#unit 11 devising performance work

[theactsoftheapostles]

"The Omers." From the Acts of the Apostles 7: 44-46.

Housing God became a big issue for the lost Israelites in the Desert of Paran. They were and still are homeless themselves but the concept of a House for God was still paramount. The instructions for building the Temple no matter where or when a Jewish person resides is detailed within the Torah. I have devised it is a floor plan for a kind of mandala, a map of how the Torah itself and its stochastic progression work. The variables are far too complicated to perform the model manually but here is the overview:

The Tabernacle, From Vayakhel:

8 All those who were skilled among the workers made the tabernacle with ten curtains of finely twisted linen and blue, purple and scarlet yarn, with cherubim woven into them by expert hands. 9 All the curtains were the same size—twenty-eight cubits long and four cubits wide.[b]10 They joined five of the curtains together and did the same with the other five. 11 Then they made loops of blue material along the edge of the end curtain in one set, and the same was done with the end curtain in the other set. 12 They also made fifty loops on one curtain and fifty loops on the end curtain of the other set, with the loops opposite each other. 13 Then they made fifty gold clasps and used them to fasten the two sets of curtains together so that the tabernacle was a unit.

14 They made curtains of goat hair for the tent over the tabernacle—eleven altogether. 15 All eleven curtains were the same size—thirty cubits long and four cubits wide.[c]16 They joined five of the curtains into one set and the other six into another set. 17 Then they made fifty loops along the edge of the end curtain in one set and also along the edge of the end curtain in the other set. 18 They made fifty bronze clasps to fasten the tent together as a unit. 19 Then they made for the tent a covering of ram skins dyed red, and over that a covering of the other durable leather.[d]

20 They made upright frames of acacia wood for the tabernacle. 21 Each frame was ten cubits long and a cubit and a half wide,[e]22 with two projections set parallel to each other. They made all the frames of the tabernacle in this way. 23 They made twenty frames for the south side of the tabernacle 24 and made forty silver bases to go under them—two bases for each frame, one under each projection. 25 For the other side, the north side of the tabernacle, they made twenty frames 26 and forty silver bases—two under each frame. 27 They made six frames for the far end, that is, the west end of the tabernacle, 28 and two frames were made for the corners of the tabernacle at the far end. 29 At these two corners the frames were double from the bottom all the way to the top and fitted into a single ring; both were made alike. 30 So there were eight frames and sixteen silver bases—two under each frame.

31 They also made crossbars of acacia wood: five for the frames on one side of the tabernacle, 32 five for those on the other side, and five for the frames on the west, at the far end of the tabernacle. 33 They made the center crossbar so that it extended from end to end at the middle of the frames. 34 They overlaid the frames with gold and made gold rings to hold the crossbars. They also overlaid the crossbars with gold.

35 They made the curtain of blue, purple and scarlet yarn and finely twisted linen, with cherubim woven into it by a skilled worker. 36 They made four posts of acacia wood for it and overlaid them with gold. They made gold hooks for them and cast their four silver bases. 

37 For the entrance to the tent they made a curtain of blue, purple and scarlet yarn and finely twisted linen—the work of an embroiderer; 38 and they made five posts with hooks for them. They overlaid the tops of the posts and their bands with gold and made their five bases of bronze. = The five books of the Torah, one for each finger, together they create the Hand of God called the Yod.

=

-> Each of these elements in the Temple and their materials symbolize the making of the Man of God. 

The Ten Purple Curtains woven with Cherubim- they protect the senses from idolatry. Each sense has two eyes and two ears and two nostrils, two mouths with two tongues in it. The Curtains produce the darkness that empties them of all that propaganda and bullshit from Egypt, prevents their re-entry. 

There are 10 of these, the same number as the nodes on the Kabbalah.

The “blue material and “gold clasps” unites the senses; are 50 precepts in the Torah called Omers that keep the person "coupled" after dipping twice (see below). The fifty Omers prevent a return to slavery after one is freed.

Blue and Gold, are the sky and the sun, and these represent the activities of God as He said let there be light and made a vault, remember God wanted to Vault things together and yet be able to discern them. 

Leather and Goat Hair Curtains: over the internal lattice work of the mind and its intuition comes skin and hair, and these are also supposed to be Vaulted together with a sentient self-concept. 

I THINK there are eleven of these because the 11th character in the Hebrew alphabet symbolizes life- there are ten faculties and One Supreme Intelligence = all living things, but man especially covered in skin and hair and the Crown. 

