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Clocktower Gallery
108 Leonard Street
dal 1/2/2013 al 31/3/2013
The Clocktower Gallery
Zipora Fried
Nancy Holt
Thiago Rocha Pitta
Papo Colo
Clocktower Gallery, New York
An exhibition of photography, video and collage -both by prominent and emerging artists- which exemplifies contemporary discourse and storytelling through the canon of landscape imagery. Contemporary: Papo Colo, Assorted Times in Singular Spaces.
The Clocktower Gallery presents Dark Paradise, an exhibition of photography, video and collage -both by prominent and emerging artists- which exemplifies contemporary discourse and storytelling through the canon of landscape imagery. The artists either engage physically with the landscape, or capture in a poetic -and only at first glance dark- traces of the past within (fictitious) vistas and historically charged places.
Artists: Antony, Zipora Fried, Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Thiago Rocha Pitta, and Patti Smith.
The exhibition developed out of a fascination for tracing the tradition of the sublime landscape in contemporary images, a genre that forcefully developed in painting in the late 18th century with masters such as Caspar David Friedrich, who coupled the sublime with awe and fear of nature, and from a search of finding these same emotions in more intimate, local, and poetic images created by artists working with small scale works. All the works in the exhibition exclude human figures and, independent of scale, evoke feelings of an undefined presence of the past or of a world still undiscovered.
The three large photographs of New York based artist Zipora Fried, are a new body of work created from a mix of photographs and hand painted layers of color. Representing fictitious landscapes, they are contemporary interpretations of the historical sublime landscape genre, and vibrate with potential: the dream and terror of the vast and undiscovered territory where anything is possible, or the feeling of a divine presence can be felt in rays of light appearing behind the clouds.
Joan Jonas’s video Merlo is an early piece from the artist’s career, in which she performs alone in several dramatic outdoor locations: a rocky gorge, a wind-tossed river, a balcony looking out over a valley. Cloaked in a dark, hooded robe, Jonas uses a long paper cone as a megaphone, singing melodies and keening, animal-like, into the landscape. The cone figure and the specific melodies Jonas uses are recurring motifs in her work, and their use here may be read against the fact that "merlo" is the Italian word for "blackbird."
Dark paradise is a particularly fitting theme for a video projection by Sao Paulo based artist Thiago Rocha Pitta. In O cúmplice secreto, set in the sea near Rio de Janeiro, the viewer seems to be standing on a boat floating on the water while an unidentified object approaches slowly through the waves. Based on the famous passage in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, where an expedition is faced for the first time with the creature they were hunting, and turns out to be the Nautilus submarine of Captain Nemo, the pieces makes the viewer’s perception shift from an idyllic tropical setting to an increasingly eerie visual. Unease takes over as one never truly discovers what is approaching the bark.
The selection of photographs by Patti Smith includes a set of never-before seen images taken during a 1981 trip to French Guiana, capturing the ruins of prisons and military buildings once built by the occupying leaders. Overgrown in time by the jungle, the scenes still reflect the traces of their (colonial) past, photographed by Smith in her signature, often melancholic, poetic way, as seen in the interplay between the density of the leaves and the appearance of light. The past comes into play even more so in the other images included in the exhibition. This group of photographs were taken in rural settings where the landscapes, seen through the artist’s eyes, are both heavy with memories of artists of previous times -including Virginia Woolf and Arthur Rimbaud- and double as intimate homages to the artistic souls that have inspired Smith throughout her own career.
Nancy Holt’s photographs are three photo stills from her seminal 1975 Pine Barrens video. Shot in a barren wilderness in South-Central New Jersey, the film documents the sandy landscape of the region and captures the feelings and myths of the local people. The most famous of these myths is about a creature known as The Jersey Devil, a being traditionally described as having hooves - its imprints can be seen in one of the stills- and allegedly born as the 13th child of a woman in the 18th Century. The two other images show the lonely trees in the desolate scenery and the traces left behind by Holt as she meanders through the dunes.
The three intimate, small-scale collages and drawings by Antony further address a darker side of nature, or rather, critique how humankind ignores the sacredness of nature. As he explains: “I have become convinced that this place is paradise. Even in ruins, even in all its virulence, you can’t deny the shadows of beauty emerging from things.” Created from mostly found images the artist describes the acts of observing, collecting, and assembling as important parts of his process. The Cut Away the Bad n.2 (Swanlights) collage, originated from the idea of removing a “bad” part of a found image, as a metaphor of trying to protect our emotional and natural world from a destructive human presence, in an attempt to restore dignity to the rest of the landscape.
Antony was born (b. 1971) in West Sussex, England, and currently lives in New York. Since 2000, he has released four studio albums with his band Antony and the Johnsons. The band's last album Swanlights was included as part of a book featuring Antony's drawings published by Abrams Image. Antony's visual work was presented in a solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum (2012). Antony has also presented exhibitions at the Melbourne Festival (2012). Isis Gallery, London (2009), and Galerie du jour, Paris (2009). His work was included in group shows at the Triennale Bovisa, Milan and Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2010). Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Antony and the Johnsons' performance Swanlights debuted at Radio City Music Hall (2012). Previous performance projects include Miracle Now (1996); TURNING (2004/2006), in collaboration with Charles Atlas, and now being released as a film (2013); and The Crying Light (2009). Antony is musical director of The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (2011-13), a collaboration with Abramović and Robert Wilson.
The art of Zipora Fried (b. 1964) is an exercise in dichotomy. The work exploits the familial, often layering an object or form to an absurd end, creating new meanings and subliminal associations. In a new body of large-scale photographs, Landscape images and handpainted backgrounds are layered using digital technologies, creating impossible horizons that remain uncannily familiar, obliquely referencing historical painting, 20th c. landscape photography and sci-fi renderings. As in her drawings and sculpture, Fried approaches photography with patience and calculated intensity, hinting at an ever-present potential for violence that lies beneath a sumptuous surface.
Zipora Fried studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. Recent exhibitions include The Locus of Control, ACFNY, New York, NY (2012); Drawing a line in the Sand, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY (2012); Salon Noir at On Stellar Rays, New York, NY (2011); Greater New York at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2010); Total Recall, Public Art Fund, New York, NY (2010); Zipora Fried, Margarete Jakschik and Sam Windett, Contemporary art Museum St. Louis, MO (2010); Trust Me. Be Careful. at On Stellar Rays, New York, NY (2009); Text at Eighth Veil, Los Angeles, CA (fall 2009); Minus Space at MoMA PS1 (2009); Other exhibitions include Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2006); Guild & Greyshkul, New York, NY (2005); Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art, Brussels (2005).
Fried's work is represented in a number of Museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Albertina Museum, Vienna; The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA. Fried is also the recipient of numerous awards for her experimental films, which have been featured in festivals worldwide.
Nancy Holt (b. 1938) was born in Massachusetts and lives currently in New Mexico. A pioneer of earthworks and public art, Nancy Holt has also worked in sculpture, installation, film, video, and photography for over three decades. She is best known for her large-scale environmental sculptural works, including Sun Tunnels in northern Utah and Dark Star Park in Arlington, Virginia. In the 1970s, Holt made a series of pioneering film and video works, including several collaborations with Robert Smithson.
Nancy Holt was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1938. She received a Bachelors degree in Biology from Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, in 1960. She has received five National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two New York Creative Artist Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of South Florida, Tampa. She has produced site-specific environmental works in numerous public places around the world, including Sun Tunnels (1976), a large-scale sculptural work in Great Basin Desert, Utah; Stone Enclosure (Rock Rings) in Bellingham, Washington; Astral Grating (1987) in a New York City subway station, and Dark Star Park, in Arlington, Virginia, among many others. She has also completed large-scale land reclamation projects, including Sky Mound (1988) in the New Jersey Meadowlands, and Up and Under (1998), in Nokia, Finland. Holt's works, including her films and videos, have been seen in exhibitions at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Dia Center for the Arts, New York, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. In 2010 Columbia University's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery in New York held the major retrospective exhibition Nancy Holt: Sightlines. The exhibition was accompanied by a monograph of the same name and edited by Alena J. Williams. In 2012 she had a traveling exhibition showing an in-depth examination of her early projects from 1966 to 1980 at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City and the Santa Fe Arts Institute, and was included in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 at MoCA, Los Angeles and Materializing "Six Years" at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Joan Jonas (b. 1936) was born in New York and lives there. Her works and performances have been exhibited widely, including recent solo exhibitions at MoMA, New York (2009–10), MACBA, Barcelona (2008), and the Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2006). She has participated in the Biennale di Venezia (2009) and was invited six times to documenta (2012, 2002, 1987, 1982, 1977, 1972). In 2009, she received the Guggenheim Museum’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Thiago Rocha Pitta (b. 1980) was born in Tiradentes, Brazil, and lives and works in São Paulo. As a multimedia artist, he develops works in search of an intimate relationship with nature. Pitta was rewarded with the Marcantonio Vilaça award, in 2005, and the Open Your Mind Award, Switzerland, in 2009. In 2012 he participated in the 30th São Paulo Biennial (Brazil) and in 2011 in The Garden of Forking Paths Sculpture Project, an outdoor sculpture project at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Switzerland). The same year, he held an individual exhibition at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (Brazil). Other notable solo exhibitions include Notas de um Desabamento (Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro) in 2010, A Rocky Mist, Meyer Riegger in Karlsruhe (Germany), 2009, Notes on an Inland Shipwreck at Andersen Contemporary in Berlin (Germany) in 2008, Scai X Scai, Arts Initiative Tokyo (Japan) in 2007. A selection of group exhibitions include Nova Arte Nova at centro cultural Banco do Brasil (Brazil) 2008, Time Frame at MoMA PS1 (USA) in 2006, and J’en Rêve, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain (France) in 2005.
Patti Smith (b. 1946) began as a visual artist and has been making drawings and taking photographs since the late 1960s. In recent years her practice has expanded to include installation. She is currently the subject of Patti Smith: Camera Solo, a survey of her photographs organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford. Also exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts, it is currently on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (February 9 - May 19, 2013). Patti Smith: The Coral Sea opens this Spring at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and will combine installation and performance (May 17 - November, 2013). In 2008 Smith was the subject of Patti Smith Land 250 at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, and Written Portrait - Patti Smith at Artium Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. Strange Messenger: The Work of Patti Smith, a three hundred-work retrospective, was organized by The Andy Warhol Museum in 2002 and traveled to numerous venues including the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Her work has also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Eki, Kyoto; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Triennale di Milano, Milan; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Just Kids, a memoir of her remarkable relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe during the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies, won her the 2010 National Book Award in the nonfiction category. Her 1975 album Horses, established Smith as one of most original and important musical artists of her generation and was followed by ten releases, including Radio Ethiopia; Easter; Dream of Life; Gone Again, Trampin', and Banga, her latest. She continues to perform throughout the world and in 2007 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In July of 2005 she was presented with the prestigious insignia of Commander of the Order of the Arts and Letters, an esteemed French cultural honor. In May 2011, Smith won the Polar Music Prize, Sweden's most prestigious music award. She has been represented by Robert Miller Gallery since 1978.
The Clocktower Gallery presents Papo Colo: Assorted Times in Singular Spaces, an exhibition of works on paper and poetry by Papo Colo, presented in the Clocktower’s historic Upper Gallery. Exploring the composition of poetry as visual imagination, the selected drawings, collages, and poems from 1976 to the present reflect Colo’s interest in calligraphy, archaeology, and mysticism, and mark iconic moments in political and personal histories. “I do calligraphy because to invent a language is to create a new form of life. In this show, you can see how from the elements of calligraphy are born organic figures and populated structures” - Papo Colo.
Colo’s artistic expression is primarily known through the seminal exhibitions, graphic identity, and institutional texts of Exit Art, the alternative space he co-founded in 1982 and ran until 2011 with his partner Jeanette Ingberman. Parallel to, and often entangled with this institutional role, Colo was always a prolific artist, working in drawing, painting, poetry, performance, and theater.
Assorted Times in Singular Spaces presents four bodies of work: Franco Documents (1976), Post History Calligraphy (1978), Secret Documents (1979), and Protos (2012), and a book of poetry.
Colo resists interpretation through the lens of cultural identity. Rather, he embraces purist, cerebral and emotional approaches to art making, guided primarily by impulse and passion, be it of a physical, intellectual, or spiritual nature. Assorted Times in Singular Spaces explores personal time, institutional time, and political time. It examines past and present identities, life-altering events, discipline, ritual, and alchemy.
Assorted Times in Singular Spaces
Papo Colo was born San Juan, Puerto Rico. He lives and works in New York City and El Yunque rainforest in Puerto Rico. Colo is a poet who uses concepts to produce art, and an artist who chooses any medium, depending on its purpose. He is a multi-dimensional artist: performance, theater and installation artist, painter, writer, and graphic designer. In 1982 he co-founded Exit Art, an internationally known cultural center in New York. He was curator and cultural producer of Exit Art from 1982 to 2011, and organized over 100 shows in which he was also the exhibition and graphic designer. In 1992 he founded the Trickster Theater to expand his experiments as an inter-disciplinary artist.
Image: Patti Smith, St-Laurent-du-Maroni Prison, French Guiana, 1981. © Patti Smith. Courtesy the artist and Robert Miller Gallery
The Clocktower Gallery & Radio
108 Leonard Street, 13th Floor New York, NY 10013
Gallery hours are Tuesday - Friday, 12PM - 5PM
Oyama Enrico Isamu Letter: Aeromural
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Page 3, 20th May 2005
Page 3, 20th May 2005 — New curial official attacks ‘stupid’ Tablet
Organisations: Catholic Church, Catholic Society of St Andrews, German College in Rome, St Andrews’ University, University of Stirling
People: William Levada, Thomas Reese, John Paul II, John Paul, Karl Rahner, Cristina Odone, Patrick Burke, George Weigel, Benedict, Fr Burke, Some Catholics, Franz König, Paul II, Oscar Romero, John Wilkins, Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI
Locations: Rome, Stirling, Vienna
Pope Chooses New Right-hand Man To Reform Roman Curia
A Turbulent Decade For The Church
Interpreting Curial Jargon
Page 2 from 2nd October 1998
New curial official attacks ‘stupid’ Tablet
Keywords: Christianity, Pope Benedict Xvi, Christian Theology, Christianity In The United Kingdom, The Tablet, Heads Of State, William Levada, Congregation For The Doctrine Of The Faith, Ratzinger, Salesians, Joseph Ratzinger As Prefect Of The Congregation For The Doctrine Of The Faith, Theology Of Pope Benedict Xvi, Religion / Belief
A NEWLY appointed British official to the most powerful congregation in the Vatican has launched a devastating assault on the Tablet, the liberal Catholic magazine.
Fr Patrick Burke described the publication as “outrageously stupid and silly”.
Fr Burke was hand-picked by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, in November 2003 to join the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) as a doctrinal official.
As editor of Faith, a conservative Catholic bi-monthly journal, Fr Burke issued a furious attack on Catherine Pepinster, the editor of the Tablet, for her publication’s commemorative issue on John Paul II — which contained a number of criticisms of the late Pope and listed suggestions for changes in the Church.
In its editorial the magazine described John Paul’s “negative response to liberation theology, above all his failure to help Archbishop Oscar Romero before he was assassinated” as “one of the calamities of his papacy”.
Some Catholics felt that, in effect, the Tablet was implying that Pope John Paul shared some responsibility for the archbishop’s murder. They were further angered by its opposition to moves to speed up John Paul’s canonisation process.
“I did not want to fight the Tablet, but I feel there comes a stage when something is so outrageous that there has to be a response,” Fr Burke told The Catholic Herald this week.
He said that if the Tablet was not prepared to stand up for the Catholic Church then it should not publicise its support from the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.
“You can’t have your cake and eat it,” he explained. “If you want the endorsement of the hierarchy, then it seems to me that you should be completely loyal.
“The Tablet wants the hierarchy to say: ‘Yes you are all wonderful little Catholics’, but on the other hand it wants total freedom to whack everybody in sight and follow its own agenda, regardless of the agenda of the Church.” Some Catholic liberals may interpret Fr Burke’s remarks as evidence of Rome’s desire to “purge” dissidents. It emerged earlier this month that Fr Thomas Reese has been removed as editor of the Jesuit magazine America on the advice of the CDF.
However, as we report on our foreign pages this week, the new prefect of the CDF, Archbishop William Levada, is regarded as a moderate figure with no close associations with the Church’s conservative wing.
In his editorial Fr Burke accused “Catherine Pepinster and co.” of “hypocrisy” and berated them for their sniping against John Paul II’s pontificate.
