Sunday, May 24, 2009

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Cheryl Saban: Lessons Learned Top
I graduated from high school in 1969. During those years, the draft was in full play. "The War" in Viet Nam, though it wasn't really supposed to be called a war, was a constant subject of conversation and heated debates. We were all touched by it in some way. My brother, who is two years older than I am, waited nervously for his number to be drawn. All of my young male friends, relatives, and neighbors who were of eligible age, were either already in Viet Nam, or enlisting, worrying about their number coming up, or trying to find a way out of fighting a war many of my age group didn't believe in. I remember when Viet Nam's deadly net was cast around my relatively small universe. One of my neighbors - a kid we all went to school with, Louie, was killed there. Another very close friend, Frank, joined up, flew helicopters, and went back to Viet Nam on multiple extremely dangerous missions. He survived. One of my second cousins fought in Viet Nam, and became addicted to drugs there. When I think about the horrors of war, it's easy for me to imagine why taking drugs to shift that reality would be appealing. But the drugs didn't erase his memories, and my cousin Eric had been around so much death, that he wanted to kill himself. When he was shipped back home to the US, I went to visit him in the Naval Hospital in San Diego. He was a handsome, gentle guy, with blue eyes that still had a sparkle in them. I guess I had a schoolgirl crush on him, but since he was a cousin, our friendship remained totally platonic. But as it turned out, he needed more friends. Eric was eventually released from the hospital, and though he tried to get back into the swing of everyday life, his addiction and the reason for it was never extinguished. A few years after coming home from Viet Nam, Eric succeeded in taking his own life - by overdosing on drugs. What a waste. I blame the war - it never left him. But I also think Eric was set adrift, and didn't receive enough societal support to overcome the demons unleashed in him. What could have been done differently? In my first year of college, I was among the peaceful, hippie protestors that engaged in sit-ins and street-concerts to try to get our government to change course -- to stop. Now that I look back on it, I can imagine that this display of protest was very difficult for the veterans of Viet Nam to take. Could we have done a better job of communicating our admiration for those who fought? Yes, I believe we could have. Though it was the war we were protesting against, not the warriors, sadly, many civilians lost sight of that fact when our warriors returned home. The returning soldiers tried to resume a 'regular life,' but they were wounded psychically and physically, with injuries and memories most of us couldn't begin to fathom. Plenty of veterans felt shame and blame, rather than the support and gratitude they should have been feeling. I hope we never repeat this mistake. Our service men and women and our veterans deserve better than that. This Memorial Day, I am remembering all the Erics, Franks and Louie's - the warriors of all the wars. Some of them couldn't handle the stress, and either took it out on others, or themselves. Some died in battle. And others survived, and signed on for tour after tour - bearing the difficulty and dread of war so that the rest of us can go on about our usual routines. This weekend, I'll be thinking that while we have the right to protest against war, the right to state our opinions and beliefs, and the right to work hard to use peaceful methods to bring about the changes we seek, we wouldn't have many of those rights without our warriors. We owe our way of life to the men and women who have stepped up, followed the orders of the Commander in Chief, and too many times, given the ultimate sacrifice. I will bow my head and offer my respect, admiration, and gratitude to our service men and women, past, present, and future. And as a peacenik, I will also be praying that one day, we'll find another way to resolve our differences. More on Vietnam
 
Michael Giltz: Cannes 2009 HuffPo Exclusive: Chat With Award-Winning Director Xavier Dolan Top
One of the big discoveries of the festival was Xavier Dolan, the 20 year old writer, director and star of I Killed My Mother. The film won three major awards at the Directors Fortnight and is already guaranteed to be playing at the Toronto Film Festival and -- if the rumours are true -- will probably be invited to the New York Film Festival as well before opening commercially. I've got a full length profile of Dolan that should run on The Advocate website in the next few days. Come back here to find a direct link when it goes up or just keep checking out The Advocate's website. Until then, here's a clip for cineastes with the Montreal-based Dolan talking about the visual style he used in his very funny but brutal debut. We were chatting at the private beach of the Majestic Hotel in Cannes, so the sound in the background is the crashing surf. Ce qui charme! More on CANNES
 
Michael Giltz: Cannes 2009 Wrapup: Quick Movie Rundown and Sights & Sounds Of The Fest Top
