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The Latin American Boom () was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world. The Boom is most closely associated with Julio Cortázar of Argentina, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia. Influenced by European and North American Modernism, but also by the Latin American Vanguardia movement, these writers challenged the established conventions of Latin American literature. Their work is experimental and, owing to the political climate of the Latin America of the 1960s, also very political. "It is no exaggeration", critic Gerald Martin writes, "to state that if the Southern continent was known for two things above all others in the 1960s, these were, first and foremost, the Cuban Revolution (although Cuba is not in South America) and its impact both on Latin America and the Third World generally, and secondly, the Boom in Latin American fiction, whose rise and fall coincided with the rise and fall of liberal perceptions of Cuba between 1959 and 1971."

The sudden success of the Boom authors was in large part due to the fact that their works were among the first Latin American novels to be published in Europe, by publishing houses such as Barcelona's avant-garde Seix Barral. Indeed, Frederick M. Nunn writes that "Latin American novelists became world famous through their writing and their advocacy of political and social action, and because many of them had the good fortune to reach markets and audiences beyond Latin America through translation and travel—and sometimes through exile."

History

Social influences

The 1960s and 1970s were decades of political turmoil all over Latin America, in a political and diplomatic climate strongly influenced by the dynamics of the Cold War. This climate formed the background for the work of the writers of the Latin American Boom, and defined the context in which their sometimes radical ideas had to operate. The Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the subsequent U.S. attempt to thwart it through the Bay of Pigs Invasion can be seen as the start of this period. Cuba's vulnerability led it to closer ties with the USSR, resulting in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when the US and USSR came dangerously close to nuclear war. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s military authoritarian regimes ruled in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and many others. For example, on September 11, 1973, the democratically elected President Salvador Allende was overthrown in Chile and replaced by General Augusto Pinochet, who went on to rule until the end of the 1980s. Chile under Pinochet became "infamous for [...] human rights abuses and torture techniques", and in Argentina the 1970s brought the Dirty War, notorious for its human rights violations and the disappearances of Argentine citizens. Many of these governments (which were supported by the US) cooperated with each other in terms of torturing or eliminating political opponents and "disposing of their bodies" in "the Operation Condor."

The period between 1950 and 1975 saw major changes in the way in which history and literature were approached in terms of interpretation and writing. It also produced a change in the self perception of Spanish American novelists. The development of the cities, the coming of age of a large middle class, the Cuban Revolution, the Alliance for Progress, an increase in communication between the countries of Latin America, the greater importance of the mass media, and a greater attention to Latin America from Europe and the United States all contributed to this change. The most important political events of the period were the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the Chilean coup d'état in 1973. The fall of Juan Perón in Argentina, the protracted violent struggle of the urban guerrillas, brutally repressed in Argentina and Uruguay, and the unending violence in Colombia also affected writers, as they generated explanations, or testimonies, or provided a troubling background for their work.

Origins
While most critics agree that the Boom started some time in the 1960s, there is some disagreement as to which work should be considered the first Boom novel. Some (such as Alfred McAdam) would start with Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (Rayuela in Spanish) from 1963 while others prefer Vargas Llosa's The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros in Spanish) which won the Biblioteca Breve Award in 1962. Fernando Alegria considers Augusto Roa Bastos' Hijo de hombre the inaugural work of the Boom even though, as Shaw notes, it was published in 1959. One could, however, even go as far back as Miguel Ángel Asturias's 1949 novel Men of Maize.

Another variation is articulated by Randolph D. Pope: "The story of the Boom could start chronologically with Miguel Ángel Asturias's El Señor Presidente (published in 1946, but started in 1922). Other starting points could be Ernesto Sabato's The Tunnel (1948) or Onetti's El pozo (1939), or even the vanguardist movements of the 1920s. However, the writers of the Boom declared themselves to be an "orphan" literary generation ––without a Latin American parent influence, an autochthonous model––, caught between (a) their admiration for Proust, Joyce, Mann, Sartre and other European writers and their owing much of their stylistic innovation to the Vanguardists and (b) their need to have a Spanish American voice, even if they rejected the most respected Spanish American writers Indigenistas, Criollistas, and Mundonovistas." Jean Franco writes that the Boom marks "a refusal to be identified with the rural or with anachronistic narratives such as the novela de la tierra."

Conclusion

The greater attention paid to Latin American novelists and their international success in the 1960s, a phenomenon that was called the Boom, affected all writers and readers in that period. What mainly brought writers together and focused the attention of the world on Latin America was the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, which promised a new age. The period of euphoria can be considered closed when in 1971 the Cuban government hardened its party line and the poet Heberto Padilla was forced to reject in a public document his so-called decadent and deviant views. The furor over Padilla's case brought to an end the affinity between Spanish American intellectuals and the Cuban inspirational myth. The Padilla affair is thought by some to have signalled the beginning of the end of the Boom. However, in a significant sense, the Boom has not ended; the writers associated with the Boom have continued to publish books that have been read by audiences far larger than those enjoyed by Latin American writers prior to the Boom. The books of such writers as Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa are widely distributed and translated into other major European and Asian languages to a much greater extent than those of such significant pre-Boom writers as José María Arguedas, Eduardo Mallea or Manuel Rojas.

Literary influences
The rise of Latin American literature began with the writings of José Martí, Rubén Darío and José Asunción Silva's modernist departures from the European literary canon. European modernist writers like James Joyce have also influenced the writers of the Boom, as have the Latin American writers of the Vanguardia movement.  Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez argues that the writers of the Vanguardia were the "true precursors" to the Boom, writing innovative and challenging novels before Borges and others conventionally thought to be the main Latin American inspirations for the mid-20th century movement.
In 1950, Spanish American novelists were tolerated but marginal in the literary landscape, with Paris and New York representing the center of the literary world; by 1975 they were celebrated as central figures. As well as being a publishing phenomenon, the Boom introduced a series of novel aesthetic and stylistic features to world literature. In general—and considering there are many countries and hundreds of important authors—at the start of the period, Realism prevails, with novels tinged by an existentialist pessimism, with well-rounded characters lamenting their destinies, and a straightforward narrative line. In the 1960s, language loosens up, gets hip, pop, streetwise, characters are much more complex, and the chronology becomes intricate, making of the reader an active participant in the deciphering of the text. Late in the period the political adventure goes sour, while the linguistic sophistication reaches a new height, and novelists turn more to a reflection on their own writing, a fiction on fiction or metafiction, while characters and story lines show the corrosive power of a postmodern society, where all is equally available and insignificant.

With the success of the Boom, the work of a previous generation of writers gained access to a new and expanded public. These precursors include Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Arturo Uslar Pietri and Alejo Carpentier, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Juan Rulfo.

Hallmarks
The Boom novels are essentially modernist novels. They treat time as nonlinear, often use more than one perspective or narrative voice and feature a great number of neologisms (the coining of new words or phrases), puns and even profanities. As Pope writes, in reference to the style of the Boom: "It relied on a Cubist superposition of different points of view, it made time and lineal progress questionable, and it was technically complex. Linguistically self assured, it used the vernacular without apologies." Other notable characteristics of the Boom include the treatment of both "rural and urban settings", internationalism, an emphasis on both the historical and the political, as well as "questioning of regional as well as, or more than, national identity; awareness of hemisphereic as well as worldwide economic and ideological issues; polemicism; and timeliness."  Boom literature breaks down the barriers between the fantastical and the mundane, transforming this mixture into a new reality.  Of the Boom writers, Gabriel García Márquez is most closely associated with the use of magical realism; indeed, he is credited with bringing it "into vogue" after the publishing of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967.

Magical realism

In The Ends of Literature, Brett Levinson writes that magical realism, "a key aesthetic mode within recent Latin American fiction ... materializes when Latin American history reveals itself as incapable of accounting for its own origin, an incapacity which traditionally ... represents a demand for a myth: mythos as a means to explain the beginnings which escape history's narrative." The writings of the Chroniclers of the Indies depicted the exotic "new world" and their accounts of conquering strange new lands became accepted as history. These often fantastical stories helped to bring about a new aesthetic, which morphed into magical realism and "(as conceived by Alejo Carpentier) marvelous realism or lo real maravilloso. According to this aesthetic, unreal things are treated as if realistic and mundane, and mundane things as if unreal. Plots, while often based on real experiences, incorporate strange, fantastic, and legendary elements, mythical peoples, speculative settings, and characters who, while plausible, could also be unreal, and combine the true, the imaginary, and the nonexistent in such a way that they are difficult to separate."

Historical fiction
An interest in history is another characteristic of the novels of the Boom period.  The epitome of this is the dictator novel where historical figures and events were portrayed in a way that connections between them and contemporary events in Latin America could not be doubted. An example is Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme, which depicts the 19th-century Paraguayan dictatorship of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia but was published at the height of Alfredo Stroessner's regime. Nunn writes that "novelists of the Boom themselves evinced a sophisticated grasp of their genre's ability to depict parallel and alternative history. And they actively participated in the cultural and political debates of the region that questioned the very meaning and worth of history."

