Category Archives: New Utopia

Marginalised Peasants, circa 1930, by Kazimir Malevich. Photograph: State Russian Museum

Lenin stands before a crimson curtain, his hand resting on some papers. It is 1919. A gap in the curtain reveals a demonstration in the street behind, banners aloft. Here he is again, in Petrograd, seated at a table, pencil poised, paper on his knee and more strewn over the table. And there is Stalin, yet more papers piled beside him. What is this thing about leaders posing with documents and pretending to write? Remind you of anybody?

And what do they write? Love letters? shopping lists? To what, in Isaak Brodskys paintings, must they put their names? Theyre writing the future, one supposes, their speeches and five-year plans, their goodbye signatures for the condemned, dead letters all.

Elsewhere in Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932, at the Royal Academy in London, we see Stalin resting in a wicker armchair, a dog outstretched at his feet. The mutt, in Georgy Rublevs informal 1936 portrait, looks much like a sturgeon. Maybe the leader is thinking of dinner as he glances up from Pravda. Nearby, scenes from Dziga Vertovs 1920s work Film Truth show footage of Lenins state funeral, while Sergei Eisensteins October recreates the revolution.

Photograph: State Historical Museum

It is all happening. Salute the Leader! is stencilled on the gallery wall, in this first section of an episodic, dense and sometimes bewildering show. This is not an exhibition about great art so much as a clamour of ideals and conflict, suppression, subjugation and totalitarianism. It takes us from the October Revolution in 1917 to the gulag, by way of food coupons and propaganda posters, architectural models, film footage, suprematist crockery (one teacup is decorated with cogs and pylons) and thunderingly bad sculpture. There are so many fascinating things here, largely drawn from Russian state collections, that the show might be seen as a corrective to the more narrow focus we often have on avant-garde art in revolutionary Russia.

In a wonderful series of photographs in the next section, Man and Machine, a muscular youth turns a great wheel of industry. Bolts are tightened, cables stretched. Photographs of oily crankshafts and vast generators turn up the tempo. In another of Brodskys paintings, sun catches the muscular back of a superhero worker on a hydroelectric dam. We visit tractor plants and textile factories. Women work at the new machines. Outside, a shirtless boy leads sheep along the street. Modernity and the old world are in conflict. Questions about arts purpose its freedoms and imposed responsibilities vie with one another throughout.

Among the photographs, the social realist and suprematist paintings, the folkloric scenes of Mother Russia and the death of a commissar, the exhibition embraces the contradictions of culture after the revolution, and before socialist realism was announced as the new and only true method in 1934. There is much to surprise, but less as visual pleasure than as a way of conveying the clamour, aspirations and contradictions of the times.

That said, this is a fun show, in spite of the density of the arguments that were waged in the new Russia. For every painting of a flag-bearing bearded Bolshevik, striding over onion-domed churches and crowded streets, there are Kandinskys abstract explosions and Pavel Filonovs crazed, teeming cityscapes, a wonderfully frightening world of boggle-eyed heads and tessellated skylines. One, from 1920-21, is called Formula for the Petrograd Proletariat. Whats the formula? The people look scared. Meanwhile, the thrusting, canted colour stripes of Mikhail Matiushins 1921 Movement in Space depict pure energy and urgency, irrevocable change. These artists, both the better and lesser known avatars of the Russian avant garde, were really going for it.

At one point, we come to a full-size mock-up of an apartment designed by El Lissitzky in 1932. Its clean, bare, multilevel spaces are a diagram for living. To encourage workers to go out and eat communally, the apartment has no kitchen, just a geometry of planes and steel handrails a hygienic machine for bare, uncluttered living. Later, I come to a painting of a man reading at his rustic table, a fish on a plate before him, a bottle and pipe at his side, somewhat different bare necessities to those proposed by Lissitzky.

Painting and film extolled collective farm labour and captured the astonishment that greeted the arrival of the first tractor. But modernity would not be bought so easily: there is nostalgia for disappearing ways of life, sentimental paintings of spring in the birch woods, troika rides in the snow, village carnivals and homely pleasures all contrasted with ration cards, food tax posters, the redolent ephemera of lean times.

Among the technological feats and heroic workers, the shock troopers of industry, the old peasant women and athletes, you find yourself looking for familiar faces in the crowd. They come at you as ghosts: Moisey Nappelbaums black and white portraits of the wonderful poet Anna Akhmatova; theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold in his leather coat in 1929, giving the camera a reproachful eye. Maybe he was hamming it up. In 1940, Meyerhold was arrested, tortured and killed. Akhmatovas first husband was also killed, while her second Nikolay Punin, the art critic and champion of the avant garde was sent to the gulag in 1949 after he described portraits of state leaders as tasteless. He died there, not long after Stalins death.

In 1932, Punin was one of the organisers of a huge exhibition, Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic, filling 33 rooms of the State Museum in Leningrad, as it was then. The exhibition was marked not only by its plurality but by the way the trajectory of art in Soviet Russia was skewed in favour of aesthetic and ideological conservatism. Vladimir Tatlin was excluded, while Kazimir Malevich was marginalised. Even so, the latter mounted an astonishing display of his own work, which has been largely duplicated in one of the high points of the exhibition.

Malevichs last version of the Black Square (the first was painted in 1915, this one dates from 1932) hangs high above our heads. Beside it is his Red Square (Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions, dating from 1915), above a symmetrical array of suprematist and figurative paintings. Even an early cubist work is here. Geometric painting jostles with faceless peasants, reapers and sportsmen clad in clothing designed by the artist. Malevich saw no distinctions between these different styles, his architectural ideas and his work in porcelain. He snuck his imagery in as and where he could, regarding his art as in service to his ideals. This display is a great counterpoint to Tate Moderns 2014 Malevich exhibition.

The plurality of Russian art was, by 1932, on the wane. Rather than suprematism, anodyne paintings of runners, soccer matches, a female shot putter, a girl in a football jersey became the acceptable face of Stalins utopia. Photographs celebrate parades and stadiums. Instead of a clean modernism, a heavy, overblown architecture was on the rise, with a gigantic Lenin towering over a Palace of the Soviets, which was planned to be the tallest building in the world.

At the very end of the show we come to a black box, a tiny cinema called Room of Memory. Inside is a slideshow projecting official mugshots of the exiled, the starved, the murdered in Stalins purges: housewife Olga Pilipenko, a Latvian language teacher, the former chair of the hydrometeorological committee, peasants, short-story writers, poet Osip Mandelstam, Punin the art critic.

It goes on. Beyond, in the gallerys rotunda, hangs a recreation of one of Vladimir Tatlins constructivist gliders, a prototype flying machine he worked on for several years. It circles the white space, part dragonfly, part bat. Tatlin saw it as a flying bicycle for workers, made from steamed, bent ash and fabric. It looks as light as air. It never flew or went anywhere, but turns in a room, endlessly.

Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 is at Royal Academy of Arts, London, from 11 February until 17 April.

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Revolution: Russian Art review from utopia to the gulag, via teacups The Guardian

One mans utopia is another mans dystopia, said British design critic Alice Rawsthorn two weekends ago at an opening festival for A/D/O, the latest creative co-working space to launch in New York City. What unites the widely varying examples of utopian visions throughout history, said Rawsthorn, is a simple and empowering definition for design: Design is an agent of change, which can help us to make sense of what is happening and turn it to our advantage.

That baseline certainly seems to be the driving force at A/D/O, a multifaceted space whose ambitious setup is best characterized, much like its moniker, with the help of a few backslashes. Backed by the automotive company MINI, the design workspace/accelerator/lecture hall/gallery/restaurant houses many resources in a 23,000-square-foot former warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyns Industrial Business Zoneand promises to do things differently.

A/D/O itself offers its own microcosmic and utopian proposal for creatives. An installation of a modular, reconfigurable furniture system by MOS Architects, made from shiny, perforated sheets of aluminum, provides communal seating for the open-plan interiors. Industrial beams are left exposed, in a nod to the original warehouse from which it was transformed by nARCHITECTS. A kaleidoscopic, mirrored skylight calledThe Periscoperefracts a collage of reflections from the street, the rooftop, and the Manhattan skyline in the near distance. The nondescript exterior, made from repurposed brick, features a patchwork mosaic of reshuffled graffiti murals. All told, A/D/O is as much a literal convergence of varying views as it is a metaphoric one.

In addition to shared studio space and a fabrication lab for its members, A/D/O also hosts Urban-X, an in-house startup accelerator co-sponsored by the HAX accelerator based in Shenzhen, China. Norman, an eatery by Scandinavian chefs Frederik Berselius and Klaus Mayer, serves up local seasonal fare. The restaurant, along with the gallery spaces and lecture hall, where A/D/Os Design Academy hosts a recurring series of talks, is open to the public. We are convinced that meaningful design cannot happen in isolation, said Esther Bahne, head of brand strategy and business innovation at MINI.

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Brooklyns A/D/O Co-Working Space Is Building a Utopia for Creatives of All Kinds Artsy

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The village aiming to create a white utopia BBC News

Music, we all know, can change moods. But can it change minds as well? Just how crazy is it to expect a single violin to coax us toward utopia?

That is the mission of Luigi Nonos 45-minute masterpiece, La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura: Madrigale per piu Caminantes con Gidon Kremer. The work for solo violin, eight channels of violin-irradiated electronic music and, importantly, eight to 10 music stands was given a rare and wonderfully convincing performance by Mark Menzies on Friday night at Art Share L.A. downtown.

There is a lot to unpack here. La Lontananza was written in 1989, the year before the avant-garde Italian composer died. Also dying at the time was communism, a movement to which the politically intent Nono was devoted. Nostalgic Distant Utopian Future suggests that through distance the hope of the future might be found in the past, or something like that. Nono then calls the score a madrigal for many travelers with Gidon Kremer.

Kremer was the violinist not only for whom La Lontananza was written but with whose sound the piece is infused. Nono devised the eight-channel tape, operated live during performances, from recordings he made of Kremer improvising. The actual score leaves room for a soloist to find his or her own solutions, which means that each new violinist who takes on La Lontananza offers a new utopian vision applied to what went before in Kremers.

The music stands are spread around the performance space, and the violinist moves from one to the next. Six of the stands hold the music for the six sections of the work. The additional two to four have dummy scores. The performers journey is not linear. Menzies lingered between sections. He zigzagged around the space, sometimes stopping at the dummy stands before reaching his destination. No one said Utopia is just around the corner.

The music itself is like an anatomical, physiological and spiritual examination of the violin: what the instrument can do and what it can do to a listener. An imaginative virtuoso is required. The dynamic range is from what is only audible to a dog to the loudest sounds the instrument can humanly make. Everything Nono could think of doing to a violin with a bow, he has the violinist do.

The result is complex and ever changing. There can be the effect of a sweet singing voice and the effect of horror. Pitches that are familiar contend with microtones that are not. The violin is caressed and attacked with every inch of the bow.Parts of the score are skittish. The second section ended with crunching effects.

For the third, Menzies stood directly behind me, playing ghostly calm drones of sustained harmonics that felt as they entered the mind as vibrations bypassing earand auditory nerve. The room itself was suffused by waves of wondrous violin effects on the surround-sound loudspeakers. Rather than rely on the banality of virtual reality, Menzies and Nono produced virtualunreality, the feeling of levitation.

What is past and what is future, what is utopian and what is dystopian in this political theater of the violin and of the mind? Nono doesnt provide the answers. He shows us not where to go but how to go. Instead of being a destination, utopia is a process of opening up to experiencing the unfamiliar.

As to whether music can change minds, it can. John Cage happened to be at the London premiere of La Lontananza in 1990. Three decades earlier he had had a falling out with Nono, but Cage (who famously disavowed music as emotional expression) said after the London concert, I no longer hold a grudge against Luigi.

After 17 years on the faculty of CalArts and a mainstay in the L.A. new music scene, Menzies has returned to his native New Zealand. But he is back in town celebrating his 47th birthday with the ambitious series four in the time of seven, four solo violin and viola recitals of new and old music in seven days.

He had played La Lontananza here in 2003 at a Southwest Chamber Music concert. This time it was in collaboration with the new music collective wasteLAnd, and Menzies had the advantage of a room ideally reverberant and flexible. The executive director of wasteLAnd, composer Scott Worthington, handledthe electronics with alluring flair.

The program began with two short pieces. Ching-Wen Chaos robustly enigmatic violin solo Elegy in Flight, evoking the Buddhist recitation for the dead, and the premiere of a winningly lyrical viola solo, Elegy, written for Menzies by Erik Ulman.

Menzies seven-day odyssey takes him to REDCAT Monday for a mixed program of New Zealand, European and American solo pieces and to Monk Space in Koreatown on Tuesday for three of Bachs solo sonatas and partitas, an early example of the violins penchant for utopian thought.

Mark Menzies

When: 8:30 p.m.Monday atREDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., L.A. Also at 7 p.m.Tuesday at Monk Space, 4414 W. 2nd St., L.A.

Tickets: $10-$20

Info: (213) 237-2800 or http://www.redcat.org; (213) 925-8562 or http://www.monkspace.com

mark.swed@latimes.com

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With violin in hand, Mark Menzies finds hope for the future in the past Los Angeles Times

Jon Baker TimesReporter.com staff writer @jbakerTRStaff Reporter

NEW PHILADELPHIA The start of construction of the 215-mile Utopia Pipeline through Tuscarawas, Harrison and Carroll counties will bring more than 300 temporary jobs to the New Philadelphia area.

