizard of Oz over to the road movie's most formative years. Duarte and Corrigan cite the 1960s-1980s as the period of classic American road movies, including such films as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Two Lane Blacktop (1971), and Badlands (1973). In 1967, television Oz was nearing 10 broadcasts; by 1973, the Oz viewers were heading for college (or film school – as the 1960s saw a number of film schools/departments open in the U.S.). Duarte and Corrigan identify the next period, the 1990s and 2000s, as the road movie's most prolific one, with an "ironic and self-referential edge"17 (as well as more diverse characters) emerging in the genre. Here we find Ridley Scott, Gus van Sant, Jim Jarmusch, Gregg Araki, Carl Franklin, and of course David Lynch and the Coens, among others. By the 1990s, the Oz viewers had been watching road movies since the 1960s and to a growing extent, making them too.
Screenshot: Dorothy on the road
The road movie consists of a number of recognizable components, most notably narratives that are journeys, quests, escapes, encounters with borders, pursuits of the frontier. On this last point, it is often seen as an extension of the western. For Manohla Dargis, the road itself becomes "the last true frontier."18 Leslie Dick suggests that the road film is where the western and film noir intersect.19 For filmmaker Chris Petit, it combines its protagonist's voyage of discovery with "the strangeness of the everyday."20 Finally, we have only to resurrect the original publicity for Easy Rider – "A man went searching for America. And couldn't find it anywhere" – to remember that the road movie regularly melds the existential angst of its protagonist with a larger social angst. Colin McArthur once wrote that the western and the gangster genres "represent America talking to itself" about its past and present respectively.21 Of course, this can be said of all genre films, and it is only part of how genre works, but it remains apt and can certainly be applied to the road movie.22
Running through all road film themes is the protagonist's personal crisis or narrative – or as Corrigan and Duarte put it:
At the heart of these films is a distinctive set of questions about subjectivity and identity. No doubt most narratives engage with these kinds of questions, but road movies tend to highlight and distinguish these questions as especially destabilizing in relation to the past, community, gender and home, frequently as encounters with some Other which in turn becomes an encounter with self.23
They further note the importance of movement, space, and place to these "dramas of identity," asserting themselves almost as "metaphorical characters" in the road film. Finally, they see an "alignment of the technology of the automobile with the technology of cinematic representation.… Seeing the world through the frames of an automobile as a moving image appears analogous to seeing the world as a movie image."24
It goes without saying that Detroit automobiles, together with rampant highway construction in the postwar era, put the "drive" in the road movie. But The Wizard of Oz is a "walking" road film and in that aspect at least, arguably has more in common with Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas (1984) or Jean-Marc Vallée's Wild (2014) than, for instance, Thelma and Louise (1991). If there are vehicles in MGM's hybrid musical/road film, they are the ruby slippers and a spinning house. Instead of a car windscreen, Dorothy's bedroom window serves as a frame for the tornado, as the drab farmhouse is lifted from sepia-toned Kansas and dropped into Technicolor Oz.
That Dorothy possessed no automobile was part of the appeal to this child of the Motor City. I spent hours in the family car. If we went downtown for a ballgame, we drove. Shopping malls, drive-in eateries and movies, supermarkets – all in the car. The driveways on our street boasted gas-guzzling vehicles that were damn near as big as the houses to which they belonged. In summer, the kids perched on the hoods and bumpers, candy cigarettes dangling from our mouths. We sat on our family cars when we talked about the Cuban missile crisis and the death of Marilyn Monroe. Throughout my childhood, my father brought home Ford model cars for me to roll along the sidewalk in imaginary shopping trips and Barbie and Ken scenarios. When a Christmas morning surprise went awry one year, Dad told us to wait before rushing out to find our presents because Santa's sleigh had "stalled" down the block and he was waiting for a mechanic. Forget the reindeer. In Michigan, Santa ran on gasoline.
But one winter not long after the annual broadcast of The Wizard of Oz, the snow was so deep that none of the cars left the driveways for three or four days. Our mother gave us a shopping list and we took our sled a few blocks over to one of the main thoroughfares where we crossed to a large supermarket, bought food, and pulled it home on the sled. I felt like Dorothy that winter day, on a mission with only my legs and wits for transport. I loved that Dorothy walked. That she wanted to leave home, then wanted to go back home. Without power in the family, a child understands perhaps better than adults that these longings can exist together. So I loved that Dorothy had to run away, then get swept up by a storm and dropped somewhere terrifying and beautiful, in order to go home. She made friends and discoveries along the way. Unafraid of direct, wide-eyed questions, she asked the Scarecrow how he could talk if he didn't have a brain. She was fierce with the Lion when he threatened Toto, but then she made him a friend. Determined to take responsibility for herself, she tried to explain things to good witches and bad witches. She faced up to her fears and mistakes. When she returned home, it was not changed; her problems were not solved. But she was changed. It was her movement that intrigued me. In all of these elements, this was a "drama of identity" on the road: Dorothy was, and remains, a classic road film protagonist. And she is a girl. Oz itself is run by powerful women; upon her improbable arrival, Dorothy joins a narrative in which good witches and bad witches are basically running things and making the important decisions. She no sooner arrives than she too is viewed as a witch – from Kansas – who must assert herself and take to the yellow brick road. Judy Garland brought her emotional sincerity and courage to this journey, showing the other girls how the road could teach us to be tough and resourceful, kind and clever at the same time. This was a rare thing for us.