Here's my Cannes 2009 scrapbook: THE FILMS I REVIEWED, IN ORDER OF IMPORTANCE: Un Prophete **** (out of four) Up *** 1/2 Police, Adjective *** 1/2 The Time That Remains *** 1/2 Inglourius Basterds *** 1/2 I Killed My Mother *** Samson & Delilah *** Fish Tank *** Eyes Wide Open/Einaym Pkuhot *** Looking For Eric *** Daniel Y Ana *** My Neighbor, My Killer ** 1/2 Bright Star ** 1/2 Mother ** 1/2 Vengeance ** 1/2 Visages ** Sister Smile/Soeur Sourie ** 1/2 A Town Called Panic ** The King Of Escapes ** Broken Embraces ** Taking Woodstock ** In The Beginning ** Spring Fever ** The Army Of Crime ** Jaffa ** I Love You, Philip Morris ** The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus ** Precious ** Thirst ** Enter The Void * 1/2 Kinatay * 1/2 Irene * 1/2 Vincere * 1/2 Les Herbes Folles * 1/2 The White Ribbon * 1/2 Montparnasse * 1/2 Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky * 1/2 The Father Of My Children * Anti-Christ * The Silent Army * To Die Like A Man * Map Of The Sounds Of Tokyo -- no stars MOVIES I REGRET MISSING Dogtooth, Farewell Gary, Agora, Drag Me To Hell, Petition, No One Knows About Persian Cats, Tales From The Golden Age, The Wind Journeys, the restored Senso, Tetro, Humpday, Eastern Plays, Les Beaux Gosses, Polytechnique, La Pivellina, The Family Wolberg, Ajami BEST QUOTE PROMOTING YOUR OWN FILM For The French Kissers aka Les Beaux Gosses , director Riad Sattouf declares loudly in an ad that ran in the trades: "I love masturbation! What a great subject. Bring it on, I can talk about it for hours." FUNNIEST MOMENT ON THE BEACH Three young women gasp with delight and literally stop in their tracks when they spot a giant billboard promoting Peter Jackson's upcoming movie The Lovely Bones. First girl, excitedly: " The Lovely Bones! Oh my God!" Second girl, informatively: "That was a book." Third girl, dimly: "I read part of it but I never finished. They turned it into a movie?" BEST POSTERS FOR UPCOMING MOVIES ROUNDUP #1 Hitler Goes Kaput! Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Undead High Kick Girl! is from the producers of Shaolin Girl (I spot a trend) and features a Buffy-like young Asian woman in a school girl skirt delivering a powerful kick sky high. Tagline: "She is more than just a cute high school girl. She is a master of Karate!" THE FRENCH APPROACH TO BUSINESS I love grabbing a freshly baked croissant on my way to the first screening of the day, which usually takes place at the ungodly hour of 8:30 am. For various reasons, that wasn't happening this year so I went looking for a croissant AFTER the first or second screening of the day, anywhere from 11 am to 1 p.m. One bakery -- and there's a boulangerie every few blocks -- was especially appealing. It had a cute sign, a warm wood interior and a terrific quiche I purchased one afternoon. Every time I walked towards the place -- literally, every single time -- one or two employees, the only people on staff, would be sitting at a chair and tables outside, smoking and chatting and drinking with friends. I would wander up, walk in and they would reluctantly get out of their seats and follow me inside. And every time I went there -- yes, every single time, they would be completely out of croissants, be it 1 p.m. or 11:30 am and almost always out of virtually everything else. Now, an American bakery that sold out of croissants by 11 am and had customers coming in to buy more (I wasn't the only one) would immediately say, "Ha! I need to make more croissants." But the French say, "Voila! My work is done and I can spend more time sitting and chatting with friends." I was frustrated about not getting that croissant but couldn't help appreciating their approach to life. On the other hand, my last two favorite bakeries in Cannes have since gone out of business. CRAZIEST PRESS CONFERENCE MOMENT At the the press conference for Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, a Brazilian journalist gave a soccer jersey of the great player Ronaldo to Emile Hirsch for no apparent reason. He didn't ask Hirsch a question, Hirsch doesn't play soccer in the movie and it wasn't clear if the journalist was doing this himself or for Ronaldo. Then he talked about Ang Lee's many movies with homosexual themes and asked, "Would you ever realize another kind of Hulk with Brokeback elements, something like this guy?" and then held up a Hulk action figure he had painted all pink. Once everyone stopped laughing, Lee actually gave an interesting answer. "Inside everybody is very complicated," said Lee. "We're all kinds of Hulks with many different elements. I'm fascinated by some great stories and they happen to revolve around homosexuality. It just fascinates me. I don't go inside and examine what exactly is -- I just portray them. I hope people will respond in a very complex way to it. This movie [ Taking Woodstock ] will have that to [the lead character is gay]. But it's not an essential core problem or issue as in Brokeback Mountain. " Then he laughs and adds, "If you examine Hulk , I'm sure there's some homo problem there too." BEST POSTERS FOR UPCOMING MOVIES ROUNDUP #2 Gladiators Versus Werewolves Just Peck, with the tagline: "In suburbia, no one can hear you scream" Gangster Exchange, which pictures two tough guys walking down an alley with one of them splattered in blood and carrying...a toilet. The tagline: "Guns thugs, and toilets made of drugs." That explains that. Lesbian Vampire Killers, which asks, reasonably enough, "What more could you possibly want?" THE HOLLYWOOD/BOLLYWOOD CROSSOVER CONTINUES The Italian Job is getting remade for the Indian market. Which means there has been a British version, the original Italian Job; an American remake starring Mark Wahlberg and now a