Kinder Morgan, the company spearheading the project, and its contractor, Minnesota Ltd., will begin Wednesday with the process of removing trees from the pipeline right-of-way.

While work is being done, Minnesota Ltd. will operate a contractor yard in New Philadelphia on 16th Street SW, between the Eagle Truck Stop and the Tuscarawas County Job & Family Services building. It will be located behind Cardinal Fleet Service.

This is going to be a big project for Ohio, said Allen Fore, vice president of public affairs for Kinder Morgan. New Philadelphia has a particular significance to the project because were also going to be locating one of our contractor yards here. Minnesota Ltd. is our contractor for the project. Its a union contractor. Its going to be utilizing union labor, so a lot of local workforce will be part of this.

We anticipate, once we get up and running, well have over 300 workers working out of that construction yard for several months.

He predicted that those workers who come from outside the area will be patronizing local restaurants and hotels and purchasing items at local stores.

These folks work very hard, but theyre also paid well, and theyre going to be living in the area temporarily or already residents here, so a it will be a good boon to the economy over the next several months, he said.

Kinder Morgan and Minnesota Ltd. employees gathered Tuesday at the Schoenbrunn Inn and Conference Center for an orientation session, where they were greeted by New Philadelphia Mayor Joel Day.

I encouraged them to explore New Philadelphia, to come downtown and go to the east side, take in the restaurants and the Performing Arts Center, the mayor said following the meeting. I asked them to explore New Philadelphia and told them Im sure youll be pleased with what you discover.

Day said the contractor yard will mean a boost in revenue for the city through income tax collections and the bed tax. It gives us more revenue to do things for the city, and it exposes New Philadelphia to more people, which is a good thing. Some of them might move here.

He said he didnt know the exact amount of revenue the project would bring in. We wont know until they start working and paying. They are well-paid workers, so itll give us a nice bump.

The Utopia Pipeline will carry ethane gas from the MarkWest processing facility in Cadiz to an existing Kinder Morgan pipeline in northwest Ohio. From there, the ethane will be taken to the Nova Chemicals plant in Windsor, Ontario, where it will be turned into plastics.

Fore expects construction on the pipeline to begin in April or May and it will go into service on Jan. 1, 2018.

The company has already secured 90 percent of the right-of-way from properties owners that is needed for construction, and Fore said the company will reach 100 percent in the next couple of months. Kinder Morgan will have a 50-foot right-of-way for the pipeline and a 50-foot temporary right-of-way for construction.

Fore said Kinder Morgan works closely with property owners, sometimes making adjustments to the route to accommodate their wishes. The company also works with counties and townships on road use agreements and on how to repair roads after the work is done.

This is a partnership that could potentially last generations, he said. These pipelines are going to be in service for a very long time, so starting off correctly is in the best interest of the company because these landowner relationships, these relationships with elected officials are going to last a long time.

The pipeline will be buried a minimum of 3 feet underground. It will go to depths of 8 to 10 feet under roads and 30 feet when going under waterways, such as the Tuscarawas River.

Fore said maintenance of the pipeline will be a top priority after it is completed.

Our pipelines are built to last a very long time, he said. The reason that they do is because, first of all, you get good quality pipe. This is American-made pipe, good quality pipe. You test it. You make sure its built to last.

We also then coat the pipe with an epoxy that avoids corrosion, because if something is going to happen to a pipe, it will be corrosion or an external impact. We also use a highly-trained workforce to build it, to put it together, to weld it. And then we monitor it.

The pipeline will be viewed regularly from the air and the ground. In addition, Kinder Morgan has an internal inspection tool, called a pig, that is able to go through the line periodically to determine if something is not right.

So there are lots of protections built into these systems that make sure that these things are built to operate safely and are built to last, Fore said.

See more here:

Utopia Pipeline project to bring 300 temporary jobs to New Philadelphia New Philadelphia Times Reporter

The first teaser trailer for a new Stellaris expansion debuted on Thursday, confirming a new wave of content will soon be headed to the beloved 4X title, but there sure isnt much hard information in the Stellaris: Utopia trailer that Paradox Interactive published this week.

According to Paradox, Utopia offers the most significant changes to Stellaris core gameplay since the game was released in May 2016. In fact, the publisher calls it the games first major expansion and has already outlined much grander changes than weve seen in previous Stellaris add-ons, like the Leviathans story DLC or the Plantoids species pack. The biggest change (both literally and figuratively) will be the players newfound ability to assemble truly enormous space stations, called megastructures, including Dyson spheres and ring worlds.

The next Stellaris expansion also introduces a new set of perks, called Traditions, that Paradox says will ease your species expansion across the stars. Traditions will be enabled/adopted through the use of Unity points; however, we dont currently have any information on how that particularly currency will be collected. Players will also be given more microscopic control over how the rights and policies of their empire are applied across its populace.

For a sneak peek at Stellaris upcoming Utopia DLC, take a minute to watch the first teaser from Paradox Interactive. Head down to the comments and let us know if youre still playing Stellaris with any regularity and/or what youd like to see in Utopia.

Stellaris is currently available on PC, Mac and Linux. The games next expansion, Utopia, does not yet have a release date.

Be sure to check back with iDigitalTimes and follow Scott on Twitter for more Stellaris news throughout 2017 and however long Paradox Interactive supports Stellaris in the years ahead.

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Stellaris Utopia DLC Gets First Trailer; Will Introduce New Buildings And Perks iDigitalTimes.com

The cast has been announced for comedian Simon Amstells directorial debut, Carnage: Swallowing The Past. The feature-length satire will debut on BBC iPlayer in the U.K. in the spring and is set in a fictional 2067 where everyone on earth is a vegan. Characters in the film find the idea that humans once ate other animals to be barbaric and beyond comprehension.

Chortle reports that the cast for Amstells film will include Martin Freeman, Joanna Lumley, Dame Eileen Atkins, Lindsay Duncan, Alex Lawther, Gemma Jones, Linda Basset, Marwan Rizwan, and John Macmillan.

Grime MC and committed vegan JME will play himself with British T.V. personalities Kirsty Wark, Lorraine Kelly, and Vanessa Feltz also making cameos in the film.

Amstell, who will narrate the film himself, is quoted as saying: I have written and directed a film about veganism. Im sorry.

Read more here:

JME Will Play Himself In A New Movie About A Vegan Utopia The FADER

Shaker furniture and design continue to inspire designers more than 150 years after its peak in the mid 1800s. Last year, Furnishing Utopia, a collaboration between Hancock Shaker Village and the Mt. Lebanon Shaker Museum, in Massachusetts and New York, respectively, held a workshop for 11 international designers to engage with the museums archives and then create their own pieces.

Now Mjlk, a lifestyle shop and gallery in Toronto, has done something similar, curating a selection of original Shaker products and commissioning a group of Canadian and Scandinavian designers to craft their own interpretations.