Major representatives
Who is and who is not to be included in the Boom has been widely debated and never settled. On the other hand, a few writers exerted wide and undisputed influence. While the names of many other writers may be added to the list, the following may not be omitted:

Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar was born in Belgium in 1914 to Argentinian parents with whom he lived in Switzerland until moving to Buenos Aires at the age of four. Like other Boom writers, Cortázar grew to question the politics in his country: his public opposition to Juan Perón caused him to leave his professorial position at the University of Mendoza and, ultimately, led to his exile. He moved to France, where he spent most of his professional life and, in 1981, he became a French citizen. Like García Márquez, Cortázar publicly supported the Cuban government of Fidel Castro, as well as leftist Chilean President Salvador Allende and other left-wing movements like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In his fiction, however, political elements were generally muted or absent until the publication of the explicitly political novel Libro de Manuel in 1973.

Cortázar was influenced by Borges, as well as by Edgar Allan Poe. He was perhaps the most radically experimental of all the Boom authors. His most important work, and the one that propelled him to international recognition, is the highly experimental novel Hopscotch (1963). This consists of 155 chapters, 99 of which are "expendable", which can be read in multiple orders according to the reader's predilection.

His other works include the short story collections Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956), Las armas secretas (1959), Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966).  He also wrote novels such as Los premios (1960) and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (1967), and the unclassifiable Historias de cronopios y de famas (1962).  Cortázar died in Paris in 1984.

Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes was born on November 11, 1928 and began to publish in the 1950s. He was the son of a Mexican diplomat, and lived in cities such as Buenos Aires, Quito, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro as well as Washington, D. C. His experiences with anti-Mexican discrimination in the United States led him to examine Mexican culture more closely. His 1962 novel The Death of Artemio Cruz (La muerte de Artemio Cruz in Spanish), which employs innovative changes in narrative point-of-view, describes the life of a former Mexican revolutionary on his deathbed.  Other important works include Where the Air Is Clear (1959), Aura (1962), Terra Nostra (1975), and the post-Boom novella The Old Gringo (1985).

Fuentes not only wrote some of the most important novels of the period, but was also a critic and publicist of Spanish America. In 1955 Fuentes and Emmanuel Carballo founded the journal Revista Mexicana de Literatura which introduced Latin Americans to the works of European Modernists and the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. In 1969 he published the important critical work, La nueva novela hispanoamericana. Fuentes held the position of professor of Latin American literature at Columbia University (1978) and at Harvard (1987) and more recently was associated with Brown University. He once said that "the so-called Boom, in reality, is the result of four centuries that, literarily, reached a moment of urgency in which fiction became the way to organize lessons from the past." Fuentes died on May 15, 2012.

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez started out as a journalist and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction and short stories; his earliest published writings were short stories which appeared in Bogotá's El Espectador newspaper in the 1940s.

He is best known for novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), No One Writes to the Colonel (1962), and post-Boom work such as Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). He has achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for introducing what has been labeled magical realism to the literary world. He experimented with more or less traditional approaches to reality, so that "the most frightful, the most unusual things are told with the deadpan expression". A commonly cited example is the physical and spiritual ascending into heaven of a character while she is hanging the laundry out to dry in One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez is now considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, as is attested by his winning the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. García Márquez died on April 17, 2014.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian novelist, short story writer, playwright, journalist and literary and political critic.  He attended Lima's University of San Marcos and subsequently attained a doctorate in Latin American literature in Spain. In fact, his thesis was on Gabriel García Márquez.  He shot to fame with his novel The Time of the Hero (1963), a scathing indictment of cruelty and corruption in a Peruvian military academy (and, by implication, in Peruvian society).

Vargas Llosa also wrote The Green House (1966), the epic Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973), and post-Boom novels such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977). Vargas Llosa returned to Lima in 2000, following the resignation of President Fujimori who won the 1990 Peruvian election, beating Vargas Llosa.  The Swedish Academy awarded him the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Other figures
Several other writers have been associated with the Boom. Juan Rulfo, the author of two books, only one of them a novel, was the acknowledged master incorporated a posteriori; a writer who balances social concern, verbal experimentation and unique style. Augusto Roa Bastos of Paraguay wrote Hijo de hombre, considered by some to be the first novel of the Boom. His highly experimental I, the Supreme has been compared to Joyce's Ulysses and is "one of the most highly regarded works of fictional history to ever come out of South America." Manuel Puig, an Argentine, is a central figure, along with Vargas Llosa, of the Seix-Barral publishing world. The Cuban novelist José Lezama Lima, though not widely known in the English-language publishing world, can also be regarded as a major figure on the basis of his major novel, Paradiso (1966). José Donoso is a Chilean writer of both the Boom and the post-Boom. In his book, Historia Personal del "Boom", Donoso also mentions other writers associated with the movement. Examples are Jorge Amado (although he began writing novels back in the 1930s) of Brazil, Salvador Garmendia and Adriano González León of Venezuela, Gastón Suárez and Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz of Bolivia and David Viñas of Argentina, among many others.

Publishing Latin American Boom novelists
Publishing played a crucial role in the advent of the Boom. Major publishing houses based in Havana, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Asunción or Santiago were responsible for publishing most of the Boom novels, and these cities became strong centers of cultural innovation.

 Santiago in Chile is presided over by the criticism of Alone, while the older generation of Benjamín Subercaseaux, Eduardo Barrios, Marta Brunet, and Manuel Rojas were quietly superseded by José Donoso. Other writers, such as Enrique Lafourcade, have a large national readership.
 Cuba is a lively cultural center, first with the group of Orígenes, and then with Lunes de Revolución.
 In Colombia the rural novels of Eduardo Caballero Calderón were displaced by García Márquez who was followed by Alvarez Gardeazábal.
 Mexico continues a tradition of strong regional writers and diverse schools of writing, from Yáñez to Sainz, with novelists such as Luis Spota or Sergio Fernández, the first a popular, the other a refined, writer, both better known in Mexico than abroad.

This period saw the publishing of Boom novels in Barcelona, reflecting the new interest of Spanish publishing houses in the Spanish American market. However, as Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola notes, the revenue generated by the publishing of these novels gave a boost to the Spanish economy, even as the works were subjected to Franco's censors. Some of the Seix Barral-published novels include Mario Vargas Llosa's The Time of the Hero (1963) and his Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973), and Manuel Puig's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1971). A crucial figure "in the promotion of Latin American literature in Spain" (and elsewhere) was the "super-agent" Carmen Balcells, whom Vargas Llosa referred to as "The Big Mama of the Latin American novel."

Critique
A common criticism of the Boom is that it is too experimental and has a "tendency toward elitism". In his study of the Post-Boom period, Donald L. Shaw writes that Mario Benedetti was very critical of Boom writers like García Márquez who, in Benedetti's view, "represent a privileged class that had access to universal culture and were thus utterly unrepresentative of average people in Latin America." In his article on Donoso's break from the Boom Philip Swanson articulates another critique of the "new novel" (i.e. Boom novel): "Though [it] was essentially a reaction against a perceived staleness in conventional realism, many of the formal experiments and innovations of modern fiction have themselves become standardized features of modern writing, leading to another form of traditionalism where one set of stereotypes has been replaced with another." Also often criticized is the Boom's emphasis on masculinity, both in the fact that all of the movement's representatives were male and the treatment of female characters within the novels. The Boom fiction's emphasis on history and the fantastic has also been the subject of criticism as it was claimed that it is too removed from the realities of Latin American political situations that it criticized. Authors such as Severo Sarduy have critiqued the tropes (e.g., phallogocentric discourse) that supported much of the literary movement's legitimacy.

Impact
The Boom had an immediate impact as it changed the way Latin American culture was viewed around the world.  The commercial success of the Boom writers had the effect of elevating them almost to rock star status in Latin America. Of course, translation played a major role in the success of the Boom writers because it gave them a much larger audience. These authors continued to produce best-sellers for four decades. In addition, the Boom opened the door for new Latin American writers in terms of the international scene. A testimony to the Boom's global impact is the fact that "up-and-coming international writers" look upon the likes of Fuentes, García Márquez or Vargas Llosa as their mentors.