Hindi version. But, as of yet, still no Italian version of The Italian Job. Another Hindi film announced at Cannes is Kambakkht Ishq, a big budget Bollywood musical featuring big US stars in the story of an Indian stuntman who takes Hollywood by storm but still can't leap, dive or dodge his way into a woman's heart. Among the US actors set to appear is Denise Richards, Brandon Routh (I guess that next Superman movie has been delayed) and...wait for it, Sylvester Stallone. If they get him to sing and dance, I'm in. THE BOOKS I READ TO PREPARE FOR CANNES OR WHILE STANDING IN LINE FOR A MOVIE Mussolini by Denis Mack Smith *** (out of four) Taking Woodstock by Eliot Tiber ** (but fun) Keats by Andrew Motion *** 1/2 The Complete Poems Of John Keats *** Hypatia Of Alexandria by Maria Dzielska *** Seven Rivers West by Edward Hoagland *** My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell **** (Ok, to be honest I haven't quite finished yet, but I'm loving it) MOST MISUNDERSTOOD FILM Lars Von Trier's Anti-Christ is not only NOT misogynist, it's very clearly pro-woman and against the patriarchal societies that have tortured and killed women throughout history. This is made explicitly clear throughout the film and -- if you still didn't get it -- is pounded into your head with the dramatic images at the finale. That final scene is inexplicable if you believe the film is somehow violating women. Mind you, that doesn't mean the film is actually good. It's not. But it is a film, with a boldly theatrical approach to telling its dark fairy tale and a very Grimm heart. I've loved earlier work of his like Dogville and Breaking The Waves and would gladly see this movie ten times over rather than sit through Gasper Noe's vapid Enter The Void even twice. MOST DRAMATIC MOMENT OFF SCREEN Walking along the Rue d'Antibes (a main drag always filled with locals, tourists and fest-goers), I saw two Japanese people standing about ten feet apart, a young man and a young woman who were clearly together but arguing. The young woman was facing in one direction but looking backwards at the man. He was turning in the other direction and looking back at her. She sort of made a move to go and then stared back at him again, as if to say, "Really? You're going to go in that direction? You're not coming with me?" He stared at her blankly, not giving away his intentions in the least. She feinted again and then finally, angrily started walking away. He sighed, put on his earplugs and then started walking in the opposite direction. I was going his way and two blocks later he suddenly stopped, turned around completely and stared back the way he came. Hadn't she turned around to follow him? I couldn't resist stopping to see. Nope, she hadn't. He hesitated, sighed and then -- defeated -- started to walk back after her. If I'd had a movie camera with me, it would have made a perfect short film. MOST UNEXPECTED SOURCE OF SUSPENSE The dictionary that takes center stage in the gripping 15+ minute scene that ends the brilliant Police, Adjective. THE MOVIE MOMENT I CAN'T SHAKE It happened during the very first screening, which was the world premiere of the latest Pixar film Up. In it, an old man is living on his own after his beloved wife died. They were each other's world and had no children, so he has literally no one, just a small home slowly being surrounded by skyscrapers and some personal belongings, like the mailbox in their front yard they decorated together. When a construction worker accidentally knocks the mailbox over, the old man -- impotent with age, hard of hearing, and grumpy by nature -- loses it. The worker apologizes and tries to fix it, but the old man is furious that the guy is even touching something so important to him. They get in an unintentional tug of war and the old man momentarily lashes out, hitting the worker with his walking cane and drawing blood. People rush to help the worker and the old man is frightened and scared; he knows he's messed up and something as simple as a small accident like this can leave him powerless and in the hands of the authorities who will undoubtedly decide he needs to be placed in a nursing home. It's a quiet, powerful scene that takes place early in the film and it captures with heartbreaking precision the vulnerability and fear that can overtake you when you're old. After years of success and control, you become like a little child again and strangers insist on telling you what to do. Few movies have ever captured the minefield that is old age as adroitly as Up , which is one more reason why the first film of the fest will surely be one of the best films of the year. MY SHORT FILM, A SURE-FIRE WINNER AT NEXT YEAR'S CANNES Here's the short film I shot at Cannes that's certain to be a winner at next year's festival. I wrote, directed, edited and star in it, a la Orson Welles. It's a little more action-packed than most movies that play here, but it's certainly in the same vein as the other films at Cannes. Since I can't sneak you into screenings of the films in Competition, this is as close as you can get at the moment. Enjoy, thanks for reading and au revoir! More on CANNES
 
Early Retirement Claims Increase Dramatically Top
Reporting from Washington -- Instead of seeing older workers staying on the job longer as the economy has worsened, the Social Security system is reporting a major surge in early retirement claims that could have implications for the financial security of millions of baby boomers.