Bronze Loops signify the Law which binds living things together, similar to how the Gold of the Sun binds life to the sky. 

Twenty Frames/Forty Silver Bases etc. 

Pure silver, is the most powerful conductor of heat, electricity and most importantly to our discussions of Torah, has the most reflectivity. There are suggestions that the 40 silver bases are the same as 40 days or forty years, “time, not place” frames the House of God, 

But really, truly, the number adds up to the # of Parshiot, which is 54: 

20 frames N

20 frames S

then 6 west

And two frames were made for the corners of the tabernacle at the far end. 29 At these two corners the frames were double=

46+ 8 = 54.

Crossbars of Gold: I am pretty sure these are Rabbis, the learned ones. 

The Final Curtain: the work of the Embroiderer is either a Magus, or a King who unites the rest within the Temple aka the Kingdom. 

Luke explains the role these "field exercises" play in making of a Home For God and a resting place for the people of the Kingdom of Israel:

44 “Our ancestors had the Tent of God's presence with them in the desert. It had been made as God had told Moses to make it, according to the pattern that Moses had been shown.

45 Later on, our ancestors who received the tent from their fathers carried it with them when they went with Joshua and took over the land from the nations that God drove out as they advanced. And it stayed there until the time of David.

46 He won God's favor and asked God to allow him to provide a dwelling place for the God of Jacob.[b] 47 But it was Solomon who built him a house.

To understand all of this one needs to be literate with the Book of Joshua which explains the purposes of the Torah Circuit. I have created an English copy here. Joshua states after we Cross Over, have plans for the future that reflect one's adult mature Self, then one has what one needs to find a home. Home, according to Joshua is the experience of Shabbat without end. All one needs is a little love squeeze and one shall be ready.

Lukes explanation of how to hand Joshua's tent over to David, the second to the last tage "persistent beloved beauty" is followed by the conlusion, called Solomon, "A Basket of Peace." Each of these Jewish national identities are "driven out" by God as the population matures into its studies of Judaism, like a horse race drives horses to the finals at the Pan Pacific Grand Prix.

We simply can't have people dancing their own steps. This is why God drives.

The Values in Gematria are:

v. 44: Our ancestors had the tent of God. The Number is 6857, ס‎חןז‎, sahenz, "the miracle." Anyone who knows what God is and why He gave us this massive math problem to solve knows why His help is a miracle. We would still be living in shit without Him.

v. 45: Later on they carried it with them. The Number is 14841, יד‎ףם‎א, jodpam, "integrity."

"The verb תמם (tamam) means to be complete, finished, ethically sound or upright. Nouns תם (tom) and תמה (tumma) mean integrity or completeness. Adjective תם (tam) means complete or perfect, sound or wholesome, or morally integer (Job 1:8). Adjective תמים (tamim) means complete or whole, or sound or having integrity. Noun מתם (metom) means entirety or soundness."

v. 46: We won God's favor. The Number is 9994, ץי‎ץץד, tshi‎tzatzad, Tzachi Tzad, "win a step." The winning step is Step 9, yagaati, "We touched."

The final Gemara is ס‎חןזיד‎ףם‎א ץי‎ץץד, s‎chanizid‎ephem‎a tshi‎tzatzad, schenzidfam a tsitztsd,

"That which is alive dip them twice and win a step."

The entire purpose of the Temple and its incarnations and serial manifestations all pertain to the completion of the Passover Seder, during which we "dip twice."

Dipping twice is a bizarre way of saying one has to perform the Seder as written and again using one's intuition. It begins, "In wisdom and factiousness, connect wisdom with the mouth. Let us hope to show grace and intelligence."

Persons who profess the Seder and then "go out" according to God will experience good lives.

It concludes, "May God pay attention to this place, may we not waste time."

Dipping twice then is "you have to spend time not to waste it. "

[silent-film-love]

Asta Nielsen (11 September 1881 – 24 May 1972), she was one of the more transcendent stars of the 1910s. With her fame crossing from Europe to the United States, in a time where that was rarely done. She was one of the many who marked a dramatic turn in how acting occurred on film. In the early days of cinema, there was a large swath of actors who had made their living as theater performers. They carried their experiences onto the screen, leading to somewhat exaggerated performances at the worst of times. It wasn’t until stars such as Nielsen or Lillian Gish came along that a more reserved style of acting took over. By then, directors such as Maurice Tourneur or Albert Capellani called for naturalism in film, which Nielsen was able to provide.

