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In this Twilight Sleep – Artist Statement (payload delivery, complete)
Video still from Miami, After. Ren Adams. 2017.
As I mentioned in this post and this post, I'm working on a multi-part project for the upcoming exhibition: Axis Mundi: the Crucial Role of the Artist in the Age of the Collapsing Global Organism, which opens in September. My video and View-Master installation is part of the Environmental Melancholia wing (more completely explained here), so my artist statement does not provide extensive framework for the big picture "environmental melancholia" theme. The exhibition space and catalog will establish these broader definitions and orientations. Instead, my statement addresses my specific project and its relation to Environmental Melancholia.
In This Twilight Sleep
As our living world collapses into infirmity, dying slowly, dying suddenly—we are surrounded by a seemingly endless cycle of loss most are powerless to mourn. In our paralysis, we turn to media for escape—but that route is haunted. Pervasive media, like television, is an accidental eyewitness, a record of our imprint on the planet. It's a virtual database of environments 'caught' tangentially on tape; an 'archive' of our former (changing) landscape exists within the very media we use for avoidance.
Yet, the environment is rarely the subject of TV programming. The land is transient, offhandedly preserved—relegated to the background of a consumable program, itself destined for obscurity. Thus excavating the environment from the backdrop of Cold War television reinforces both the fleeting, secondary representation of landscape, and the notion of environment as 'accessory' to human story. This 'accessorizing' is part of our misery.
In this Twilight Sleep is a series of linked, looping 'episodes' that capture this fading fingerprint, as if recalling the image in perpetuity can somehow mourn and undo human-induced calamity. Using experimental photography and glitch to suggest the partially preserved and the mostly lost, I emphasize the distance between actual loss and our inability to process (or avoid) it. Videos are composed of reanimated, mutated stills extracted from television with a cell phone. This reanimation appropriates life, after the landscape has died. The corresponding Lovely… View-Master set expands this melancholic TV block by serving as memento mori. Suggesting old View-Master reels of postcard locations, my reels are souvenirs of a lost landscape; ruin and absence the only remaining commodity. Together, they are lamentations; a virtual tourism of a seemingly unstoppable end.
This entry was posted in Announcements, Papers and tagged artist statement, axis mundi, axis mundi is coming, axismundiiscoming, climate, conceptual art, environmental melancholia, exhibition prep, glitch, glitch art, loss, mfa, mourning, new media, project statement, ren adams, video art on July 7, 2017 by plasticpumpkin.
A working still from one of my video episodes
I'm in the throes of working on an experimental video project (and View-Master series) for AXIS MUNDI: The Crucial Role of the Artist in the Age of the Collapsing Global Organism.
You can read more about the group exhibition and the concept behind Axis Mundi in this post, including my overall intent.
As I mention in the above link, I've turned again to TV to tap into a haunted and melancholic space; the terrain of television becomes an accidental eyewitness to human-induced global catastrophe even as we practice a stubborn and complicated mix of intentioned forgetting and paralytic grief. We're normalizing global calamity (as a shifting baseline) with each successive generation and our constantly and endlessly distorted sense of the original, natural environment is the stuff of theses (and nightmares).
I've been researching, planning, and producing work for the project since spring, and the moving parts are finally taking shape.
Research, as always, is vital to both idea and image development in my work. In addition to researching environmental melancholia (the category my pieces fit), I've also been digging into notions of ruin, the myth of apathy, environmental amnesia, environmental generational amnesia, absence, presence and disappearance. If you're interested in viewing or mining my research, my bibliography is available here: https://renadamsmfa.wordpress.com/bibliography-fall-2013/ – yes, I know the link says 2013, but it's current (and also includes research for the other series I'm working on, Channeling – Televisual Memory and Media Seance).
Video still from one of the episodes (currently untitled). The bodies provide a televisual grounding point (we're watching a show, but zooming in on the ignored background).
The process? Experimental photography. Glitch. Video. View-Masters. These are my alchemical tools. My studio-lab is bubbling with 50 beakers of mourning and mayhem. Videos are coming alive on the proverbial laboratory table and glitched pixels are flying.
Using my obsessive hunt-and-gather image harvesting approach (commonplace camera, flat television screen), I combine experimental photographs into short videos, which are then linked into a 'television programming' structure. The videos then fold one 'episode' into the next, punctuated by dark, end-stop commercials (more on that in a future post). The videos are currently silent, but I am experimenting with several possible soundtracks (including a melancholy drone).
Video still
And by "television programming structure," I mean I'm developing a pseudo television listing, like a standard prime time station block. Think of "Must See TV" or "Adult Swim," where a lineup of carefully slotted programs play out over a multi-hour chunk, often with a thematic or intentioned purpose.
Instead of popular sitcoms or adult-oriented cartoons, my haunted block programming (In this Twilight Sleep) will address the melancholy of Cold War television as accidental eyewitness to a fragile, tangential and rapidly eroding environmental condition. The benchmark once set as our 'normal environment' in these older media backgrounds has already shifted since their original filming, just as they changed from what each previous generation also experienced as 'normal.'
The overall programming block piece, In This Twilight Sleep, will ultimately be a chain of linked videos, each serving as an 'episode' from a different implied and melancholic 'program.' Each 'episode' will therefore be carefully slotted, plotted and designed to contribute to an overall sense of erosion and distance, complicity and helplessness, mourning and exhaustion.
Conceptualizing "In this Twilight Sleep."
Episodes play out like a distorted, amnesia-inflected prime time lineup, punctuated by dark, anxious 'commercial' strings. Each episode corresponds to an aspect of the fading, the mostly lost, the elusive and the eroded.
But the videos are not the only component. I'm also developing a set of View-Master reels, the Lovely… series, which will amplify and expand aspects of the video installation.
Most of us are familiar with View-Masters as a cool, collectible extension of beloved movies and TV shows; neat, interactive kid's stuff. View-Masters were originally marketed to adults as an extension of literal and armchair tourism (a convenient, commercialized consumption of place and space). Inheriting the 19th century tradition of stereoscopic travel photography (often hand-in-hand with manifest destiny and expansionist ideals), the early 20th century saw a boon in View-Master reels meant for discerning travelers. You visit a place. You bring back souvenirs. You experience a permanent, repeat simulacrum of the original experience via media, via product, via self-haunting cycle.
One of many vintage travel reels I'm researching for the Lovely… pieces.
My Lovely… series suggests View-Master reels of postcard locations, and their tendency to commodify nature as a fetishized and ownable experience. Also using the experimental photographs I extract from television, I compose reels that serve as souvenirs of a destroyed landscape; ruin and absence the only remaining commodity. The Lovely… souvenirs are lamentations; a virtual tourism of the end. Combined with the videos, it's a chorus that features an eroded and unstable space, suggesting the destruction of the site and the eventual decay of the very media that preserved its accidental memory.
More on the Lovely… reels in coming posts.
As most of my work deals with the literal, visual and conceptual impact of televisual media on our sense of self and location, mining the language of television offers the perfect kind of elusive, yet pervasive, space of confused mourning. Television thus becomes both method of escape and unintentional, archival monument. Cold War programming even functions as an early form of Google Street View; a proto-virtual database of environments 'caught' tangentially on tape. The actual footage becomes semi-documentary; an 'archive' of our former landscape exists within the very media we use for avoidance. As I mentioned earlier, the former landscape represented in the original television footage is itself already the 'former' environment of an endless string of healthier, better times.
Yet, the environment itself is rarely the subject of television programming. The land is transient, offhandedly preserved—it's only held in regard by being the background of a consumable program, itself destined for obscurity. Thus excavating and mutating found environments from the backdrop of Cold War television reinforces both the fleeting, non-central representation of landscape, and the notion of environment as "accessory" to human story.
And we've been accessorizing our natural environment for centuries, justifying it in the name of religion, industry, money, triumph, politics, power, progress… An androcentric view has already displaced and subsumed other species, other spaces, the health and vitality of entire ecosystems…
That our only representation or understanding of some locations might come through television, itself unstable and fading, is another brick in the wall of mourning.
My TV programming also suggests that even when we try to escape facing (and therefore mourning and processing) the nature of human-induced calamity, or when we are unintentionally affected by environmental amnesia: on one level, we can only pay attention when it's on a screen.
We can only see the simulacrum.
We have already forgotten what has not even arrived.
This entry was posted in Papers, Pieces and tagged art and climate change, axis mundi, axis mundi is coming, axismundiiscoming, climate, contemporary art, denver art, environmental melancholia, experimental photography, mourning, new media art, process, ren adams, studio art, television culture, televisual, video art, visual art, wip, work in progress on June 30, 2017 by plasticpumpkin.
Axis Mundi is Coming
Video still from rough cut for Axis Mundi
I was invited to submit a project proposal for an upcoming multi-venue exhibition curated and coordinated by Regan Rosburg, Adam Gordon, Tracy Tomko and Alvin Gregorio:
AXIS MUNDI:
The Crucial Role of the Artist in the Age of the Collapsing Global Organism
The exhibition will feature 20 artists, half of which are local to Denver (the project is part of the Biennial of the Americas)–and the other half are national and international contributors.
I am producing experimental video pieces and a suite of View-Masters for the exhibition and I'll be sharing process, ideas and project shots here on my blog. The other artists are working in photography, video, full-length film, painting, sculpture, recycled plastics, bioluminescent algae, DNA, petroleum distillates, deceased animals, public murals, and natural objects. I can't wait to see each artist's response to the project's conceptual framework.
A little background on the exhibition/project (from the prospectus):
Despite the brevity of our lifespans, humans collectively are changing the face, and fate, of the planet's species. Be it runaway pollution, our contribution to rising global temperatures, or the fervent gobbling of resources to feed our manic hunger for "progress," we are manipulating the efficient ecological balance that took millions of years to evolve. Worldwide, the scientists unite in agreement on the causes of climate change. Humans witness changes in their backyards, while millions of voiceless plants and animals succumb to changes beyond their evolved adaptability.
As the situation progresses, clearly the term "climate change" is not large enough to encapsulate the multi-dimensional and far-reaching impacts of humans on Earth. James Lovelock created the hypothesis of Gaia: that the living and non-living components of Earth function as a single living organism. The organism self-regulates in order to maintain a healthy balance, suitable for sustaining its life. In essence, all actions on Earth (no matter how small) can affect the organism as a whole.
If Lovelock's hypothesis is applied to the calamities of today, Gaia is sick. Her immune system is compromised. Her body is shaking and whipping about with storms, fires and droughts. Her blood has filled with oil and trash, and her lungs with billowing plumes of burning fossils. Her skin crawls with machines that dig, cut, squeeze, and strangle. She resembles a child in a hallucinatory, feverous fit of delirium. In the Gaia model, humans are the mutant cells of a collective cancerous tumor that has metastasized in the global body.
What can be done? It is apparent that we have enough information, and still nothing changes. Why? What is the human psychological block that keeps us on a path towards global eco-suicide? Where does one put the pain, when the pain is relentless? What actions can be taken, when everyone knows they are partially to blame? What does it matter?
Axis Mundi addresses the psychology behind these issues. The aim is to expose hidden motivations, unspoken shame, un-mourned losses and forgotten love for our world. The aim is also to evoke awareness, personal or otherwise.
Axis Mundi will explore and expand upon three crucial, contributing, interconnected aspects of the current crisis: Environmental Melancholia, Collective Social Mania, and Biophilia. The first two aspects are connected in a hedonic loop of capitalism and buyers remorse. The last plays a crucial role in re-establishing our instinct to protect that which we have co-evolved alongside and are genetically predisposed to love: The Earth.
Another still from a working video I am developing for the exhibition
For this project, the artists were asked to develop work within one of three categories: environmental melancholia, collective social mania, and Biophilia. Reading the prospectus sparked a flood of ideas and I found the first two categories the most relevant and fertile for my method and methodology. The curators selected my proposal for the environmental melancholia category, so my project will be developed within this framework:
Environmental Melancholia: the pathology of being melancholic about the collapse of the environment.
This happens when "deaths" around the world (global or local) are not properly mourned because 1) time is not given to properly mourn the losses 2) the losses are abstract due to sheer enormity (example: the melting of glaciers, the collapse of bee colonies world-wide, or the massive deforestation of the Amazon), or 3) when the losses are abstract due to overlapping, continuous events (an oil spill one day, a flood the next, etc).
When one turns on the TV or log onto the Internet, the amount of horrific and saddening images he sees make him have an emotional response of overwhelming, unarticulated sadness. When the dead bodies, so to speak, are not buried, he or she has no symbolic release of those he or she has lost. Essentially, those deaths cannot be mourned, so the person becomes melancholic. Conversely, if he or she has a symbol or symbolic action that can represent that loss, and is able to grieve, then this allows for healthy mourning.
Artworks in this section must address melancholia and/or mourning. For more information on this topic, please read "Environmental Melancholia" or "The Myth of Apathy" by Renee Lertzman.
Our world is on fire… video still from rough cut in progress
Excerpts from my project proposal:
Background: The Absurd (Necessity) of Mediating Grief
Mourning is a complicated, abstract process, no matter the focus. Even grappling with the passage of individuals presents a nearly insurmountable gulf—the distance between specific loss, ongoing post-loss reality, and our ability to process such loss effectively. In our attempts to mediate the space of grief—flowers, cards, and condolences become the trappings of a cultural process of mourning, often our only recourse in dealing with the unexplained.
