Category Archives: Immortality Medicine

Posted onAugust 26, 2022Posted byJohn Scalzi

Life is short but TV is forever. Author Randee Dawn plays with a fantastical variant of this sentiment with her new novel Tune In Tomorrow.

RANDEE DAWN:

Who wants to live forever?

One great thrill we get from writing and reading fantasy, science fiction or even horror is about imagining creating and watching creatures who toy with mortality. Ancient demons, immortal gods, fae with unknown lifespans, potions that turn back the clock. Were fascinated with tweaking time and simultaneously terrified by it.

Time weighs on me now more than it did in my 20s or 30s; there are more never gonna do that listings in my bucket list column than there used to be. Mostly because theres no time. My body tells me that. My patience is shorter, my attention span shifted. I get cranky at things that waste my time, because they feel like theft.

When I first started writing Tune in Tomorrow, a book that muses on what a reality TV show/soap opera created by mythical creatures, for mythical creatures but starring humans would look like, I confess that I didnt give the nature of time much thought. After all, Tunes a funny book (if Ive done it right) full of slapstick, puns and backstage shenanigans. Im an entertainment journalist and trust me, Ive seen some stuff.

But time was always part of the story. The title even harks back to classic cliffhangers soaps relied on, suggesting the answers you crave will all be there if you tune in tomorrow. Many soap actors devote their careers to one character, one show. So what would it be like to work among creatures who live for hundreds, if not thousands, of years whod want you, a puny human actor, to stick around longer than their molting cycle? What would it like for them to confer a prize (an Endless Award, in the book) for your talent that gave you immortality so long as you were employed on the show?

Weirdness would ensue, to say the least.

In one way, its an ideal solution to the conundrum of never being able to die: immortality, but conditional. Exit when youre ready (in my world, you dont turn into a heap of dust with all your years accruing at once) and live as long as you want. After all, immortality ranks up there with almost everybodys top three super wishes (right after flying and invisibility).You could do All! The! Things! You could invest your money wisely and spend hundreds of years tending your portfolio. Youd be wealthy and forever young. Or young-ish.

But I wanted to explore what this would feel like beyond a thought experiment. Long life is a double-edged sword, something people my age are only starting to comprehend. Weve already read the moaning and groaning of creatures like vampires, whore purely exhausted with all the chasing down of victims, the sameness of meals every day. Anne Rices Interview with the Vampire got it right it takes stamina to be a bloodsucker decade after unending decade, until Buffy catches up with you.

For humans, this is exponentially more horrifying. Mortality introduces stakes to a life (not wooden stakes, weve moved on from vampires now), while immortality removes them. Like a river youve stepped out of, the world moves on without you. Loved ones and friends die. Politics, entertainment, culture, medicine everything goes on, while you stay fixed in place. Actors in the book stop going back to the real world on the other side of the Veil, living full time on sets and in dressing rooms, with the occasional jaunt to protected areas of the fae world. Meanwhile, the real world becomes its own alien landscape, made all the more so because they no longer participate in it. Theyre like Severances innies cut off from anything but their jobs.

I feel this pain, now that the car Im driving has crested the hill of middle age and is heading faster and faster toward well, you know. Theres a line from The Breakfast Club that used to make me well up like a baby when I watched it as a teenager: When you grow up, your heart dies. Tragic! Unfeeling adults, lazy and comfortable! Yet thats not it as I understand now, its not that your heart dies, but you become less relevant to the world even as you live in it. Everyone on TV feels like they could be your kids or your grandkids age. The soundtrack of the zeitgeist Muzak, music in movies, lyrics is not your music. Technology advances come and go so fast theyre like quicksilver in your fingers. And then you learn that three of the four Golden Girls were in their late 40s or early 50s on the show. Youre behind the times, not ahead or even in the middle of them.

The world moves on.

It takes more effort to remain in touch these days. Its tempting to stay in my own version of a dressing room, to withdraw and engage. To understand only the things I already know and say enough. To stop listening to new songs or watch new movies. So I actively push back. I listen to Billie Eilish (whos already mainstream). I think about what its like to grow up as this generation, in this version of the world. I try to taste the world as it is, not as I want it to be, so I wont get stuck. So my heart wont die.

One character in Tune in Tomorrow is terrified of losing their position on the show, and that fear makes them do terrible things. To be thrown out into the cold, into the real world, is a horror that justifies them doing anything to protect their station. But its not sustainable. Something has to change. It may take a newcomer, a rising star to upend the way forever has always worked.

Because the way forever has always been, doesnt have to be forever.

Tune in Tomorrow: The Curious, Calamitous, Cockamamie Story Of Starr Weatherby And The Greatest Mythic Reality Show Ever:Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powells

Visit the authors website. Follow her on Twitter.

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The Big Idea: Randee Dawn - John Scalzi's Whatever

2022 marks the 20th anniversary of the debut of The Wire, the five-season HBO masterpiece that is now considered one of televisions great achievements. In its time, however, the show faced yearly cancellation threats and low viewership, and was virtually ignored during awards season.

In the years since, David Simons magnum opus has gained generations of fans who debate, to this day, favorite characters, episodes, and seasons in what is described as a Russian novel applied to the Baltimore streets, police, politicians and drug dealers.

The anniversary has spawned a new round of critical appreciations, an eight-part podcast from HBO, and this project.

Over the years, many of the people who worked on the program have recounted their experiences during WAMC interviews. What follows is an oral history of the program as heard on WAMC.

Jonathan Abrams, author of All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

I think that was a big part in why The Wire initially struggled when it was on. Chris Bauer, who played Frank Sobotka, has a quote in the book that You can't watch The Wire and make a casserole at the same time The Wire requires that you paid attention to it and didn't get up out your seat. And I can only imagine being one of the first to actually watch that show when it aired on HBO. And in the pilot, you're introduced to so many characters, you can't really figure out what's going on. The dialect is like nothing you've ever heard on television before. And then it's off for a week, it's not like you can just stream it and go to the next episode, you don't see it for a whole nother week. And then you have to it's on your own to pick up where you left off. So that' as a lot. So that's why it didn't really gain popularity until you were able to stream it all at once.

Show creator David Simon

I'm not sure that anybody can make a credible argument to a 14-year-old kid coming up in places in South Chicago or North Philadelphia or West Baltimore that it's an irrational decision to go down on the corner and raise up as a lookout or run a ground stash for some older drug dealer, when that's the only industry you've ever known in your neighborhood who's ever been hiring. The factories are all closed, the jobs that used to be an evident transport to American society. You know, for people who had a high school degree, or maybe not even that, they don't exist anymore. Now the job is at a computer screen somewhere far away from you. And it requires a level of training that wasn't ever credible as an outcome within the public education system that you knew. And there's this one factory still hiring, and it's up on the corner, and it hired your older brother and hired your cousin and hired your father.

The level of hopelessness is such that I'm not sure you can argue with that kid. The kids that we saw in West Baltimore when we did The Corner and we followed them for a year, they were being rigorously trained for the one factory that was still open. Never mind mental health, poverty, the fact that there were these two Americas and in one of them there are viable alternatives to find your way through and become connected economically, socio-economically to the society, and then the other one there isn't. And I live in a city that is rigorously divided between those two Americas. Ao the people in the one America, you try to police into the face of that you might as well be policing Soweto or Gaza I mean you're up against the entire neighborhood because everybody looks uponit's like trying to police Birmingham in 1960 and saying, Guys you can't work in the steel mills. Steel mills are illegal, don't make steel. You know, it sounds insane. But to tell a kid in Baltimore in 2005 or 2015 don't go down to the corner, don't make that money. We have some other place, some other plan for you. Yeah. What other place? What other the plan? Really? We can't even figure out a summer jobs program. So, on some level, the drug trade as an industry proved itself to be rational even as it destroyed human beings, even as it destroyed neighborhoods. It proved to be rational on a day-to-day basis and on an economic basis. And we have to upend that. And that's kind of epic. That would be epic.

Musician Steven Earle played recovering drug addict Walon

Really a lot of it has to do with how much the show means to people. I mean, David Simon is a really good friend of mine, I'm really proud of him and really, you know, happy for him that because he's a guy making art for the right reasons in a medium where you don't have to to be successful. In fact, he would probably be more successful if he would bring my character on Treme back as a vampire, he would probably have better ratings, but he has more integrity than that. So, I'm dead on that show and I'm dead. I'm gonna stay dead. So, it's an amazinga lot of people think it's just the best show that's ever been on television. You'd be amazed how many people believe that how many people say it and it's all over the world. So, I learned a lot from doing it. And you know what, it's brought a few people that my music that never listened to before. So, it's hard to complain about it.

David wrote the part for me and it required zero acting, which is the reason I had, you know, only a small amount of trepidation about doing it. And it didn't require any acting at all. Harley, the character on Treme, was similar but actually required more acting even though Harley was a musician, I got to sing. I got to sing my own songs. But I was really playing the person that was sort of fundamentally different than I am. Walon's a redneck recovering addict; that requires no acting.

He's a huge music fan. And he used a song of mine in a miniseries called The Corner that he did for HBO. And then when he was writing the first episodes of The Wire, he called my manager and said, I'm writing this character that I think might be good for Steve. And he tracked me down and I read for it in a recording studio in Nashville. And they filmed it and I read it. And I got the part. And I mean, it was written for me, he was just hopingI had to really suck probably not to get it. Next thing I knew I was on a plane to Baltimore. And I was in the show off and on for the five years and a lot in the fifth year. And I was makingit was weird, I had just moved to New York when we started filming the fifth season, I was making Washington Square Serenade so I'd make that record; I'd like work a day on the record and then I'd have a day where they have to shoot. So, Id just take the train from New York down to Baltimore the night before. As soon as like I would work in the studio till the last train, 7 or 8 or something, take the train to Baltimore get up and do the early shoot, and I'd be back in the studio, they'd work on something else while I was gone. And I'd be back in the studio usually by dinnertime.