Reprised every year, Dorothy's story would add to my slowly gathering sense that home was a place to question, long for, and imagine leaving. We learn to live with critical ambivalence toward the places we love, and our box house suburb was such a place. Ford, GM, and Chrysler had bound themselves perfectly to notions of Manifest Destiny and to the idea that if you don't like a place, you move to a new place. You "light out for the territory," get in your car, and drive away. Westerns and road movies. If you do like a place, you just drive around it a lot, call it home, distort it, and develop an unhealthy obsession about it. Frank Capra's small-town movies. American Graffiti. But it was Dorothy who gave me a girl's version of our peculiarly American restlessness. To live is to constantly wonder whether to stay or go. To live is to feel perpetually torn between Kansas, the Emerald City, and the Yellow Brick Road itself.
Amy Kenyon c. 1957. Author's collection.
Dreams, Lies and Humbugs
The film departs from L. Frank Baum's book in a number of ways but perhaps most importantly in its final assertion that "there's no place like home" and that Dorothy's journey to Oz was a dream. Back in Kansas, she finds no believers when she tells them that Oz was a real place and that "some of it wasn't very nice, but most of it was beautiful."
For Salman Rushdie, who cites Oz (film, not book) as his first literary influence, this was an act of "bad faith" by the screenwriters.25 Certainly, the script ignored the expectations of readers who had grown up with the books, including Baum's 13 subsequent Oz tales in which not only is Oz real, but Dorothy returns again and again, eventually taking Uncle Henry and Aunt Em (whose farm is about to be repossessed by the bank) along with her.
Rushdie was not the only viewer to sense betrayal. Michael Chabon had this to say about dreams and Oz:
I hate dreams.… I hate them for their absurdities and deferrals, their endless broken promise to amount to something.… Pretty much the only thing I hate more than my own dreams are yours. "I was flying over Lake Michigan in a pink Cessna," you begin, "only it wasn't really Lake Michigan…," and I sink, cobwebbed, beneath a drifting dust of boredom.… Worse still than real dreams, mine or yours … are the dreams of characters in books and movies. Nobody, not even Aunt Em, wants to hear about Dorothy's dream when she wakes up at the end of The Wizard of Oz… the journey to Oz is peerless, joyous, muscular with truth; to call it a dream (a low trick Baum never stooped to) is to demean it, to deny it, to lie; because nobody has dreams like that.26
Others were more forgiving. John Updike somewhat effortlessly recast Dorothy's dream as "an alternative reality, an inner depiction of how we grow."27 Margaret Atwood, noting that Dorothy has been knocked unconscious during the storm, described Oz as a land of "brain episodes.… The Kingdom of Oz – like Christ's Kingdom of God, like Milton's inner Paradise, and like Weber's reality-as-we-experience-it … is within."28
David Lynch has always seemed at ease with the film's ending, perhaps understanding – more than most – the notion of Hollywood/cinema as "dream factory" and its probing of the boundaries between real and unreal. Lynch once introduced one of his own films with a line from the Upanishads: "We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream." Moreover, should the protagonist/dreamer, like Dorothy, tumble into another world, this holds no problems for Lynch: "You know, films are a world within a world. And maybe it's a world within a world within a world – within another world. It's a really beautiful thing how lost we are, and we want to get even more lost sometimes."29 Brian Hoyle sees both The Wizard of Oz and Wild at Heart as surrealist road films:
The Wizard of Oz has exerted the most profound influence on filmmakers around the world who refuse to see the cinema as a realist medium, but rather view it as the art form that comes closest to our dreams.30
Gregory Maguire found an alternative interpretation of the film's ending by taking up the position of the child-spectator, making all children Dorothy's allies against the adults who insist that her journey to Oz was a dream:
All the way through the film, Dorothy encounters charlatans and liars. The Wizard has no magic powers. Glinda the Good Witch waits until Dorothy has narrowly averted mortal danger before she reveals the secret of the ruby slippers.… When Dorothy wakes up in the film's final sequence, and the adults dismiss her insistence that she actually had traveled to Oz, we – the audience – realize that adults are so accustomed to lying … that they can't recognize the truth when it is spoken.… But we children in the audience know that Dorothy went to Oz.31
But it is Rushdie who takes this insight to its logical, and perhaps most poignant conclusion. The dream narrative, he reminds us, is not the only adult betrayal of children in the film: "Even the shock of discovering that the Wizard was a humbug was a shock I felt as a child, a shock to the child's faith in adults."