Titled That Is Best Which Works Best, the show spotlights minimalist but functional design, traits that characterize much of Shaker-produced goods. Designers include Hallgeir Homstvedt (from Norway, who also contributed to Furnishing Utopia), Canadian designer Thom Fougere, and Jason Collett, all of whom made simple objects like a toolbox, shelving, and a table out of wood.

Original Shaker artifacts like a large cabinet, cast iron stove, and utensils are displayed alongside designs by Danish masters like Hans J Wegner and Brge Mogensen. According to Dezeen, Mjlk co-founder John Baker believes that the recent popularity of Danish modernist design has led to a renewed interest in the Shaker aesthetic, which was a major influence on the afore-mentioned designers:

You start to look at these Danish pieces and you think, thats somewhat reminiscent of older pieces. You end up going down the rabbit hole and I think its a natural conclusion to reach the Shakers. Were talking about modern ideas: function first, reduction. This was happening a hundred years before the modern movement.

Via: Dezeen

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Toronto lifestyle store and gallery spotlight new and old Shaker design Curbed

Between plantoids, Leviathans, and Alexis Kennedy-inspired Horizon Signals, Stellaris post-launch updates have grown the space-flung 4x-meets-grand strategy game quite considerably since its May release last year. Its now announced its first major update, Utopia, which encourages players to develop their interstellar empires further still.

With a choice of following a biological path, a psionic path, or a synthetic pathwith various options within these broad categoriesplayers will determine how their species evolves and advances by way of Ascension Perks. Body, Mind or Machinehow will your species challenge the future, asks developer Paradox.

Read more from the original source:

New Utopia | Futurist Transhuman News Blog | Page 5

The Harlem-based musician performs in Providence, where she lived for awhile after attending Yale.

Larkin Grimms voice is sexy and commanding with its raw, almost visceral tones, somethingher promoter calls a bloody howl that is fierce enough to gobble people whole and spit out theirsouls.

Yet, in a recent phone interview, she is another single mom waiting for her son to get home andmusing about the artistic side of her craft, her dedication to being considered an artist byherself, her fans and her peers unwavering.

Why do people create anything? she asks, quickly answering the rhetorical question with,they are trying to make the world better. None of us can be as beautiful as their artwork, but wecan strive for something beautiful.

The Harlem-based musician, who lived in Providence for a time after attending Yale University, returns June 22 for a concert at The Grove.

Grimm's latest album, Chasing an Illusion, dropped June 16. She saysshe surrounds herself with amazing people and finds herself consistently holding them andherself to higher standards than the industry generally demands.

Chasing an Illusion is a freer sound than Grimms previous albums, as sheblurs the confines of genres and infuses her songs with a more jazz edge, tapping older recordingand mixing equipment to achieve a more unique result.

I dont get moved by todays computerized pop songs why would you Auto-Tune Beyonc? even though I recognize the artistry behind them," she says. I love old, flawed songs. Its all about thefeeling. Auto-Tuning is as bad for our soul as airbrushed pictures are to a womans selfimage.

The lyrics on the new album are drawn from her life experiences, particularly motherhood. Shecalls it her latest attempt at creating utopia through sound.

This is an album about higher love and truth truth in sound, accomplished by recording live,keeping the vocals raw, hearing the actual sound of the room and letting the out of tune and outof time parts celebrate our humanity and imperfection, Grimm notes. This is the beauty of thealbum, as we honor the perfection of the divine energy that we invoke through the ritual trance ofthis music.

Believing that the music is a product of the energy and vibe among the musicians at themoment of recording, she tries to direct that feeling to a degree. At one point while recordingpieces for Chasing an Illusion, she started a conversation with her musicians about the bookshe was reading about a transgender kid whose father sent him to straight camp. A lesbian, shesays she was also sent away when her parents learned about her first girlfriend.

Through this music, I strive to be free free from suffering, free from shame, free frominhibitions, free from language, free from hatred, free from oppression, free from gender, freefrom race, free from expectations, she says.

Chasing an Illusion was written in the midst of Grimms divorce and at a time she found outshe had skin cancer. Both left the artist feeling deflated and with an ego that was crushed. Sheturned to yoga, where she met other musicians who helped her regain her self-awareness throughhealing and creating music.

It was like getting a head-to-toe massage hitting all of your stuff and expelling all of yourstuff, she explains.

Susan McDonald is a regular contributor to The Providence Journal. She can be reached at Sewsoo1@verizon.net.

If you go ...

What: Larkin Grimm

When: 7 p.m. Thursday, June 22

Where: The Grove, 25 Grove St., Providence

Tickets: $10 suggested donation at the door

Continued here:

Singer Larkin Grimm creates utopia through sound - The Providence Journal

The nuclear electric industry has sustained some mighty blows in the United States and Western Europe in recent years. It might be reeling, but it is not out and it is not going down for the count. Taken globally, things are good.

The need to curb carbon in the air, to service a growing world population and the surging cities are impelling nuclear forward. At the annual summit meeting of the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council (NIC) in Washington, this future was laid out with passion: Nuclear power is experiencing a growth spurt but not in the United States and Western Europe, except for Britain.

Nuclear demand is high where air pollution is at its worst and where economic activity is fast and furious in Asia generally, and in China and India in particular.

Vijay Sazawal, president of IAEC Consulting, told the NIC meeting that India would be adding two reactors a year to its nuclear fleet moving forward. China and India are building half of the 60 new reactors under construction worldwide, according to Andrew Paterson of Verdigris Capital Group, which studies nuclear.

Paterson predicted world electricity demand will double by 2050 and that most of the demand would come from the megacities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. He said, By 2030, China will have 15 megacities (10 million or more people) and 150 cities with more than 1 million people.

Wind and solar energy, the other carbon-free electricity sources, also will grow dramatically but will be constrained by their land needs. Big cities are ill-suited to roof-mounted solar, and windmills require large acreages of open land not found near megacities.

In the United States, the shadow of the Westinghouse bankruptcy is passing over the nuclear community. How could a once-proud and dominant company get its sums so wrong that it has been forced into bankruptcy? The collapse of the company which was building two plants with four reactors in South Carolina and Georgia, four reactors in China, and was engaged in projects in the United Kingdom and India will be studied in business schools for generations to come. Bad management, not bad nuclear, has brought Westinghouse and its parent Toshiba to its knees.

But nuclear believers are undaunted. Nuclear advocates have a kind of religious commitment to their technology, to their science and to the engineering that turns the science into power plants.

I have been writing about nuclear since 1970, and I have featured it on my television program, White House Chronicle, for more than 20 years. I can attest that there is something special in the passion of nuclear people for nuclear power. They have fervor wrapped in a passion for kind of energy utopia. They believe in the great gift that nuclear offers a populous world: a huge volume of electricity.