David Simon

We've been witness to a lot of police violence that is absolutely without question an affront to Black lives. I don't think there was anything in my head that suggested it wasn't happening. Even when I was a police reporter. The difference between now and then, is simply this and you know, I realize we're doing radio, I'm holding up my smartphone with the camera in it. As a police reporter, I probably covered 100 police shootings. I haven't taken a careful count, but I would guess that probably 70-75 of them, 70 of them, at least, I had no question about they werewe live in a heavily armed society. There's a lot of guns on the street, there's a lot of violence. It's kind of hard to ask anybody to police anywhere in an American city, you know, with this level of gun saturation, and do so unarmed or do so in a circumstance where you're never going to use your weapon, although many police go their whole careers without using their weapon. You know, there are certain posts where it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen to somebody at some moment. So, I guess I'm saying I covered a lot of honorable police shootings. They were not any less tragic than many dishonorable ones. People died; people were wounded. But I covered a lot of police shootings that were legitimate. And then I covered, I would say, maybe 25% of them. I have no, I had no idea. I don't know what happened becauseit was what a police could write in his report, and what a guy might claim, but it was basically one guy's word against another and there was no other evidentiary logic with which you could judge it. And one of those guys knows how to write a police report. He knows how to testify in front of a grand jury and one of them doesn't and one of them might have no criminal history and one of them might have an extensive criminal history. So even if there were a couple of witnesses, if they were from the milieu of the drug corner or wherever the shooting happened, and they had criminal histories, the credibility was such that a prosecutor could knock it down. So, there were a lot of shootings, where as a reporter I have no consistency between the narrative that the police are telling me and the guy shot, or the witnesses. So often the guy shot is dead, he can't tell me anything. And that case would fly. And you would always be left with, you know, wondering, what was legit. And then there were 5% of the cases where there were a lot of witnesses, and the police really did something wrong. And in those cases, there were controversies and I covered some of those. But what's happened with the cell phone is that a lot of the cases that were in that 25% bracket, of we don't know, now, suddenly there's first generation evidence from just regular folk pointing their cameras and for police, that's a whole new world. And they're having a hard time adapting to the fact that sometimes the lies and the disconnects and the falsity that that used to protect them in the case of a bad shooting is no longer there or is now confronted by an alternative reality.

I mean, I think if you if you look at The Wire, the impulse towards brutality and towards non-accountability on the part of police department is embedded in the piece. I mean, I don't think you have to go two and a half episodes before one of the police officers resorts to an unnecessary brutality and blinds a kid, blinds a kid in one eye in the projects, and his lieutenant explains to him how to lie about it to the internal investigators so that it won't go further than the grand jury. That happened, I think, in episode three of a 60-episode show, and we revisited the idea of brutality. You know, when one police beat up a schoolteacher in a car, one other guy broke the fingers of a of a 12-year-old after he stole a car, we routinely returned to the idea of the drug war being this moral disconnect for some officers. But what we didn't have was the idea of being confronted by the fact that your lies might now bethat the things that you do to protect officers who've overreached or who've made mistakes, or who have been willfully abusive, your ability to damage control that stuff is now much more vulnerable because of this technology. We would certainly show that because the smartphone with its camera has been a revolution.

Wendell Pierce played homicide detective Bunk Moreland

Bunk, first of all, was based on a real man. So, I have a relationship with the real Bunk. Oscar Requer, retired police detective in Baltimore. I consider him family. I think of Darryl Massey and other sergeants in the homicide who I studied with in preparation for the role and thought of them in the recent, you know, uprising that was happening in Baltimore especially. The first thing people had to think of was all those issues that we brought up in The Wire over those seven years that we worked on, in the five seasons that we produced, were the same issues that were coming to a head this summer. And I thought of those specifically Black protectors on the police force, who became policemen because the crime and the violence in that neighborhood reduced by only 1% was not reflective of the good people in the neighborhood. And that's why they became police officers.That was developed in the script when Bunk Moreland had a relationship with Omar. You know, this homicidal burglar of the drug dens and he said listen, no more bodies. I don't want any more bodies. The community also puts that challenge to the police officers if you became a policeman because you feel as though this neighborhood is of great value, don't allow the few to ruin the relationship because of their behavior within your ranks as police officers. And that's what the community was saying back to the police officers this summer in real life. So that form of art reflecting on all of those things, shows you how powerful and influential and profound culture is. And it's not just a piece of entertainment, it's something of great substance, and importance. And that dialogue, once you create a character, is something that you always go back to because it's the humanity that we all share, that we reflect on, when we consider all the issues that we bring up in a piece of art that we created. And so, the character of Bunk that I created, I constantly reflect on because I think of the men that helped me create it, like Sergeant Darryl Massey, and the original Bunk, Oscar Requer, because they root me in the reality of those issues that are so profoundly important to act on today, especially in Baltimore.

Jim True-Frost played police officer-turned-math teacher Roland Pryzbylewski, Prez

It was very dramatic. And it was a great couple of scenes there where me and a couple of the other cops go to a housing project and raise hell trying to say that we're in charge, and we're going to take things in hand. And things go terribly, terribly wrong. And my gun goes off and my gunI'm trying to put everything in the passive voiceand my gun makes contact with somebody else's face. My character, you know, appeared right then to be a real piece of work, I pistol whip a young kid in the face, and I take some shots up in the air randomly and recklessly. So, it was really interesting. Yeah, it was, as you said, it was it was very confidence instilling, you know, just to know that, wow, it's a cool, complicated, messy part. And could be really interesting. But it was also a total mystery. I mean, we didn't get the scripts until we were about ready to shoot each episode. So, I had no idea what the arc of the character was going to be. And, you know, from the looks of those first couple episodes, for all I knew, my character's problem was he was a total loose cannon and he had a drinking problem and who knows what, but those turned out to be not such a big part of the whole picture. It was more than the character was kind of frustrated and lost in the system, which was a big theme of the show. Sort of the individual who may have good intentions, but gets sort of mired in institutional apathy and unchanging ways of doing things even when things are going terribly wrong. So, in a way, that's what came to ring true much later in the series too when my character became a school teacher. Those themes were very much there again for Prez where he's the little guy who, at that point, is a little bit more on the ball and is a little bit more in control, but is still nonetheless a guy who's completely at a loss for what to do in the face of this monstrous bureaucracy of the school district and city politics that just aren't getting the job done and he's up close witnessing these kids in the schools who are just being left behind.

Brian Anthony Wilson played homicide detective Vernon Holley

I was just a local hire guy. Came in, I read for like three roles at first and then I was lucky to get Holley and I thought it was just a one and done. And I ended up being in five seasons of it, all five seasons, by the grace of God. I mean, the weird thing is I probably would have been in probablyI was in 19 episodesI probably would've been in about 30 or more, but because of the way TV series shoot, they only give you a couple of weeks notice. And a lot of times I was committed to theater projects, and they would just write me off, they would call me and say hey, are you available? If not, they write you out. And then they give your lines to somebody else and figure out something else. But yeah, because of my theater schedule, I was knocked out of over half of the episodes, I would think. But yeah, I've been very lucky to work as much as I do. And very fortunate, I'm usually working on two or three projects at once. Because I mean, I seek those out. And a lot of times work begets work, but it is tough. You know, for Black actors, firstly, especially of a certain age, you know, past middle age, and certainly not a leading man type, like I say, I'm the big linebacker kind of build type, but I've you know, luckily knock on wood have been working, professionallyI mean for as a livingsince 96 when I did my first film, The Postman with Kevin Costner. So, I've been lucky, but it is temp work. You know, you're always looking for that next gig and always looking for that next job, which is a little scary.

Benjamin Busch played Police Officer Anthony Colicchio

I think some of my best acting actually was in Iraq, simply because of the fact that I was very frustrated. I mean, it was an incredibly difficult situation every day. And I did have a position that came with certain expectations. You know, my Marines expected me to be invulnerable. And so, I had to believe that I was, and the Iraqis themselves, were also looking for vulnerability, they were looking for, at the same time, for strength, for confidence. And in the face of these things, I created an invulnerable persona. You kind of cloak yourself in a certain belief in your own immortality, you create your own myth. And that's what an actor does. An actor has to move into a character and inhabit them all the way in enough that their emotions are reflected in their eyes. You play someone that you half are and half can't be. And I think I did that a lot in Iraq, because I was a public performer to an extent. And I think you carry your experiences back and forth. I think that when I came back from my first tour in Iraq, the first audition I had was for Officer Anthony Colicchio on The Wire on HBO. And he was a very frustrated police officer but at the same time he was someone who had an uncompromising sense of justice. That's why he was frustrated. He was seeing things black and white in Baltimore, which is a city of gray, the police are cheating, the criminals are cheating, and he couldn't stand any of it. It was coming from a war which had been entirely gray, which as a Marine, you hope is a noble mission. And that was compromised very early. So, I think all these experiences feed into your performances and your performances feed back into your life. You begin to gather all this, like I talked about emotional resonance and also memory and begin to build who you really are. And I feed off of all of that, I think. I think there's some truth in in Tony Colicchio for me.

Clarke Peters played homicide detective Lester Freamon

When I left America, we were in the throeswe were coming to the end of the Civil Rights Movement. And we were going into the Vietnam War debacle on whether it was good or bad. You know? I think that I was on the right side of both of those arguments, and I see that history has shown me that I was. Now, you know, 50 years later, I see that some of those issues are still being debated and argued and questioned, and there not just being questioned by Americans and myself, but it's also the way that the rest of the world is viewing America, its involvement in Afghanistan, its possible involvement in going into Eastern Europe. It's the same arena as, politically, as I saw myself view Vietnam. I'm looking at now the civil rights movement that we were working on in the late 60s, in the mid-60s, is now still a point of contention for some parties. And the outside world, Europe, looks at that as well and says, What's happening over there? Who are you? I have to say that living outside of America, America has the best idea. We have the best idea of how a society should be. And if only we would live up to it, it would be great. Believe me, the rest of the world loves the idea of America, they really do. And if we can get there, we will have a beautiful, utopian existence, I'm sure.

