text:
The Aesthetics of Impact
A remake of George A. Romero's film of the same name, Dawn of the Dead is a twofold diminishing returns action film. Firstly, because the body count is so high that one grows weary of the next death, and secondly, because the characters killed are zombies, there is no sense of a life snuffed out – merely a special effect achieved. In the original that wasn't such a problem – half Romero's point lay in the idea that society was zombifying us anyway, and so any sense of humanity was contained within a broader political question. Is Dawn of the Dead, the remake, though, symptomatic of an action genre that no longer has a sense of humanity and tempo not because it wants to contain the human and the narratological within a wider problematic, but because it wants simply visceral thrills at any price; that so insistent becomes the pyrotechnical aspect, that filmic rhythm and human purpose get lost to a crunching, cinematic self-regard?
Examples of skilful cinematic tempo can be found in any number of seventies/early eighties horror/action films, including The Exorcist and Jaws, Alien, The Thing, The Shining and, despite the prioritising of a political agenda, the original Dawn of the Dead. Here tempo dictates action, with the filmmakers pacing their works rather like musical pieces with a variety of moods and rhythms. An action scene thus works like a crescendo, but it needs quieter moments to determine the heightened aspect. However, tempo needn't only require musical analogies; we can also understand it through the contrast of the human and the non-human.
Now what we mean by the human here is the characters, and their relationship with each other. This doesn't require the most evolved psychology, but perhaps it needs to be human enough to contrast with the inhumanity surrounding the situation. In Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, the human moments are what we'll call precursory: that is, they have a human significance before the event, but almost no significance after it. Precursory humanity in Dawn of the Dead includes of course central character Sarah Polley's husband and child. As she returns home from her tough job as a nurse, she takes a shower with her hubby and we're shown a loving, happy family. Moments later the daughter comes into the bedroom with blood drooling down her mouth, takes a chunk out of daddy's neck, and, as Polley's husband becomes a zombie, survival quickly becomes the priority. This is perfectly understandable: she has no time to reflect on the fact that she's just lost her husband and child, because action must take precedence over reflection. The human must give way to the non-human. This is the objective in relation to the object: Polley must objectify the world surrounding her if she's to achieve her objective of escaping with her life. But should the subjective not return in relation to the subjects who've just been removed from her life once the objective has been achieved? Shouldn't Polley then realize the enormity of the situation, and the film accept that this crisis becomes part of her psychological make-up thereafter, just as the filmic world, now radically altered from generally human to generally zombie, should show the impact of instant sociological change?
Now some might insist that we're using a very large hammer to crack a very small nut, but if we take Dawn of the Dead to be symptomatically useful, and also take into account its sociological veneer where the opening credits run through various archival scenes of social breakdown, maybe one isn't protesting too much. Is it, finally, just yet another film working loosely within Geoff King's notion of impact aesthetics, explored in New Hollywood Cinema and elsewhere, and David Bordwell's idea of intensified continuity, anlaysed in The Way Hollywood Tells It? Does it want endless visceral impact and intensity? If so, maybe it's quite apt that we're going to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut: it's in keeping with the hyperbolic nature of the films themselves.
What we really want to discuss here though is whether the films really have much of a nut to crack; is there some underlying principle at work that demands the pyrotechnics? If we look at Dawn of the Dead's very impressive credit sequence we might think the film's an apocalyptic take on society's downfall. Combining Johnny Cash's lyrics of society's areligious decline and fall with archival and archival style images of social collapse, the film seems to have something at stake. Maybe we could accept the precursory humanity if it gave way to a societal collapse that made the individual crises irrelevant to the broader despair. Sure, Polley's husband and daughter are dead – or more specifically zombified – but it's apocalypse now. There can be no retrospective humanity because the very society human-ness predicates itself upon has collapsed. It would be like worrying about a snagged nail when you're leg's been torn from its socket.
But Dawn of the Dead has little interest in an apocalyptic, post-human psychology; like many impact aesthetic films, it has little interest in imagining a fully evolved world so suddenly different from our own, but instead in utilising special effects as an adjunct to telling a conventional story. In this sense Bordwell's absolutely right when he says, in The Way Hollywood Tells It, "what some call "postclassical" filmmaking needn't be anticlassical filmmaking." It's just that they've taken to much greater heights what Susan Sontag in an essay on fifties science fiction films, 'The Imagination of Disaster', called "sensuous elaboration". Here Sontag differentiates between the sci-fi novel and the sci-film, saying "compared with the science fiction novels, their film counterparts have unique strengths, one of which is the immediate representation of the extraordinary: physical deformity and mutation, missile and rocket combat, toppling skyscrapers…"
However, can this sensuous elaboration in-itself prove to be at the same time cinema's weakness? For example, Speed is undeniably an impressive piece of sensuous elaboration as Sontag defines it, and there are numerous scenes in the film appropriate for cinematic tension. There is the scene at the beginning of the film where a lift falls through a shaft and the central character and his buddy determine to save the lives of all the lift's occupants. As the film busily crosscuts between the occupants and their saviours, the Dolby sound captures every lurch and every scream. It's a wonderful example of the ontology of film: what other form could achieve such vivid re-enactment?
Now this still complies to an urgent sensuous elaboration, but what about scenes that are certainly ontologically cinematic, but pass for redundant sensuous elaboration? There is a scene later on in Speed, just after all the passengers have managed to escape the bus that will blow up if it happens to go below fifty miles an hour, and the empty bus careers into an empty airplane, creating a huge explosion the film insists on viewing from multiple angles. What makes this redundant sensuous elaboration is that it is quite literally simple spectacle. It's as though the bus is a remotely controlled toy the idle child allows to crash into something for the simple pleasure of watching destruction. There is nothing human at stake here.
David Thomson, in an essay on Screen Violence, called 'Explosions', says "In the practice of filmmaking, explosions have become a sport and a craft – nearly a cult…crews love those moments when care relaxes and they can blast order to hell." And the crew's love of explosion is mimicked by the audience: "In life we agonise over a scratch on our car or a leak in the roof. Those nagging bourgeois longings for wholeness and tidiness inspire a demon of resentment that is itching to breakout in a riot of mayhem, the lovely innocent plenty of ruin." Here Thomson suggests that even redundant sensuous elaboration has its purpose, but the way Thomson describes it, it seems almost non-diegetically resentful, as if we're thrown out of the thrust of the film for a moment of reflection on our own hemmed in existence. Thus a scene like the empty bus careering into an empty plane doesn't need anything at stake because its purpose lies less in diegetic purposefulness than non-diegetic resentfulness.
Is there something similar going on in Dawn of the Dead? That just as we can have action without consequence; can we not have death without meaning? Though the zombie tradition is "an integral part of the religious beliefs that dominated the island [of Haiti]", according to Jamie Russell in Book of the Dead, few zombie films care to explore the sociology of the zombie; taking into account the odd, and hardly anthropological, exception like Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow. Certainly Snyder has no interest in its anthropological routes, and it is perhaps partly this social disembodiment that allows for a further disembodiment of lost lives that are meaningless; empty signifiers of destruction like the bus and the plane in Speed. Both Dawn of the Dead and Speed are examples of impact aesthetics, but it's an impact aesthetics that relies on the quality of the effects over the capacity for emotional engagement.
So maybe we need another term for an impact aesthetic that has, as Geoff King would say, an impact on the body as visceral response in the viewer, but could also suggest a visceral impact in relation to the human being on screen. We could call it an aesthetics of impact, where the filmmaker tries to find, say, out of narrative event, casting against type, or working against moral expectation, a sense of shock and surprise in the viewer that isn't just a kind of hyperbolised Pavlovianism. Examples that come to mind include the child's death at the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West, Kevin Spacey being shot in LA Confidential, Matt Damon's son drowning in Syriana, 'love interest' Maria Bello being shot in the remake of Assault on Precinct 13, and the child eating ice cream in the original. We might also think of Scorsese's remake of The Departed, where two scenes – Martin Sheen's death, the shooting in the lift near the end – have of course been lifted directly from the Hong Kong original Infernal Affairs, but Scorsese brilliantly combines abrupt narrative shifts and brutal visceral impact simultaneously and dovetails immediate impact aesthetics with an aesthetics of impact. All these instances rely less on the quality of the special effect, than the emotional after-effect, however brief. In each instance we have not just a precursory humanity, but also, at the very least, a moment of posthumous recognition. When we compare even a human death – let alone a Zombie death – in Dawn of the Dead, the difference is pronounced. Early in the film, just after her husband and daughter have been zombified, Polley's character wanders outside and her neighbour warns her not to come close. As he speaks, an ambulance trundles past and another life's carelessly and un-empathically lost.
Now this isn't to insist that all action-oriented films need to create an aesthetics of impact over an impact aesthetics. But we might wonder if special effects prove so often to be a diminishing returns issue, does it lie in the technological advancement countering narrative and characterisational options? A couple of films that work this balance quite well are Alien and The Thing. In each instance, the directors work from character and atmosphere to the effect. Each film has the components of a stage play allied to the advanced design by H. R. Giger in Alien, the 70mm widescreen atmosphere of the Antarctic in The Thing. Critics like Kim Newman, in Nightmare Movies, may believe that each film insists on characters acting illogically for the purposes of the through-line of action suspense, but there is a carefully worked mood in each film. They know that the effects aren't simply special effects, but shock effects as Hitchcock might define them.