“One almost has a sense that they interpret a papal election to be the same as a party political election: a new Pope will reverse and change the previous Pope’s “policies” (ie, the teachings of the Church) in much the same way that a new Prime Minister does with his predecessor’s policies. ” he wrote.
In response Ms Pepinster argued that the Faith editorial was misguided. “Fr Burke is, of course, entitled to his view, but it seems a shame that he bases it on very selective quotations from the Tablet,” she said.
“He also omits to mention other contributors to the Tablet’s papal obituary edition, including George Weigel [a respected American theologian who has defended Catholic orthodoxy], whose views I imagine he would prefer to others he mentioned in his commentary.
“Others do not share Fr Burke’s opinion of the Tablet. Many readers, including those who read the Tablet for the first time when they bought the papal obituary edition, commented on its balance and how measured they found the leader on John Paul II. Indeed, so popular was the edition that it enjoyed record sales.” Fr Burke declined to say whether, in his new role, he would bring his opinions to the attention of the CDF, commenting that he did not know what his post would entail. “I really don’t know what they want me to do,” he said.
Fr Burke, who for six years has edited Faith, is a popular priest and distinguished academic.
He has gained a reputation for publicly savaging liberal figures. “If Cardinal Ratzinger was ‘God’s Rottweiler’ then Fr Burke will be his bloodhound,” said one Vatican source. “He is not a reticent man. What he lacks in charm he makes up for in clarity of thought.” On BBC2’s Newsnight the evening that Pope Benedict was elected, Fr Burke became caught up in a bitter argument about orthodoxy with Cristina Odone, the Catholic journalist and broadcaster.
Fr Burke told parishioners last weekend that he was leaving for Rome in September. He will also step down as editor of Faith. As an official for the CDF, he is expected to become one of the most influential British men in the Catholic Church. There are only 36 full-time officials in the Congregation.
Yet for personal reasons Fr Burke would have preferred to stay in Scotland. He said: “I don’t want to go to Rome. It’s very difficult for me. I am very happy here. But it’s an obedience thing, it is a legitimate request from a legitimate authority.” Fr Burke was born in Rhodesia, but went to school in England and has for a long time worked in Stirling, Scotland. He runs two parishes, and is chaplain to the University of Stirling. He also has close ties with the Catholic Society of St Andrews’ University.
Pope Benedict knows Fr Burke personally. The two men often met while Fr Burke was studying at the German College in Rome, where Cardinal Ratzinger was often a guest.
They share an interest in the liberal German theologian Fr Karl Rahner. Fr Burke’s doctorate, “Re-interpreting Rahner”, a critical overview of the theologian’s influential work, was well received in the Vatican.
“We can assume that Ratzinger has an eye for talent and his memory hasn’t failed him in picking out this unusually gifted young theologian,” said a priest close to the Vatican, who did not wish to be named.
The Tablet has already had brushes with the CDF, and Cardinal Ratzinger, its former prefect, in particular.
John Wilkins, the former editor, said he received two “yellow cards” from the man who would eventually succeed Pope John Paul II.
In October 1991 Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a long letter to the journal criticising two articles on remarriage after divorce. “He thought [the pieces] diluted the edge of the Catholic witness to the Gospel,” said Mr Wilkins.
“I published the letter, of course, in full. My critics said that that week the Tablet was really worth reading.” In March 1999, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote another letter to Mr Wilkins, objecting to an article from Cardinal Franz König, in which the late Archbishop of Vienna had argued in support of liberal views on religious pluralism.
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Blue Ridge Region
Burdette “Berdie” H. Martin Jr.: 1929-2020
Andrea Wolfe
Sports Car Club of America has learned that Burdette “Berdie” H. Martin Jr., who was inducted into SCCA’s Hall of Fame in 2010, passed away Saturday, December 5. A member of the Road Racing Drivers Club, Berdie began hot rod racing in 1946 and went on to compete in dirt oval midget and hydroplane races. He became a member of SCCA’s Chicago Region in 1950, then entered his first SCCA regional race in 1954 driving a MGTC at Wilmot after serving with the U.S. Marine Corps in Korea.
Berdie competed in road racing for nine years, including the first race at Road America in 1955 and the first Chicago Region June Sprints in 1956. His last road race was the Sept 9, 1962 RA 500 in a Lola MK1 at Road America. But he then grew active as an official with SCCA and, in 1965, became the organization’s Chief Steward. Later, he was elected head of Chicago Region and earned SCCA’s highest honor, the Woolf Barnato Award, presented to a member who has made an outstanding long-term contribution to the Club.
In the early 1970s, Berdie served as Chief Steward for Trans Am, Can-Am, Super Vee and North American F1 races. By 1974, he was assistant director of SCCA Road Racing, and later headed that department. Berdie served SCCA as Director of Pro Racing during a period of great expansion, and managed to remain highly active in amateur hockey circles.
Berdie became a board member of the Automobile Competition Committee for the United States (ACCUS) during the ‘70s, which governs U.S. racing as part of the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). By 1983, Berdie had been appointed head of ACCUS and later served as Vice President of the FIA. He chaired several FIA Commissions and was a regular steward at F1, sportscar and rally events. Berdie retired in 2004 from his position with ACCUS and returned to his motorsports roots in the Chicago area.
Berdie once recalled his first motorsports memory developing in the late 1930s during a visit to Indianapolis Motor Speedway for Indy 500 practice with his father. Nobody could have predicted that little boy would become a giant in the industry and a mentor to generations of race stewards. He will be missed, but his impact never forgotten.
Hoosier Super Tour Sebring: Saturday Report
The Hoosier Racing Tire SCCA Super Tour’s first races of the season ran on Saturday at Sebring International Raceway. A President’s Choice We Can All Agree On: Though it was announced in December, Preston Pardus was...Read more
© 2021 Blue Ridge Region
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Clive Sinclair on the takeover of Sinclair by Amstrad (1986)
Interview with Clive Sinclair, owner of Sinclair, about the takeover of his company’s computing arm by Amstrad. Male interviewer not identified.
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TURF: Concert Review!
Kurt Vile and the Violators // Yo La Tengo // Whitehorse // The Cat Empire // Xavier Rudd // Neko Case // Belle & Sebastian
The line-up at the first (and hopefully not the last) Toronto Urban Roots Festival, was wide-ranging and incredibly satisfying. The final day, which landed on Sunday, July 7, consisted of such great musical talents as Yo La Tengo, Neko Case, and Belle and Sebastian. With non-stop music stretching from 12 pm to 10 pm, it’s remarkable that the crowd stayed as upbeat as it did, yet even in unpredictable weather, Toronto came out to show it’s devotion to international (and national) music, both new and old.
Kurt Vile and the Violators — 2pm
Starting in the afternoon, with threatening skies overhead, Kurt Vile and the Violators took the east stage and rocked the large crowd. The indie rock, loud and imposing near the speakers, sent Vile fans into a frenzy. Halfway through the set, the sky opened up and poured, but Vile fans met the sudden downpour with cheers (only the VIP fled to their tent). The water messed with Vile’s electronics and the band had to stop midway through and Vile resorted to his acoustic, playing Peeping Tomboy until the electronics were sorted out and the band could go back to the exciting momentum they had been building. Luckily, the fans getting drenched were rewarded with the sun and with Jesse Trbovich’s saxophone solo. Vile’s unique, indie underground sound brings to mind 70s New York in more than just his appearance, and with their old-school style bring their music to newer audiences, Vile is guaranteed to pleased listeners for years to come.
Yo La Tengo — 3pm
On the west stage, Yo La Tengo emerged to a wet and dripping audience, and within moments Ira Kaplan himself dripped (in sweat). The band declared that with the backdrop of green trees reminding them of their newest LP, Fade, they were going to “take you into our living room,” starting their set with a series of quieter songs, which YLT is noted for; a rest for our ears after Kurt Vile’s CBGB-esque 70s rock. Kaplan launched into “I’ll Be Around,” and as the living room music morphed into the band’s typical alternative rock style, the audience started to catch the vibe. As Kaplan moved on to “The Point of It,” a foot-tapping relationship ballad strung along with his gentle guitar the good-natured audience swayed. Later, the band played “Autumn Sweater,” from their album I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One, one of several catchy, pop-y songs that interspersed the performance. Yo La Tengo’s folky guitar was definitely a crowd-pleaser.
Whitehorse — 4pm
The band from Hamilton has moved to Toronto! With a cheery hello, Whitehorse entered the stage at 4 and played a jaunty, folk/rock instrumental song that consisted of telephone’s enlisted to create echoing, haunting melodies, allowing the duo to carry on lyrically while their own voices still sounded in the background. The band played “Killing Time is Murder” from their self-titled album, and had a thrilling drum-off against each other before moving into their song “No Glamour in the Hammer,” a love song for the gritty, western Ontario town of Hamilton. Regardless of the town they call home, the crowd didn’t hold it against Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland, enjoying their combination of indie/folk/blues/alternative/country (there’s no one genre to slot these guys into!) even amid the second downpour of the day.
The Cat Empire — 5pm
A brass and ensemble band always leads to a jazzy and upbeat indie/alternative feel, and Australian band The Cat Empire knows it. Felix Riebl, lead singer and percussionist, has quite the set of lungs, and played his bongos with incredibly fervor and rhythm, resulting in the excellent, crowd-moving, ska that the band is known for. Despite the third downpour of the day, erupting over TURF as Riebl sang the lyrics “as the rain fell again,” the crowd couldn’t be dampened, and the latin jazz feel of the band moved people to dancing. Bare foot. In the mud. Harry James Angus, trumpet player and vocalist, encouraged the crowd, which consisted mainly of bobbing umbrellas, with his impressive scat singing and his exuberant trumpet. The Cat Empire is always the perfect remedy for a rainy day.
Xavier Rudd — 6pm
Didgeridoos and drums abound. Xavier Rudd is perhaps one of the most accomplished musicians around, if only for the impressive array of instruments he can play. Adding a touch of environmentalism to TURF (somewhat suitable and somewhat ironic) Rudd’s music added a bluesy vein to the festival. His surfer-esque appearance seemed to contradict his meaningful lyrics, but the spirit was overwhelmingly atmospheric and trance-like, with heartbeat-like percussion and soaring vocals. The didgeridoo itself was beyond impressive. The very mellow, melodic music also appeared almost as a soundtrack to a film, and brought to mind a certain level of nostalgia and sentimentality, suitable due to the environmental and ecological lyrics. With quite a loyal fan-base in Canada, the crowd trudged across the now swampy grounds to reach the east stage and sway barefoot in the mud.
Neko Case — 7:10pm
Case is personable with the audience, greeting the rain-soaked Torontonians with “can you handle all this love?” and opening her set with “That Teenage Feeling,” a melodious and melancholic song about love. The band played several of their new songs, and even in the fourth downpour of the day, Neko remained upbeat, infact, Case rocked the rain, adding it and incorporating it into the atmosphere on her set as if the concert was intended to come with the rain all along. The rain drops were lit by the stagelights and the audience forgot they were standing in a rainstorm. Instead of Yo La Tengo’s living room, we were now in a warm and cozy cabin with Neko Case. The harmony between Case and was perfect, fitting together like two pieces of a puzzle. Neko Case remains one of the few people who sound just as good live as she does in her studio recordings, every note hit perfectly, every guitar strum exactly on beat, culminating in a beautiful tour de force that could never perform as wonderfully if it were, heaven forbid, separated. Close to the end of the set, Hogan played a tiny tambourine while Case entered into a guitar solo that took the crowd above the rainy skies. The love Case has for Canada, due to her long history with the country, was evident in every song; her music was a love song for the country, and a gift to every Torontonian standing in the rain. She praised her beloved fans for sticking it out, and, with regret and sadness, left the stage.
Belle & Sebastian — 8:30pm
Closing down the festival was the much-loved band from Scotland, and they opened their set like a full-on concert, the instrumental start, and Stuart Murdoch’s onstage dance moves, getting the crowd going. Belle & Sebastian are known for their quirky, narrative songs that mix emotions and ideas. Similar to the Shins in their ability to tell a complete and fleshed-out story in a span of a few minutes, Belle & Sebastian wasn’t just about the music, but the performance itself. Stuart praised the crowd for sticking it out in the mud, then started singing Song for Sunshine, ironically, as the sky opened for yet another bout of rain, followed by The Stars of Track and Field, which was soft and melodic in the growing night. The crowd started singing along, and the magnetic band had grabbed hold of us all. A trumpet floated up from the brass section of the band and brought soul to the dusky night. The full ensemble band fleshed out the music in a very rounded way. Later, Stuart called a woman onstage, who helped him sing the song Dirty Dream #2; Stuart interacting with the crowd during the spaces between songs. It began to seem like each song was paired with an act which engaged the audience, as Stuart stood on the divider between the crowd and the VIP section to belt out another song, then calling another girl on stage for a game of Scrabble, then ending the night with a dance party of concert-goers on stage, commenting “it’s a bathnight!” at the sight of one girl’s bare, muddied feet. Belle & Sebastian were all about the people during TURF, with their soft tones and melodic music inspiring an interconnectedness amongst the wet and muddy beautiful people. There was a feeling of camaraderie and contentedness, even as the band left the stage after their encore; even the security guards around the exits were cheery, and the people sliding in the mud were supporting each other. Such, I suppose, is the power of Belle & Sebastian.
Emily Fox
Gimme Your Answers: An Interview w/ Terror Bird
Song of the Day: “Half Moon Lake”
One thought on “TURF: Concert Review!”
Empire Turf says:
I would like to thank you for the efforts you have made in writing this article, and i am hoping the same work from you in the future as well. Thanks for sharing us this article!
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Posted on January 18, 2021
Ugandan authorities should immediately cease all efforts to disrupt internet access in the country and allow the press to cover the country’s elections freely, the Committee to Protect Journalists said . Yesterday, the Uganda Communications Commission, the country’s broadcasting and telecommunication regulator, ordered telecommunications providers to suspend internet services in the country until further notice, according to a statement posted on Facebook by one of the providers, Africell, a separate statement by another company, MTN Uganda, which CPJ reviewed, and a copy of a letter from the commission to Simbanet, which was posted on social media…Read more
Indian authorities seal Kashmir Times office in Srinagar
The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned the ongoing harassment of the Kashmir Times and its editor, Anuradha Bhasin, by the Jammu and Kashmir administration and called on authorities to immediately reopen and allow staff to work from its Srinagar office. On October 19, officials from the Estates Department of the region’s administration forced out employees and sealed the Srinagar office of the independent, English-language daily Kashmir Times without advance notice or legal documentation, according to multiple news reports and Bhasin, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview. Bhasin said the newspaper has faced various retaliatory actions from authorities, including…Read more
Tanzania bans Kwanza Online TV for 11 months citing ‘misleading’ Instagram post on COVID-19
Posted on July 13, 2020
Tanzanian flag with fabric structure Tanzania’s broadcasting regulator should immediately lift its suspension of Kwanza Online TV and stop weaponizing regulations against critical media outlets, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. On July 2, the Contents Committee of the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority, a department within the country’s broadcast regulator, sent a letter to Kwanza Online TV, a privately owned local broadcaster, requesting its management to appear before the regulator and provide a written submission the following day, according to a copy of the summons seen by CPJ. In that summons, the…Read more
Pakistan media regulator suspends 24NewsHD broadcaster indefinitely
The Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority should immediately lift the suspension of independent news channel 24NewsHD, and allow it to broadcast freely, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. On July 3, the regulator ordered the station off the air indefinitely for the alleged “illegal transmission of news and current affairs content” in violation of its broadcast license, according to a statement by the regulator on social media, as well as news reports and a report by 24NewsHD. The statement alleged that the outlet was only credentialed to air entertainment programming, not news. The Association of Electronic Media…Read more
Zambia cancels broadcaster Prime TV’s license, police shutter office
Posted on April 20, 2020
Zambian authorities should restore Prime TVs broadcast license and cease harassing the outlet, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. On April 9, the Independent Broadcasting Authority, Zambia’s broadcasting regulator, cancelled Prime TV’s license “in the interest of public safety, security, peace, welfare or good order,” according to a statement from the regulator, which CPJ reviewed. The statement said that Prime TV must surrender its license and cease broadcasting immediately. It did not specify any broadcasts or actions by the station’s employees that prompted the decision. On the same day, police arrived at…Read more
Indian Supreme Court denies government request for prior censorship of COVID-19 news
The Indian government, on 31 March, approached the Supreme Court seeking a directive to news outlets to refrain from publishing any COVID-19-related news without clearance from the government, according to an affidavit filed by the government in the court and a report by the legal news website Live Law. The Supreme Court denied the request, according to the judgment reviewed by CPJ. The government had justified the request for the blanket order by claiming that “fake or inaccurate” reporting could cause panic in the country and had proposed setting up a “separate mechanism” for clearance of any coverage…Read more
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns BBC Africa’s decision to fire a journalist over an interview about the Rwandan genocide that supposedly annoyed the Rwandan government. The dismissal was “disproportionate” and will help to intimidate journalists who tackle this controversial subject, including those outside Rwanda, RSF said. Jacques Matand Diyambi, a Congolese journalist working at BBC Africa in Dakar, Senegal, was fired for “serious misconduct” as a result of his interview last November with Charles Onana, the Franco-Cameroonian author of a new book about the 1994 Rwandan genocide entitled “Rwanda, the Truth about Operation Turquoise.” The…Read more
Pakistan government secretly passes strict social media regulations
The Pakistan government should immediately roll back a set of social media regulatory measures that were passed in secret, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. On January 28, the federal cabinet approved the “Citizens Protection (Against Online Harm) Rules, 2020,” a set of regulations on social media content, without public consultation; the measures were enacted in secret and were reported yesterday by The News International, an English-language daily. A copy of the regulations, which was leaked online, shows that the rules empower the government to fine or ban social media platforms over their users’…Read more
Three journalist arrested, two radio stations closed in Gambia
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is extremely concerned about Sunday’s serious press freedom violations in Gambia, where three journalists were arrested and others were attacked during a banned protest in the capital, and the authorities closed two radio stations. The protesters were calling for President Adama Barrow to resign on completing the first three years of his five-year term, as he had promised to do when he took office The detained journalists are Giby Jallow, the manager of King FM, a member of his staff, and Pa Modou Bojang, the manager of Home Digital FM. The authorities closed their radio…Read more
TV news channels blocked in Pakistan after airing opposition speeches
Pakistan authorities should immediately unblock broadcasts of privately owned news channels Capital TV, 24 News HD, and Abtak News 247, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Yesterday, Capital TV posted a notice on Twitter stating that the three channels' transmissions had been blocked by the country's broadcast regulator, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority. Later that day, the Pakistan Broadcasters Association, a private industry association, issued a statement saying that the channels had been taken off air by the regulator without being given a reason or a hearing. The move came after the channels aired speeches…Read more
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No Strings Attached topped The Green Hornet this weekend to take first place in a fairly close race between the two.
