Category Archives: Immortality

A friend and fellow Pagan priest recently came across this quote at a local hospital:

What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal. Albert Pike, American Freemason

Its a beautiful quote and its place outside a hospital is very appropriate. But while it is clearly true (the second half, at least), it raises the question of whether thats the only form of immortality.

There are those who believe the contemplation of immortality is a colossal waste of time. All we know for sure is that we have this one life. Surely we should focus our attention on making it the most we can and worry about what comes next when this life is done.

Yet to be human is to live with the realization that we are alive but some day we will die. Life will go on for those who remain until their time also comes but we will be gone.

We mostly live with this certainty by ignoring it. But for those of us who are mindful of such things, we wonder: will we really cease to exist? Or will we live on, in one form or another? Philosophers, theologians, and ordinary people have contemplated this question for at least as long as weve been human. There are many answers, some of which are more likelythan others.

As for me, I see three forms of immortality.

This is what Albert Pike was talking about what we do lives on after us. Pike achieved this form of immortality he was an extremely influential figure in American Freemasonry, especially within the Scottish Rite. The very wealthy have long endowed education and the arts, looking to have their names attached to beneficial institutions that live on for centuries after them. This past fall we were reminded of the deeds of the women who won the right to vote and Susan B. Anthonys grave became a shrine. Ross Nichols and Isaac Bonewits live on in me and in many other contemporary Druids.

It is not only what we have done for others that remains. Shakespeares Mark Antony said the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. Pike achieved this form of immortality as well. He fought for the Confederacy and threatened to leave Freemasonry rather than accept black men as brothers. Jack the Ripper appears to be immortal I hope the far-more-deadly 20th and 21st century mass murderers fade into obscurity instead.

We need not be famous or infamous to live on in our deeds. Rich mens names may be on the buildings, but carpenters and stonemasons live on in the structures built by their labor. Parents and teachers live on in the children who learn from them.

Our world is more interconnected than we can imagine. Every day our lives touch the lives of others, impacting and influencing them in ways that are sometimes unnoticeable and sometimes overwhelming. Those impacts and influences will remain long after we have moved on to whatever comes next.

Our deeds make us immortal.

Daniel OConnell Monument Dublin, Ireland

We will die, but our blood kin will go on. Even if like me we leave no physical offspring, we have nieces and nephews and cousins of various degrees and levels of removal. Our families of blood continue.

So do our families of choice: our networks of close friends, our social and political organizations, and especially our religious communities. Ross Nichols lives on in OBOD and Isaac Bonewits lives on in ADF.

This is not the same as the immortality of our deeds. We do not live on in our families because we were influential or even because we were loved. We live on in our families because we were a part of them, and the whole continues even if a part of it dies.

This is a difficult concept for modern Westerners whose sense of identity rests firmly in the individual and not in the group. The liberal Christian theologian Paul Tillich called this the courage to be as a part. He said it is the participation in something which transcends death, namely the collective, and through it, in being-itself (The Courage to Be, 1952).

What if your family line dies out? Just remember that if you go back far enough, every living person is related (and for that matter, so is every living creature). Your name may die, but your family continues.

Because our families live on, we are immortal.

The first two forms of immortality require no religious beliefs, just a way of thinking that is bigger than ourselves. But when most people talk about immortality theyre thinking of the immortality of themselves as individuals. Call it consciousness, call it the soul whatever it is that makes you you. Does it live on?

The only completely honest answer is that we dont know. If you have examined the evidence and have come to the conclusion that it does not, or that the question is unimportant, know that I respect your beliefs. But I have come to a different conclusion.

We see the concept of life after death in almost every culture and tradition. We see it in the earliest human burials with grave goods why would people who had almost nothing bury useful objects with the dead unless they were sure the dead would need them? We see it in the tomb-shrines of Northwestern Europe and in the pyramids of Egypt. We see it in the beliefs and practices of many of the worlds remaining tribal cultures, and in the beliefs and practices of our friends and neighbors. Perhaps this near-universal belief simply reflects a near-universal fear of death and non-existence. For me, though, its one more reason why I believe we live on.

There are near death experiences and past life memories. Yes, there are rational explanations for them, and some of those explanations are probably true. But some experiences defy rationalization.

Ive had my own past life experiences. Some were part of a deliberate attempt to remember, while others came spontaneously. I have no way of knowing if these memories are authentic or if theyre imagined, but they feel right, and they go a long way in explaining why I am the way I am. So as with so much else that cant be proved one way or the other, I order my life as though the memories are authentic, even though I cant be sure.

Ive also had other, more powerful spiritual experiences. These have been so real and theyve happened enough times even I cant be skeptical about them any more. They have not specifically addressed the form that the immortality of the soul takes (Otherworld? Reincarnation? Some combination of the two?), but I am completely convinced there is more to Life than the material world, and that the soul whatever that is never dies.

I cannot prove this to you. I can only tell you what Ive done, and what others like me have done. Experiences like this come in their own time and not when we demand them, and even then it is up to us to interpret them authentically.

But Im convinced our souls are immortal.

The time to contemplate death and what comes afterwards is not when we are old and sick and death is imminent. These things are best contemplated on a beautiful Spring day when you are healthy and all is right in the world, or at least in your little corner of it. So let us consider immortality and the forms it might take.

This we know: our deeds make us immortal.

This we know: because our families live on, we are immortal.

If thats enough for you, Im happy for you. Seriously if youre good with that, it makes your life a lot simpler. If thats as far as your worldview will allow you to go, I respect your choices.

But this I know: my soul will live on.

See more here:

Three Forms of Immortality - Patheos (blog)

Good Friday seems a suitable day to consider the fact that, in an era in which life expectancy everywhere has almost doubled, humankind is more confused than ever aboutdeath. Nearly half of the British population supposes that death is complete annihilation; an almost equal number still believes in some form of life after death, and, for a subject notably lacking in eyewitness data, a surprisingly small proportion, less than 10%, acknowledge they do not know what happens. Meanwhile, in California but also elsewhere, there are enormously rich men who believe that death is a problem witha technological solution which they hope to live to profit from.