After the Boom
Since the 1980s it has become common to speak of Post-Boom writers, most of whom were born during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, such as Roberto Bolaño (By Night in Chile, 2000; The Savage Detectives, 1998), the post-Boom Spanish-language writer who has made the greatest impact on world literature. It is difficult to clearly situate the Post-Boom as many of its writers were active before the end of the Boom. Indeed, some writers, like José Donoso could be said to belong to both movements. His novel The Obscene Bird of Night (El obsceno pájaro de la noche, 1970) is considered, as Philip Swanson notes, "one of the classics of the Boom."  His later work, however, fits more comfortably into the post-Boom. Manuel Puig and Severo Sarduy are considered writers whose works embody the transition from the Boom to the Post-Boom. It is important to note that this uneasiness in categorization is perpetuated by the fact that major writers of the Boom (Fuentes, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa) continued writing well after the end of the Boom. The post-Boom is distinct from the Boom in various respects, most notably in the presence of female authors such as Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits, 1982), Luisa Valenzuela (The Lizard's Tales, 1983), Giannina Braschi (Empire of Dreams, 1988; Yo-Yo Boing!, 1998), Cristina Peri Rossi (Ship of Fools, 1984) and Elena Poniatowska (Tinisima, 1991). While Valenzuela and Poniatowska were both active writers during, and in Poniatowska's case even before (Lilus Kikus, 1954), the Boom period, Allende is considered "a product of the Boom." Shaw identifies Antonio Skármeta (Ardiente paciencia, 1985), Rosario Ferré ("La muñeca menor", 1976; The House on the Lagoon, 1999) and Gustavo Sainz (The Princess of the Iron Palace, 1974; A troche y moche, 2002) as Post-Boom writers.  The Post-Boom writers challenge the perceived elitism of the Boom by using a simpler, more readable style and going back to realism.

See also
 McOndo

References

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Literary movements
Latin American literature
20th-century literature
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Home › Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mysteries › Cop Job (Sam Acquillo Hamptons #6)
Cop Job (Sam Acquillo Hamptons #6)
By Chris Knopf
It's bad enough when someone you know is brutally murdered, it's worse when the guy was a paranoid schizophrenic helplessly bound to a wheelchair. Sam Acquillo and Jackie Swaitkowski tried to look after Alfie Aldergreen, as had others around the Village of Southampton, but now they were forced to wonder, what else could they have done?
One thing is for certain, Alfie's killers are about to know what it means to murder a friend of Sam, former corporate troubleshooter, former professional boxer and all-around ornery bull dog, and Jackie, a defense lawyer often described as an avenging angel.
This sixth installment in the Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery series brings back Knopf's ensemble of famously eccentric and involving characters, not the least of which is Sam's mutt Eddie Van Halen. Not just a crime story, it examines the fraught intersection of wealth, culture, politics and the ravages of an ugly war. Combine beautiful watery settings with a unique look into the underbelly of the Hamptons, it's a mystery you won't find anywhere else.
CHRIS KNOPF'S twelve previous mysteries have critics likening Sam Acquillo to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Robert Parker's Spenser, while repeatedly comparing Knopf to Elmore Leonard.
The Last Refuge was a finalist for The Connecticut Book Award. Two Time (2007) was named a runner-up for this same prize. It was also one of thirteen mysteries listed in Marilyn Stasio's "Recommended Summer Reading" column in The New York Times Book Review, was listed in Entertainment Weekly as one of the 50 "Hot Picks" of that summer, and Publishers Weekly chose it as one of the "Best 100 Books for 2006."
Head Wounds (2008) won the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Myster. Last year he won the 2013 Nero Award for Dead Anyway, the first in a new series featuring Arthur Cathcart, followed by Cries of the Lost (2013) and A Billion Ways to Die (2014). His mysteries have had overseas subrights sales in the UK, Canada, Japan, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Italy, England, and China.
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Gov. Pat Quinn's "millionaire tax" question, the most recent nonbinding vote added to the bloated November ballot, is not only a misguided effort to draw his base to the polls with blatant class warfare but incredibly poor public policy. Like all "soak the rich" tax schemes, the imposition of increased taxes on high-income earners will discourage new capital and entrepreneurs from entering the state.
High-income taxes drive taxpayers out of the state and their income, capital and tax revenues with them. Illinois need only look to Maryland to see the results of such a tax: That state found that by the year after its millionaire tax was passed, instead of new revenue, one-third of the state's millionaires disappeared.
Only a few years ago, Illinois' tax competitiveness compared well to its neighbors and other states. In 2011, however, the state increased the personal income tax rate to 5 percent from 3.75 percent in 2011 and raised the corporate tax rate by 30 percent. As a result, the Tax Foundation's State Business Tax Climate Index ranks Illinois No. 31 in terms of competitive tax climates for businesses, far below its No. 17 rank in 2010.
Since these temporary tax hikes were implemented, state spending has continued to skyrocket, growing by more than 17 percent. Illinois still faces one of the nation's worst fiscal deficits, the highest pension liability, and worst bond rating.
Mr. Quinn's millionaire tax bucks the trend of almost every other state across the nation. Dozens of states have cut their income taxes in the last year to help spur economic development and create jobs. Many have already seen improvements. Indiana and Wisconsin have moved to make significant cuts in their taxes. Illinois has the 11th-highest total tax burden in the nation when calculated as a percentage of income; expanding the tax for high-income Illinoisans will make the state less competitive.
Assuming the millionaire tax will raise any meaningful revenue is simply wishful thinking. Even under the current tax system, higher-income earners are already leaving: According to the IPI, the average income of a taxpayer who leaves Illinois is $13,100 above Illinois' median household income.
Instead of increasing taxes on higher earners, a source of revenue that fluctuates greatly with the changing economy, Illinois legislators should focus on making the state a more attractive place for businesses and workers by restraining spending, lowering taxes and reducing unnecessary regulations. Illinois' tax rates are steadily climbing higher than most states'; increasing them any further risks greater harm to the state's economic competitiveness.
People and businesses are leaving the state in droves; Mr. Quinn's tax policy is the exact opposite of what the state should be doing.
Matthew Glans is a senior policy analyst at the Heartland Institute in Chicago.