But children become adults in turn. And for Rushdie, this effectively removes the film from our childhood grasp of it, altering its meaning irrevocably and making every adult viewing a melancholy one:
Now as I look at the movie again, I have become the fallible adult. Now I am a member of the imperfect parents who cannot listen to their children's voices. I, who no longer have a father, have become a father instead, and now it is my fate to be unable to satisfy the longings of a child. This is the last and most terrible lesson of the film: that there is one final, unexpected rite of passage. In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic, exposed conjurors, with only our simple humanity to get us through. We are the humbugs now.32
My first road
We are the humbugs now, but we were true then. In the era of network television, the era of that other Big Three – CBS, NBC, and ABC – Oz came into every house on the block at the same hour, making it both private and collective. During the two hours of the broadcast, I was next to Dorothy. I could be Dorothy. But I had only to look out the picture window to glimpse my first public world, the space of early childhood, a winter scene of box houses illuminated by a single streetlight and the flickering lights of television Oz in all the other picture windows. This was the age of network television: assassinations, moon walks, and The Wizard of Oz viewed simultaneously by all. So if Dorothy was mine, she was also shared: the broadcast would string us together as tightly as the twinkling holiday lights decorating our houses. The next day, in our snowsuits and rubber boots, the kids on our street would gather to talk of the film. In the era of suburban detachment, network television gifted such moments of communality.
Screenshot: Home
Year after year, along with many others, I was rapt through to Dorothy's final line: "There's no place like home." Yet as Rushdie states so well, this may be "the least convincing idea in the film." The Wizard of Oz was and is far too easy to read against the grain. Not only is Kansas drab, impoverished, and sepia-toned in comparison to Oz, but the film's key song and moment – Over the Rainbow – is an expression of "the human dream of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots."33
Dorothy came to tell me that the place we call home matters. But it is a place we can criticize. A place we might leave. A place we can long for, after we have gone. Dorothy gave me my first road.
The Wizard of Oz aired on November 3, 1956, but did not become an annual event until after 1959. Between 1959 and 1991, the film was usually shown during the period before Christmas, and most often as a television "special." See also Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (UK: Tavistock Publications, 1972). [↩]
The 1956 broadcast earned a 52.7 percent share of the audience, and even higher shares in 1959, 1964, and 1965. By 1975, the film was the 11th-highest-rated movie ever shown on network television. See Aljean Harmetz, The Making of The Wizard of Oz (London: Pavilion Books, 1989), and Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows 1946–Present (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007). [↩]
Tacita Dean, Dublin City Gallery, 2007: https://www.hughlane.ie/past/128-tacita-dean [↩]
Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" New Left Review, July/August 1984. [↩]
See especially Henry Littlefield, "The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism" American Quarterly, Vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring, 1964). Littlefield's interpretation was influential for at least two decades, during/after which it was challenged and/or reworked by various scholars. For a recent summary of these debates, see Ranjit S. Dighe ed., The Historian's Wizard of Oz: Reading L. Frank Baum's Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory (Westport CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002) and Kevin K. Durand and Mary K. Leigh eds., The Universe of Oz: Essays on Baum's Series and Its Progeny (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010). [↩]
John Updike, "Celebrating the Centennial of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," The New Yorker, Sept. 25, 2000. [↩]
Gregory Maguire, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2014: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/early-script-wizard-oz-offers-rare-glimpse-creation-iconic-film-180951858/ [↩]
See David Rosenberg ed., The Movie That Changed My Life (USA: Penguin Books, 1993). [↩]
Carol Billman, "I've Seen the Movie: Oz Revisited," Literature Film Quarterly Vol. 9, Issue 4 (Dec. 1981). [↩]
Livio Bioglio and Ruggero G. Pensa, "Identification of Key Films and Personalities in the History of Cinema from a Western Perspective," Applied Network Science (December, 2018). [↩]
Liam Lacey, "The Coen Brothers: Benevolent Gods," The Globe and Mail, Oct. 9, 2009: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/the-coen-brothers-benevolent-gods/article4290548/ [↩]
Gerrick D. Kennedy, "On its 40th Anniversary, a Look at How The Wiz Forever Changed Black Culture," Los Angeles Times (October 24, 2018). [↩]
Amy Kenyon, Dreaming Suburbia (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004). [↩]
George Will, "Seeking a Ford in Our Future," Real Clear Politics (Dec. 18, 2008). [↩]
Robert Warshow, "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," Partisan Review 15:2 (February, 1948). [↩]
Jose Duarte and Timothy Corrigan, eds., The Global Road Movie: Alternative Journeys around the World (Bristol, UK/Chicago, USA: Intellect Ltd. 2018). And here, Edgar Ulmer's Detour (1945) provides an early signal of the shift Duarte and Corrigan describe. [↩]
Manohla Dargis, "Roads to Freedom," Sight and Sound (July 1991). [↩]