Ideals of technological immortality come in two sorts. There are those who hope that their bodies will be preserved or at least prolonged almost indefinitely, usually by freezing. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that the present technology allows brains to be frozen and rethawed without being reduced to a unworkable state. To hope that this will be changed by some future breakthroughs is an act of faith at least as remarkable as supposing that Jesus rose from the dead. That belief was at least marked since its earliest appearance by a saving ambiguity about what it might actually mean. Saint Paul, for example, was absolutely certain it had happened but nowhere managed to explain what it materially might have been.

The second kind of technological immortality presumes an immaterial soul a pattern of electrical and chemical activity that can be copied from brains into silicon and then reactivated, either inside a computer or transferred back into a conveniently available human brain. Possibly both: one contemporary science fiction novel, Cory Doctorows Walkaway, takes the idea of personalities as computer programs to its logical consequence, and envisages multiple copies of the same program the same person running simultaneously on different networks. This is the closest anyone will ever get to the fantasy of cloning identical human beings.

These approaches to the afterlife differ from most of the world religions in that they have no moral aspect. Perhaps to the believers it is a moral quality to be rich enough to afford such fantasies, but to the rest of the world it looks like a giant leap backwards. This amoral approach to immortality reaches back to a world before the great proselytising world religions. Christianity, Islam and Buddhism all have conceptions of an afterlife which will make up for injustice before death. This was an important novelty. Most other religious systems, if they had any concept of an afterlife, had one without justice. The twittering shades whom Odysseus fed with blood were not being punished for anything except being dead. The nearest that a ghost can come to justice is a craving for revenge. Although belief in heaven and hell can gratify that craving, so that a Christian journalist, outraged by the slaughter of Christians in Egypt this week, consoles himself that the murderers will suffer a thousand times worse in hell, it has also served to underpin a concept of justice wider than revenge and capable of bringing an end to reprisals.

A belief in heaven and hell tends to enforce social norms, discouraging cheating on the one hand, but also holding the potential to make this life pretty hellish for those who fall outside the norms for any reason, including gay people. Social liberalism often goes hand in hand with a rejection of the afterlife, but so does destructive libertarianism. If this life is all we have, success before death is the only kind worth having. But who is to judge that success if not posterity? This itself implies a kind of afterlife. To evoke posterity is to weep on your own grave, as Robert Graves pointed out, and if you are truly dead you cannot leave your grave to weep on it.

Suppose, though, that the tech billionaires get their wish. Would they be happy then? Theyd certainly be envied. Immortality is after all a promise that people are prepared to die for, whether in expectation of heaven, or of some earthly miracle that will revive their frozen corpses. The possessors would certainly be prepared to kill to retain it. But once attained, at whatever cost to the rest ofus, would it satisfy?

The prospect of a life infinitely prolonged becomes after some time the prospect of infinite futility. Its often said that heaven would be extremely boring because all the interesting people end up in hell. But even the company of saints would be preferable tothat of the disciples of Ayn Rand.

The rest is here:

The Guardian view on immortality: not for the faint-hearted - The Guardian

This article comes from Den of Geek UK.

Few horror films have been as closely studied and intimately dissected as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The simple story of a family ripped apart by the effects of a remote, haunted hotel, Kubrick's film has only grown in mystique since its release in 1980. Clearly, there's far more going on below the surface, but what does Kubrick's imagery and symbolism - much of it unique to the film, and absent from Stephen King's source novel - actually mean?

Rodney Ascher's superb 2012 documentary Room 237 pulled together some of the more outlandish theories about The Shining. It's Kubrick's veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the 1969 Moon landings, goes one line of thinking. No, it's an allusion to the horrors of World War II and the holocaust, says a different theorist. Wrong again, another voice suggests: it's a retelling of the Minotaur myth. Often, these theories are based on incidental background details - a home-knit Apollo 11 jumper, the specific make of a typewriter, a tin of baking powder, a poster that looks a bit like a mythical beast if you squint hard enough.

There's a richness and attention to detail and ambiguity in Stanley Kubrick's movies that invites this kind of close study, though few films in his career have sparked quite so many varied readings as The Shining. To an already crowded list, we offer an additional theory: The Shining's about the immortality of evil.

Kubrick embarked on The Shining in the wake of 1975's Barry Lyndon, his glacial period film which, despite its reputation today, was a critical and financial failure at the time. The director therefore threw himself into a more commercial project: an adaptation of The Shining. Stephen King's novels had made him phenomenally popular in the late 1970s, and King was among a generation of storytellers who took horror out of the castles and capes of Dracula and Frankenstein and into the modern era.

King's novels Carrie (1974) and 'Salem's Lot (1975) took paranormal powers and vampirism into the 20th century, just as such hit films as Rosemary's Baby (based on the novel by Ira Levin) and The Exorcist (adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own book) had introduced a classier, more contemporary brand of horror in cinemas.

When Kubrick took on The Shining, he was therefore following a fashionable trend among respected filmmakers. Roman Polanski, William Friedkin, and Nicolas Roeg had all crafted deeply individual horror films in the 60s and 70s. The decade also introduced such wayward talents as Wes Craven (Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes), Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), and David Cronenberg (Shivers, Rabid).

When Kubrick started work on The Shining, he showed off the work of another upcoming filmmaker he greatly admired: Eraserhead, the surreal, immensely disturbing debut by David Lynch. The Shining would, of course, wind up being wildly different from Eraserhead's monochrome hellscape, yet Kubrick evidently appreciated how Lynch used sound and imagery to create an oppressive atmosphere of dread.

To Stephen King's later chagrin, Kubrick wasn't particularly interested in adapting The Shining beat for beat. For one thing, the filmmaker didn't have much time for stories of ghosts and the afterlife - something Kubrick told King in no uncertain terms one day in the late 70s.