How then do we address environmental grief? That permeating sense of awareness and enormity, blended with feelings of helplessness, complicity, confusion? As vast swaths of our living world collapse into infirmity, dying slowly, dying suddenly—we are surrounded by a seemingly endless cycle of "before" and "after," one great loss after another. It's an overwhelming cascade, causing cultural and personal paralysis. Without processing, how can we possibly move beyond the paralytic and into a space where we have the confidence and mobility to arrest the next wave of global disaster?
How do we begin to process such vastness? Do we, in futility, send a card to Gaia?
In Poppy Transitory/Receding (recent work), I investigated the sincere absurdity of processing "small-scale" loss with decorative memorials, themselves transitory tokens of grief. I sourced shapes from the clothing and desert location where my sister Cindy Adams and family friend Gram Parsons died, developing a visual language that applied to their specific moment. For Axis Mundi, I will again develop a visual vocabulary drawn from the "source material" of passage—imagery that supplies specificity, immensity, and the mediated erosion of the real.
My videos are layers of glitch, experimental photography and noise.
Approach: Television as Accidental Eyewitness
As most of my work deals with the literal, visual and conceptual impact of televisual media on our sense of self and location, I turned to television to investigate this elusive, yet pervasive, space of mourning.
Media influence our daily lives. The ubiquity of televisual media impacts our process of self-shaping and our understanding of relational space-place, even serving as a surrogate experience for the physical world; some people only "know" the Grand Canyon through media (for example).
If we construct an understanding of our world through media (Henry Jenkins) and this media is often used to escape from reality, while simultaneously encapsulating an undeniable record of our imprint on the planet, media becomes both intentioned forgetting and accidental historian; the perfect source material for a language of mourning. Television itself plays a central role in disseminating the paralyzing information about what's been destroyed—even as it provides a zombie platform for the proliferation of politics that encourage or dismiss these same global catastrophes.
Television becomes both method of escape and unintentional, archival monument. Cold War programming itself even functions as an early form of Google Street View; a proto-virtual database of environments 'caught' tangentially on tape. The actual footage becomes a semi-documentary—an 'archive' of our former landscape exists within the very media we use for avoidance.
Yet, the environment itself is rarely the subject of television programming. The land is transient, offhandedly preserved—it's only held in regard by being the background of a consumable program, itself destined for obscurity. Thus excavating and mutating found environments from the backdrop of Cold War television episodes reinforces both the fleeting, non-central representation of landscape in their original context, and the notion of environment as "accessory" to human story.
Using this language, I will construct a looping video of found landscape material, as if recalling the image in perpetuity can somehow undo the seemingly unstoppable avalanche of global changes resulting from human impact; a vain attempt to hunt, save, preserve and present—a digital gesture of condolence.
Unable to completely divorce itself from collective social mania, my video shrine will be a quagmire of paralysis and anxiety, highlighting locations that have been lost (or will be lost), or those forever altered due to "progress," but which remain filed in now-fading media, itself actively losing ground and relevance. That our only representation or understanding of some locations might come through television, itself unstable and fading, is another brick in the wall of mourning.
The earth, the landscape–all captured as secondary to the humans and the story; television becomes an accidental eyewitness
I've begin work on several video sections and View-Master reels, with this overall structure in mind:
What: Physical Output
Looping video played on a television
Probably silent, but may experiment with droning noise or natural sounds
Imagery is layered, disturbing, melancholic, distant, failing, uncertain
Imagery will be created with experimental photography and glitch, in order to suggest the missing, the incomplete, the partially preserved and the mostly lost. This should emphasize the distance between the real state of loss and our abstraction of it through media
Video will be composed of re-animated, glitched, mutated stills extracted from television, using my preferred method of obsessive excavating with a commonplace camera (cell phone)
Rather than using active footage, which would suggest the still-living, still-vital, I will reanimate stills that are obviously frozen and separated from both nature and their original filmed source. This reanimation appropriates life, after the landscape has died. Thus, stills become a melancholic suggestion of life, rather than the continuous movement of the living.
The flat void of the television screen is a fitting metaphor for the swallowed-whole destruction of our real environment
An eroded, unstable video suggests both destruction of the site, and the eventual decay of the media that preserved an accidental memory of the site's existence
When the earth is lost, guess who else gets swallowed by oblivion
This entry was posted in Analysis, Pieces and tagged art and climate, art and climate change, artist activism, axis mundi, axis mundi is coming, axismundiiscoming, biennial of the americas, climate change, conceptual art, contemporary art, denver art, denver exhibition, exhibition, experimental video, gaia, mfa, new media art, new projects, regan rosburg, ren adams, temple art space, the temple, upcoming exhibition, video art, wip, work in progress on June 6, 2017 by plasticpumpkin.
Chase (Calling Palmdale), 2015
The next 'episode' in The Cascade – Moments in the Televisual Desert.
This entry was posted in Pieces and tagged art, contemporary art, mfa, remix theory, ren adams, ren adams art, television theory, tv impact, video art, video experiment on June 14, 2015 by plasticpumpkin.
Rental (Requesting Backup), Version 1.4
Rental (Requesting Backup), 1.4 (2015) from Ren Adams on Vimeo.
The new version of Rental (Requesting Backup). I made a number of changes and improvements to the late-middle and ending of version 1.3. Rental is intentionally chaotic, the least narrative of the video series, but I did make a few adjustments for clarity, including both audio and video manipulations.
This entry was posted in Pieces and tagged aib, fine art, lucad, media art, new media art, remix, ren adams, ren adams art, rental, requesting backup, television theory, video art, video arts on May 3, 2015 by plasticpumpkin.
Time-Based Screenings
If you're attending the Spring, 2015 residency (or if you will be near Lesley University) this January, please do stop by the screening for our program's video art and film folks. I will be showing So I Asked…, Elevator (Finding a Way Out of Here, I Hope), Rental (Requesting Backup) and Encounter.
Monday, January 12, from 4-6 pm.
Snacks. There will indeed be snacks.
This entry was posted in Announcements, Pieces and tagged aib, cinema, contemporary art, film, fine art, lesley university, lucad, lucad mfa, mfa program, ren adams, ren adams art, short films, video art, video art clips, video exhibition, video pieces on January 5, 2015 by plasticpumpkin.
Rental (Requesting Backup), 1.3
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged abstract art, abstraction, art experiment, controlled chaos, language of television, lucad, lucad mfa, new media, remix, ren adams, ren adams art, rental, requesting backup, televisual information, video art on December 10, 2014 by plasticpumpkin.
Video, Still
In delicious, meta-telescope fashion, I've been taking screen caps of my video art.
The videos themselves are already either composed of sequenced screen caps, or of sampled and heavily modified clips that in turn generated other sets of screen caps (and subsequent digital images). I'm excited about the results:
Still from "So I Asked…"
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged aib mfa, art institute of boston, contemporary art, digital art, digital new media, lucad, meta, metamodernism, mfa, mfa research, mfa thesis, new media, new works, ren adams art, screen caps, the cascade project, video, video art on November 28, 2014 by plasticpumpkin.
Elevator (Finding a Way Out of Here, I Hope) 1.2.1
Revisited Elevator recently. Here's the latest version of the video:
This entry was posted in Pieces and tagged contemporary art, elevator, fine art, lesley university mfa, lucad, mfa thesis work, ren adams, spatial memory, television culture, televisual information, time and space, video art on November 11, 2014 by plasticpumpkin.
Haunted Temporality: The Loop as Semi-Narrative Engine
AJ is trapped in an endless helicopter-gunfire-convertible chase through the desert…
Ren Adams
Research Paper 3
Peter Rostovsky – Advisor
Note: Footnotes are below, if internal links don't direct you there properly.
Download and Read PDF Version
Loops are powerful invocations, abandoning linear narrative for the intensity of a continuous present, capable of establishing, disrupting and directing temporal relationships. Media theorist Lev Manovich suggests the loop is actually "a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age," even as it occupies a liminal, anti-narrative space between story and instance (Manovich xxxiii).[1] The term 'loop' itself describes a complex range of repetitive gestures, from 3-second animated GIFs to middle-ground montage (establishing shots, action sequences in television) and the broader, or nearly imperceptible, cycles found in contemporary art (e.g. Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho[2]). Woven into longer segments, loops can even establish a haunting sense of repetition and reappearance, affecting the viewer's relationship to the viewed and the recalled. This flexibility allows loops to serve as an effective investigation into the conflated space of time and memory. In the case of my own video work, they allow access and reference to the uncanny familiarity of television and its rapid-fire montage experience. The video components of The Cascade incorporate loops to provide the kind of mosaic understanding of space-place that come from a de-centered, semi-narrative form. The loop provides critical negotiation of the televisual structure and the ways we commit and recall memory-images,[3] opening my artistic process to post-narrative methodology.
The contemporary loop recalls proto-cinema and early avant-garde film[4]—the active image repetition later supplanted by cinema's reliance on linear narrative (Manovich 315). Early cinematic devices like the zoetrope and zoopraxiscope animated short sequences—dancers whirling, a horse jumping a fence, and so on, by "mapping time onto two-dimensional space" using sequenced, discrete images spaced around a circle (Manovich 51). These analog devices used physical motion to speed through individual shots, simulating activity within a closed-circuit (Manovich 296-7). They were capable of expressing an instant in time, a suspended action, often with its own micro-narrative (the horse jumps, the dancers dance), but without reliance upon storyline. With the emergence of cinema proper, the language of film abandoned the 'artifice' of the loop, avoiding repetitious sequences to stress the illusion of realistic 'capture.'[5] The more cinema embraced capture, the more it bound itself to the forward-moving act of storytelling (Manovich 300-01). Cinema thus behaved like novels and theater, with clear progression through a series of events.[6] Since early television heavily mimicked film, it initially embraced the loop-free approach (Fiske 15), but as television developed its own language and aesthetic system, it integrated (even centralized) loops for defining program elements, story structure, and all manner of serialized and episodic development—even systems of re-run, re-make, programs, commercials,[7] and consumption.[8] Loops also resurfaced in video games, animation and the internet, reincarnated as short videos, animated GIFs and the like, carrying a renewed sense of the immediate present (Manovich 315). In current pop culture, loops are critically, even playfully integrated into the fiber of daily life, popping up in Facebook feeds, apps, games and television, expressing emotion, advertising products, making political statements, and so on.[9]
Thus, loop forms are an alternative to cinematic narrative. Repetitive structure prevents a clear understanding of beginning, middle and end, erasing our reliance on static waypoints while expanding a single moment into a potentially infinite, self-spiraling universe. This allows contemporary artists to manipulate the viewer's relationship to time and memory (even to place and event), just as the use of repeated sequencing in television programs reinforces the viewer's sense of flow, place and character by offering a mosaic[10] of recorded experiences the viewer must link by viewing.[11] Where cinema unfolds an elaborate story system, loops invite focus, even frustration, functioning as discrete, contained occurrences or as open-circuit systems that manipulate the audience expectation set by visual media (Fiske 62).
The loop in a broader sense can also describe the progress of televisual language (and structure) itself. Most programs rely on formula, such that viewers gain a sense of familiarity with series they have never personally watched, simply by participating in televisual exchange (Fiske 17).[12] Unlike the linear drive of cinema, television reveals the nature of its ideas, characters and events as cross-referenced mosaics that may even span years of development (Fiske 125)(Footnote 9). In TV, literal looping segments become intertextual references, suggesting the repetitive structure of the programming and a GIF-like condensation of proto-cinema, while establishing rhythm, expository information and aesthetic value. The re-use of stock footage loops, for example, provides a punctuating rhythm that can link multiple seasons and ideas across, and through, the visual mosaic.
Looping stock footage is an established television practice and though the loop may contribute to the story, it is actually a collapsed, or excised, unit of time, without narrative—used repeatedly to transition the primary material.[13] Driving sequences from Emergency! and Adam 12 are excellent examples of this kind of punctuating loop. Each episode contains pre-recorded, circular footage of emergency vehicles or police cars leaving the station, hurtling through city streets or returning to the garage. The loops are not immediately apparent, but reveal ticks over time: the same cross traffic, pedestrians and clouds populate the time-frozen cycle. Repetition also suggests the endless, grueling process of rescue and law enforcement, so the loops also have conceptual meaning for characterization, but there is a composite relationship here, where action sequences and establishing shots form a kind of nonlinear temporality (135), resurfacing across multiple episodes to mark infinite spiraling points, yet the "narrative does not proceed as simple causality" (Birnbaum 137). Though the story moves forward because the police rush to the scene, the act of rushing is divorced and looped, intertwined with the "indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, or of the present and the past, of the actual and the virtual…" creating double images, or looping engagements (Farr 23).
The Day After (1983)
In contemporary art, loops can provide overall structure, as in Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho, Cory Arcangel's Clouds (2002) or Stan Douglas' Overture (1986).[14] Punctuating longer works, or used in variation, the loop encourages viewers to consider the nature of time and the relationship between the reinvented continuous and the discrete, to see multiple potentialities simultaneously and to establish formal rhythm, as in Claudia X. Valdes' In the Dream of the Planet (2002). Valdes employs intense cycles and 'reincarnated' excerpts, in order to direct viewer interpretation and to reinforce Cold War conditions. In The Dream of the Planet (2002)(Fig. 1), Valdes appropriates made-for-TV-movie The Day After (1983), compressing the two-hour film into a 56-second loop. The loop is repeated six times in rapid succession, with each incarnation skewed to emphasize a different aspect of Cold War anxiety: the military complex, social upheaval, survival, detonation, media, etc.… The original film grapples with a fictional nuclear escalation between the United States and the Soviet Union, culminating in a full-scale nuclear war. In the condensation, images hurtle past, allowing only a frantic glimpse of each person, each situation. The cycle slows with terrifying agony as missiles launch, buildings collapse and the media responds—distilling the doom of the original into a frenetic, semi-narrative commentary. The painfully recognizable, yet ultimately unreliable loop incites a state of hyper-arousal that parallels nuclear paranoia. Valdes' ability to distill the made-for-TV movie, its subtexts and anxiety, with her own queries, is an excellent example of the haunted loop, which refers to, and reenacts, its own apparitional forms—making it incredibly relevant to the distillation of action and interaction in The Cascade.[15]