Leslie Dick, "R: Road," Sight and Sound 7, no. 11 (1997). [↩]
Chris Petit in Jason Wood, 100 Road Movies, (London: BFI, 2007). [↩]
Colin McArthur, Underworld USA (New York: Viking Press, 1972). [↩]
For example, we might add Robert Warshow's early point that genre films refer not to social history but to other genre films. Or where genre theory attends to history, it must analyze cultural needs and perceptions about history, in other words, ideological questions. Finally, there are impositions on genre brought by the film industry and/or the personal visions of filmmakers. For a survey of all these approaches and more, see Pam Cook, The Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2007). [↩]
Duarte and Corrigan, op cit. [↩]
Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz, (London: BFI Film Classics, 1992; UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). [↩]
Michael Chabon, "Head or Tale," New York Review of Books, Sept. 27, 2012. [↩]
Margaret Atwood, "In the Heart of the Heartland," New York Review of Books, Dec. 21, 2006. [↩]
B Kite, "Remain in Light: Mulholland Dr and the Cosmogony of David Lynch," Sight and Sound, March 2012. [↩]
Brian Hoyle, "Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Why The Wizard of Oz Is Such an Influential Film," The Independent, Dec. 5, 2018. [↩]
Gregory Maguire, "An Early Script of The Wizard of Oz Offers a Rare Glimpse into the Creation of the Iconic Film," Smithsonian Magazine, July 2014. [↩]
Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz, op cit. [↩]
Rushdie's view of the song could hardly be more relevant to our present situation: "In its most potent emotional moment this is unarguably a film about the joys of going away … of making a new life in "the place where there isn't any trouble." Over the Rainbow is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world's migrants.… It is a celebration of Escape." [↩]
— Amy Kenyon
Amy Kenyon is a historian and writer-photographer. She is the author of Dreaming Suburbia (Wayne State University Press) and Ford Road (University of Michigan Press). Born and raised in Michigan, Amy now lives in the UK. More at amykenyon.net.
Previous story 8 Million Ways to Die (1986): An Autopsy of the Great L.A. Noir That Never Was
Next story "This Film Is Blessed by the Gods": Talking with Mag Hsu, Director of Dear Ex (Netflix, 2018)
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith: George Lucas's Greatest Artistic Statement? August 28, 2016
Kubrick and the Coen Brothers Again: The Shining and Fargo October 31, 2003
"Downsizing" Liberal Hollywood: How the Film's Christian Message Undermines Arguments for National Health Care February 2, 2019


text:
Books Essay
Jesus, Coetzee Is at It Again
He is one of the greatest novelists of his time, but his late novels take him to a grim elsewhere, baffling his devotees
Shreevatsa Nevatia Shreevatsa Nevatia	| 19 Oct, 2016
READING JM COETZEE'S The Schooldays of Jesus (Penguin Random House; Rs699; 272 pages) can best be likened to visiting your favourite bistro after a hiatus. To your horror, you discover the chef has removed from the menu those succulent pieces of chicken you'd sink your teeth into. Gone is the comfort of your medium-rare steak. In its place, you're given an all-vegan fare—leafy, bland, forgettable. Coetzee's own eating habits befit the analogy. His vegetarianism makes him a veritable activist. "I find the thought of stuffing fragments of corpses down my throat quite repulsive, and I am amazed that so many people do it every day," he had said. But man's capacity for this unthinking cruelty is what had once made his writing so meaty. Schooldays isn't just marked by its tepidity. It's also very insipid.
In The Childhood of Jesus, Schooldays' 2013 prequel, we saw Coetzee ditch realism for a parable which many reviewers described as 'Kafkaesque'. Simón adopts Davíd, finds him a mother and when Davíd's ingenuity proves too volatile for the city's authorities, they quickly flee. The story was wafer-thin, but there were lines, doctrinal and luminous, that brought pleasure—'For real reading you have to submit to what is written on the page. You have to give up your own fantasies,' as Simón puts it.
Franz Kafka had written that there is 'universal delight in the literary treatment of petty themes', and in Schooldays, the only line you remember is conspicuously frivolous—'You can't ask for more than that in a car, fidelity.' The rest of the book is overweight, dragged down by its grand ideas about history, justice and identity. In Childhood, Simón says, 'We are ideas. Ideas never die.' That precisely is the problem. The characters in Coetzee's last two novels are more ideas and less people. In a moment that comes late in Schooldays, Simón, the Joseph stand-in, is drinking his crises away with wine. Here is how Coetzee sums up the air of self-lacerating melancholy—'The child [Davíd] turns to him for guidance, and what does he offer but glib, pernicious nonsense.' You reluctantly borrow the words 'glib' and 'nonsense' when describing Schooldays, but Coetzee, you soon realise, has not just pre-empted your criticism, he seems to have slyly planned it.
In Summertime (2009), the last part in a trilogy of fictional memoirs, a character brutally sums up the work of John Coetzee: 'In general, I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight […] Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion.' Even the harshest of critics can't say of Coetzee anything he has not said of himself before. The trouble, though, is that Coetzee seems to have said his piece long before he published Childhood and Schooldays. He isn't really saying anything novel anymore. Our expectation of an unputdownable Coetzee necessitates nostalgia, and like all nostalgia, its destination now remains an impossible one.