Now, as we'll see, these effects may not demand the type of anticipation Hitchcock would talk about when defining the difference between terror and forewarning. In an article on 'The Enjoyment of Fear' Hitchcock says, "terror is induced by surprise; suspense by forewarning. Let us suppose to make all this clear, that our plot is concerned with a married woman residing in Manhattan and engaged in amorous dalliance with a young cad." Hitchcock says there are two ways to play it. One approach would focus so exclusively on the lovers that when the husband bursts through the door it takes the audience and the lovers completely by surprise. The second approach would cross-cut between the couple and the husband who's not out of town as the couple suspect, but back in New York and approaching home. The filmmaker constantly cross-cuts, and the audience suspensefully wonders whether the husband will catch the couple in the act or not. But in atmospheric films like Alien and The Thing, we have a low-key build up of atmosphere that works suspense by other means. Not by cross-cutting, but by silence and solitariness. Where in Dawn of the Dead noise and music rarely let up except for a couple of seconds before the moment of terror – evidenced for example in an early scene where Polley hides behind the bathroom door, and her zombified husband head-butts a hole through it as he tries to break in, The Thing works for a much longer term effect. It isn't exactly looking for the sort of existential dread that would be closer to portent, an inexplicable ineffable insecurity of existence, but it is searching out a sense of tension that comprehends the enormity of the situation. It's as if John Carpenter's film could have been called The…Thing, with the director creating a cinematic hesitancy towards this shape-shifting creature, a creature that can mimic all life forms. What Carpenter's film generally refuses to do is reduce the Antarctic environment, the characters and the monster merely to action exigencies. Newman, in Nightmare Movies, was right to say "Carpenter handles a few quietly uneasy scenes as the characters try to put off any action by talking through their insoluble problem…" and it's in the characters' discussion and the insoluble problem that the film works its fear. In a way, indeed, that's a healthy inversion of Dawn of the Dead.
Where in Snyder's film we have characters whom Polley cares about but the audience does not, in The Thing we have to some degree the opposite: characters that care little about each other but characters whom the director nevertheless details. And where Dawn of the Dead, after its brilliant credit sequence, normalizes the zombie by the characters' pragmatic reaction to it, in The Thing Carpenter determinedly wants to hold to the extraordinary problem this sleeping ugly presents, and the moral questions therein. Hence, central character Kurt Russell and co don't want just to re-freeze the monster, for to do so there will then be the possibility that it will once more wreak havoc in the future. Thus, as the characters offer the sort of future tense moral arguments we expect from eco warriors protecting the planet in the present for generations in the future, they decide they need to get rid of it altogether; to burn it out – the one thing that can kill it is intense heat. If Carpenter's film is more aesthetics of impact over impact aesthetics, it resides in the need to create evolved characters; they may have no great humanity towards each other, but the audience has a modicum of humanity for them. The aesthetics of impact also resides in a sense of portent that keeps the monster's enormity present without quickly reducing it to special effects ingenuity
So what we've been moving towards here is a notion of an aesthetics of impact over impact aesthetics. How can filmmakers utilise elements that have ostensibly nothing to do with the design of impact aesthetics; but that nevertheless very much impact upon an audience? It is perhaps the difference between a positivist aesthetic insistence that the effect be evidential; against an effect that is suggestive and thus harder to pin down. In both Jaws and The Exorcist, in The Shining and Dawn of the Dead, Spielberg and Friedkin, and Kubrick and Romero, of course don't completely negate the special effect, but they do contain it – they contain it within a broader disturbance that allows the effect to possess an uncanny sense. Thus the filmmakers aren't so much interested in ruptured normality, with the special effect of awe-struck terror countering the normal, but a special effect that seems to come out of the subtle abnormality of the environment. Here the special effect doesn't do all the work; it contributes to the work already done by the aesthetics of impact elements that cover anything from the use of sound, camera positioning, and the slightly unhinged social or familial context.
It's this sense of a special effect coming out of an, if you like, special environment, that interests Kubrick in The Shining. Early in the film, after Jack Nicholson's character has got the job looking after a top hotel over the winter period, his son back home asks his imaginary friend why the imaginary friend is keen not to go. The friend won't explain, but then Kubrick cuts to a series of shots, including a scene where we see blood pouring out of a lift and all over the hotel carpet. Something happened years ago at the hotel, we've earlier been informed, but at this stage young Danny doesn't know this. Kubrick cuts to what might be past events, what might be Danny's imagination, but the scene lacks the certitude of narrative purpose and the moments are as much inexplicable as explanatory. What we have here is a fairly low-key impact aesthetic sequence of blood flooding the hotel floor, but the uncanny sense of indiscernibility robbing the scene of the certitude of an awe-inspired response.
What we so often have with impact aesthetic moments is an epistemologically certain set of events allied to a moment of technologically or pyrotechnically breathtaking action. In anything from Speed to the remake of Dawn of the Dead, little attempt is made to generate an underlying tension which cannot be dispelled by the effect. Thus, we notice in films like Independence Day and Armageddon – films that deal with nothing less than the possible destruction of the planet – that they want to banalise the surrounding events to emphasise the contrast between people getting on with their lives, and lives promptly destroyed by moments of impact. Kubrick wants much more to channel the special effect through unease, so that the effect is an exacerbation of mood, not a countering of it.
One way to explain this is to look at tangible versus intangible fear, or rather fear versus dread. Dread and the uncanny are often intangible states that cannot quite find their form – this is partly what makes them so 'dread-ful' and partly what Kubrick and Friedkin want to tap into. They want the tangible effects attached to a wider 'dread-fulness'. Thus the effect works as no more than the explication of the dread, the justification for the dread, without in any way dispelling it. If we look again at the lift sequence early on in The Shining (though repeated later), we notice the scene isn't there to 'awe' us but to disturb us. Now when using the term 'awe' what we mean really is a combination of the startle effect as Robert Baird defines it in an article of the same name in Film Quarterly (where we're brought up short by a moment of intense surprise) combined with a sense of pacified impressiveness at the special effects work. It's a bit like Thomson's idea quoted above where we're diegetically terrorised and also non-diegetically impressed. It is even as if the non-diegetic compensates, maybe dilutes, the startle, as the awareness of ingenuity almost coincides with the impact.
This is not what Kubrick is looking for, nor, generally the other filmmakers of an aesthetics of impact. In Kubrick, Carpenter, Friedkin and to some degree Ridley Scott in Alien, the awe, the awe defined by the dictionary as "an emotion compounded by dread", rather than the "awe compounded by wonder" (Longman) needs to be greater than the special effect, not contained by it. Hence, at the end of The Shining, the film contains a haunted feeling that comes not from the effects but from the atmosphere the location generates. By the end of the film Kubrick manages to work a far higher degree of disquiet out of a picture of Jack Nicholson's character working as a bar tender at the Overlook Hotel sixty years earlier than he does out of more conventional suspense moments, like the one where the summer caretaker comes back to the hotel in the middle of winter when he knows something's gone wrong, and promptly gets killed as he arrives at the hotel. Whenever Kubrick works conventional suspense, startle moments or impacts aesthetics, the scenes seem weak next to the uncanny ones – suggesting Kubrick is much more, finally, a filmmaker of an aesthetics of impact over an impact aesthetic. After all, the latter tends to work best off the startle and special effects combined.
In Baird's article, one of the examples he gives of a great startle moment is the head popping out of the hull of the boat in Jaws. Now this undeniably fits with impact aesthetics in terms of the quality of its startle. It's easily more effective than the startle moments in The Shining, like the moment when Nicholson's wife comes across the caretaker's dead body, and might lead us to think that Spielberg is a filmmaker of impact aesthetics over aesthetics of impact. Yet we should remember that though Jaws is famous for its shark soundtrack, it also works extremely well with lengthy passages of quietly atmospheric music that can lead to the startle. So in the scene where Richard Dreyfuss discovers the cadaver, sure there is music leading up to the moment of terror, but this isn't the sort of music that demands nerve crunching sounds and an over the top score to create terror in the wake of it, but that allows for just a slight upping of the ante. It still wants to work within a subdued sound-sphere rather than an agitated sound-sphere: it still wants us to hear hushed voices, domestic sounds and the breeze on the sea. In films like Speed, Independence Day and Armageddon, it's as if everything has to be hyperbolized as the film creates a strident sound envorinment.
Now we might say that in films of fear there has always been the imaginary and the real. That is, imaginary in the sense, as Slavoj Zizek puts it in The Obscene Object of Post Modernity, "instead of directly showing the terrifying monster (vampire, murderous beast), its presence is indicated only by means of off-screen sounds, by shadows, and so on and thus rendered all the more horrible," and real in the sense of realizing the monster instead of expecting us just to imagine it. (Jaws, interestingly, is probably better here with the imagination than the realization.) But now in many a spectacle film we don't so much have the imaginary and the real, as the two subsumed into the hyper-real – into the hyperbolic that demands ever more concern for the exaggerated.
