During the early Qing dynasty the frontiers of northern domains extended far beyond those previously limited by the Great Wall. As a result the Ming Great Wall languished and fell into gradual obsolescence as the Manchus incorporated what is modern Mongolia and the Tarim Basin into their rule. However the defensive arrangements around Beijing remained the most extensive fortifications anywhere in the empire.
Beijing, the political, cultural, military, and commercial centre of the empire, was the capital city of the last three dynasties of China. In this process of continuing and improving upon the construction and planning traditions of earlier dynasties, the construction of the fortification system borrowed ideas from Dadu of the Yuan era and Nanjing of the Ming era. Although various Chinese polities have fell into prey to foriegn powers, out of the dozens of engagements fought across 500 years Beijing was breached twice in battle. Remember, the Ming citizendry of Beijing opened the gates to let the Manchus enter.
Beijing's Inner city came under siege many times; for example, the invasions of Anda Khan and Houjin during the Ming dynasty and the Boxer Rebellion and Eight-Nations Alliance attack during the Qing dynasty. All but the Eight-Nations Alliance were successfully defended against. Just know that before you read on, any name with 门 "men" at the end means "Gate."
The 9 Gates of Inner Beijing were mammoth medieval structures, vertically comparable to medieval European castles and horizontally many would have been the size of giant 18th century warships. In fact, if we look at some of these watchtowers, the size of which would be comparable to an 10-13 story tall modern apartment and see how many would have rows upon rows of square gun/ arrow slits from where a red lacquered pane could be raised and arrows fired out, they practically looked like the broadside of a cannon filled warship. They were all unique.
Nearly all of them consisted of an official gate, then another watchtower gate in front of it designed to shower foes with arrows. The watchtowers were connected to both the inner walls and outer walls by a barbican. Nearly all were the size of track fields. The barbicans of Dongzhimen or Xizhimen were square; the ones at Zhengyangmen and Deshengmen were rectangular; at Dongbianmen and Xibianmen they were semicircular. Most of the Inner city barbicans had rounded corners, which provided better sight lines and were more difficult to climb or destroy. Each Inner city barbican also had a unique design.
正阳门 (Lit. Gate of the Zenith Sun) the watchtower at Zhengyangmen was 38 metres high, 52 metres wide, and 32 metres deep, constructed on a raised platform 12 metres high. This gate, named "Qianmen", meaning "Front Gate" was for the exclusive use of the emperor. The gate is situated to the south of Tiananmen Square and once guarded the southern entry into the Inner City.
Zhengyangmen was first built in 1419 during the Ming dynasty and once consisted of the gatehouse proper and an archery tower, which were connected by side walls and together with side gates, formed a large barbican. The gate guarded the direct entry into the imperial city. It was constructed in the triple-eaved Xieshanding style, with green glazed tiles. The overall height was 27.76 metres. The gate had rooms on two levels, with seven exterior rooms 41 metres wide and three interior rooms 21 metres wide. Directly to the south was the watchtower, commonly known as "Qianmen"; it was seven rooms wide. Each floor had 13 arrow slits (the other Inner city watchtowers all had 12 arrow slits per floor).
Additional towers in the rear had four arrow slits on the southern sides of their upper floors. The eastern and western sides had four floors with four arrow slits on each floor. The watchtowers and gate towers were connected with thick brick walls to form the Zhengyangmen barbican, 108 metres wide and 85 metres deep. The eastern and western ends had side gates with arches fitted with thousand-jin (approximately 500 kilograms) locks.
Normally the watchtower gate and the eastern side gate were closed; commoners used the arch underneath the western side gate. During the Boxer Rebellion and the ensuing reprisal by the forces of the Eight Nation Alliance. it suffered extensive damage and over 100 Qing Imperial soldiers and officers, including the high ranking Hui General Ma Fulu and his four cousins (who were also officers) were all killed by in the fighting against the British. Many who died were part of the turban wearing Kansu Braves (Muslim loyalist soldiers from Gansu region of western China armed with western styled Mauser Rifles and field artillery.) During the latter 20th century it was restored.
Rear View of the Watchtower, note the absence of arrow slits so as to prevent enemy occupants of having the chance to fire at the defenders behind the edifice.
Each Inner city barbican contained a temple, and the barbican at Zhengyangmen had two: The Qing emperor would visit Guandimiao and light some incense each time he returned from a visit to the Temple of Heaven. However, the temples of Guandimiao and Guanyinmiao were dismantled during the Cultural Revolution. Today the watchtower (Qianmen) remains.
the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City (north) to the Temple of Heaven (south).
The length of the procession is about 4 km.
Chongwenmen ('Gate of Respectful Civility'), commonly called "Hademen", was located on the eastern section of the Inner city southern wall. Originally called "Wenmingmen ('The Door of Civilization'), it was built in 1419. The name was changed during the Zhengtong era (1435–1449). The new name was taken from Zuo Zhuan: "崇文德也"('It is a virtue to respect civility'). The barbican, sluice gates, and a watchtower were built in the Zhengtong era.
Beijing's souther wall complex near the Chongwenmen area, circa 1900. Note the massive arrow tower and its many arrow slits.
Chongmen Gate's gate tower was built in multi-eaved Xieshanding style, with grey and green glazed tiles. It was three rooms by five, with an overall width of 39.1 metres and a depth of 24.3 metres. The gate tower had two floors and was built on a tower platform at a height of 35.5 metres. The watchtower was similar in design to the one at Zhengyangmen, but on a slightly smaller scale. The enceinte had a width of 78 metres and a depth of 86 metres. There were sluice gates and arches on the western side.
Top-down diagram of Chong Wen Gate, the official gatehouse lies in the north while the barbican projects outwards. The watchtower lies directly south to the main gate, while the small entrance to the barbican (and a small watch tower gate) lies to the west of the complex. There is a temple, a courthouse, a toll office and a jail inside the barbican.
Above: Various parts of the Chongwen Gate complex: the Main inner gate, the moat and the adjacent walls. The watchtower gate that opens up the barbican. The busy commercial avenue outside the gate. Because of the heavy commercial traffic that must pass through it daily, there was a toll set up at this particular gate for nearly 500 years.
Due to its close proximity to the busy Tonghui river, it was the busiest gate in Beijing. Entry and departure taxes were charged at Chongwenmen throughout the Ming dynasty, Qing dynasty, and early Republican eras. Because of the special eastern orientation of the gate, it is also the spot where many of the businessmen of the Outer City routinely conduct business with. As a result of the area serving as supplier of luxury goods to the elites of the Inner City, the avenues next to the Chongwen Gate became some of the most wealthy business areas in all of Beijing.
The Brutal Coming of the Modern World.
The legacy and perhaps significance of this gate could perhaps best extracted from the edifices that utterly replaced it. Today the Chongwen Gate area was utterly demolished and served as a busy traffic junction in eastern Beijing, however, on top of where it used to stood rose 1. a western styled church, and 2, a railway station.
There was already a sizeable number of Chinese Christian converts in this region before the reactionary and nativist terror of the Boxer Rebellion began. As foreign powers began to exert their power over China and forcing it to open its doors in the late 19th century, a large number of missionaries arrived with many of the western delegates into Beijing. The great Chongwenmen Church or 亚斯立堂 (Ashbury Methodist) was built in 1870 and had attracted a large number of local adherents. China had historical contacts with German Protestants and Jesuits who served Ming and Qing Emperors and the church was erected in areas that was previously delegated to them.
Within the Chongwen Gate barbican there was a Guandimiao (Temple of Guan Yu) temple in the northeastern corner, built facing the south. However in 1900 with the siege of Beijing by the Eight Nations Alliance the gate's watch tower was destroyed by British cannon fire. By the time the violence and slaughter settled and Beijing was captured by the Eight Nations Alliance, the last embers of China's native cults and societies have lost much of their previous hold on the peasants and landed gentry.
With the collapse of the Qing dynaty the nation spiraled into nearly half century of uncertainly- during this time Christianity steadily gained millions of adherents until the Communist victory in 1949. Today the churches are reopened and eastern Beijing boasts one of the largest Christian communities in China. The churches would remain, while another- more pressing set of structures accelerated the disassembly of Chongwen Gate.
In the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion a railroad station was designated right on the southern axis of the Inner City, crossing all three of the southern Inner City gates. It was this that ultimately led to the demolition of 2/3 gates of the Inner City and nearly all of Inner City's southern walls.
Map of Beijing ca 1910. In the center- south portion of the map, notice the margins of the Inner City's wall. The new Beijing railroad was erected directly along the southern walls. In order to reduce traffic and create large horizontal high ways that bisects the city horizontally, each of the three southern city's barbicans at Zhongyangmen, Chongwenmen, and Xuanwumen were demolished.
accommodate the traffic, necessitating additional demolition.
the whole of Beijing's wall systems.
Additional railroads and highways were also constructed on the eastern portion of the city as well. As seen in Chaoyangmen (E) here.
To avoid disrupting rail service at the nearby main train station while the metro was being built, the metro was routed away from the city walls and the southeastern corner guard tower. The barbican and the gate proper was completely demolished in 1920, today, only the watchtower survived, along with a marginal section of the Inner city wall.
Xuanwumen ('Gate of Advocated Martiality') was located on western section of the southern wall. It was built in 1419 when Beijing's southern walls were expanded. Before the Zhengtong era (1435–1449) the gate was called Shunchengmen ('Shun Cheng Gate'), while commoners referred to it as Shunzhimen. The gate tower was completely rebuilt during the Zhengtong era, and a barbican, sluice gate tower, and watchtower were added.
The name was changed to Xuanwu ("martial advocacy"), from a quotation from Zhang Heng's Dongjing Fu: "the martial integrity is to announce 武节是宣 wu jie shi xuan". The gate tower was five rooms wide and three deep, with an overall width of 32.6 metres and a depth of 23 metres. The gate tower had two levels and was 33 metres high. The roof was built in the multi-eaved Xieshanding style with green glazed tile edges on grey tiles. The watchtower was similar to the one at Zhengyangmen, but on a slightly smaller scale.
The barbican was 75 metres wide and 83 metres deep, with sluice gates on the eastern and western sides and one archway on each side. A Guandi (of Guan Yu, the God of War) Temple was located on the northwestern corner of the barbican, facing southward. The giant cannons on Xuanwumen were fired at noon.
Xuanwumen was informally referred to as the "Death Gate", because carts carrying prisoners for execution were taken through this gate to the execution ground, located in Caishikou (pronounced Tsai shi kou,) to the south. Beijing's many cemeteries were located in and around Taoranting in the southern suburbs.
Funeral carts carrying commoners would often leave the city through Xuanwumen.
Of the nine Inner city gates of Beijing, Xuanwumen was built at the lowest elevation. Although normally the river system accommodated and directed water flow out of the city through Zhengyangmen's eastern sluice gates, these proved ineffective during heavy rainstorms, when most of the water would flood out of Xuanwumen. According to Guangxu Shuntianfu Zhi, heavy rainstorms in Beijing in 1695 flooded the gates at Xuanwumen, making them impossible to open. Six elephants were brought over from the zoo to force open the gates, and the flood finally dissipated out of the city.
Just like the Chongwen Gate, during the construction of the Beijing railroad, it severed through the 3 of Inner City's southern barbicans. Xuanwu Gate was first made a railway station, then its watchtower was dismantled in 1927. The watchtower platform and the barbican were dismantled in 1930, and the gate tower was dismantled in 1965.