 
Alexi Giannoulias: Like Stephen Douglas, Cheney on the Wrong Side of History Top
As an Illinoisan, I was struck by how the side-by-side speeches of Barack Obama and Dick Cheney this past Thursday paralleled those of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates 150 years ago. How we fight to keep Americans safe from terrorism, like that long ago debate, will define who we are as a people for decades, perhaps centuries, to come. Like Lincoln, President Obama gave the American people principled answers to a complicated and divisive issue. Invoking the letter and spirit of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, Obama showed how we, the American people, can have security without abandoning our core principles. Like Douglas, who sought temporary political gain with his backward looking views, Cheney defends a failed past, one destined to fall on the wrong side of history. In a speech teeming with falsehoods, Cheney's core argument presents dishonest and false choices: that to secure America you must embrace not only the mistaken war in Iraq but also a use of torture that has put our troops at risk, undermined our moral authority in the world and violated our national values. He suggests that, wracked with fear, we as a nation must choose between the security we need, and the principles that have kept us free and inspired the world for over 200 years. But that is not the America I know. President Obama is taking on the Taliban more aggressively than Bush and Cheney ever did, his swift actions defeated Somali pirates, and his relentless pursuit of terrorists and the defense of this great nation remain at the top of his agenda. At the same time, he rejects, as do I, the failed policies of the Bush-Cheney years. He is not only ending the War in Iraq, he also dismantled those policies that have questionable value but have done unquestionable damage to our standing in the world. President Obama knows that this nation has been most successful when it has led not by the example of its power, but by the power of its example. While Obama is moving forward with a plan to protect the American people, respect the rule of law and clean up the mess at Guantanamo Bay, Cheney wants to drag us back through the failures of the past, based on failed arguments of the past. His continued embrace of the Saddam canard -- the false claim that Iraq was linked to the Middle East terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 -- shows again that Cheney will use any tactic to justify the unjustifiable. In fact, the torture and false confession of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was the source of the faulty intelligence that Cheney used as a pretext for that misguided war. While he offers empty tributes to them now, few have done more to undermine the morale and effectiveness of our intelligence officers than Dick Cheney himself. His top aide earned a felony conviction for obstructing the probe into the outing of a covert CIA agent. Cheney continues to show his contempt for the intelligence community every time he tries to blame the CIA for what he did to mislead the American people in the run-up to the Iraq War. Moreover, few top military officers, intelligence experts or leaders in either party agree with Cheney on the effectiveness of torture on detainees. Senator John McCain, General David Petraeus and top intelligence officers have made it clear that Cheney was wrong on torture then, and he is wrong now. They believe, as I do, that simulated drowning is illegal, immoral and ineffective. In addressing those who support the use of these techniques, General Petraeus said, "Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary." McCain, himself a victim of torture as a POW in Vietnam, said "Waterboarding is torture, period. I can assure you that once enough physical pain is inflicted on someone, they will tell that interrogator whatever they think they want to hear. And most importantly, it serves as a great propaganda tool for those who recruit people to fight against us." Perhaps the strongest rebuke to the Cheney world view came from no less an expert on American values and security than George Washington. Even as American POWs died at the hands of a sometimes sadistic enemy, Washington issued firm orders regarding the humane treatment of prisoners. Similarly, Winston Churchill, in the midst of a Nazi blitz that was killing thousands of innocent civilians in the hopes of terrorizing England out of the war, resisted torturing captured German pilots. Washington and Churchill knew what President Obama and most Americans know: that torturing prisoners is morally indefensible, doesn't work, puts our security at risk, and flies in the face of the very values that our soldiers are fighting for. We as Americans should remember that free nations have stared down ominous threats before without closing their eyes to the principles that guide us. We should do no less today. Illinois State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias is exploring a run for the U.S. Senate seat once held by President Obama. You can learn more at www.alexiforillinois.com More on Barack Obama
 
Mazer Mahmood, The Fake Sheikh, Buys His Way Into Buckingham Palace Top
The Fake Sheikh strikes again. Safety for the Queen and Royal Family is being urgently reviewed after a Buckingham Palace security breach engineered by Britain's most notorious undercover reporter.
 
Johann Hari: Is This the Greatest Play of the Late Twentieth Century? Top
What will endure from the plays of the late twentieth century? Already, the theatre that caused the greatest fuss at the time -- the In Yer Face shockers by Mark Ravenhill, Martin McDonagh and friends -- look flashy and shallow and strangely dated; only Sarah Kane's psychological slashing seems to have survived from this flashing pack of playwrights. Yet one genre seems to have solidified as the decades pass into bona fide masterpieces, and will perhaps define that period: the play of ideas. It looks now like the theatre from the 1980s and 1990s that tried to dramatise the great intellectual mudslides and forest-fires of its time has thrived better than any other -- from Michael Frayn's Copenhagen to Caryl Churchill's 'Top Girls' to Terry Johnson's 'Insignificance'. Using the old theatrical forms of the comedy or the thriller, they ask the most profound questions -- what is human life for, and how it should it be lived? Standing above them all, making the case for the entire genre, is perhaps the greatest play of its time: 'Arcadia' by Tom Stoppard. As it is about to have its first major revival in London's West End since its premiere in 1993 - starring Stoppard's own son, Ed - the vindication of 'Arcadia' seems close at hand. Yet Stoppard compresses so many ideas and guffaws and griefs into less than three hours that any attempt at a summary of the play will sound paradoxical. It is an English