COETZEE AND WRITER Paul Auster still fiddle with fax machines, and to communicate, these Luddites write each other letters. Here and Now, a collection of their correspondence between 2008 and 2011, sees them pontificate about cricket, baseball and Philip Roth. Sadly, the two colleagues never gossip. Released in 2013, their epistolary exchange does leave decorum intact, but Coetzee, at one point, unwittingly shows us his cards. He writes to Auster, 'One can think of a life in art, schematically, in two or perhaps three stages. In the first you find, or pose for yourself, a great question. In the second, you labour away at answering it. And then, if you live long enough, you come to the third stage, when the aforesaid question begins to bore you, and you need to look elsewhere.' If after winning the Booker for Disgrace in 1999, Coetzee's work has bewildered more than it illuminated, baffled more than it entertained, we finally know why. The writer is a tad bored.
The Spectator gave its review of Schooldays a rather sensational headline: 'JM Coetzee has lost the plot'. Strangely, the author might consider this slightly accurate. That loss, for him, is a disavowal. In a draft of Diary of a Bad Year (2007), Coetzee writes, 'Readers who come to my recent books looking for the kind of pleasure that one can legitimately expect from the novel, and that one perhaps gets from books like [Life and Times of] Michael K, find them thin and artificial, and who can blame them?' Critics have for long used the easy labels of 'early' and 'late' to categorise the work of canonical writers. In Coetzee's case, he was expectedly the first to draw a distinction. For JC, Diary's narrator, reality was exhausting. He didn't want to recreate it. Coetzee too is no different.
The Coetzee who hung up his boots in the late 1990s gave narrative context its due. The Coetzee of Jesus busies himself with essence instead
In his book, Late Style, literary theorist Edward Said writes, 'To be late meant therefore to be late for (and refuse) many of the rewards offered up by being comfortable inside society, not the least of which was to be read and understood easily by a large group of people.' To Coetzee, refusing rewards comes easy—he didn't turn up to receive his two Booker Prizes—but an audience may have been harder to abjure. Realism, one would like to think, became a casualty of age, not of arrogance.
At 76, Coetzee has written a novel where the narrative thins as swiftly as a septuagenarian's hair. Schooldays isn't his first book whose historical and geographic specificity is vague. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) created a fictional Empire that was similarly abstract. But Waiting was still concerned with the gallery—'I behave in some ways like a lover—I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her—but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.' Schooldays , on the other hand, never speaks with such passion, it only philosophises it. We are forced to wonder if Coetzee, like Diary's JC, was always a 'pedant who dabbles in fiction'.
Comparing Coetzee's early works to titles such as Childhood is perhaps a schoolboy error. The writings, and its writers, are tellingly dissimilar. The Coetzee who hung up his boots in the late 1990s gave narrative context its due. The Coetzee of Jesus busies himself with essence instead. Some of his themes have survived decades, but distilled as they now are, they seem like vital ingredients never fully mixed to make a broth. Though dance and its capacity to transform give Schooldays much of its propulsion—'Words are feeble—that is why we dance' — Davíd is not the first of Coetzee's characters to have made up for the inadequacies of language with his feet. In Foe (1986), Coetzee's retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story, Friday at one point dons his author's robe, and, wearing nothing else, he spins like a dervish. Friday has no tongue, but his body is discourse. His dance marks a welcome dissonance, while Davíd's instruction is comparatively tedious and abstruse.
Writing on Disgrace, academic Derek Attridge says almost all of Coetzee's novels stage a political challenge. They each want to find a way of building a new, just state that is not founded on the notion of 'unpredictability, singularity, excess, a state that recognises the importance of an inventive responding to the other, and a wagering on, a trusting in, a different future.' Rather than being inferred, Coetzee is sadly making his politics obvious. Sections of his recent novels read like dry theses. When Dmitri, the only character in Schooldays with a modicum of 'passion', finds himself in the dock, a judge tells him, 'Of course we have a responsibility to society […] to shield it from rapists and murderers. But we have an equal responsibility to save you the accused from yourself.'
JUSTICE, MUCH LIKE literature, is made relatable by its consequence. Nothing or no one here really matters. Human nature isn't examined in some novelistic operating theatre. It is seen through an ultrasound machine, without its flesh. In an early draft of Dusklands (1974), his first novel, Coetzee had written that 'the need of the soul to be relieved of its past remains urgent as ever'. For someone who has said that "all autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography," there's some wish fulfilment in these Jesus novels. When he became a citizen of Australia in 2006, Coetzee had claimed, "In becoming a citizen one undertakes certain duties and responsibilities. One of the more intangible of those duties and responsibilities is no matter what one's birth and background, to accept the historical past of the new country as one's own." Simón and Davíd arrive at Novilla with their minds wiped clean of all past memories, and this obliteration of subjectivity made Attridge say that Childhood was Coetzee's first truly Australian novel. The turbulent South Africa, which Coetzee left in 2002, gave his fiction a riveting immediacy. Adelaide is perhaps too tranquil a corner.