As King recalled in one hilarious anecdote, Kubrick called King up at 7:00 am one morning - completely out of the blue - and said, "Hi. Stanley Kubrick here. I actually think stories of the supernatural are optimistic, don't you?"

King, hung over, covered in shaving cream, two kids screaming in the background, gripped the telephone and murmured, "I don't exactly know what you mean by that."

"Well," Kubrick replied, "supernatural stories all posit the basic suggestion that we survive death. If we survive death, that's optimistic, isn't it?"

King asked, "Well, what about hell?"

There was a long, ominous pause, like the silence after a thunderclap.

"I don't believe in hell," Kubrick said, and hung up.

Kubrick therefore set about reworking his own vision of The Shining with screenwriter Diane Johnson, using only the basic framework of King's story. A husband, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their young son Danny (Danny Lloyd), who has telepathic powers, spend the winter at the Overlook, a hotel located in the mountains of Colorado. The husband, Jack intends to use the weeks of seclusion to write a novel. The malevolent spirits in the hotel, on the other hand, have other ideas. As strange apparitions manifest themselves to both son and father, Jack's already threadbare sanity begins to unravel...

The shoot of Kubrick's The Shining was legendarily difficult, as the filmmaker's exacting methods took their toll. Nicholson and Duvall were required to provide take after take - a pivotal stairway confrontation between the pair was shot anywhere from 45 to 125 times depending on whose account you believe. Scatman Crothers, who plays the hotel chef Dick Hallorann, spent so long reciting his lines in front of the camera that he eventually lost his temper with Kubrick.

By the time filming had concluded in 1979, Kubrick had spent about a year at Elstree Studios, obsessing over individual scenes and tiny details. As cast and crew began to crack under the pressure of all the script rewrites and long work days, it must have felt at times as though the production itself was descending into madness.

If critics struggled with The Shining when it finally emerged in 1980, then maybe that's because it didn't adhere to the conventions of a typical horror movie. The Overlook's supernatural threat - if it exists at all in the movie - is kept ambiguous. Its pace is slow and deliberate; and unlike the Jack Torrance in King's book, who's initially presented as a flawed yet likeable character before the ghosts get to him, Jack Nicholson's protagonist is fairly cold and sinister before he even sets foot in the Overlook.

This latter point is surely deliberate, however. Kubrick's implication is that, far from being corrupted by the evil presence in the Overlook, Jack Torrance is simply given license by it. The evil's already present in Jack - it merely takes a few nudges from the Overlook's remote location and ghostly echoes to bring it out into the open.

The Shining's opening credit sequence could be read as the first hint at this. As Wendy Carlos' doom-laden electronic music plays in the background, a helicopter shot follows the Torrance family's journey through the Colorado countryside in their car. The camera becomes a detached, floating spirit, hovering over or just behind the central characters - much as it does through the rest of the film in those celebrated Steadicam shots Kubrick so insistently employs. Evil is following.

In King's novel, there's the suggestion that the Overlook has somehow sucked up the evil things that have taken place within its walls. Kubrick goes a step further, with a character's line that the hotel was built on an old Indian burial ground implying that the presence may be older than the structure itself. And if we follow the theory that The Shining isn't about ghosts, but about evil, then this certainly makes sense. Evil doesn't inhabit buildings, it inhabits human beings - even ordinary, unremarkable ones, like Jack Torrance.

There's plenty of support from Kubrick to support this reading of the film; in Paul Duncan's Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Films, the filmmaker said:

"There's something inherently wrong with the human personality. There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly."

Stephen King was certainly confronting his own demons when he wrote his novel. The inspiration from The Shining came to him during a stay at The Stanley Hotel in Colorado, where King fused a stay in the real room 217 - supposedly haunted - with the difficulties he was having as a father of two young children.

"Sometimes you confess," King said in The Stephen King Companion, published in 1989. "You always hide what you're confessing to. That's one of the reasons why you make up the story. When I wrote The Shining, for instance, the protagonist [...] is a man who's broken his son's arm, who has a history of child beating, who is beaten himself. And as a young father with two children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism toward my children..."

The Shining therefore de-emphasizes the moving topiary animals and ghosts of the novel and focuses the story more squarely on Jack Torrance's growing capacity for violence. The Overlook becomes a place where, away from the gaze of society, moral laws are suspended, and Jack is given license to do all the things he's long fantasized about.

As Jack drunkenly confesses to Joe Turkel's impassive barman, Lloyd, he'd already subjected his young son to violent abuse before he even set foot in the Overlook:

"For as long as I live, she'll never let me forget what happened. I did hurt him once, okay? But it was an accident. Completely unintentional [...] a momentary loss of muscular coordination."

The Shining then ties the evil of domestic violence to evil in a more general sense. Evil doesn't just reside in Jack; it's everywhere. As the sinister Delbert Grady (Philip Stone) tells Jack, "You've always been the caretaker. I've always been here."

The references to the genocide of Native Americans, as picked up by other theorists, could tie into The Shining's theme of evil presenting itself in different ways. The elevator doors opening, the blood gushing up, seemingly from the foundations of the Overlook itself, could be a symbol of the hotel's grim past - and the country as a whole.

In the same scene with Jack quoted above, Delbert Grady uses a racial slur to describe Dick Halloran that strikes out of the film like an ice pick - an example of another kind of evil that sticks to our species like a leech. Perhaps this is what Jack means by the odd, apparently throwaway line: "White man's burden." If we don't feel guilty about the skeletons in our species' closet, then maybe we should.

Away from The Shining, Kubrick's films frequently explored the darker continents of human nature - particularly the destruction wrought by flawed men. His adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita was about the horrors wrought by a sexual predator. At its heart, Dr. Strangelove was about how a world led by neurotic, sexually repressed men might be obliterated by nuclear weapons. A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket both dealt explicitly with violence and dehumanization.