But, as we've proposed, with less of the human at stake. Now we're not especially asking for the real to be eschewed for the imaginary, but just that the two can work in conjunction, without an overly emphatic hyper-real imposing itself on the film to the detriment of character, narrative and ethos. In an aesthetics of impact, all three are finally more significant than the special effects, and can allow for the diminishing return of the ever more elaborate pyrotechnics (which of course needn't be eschewed), to be contained by the threefold aspects mentioned above. Now a fine example of this aesthetics of impact can be found in a film as far away from impact aesthetics as we're likely to find: Alan Clarke's low-budget, made for television film, The Firm. This short feature on London football fans constantly looking for a ruckus, works its moment of impact on the basis that the violence be administered by knives, razor blades, broken bottles and baseball bats. Yet near the end of the film what happens is that the central character, played by Gary Oldman, gets blown away with a shotgun by an opposing gang member. It is a brilliant example of bringing a gun into a film when we least expect it, and gaining maximum impact from its use. It also conforms to the threefold purpose of the action film (which incorporates horror, thriller etc) we've proposed: that it respects character, narrative and ethos. Now of course most people would say that The Firm is hardly an action film, and yet louder, bigger action movies can learn a lot from a work ostensibly belonging to sociological cinema (closer to Mike Leigh and Ken Loach) in looking at its specifics, at the way it justifies its action sequences.
Let's look briefly, for example, at its use of suspense and surprise as Hitchcock so famously defined them in his dictum: terror by surprise, suspense by forewarning. Clarke works with both. Now he doesn't generate suspense mechanically – not through say cutting from a dangerous object like a knife or a gun that will lead to inevitable violence. There isn't the sort of cause and effect we take for granted in a film where it will cut, say to a pot of boiling water as the baddie grapples with the heroine. And where we know that soon she will have to resort to that boiling pot, and thus the film builds suspense as we wonder whether she'll be able to reach the stove before the baddie. No, in Clarke's film it is much more socio-politically integrated and slow-burning than that. Here Oldman's central character has a habit of leaving sundry fighting items around. One of these happens to be a razor blade, and there's a scene where his young daughter finds it lying in the sitting room and decides to chew on it: ripping her mouth to shreds before her parents discover what she's doing. This is the sort of forewarned suspense that is barely forewarned at all. It isn't mechanically inevitable, but sociologically plausible. It wants to create an environment of forewarning; not the inevitability of an action to come.
If that takes care of suspense, albeit reconfigured; then what about terror, or shock? Here we can return to the moment of Oldman's death. We cannot see it coming because it isn't sociologically forewarned: there is nothing in the milieu to suggest somebody will pull a gun out and kill someone instantly. In this sense Clarke's use of shock is almost equal to Hitchcock's in Psycho, in the death of Marion Crane, but possesses a more obvious socio-political purpose. It's as though Clarke's refusing to play the game that he's set up narratively – which is really about rival football gangs getting their kicks every weekend with a bit of aggro – and suddenly replaces it with a new set of rules. But while this in some ways cheats the audience; it does so purposefully rather than emptily. It changes the rules not because it is a game, which would suggest of course cheating, but because it isn't. The characters may think they're playing a game, but Clarke is at pains to indicate they're not, and utilises Hitchcockian tension and surprise to throw us back into some notion of a real world.
What we've been proposing here, then, are ways in which recent filmmakers can learn from genre masters of the past, directors who transcend the genre boundaries, or who utilise generic elements without actually working in 'genre' at all. This allows for options within shock, terror, suspense and audience manipulation without resorting necessarily to intensifying continuity and impact aesthetics, and allow special effects to play once again their dutiful role as bridesmaids and not brides.
A remake of George A. Romero's film of the same name, Dawn of the Dead is a twofold diminishing returns action film. Firstly, because the body count is so high that one grows weary of the next death, and secondly, because the characters killed are zombies, there is no sense of a life snuffed out - merely a special effect achieved. In the original that wasn't such a problem - half Romero's point lay in the idea that society was zombifying us anyway, and so any sense of humanity was contained within a broader political question. Is Dawn of the Dead, the remake, though, symptomatic of an action genre that no longer has a sense of humanity and tempo not because it wants to contain the human and the narratological within a wider problematic, but because it wants simply visceral thrills at any price; that so insistent becomes the pyrotechnical aspect, that filmic rhythm and human purpose get lost to a crunching, cinematic self-regard?
Examples of skilful cinematic tempo can be found in any number of seventies/early eighties horror/action films, including The Exorcist and Jaws, Alien, The Thing, The Shining and, despite the prioritising of a political agenda, the original Dawn of the Dead. Here tempo dictates action, with the filmmakers pacing their works rather like musical pieces with a variety of moods and rhythms. An action scene thus works like a crescendo, but it needs quieter moments to determine the heightened aspect. However, tempo needn't only require musical analogies; we can also understand it through the contrast of the human and the non-human.
Now what we mean by the human here is the characters, and their relationship with each other. This doesn't require the most evolved psychology, but perhaps it needs to be human enough to contrast with the inhumanity surrounding the situation. In Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, the human moments are what we'll call precursory: that is, they have a human significance before the event, but almost no significance after it. Precursory humanity in Dawn of the Dead includes of course central character Sarah Polley's husband and child. As she returns home from her tough job as a nurse, she takes a shower with her hubby and we're shown a loving, happy family. Moments later the daughter comes into the bedroom with blood drooling down her mouth, takes a chunk out of daddy's neck, and, as Polley's husband becomes a zombie, survival quickly becomes the priority. This is perfectly understandable: she has no time to reflect on the fact that she's just lost her husband and child, because action must take precedence over reflection. The human must give way to the non-human. This is the objective in relation to the object: Polley must objectify the world surrounding her if she's to achieve her objective of escaping with her life. But should the subjective not return in relation to the subjects who've just been removed from her life once the objective has been achieved? Shouldn't Polley then realize the enormity of the situation, and the film accept that this crisis becomes part of her psychological make-up thereafter, just as the filmic world, now radically altered from generally human to generally zombie, should show the impact of instant sociological change?
Now some might insist that we're using a very large hammer to crack a very small nut, but if we take Dawn of the Dead to be symptomatically useful, and also take into account its sociological veneer where the opening credits run through various archival scenes of social breakdown, maybe one isn't protesting too much. Is it, finally, just yet another film working loosely within Geoff King's notion of impact aesthetics, explored in New Hollywood Cinema and elsewhere, and David Bordwell's idea of intensified continuity, anlaysed in The Way Hollywood Tells It? Does it want endless visceral impact and intensity? If so, maybe it's quite apt that we're going to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut: it's in keeping with the hyperbolic nature of the films themselves.
What we really want to discuss here though is whether the films really have much of a nut to crack; is there some underlying principle at work that demands the pyrotechnics? If we look at Dawn of the Dead's very impressive credit sequence we might think the film's an apocalyptic take on society's downfall. Combining Johnny Cash's lyrics of society's areligious decline and fall with archival and archival style images of social collapse, the film seems to have something at stake. Maybe we could accept the precursory humanity if it gave way to a societal collapse that made the individual crises irrelevant to the broader despair. Sure, Polley's husband and daughter are dead - or more specifically zombified - but it's apocalypse now. There can be no retrospective humanity because the very society human-ness predicates itself upon has collapsed. It would be like worrying about a snagged nail when you're leg's been torn from its socket.
But Dawn of the Dead has little interest in an apocalyptic, post-human psychology; like many impact aesthetic films, it has little interest in imagining a fully evolved world so suddenly different from our own, but instead in utilising special effects as an adjunct to telling a conventional story. In this sense Bordwell's absolutely right when he says, in The Way Hollywood Tells It, "what some call "postclassical" filmmaking needn't be anticlassical filmmaking." It's just that they've taken to much greater heights what Susan Sontag in an essay on fifties science fiction films, 'The Imagination of Disaster', called "sensuous elaboration". Here Sontag differentiates between the sci-fi novel and the sci-film, saying "compared with the science fiction novels, their film counterparts have unique strengths, one of which is the immediate representation of the extraordinary: physical deformity and mutation, missile and rocket combat, toppling skyscrapers..."
However, can this sensuous elaboration in-itself prove to be at the same time cinema's weakness? For example, Speed is undeniably an impressive piece of sensuous elaboration as Sontag defines it, and there are numerous scenes in the film appropriate for cinematic tension. There is the scene at the beginning of the film where a lift falls through a shaft and the central character and his buddy determine to save the lives of all the lift's occupants. As the film busily crosscuts between the occupants and their saviours, the Dolby sound captures every lurch and every scream. It's a wonderful example of the ontology of film: what other form could achieve such vivid re-enactment?