Jonathan Abrams

Early on, Uta Briesewitz, the cinematographer, came to Bob Colesberry, who was kind of the eyes of the show and said that the show shouldn't lose any visual elegance when it goes from, say, inside the police station to the streets. So, they kind of kept that same template. I think, probably in the pilot, it was a little bit different. But as it carried on, it kind of kept the sophistication between the two. And what they were trying to show was that the methods that the drug sellers were using was often just as sophisticated as the methods the police were using in trying to capture them. Literary titans like George Pelecanos and Richard Price and Dennis Lehane, that was a real joy, because these guys are some of the best crime novelists around. And, honestly, it's so surprising to me that they were able to get any type of work done, because you just have all these guys who, when you write a book, it's really isolating, and you're by yourself, you're just you and your editor. But you bring all these guys together. And you all think that you're the best novelist. Meanwhile, David Simon and Ed Burns are kind of overseeing the whole ship, and they really put their egos aside to be able to make great television. And for me, Season Four is just so instrumental, I just consider it the best season of television in history, just as far as it shows such a huge problem and really humanizes it. At the beginning of the season, we see these four boys who are bright eyed and seemingly have a lot of potential and through their character arcs, we see just almost the lights turn out and the forces that are against them and how they really don't even have a chance to get going in life.

Jim True-Frost

I wouldn't say it surprised me because, I mean, it surprised me somewhat during the life of the show, while we're still in production, it just seemed to get more and more of a fire behind it and a real acclaim for the great writing. And the pertinence of the social issues and the quality of the show, which was just very episodic, or very serialized, just a long form, kind of a long novel on TV, which wasn't the first show like that, but it may have sort of really cracked the form or set the bar for that kind of television. So yeah, we saw then that it was really catching fire and people were really responding to it and it was so exciting to be a part of it. And yeah, I mean, I do I continue to hear from people all the time either renting the show or watching it online or whatever. And I bump into people on the street and say, "Hey, I just started the show" or, "I'm just through the first season" and things like that. So, it obviously it's got legs. We shot our five seasons, but the audience is still growing.

Jonathan Abrams

I think those feelings still remain. I think that's a blessing and a curse with the show in that The Wire accomplished what few television shows can it educated and entertained. So, you're gonna have a good segment of people who just watched The Wire as pure entertainment and maybe the larger messages of the show flew over them. I remember when I watched it in real time, I was saying that, hey, I've never seen a character like Stringer or Omar. And I think that's what first led me into the show. But if you watch it deeper, and if you watch it multiple times, you enjoy the aspects of the message that it's trying to get across, and that these institutions often fail to reform themselves and the individuals are the ones who often get caught up in it.

David Simon

I mean, the one thing that is probably been my predominant theme for about a decade, certainly in The Wire, is to try to assert against the drug war, drug prohibition, as being an incredible disaster for the country and for American cities in particular. So, I tend to try to get near young impressionable minds and urge them to have nothing to do with the drug war. I think if I get that one done, I've done a little something. The drug war has always been, I think, a means of social control. And it's always been targeted against fear of the other. If you go back to its origins, I mean, if you go back all the way to the turn of the century, and into the late 19th century, the first moments of drug fear of what became the basis of policing of dangerous drugs, has to do with the fear of the yellow horde on the West Coast, the opium dens of the dreaded Chinese, it's always been linked to some fear of the immigrant other or the racial other. And if you look at the history of drug prohibition, it's never come from an organic logic that says, by treating this as a criminal dynamic rather than a health problem, we can achieve anything. They've never sold that with any credible empiricism because it never does. It never fixes anything. It just makes for a lot of people in a lot of prisons. And at this point we never lost our mind quite as we did in the 1990s, but we did lose our minds and we filled prison after prison after prison with nonviolent offenders.

See the rest here:
The Oral History of "The Wire" on WAMC - WAMC

Its important to remember that George Miller is and has always been more than Mad Max, but that Mad Max is all George Miller. See, Miller, like the bespectacled and bookish protagonist of his latest film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, is a storyteller, and my favorite interpretation (call it a fan theory or whatever you want, its still compelling) of the Mad Max films is that theyre ultimately depicting the creation of a folk legend. In the first, the modern world exists in living memory and is contextualized as such, but as the films progress, they get more and more fabulous until you wind up with a cult-leading warlord hoarding water and enslaving women, the thread linking reality and pure myth severed so long ago that its riding with the War Boys in Vahalla, shiny and chrome. Miller specializes in that kind of adult fairy tale even outside the Wasteland, most obviously in The Witches of Eastwick and more subtly in Lorenzos Oil, but even his childrens films tenors are perfectly pitched to shatter the hearts of even the coldest adult without overwhelming them with treacle. The Babe movies rightfully hold a special place in the hearts of parents everywhere as much as they do within the children they delight(this is also where I beg you to reconsider Happy Feet, which is as gorgeously imagined and rich as any of his other works as hard as it may be to swallow the idea of a jukebox musical about dancing penguins). So, to the folks hopped up on Fury Road who may leave Longing wondering exactly where the hell that filmmaker is and how a studio could finance a condensed adaptation of D.W. Griffiths Intolerance, clothed, this time, in the rich fabrics that adorned The Thief of Baghdad which also somehow manages to be a painfully gorgeous and earnest two-person love story, well, this is who hes always been.

Clocking in just under 110 minutes, Longing covers a span of human history that could be, in the hands of another filmmaker, perilous and paralyzing in its ambition. But Millers ferocious skill and ability as a storyteller ensure that it never strays too far from its emotional core, even as it documents the happenings within the court of Queen Sheba while shes being romanced by King Solomon or the longings of a young woman, trapped in a loveless marriage to an older man and in an era in which her natural talents for science make her into a sort of Da Vincis Sister (with the inventor and artist substituting for Shakespeare in my adaptation of Woolfs idiom). Such are all the things that a Djinn (Idris Elba) can witness throughout his odd immortality, linked to the mercurial wants and needs of the humans hes bound to serve. Unlike the rest of his kind, this Djinn isnt a trickster: hes a hopeless romantic, doing his best to try and bring gratification and satisfaction to those around him and, occasionally, trying to forestall the worst possible outcomes for all, say, in a medieval Byzantine power struggle. But Altheia (Tilda Swinton), the storytelling scholar I mentioned earlier, has her doubts: she knows, from years and years of research, not to trust them.

But, then again, shes found herself in an impossible circumstance: while in Istanbul for a conference, she stumbles upon a Nightingales Eye in a junk shop buried amongst a thousand other trinkets. Its a gorgeous blue-and-white shaped bottle, covered in some amount of detritus, and when she returns to her hotel room and absent-mindedly starts to clean it with her electric toothbrush, she pops the top off and is overwhelmed by a swarm of electromagnetic vapor, which congeals into a giant. The Djinn introduces himself and, after a short interlude where he converses with her in Ancient Greek, sucks knowledge out of a computer and television to quickly learn English, clothes himself in a comfortable bathrobe just like hers, and presents her with a tray of delightful delicacies for her to nibble on, presents her with the eternal problem for both Djinn and master. She has three wishes. There are rules: she cant wish to become a Djinn, nor can she wish for unlimited wishes, she cant change the past or, say, eliminate suffering wholesale from the human condition, and her wishes, importantly, have to be her hearts true desire. But, much like Christian Slater with Brad Pitt in Interview With the Vampire, why rush headlong into anything when you have the chance to pick the brain of a creature whose life contains stories beyond your imagination? And, much like anyone who ever imagined themselves in Slaters role in that film, how could you not fall hopelessly and madly in love with a person trapped in such a desperate and romantic situation who also happens to look like that? So, over the course of his stories (three historical tales, with a modern-day fourth, much like Griffiths bladder-busting apologia for The Birth of a Nation), we witness Altheia turn the central question over and over in her head and find ourselves, along with her, stunned as to where it ends up.

One can practically feel Miller taking each and every one of the Oscars that Fury Road surprisingly won back in 2016 and putting them in the smelter to fashion this particular brick of solid gold, and Id argue that it was well worth it. Longing is what folks would call a loss-leader, and its financial prospects are suitably dismal given how hard it goes against the grain. As usual, Miller disregards many of the central tenets of the modern cinematic landscape and, instead, tells the story that he wishes to tell in the fashion that he wishes to tell it, without an ounce of irony or audience flattery included in the mix. Hes always proudly worn his silent-film influences on his sleeve, to the point that Fury Road got a black-and-white cut whose Blu-Ray one could always mute if they wanted to experience it without all that lovely sound design or, you know, intertitles. Yet the long stretches within the three tales without any diegetic dialogue with Elbas narration, the score, and the sounds within the scene comprising the audio track make it clear that Millers placing the same kind of care and emphasis on visual storytelling as he did his last film. Its a fantastically colorful and gorgeous bizarre bazaar of uncommon imagery, rendered fantastically with the same and oft-subtle usage of CGI that shocked so many after they discovered how much of Fury Roads central images were created in post-production, but applied to different ends. The pace remains frenetic throughout the historical tales, the images coming at such a fast clip that one may feel the need not to blink lest they miss something, but the film does slow down for its fourth story, a modern-day tale whose movement can feel ponderous and without an obvious direction. It bears few of the hallmarks of what Miller is properly known for, and perhaps best can be compared to the black-and-white sequence in the zoo at the climax of Happy Feet in its ability to depress, with all of the joy and vivid emotion of the first hour-and-fifteen minutes made all the more meaningful by its lack.

But thats where Millers other talents come in. Elba and Swinton are a perfect pairing, and their energies are delightfully complementary in a way that elevates Millers already hyper-competent screenplay, which he co-wrote with Augusta Gore (its also lovely to see Swinton in a straight-man role, confronted by the oddities of the universe, much like she was in Memoria). Theres such a deep wellspring of emotion that the pairs the cast and the writers are able to tap into, and were all lucky enough to be able to drink from it, being the kind of rich refreshment that seems to elude so many similar works. Why they fail and why Miller succeeds seems to boil down to a single reason: they dont mean what they say, and he always does. His tempered earnestness be it focused on love, the power of storytelling, or in the propulsive and pounding nature of cinema itself, wielded as a blunt instrument to remind viewers that they have working and functional hearts that can still set off Apple Watch heart-rate alerts in the middle of movies is in desperately short supply, and even if it were abundant, youd find few other filmmakers able to execute it with the same level of joyous precision and wonder present in a film like Three Thousand Years of Longing. If Miller should choose (and if its not a sacrifice on his part or a concession) to make a dozen more Mad Max movies in his short time left on this planet so that he may find funding for ecstatically dreamy projects like this and its an underrated power move to go ahead and sign on to a film like Furiosa knowing that youve got this chambered, waiting to splatter audiences expectations all across the walls and then all moviegoers should thank their lucky fucking stars. We genuinely do not deserve his talents, and its amazing that we ever got the chance to witness them. After all, he could have just remained in medicine.