First Place Debut for ‘No Strings Attached’
on January 24, 2011 by Daniel Garris
As was widely expected Paramount's No Strings Attached claimed first place this weekend. The R-rated romantic comedy starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher debuted with $19.65 million. Due to yesterday's NCF and AFC Championship games, Sunday grosses ended up being softer than estimated by the studios nearly across the board.
No Strings Attached was off to a very solid start this weekend, especially when considering the film's $25 million production budget. No Strings Attached opened 3 percent softer than the $20.17 million start of 2008's What Happens in Vegas... While No Strings Attached will have a tough time matching the holding power of What Happens in Vegas..., it could very well hold up well in its own right as it faces no new direct competition until February 11 when Sony's Just Go with It enters the marketplace.
Sony's The Green Hornet slid one spot from its first place debut last weekend to finish in a close second. The big-budget 3D film grossed $17.68 million, which was down a reasonable 47 percent from last weekend's three-day frame. The Green Hornet experienced a healthy 72 percent daily increase on Saturday, a sure sign that the film is making an impact with family audiences. The Green Hornet has grossed $63.02 million through ten days of release. That places the film 3 percent behind the pace of 2009's Paul Blart: Mall Cop (which fell 32 percent in its second weekend) and 4 percent ahead of the pace of last year's The Book of Eli (which fell 52 percent in its second weekend).
The Dilemma experienced a similar decline from last weekend, as it was down one spot and down 49 percent to take third with $9.11 million. After a lackluster start last week, Universal's comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Kevin James was able to avoid a freefall in its second weekend of release. The film's PG-13 rating likely helped soften the hit it took from No Strings Attached this weekend. With that said, the ten-day start for The Dilemma stands at a disappointing $32.75 million. At its current pace The Dilemma is headed for a final domestic gross in the neighborhood of $50 million.
This weekend's most impressive performance was once again perhaps that of The King's Speech. The Oscar hopeful for Best Picture from The Weinstein Company took fourth place with $7.85 million. The film was down a very slim 14 percent from last weekend. With Oscar nominations being announced on Tuesday, the film should hold up very well once again this coming week. The King's Speech has exceeded expectations with $57.31 million to date and will soon top the $60 milion mark.
Fellow Oscar hopefuls continued to hold up nicely as well. Paramount's True Grit fell 33 percent from last weekend to round out the weekend's top five with $7.33 million. Fox Searchlight's Black Swan fell 30 percent to finish in sixth with $5.87 million and Paramount's The Fighter slid just 18 percent to take eighth with $4.16 million. Respective domestic totals stand at $137.96 million for True Grit, $83.25 million for Black Swan and at $72.68 million for The Fighter. All three films will hope to benefit this week from potential Best Picture nominations.
In its first weekend of major international release Black Swan grossed $10.9 million from nine foreign markets this weekend. Key grosses included $4.2 million in The United Kingdom, $3.0 million in Germany and $2.6 million in Australia.
Back on the domestic front, it was a tough start for The Way Back in limited release. The Peter Weir directed film from Newmarket grossed just $1.21 million from 678 locations. That gave the film a per-location average of $1,782. The Weinstein Company's The Company Men was off to a much better per-location average of $6,111. The drama starring Ben Affleck opened with $647,797 while playing in 106 locations this weekend.
Tags: The Company Men, The Way Back, The Fighter, Black Swan, True Grit, The King's Speech, The Dilemma, The Green Hornet, No Strings Attached
read all Daily analyses »
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Sir John Soane's Museum
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Soane office, (48-50) Designs for centering to support arches during Bridge construction, Elevations
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Dave Meehan
Travelling Through Life
4th June, 2011 24th June, 2011 Dave
Eurovelo 6 – Day 4 – St. Nazaire to Nantes
Eurovelo 6
Click Here for the Full Interactive Map
Today is in three parts, only two of which were optional, the third created by the mischeavous technology. The first map and pictures was the post-breakfast walking tour. Right next to our hotel was the most impressive concrete construction – something that Blowfeld from James Bond would have been most envious of. The receptionist had described it as ‘The Bunker’, but we’d been curious to know more. It turned out to be a WWII German U-Boat dock, where they were serviced and re-armed before setting out into the Atlantic to knock seven bells out of the Allied convoys and Navy.
It’s a truly impressive feat of engineering, but probably wouldn’t win many prizes for it’s looks. It’s made from nearly 500,000 cubic metres of reinforced concrete, and took just under two years to complete, between 1941 and 1943. Only about 2 months later, the Allied forces sent 85 bombers to try and disable it, but managed to level the entire town leaving the bunker mostly untouched. St. Nazaire was the last town in France and occupied Europe to be liberated, when the Germans who were holding out there surrendered on the last day of the war. The Allies had done enough to disable it’s purpose by then, so just went around it.
Its now used as an entertainment venue, with gigs, bars and cafe’s etc, and a plan to turn the roof into a series of gardens. The roof is 30 feet thick of solid concrete. I think they might need some top soil!
So, after a fascinating stroll around the concrete lump, we did a little supermarket sweep, and set off at nearly noon. Getting beyond Nantes was the objective, as Jones was convinced that it was a concrete hell whole, but only admitted later to only having been to the airport.
Our first task however was to get out of St. Nazaire which required us to cross the infamous road bridge, something similar to the Severn Crossing between England and Wales. In all the accounts of the Eurovelo 6 route, it had been resoundingly reported as being a bit of a cyclists nightmare, but in fact it turned out to be a doddle. Ok, it’s quite a climb, but to us hardened Exmoor cyclists it’s just a gentle slope, and there is a safety margin which in effect doubles as a cycle lane, so the traffic doesn’t have to cross lanes to pass you. This morning the traffic was moving over the bridge at more or less cycle pace anyway, so really didn’t present a problem. Perhaps don’t try it if it’s pissing with rain, blowing a gale, and the lorries are travelling at 60mph. Also, don’t think that it’s worth cycling down the north shore, as it’s horribly industrial. I think there may be a ferry near to the bridge, but don’t rely on it, as I don’t think I saw any evidence of such.
Once the bridge was crossed, we did a quick right turn to the old fort and found the official starting point of the route, and a modern sign board showing the route name and various important European bodies responsible for it’s creation. There was no one else about, so we attempted some self-portraits to record the start of the route proper. We’ll need to think of something appropriate when we get to Basel, as there will not be a similar marker as it’s not the end of the EV6 route. Another 1800 miles would be needed to find that gem. I’m sure a bar and cold beer will do as a replacement landmark.
Ignore the ridiculously erratic GPS plots on the above map, I’m sure you’ll get the gist of the route. Either metal bridges play havoc with the GPS signal, or the French have some way of skewing GPS to protect their assets from guided missiles. Or Everytrail is a piece of shite and gets it’s knickers in a twist, which I’m beginning to think is a more likely occurrence.
Anyway, once I had wrangled the technology into working, and we’d taken the 5 mile inland detour to avoid the euphemistically labelled ‘low quality’ route along the river bank, we were following a canal that ran parallel to the river for another 5 miles or so. A pretty start, but I had to keep reminding myself that this was only a canal, and not the river proper.
This part of the route is not particularly remarkable, passing through relatively quiet country lanes alongside the canals and the river, and some non-descript towns that were not in the least bit chic.
It was quite enough that when we heard a twang, we thought the nano people had cone out to play, but on further consideration realised the Jobes had broken a spoke on the rear. Possibly a result of over tightening them on the first day, as we were rolling on a perfectly flat road at the time. Fortunately he had spares, and even more fortunately it was not on the same side as the cassette as without the proper tool, no chance of replacing it. Still took best part of 30 minutes to sort out, but a useful bit of sunbathing time for me.
I had my own little dilemma today also, as we took a dubious looking part of the route through some scrub, then found a steep bank which I tried to climb quickly in bottom gear. The extra pressure on the pedals was enough to push the rear wheel out of line and into the frame, so I came to a grinding halt just at the top. Bags off, bike turned over, pop the wheel and reseat it, job done. We were then at the end of what looked like a travellers camp, lots of caravans and kids running about. As we cycled through, I realised that there was a mixture of nationalities, from Turks to Indians. Exclusively brown skinned though, and these were not travellers but obviously poor people for whom these broken and dilapidated caravans was their only home. The women all sat outside their vans, washing and talking, the kids ran about smiling and laughing, and the blokes all stood guard at the entrance to the camp engrossed in conversation. No-one paid us any notice other than the kids who were happy to say bonjour as we passed. All like something from another world.
We then came across the first of the river ferry crossings, timing our arrival perfectly to roll onto the ferry, which was free for cars, cycles and pedestrians. It was remarkable to note the speed at which the river was running upstream. It was like an express train, swirling around and carrying a huge amount of silt so that it looked like a hot chocolate drink with a whisk in it. A large container ship then trundled upstream, but I doubt it needed it’s engines on as it seemed to be moving at the same speed as the river. Either the river is tidal at this point, or since we’ve started this trip the earth’s polarity has flipped.
The run into Nantes was unremarkable, apart from the industrial, drab nature of the place, but once we got to the city centre things started to look up. We tried a couple of streets back from the riverbank and the first hotel we tried had what we needed at a reasonable price, so here it is we stay. The interior is very chic and boutiquey, but not too pricey. After a quick freshen up, we were out on the town. Being a Saturday night we thought it appropriate to start with a couple of drinks, before moving off to find something to eat. A good meal in a relatively simple restaurant with the obligatory slightly surly service, but we were both happy with what we had.
I do have a bone to pick with Everytrail though. This is the app on the iPhone that I use to record where we have been and capture the images seen on the map. All well and good, but it has a major flaw. If you download the maps and turn off data services, it crashes, freezes, and stops tracking at it’s own whim. As long as there is a data connection, regardless of the map type or if it’s been downloaded already, it works pretty flawlessly. The whole point of the map downloads is to allow you to still navigate when out of mobile service or if roaming charges would be prohibitive, so I don’t get why this aspect of Everytrail works so badly. I’d had experience of this during the South Downs walking weekend just after I’d got the phone, but couldn’t figure it out other than for being buggy software, but now I’ve had to deal with several days of it, it’s become apparent that the key to the errors is lack of data service. Fortunately my 25MB roaming data allowance per day is enough to cover the maps needed for reference throughout the day, as long as I only use it occasionally to double check the route.
Miles covered today: 45
Executive summary: Don’t get up to early, take a stroll and learn something new, and don’t try to do too many miles in a day.
Tagged Cycling, Eurovelo, Eurovelo 6, EV6, Everytrail, France
Eurovelo 6 – Day 3 – Locminé to St. Nazaire
Eurovelo 6 – Day 5 – Nantes to Angers
Eurovelo 6 – Roscoff to St. Nazaire to Basel – I Miss You Already
Eurovelo 6 – Day 19 – The Journey Home
Eurovelo 6 – Day 18 – Montbéliard to Basel (and back to Mulhouse)
My name is Dave Meehan. I lived in a motorhome for 6 years, details of the adventures had are here, along with musings on technology and life in general. Where will the next adventure be?
or call my mobile, 07769 320666 if you want a chat!
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VOM-00
On World Ratings, the Future, Social Justice
Posted on November 4, 2000 3:50 pm By Del Meyer in VOM-00
WHO, CMA, Los Angeles County Medical Association and Sonoma County Medical Society. The World Health Organization has listed the best healthcare systems in the world. The USA ranks 37th out of 191 and France heads the list. I recall the time I was leaving Paris and a gentlemen with a bandaged eye lay on a […]
On Charles Schulz, Hattie, Lully, Mozart, et al
Posted on July 4, 2000 3:48 pm By Del Meyer in VOM-00
Reports from the Society of Anesthesiologists, and Humboldt-Del Norte, Alameda, San Joaquin, Kern, and San Joaquin Counties. Stephen H Jackson, MD, editor of the California Society of Anesthesiologists Bulletin, commented on the passing of Charles Schulz. His kind-hearted stories and human commentaries ran in 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries, making him the most widely read […]
Suisun, Fresno-Madera & the AMA
Posted on May 4, 2000 3:47 pm By Del Meyer in VOM-00
While filing my 1996 NEJM, I noticed an interesting letter to the editor: “Compensation of Lawyers and Doctors.” Richard G Williams, MD, from Suisun, California, reflects on seeing two lawyers. The first was his own attorney who charges Dr. Williams $185 per hour.. The second attorney was a patient. whose health maintenance organization pays Dr […]
Warnings of the New Millennium
Posted on January 4, 2000 3:46 pm By Del Meyer in VOM-00
Macon, GA; Jamestown, NY; San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Orange California In a recent issue of the Medical Sentinel devoted to Futility of Care and Duty to Die, Miguel Faria, Jr, MD, cautions us with a history lesson from Germany. Although Hitler issued his first order for euthanasia in Germany on September 1, 1939, the […]
MODERN ESPIONAGE MAY NOT BE RECOGNIZABLE
Corono-Flu-Virus in Perspective
Corona-flu-virus in Perspective Covid-19, Sars-CoV-2, MERS, Ebola, Marburg Virus
CORONA VIRUS – INITIAL MISSTEPS
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Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction Films
The History of Cinefantastique Magazine
Muoi: The Legend of a Portrait – review
Remember when J-Horror and K-Horror were a thing, and Asian filmmakers could barely churn out titles fast enough for Hollywood to remake them? Well, here is a relatively late example of the form, an elegantly crafted Korean ghost story, Muoi: Legend of a Portrait (2007), which should please fans who cannot get enough of a good thing, even if this particular thing is not quite as good as the films that turned you into fans in the first place. The background landscape is new, but the familiar compositions and pictorial elements remain, enhanced with an interesting color palette, a fine sense of light and shadow, and some entertaining brush strokes; however, the portraiture is more technically proficient than inspired: unable to render its subject in compelling detail, the finished painting is a beautiful pastiche but no masterpiece – interesting enough to peruse in a gallery but not enough to purchase and admire for a lifetime.
This is the Night Gallery.