Now this still complies to an urgent sensuous elaboration, but what about scenes that are certainly ontologically cinematic, but pass for redundant sensuous elaboration? There is a scene later on in Speed, just after all the passengers have managed to escape the bus that will blow up if it happens to go below fifty miles an hour, and the empty bus careers into an empty airplane, creating a huge explosion the film insists on viewing from multiple angles. What makes this redundant sensuous elaboration is that it is quite literally simple spectacle. It's as though the bus is a remotely controlled toy the idle child allows to crash into something for the simple pleasure of watching destruction. There is nothing human at stake here.
David Thomson, in an essay on Screen Violence, called 'Explosions', says "In the practice of filmmaking, explosions have become a sport and a craft - nearly a cult...crews love those moments when care relaxes and they can blast order to hell." And the crew's love of explosion is mimicked by the audience: "In life we agonise over a scratch on our car or a leak in the roof. Those nagging bourgeois longings for wholeness and tidiness inspire a demon of resentment that is itching to breakout in a riot of mayhem, the lovely innocent plenty of ruin." Here Thomson suggests that even redundant sensuous elaboration has its purpose, but the way Thomson describes it, it seems almost non-diegetically resentful, as if we're thrown out of the thrust of the film for a moment of reflection on our own hemmed in existence. Thus a scene like the empty bus careering into an empty plane doesn't need anything at stake because its purpose lies less in diegetic purposefulness than non-diegetic resentfulness.
Is there something similar going on in Dawn of the Dead? That just as we can have action without consequence; can we not have death without meaning? Though the zombie tradition is "an integral part of the religious beliefs that dominated the island [of Haiti]", according to Jamie Russell in Book of the Dead, few zombie films care to explore the sociology of the zombie; taking into account the odd, and hardly anthropological, exception like Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow. Certainly Snyder has no interest in its anthropological routes, and it is perhaps partly this social disembodiment that allows for a further disembodiment of lost lives that are meaningless; empty signifiers of destruction like the bus and the plane in Speed. Both Dawn of the Dead and Speed are examples of impact aesthetics, but it's an impact aesthetics that relies on the quality of the effects over the capacity for emotional engagement.
So maybe we need another term for an impact aesthetic that has, as Geoff King would say, an impact on the body as visceral response in the viewer, but could also suggest a visceral impact in relation to the human being on screen. We could call it an aesthetics of impact, where the filmmaker tries to find, say, out of narrative event, casting against type, or working against moral expectation, a sense of shock and surprise in the viewer that isn't just a kind of hyperbolised Pavlovianism. Examples that come to mind include the child's death at the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West, Kevin Spacey being shot in LA Confidential, Matt Damon's son drowning in Syriana, 'love interest' Maria Bello being shot in the remake of Assault on Precinct 13, and the child eating ice cream in the original. We might also think of Scorsese's remake of The Departed, where two scenes - Martin Sheen's death, the shooting in the lift near the end - have of course been lifted directly from the Hong Kong original Infernal Affairs, but Scorsese brilliantly combines abrupt narrative shifts and brutal visceral impact simultaneously and dovetails immediate impact aesthetics with an aesthetics of impact. All these instances rely less on the quality of the special effect, than the emotional after-effect, however brief. In each instance we have not just a precursory humanity, but also, at the very least, a moment of posthumous recognition. When we compare even a human death - let alone a Zombie death - in Dawn of the Dead, the difference is pronounced. Early in the film, just after her husband and daughter have been zombified, Polley's character wanders outside and her neighbour warns her not to come close. As he speaks, an ambulance trundles past and another life's carelessly and un-empathically lost.
Now this isn't to insist that all action-oriented films need to create an aesthetics of impact over an impact aesthetics. But we might wonder if special effects prove so often to be a diminishing returns issue, does it lie in the technological advancement countering narrative and characterisational options? A couple of films that work this balance quite well are Alien and The Thing. In each instance, the directors work from character and atmosphere to the effect. Each film has the components of a stage play allied to the advanced design by H. R. Giger in Alien, the 70mm widescreen atmosphere of the Antarctic in The Thing. Critics like Kim Newman, in Nightmare Movies, may believe that each film insists on characters acting illogically for the purposes of the through-line of action suspense, but there is a carefully worked mood in each film. They know that the effects aren't simply special effects, but shock effects as Hitchcock might define them.
Now, as we'll see, these effects may not demand the type of anticipation Hitchcock would talk about when defining the difference between terror and forewarning. In an article on 'The Enjoyment of Fear' Hitchcock says, "terror is induced by surprise; suspense by forewarning. Let us suppose to make all this clear, that our plot is concerned with a married woman residing in Manhattan and engaged in amorous dalliance with a young cad." Hitchcock says there are two ways to play it. One approach would focus so exclusively on the lovers that when the husband bursts through the door it takes the audience and the lovers completely by surprise. The second approach would cross-cut between the couple and the husband who's not out of town as the couple suspect, but back in New York and approaching home. The filmmaker constantly cross-cuts, and the audience suspensefully wonders whether the husband will catch the couple in the act or not. But in atmospheric films like Alien and The Thing, we have a low-key build up of atmosphere that works suspense by other means. Not by cross-cutting, but by silence and solitariness. Where in Dawn of the Dead noise and music rarely let up except for a couple of seconds before the moment of terror - evidenced for example in an early scene where Polley hides behind the bathroom door, and her zombified husband head-butts a hole through it as he tries to break in, The Thing works for a much longer term effect. It isn't exactly looking for the sort of existential dread that would be closer to portent, an inexplicable ineffable insecurity of existence, but it is searching out a sense of tension that comprehends the enormity of the situation. It's as if John Carpenter's film could have been called The...Thing, with the director creating a cinematic hesitancy towards this shape-shifting creature, a creature that can mimic all life forms. What Carpenter's film generally refuses to do is reduce the Antarctic environment, the characters and the monster merely to action exigencies. Newman, in Nightmare Movies, was right to say "Carpenter handles a few quietly uneasy scenes as the characters try to put off any action by talking through their insoluble problem..." and it's in the characters' discussion and the insoluble problem that the film works its fear. In a way, indeed, that's a healthy inversion of Dawn of the Dead.
Where in Snyder's film we have characters whom Polley cares about but the audience does not, in The Thing we have to some degree the opposite: characters that care little about each other but characters whom the director nevertheless details. And where Dawn of the Dead, after its brilliant credit sequence, normalizes the zombie by the characters' pragmatic reaction to it, in The Thing Carpenter determinedly wants to hold to the extraordinary problem this sleeping ugly presents, and the moral questions therein. Hence, central character Kurt Russell and co don't want just to re-freeze the monster, for to do so there will then be the possibility that it will once more wreak havoc in the future. Thus, as the characters offer the sort of future tense moral arguments we expect from eco warriors protecting the planet in the present for generations in the future, they decide they need to get rid of it altogether; to burn it out - the one thing that can kill it is intense heat. If Carpenter's film is more aesthetics of impact over impact aesthetics, it resides in the need to create evolved characters; they may have no great humanity towards each other, but the audience has a modicum of humanity for them. The aesthetics of impact also resides in a sense of portent that keeps the monster's enormity present without quickly reducing it to special effects ingenuity
So what we've been moving towards here is a notion of an aesthetics of impact over impact aesthetics. How can filmmakers utilise elements that have ostensibly nothing to do with the design of impact aesthetics; but that nevertheless very much impact upon an audience? It is perhaps the difference between a positivist aesthetic insistence that the effect be evidential; against an effect that is suggestive and thus harder to pin down. In both Jaws and The Exorcist, in The Shining and Dawn of the Dead, Spielberg and Friedkin, and Kubrick and Romero, of course don't completely negate the special effect, but they do contain it - they contain it within a broader disturbance that allows the effect to possess an uncanny sense. Thus the filmmakers aren't so much interested in ruptured normality, with the special effect of awe-struck terror countering the normal, but a special effect that seems to come out of the subtle abnormality of the environment. Here the special effect doesn't do all the work; it contributes to the work already done by the aesthetics of impact elements that cover anything from the use of sound, camera positioning, and the slightly unhinged social or familial context.
It's this sense of a special effect coming out of an, if you like, special environment, that interests Kubrick in The Shining. Early in the film, after Jack Nicholson's character has got the job looking after a top hotel over the winter period, his son back home asks his imaginary friend why the imaginary friend is keen not to go. The friend won't explain, but then Kubrick cuts to a series of shots, including a scene where we see blood pouring out of a lift and all over the hotel carpet. Something happened years ago at the hotel, we've earlier been informed, but at this stage young Danny doesn't know this. Kubrick cuts to what might be past events, what might be Danny's imagination, but the scene lacks the certitude of narrative purpose and the moments are as much inexplicable as explanatory. What we have here is a fairly low-key impact aesthetic sequence of blood flooding the hotel floor, but the uncanny sense of indiscernibility robbing the scene of the certitude of an awe-inspired response.