Like its southern cousin the Chong Wen Gate, Xuanwu Gate also experienced nearly a complete demolition. Also like Chong Wen Gate, in its former location was replaced with a railroad station and a Christian church. But this time, it was a church of another sort. Today the Xuanwumen area stood the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, where the Archdiocese of Beijing is located.
The Xuanwumen Church: or The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, as a foundation, dates back to 1605, in the 33rd year of the reign of the Wanli Emperor of the Ming dynasty. When the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci arrived in Beijing, the Wanli Emperor permitted him a residence slightly to the west of the site of the current cathedral, near Xuanwumen.
In 1650, in the seventh year of the reign of the Shunzhi Emperor of the Qing dynasty, under the leadership of the German Jesuit Johann Adam Schall von Bell, work on a new church building was begun on the site of the Xuanwumen Chapel. Construction of was complete in two years, and the new church received the honour of a Ceremonial gateway with the words 'Respect the Teachings of the Way of Heaven' (钦宗天道).
The Shunzhi Emperor was friendly to Schall and the church, visiting it no less than 24 times, bestowing upon it a stone stela with the words 'built by Imperial Order' (敕建) inscribed upon it. In 1690, Beijing received its first Roman Catholic bishop in three hundred years, the Franciscan Bernardin della Chiesa, and the church became a cathedral.
In 1703, in the 24th year of the reign of the Kangxi Emperor, the cathedral was enlarged and renovated, and after ten years, a European-style building was complete, the second European-style building in Beijing after the Canchikou church. This was destroyed in 1720 by an earthquake in Beijing. A new cruciform structure was built in the baroque style, with a length of 86 metres and width of 45 metres. This was again severely damaged by an earthquake in 1730, in the eighth year of the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor, who donated 1000 taels of silver towards its repair. The repaired cathedral had larger and taller windows, resulting in a brighter and grander interior.
While the original foundation of the cathedral was in 1605, making it the oldest Catholic church in Beijing, the current building in Baroque style dates from 1904. In 1838, in the 14th year of the reign of the Daoguang Emperor, due to constant conflicts with the power and influence of the Catholic Church, for the sake of peace, the Qing government decreed a restriction of the activity of the Catholic Church in China. In this decree, the cathedral was confiscated by the government and remained such until the end of the Second Opium War, when the Catholic Church was again permitted to act freely. The cathedral was reopened in 1860 under the leadership of Bishop Joseph Martial Mouly.
When the Boxer Rebellion broke out in 1900, all the churches of Beijing were targets of vandalism, and on 14 June 1900, the cathedral was set razed to the ground, together with most other churches of Beijing. In 1904, the present structure was completed, the fourth church on the site. On 21 December 1979, Bishop Michael Fu Tieshan was consecrated in the cathedral, the first major event in the life of the Catholic Church in China after the Cultural Revolution.
Dongzhimen (東直門 lit. 'Eastern Upright Gate') was located on the northern section of the Inner city eastern wall. It was built on the location of the Chongrenmen (崇仁門) gate of the Yuan era, the central gate of the eastern city wall of Dadu. In 1419 the name was changed, quoting "东方盛德属木、为春" and "直东方也,春也". Dongzhimen's gate tower was five rooms long (31.5 metres), three rooms wide (15.3 metres), and two floors high (34 metres).
The watchtower was similar to the one at Zhengyangmen, but on a slightly smaller scale. The barbican was built during the final years of the Yuan dynasty (ended 1368). It was nearly square, and was the smallest barbican of any of the nine Inner city gates. The northern and southern walls were 68 metres long, and the eastern and western walls were 62 metres long. Archways and sluice gates were present on the eastern and western sides.
This inner city gate was known as the "Gate of Wood."All the wood needed for the construction of palaces for royal families was transported through this gate, which was surrounded by woodwork factories and coffin stores.
Outside Dongzhimen was a pagoda made completely from iron, with a stone statue of Yaowangye. Many carts carrying raw wood entered the city through Dongzhimen. A Guandi Temple was located on the northeast corner of the Dongzi Gate barbican facing southward. The temple had no proper statue of Guandi; a minor deity made of wood was located there instead. This gave rise to the old Beijing saying: "Nine gates, ten temples, one without morality".
the complete demolition of the eastern walls as well.
Chaoyangmen (朝陽門 lit. 'Gate that Faces the Sun') was located at the midpoint of the Inner city eastern wall. This inner city gate, which translates as the Gate of the Morning Sun, was used to transport grain. Using a moat in front of the gate, Beijing's grain was shipped from Chaoyangmen to residents. Many rice storage buildings were located near the gate. Because of its role in distributing grain, Chaoyangmen was also known as the city's "life gate".
Built at the site of the Dadu gate called Qihuamen (齊化門), it was informally known by that name by the commoners. The gate tower and watchtower were similar to those at Chongwenmen. The gate tower was 31.35 metres wide, 19.2 metres deep, and 32 metres high. The barbican was 68 metres wide and 62 metres deep, with a sluice gate and archway on the northern side. Its Guandi temple was located on the northeastern corner, facing south. The watchtower was destroyed by Japanese forces in 1900 and was rebuilt in 1903.
Chaoyangmen was Beijing's "Food Gate", through which many carts carrying staple foods entered the city. The gate was closest to the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, and wheat and rice from the south China plains such arrived via that route. Much of the food was stored in warehouses just inside Chaoyangmen. Thus it has the symbol of a wheat grain engraved on the archway of the barbican gate. Chaoyangmen has the informal name of "Dumen", meaning 杜门 "resting station".
Arrow tower of the southern walls of Inner Beijing. Note the moat beneath it. The gate was closest to the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, and wheat and rice from the south China plains such arrived via that route.
An inner city gate literally meaning the Gate of Peace. When generals and troops returned victorious from war, they would walk through the gate to report their triumph to emperors living in the Forbidden City. Andingmen (安定門 lit. 'Gate of Secured Peace') was located on the western side of the Inner city northern wall. It was built when the gate called Anzhenmen (安貞門) was moved south during the early Ming dynasty. It was renamed Andingmen, hoping for "peace and tranquility under the heavens (天下安定)".
Its gate tower was 31 metres by 16.05 metres and 36 metres in height. The barbican was 68 metres by 62 metres, with a sluice gate and an archway on its western side. The barbican was dismantled in 1915 and the gate tower and watchtower in 1969.
Seven of Beijing's Inner city gates had a Guandi temple built within their barbican grounds. Andingmen and Deshengmen had Zhenwu temples instead, as these gates were used by soldiers entering and leaving the city.
Andingmen was informally known as "生门 Shengmen", meaning "bountiful harvest". The Emperor always used this gate when leaving the city for the Temple of Earth, where he would pray for a bountiful harvest.
Outside Andingmen were storage areas for manure, which was used as fertilizer. Carts carrying manure and cowpies would leave via this gate for farms in the countryside.
During the dismantlement process, a small experiment to test the structural integrity of its gate tower was conducted. It was found that the gate tower structure could lean forward by 15 degrees and still not collapse.
The Gate of Victory. This was one of nine gates in Beijing's inner city, through which armies sent into battle by China's emperors would walk to begin their expeditions. Deshengmen (德勝門 lit. 'Gate of Moral Triumph' or 'Gate of Righteous Victory.') was located on the western section of the Inner city northern wall. It was originally part of the Mongol Yuan dynasty capital of Dadu located in the norther section of northern Beijing. After the Ming dynasty expelled the Mongol overlords, is name was changed from the original "Jiandemen (建德門)" during the early Ming dynasty to the new 'Gate of Moral Triumph.' The new name implied that the Ming won the war against the Yuan Mongols by having strong ethics and morals and thus worthy of Heaven's favor.
Thus, Deshengmen (N) is often the site of many battles.
The northern wall was rebuilt in 1372 slightly to the south of the original position. When the Qing conquered the Ming in 1644, this would be the gate where the Emperors send out columns of his royal army. Being in the northern most part of not only the Inner City (for there is no "Outer City" sections in the northern part of Beijing) this is also the gate most invaders will try to breach if they wish to take Beijing. If anyone (especially the Mongols to the north) wanted to invade Beijing, they would first have to forcefully take control of Deshengmen.
Both the Ming and the Qing, after defeating the Yuan and the Ming respectively, entered the city for the first time through Deshengmen; the name "Desheng" means "morally victorious". Carts carrying weapons used this gate for luck when entering or leaving the city. Deshengmen was also informally known as "修门 Xiumen", meaning "having high moral and ethical standards". Both the famous epic Ming dynasty scroll paintings "Departure Herald" and "Return Clearing" has the Desheng Gate marked as the respective entrance and exit for the Emperor's expedition.
The gate tower at Deshengmen was 31.5 metres by 16.8 metres, with a height of 36 metres. The barbican was 70 metres by 118 metres, the second largest, after Zhengyangmen. The barbican had a sluice gate and an archway on the western side. Its Zhenwu (the Dark Warrior) temple was at the center of the northern side of the barbican, facing south. The original gate complex, -erected over the previous gate of Dadu was built in 1437 and modeled on the other gates of Ming Beijing, it composed of three structures – the gatehouse, archery tower, and barbican. They overlook the northern city moat, today only the archery tower and the barbican survives.
Like many of the gates in Beijing it was staffed by hundreds of guards and ringed with cannons on its ramparts. A temple and a court along with several supply depots are located within Desheng Gate.
The barbican was dismantled in 1915. In 1921 the gate tower was dismantled and in 1955 the gate tower platform was dismantled. A proposal was made in 1979 to dismantle of the watchtower, but it was kept intact.
Xizhimen (西直門 lit. 'Western Upright Gate') was located on the northern section of the Inner city western wall. This inner city gate functioned as the Gate of Water. Mineral water for emperors was fetched from a spring outside Beijing and sent to the palaces through this gate before sunrise.
Due to the poor water supply within Beijing, the Imperial family and wealthy families would get their water from springs on Mount Yuquan in the northwestern suburbs. Every morning, carts carrying spring water would enter the city through Xizhimen. Thus, a symbol of water was engraved on the barbican gate archway of Xizhimen.
Xizhimen, the last gate to remain fully intact, was completely dismantled in 1969. During demolition, workers discovered that parts of the barbican gate's archway were the originals from the 13th century.
Fuchengmen (阜成門 lit. 'Gate of Abundant Success') was located at the midpoint of the Inner city western wall. Originally the site of the Pingzemen (平則門) gate of the Yuan era, it was still informally known as Pingzemen by the commoners even after its name was changed. The new name, "Fucheng", came from the classic Shàngshū, "六卿分职各率其属,以成九牧,阜成兆民". The gate was repaired in 1382 and completely rebuilt in 1435. Its gate tower and watchtower were similar to those at Chaoyangmen.
The gate tower was 31.2 metres by 16 metres and 30 metres high. The barbican was 74 metres by 65 metres, with a sluice gate and an archway on its northern side. The Guandi temple was located on the northeastern corner of the barbican, facing south. The sluice gate tower and watchtower were dismantled in 1935. The barbican and watchtower platform were dismantled in 1953, and the gate tower in 1965.
Due to its proximity to the Western Hills and the coal reserves at Mentougou District, carts carrying coal would enter the city through Fuchengmen. The barbican gate archway had an engraving of a plum flower (plum flower "梅 Mei" and coal "煤 Mei" are homophones in Chinese.
Also, the plum trees near Fuchengmen blossom in spring, around the time when coal was no longer needed and deliveries ceased). This gives rise to the old Beijing saying: "Fucheng's plum blossoms announce the arrival of the new spring's warmth". Fuchengmen is also informally referred to as "惊门 Jingmen", meaning "Justice".