The Shining could therefore be seen as a continuation of those themes: a continuation of the things "inherently wrong with the human personality," but in a horror context. It's not the ghosts in haunted houses we should be afraid of, Kubrick seems to suggest, but the demons that lurk within ourselves.

Time and again, the director returns to the symbol of the maze: the hedge maze in the Overlook garden, the incomprehensible network of corridors in the building itself. This is The Shining's lasting, chilling implication: the blacker sides of human nature are hardwired into our DNA. Inextricable. Inescapable.

Visit link:

The Shining and the Immortality of Evil | Den of Geek - Den of Geek US

Saskatchewan's Joel Gagnon, shown competing with the Minnesota Gophers, has had a gymnastics element named after him. Courtesy Minnesota Athletics/Christopher Mitchell/SportShotPhoto.com

Saskatchewans Joel Gagnon, unlike the rest of us, has his own move.

Its documented, codified, immortalized. People all over the world are trying it; theyre sending him video links via Instagram.

Try it sometime: Head to the closest parallel bars, and perform, as the International Gymnastics Federation puts it, a basket roll backwards with tuck salto half to upper arm hang.

Youve just performed The Gagnon named by the federation after its inventor, a kid from Saskatchewan, and placed into the mens gymnastics Code of Points.

Someone came up to me this weekend, relates Gagnon, a third-year gymnast with the University of Minnesota Gophers who is freshly returned from the Big 10 championship.(He was) one of the photographers, and he said, Ive been shooting that skill all season. I didnt realize it was named after you. Its one of those little comments that make you happy. You know its kind of a big deal.

Gagnon, who grew up in Regina before moving to Saskatoon to train with the Taiso Gymnastics Club in Grades 11 and 12, is the first Saskatchewan gymnast to have a skill named after him.

He invented it late last summer, while working on a different skill at a gym in Montreal. He was having difficulties, and made his own variation an extra half twist, instead of an extra flip, and that moved it off the books and into uncharted territory.

I was lucky enough to be scheduled to go to my first World Cup in Hungary a month and a half after that, he says. It was pretty good timing, if I could master the skill quickly. I knew there was a chance of getting it named after me. It all happened pretty fast. Before I knew it, I was competing in Hungary, and now its named after me.

Before Gagnon could perform the unknown move in competition, it had to be submitted to meet officials. They gave it a difficulty value of C, which carries a points score of 0.3.

Later, it went to a technical committee at the International Gymnastics Federation. Last week, they announced that The Gagnon is one of eight new elements, all performed at World Cup events in 2016 and 2017, to be published in the mens Code of Points.

It is a way, the Federation noted in its preamble, of achieving immortality in gymnastics. The gymnast who has an original skill named after them in the Code of Points assures that his or her name will live on in the sport, years after they have taken their final bows on the international stage.

Its incredible, says Gagnon, an aspiring Olympian and aerospace engineer who is also on Canadas national gymnastics team.

Its almost surreal to have my named attached to something that will be in the Code of Points forever. I can say I left a legacy, or my mark, on the sport in some way. Its something you dream about, but its not something you think will ever happen, because you have to have the stars align in the right way you come up with a skill, and are able to compete it at the high level required to get it named after you.

Gagnon is now working to refine the element. Since introducing it, hes done the move with legs tucked, but hes now trying it with legs splayed. Hes been using it just about every weekend at NCAA competitions.

He laughs when asked to evaluate that first public display of The Gagnon, at the Szombathely World Challenge Cup in Hungary.

It was the best anyones ever done it, he said wryly. It wasnt perfect. It was clean, well-executed. I could have had a bit more rotation on it, so theres still improvement, which is good.

Gagnon, who first started in the sport as a four-year-old in Regina, remains a Taiso member while working towards his goal of competing at the 2020 Olympics and, maybe, of using his element there.

Hes juggling all that, and his aerospace engineering studies, while noting that they do have at least one thing in common.

Both of them are very challenging, Gagnon said. Anytime youre learning something new in the gym, theres a lot of analysis going on what can I do to fix this; what can I do to catch this release move or stick this landing? It takes a lot of patience, a lot of time, a lot of thought, a lot of dedication, a time commitment. Both (gymnastics and engineering) have those same trends.

With all that said, he continues to work on a variation of The Gagnon. Perhaps, he muses, he can try another new element in international competition, and theyll immortalize The Gagnon 2.

Ill still try to innovate, to be creative and maybe get another skill one day, he says.

kemitchell@postmedia.com

twitter.com/kmitchsp

Read more:

Saskatchewan gymnast Gagnon finds immortality in a name and a skill - Saskatoon StarPhoenix

Few horror films have been as closely studied and intimately dissected as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The simple story of a family ripped apart by the effects of a remote, haunted hotel, Kubrick's film has only grown in mystique since its release in 1980. Clearly, there's far more going on below the surface, but what does Kubrick's imagery and symbolism - much of it unique to the film, and absent from Stephen King's source novel - actually mean?

Rodney Ascher's superb 2012 documentary Room 237 pulled together some of the more outlandish theories about The Shining. It's Kubrick's veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the 1969 Moon landings, goes one line of thinking. No, it's an allusion to the horrors of World War II and the holocaust, says a different theorist. Wrong again, another voice suggests: it's a retelling of the Minotaur myth. Often, these theories are based on incidental background details - a home-knit Apollo 11 jumper, the specific make of a typewriter, a tin of baking powder, a poster that looks a bit like a mythical beast if you squint hard enough.

There's a richness and attention to detail and ambiguity in Stanley Kubrick's movies that invites this kind of close study, though few films in his career have sparked quite so many varied readings as The Shining. To an already crowded list, we offer an additional theory: The Shining's about the immortality of evil.

Kubrick embarked on The Shining in the wake of 1975's Barry Lyndon, his glacial period film which, despite its reputation today, was a critical and financial failure at the time. The director therefore threw himself into a more commercial project: an adaptation of The Shining. Stephen King's novels had made him phenomenally popular in the late 1970s, and King was among a generation of storytellers who took horror out of the castles and capes of Dracula and Frankenstein and into the modern era.