What we so often have with impact aesthetic moments is an epistemologically certain set of events allied to a moment of technologically or pyrotechnically breathtaking action. In anything from Speed to the remake of Dawn of the Dead, little attempt is made to generate an underlying tension which cannot be dispelled by the effect. Thus, we notice in films like Independence Day and Armageddon - films that deal with nothing less than the possible destruction of the planet - that they want to banalise the surrounding events to emphasise the contrast between people getting on with their lives, and lives promptly destroyed by moments of impact. Kubrick wants much more to channel the special effect through unease, so that the effect is an exacerbation of mood, not a countering of it.
One way to explain this is to look at tangible versus intangible fear, or rather fear versus dread. Dread and the uncanny are often intangible states that cannot quite find their form - this is partly what makes them so 'dread-ful' and partly what Kubrick and Friedkin want to tap into. They want the tangible effects attached to a wider 'dread-fulness'. Thus the effect works as no more than the explication of the dread, the justification for the dread, without in any way dispelling it. If we look again at the lift sequence early on in The Shining (though repeated later), we notice the scene isn't there to 'awe' us but to disturb us. Now when using the term 'awe' what we mean really is a combination of the startle effect as Robert Baird defines it in an article of the same name in Film Quarterly (where we're brought up short by a moment of intense surprise) combined with a sense of pacified impressiveness at the special effects work. It's a bit like Thomson's idea quoted above where we're diegetically terrorised and also non-diegetically impressed. It is even as if the non-diegetic compensates, maybe dilutes, the startle, as the awareness of ingenuity almost coincides with the impact.
This is not what Kubrick is looking for, nor, generally the other filmmakers of an aesthetics of impact. In Kubrick, Carpenter, Friedkin and to some degree Ridley Scott in Alien, the awe, the awe defined by the dictionary as "an emotion compounded by dread", rather than the "awe compounded by wonder" (Longman) needs to be greater than the special effect, not contained by it. Hence, at the end of The Shining, the film contains a haunted feeling that comes not from the effects but from the atmosphere the location generates. By the end of the film Kubrick manages to work a far higher degree of disquiet out of a picture of Jack Nicholson's character working as a bar tender at the Overlook Hotel sixty years earlier than he does out of more conventional suspense moments, like the one where the summer caretaker comes back to the hotel in the middle of winter when he knows something's gone wrong, and promptly gets killed as he arrives at the hotel. Whenever Kubrick works conventional suspense, startle moments or impacts aesthetics, the scenes seem weak next to the uncanny ones - suggesting Kubrick is much more, finally, a filmmaker of an aesthetics of impact over an impact aesthetic. After all, the latter tends to work best off the startle and special effects combined.
In Baird's article, one of the examples he gives of a great startle moment is the head popping out of the hull of the boat in Jaws. Now this undeniably fits with impact aesthetics in terms of the quality of its startle. It's easily more effective than the startle moments in The Shining, like the moment when Nicholson's wife comes across the caretaker's dead body, and might lead us to think that Spielberg is a filmmaker of impact aesthetics over aesthetics of impact. Yet we should remember that though Jaws is famous for its shark soundtrack, it also works extremely well with lengthy passages of quietly atmospheric music that can lead to the startle. So in the scene where Richard Dreyfuss discovers the cadaver, sure there is music leading up to the moment of terror, but this isn't the sort of music that demands nerve crunching sounds and an over the top score to create terror in the wake of it, but that allows for just a slight upping of the ante. It still wants to work within a subdued sound-sphere rather than an agitated sound-sphere: it still wants us to hear hushed voices, domestic sounds and the breeze on the sea. In films like Speed, Independence Day and Armageddon, it's as if everything has to be hyperbolized as the film creates a strident sound envorinment.
Now we might say that in films of fear there has always been the imaginary and the real. That is, imaginary in the sense, as Slavoj Zizek puts it in The Obscene Object of Post Modernity, "instead of directly showing the terrifying monster (vampire, murderous beast), its presence is indicated only by means of off-screen sounds, by shadows, and so on and thus rendered all the more horrible," and real in the sense of realizing the monster instead of expecting us just to imagine it. (Jaws, interestingly, is probably better here with the imagination than the realization.) But now in many a spectacle film we don't so much have the imaginary and the real, as the two subsumed into the hyper-real - into the hyperbolic that demands ever more concern for the exaggerated.
But, as we've proposed, with less of the human at stake. Now we're not especially asking for the real to be eschewed for the imaginary, but just that the two can work in conjunction, without an overly emphatic hyper-real imposing itself on the film to the detriment of character, narrative and ethos. In an aesthetics of impact, all three are finally more significant than the special effects, and can allow for the diminishing return of the ever more elaborate pyrotechnics (which of course needn't be eschewed), to be contained by the threefold aspects mentioned above. Now a fine example of this aesthetics of impact can be found in a film as far away from impact aesthetics as we're likely to find: Alan Clarke's low-budget, made for television film, The Firm. This short feature on London football fans constantly looking for a ruckus, works its moment of impact on the basis that the violence be administered by knives, razor blades, broken bottles and baseball bats. Yet near the end of the film what happens is that the central character, played by Gary Oldman, gets blown away with a shotgun by an opposing gang member. It is a brilliant example of bringing a gun into a film when we least expect it, and gaining maximum impact from its use. It also conforms to the threefold purpose of the action film (which incorporates horror, thriller etc) we've proposed: that it respects character, narrative and ethos. Now of course most people would say that The Firm is hardly an action film, and yet louder, bigger action movies can learn a lot from a work ostensibly belonging to sociological cinema (closer to Mike Leigh and Ken Loach) in looking at its specifics, at the way it justifies its action sequences.
Let's look briefly, for example, at its use of suspense and surprise as Hitchcock so famously defined them in his dictum: terror by surprise, suspense by forewarning. Clarke works with both. Now he doesn't generate suspense mechanically - not through say cutting from a dangerous object like a knife or a gun that will lead to inevitable violence. There isn't the sort of cause and effect we take for granted in a film where it will cut, say to a pot of boiling water as the baddie grapples with the heroine. And where we know that soon she will have to resort to that boiling pot, and thus the film builds suspense as we wonder whether she'll be able to reach the stove before the baddie. No, in Clarke's film it is much more socio-politically integrated and slow-burning than that. Here Oldman's central character has a habit of leaving sundry fighting items around. One of these happens to be a razor blade, and there's a scene where his young daughter finds it lying in the sitting room and decides to chew on it: ripping her mouth to shreds before her parents discover what she's doing. This is the sort of forewarned suspense that is barely forewarned at all. It isn't mechanically inevitable, but sociologically plausible. It wants to create an environment of forewarning; not the inevitability of an action to come.
If that takes care of suspense, albeit reconfigured; then what about terror, or shock? Here we can return to the moment of Oldman's death. We cannot see it coming because it isn't sociologically forewarned: there is nothing in the milieu to suggest somebody will pull a gun out and kill someone instantly. In this sense Clarke's use of shock is almost equal to Hitchcock's in Psycho, in the death of Marion Crane, but possesses a more obvious socio-political purpose. It's as though Clarke's refusing to play the game that he's set up narratively - which is really about rival football gangs getting their kicks every weekend with a bit of aggro - and suddenly replaces it with a new set of rules. But while this in some ways cheats the audience; it does so purposefully rather than emptily. It changes the rules not because it is a game, which would suggest of course cheating, but because it isn't. The characters may think they're playing a game, but Clarke is at pains to indicate they're not, and utilises Hitchcockian tension and surprise to throw us back into some notion of a real world.
What we've been proposing here, then, are ways in which recent filmmakers can learn from genre masters of the past, directors who transcend the genre boundaries, or who utilise generic elements without actually working in 'genre' at all. This allows for options within shock, terror, suspense and audience manipulation without resorting necessarily to intensifying continuity and impact aesthetics, and allow special effects to play once again their dutiful role as bridesmaids and not brides.


Sponsored by Meguiar's, the show field at the 2018 Carlisle Ford Nationals was jam-packed with Fords of all kinds, and a big chunk of the participants wheeled their 1994 to 2018 Mustangs onto the grounds and took their spots in the designated sections for each model year and/or special make.
Walking into the show from the main gate, it was all early Mustangs to the left, late-models to the right, and everything else from Ford Motor Company beyond that and over the hill. There were special displays for Saleen Mustangs, and Steve Saleen himself was even on grounds singing posters and showing off his new 2018 Saleen Mustang packages. Likewise, Shelby American had a big presence with their new Wide Body Super Snake and a 1967 G.T. 500 "recreation" car that you can buy new.
This year was also the 50th anniversary of the Bullitt movie and legendary '68 fastback that Steve McQueen drove in that movie (which has recently been found, but you probably already know that), so there was a dedicated area both inside Building T and outside under a tent for the various years of Bullitt Mustangs, but we'll bring you a small gallery of those later in the week. Of course, Ford Performance had a big presence, with their big rig full of toys and the Ford Performance Garage where participants could have Ford parts bolted onto the car, right on the show grounds. They even had a $2,500 contest for one lucky winner to choose anything he wants (up to $2,500 of course) from the Ford Performance catalog. That'll make your weekend!