country-house farce about the death of the Universe. It is a laugh-filled tragedy about what happens if you take the intoxicants of poetry and science seriously. It is a play where Stoppard turns himself into a clown whose juggling balls are romanticism, classicism, and the meaning of life. It sounds convoluted, yet it unfolds to the audience with the clarity of a cool breeze on a hot day. The play is set in Sidley Park, an English stately home, in two different centuries. It opens in 1809, in the style of an Oscar Wilde drawing room farce. A handsome young science graduate, Septimus Hodge, is living there, tutoring the precocious thirteen year old girl of the house, Thomasina Coverley. Reading through her Latin homework, she wants him to explain what "carnal embrace" means. When he tells her, she is appalled. "Now whenever I do it, I shall think of you!" she rasps. "Is it like love?" He replies: "Oh no my lady, it is much nicer than that." And he has been demonstrating this conviction: Septimus has just been spotting having "a perpendicular poke" in the gazebo with Mrs Chater, the wife of a visiting poet. The lesson is interrupted by a note from Mr Chater, demanding he receive "satisfaction" for his wounded honour in the form of a duel. Septimus sighs: "Oh, Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you demand satisfaction. I cannot spend my day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family." When Mr Chater arrives in a fury, Septmius insists he won't engage in a pistol-fight to defend the honour of "a woman whose reputation could not be adequately defended with a platoon of musketry deployed by rota." The play then shifts suddenly to the 1990s, and a more realist style. In the same house on the same set, a historian called Hannah Jarvis - a role written for Felicity Kendall - is delving into the history of Sidley Park with the permission of the Croom family. She is a cool woman who has stripped herself of emotion and stocked her heart with icy frigid air, as she buries herself in piecing together stories from the past. Her work suddenly is interrupted by a braying, patronising English don called Bernard Nightingale who - we soon realise - has discovered the note that Chater wrote to Septimus in an old book, after all this time. Only he is convinced it means something more - something much more. He believes the note was written by Lord Byron, the great Romantic poet, who happened to be visiting that weekend - and that he fought the duel and killed Chater. This would explain his until-now mysterious fleeing to France in 1810. It will be "the literary discovery of the century", he neighs, turning him into a "Media Don - book early to avoid disappointment." And so the structure of the play is set. We watch the action unfold from 1809 to 1812, while the characters in the late twentieth century try to figure out what happened using the surviving scraps of their lives. The stories alternate - until, in the final scene, they appear on stage together, stumbling past each other, unseen, unseeable, yet locked in a waltz. Hannah - and Stoppard - are obsessed with the way the garden at Sidley Park was redesigned while Thomasina was swotting and Septimus was shagging, because it represents the intellectual shift that was sweeping Europe at the time. Until 1809 the garden was in the classical style, modelled on Virgil and ancient Greece - ordered and clean and geometrical. As Thomasina's mother, Lady Croom, describes it: "The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage... The right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged - in short, it is nature as God intended." But then the garden was demolished and remade to conform to the vision of the new romantic craze sweeping Europe - wild and irregular and disordered. Lady Croom exclaims: "Where there is the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman's garden, [there will soon be] an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was never a spring. My hyacinth dell is to become a haunt for hobgoblins." Hannah calls it "the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires." The idea of what Arcadia - paradise - looks like flipped in one generation, from order to disorder, from classical calm to romantic chaos. Hannah believes she has uncovered - in the crags of the garden's history - a perfect symbol of this degeneration. When they were carefully constructing their fake wilderness, the gardeners built a fake hermitage - and Lady Croom demanded that the gardeners provide a hermit to live in it. "If I am promised a fountain I expect it to come with water," she says. The bemused gardeners suggest advertising for a hermit in the newspaper, causing her to retort: "But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence." But a hermit was found - and he is the subject of Hannah's new book. He spent decades scribbling away in his fake hermit's hut, unremarked on by the Croom family. When he died at the age of 47, he was discovered to have been writing tens of thousands of pages of incomprehensible equations and Cabbalistic proofs that the world was coming to an end. "He's my peg for the breakdown of the Romantic Imagination... the whole Romantic sham!" Hannah explains. "It's what happened to the Enlightenment, isn't it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and fake beauty... The decline from thinking to feeling, you see." And so the tension that runs through the play is set up, in the very set itself. It's the old division that obsessed the eighteenth century. The classical order - which mutated into the Enlightenment - believed the world was ordered and comprehensible and was governed by rules that could be slowly uncovered. The Romantics believed this was a suffocating cage in which humanity was being imprisoned, and sought to overthrow all rules in the name of individual creativity. You make up your own rules as you go along: every man is an artist. There is no order other than the one you invent. Against the backdrop of this transformed garden and the transformed ideas it embodies, a strange story begins to unfold. The young Thomasina is, it soon becomes clear, a genius. Even as she girlishly prances around failing to spot the series of the sexual farces unfolding in her family, she can grasp the implications of the newest scientific discoveries way ahead of any of the adults around her. Septimus teaches her about Newton's laws of physics. They are clean, clear laws, promising an underlying, predictable order to the universe. Thomasina frets about what becomes of free will in a world where we are all merely atoms moving in line with his laws of motion - and then, suddenly, she spots a series of dark flaws in Newton. She explains to Septimus that in Newton's universe, equations can run in either direction - forward or back. But there is one equation that runs only one way: heat turns to cold. A cup of tea left