Right from the very beginning, Nielsen made a name for herself. When she starred as Magda Vang in ‘The Abyss’ (1910), her minimalistic acting style garnered acclaim across Denmark. Although her acting in the film as a young, naïve person who is lured into a tragic life was exceptional, it is the eroticism from the Gaucho Dance scene that brought attention over seas. Before ‘The Abyss’ could be shown in theaters in the United States it needed to be heavily edited, something that would become a trend in her films over the years. 

After the immense popularity of, ‘The Abyss,’ Nielsen moved with her husband, screenwriter and director Urban Gad, to Germany where they founded the Internationale Film-Vertriebs-Gesellschaft with Paul Davidson. While in Germany, Nielsen’s popularity hit an all-time high, she was simply known as Die Asta (The Asta). In 1914, she had an annual fee of 85,000 marks. Paul Davidson is quoted as saying:

‘I had not been thinking about film production. But then I saw the first Asta Nielsen film. I realized that the age of short film was past. And above all I realized that this woman was the first artist in the medium of film. Asta Nielsen, I instantly felt could be a global success. It was international film sales that provided Union with eight Nielsen films per year. I built her a studio in Tempelhof, and set up a big production staff around her. This woman can carry it. Let the films cost whatever they cost. I used every available means – and devised many new ones – in order to bring the Asta Nielsen films to the world.’

In 1911 she was voted the world’s top female star by a Russian poll.

In 1921 she acted in what was at the time, a radical interpretation of ‘Hamlet,’ where she played the titular character, a woman disguising herself as a man. This was done because in Prologue, the Queen of Denmark gives birth to a girl and shortly thereafter hears her husband has been killed in battle. Knowing only a male heir can claim the throne, she announces that she gave birth to a boy, named Hamlet. The New York Times would go onto rank it as one of the top ten films of that year, citing her performance as one of the main reasons why.

Neilson worked the remainder of her career in Germany, finishing out her acting career in 1932 with ‘A Crown of Thorns,’ her lone Talkie. It wasn’t that she lacked the passion to continue acting, it was just by the time Talkies came along there came with them a whole new generation of actors who had perfected the style Neilson had helped innovate. She did return to the stage for a brief period. However, with the rise of the Nazi’s, there came an increased demand for propaganda, and one afternoon, Neilson was offered her own studio by Joseph Goebbles. When she declined, she was invited to tea with Hitler, who tried to show her how much sway she could have with the German people.

Neilson again declined. Understanding the situation she was in, she left for Denmark. While there she wrote articles about art, acting and began work on her autobiography. 

[nasa]

We Worked on Apollo

On July 20, 1969, the world watched as Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps on the Moon. It was a historic moment for the United States and for humanity. Until then, no human had ever walked on another world. To achieve this remarkable feat, we recruited the best and brightest scientists, engineers and mathematicians across the country. At the peak of our Apollo program, an estimated 400,000 Americans of diverse race and ethnicity worked to realize President John F. Kennedy’s vision of landing humans on the Moon and bringing them safely back to Earth. The men and women of our Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley supported the Apollo program in numerous ways – from devising the shape of the Apollo space capsule to performing tests on its thermal protection system and study of the Moon rocks and soils collected by the astronauts. In celebration of the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, here are portraits of some of the people who worked at Ames in the 1960s to help make the Apollo program a success.

“I knew Neil Armstrong. I had a young daughter and she took her first step on the day that Neil stepped foot on the Moon. Isn’t that something?”

Hank Cole did research on the design of the Saturn V rocket, which propelled humans to the Moon. An engineer, his work at Ames often took him to Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California, where he met Neil Armstrong and other pilots who tested experimental aircraft.

“I worked in a lab analyzing Apollo 11 lunar dust samples for microbes. We wore protective clothing from head to toe, taking extreme care not to contaminate the samples.”

Caye Johnson came to Ames in 1964. A biologist, she analyzed samples taken by Apollo astronauts from the Moon for signs of life. Although no life was found in these samples, the methodology paved the way for later work in astrobiology and the search for life on Mars.

“I investigated a system that could be used to provide guidance and control of the Saturn V rocket in the event of a failure during launch. It was very exciting and challenging work.”

Richard Kurkowski started work at Ames in 1955, when the center was still part of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, NASA’s predecessor. An engineer, he performed wind tunnel tests on aircraft prior to his work on the Apollo program.

“I was 24 and doing some of the first computer programming work on the Apollo heat shield.  When we landed on the Moon it was just surreal. I was very proud. I was in awe.”