The story has Korean novelist Yun-hee (An Jo) desperately trying to come up with material for a new book before a publishing deadline runs out. Fortunately, Seo-yeon (Ye-ryeon Cha), an old friend who moved to Vietnam, has run across a fascinating legend about a haunted portrait; unfortunately, Yun-hee’s previous book used thinly disguised and possibly embarrassing material based on Seo-yeon’s life. Hoping that Seo-yeon never realized the connection, or perhaps never even read the book, Yun-hee heads to Vietnam and begins investing the legend of Muoi (Anh Thu), a woman who died after a horrible betrayal and whose vengeful spirit was contained in a painting . The writer begins having nightmares, fueled by a combination of her research and residual doubt about whether or not Seo-yeon is really unaware of having been exploited in Yun-hee previous book.
In the manner of good Korean horror films, Muoi: The Legend of a Portrait relies on subtle brushstrokes to gradually reveal hints and portents, until finally the accumulation of detail resolves into a clear picture of the horror lurking in shadows behind the foreground characters. The problem is that those characters are not worthy subjects: they are too shallow to be intriguing, and the attempt to creature mystique through Chiaroscuro lighting only reveals how obvious their “secrets” are.
Seo-Yeon (Ye-ryeon Cha)
Yun-hee’s dreams may indicate she is victim of a guilty conscience, but she actually seems completely remorseless; her concern is only about having her betrayal discovered, not about atoning for it. Seo-yeon, on the other hand, is so preternaturally congenial that viewers immediately suspect she is faking it; the visuals and the narrative identify her so closely with Muoi (both of whom suffered betrayal horrible enough to inspire revenge) that, if you’re wondering whether Seo-yeon’s attempt to help Yun-hee is really a cover for a hidden agenda, all signs point to an emphatic YES!
The problem is exacerbated by a narrative gambit that the screenplay fails to pull off. By structuring the story around the relationship between Yun-hee and Seo-yeon, Muoi: The Legend of a Portrait misfires, building to a confrontation so climactic that the story seems concluded – although, in fact, it is this sequence that finally unleashes the vengeful power of Muoi from the portrait. What should have been the climax – the film goes on to paint the screen red with blood in a satisfyingly horrific rampage of revenge – instead feels like an extended epilogue.
Yun-hee (An Jo)
This epilogue lasts just long enough to make one realize that it could have been the main body of the film: the script could have begun with the deaths and had Yun-hee tracking down the legend of Muoi’s portrait not simply to earn a paycheck but to put a stop to the murders. With the threat active throughout the proceedings, dread would have evolved naturally, instead of being artificially injected through Yun-hee’s dreams. As it stands now, the film is punctuated with the world’s least suspenseful countdown, with calendar dates periodically flashing on screen to let us know that the traditional date upon which Muoi takes revenge is approaching – even though the story has given us no reason to think Muoi is currently targeting anyone and, in fact, we are clearly told that her spirit is helplessly trapped in the portrait.
Without this kind of ongoing threat, Muoi: The Legend of a Portrait relies on a vague sense of anticipation (what – if anything – is Seo-yeon up to?) coupled with Yun-hee’s quest to discover the truth about Muoi. The later is a bit contrived and even clunky. At one point, Yun-hee randomly questions people on the street – a pointless endeavor, considering that she does not speak Vietnamese; however, the screenplay provides a lucky coincidence that rewards her efforts.
Flashback to betrayal
Fortunately, the actual revelations of the Muoi’s history is intriguing enough to sustain interest, and it climaxes with a truly heart-rending double betrayal, first in life and then in death: the first drives Muoi to suicide; the second traps her soul in the portrait before she can seek justice against those who wronged her. The film then tops this with a parallel betrayal in the more recent past, which is ghastly enough to prime viewers for the supernatural settling of scores that eventually transpires. You will guess where the film is heading long before it gets there (once you learn that Muoi has a reputation for rendering vengeance on behalf of those willing to pay her price, the big plot revelation is relatively obvious), but you will be glad to follow along anyway.
Like a lesser work in an established artistic movement, Muoi: The Legend of a Portrait is more interesting when considered within the context of its predecessors (e.g., as in 1998’s Ring, we have a female writer tracking down the legend of a ghost that strikes with clockwork regularity). Enhanced with lovely location work in Vietnam (apparently a first for this kind of film), Muoi: The Legend of a Portrait attempts to create an interesting variation on established conventions; even though it fails to equal the masterworks it emulates, it does understand and exploit the power of the familiar stylistic devices, rendering a new work that reminds us of why we enjoy the genre. Muoi: The Legend of a Portrait will not win many converts to the movement, but the already initiated may find it worthy of a brief perusal.
Movies, Reviews
Asian horror, horror, K-Horror, MUOI, MUOI: THE LEGEND OF A PORTRAIT
Steve Biodrowski No Comments
The Lady Vampire review
This movie has everything – well, almost everything. It has a dwarf; a mute bald-headed assistant; an old lady who shows up at the beginning of the story, looking young; another old lady who shows up at the end of the story looking old; a bunch of other ladies immobilized like mannequins on display; and an artistic Japanese vampire who dresses like a European count and turns savage by the light of the full moon. About the only thing the film lacks a Lady Vampire, but you can’t have everything.
The Lady Vampire (original title: Onna Kyuketsukiaka) is one of many horror films directed by the prolific Nobuo Nakagawa during a fertile period that lasted from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Unfortunately, The Lady Vampire serves to prove that even the talented Nakagawa could not hit a home run every time; at least he doesn’t totally strike out. Though the story is a jumble of mis-matched elements, the film is enjoyable in bits and pieces, thanks to the familiar stylistic tricks and narrative devices.
Things get off to an intriguing start when a taxi carrying reporter Tamio (Keinsosuke Wada) seems to run over a mysterious figure that appears out of nowhere – only to find no body lying on the road. The non-collision slows Tamio down so that he arrives late for the birthday celebration of his girlfriend Itsuko (Junko Ikeuchi), who cuts herself instead of her cake. Though the wound is slight, it seems like an ill omen to her father Shigekatso (Torahiko Nakamura), who recalls the time his wife mysteriously disappeared twenty years ago. The recollection seems slightly prophetic when, coincidentally, the mysterious figure from the road shows up and turns out to be Miwako (Yoko Mihara), Shigekatso’s wife and Itsuko’s mother – and she has not aged a day since her disappearance.
While Miwako recuperates, too incoherent to explain her decades-long absence, Tamio and Itsuko go to a museum, where they see a semi-nude painting the strongly resembles Miwako. Though they do not notice, an elegantly dressed stranger (Shigeru Amachi) overhears their conversation. Later, the stranger orders his dwarf assistant to steal the painting and deliver it to Miwako. The painting jars her memory: on vacation long ago, she fell under the spell of an artist, who turned out to be a vampire. Flashing further back, we see that the artist was a samurai who became undead hundreds of years ago, after he drank the life’ blood of his beloved, a member of the Amakusa clan, a sect of Japanese Christians, rather than let her fall into the hands of the Shogun’s conquering army. The vampire, who preserves his immortality by drinking the blood of Amakusa’s descendants, promised her immortality. Eventually, she escaped, and now the vampire (who currently signs his paintings Shiro Sufue, though he otherwise goes by the name Nobutaka Takenaka) wants to find her again.
Meanwhile, we see that Shiro/Nobutaka, despite his well-coiffed appearance and fancy apparel (including the no-vampire-would-be-caught-undead-without-it cloak), has a werewolf-like reaction to moonlight, which turns him into a bestial blood-drinker who attacks women like a violent thug. Despite living in an apartment right next to a recent victim, he manages to avoid the slow-moving police long enough to kidnap Miwako and take her back to his lair: an underground castle. The police follow, along with Tamio and Itsuko. Apparently tired of Miwako, Nobutaka kidnaps her daughter and offers the same immortality deal he previously offered her mother. Tamio and the police arrive; a wild melee ensues, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing, and eventually the young couple walk away to safety.
For most of its short running time, The Lady Vampire comes across like the Japanese equivalent of the Mexican horror films that would start appearing a few years later: it resembles an assembly of clichés from classic American horror movies, filtered through the cultural eye of some competent technicians intent on manufacturing a successful pastiche with a touch of local flavor. The black-and-white photography is nicely done; the mystery is intriguing; the whole thing seems like good fun, but…
After the initial setup, the story goes nowhere fast; the human characters wander around somewhat cluelessly, while the vampire puts his plan into effect. But even his plan is unnecessarily protracted: once he knows Miwako’s whereabouts, why not kidnap her immediately instead of going through the trouble of getting the painting to her – which turns to be simply a plot device to jog her memory, so that the film can fill in the back story via flashbacks? Consequently, The Lady Vampire ends up treading water during its middle section, while the audience waits for someone to do something, with only Nobutaka’s occasional vampire outbreaks to rev up the proceedings.
The Lady Vampire is further hampered by its confusing mix of elements, best exemplified by the title itself: Shiro/Nobutaka never turned Miwako into a Lady Vampire, leaving her continuing youthful appearance somewhat puzzling. The enigma is exacerbated by his mannequin-like collection of women, embalmed in eternally youthful perfection; these are women who previously rejected Shiro/Nobutaka’s overtures – a fate that may befall Miwako as well – but the process by which they are immobilized is never explained, and considering that we see only half a dozen, we have to wonder whether that meager blood supply was enough to sustain him for centuries. This image of embalmed former wives/lovers standing at attention seems borrowed from the 1934 Universal Pictures horror film The Black Cat, in which Boris Karloff’s character had a similar collection of ex-wives; elements like this suggest that the writers of The Lady Vampire were tossing in genre motifs at random, out of a misplaced sense of obligation – such as the lunar transformations, which haphazardly mixes vampire mythology with lycanthropy.
Eventually, the unanswered question mount too high. Why was the vampire hanging out in the museum at exact time that Tamio and Itsuko happened to see his painting – was he hoping that Miwako’s relatives would just happen to show up and reveal her location, or is he just an egotist with an eternity to admire his own work? Why does the moon send Shiro/Nobutaka on a rampage? What the hell is the crazy ritual Shiro/Nobutaka performed on Miwako, thumping her breast with the base of a large candelabra? Why does Shiro/Nobutaka, after going to such trouble to retrieve Miwako, suddenly give up on her and go after Itsuko instead? If Shiro/Nobutaka requires the blood of Amakusa descendants to survive, why do we only see him drink from random victims when he wolfs out during the full moon?
Even when the script attempts to answer questions, it proves mostly lip service. I am willing to accept that, having lived several hundred years, Shiro/Nobutaka could have picked up a dwarf assistant somewhere along the way; however, the film randomly introduces two other servants, a bald henchmen, who provides a little extra muscle, and a withered old crone, who looks as she wandered in from Black Cat Mansion (which Nakagawa made a year earlier) and whose sole function is to utter prophecy of doom to explain why things go so wrong for Shiro/Nobutaka. She claims that that Shiro/Nobutaka is somehow angering the God that protects the Amakusa family, which I guess explains why the moonlight at the end suddenly ages him instead of simply turning him into a monster. Though I enjoy the idea that the old crone sees the Christian God as just another polytheistic deity, I have to wonder why Yahweh took so long to put the hammer down on Shiro.
I also have to wonder whether we’re supposed to assume that Shiro/Nobutaka became a vampire specifically because he drank Christian blood from his lover all those centuries ago – and does that also explain why he appears mostly in the guise of a Western-style vampire instead of a more indigenous species? (I guess this is as good a place as any to point out that script pretty much makes up the vampire rules to suit itself: Shiro/Nobutaka walks in daylight, drinks wine, and casts a reflection; we never hear exactly what it takes to destroy a vampire, but in the end he is dispatched by rather prosaic means.)
In spite of all this, why does The Lady Vampire remain watchable? Two factors:
The story unfolds in a manner that pulls us into its mysteries (even if those mysteries remain frustratingly unfulfilled).
Nakagawa knows how to deliver the genre elements you want to see in a film titled The Lady Vampire.
Like 1958’s Black Cat Mansion (based on a source novel by Sotoo Tachibana), The Lady Vampire wraps its story in three layers: present day, flashback to living memory, and flashback to history. This provides a sense of peeling away layers of the mystery moving deeper into the past, before returning to present day to see how the echoes of history reverberate in modern times. Unfortunately, the technique works less well here: in Black Cat Mansion, the historical flashback was the emotional core of the story; in The Lady Vampire, the much shorter flashbacks serve more as exposition, which do little to engage is in the outcome of Nobutaka’s pursuit of Miwako.
Fortunately, we still have Nakagawa’s visual skills to pull us through. The oddball mix of Western and Japanese genre elements is visually enjoyable, with some interesting variations on the expected: for example, instead of a fly-eating Renfield, this elegantly cloaked vampire has an ugly, misshapen assistant – but a dwarf rather than the more traditional hunchback.
One of the eccentric joys of Nakagawa’s horror films is that, though the supernatural elements are rooted in tradition and history, these elements often manifest in a modern context, creating an interesting clash of sensibilities (often underlined by jazzy soundtrack music). Typically, The Lady Vampire begins with an opening credits sequence playing over the dashboard of a car, whose journey will soon be interrupted the unexpected reappearance of Miwako. From this opening scene of the ghost-like figure nearly run over, Nakagawa establishes a supernatural atmosphere the overlays the entire film; the buildup to the revelation of Miwakos’ return (including a service bell ringing in a room closed for decades, followed by a long walk, illuminated by fluttering candles, into the room) is a classic bit of anticipation. The sequence stands on its own as a mini-gem of low-key horror in the Japanese tradition, enhanced with striking images, such as blood from Itsuko’s cut finger dripping blood on her own birthday cake – an unsubtle omen that jabs the eye with its impact.
Equally effective is Shiro/Nobutaka’s first moonlit vampire transformation. In the manner of Horror of Dracula (1958), The Lady Vampire presents its immortal blood-drinker in two guises: refined and savage. The jarring transition afflicts not only the character but also the film itself, which goes from the more refined uneasiness of a traditional Japanese ghost story to outright brutality. Shiro/Nobutaka’s attack upon a maid plays like a vulgar rape scene, with an emphasis on the helplessness of the victim. After filming the facial change with a subtle lighting effect (a la the 1932 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which used tinted filters to gradually reveal makeup otherwise invisible on black-and-white film), director Nakagawa plays with our visual expectations, keeping the camera mostly focused on the floor, where we see feet and shadows, as if to keep the violence just out of frame – but then he breaks the expectation with a jagged insert shot of the vampire savagely goring the maid’s throat, before tossing her on the bed to finish her off.
Shiro/Nobutaka’s later outbreak in a nightclub is even more extreme: a ramped-up rampage with multiple victims, it plays like an action set-piece and like a precursor to the later body-count attacks of monsters like Jason Voorhees (though of course without the explicit gore). The craziness of the sequence, with spectators standing in slack-jawed stupefaction while the vampire runs around unimpeded, has a go-for-broke quality, with the last couple victims gratuitously thrown in just for good measure. Unfortunately, even here, the narrative is confusing: Shiro/Nobutaka is exposed to moonlight because his dwarf assistant hurls a bottle through a tinted window. Did the dwarf do this on purpose – and if so, why? – or did he just get carried away while blowing off a little steam?
Nakagawa and his cinematographer also do a fine job with the vampire’s lair, initially visualized in flashback as a black void, housing only necessary props: a painting on an easel, a couch where Miwako reclines naked (arm strategically placed, of course), a mirror behind which the vampire’s previous brides stand motionless. We get a better look during the third-act daylight scenes, when the underground castle appears like a bundle of expressionistic angles and shadows, and Nakagawa, ever the master of the tracking shot, uses the twisted corridors to make us feel as if we are entering a netherworld fantasy-land of the imagination.
Sadly, Nakagawa’s directorial skills desert him when the wild melee erupts in the castle. Tamio and Shiro/Nobutaka run around fighting, while Itsuko is pursued by the dwarf, while the police rush in to assist. Because the sets are limited, the characters retrace their steps several times, crossing paths while pretending not to be able to catch each other. The overall effect is a bit like watching a horse race in which all the jockeys have taken bribes and are trying to let the other horses outrun them.
The climax (after aging in the moonlight, Shiro/Nobutaka seemingly commits suicide by walking into a pool of water and drowning) is not only a rather unusual demise for an undead being; it is also anti-climactic and visually uninteresting. (The troweled-on age makeup and the ridiculous white fright wig hardly help.) As if to compensate, the old crone blows up the castle, providing a little pyrotechnic excitement.
Yoshimi Hirano’s photography and Haruyasu Kurosawa’s art direction provide ample atmosphere throughout, enhanced by Hisachi Iuchi’s music. Amachi cuts a dashing figure as the vampire, though he over-does the evil sneer a bit. The rest of the cast is adequate.