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Lithium: balancing mental and renal health
Rebecca Strawbridge, Allan H Young
Funding Information: RS reports grant support from the UK National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR), the German Research Foundation, and the European Commission; paid lectures (non-promotional) for Janssen and Lundbeck; and support for attending meetings from Janssen, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the International Society of Bipolar Disorders, the International Society of Affective Disorders, the British Association for Psychopharmacology, and the Central European Biomedical Congress. AHY reports grant support as the chief or principal investigator from the NIHR and other public funding agencies, Janssen, Compass Pathways, Novartis, and LivaNova; consulting for Johnson & Johnson and Livanova; paid lectures and advisory boards for the following companies with drugs used in affective and related disorders: Lundbeck, Sunovion, Servier, Livanova, Janssen, Allegan, Bionomics, Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma, COMPASS, Sage, Novartis, and Neurocentrx; support for attending meetings from Lundbeck, Sunovion, Servier, Livanova, Janssen, Allegan, Bionomics, Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma, COMPASS, Sage, Novartis, and Neurocentrx; having a leadership or fiduciary role in the following boards: the International Society for Affective Disorders, the British Association for Psychopharmacology, the International College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the Drug Safety Research Unit, and Bipolar UK. AHY is an honorary consultant for South London and Maudsley National Health Service Trust. RS and AHY hold positions on journal editorial boards. This work is supported by the NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King's College London. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the UK Department of Health and Social Care. We are grateful to David Cousins for expert considerations surrounding low-dose lithium.
Rebecca Strawbridge (Psychological Medicine, NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre)
Allan H Young (Academic Psychiatry, Psychological Medicine, NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre, Centre for Affective Disorders )
In The Lancet Psychiatry, Filip Fransson and colleagues 1 have undertaken an in-depth examination of kidney function in people treated with lithium in two large representative cohorts in Sweden. 1 In more than 2200 participants, the authors compared individuals with bipolar disorder or schizoaffective disorder with the general population, finding that lithium was associated with steeper declines in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) and was found to contribute to chronic kidney disease. First, the authors found a steeper eGFR decline in patients than in controls, with this difference seemingly explained by lithium use. Lithium use was associated with an additional eGFR deterioration of 0·54mL/min/1·73m2 per year treated (R2=0·37). However, the effect of lithium on eGFR showed high interindividual variation, and this pattern was only significant for people taking lithium for more than 10 years. Of 22 chronic kidney disease cases, ten (45%) were definitively caused by lithium, with five (23%) partially attributable to lithium, and seven (32%) not attributable. Of cases not attributable to lithium, four (57%) had not been exposed to lithium, and two (67%) of the three who were exposed had lithium incorrectly recorded as the cause of chronic kidney disease on their medical records. Wrongful attribution of chronic kidney disease as being lithium induced is concerning, as this appears to occur routinely, albeit infrequently.
Identifying the neuropsychiatric health effects of low-dose lithium interventions: A systematic review
Strawbridge, B., Kerr-Gaffney, J., Cousins, D. A., Juruena, M. F. & Young, A., Jan 2023, In: Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 144, 104975.
Peripheral inflammatory effects of different interventions for treatment-resistant depression: A systematic review
Strawbridge, B., Day, E., Tee, H., Tong, C., Young, A. & Cleare, A., 1 Nov 2022, In: Neuroscience Applied. 101014.
Predictors of Functional Impairment in Bipolar Disorder: Results from 13 Cohorts from Seven Countries by The Global Bipolar Cohort Collaborative
Strawbridge, B., Cleare, A. & Young, A., Nov 2022, In: Bipolar Disorders. 24, 7, p. 709-719 11 p.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of treatments for rapid cycling bipolar disorder
Strawbridge, R., Kurana, S., Kerr-Gaffney, J., Jauhar, S., Kaufman, K. R., Yalin, N. & Young, A. H., Oct 2022, In: Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. 146, 4, p. 290-311 22 p.
Strawbridge, B. & Young, A., 12 Sep 2022, In: The Lancet Psychiatry. p. 760-761
Serum NOX1 and Raftlin as new potential biomarkers of Major Depressive Disorder: A study in treatment-naive first episode patients
Hurşitoğlu, O., Kurutas, E. B., Strawbridge, R., Oner, E., Gungor, M., Tuman, T. C. & Uygur, O. F., 8 Mar 2023, In: Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry. 121, 110670.
AI-based dimensional neuroimaging system for characterizing heterogeneity in brain structure and function in major depressive disorder: COORDINATE-MDD consortium design and rationale
Fu, C. H. Y., Erus, G., Fan, Y., Antoniades, M., Arnone, D., Arnott, S. R., Chen, T., Choi, K. S., Fatt, C. C., Frey, B. N., Frokjaer, V. G., Ganz, M., Garcia, J., Godlewska, B. R., Hassel, S., Ho, K., McIntosh, A. M., Qin, K., Rotzinger, S., Sacchet, M. D., & 29 othersSavitz, J., Shou, H., Singh, A., Stolicyn, A., Strigo, I., Strother, S. C., Tosun, D., Victor, T. A., Wei, D., Wise, T., Woodham, R. D., Zahn, R., Anderson, I. M., Deakin, J. F. W., Dunlop, B. W., Elliott, R., Gong, Q., Gotlib, I. H., Harmer, C. J., Kennedy, S. H., Knudsen, G. M., Mayberg, H. S., Paulus, M. P., Qiu, J., Trivedi, M. H., Whalley, H. C., Yan, C-G., Young, A. H. & Davatzikos, C., 23 Jan 2023, In: BMC Psychiatry. 23, 1, p. 59
Genetic and Structural Brain Correlates of Cognitive Subtypes Across Youth at Family Risk for Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder
Valli, I., De la Serna, E., Segura, A. G., Pariente, J. C., Calvet-Mirabent, A., Borras, R., Ilzarbe, D., Moreno, D., Martín-Martínez, N., Baeza, I., Rosa-Justicia, M., Garcia-Rizo, C., Díaz-Caneja, C. M., Crossley, N. A., Young, A. H., Vieta, E., Mas, S., Castro-Fornieles, J. & Sugranyes, G., Jan 2023, In: Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. 62, 1, p. 74-83 10 p.
Single-Dose Psilocybin for a Treatment-Resistant Episode of Major Depression
Goodwin, G. M., Aaronson, S. T., Alvarez, O., Arden, P. C., Baker, A., Bennett, J. C., Bird, C., Blom, R. E., Brennan, C., Brusch, D., Burke, L., Campbell-Coker, K., Carhart-Harris, R., Cattell, J., Daniel, A., DeBattista, C., Dunlop, B. W., Eisen, K., Feifel, D., Forbes, M., & 54 othersHaumann, H. M., Hellerstein, D. J., Hoppe, A. I., Husain, M. I., Jelen, L. A., Kamphuis, J., Kawasaki, J., Kelly, J. R., Key, R. E., Kishon, R., Knatz Peck, S., Knight, G., Koolen, M. H. B., Lean, M., Licht, R. W., Maples-Keller, J. L., Mars, J., Marwood, L., McElhiney, M. C., Miller, T. L., Mirow, A., Mistry, S., Mletzko-Crowe, T., Modlin, L. N., Nielsen, R. E., Nielson, E. M., Offerhaus, S. R., O'Keane, V., Páleníček, T., Printz, D., Rademaker, M. C., van Reemst, A., Reinholdt, F., Repantis, D., Rucker, J., Rudow, S., Ruffell, S., Rush, A. J., Schoevers, R. A., Seynaeve, M., Shao, S., Soares, J. C., Somers, M., Stansfield, S. C., Sterling, D., Strockis, A., Tsai, J., Visser, L., Wahba, M., Williams, S., Young, A. H., Ywema, P., Zisook, S. & Malievskaia, E., 3 Nov 2022, In: New England Journal of Medicine. 387, 18, p. 1637-1648 12 p.
Psychological distress, depression, anxiety and life satisfaction following COVID-19 infection: Evidence from 11 UK longitudinal population studies
Thompson, E. J., Stafford, J., Moltrecht, B., Huggins, C. F., Kwong, A. S. F., Shaw, R. J., Zaninotto, P., Patel, K., Silverwood, R. J., McElroy, E., Pierce, M., Green, M. J., Bowyer, R., Maddock, J., Tilling, K., Katikireddi, S. V., Ploubidis, G. B., Porteous, D. J., Timpson, N. J., Chaturvedi, N., & 2 othersSteves, C. & Patalay, P., 9 Aug 2022, (Accepted/In press) In: The Lancet Psychiatry.
Sub-national patterns and correlates of depression among adults aged 45 years and older: findings from wave 1 of the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India
Perianayagam, A., Prina, M., Selvamani, Y., Gudekar, D., Salvi, S., Varghese, M. & Dandona, R., Aug 2022, In: The Lancet Psychiatry. 9, 8, p. 645-659 15 p.
Relaxation of the criteria for entry to the UK Clozapine Central Non-Rechallenge Database: a modelling study
Oloyede, E., Whiskey, E., Casetta, C., Dzahini, O., Dunnett, D., Gandhi, S., Gaughran, F., Shergill, S., McGuire, P., MacCabe, J. H. & Taylor, D., Aug 2022, In: The Lancet Psychiatry. 9, 8, p. 636-644 9 p.


text:
New Zealand to donate 250,000 courses of COVID-19 vaccines to Fiji
Hon Aupito William Sio
New Zealand has offered, and Fiji has accepted, sufficient doses of AstraZeneca for 250,000 people from New Zealand's domestic vaccine portfolio, New Zealand Associate Minister of Health and Foreign Affairs Aupito William Sio and Fiji Health and Medical Services Minister Ifereimi Waqainabete announced today.
"New Zealand and Fiji are working together closely to support Fiji with access to safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines at the earliest opportunity," the Ministers said.
Both Ministers stressed that there are still a number of steps to work through before the vaccines can be delivered. The vaccine still has to be approved by Medsafe before it can be used in New Zealand and donated to Fiji.
The Ministers met virtually last week to discuss New Zealand's offer, which also includes $2 million of Official Development Assistance to support Fiji's vaccine rollout.
"Fiji has worked hard to keep COVID-19 contained and New Zealand has been committed to supporting it in this," Minister Sio said.
"But this success has been hard won. Following recent community cases in both our countries, we see a vaccine as key to protecting our people from the virus, and for our economic and social recovery."
"Fiji has chosen to roll-out AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine following earlier deliveries through the COVAX AMC and from India, and we are delighted New Zealand has been able to support us to continue our campaign," Minister Waqainabete said.
"New Zealand is working hard to make that happen as soon as possible with a target of delivery for the third quarter of this year. Under New Zealand Health standards the AstraZeneca vaccine cannot be donated until it's approved by Medsafe," Minister Sio said.


This year on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day the Albuquerque Journal ran a repulsive advertisement from Los Ranchos Gun Shop that invoked the name and image of Dr. King in order to sell firearms and ammunition.
Placed alongside women's basketball scores in the sports section of Sunday's Journal, the ad promoted 10% off all accessories with the purchase of a gun on MLK Day. Customers who mentioned the ad were given an additional 5% off.
The owner of Los Ranchos Gun Shop, Mark Abramson, defended the ad as an "appropriate depiction of Dr. King." He then claimed, wrongly, that Dr. King "fought" to put more firearms into the hands of African-Americans.
In truth, Dr. King decried Americans' easy access to firearms and voluntarily disarmed himself and his bodyguards because of his unshakable commitment to nonviolence.
I am deeply offended by the Los Ranchos Gun Shop advertisement that the Albuquerque Journal published on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Given Dr. King's absolute commitment to nonviolence, and the circumstances surrounding his assassination, it is beyond the pale for your newspaper to print his image and good name in a promotion designed to sell guns and ammunition. Dr. King was patently clear on where he stood on guns. "By…our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim…we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes," he wrote. Dr. King also unilaterally disarmed himself and his bodyguards, explaining, "Had we become distracted by the question of my safety we would have lost the moral offensive and sunk to the level of our oppressors." The staffer in your advertising department who approved the running of this ad should be fired immediately.
Thank you for standing up for the good name and legacy of one of America's greatest champions of nonviolence.