The kernel here, the core belief, the holy grail of nuclear is wrapped up in energy density: how a small amount of nuclear material can produce a giant amount of electricity in a plant that has few moving parts, aside from the conventional steam turbine. As designs have evolved and plants have become passive in their safety systems, the things that can go wrong have been largely eliminated.

To understand energy density think this way: The average wind turbine you see along the highway turns out 2 megawatts of electricity when there is wind, a trifling amount compared to the 1,600 megawatts a new nuclear plant produces continuously and probably will produce for 100 years before it is retired.

Asia, choking on air pollution and with huge growth, needs nuclear. America is not gasping for new generation: demand is static and there is a natural gas glut. Also, there is land aplenty for solar and wind to be installed.

But U.S. nuclear creativity, even genius, will not rest. The United States is on the frontier, pioneering a generation of wholly new reactor concepts, mostly for small modular reactors and even big new reactors, which may first be built in China and India but, like so much else, will be thought up in America.

At nuclear conclaves like the NIC meeting, there is sadness that the U.S. market is stagnant. But there is incandescent hope for the future.

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Nuclear Booms in Asia as New Reactor Ideas Flourish in US - InsideSources

By Gerald Ford

In this Midweek, a columnist shares an amusing catalogue of last meals, ordered by prisoners facing execution.

It got me asking not only what would I eat, but how would I end up in that mess?

I could only blame the kind of future world I see in my worst nightmares, where non-conformity is a capital offence

It is the year 2028 and New Zealand is in trouble.

The global Ministry of Environmental and Security Services (MESS) took over from the last indigenous Prime Minister (a cryogenically preserved Roger Douglas) three years ago, and life is not much fun.

The national anthem and the haka have been banned as fostering nationalism, now as dirty a word as racism used to be.

Without their inspiration, the All Blacks havent won in two seasons.

Now we sing the international anthem, Its a small world after all, with lines in six languages.

Not that Disney has fared that well. The 18th remake of Captain Planet bombed at the VR plex.

(This is a giant maze of cubicles with headsets and gloves. The genetically modified popcorn is as big as walnuts so it can be held in gloved hands, but to us old-timers its not the same.)

Sheep and beef farming has been discontinued and the nearest thing you can get to a burger is a lentil, mussel and synthetic monstrosity known colloquially as a McMummy.

Economics is simpler since the Globo our new unit of currency was instituted, and tax dodging is trickier, too. The compulsory smart chip implants have turned us all into walking wallets.

There is a black-market currency of old New Zealand $1 coins, Pokemon cards, .22 bullets and cigarettes.

Just dont let MESS catch you with the cigarettes. Their re-education courses are brutal and the official vape alternative, Little Nico, is even more addictive than tobacco.

Religion has gotten weird.

Divisive sacred texts have been banned, as have symbols except for the peace sign, and MESS-approved clerics preach awareness from circular temples, as the congregation meditates or secretly watches sports games through headsets disguised as spectacles.

All our clothes are smart clothes now. Basically everything we wear and use is now cleverer than us and connected to the Internet.

With AI or its trendier new name CC (connected consciousness), the Internet is all around us, on us, and increasingly with all the tech implants, in us.

TV still exists, despite all predictions, being essential to combat boredom since most of our jobs are now done by machines.

MESS itself is in fact the only employer, and they screen all their applicants with the peace and unity test. This weeds out anyone who doesnt believe in the inevitable goodness of human progress.

I failed the test. My fish and chips are waiting.

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Utopia and fish & chips: Opinion - Wairarapa Times Age

Throughout both Bill and Ted movies, the titular teenage metalheads are presented as little more than dim slackers barely able to play their instruments, even though we learn they'll one day make music so righteous that it will put an end to famine and war, uniting the planet and ushering in a new utopia for mankind. We never hear a note of this actual music until the very end of 1991'sBill and Ted's Bogus Journey when our heroes return from "16 months of intensive guitar training" to finally play one of these magical songs we've heard so much about.

They then break out Kiss' cover of Argent's 1973 tune "God Gave Rock and Roll To You" with a new guitar solo by Steve Vai. Kiss modified the lyrics to the point where they felt compelled to change the title to "God Gave Rock 'N' Roll To You II," but the message of rock music as a unifying force remains. It was the most attention a new Kiss song had gotten in quite some time, but it came at a very dark time for the band. Drummer Eric Carr was deathly ill from heart cancer when they recorded it, and was only able to contribute backing vocals. He plays drums in the video (which you can watch here), but passed away at age 41 just a few months later. It's one of the few post-makeup songs that Kiss play in their live show today, and one of the only Kiss songs featuring both Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley on lead vocals.

The big performance in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey seemed to wrap up the movie series quite nicely, but Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter (now an accomplished documentary filmmaker) have been pushing for a third move for years. "Basically, they're supposed to write a song to save the world and they haven't done that, Reeves said last year. "The pressure of having to save the world, their marriages are falling apart, their kids are kind of mad at them, and then someone comes from the future and tells them if they dont write the song it's just not the world, it's the universe. So they have to save the universe because time is breaking apart."

This comes up in interviews every time Reeves is promoting a new movie, and a thirdBill and Ted filmalways seems to be just a year or so away from going into production, but we've been hearing that for a good decade now. It seems like no studio is willing to bankroll this idea, and not without good reason. Sequels from long-dormant franchises have a very dicey history. Look no further than Dumb and Dumber To and Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles if you don't believe us.

But we think that Bill and Ted 3 will be different. Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey is one of the only comedy sequels in history that live up to the originals. These are iconic characters that paved the way for Wayne and Garth and Beavis and Butt-head. They deserve a conclusion to their trilogy. Hollywood, don't give us another John Wick movie. Give us Bill and Ted 3. While you're at it, make sure Death (aka the Grim Reaper) has a large role. He's the best part of the second one. And when the time comes, maybe have Kiss cover another Argent song, perhaps "Hold Your Head Up" this time.

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Flashback: A Kiss Song Unites Mankind In Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey - RollingStone.com

John Davidson, a veteran of Broadways Wicked and State Fair and televisions Hollywood Squares, will join the national tour of Finding Neverland June 27 in the role of Charles Frohman/Captain James Hook.

He joins a cast that includes Billy Harrigan Tighe, Christine Dwyer, Karen Murphy, Turner Birthisel, Connor Jameson Casey, Wyatt Cirbus, Bergman Freedman, Tyler Patrick Hennessy, Colin Wheeler, Christina Belinsky, Caitlyn Caughell, Sarah Marie Charles, Adrianne Chu, Calvin L. Cooper, Dwelvan David, Nathan Duszny, Victoria Huston-Elem, Melissa Hunter McCann, Connor McRory, Thomas Miller, Noah Plomgren, Matthew Quinn, Will Ray, Kristine Reese, Corey Rives, Dee Tomasetta, and Matt Wolpe.