My video work considers the way loops are capable of suggesting the space of spatial memory and whether repetition provides a condensed sense of the mosaic found in televisual language.[16] Embedded, unstable grooves offer the viewer contextual déjà vu—where they begin to identity recognizable sequences, but are confronted by uncertain, semi-narrative that haunts itself with its own re-visitation. This perpetual re-enactment suggests the denial of traditional story, while establishing a dream-like state where characters engage and re-engage, running over a tight temporality that flirts with story.
So I Asked… (2014)(Fig. 2) establishes this kind of haunted, repetitious cycle via deeply interlocked, repetitious passages. Opening with two firefighter-paramedics caught mid-conversation (then interrupted by an emergency call), the tumbling, heavily altered stream collides with a rotating sequence of loops (a landing helicopter, a high speed gunfight, rescue vehicles en route, etc.). The loops continually intertwine, ghosted, as intensity builds. The increasingly anxious, overlapping dialogue suggests "something happens, is happening, goes on happening…" (Drucker 23), though sequenced temporality ruptures: the 'goes on happening' may actually occur before the initial 'something' that sets off the chain. The paramedics seem to be responding to a gunfight, yet the rescuers themselves are caught in a disruptive loop that leaves the title question unasked and the rescue unresolved, though viewers can rely on their knowledge of televisual language to determine that a rescue has been, or will be, attempted. We are unable to rely on linearity, yet the hurtle of loops describe the events most likely to have occurred, though order is unclear—rather like catching episodes out of sequence, leaving us to infer connections.[17]
I also take into consideration the telescoping stages of video itself: the time of the original filming, editorial time in appropriative postproduction, the immediate present of the watching viewer, the viewer's present-into-past transition and the after-processing (and any subsequent recollection). The intensity of repetition is meant to reinforce the experience of an immediate, unyielding present, both in terms of 'story' progression and reception. The moments-after transition through what has immediately passed suggests: "time flows and each present fades but doesn't disappear" (Birnbaum 139), amplifying the sense of déjà vu as almost-identical snippets continually resurface. This holds true in Valdes' work, as well as in the stock footage loops I reference in my own work. So I Asked… (and other Cascade videos) may even behave as fragmentary, fragile archives—bound by our desire to sort out the phenomena of "haunting," and the activation of memory that occurs with reappearance (Farr 12). Are we seeing the same event as an instant replay? Are we remembering an earlier incarnation, or is a similar event happening repeatedly in the same space, over time? The embedded loops thus recall the instant-moment introspection of proto-cinema, or the characterizing, time-independent stock footage of the appropriated programs.[18] The semi-narrative is stitched, overlaid and underwritten by time.
Loops possess a kind of visual déjà vu adapted from proto-cinematic experiments, re-contextualized by digital culture, manipulated by television and increasingly fundamental to contemporary art. They are versatile vehicles of conceptual delivery, raw enough to link and characterize television and capable of leading to surprising engagements with the haunting re-enactment of contemporary life. Loops can be semi-narrative, providing time-introspective context for larger stories, or they can perform as narrative-defying moments of their own, operating outside traditional viewer expectation. They fundamentally speak of time, memory and reflective space, especially when divorced from big-picture enslavement, becoming a postproduction, anti-narrative engine, disruptive and interstitial. Repetition changes our engagement with the 'place' of moving image, making loop investigations a relevant, even vital, expression of our time—a way of zeroing in on the atoms of information flow.
Adams, Ren. So I Asked… 2014. YouTube. 8 Aug. 2014. Web. 15 Aug. 2014.
Birnbaum, Daniel. "Crystals." Memory. Ed. Ian Farr. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012. 137-144. Print.
Boyd, Mark Cameron. "Postnarrative Structure." Theory Now. 10 April, 2008. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.
Culley, Peter. "Two Works by Stan Douglas." Vanguard 16:4 (1987).
Dienst, Richard. Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Print.
Drucker, Johanna. "Temporal Photography." Philosophy of Photography 1:1 (2010): 22-28. Print.
Enwezor, Okwui. "Documents into Monuments: Archives as Meditations in Time." Memory. Ed. Ian Farr. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012. 133-136. Print.
Farr, Ian. "Introduction/Not Quite how I Remember it." Memory. Ed. Ian Farr. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012. 12-27. Print.
Fiske, John and John Hartley. Reading Television. Florence: Routledge, 1978. Print.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. Print.
Valdes, Claudia X. "In the Dream of the Planet." Portfolio. Claudia X. Valdes. 2002. Web. 26 Oct. 2014.
Figure 1. In the Dream of the Planet (2012). Claudia X. Valdes. Video (Installation View).
Figure 2. So I Asked… (2014). Ren Adams. Video.
[1] Manovich also suggests it is "relevant to recall that the loop gave birth not only to cinema but also to computer programming," thus tying loop logic to database execution—a fundamental 20th and 21st century interface (Xxxiii)Loops are found in proto cinema and at the beginning of cinema, then re-emerge in new media. (215).
[2] Gordon's installation incorporates two projection screens which simultaneously play an endless loop of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), one proceeding forward, the other backward. The loops move at only a few frames per second—so slowly that casual viewers may not even recognize change or directional progression at all. Longer consideration of the piece reveals the uncanny, unnerving and crystallized sense of frozen (yet endlessly progressing) cinematic time, as they loop in such long spans, few could sit through the entire motion—even as they are aware of the sweeping loop.
[3] Theorists like Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Paul Sartre suggest the uncanny, layered experience of memory is a process part logic, part hallucinatory. Ricoeur applies some of Henri Bergson's memory theory, when interpreting Sartre's psychology of imagination by describing a kind of intermediary memory as a mixed state, where "the 'memory-image' [is] halfway between 'pure memory' and memory reinscribed in perception" (Farr 14). The memory-image, or mixed media we construct in our minds, is never wholly factual, or entirely reliable, instead a play between the imaginary and conscious, between the interpreted and the understood.
[4] Dziga Vertov's 1929 Man with a Movie Camera re-enacts the proto-cinematic loop, embedded in longer experimental montage that remains relevant to new media considerations (Manovich xiv, 316).
[5] Manovich suggests "narrative cinema avoids repetitions; like modern Western fictional forms in general, it puts
forward a notion of human existence as a linear progression through numerous unique events" (315-316).
Cinematic linearity is not just a storytelling structure, but an attribution of larger psychological ordering techniques in Modernity.
[6] At least mainstream/dominant cinema. Avant-garde cinema plays by different rules.
[7] Television theorist Richard Dienst claims television endlessly cuts away from program moments to return to the "traffic of images and sounds, to all the messages carried by all the messengers crossing through the world" (129). This creates a loop of program-commercial-program-commercial.
[8] Artist Nam June Paik echoes television theorists when he suggests "the fundamental concept of TV is time…" (Dienst 159). Television is recorded, produced, cut and offered in terms of time, so time is not only a fundamental concept, but also the fundamental shape of television. The familiar loops we encounter in viewing owe much to the backbone of the medium. Thus, "time is the substance of television's visuality, the ground of its ontology and the currency of its economy" (Dienst 159).
[9] Their ubiquitous culture-wide return can be attributed to larger postmodern and 'digimodern' cultural shifts, not expounded here.
[10] Which more closely resembles oral tradition than novels or theater, where characters repeat, refrains establish elastic structure and context, but in which stories exhibit a kind of fluidity not found in directional cinema. Television has been likened to oral tradition by more than one theorist (Fiske 125). Viewers gain an understanding of characters and events by viewing, digesting and cross-referencing visual information. We get a sense of who Jack Bauer is, not because of lengthy cinematic development, but because we cross-patch, experience and unite threads from 9 seasons of 24. This is similar to the way in which audiences might come to understand the epic poetry or folktales of Odysseus or Coyote.
[11] Cinema and radio are considered 'hot' media because they extend and deliver a focused sensation; the viewer or listener watches, listens and receives to gain understanding. Television is considered a 'cool' medium because the viewer must do most of the work; "the screen supplies mere metonyms, we make them meaningful" (Reading 123). Because information about characters, events and plotlines are stretched across multiple episodes, even multiple seasons and years, and TV occupies living space, rather than the black box of the focused theater, television asks the audience to perform and engage. Episodes do not even need to be viewed 'in order' to garner a sense of the program's reality. Thus, it is "only at the moment when the semiotic codes interlock with the cultural awareness supplied by the viewer, whose own context will play a part in shaping that cultural awareness" (Fiske 123).
[12] We may catch an advertisement for a new detective show or medical drama and already have a sense of the kind of language, pacing and aesthetics that are likely to be offered, related in part to past viewing experiences, or to general cultural understanding of genres. We know how sitcoms are meant to behave, etc.
[13] Thought it may contain the kind of micro-narrative present in the spinning zoetrope: the vehicles turn a corner, the firemen jump into the engine and leave, etc.
[14] Arcangel's Clouds is a new media projection piece, endlessly rebuilt in real time from a modified Super Nintendo game cartridge. The background clouds from Super Mario Brothers provide an infinite, fabricated loop.
In Stan Douglas' piece, a 16mm Edison Company promotional film is looped under a narration from Proust. In the cycle, a train curves through a British Columbian landscape in an infinite circle (Boyd)(Culley). The voice-over is contemplates the transition from waking to sleeping, echoed in the uncanny monotony of the endless train ride. Here, the loop is at first uncertain. The film lasts 6 minutes—enough time to seem discrete, yet the viewer realizes the train is passing through the same terrain, just as our minds do (especially during the process of recollection). Here, the loop offhandedly illustrates the philosophy of Proust's memory-grooves (Boyd).
[15] The Cascade is my three-part, interdisciplinary thesis, which includes painting, video and interactive elements. The interactive component also makes use of loops, though it is not discussed here.
[16] A number of television theorists describe cinema as 'linear' and television as 'mosaic.' Viewers gain a sense of who the characters are, the world they inhabit and t, mosaic, oral tradition(reading television 125)
[17] Due to my schedule, I was unable to watch the first four seasons of The Office in real time, or in 'proper' order. Instead, I watched their non-sequential re-broadcast in syndication, which made no attempt to present the series in linearity. Instead, I saw snippets of the before and after of several relationships and dramatic story arcs, piecing together the total experience by seeing events out of turn. The overall mosaic offered a smattering of details that came into focus only after viewing each puzzle piece separately. I thought of this as a critical motive when constructing my videos, as this is often the case with shows in re-rerun, or for viewers who miss a week's installment. We understand television as mosaic, and we know how to complete the metonymic role of television (Fiske 123). We are the connotative agents (Fiske 41).
[18] My videos intentionally reference the looping stock footage of the appropriated television programs. Loops invoke re-enactment, whether suggesting repeat activities or behaving as discrete repetitions in themselves. Thus, the overall atmosphere recalls previous stories and future adventures, while flirting with narrative, but not offering closure. By overturning cultural expectations of narrative progress, the videos undermine the process of viewing that we are most familiar with (Boyd).
This entry was posted in Papers and tagged aib, aib boston, aib mfa, AIB mfa program, appropriation, art, art in progress, art institute of boston, art mfa, art process, art research, art theory, art theory papers, contemporary art, douglas, fine art, looping, lucad, lucad papers, mfa papers, new media art, postnarrative, video art, writing about art on November 7, 2014 by plasticpumpkin.
MFA in Visual Art from Lesley University College of Art and Design. BFA in Studio Art, printmaking from the University of New Mexico. Primary media: digital, video, sound, printmaking, hybrid media, new media, experimental photography. I also have a degree in English (emphasis on Modernism, poetry). Professor.
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Mercedes Benz today launched Sports Editions of its C Class 220 CDI and E Class 220 CDI sedan in India. The C & E Class Sports Edition was launched by Mr. Peter Honegg & Mr. Debashis Mitra of Mercedes Benz India.
Mercedes C Class has been a successful car for the company in India. As of now Mercedes has sold over 16,000 C Class cars and since the average age of luxury car buyers is coming down in India the number will go up fast in the future. The E Class has set a benchmark for luxury in its segment and Sports Editions of C & E Class will attract young customers as they look attractive with dynamic lines and new trims.
AMG Body Styling with front and rear bumper aprons and side skirts.
17 inch 5 twin spoke light Alloy Wheels.
Black painted roof with a SPORT badge.
Halogen lamp and fog lamps (available in Polar White body colour).
Artico upholstery with a Black piano lacquer time.
Mirror package, Electric seats and THERMATIC automatic climate control.
Audio 20 with single CD player, USB, Aux in and Bluetooth connectivity.
PRE–SAFE, NECK Pro, Tire pressure loss warning system.
6 Airbags, Antilock Braking System (ABS), Electronic Stability Program (ESP®), Acceleration Skid Control (ASR) and Brake Assist.
7G TRONIC automatic transmission, 4 cylinder 2143 cc engine with power output of 170 hp @ 3000-4200 rpm and torque of 400 nm @ 1400-2800 rpm.
fuel saving technology like ECO START STOP, Agility Control Suspension and Cruise control.
AMG Body Styling with front and rear bumper aprons and sports side skirts.
New 18 inches 5 spoke light Alloy Wheels.
Black painted roof and a SPORT badge .
Artico upholstery and burr walnut wood trim.
Halogen lamps, LED Day time driving light and Direct Control Suspension.
PRE – SAFE, NECK Pro, Attention Assist and Tyre Pressure Loss warning system.
6 Airbags, Antilock Braking System, Brake Assist, and Electronic Stability Programme with Acceleration Skid Control (ASR).
7G TRONIC automatic transmission, 4 cylinder 2143 cc engine with power output of 170hp@3000-4200 rpm and torque of 400 nm @ 1400-2800 rpm.
The C Class and E Class Sports Editions are priced at Rs. 29.9 lakh and Rs. 39.9 lakh (ex-showroom, New Delhi) respectively.