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'Three Thousand Years of Longing' Review: George Miller, the G.O.A.T. - Vanyaland

Its always been easier for him on the field. Give up a touchdown and you move on to the next possession. Allow a long catch and you get yourself ready for the next play. Between the lines, Baltimore Ravens cornerback Kevon Seymour has learned how to quickly forget. His position demands it. Of the qualities that make up a good NFL corner, short-term memory is as vital as size and speed.

But it becomes infinitely harder for him off the field, when real life continually intervenes and lands blows far more damaging than a 340-pound pulling guard can deliver. The truth is that the things that Seymour has endured, from not having a father in his life to running from gunshots to losing family members and friends, are impossible to forget. He wouldnt want to anyway. Its all shaped who he is.

Theres been so many times when you feel like, Man, Ive been through it all and theres nothing else that I can go through thats harder than that, Seymour said. And then something else happens.

Seymour was home in Arizona in May preparing to travel to Baltimore for the start of organized team activities when he learned that his older sister, Ebonee Tinnin, who helped raise him, died suddenly at the age of 35. Seymours twin brother, Keon, found her collapsed in their mothers Pasadena, Calif., apartment. Seymour said Tinnin had a heart attack.

Not long after getting the crushing news, Seymour phoned Ravens coach John Harbaugh to update him and ask when he needed to report for workouts. Harbaugh urged Seymour to go to California and be with his family.

I said, Ive got to come. My sister wouldnt have wanted it any other way, Seymour said. But man, it was tough. Still is. Its another battle Im dealing with now. I dedicate every day to her.

As a teenager growing up in Pasadena, Seymour was told that football could be his way out, a path to a better life for himself and his family. It sounded far-fetched. So few people from his neighborhood were making it out. It was hard to dream that big amid such humble surroundings.

Yet, he clung to the idea and his football skills helped him get a college scholarship at the University of Southern California. He still believed, even after a final college season spent partly on the bench. When a litany of injuries led to him being out of the NFL for two years and prompted him to get a job at a car and tire shop to support his family and settle his mind, Seymour never once conceded that his playing days might be over.

Three years later, hes still on an NFL roster. His life really has been kind of a movie-type scenario, said Seymours agent Ali Siam. Pound for pound, Kevon might be one of the most physically and mentally tough and resilient people I know. Hes just bounced back from so much and kept going.

Seymour is now on the proverbial roster bubble heading into the Ravens preseason finale against the Washington Commanders Saturday night at M&T Bank Stadium. Hes probably behind Marlon Humphrey, Marcus Peters, Brandon Stephens, Kyle Fuller and rookies Jalyn Armour-Davis and Damarion Williams in the pecking order and there is no guarantee that the Ravens keep seven corners. No matter, hes faced far longer odds and much greater adversity before.

When I watch him, its surreal, just because I know where he came from, said Drew Pearson, one of Seymours mentors and former football coaches. To watch it at a distance is tough. Not only does he represent the high school he comes from, he represents the whole city. A lot of stuff that goes on in our city, man, its tough, in regards to making it out, in regards to having opportunities. Not once has he shied away from doing the right things. Not once has he quit. Its an amazing story.

Seymour, 28, has been a Raven for less than a year, yet almost everybody you talk to players, coaches, equipment staff, secretaries has a story about an uplifting interaction theyve had with him. He is engaging and full of energy and positivity. And oh, that smile. It is wide and welcoming and it belies years of anger and frustration about things entirely out of his control.

But if you look closely at his 6-foot frame, youll see the signs. There is a tattoo on his right bicep that reads: God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers. Seymour reminds himself of that often. Stretched across his right forearm is his last name. Seymour says that old teammates used to make fun of him for that tattoo, asking if he had it done so he could remember it. If they only knew.

For me, it was more motivation, because I didnt have the same last name as my mom or dad, Seymour said. I used to ask, Where did I get this name from? I had a lot of built-up anger inside because of little things like that and not knowing my dad.

Seymours grandmother once told him that his last name came from a man who was close with his mother, Veronica Starling, and agreed to look after him and his twin brother when their biological father refused to take responsibility. The mans name was Phil Seymour and Kevon still recalls every detail of one glorious evening he and Keon spent with Phil.

He took them to a Pasadena pizza shop and handed them a roll of coins to use in the machines that dispense toys and trinkets. Kevon and Keon filled their little palms and pockets with plastic rings, bouncy balls and figurines called Homies. Afterward, they returned to Starlings apartment, ate pizza and watched a bootleg copy of the movie, Deep Blue Sea.

We never had a movie night before, Seymour said. I thought it was the best night ever.

It ended with Starling summoning her twins downstairs and telling them that Phil wouldnt be around much going forward. It was a pattern that the Seymour boys would regrettably get used to. Their father made a few half-hearted efforts to get back in their lives, but they were always fleeting. For years, Kevon was led to believe that his father was living in North Carolina, when in actuality, he was staying in the Los Angeles area, a relatively short drive away.

I had a chip on my shoulder growing up, Seymour said. I remember there were times where Id just go in the bathroom and just cry, like, If my dad was here, none of this would happen. Id be able to get these shoes and Id be able to get and do this and that.

Seymour slowly learned to appreciate what he did have. Starling was fiercely protective and supportive of her kids. She worked long days at a Los Angeles hospital and would get home some nights around 9 p.m., but she was adamant about cooking a nice meal, even when the kids insisted a bowl of cereal would do just fine. Starling made the familys small apartment feel like a mansion, Seymour said.

Tinnin looked after the boys when her mother couldnt. Keon might as well have been Kevons shadow, the twins doing everything together. There were mentors like Pearson, who invested his own money and time to make sure Kevon was seen by college programs and taught him how to eat and train like a high-level athlete, and Antyone Sims, a high school football coach who told young Kevon something that proved prophetic.

There was also a troubled, yet caring community that recognized Kevons potential and sense of purpose and was determined to shield him from some of the trouble and temptations that derailed so many kids before him.

The majestic Rose Bowl and all its pageantry casts a large shadow over Pasadena. Its only a couple of miles from where Seymour grew up in the Community Arms Apartment complex in the northwestern part of the city. It might as well be a world away.

The neighborhood, which includes Section 8 housing, carries an apt moniker: The Snake Pits.

If you know anything about a snake pit, thats not a good place where anybody wants to be, said Sims. You have the gangs, the drugs, all those things.

There used to be a TV show called Gangland. That show specifically came to our section, said Pearson, who also grew up in Community Arms. To come from a section like that and to not fall into that, its very rare.

There was an extended time when Seymour accepted what he witnessed as the norm. Hed wake up in the middle of the night, look out his back window and see crackheads having meetings. Hed watch gang initiations, various acts of violence, police storming apartments with guns drawn. Sometimes, it hit entirely too close to home.

Ive been at Jackie Robinson Park playing T-ball when theres shooting going on, Seymour said. You got to hide under a car.

Seymour would listen to classmates talk about their neighborhoods, about playing tag outside, about staying out after it got dark to hang with friends. Hed grow quiet and even went through a phase where he wouldnt volunteer where he was from. Eventually, it became a source of pride.

If youre not from there, you just feel that its dangerous. You dont want to be around, Seymour said. When youre from there, thats home. Ill always go back and show love. Just about all of the friends I grew up with inside there, they didnt make it out. They are either in jail, gang banging or got killed. I lost a lot of friends that I played Pop Warner with, high school ball with.

Seymours grappled with his own immortality, too. He once went to nearby Inglewood to visit his USC teammate and roommate, Devian Shelton, and his mother. He thought he had taken the appropriate precautions. When his then-girlfriend and now wife, Tori, noticed Seymour had on a red Michael Vick Atlanta Falcons jersey, she warned him about wearing the colors traditionally associated with the LA-based Bloods gang.

Seymour changed into a neutral white T-shirt, yet trouble found him anyway. He was outside talking with friends when he started hearing what initially sounded like fireworks.

It was a, Pop, pop, pop, pop, Seymour recalled. And my friends were like, Run.

Seymour did just that, not fully stopping until he darted through the door of a local motel and found a place to hide. When he finally took shelter, Seymour realized he was bleeding from his legs and arms. He quickly deduced that it was not because of gunshot wounds, rather he had sustained cuts and scrapes while tumbling on the street during his dash to safety. The incident triggered an epiphany.

I just didnt want to be a statistic, he said. I looked up to my mom. She was never taken care of and I wanted to be better and give her a better life.

Football was Seymours means of doing that.

It was almost over before it began. As a freshman at John Muir High School, Seymour was told by the head coach to go work out with the running backs. He resisted because he had gotten wind of the fact that the running backs coach wasnt interested in having him. Seymour walked off the field with tears running down his cheeks. He was stopped by Pearson, who questioned the boy about where he was from, who his father was and why he was quitting. Pearson was from the same neighborhood and also grew up without a father in his life. He couldnt relate, however, to quitting, and he told Seymour as much.

I understand it was all emotion. I knew what was in his heart, Pearson said. I couldnt let him do that to himself. I pretty much let him know, If thats the decision for you right now, youll be willing to walk away again. Thats something we dont want. He went back to practice and never looked back.

It would be the first of a plethora of times Seymours resilience and commitment were tested when it comes to football.

Going into his sophomore year, we had 23 seniors graduate. We had a whole new team and we knew we were going to have to rely on Kevon, Sims said. We put him through the wringer to see if he was going to be tough enough to handle varsity at such a young age. We put him in a drill with one of our biggest hitters and we set it up where Kevon had to go one-on-one with this guy. The guy got the best of him. Kevon was upset. He looked dead at me and said, Put me back in there and lets do it again. We knew then that he had the mentality that it takes.

When Sims was trying to convince Seymour to attend Muir High instead of Pasadena High, he made a prediction. He told Seymour that if he listened to coaching and did what he was supposed to do, hed be a high school All-American and attend any college he wanted. Both were proven true. Seymour was on the fast track to the NFL, starting at cornerback in both his sophomore and junior seasons at USC. He had enough of a profile where he considered leaving one year of eligibility on the table and going to the NFL.