Some of Coetzee's themes have survived decades, but distilled as they now are, they seem like vital ingredients never fully mixed to make a broth
Doggedly cerebral, Coetzee, like his female alter-ego Elizabeth Costello, is 'by no means a comforting writer'. Elizabeth Costello (2003) is itself a difficult book, more polemic than fiction. Amusingly, Costello's son John remained puzzled by the fact 'that a woman who wrote books for a living should always be so bad at telling bedtime stories'. Coetzee, quite obviously, would have had the same problem. He was always parsimonious with warmth, but the Nobel laureate has become stingy with his stories too. 'When all else fails, philosophise'—this line from Disgrace seems to be fashioning the writer's late oeuvre. Diary, for instance, was part-essay and part-narrative. The two Jesus novels are didactic enough to fault. Roland Barthes, whose influence Coetzee has acknowledged, had once said literature is the question minus the answer. In today's Coetzee, there is only answer.
Childhood sees Simón abruptly leave a philosophy class in disgust because he does not have any patience for questions like what makes a chair a chair. His restlessness affords us some absolution when giving up on Schooldays. The book spends too much time dwelling on what makes a number a number. In his critique of Disgrace, Salman Rushdie had written, 'When a writer's created beings lack understanding, it becomes the writer's task to provide the reader with the insight lacked by the characters. If he does not, his work will not shine a light upon the darkness, but merely become a part of the darkness it describes. This, alas, is the weakness of Disgrace.' Such criticism is perhaps unjustified for a book that was, in the end, affecting, but of late, Coetzee has only traded in shadows. Though he might have erased his past, his readers haven't. Our pleasure unfortunately is indelible.
Unlike Rushdie, Ian McEwan or Paul Auster, Coetzee has never been known for lightness. His characters don't fall in love. They brutalise one another. The writer had once said, "Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don't read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them." Though this is perhaps the closest Coetzee has come to cracking a joke, he would have to revise this assessment of his literature. The world hardly falls to pieces around Simón. He simply tires of comprehending it. Having tried to grapple with the mystery of who we are for the better part of his days, Coetzee, like his many protagonists, is finding comfort in a grim elsewhere that remains parched and austere. His frequent invitations to this unforgiving terrain, however, provide little solace to dedicated readers. If a book, like Coetzee, paraphrasing Kafka, had prescribed in Summertime, 'should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us', then we are in need of a sharper machete.
Booker PrizebooksJM Coetzeeliteraturenovels
Shreevatsa Nevatia
Shreevatsa Nevatia is the author of How to Travel Light: My Memories of Madness and Melancholia
Hate: Inside the rage on social media
18 Jan, 2022 - 24 Jan, 2022
Vol 11 | Issue 114
Subscribe Digital
Tracing Footsteps
Urvashi Bahuguna
'Writing Is Somewhat a Masochistic Activity' Antara Raghavan
LICMF BAF Open
The Rise of Hollywood Kaveree Bamzai
Antara Raghavan M Mukundan's award-winning biography of a city reveals Delhi's underbelly with compassion. The author tells Antara Raghavan why a river of sorrow runs beneath his stories
Red-Light Dreams
Vikram Zutshi A police procedural and sociological treatise set in Calcutta
Raunaq Saraswat A Delhi saga spanning two hundred years foregrounds the masons and labourers


As part of the American Medical Association (AMA)'s Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium's work, Health Systems Science (HSS) is establishing itself as the third major branch of a balanced medical education, alongside basic and clinical sciences. Health Systems Science Review is a first-of-its-kind review book designed to prepare future physicians and other health care professionals to function effectively within health systems by better understanding how health care is delivered, how health care professionals work together to deliver that care, and how the health system can improve patient care and health care delivery. This study tool provides case-based questions followed by discussions of answers and suggested readings—making it a valuable review resource for medical students and instructors, as well as medical residents; nursing, allied health, and public health students; and hospital administrators.
Meets a growing need for an effective, targeted review tool on HSS, a topic increasingly covered on the USMLE and other exams.
Contains 250+ case-based, multiple-choice questions, with extensive discussion of correct and incorrect answers, as well as access to interactive questions online.
Offers an up-to-date, effective review to support and assess competence in HSS, covering health care delivery and processes, health care policy and economics, clinical informatics and technology, social determinants of health, patient safety, teamwork and collaboration, systems thinking and complexity science, and much more.
Provides highly relevant content applicable to today's evolving health care delivery written by experts in emerging areas of HSS.
Serves as an excellent study companion for the ground-breaking book, Health Systems Science, by Susan E. Skochelak, MD, MPH, et al., also developed by the AMA's Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium, which is at the forefront of change and innovation in medical education.