This class purpose is to manage the probe protocol or apply specific operations to collected data. In most cases, you will not need to write a new class, unless you're collecting using a new protocol.
http://jrds.fr/apidoc-core/jrds/Probe.html#getNewSampleValues() This class generate a map of raw collected values.
http://jrds.fr/apidoc-core/jrds/Probe.html#filterValues(java.util.Map) This method can transform the collected values.
http://jrds.fr/apidoc-core/jrds/Probe.html#modifySample(org.rrd4j.core.Sample,%20java.util.Map) this method can directly update that will be the stored sample.
The constructor is not used for configured, only the empty constructor is used. The configuration is done using configure() methods. The boolean values is set to fail if the probe configuration failed.
Arguments can be given to a probe. The must respect bean syntax, take a String setter and be declared in the ProbeBean annotation. The bean name will the the attr name in the probe declaration.
When writing a class using a new protocol, the method getNewSampleValue should return values read directly from it, with the least amount of transformations done. If it failed, it must return a null value.
The parsing of collecting value from the native type of the protocol to Number object should be done in the filterValues method.
If high level operations are needed, they can be done in modifySample, it gives access to both the filtered values and the final rrd sample.
Some probes are connected probes. For this kind of probe, it's not getNewSampleValues that should be overidden but getNewSampleValuesConnected that receive the alive connection as a parameter.