Blue Subaru Impreza, manufactured in 2000, first registered on 1 December 2004. Cylinder capacity: 1994cc.
As of 24 May 2013 this vehicle had done 95,294 miles. Current estimated odometer reading: 102,700 miles.
both front chassis rails slightly damaged.


text:
AfreecaTV (, short for "Any FREE broadCAsting") () is a P2P technology-based video streaming service. It is now owned and operated by AfreecaTV Co., Ltd. in South Korea after Nowcom's AfreecaTV Co., Ltd and ZettaMedia split in 2011. As of July 2019 AfreecaTV was listed 4th in the "Asia's 200 Best Under A Billion" list by Forbes.

History
AfreecaTV initially started as a W beta service on May 11, 2005, and was officially named "AFREECA" on March 9, 2006. The site mainly re-transmits TV channels but also allows users to upload their own videos and shows. Functions such as broadcasting, viewing, channel listing, live chatting, and discussion boards are provided. Users are required to install 'Afreeca Player' for grid delivery. Independent broadcasters called broadcasting jockeys (BJs) deliver live broadcasts to viewers, who can add them to their list of favorite channels using an Afreeca Player tool.  Some channels have tens of thousands of viewers at any given time. Paid services such as quick views or channel relays allow BJs additional sources of revenue.

The platform ranges anywhere from TV broadcasts, live video game broadcasts, taxi driver monitoring, artist performances, and personal daily-life video blogs and shows for actresses and professional broadcasters.

The head of AfreecaTV's parent company Nowcom, Mun Yong-sik, was arrested in 2008 for illegally distributing copyrighted films. Some alleged the arrest was politically motivated due to Afreeca being used by protesters to coordinate.

On September 27, 2012, AfreecaTV English was released on the Google Play store.

One example of expansion of Afreeca's role is the hosting of a live talk session with Mayor Park of Seoul, broadcast live online and via mobile on AfreecaTV. He used the platform as a way to conduct a community scanning forum to collect public opinions and allow bloggers with various areas of expertise to participate in the dialogue. The bloggers were able to address the problems facing Seoul and propose solutions in their areas of expertise, while also exchanging ideas with Mayor Park in an in-depth discussion on the administration of the Seoul Metropolitan Government. Depending on rising of power of AfreecaTV, many Idol Groups participate in AfreecaTV for their fans, for example, Nine Muses.

Controversy
There have been many social problems with Afreeca TV such as offers for sexual favors and abasement of disabled individuals. Many broadcasters were involved in these incidents, and they were punished by managers of Afreeca TV by suspension of their IDs. Due to such problems, mass media in South Korea have shown concern about the effects of personal broadcasting platforms.

A claim was made that audience overloading has caused overpayment of fees for Internet broadcasting. In light of this, Korea's Clean Internet Broadcasting Council came to an agreement with Afreeca TV to reduce the payment maximum to less than 1 million won (a little less than US$900) per day by June 2008.

Esports
Afreeca picked up the SBENU StarCraft II team on January 23, 2016 and participated in Proleague. On November 21, 2016, it was announced that the team was disbanding its StarCraft II division, though it kept involvement in Starcraft up. They currently sponsor a professional League of Legends team, Afreeca Freecs. The Starcraft 2 team was reformed at the start of 2020.

Afreeca also announced on January 23, 2016 that they would be sponsoring two seasons of Brood War tournaments. The tournament has proved popular and is now in its 14th season as of August 2022.

Esports League
 AfreecaTV StarCraft League (ASL)
 Global StarCraft II League (GSL)
 Afreeca TV Battle Ground League (APL)
 LoL ladies Battle
 LoL Challengers Korea
 Hearthstone battle royal

Esports broadcast relay station
 Overwatch APEX relay
 League of Legends Pro League Korean Relay
 LoL Champions Korea Relay
 Sudden Attack Champions League
 AfreecaTV Tekken League (ATL)
 Chinese League of Legend Pro League (LPL)

See also
 Vevo

References

External links
 Official website

Peercasting
Internet properties established in 2005
Streaming television
Online companies of South Korea
Peer-to-peer software
Video game streaming services

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


I post a new article or video every week, to be notified of new articles just connect to me via social media. I blog about body language, personality traits and people.
With our busy lives (and the expense!) holiday time can be put on to the back burner. However there are actually scientific studies which have shown the importance of taking holidays.
It is really hard sometimes to feel grateful or happy. Day to day small scale disappointments also can knock us off our positive equilibrium. Here's some thoughts on positivity.
Is having friends a good thing? As we move into adulthood with responsibilities of a family, work and meeting your partner's needs sometimes friendships, especially those that have been in place for a long time, fall by the way side and are treated as last in the list.
Love thy neighbour. In my first positivity experiment I put myself out there and give gifts to my neighbours to thank them for being awesome.
Do you feel like you could be happier day to day? Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is often referred to as more important than traditional IQ. Optimism and the ability to handle stress is a major part of EQ, so come with me on this journey and begin our Positivity experiment for 2017!
Interested in body language, but get bored easily by academic references? Check out the series Lie to Me, based on the work of Dr Paul Ekman.
You would have had to be hiding under a log not to have known about the contentious US Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Whether you begin today or the next month, the next week it doesn't matter as long as you start. You can make a resolution to work on your goals and enjoy the present while doing so.