to stand will always go cold; it will never spontaneously become hot. The same thing is happening everywhere, all the time: it's called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The implications - only just being grasped by the generations after Newton - were plain, and bleak. "It'll take a while, but we're all going to end up at room temperature," says one character. Septimus - sobered by Thomasina's explanation - adds softly: "So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold." These are characters who take the implications of their ideas seriously. Septimus and Thomasina are stricken by the realisation that instead of setting up a perfectly ticking and well-oiled machine, Newtonian physics exposed us as living in an irrevocably doomed world. Hannah too says the inevitable end-game of this universe is summarised in one of Byron's poems: "I had a dream that was not all a dream./ The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars/ Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/ Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/ Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air." In the present day, Bernard the aspirant Media Don scorns all the implications of science. In his struggle to prove Byron was a killer, he thinks gut instinct and aesthetics trump boring old scientific facts. He announces to the scientist who lives at Sidley Park, Valentine: "A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars, big bangs, black holes - who gives a shit?... I'd push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I'd lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through... If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out, I can expand my universe without you." Bernard's romantic passion - laced with a little charlatanry - is in opposition to Hannah's classical reserve. She is afraid of emotion and passion; Bernard is afraid of sobriety and the nagging sensation that the facts might not justify his flights of fancy. He "just knows" Byron murdered Chater. Meanwhile, nearly two centuries before, Septimus is clearly falling in love with Thomasina, as she ages into a young woman. He is thrilled by her discoveries, not only of the "heat death" implicit in Newton, but of another, deeper flaw in Newtonian physics. Why, Thomasina asks, can Newton's laws and equations only predictably describe the physics of linear, manufactured objects like squares and cones and pyramids? "Armed thus, God could only create a cabinet... [But] if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?" There surely must be a mathematical pattern underlying the things of real life too. She determines to draw these equations. But the audience slowly realise this is impossible - not because she is wrong, but because she is so far ahead of her time. When Hannah finds her old notebooks, she gets Valentine to explain them to her. He is a mathematician living in the house, pining for Hannah, and trying as part of his PhD to unlock the numerical patterns underlying the changing population of grouse at Sidley Park, as recorded in the old game books. He explains: "When Thomasina was doing maths it had been the same maths for a couple of thousand years. Classical. And then for a century after Thomasina. Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art, really. Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to be the mathematics of the real world." It turns out that so much of the world around us - rainfall averages or measles epidemics, say - follow bizarre equations. Valentine explains: "People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole pattern between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about - clouds - daffodils - waterfalls - and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in - these things are full of mystery... because the problem turns out to be different." How do we understand them? With a new kind of maths, known as chaos theory. Traditionally, scientists expected dynamic systems to settle into stable, predictable behaviour. But actually, tiny variations in inputs can cause huge changes. Simple equations can produce complex patterns. The way to decode them is a process known as an iterated algorithm. This is a piece of algebra where you take the solution to an equation, and plug it back into the start of the same equation, and keep repeating the process, again and again. Out of a simple equation, you get complex patterns. This is precisely what Thomasina was trying to grasp. But the maths is so complex and so time-consuming, it can only be done with computers. It was inaccessible to Thomasina with her pencils and notebooks, except as a glint in the distance. So Thomasina, the audience realizes, glimpsed a truth, centuries earlier than anyone else. "She didn't have the maths, not remotely. She saw what things meant, way ahead, like seeing a picture," Valentine says. And she knew that if she was right, she could help us escape from the trap laid by Newton - of a predictable, determined universe shorn of free will, and doomed to freeze. With the day-to-day unpredictability of chaos theory, "determinism leaves the road at every turn," she says. "The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm." And maybe it, too, offered a form of hope beyond the universal freeze. When it is explained to her, Hannah asks Valentine: "Do you mean the world is saved after all?" He replies: "No, it's still doomed. But if this is how it started, perhaps it's how the next one will come." But what became of Thomasina's insight? Hannah reveals its fate casually, in the sixth scene. (Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid a plot spoiler.) Thomasina died in a fire on the eve of her seventeenth birthday - a "heat death" of her own, caused by a candle Septimus lit for her. Her insights came to nothing. Then we see her alive again, skipping onto the stage, trying to persuade Septimus to kiss her. It is, we realize, the night of her death. And suddenly, it hits the audience. The hermit in the garden is Septimus, trying to prove Thomasina's equations, alone and half-mad in the romantics' garden after her death. His mind and pencil didn't have the capacity to do what a computer can manage in a few minutes - but he tried, scribbling endlessly, for decades, trying to prove there is hope after all, and it can only be discovered "through good English algebra." The stale cliché about Stoppard - and about this genre - is that he is a brilliant manipulator of ideas, but with no heart. Yet here - at the core of his best play - is the greatest love story on the British stage for decades. Yes, the characters bond over ideas - but some of the most
 
Carl Spencer, National Geographic Diver, Dies From 'The Bends' While Filming In Greece Top
Carl Spencer, 37 is believed to have died from decompression sickness - the bends - according to the country's merchant marine ministry.