The Mindanao-based publication report said the two had "escaped" from the Bato Ali Mosque, which is being used by the Daesh-influenced militants as a base for carrying out attacks against government forces.
Speaking on the occasion, Congressman Bato O'Rourke thanked Pakistan government and its people for their enormous sacrifices in the fight against terrorism.
This area is also home of many BATO Group's properties such as the historical Josetti Hofe and the Best Sabel's facility.
In July 2011, BATO announced that the Aiken Plant's production capacity would be increased by approximately 4,750 tires per day.
Last night a BATO spokeswoman told the Sunday Mercury that the refuge could open within two to three months and be used by up to 11 women aged 20-40.
14 billion yen, Saganoseki 190 million yen, Dainikko 1 billion yen and Bato 730 million yen as of Sept.
Aligning the 109-year-old Firestone brand with America's National Pastime is a great combination," said John Baratta, President of Consumer Tire Replacement Sales, BATO.
Smart and PLDT signed separate agreements with the PNP in 2016 to formalize the launch of the Text Bato hotline and ever since, thousands of complaints and reports from citizens have been recorded by the national police force and given action.
The endless runner game titled, "Tsip Bato Ang Bumangga Giba" allows you to catch criminals (in green masks), while avoiding obstacles like pedestrians and other vehicles.
The appreciation came during a meeting of Pakistan ambassador to the United States Aizaz Chaudhary with Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, Congressman Al Green and Congressman Bato O'Rourke in Houston.
Philippine National Police (PNP) Chief Director General Ronald Bato M.
Narumi "Nick" Zaitsu, currently vice chairman, Bridgestone Americas, will assume the additional title of executive vice president, BATO.


Cushner Capital Group is a direct Private Mortgage Lender and Brokerage based in Fallbrook, CA, thirty miles north of San Diego. We have been providing hard money non-standard and conventional mortgages throughout the state of California for the past 20 years.
Our goal is to provide a viable non-standard mortgage solution for borrowers, who have strong equity or down payment, but cannot obtain bank financing. This goal is achieved by matching borrowers, who have strong equity in California property, with private investors, who are seeking a nice and consistent return on their investment.For investors, we offer a wonderful rate of return, collateralized by strong equity in real estate and an insured title.
We rapidly review and assess a borrower's challenges, then provide a financing solution. We know that most borrowers want to close quickly and without endless personal intrusion. Our process enables us to quickly fund loans that make sense and limit paperwork headaches!
We offer a unique approach to financing that traditional banks cannot provide. Traditional banks' underwriting guidelines often fail to realize the true potential value of a project or the borrower. These circumstances thus create a flexible "make sense" equity lending environment. It is in this niche where private investors can provide the capital that borrowers cannot get at their institutional lender.
If you are a real estate or mortgage broker that has a borrower that has strong equity seeking financing, please call us. We are always seeking broker inquiries. Your goal, as the broker, is to find a bridge to get the client back to a low rate standard Fannie Mae loan. We are that interim step. We cooperate with licensed mortgage brokers.
For private investors, we at CCG are a Trust Deed company bringing you loans that make sense, backed by strong equity positions.


My first impression of the name 'crab cake' was like an awkward: "okay..".
shrimp cake! With my favorite Asian mushroom 'shii-take'.
Its really easy, and in my opinion a good fingerfood dish as well!
Taste good with sweet chilli sauce. Any sauce of desire is of course okay!
Get your wooden cutting board ready and butcher knife ready and chop the shrimps and soft shii-take until finely minced. Add egg, pepper, salt, parsley, ginger and mix well.
Heat up a frying-pan with oil, on medium-low heat. Saute the garlic but do not let it burn.
Make a meatball of the minced mixture and place it carefully in the grillpan. Flatten it by pressing it with a wooden spatula.
Grill 1-1,5 minute on each side.
Serve it with your favorite sauce and you are done!
Dit is engig... ik vroeg net wat we aten voor vandaag en we eten zo ook garnalenkoekjes haha!
I'm sure you could do this with loads of stuff, right?
Looks yummy! I'm not that fond of crab so I'd be down with your version with shrimp! Definitely need to save and try this for dinner soon. Thanks for the recipe!
OMG this looks seriously amazing!! so delicious.. going to try out this recipe thanks for sharing :)!
I just woke up and visited your blog. I am feeling so hungry right now! hahahha!!
Aww they look like little tasty hamburgers! :) I like shrimps out of sea food the best and I guess that my parents will be impressed if I make this haha.
Now I'm hungry. oWo Must make this some time.
Yum, dit ziet er echt weer heel lekker uit! Ik ben de laatste tijd nogal inspiratieloos als het op avondeten aankomt, maar ik ga dit even bewaren!
That looks great! I'll have to remember this.
gulp! looks amazingly delicious. i loove shiitake mushrooms as well. i love the presentation of this and the photos are always amazing!
Oh wow, this looks incredibly tasty!
This actually looks pretty good, considering I'm not really a big fan of seafood. Love the look of this, though :) I'm a sucker for "pretty" food.