The Lady Vampire is historically significant not only as Japan’s first full-blown vampire film but also as an early example of a vampire in a modern setting; also, Shiro’s longing for his lost love prefigures the reincarnation plots of Dark Shadows and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as the romanticized depiction of vampirism in many later films.
Aesthetically, The Lady Vampire does not rank among Nakagawa’s top-tier efforts (Jigoku, Ghost Story of Yotsuya), but it does contain individual sequences that rank among his best work. If you are a fan of old-fashioned black-and-white vampire movies, and you are seeking something beyond the acknowledged classics, you might want to tap this vein.
black-and-white, horror, J-Horror, Nobuo Nakagawa, Onna Kyuketsuki, THE LADY VAMPIRE, vampires
Mansion of the Ghost Cat review
An atmospheric and well-executed genre piece from Nobou Nakagawa, Japan’s equivalent to Terence Fisher.
If Japanese director Nobou Nakagawa is known at all in the U.S., it is because of Jigoku (1960), an art-house perennial and the recipient of a Criterion Collection release on DVD and streaming services. This might lead western audiences to view Nakagawa as a highbrow artiste, but in truth the director had a successful career in the 1950s and 1960s as a director of modestly budgeted horror films, appealing to general audiences by presenting familiar genre tropes with a sense of impeccable craftsmanship. The closest American equivalent from the era would be Roger Corman, but England’s Terence Fisher and Italy’s Mario Bava also come to mind: all three took material that could have been conventional in other hands and turned it into something remarkable.
A perfect example of this is Nakagawa’s atmospheric and intriguing entry in the Japanese Bakeneko or “Ghost Cat” genre, Borei Kaibyo Yashiki, known in the U.S. as Black Cat Mansion, though the title is sometimes translated as Mansion of the Ghost Cat (perhaps because, although a black cat is seen beneath the credits, the ghost cat itself is definitely not black). The story follows a Japanese couple who, for the benefit of the wife’s health, move from the city to the countryside, where they take up residence in an old mansion, which doubles as their home and as a clinic. Unfortunately, the mansion turns out to be haunted by a malevolent spirit, which seems to be targeting the wife.
Inquiries reveal that, hundreds of years ago, the mansion was the scene of a ghastly crime, when a brutal lord murdered a samurai and raped the samurai’s blind mother, who committed hara-kiri after charging her pet cat with seeking revenge (“Lap my blood, and imbibe my hatred!”). After the mother’s death, the cat transformed into a humanoid spirit, killing off all members of the household, including the servants. Back in the present day, we learn that the tormented wife is a descendant of one of those servants – in effect, an innocent victim of a vengeful “grudge” that is not very discriminate about its victims.
The narrative of Black Cat Mansion is wrapped in three layers, including two levels of flashback. We start in the present, with Dr. Kuzumi (Toshio Hosokawa) roving through the corridors of a city hospital late at night while a black cat meows outside, reminding him of the time he and his wife (Yuriko Ejima) moved to the haunted mansion. This takes us to the events concerning him and his wife, which in turn leads to the extended flashback regarding the history of the mansion. The movie then returns step by step to the present, first to the story of Kuzumi and his wife at the mansion, then to Kuzumi at the hospital.
The symmetrical structure neatly organizes a story that might otherwise have seemed stitched together to achieve feature length (though only barely, at 69 minutes). We get a sense of going deeper and deeper into the past, like peeling back a proverbial onion to reveal an elusive mystery. The back-the-the-present structure also provides a sense of finality to climax that is a bit vague in its details (we know what happened, though why is not precisely clear – at least not to Western viewers relying on subtitles).
Nakagawa presents the material with several stylistic flourishes that transform the genre material into a distinctive form of popular art. The wraparound segment begins with the camera drifting past an unexplained scene of a body being wheeled through a darkened hospital hallway like a ghostly funeral procession – which Dr. Kuzumi’s voice-over totally ignores, as if his thoughts are too preoccupied to bother noting the weird visual flashing before our eyes. Totally unrelated to the narrative, the scene serves only as visual warning sign, an omen of the supernatural horrors to come.
When Kuzumi and his wife arrive at the mansion, the scenery is straight out of the horror movie playbook, right down to the ominous raven perched atop a branch of one of the many wild plants apparently reclaiming the land from the disused property. Nakagawa films the scene in a simple, elegant long shot, slowly tracking to follow as the front gate is opened and the characters enter; the effect is to make the audience feel as if they, too, are crossing a borderland into a different world, a slightly dreamy landscape where anything can happen. The effect is punctuated when the extended take is broken by a single insert closeup, as the wife sees a mysterious woman within a side building – only to find that the ghostly figure is gone when Kuzumi comes to see.
As effective as these touches are, the present day footage is a bit methodical in its buildup, as the ghost’s presence becomes gradually more intrusive, entering the premises, killing the family dog (off-screen), and eventually attacking the wife. Black Cat Mansion truly comes to life when it enters its extended flashback: the uncanny creepiness of the present day scenes are replaced by a overtly horrific melodrama that is more full-blooded and colorful – quite literally so, as the present days scenes are shot in blue-tinted black-and-white, while the period footage is in color.
Nakagawa immediately captures a convincing sense of a household living in fear of its temperamental master. There is an awful sense of inevitability as the events build to the murder and rape, reaching an emotional crescendo as the blind mother begs the pet cat to be her avenger, then takes her own life, after which the cat dutifully licks up the dead woman’s blood. The revenge that ensues is bizarre to say the least, with the actual cat soon replaced by a human with cat-like features, who sows mayhem and discord, leading to the deaths of not only the guilty lord but of innocent victims as well.
The makeup of the Ghost Cat appears slightly absurd to modern eyes, but it works well enough in longshot and shadows; some of the best scenes feature the character silhouetted against translucent screens. The action uses some simple camera tricks to create bizarre imagery: jump-cuts and reverse motion imbue the vengeful cat with supernatural powers. The matter-of-fact impact of these simple effects adds a touch of low-key believability to the otherwise unbelievable scenes.
SPOILERS: With the back story filled in, the film returns to the events at the mansion, where the wife suffers a final attack before the hiding place of the murdered samurai’s body is revealed. Black Cat Mansion then returns to the opening scene at the hospital, where Kuzumi’s wife appears and asks to adopt the cat we heard meowing earlier. The return to normalcy offers a refreshing sigh of relief after what came before, but the wraparound feels a bit like the opening and closing footage of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which used a similar structure to stitch a happy ending onto what had been intended as a pessimistic story. How did Mrs. Kuzumi survive the final attack, which apparently left her dead? Was the ghost cat exorcised by the revelation of the hidden body? Apparently so, but the film is not saying for sure. Viewers simply have to accept the ending as if emerging from the depths of a nightmare, back to a waking world where the past truly has been laid to rest, and life can go on with no residual fear of innocuous felines. END SPOILERS.
Black Cat Mansion is not a masterpiece that will sway the uninitiated. It is, however, a fine example of well-executed genre material, handled with serious intent and dedicated craftsmanship. Fans of old-fashioned horror looking for something beyond the standard list of classics should be satisfied, as should anyone with an interest in cult Japanese cinema, especially cineastes seeking the roots of modern J-horror (for example, with his feline yowl, Toshio from the Ju-On films is clear descendant of the ghost cat genre). Even cat lovers may get a kick out of the lengths to which a beloved pet will go to right the wrongs inflicted on its master and mistress. A dog may be man’s best friend; a cat, however, is a ruthless undead avenger.
BLACK CAT MANSION, horror, J-Horror, MANSION OF THE GHOST CAT, Nobuo Nakagawa, scaredy cats
Tetsuo: The Bullet Man review
Two decades after TETSUO: THE IRON MAN, writer-director Shinya Tsukamoto returns to the franchise that he last visited in TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER. The results should please fans eager for another helping of science-fiction body horror, featuring a hapless human transforming from mere flesh and blood into a mutant metallic hybrid, but despite the addition of an American lead and English dialogue, there is little to draw in first-time viewers not already bewitched by the strange spell that Tsukamoto weaves (o r rather welds).
This time out, Anthony (Eric Bossick) is an American salary-man living in Tokyo with a Japanese wife (Akiko Mono) and their son, Tom (Tiger Charlie Gerhardt). Anthony’s father Ride (Stephen Sarrazin) seems peculiarly concerned with the health of Anthony and Tom – a concern that seems mysteriously related to a lifelong admonition that Anthony should never lose his temper. (Fans of the Incredible Hulk, take note.)
Anthony’s eternal calm is put to the test when Tom is deliberately run over by a mysterious driver, known only as the Informant (Tsukamoto himself). Tom seems to take longer to die than one would expect; briefly, his shattered body seems to be retaliating against the car from below (it’s hard to tell with all the shaky camer work). Yuriko is outraged that Anthony doesn’t want revenge, but that changes when a delivery man turns out to be an assassin who attempts to kill Anthony, provoking his body to begin mutating into a misshapen Terminator-like weapon that blows away his opponents.
Eventually, it turns out that Ride was involved with an experiment to create cyborg weapons; after his wife Mitsue (Yuko Nakamura) dies, he created a cyborg duplicate, by which he sired Anthony. Since then, he has worried that Anthony (and, later Tom) could transform into weapons if their anger was aroused. The Informant has been deliberately attempting to provoke this transformation, for vaguely expressed reasons of his own (echoing the first TETSUO film, he tells Anthony to use his love to destroy the world). Anthony must choose between embracing his new power to kill the man who killed his son, or restraining his anger for fear that once unleashed it will lead to uncontrollable destruction.
I fear that my summary has made TETSUO: THE BULLET MAN sound more coherent than it intends to be. Tsukamoto’s directorial approach here is to shoot everything with a bouncing hand-held camera, then splice the footage together with as many micro-cuts as possible, to create a deliberately disorienting experience. The visceral impact is undeniable, but it is also exhausting, making the film feel much longer than its 71 minutes. At a certain point, you want to say to the screen, “Yeah, I get it; let’s move on, okay?”
Consequently, narrative progression is obscured: audiences are not so much watching the story of Anthony’s dilemma as experiencing a delirious surge of sensory impressions that simulates in the viewer’s mind the confusion that must be afflicting Anthony. The revenge story is further weakened by a plot structure that focuses mostly on revealing the mysterious back story of Anthony’s situation, through flashbacks, narration, and glimpses of documents.
The hyper-kineticism pays off in the action scenes, and the final act is interesting an an over-the-top AKIRA kind of way, which maybe sees Anthony resolving his dilemma of whether or not to kill the Informant (SPOILER: Anthony’s new metal body absorbs the Informant, who vows, “You don’t want me inside you – you don’t know what I’ll do” – a threat that remains unresolved by the closing credits, which see Anthony somehow returned to a normal life with a new son.)
Stylistically, Tsukamoto has forged a new metallurgic spectacle with all the white-hot alloys and burning sparks of a foundry running at twice full capacity. It’s crazy enough that those willing to embrace that madness should have a deliriously good time. Just don’t expect much in a way of deeper exploration of themes from the previous films. This is mostly more of the same – just louder, slicker, and hotter than before.
TETSUO: THE BULLET MAN (2009). Directed by Shinya Tsukamoto. Written by Tsukamoto, Hisakatsu Kuroki. Unrated. 71 minutes. Cast: Eric Bossick, Akiko Mono, Yuko Nakamura, Stephen Sarrazin, Tiger Charlie Gerhardt, Prakhar Jain, Shinya Tsukamoto.
science fiction, Shinya Tsukamoto, TETSUO, TETUSO: THE BULLET MAN
Laserblast: The Paramount Vault – Science Fiction & Horror on YouTube
Parmount Pictures recently created a new YouTube channel, The Paramount Vault, which streams free films from the studio’s library. Along with clips from classic titles, there are approximately 150 full length movies. Of course, these are not premium titles but lower end stuff for which services such as Netflix might not be inclined to pay licensing fees. However, there are some horror and science fiction films that might be of interest to cult movie enthusiasts and completists: THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK, THE SPACE CHILDREN, CONQUEST OF SPACE, THE DEADLY BEES, CRACK IN THE WORLD, BENEATH, THE SENDER, etc.
The Paramount Vault divides its titles into playlists. You can find science fiction films here and horror films here.
Films worth checking out include I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (an tense little thriller despite the title); THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 (a gore-filled sequel to the cult original); IN DREAMS (Neil Jordan’s psychic thriller); and SHANKS (an oddity starring mime Marcel Marceau). And of course fans of ’80s cheese from Cannon Films should get a kick out of MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE.
Note: The Paramount Vault YouTube channel is not to be confused with the Paramount Pictures YouTube channel. The former is a library of archival titles; the latter offers trailer and promotional videos for Paramount’s upcoming releases.
Home Video, Laserblast, VOD
Paramount Pictures, science fiction, The Paramount Vault
Shaun the Sheep Movie – review
Despite some forays into computer-generated animation (Flushed Away, Arthur Christmas), Aardman Animations remains committed to the art of stop-motion, as evidenced by their most recent theatrical release, 2015’s Shaun the Sheep Movie, which sees the company struggling but ultimately succeeding at expanding their television series a feature film. The movie lurches to a shaky start, as if uncertain how to stretch its concept to full length, but after a wobbly first act, the narrative hits its stride and runs smoothly to a successful finish, delivering delightful entertainment on the way.
Personally, I was dubious about the potential of a Shaun the Sheep movie. I preferred the title character when he played a supporting role in his debut, A Close Shave, the Oscar-winning short subject starring the lovable characters Wallace and Gromit. The Shaun the Sheep television series moved the character to center stage, but there was not necessarily that much distinctive about the little fur-ball. Sometimes he was the one coming up with clever schemes, but other times he just happened to be the one swept up by the zany antics (i.e., in the first episode, he is dragged around by a hungry, high-speed goat, trailing behind like a water-skier). The show shifted the setting from town to country, placing Shaun on a farm run by another human-dog combo, the Farmer and his Sheep Dog (amusing but no match for Wallace and Gromit). A typical 20-minute episode consists of three unrelated segments, each telling a mini-story. The series cleverly eschewed dialogue, relying only on grunts, bleats, and exclamations (even from the Farmer), but the stories tended to be more juvenile in their appeal than Aardman’s best work. I will admit to being thoroughly charmed by “Who’s the Mummy” (which despite its title is not a horror movie spoof), which had Shaun bedeviled by a quartet of freshly hatched chicks who imprint on him (they resemble tribbles with tiny beaks, and they were so ridiculously cute that I had to laugh in spite of myself). Nevertheless, the question remained: could the format of 6-to-7-minute segments be stretched to full narrative length?
Shaun the Sheep Movie begins with a recreation of the show’s opening title sequence, portraying Shaun, the other sheep, the Farmer, and his dog getting up in the morning; the joke is that this sequence, which repeats weekly on the series, is repeated multiple times in the film, creating an immediate sense of an endless, boring routine, which ultimately motivates Shaun to break that routine by fooling the farmer into sleeping in late, so that the sheep can have a day off. It’s just enough of a narrative tidbit to set up a situation in which the sheep can get into some hi-jinx; basically, it’s little more than what one would see in an average episode, and it initially seems as if the script is simply going to string together several such episodes until they fill the minimum necessary running time. Things start to feel a little desperate when a camper-trailer (in which the farmer is sleeping) rolls down the hill and into nearby city, creating an excuse for one of those action-packed high-speed chases that Aardman does so well (e.g., The Wrong Trousers with Wallace and Gromit); one almost gets the feeling that Aardman is stumbling into DreamWorks Animation territory (in which an extended, gratuitous action set piece is de rigueur in the first twenty minutes of any film).
Fortunately, all of this is just preamble – a messy first act setting up the fun to follow. Once the Farmer awakens in the city, the story moves smoothly from one development to the next, and the script never again seems to be padding itself unnecessarily. The Farmer suffers amnesia, but he recollects enough of his skill with a pair of sheers (originally used on the sheep) to become a successful barber; Shaun and the other sheep, meanwhile, find that the farm doesn’t run so well without the farmer, so they embark on a mission to rescue him, which is complicated by an officer from animal control, who is every bit as threatening and efficient (but a lot less unpleasantly designed) than the one in Madagascar 3).