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How Much Longer Will Lynch Downplay Hillary's Emails?
This column by ACRU Policy Board member J. Christian Adams was published July 1, 2016 by The New York Post.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said her impromptu tarmac summit at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport was a purely social affair. Golf and grandchildren were on the agenda, she said — and not how a home-brew server crammed with classified information ended up in Bill Clinton's basement.
However, the attorney general normally doesn't meet with family members of a target in an active FBI criminal investigation.
Hillary is just that — a target in an FBI criminal investigation.
But you'd never know that, listening to Lynch. She borrowed the narrative of the Hillary campaign when she described the FBI criminal investigation as a "security inquiry."
Downplaying the FBI criminal investigation is a deliberate communications strategy of the Clinton campaign. It's a very bad sign that the person who must approve any grand-jury referral has adopted Hillary's dishonest language.
Many won't believe Lynch and Clinton only discussed grandkids and golf in her cozy jet. But I do.
That's all they needed to discuss for Bill to interfere with a criminal prosecution. Sophisticated insiders don't need to use clumsy and explicit language. Merely having the tarmac meeting interferes with the investigation, even if golf and grandkids were the only topics discussed.
The tarmac summit sent a signal. It is a signal to all of the hardworking FBI agents who have the goods on Hillary. The attorney general has made it clear what team she is on. The attorney general isn't on the side of justice. She's on the Democratic Party team.
This is the unspoken message from Lynch to all of the FBI agents on the case and to all the front-line lawyers at the Justice Department: When you send your recommendation to refer Hillary's case to the grand jury, you had better realize your burden to convince me I should sign off on a grand-jury request is higher than you thought. These are my friends.
This is standard operating procedure in the Obama Justice Department. When DOJ lawyers were reviewing South Carolina voter-ID laws for pre-clearance under the Voting Rights Act, then-Attorney General Eric Holder gave an interview and speech about the discriminatory nature of voter-ID laws. Like day follows night, the lawyers responsible for the review then blocked South Carolina's law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
It took South Carolina several million dollars in attorney fees to win a federal court case to gain approval — fees the state cannot recover.
I have never believed Hillary will be indicted, even though the case appears fairly easy to make. As I said on "The Kelly File," I suspect a county district attorney could win the case. For a
swarm of seasoned assistant United States attorneys? It seems like a slam dunk.
But that's not what matters in the age of Obama. An indictment of Hillary would likely increase her popularity with Democrats. It's Ken Starr all over again. Remember, Bill Clinton became more popular when he was under legal attack.
This saga involves two American values that perhaps are irreconcilable in this mess.
Criminal proceedings should not alter election outcomes. The Justice Department has long had such a policy where proceedings are delayed until after an election — that's so America doesn't come to resemble a third-world nation that criminalizes politics.
At the same time, the American ideal says nobody is above the law — even Hillary.
That's what separates the Anglo-America legal experience from every other legal culture in world history.
This is a marriage of a Clinton-style carnival ride in an age of Obama-style lawlessness. The stars of "no controlling legal authority" are behaving badly in an age of "punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends."
That it is no longer about a dalliance with a White House intern and instead involves national security makes the gangsterism all the more frightening.
Lori Roman2019-11-04T15:23:23-05:00Categories: OPED|Tags: Attorney General, Bill Clinton, Clinton scandal, Hillary Clinton, J. Christian Adams, Justice Department, Loretta Lynch|

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Holiday home Risør 59 is situated in Sauvika. The 5-star holiday home features sea views and is 34 km from Arendal. With free WiFi this holiday home features a TV a washing machine and a kitchen with dishwasher. Kragerø is 26 km from Holiday home Risør 59. The nearest airport is "Kristiansand Kjevik" Airport 81 km from the property.


International human rights body, Amnesty accuses the federal government of fuelling impunity and insecurity in the country by failing to hold murderers to account.
The group said in a statement on Thursday that independently verified figures indicate that at least 1,813 persons have been murdered across 17 states, which is double the 894 people killed in the entire 2017.
File photo: A community deserted in Kogi State by residents after an alleged herdsmen invasion.
The group explained that the killings are usually results arising from the farmers-herders conflict and Boko Haram attacks, as well as armed banditry among others.
"We are gravely concerned about the rising spate of killings across the country, especially the communal clashes between farmers and herders and attacks by bandits across at least 17 states," said Osai Ojigho, Director Amnesty International Nigeria.
She added, "The authorities have a responsibility to protect lives and properties, but they are clearly not doing enough going by what is happening.
But the government and, police, and the military have yet to respond to the allegations.
They explained that the killings are usually the result of the farmers-herders conflict and Boko Haram attacks, as well as armed banditry among others.
But the government and the military have yet to respond to the allegations.
The Amnesty International director in the country further blamed the violence in Plateau, which began after an attack said to be followed by a reprisal from Thursday last week, on unacceptable security lapses.
She noted that despite the deployment of security forces, including the military in over 30 states, the escalation of the attacks has proven that whatever the authorities were doing was not working.
The spokeperson, Ojigho also stressed the urgent need for people who are suspected of committing crimes across the country to be held accountable.
These are questions begging for answers from the authorities.


With this package you get 3 Gigabytes of Bandwidth. This package is ideal for users who just requires basic internet access for work, school projects, research, Skype and occasional video streaming.
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Magikoopa Blockade (known as Kamek Blockade in Europe), also known as World 3-A, is the Enemy Blockade of World 3. The course takes place in a red caged room with small raised platforms in two corners and some portraits of Bowser on the walls. The enemies here are three Magikoopas.
Present after the Magikoopas in the course are defeated.
Dutch Aan de kant, Kameks! Step aside, Magikoopas!
German Aus dem Weg, Kameks! Out of the way, Magikoopas!
This page was last edited on April 13, 2019, at 02:19.


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Most Voters Say Clarence Thomas Should Not Be Involved in 2020 Election Cases
Just 28 percent of voters have a favorable view of the Supreme Court justice.
Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas attends the ceremonial swearing-in ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett to be the U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice on the South Lawn of the White House on October 26, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images
A majority of Americans believe that Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from any future Supreme Court cases relating to the 2020 presidential election, due to his wife Ginni Thomas's involvement in plans to overturn the results to keep former President Donald Trump in office.
Last month, it was revealed that Ginni Thomas had sent dozens of text messages to Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows, encouraging him to take the lead in challenging President Joe Biden's win in the 2020 presidential race. Thomas cited false claims of election fraud — which have been debunked numerous times — as her justification for doing so.
Within the 29 texts that she exchanged with Meadows, Thomas told him that he needed to "make a plan" to "save us from the left." In another conversation, she called Biden's win "the greatest Heist of our History."
Ginni Thomas admitted in mid-March that she attended the "Stop the Steal" rally that Trump held outside the White House on January 6, 2021, an event that led hundreds of Trump loyalists to attack the Capitol building during the certification of the Electoral College. Thomas said that she did not play a role in organizing the rally, and claimed that she left early due to the temperatures that day, before the mob descended upon the Capitol building.
Ginni Thomas has previously said that she and her husband never discuss her right-wing advocacy work or his Supreme Court cases in private. But Clarence Thomas has never recused himself from any case that involved his wife, despite Supreme Court standards that encourage justices to recuse themselves when their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned."
Ginni Thomas Debacle Is a Warning That Trumpism Lives On in the Halls of Power
As far as Clarence Thomas goes, recusal would be nice. Resignation in disgrace would seem more appropriate.
William Rivers Pitt ,
According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll published this week, 53 percent of voters believe that Thomas should recuse himself from cases that involve his wife, while only 28 percent said that he shouldn't have to do so. Another 19 percent said that they didn't know or had no opinion on the matter.
Thomas's favorability rating in the poll is also low. Just 28 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Supreme Court justice, while 36 percent say they see him in an unfavorable light.
Other polls have asked about a specific case that dealt with documents relating to the Capitol attack, noting that the Supreme Court ruled on a matter relating to January 6 documents being given to the House select committee investigating the day's events. Clarence Thomas was the only justice to dissent in that case, saying that Trump should have been allowed to appeal a lower court's decision that said those documents had to be handed over to the committee.
A plurality of respondents in an Economist/YouGov poll published this week agreed that Thomas's participation in the case was wrong, given that his wife was directly involved in discussing strategies to undo the election with Trump officials. Forty-eight percent of respondents said that he shouldn't have taken part in ruling on the case, while only a quarter of respondents (24 percent) said that his involvement was acceptable.
Today is our last chance to raise $22,000 and we need your support before time runs out. We're not asking for a handout, we're asking for an investment: Invest in a nonprofit news site that's not afraid to ruffle a few feathers, not afraid to stand up for what's right, and not afraid to tell it like it is.
Chris Walker is a news writer at Truthout, and is based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on the American people.
Ginni Thomas, Wife of Clarence Thomas, Attended "Stop the Steal" Rally on Jan. 6
Ginni Thomas claims her work does not interfere with or influence her husband's decisions on the Supreme Court.
Ocasio-Cortez Calls for Clarence Thomas to Resign Over Wife's Ties to January 6
She warned that if Democrats don't act against the Supreme Court justice now, it could come back to bite them.
House GOP's Natural Resources Chair Has a New Chief of Staff: An Oil Lobbyist
A former fossil fuel lobbyist could have huge sway over the House's energy policy priorities.
Oklahoma Republican's Bill Would Fine Drag Performers $20K Over Shows for Kids
The proposal places "a target [on] drag performers," one LGBTQ advocate said.
Kyrsten Sinema Challenger Ruben Gallego Breaks Fundraising Record With $1M Haul
The Gallego campaign says it got over 27,000 donations, breaking the previous 24-hour fundraising record in Arizona.
Republicans Invite Sinema to Caucus With Them Instead of Democrats
Arizona Sen. Krysten Sinema switched her political affiliation from Democrat to independent in December.
Poll: Most Think Trump's Actions on Classified Docs Were Illegal But Not Biden's
Just 37 percent of Americans think what Biden did was illegal, while 52 percent say Trump's actions were illegal.
McCarthy Says "It's Not My Role" to Remove George Santos Despite Rampant Lies
McCarthy has refused to discipline Santos despite having numerous options to do so as speaker of the House.
George Santos Changes His Story About How He Got $625,000 in Campaign Funds
Santos's campaign has pivoted, saying that previously reported personal loans weren't actually from personal funds.
Final day: Truthout needs your help!
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text:
Габриэль Луи Перо (1700, Семюр-ан-Осуа — 31 марта 1767, Париж) — французский писатель-биограф, автор нескольких книг.