Based on the Academy Award-winning Miramax motion picture by David Magee and the play The Man Who Was Peter Pan by Allan Knee, Finding Neverland, according to press notes, follows the relationship between playwright J.M. Barrie and the family that inspired Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up one of the most beloved stories of all time.

The musical has a book by Olivier Award nominee James Graham, music and lyrics by Gary Barlow (Take That) and Grammy Award winner Eliot Kennedy, and choreography by Emmy Award winner Mia Michaels (So You Think You Can Dance, Cirque du Soleils Delirium).

The production also features scenic design by Tony Award winner Scott Pask (Pippin, Book of Mormon), lighting design by Tony Award winner Kenneth Posner (The Coast of Utopia, Pippin), costume design by Suttirat Larlarb (Of Mice and Men), sound design by Tony Award nominee Jonathan Deans (Pippin, La Cage aux Folles), hair and make-up design by Richard Mawbey, projection design by Jon Driscoll, and casting by Stewart/Whitley.

The musical supervisor is Fred Lassen, the music director is Ryan Cantwell, the orchestrator is Simon Hale, and John Miller is the music contractor.

Finding Neverland is produced by Weinstein Live Entertainment and NETworks Presentations.

For additional information visit FindingNeverlandTheMusical.com.

LOVE THEATRE? CHECK OUT PLAYBILL STORE FOR MERCHANDISE!

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John Davidson Is Finding Neverland's New Hook - Playbill.com

At the Peoples Summit, the left plots its takeover.

Tim MurphyJun. 12, 2017 12:24 PM

Michael Bowles/Rex Shutterstock via ZUMA Press

When supporters of Bernie Sanders convened the first Peoples Summit last year in Chicago, an air of anxious optimism suffused the event. The gathering came days before the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and the attendees, drawnfrom the ranks of the candidates most passionate supporters, held onto hopes that the independent senator from Vermont might still be on the path to the White House.

He wasnt, but 12 months later, some 4,000 lefty organizers, activists, campaign vets, candidates, and Sanders himself returned to Chicago for what amounted to a three-day celebration of the movements political ascendancy. In speeches, breakout sessions, and interviews, attendees offered a similar refrain: The political revolution is already happening, and it is already remaking the Democratic Party.

Over three days at the sprawling McCormick Center, they huddled in small groups to discuss best practices for organizing, lessons learned from 2016, and how to prevent, er, Bernout. The sessions ranged from trainings on nonviolent resistance (attendees were sequestered in a breakout room where they took turns role-playing as protesters and police) to PowerPoint presentations on neoliberalism and the emerging possibility of utopia.

The event was put together by a collectionof Sanders-aligned organizations, including the grassroots group People for Bernie, the Democratic Socialists of America, Sanders political nonprofit Our Revolution, and the new Sanders Institute, a think tank run by his wife, Jane. The bulk of the funding came from National Nurses Unitedthe union that was instrumental in backing both Sanders presidential campaign and the single-payer health care bill that recently passed Californias Senate.

One thing was clear: The diverse movement Sanders assembled last weekend looks far different from the lily-white one that first set out to win Iowa and New Hampshire for him. Attendees submitted applications to take part in the summit,and organizers looked for racial and socioeconomic diversity. If we had open registration to the general public, it would have looked like a Bernie rally in Wisconsin, said Winnie Wong, a People for Bernie co-founder who helped organize the summit. Just 46 percent of the 4,000 attendees were white and a third were under 30. There were undocumented Latino students, Oglala Lakota water protectors, Black Lives Matter activists, and yes, at least one white factory worker from Wisconsin who once voted for Scott Walker.

The Peoples Summit didnt have the cattle-call quality that has come to define similar events on the right, such as the Conservative Political Action Conferenceand the Values Voters Summit. Sanders gave a keynote, but only a handful of other elected officials dropped byand most of them were not household names. They included Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a tech bro turned populist; Chokwe Lumumba, the newly elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, who promised to turn his city into the most radical city on the planet; and khalid kamau, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who recently won election to the city council of South Fulton, Georgia (and spells his name without capital letters).

The West Virginia environmental activist running against conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin was there; so was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosis Democratic challenger. You could hardly refill your coffee without meeting someone running for county commissioner.

Bernie would have won may have been the mantra of some of the attendees, but many of the organizers took seriously the fact that he ultimately didnt win, and they wrestled with the mechanics and messaging of a campaign that could.

At a breakout panel on Saturday, Becky Bond, a former senior Sanders aide who helped assemble the campaigns national field operation, was challenged by an African American attendee about the whiteness of the campaigns leadership. Bond acknowledged that the homogeneity of the campaigns top guns had hurt them. She pointed to the recent district attorneys race in Philadelphia, where Larry Krasnera defense attorney supported by groups including Our Revolution, the DSA, and Bonds Big Organizing Projecthad won an insurgent victory in the Democratic primary by campaigning on his record opposing police brutality and cash bail.

Had we done years of that work, she said of the issues animating the DAs race, I think we would have won the presidential primary.

As it happens, Krasner was holding court about his win a few floors down, at a training session for would-be candidates and campaign workers. Krasner had been opposed by almost every Democratic ward boss in the city, but he ended up winning 44 of 66 wards. He accomplished that by boostingturnout almost by 50 percent over previous municipal races. He even found some voters who hadnt turned out last fall when Donald Trump won the state. Most of those new Krasner voters were African American.

The reality that I represented activists and organizers for 25-plus years unquestionably meant that the campaign activated people who are incredibly good at politics but dont normally do it, he said, giving a description that also applied toa lot of the people who showed up in Chicago. That might be the big lesson: All over the country there are networks of activists and organizers who might just be better at politics than the people in politics.

In Krasners view, his race offered a template for similar candidates to succeed. Candidates of color and white candidates who are able to form that coalition will be unbeatable with their own party, he said. And theyll be unbeatable by any other party.

The summit represented a very different view of the political landscape than that being discussed by many Resistanceminded Democrats. If you got your political news from speakers at the conference, you might not know about the Obamacare repeal bill making its way through the Senate or Democrat Jon Ossoffs lead in the upcoming Georgia congressional special election. Hardly anyone mentioned Russia, except to say that no one should mention Russia. We need to keep the focus of our work on our vision, not the latest scandals, Jane Sanders said. The hell with Russia! said Nina Turner, a potentialcandidate for governor of Ohio, who may have been Bernies most popular surrogate at the conference.

You would, on the other hand, be fully up to date on the status of California Senate Bill 562, which would create a single-payer health care plan in the nations largest state. And youd probably know about Christine Pellegrino, a Berniecrat who recently won a special election for a New York state assembly seat in a Trump-voting Long Island district.