text:
Rough Week-End For The GOP
by John Hawkins | December 9, 2002 1:43 am
Rough Week-End For The GOP: There was a lot of bad news for the GOP this week-end including…
The firing of Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, and chief economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey: Both O'Neill and Lindsey are smart, competent guys. But, Lindsey was reportedly combative and O'Neil seemed to blurt out some dumb comment about every month or so. If the economy was humming along, both of them might have survived, but with a soft economy, firing them is a good political move – especially since both of them are easily replaceable. In fact, O'Neil's spot has already been filled by John W. Snow, a smooth talking railroad executive who'll probably be a better fit than O'Neil. Short-term, the Democrats will get in some cheap shots on this issue but long-term it's a good move.
Mary Landrieu Defeats Suzanne Haik Terrell In The Louisiana Senate Race: I thought Haik Terrell had the momentum in this race but Landrieu pulled it out. I don't suppose that this should be a big surprise for anybody since there hasn't been a GOP Senator in Louisiana since reconstruction. But, this is a significant loss for the GOP for at least a couple of reasons. Not only does Landrieu's win buoy a Democratic Party that was despondent after the 2002 elections, it also leaves the GOP majority a little thinner than I'd like. If a GOP senator were to die in a state with a Democratic governor and a GOP senator jumped or if let's say John McCain and Lincoln Chafee were to change parties, the Dems could regain control of the Senate. But that being said, both of those are unlikely scenarios and there is a silver lining — this loss will help keep the GOP from getting cocky — and that's a good thing.
Trent Lott's Moronic Comment: Trent Lott had this to say[1] at a 100th birthday party and retirement celebration for Strom Thurmond,
"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
Of course, back then Thurmond had been nominated for President by the ultra-racist Dixiecrat faction of the Democratic Party and was fighting against "anti-lynching" laws and was heavily backing segregation. So having Lott say he was "proud of voting for him" and suggesting that "the rest of the country (should have) followed our lead" is a huge blunder.
Now I'm sure Lott only made that comment because he was trying to be nice to Thurmond at his retirement party. However, it's absolutely inexcusable for the Senate Majority Leader to say that sort of thing — especially since it plays right into the false racist stereotype that Democrats continually try to pin on Republicans. All of this is on top of the fact that I've never been particularly impressed with Trent Lott to begin with. Therefore, I can't say that I'd be unhappy if he were ousted over this remark. Hey, Newt Gingrich made Lott look like Jimmy Carter in the political acumen department and he had to take a bullet for the party over less than this. Maybe Trent can take a lesson from Newt and step aside. I would be pleased if he did….
***Update***: Instapundit[2] is hammering Lott and now Drudge[3] is weighing in. Worse yet, Lott's remarks were so idiotic that I'm finding myself inclined to agree with Al Sharpton (Let the ice skating tournament in hell begin)…
"According to Sharpton[4]: "Lott's statements are blatant racism at the highest order, and are insulting to all Americans at a time that America needs to be unified." In a time of unprecedented attacks on the American way of life, to have the majority leader of the U.S. Senate give tacit support to a white segregationist's political philosophy, is frightening and offensive."
"The Republican Party has said that it wants to reach out to minorities, whom have historically felt uncomfortable with being members of their party in any great numbers. Now the Republican Party has an opportunity to show they sincerely reach out, by repudiating Lott's statements and asking him to step aside as Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate."
this to say: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20730-2002Dec6.html
Instapundit: http://instapundit.com/
Drudge: http://drudgereport.com/
Sharpton: http://drudgereport.com/flash3.htm/
Source URL: https://rightwingnews.com/top-news/rough-weekend-for-the-gop/


text:
ASUU Threatens To Go On Strike
by wada February 14, 2022 February 14, 2022 0
Tension has surrounded students, parents and university staff as the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU's National Executive Council meeting is ongoing.
The meeting taking place at the University of Lagos, Akoka Campus, was convened by the union to decide possible action to take following the alleged refusal of the federal government to accede to its demands.
The union had last week hinted that its decision, whether to proceed on strike to protest the government's action or continue to render services would be determined at its ongoing NEC meeting, expected to end tomorrow in Lagos.
The decision which will be via voting would determine the fate of students of public universities across the country, who had just returned to campuses after the yuletide break.
The union latest action is aimed at forcing the government to sign the re-negotiated FGN-ASUU 2009 agreement, payment of the balance of Earned Academic Allowances, deployment of University Transparency and Accountability Solution, UTAS, payment of lecturers on sabbatical as well as the proliferation of universities by state governments.
#Punch
Christian Pilgrimage : A Tool For Spiritual Rebirth, National Upliftment
Shakirat Alabi June 27, 2022 June 27, 2022
Philippines Election: Bongbong Marcos Poised To Win Presidency In Landslide
Shakirat Alabi May 10, 2022 May 10, 2022
NMCO's Award Is A Result Of Funding By FG- Adegbite