King's novels Carrie (1974) and 'Salem's Lot (1975) took paranormal powers and vampirism into the 20th century, just as such hit films as Rosemary's Baby (based on the novel by Ira Levin) and The Exorcist (adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own book) had introduced a classier, more contemporary brand of horror in cinemas.

When Kubrick took on The Shining, he was therefore following a fashionable trend among respected filmmakers. Roman Polanski, William Friedkin and Nicolas Roeg had all crafted deeply individual horror films in the 60s and 70s; the decade also introduced such wayward talents as Wes Craven (Last House On The Left, The Hills Have Eyes), Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and David Cronenberg (Shivers, Rabid).

When Kubrick started work on The Shining, he showed off the work of another upcoming filmmaker he greatly admired: Eraserhead, the surreal, immensely disturbing debut by David Lynch. The Shining would, of course, wind up being wildly different from Eraserhead's monochrome hellscape, yet Kubrick evidently appreciated how Lynch used sound and imagery to create an oppressive atmosphere of dread.

To Stephen King's later chagrin, Kubrick wasn't particularly interested in adapting The Shining beat for beat; for one thing, the filmmaker didn't have much time for stories of ghosts and the afterlife - something Kubrick told King in no uncertain terms one day in the late 70s.

As King recalled in one hilarious anecdote, Kubrick called King up at 7.00am one morning - completely out of the blue - and said, "Hi. Stanley Kubrick here. I actually think stories of the supernatural are optimistic, don't you?"

King, hung over, covered in shaving cream, two kids screaming in the background, gripped the telephone and murmured, "I don't exactly know what you mean by that."

"Well," Kubrick replied, "supernatural stories all posit the basic suggestion that we survive death. If we survive death, that's optimistic, isn't it?"

King asked, "Well, what about hell?"

There was a long, ominous pause, like the silence after a thunderclap.

"I don't believe in hell," Kubrick said, and hung up.

Kubrick therefore set about reworking his own vision of The Shining with screenwriter Diane Johnson, using only the basic framework of King's story. A husband, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their young son Danny (Danny Lloyd), who has telepathic powers, spend the winter at the Overlook, a hotel located in the mountains of Colorado. The husband, Jack intends to use the weeks of seclusion to write a novel; the malevolent spirits in the hotel, on the other hand, have other ideas. As strange apparitions manifest themselves to both son and father, Jack's already threadbare sanity begins to unravel...

The shoot of Kubrick's The Shining was legendarily difficult, as the filmmaker's exacting methods took their toll. Nicholson and Duvall were required to provide take after take - a pivotal stairway confrontation between the pair was shot anywhere from 45 to 125 times depending on whose account you believe. Scatman Crothers, who plays the hotel chef Dick Hallorann, spent so long reciting his lines in front of the camera that he eventually lost his temper with Kubrick.

By the time filming had concluded in 1979, Kubrick had spent about a year at Elstree Studios, obsessing over individual scenes and tiny details. As cast and crew began to crack under the pressure of all the script rewrites and long work days, it must have felt at times as though the production itself was descending into madness.

If critics struggled with The Shining when it finally emerged in 1980, then maybe that's because it didn't adhere to the conventions of a typical horror movie. The Overlook's supernatural threat - if it exists at all in the movie - is kept ambiguous. Its pace is slow and deliberate; and unlike the Jack Torrance in King's book, who's initially presented as a flawed yet likeable character before the ghosts get to him, Jack Nicholson's protagonist is fairly cold and sinister before he even sets foot in the Overlook.

This latter point is surely deliberate, however. Kubrick's implication is that, far from being corrupted by the evil presence in the Overlook, Jack Torrance is simply given licence by it. The evil's already present in Jack - it merely takes a few nudges from the Overlook's remote location and ghostly echoes to bring it out into the open.

The Shining's opening credit sequence could be read as the first hint at this. As Wendy Carlos' doom-laden electronic music plays in the background, a helicopter shot follows the Torrance family's journey through the Colorado countryside in their car. The camera becomes a detached, floating spirit, hovering over or just behind the central characters - much as it does through the rest of the film in those celebrated Steadicam shots Kubrick so insistently employs. Evil is following.

In King's novel, there's the suggestion that the Overlook has somehow sucked up the evil things that have taken place within its walls. Kubrick goes a step further, with a character's line that the hotel was built on an old Indian burial ground implying that the presence may be older than the structure itself. And if we follow the theory that The Shining isn't about ghosts, but about evil, then this certainly makes sense. Evil doesn't inhabit buildings; it inhabits human beings - even ordinary, unremarkable ones, like Jack Torrance.

There's plenty of support from Kubrick to support this reading of the film; in Paul Duncan's Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Films, the filmmaker is quoted as saying:

"There's something inherently wrong with the human personality. There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly."

Stephen King was certainly confronting his own demons when he wrote his novel. The inspiration from The Shining came to him during a stay at The Stanley Hotel in Colorado, where King fused a stay in the real room 217 - supposedly haunted - with the difficulties he was having as a father of two young children.

"Sometimes you confess," King said in The Stephen King Companion, published in 1989. "You always hide what you're confessing to. That's one of the reasons why you make up the story. When I wrote The Shining for instance, the protagonist [...] is a man who's broken his son's arm, who has a history of child beating, who is beaten himself. And as a young father with two children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism toward my children..."

The Shining therefore de-emphasises the moving topiary animals and ghosts of the novel and focuses the story more squarely on Jack Torrance's growing capacity for violence. The Overlook becomes a place where, away from the gaze of society, moral laws are suspended, and Jack is given licence to do all the things he's long fantasised about.

As Jack drunkenly confesses to Joe Turkel's impassive barman, Lloyd, he'd already subjected his young son to violent abuse before he even set foot in the Overlook:

"For as long as I live, she'll never let me forget what happened. I did hurt him once, okay? But it was an accident. Completely unintentional [...] a momentary loss of muscular coordination."