Биография

По некоторым данным, был настоятелем монастыря в Сорбонне и назывался аббатом, хотя на деле никогда не был рукоположён. Более всего известен как продолжатель многотомного труда «Vies des hommes illustres de la France», начатого д'Овиньи и законченного Тюрпеном. Его авторству принадлежат тома XIII—XXIII, в которых особенно интересна биография адмирала Колиньи. Он также составил первый том «Recueil A. B. C.». Его работа «L'Ordre des francs-maçons trahi», впервые изданная в 1742 году, признаётся ценным источником по истории франкомасонства первых десятилетий XVIII века.

Большую часть его произведений реализовывали книготорговцы, которые, когда в конце жизни Перо потерял зрение, в складчину организовали ему пенсию размером в 1200 франков.

Библиография
 Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, vol. XII, 1874, p. 579.

Примечания

Литература

Писатели Франции


ACSL organizes computer science contests and computer programming contests for elementary, junior, and senior high school students. This year, our 41st year of continuous operation, over 300 teams in the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa and Asia are participating in various divisions. ACSL is on the approved activities list of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP). ACSL is also an institutional member of the Computer Science Teachers Association.
The Senior Division is geared to those high school students with experience in programming, especially those who are taking a Computer Science AP course. We suggest that students do not register for the Senior Division during their first year of ACSL participation.
The Intermediate Division is geared towards senior high school students with computer programming experience, and advanced junior high students.
The Junior Division is geared to middle school students with no previous experience in programming. No student beyond grade 9 may compete in the Junior Division.
The Elementary Division is open to students from grades 3 -6. It consists of non-programming problems. Four categories, one each contest, will be tested. The contest consists of a 30-minute, 5-question test each month.
Note: Experienced lower grade students can choose higher level contest. For example, primary school students with high programming skills can choose senior or intermediate or junior contest, and junior school students with strong programming skills can choose the senior contest. However high school students can't choose lower level contests.
Part 1 (Individual round): 5 short answer questions in 30 minutes. 1 point for each question.
Part 2 (Team round): 1 programming question in 2 hours, worth 5 points.
Elementary Division (Individual written contest): 5 short answer questions in 30 minutes. 1 point for each question.
The top 70% of teams from the preliminary round are invited to attend the final competition, and the score of the preliminary are still included in the final scores.
No need to use a computer in the exam for Elementary Division.
Invitations to the All-Star Contest are based on cumulative team scores in the Junior, Intermediate, and Senior Divisions. All Star Contest will be held on 8th June, 2019 in Beijiing. All the teams will compete in their own division. They need to solve 4 programming problems in 3.5 hours and also have written test.
Calculators can not be used on ACSL.


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Ripple-backed MoneyGram expands into India
Ripple partner MoneyGram has teamed up with EbixCash to take a leap into the India market, broadening its remittance payment services.
By Nicholas Marinoff
MoneyGram, a global money transfer and payments firm which recently joined up with crypto giant Ripple, is pushing into the India market.
The company today announced that it has partnered with Ebix, Inc. subsidiary EbixCash to bring its financial services to customers across India. MoneyGram will now have access to EbixCash's 320,000 distribution outlets in India, which are spread throughout 4,000 cities in roughly 75,000 rural villages, according to today's statement.
MoneyGram customers can use its services to send money to anyone they want across "200 countries and territories." With this deal, the firm expects to service remittance volumes more than $3 billion, and EbixCash anticipates annual revenue of between $20 and $35 million thanks to its new partnership.
Grant Lines—chief revenue officer of MoneyGram—explained in a statement, "India remains the world's top recipient of remittances, and we're excited to better serve this critical market through our partnership with EbixCash, a leading brand with an approximate 80 percent share of locations in the country."
While not explicitly mentioned in today's announcement, it's safe to assume the deal bodes well for both Ripple and the XRP cryptocurrency. MoneyGram has been working with Ripple since mid-2019. More recently, the company has increased its usage of XRP through its remittance payment system following Ripple's $50 million investment in MoneyGram.
Ripple now owns around 10 percent of MoneyGram and could increase its stake to 15 percent down the road, according to the term's of the deal.
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MoneyGram, meanwhile, is an aggressive expansion track. The firm announced last July that it would be entering the South Korea market with the help of Sentbe, a payment startup that services large companies in the region including Samsung.
Alex Holmes—chairman and CEO of MoneyGram—said the company is looking to diversify itself by focusing on "key international markets," such as India.
"Partnering with the largest financial exchange in [India] is an important milestone, and we are excited to enable EbixCash to plug into the MoneyGram platform to access our customer-centric capabilities and services," he said in a statement.
https://decrypt.co/16563/ripple-backed-moneygram-expands-into-india