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn got more mentions onstage than Trump, and he got a special shout-out from Sanders during his keynote. In this context, Corbyns surprisingly strong showing in Thursdays UK election was just a higher-profile version of what Krasner, Lumumba, and kamau had done. In fact, some Bernie veterans had worked on Corbyns behalf.

Claire Sandberg, a former Sanders campaign stafferwho spoke to a group of organizers Saturday, was fresh off the plane from the United Kingdom, where she spent six weeks volunteering for Corbyns Momentum campaign. Everyone here is looking to the UK right now and feeling this wellspring of hope, she said. The Labour Party defied expectations , she believed, less through innovative campaigning or the raw charisma of Corbyn than through a compelling message, in the form of the Labour Manifesto. It wasnt too hard to find a Bernie parallel. (It also didnt hurt that Corbyns success had come at the hands of the Democratic elites Sandernistas rail against: Obama 2012 campaign chief Jim Messina helped run the Tory campaign.)

A major aim of the conference was to build a political left that can transform the Democratic Party, inSanders words. Organizers persuasively made the case that from California to Mississippi to the halls of Congress, this transformation is already happening. The idea is to take what started as one long-shot campaign and turn it into hundreds or thousands of different onessome electoral and some notand build an intersectional movement strong enough to walk on its own without a presidential race to guide it.

But the glue for the weekend, the element that united such diverse groups of lefty organizers, was still Bernie. You could pose next to cardboard cutouts of the senatorat booths in the exhibit hall or sign a petition to Draft Berniepart of an effort to coax the senator into running for president again under a new Justice Party. People for Bernie, the grassroots group that helped turn a 70-year-old curmudgeon into a millennial icon, offered T-shirts with the senators hair and glasses over the phrase Hindsight is 2020. The official conference store was filled with Bernie swag. The senator came and went, but Jane Sanders was everywhere.

He is a global meme, says Wong, the People for Bernie co-founder who helped organize the summit. And we have direct access to the global meme, so we should really utilize this moment. Why mess with what works?

Even the best-run campaigns have a tendency to fade away the further they get from the race in question. (Barack Obamas Organizing for America famously fizzled out during the 2010 midterms.) But Sanders army is very much alive. Whenone of his closest allies, National Nurses United executive director Rose Ann Demoro, referred to Sanders at a pep-rally-style Friday event as our real president, chants of Bernie would have won! broke out in the crowd.

Sanders has expressed frustration with questions about his future prospects, but at the Peoples Summit the speculation was coming from inside the room. He was interrupted repeatedly by supporters shouting Draft Bernie! and clutching signs from the Justice Party booth. His hourlong address was part stump speech and part manifesto. He rattled off a list of movement-backed candidates (many of them Sanders delegates) who had won local elections since November, and he outlined a platform and message by which heor someone like himmight effectively run against a faux-populist bomb-thrower.

When it was over, he gave the microphone back to Demoro. I want to say to the Draft Bernie people: Im with you, she said.

Bernie and JaneSanders smiled awkwardly, and Demoro shrugged. Heroes arent made, she said. Theyre cornered.

Mother Jones is a nonprofit, and stories like this are made possible by readers like you. Donate or subscribe to help fund independent journalism.

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This Is Why Bernie Sanders Thinks His Political Revolution Is Winning - Mother Jones

I CANT get my head around Leo Varadkars brand new Republic, the place where prejudice has no hold. Of course I welcome it, but at the same time, I cant wait to test it, which means, in essence, that I havent much faith in it. Anyway, Im not even sure if Im ready for it yet.

Im full of prejudices, fears and phobias myself, and only last night I had a nightmare that the Irish language lobby was having me committed to Mountjoy for racism after I had once again questioned the policy of making it a compulsory subject for every Leaving Cert student apart from those whose parents had the money to be able to provide evidence of a learning difficulty that applied only to Irish.

Neither can I shake off the feeling of deep prejudice that I have been harbouring for years against the likes of highly paid hospital consultants who virtually dictate the effectiveness or otherwise of the HSE, and who include their childrens nannies on their staff payrolls to cut their tax bills. Am I going to have to clasp them to my bosom now lest they flee abroad and leave us all without access to open heart surgery?

Even as I write, this new non-judgemental Republic is seething with prejudice against social welfare recipients who have to prove that they are not cheats or parasites, while the richest among us draw down the Childrens Allowance and the free travel and dont have to prove anything. The Taoiseach in waiting had best watch out in case he gets infected with this prejudice, because he already seems to have diverted most of his old Social Welfare staff to fraud detection, while mothers about to give birth have to wait six weeks for their badly needed maternity benefits. Look, we either have a Welfare State or a Republic that holds no prejudice, and I know which one Id prefer.

Now dont even get me started on priests and nuns. If the so called non-judgemental secularists of the new Republic had their way, the clergy would be obliterated with even more ferocity than Henry VIII could ever have mustered against the Monasteries. An innocent priest is vilified on Prime Time and an innocent nun is jailed on hearsay evidence and, because of our prejudices, we dont even bat an eyelid at the injustice. We may have managed to dump some of our nastier phobias, but now weve developed an even more malevolent one Christophobia, a fear of Christianity.

Most people in this country are Christians and why any of us have to lie down and have our religious beliefs disrespected the way they are in some quarters is beyond me.

Im telling you now, if we dont stand up to the new visionaries, well have to bring back the Mass rocks and head for the glens and mountains to practice our Faith, or risk being burned at the stake.

Ive had my problems with individual priests and nuns all my life, but generally I found them nothing but a force for good and I cant even imagine the hurt people like Sr Stan, who devoted her life to helping the poor and the homeless, are now enduring.

But of course, if you really want to experience what its like to be the butt of prejudice in this grand new Republic, all you have to do is grow old and listen to someone asking you when youre going to throw in the towel and make way for a younger person.

For despite all the lip service paid to the venerable elderly, were not as valued as older people once were and were fair game for second rate comedians. Maybe its because there are more of us now, and our numbers are likely to swell even further in the years ahead.

Were a growing demography with serious implications for the economy and the health service, and the real test of Leos new Republic, for us anyway, is whether anyone will have the gall to tell us to our faces that weve become a burden.

It wouldnt, of course, be the first time we declared a Republic where every person and every child would be cherished equally.

But it wasnt long before we had lost the plot and, in the end, we even lost the run of ourselves. But this is different. This is a place where even tolerance with its unfortunate connotations of them and us is considered a dirty word. Weve moved on from all that, it seems, and there is no going back?

Forgive me for being cynical but its hardly two years since the wealthy and influential citizens of South County Dublin - where apparently the seeds of this new Utopia of equality were sown behind electronically gated entrances - successfully resisted plans to have a travellers halting site planked in their midst. I dont know what inspired them if it wasnt prejudice of some kind, but Im sure theyve overcome the intolerance by now.

Maybe Id have been better prepared for this brave new world if I had done what everyone told me to do a long time ago and moved with the times. But I didnt.