The Shining then ties the evil of domestic violence to evil in a more general sense. Evil doesn' t just reside in Jack; it's everywhere. As the sinister Delbert Grady (Philip Stone) tells Jack, "You've always been the caretaker. I've always been here."

The references to the genocide of Native Americans, as picked up by other theorists, could tie into The Shining's theme of evil presenting itself in different ways; the lift doors opening, the blood gushing up, seemingly from the foundations of the Overlook itself, could be a symbol of the hotel's grim past - and the country as a whole.

In the same scene with Jack quoted above, Delbert Grady uses a racial slur to describe Dick Halloran that strikes out of the film like an ice pick; an example of another kind of evil that sticks to our species like a leech. Perhaps this is what Jack means by the odd, apparently throwaway line: "White man's burden." If we don't feel guilty about the skeletons in our species' closet, then maybe we should.

Away from The Shining, Kubrick's films frequently explored the darker continents of human nature - particularly the destruction wrought by flawed men. His adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita was about the horrors wrought by a sexual predator. At its heart, Dr Strangelove was about how a world led by neurotic, sexually repressed men might be obliterated by nuclear weapons. A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket both dealt explicitly with violence and dehumanisation.

The Shining could therefore be seen as a continuation of those themes: a continuation of the things "inherently wrong with the human personality", but in a horror context. It's not the ghosts in haunted houses we should be afraid of, Kubrick seems to suggest, but the demons that lurk within ourselves.

Time and again, the director returns to the symbol of the maze: the hedge maze in the Overlook garden, the incomprehensible network of corridors in the building itself. This is The Shining's lasting, chilling implication: the blacker sides of human nature are hardwired into our DNA. Inextricable. Inescapable.

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The Shining and the immortality of evil - Den of Geek UK

Girl In The Machine

Traverse Theatre,

Edinburgh

Until April 22

Dr Stirlingshire's Discovery

Edinburgh Zoo

Ends today

Reviewed by Mark Brown

THERE'S an elephant in the room when it comes to public discussion of theatre in Scotland. The unveiling of a new play (Girl In The Machine by Stef Smith) in the main performance space at the Traverse Theatre is as good a time as any to point it out.

New writing is the most essential, and the most difficult, element in any theatre culture; this is particularly true of Scotland, which, thanks to the proscriptions of our Calvinist Reformation, has little by way of a theatre tradition. Now, in the second decade of the new millennium, new theatre writing in Scotland is not good enough often enough. We need to examine our national theatre strategy and the place of the Trav, which self-declares as "Scotland's new writing theatre", within it.

I don't say this because Girl In The Machine (which is directed by the Traverse's artistic director Orla O'Loughlin) is a bad play; it's actually a reasonable drama, albeit one that never really threatens to set the heather alight. I say it, rather, because the staging of Smith's piece reminds one, yet again, that we need a national conversation about the role of the Traverse.

I've never enjoyed fence-sitting, so allow me to declare my hand. I don't think there is enough good, new theatre writing in Scotland to justify the Traverse's dedication to world premieres. In fact, this was true even in the 1990s, the decade of Scottish theatre's golden generation of playwrights: David Greig, Zinnie Harris, David Harrower and Anthony Neilson.

The Trav would, in my opinion, be better widening its remit to include established modern classics, both Scottish and international; the highly successful staging of Edward Albee's The Goat, by O'Loughlin's predecessor Dominic Hill, in 2010 remains a high point in the theatre's recent history. Rather than simply nurturing writing talent, the Trav's new writing remit also puts undue pressure on writers, new and established, to come up with the goods.

There is, in my experience, considerable private agreement on these issues within the Scottish theatre community, and yet we plough on, as if the Trav's self-imposed brief was some kind of sacred cow. The questions I raise here are not only for O'Loughlin and her team at the Traverse, but for the whole of the Scottish theatre community, including funding body Creative Scotland, writers' development organisation the Playwrights' Studio and, of course, audiences themselves.

Which brings me back to Girl In The Machine. Although its subject (the fatal digitisation of humanity in a dystopian near future) is ambitious, it feels like a modest studio play which has been given a main stage billing it can't quite carry off (indeed O'Loughlin has, not for the first time, reconfigured the seating in Traverse 1 to reduce its capacity and increase its intimacy).

The play takes place in an Orwellian society in which people have "citizen chips" embedded in their arms; these personal data banks are regularly updated by the state. Polly (a woman in her 30s who works in the hi-tech industry) receives Black Box, a supposed, computerised relaxation tool, from her husband Owen (who's a nurse). The machine (a digital headband) updates itself with increasingly sophisticated, and intrusive, software, until, all over the world, it is able to ask its wearers the sinister question: "Do you want to live forever? Yes or no?"

As Black Box works its way into Polly's psyche, playing on her burgeoning despondency about the future of humanity, the battle between human and machine turns into a popular uprising on the streets.

Powerful though this premise is, and despite strong performances from Rosalind Sydney and Michael Dylan, both play and production underwhelm. Smith's script does have occasional poetic flourishes, but, for the most part, the dialogue is so prosaic and the future-gazing so predictable that the piece resembles a sci-fi soap opera.

None of this is assisted by O'Loughlin's directing, which swings irritatingly between a boring physical stasis and pointless running about (inserted, no doubt, by choreographers White and Givan). There is, without question, something genuinely chilling in this play, but, like too much of the Traverse's output, it fails to fulfil its promise.

Head west from the Traverse to Edinburgh Zoo and you will find another, entirely different piece of new Scottish theatre. Dr Stirlingshire's Discovery, by Morna Pearson, takes us on a wild goose chase for The Something Or Other, a newly discovered, large mammal which has escaped, leaving only huge dollops of purple poo around the Zoo as evidence of its existence.