For its second two-thirds, Shaun the Sheep movie is pretty much a non-stop delight, in which the comic set pieces (such as the sheep disguising themselves as humans to thwart the animal control agent) are effortlessly blended into the narrative. As always, Aardman provides state-of-the-art stop-motion, effortlessly realizing sequences traditionally difficult to achieve in the medium (e.g., splashing water, quickly moving objects). Not all of these tour-de-force moments are high-octane highlights; some are just amusing throw-aways, such as the delightful sequences in which the sheep lull the Farmer into falling asleep by jumping one by one over a fence. The basic joke (counting sheep puts people to sleep, right?) is only mildly funny, but the visual execution augments the humor by having the sheep ever so subtly go into slow motion as they reach the peak of their jump, the floating effect enhancing the hypnotic quality upon their intended victim.
Unlike many of their computer-generated competitors, who sometimes don’t know when to modulate the animated anarchy, the Aardman team know when a simple sight gag is as entertaining as a technical tour-de-force: during a stint in jail, the sheep inmates are continually perturbed by the silent stare of an angry dog in the cell opposite; the joke is that his expression is exactly the same every time the camera cuts to him (which means of course that the animators could save time by not animating the figure). The recurring images eventually pays off with a punchline I won’t spoil, except to say that it explains the character’s total lack of movement.
In a world filled with CGI blockbusters that seem to tell the same tale over and over (little guy achieves his great destiny and/or a sense of belonging), Shaun the Sheep Movie offers a pleasant change of pace. The tactile quality of stop-motion puppetry grounds the visuals – not in reality, exactly , but in a sense of physicality that enhances the sight gags and set pieces; the narrative delivers unpretentious fun without trite lessons about letting go or finding inner self.
I don’t think I will ever love Shaun the Sheep as much as I love Wallace and Gromit, but to my surprise the little lamb’s feature-film debut is actually better than the disappointing Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Shaun the Sheep Movie improves on the television series, providing the kind of stop-motion delights that should amuse adults whether or not they have children.
Aardman Animations, SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE
The Bloody Judge (1970) review
“You are all condemned, for crimes against king and kingdom, to hang… to dangle until you are but dead, to be then cut down still alive, to have your entrails drawn out and thrust into your own mouths, to be further hanged, then quartered like the carcasses of beef you are. You number five hundred, but even if you were five thousand, the execution of this sentence would be just before God Almighty… and may He have mercy upon your souls.” – Lord George Jeffreys.
There is perhaps no more enduring mystery in the world of cinema than the cult reputation of Jesus Franco. Certainly, no filmmaker ever did less to earn more respect from people who should know better. A purveyor of exploitation trash, Franco is viewed as a talent who transcended genre obligations and meager resources, and Exhibit A in his case is The Bloody Judge (original title: Il trono di fuoco), a 1970 production that sees the director for once working with something like a reasonable budget. Sadly, this means only that Franco’s usual cinematic shortcoming are elevated to the level of garden-variety incompetence.
Like 1966’s Psycho-Circus, The Bloody Judge is one of Christopher Lee’s non-horror “horror” films – which is to say, it has enough genre trappings to capitalize on the actor’s status as horror star, but these elements are simply window dressing on a story that is really something else: a wanna-be historical epic of political intrigue, upheaval, and warfare. (This misrepresentation of the film as a horror-thriller was compounded in the U.S., where the release was irrelevantly re-titled Night of the Blood Monster.)
Lee plays Judge Jeffreys, a real-life historical character, who is initially seen presiding over the trials of accused witches, who are tortured to extract confessions. Just when viewers think they are seeing Lee’s version of Witchfinder General (1968), the narrative shifts: the witch-hunting turns out to be a gratuitous sideshow; the remaining running time focuses on political foes seeking to overthrow the current regime in England, and most of the people before Jeffreys’ court stand accused of treason. At times, Jeffries seems less like the lead character than a Greek chorus, delivering exposition to explain action taking place elsewhere, though he does occasionally take some action to squelch the uprising. In short, this is another one of producer Harry Alan Towers’s scatter-shot scenarios (he co-wrote the story as “Peter Welbeck”) and also an example of a modestly budgeted film that couldn’t afford to keep its star around for the duration of production, resulting in a fragmented, unfocused mess, which abandons its most interesting idea to waste time on secondary characters.
Strangely, there is an interesting idea at the heart of the film – well, not at the heart, but pulsing in one of the outer arteries, blocked from circulating throughout the rest of the system. Though Jeffreys is presented as a merciless judge in public, he privately frets about the severity of the sentences he hands down, continuing in his work only because he believes it is his duty before God and Country, regardless of his personal feelings. This leads to a nice confrontation wherein Lord Wessex (Leo Genn) admonishes Jeffreys, wishing that for once the judge would see one of his abominable sentences carried out, so that his abstract justifications might be tempered by a collision with the awful reality.
In a nifty bit of accidental art, Wessex’s admonition rings true precisely because The Bloody Judge belongs to that breed of exploitation film which, for reasons of budget and schedule, keeps its star well segregated in his own little portion of the film, never allowing him into the torture scenes, which seem to have been filmed separately, with an eye for inclusion on a country-by-country basis, depending on local audience preference for depraved debauchery. Thus, Jeffreys truly does seem completely oblivious to the horrors inflicted because of his judgments.
At the conclusion, Jeffreys – arrested and in jail, awaiting the sort of punishment he has handed out to others – looks out his cell window and for the first time beholds an execution – a sight which provokes a heart attack in the previously stolid judge, who collapses, gasping, “You were right, Wessex. I never knew!” It’s a strangely affecting moment, well stage and acted, evoking pity for a character who bestowed so little pity on others – a hint of what The Bloody Judge could have been, had its focus remained on the title character.
Sadly, the film spends just about as much time on this dramatic arc as I have spent describing it here; the impact is considerably diluted by the rest of the movie, with its political machinations, espionage, warfare, attempted rapes, aimless brutality, and torture scenes forming a bloody stew of mismatched ingredients.
Had these other scenes been executed with aplomb, their inclusion might have been forgivable, but often they are simply absurd. One “highlight” features Lord Wessex’s son visiting an oracular woman living in a cave: she vaguely warns him of “danger” but neglects to mention that, not sixty seconds previously, the king’s men were in the cave searching for him and are presumably still outside waiting. When he leaves, he almost literally walks right into their arms. (Of course, how young Wessex managed to get past them and into the cave is a question best left unasked, because the film will not bother to explain it.)
Franco admirers cite the mid-film battle sequence as an example of what the director could achieve, given decent resources, but the result is not exactly David Lean in scope; it looks more like a competently executed second-unit scene, whose moderate impact is undermined by foreshadowing that completely oversells the event: a character refers to an army “10,000 strong,” which – even allowing for hyperbole – is laughably wrong. What we see looks more like 50 men on horseback, fended off by half a dozen unsupported canons. Photographing the same horsemen from three or four different angles doesn’t make them seem like 150 or 200 men; it makes them look like the same men photographed from three or four different angles.
Even worse, the geography of the battlefield is so haphazardly presented that it’s never clear why the horseman ride directly toward the canons instead of simply circumventing them and attacking from behind. A few do ride up from behind, but the editing quickly obscures this, in order to keep the scene going, because it’s clear that, even with their small numbers, the horsemen could easily overwhelm the cannoneers while they pause to reload.
As if this were not bad enough, midway through the sequence, Franco violates the 180-degree rule, switching to a 180-degree reverse angle, so that the cannons suddenly seem to be firing from left to right onscreen instead of right to left. Viewers cannot tell whether the canons have been re-aimed in the opposite direction or whether there is a different battery of canon. Confusion is aggravated by the fact that the cannoneers’ uniforms change from blue to red, and they seem to be shooting at other soldiers in red uniforms. A triumph of cinematic mise-en-scene, it ain’t.
As lame as these cinematic stumbles are, they look like exemplars of cinematic form compared to the torture scenes, which pretend to be the physical manifestation of Jeffreys’ harsh judgments but feel more like gratuitous torture porn. The allegedly serious intent is hardly enhanced by the presence of actor Howard Vernon as the chief torturer Jack Ketch: his skinny frame, dressed in a black-hooded costume, suggests a reject from a Monty Python sketch.
Some of this footage was omitted in the 84-minute version of the film released in 1970, but it’s been lovingly restored in the 103-minute version currently available on DVD and streaming services. The key sequence involves Mary Gray (Maria Rohm), an accused woman who has caught the eye of the judge, who summons her to his quarters. For reasons the film never explores, Ketch does not immediately bring her from the torture chamber as ordered; he has a little fun with her first, apparently unconcerned that his boss might be a little impatient.
Ketch’s “fun” consists of shoving Mary into a cell with a tortured woman, who is either unconscious or dead, and then waiting to see what Mary does. Literally, he gives no orders, forces her to do nothing. Instead, she takes the initiative on her own, kissing and licking the other woman’s wounds. In the liner notes for the DVD, Tim Lucas calls this scene “incredible, transgressive erotica,” but a more accurate description would be risible nonsense. What is presumably supposed to register as horrible humiliation and degradation instead reads as silly soft-core foreplay, as actress Rohm exhibits neither reluctance nor revulsion. It should go without saying that none of her subsequent scenes show any hint that the character has been scarred by this experience, because it is precisely the kind of scene intended to be included only in versions of the film released to specific countries that want a little extra schlock (a theory supported by the fact that, unlike the rest of the film, the restored scene is dubbed in German, with English subtitles – suggesting that the footage was never intended for English-speaking countries).
If this is the evidence that’s supposed to prove Franco’s genius, I remain unconvinced, but in spite of its manifest shortcomings, The Bloody Judge did keep me watching until the end, if only for the benefit of seeing Lee in a mildly interesting role in a historical film. The Bloody Judge lacks the class and craftsmanship of the Hammer Film productions that made Lee famous, and the Jeffreys lacks the iconic stature of Lee’s Count Dracula, but at least the villainous judge is given a tiny note of interest. (Fortunately for Lee, the actor would appear in a high-class period costume piece a few years later, The Three Musketeers.) Apart from Lee, The Bloody Judge has little to recommend it to anyone who has not already succumbed to the dubious allure of Franco. It’s beautifully shot but inept in storytelling and execution, and even its sleazy excesses are more laughable than shocking. This Judge has been weighed on the scales of cinematic justice and found wanting.
THE BLOODY JUDGE (Original title: Il trono di fuoco [“The Throne of Fire”]; also known as NIGHT OF THE BLOOD MONSTER, 1970) Produced by Arturo Marcos, Harry Alan Towers. Directed by Jesus Franco. Written by Enrico Colombo, Jesus Franco, Michael Haller; story by Harry Alan Towers, Anthony Scott Veitch. Cast: Christopher Lee, Maria Schell, Leo Genn, Hans Hass Jr., Maria Rohm, Margaret Lee, Howard Vernon. 103 minutes.
Christopher Lee, Harry Alan Towers, IL TRONO DI FUOCO, Jesus Franco, NIGHT OF THE BLOOD MONSTER, THE BLOODY JUDGE
Psycho-Circus (1966) review
With a title like Psycho-Circus, not to mention the presence of two Count Draculas (Christopher Lee and Klaus Kinski), fright fans will probably expect this to be some kind of lurid horror-thriller filled with circus acts gone horribly wrong (lion tamers mauled, knife thrower’s assistant stabbed) along the lines of 1960’s Circus of Horrors (stock footage from which appears here). Unfortunately, Psycho-Circus is horror-in-name only; though it features a circus, there is nothing psychotic about it. Based on a story by Edgar Wallace, the film is more of a mystery-crime-melodrama, more accurately represented by its original title, Circus of Fear. Taken on its own terms, the film is a passable time-waster, though just barely.
The plot kicks off with the nicely staged robbery of an armored car in broad daylight, abetted by one of the security guards. The stolen loot is hijacked, however, when one of the robbers is killed while trying to deliver the money to an accomplice at the circus. This sets up two mysteries: (1) Who was supposed to get the money; and (2) Who actually got the money? Unfortunately, the film is concerned with the mechanics of its gimmicky mystery plot that it forgets to ask, let alone answer, the most important question: Why should we care about the answers to Questions 1 and 2?
Misleading artwork for the re-titled version of the film.
This is a consequence of a typically fragmented script by producer Harry Alan Towers (writing under his Peter Welbeck pseudonym), which follows different characters in different plot threads, without ever winding them into a tight skein. There’s no central protagonist or point of view, and the interesting bits must fight for attention with scenes that drag the pace to a crawl: the police attempts to solve the crime are interrupted by criminal attempts to track down the loot, which in turn must give way to behind-the-scenes melodrama at the circus. Though the anticipated circus carnage never takes place, eventually suspects and witnesses start showing up with knives in their backs, but that’s so obviously a red herring for the knife-thrower that you almost wonder whom the film thinks it’s fooling.
Credit the scattershot approach to a combination of convoluted mystery plotting and more pragmatic concerns: a British-West-German co-production, Psycho-Circus is proto-Eurotrash cinema, a genre in which the need to satisfy investors from different countries outweighs the needs of the narrative. German money? Get German actor Klaus Kinski in there for a few scenes, whether or not he adds anything to the plot.
One intriguing bit involves Lee’s character, Gregor, the lion-tamer, who goes through most of the film wearing a mask, supposedly to hide scars inflicted by one of the beasts in his act – or is he really a criminal hiding his identity? Is he the man to whom the loot was supposed to be delivered, or did he purloin it to finance his escape, now that a dark secret in his past seems to be catching up to him? There might have been a fascinating film to be made that focused on these aspects; instead, these tiny threads are twisted and knotted with less interesting strands.
Despite star billing, Lee is just one of the ensemble. At least his voice is distinctive enough to register while his face is hidden, and when he is finally unmasked he manages to generate a little pathos for a character who is a bit shady. Leo Genn is decent as the Scotland Yard detective on the case, but Kinski gets little to do except skulk around suspiciously.
Production values are okay; direction is competent but unremarkable. The film could have benefited from more robust handling to push it out of the German krime territory and into the giallo genre; a little stylized violence would have gone a long way toward enlivening the drab plotting. The story winds up with one of those scenes in which the detective assembles the suspects to reveal the murderer’s identify. If you’re a fan of that kind of who-dunnit hijinx, it might be worth your while to sit through this one to the end.
Though the revelation of Gregor’s face is withheld until late in the British film, the trailer gives it away.
Credits: Produced by Harry Alan Towers. Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey. Screenplay by Harry Alan Towers (as Peter Welbeck) based on Edgar Wallace’s novel The Three Just Men (uncredited). Cast: Christopher Lee, Leo Genn, Anthony Newlands, Heinz Drache, Eddi Arent, Klaus Kinski, Margaret Lee, Suzy Kendall, Skip Martin. 90 minutes.
Christopher Lee, CIRCUS OF FEAR, Harry Alan Towers, Klaus Kinski, Psycho-Circus
The House of Exorcism (1975): restrospective review
In cults circles (especially among fans of Italian horror cinema in general and director Mario Bava in particular), THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM is probably the most (in)famous alternate film version in existence – a complete do-over of Bava’s excellent and ethereal LISA AND THE DEVIL (1973) with added scenes of (you guessed it!), exorcism and all that entails: bile, vomit, and profanity. What may make HOUSE OF EXORCISM unique among alternate versions is that (as its producer Alfredo Leone is fond of pointing out) it actually has a separate copyright date, distinguishing HOUSE OF EXORCISM as a separate film unto itself. The irony here is that, if HOUSE OR EXORCISM holds any interest at all (a position seriously open to debate), that interest lies not on the merits of the film itself but on its relationship to LISA AND THE DEVIL.
The original is an atmospheric, ambitious work, filled with suggestion and ambiguity about a tourist named Lisa (Elke Sommer) who loses her way and ends up in a chateau with a strange family, who seem to recognize her as someone named Helena. Is she a reincarnation of a dead woman, or are these the ghosts of the past? Is Leandro (Telly Savalas) simply a butler, or is he an incarnation of the Devil, tormenting Lisa by making her relive events of her previous life over and over? In the manner of many such movies, which combine artistic aspirations with genre obligations, it’s not a fully satisfying experience in a conventional sense, and it’s sometime hard to determine whether the questions lingering over the narrative are a part of an intricate puzzle box or simply a matter of sloppy screenwriting. Fortunately, the film bravura visual qualities pull you into its weird world, so that any puzzling plot developments become part of the dreamlike experience.
Apparently this was too much for U.S. distributors, who passed on LISA AND THE DEVIL after it was completed in 1973. Hoping to get some return on his investment, Leone went back and shot more footage (apparently directing the additions himself) featuring Sommer and Robert Alda as a priest. The result was THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM, which was released in Italy in 1975 and in the U.S. in 1976 – a film that mimics THE EXORCIST (1973) only close enough to remind viewers how inferior the ripoff is.