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text:
The Theater of No-Form
Antero Alli in Conversation with R.U. Sirius
for NEOFILES, Summer 2004
Antero Alli is a cherubic and intense technician of ecstasis and personal transformations. Operating primarily under the rubric of experimental theater, Alli specializes in personal/interpersonal/group dynamics within a ritualistic context. Influenced by "paratheatrical" ideas introduced to the world by Jerzy Growtowski, Alli's theatrical groupings are "asocial" laboratories — experiments in human and group consciousness. Alli studied method acting at the famous Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Hollywood. Since the late 1970s, he has been organizing "private ritual labs", some of which mutate into live performances. I conducted this conversation by email after reading his most recent book (written "with friends"), Towards an Archeology of the Soul: a Paratheatrical Workbook. -- R.U. Sirius
R.U. SIRIUS: Your theater seems to be more directed at challenging and transforming the performers than it is with putting on a great performance or even changing your audience. Would this be accurate? How did you come to this place in your own life and philosophy?
ANTERO ALLI: It would be misleading to call what we do "theater" as most of our work occurs behind closed doors without an audience and for non-theatrical reasons. What we do may be closer to the early paratheatre and "theatre of sources" work of the late Jerzy Grotowski, circa late seventies, but even this is not quite accurate. None of us are acrobats. Also, the medium we work in, which I have been developing since 1977, leans heavily on a standing Zazen meditation technique we call No-Form, something Grotowski did not utilize. Occasionally our private work develops characters or a theme or mythos that, with further distillation, ripens for public offering. This happened with our 2004 performance experiment, "Orphans of Delirium." It's a story of eleven sub-types within the psyche of an actor that wreck havoc as he undergoes an absinthe binge. Hallucinagenic symbolist theatre. Coleridge's delirious epic "Kubla Khan" was also incorporated as an oblique narrative randomly spoken by the wildly talented Serene Zloof as she embodied the hallucinating intellect of the actor.
Maybe only 25% of our work sees the public; the rest is devoted to private research. When we are ready to raise the bar from private ritual to public performance, you are correct in assuming we are not out to put on some great performance or change the audience. Unlike theatre, our aim is neither to entertain nor to educate but rather ... to fascinate ... to fasten audience attention to the flow of spontaneous physical eruptions and their ever-molting expressions of emotion passing before your eyes. The results are visceral, unpredictable, convulsive, and sometimes violent. But we don't hurt each other. It's more like we're giving expression to the raw force of violence in less literal, more abstract ways. With or without an audience, our aim is to execute rituals with enough force of commitment to trigger our own most resonant responses to what we are doing. Our research is discovering how these forces act on us. If our force of commitment is complete enough, we believe it can elicit spiritual and visceral resonances in an audience. I'm not interested in changing the audience as much as setting up a kind of climate of seduction for inciting their own impulses. For us, it's more about participating in — and maybe sharing — a spiritual event.
My overall philosophy mirrors Hakim Bey's "Immediatism." Moments of minimal mediation are sacred to me. Imagine living without a self-image ... how straight up and direct can your perception get? Paratheatre work acts as a lab for testing my perceptions by its corrosive effects on the ego and its past diet of social conditioning. This work employs a "via negativa" approach to exposing and exfoliating dead layers of beliefs, concepts, values, and ideals absorbed from the default culture at large. We are approaching the power of our most naked experience. This process can be a bit disconcerting at first and why this work is not for everybody. Not everyone wants or needs to outgrow the brittle shell of their false self and take flight in rebirth. We are actively engaging an iconoclastic process of destroying images -- self-imposed and those we wear as cultural badges and identities -- towards liberating more spontaneous expression of innate being.
from "Orphans of Delirium" dvd (2004)
RUS: You create rituals that seem to emerge from somewhere within your own consciousness and perhaps that of the group. Do you have some means, or some criteria through with you validate some rituals as being worthy or effective and others as not working?
AA: Those criteria come from knowing the difference between what is mechanical and what is alive. For example, the numerous rituals organized in my book, Towards an Archeology of the Soul, were developed and tested over three decades of active paratheatre work. However, they're not guaranteed to automatically function for anyone who tries them. What renders any ritual effective or ineffective is preparation. What you put into it is what you get out of it. Effective preparation in this ritual medium begins with a silent pledge everyone makes to be accountable for: 1) his or her own safety and 2) for his or her own creative states. Anyone unwilling to take this vow of autonomy is warmly discouraged from doing this work.
The next criteria is instigating and maintaining an asocial climate, or "rare area", to minimize the sway of social considerations — like flirting or wanting emotional support or approval or to make friends — that can inhibit real creativity by crimping our more honest responses. For some, this asocial adjustment can quickly become a source of frustration and annoyance or anxiety if they can find no other reasons to be in the room with others than trying to satisfy their unmet social needs. One way to instigate asocial intent is through any action that amplifies spatial awareness. We do this by a ritual we call "space-forming" which amounts to moving throughout the room and relating only to the space itself, the space between people rather than the people themselves. What results is a discovery and respect for the space between things and people, rather than automatically reacting to everybody's personalities, and how that influences the way we relate with each other. With practice, this spatial awareness lends itself to a greater regard for the personal space of others and introduces a higher quality of interpersonal intimacy. When your own personal space is respected by another, it is natural to respond with more trust and openness.
Paratheatre experiment Pinnacles Wilderness, California, 2006
RUS: Can you describe some of the results individuals and groups have gotten from the rituals? Do you see people permanently changed? Temporarily energized? Any breakdowns?
AA: How people have been influenced by this work varies. I think the primary way this work affects the participant's sense of identity is through an amplified awareness of the existing conditions of their lives and recognizing the internal landscape as a legitimate source of spiritual authority and autonomy. Due to the high level of self-commitment required to actually do this work over several months at a time, most participants confess to tangible changes in their lives. These often involve adjustments in attitude, redefinitions of values and beliefs, expansions of personal movement vocabulary, and various kinds of spiritual epiphanies and breakthroughs.
Those who continue work in this medium experience a certain transformation at the level of their Central Nervous System in ways similar to, but differing from, Kundalini yoga. Because we work with the direct engagement of real energies and living forces -- not just concepts -- the CNS gradually becomes more engaged and sensitized. This type of change also brings its own kind of responsibilities. Many of us live in a hyper-media society where our CNS can easily numb out and dumb down. There is very little external support for developing this kind of intuitive and visceral sensitivity. That support must come from within and from those who share in this process of awakening. Without a strong support system, this work can also push people into self-delusion and other pitfalls common to transformative ritual work.
Each paratheatrical lab meets for about two months (once or two nights a week) and pivots around a theme that shapes the nature of the group experience and outcome. The lab theme for "Orphans of Delirium" was "initiation. We explored ritual forms for triggering exposure to direct experience of states of consciousness we had never known before and for which there was no previous reference or maps. True to form this lab produced volatile results that were soon directed into the development of the performance vehicle of "Orphans of Delirium." Other themes have included "anima/animus" (which opened our eyes to our current and future loves), "ancestors" (which opened our hearts to those who have lived and passed before us) and "trinity" (triadic ritual structures for exposing and expressing each person's "holy trinity" of sources that are holding them together).
The results of each ritual lab varies and are determined by the commitment shown in three areas: 1) the physical warm-up, the No-Form states, and 3) acceptance of the existing conditions of the internal landscape. The first event involves the degree of commitment shown to a 5-phase physical warm-up, which everyone designs and executes in their own idiosyncratic ways, simultaneously. These five phases last about six minutes each and reflect five objectives: physical stillness, flexing the spine, working the core, stretching the muscles, and breaking a sweat. The overall objective of this warm-up is meeting the body's central-most need to be felt deeply. When this need is met, the physical energies are raised and the body shows less resistance to change.
CLICK THIS TO WATCH A VIDEO OF THE 5-PHASE WARM-UP
The 'Song as Vehicle' Lab, Pinnacles Wilderness, 2004
Something about No-Form: either people already have an existing relationship with void, or the potential state, or they don't. And I'm speaking of No-Form not as an idea but as an experience. Those that do connect with the potential state usually take to this No-Form technique like fish in water. It amounts to a certain comfort around being nothing. Those unfamiliar with or threatened by this intimacy with void often meet with immediate frustration. They freeze up. No-Form refers to a kind of free-floating, concept-free zone and is at the very crux of this ritual technology. We are courting realities and living forces rather than concepts and ideas about those realities, though these will also emerge since there is nothing we can do to stop thinking.
For those who find this experience of No-Form unfamiliar, an external catalyst, or transmission, may be required from a talented facilitator. This facilitator will have a talent for inciting the No-Form experience in others. As with any real talent, I don't think it can be learned like a skill can be learned. You either have it or you don't. The quality and depth of your No-Form experience tends to determine the quality and depth of your results. Now the exact nature and substance of your results will invariably be shaped by how the first two events support, or don't support, the evocation of the third event ... the internal landscape.
If you can honestly perform these three events with your full commitment over and over again, it will probably change your life. It can be very effective that way. Whether the change is permanent or temporary depends on the existing conditions of your life — your support system, your ego-structure, your health — coupled with the extent of your integrity and self-honesty. We work within a sanctified container to experiment with and to test ourselves. Some people, like me, have used labs as a metaprogramming device to break down old habits and programs towards rebuilding greater authenticity of response. But the more common motive is doing the work for more hedonic reasons — to get high or to trance out.
from "Orphans of Delirium" live performance (2004)
I look at paratheatrical research as a kind of archeology of the soul. From my vantage, we live in massively soul-deadening times and have to dig deep if we are to mine the veins of spiritual energy. Not everyone wants to do that or even can do that. This work is not for everybody. Maybe 1% of the population would or could do this, and that's a generous assessment. So we're, by default, engaging an elitist technology. The purpose of our paratheatrical forms and designs are to evoke, expose and excavate the internal landscape ... that complex layering of memories, fears, desires, fantasies, dreams, complexes, social conditioning, and the more autonomous, archetypal dynamics connecting our personal lives to larger collective shifts.
Why do we do this ? We do it to access these dynamics as movement resources, as energies that animate our actions, sounds, gestures and the development of new rituals. We bypass any psychological interpretation or analytical treatment of these complexes and interior dynamics in lieu of turning to them as spiritual events. When related to simply as sources of energy, the leylines of our internal landscape avail themselves as vital movement resources. I am not interested in analyzing myself to death but with bringing myself to life.
You ask about breakdowns. Due to the emphasis on individual pacing, these rituals are never rushed. That's probably why I haven't seen any serious breakdowns or psychotic breaks. Except once. There was this young Catholic woman whose paratheatrical experiences shocked her lifelong religious beliefs. She suddenly turned on the group, and me especially, with vehement satanic accusations. She was in the grips of some kind satanic panic. I knew she was fighting to hold onto her beliefs; and to do that she had to make me "the devil." I hate when that happens. I calmly suggested that she leave the dance studio and stop working with us. She stormed out screaming "devil worshippers!" Later on, I heard that she told her friends about her narrow escape from an evil cult. That was a close call for us, too. I do feel a deep responsibility to this work and to the people doing it and have implemented a screening process to weed out potentially unstable personalities. You have to be 24 years or older, in good physical health and have your basic survival needs met -- food, shelter, income -- before I agree to work with you. Survival needs also includes friends and a social life outside of the lab.
CLICK THIS FOR MORE ON THE DANGERS OF PARATHEATRE
RUS: One phrase in your book particularly caught me. You write "Discover movement as nourishment." What is being nourished and how does movement most effectively become nourishment.
AA: Movement-as-nourishment is a kinetic adjustment often applied in the physical warm-up cycles to infuse more pleasure into stretching the muscles and breaking a sweat. It's a non-directional mode allowing expression of the body's own impulses and rhythms, rather than imposing one's will over the body, as with ballet and yoga, which are more "mind over matter" directional modes. What is being nourished is receptivity to body wisdom and the self-awareness to detect and serve the organism's innate impulses without immediately trying to control or direct them. Movement-as nourishment is one device that paves the way there. Movement-as-nourishment is actually a fusion and distillation of two American Mime techniques I learned from Keith Berger over thirty years ago called "motivated movement" and "moving to words." These were used to prepare us for entering a creative state. Keith learned them from Paul J. Curtis, artistic director of the American Mime Theatre in New York City.
Surprisingly, what can also become nourished with this technique is the intellect. As the conceptual analytical mind develops more receptivity to the body's own distinct voice, the intellect learns to either wise up or shut down inside its cocoon of false certitude and arrogance. An intellect wises up after being humbled enough by the consistent exposure to the body's innate truths. The body never lies; it's the only part of us that's always in present time. The mind lies all the time; it's rarely in present time unless it wises up to the body. The newly humbled intellect learns to pay closer attention and increases its powers of observation and perception. Many intellects are too arrogant to wise up; in the face of the greater intelligence of Body Wisdom, they save face by self-denial and the painful solace of stupidity.
Paradox Pollack and Alaska Yamada
RUS: Another nice quote: "Economy of motion is not the same as repression." I'm thinking that there's graceful release and not-so-graceful release. Can you expand on this idea?
AA: "Economy of motion" stems from another skill I initially learned from my very early Mime training with Keith Berger. Since then, I have applied it to the paratheatrical work of extracting from the raw, messy primordial noise of self-expression, a series of patterns — patterns of motion, gesture and sounds — that actually begin to communicate something. It's a distillation process involving pattern recognition amidst the chaos of impulses aroused in the ritual preparation cycles.
By the way, grace is not the goal in our work. Grace can be an impediment, in the way too much structure, finesse or refinement can crimp spontaneity. On the other hand, too much free-form spontaneity can disintegrate into this group soup effect which is also quite worthless. The really valuable work results from maintaining a dynamic tension between high performance skills and raw creative talent, which can only be sustained for fifteen minutes at the most, the way we work. When it does work, it's miraculous ... a miraculous interaction of self-governing bodies ...
In the first stages of any ritual lab, we tend to allow lots of space and time for not-so-graceful releases of outright catharsis and the blathering, blubbering blows of emotional surrender. We do this to gain more direct access to the sources of power we are excavating.
Another technique, similar to movement-as-nourishment, is "cellular choreography." This direction represents more advanced paratheatrical work in that the intellect has, by now, learned to yield and serve innate patterns of motion expressed through the body's impulses. The forms, shapes and movement designs that emerge are totally unplanned and spontaneous. Not spontaneous as in frenetic and chaotic but fluid, graceful, and unhindered. This technique also requires a very strenuous physical and emotional warm-up process to activate a second wind exhaustion state assisted by our friends the endorphins.
Our aim at this point is simply subjecting ourselves to these energies without trying to shape, control or direct an outcome. Though we do not allow auditors in our lab work, any casual outside observer could easily mistake this phase with a roomful of raving lunatics in an insane asylum. A real sense of danger and emergency cuts the air. After these initial primordial phases have their way with us, we gradually start the distillation process by honing our overwrought expressions down to their most basic essence. This also begins the more advanced paratheatrical work that demonstrates "how economy of motion is not the same as repression."
Sylvi Alli in "The Invisible Forest" (2008)
RUS: You mentioned Hakim Bey's Immediatism and have otherwise criticized our mediated society. You also clearly love cinema, and have been involved in it yourself. So what is your take on "virtuality" and what is it that you love about cinema?
AA: Virtuality, in all its morphing forms and myriad enterprises, is our future because it is already a way of life for the millions who have cocooned — they have made a home in their minds and are becoming mental domestics. Mental domestics, the hot new demographic! I don't know exactly when it started but I've noticed this epidemic, a kind of new mental illness, let's call it schizapression, that leaves the mind in a state of perpetual bewilderment around what is real and what is symbolic, as if they're more fused, confused, in the mind. More people are confusing their thoughts for actions and their emotions for experiences. I see more people thinking or talking about doing something and never getting around to actually doing it. Or people over-reacting to almost anything just to create an experience to feed their meaning-starved souls.
I've detected this virus in the local language, too, in the way we speak, especially this avoidance of using first person pronouns to express any experience that is actually personal. The pronouns "I" and "me" are being rapidly replaced by "you" or "we" or "most people." This, to me, reflects a larger collective wave of depersonalization. Accordingly, all virtual reality technologies; VR porn, and top secret military VR applications will reap massive economic harvest from the virtualization of humanity, but there is a tragic cost when the human body, and the direct experience of life it affords, grows obsolete in the name of that progress.
The bright side of virtuality is a resurgence of creative imagination, that is, for anyone still possessed of one. This means the programmers, which includes anyone creating or producing more meaningful media than they are consuming. Successful media makers and media producers have Strangest stimulate their imaginative faculties just to keep updating program content. The closest I get to programming is filmmaking; and though I usually write, direct, and edit my own stuff, the actual production process involves serious teamwork with actors, crew, venues, etc.
What I love about cinema are the poetics of it, the way the medium conveys texture and subtle nuances and memory with a simple moving image, sound, light. It's really quite staggering. I love how I am able to communicate complex visions through my films. My chief influences are visionary filmmakers — Tarkovsky, Herzog, von Trier, Wenders, Jodorowsky, Maddin — whose works transport my consciousness.
I love the way each of my own films represent a different adventure and journey, first for my crew and me and then for the audience. Paratheatre techniques were used and also demonstrated in my 2003 feature, Under a Shipwrecked Moon which follows a self-styled shamanic punk rocker performing extreme rituals with DMT to catapult his consciousness into the spirit realm in search of his father who drowned at sea. In 2002, I made my post-9/11 statement, Hysteria, about a Catholic soldier who mistakenly drinks datura tea and hallucinates a vision of the Virgin Mary who grants him a divinely dangerous mission. In 2000, I made "Tragos", a cyber-fi feature about an urban tribe of techno-pagans practicing their ecstatic rituals in a VR program, until one of them uses the device as a suicide machine. This, in turn, sparks a modern day witch hunt. Technically, I shoot in various mediums of digital video and high-speed super-8 film and then, edit on Final Cut Pro.
Antero Alli
On a closing note, I think it's important to say here that most of the seed ideas for my films have emerged through the hard-earned excavation processes of our paratheatrical research work. I honestly do not know what I am going to do next or what idea or vision will spring forth next from the vertical wellsprings of the internal landscape. It's a mystery to me. Beyond the spiritual and self-work aspects of paratheatre I also do it to stay in touch with the Muses, those autonomous numin of archetypal design, that come and go beyond my control and comprehension and, that act on my life as a calling. - AA
Paratheatre F.A.Q.
Paratheatre Manifesto by Antero Alli
Other Interviews with Antero on Paratheatre
Films and Books by Antero
ParaTheatrical ReSearch Site Map