Performed in the Zoo after closing time (when, be warned, most of the animals are in their beds), the piece brings together site-specific theatre company Grid Iron and Lung Ha, Scotland's leading theatre company for people with learning disabilities. The play is a family drama in which the Zoo's manager Henry Stirlingshire (played with hilarious haughtiness by Antony Strachan) invites his sister, "cryptozoologist" Dr Vivienne Stirlingshire (the unerringly eccentric Nicola Tuxworth), to exhibit her latest finding; he does so in the hope and belief that the unveiling will be a humiliating failure.

As we join the hunt for the missing beast, the Lung Ha chorus offer us an array of humorous characters, from parading penguins to scatter-brained zookeepers. Like a cross between Dr Seuss and Monty Python, the show is great fun, especially for young theatregoers.

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The quest for immortality ... an an exotic beast: reviews of Girl In The Machine and Dr Stirlingshire's Discovery - Herald Scotland

The jockeys riding in Saturdays Randox Health Grand National at Aintree may face slightly different challenges to those faced by my generation in the 1990s - just as we faced very different challenges from those riders who tackled the upright gorse obstacles of the 1950s in cork helmets.

But even while the course continues to evolve, the Grand National remains a race like no other. Reg Green, the Grand National historian, even called one of his books A Race Apart'.

It still holds a place close to the countrys heart and though it may not be quite the family occasion when we drew the curtains and all gathered round a television set in the sitting room to watch it undisturbed, a good percentage of the nation will nevertheless see it one way or another - as will some 600 million around the world.

Form goes out of the window. The safest bet is that every Arthur in the country will have a small wager on One For Arthur, that Katie Walsh on Wonderful Charm will be this years housewives choice and, in China where red is a lucky colour, Definitly Red and Vieux Lion Rouge will be popular.

Click here for your guide to the best odds, free bets and offers >>

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Why the Grand National is the holy grail and sporting immortality the prize - Telegraph.co.uk

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Black Mirror's San Junipero: Technological Immortality - The Georgetown Voice

Atlassian co-CEO Scott Farquhar speaking at the AWS Sydney Summit.

Atlassian co-CEO Scott Farquhar has shed light on a major challenge facing the $8.7 billion Australian-born software giant, as its customers shift to the cloud, and played down the chances the company will imminently pursue more acquisitions.

Speaking before an audience of technology industry executives in Sydney on Wednesday, Mr Farquhar outlined his ambitions for Atlassian to "survive for 100 years" and not succumb to the traps that many dominant, brand name corporations fell into in recent decades.

"It's actually easier to build a big company than it is to build a long-term company," he said at the annual Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in Sydney on Wednesday.

"Companies today are optimised for the current environment they live in, and when change happens, as it inevitably does, companies can't adapt.

"It's not the largest company, it's not the most successful company, it's not the strongest company, it's the most adaptable companies that are going to survive".

To that end, he said Atlassian was already taking steps to transform its business.

For example, the company is in the process of moving its global operations from being hosted on its own servers, to being hosted in the cloud by AWS, the outsourcing vendor famously used by Netflix and a string of other giant corporations.

This comes as Atlassian expects many of its customers to shift from using its software products hosted on company-owned servers to versions hosted remotely in the cloud over the next decade.

"About a third of our revenue, give or take, comes from the cloud," he later told journalists in a briefing.

"There are many companies that haven't yet adopted the cloud and want to choose to run something internally for various reasons.

"We have invested heavily so we have leading cloud versions of our products ... we see the future. In 10years time I would think 90 per cent of our customers will be in the cloud."

Atlassian in January paid $US425 million ($561 million) to acquire Trello, a collaboration and project management tool, the biggest of the 18 acquisitions it has made in its history. Trello is used in creative industries, as distinct from the company's flagship JIRA software, which is typically used by technical teams of software developers and IT help desks.

"For us,it fits in our portfolio really well," Mr Farquhar said of the acquisition. "The integration is going really well.

"At the moment we wouldn't do any more acquisitions, but we could do in the future. We want to make sure any acquisition we do is really successful, so we don't do big ones back to back."

Research house Gartner estimated last year that up to $US1 trillion in IT spending by companies could be affected by the shift to the cloud by 2020. It has also estimated that 80 per cent of software vendors will have shifted to cloud-based, subscription-based selling models by that point.

However, there can be a short-term margin impact for software companies making this shift. This is because installed software typically involves higher upfront fees than subscription-based products.

Referencing fallen corporate giants such as the airline Ansett and grocery chain Franklins, Mr Farquhar added: "When things changed they didn't adapt to the changing environment. And as a result they are no longer the large companies they once were."

Originally posted here:

Atlassian aims for corporate immortality in the cloud - The Australian Financial Review

Updated 21 hours ago

James Madison Toy was an average, 19th century major league baseball player and average might be generous.

In two unremarkable seasons, he batted .211. He finished his career with one home run. And he played on awful teams, which combined to win 65 games and lose 165.

When he died in 1919, the newspapers did not pay special attention.

Yet, Toy managed to achieve something few ballplayers do: baseball immortality.

Not because he was the first Beaver Countian to play in the big leagues, though he was. Not because he suffered a particularly gruesome career-ending injury, which he did.

Rather, Toy achieved baseball immortality more than four decades after his death because of a distant relative's baseless and apparently false claim about his heritage and a well-respected baseball historian's failure to investigate that claim.

"I'm not sure where it got started, but there were parts of the family that insisted he was part Sioux Indian," said Toy's great-great-nephew, Jim Toy, 57, of West Mayfield, Beaver County. "No one had any documentation to prove it.

"My dad always kind of questioned the claim."

Others did not.

And so James Madison Toy, an average, white major league baseball player from Beaver County, became known, incorrectly, as the first Native American to play in the big leagues.

That didn't sit well with some.

Real life

James Madison Toy's pro baseball career began in 1884 in the short-lived Iron and Oil Association, a minor league that included teams from Western Pennsylvania and Ohio. His New Brighton team disbanded before the season ended, and the league went under a few days after.

Over the next two seasons, Toy played for three minor league teams in New York and one in Georgia.