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The American Way: Writer/Director Rick Alverson on The Mountain
Jeff Goldblum and Tye Sheridan in The Mountain (courtesy of Kino Lorber)
by Michael Tully
in Features, Issues
Jacqueline Abrahams, Lorenzo Hagerman, Rick Alverson, Summer 2019, The Mountain, Zia Anger
Divisive. Vexing. Hilarious. Disturbing. Stimulating. Exhilarating. However one feels about the films of Rick Alverson, one thing's for certain: the adjectives used to express that opinion will be strong. From The Builder (2010) to Entertainment (2015), Alverson has relentlessly challenged his audiences to confront—and dare to release—their preconceived notions of narrative cinema. At a time when the independent festival circuit has begun to feel more like a breeding ground for the major studios and television networks than a showcase for brash, defiantly original stand-alone works of art, Alverson is providing a desperately needed jolt—a reminder of what truly independent cinema is. It is that dizzying feeling of emerging from a theater and thinking, No one else could have made that movie.
With his latest film, Alverson widens his production palette while retaining his rigorous, provocative voice. Set in 1950s America, The Mountain follows Andy (Tye Sheridan), a withdrawn young man who falls under the charismatic spell of Wallace Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum), a traveling doctor performing lobotomies at a time when the world is finally starting to realize that, huh, maybe these crude mutilations aren't, in fact, the appropriate way to treat mental health issues after all. As Andy photographs these ghastly procedures and simultaneously witnesses Fiennes's inward-and-downward spiral, he finds himself drawn to a female patient (Hannah Gross), whose unhinged father, Jack, just so happens to be played by the inimitable Denis Lavant in one of his most unhinged, mesmerizing performances ever (and, yes, that's factoring Holy Motors into the equation).
In the lead-up to Kino Lorber's summer release of The Mountain, I spoke to Alverson about the arc of his career, the technical and ideological challenges of pulling off a film as audacious as this and how someone who is so resolutely committed to making polarizing cinema grapples with the issue of "career sustainability."
Filmmaker: When you set out to make your first feature, The Builder, after making music for so many years, was an ambitious film like The Mountain—a period piece with bankable stars and all that mumbo jumbo—the kind of goal you wanted to work toward?
Alverson: I think initially [filmmaking] was just a formal preoccupation. I had gone to NYU briefly in the early 1990s, dropped out, left New York City and moved to Richmond, Virginia, where I still live. I was a carpenter and a cook, and I had just built a house and was beginning to play with the video technology of the day—smaller sensors, lens adapters—and [filmmaking] just felt approachable again. It became a yearlong process with me and Colm O'Leary, my cowriter and the star of The Builder, to explore the medium and see what it had to offer and what I had to offer it. [I had] a lot of curiosity and a preoccupation with nonactors. So [I was] scrutinizing the form and letting the questions get in the way, making sure that you could feel them in the product to some degree. I don't know if that answers your question.
Filmmaker: You share writing credits on all of your films, and particularly with Colm O'Leary, who cowrote The Mountain. Over the course of five features, has your writing process remained consistent or does each project dictate its own specific terms with how you set out to attack it?
Alverson: Initially, I was really interested in the traditional script-to-screen process having more elasticity. Again, I was interested in nonactors and the reflexive quality of independent cinema, so I worked with fairly short treatments. The Builder was essentially written as it was made, and now, with The Mountain, there was a full script with dialogue, and the improvisation is more spatial and physical.
Filmmaker: Has that trajectory been an extension of "playing the game"—presenting talent and managers and agents something that's in screenplay form and thus more recognizable to them?
Alverson: Well, of course, as you go through the process of struggling to make films, struggling to convey your vision for them, and the projects get bigger and you're dealing with people outside your circle, you have to convey more on the page. There's the classic "increased financial risk," and there's also risk mitigation for the filmmaker. You know, there are a lot of production problems that really interested me and that I tried to cultivate in the early films, and there are a lot that don't interest me and that were just sort of cumbersome. It is a fine line—independent cinema's contribution for me has always been that, out of necessity, it had to be scrappy and reflexive and reactive, and that the detriments and the obstacles all left their imprint on the thing, [giving it] a vitality that the cold manufacture of a completely and supposedly "realized" project on the page and in development didn't have. There's a vitality that is evident in Cassavetes's work and Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky—you can really see the imprint of the problem of development and production. That's actually the contribution of independent cinema, and the sort of "whimsical" stamp that has since been put on it is, I think, an unfortunate byproduct.
Filmmaker: Not to get too therapeutic about it, but how much of your vision and voice would you say is driven by a conscious desire to put something distinct in the world versus simply how you creatively express yourself in the way you know how?
Alverson: I think that in a world where there's a glut of content, where content is the holy grail, to just fill up the digital receptacle is a kind of pollution to me. When I talk to younger people who are interested in filmmaking, the first thing I say is, "What is your contribution? If you're going to be just contributing to the glut, you need to ask yourself bigger questions about who [that film] is nourishing and what it's actually doing." I'm very conscious of some element that feels unique to my perspective, and a lot of that [has to do with] problems. I think of The Mountain as "a problem film." I think of it as an anti-utopian film. I think of it as even an antinarrative film, at times, in a constructed way—one that wears its dilemma on its sleeve in the hope that there's something useful in that for the audience.
Filmmaker: Can you talk a little bit about the history behind Jeff Goldblum's character, Dr. Wallace Fiennes, and whatever types of philosophies or critical thinking crept into him as a character? I've read a little, and it seems like the inspiration for him was a 20th-century doctor, Walter Freeman. But you don't call him Walter Freeman, so there's a separation right there.
Alverson: [He is] built very loosely on the architecture of a historic character, Dr. Walter Freeman, who popularized lobotomy in the early to mid-century and fell from grace as drugs came on the market that made the lobotomy superfluous. The problems [of mental illness] could be hidden a little more, and there weren't as many evident side effects—or carnage, to be blunt about it. But that's just a springboard. In a larger sense, like with my other films, it's about the unique characteristics of particular individuals and a particular American psyche that is hell-bent on progress and lunges into the future without consideration for the ramifications of an act. That's a utopian lunge, you know? Largely, it was white American males of European descent who contributed, if you can call it that, to this brand of progress. I saw Freeman as a really chiseled, articulated example of that kind of psychology.
Filmmaker: A more traditional movie would have had Andy go through a showier devolution from lively and vivacious into an eventual lobotomized condition. You start with him already in a state of recoiled passivity. Could you talk about that choice? Did that icky question ever come up about Tye needing to be a "proactive lead character?"
Alverson: Well, I have all these theories about what cinema and media and episodic narrative—and narrative in general—does to us culturally and psychologically. We're subject to manipulations of form because we're increasingly ignorant of form. I think when we look at cinema, we look for it to do the thinking for us. We love to become vacant and have that oneiric spectacle be our brain outside of our body. Narrative is a big part of this—we don't just desire but we need our characters to experience not just some sort of salvation but change. They must shift within the envelope of the film, and that's always driven me crazy. I grew up on the television of the late '70s and '80s, and the cinema of the late '80s and '90s, and I could never find that [change] in the real world. At some point, it just seemed a kind of fantastical novelty to comfort us.
I always preferred as an audience member to be changed by a film, and that seemed to happen the most the less [the characters in] the film changed. [That approach] would force me to become engaged and be an active participant in the thing. So, I wanted to tamp down that very evident radical transformation of [Tye's] character. He lives an internal life. The evidence of that isn't available to us. The film pushes us to deal with the material itself, the form, and to speculate about the shifts. It's kind of a creative partnership with the audience, whether they like it or not.
Filmmaker: I was talking with Filmmaker's editor, Scott Macaulay, about the film, and he saw in its dialogue about the relationship between photography and death echoes of the writings of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes.
Alverson: Well, I like Sontag a lot. Against Interpretation was big for me when I was younger. But I think there's a lot about representation in the film, and I wanted to pull the audience back into awareness of the material of the film and it being representation, you know? There are all of these flirtations and augmentations and failures of historical representation in the movie, and I hope to make us realize that it's a byproduct, an artificial construct, and that this is an easy avenue of moving through the form into the content. I wanted it to be an obstruction, kind of. I joke at Q&As that I describe the film as "a beige obstruction."
I hate metaphors in cinema. I always have. I think that they are something that was useful in the oral narrative and in literature as a kind of mechanism, but film is experiential, and the fact that you're redirected through the veiled metaphor of symbolism has always driven me crazy. I understand its necessity in Soviet cinema and in countries and cultures where there's profound censorship, where you literally have to hide the actual exploration. But we don't live in that culture, and I think it's gone off the rails a bit in the way that we just look to read cinema as opposed to experience it.
Filmmaker: At your Venice press conference you described America as an "antiseptic utopia," a description that seems to play out in the film's production design, not to mention how it's shot with a square aspect ratio and all of that. Could you discuss how you worked with your production designer, Jacqueline Abrahams, on creating these period locations?
Alverson: Jacqueline and her art department were great. Everything was essentially built but in the locations. We spent our money on traveling—14 different towns and cities and counties in upstate New York, then another 10 in the Pacific Northwest. Essentially, we'd find historically accurate architecture and then dress everything. It was pretty difficult and grueling. A lot of the institutions, like the Kirkbride Plan institutions of the 19th century—which were, strangely enough, beautiful places with incredibly progressive behavioral approaches to psychiatric medicine and a lot of [natural] light—were overcrowded and gruesome by the mid-20th century. And I was sort of pushed up against the wall—like, "What are we doing?" There's this common thinking [in period moviemaking] that we're reconstructing something and that [reconstruction] is a window onto a reality, which is so far from the truth. It gets really dangerous, I think, when the recreation is close enough—deceptively close—that we feel like it is an actual representation. So, we sort of moved back from that and played up the wax museum–quality of the audacity of time travel, essentially. The horrors of these institutions [as they were by midcentury] started to feel crippling, to some degree, so I essentially pulled back from that and let the artifice bleed through. I created something that felt just slightly artificial while playing with the historical reality.
Filmmaker: You just anticipated my next question, which is about the ambitious nature of the production. Were there scenes that, on the day, were more of a beast than you had imagined when you wrote them?
Alverson: I mean, we jammed in a lot on this film. It was a five-week shoot, which is the most I've ever had, and there were, I think, 198 scenes. I definitely learned some lessons. There was a lot that the budget ultimately couldn't support for whatever reason, as inevitably there is in what we do. A lot was about creative use of extras. Studios will throw money at something to try and make it conform to the expectations of the writer—what's on the page and that sort of thing. I find it so much more interesting to say, "What does the thing want to do and what can it do? We have to cut 200 extras, so how does this scene work?"
Filmmaker: There's a scene that reminded me of Titicut Follies. That had to have been the scene with the most extras, right?
Alverson: Yeah, there were a few others that were cut that were supposed to have a lot of extras, too, but that was the scene with the most extras. I had [director] Zia Anger come on. With the short amount of time we had to shoot it, it seemed interesting to have another director in there to work with some of the actors. We talked about behavioral modes and the diversity of behavior but then also what the film was trying to achieve. She was helpful in that regard.
Filmmaker: At points in the film, you use god's eye view perspective—an overhead shot. At what point in the writing or prep or shooting did you, or you and your DP, Lorenzo Hagerman, make those coverage choices?
Alverson: Well, I have a lot of hang-ups. I don't want to say that I want to make it hard for the audience, but I think their having access to everything in terms of discovering the world is really problematic. I think our vantage [point] needs to be limited to some degree. I have all these bizarre rules that Tye would tease me about. Like, no protagonist or supporting actor can ever enter or exit the frame unless they go through a door. And if you look through the film, that's the case. But there were these moments where it felt useful to just break that entirely and have that sort of, like you say, deity vantage. But there was a list of approaches that have been done before that would be the default [approach to coverage] and that we want to stay clear of.
Filmmaker: Is it really true that Denis Lavant's epic monologue in the film was scripted down to the word?
Alverson: Yes, it's scripted. He's a living, breathing masterwork, that guy. He's the most rigorous performer I've ever worked with. Initially, it was a 13- to 15-minute monologue that he performed the totality of in two takes, even down to where it went in and out of English and French. It seems spontaneous, but that's just his discipline as a theatrical performer. Some of the gesticulations were his, but yeah—he's just incredibly, incredibly disciplined. We talked a lot about it. I speak no French, and his English is all right, but he's a little tentative about it, so we worked with a translator. Sometimes the translator would disappear, and we would just be making faces at each other, which was a joy. And there were references to some of the mania of Antonin Artaud and Lautréamont and the French surrealists. It is a theatrical kind of performance, and he also nailed that, and I think that that gets under people's skin a little bit. Some people who have seen the film feel that falseness and think that it's inadvertent. But, I mean, he literally is performing for those [people]—he occupies a real performative space at the end that is necessarily a smidge false.
Filmmaker: I live in Austin, Texas, which is known as a film town. There are 24 first-run movie theaters here, three of which define themselves as art houses. Last weekend, only one theater in Austin was not showing the Avengers movie on at least one screen, and that was the Austin Film Society Cinema. Do you think things are getting worse in terms of the dominance of blockbuster cinema?
Alverson: In Richmond, Virginia, which is a much smaller version of Austin but with fewer food trucks, all of the art-house cinemas have closed, with the exception of one, which is sort of a spinoff of a chain cinema. I definitely think that, yeah, it's bad. I think it's inevitable, too. Those tentpole films satisfy all of the spectacle requirements of cinema—all of that access, all of the expectation. Even when they're able now to work in some sort of supposedly challenging content or politics or something, they're still completely performing for the audience's expectation and validation. I think the most frightening thing about it is that that's the utility of cinema now. It needs to "work," and all of us are schooled by the hall of mirrors of social media, where we're constantly surrounded by representations and validations of ourselves. That's where all this maniacal social media in-fighting comes from: when somebody is challenged in the slightest bit by an opinion other than their own or when something doesn't validate their worldview. So, it's a bit of a battle, and I think it's more important than ever for there to be problematic cinema.
Filmmaker: How do you balance the unavoidable issue of career sustainability—growing and making bigger, more ambitious work—when that is the reality that we're up against? How do you personally keep going and thriving?
Alverson: I mean, there are people like Jeff Goldblum and Tye who require and thirst for more challenging and problematic content. There are people in that space who then lend their credibility and reputation, and that helps. Even if it's a bit of a red herring, you want people to come into the door and be subject to the thing and have to contend with it. I have friends in the gallery and experimental cinema space [whose work is] seen by a very, from my perspective, minute portion of the population. Sometimes, I prefer to be making work that's as uncompromising as that, but then the conversation doesn't happen. So, I think it's a tightrope walk, but there is a threshold that any filmmaker can find. It can be established fairly easily what people will tolerate—what they won't and what they've been taught to tolerate mostly—and then to step up from that. That's why I love the idea of metaphors and symbolism that are dysfunctional. Essentially, there are metaphors all over this film, but the metaphors don't work properly. They fall apart. My dream is that people step over the threshold into the film and then they're sort of caught there because they can't entirely transport themselves into the thing, but they also can't entirely remove themselves because of their prurience.
Crime Family by Scott Macaulay in Directors, Features, Interviews, Issues, Screenwriters
Travel Companions: Steven Soderbergh on Cruise-Ship Shooting, Working with Deborah Eisenberg and Meryl Streep, and Let Them All Talk by Amy Taubin in Directors, Features, Interviews, Issues
Flipping the Script: Mary Harron Interviews Radha Blank About Her Spirited and Wise New York Comedy, The Forty-Year-Old Version by Mary Harron in Actors, Directors, Features, Interviews, Issues, Screenwriters
I'll Come Running: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and Jesse Andrews on Me and Earl and the Dying Girl By Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2015
Hacking Arts – Using Technology To Connect With Your Audience By Michael Murie on Oct 1, 2013
Underground: Sam Fleischner on Stand Clear of the Closing Doors By Brandon Harris on May 23, 2014