text:
Q: reverse_graph argument to dijkstra_shortest_paths What is the correct way to pass a reverse_graph as an argument to Dijkstra? I want to achieve something like this:
graph_t G;
vertex_descriptor u;
dijkstra_shortest_paths(G, u,
 predecessor_map(get(vertex_predecessor,G))
  .distance_map(get(vertex_distance,G))
   .weight_map(get(edge_weight,G));

with the parameter that is a reverse graph adaptor:
reverse_graph<graph_t> R(G);

The problem is that the straightforward guess doesn't work:
dijkstra_shortest_paths(R,u,
 predecessor_map(get(vertex_predecessor,R))
  .distance_map(get(vertex_distance,R))
   .weight_map(get(edge_weight,R)));

The boost doc pages are very frugal about reverse graphs... I managed to narrow it down to an issue with accessing the edges of R, I think, since this works:
print_graph(R,get(vertex_name,R));

but this doesn't:
print_graph(R,get(edge_weight,R));

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Mýa prepares us for the ultimate Hip Hop nostalgia concert series with Blackstreet & 112!
Ricky Wilson takes us behind the new Kaiser Chiefs record, Stay Together!
Thaddeus Anna Greene talk shop as new EP Bleed celebrates its release!
The Black Sorrows embarking on epic tour in support of new album, The Faithful Satellite!
The third and final Rolling Stone Live Lodge lineup is here!


Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was born in York in 1907. He was educated at Oxford University: e he soon revealed his poetic talent, and joined a group of young left-wing er intellectuals. After graduating in 1928 he spent a couple of years in Berlin, and when he returned to England he worked as a teacher for five years In 1935 he married Thomas Mann's daughter, Erika, to help her escape from Nazi Germany thanks to a British passport. They never lived together, but remained on friendly terms and never thought about a divorce His early works, such as Poems (1930), and Look, Stranger (1936) contain his political views on capitalist society and advocate freedom from conformism and repression In 1937 Auden was in for the prejudice and cruelty he witnessed on both side the war with Japan, Auden emigrated to the USA in 1939 and settle Spain to help the Republicans, but this experience greatly upset and disillusioned him s. After a visit to China, where he saw the atrocities of d in New York; a few years later he became a naturalised American citizen (he used to say that he considered himself not an American but a New Yorker) In America he held important positions with various schools and universities, gave lectures, edited literary magazines, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 While Marx and Freud had been his main reference points in the first part of his literary career, the disillusionment and the shock deriving from what he had witnessed both in Spain and in China, together with a personal evolution in his thinking, led Auden to seek a solution to evil in Christianity; after his emigration to America he became more and more involved with religious and theological themes, and he converted to the Anglican religion. The works written between 1939 and 1948, when Auden had made New York his home, are considered his best: Another Time (1940), a collection which includes Refugee Blues, one of the poems which express his commitment to political and social issues, Musée des Beaux Arts and September 1, 1939 on the beginning of World War 2, two lyrics about suffering which were revived becoming emblematic of our present-day mood after the attacks of September 11th; For the Time Being (1944) a modern Nativity oratorio, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Anxiety (1947), whose title is often used to define the decades between the two World Wars In 1948 Auden began to spend his summers in Europe, first in Italy and then in Austria. From 1956 to 1961 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and in 1972 he returned to live there. His later poetry includes Nones (1951), The Shield of Achilles (1955), and City Without Walls (1969) Auden died of a heart attack in Vienna in 1973, after giving a poetry reading.


text:
Ніколюк Микола Іванович (26 серпня 1947 — 14 вересня 2012) — актор, режисер, педагог і сценарист, режисер-постановник Вінницького обласного академічного театру ляльок, Заслужений артист України.

Життєпис
Батько був етнічним німцем. Перед війною, побоюючись репресій, він утік до фатерланду і став там військовим. Мати, поки розшукувала його, працювала на заводі — начиняла бомби. Потім жила у батькової тітки, а тато служив. Вжитися вони не змогли. Повернулася вона додому, в село Малий Митник під Хмільником, у 1947 році вже вагітною, і тут народився Микола.

Із восьмого класу з друзями влаштовував у сільському клубі концерти, ставив сценки. Сам складав репертуар, малював афіші, друкував квитки і продавав їх. Їздили і по околишніх селах на велосипедах з «гастролями».

Після школи працював у Хмільнику в райхарчокомбінаті. Заочно вчився у народному університеті ім. Крупської у Москві, закінчив відділення режисури. А в 1966 році пішов служити до армії. Миколі доручили проголошувати промову від імені призовників перед командуванням. Там його помітили і забрали служити в Москву. Був завідувачем секретного діловодства.

Після армії хотів влаштуватися завклубом у селі, але його не брали, бо не вмів грати на баяні. Тоді він і згадав про театр ляльок. Пропрацював там два з половиною роки, встиг зіграти за цей час у п'яти виставах по чотири-п'ять ролей. Працювали тоді постійно на виїзді, квартири не було. І поїхав Микола у Рибінськ Ярославської області, де обіцяли квартиру. У Ярославлі закінчив вище театральне училище.

Жив Микола Іванович у Рибінську 14 років, там одружився, народився син Максим. Потім прийшла звістка від друзів з Вінниці, що у театрі ляльок є вакансія режисера-постановника. Вирішив повертатися. Дружина на той час очолювала податкову інспекцію Рибінська і зриватися з місця не захотіла. Поїхав Ніколюк сам. Спочатку подружжя провідувало одне одного, а потім дружина раптово померла. Було їй усього сорок років. Сина забрали до себе родичі дружини, та не самого, а з нареченою — він одружився рано, у 18 років. Є дві онучки. Зараз його син працює в Москві, у науково-космічному центрі головним спеціалістом з електронної апаратури. Спочатку він, правда, хотів бути артистом, але мати сказала, що з неї досить і одного.

У Вінницю Микола Іванович повернувся в 1985 році, встиг попрацювати і режисером-постановником, і головним режисером. І ролі, і звання заслуженого артиста — усе якось приходило само. А на сцені працював більше 40 років. У його доробку понад 100 ролей, більше 30 яскравих спектаклів і видовищ для дітей.

Увечері 11 вересня 2012, повертаючись додому у Калинівку, він потрапив в аварію. 14 вересня, так і не прийшовши до свідомості, Микола Іванович помер.

Театральні роботи

Вподобання
 Улюблена страва: екзотичні салати.
 Улюблений письменник: Гоголь.
 Улюблений фільм: «Брати Карамазови».
 Улюблена музика: класична, від Баха до Шнітке.