Like we said in previous Carlisle stories, this is one you should see if you call yourself a fan of Ford. Literally everything that Ford has built in the last 80 years is on grounds (and a few before then too, including a huge display of old Ford tractors). As a single model, Mustangs dominated the show, of course, and the late-models may have had the biggest number on their side of the field. So make plans to check it out next year for the weekend of May 31-June 2, 2019. That gives you plenty of time to get the vacation days and get the Mustang ready to show off to the world!


Black Butler 2, the simulcast of Black Butler is a manga series written and illustrated by Yana Toboso which debuted in 2006. In 2008 an anime adaption, directed by Toshiya Shinohara premiered. In 2010, FUNimation Entertainment announced that they have licensed Black Butler and have since began streaming the simulcast series Black Butler 2.
Lady Sandra has teamed up with FUNimation to create a collection of Black Butler 2 throws and blankets.


Duke Ellington (Edward Kennedy Ellington, Washington, D.C., 29 April, 1899 - New York City, 24 May, 1974), was an American jazz composer, pianist, and bandleader. Through the ranks of Duke Ellington's Orchestra passed some of the biggest names in jazz, including Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Bubber Miley, Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton, Barney Bigard, Ben Webster, Harry Carney, Sonny Greer, Otto Hardwick, Clark Terry, Jimmy Blanton, Ray Nance, Paul Gonsalves, and Wellman Braud. Many musicians stayed with him for decades.


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Trump CFO's plea deal could make him a prosecution witness
NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump's chief financial officer is expected to plead guilty tax offenses On Thursday, as part of a deal that would require him to testify about illicit business practices at the former president's company, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.
Allen Weisselberg is accused of taking over $1.7 million in informal compensation from the Trump Organization over several years, including untaxed benefits like rent, car payments and tuition.
The plea deal would require Weisselberg to speak in court Thursday about the company's role in the alleged compensation arrangement and possibly serve as a witness when the Trump Organization goes on trial in October on related charges, the officials said. people.
Both individuals were not authorized to speak publicly about the case and did so on condition of anonymity.
Weisselberg, 75, is likely to receive a five-month prison sentence, to be served at New York's notorious Rikers Island resort, and he could be required to pay around $2 million in restitution, including taxes, penalties and interest, the people said. If this punishment is upheld, Weisselberg could be released after around 100 days.
Messages seeking comment were left with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and attorneys for Weisselberg and the Trump Organization.
Weisselberg is the only person to face criminal charges so far in the Manhattan prosecutor's long investigation into the company's business practices.
Considered one of Trump's most trusted business associates, Weisselberg was arrested in July 2021. His lawyers argued the Democratic-run district attorney's office was punishing him for not providing information that would would hurt Trump.
The district attorney also investigated whether Trump or his company lied to banks or the government about the value of his properties to get loans or reduce tax bills.
Former district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who opened the investigation, last year asked his deputies to present evidence to a grand jury and seek Trump's indictment, according to former prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, who previously led the investigation.
But after Vance left, his successor, Alvin Bragg, allowed the grand jury to disband without charge. Both prosecutors are Democrats. Bragg said the investigation is continuing.
The Trump Organization is not involved in Weisselberg's expected guilty plea on Thursday and is expected to go on trial under the so-called compensation package in October.
Prosecutors alleged that the company provided untaxed benefits to senior executives, including Weisselberg, for 15 years. Weisselberg alone was charged with defrauding the federal government, state, and city out of more than $900,000 in unpaid taxes and unearned tax refunds.
Under state law, punishment for the most serious charge against Weisselberg, grand larceny, could carry a sentence of up to 15 years in prison. But the charge carries no mandatory minimum sentence, and most first-time offenders in tax-related cases never end up behind bars.
Tax evasion charges against the Trump Organization carry a fine of twice the amount of unpaid taxes, or $250,000, whichever is greater.
Trump has not been charged in the criminal investigation. The Republican called the New York investigations a "political witch hunt," saying his company's actions were common practice in the real estate industry and not a crime.
Last week, Trump sat for deposition in New York Attorney General Letitia James' parallel civil investigation into allegations that Trump's company misled lenders and tax authorities about the value of loans. assets. Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment Protection against self-incrimination more than 400 times.
Follow Michael Sisak on Twitter at twitter.com/mikesisak. Send confidential advice by visiting https://www.ap.org/tips/.
Categories Food Network Tags American News, Company, donald trump, Government and politics, New York, Policy, Top PA News
Rangers part ways with team chairman Jon Daniels, club hands keys to Chris Young
The NY-10 debate is a lion's den for Daniel Goldman

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


LOS ANGELES Chef Stefan Richter of Stefan's at L.A. Farm in Santa Monica says putting a party together on a budget is easy. If it's a tapas party, offer four or five choices, each with something special so your guests won't go home hungry or dissatisfied, like Richter's popular turkey sliders.
"80 percent breast meat, 20 percent thigh meat, because it gives you a little more texture and a little more flavor," Richter said.
But beyond the poultry, add some goodies.
"Add some sauteed onion, add some fresh thyme, add some parsley, add some herbs, salt, pepper, and some good flavors," Richter said.
Top with arugula, low-fat dressing and a bit of cheese. Make your own mini buns from cut-out whole wheat toasts if you can't find the baby buns.
An elegant yet inexpensive offering is oysters on the half shell.
"It's a dollar an oyster. The salt is nothing, a pound of salt is 32 cents," Richter said.
Oysters should be purchased fresh, but he suggests mixing salt with a little water in cup molds, then freeze up to a week in advance. Top the oyster on party night with a bit of shallot vinaigrette.
Try what Richter calls "crudo," small slices of fresh fish, laced with lime juice, vegetable oil, a pinch of salt and pepper, and topped with an herb, like micro-cilantro -- quick to assemble. Again, serve on ice for freshness.
One of the best ideas yet, Richter's party perfect way to serve his Thai lobster bisque is in small candle votives.
He also puts the finished soup in coffee pump pots with it so guests can help themselves.
"You puree it in a mixer, you strain it, you put into the coffee thermal can, very hot, close the lid. You can do it an hour before, it still will be hot," Richter said.
Another benefit of small bites is they're easy to serve, easy to eat and because you're not buying much food, they're easy on the wallet.


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Réseau Sydom du Jura // CC Pays des Lacs // Non classé // Science Lab Report – Using Sequence and Uncertainty Rule
Science Lab Report – Using Sequence and Uncertainty Rule
Do you make the most of the dimension and doubt principle on your lab report? This really is an area which could be subjective but is more essential if you are employing a statistics package deal to write your document.
The subject of doubt and measurement in figures has turned into a topic of discussion for many years inside the scientific area. It's a subject that has been debated by several research paper thesis statements prominent writers, for example Simonsohn and Nisbett, and has been debated with a number of different authors Bernstein and Scheines.
The discrepancy among the range and standard deviation has been a subject of controversy as it was first launched in 1935 by Richard Gardner. It's maybe not a totally new controversy. In fact, this theory was first released as a result of confusion in a paper which Simonsohn composed for his college pupils.
Conditions were writemythesis net noted which were uncertain they mightn't be estimated at all by the principles which were applied to write the accounts. The basic principle which has been usedto spell out the record was that the doubt and dimension theory.
The principle that was usedto spell out the truth of a mathematics lab report was the uncertainty and measurement will get an influence on the magnitude of the dimension error. The idea behind this rule is that the magnitude of this instability can be regarding the amount of uncertainty from the experimental conditions.
You have to know the degrees of independence, to change degrees of flexibility to uncertainty. Thus, if you know the number of degrees of independence that is potential in a particular experimentation, you're going to be able to convert the info out of rates of liberty.
The basic principle of measurements and also uncertainty has been used in many distinctive experiments in the past. The principal reason that it is being used today is as it's quite simple to describe https://hours.library.columbia.edu/locations/cuarchives?date=2017-12-06 to a particular individual. You may realize the principle is still used in these experiments, if you go back through lots of the experiments which were performed throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
To simplify the argument, you can think about this experiment because being divided to methods. The very first step represents the observation of the experimental arrangement. The 2nd task would be to model the data which has been obtained to be predicted by the conditions.
The next thing is to translate the outcome depending on the model that you have derived from your version you have made. It's critical the model you've chosen is usually the main one that you would have built within an identical setting and under identical ailments. You wouldn't be true enough to figure out the information that you'd need to report, to do this.
The way to do so would be by using the version that is used to derive the version by the version that you simply just used to help produce the model. This principle's purpose is the fact that the product that you just make must be the version which would have already been applied under the identical experimental problems.
The accuracy of this quote is related to the size of this doubt. This really is a result of the essentials of measurement and uncertainty.
In the event you replace the authentic version using a new version that has been produced from the precise model that has been employed to generate the model in the experimentation you will have calculated the uncertainty in the version. You have to define how the most model was made by you.
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Erie County NY Utz snack route with accounts in Hamburg, West Seneca and Orchard Park. The warehouse facility is located in Cheektowaga. The owner has exclusive and protected sales rights for Utz, Bachman, Chi-Chi's and TGIF snack products. Accounts include Walmart, Target, Tops and other retailers.