YCS Holdings Ltd, a subsidiary of Terus Construction Ltd (Colas Canada), resurfaced the runways at Prince Rupert airport, in the far west of British Columbia.
One of the key features of this project was the fact that the island airport can only be reached by plane or boat. Given the weight of the equipment to be transported, the subsidiary opted to use barges.
Numerous return trips were required between the mainland and the airport site to ship the 32,000 tons of aggregates needed for the project. The bitumen was moved by truck from northern Alberta, some 1,700 km away, while the asphalt mixes were produced on-site using a mobile plant.
As well as the logistical constraints, teams had to contend with another challenge: to avoid disruption to air traffic, they worked exclusively at night at maximum output before the runways reopened in the morning. A total of around fifty employees were mobilized for the operation.


The CharacterController Behavior enables you to get character avoidance based on a physical shape approximating your characters. The biggest advantage is that it is computed post-animation, meaning that it enables you to get character avoidance even when just playing a Motion behavior (which is not possible e.g. with the Navigation Behavior).
In this tutorial we will generate a characters playing various motions from walk to run and avoiding each others thanks to the CharacterController Behavior.
3. Open the Behavior Editor and add a Motion Behavior. Double-click on it to load several motions inside (E.g walk, walk fast, run from the Golaem Assets Motions/Battle directory). The motions will be distributed among the different characters.
5. Make sure that all your motions are going straight. E.g for this tutorial, we had to edit the run motion Motion Clip in order to remove a rotation on the root (hence sending all running characters to the left...). This would not be a problem with a Locomotion Behavior because this latter adapt the orientation of your character to the path it is following, but not the Motion Behavior.
7. The default radius of the CharacterController Behavior approximation Capsule being 1m, your characters capsules could collide with each others before even starting, thus leading to characters stuck in each others. Replace the Radius attribute by 0.3 which is the usual radius for a human character.
9. For debug purposes, it is possible to display the CharacterController capsules, by enabling the Physics Shapes display on the Physics Locator.
Note: remember that physics shapes display is always 1 frame late compared to the simulation which explains some discrepancies between the characters and the shapes when they are running fast.