text:
Philly Activists Take on Fossil Fuel Giants — and Win
The fracking industry spent big money to expand a dirty refinery in South Philly. But local activists and climate campaigners fought back, because communities harmed by fossil fuel pollution needed jobs, not more dirty air.
By Sam Rubin
For over a year, Food & Water Watch and our allies in Green Justice Philly -- a coalition of over 25 environmental, community, and labor organizations--have been battling fracking interests over a stretch of publicly-owned land on the waterfront called Southport.
This November, the coalition was gearing up for what seemed like the biggest round of the battle, pressuring the state agency responsible for approving the final plan. But then, right before the holiday break, came the amazing news: responding directly to our campaign, the governor announced that Southport would take a greener path with a $300 million investment in expanding the port's storage facilities instead of more fracking infrastructure.
All along, we knew that the Southport decision would have real consequences for the future of Philadelphia. When we started our campaign, the leading contender for securing the land was Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES). The company was investing significant resources and wooing local lawmakers to create a massive dirty energy expansion project on our waterfront. The company's existing refinery is already responsible for the vast majority of toxic emissions in the city; allowing it to grow even larger would mean more toxic emissions in a city already suffering some of the worst air quality in the country. Our shocking asthma epidemic is most acutely felt among low-income communities of color, the people who live closest to the refinery. This was a major opportunity to stop the fossil fuel industry and instead open the door to a future of stable, family-supporting jobs that won't kill the planet.
The odds were long, but the communities affected by industry pollution fought back, saying that they refused to continue to bear the deadly burdens of fossil fuel pollution. Several organizations rooted in the affected communities, such as Action United, One Pennsylvania, and Philly Thrive, were major parts of the coalition which was victorious. The coalition also made common cause with local labor unions, who see responsible development at Southport as a way to build quality jobs and a sustainable future for the city.
On November 22, Green Justice Philly delivered that message loud and clear at a Philadelphia Regional Port Authority (PRPA) Board Meeting, where dozens gathered to appeal to the agency to choose good jobs and public health over fossil fuel profits. This was the final action in a long string of efforts that had steadily increased pressure on the PRPA board.
Our pressure worked, and we didn't need to wait long to get an answer. That afternoon, Governor Tom Wolf announced a $300 million plan to increase shipping capacity at the port. That means no expansion of the refinery, and no new fracked gas infrastructure at Southport. As community leader Sheree Arnold--from Southwest Philadelphia, in the shadow of the refinery--put it, "Today, I told the PRPA about how toxic pollution affects communities of color in Philadelphia. Literally an hour after taking action, the PRPA rejected fossil fuel expansion at Southport. This proves that when we stand up together and fight, we win."
Knowing that the door to green jobs future could be opened—even if just a crack—through a victory at Southport was our rallying cry. Putting jobs before the oil and gas industry, especially jobs that were high-paying and community supporting, would be a major win for Philadelphia.
We went forward with an inside and outside strategy. Along with our allies, we lobbied, had conversations with the PRPA, attended public meetings, and worked closely with our legislators. But we also knew that it wasn't about convincing those in power to do what was right. We needed to show them what actual Philadelphians wanted, and we needed to challenge them to confront the choice that they faced. So we organized public demonstrations, rallies, and packed the board room. We knew that is was about generating escalating pressure on the PRPA.
This isn't a total victory. We were fighting for Southport to be developed as a truly modern shipping terminal, which would have created an estimated 8,000 direct jobs. In a city where 25% of the population lives below the poverty line, choosing to not create those jobs would have been an act of serious negligence. We know that the future we're fighting for needs to be one for everyone, and that means high paying jobs that support our most vulnerable communities.
As climate change accelerates and its effects become more visible year after year, we are still have a lot of work to do to transition away from fossil fuels. But our victory at Southport distills something that we all already knew: We have victories to win, and we have to go out and win them. The battle may not be over, but this is a big step in the right direction to developing a more stable and just future for Philadelphia.