Примітки

Уродженці Малого Митника
Персоналії:Вінницький академічний обласний театр ляльок «Золотий ключик»

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Manhunt Monday: Who killed Michael Malone?
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A father makes an emotional plea for answers after his son was shot and killed outside his tire shop on Lamar Avenue.
Charles Malone doesn't care about people seeing his tears on his face. He's spent two months waiting for an arrest in his son's murder.
"Whoever did this needs to be off the streets," he said.
Memphis Police say 32-year-old Michael Malone was killed at his tire shop on Lamar Avenue in the middle of the afternoon.
Manhunt Monday: Who killed Kirara Holmes?
Surveillance video shows a car pulling up to the business and Malone walking up to the car. Seconds later, a man pulls out a gun and opens fire.
Someone driving down Lamar saw what happened and called 911.
"Mike wasn't the type of guy that would argue with anybody or get into it with anybody," Charles said of his son. "When I got to the hospital, guards were out there. The chaplain was out there. When I saw the chaplain, I dropped my head. I knew Mike was dead."
He says his son was shot five times in the back.
"I love Mike. I love all my kids. But for somebody to do Mike like that, that is wrong."
Homicide detectives say they've questioned several people, but non one has been charged.
"I try not to be angry. But sometimes I get angry, and I have to look at his pictures and start smiling," Charles said.
If you know who killed Michael Malone, 32, call Memphis Police at (901)-528-CASH.


text:
#ifndef __IW_H
#define __IW_H

#include <stdbool.h>
#include <netlink/netlink.h>
#include <netlink/genl/genl.h>
#include <netlink/genl/family.h>
#include <netlink/genl/ctrl.h>
#include <endian.h>
#include "../backports-3.12.8-1/include/uapi/linux/nl80211.h"
#include "ieee80211.h"

#define ETH_ALEN 6

/* libnl 1.x compatibility code */
#if !defined(CONFIG_LIBNL20) && !defined(CONFIG_LIBNL30)
#  define nl_sock nl_handle
#endif

struct nl80211_state {
	struct nl_sock *nl_sock;
	int nl80211_id;
};

enum command_identify_by {
	CIB_NONE,
	CIB_PHY,
	CIB_NETDEV,
	CIB_WDEV,
};

enum id_input {
	II_NONE,
	II_NETDEV,
	II_PHY_NAME,
	II_PHY_IDX,
	II_WDEV,
};

struct cmd {
	const char *name;
	const char *args;
	const char *help;
	const enum nl80211_commands cmd;
	int nl_msg_flags;
	int hidden;
	const enum command_identify_by idby;
	/*
	 * The handler should return a negative error code,
	 * zero on success, 1 if the arguments were wrong
	 * and the usage message should and 2 otherwise.
	 */
	int (*handler)(struct nl80211_state *state,
		       struct nl_cb *cb,
		       struct nl_msg *msg,
		       int argc, char **argv,
		       enum id_input id);
	const struct cmd *(*selector)(int argc, char **argv);
	const struct cmd *parent;
};

#define ARRAY_SIZE(ar) (sizeof(ar)/sizeof(ar[0]))
#define DIV_ROUND_UP(x, y) (((x) + (y - 1)) / (y))

#define __COMMAND(_section, _symname, _name, _args, _nlcmd, _flags, _hidden, _idby, _handler, _help, _sel)\
	static struct cmd						\
	__cmd ## _ ## _symname ## _ ## _handler ## _ ## _nlcmd ## _ ## _idby ## _ ## _hidden\
	__attribute__((used)) __attribute__((section("__cmd")))	= {	\
		.name = (_name),					\
		.args = (_args),					\
		.cmd = (_nlcmd),					\
		.nl_msg_flags = (_flags),				\
		.hidden = (_hidden),					\
		.idby = (_idby),					\
		.handler = (_handler),					\
		.help = (_help),					\
		.parent = _section,					\
		.selector = (_sel),					\
	}
#define __ACMD(_section, _symname, _name, _args, _nlcmd, _flags, _hidden, _idby, _handler, _help, _sel, _alias)\
	__COMMAND(_section, _symname, _name, _args, _nlcmd, _flags, _hidden, _idby, _handler, _help, _sel);\
	static const struct cmd *_alias = &__cmd ## _ ## _symname ## _ ## _handler ## _ ## _nlcmd ## _ ## _idby ## _ ## _hidden
#define COMMAND(section, name, args, cmd, flags, idby, handler, help)	\
	__COMMAND(&(__section ## _ ## section), name, #name, args, cmd, flags, 0, idby, handler, help, NULL)
#define COMMAND_ALIAS(section, name, args, cmd, flags, idby, handler, help, selector, alias)\
	__ACMD(&(__section ## _ ## section), name, #name, args, cmd, flags, 0, idby, handler, help, selector, alias)
#define HIDDEN(section, name, args, cmd, flags, idby, handler)		\
	__COMMAND(&(__section ## _ ## section), name, #name, args, cmd, flags, 1, idby, handler, NULL, NULL)

#define TOPLEVEL(_name, _args, _nlcmd, _flags, _idby, _handler, _help)	\
	struct cmd							\
	__section ## _ ## _name						\
	__attribute__((used)) __attribute__((section("__cmd")))	= {	\
		.name = (#_name),					\
		.args = (_args),					\
		.cmd = (_nlcmd),					\
		.nl_msg_flags = (_flags),				\
		.idby = (_idby),					\
		.handler = (_handler),					\
		.help = (_help),					\
	 }
#define SECTION(_name)							\
	struct cmd __section ## _ ## _name				\
	__attribute__((used)) __attribute__((section("__cmd"))) = {	\
		.name = (#_name),					\
		.hidden = 1,						\
	}

#define DECLARE_SECTION(_name)						\
	extern struct cmd __section ## _ ## _name;

extern const char iw_version[];

extern int iw_debug;

int handle_cmd(struct nl80211_state *state, enum id_input idby,
	       int argc, char **argv);

struct print_event_args {
	struct timeval ts; /* internal */
	bool have_ts; /* must be set false */
	bool frame, time, reltime;
};

__u32 listen_events(struct nl80211_state *state,
		    const int n_waits, const __u32 *waits);
int __prepare_listen_events(struct nl80211_state *state);
__u32 __do_listen_events(struct nl80211_state *state,
			 const int n_waits, const __u32 *waits,
			 struct print_event_args *args);

int mac_addr_a2n(unsigned char *mac_addr, char *arg);
void mac_addr_n2a(char *mac_addr, unsigned char *arg);
int parse_hex_mask(char *hexmask, unsigned char **result, size_t *result_len,
		   unsigned char **mask);
unsigned char *parse_hex(char *hex, size_t *outlen);

int parse_keys(struct nl_msg *msg, char **argv, int argc);

void print_ht_mcs(const __u8 *mcs);
void print_ampdu_length(__u8 exponent);
void print_ampdu_spacing(__u8 spacing);
void print_ht_capability(__u16 cap);
void print_vht_info(__u32 capa, const __u8 *mcs);

char *channel_width_name(enum nl80211_chan_width width);
const char *iftype_name(enum nl80211_iftype iftype);
const char *command_name(enum nl80211_commands cmd);
int ieee80211_channel_to_frequency(int chan, enum nl80211_band band);
int ieee80211_frequency_to_channel(int freq);

void print_ssid_escaped(const uint8_t len, const uint8_t *data);

int nl_get_multicast_id(struct nl_sock *sock, const char *family, const char *group);

char *reg_initiator_to_string(__u8 initiator);

const char *get_reason_str(uint16_t reason);
const char *get_status_str(uint16_t status);

enum print_ie_type {
	PRINT_SCAN,
	PRINT_LINK,
};

#define BIT(x) (1ULL<<(x))

void print_ies(unsigned char *ie, int ielen, bool unknown,
	       enum print_ie_type ptype);

void parse_bitrate(struct nlattr *bitrate_attr, char *buf, int buflen);

DECLARE_SECTION(set);
DECLARE_SECTION(get);

#endif /* __IW_H */

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Cherlynn Ng
Posted on 13 July 2017 | 13,287 views | 65 comments
For those who are confused, the Miss Singapore Beauty Pageant is not affiliated in any way to the Miss Universe Singapore and Miss Tourism Global Singapore beauty pageants.
The latter two are strictly open to only Singapore citizens.
Meanwhile, the Miss Singapore Beauty Pageant is open to both Singaporeans and Singapore PRs from 17 years old.
The organiser of the pageant, ERM Singapore Marketing, confirmed that six of the 19 finalists in this year's competition are permanent residents, with three originating from China and three from Malaysia.
According to The Straits Times, the pageant, will yield four winners under different titles who will go on to represent Singapore internationally under each title.
The four titles are: Miss Singapore Tourism Queen, Miss Singapore Chinatown, Miss Singapore Global Beauty Queen and Miss Grand Singapore.
It was earlier reported that an unofficial photo of the Miss Singapore Beauty Pageant 2017 finalists drew flak from netizens, who questioned the calibre of the participants.
Comments ranged from "Is this for real?" to those slamming the women's physical appearances and their attractiveness.
The picture was taken when the women were doing a talent and fashion showcase at OneKM mall in Katong last Saturday.
Contestants will have makeovers over subsequent weeks as part of the competition, and the pageant organiser said the picture circulating online was taken before the makeovers.
In addition, netizens also questioned the legitimacy of the event, but the organiser said the pageant has been running for 29 years with its winners going on to represent Singapore globally, reported The Straits Times.
However, the contestants themselves had different opinions.
Finalist Nur Amelina, 21, said: "As long as they are Singaporeans or residents, they are allowed to join the competition. So I don't see why they can't represent Singapore."
China-born finalist Honey Tian, 25, who has been in Singapore since she was eight, said it should not matter where contestants were originally from.
"A lot of us (PRs) have been here for a really long time and we love this country. We are proud to represent Singapore," she added.
Netizens slam standards of Miss Singapore Beauty Pageant finalists -- but are you brave enough to join?
Malaysian girl who was bullied for having moles all over body auditions for Miss Universe Malaysia
Mum in breastfeeding saga is Mrs Singapore pageant finalist
Miss Singapore