In 1887, Toy got his big break. He landed a spot on the newly created Cleveland Blues in the American Association, then a major league. In announcing the signing, Sporting Life described the 5-foot-6, 160-pound Toy as "a tall, athletic young fellow, a splendid back-stop and very fine thrower."

He batted .222 in 109 games and slugged one of the team's 14 home runs. The numbers weren't eye-popping, but it was the dead-ball era.

The Blues were awful. They won just 39 of their 131 games and finished last in the American Association. After the season, owners let go of 16 of the team's 25 players, including Toy. He spent the next two years toiling in the minor leagues for the Rochester (N.Y.) Jingoes.

Toy returned to the majors in 1890 with the American Association's Brooklyn Gladiators. They were even worse than the 1887 Blues. The Gladiators won 26 of 99 games and folded before the season ended. Toy batted .181 and suffered a career-ending injury when a baseball struck him in the groin.

The injury pained Toy for the rest of his life, according to his great-great-nephew from West Mayfield.

Toy returned to Beaver County and took up work as a stove molder for the former Howard Stove Co. The 1900 Census showed him living in Beaver Falls with his wife of 14 years, Ida, and their three children: Pearl, 13; Gertrude, 12; and George, 10.

Toy died in Cresson Sanatorium, where tuberculosis patients were treated, in 1919. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Beaver, family members said.

'First of the natives'

In 1963, an ambitious project by baseball historian Lee Allen to obtain biographical information about every major leaguer who played brought more notoriety to the late Toy than he enjoyed in life.

"There have been approximately 10,000 players and we have heard from 4,198. We would be most proud to have a record of Mr. Toy and anything you can do to aid us will be greatly appreciated," Allen, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum's chief historian, wrote in a letter to Hannah Toy of Beaver Falls.

Copies of letters exchanged between Allen and Toy's relatives are included in a file in the National Baseball Hall of Fame's archives.

James M. Toy, Hannah Toy's son, filled out the questionnaire. On a line asking for the player's nationality, Toy typed: "SIOUX INDIAN."

Allen replied immediately, writing: "I think he must have been the first Indian in major-league history, which gives him another distinction. There were quite a few after him, but none before that I know of, and I have questionnaires now from 4,321 players."

Allen went public with the claim in his Sporting News column, "Cooperstown Corner."

"It has often been printed that the first American Indian to appear in the majors was Louis Sockalexis, that folk hero out of the Penobscot country of Maine," Allen wrote in the 1963 column. "But now it develops that Sockalexis was not the first of the natives, that the honor should go to James Madison Toy of Beaver Falls, Pa."

It's unknown what, if any, independent research he did to try to confirm the claim.

Allen died in 1969.

Imposter

Journalist and author Ed Rice spent decades disputing the claim, starting in the 1980s as he began researching Louis Sockalexis for a biography on the Penobscot legend.

"What Lee Allen was trying to do was laudable," said Rice, 69, of New Brunswick, Canada. "But to strip Sockalexis of being recognized as the first American Indian to play major league baseball, that was an injustice."

Rice, who formerly lived in Maine where the Penobscot Nation is based, contends that Toy didn't deserve the distinction even if he was Native American because he was not listed in a Census as an Indian or registered with a tribe. Furthermore, there are no accounts identifying Toy as being an American Indian or being identified by others as such. Rice applies the same criteria to other players whose names emerged as being the first American Indian to play in the majors.

But Rice reserves particular disdain for Toy, who never claimed to be Native American during his lifetime. In a 2015 op-ed in the Bangor Daily News, Rice refers to Toy as an "imposter."

Rice was so determined to prove Toy wasn't Native American that, in 2006, he said he lied to Cambria County officials in an attempt to obtain a copy of Toy's death certificate. He told them over the phone that he was a family member, and they mailed it.

The certificate listed Toy's race as white.

Rice has urged Cooperstown to weigh in on the debate. But its library director, James L. Gates Jr., told the Tribune-Review: "The Hall of Fame is not a sanctioning body for ethnic backgrounds. (Lee Allen) was writing for himself when he made that claim. We don't stipulate anybody as being the first in terms of ethnic background."

0.0 percent

Genealogical research and DNA analysis appears to show that Toy wasn't Native American.

While numerous accounts suggest that the ballplayer's father was a Sioux Indian, records stored at the Beaver County Genealogy and History Center list the ballplayer's parents as James and Caroline (Caler) Toy. Toy's father was the son of Henry and Mary Toy, both of whom were born in Ireland.

And results of a DNA test added recently to Toy's file in Cooperstown show that the ancestral composition of another one of Toy's relatives, James Woods, who couldn't be reached, amounted to 0.0 percent Native American. Woods' great-great-grandfather John Wesley Toy was the ballplayer's brother.

Woods said in an email accompanying the DNA results that he took the test "not to discredit any family lore, but to accurately document my family history."

What matters

West Mayfield's Jim Toy, the ballplayer's great-great-nephew, can't believe the issue has generated as much debate as it has. While family members respected the significance of James Madison Toy's distinction, questions about its authenticity weighed on some of them.

"My grandmother (Hannah Toy) and her sister Kate insisted that Caroline Caler married an Indian," Jim Toy said. "They knew James Madison Toy when he was alive, and they were very adamant about it. My father (who filled out the questionnaire in 1963 and died in 2014) felt like, who was he to say yes or no? He didn't have proof one way or another.

"My dad was more interested in the fact that James Madison Toy played baseball."

A relative of Sockalexis, who began his career in 1897 with the Cleveland Spiders, didn't appear to be concerned with the debate.

"We've always thought that Louis Sockalexis was the first," Chris Sockalexis, chief historic preservation officer for the Penobscot Nation, said of his distant relative. "I think he set the standard for all minorities in the game."

He added: "This is the first time I've ever heard of Jim Toy."

Tom Fontaine is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 412-320-7847 or tfontaine@tribweb.com.

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The baseball immortality of Beaver County's James Madison Toy - Tribune-Review