text:
Q: Why don't I get an EF5 Concurrency Error? In the database I'm working on the company keeps track of order numbers for each regional office.  I have a table named [Company] that has a single record for each regional office. This table has a field that holds the next available order number for that office. All orders are created in a single [Order] table. I realized it would be possible for more than one user at a given office to ask for a new order at the same time. I have everything set up for optimistic concurrency. The [Company] table has a column named RowModTracker used for concurrency purposes (see images at bottom for all the  properties in EF and SQL).
In my code below, I get the record for the regional office, increment the field that has the order number and put a copy in a local variable. Then I immediately save off the table. I would expect that if two users hit this method at the same time the first user to save off will get a valid order number. I would expect the second user to save off would get an  optimistic concurrency error and null should be returned (which causes a prompt that asks them to try again). The users tell me that a few times in the last eight months they have indeed gotten orders with the same order number. No messages and no errors happen until later in the process when they go to save the order and the unique constraint on the order number is violated.
I obviously don't understand something fundamental about EF concurrency checking and I'm hoping someone can show me the light. I wrote a test version of GetNextOrderNumberAndUpdate where I wrapped a second using context around the first and it did indeed generate the expected concurrency error. It just doesn't seem to happen when two different clients do it.
 private int? TryToGetNextOrderNumber()
 {
     int? order_number;
      bool keep_trying = true;
      while (keep_trying)
      {
          order_number = _entityManager.GetNextOrderNumberAndUpdate();
          if (order_number != null) return order_number;
          keep_trying = KeepTryingForOrderNumberPrompt();
      }
      return null;
  }

  public int? GetNextOrderNumberAndUpdate()
  {
     try
     {
         using (var db_context = new HotEntities(EntityConnectionString))
         {
              var hss_company = db_context.Companies.Find(HssCompanyInUse.HssCompanyId);
              int? next_order_num = ++hss_company.NextOrderNum;
              db_context.SaveChanges();
              return next_order_num;
          }
       }
       catch (DbUpdateConcurrencyException)
       {
           return null;
       }
       catch (Exception ex)
       {
           return null; //actual code puts out an alert as well
       }
  }

I am using Entity Framework 5 and SQL Server 2008 R2 with .NET 4.5.
Edit
The test version looked like this, I've elided all the try/catch stuff it was the same as above

//Test force a failure
using (HotEntities test_context = new HotEntities(EntityConnectionString))
{
    var test_hss_company = test_context.Companies.Find(HssCompanyInUse.HssCompanyId);
    int? test_next_order_num = ++test_hss_company.NextOrderNum;
    //======= Normal Code ============
    using (var db_context = new HotEntities(EntityConnectionString))
    {
        var hss_company = db_context.Companies.Find(HssCompanyInUse.HssCompanyId);
        var next_order_num = ++hss_company.NextOrderNum;
        db_context.SaveChanges();
        return next_order_num;
    }
    //======= End Normal Code ============

test_context.SaveChanges(); //DbUpdateConcurrencyException exception would get thrown here
} //end for test using

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


The movie "Act of Valor," about our country's brave Navy Seals, did so well at the box office in 2012 that Relativity and The Bandito Brothers are getting ready to do it again. Plans are in the works to film "Act of Valor 2," this time with the focus on elite SWAT officers. For this second film, Scott Wiper ("A Better Way to Die," "The Condemned") will direct. What was it about the first "Act of Valor" that audiences identified with, helping the film do a respectable $70,012,847 in the U.S. alone and $12,484,188 internationally?
It's been talked about for a few years now, but a Road House remake is finally on the way. Side note confession: I never seen the direct-to-video sequel from a few years ago.
This remake is to be directed by Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious) from a screenplay by Michael Stokes.
Ah, hell -- I'll see it.
The original starred Patrick Swayze as a tough-as-nails bouncer know as The Cooler. This type of role for a remake has Jason Statham written all over it. But I'm not too sure I would want to see that movie.
Although the new film Transformers: Age of Extinction is a sequel, it's working on the reboot plane as well. And as with all reboot-sequels, some of the characters get a slight re-design. For example: the new Optimus Prime in this fourth Transformers film.
O-M-G. A release date has finally been set for Dumb and Dumber To -- November 14, 2014!
For those of you who were excited about (or disappointed by) the news of a sequel to It's a Wonderful Life then go ahead and get those thoughts out of your head now. The film was thought to be in public domain, but as it turns out, Paramount still owns any and all rights to the film so any sequel would have to go through them -- which they have absolutely no interest in.
A new photo of Jamie Foxx in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has surfaced. It's been awhile since we've gotten anything new on Amazing Spider-Man 2 so this is better than nothing I suppose -- or equivalent to.
Amazing Spider-Man 2 hits May 2014.
In need of a RoboCop fix? Look no further! The new trailer and poster for the film has been released.


These terms of business set out the general terms under which our firm will provide General Insurance business services to you. It details the respective duties and responsibilities of both the firm and you in relation to such services. Please ensure to read these terms thoroughly and if you have any queries, please contact us at the above address and we will be happy to clarify any questions you may have. If any material changes are made to these terms we will notify you, at the earliest opportunity.
We commit to providing you with an excellent and professional level of service. We believe in acting only in the best interests of our clients to ensure that a relationship as important and fundamental as ours is maintained for life.
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Commonly speaking, not having a wedding ring or band to provide when suggesting to your significant various other is a practice that is frowned upon. For a lot of part, the interaction ring is merely a symbol, which is then changed by the actual wedding event ring. Many pairs pick to maintain the same ring in both situations, therefore it is needed to have a fantastic wedding celebration ring design. Even the simplest of wedding event bands features a little thrive of design these days, which is what one must decide.
Over the years, there are certain wedding ring layout concepts that have come to be the most preferred. Leading these are the ruby rings and also platinum wedding event bands. The various other is to personalize the design as per your preference as well as have a brand brand-new wedding celebration ring. When the option has actually been made, you can begin thinking about layout ideas. It does not matter if you are selecting a prefabricated one as they too can be found in numerous cuts, collections as well as layouts which have to be picked ahead of time. It may not seem very enchanting, but when you see the smile on your companion's face on seeing the flawlessly developed ring; it will definitely be worth all of the effort. Initially, you ought to recognize of the best wedding ring style to get from.
Related Post "Wedding Ring Sets For Bride And Groom"


text:
Aetna-Expo Successfully Take on the Killington Stage Race!
Killington Stage Race Report
By David Hildebrand
The end of May marks the coming of warming weather, sun, and the first stage race in New England. The race takes place over 3 days/3 stages and traverses the mountain area around Killington ski resort in Vermont. Over the last 4-5 years this race has grown into the capstone event of the spring season with teams traveling from all over the country to race.
The three stages include:
A Circuit Race (88.5km) completes 3 loops along U.S. 4, 100a & 100 passing by the Long Trail Brewery and President Calvin Coolidge historical site and provides the most excitement with all three Leaders Jersey's available (Sprint, King of the Mountain and General Classification)
A Road Race (100km) that tackles the biggest hills in the region and finishes at the top of Killington Mountain Ski Lodge. After 67km or rolling terrain and challenging hills Racers turn onto U.S. 4 and climb for 33km straight finishing up the punishing Killington Access Rd. This stage also solidifies the final points competitions for the Leaders in the Sprint and King of the Mountain competitions.
A Time Trial (17.6km) beginning at Long Trail Brewery heading uphill the entire course.
The team headed up to the race with lots of excitement given the opportunity to do our first stage race together and everyone being on good form. Ben would represent the team in the Pro 1-2 field, while Gary, Todd and David would race the competitive Masters field. Misfortune struck on the morning of day one with Gary falling ill with a stomach bug throughout the previous night. Nonetheless, he came out to support the team on day one and contribute significantly to the team's overall success.
Stage one wrapped up with great results putting Todd and David both on the Podium sweeping the Leader's Jerseys for the day; Todd in the King of the Mountain and David in the Sprinters Competition as well as finishing 3rd on the stage. With Gary unable to start the remaining stages, Todd and David continued through the next two stages and successfully retained the Sprinter Leader's Jersey and a top spot for Todd who finsihed 10th overall on general classification!
Overall this race was very satisfying for our team. We set goals way back in January of being in good form for this race and we were able to do that. More importantly we had a lot of fun in the process!
The Killington Stage Race is an amazing venue with challenging competition and an overall great place to bring your family. We look forward to building on our team's success throughout the rest of the race season.