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


These scissors are great for pruning suckers from tomato plants and cutting dead leaves and broken stems. Use garden scissors to thin and harvest smaller plants and pruning shears to harvest.
The angle of the shear tips allows you to keep your hand above the sheet metal as you cut. Photo 1A: Right-handed offset snips in action Cut a round duct from the.
Hand pruners are best for cutting branches that are less than 1/2 inch in diameter, whereas lopping shears should be used for branches that are between 1/2 and 1 inch in thickness. For branches larger than 1 inch thick, a pruning or bow saw is the best tool. Ideally, pruning tools should be disinfected after each cut is made.
Flood the soil surrounding the plant using a garden hose. Stop the flow of water once it begins. Stop digging if your shovel hits a large root. Cut the root with the pruning shears, and then resume.
Our award winning AN Hose Assembly Tool installs braided, stainless steel hose into the fittings quick and easy. Home » Products » Hose Assembly Tools » AN Hose Assembly Tool. AN Hose Assembly Tool. Rated 5.00 out of 5 based on 7 customer ratings. or Beverly shear to cut the hose. I have always used the cutoff wheel with pretty good.
Cut through any circling roots with pruning shears or a knife to prevent this harmful growth. Fill the hole with water from a garden hose. Wait for the soil to absorb the water completely. Fill the.
Cutting the hole (1.5 inches by 2.5 inches) was truly a brutal ordeal. Because of the contours in the metal and the challenging access, a holesaw turned out to be useless. Instead I hacked away at the.
If the black residue is coating only one area of your tree, check for a cut or gash. Sooty mold that has appeared. Alternatively, if the infestation is light, dip the blades of your pruning shears.
Water slowly — a drip line or soaker hose. Cut off shoots that grow out of the root zone. These upright shoots are called suckers. If left to grow, your baby olive tree will turn into a multi-stem.
Apply at least 3 inches of water from a garden hose to the area below the canopy to. Prune the tree in late winter when growth is slow. Cut off any dry, dead and broken limbs. Use pruning shears to.
Cut back all the bird of paradise's leaves, flower stalks and stems using sharp, sturdy pruning shears. Prune them back to ground level to make the removal process easier. Discard the pruned foliage.
Description. Do you have a big garage or small garage? Do you want a lot of heat or a little? The choice is yours with any of the Fahrenheat Ceiling Mount Automatic Electrical Garage Heaters.
Manual hedge trimmers (sometimes also called hedge shears, or hedge clippers) are designed as large scissors or large pruning shears. They do not need anything to operate and are cheapest/most environmentally friendly. Motorized hedge trimmers allow work to.
The tidy gardener in all of us wants to cut back our bushes and our trees so that they look. be chopping off the flower buds—which means no blooms the following season. Pruning larger trees in.
The method I use is to cut the herbs to dry. oReplace worn or broken tools. Clean, sharpen and oil hand tools. •Safety oAvoid pruning anything that can't be reached from the ground. Never prune.
Description. There's just no way around it. Sometimes the weather can suddenly turn bone chillingly cold! However, you shouldn't have to put your life on hold just because the thermometer's dropped a couple of degrees below zero, not especially, when you have the Mr. Heater Big Buddy Indoor Safe Propane Heater.
All of the digging, seeding, watering, planting, pruning, mulching, raking and harvesting. Just as a keen kitchen knife eases food preparation, sharp garden tools allow more efficient cutting, are.
We've also run across a couple of new tools that will make your wrenching. to adapt a -6 male AN fitting and then cut the stock 5/8-inch pickup tube in the middle and extended it with a length of.
Trickle a garden hose at the base of the Red Rooster sedge for. Measure one-third of the way down the leaf blades. Cut them straight across with pruning shears to remove the top one-third of the.
Air tools range in scope and capability, and include air knives, saws, scrapers, shears, multifunction tools, needlers, as well as many others. These tools pull their power from compressed air, and provide incredible torque to a task.
///About Us. We are a family owned and run business servicing the Sutherland Shire and outer areas. Your One-Stop Handyman, Builders & Landscaping Equipment Hire Specialist.
Locate the leak, which may require digging up some buried hose. Once you know where it is, turn off the water and wait a few minutes for the water pressure to go down. Cut out the leaking section of.
How to remove the heater core without removing the dash. Can you remove the heater core without removing the dash? Yes, the process is listed below, however also read the comments by John and Paul at the bottom before you decide to take the leap. First remove the 2 heater hoses from the heater core pipes on the firewall side under the.
Hose off the. pruner for high pruning or heavy branches or for any work around power lines. •Wear gloves to protect hands; use eye protection when cutting or chopping; and use appropriate ear.
3 – A Pruning Straight Blade Saw. Straight blades are normally used for cutting sap or green wood because of their unique functionality added to a straight motion. These types come with a 6 or 8 teeth per inch as opposed to 4 to 6 per inch on the other size, which means it is one mean saw.
BN Products Corona Clipper Parts Portable Heater Parts Target Parts Superior & Bellota Tile Cutter Parts Wiltse Hinged Bell. Corona Clipper Razor Tooth 13-Inch Pruning Saw Blade Corona models TP 3841, TP 3811 and AC 9100. Corona Classic Cut Pruners and Grass Shears Spring 6200-5 Fits Corona Clissic Cut Hand Pruners and Grass Shears.
Garden Tools Buying Guide. Bow Pruning Saw: This is used for quick cuts on large limbs when the cut is obstructed. A diverse group of cutting tools. Depending on your landscape plantings, you may find a need for all of these. Wheelbarrows. This is the traditional garden standby. Shoveling material in.
NPR's Planet Money team traveled to the Ohio State Fair to. SMITH: But then, all of a sudden, she's placed into my hand a set of pruning shears called the Tiger Jaw. MALONE: And without missing a.
Designed to prune large bushes and cut thick branches (up to around 10cm). The tool consists of a C-shaped frame which connects to each end of a toothed blade. The shape of the frame and blade lead to the name "bow" saw. The tension of the blade can be adjusted with.


So I was like doing some warm-up doodling before assessment started yesterday and for some insane reason... I drew my OC, Avista, smiling... again!
I feel so happy with this sketch that I just had to post it online... it's like she's wishing me goodluck yesterday.


It appears that Tuesday's night's presidential debate was the most watched of all time with nearly 84 million people tuning in. That number is a 17% spike over the first debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012.
I studied the debate prayerfully with much thought and attention. I also listened to many of the pundits who gave their opinions afterwards.
Here is what I learned from the Great Debate.
I will share these observations in "point" form like a running stream of consciousness. I'm sure you have your own, and I hope my ramblings will help you to sharpen yours to pray, to vote, and to be an influence during this perilous time in American history.
Yes, I said perilous. This is the first presidential election in Post-Christian America. Our nation has reached a tipping point where the secularism has overtaken, in many ways, the biblical worldview that characterized our first two hundred years.
This is the first election in US history where it can be argued that neither candidate shares a personal relationship with Jesus Christ or possesses a faith-oriented worldview. Both the voters of the Democrat and Republican parties rejected candidates with strong biblical faith–so we're left with two people that are more secular than Christian.
It's a new day. A sober day.
And a day of great opportunities for God to move in our nation.
Here's what I learned from the Great Debate.
1. It many ways, it was a draw. Neither Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton clearly won on points. How you judged it had much to do with your preference of candidate. There were no knock-out punches.
2. Because I prefer Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton, I give him the edge. It was his first time on a solo national stage and he did well. Mrs. Clinton has been in this scenario 35 times before. She was more familiar than he was. But she didn't take great advantage.
3. Donald Trump appeared presidential and probably helped his cause, He refrained from name-calling and childish behavior and showed a basic grasp of all the issues that were brought up.
4. Hillary Clinton demonstrated good attention to detail and ample evidence of her policy-wonk credentials. She was better on a number of specifics than Mr. Trump.
5. I give Trump an edge in speaking the language of the common person. That's one of his strengths. He is open and honest and you can relate to him and his concerns.
6. Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, was overly robotic and prepared. Even her mention of her 2-year old granddaughter seemed forced and pre-meditated. Everything was calculated. She came across as a slick politician. Trump expressed the normal emotions of a passionate human being.
7. Mrs. Clinton was clearly the aggressor in this debate and showed a bit of a mean-streak. She came at Trump over his taxes, business practices, and name-calling, but it seemed to emanate from cue cards and focus groups instead of deep within. Also seemed a bit whiny at times.
8. Mr. Trump acted as the counter-puncher in this debate, especially on trade (NAFTA and TPP), creating jobs, the national debt, and a few other issues. He missed some big opportunities to expose Mrs. Clinton's corruption re: the e-mail server scandal and the Clinton Foundation (what Rush Limbaugh calls the Clinton Family Crime Foundation). He must not make that mistake in future debates.
9. Did you see that Mrs. Clinton rarely looked Donald Trump in the eyes when she was speaking to him? I've noticed that in many of her appearances. When she first spoke of the e-mail fiasco, her eyes were always down and never looked at the camera. Same last night. If she can't look Trump in the face with conviction and passion, how can she stare down Vladimir Putin or other world leaders?
10. It was easy to see the difference in transparency and honesty between the two candidates. I'm sure Donald Trump has things to hide, but overall he's quick to rebut lies and seems genuinely transparent on most things. Mrs. Clinton is the opposite. Her words are so carefully crafted that you think you're listening to an "angel of light" who's telling you one thing but doing another. Donald wins on honesty.
11. Trump was very good at the beginning of the debate on how to create jobs and deal with the debt. After all, he's a businessman and understands that realm. Mrs. Clinton has lived on the public dole all her life and never created a real job. So how can she help ignite an economic renewal in this nation?
12. The two candidates are starkly different on taxes. Mrs. Clinton wants to raise most people's taxes, though she cleverly use class warfare words to make it appear she's against the rich. But that's a lie. There aren't enough rich people to fund a four trillion dollar budget. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, sees the importance of lowering taxes for most to bring back capital to the country and ignite business expansion.
13. Mrs. Clinton is a classic tax and spend liberal. She had no comeback for Trump's rightful assertion that Barack Obama created more debt that all the previous 43 presidents combined–and that our national debt has America on the precipice of great disaster. Mrs. Clinton would blindly (in the name of false compassion) explode that debt.
14. Mrs. Clinton cleverly used the word "investments" for government taxation. She went through the normal progressive list of crony capitalism including renewable energy, infrastructure spending and climate change. These are all buzz words for "we know better than you" and it's too bad if you lose your job (like coal miners in West Virginia).
16. Both candidates seemed competent on nuclear policy. Trump was more realistic on other nations doing their part to police themselves and not simply ride the coattails of the world's lone super power. Neither candidate would be prone to use nukes unwisely.
17. Trump won the skirmish over the war in Iraq and the mess that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have made of the Middle East. The Democrats created ISIS by leaving Iraq prematurely without a Status of Forces agreement. It was simply poor leadership. They could never be trusted to defeat them.
18. Mrs. Clinton won the argument over Donald Trump's taxes. He needs to release them, under audit or not, and let the chips fall. If there are some embarrassing details there, they probably pale in comparison to the pay-for-play of the Clinton Foundation. Let them stand side-by-side.
19. Mrs. Clinton looked and sounded healthy, but you never know. JFK looked good most of the time but was living on medical "cocktails" because of his Graves Disease. Mrs. Clinton should release her full medical records just as quickly as Trump does his taxes.
20. Most of the time, when Mrs. Clinton was listening to Trump speak, her face was hard, cold, or bored (see photo above). That was the thing that struck me most from a body language perspective. She is not a warm person. He, on the other hand, is very engaging and relatable to most Americans.
21. Mrs. Clinton shouldn't have been given a higher podium. She's 5'4″ and he's 6'2." That difference in stature should have been noticed. Let her make up in gravitas what she lacks in height.
22. Mrs. Clinton was condescending at various moments–especially at the end of the debate when she shrugged he shoulders in pride at a Trump response.
23. Lester Holt asked six follow-up questions of Trump and none of Clinton. The bias was obvious.
24. Trump's smile seems genuine though he's often sober. Clinton's smile often looks calculated and forced.
25. Trump's family is beautiful and accomplished. Bill Clinton is a chronic adulterer who is hard to watch.
These are my 25 observations from the Great Debate.
These 25 items remind me of the greatest need in America: a new found encounter with the King of kings and Lord of lords–Jesus Christ.
If you want some encouragement after watching the Great Debate, check out this magnificent list of 25 reasons that we need leaders who will lead like Jesus.
I always enjoy your posts. 1040 shows you hardly anything. He released countless pages of his financial statement. So the question was terribly misleading. The 1040 doesn't mean anything. All bookkeepers and accountants understand this. So technically Trump's was correct in what he stated. He is not holding back but going thru the proper process.