 
Mark Goulston, M.D.: Memorial Day, 2009 - Sacrifice Repaid Top
The opposite of selfishness is not generosity, it's sacrifice. Selfishness --> Generosity --> Sacrifice Last Memorial Day, television actor and Marine Hugh O'Brien spoke to the assembled audience at the Los Angeles National Cemetery and told us that we were there to honor the all who gave some and the some who gave all so the rest of us could be free. I didn't serve in Vietnam because I pulled 363 in the draft lottery. I have spent the last forty years living a good life. My high school classmates, Arthur Stroyman and Paul Dunne, have spent the last forty years on the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial . My children age 27, 24 and 19 have also had a blessed life going to nice colleges and now have jobs. During the same time my good friend Jane Bright's son Evan Ashcraft was killed in Iraq. The pain and anger threatened to consume Jane until she focused on what Evan kept writing to her in his letters: "When I come home from Iraq, I just want to help people. Evan" To fulfill his dream Jane and her husband Jim established the Evan Ashcraft Foundation . Every day I drive by the intersection of Sepulveda and Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles. And each time I usually see a veteran of an older war. They are now beginning to be replaced by veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq, by people the age of my children. On a good day, I'll roll down my window and give one a dollar. But on most days I'll be on my Blackberry on a call of questionable import and just wave the veteran on refusing to even make eye contact. I can no longer sit back and do nothing. I don't think honoring those who gave so much so we can be free -- the soldiers, veterants, police, firefighters and their families -- is enough; we need to repay them for their sacrifice. I dedicated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for Dummies to those who sacrificed so much to create peace on Earth so they might regain peace of mind. In celebration of Memorial Day I thought it was timely to spread the word about the Aids and Attendance Program to qualified Vets who could benefit from assistance with their care needs. The Veterans' Administration offers a Special Pension with Aid and Attendance (A&A) benefit that is largely unknown. This Special Pension (part of the VA Improved Pension program) allows for Veterans and surviving spouses who require the regular attendance of another person to assist in eating, bathing, dressing, undressing or taking care of the needs of nature to receive additional monetary benefits. It also includes individuals who are blind or a patient in a nursing home because of mental or physical incapacity. Assisted care in an assisted living facility also qualifies. This most important benefit is overlooked by many families with Veterans or surviving spouses who need additional monies to help care for ailing parents or loved ones. This is a "pension benefit" and is not dependent upon service-related injuries for compensation. Most Veterans who are in need of assistance qualify for this pension. Aid and Attendance can help pay for care in the home, nursing home or assisted living facility. A Veteran is eligible for up to $1,632 per month, while a surviving spouse is eligible for up to $1,055 per month. A couple is eligible for up to $1,949 per month. Find out more at: VeteranAid.org PS: Please forward this information to someone who could use it!
 
NYT Public Editor Slaps Friedman, Dowd, Andrews Top
IT has been a busy week or two for the ethics police -- those within The Times trying to protect the paper's integrity, and those outside, ready to pounce on transgressions by Times journalists. More on Thomas Friedman
 
Jack Hidary: Hey Steve! Where's Brooklyn? Top
Steve Wolfram's new search engine is powered by a huge database and a supercomputer, but can't find some pretty easy things. WoframAlpha is a new search engine that launched to great fanfare this past week. It is supposed to track down all kinds of data that can be calculated in some way: population of a city, exports of a country, a stock price, etc. The site claims to have amassed 10+ trillion pieces of data including lots of geographical knowledge. Somehow in all that amassing, nobody told the engine that there is a place called Brooklyn, NY. Wolfram comes up with Brooklyns in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa! But not the biggest one in NYC. When you type in Queens, the answer is even better -- it doesn't know about Queens, NY; instead Wolfram gives back: Leaders -- President -- Barack Obama, Vice President, Joe Biden. Queen Elizabeth must be miffed. Searching for Manhattan gives the population of the entire city of NY; some Manhattanites may feel that way, but this is supposed to be a very accurate, mathematically-driven search engine. Here's hoping for WolframBeta. More on Google
 
Scott Mendelson: Judgment Day for Terminator Salvation Top
Unlike everyone else with a blog/web site, I do prefer to wait till the final numbers roll in before discussing box office at length (part of that is convenience, as I'm usually playing with my daughter when the Sunday estimates roll in). So here's the top-ten list for now , and I'll discuss everything non- Terminator related on Monday night or Tuesday. For now, it's time for to face facts about a certain beloved sci-fi franchise. There was no major Saturday bounce. Grosses actually went down 1.6% from Friday to Saturday. Terminator Salvation is officially in trouble. I was bending over backwards to be fair, not wanting to the be the sort of pundit to condemn a movie as a financial disappointment after just one or two days. But while the three-day total is $43 million, which is just below the three-day opening Fri-Sun for Terminator 3 , the five day total is expected to be a bit less than the $72 million that Rise of the Machines pulled in over July 4th weekend in 2003. The $56 million four-day total is already $3 million behind the Jonathan Mostow sequel, and it's only going downhill from here. Ironically, it may be a matter of expectations. Everyone expected that the third Terminator film was going to be a cash grab, designed to give Arnold Schwarzenegger one last payday before his California gubernatorial run. Unless I'm mistaken, it's near-record $170 million budget was caused partially by the actor's insistence on shooting in Los Angeles, in order to boost the economy of the business capital of the state he wanted to run. Cringe-inducing trailers highlighting the campier elements did not help. But the film shocked critics and audiences by actually being pretty good, with tight, low-key character interplay and some astonishing action beats (plus a stunningly powerful finale). So it was able to weather the one-two onslaught of Pirates of the Caribbean and Bay Boys 