A year later, Seymour spent his senior season wondering if he had made a catastrophic choice. His playing time dipped under Clay Helton, one of four head coaches he had in as many years at USC. A few people familiar with the situation said it wasnt a result of anything Seymour did wrong. It was more a matter of new coaches wanting to lean more on players they recruited. Seymour was devastated but never pointed any fingers, at least not publicly. Even now, seven years later, he declines to play the blame game beyond saying that he was treated unfairly.

It would have been age appropriate for him to say how he feels, but when it comes to the football process, sometimes you have to bite the bullet, and sometimes you dont learn that, said Pearson, a defensive assistant at USC for much of Seymours time at the school. The best thing he learned out of there was that life is not fair. The only fair that we know out here is the Pomona Fair and the Orange County Fair.

Seymour still got an invitation to the NFL scouting combine, where he ran a 4.39 40-yard dash time despite not really training for it. Seymour sustained a torn ligament in his ankle in his final college season. He got a medical boot off his foot just days before arriving in Indianapolis for the annual prospect showcase, spread some Tiger Balm on his foot and then toed the line. It was also at the combines medical checkups where Seymour learned that he had been playing for years while mostly blind in one eye. Lasik surgery ultimately fixed that problem.

But the week was mostly spent answering questions from curious NFL scouts, executives and assistant coaches. They, too, wanted to know why a freshman contributor and a sophomore and junior-year starter once considered a likely early-to-mid-round pick barely could get on the field as a senior.

One NFL assistant told Seymour that he heard he had a problem getting along with coaches. Seymour respectfully dismissed that as false. A coach from another team came right out and told Seymour that the perception of him is that hes soft. That one bothered Seymour. Had the coach done any homework on me? Seymour wondered. Did he know where I was from?

The Buffalo Bills drafted Seymour with a sixth-round pick in 2016. There would be Pasadena-area players to follow in his footsteps in the ensuing years. Wide receiver Steven Mitchell earned a roster spot with the Houston Texans as an undrafted free agent in 2018. David Long Jr. was a third-round pick of the Los Angeles Rams in 2019 and was on their Super Bowl team last season. Darnay Holmes was selected by the New York Giants as a fourth-round pick in 2020. Myles Bryant made the New England Patriots as an undrafted free agent that same year.

Those are all guys that looked up to Kevon, Sims said. He was the first guy to make it after a long layoff (for the city).

Seymour has the scars to prove it. There are ones on each shoulder after he had both of his labrums repaired within a month of one another in 2018. He spent that entire season on the Carolina Panthers injured reserve list. Theres another scar on his left wrist, thanks to surgery on his scapholunate ligament. That injury, plus a torn hamstring, spurred his Panthers release in 2019 and forced Seymour into making a choice.

He wasnt healthy enough to pass a physical, so no team was going to sign him in 2019. He had a wife and two young children he needed to support and a psyche that was more fragile than ever before.

I stayed in Carolina and reality started to hit. I was like, Is this it for me? Seymour said. I knew I was going to have to work.

Seymour developed a love of cars in college and he spent a lot of time doting on his Dodge SRT Hellcat. He was already a customer of the Wheel & Tire Exchange in Charlotte and had gotten to know several of the employees there through their relationships with other Panthers. Having a rehabbing NFL player as an employee seemed like an odd dynamic, but it felt very natural to those involved.

Greg Mitchell, an employee at the Wheel & Tire Exchange for the past five years, would walk around with Seymour and meet customers, but then lay back as Seymour carried the conversation. He was certainly still in his element.

It was like a really good friend coming to work with us, said Greg Mitchell. I knew that there were things going on. We didnt get into everything, but hed fill me in on some things. He kept such a good, positive attitude about everything. He was like, I know its going to happen. I know Im going to get back to playing in the league.

Seymour would get in a real early workout at a local Planet Fitness, drop his kids off at school, go to work at the tire shop, pick his kids back up and then work out again in the evening. Having a job was almost therapeutic.

I was getting my mind right, he said. It was so tough for me mentally. I found myself in a low state of mind, not playing and being on the field. I had to get away. I couldnt break down in front of my wife and kids, so Id go there and it uplifted me. The people there gave me so much support.

Seymour and Greg Mitchell still talk regularly, and Seymour will go on FaceTime so he can say hello to his other friends at the tire shop. Other than Seymour, his friends and family members, nobody celebrated his return to the NFL in December 2020 with the Philadelphia Eagles more than the employees at the Wheel & Tire Exchange.

He spent about eight months in the Eagles organization before he was released and again looking for a new NFL home. Siam was hearing from a few teams interested in Seymour, but something just felt right about a workout he had with the Ravens, so much so that he called his wife as soon as it was over and told her that it was where he wanted to be.

It made an impression on Seymour that the Ravens offered to move back his 7 a.m. workout, because he hadnt gotten into town until around midnight the night before after visiting with the Chicago Bears the previous day. Seymour declined. He felt ready. While other squads have instructed him to return the team-issued clothes after a workout, a Ravens official told Seymour to keep theirs. That was before they offered him a practice squad contract.

Seymour played in nine games with the Ravens last season, starting two in what was an injury-depleted secondary. He himself had quadriceps and hamstring injuries. He said it was suggested to him at one point that he should consider shutting it down. Seymour refused. He had already spent too much time off the field in recent months.

He re-signed with the Ravens in January and now, he finds himself with another challenge: trying to crack the 53-man roster at one of the teams deepest positions. Seymour has had a solid camp, by and large, giving up some big gains, but making his share of plays, too.

The first thing that sticks out with him is just his attitude every day, Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald said. Hes a guy that attacks everything.

After a recent training camp practice, Seymour stood outside the weight room and under the hot sun for more than an hour as he retraced his journey to get to this point. He talked with pride about the family hes building with his wife, Tori, and being the supportive father that he never had. The couple, which has been together for more than a decade, has four kids, the oldest 5 years old and the youngest just 8 months.

He talked almost matter-of-factly about things no young boy should have to witness and experience. He choked up when he discussed the influence his mother and people like Pearson have had on his life. He then spoke solemnly about all the personal loss hes endured. His father died in 2020, a few years after he expressed an interest in having a relationship with Seymour, only to not follow through. His sisters sudden death in May is still on Seymours mind, as is the declining health of his grandmother.

Its been one thing after another, he said.

Yet, when the conversation finally ended and Seymour ducked inside the team facility, a smile still stretched across his face.

I used to be so angry, but thankful, too, he said. If I could do this all over again, I wouldnt want it any other way. It shaped me into who I am today. I look at things way differently.

(Top photo: AP / Terrance Williams)

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Ravens cornerback Kevon Seymour is still able to smile through the pain - The Athletic

Saul Basss poster for 1966s Seconds.Source: picryl.com

Reincarnation always seemed worse than Hell to me. Never mind that I feel pretty bound up in this-here body and these-here experiences, one ride on this train is enough. To invest all that love and hatred into one cast of characters, forget everything, and do it all again as a volenot for me. Hell, for all its problems, is at least a place you can put down roots. Its torture, yes, and eternal darkness, but its got the benefit of familiarity. And Heavenhoo boy Heavenhow could you get bored of eternity there? Sure, its a question-begging concept, but what isnt? As Homer Simpsons tells us while banging himself in the head with a bat, wow, up here that feels good! Give me Catholic Heaven any day.

John Frankenheimers Seconds (1966) is an experiment in starting over, in reincarnation with the mind in-tact (a fact made obvious by its German title, Der man, der zweimal lebte, The Man Who Lived Twice). On paper, its classic 60s sci-fi fare, a Twilight Zone episode stretched out to 107 minutes and blessed with the disturbing cinematography of James Wong Howe. Its the tale of a white-headed, gray-flannel suited executive, Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph), who abandons his wife and distant daughter to be reborn as Rock Hudson (or, in the movies terms, Antiochus Tony Wilson). Seconds has all the mainstays of mid-century paranoiathe corrupt corporation, evil psychiatrists, spies disguised as friends, generational conflict, and the exhaustion of the happiness offered by the post-war truce between capital and labor. We see shots of a real rhinoplasty operation, witness horribly distorted montages of surgeons, mutilated faces, and glaring medical lights. It all makes sense as a collective American fever dream. Just on these terms, Frankenheimer has made a masterpiece.

But I propose to do one betterto look at Seconds on the other side of the Great American Century. It did poorly in the 60s and it would do poorly today, in large part because the problems it scrutinizes have only become worse. That, and much weirder. Take the notion of reinvention the film plays with. Arthur becomes younger and hotter. He leaves behind his frigid familial relationships on the East Coast for West Coast orgies and nude grape stomping. He is become hippy, fulfiller of dreams. What ruins this shift for him is the public recollection of who he is. The company that subsidized his surgery doesnt like that. But hes defiant; he realizes hes both Arthur and Tony (a man who is recently deceased and whose identity he has essentially stolen, in a horrific presage of the British Undercover Cops and Sex Scandal). And so, he visits his wife and speaks to her as if he were but a friend of Arthurs who wanted to pick up some of his art. His wife, however, doesnt have them anymore and speaks of Arthur as a distant, dissatisfied man. There is nothing but dejection for our protagonist, who is not who he is and feels seen and suffocated in who he was.

Today we can reinvent way more rapidly. Yes, there is ubiquitous plastic surgery. Yes, you can try on a thousand hats as a thousand different accounts. But above all, we are reinvented by attention, by clout. The hyper-competitive marketplace of faces, songs, and styles means an incessant drive to be baptized in the gamer girl bathwater of fame. We all wish to enter what Michael Judge calls the Eikonosphere. Here, Judge says, we willingly and enchantedly accept the parasite Fama, who, no doubt, plans to give every working man a brain slug. This is also an attempt to disappear, to be erased by the very glory that overtakes us, to become small under Gods microscopeor better yet, under the magnifying glass composed of humanitys collective and individuated eyes. Who among us isnt Arthur? Who among us would not be destroyed? Need I tell you how many of my wifes pre-school students want to be YouTubers?