The route is currently averaging $5,525 per week in sales volume and is compensated at 20% commission. This generates a weekly gross income of approximately $1,105. Operating expenses will vary from owner to owner and are estimated at $225 per week (gas, insurance, maintenance, etc).
Full training will also be provided by current owner and company. The current schedule is Monday-Friday (8-9 hours) and Saturday (3-4 hours as necessary).


Introduction to Latin is a complete introductory Latin text specifically designed as a core text for a full year of college course work. The text is designed as a streamlined and uncluttered approach to Latin and grammar, providing a complete course without hindering the first year student's mastery of the material. It covers all aspects of Latin grammar in a familiar pedagogical flow, with English grammar explained as needed, providing students with an in-text reference point for new Latin material. Latin readings occur throughout the text, early and often, in the form of sentences and short passages. They are unconnected, providing the instructor the option of covering them as time and need allows. This text also includes a variety of exercises that provide different approaches to mastery of the language, especially in the early chapters.
In the Noet edition, this volume is enhanced by amazing functionality. Scripture citations link directly to English translations, and important terms link to dictionaries, encyclopedias, and a wealth of other resources in your digital library. Perform powerful searches to find exactly what you're looking for. Take the discussion with you using tablet and mobile apps. With Noet, the most efficient and comprehensive research tools are in one place, so you get the most out of your study.
Shelmerdine has greatly improved an already excellent book . . . I have always liked the way she explains concepts, such as sentence patterns, subordinate clauses, correlating conjunctions, etc., that other books take for granted . . . [T]he book discusses the structure of the Latin sentence as a whole before breaking it down into its individual parts, allowing the students (and the teachers!) to really understand how the Romans put words together.
A concise, no-nonsense approach that isn't 'over-scripted.' Shelmerdine allows the instructor scope for real teaching and meaningful interaction with students.
Susan Shelmerdine is professor in the department of classical studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is also the author of Homeric Hymns.


Lake Publishing Society (LPS) supports a University of British Columbia initiative that links student artists with the local community- the DIG YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD project. Student artists create literary and artistic works directly related to specific Kelowna neighbourhoods and, through a specially created imprint, DYN, LPS publishes these works which are sold in the community and delivered free to newcomers by the Welcome Wagon Ltd. Watch for the April Launch of DYN Mission! For more information see our page.
You are invited to the Dig Your Neighbourhood Mission Launch!
Draw for free items! Meet the artists and authors! Celebrate the Okanagan Mission neighbourhood with Lake Publishing Society.
Lake Publishing Societyublishes or supports contemporary literary or visual art that engages with the natural world or with locality and place.


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What's so bad about spearfishing?
By Doug Hissom · May 7, 2012 · No comments
Spearfishing season in northern Wisconsin wrapped up this week and, as it has for the most part in the past 19 years, was a peaceful exercise of Native American treaty rights.
That wasn't so 25 years ago when Wisconsin tribes started spearfishing in earnest after a federal court ruled that they could take unlimited amounts of fish from northern state lakes. The state Ojibwa tribes had signed treaties with the United States in the 1800s that, in exchange for turning their lands over to the government, they would be able to harvest the natural resources from the area, which covers millions of acres and about a third of the state.
In 1983 a federal court ruled that the state had to allow tribes to exercise their spearfishing rights that were granted by treaties in 1837, 1842 and 1854. The Ojibwa exchanged its lands for cash payments and an agreement that they would not have to leave the state.
The fishing rights were never allowed by the state until two native fishers were arrested for spearing in 1974. The two carried copies of the treaties on them, showed the sheriff, but the sheriff ignored the paper and arrested them. The issue wound its way through the federal courts until the 1983 Voight decision.
In 1987, Federal Judge James Doyle, Sr. (father of future governor Jim Doyle) ruled the tribes have "the right to exploit virtually all the natural resources in the ceded territory" to achieve a "modest living."
Spring spearfishers were then met with crowds of protesters shouting racial slurs, throwing bottles and sticks and in many cases having a disinterested local law enforcement doing little to prevent violence. "Spear an Indian, save a fish," was a common bumper sticker in the northwoods for years.
I was at a tavern in Conover, just north of the fishing mecca of Eagle River during the 1980s when the owner told me, "I have a shotgun behind the bar and if any of those reds come in here, I'm pulling it out and they're getting outta here one way or another." The proprietor was a woman, so the racism was not gender specific.
In the early 1990s we headed to a boat landing in another tourist area looking for a place to camp, only to roll into a serious protest, where they wouldn't let the fishers off the water after they finished their work. The sheriffs there, in Price County, said the crowd would settle down and eventually disperse. It was hours later until that was the case.
But that wasn't the case in many boat landings across the north. Organized by two groups, Stop Treaty Abuse, and Protect Our Rights and Resources, boat landings were the scene of violence not seen since the civil rights marches of the 1960s. The American Indian Movement (AIM), which was the major player of the Wounded Knee sit-in, got involved as did many civil rights leaders around the country.
The protesters were fueled, not only by beer, but by misinformation that Indians taking some 18,000 fish a year would deplete the resource and ruin the tourism economy. (In contrast, anglers take about 300,000 fish a year from the same area.) With the state refusing to initially negotiate fish limits with the tribes, the tribes would fully exercise their rights and take the most fish they could spear from selected lakes. That also fanned the flames of racism and the state then instituted arbitrary bag limits for recreational fishers that gave the impression for most that the fish were being alarmingly depleted.
A 110-page study by state, federal and tribal agencies found that spearing does not adversely affect the numbers of the fish population available for sports anglers. It also found that about 6 percent of the fish take is by Indians. Tribes also have their own fish hatcheries and restock spearing lakes.
(Feature photo courtesy of Hastings Nonviolence)
After federal lawsuits were filed, the courts placed injunctions against leaders of the protest group and the perpetrators and organizers of most of the violence, stating that they were violating the tribes' civil rights. That, at least, took the violence out of the headlines and the protests died off. It also created a changed atmosphere in the north, to one of quiet acceptance, since time showed that the fish were not becoming extinct in the pristine waters of the Wisconsin northwoods.
Only about 450 tribal members spearfish each season.
Years after my foray into the Conover bar, I stopped again and was told that the bar owner had actually been run out of town since the locals didn't share her poignant views any longer.
The state government also came around to the realities of spearfishing as well, discontinuing efforts to buy the tribes' rights out or to set up previously arbitrary quota limits to recreational fishers. In 1991, then-state Attorney General Jim Doyle said that the both sides should just live with the court rulings. The state Department of Natural Resources began to work with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, which was set up in 1984 by state tribes to offer its own take on managing the resources of the north.
Tribes would say how many fish from each lake they would take and the DNR would then set bag limits for the rest of the year, usually a two- or three-daily limit of walleye was the answer. Most lakes have a five-walleye limit in the state.
But those discussions depend on who's in the statehouse at the time. This year the DNR took a hardline approach to tribal spearing, saying it would impose a two-fish limit on all lakes in northern Wisconsin. That ignored a previous agreement the state and tribes had for the past 15 years, fueling speculation in the papers of a "major conflict" again brewing in the northwoods.
The state DNR is now headed by former state Sen. Cathy Stepp, a Republican who barely eked out a win for her seat. She served from 2002-2006. Her environmental creds aren't respected as she was the wife of a construction contractor in the urban southeast part of the state and has long been critical of the DNR and its mission. When she was appointed it was termed akin "to putting Lindsay Lohan in charge of a rehab center." She does have a pond on her land in Racine County.
Her initial hardline stance was tempered the weeks before the season started this spring. The two sides decided on 14 lakes that would be speared to a two-fish a day limit and the rest would be at three-fish limits.
Michigan tribes entered into a court-ordered consent decree in 2000 with the state, which uses several mathematical factors in determining their fish take on ceded lands in that state. That agreement runs through 2020.
In Minnesota, tribes there tried to negotiate with the state on their ability to spear fish. The state legislature refused to make a deal and the courts ordered that the Mille Lacs Tribe would be able to spear on certain lakes the tribe would self-regulate. Two years ago, tribal fishers went outside the agreed upon fishing area to fish with nets (also allowed by treaty) and were cited for violating the law. They asserted the tribes should be allowed to fish most lakes in northern Minnesota, per the terms of an 1855 treaty.
Since there is no settlement on that issue, it's looking like Minnesota is headed the Wisconsin way–just 25 years later.
(Feature photo courtesy of the museum at chippepedia.org)
Doug Hissom writes a weekly environmental column for Baltimore Post-Examiner. He has covered local and state politics in Wisconsin for more than 20 years. Over the course of that time he was publisher, editor, news editor, managing editor and senior writer at the Shepherd Express weekly paper in Milwaukee. He also covered education and environmental issues extensively. He ran the UWM Post in the mid-1980s, winning a Society of Professional Journalists award as best non-daily college newspaper. An avid outdoors person he regularly takes extended paddling trips in the wilderness, preferring the hinterlands of northern Canada and Alaska. After a bet with a bunch of sailors, he paddled across Lake Michigan in a canoe.	Contact the author.