This bathroom cleaner-descaler is very effective to clean residues of lime, soap and all kinds of dirt from bathtubs, toilets, bidets, sinks, taps, etc. This heavy-duty cleaner is gentle with chromed and metallic surfaces, such as taps or mouldings.
Apply the product over the whole surface.
Scrub or brush and rinse with water.
For edges and hidden areas, direct the product with the applicator.


text:
Metrolinx letter to Toronto City Council seeks to clarify Scarborough Subway debate
Posted on October 3rd, by Move the GTHA in Discussion. No Comments
When Toronto City Council voted to support an extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway in place of the planned Scarborough LRT, its Master Agreement with Metrolinx was called into question.
The ensuing debate became complex. With questions of sunk costs from the Scarborough LRT, which was well into planning and procurement, as well as who would fund the new subway extension and what route it would follow.
The provincial government announced $1.4 billion in funding for the subway extension to Scarborough Town Centre in early September. While the federal government recently announced $660 million for a subway that extends to meet the future Sheppard LRT.
With new funding and new routes. The initial question remained. Who makes the final decision, and who pays for the sunk cost of the Scarborough LRT and renegotiation of the LRV contract with Bombardier.
Metrolinx President and CEO, Bruce McCuaig, clarified in a letter to Toronto City Council that the $85 million spent on the Scarborough LRT would have to be reimbursed by the city, while any additional costs associated with the renegotiation of the Bombardier contract would also have to be covered by City Hall. The final decision regarding the subway proposal would lie with City Council.
The letter further states, "Metrolinx continues to believe that the LRT project, which was to run from Kennedy station to Sheppard Avenue through the Scarborough Town Centre and to be located on an alignment that would be fully separated from roads and traffic, would provide an effective rapid transit solution to the transportation challenges in this area," but recognizes that all three levels of government have shown support for a subway instead. Furthermore, the subway project would be lead by Toronto and the TTC, meaning Metrolinx would not be responsible for the delivery of the project.
Toronto City Council is set to review the question of the Scarborough subway this month.
Read the full letter from Metrolinx for more details.
Reaction to the various subway proposals has been mixed.
While staunch subway supporters claimed victory, others questioned whether transportation planning was being co-opted for political gain.
John Lorinc wrote in Spacing, "for the foreseeable future, major transit investment moves in Toronto will be entirely determined by council and its electoral politics."
City councillor Josh Matlow called upon fellow city councillors to return the original LRT and "move forward with an evidence-based and fiscally responsible plan that will serve the most residents and priority neighbourhoods."
Toronto City councillors representing Scarborough, Glenn De Baeremaeker and Michelle Berardinetti, support the subway funding, saying that residents will "be in close striking distance from a subway stop" and will no longer feel "left out" from the rest of Toronto.
Photo: Loozrboy, via Wikimedia Commons
Metrolinx Toronto Transit Move the GTHA Scarborough subway LRT


Most people only think of bankruptcy as a process in which you go to court and get your debts erased. But in fact, there are two types of consumer bankruptcies: the more familiar liquidation bankruptcy, where your qualifying debts are discharged ("Chapter 7" bankruptcy) and reorganization bankruptcy, where you partially or fully repay your debts. Reorganization bankruptcy for individuals is called Chapter 13 bankruptcy. (There are two other kinds of reorganization bankruptcy: Chapter 11, for large businesses and individuals with extremely large amounts of debt; and Chapter 12, for family farmers.) The names come from the chapters of the federal Bankruptcy Code.
Chapter 13 bankruptcy lets you rearrange your financial affairs and repay a portion of your debts. You repay your debts through a "Chapter 13 plan." Under a typical plan, you make periodic payments to the Chapter 13 trustee for three to five years. The bankruptcy trustee distributes the money to your creditors.
Chapter 13 bankruptcy isn't for everyone. If your total debt burden is too high or your income is too low or irregular, you may not be eligible. You may be better off handling your debt problems in another way – such as filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, seeking help from a nonprofit consumer counseling group, or negotiating with your creditors on your own.
For you to qualify for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, you must have "stable and regular" income. Your income must be high enough so that after you pay for your basic needs, you are likely to have money left over to make periodic (usually monthly) payments to the Chapter 13 trustee for three to five years. The total amount you must pay will depend on how much you owe, the type of debts you have, and your household income.
You are behind on your mortgage or auto loan, and want to make up the missed payments over time and reinstate the original agreement.
You have a tax debt that cannot be eliminated (discharged) in Chapter 7 bankruptcy, but can be paid off over time in a Chapter 13 payment plan.
You need help repaying your debts now, but need to leave open the option of filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the future.


By my measure, the second Clojure Conj was a smashing success. I wrote summaries of the mainline Conj activities and the unconference activities if you need some context. The amount of brain power on tap at the conference was intoxicating. In an attempt to present a feel for the topics of discussion in the lecture hall and hallways I'll post with links to posts, papers, presentations, and tidbits of information for learning more.
I've limited the scope of this post to cover only the initial released talks, but as more are released so too will I post more.
From this talk there are a couple of interesting follow ups at your disposal. First, the idea of using Clojure's rich data formats as a replacement for JSON was a topic of discussion during my DevIgnition talk on December 2nd, 2011 entitled *Code as data as code. The slides are only partially helpful, but I hope that a video will be available soon. In any case I will likely explore this idea in a later post. Second, the idea of an extensible Clojure reader via tagged literals was discussed deeper in Rich Hickey's keynote at the Conj and is currently under design and implementation.
While Clojure's official fork-join story is incomplete, David's talk discusses Revelytix's approach to concurrent data stream processing in their query processing engine. With a bevy of nice images, he walked through the high-level architecture of a system designed to combine large data streams as one might connect the ends of hoses. Related to this point, and of critical importance to Clojure, is the focus on leveraging topnotch Java libraries in achieving their goals. The near-seamless Java interop in Clojure is an incredible boon to companies and individuals using Clojure in their projects.
One of the interesting aspects of David's talk was his discussion of how he and his team discovered ways to improve the design of their system, specifically how they might refactor protocols to split orthogonal concerns. This kind of thought-process and its benefits was recently summarized beautifully by Steve Losh on Hacker News.
Anthony's talk on his Clojail library that provides a sandboxed environment for Clojure execution has a long and storied precedent. For example, Racket's sandboxing capability is at least superficially very similar to Clojail. However, Racket's runtime security mechanism called Custodians are very different from the JVM model absorbed by Clojail, although the goals for each are similar.
Before Racket (and PLT-Scheme on which it's built) there was some research an implementation for Scheme48 of a security kernel by Jonathan Rees called W7.1 The approach of W7 is quite breathtaking and there may be some lessons to take away for Clojail itself.
Chouser's presentation on ClojureScript was given on a nifty little piece of presentation software written in ClojureScript named Traction. This is just an interesting aside.
In his talk he talked about how ClojureScript's data structures are currently copy-on-write, mimicking Clojure's behavior below a certain threshold. Reading over Clojure's implementation of PersistentVector and PersistentHashMap provides some insight into this approach.
In addition to a nice talk, he and his company put together a ClojureScript pamphlet that although a bit outdated at the moment2 is still a useful reference. Since his talk ClojureScript has matured thanks in no small part to his own efforts and comments.
There are more Conj 2011 videos due for release soon, so I will try to keep up as they are released.
I see one major problem with using Clojure data over JSON for client-server communication: you lose interoperability. When you build your client on top of a JSON API, you can use that same interface for your public API. If you use Clojure data instead, you have to maintain a separate JSON version for the public.
I've seen others go even further and abstract the server API into remote Clojure function calls, leaving the principles of REST behind. This might not be a problem for a small, isolated ClojureScript app, but for anything more you're going to want to open up your data, even it's just for yourself. For example, how would you make an iPhone app for your site if it only speaks Clojure?
Everything I've read about this technique presents it as an upgrade rather than a trade-off. I see the benefits in using more powerful data structures, but the drawbacks seem even worse for medium to large applications.