Seconds also highlights sexual blackmail, which we all accept, know exists, and see in movies, yet seem to reject as any meaningful part of the dirty work of politics (Dennis Hastert anyone?). In its time and place, the movies depiction of Arthurs getting drugged and videotaped committing sexual violence might seem like a reflection on MKUltra or the general melting of Americas acid-washed brain. Today, it reeks of Jeffry Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Jean-Luc Brunel. In the movies world it is fundamental; it forms the fulcrum of Arthurs decision (or lack thereof) to go through with his transformation. Hows he going to say no when such a tape exists? Equally key, however, it is never brought up again. Sexual blackmail is the invisible knot holding the whole operation together, keeping the Company going and forcing our protagonist under the knife. Qoheleth was right: aint nothing new under the sun.

Whats left but that eternal human desire, immortality? True enough Arthur is not seeking eternal life. But is constant reinvention not just reincarnation? Sure, the Companys clients need to suppress their old selves, but in classic metempsychosis, the old you determines a lot about the new one. This is the fantasy of escape, most ably incarnated today by the ultra-rich, who imagine transferring their consciousnesses to new (perhaps mechanized) bodies. In Seconds, the idea is that the body changes and with it the mind. In our world (as usual), we get the worst all around: the body is often adapted to suit Fama, but not without the ultimate focus on the mind. A rich man must be a smart man, and a smart man must be smart enough to save his consciousness from degradation and eventual demise. As we learn in the film, there is no such escape; you can be damned to be yourself only in the negative sense. To imagine liberation while remaining entirely your own is to imagine slow insanity and eventual subjugation. We run because we can dream up no decent answers to the actual problems facing us. This too is Arthurs cowardice.

Theres too much to say. Seconds is a phenomenal work of art with the technical essentials to back-up, complement, and enhance its vision. Frankenheimer made something special here, something that stands out even now, not as a reflection of the 60s and its angsts (though it is that), but as a remarkably contemporary investigation of our societys basest desires and ways of doing business. A rolling stone picks up moss; it picks up crap as well.

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Wake Me Up When I'm Rock Hudson, then Kill Me - Patheos

John McTiernan followed 1987's "Predator" with arguably the greatest action movie ever made in 1988. In two films in as many years, he made himself immortal. After production wrapped, Ronald Reagan made an office out of one of the "Die Hard" locations. There were still spent shell casings all over the floor, according to "Die Hard: An Oral History" (via Thrillest). An editor recalled, "We neglected to tell the FBI that this was going on. They thought it looked like a terrorist attack." That's what kind of movie this is as New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) visits his wife during a corporate Christmas party in a Los Angeles skyscraper. The reunion is interrupted when terrorists, led by the iconic Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), take over the building. Only McClane can stop them.

Creating a vulnerable action hero seems obvious today, but Hollywood in 1988 was all about Arnold Schwarzenegger's robot assassin in "Terminator" and the inhuman body count of Sylvester Stallone's super soldier "Rambo." Willis' far less muscled McClane and his bare feet full of broken glass felt like fresh takes. "Our basic task was to show what Bruce's character was about," McTiernan explained. "You had to let the audience in on it. He doesn't like himself. He is in pain, basically. You let the audience see all those things behind the smart-ass face. You let the audience see the hurt. Being a smart-ass turns into an act of courage instead of just being an asshole."

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All 11 John McTiernan Movies Ranked Worst To Best - /Film

As the title of one book famously proclaimed, everybody poops. That truism really is remarkable to think about. There is one experience shared by every person on Earth, and most people would rather dismiss or ignore it. That is unfair. A few trips to the bathroom were literal pit stops in history. The following list is ten of the most consequential things to ever happen on the toilet. It does not take much to redirect the flow of history. Sometimes, all it needs is a flush

Related: Top 10 Curious Facts Involving Ancient Poop

Even more than most presidents, Lyndon B. Johnson has a fairly mixed legacy. He is responsible for both groundbreaking domestic achievements like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and foreign fiascos like escalating the Vietnam War. Whether Johnson reshaped American society for better or worse is up to debate, but he almost did not do anything at all.

On June 9, 1942, Johnson was a just young sailor in the Naval reserve deployed on a bombing mission. He was initially assigned to fly on the B26 Marauder, the Wabash Cannonball. Moments before takeoff, Johnson departed the plane to visit the toilet. When he came back, Lieutenant Colonel Francis R. Stevens had taken his seat instead. Johnson was forced to board the next aircraft in line, another B26, the Heckling Hare.

It was a lucky break. The Heckling Hare saw limited combat and, shortly after, abandoned its mission. The Wabash Cannonball was not as lucky. It was shot down by Japanese forces, killing everyone on board. Johnsons full bladder saved his life.[1]

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart foresaw a new world. One of the first visionaries of the digital future, Engelbart imagined much of what would become the basics of modern computing, everything from graphic apps and video conferencing to word processing and linking files. However, he had help envisioning these new realitiesLSD.

Like many fellow Californians of the time, Engelbart was an enthusiastic advocate for the mind-expanding benefits of LSD. As the head of the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute, he and his team took acid for inspiration. Engelbart was initially doubtful that any contraption he conceived while on the drug would have any use once he was no longer under the influence.

He was finally convinced of the drugs possibilities when he came up with the tinkle toy, a miniature water wheel installed to the side of a toilet that would spin when peed on. It could be a fun and practical tool to help potty train young children. Now assured of LSDs potential, he regularly took the drug while working. In those sessions, he conceived much of what would become the computer, even if he did not actually invent it. He did make one tangible breakthrough, though, a small strange rounded controller on the end of a wire that could move items on the screen. He called it a mouse.[2]

Millions of lives have been shaped by pure luck. In 1899, Dr. Oskar Minkowski accidentally bumped into his colleague, Josef von Mering, in the university library. The conversation naturally turned to that classic icebreaker, pancreases. The two got into a friendly debate about if someone could theoretically survive with their pancreas removed. To find out, the two staged a little bet. Later that afternoon, Minkowski removed his dogs pancreas. The dog was perfectly healthy. Minkowski had won the bet and beat his friend. The experiment was over. That was until he noticed one curious side effect.

While cleaning the dogs kennel, Minkowski noticed an inordinate number of flies flocking to his dogs pee. While most people would have just dismissed that observation as flies being gross, Minkowski started investigating. He discovered that the urine was now full of sugar, a clear sign that the dog was diabetic. Because the dog had no signs of diabetes before its pancreas was removed, Minkowski hypothesized that the organ must have some role in metabolizing sugar.

It took a while, but other scientists eventually figured out how the pancreas secretes insulin. Because of Minkowskis medical breakthrough, diabetes went from a death sentence to a treatable disease. Some victories really are that sweet.[3]

The goal of all 17th-century alchemists was to discover the philosophers stone, an impossibly elusive elixir capable of turning base metals into gold and granting immortality. With powers like that, it is pretty understandable how someone would take extreme measures to find it. Even then, Henning Brand probably took things a bit too far.

Starting in 1669, Brand collected more than 1,500 gallons of urine from his neighbors and friends. He baked and boiled the urine until the residue was all that was left. The experiment followed a certain kind of perverse logic. Water, he presupposed, is the basis of life; therefore, the cure for a longer life would be found in water. If that water passed through a person, it would have even more of a mystical connection to life. Put that all together, and it is not that absurd to think the philosophers stone might be lying among kidney stones.

While he never found gold in his golden treasure, he did find something arguably more valuable. The final distilled product was a white powder that glowed in the dark. Named for the Latin for light-bearer, Brand dubbed his discovery phosphorus. Phosphorus is, of course, a bedrock of modern life. Industries from fertilizer to steel production rely on phosphorus to exist. So next time you go to the restroom, feel free to light a match, something only possible because Henning Brand did the same thing all those years before.[4]

By 1937, the tension between Japan and China had reached a breaking point. A series of escalating military maneuvers over the past decade pushed the two nations to the brink of conflict. Every time before, cooler heads prevailed, and soldiers retreated before things spiraled into all-out war. That was until the Marco Polo Bridge incident.

On July 7, 1937, Japanese troops gathered around the city of Wanping in a clear antagonistic display. During the exercise, a private of the Japanese Imperial Army, Shimura Kikujiro, broke ranks to relieve himself. Because there were no appropriate facilities nearby, he ducked into the woods. Once finished, he tried to rejoin his unit, but they had already left. Lost in the darkness, it took him a while to find his way back to base. He did not know it, but his bowel had started a movement.

In the meantime, Kikujiros absence caused the army to panic. Japanese officers dispatched troops to Wanping to find their missing soldier. When the Chinese refused to let the Japanese enter Wanping, a small Japanese infantry tried to breach the citys walls. They were successfully repelled. Forty-five minutes later, a larger group tried to siege again and fired the first shots of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

The Japanese had the excuse they had been looking for. The minor skirmish became the pretext for a full-scale invasion of China. The resulting conflict was the largest Asian war of the twentieth century. By the time of Japans surrender in September 1945, the war had claimed the lives of more than 33 million soldiers and civilians.[5]

King George II was not a particularly popular ruler, but he got things done. His reign from 1727 to 1760 was marked by firm leadership in foreign policy and military appointments. On domestic issues, he acquiesced most power to Parliament. He was too busy gorging himself in his castle. As far as last meals go, its hard to beat hot chocolate.

On October 25, 1760, the King finished a nice cup of hot chocolate and retired to his chambers. Moments later, his body was discovered slumped over the toilet. He had so strained himself that he caused an aortic aneurysm. While the doctor on the scene could not save the king, he did help save many others. The doctors extensive notes on the Kings condition contained the first known description of an aortic dissection. With those findings, other doctors had the knowledge to diagnose a secret killer before it was too late. Today, thousands are saved from something that is silent but no longer deadly.

His death had another unintended consequence. Logically, King George II was succeeded by King George III, an infamous reign marked by moments of erratic behavior and insanity. To treat his condition, doctors tortured the king with a series of painful and unnecessary experiments. Burdened by personal problems, George III delegated much of his responsibilities to Parliament.

Without guidance from the King, Parliament enacted strict taxes on their colonies in North America. Perhaps a more present and invested leader would have asserted more control over Parliament or taken the leadership to quell the insurrection forces in the American colonies before it escalated into a war. It is impossible to know how George II would have handled the crisis, but the distracted King George III failed to respond as the gears of revolution were set in motion.[6]

During World War I, the brilliant mathematician and physicist William Lawrence Bragg was stationed in France. He thought he could better serve the war effort with his intelligence rather than fighting. As great as his brain was, his most important inspiration came from a different place.