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APA Applauds Mental Health Funding in Federal Spending Bill
WASHINGTON, D.C. — This week Congress passed a $1.4 trillion fiscal year 2020 spending bill that includes several provisions that will fund medical research and treatment programs for people with mental illness and substance use disorders (SUD).
Among these provisions were:
Significant resources to combat the opioid epidemic, including $1.5 billion for state opioid response grants and $800 million for research. The bill also includes $12 million in new funding for a student-loan repayment program for the SUD workforce and $26.7 million in new funding to establish grants to train professionals to provide treatment for mental illness and SUD, both administered through the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).
$5.9 billion for SAMHSA, including $14 million for the Minority...
Author: mbourdase - Published: Dec 19, 2019
American Psychiatric Association To Offer Solutions at White House Mental Health Summit
WASHINGTON, D.C. – American Psychiatric Association (APA) President Bruce Schwartz, M.D., will be among many mental health advocates and others attending a White House Summit on Transforming Mental Health Treatment tomorrow, Dec. 19.
The summit will cover a wide range of topics, during which Dr. Schwartz will put forth the APA's positions on several key mental health issues, including:
Improving Access to Treatment and Services for People with Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders: APA urges policymakers to take steps to address the lack of available services for people with mental health and substance use issues, including shortages of hospital beds and workforce. To address the workforce needs we need to implement effective new and innovative health care delivery models such as...
APA Statement on Passage of House Prescription Drug Cost Lowering Legislation
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the wake of the House passage today of H.R. 3, The Lower Drug Costs Now Act, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced its support for several provisions in the bill that benefit mental health care.
In addition to efforts that limit out-of-pocket costs for our patients, APA appreciates the House's attention in H.R. 3 to additional investments to stem the opioid epidemic, fund Community Health Centers, increase resources devoted to the Precision Medicine Initiative and the BRAIN Initiative of the National Institutes of Health, boost financial support to help low income seniors afford their prescription drugs, and provide a modest two-year update for physicians' services.
"These provisions will help us address the opioid epidemic and fund important research that will...
New Study Finds a Shortage of Therapists to Treat Children with Autism; Significant Variation by Region
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The supply of certified applied behavior analysis (ABA) providers is insufficient to meet the needs of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in nearly every state, according to a study published online today in Psychiatric Services. The new study found there is substantial variation across states and regions—for instance, the per capita supply of certified ABA providers is substantially higher in the Northeast than in any other region.
The rising prevalence of ASD underscores the importance of access to evidence-based interventions such as ABA. An estimated one in 59 children had ASD in 2014, up from one in 125 a decade earlier, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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The Path Forward for Mental Health and Substance Use Names Eight Regions to Spearhead Employer Efforts to Improve Access to Effective Care
WASHINGTON – The national steering committee for The Path Forward for Mental Health and Substance Use – National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, American Psychiatric Association (APA), American Psychiatric Association Foundation (APAF) Center for Workplace Mental Health and Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute – has selected eight locations across the nation to implement its multi-stakeholder transformative initiative.
Launched last month, The Path Forward has embarked on a five-year plan to execute a first-of-its-kind private sector approach to improve mental health and substance use care for Americans across the nation. As a key part of the initiative, the Regional Employer...
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The Rookies is an American crime drama series that aired on ABC from 1972 until 1976. It follows the exploits of three rookie police officers working in an unidentified city for the fictitious Southern California Police Department.
Director: Rita Lakin
Actors: Georg Stanford Brown, Gerald S. O'Loughlin, Kate Jackson, Michael Ontkean, Sam Melville
TV Status: Ended
Networks: ABC
Keywords:go movies series The Rookies Online The Rookies Putlockers watch series go Watch The Rookies Watch The Rookies Full Series watchseries
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Based on Michael Connelly's best-selling novels, these are the stories of relentless LAPD homicide Detective Harry Bosch who pursues justice at all costs. But behind his tireless momentum is a…
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Agent Phil Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division) puts together a team of agents to investigate the new, the strange and the unknown around the globe,…
The protagonist, Baki Hanma, trains with an intense focus to become strong enough to surpass his father, Yujiro Hanma, the strongest fighter in the world. Five of the world's most…
Genre: Action & Adventure, Animation, Crime, Drama
Thomas & Friends is a British children's television series, which had its first broadcast on the ITV network on 4 September 1984. It is based on The Railway Series of…
In Beacon Heights, a seemingly perfect town, a group of three college friends struggle with the stress of being overachievers. In the aftermath of the town's first murder, each Perfectionist…
All her life, teen-hacker Robin of Sherwood thought she was an orphan. But when a mysterious Gauntlet unlocks a secret that turns her world upside down, Robin joins forces with…
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A suburban couple's ordinary lives are rocked by the sudden discovery that their children possess mutant powers. Forced to go on the run from a hostile government, the family joins…
Single father George Altman is doing his best to raise his sixteen-year-old daughter Tessa in the big city. When he discovers a box of condoms in her bedroom, though, he…
When Clary Fray's mother has disappeared, Clary joins a band of Shadowhunters; demon killing hunters, and gets caught up in a plan to save the world.
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What will the Student Health Association Assistance Fund grant cover?
Only one award will be made to an applicant. i.e. you can only apply once.
Expenses incurred by all students such as fees, living costs, books etc needed by all regardless of disability or illness.
Medical equipment unless specific to study problems.
Present maximum is £500 per applicant in order to allow maximum number of grants, as there is a limited amount of money available.
This does not mean that £500 is always given.
Your application will not be considered by us until you have sent your supporting evidence (see below) to us via email.
What supporting evidence will be needed?
When will I know if I have received an award?
Please note incomplete applications at the cut off date (e.g. supporting evidence has not been received) will be discontinued and candidates will need to reapply in the next period.


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Ultimate Fallout #1
Writer: Brian Michael Bendis	Artist: Mark Bagley Publisher: Marvel Comics Release Date: July 13, 2011 Cover Price: $3.99 Critic Reviews: 7 User Reviews: 1
The End before The Beginning.
Comic Vine - Tony 'G-Man' Guerrero Jul 13, 2011
You can't (or shouldn't) have a comic book death without seeing the reactions of those close to the character. I highly enjoyed the Death of Spider-Man story arc despite being tired of the numerous comic book deaths we've been seeing. Bendis simply made it work. He should us how heroic his version of Spider-Man could be and made his death matter. Because this is the Ultimate Universe, death here isn't the same as it usually is. If Ultimate Peter Parker does somehow return, he's going to do some tricky maneuvering to make his return work. Brian Bendis made me get emotionally attached. You might have an idea what type of reactions you'll see and how they play out but that doesn't lessen the impact. Combined with Bagley's depiction of the emotion on each character's face, this truly was a touching issue. Read Full Review
X-Man's Comic Blog - x-man75 Jul 15, 2011
Wow... That was quite the emotional ride right there... I seriously teared up when that little girl and May embraced outside the Cathedral... Hell, just typing about it is making me kind of misty eyed right now! Read Full Review
Comic Book Revolution - Kevin Jul 20, 2011
Ultimate Fallout #1 is the type of comic book that reminds me why I read comics. Brian Bendis and Mark Bagley teamed up to deliver one of the most emotional comic books in recent memory. Outside of one minor hiccup, this was the perfect issue that delivered a final four pages that will leave some readers on the verge of tears. If you are an Ultimate Spider-Man fan do yourselves a favor and pick this issue up. It is an issue that you do not want to miss out on buying. Read Full Review
Chuck's Comic Of The Day - Chuck Jul 17, 2011
Assuming that's the plan, of course. Read Full Review
Eye On Comics - Don MacPherson Jul 13, 2011
Subsequent issues of this series will be illustrated by other artists, and the variant covers indicate that Ultimate Fallout will span the full scope of the Ultimate Universe. That worries me a bit, as I'm concerned that this will stop being about the aftermath of Peter Parker's death and will turn into a larger story about a new start for this world of super-heroes. I also know Marvel plans to relaunch a new Ultimate Spidey title with someone new (presumably) in the title role, but there's no need to start telling that story here. I want the focus to remain on emotion, to remain on Spidey's supporting cast. We'll see what lies in store, but this was a wonderful start. Read Full Review
IGN - Jesse Schedeen Jul 14, 2011
This issue doesn't end on the strongest or most effective note, but for better or worse the final panel does entice readers to keep reading for the long haul. Once the mourning period is over, it should be interesting to chart the evolution of the Ultimate Universe as the new creative teams gear up for the fall. Read Full Review
Comic Book Resources - Chad Nevett Jul 13, 2011
As a single comic, "Ultimate Fallout" #1 feels incomplete and ill-suited to the format it has been placed in. Nonetheless, what happens in this issue is some strong character work and storytelling as those that loved and knew Peter Parker react to his death. Thankfully, we won't have to wait long for the rest of this story with issue two shipping next week. Read Full Review
5 Star Reviews Jan 20, 2019
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