HOUSE OF EXORCISM begins with a much more bombastic opening music cue, beneath a completely revised opening credits sequence, with graphics emphasizing crosses against garish red backgrounds. After that, there is some attempt to simulate the visual style of the original, and the new footage blends relatively seamlessly at first (though sharp-eyed viewers will note that Leandro is shot only from behind to disguise the absence of Savalas). In the added scenes, instead of simply losing her way and hitching a ride that takes her to the chateau, Lisa suffers some kind of fit; taken to a hospital, she exhibits signs of possession, so Father Michael (Alda) performs an exorcism, which more or less lasts the rest of the film, with footage from LISA AND THE DEVIL intercut like flashbacks or dreams.
The possession scenes pilfer THE EXORCIST’s bag of tricks, adding little new and nothing worthwhile. There is some stunt work with a contortionist that’s halfway creepy and some belabored attempts to use adult nudity and innuendo show the evil spirit tormenting the priest with his guilty feelings over an affair from before he took to the cloth; a particularly risible moment occurs when Father Michael’s dead girl friend materializes to seduce him – in a room whose walls are covered in puke (it doesn’t help that the hospital set, where the exorcism takes place, looks more like a toolshed). Like almost every other film that followed in the wake of director William Friedkin’s version of William Peter Blatty’s best-seller, HOUSE OF EXORCISM eschews any attempt at grappling with its subject matter in a realistic way, instead simply serving up a bunch of recycled cliches like so many obligatory genre elements: Lisa contorts, pukes, and levitates on cue because that’s what happens in a film with “exorcism” in the title – but it’s all gratuitous mayhem, with no thematic underpinnings.
There are a few transitional bits to visually justify cross-cutting between the two narrative threads (i.e., as Lisa wanders lost in a scene from the original, the camera zooms in on a broken pocket watch, before cutting to a closeup of someone looking at his wrist watch in the hospital to which Lisa has been taken in the new footage). However, the logical connection between the two threads remains elusive. In one early addition, a repairman, working on a mannequin for Leandro, notes that Lisa looks exactly like Helena, suggesting that Leandro plans to “use” her tonight, instead of Helena – presumably in the drama about to unfold at the chateau. Later in the hospital, the possessed Lisa declares to no one in particular, “You won’t use me in your games tonight!” The implication seems to be that the scenes in the chateau represent events that the spirit of Helena is somehow avoiding by possessing the body of Lisa. Or something like that…
What is mildly interesting is that the film eventually feels some obligation to spell out, however incoherently, what is happening. In between hurling profanity and invective at Father Michael (“Don’t break my balls, priest!”), Helena, speaking through Lisa, offers a sort of running commentary on the events in the chateau, spelling out not only what is happening but also why. In a sense, she becomes the Greek Chorus, explaining the story to the audience.
The completely unexpected result of this is that HOUSE OR EXORCISM emerges feeling less like a ripoff of THE EXORCIST and more like DAUGHTER OF HORROR, the re-release version of DEMENTIA (1955), which added narration to clarify a nightmarish scenario that was originally intended to perplex audiences with its dreamlike surrealism. Is this enough to make HOUSE OF EXORCISM interesting, even if not worthwhile? Not really. The explanation proffered by HOUSE OF EXORCISM makes little sense. Unlike DAUGHTER OF HORROR, whose narration may actually have enhanced the movie, providing answers that did not feel tiresome or trite, HOUSE OF EXORCISM does not emerge as an intriguing alternate version; its exposition simply reminds us that we would have been better off watching LISA AND THE DEVIL and figuring things out for ourselves.
In HOUSE OF EXORCISM, Helena is speaking in the past tense about things she has experienced, but she also insists that these events at the chateau are taking place again tonight, though it is not completely clear how that could be possible without her participation. Are we to assume that Helena and Lisa’s spirit have traded places and that Lisa is now in Helena’s place, trapped in some kind of limbo where the events of the past repeat endlessly? If so, the explanation is unsatisfying – why should Lisa suffer for Helena’s sins? As elusive as the original film was, the implication ultimately was that Lisa and Helena were the same, and the events in the chateau represented her past – perhaps another lifetime – catching up with her.
With this element obliterated, the ending pushes Lisa aside to focus on Father Michael as he travels to the chateau to exorcise the house itself. Why? No particular reason, except perhaps that placing this new character in the setting from the old footage would forge a slightly stronger link between the film’s two narrative threads. This leads to a relatively uneventful climax in which the priest wanders around the building, assaulted by wind and threatened by snakes, while shouting to cast out the devil.An abruptly edited flash of lightening seems to show him going up in a puff of smoke, but by that time viewers are past caring.
HOUSE OF EXORCISM is, top put it bluntly, an abomination. Back in 1975, when there was no other way for U.S. viewers to see LISA AND THE DEVIL in any form, there may have been some justification for the existence of HOUSE OF EXORCISM; now, however, the film is nothing more than a historical footnote, a curiosity for Bava fans who want to see the their idol’s masterpiece bastardized into one in a long line of EXORCIST ripoffs. As understandable as producer Leone’s intentions were (was it better to leave the film unseen in a vault or get it on the screen in some form?), HOUSE OF EXORCISM takes Bava’s intriguing original and spoils it with crude vulgarity. If you really want to see a marriage of LISA AND THE DEVIL and THE EXORCIST, rent both of them and watch them back to back.
THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM (1975). Produced by Alfredo Leone. Directed by Mario Bava and Alfredo Leone (as Mickey Lion). Written by Mario Bava, Alberto Cittini, Alfred Leone, Giorgio Maulini, Romano Migliorini, Roberto natale, Francesca Rusishka. Cast: Telly Savalas, Elke Sommer, Sylva Koscina, Alessio Orano, Gabriele Tinit, Kathy Leone, Eduardo Fajardo, Carmen Silva, Franz Von Treuberg, Espartaco Santoni, Alida Valli, Robert Alda. Rated R. 92 minutes.
Alfredo Leone, Elke Sommer, exorcism, horror, Italian horror movies, LISA AND THE DEVIL, Mario Bava, possession, Telly Savalas, THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM
The Walking Dead:Wolves Not Far at Universal Studios
Fans of THE WALKING DEAD can experience their favorite moments from Season 5 – live! – at Universal Studios Hollywood, where the annual Halloween Horror Nights is running from now through November 1, on weekends and some weekdays. Check out the video.
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2007 / newscast
Headlines (5:13)
SECTARIAN VIOLENCE TWICE AS DEADLY AS LAST YEAR
New data shows that the level of violence in Iraq’s sectarian warfare has double since last year. The new statistics compiled by the Associated Press – and based in its reports – indicate that just over half of violent deaths in Iraq occur in Baghdad… and that attacks in northern Iraq have increased. The AP figures estimate that an average of 62 non-insurgent Iraqis die every day in war-related violence. The news organization recognizes that the actual numbers are likely higher because many deaths go unreported. Additionally, figures compiled by the Iraqi Red Crescent indicate that the number of displaced Iraqis has doubled in the last 8 months.
POPPY PRODUCTION AT NEW HIGH IN SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN
In other news, the Helmand province in Southern Afghanistan is poised to become the world’s largest supplier of illegal drugs. This, according to the United Nations World Drug Report for 2007. While the report cites that drug production and consumption has stabilized on an international level, the southern provinces of Afghanistan are producing more drugs than entire countries, including Morocco, Myanmar, and Colombia. Approximately 92 percent of the world’s heroin comes from poppies grown in Afghanistan.
GREEK WILDFIRES RAVAGE COUNTRYSIDE
Firefighters from across the European Union are in Greece to battle raging fires that have killed more than 60 people in the last 3 days. Aris Oikonomou reports from Athens.
The government has declared a state of emergency and at least 11 countries – including France, Italy, Spain, Cyprus and Russia – have sent airplanes, helicopters and specialist fire fighters. Meanwhile, the country is awash with theories about how the fires started. One widely-repeated theory is that the fires were set intentionally as a way of getting around Greek laws forbidding development on areas designated as forest land. The state has ordered an investigation and a one-million euro reward has been offered to help catch the arsonists. The fires have gutted hundreds of homes, forcing thousands of villagers to flee and blackening entire hillsides. Reports indicate that at least one hundred villages have been damaged and thousands have been left homeless. Many people were caught unaware by the rapidly advancing fire and were trapped in their houses, cars, or as they tended to their olive groves. At least 63 people are reported to have been killed and hundreds are missing. Many people, angry after seeing their homes, crops, relatives and even parts of the ancient city of Olympia, turned into ashes are blaming the government for failure to act swiftly to prevent the spread of the fire. Some analysts say the fires have also burned the chances of the ruling party to win next month’s general elections. For FSRN, this Aris Oikonomou from Athens.
RUSSIAN AUTHORITIES ARREST 10 SUSPECTS IN JOURNALIST’S MURDER
Russian authorities have arrested 10 people in connection with last year’s murder of a dissident journalist. Claudia Cragg reports.
Most theories surrounding the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya connect her reporting on human rights abuses in Chechnya to her death. Those arrested today include former and current members of Russian security forces and suspected Chechen gang members. Russia’s Attorney General Yuri Chaika told a press conference today that those arrested will be charged with the crime in the (quote) “very near future”. Chaika has also connected the figures suspected in the Politkovskaya murder to other high-profile assassinations. Patrick Moore, Russia correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty told FSRN that the Attorney General is tying the murders together and using the opportunity to implicate political enemies. “He is now saying that there was a Chechen professional criminal who was the head of a hit squad that carried this out, not only of Politkovskaya but also of the American-Russian journalist, Klebnikov, and the banker, Koslov, and – to boot – that the whole thing was orchestrated by someone abroad who wanted to damage Russia’s image.” The administration of Russian president Vladimir Putin has a history of blaming political failures on rivals living abroad, which is perhaps why news of the arrests was met with a degree of skepticism. For FSRN. I’m Claudia Cragg.
PROTESTS AGAINST PETE WILSON STATUE IN SAN DIEGO
Some 300 people from the immigrant and queer communities protested outside San Diego’s Horton Plaza mall Saturday, during the unveiling of a statue in honor of former California Governor Pete Wilson. A cloth-covered fence separated the demonstrators from those attending a ceremony in Wilson’s honor. Wilson was the mayor of San Diego prior to serving in the Senate, before going on to become California’s governor. His critics blame him for discriminatory policies against against queers and communities of color. Enrique Morones is the president and founder of Border Angeles, an immigrants rights group along the US/Mexico border. (audio) Demonstrators say they are organizing a boycott of the San Diego mall, where the Pete Wilson statue now stands.
Alberto Gonzales Resigns (4:22)
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has resigned. After months of turmoil and repeated calls for his resignation by members of Congress, he announced his resignation with no explanation. He leaves a Justice Department in turmoil with a long list of scandals and high profile vacancies. Washington Editor Leigh Ann Caldwell has more.
ACLU Announces Landmark Settlement with ICE to Improve Conditions at Hutto Detention Facility (2:32)
The ACLU has reached a settlement with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement which immigrant rights advocates say will improve conditions for children and their families being held at the notorious Hutto detention facility in Taylor, Texas. Dozens of children were released as a result – although the ACLU is still calling on Congress to bar the practice of imprisoning children whose parents are awaiting immigration hearings. FSRN Host Aura Bogado spoke with Lisa Graybill ACLU Texas Legal Director.
One Year Later, Many Women Still Lack Access to Plan B Contraception (2:05)
The Food and Drug Administration finally approved over the counter sales of the emergency contraceptive Plan B a year ago. But that doesn’t mean the drug has been made accessible to all the women who need it. FSRN Correspondent Matt Laslo reports from Washington.
Critics Question Why US Continues Military Exercises in South Korea (4:23)
Ten thousand U.S. solders are participating in joint war games with the South Korean military this week – an annual exercise that has been taking place for more than thirty years. As FSRN’s Jason Strother reports from Seoul, many South Koreans question why US forces continue to have such a heavy presence in their country despite improvements in relations with North Korea.
DC Homeless conference (3:23)
The DC-based Homeless Action Research Team took to the streets to find out what homeless people think about being homeless. Karen Miller reports on their findings.
Katrina and the Gulf: Two Years Later (4:17)
The nation marks the second year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina this week, and the destruction it wreaked on the Gulf Coast. FSRN begins our special coverage of the anniversary in Gulfport, Mississippi, today – which was ground zero for Katrina’s landfall. Though redevelopment is taking hold in the region two years later, it’s not in the form of building new homes but, instead, of erecting casinos and condominiums. Local activists say that the development is driving up the cost of land in the area and is threatening nearby low-income and traditional African American neighborhoods. One of those activists, Jason Mackenzie of the North Gulfport Community Land Trust, brings us this perspective.
Next story August 28, 2007
Previous story August 24, 2007
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Amphibic Drone
Smart CanMELEK Project
Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University
Geographical Information Systems & Remote Sensing Center
Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University, Geographical Information Systems and Remote Sensing Research and Application Center is a research-oriented center. It conducts and supports multi-disciplinary, scientific and practical studies in all areas related to Geographical Information Systems and Remote Sensing. Project Development and Researcher Training Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University, Geographical Information Systems and Remote Sensing Research and Application Center; local, regional and global projects, developing solutions to meet the needs of the national / international community. Through these projects, it increases its accumulation and provides funds, and with its infrastructure, it hosts and educates expert researchers in its field. Thus, it aims to reach an infrastructure and accumulation that can compete globally in its field.
Technical Support / Consultancy / Coordination
In addition to its central staff, the project-based range of technical consultants / researchers established in relation to various departments of our university and other national and international educational and research institutions, public institutions and private sector provides technical support to all kinds of multidispliner research and application projects in related fields and provides management / coordination / consulting services. Alansan / Temporal Data Provision In particular, in the prevention, intervention, post-disaster measures, implementation, direction and management of natural disasters; mitigation of disaster damages, supporting scientific research in this field, raising public awareness and so on. aims to provide spatial and temporal GIS / Remote Sensing data and model results before and after disasters.
Training and Coordination
The Center is thought to contribute to all kinds of undergraduate and graduate activities related to GIS / Remote Sensing areas carried out by various academic units of Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University. It provides an environment in which students can benefit from technical support, to make / develop their homework, projects and theses. In addition to its administrative staff, our university aims to meet all kinds of training needs from public and private sectors, to organize certification programs and to meet the need for labor training in these fields.
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English Français Deutsch Español Русский Português العربية
Info paesi
Informazione paesi
1. International Family Mediation
Family mediation, in Mexico, is legally recognised and encouraged by the State. Mexico has 32 alternative justice laws (e.g. as alternative disputes resolution, the mediation is upheld in the 2008 Alternative Justice Law of the Superior Court of Justice of the Federal District).
Alternative Justice Centres provide family mediation services. There is no list of all Centres in Mexico, please look for “Centro de Justicia Alternativa” in your State. For example, you can contact Alternative Justice Centre of Federal District situated in Mexico City and find a List of private mediators certified by the Centre practising in the State (website is in Spanish).
There is no structure specialised on international family mediation in Mexico.
2. International Legal Framework
1) Mexico is a Party to the 1980 Hague Convention.
The 1980 Hague Convention: a multilateral treaty which provides procedural guidelines on the return of children and their protection in cases of international parental child abduction.
Contact the Central Authority established in Mexico for cases of child abduction. The Central Authority should be the first point of contact despite regional contact information provided on the link. The Central Authority will transmit your application to these regional agencies.
2) Mexico is a Party to the 1989 Inter-American Convention.
The 1989 Inter-American Convention: a multilateral treaty among 14 American States that, similar to the 1980 Hague Convention, secures the prompt return of children who have been wrongfully removed from their country of residence.
Contact the Central Authority established in Mexico designated under the 1980 Hague Convention to find out whether the Inter-American Convention prevails in your case and learn how to initiate an application for return of your child.
3) Mexico is not a Party to the 1996 Hague Convention.
The 1996 Hague Convention: a multilateral treaty which determines jurisdiction, applicable law, co-operation in respect of parental responsibility and access rights, as well as civil and public measures for the protection or care of children.
You can determine whether countries relevant to your case are Parties, or not, to the 1980 Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, the 1996 Hague Convention on Child Protection and/or the Inter-American Convention on the International Return Of Children in order to locate the appropriate central authority. As for the 1980 Hague Convention, you can check whether the Convention is in force between two specific States in the Spreadsheet showing acceptances of accessions to the Child Abduction Convention.
3. Legal and Psycho-Social Expertise and Support
Human Rights Commission of the Federal District is an independent institution responsible for hearing complaints of alleged violations committed by any authority or person working in the public administration of the Federal District or procuratorial organisms. The contact information of your regional Commission can be found here.