Yum! Definitely need to try these!
mmmm i love shrimp cakes! thank you for sharing... hopefully i'll try it soon!
this is absolutely divine, i go crazy for shrimps! and just wanted to say, how awesome is your layout?! wow!
These look so well-made! I would love to try this at home myself! Nice blog post!
Woow!wat ziet dat er super heerlijk uit!
Yours look so delicious too - love the presentation too!
Omg, dit klinkt en ziet er heeeerlijk uit zeg!
Wow ziet er goed uit! Wat een mooie kleuren, aaahh. Jij bent echt keukenprinses 8)!


text:
Q: Jitsi -Signal ~ Channel is unrecoverably broken and will be disposed I Tried to combine Jitsi Android SDK and signal messenger, the jitsi run well until another participant joined room, and jitsi SDK crash return the following error in logcat :
Channel 'c06d484 xxx org.jitsi.meet.sdk.JitsiMeetActivity (server)' ~ Channel is unrecoverably broken and will be disposed! Camera3-OutputStream: returnBufferCheckedLocked: Stream 0: Error queueing buffer to native window: Broken pipe (-32) E/Surface: queueBuffer: error queuing buffer to SurfaceTexture, -32 [TransactFailed]
i used the proguard-rules.pro but still didnt works.
I Found The Problem, The WebRTC library in ringtc_rffi.so (ringRTC Library signal) is conflict with libjingle_peerConection.so,
Any body know how to separate system to read the libjingle_peerConection or ringtc_rffi?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Man Shot at Woodside Houses Wednesday Night, Third Shooting in Two Weeks
Woodside Houses (Photo: Queens Post)
A man was shot outside the Woodside Houses NYCHA complex last night—marking the third shooting to take place at the public housing development within two weeks.
The victim, a 32-year-old man, was shot in the back at around 11:45 p.m. while sitting outside the complex on 49th Street near 31st Avenue.
Police say the man was shot in what appeared to be a botched robbery attempt. The suspect allegedly approached the man and demanded "give me my money."
Police were unable to confirm whether the victim and suspect knew one another.
The victim was taken to Elmhurst Hospital and is expected to survive.
The victims in the other two shootings this month were killed in gun fire. No arrests have been made and the investigation remains ongoing.
A man was shot dead on Tuesday, while on March 12, a mother Gudelia Vallinas was hit by a stray bullet while walking near the complex on 48th Street.
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards is holding a press conference outside the complex this morning to call for an end to gun violence and justice for the victims.
Anonymous March 27th, 2021
Fight the criminals with loafs of bread and councelors!
Defund Jimmy March 25th, 2021
More cops need and more criminals in jail. Lawyers and judges need to step up.
Defunding the police is not working. Bail reform is not working… Unless you want ordinary decent people being gunned down.
x man March 25th, 2021
Crime: Its all Diablasios fault at this point
Joey M24 March 25th, 2021
I don't trust Queens Borough President Donovan Richards because he is an Anti-NYPD and he has not done anything to reduce crime and gun violence protection. So freaking sad 😞.
NYCHA? March 25th, 2021
You get what you DON'T pay for.
Dan March 25th, 2021
25,000+ lost Amazon jobs would have gone a long way towards helping all New Yorkers earn money. Instead, we have NYCHA Housing horrors, Defunding police, building prisons, and homeless hotels in Residential Communities and higher taxes. The billions stolen by Diblasio could have gone a long way to help build Charter Schools for at-risk students, and genuine help for the homeless and mentally ill. Democrats in Charge.
Community counselors!?!? March 25th, 2021
Holding a press conference calling for this or that does nothing except get you a 30 second spot on the evening news to promote yourself.
What we need to do is support the police and give them what they need to protect the community so mothers dont get killed as they run an errand for their family. If we dont make changes this violence will continue and get much worse. Anyone remember the 80s and early 90s?
The 70s are back, baby! March 25th, 2021
That's common sense. You will just confuse people with it.
Agreed March 25th, 2021
More wasted tax money if they really implement this nonsense. Can you imagine someone signing up for this? If the city doesn't provide a waiver, and one of these social justice warriors gets killed, the city will be liable. These folk are the most ignorant and violent people out there. Look who is doing all the Asian hate crimes. Of course, more money will be needed for translators, especially in Woodside.
Why does the Radical Right want everything to be PC? March 25th, 2021
Could they have a press conference in a way that wouldn't offend you?
Common sense is radical now too? March 26th, 2021
What's offensive is that they've helped create the mess by adopting bad politics and advancing disinformation advanced by the left and liberals. Then they hold rallies that do nothing but give them political recognition while nothing meaningful gets accomplished. In the meantime innocent people, mostly POC, get hurt and suffer. A better question is when will POC finally see through this farce?
Google poorest US States, Least Educated US States, Lowest Per Capita Income, Highest Crime US States all Republican March 29th, 2021
Can you say defund social welfare and education ?