In 1915, Bragg visited an outhouse in a field. The room was completely closed off from the outside world, except for a pipe that ran under the toilet. While Bragg was using the toilet, a British six-inch gun 1,000 feet (304 meters) away fired a round. The energy traveled through the air until it shot up the pipe. A puff of energy lifted Braggs bare bottom off the seat. Surprised that something was coming up from the drain instead, Bragg tried to track down the source of the energy.

He soon realized that the pressure was caused by the guns low-frequency infrasound. If these unique frequencies could be traced back to their source, Bragg could locate any enemy artillery. He created a small empty wooden ammunition box with a thin platinum wire that could detect infrasound. With this device, the Allies could pinpoint enemy weapons within 150 feet (45 meters). The new technology was a crucial development that helped turn the tide of the war, securing victory four years later.[7]

On February 12, 1946, 26-year-old African American veteran Sergeant Isaac Woodard returned to the U.S. from fighting abroad in World War II. He boarded a Greyhound bus toward his home in Winnsboro, South Carolina. Along the route, he asked the bus driver if he could pull into a rest stop. Furious over having to make the stop, the bus driver called the police on Woodward. The police forcibly removed Woodard from the bus. In custody, they beat him unconscious and gouged out his eyes. Denied medical care for three days, Woodard was left permanently blind.

Such brazen police brutality was a political awakening for President Harry S. Truman. Spurred by Woodards blinding, Truman created a presidential commission on civil rights. Per its recommendation, he issued Executive Order 9981, the order that formally desegregated the U.S. military in 1948.

Another federal official was similarly moved by the injustice against Woodard. Judge Julius Waring, the judge presiding over the case against the police officers, was outraged when they were acquitted of all charges. He dedicated the rest of his life as a fierce advocate for civil rights. His judicial decisions played a key role in dismantling school segregation. His dissent in Briggs v. Elliott was the first federal case to argue that segregation violated the fourteenth amendment.

When the NAACPs defense lawyerand future U.S. Supreme Court JusticeThurgood Marshall lost the case, Waring was the one who encouraged him to appeal the decision. That appeal ultimately culminated in the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. Segregation was officially unconstitutional.[8]

In 1946, 13-year-old Charlie Wilson could not get control of his dog. The little mutt kept straying into his neighbors flower bed. Eventually, the neighbor had enough. Because the dog could not stop peeing, he would have to stop breathing. The neighbor buried some shards of glass into the dogs food bowl. Wilson vowed to avenge his dogs death. His first method of payback, burning down the flowers, would only sting for a little bit. So he had to stick it to him where it would really hurt.

The neighbor was a Texas councilman named Charles Hazard, who was up for reelection. Wilson organized a campaign to oust the dog-murderer. He went door-to-door, telling people about what happened to his dog and asking them to vote against Hazard. In total, he swayed 95 voters or nearly 25% of the total electorate. As a result, Hazard lost his reelection bid by a mere 16 votes. Gloating at Hazards loss, Wilson went to his house and told him he shouldnt poison any more dogs.

That personal victory inspired Wilson to spend his life in politics. He eventually climbed all the way up to become a Congressional Representative. In that role, he spearheaded Americas covert operations in the Soviet-Afghan War. He funneled funds and training for the Afghan Mujahedeen. While the Afghanistan forces helped America score a decisive victory in the short run, the sect soon broke off into splinter groups, including the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that victory soured. A new age of terrorism had begun.[9]

Unlike all the other entries on the list, this last one is not about any particular trip to the toilet. Instead, this one focuses on an uncoordinated series of millions of participants stretched over eons. The only thing that connects them is that they really needed to go. Although to be fair, there wasnt much else going on.

Most of the Earths history is nothing. For three billion years, simple primordial organisms littered the planet. They ate, pooped, and made more cells. That was it. Then, suddenly, there was life. During the Cambrian explosion, clumps of single-celled bacteria rapidly evolved into complex life with nervous systems, internal organs, and backbones. It is arguably the most important event to ever happen. Yet, no one can explain it.

The rapid divergence has baffled generations of scientists. There is no settled answer, but one theory proposed by Australian geoscientist Graham Logan has gained some acceptance. According to him, the incredible beauty of life exists from its most disgusting elements.

Before the Cambrian explosion, the oceans were full of carbon but void of oxygen. Any oxygen-photosynthesizing plankton produced was quickly offset by the slower sinking carbon. The chain was finally broken with the rise of multicellular organisms. When multicellular organisms ate the bacteria, they processed the waste into carbon-rich feces. As the carbon fell to the ocean floor, the oxygen levels rose. Oxygen threw the ecological gates open. Animals finally had a chance to grow and take form. So if you ever feel like your life is pretty crappy, take solace in knowing it has always been that way.[10]

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10 Bathroom Breaks That Changed History - Listverse

The Uncanny Counter

The drama is set in the fictional city of Jungjin, where a group of four demon-hunters called the Counters bear the arduous task of searching for and banishing evil spirits (akgwi) that escape from the afterlife to gain immortality. These evil spirits possess local human hosts who have committed murder or have a strong desire to murder, encourage their host's desire to kill, and consumes the spirit of the victim. The Counters were once under coma when a partner spirit from Yung, the boundary between the afterlife and the world of the living, possessed them and gave them perfectly healthy bodies and consciousness along with superhuman strength and supernatural abilities. Four of the CountersGa Mo Tak (Yoo Jun ang), Do Ha Na (Kim Sejeong), Choo Mae Ok (Yeom Hye Ran) and So Mun (Jo Byung Gyu) pose as workers in Eonni's Noodles, a noodle restaurant which serves as their hideout.

Healer

Ji Chang Wook, Park Min Young and Yoo Ji Tae starrer drama follows a decades-old incident involving a group of five friends who ran an illegal pro-democracy broadcasting station during the Fifth Republic in South Korea brings together three different peoplean illegal night courier with the codename Healer (Ji Chang Wook) who possesses top-notch fighting skills, a reporter from a second-rate tabloid news website (Park Min Young), and a famous journalist at a major broadcast station (Yoo Ji Tae).

My Name

Following her father's murder, a revenge-driven woman puts her trust in a powerful crime boss and enters the police force under his direction. The drama deals with various aspects of revenge and how it can destroy a person when it becomes the sole thing that keeps them going. Yoon Ji Woo (Han So Hee) becomes a different person after she sees her father die in her arms and the actor did an amazing job at making the audience invest in Yoon Ji Woo.

Descendants of the Sun

Shi Jin (Song Joong Ki) is the captain of the special forces. He catches a motorcycle thief with Sergeant Major Dae Young (Jin Goo). The thief is injured during his capture and is sent to the hospital. Dae Young realizes his cellphone was stolen by the thief and goes to the hospital to retrieve his cellphone. In the emergency room, Shi Jin meets Dr. Mo Yeon (Song Hye Kyo) for the first time. He falls in love with her immediately. Mo Yeon mistakenly assumes Shi-Jin is part of a thief's criminal gang. He proves to her that he is a soldier with the help of army doctor Myeong Joo (Kim Ji Won). Shi Jin and Mo Yeon begin to date, but due to their jobs their dates don't go well. Due to an incident, she was assigned to lead a medical team in Uruk. There, Shi Jin and Mo Yeon meet again.

K2

Kim Je Ha (Ji Chang Wook) is a former mercenary soldier for the PMC Blackstone. While in Iraq, he gets framed for the murder of his lover Raniya, a civilian. As a result, he runs away and becomes a fugitive. He returns to South Korea and by chance is offered work as a bodyguard by Choi Yoo Jin, the owner of JSS Security Company and wife of presidential candidate Jang Se Joon. He accepts the job in exchange for resources that he needs to get his revenge on another presidential candidate, Park Kwang Soo, who previously ordered Raniya's killing. Je Ha is assigned to guard Go Anna (YoonA), the hidden daughter of Jang Se Joon whose life is always threatened because of Yoo Jin, her stepmother. Anna, who has been a recluse and lonely all her life, starts relying on Je Ha, who shows concern for her and protects her at all costs. They slowly fall in love, causing Je Ha to be torn between having to work with his boss, Yoo Jin, to enable him to take revenge on Park Kwan Soo and protecting his newfound love, Anna, against the wishes of Yoo Jin.

D.P.

Set in 2014, D.P. tells the story of a team of Korean military police with their mission to catch deserters. The series magnifies the undesirable nature of the military, especially within a South Korean context. The widespread bullying and hazing as well as the mindset for the survival of the fittest are rife, with those presumed the weakest thrown to the bottom of the pile and served horrifying experiences at the hands of their superiors and compatriots. Private Ahn Joon Ho and Corporal Han Ho Yul both team up to find the deserters, and end up in an adventurous journey.

ALSO READ: BLACKPINKs Jennie and BTS Vs new photo allegedly taken at his house fuels dating rumors between K-pop stars

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Which drama have you added to the list? Let us know in the comments below.

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Katalogue: 6 blockbuster action K-Dramas to add to your list feat. The Uncanny Counter, Healer and more - PINKVILLA

By Nehru Odeh

The child is father of the man; and I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety William Wordsworth

The greatness of a literary work lies in the writers ability to make his individual experience a collective one; in his ability to make the reader relate not only to his work but also be engaged by it and be immersed in that aesthetic experience. And this is what Ogaga Ifowodo, poet, lawyer and activist, has succeeded in doing with his latest collection, Augustas Poodle. Ifowodo has not only made us part of his childhood experience but he has also made us own it.

Own it? Sure. Though the poet once said in an interview that Augustaspoodle is a recollection of childhood, a journey into the past to thread into a narrative spool those memories that have managed to survive the fog of forgetfulness, to re-experience the sense of awe, wonder and elation which the child discovers and enacts his being in the world, it is more than that. It is more than just a mere recollection of childhood in the sense that it is not just his childhood but ours as well. It is not just his childhood but that of his people, the people of the Niger Delta.

Singing about his experiences growing up, the poet also reminds us about the collective experience of everyone who ever tasted childhood like the succulent coloured fruits of his natal days (and who didnt by the way?), that childhood innocence, vulnerability and sense of wonder about a world peopled by beings (both human and supernatural), rivers, flora and fauna, a world peopled by storied beings and things beyond our comprehension at the time.