text:
Paths of Least Resistance: A Conversation With Teresa Moller
Georgina Reid
'It is a brave piece of land,' Chilean landscape architect Teresa Moller says of Punta Pite, the setting of one of her most acclaimed projects. 'It is one of those places where you can witness how ocean and earth happened to touch one another.' Teresa is a poet of place. Over the past thirty-five years, word of her work has trickled across the world. Quiet, spare, mysterious. A friend, when I mention I'm interviewing Teresa, tells me her work is 'transcendent'. It is rare for a landscape architect's work to be described as such. But as I am soon to learn, Teresa herself has never managed to stay within the bounds of what is expected and assumed. Her work stands alone in a place that is and isn't design. It is somehow more.
'I work with nature as my partner,' she tells me. The partnership has taken her from the Atacama Desert, where she and her studio worked with existing plants and agricultural structures to create a landscape at the Hotel Tierra Atacama that speaks only of place; to the Venice Biennale, where she utilised quarry offcuts to form a series of resting points along the city foreshore titled Catch the Landscape, intended to bring 'value to the existence of the landscape'; to a project in the forests of Chile's south where Teresa's only landscape intervention was a water-channel made of fallen tree trunks running through the property.
Teresa Moller. Photo: Chloe Humphries.
And then there is Punta Pite, on Chile's western coast. Teresa's brief was to create a pathway along the coastline as part of a larger project for a private condominium development. But how do you make a path in a place that already speaks so strongly? You don't. 'If the rock wants you to walk on it, you do not need a path,' she says. Instead, a series of small stone interventions were made. Hints, rather than instructions. 'The fact that it's a discontinuous path makes you look for directions or signs in the landscape … Sometimes, it is absolutely clear where to go, to know where you are. And sometimes you have to search for clues, like in life.' There is no need, she says, to intervene when it is not necessary.
It is easy, these days, to find all you need to know about someone online, except for Teresa Moller. I hunt around, and while I find some project images and snippets of information from past lectures, I don't find out much about Teresa herself. I imagine her to be a cloud of a woman, enigmatic and serious. And so I prepare, very diligently, for a serious conversation. Instead, I find myself being interviewed. Teresa wants to know everything! She is warm and genuine and interested. We share a delightful hour, but we could have talked all day.
Teresa Moller: I want to ask you so many things. I want to do the interview for you.
Georgina Reid: Let's have a conversation instead of an interview and it can go both ways. I'm so interested in where people come from. You've said that 'life brought me to work with nature because I couldn't do anything other'. I want to know how this came to be?
TM: I am a very good example of somebody who is successful, but has difficulties being in the system, accepting things the way they are. I was always questioning everything, and doing things the way I thought they should be done. That brings a lot of problems in the system, you see? Because I did it my way very deeply.
GR: Were your parents free-thinking, or were you the black sheep?
TM: I am totally the black sheep. My parents were Catholic, and they were very, very fanatic. I always say I had enough of religion in the uterus of my mother. So, from there on, I came out and I say I had enough [of religion], this is it. So please let me go on my way. But also, my father was somebody who was very much connected to nature, he went to nature to save himself too.
GR: And did you grow up in Santiago?
TM: In Santiago, yes. But I grew up outside Santiago in a house, it was a very farm-like place and my everyday life was outside in the garden. So, I came from school, where I felt very restricted because it was a religious school, and I spent afternoons under the trees. I felt totally good, fine, protected. It was my place for solving the problems I had. My family was really hard. I think, without knowing, I stayed under the trees to save myself.
GR: It's interesting how often our bodies save us, like as you say you went to the trees, not because your mind told you to, but because you had to, intuitively. It makes so much sense to hear you say this, because it comes through very strongly in your work – this intuitive sense for place, a knowing that is bodily not necessarily intellectual.
TM: You know, I have no studies …
GR: No university study?
TM: Not that way I should do it, you see? I took the other way. I get bored in classes. I fight the teacher. And I say that's not true, why do you say that? I am really, I don't know, somebody who is difficult for the system.
At Hotel Tierra Atacama, in the Atacama Desert, Teresa Moller Studio designed a landscape intervention around
existing vegetation such as the algarrobo (Prosopis chilensis) and saltbush, the design celebrating the tenacity
and life-force of plants surviving in one of the driest places on Earth. Photo: Chloe Humphreys.
GR: How did you go from lying underneath the trees to designing all these incredible gardens and landscapes?
TM: At university I studied kinesiology, I had very good grades and I was doing well, but I was very emotional with the people I had to work with. So, I studied something else, but I left because I found it not so important. So you see? I am very sensitive. I didn't have the protection to be able to work with people who are suffering.
GR: That makes sense. But it makes sense also that you're very interested in people and emotion as well.
TM: Yes, very much. I wanted to help people, you see? It gives me a sense of life. I mean, why else are we here? After I was two times at university, I didn't know what to do. I couldn't go back. And then my boyfriend at that time said, 'Why don't you go and study something with flowers and gardens? It wouldn't hurt you.' So I felt like okay, I can't do anything other than that because I'm not good at anything else. I was totally derrotada [tired, defeated]. But from the very beginning, it felt right. I had a very good teacher who's a well-known architect here in Chile. I learnt a lot from him. I didn't expect it, but suddenly everyone was like, 'Please do this, do that.' And every day that happened to me.
GR: I had a sort of similar path, in that I studied journalism at university, but my heart wasn't in it. And, of course, doors didn't open. But the minute I decided to study plants and design, everything just happened – jobs came, doors opened.
TM: It made sense, everything made sense.
GR: Yeah, I knew one hundred percent that that's the path I was supposed to be on. It's like something opens in the world and says, 'Yes, this is where you're going. Go!'
TM: It's fantastic, isn't it?
GR: Yeah, it is.
TM: It's a gift of life that comes for free.
GR: Yeah, you just have to be open to it. So what happened next? You studied and …
TM: I went to live in New York for four years and studied at the New York Botanical Garden. It wasn't for me. I did it because I knew that it was going to help me when I came back to Chile, they love people who have studied anything in New York, any place. So when I say I studied in New York, they say, 'Oh, come over here.' So I did that, and then I came back and I started to do projects, little by little. I mean, I have never stopped because they have been asking me for projects all the time. So, I'm really lucky.
Punta Pite. Photo: Filipe Fontecilla
GR: Has your aesthetic evolved? When you first started like twenty, thirty years ago, what sort of gardens were you doing then?
TM: Most of my best-known projects are ten or twenty years old. And I keep doing the same. It's becoming the way to work. Today, people are thinking more of keeping and giving value to what is in the place, being very sustainable, and more conscious of the beauty of nature – the way it grows, belongs, tastes. It's not about aesthetics, it has to be much more than that. It's working with life, it's getting involved with something that helps to understand life.
GR: I think so too. Your work resonates so strongly for me because, you know, you're really asking the questions. You said recently about beauty, how it's not enough anymore, that there has to be something before or after it. What do you mean by this?
TM: Well, I think that having beauty or aesthetics as a goal is not enough anymore. There are some other values that come much before. Beauty should come after everything is well designed, is well thought out and experienced. I mean, the project should work by itself. And that's the beauty. It's not the colours or the textures or the extravagance. It is, for me at least, having people involved and feeling that they are part of that place. We are part of the forest, it's not like we're here and the forest is there.
GR: So beauty is more of an intangible rather than form?
TM: Today I was asked to do an amazing project in the south of Chile and I cannot start by thinking how can I make it beautiful? No, it's like how I am going to respect that place? How am I going to understand that place? How am I going to touch that place? You see? It's other questions. And if I work on answering them, and end up with an answer that works for that place, it will be beautiful.
GR: Yes, and yet many designers talk about the same sort of things that you talk about, but the outcomes are so different, you know? They talk about listening and genius loci and all of these things, and then they build all of this terrible stuff. And it's like, where did that come from?
TM: This is not very nice to say, but on our planet, there is a thing of becoming well-known, published. Architects used to think that the more you are noticed, the more you can be seen by the machine that is taking photographs or whatever, the better. So, if you work for being published, it's one thing. But if you work for the site or the people, it's another. You need to be very simple, very humble.
GR: Yes, humble is a word I've written down to discuss with you. You have to have humility to do the sort of work that you do.
TM: Ego is a killer, you know? Because it's like, how am I going to be recognised for this project? Like lots of concrete, lots of lighting, lots of huge things that come from helicopters? You see, it's another thing.
GR: I guess the question in some ways is who is the client? The way you speak, the land and the human have an equal say in what actually happens. Whereas most of the time, it's the human, and the land is the blank canvas or the backdrop.
TM: Yes, that's very interesting what you say. It's like we see each other as two parts, different. So, then we walk on top land as if we were the owners of it. But, actually, we are like this [clasps hands together, linking fingers], we are in the same position in life. If we don't understand that, then we never will find a way to respect land.
GR: Yep. I guess the other thing that I think is very interesting, is that we're all inspired by nature, but in design there's quite a difference between re-creation and response. Your work is like a conversation rather than a replication.
TM: Yes. Many times, I say in my projects that this part is not going to be touched, we will leave it the way it is because it's the best way it can be. And we will walk on top of this grass, for instance, and have the feeling of the place the way it is. We don't want to change it. People are still thinking of having what the others have, they want to make wildflower meadows like the Americans, you see? It's like you never think what you have is the best you can have.
GR: So your job then becomes helping people see what they already have?
TM: Yes, and it takes a lot of time, energy, and explaining when we're talking to somebody who really wants to have a garden more beautiful than the garden next door. It's difficult.
Hotel Tierra Atacama, in the northern Chilean town of San Pedro. Photo: Chloe Humphreys.
GR: On that note, are you very particular about the clients you work with?
TM: I think I am really easy, because I am grown-up enough to accept that people will not understand everything. I never say no. It's like, well, a client might want a mixture of colours and things that she sends me many photographs of. If I work my way and she is happy, she will connect with nature through her own ideas. So I keep going. I don't fight. Because my goal is other, you see? I really want her to be involved in her garden. So, if I have to do something that is not my style, I don't really care.
GR: I assumed you would be stricter.
TM: No, because I feel old. At the beginning, I said no to many people. You want me to do a rose garden? This is a horrible thing you are asking me. You know, that client, she was an old English lady, and she said, 'Well, I don't care what you want or you don't want, I want the rose garden and you will do it.'
GR: Wow.
TM: I was just starting and she was kind of nice to me. And I always say thank you to her – I learnt about roses because of her. And I really got deep in roses and I worked in the rose garden and I loved it, you see? I learnt, I thought it was horrible to do that and it wasn't.
GR: Do you use a lot of roses now as a result?
TM: No. But if I see roses, I appreciate them, you see?
GR: Oh, I've got a dog at my door [dog barking]. One second, sorry.
TM: Oh, let me see it.
GR: She is naughty, this dog.
TM: She wanted to be in the meeting because now she's really quiet.
GR: Yes, now she's happy … So you mentioned in the Harvard Graduate School of Design lecture that you spend a lot of time thinking about line and landscape. And your project at Punta Pite is very much about line. Can we talk about lines please?
TM: At Punta Pite, the line came first, and then I thought about it [laughs]. I was in this place, and I said, what should I do here, I can't do anything because it's so beautiful, and I did a line to cross it, a path, and then I looked at it. It works so well, I can't understand why.
So I started to think why the line works so well. And I said to myself, I am always looking at the lines in the sky of the airplanes, I am in love with train lines in the landscape. It's an obsession in my life. You see a fence on a landscape and it is amazing how it works. I don't know, it's like the line represents the human mind and it represents the simplest way of going from one place to the other. And since we cannot try to be like nature, because it becomes really horrible, I think it's about simplicity and rationality, it's about the way humans have worked or touched nature from the very beginning; by irrigation, by walking.
Punta Pite. Photo: Filipe Fontecilla.
Punta Pite. Photo: Pascale Mondion
GR: I'm thinking about your project in the forest in Patagonia, with that one line, the hollowed-out timber. Sometimes all you need – and I think you understand this better than most – is a circle or a line. That's all that is needed to mark a landscape.
TM: Totally. And that is more difficult than clients understand.
GR: Why do you think it is so hard? You know, we make more and make more noise and add, add, add to a place. I wonder why?
TM: I think it's just pure insecurity of human beings. Just that. Relying on what the others have, think, say, not on your own feelings and what is inside you. I mean, I don't know how to explain it. I am not so good in words.
GR: I think you are, actually. I feel like landscape architects and people who work with land have such important skills in terms of connecting with nature and shaping our world in ways that are more sustainable and regenerative. But we're stuck in this sort of decoration mindset. I'm wondering how you see the role of landscape architects, designers and gardeners going forward?
TM: It's changing.
GR: I hope so, yes.
TM: That's why I was so happy to hear from you. Really. What you are doing is amazing and so important.
GR: But you're doing the same thing.
TM: Yeah. It's just that I am really old doing this. But now it's being published, it's being talked about, it's being shown.
GR: Are you saying that your work is getting more attention now than ever before?
TM: Well, I think my work is being better understood now than before.
GR: So the world is catching up to you. That's great.
TM: That sounds too much. But I feel like we are more. Every day we are more.
GR: That's really good to hear.
TM: You don't feel like that?
GR: I hope I do. I'm an optimist, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. But I sometimes wonder if I'm so sort of deep in this thinking that I just assume everyone is coming along when really no-one is taking any notice.
TM: I think twenty years ago, you would not have found anybody for your publication. They were all looking at who has the most beautiful garden. I think everything – COVID-19, climate change, economy – is bringing us to the answer. There is no way to keep going the way we used to. So it's going to be fine.
GR: I hope so. Your work reaches beneath the conceptual to the essence of things which is so powerful. There's a truthfulness to it. Is there a kind of spiritual undertone or thread that connects your thinking?
TM: Well, I was born asking myself, 'What is all this about?'
GR: Same.
TM: Can you explain to me what is this about? I can tell you, I haven't found any answer but being nature. So this is my answer. Everything is in that answer. I belong to something, I am part of something, I am not a unique intelligence on top of society directing the world. The only thing I know is I have no control. You see, every day it becomes more clear that there is no control. It's the way it is. So that's what I think, I'm trying to understand.
GR: That's all you can do really. And also accepting the impossibility of ever actually understanding everything!
TM: We will never understand. People think that they understand everything. But still, it came to COVID-19 and we were all looking at each other saying what happened? We were in control of everything. I keep seeing your plants behind you on the screen. I find it is so beautiful they come back into our homes and surround us. All the time reminding us who we are. You know, I feel myself very much like plant material.
GR: You're a poet.
TM: Or crazy.
GR: No, no. Poet. Do you have a garden actually? I'm curious.
TM: I live in an apartment here in Santiago. I have a garden in my studio where we sell special plants and beautiful things. But my garden is on Punta Pite. I have a huge experimental garden on the seaside. It's full of planting materials from Australia. And I play there and I spend all the time I can there. That's my garden. You are so invited to come to my house in Pite. We can talk about planting and about life and dogs and everything.
GR: I'd love that. I'll be there.
Georgina Reid is a writer and the founding editor of Wonderground. Her prose and poetry have been published in books and magazines nationally and internationally. She's the author of The Planthunter: Truth, Beauty, Chaos and Plants and lives by the river on Darug land.
This story appears in Wonderground Issue Three.
Next:The Collector