Caritas Mexico (CEPS) is a private charitable institution with a presence in 30 of Mexico’s states (website is in Spanish). It provides housing, medical financial and familial support for those who have suffered natural disasters. The organisation also provides educational and reconciliatory support for individuals and families enduring times of conflict.
4. Child Welfare Services
Procuraduría de Protección de Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes provides contacts to child protection authorities at the federal and state level. Federal level contacts address cross-border cases in cooperation with local state authorities (website is in Spanish).
Red por los Derechos de la Infancia en México (REDIM) is a coalition of 75 non-governmental organisations in Mexico that develop help programs for Mexican children and adolescents in vulnerable situations and operates in 16 Mexico States (website is in Spanish).
Ayuda a Niños y Adolescentes en Riesgo is an association providing homes for children at risk, enabling the recuperation of those suffering from traumas such as malnourishment, domestic violence, and being directly impacted by the abuse of drugs and/or alcohol by a parent (website is in Spanish). Please contact them directly here.
Children International – Mexico is a non-profit organisation in Mexico which focuses on gang violence prevention, especially the violence which occurs in young girls. The organisation contains community centres for both children and graduated students to help further their educational and financial goals. They also provide healthcare to children and adolescents who may not be receiving adequate healthcare and teaching preventative care at community centres.
Defence for Children in Mexico (DCI-Mexico) is a non-profit organisation having a Community Probation Programme which aims to generate social reintegration processes of adolescents in conflict with the law. It provides family, educational, social interventions in order to prevent recidivism. In addition, DCI-Mexico has a similar program in the state of Guerrero called Reintegra which provides activities to children in the form of art, culture, and sports, to prevent children from dropping out of school and to prevent family violence and addictions (website is in Spanish).
SOS Children’s Villages in Mexico offer Family Strengthening Programme allowing families with children who are at risk of losing parental care to improve their living conditions and prevent child abandonment. You can find an SOS Children’s Village in your region here (website is in Spanish).
5. Support to Bi-National Couples, Cross-Cultural and Migrant Families
Comisión Mexicana De Ayuda a Refugiados (COMAR) is a public inter-departmental body that performs recognition, cessation and revocation procedures on the status of refugees and grants institutional assistance to refugees by establishing collaboration with government bodies, international and civil society organisations. (website is in Spanish).
Sin Fronteras is a non-governmental organisation which offers legal, psychosocial and economic assistance and services to migrant populations and participates actively in the creation of comprehensive migrant policies and programs. You can contact them here (website is in Spanish).
Alcuni degli hyperlinks che troverete nei testi di questa sezione vi ricondurranno ai siti che sono disponibili solo nella lingua del paese scelto. Copiate l’indirizzo URL ed incollatelo in Google Translate, scegliete la vostra lingua e cliccate su “traduci” per trovare il sito disponibile.
Access to Professionals / Hotlines:
Alerta Amber Mexico is an emergency hotline and information centre dedicated to the search and finding of lost children (website is in Spanish).
Línea Mujeres is a contact centre for Mexico City, which provides information services, guidance, legal advice and psychological support to women (website is in Spanish).
Useful brochures / Documents of reference:
Useful guides for parents concerning mediation practice and child abduction prevention can be found in our Library.
© 2021 ISS Tutti i diritti riservati
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Reyes Entertainment opens in Austin.
Reyes Entertainment will expand into the Texas markets with new headquarters in Austin, announced its founder and president, Gabriel Reyes.
“Reyes Entertainment is pleased to continue to offer our clients an ever-expanding menu of services by way of our national network of account executives in key cities,” says Reyes. “Austin is a thriving center for business, education, technology, music and filmmaking. It is also at the center of Texas, home to over 10 million Latinos and one of the fastest-growing cities in the country.”
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home / police commission / use of force
Southeast Area Officer-Involved Shooting NRF016-19ma
South Los Angeles: Los Angeles Police Department's Force Investigation Division is investigating an officer-involved shooting in which officers were shot at by a man with gun.
On April 22, 2019, around 6:45 a.m., officers assigned to Southeast Area were responding to multiple radio calls of a "Man with a Gun" in the area of Figueroa Street and West Gardena Boulevard. As Police Officers II Andrew Do, Serial No. 43209 and Bryan Tahuite, Serial No. 42780 approached the intersection, they saw a man they believed was the suspect, later identified as 36-year-old David Flores, armed with a handgun. Flores shot at the officers as they exited their vehicle, resulting in an officer-involved shooting.
Flores was struck by gunfire and pronounced deceased at the scene. No officers were injured. One of the rounds fired by Flores struck the front passenger door panel of the police vehicle the officers were driving.
The handgun used by Flores was recovered by detectives.
LAPD's specialized Force Investigation Division responded to the scene and began interviewing witnesses and collecting forensic evidence. Representatives from the Office of the Inspector General and Los Angeles County District Attorney's Justice System Integrity Division responded and monitored the investigation.
The complete investigation will be reviewed by the Chief of Police and the Board of Police Commissioners and the Office of the Inspector General to determine the thoroughness and accuracy of the investigation and whether the use of deadly force complied with the LAPD's policies and procedures. Additionally, representatives from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office who responded to the scene will review the subsequent FID investigation; evidence collected and witness statements to determine if the force used by the officer(s) violated any criminal laws.
Anyone with additional information regarding this incident is urged to call the LAPD at any of the following numbers:
• During business hours at (213) 486-5230;
• During non-business hours or on weekends at (877)-LAPD-24-7 (877-527-3247);
• Anonymously 24-hours a day to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (800-222-8477) or by texting "LAPD" and your tip to phone number 274637 (C-R-I-M-E-S); or
• Online at www.lapdonline.org and click on "Anonymous Web Tips.
FORCE INVESTIGATION DIVISION
Force Investigation Division (FID) is responsible for the investigation of all incidents involving the use of deadly force of an LAPD officer. In addition, all use of force resulting in an injury requiring hospitalization commonly referred to as a Law Enforcement Related Injury (LERI). Investigative responsibility of FID also includes all deaths while the arrestee or detainee is in the custodial care of the LAPD, accidental and animal shootings and other investigations as directed by the Chief of Detectives.
100 W. First Street Suite 431
(213) 486-5230 (Main)
The OIG is separate and independent from the Department. The OIG also reviews investigations specific to all officer-involved shootings and significant uses of force that result in death or hospitalization, as well as complaint investigations of police officer misconduct. The OIG conducts its own performance-related audits, as well as other reviews.
For further contact, please call (213) 893-6400.
https://www.oig.lacity.org/
2019 O.I.S. Shootings and Critical Incidents
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Latina Lista: News from the Latinx perspective > Columns & Features > BlogBeat > Racial, Ethnic Disparities Stubbornly Endure in Juvenile Justice System, Expert Says
Racial, Ethnic Disparities Stubbornly Endure in Juvenile Justice System, Expert Says
inBlogBeat, zNew Headline
By Daryl Khan
Juvenile Justice Information Exchange
BOSTON — The video should not have come as a shock to this audience. If anyone is sensitive to the subject matter — how race and racial bias subtly and expressly influence people’s decision-making — it is this group of probation officers, administrators and experts gathered at a symposium on probation reform hosted by the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps in Boston. They had gathered to listen to a workshop wonkily entitled: “Balancing the Scales: Effective Strategies for Addressing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Juvenile Justice System.”
These are people who are familiar with the persistent problem of having black youth in their facilities at a rate far out of whack with the population. They are the ones who obsess over data, examining every point of contact to identify and ferret examples of implicit bias.
Tiana Davis
But despite that familiarity with the problems and ways to fix it, the almost comically obvious videothat Tiana Davis, the policy director for equity and justice at the Center of Law and Children’s Policy, plays from a popular television show still disturbs the 20 or so juvenile justice professionals in the room.
It’s from “What Would You Do?” A young, casually dressed white guy — maybe in his late teens or early 20s — is trying to cut the lock on a bike in a park. He’s an actor. The show’s hidden cameras capture the made-for-TV social experiment that follows.
First the actor uses a hammer, then a saw to try to break through the chain lock until he graduates to an industrial-strength bolt cutter. The host’s voice pipes up: “You see this and you wonder did he lose his keys or is he blatantly trying to steal this bike?”
What follows is a series of half-hearted attempts from white passers-by to inquire about what the young man is up to. At one point someone asks point-blank if the locked bike is his. In an hour more than 100 people pass by, including a black family, but aside from some questioning they do nothing to stop the theft. Only an elderly white couple, George and Arlene, confront the young man.
“I remember thinking young white men don’t carry burglary tools,” says one black woman when she is interviewed and made aware of the show’s participation in the stunt.
And then the show’s producers replace the white actor with a black one, roughly the same age, same clothes, same tools grinding away at the bike’s chain. This time the reaction is instant and almost violently confrontational. Within minutes the young black man is surrounded by a crowd of white vigilantes demanding that someone call the police. The crowd turns angry; a woman snaps pictures of the young black man.
“Got you,” she says with gleeful spite.
As she watches this scene unfold during the workshop, Lisa Hill, who is superintendent of a juvenile facility in Oakland, California, is clearly troubled by the scene. Her jaw clenches, her eyebrows furrow, she shakes her head almost imperceptibly with disgust.
At the end of the scene Davis asks for people’s response. Many attendees express their displeasure with how this scenario played out, but Hill’s response is almost visceral.
“For me I was feeling a little anxious,” Hill said. “I was trying to avoid being angry about that because I know that that’s real. I’ve never experienced [it] to that degree because I have never stolen a bike, but I’ve been followed around in the store.”
The scene was also an example of how white youth sometimes do not get needed attention from the system, she said. Consider, she pointed out, here is a young man who is out in broad daylight, with a sack full of tools, stealing a bike. At the very least someone should have called authorities so he could get an evaluation to see if he had mental or emotional problems.
“So I was really angry watching that,” Hill said.
How DMC hurts juvenile justice system
Davis cribbed notes from two much more in-depth publications put out by her organization — the Practice Manual and the Graduated Responses Toolkit — to lay out the scope of the problem of “disproportionate minority contact” and the ways juvenile justice systems can root it out and prevent it. Her organization’s goal is to “enhance equity” in the juvenile justice system.
“This isn’t about changing the social conditions,” she said, such as curing poverty, or changing the youth or the families. “It is targeted to the juvenile justice system itself.”
First she asked a simple question: Why is it important to you?
“Fairness is a fundamental value in our society, and it’s important in this juvenile justice system. Unfairness creates ineffectiveness,” she said. “We want to make sure that we are fairly treating youth that are coming into the system, and that we’re being effective,
This is not just a moral imperative, but a practical one for professionals working in the system, Davis said.
“We know from the research that youth are not likely to engage in the system that they perceive as unfair,” she said. “If there’s a perception of unfairness then you’re going to have an even greater challenge at being effective with the young people that you are working with in the system.”
After laying out the various technical and utilitarian reasons that these racial biases and disproportional outcomes undermine the system, Davis said that ultimately: “It’s just the right thing to do.”
Davis described what she called the three widely identified key indicators of how race corrupts the juvenile justice system. First there is overrepresentation of youth of color in the system. When youth of color are held in facilities in greater percentages than their population in the community, then you have a textbook example of overrepresentation.
Next she identified disparate treatment of youth of color. She said they — more than their white counterparts — tend to receive harsher, more punitive treatment. As illustrated starkly by the bike stealing video: two kids, same age, same offense, but with different skin color and experiencing sharply different outcomes.
And the final indicator, she said, is how once a youth of color enters the system he moves deeper into the system. She said too often youth of color will descend into the deep end of the system while their white counterparts — through diversion or lighter sentencing — end up in the shallower end.
The data, Davis said, bear this out. Researchers at the Center for Law were studying one of its jurisdictions when they made a troubling discovery. They found the number one reason why youth of color were in secure detention facilities was because they had violated court orders for truancy proceedings.
“Here you have one of the most intensive interventions you can have in the juvenile justice system — removing them from their communities, from their families, putting them into a locked facility — because they missed school,” Davis said. “We consider that an abuse in many ways of that type of intervention of incarceration, and certainly that is unnecessary. Completely off the wall.”
Davis projected a chart illustrating the numerous points where a youth could end up in the shallow end or the deep end of the system at every stage in the process. For example, if there’s an arrest the deep end of the system is law enforcement and probation, the shallow end is diversion or community service. In nearly every stage of process, she said, youth of color are treated more harshly than white youth.
How to stop disparities
Paul Daniels, the court manager for King County, which covers Seattle, said his department has started a “decision point framework” based on a similar model.
“We’ve basically looked at every decision point from first law enforcement contact to all the way up to including probation to when a decision is made. We’ve done all we can to identify … how and why that decision is being made,” said Daniels, who attended the workshop. “We’ve looked at the police contact, the referral to the prosecution attorney, diversion. What are the racial and ethnic breakdowns? We’re trying to get to the point where kids are treated equally and no one is over-represented. That’s one of our number one priorities in King County.”
Davis laid out five approaches to rolling back racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. She encouraged collaboration between agencies within the system, but also with systems that touch juvenile justice such as schools, child welfare and mental health institutions.
She stressed a commitment to learning how to use sound data and what it can tell us to drive change. Sometimes that data can yield counterintuitive results, she said.
John Ryals Jr., Evaluation/Treatment Supervisor,
Jefferson Parish Department of Juvenile Services
For example, despite the popular perception that law enforcement is singling out black youths, 30 percent of youth arrests in New Orleans were triggered by calls coming from their community, said John Ryals, evaluation/treatment supervisor of Jefferson Parish (Louisiana) Department of Juvenile Services. He was speaking at another workshop.
When they dug into the data, they found that only 10 percent of the youth entering the system were there as a result of a police officer on patrol making a stop and an arrest, he said.
Ryals said this information allowed his boss Roy Juncker, director of the Department of Juvenile Services, to concentrate on outreach and developing other programs in the community to figure out how to remedy the situation there instead of devoting all the resources to law enforcement.
“The data allows us to focus all of our efforts on creating better outcomes for the kids, which is at the end of the day what we all want,” Ryals said.
It’s crucial to have policies and practices based on objective criteria, Davis said. When professionals go with their gut, he or she is most likely to let bias sneak into the decision-making process.
Finally, she pointed to “culturally responsive programs” that engage communities of color in new ways that allow the system to be able to better serve them. “They’re greater stakeholders in this, even more than us,” she said. “This is their lives.”
She said even if you do intercede on behalf of a youth of color and divert him from going into the “deep end” of the system it’s of no use if they end up in a program that doesn’t work for them.
“If the program they go to doesn’t serve them you might as well not have not sent them there at all,” she said.
‘The numbers don’t change’
In an interview after the workshop, Hill said she learned an uncomfortable secret after her daughter started working in a retail store: Security guards told her that it was common practice for employees at stores to come and politely ask people they suspected of shoplifting: Can I help you with anything? When Hill learned that tidbit it struck her how many times over the years she was approached while she was shopping and asked that very thing.
“Maybe I was naive,” she said. “Like I said, I never stole a bike, but I’ve gone shopping.”
Her own experience is an example, Hill said, of the deeper, cultural battle over race that needs to be won to really curb the persistence of disproportionate outcomes along racial and ethnic lines in the juvenile justice system.
More than a decade ago, she led workshops and presentations like the one she had just sat through, she said. Back then she too cautioned juvenile justice professionals against implicit bias, and encouraged them to let objective criteria guide their decision-making instead of their gut. But a decade later the problem still plagues juvenile justice systems across the country.
“We called it something different back then but the proposals were the same. Unfortunately the numbers don’t change,” she said. “That video reveals where we are. I feel like there is a certain level of racism that goes along with those numbers.”
Hill noted how the black family from the video thought the white thief was an employee.
“They’ve been so negatively affected by the bias that they see their own faces as criminal,” she said. “They couldn’t see that white young man as a criminal, even when it’s right there in your face.”
She used to attend citywide meetings to talk about the subject with other stakeholders, Hill said. One conversation stands out still. She was at a pre-meeting with the presiding judge in the district. She asked the judge to consider a hypothetical. What if out of 25 people on the docket on a given day, 20 were in wheelchairs?
“You’re going to say to yourself, wow, there must be something going on with kids in wheelchairs. I need to look into this and figure out what’s going on,” Hill said. “Why don’t black youth get the same attention? Why doesn’t anyone try to figure out what is going on?”
The judge, Hill said, just looked at her. She didn’t have an answer.
African American, criminal justice system, juvenile justice, latino, law enforcement, minorities, youth
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