text:
The Secret Of The Grain
Habib Boufares, Hafsia Herzi, Farida Benkhetache
At the beginning of The Secret Of The Grain, a subtle and affectionate treatment of a North African family in a French port city, Habib Boufares, a 61-year-old who looks considerably more worn, decides to take his life in a new direction. This decision is astonishing in itself, since people of his age are not supposed to try another career, but after losing his job of 35 years at the shipyard, the entrepreneurial spirit suddenly hits him. Right away, Tunisian-born, French-bred writer-director Abdellatif Kechiche sets the stage for a real crowd-pleaser, especially once he introduces Boufares' extended family, which includes a tempestuous ex-wife, four children and their kids, a new girlfriend, and her determined, outspoken daughter, played by Hafsia Herzi. Their collective efforts to help Boufares' open up a couscous restaurant, culminating in a big party intended to attract investors, makes it sounds like Big Night revisited.
But The Secret Of The Grain is more complicated than it sounds, less geared toward uplift than in revealing the fault-lines within this sprawling, multi-generational family and between their immigrant culture and their French hosts. Kechiche cares deeply about his characters and does what he can to preserve their dignity, but he cleverly frustrates convention by having Boufares' dream recede from his grasp. There's a great series of scenes midway through the film's loping, perhaps too-casual 151-minutes that finds Boufares and Herzi mucking their way through French loan and licensing agencies, meeting resistance at every turn. The meetings are cordial and the questions about their shakily sketched-out plans are mostly valid, but the obstacles are clearly race-based, too, and Kechiche gets the balance of these factors precisely right.
The Secret Of The Grain stretches out at the relaxed pace of a seven-course meal, but at the end of it, Kechiche has squeezed the most he can out of percolating dramas within the family and he lets the audience get to know its members without needing to throw them all a subplot. He also gets an electrifying performance out of Herzi, playing a young woman whose tenacity and devotion to Boufares surpasses her mother's and leads to a stunning gesture at the party. Kechiche doesn't deliver the payoffs he appears to be setting up, but in a situation this fraught with problems and internal tension, anything tidier would be a cheat.


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Every now and then, a wedding comes along that just blows me away on a number of levels…that wedding was Debbie & Stephen's as they celebrated their big day at the fabulous Tullibole Castle, a little gem tucked away (and I do mean "tucked away") in the heart of Perthshire.
How many weddings are there where you get married inside, yes "inside", a tree; where you're surrounded by the many peacocks, and there are "many"; and then there's the totally beautiful grounds to explore – honestly, I could have spent hours wandering round here taking shots…maybe one for a "Rock the Frock" shoot at some point!
One thing I must mention is how awesome the guys were on the day, especially during the bride & groom shoot. Despite the seemingly constant rain that fell in the early part of the day, they just ploughed on through to get the shots..I guess, after all, you only get one shot at these and it's not as if we can come back the next day and try again. You should have seen Debbie's dress…totally soaked through and muddy…so hats off guys, you're a total pair of troopers for braving the elements :-).
Debbie & Stephen, it was an honour to photograph your fantastic day. I loved every minute and all the little touches such as the Harry Potter themed reception and the vintage coach. Here's just a few of my own favourites which I hope you like – click on any image below to view big!


text:
Music keeps the mind sharper as people age
Childhood Music Lessons May Provide Lifelong Boost
in Brain Functioning
Research explores possible link between early musical study and cognitive benefits
WASHINGTON—Those childhood music lessons could pay off decades later - even for those who no longer play an instrument – by keeping the mind sharper as people age, according to a preliminary study published by the American Psychological Association.
The study recruited 70 healthy adults age 60 to 83 who were divided into groups based on their levels of musical experience. The musicians performed better on several cognitive tests than individuals who had never studied an instrument or learned how to read music. The research findings were published online in the APA journal Neuropsychology.
"Musical activity throughout life may serve as a challenging cognitive exercise, making your brain fitter and more capable of accommodating the challenges of aging," said lead researcher Brenda Hanna-Pladdy, PhD. "Since studying an instrument requires years of practice and learning, it may create alternate connections in the brain that could compensate for cognitive declines as we get older."
While much research has been done on the cognitive benefits of musical activity by children, this is the first study to examine whether those benefits can extend across a lifetime, said Hanna-Pladdy, a clinical neuropsychologist who conducted the study with cognitive psychologist Alicia MacKay, PhD, at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
The three groups of study participants included individuals with no musical training; with one to nine years of musical study; or with at least 10 years of musical training. All of the participants had similar levels of education and fitness and didn't show any evidence of Alzheimer's disease.
All of the musicians were amateurs who began playing an instrument at about 10 years of age. More than half played the piano while approximately a quarter had studied woodwind instruments such as the flute or clarinet. Smaller numbers performed with stringed instruments, percussion or brass instruments.
The Relation Between Instrumental Musical Activity and Cognitive Aging (PDF, 98KB)
The high-level musicians who had studied the longest performed the best on the cognitive tests, followed by the low-level musicians and non-musicians, revealing a trend relating to years of musical practice. The high-level musicians had statistically significant higher scores than the non-musicians on cognitive tests relating to visuospatial memory, naming objects and cognitive flexibility, or the brain's ability to adapt to new information.
The brain functions measured by the tests typically decline as the body ages and more dramatically deteriorate in neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. The results "suggest a strong predictive effect of high musical activity throughout the lifespan on preserved cognitive functioning in advanced age," the study stated.
Half of the high-level musicians still played an instrument at the time of the study, but they didn't perform better on the cognitive tests than the other advanced musicians who had stopped playing years earlier. This suggests that the duration of musical study was more important than whether musicians continued playing at an advanced age, Hanna-Pladdy says.
"Based on previous research and our study results, we believe that both the years of musical participation and the age of acquisition are critical," Hanna-Pladdy says. "There are crucial periods in brain plasticity that enhance learning, which may make it easier to learn a musical instrument before a certain age and thus may have a larger impact on brain development."
The preliminary study was correlational, meaning that the higher cognitive performance of the musicians couldn't be conclusively linked to their years of musical study. Hanna-Pladdy, who has conducted additional studies on the subject, says more research is needed to explore that possible link.
At the time of the study, Hanna-Pladdy was an assistant professor in psychiatry at the University of Kansas Medical Center and a research faculty member of the Landon Center on Aging. She is now an assistant professor in neurology at Emory University School of Medicine. MacKay, a former research assistant at the University of Kansas Medical Center, is now an assistant professor of psychology at Tulsa Community College.
Article: "The Relation Between Instrumental Musical Activity and Cognitive Aging," Brenda Hanna-Pladdy, PhD, and Alicia MacKay, PhD, University of Kansas Medical Center; Neuropsychology, Vol. 25, No. 3
Dr. Hanna-Pladdy can be contacted through Kathleen Baker, phone: (404) 727-9371, cell: (404) 227-1871.
The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States and is the world's largest association of psychologists. APA's membership includes more than 154,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a means of promoting health, education and human welfare.
http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2011/04/music-lessons.aspx
Labels: strains of violin music cognitive benefits

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