2 . The film pulled in $150 million in the US and nearly $300 million overseas for a profitable $433 million total. Comparitively, for whatever reason, expectations were high for the fourth installment. I'm honestly not sure why. Yes Christian Bale is a great actor, but he was no more suited to play John Conner than Kevin Costner was to play Robin Hood (Bale may have a reputation as a gloomy brooder, but most of his characters are lively mad men). While I have nothing against McG and rather enjoyed the first Charlies Angels , his name did not inspire confidence amongst the masses. So why did everyone expect this to be something other than a bigger budget variation on Reign of Fire , with robots filling in for dragons (and minus the character development)? Why didn't we expect Warner Bros. to (apparently) panic over the collapse of Watchmen and demand a PG-13, action-filled theatrical cut? The trailers promised atmosphere and action, and that's what the picture delivered on in spades. I'm not saying the movie is a wrongly condemned masterpiece, but I think the movie turned out about how we all should have known it would had we been thinking logically. So the film will likely end its first five days with about $66 million. After that, lousy word of mouth and negative press will keep it fighting to even approach the $150 million that part 3 reached. The official budget, which was funded by six private production companies, is 'only' $200 million but, and I mean this as a compliment, I don't believe that for a second. The ad campaign has been super-saturation level as well, so this very expensive marketing investment could hurt Warner Bros. in a mass-layoff kinda way, since Columbia has the rights for international distribution (and this film could very well double or triple its domestic take overseas). The saving grace for Warner's domestic investment may be the DVD/Blu Ray release that may or may not contained some kind of extended cut involving that 40 minutes of deleted footage. Here's hoping that WB Home Video doesn't wimp out a la Speed Racer and just cancel all of the already completed bonus materials. With Terminator Salvation , Observe & Report , and Watchmen under performing to varying degrees, Warner Bros' decision to move Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to July is now an unmitigated stroke of genius. It's now up to 'the boy who lived' to save the studio, as well as the world. Who would have thought that Warner Bros' highest grossing picture of 2009, heading into July, would be Gran Torino ?
 
Woman in 50s is NY's 2nd swine flu death, US' 11th Top
NEW YORK — A woman died over the weekend of swine flu, becoming the city's second victim and the nation's 11th. The woman, who was in her 50s, had other health conditions, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene spokeswoman Jessica Scaperotti said. No other information on her case was disclosed Sunday. Assistant public school principal Mitchell Wiener, who died May 17, was the city's first death from the virus. The 55-year-old had been sick for several days. There were 280 confirmed cases of swine flu in the city and 94 hospitalizations as of Sunday, Scaperotti said. The number of confirmed cases probably doesn't fully reflect the spread of the virus, given that health officials aren't testing everyone for the H1N1 strain. "It's most likely that if you're sick with the flu, that you have the H1N1 virus," Scaperotti said. Those people with chronic health conditions such as diabetes and compromised immune systems who are suffering from flu-like symptoms should seek medical advice, Scaperotti said. Only those with more serious symptoms, such as shortness of breath, should go to emergency rooms, she said. The health department recommended that physicians prescribe anti-flu drugs such as Tamiflu over the phone to patients with mild flu symptoms who have other health conditions. Scaperotti said that as the virus spreads "we are going to see more increases of severe illness." She said that each year more than 1,000 people die of seasonal flu in the city. The city's first outbreak of swine flu occurred about a month ago, when more than 1,000 teenagers at a Catholic high school in Queens began falling ill following the return of several students from vacations in Mexico, where the virus was first detected. The virus has coursed through the city's schools and even reached its jail system, where inmates' visiting hours have been limited and hand sanitizer passed around. On Thursday, correction officials said they would sanitize a 2,600-inmate jail on Rikers Island. The World Health Organization, as of Friday, had tallied more than 12,000 swine flu cases worldwide, with more than half of them in the United States. It counted at least 86 deaths, with 75 of those in Mexico. Eighteen U.S. soldiers infected with swine flu have recovered after treatment on an American base in Kuwait and left the country, a Kuwaiti health official said Sunday. "They were treated and they have fully recovered," said Youssef Mandakar, deputy head of Kuwait's public health department. He said the soldiers had shown "mild symptoms" of the disease upon their arrival at an Air Force base. Kuwaiti authorities confirmed that the soldiers came from the United States but would not say where they had gone, adding that the troops had no contact with the local population and were treated at U.S. military facilities. Ibrahim Abdul-Hadi, an undersecretary at the Health Ministry, said the U.S. military had examined and quarantined a number of soldiers who mixed with the infected ones. Kuwait is a major ally of Washington and a logistics base for U.S. military personnel serving in Iraq. Raad Mahmoud, a spokesman for the Iraqi Health Ministry, said precautions are being taken at airports and border entry points, but he said Iraqi authorities have no authority over U.S. troops and the foreigners who enter with them. He said the U.S. military has to administer medical tests to everybody when they enter the country and the military must present the reports to the ministry. U.S. Army Maj. Jose Lopez, a military spokesman, said there were no reported cases of swine flu among American troops in Iraq. Poland's Chief Sanitary Inspectorate on Sunday confirmed the country's third case of swine flu in a 21-year-old who had just returned to Poland from the United States. Jan Bondar, the spokesman for the state office, said the man returned on Friday and presented himself at a hospital for testing after getting a call from a friend in Washington whom he had spent time with and who had contracted the virus. The Pole's condition is not serious, Bondar said. ___ Associated Press Writers Chelsea J. Carter in Baghdad, Vanessa Gera in Warsaw and Diana Elias in Kuwait City contributed to this report. More on Swine Flu
 

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