So here I am, full, no doubt, of old loyalties, but a Neanderthal at heart with Neanderthal opinions that should never be dismissed as prejudices. For I believe wholeheartedly in equality, and Im not sure that everyone else does, because according to the late lamented Sean O Faolain, the notion of equality is not really in our genes, and that may yet rebound on Leos vision.

The Irish, OFaolain declared, had an ineradicable love of individual liberty. Equality, as far as I could see, they never bothered about, he admitted.

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The real test for Leo's 'new Republic' - Limerick Leader

He praised Kroes and his staff for building "a remarkable legacy."

The foundation also hired Samantha Brucker, who has a background in environmental and energy affairs and water resources, as a research analyst and made Shawn Teigen a vice president and research director with responsibilities for the office's day-to-day management.

PECO Real Estate, Almanac Realty to form retail-focused company

Park City-based PECO Real Estate Partners said it has received a $300 million commitment from Almanac Realty Investors to form a retail-focused company called PREP Property Group.

The investment by New York City-based Almanac will enable PREP to grow its business of "repositioning undermanaged, capital-starved, poorly merchandised or distressed" malls and other commercial retail centers.

Michael Phillips will be president and CEO of PREP, which spun out of Phillips Edison and Co.'s former development and strategic divisions. It has expertise in every aspect of retail shopping center operation and management, added chief operating officer Sara Brennan.

Founded in 1981 as Rothschild Realty, Almanac said it has invested $4.4 billion in 39 companies in North America.

Utopia Fiber moves to Murray, will add interactive demo space

The Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, better known as Utopia Fiber, has moved its offices to 5858 S. 900 East in Murray. This summer, the fiber optic network will add an interactive demo space to showcase the bandwidth capabilities of its system, said Executive Director Robert Timmerman.

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Briefs: Utah Foundation, PECO, Utopia, Inc., PRMI, rural housing - Salt Lake Tribune

The first teaser trailer for Black Panther is finally here, and it looks incredible. If there was ever any doubt about how Black Panther, one of Marvels more enigmatic and under-appreciated superheroes, would fare on the big screen, this two-minute spot should put those fears to rest. Theres political intrigue, a sci-fi utopia, and plenty of action to look forward to, with a largely black cast put right on center stage.

But more than being just generally entertaining, this trailer is dense. Director Ryan Coogler has clearly done his homework on Black Panther lore, pulling in threads and ideas from some of the characters best stories over his 50 year history. Lets break some of them down.

Potential spoilers ahead.

Right off the bat, it should strike you that a movie trailer about the first black superhero in mainstream comics opens on a meeting between two white characters. Thats almost certainly by design. Weve met both of these characters before and they provide a window into a world that has been a complete mystery to us and the Marvel Cinematic Universe up until now.

Lets start with Everett K. Ross, played by Martin Freeman. He was first introduced in a minor role in last years Captain America: Civil War, but hell play a major part in this film as TChallas (Chadwick Boseman) key American ally. His role pulls directly from Christopher Priests classic 1998 Black Panther run, where Ross is a hapless government agent assigned to keep an eye on TChalla during a diplomatic crisis. Just like in the comics, he initially knows little about Wakanda. But is he ever going to learn.

Across from him is the one-armed Ulysses Klaw (Andy Serkis), a traditional Black Panther villain who was first introduced onscreen back in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Hes a gangster and smuggler whos been trying to steal Vibranium the metal Black Panthers suit is made of from Wakanda, the hyper-advanced African nation where TChalla is set to rule as king. Hes likely a pivotal figure in the unrest TChalla will have to face as ruler.

The crux of the film looks like itll have to do with TChalla returning to Wakanda to claim the throne. His father, King TChaka, was killed in Civil War, so its now up to TChalla to rule and deal with the drama that comes with his new duties.

Its from his point of view that we really see Wakanda for the first time. The first place we see is Warrior Falls, where his coronation will take place.

This gives us a peek at how Coogler has envisioned Wakanda for the film: a techno-utopia that features both futuristic airships and traditional culture. Its beautiful to behold, but also hints at how complicated life in the country is. TChalla will have to balance his responsibilities as a monarch with his life as a superhero, and thats going to be a difficult task. King TChaka (John Kani) even returns to do voiceover in the second half of the trailer, intoning, You are a good man with a good heart. And its hard for a good man to be king.

A major challenge for TChalla will be the factions vying for supremacy in Wakanda, a theme writer Ta-Nehisi Coates touched on in his recent run in the comics. Wakanda has numerous tribes across its numerous regions with varying levels of influence, even though the Black Panther is the leader of the entire country. One powerful figure among those tribes is Man-Ape (Winston Duke), another Panther villain who appears late in the trailer.

However, the core villain looks like it might be NJadaka, otherwise known as Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan). Killmonger, who first appeared way back in Don McGregors epic 1970s Jungle Action comic run, is a Wakandan exile who holds a powerful grudge against TChallas father. Hes the mental and physical equal of the Black Panther in the comics, and once even managed to best TChalla in combat at Warrior Falls.

Some of Wakandas most powerful figures, both in the comics and in this trailer, are women. The most visible ones are the Dora Milaje, Black Panthers royal guard and traditionally his wive-in-training. They all kick ass. Theres Ayo, played by Florence Kasumba and first seen in Civil War. (You might also recognize her from Wonder Woman, where she played the Amazon Senator Acantha.) She doesnt play around. In the comics, she even helped lead a revolution against Black Panther himself.

Theres Okoye, played by The Walking Deads Danai Gurira, the leader of the Dora Milaje. And theres Nakia, played by Lupita Nyongo. Nakia fell deeply in love with TChalla in the comics, and her obsession with him eventually made her an enemy. Well see where Coogler takes their story in the film.

Even beyond the Dora Milaje, the royal family is sure to be formidable. Angela Bassett plays Queen Mother Ramonda, and even though we see her briefly, shes sure to play an important supporting role to TChalla. And then theres Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright). First introduced in Reginald Hudlins Black Panther run in 2005, shes TChallas kid sister. She eventually goes on to become a Black Panther and Queen of Wakanda, but thats probably a ways off.

One more thing. That purple blast before we see Black Panther flip off a destroyed car almost certainly comes from his suit, meaning well get the chance to see what he can really do. The vibranium armor TChalla wears is arguably as advanced as Tony Starks Iron Man armor, only with the emphasis put on stealth and agility instead of flight. With it, he can fire powerful energy blasts, scale buildings, and take gunfire without so much as blinking an eye.

Theres so much more that we still dont know about whats to come for this movie. (Which is good! Trailers really shouldnt give everything away!) But theres plenty to be excited about, particularly for new and long-time Black Panther fans.

Black Panther hits theaters on February 16th.

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Let's break down the incredible Black Panther trailer - The Verge