A child is always a child, no matter where the placenta was planted or where it (the child) is growing up. It is that universalist sense, that strange familiarity that feels like dj vu, that Ifowodo has demonstrated and conveyed with Augustas Poodle. In the writers world, everything, whether animate or inanimate, tangible or intangible, comes alive; and the imageries are so palpable and metaphors so strong that the reader cannot but feel them and be drawn to them.

What I am doing in Augustas poodle is to return to childhood, my earliest childhood up to the age of 12, to raise the submerged sensations of that past, thereby commemorating flora and fauna, places and phases, rites and rituals to renew allegiance to it, Ifowodo once said in an interview.

Asked at the NNLG/ CORA Book Party in Lagos what inspired him to write the book, the poet spoke about how he experienced displacement at such a tender age when life happened to him. His father died when he was a year old and was forced to relocate with his mother. And of course, that is the reason he is his mother, Augustas poodle: My aim here has no grander manifesto than to recapture some memories, a rather usual, relatively speaking, childhood. Like I said, I was born in one place and open my eyes to the sun in another. My father died when I was a year old. So my mother left my fathers hometown to my mothers hometown, which is where I grew up.

And sharing my time between the village and the city, it made me see life in a different way. And because as post-colonial, as people who had to live under colonialism and imperialism and its ideology of denying the colonized place, history, identity and culture I felt it as a mission to by recapturing those experience of childhood thereby commemorating and representing, thereby affirming identity and place. Of course, in every coming and going, in every displacement, there is always a return to ones village. Just as T.S Eliot said, a mans destination is his own village.

A very important feature of the book, which must not be ignored and which makes it stand out, is that it has satisfied the reader both in terms of form and meaning. As form, the 55 cantos in the collection, divided into three movements, are related and each of them represents a year in the life of the poet. The poet himself confirms this in the prologue of the book. And I have rendered it in fifty-five cantos, for this is a song of myself as composed by the many selves of a five-and- a-half decade existence, Ifowodo said.

As meaning, it is a recollection of not just the poets childhood, but also anyones that sense of awe and wonder, and as the poet himself puts it, the surprise and elation of becoming conscious of ones existence as an autonomous being.

Still, one of the writers major strength is his uncanny ability to take us into a world of wonder as experienced by a child. For instance, the writer gives the reader a foretaste of the magic experience, that sheer delight of waking up to something memorable, in the opening canto of the 55 cantos that make up the collection. I wakened to the soft-green-filtered light / of my second residence on earth, some place / unknown to the wider world; the orange trees / had ripened to that yellow green/ of enchanting juice pressed from the pulp/ by both hands of a child

In the 9th cantos, the writer makes the reader experience this sense of wonder, even against the backdrop of the Nigerian civil war. The poet sings: I saw a soldier and a motor-car / for the first time in front of Ugbos compound; / One of Ezes sons had joined the army / (no surprise, the forebears name means courage) ; he came in a grim and grey Land Rover.

And if you delve deeper you would recognise the fact that while singing about his childhood experiences, the poet also sings about the sight and sound of the Niger Delta, where the poet comes from. By singing and telling the stories of the Isoko people, the poet also sings of the sight and sound of Niger Delta, an area rich with flora and fauna, folklore and magic, mythical beings and legendary warriors, rites and rituals; thereby affirming identity and place.

The poets ability to tell his story so vividly is worthy of note. Here we are made to feel the beats of the Isoko people in the Niger Delta, as they interact with one another. We are made to experience mythical beings and their environment (mud houses, farmlands, creeks and freshwater fishing ponds), and legendary characters like Pa Ukuevo, who lived the bounty of his name; Pa Edhemuno, who was slight of build, steely in mind; and Oneroha, who swelled with the strength of seven warriors.

A significant thing about Augustas Poodle is that, apart from its aesthetics, the reader is taken on a journey into a world that is strangely familiar but no longer present, the idyllic world we all seem to have lost, as the author tells the story of his lifes journey in three parts: 1. First Residence, which was the second. 11. Second residence, which was the first and 11. Ramdom Recollections. His kind of pastoral poetry reminds one of Thomas Grays Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and William Wordsworths Ode: Intimations of Immortality (from recollections of Early Childhood.

The power of Augustas Poodle, therefore, lies not only in the poet experiencing a world long gone but in his bringing back that world through remembering and memory, remembering not just his childhood but also that of us all. And as Ifowodo said, The idea is that whatever survives forgetfulness, that does not resist recall, is something worth recounting. And the hope is to commemorate the rites and rituals, the faces and places and the flora and fauna that shaped the poets earliest consciousness. For example, the poet sings of Emete-ame and medicine men and snake charmers in the 12th and 17th cantos.

Emete-ame. Watermaidens who for their beauty / or divine covetousness are chosen devotees / of the water goddess. For a boy yet to crack / the mysteries of water and float in it; their processions to Eterobo, those lucky / days, were solemn rites that taught me, / perhaps too early, the profaning aura, of altars.

Ovunuvboye. Everyone comes of a lineage; / his, of medicine men and snake charmers / or so it had to be: such frightful powers / come handed down from times lost in mists / beyond memory.

The sheer lyrical power of Ifowodos poetry is well represented in the 18th acantos, a poem about his mother, Augusta, after whom the poetry collection is entitled. If Im partial to the women, if I love with only Augusta / by my side she whose fingers softly their morning scent and evening chatter / after sun-sweated labours or hard bargains ; for salt or fish more than the fragrances of France or rise gardens. Know that I saw / the world for the first time with only Augusta / by my side she whose fingers softly / opened my eyes to sunlight and Poetry was my refuge / before I knew of something called poetic justice.

Ifowodo has once again demonstrated in Augustas Poodle, the lyricism of his poetry, his mastery of metaphors, lines that dance as well as imageries that bop up and down in a rhythmic manner. The book is indeed a sheer delight. And since he has succeeded in making us know what it is to be and feel like a child and to be displaced due to no fault of ours and still go back to ones origin to affirm identity and place, I recommend this book to everyone who loves good poetry and wants to be engaged by it.

Nehru Odeh, journalist and writer, is the author of The Patience of an Embattled Storyteller.

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Displacement and collective memory in Ifowodos Augustas Poodle - P.M. News

The phenomenon of actors playing funhouse-mirror versions of themselves has been turbocharged over the past 30 years from Being John Malkovich to This is the End, via TV comedies such as The Larry Sanders Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Trip. Johnny-come-latelys, the lot of them: the practice goes back at least as far as 1964, with Billy Wilders glorious Kiss Me, Stupid, which starred Dean Martin (born Dino Crocetti) as a womanising crooner named Dino.

Now its the turn of Antonio Banderas to make merry with his persona. In Official Competition, a sharp-clawed comedy from the Argentine film-making duo Gastn Duprat and Mariano Cohn, he is Flix Rivero, a movie star with a lucrative US career. When he is cast in a prestigious literary adaptation opposite the highfalutin Ivn Torres (Oscar Martnez), commerce meets art. Ivn is all about rehearsal and immersion; Flix, who reaches for the menthol stick when tears are required, wonders why they cant just get on with it.

The director who has brought them together to play warring siblings, and to exploit their off-screen tension, is Lola Cuevas (Penlope Cruz), the nutty maverick auteur behind The Inverted Rain (a perfect spoof arthouse title). With a wicked glint in her eye, Lola forces them to rehearse with a giant boulder suspended above them on a crane (Use it, use it!), and makes Ivn go over the same piece of dialogue repeatedly until he invests it with the necessary layers of conflicting emotion. The line is: Good evening.

[See also: Meghan Markles Archetypes podcast review]

Ivn has nothing but disdain for actors who defect to Hollywood. I dont want to be the Latino who puts a little bit of colour into entertainment for those numbskulls! he huffs. Hearing this, we cant help but scroll through Banderass English-language credits the Zorro films, the Shrek series and its Puss in Boots spin-offs and marvel at what a good sport he is.

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There is also a scene in which Flix parades armfuls of awards, some of which (Goyas, Golden Globes) Banderas really has won or been nominated for. Ivn claims not to care about such trifles, though privately he rehearses a speech, brandishing a kettle in place of a trophy, in which he scorns the idea of artistic competition. (He even makes an adorable little cheering sound at the end, to suggest an off-screen audience awestruck by his integrity.) Like Banderas, Martnez is spoofing his public image: he is a highly regarded theatre actor in his native Argentina and not short of silverware himself. (His last film with Duprat and Cohn, The Distinguished Gentleman, won him the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival.)

The initial joke of Official Competition is that this whole film-making endeavour has been conceived simply to burnish the reputation of a pharmaceuticals billionaire, Humberto Surez (Jos Luis Gmez), who cant decide whether to build a bridge to ensure his immortality or finance a movie. The eventual and far superior gag is that Lolas apparently cuckoo methods start to bear fruit: both men become more limber under her tutelage. The visual humour as she puts them through their paces is heightened by the austere setting of the Surez foundation. Its pristine, soulless spaces (glass-walled rooms, stone forecourts cleanly delineated by knife-like shadows) suggest both opulence and spiritual emptiness.

Reality makes itself felt only fleetingly: once in a brief shot of a homeless person outside a burger bar, and again in the reflection of a plane crossing the sky overhead, which recalls the plane mounted above Lolas bed in a nosediving position. Christ is crucified on it, arms spread out across its wings a gaudy pop-art homage to the statue of Christ the Redeemer dangling from a helicopter at the start of La Dolce Vita.

Official Competition appears at first to be a standard movie-business takedown la The Player, but it has far more faith in the art form than that. Among its tastiest pleasures is the chance to see Cruz and Banderas sparking together on screen at last; theyve both benefited extensively from the patronage of Pedro Almodvar, yet have coincided only briefly in two of his films, Im So Excited! and Pain and Glory. Now they can properly let their hair down, literally so in the case of Cruz, dragging on cheroots and tossing around her untamed copper torrent of Louis XIV curls.

Official Competition is in cinemas now

[See also: House of the Dragon: sex, violence and top notes of incest]

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Antonio Banderas and the art of self-parody - The New Statesman