Mike Green started at Ames in 1965 as a computer programmer. He supported aerospace engineers working on the development of the thermal protection system for the Apollo command module. The programs were executed on some of earliest large-scale computers available at that time.

“In 1963 there was alarm that the Apollo heat shield would not be able to protect the astronauts. We checked and found it would work as designed. Sure enough, the astronauts made it home safely!”

Gerhard Hahne played an important role in certifying that the Apollo spacecraft heat shield used to bring our astronauts home from the Moon would not fail. The Apollo command module was the first crewed spacecraft designed to enter the atmosphere of Earth at lunar-return velocity – approximately 24,000 mph, or more than 30 times faster than the speed of sound.

“I was struck by the beauty of the photo of Earth rising above the stark desert of the lunar surface. It made me realize how frail our planet is in the vastness of space.”

Jim Arnold arrived at Ames in 1962 and was hired to work on studying the aerothermodynamics of the Apollo spacecraft. He was amazed by the image captured by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve in 1968 of Earth rising from beneath the Moon’s horizon. The stunning picture would later become known as the iconic Earthrise photo.

“When the spacecraft returned to Earth safely and intact everyone was overjoyed. But I knew it wasn’t going to fail.”

Howard Goldstein came to Ames in 1967. An engineer, he tested materials used for the Apollo capsule heat shield, which protected the three-man crew against the blistering heat of reentry into Earth’s atmosphere on the return trip from the Moon. 

“I was in Houston waiting to study the first lunar samples. It was very exciting to be there when the astronauts walked from the mobile quarantine facility into the building.”

Richard Johnson developed a simple instrument to analyze the total organic carbon content of the soil samples collected by Apollo astronauts from the Moon’s surface. He and his wife Caye Johnson, who is also a scientist, were at our Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston when the Apollo 11 astronauts returned to Earth so they could examine the samples immediately upon their arrival.

“I tested extreme atmospheric entries for the Apollo heat shield. Teamwork and dedication produced success.”

William Borucki joined Ames in 1962. He collected data on the radiation environment of the Apollo heat shield in a facility used to simulate the reentry of the Apollo spacecraft into Earth’s atmosphere.  

Join us in celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing and hear about our future plans to go forward to the Moon and on to Mars by tuning in to a special two-hour live NASA Television broadcast at 1 pm ET on July 19. Watch the program at www.nasa.gov/live.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

[petulant-poet]

Tell me about ur ocs

Okay okay I have been WAITING for someone to ask me this. I hope you’re ready for an onslaught anon!

okay so since you didn’t ask for a specific set or certain oc, imma tell you about my main oc’s, the prime 16!

the prime 16 are a class of super-powered individuals living in a post-apocalypse, and under the gaze of the institute they live in. that is, until they run away and make lives of their own! Their main goal is to regroup in Boston, but many decide to take the scenic route around the broken country. Here they are, from oldest to youngest and in order of class:

Class Alpha: the first class to emerge, they are the strongest and most skilled with their abilities. They’ve been in the clutches of the institute longer than any of the others, and their need for escape lets them find freedom.

1: Marlon, the soul scholar. He is the oldest and was the one to devise the escape plan in the first place. He escaped and went straight to Boston, using his power of elemental construction to research into soul power, making him a useful asset to anyone. However, his need for knowledge doesn’t stop there. He goes searching and looking where no one has or should, and finds himself deep into something he never should have disturbed.

2: Charlie, the shadow spy. She is the second-in-command to Marlon, but prefers to stay out of the limelight. She finds herself in the holographic city of Chicago, and finds that the best places for her are in the dark corners of the streets. She uses her ability intuition to become a valuable spy and mercenary, able to take out or find anything she is hired to find. She finds though that the shadows she saw as her ally can hold more secrets than she could ever want to know.

3: Colby, the glam American. Colby is a lot more easygoing than most of the others in his class, and is able to mutate his genes however he likes. He uses this skill to join a rock band and become a roving sensation across the ruined country. He finds that not everyone just wants to listen though, and that there will be people who may just want to use him for themselves.

4: Lydia, the lucky bullet. She’s the most energetic of class Alpha and has herself a cartoon physiology, making life around her a living cartoon. She moves off to the west to become a famed cowboy, and is beloved by the people around her. However, all cartoons have their run, and Lydia is terrified of when she will run out of luck.

Class Beta: the second best, the afterthought, whatever you call them, class Beta has heard it before. They have powers that are less useful in battle and more with other people, or in life. They are constantly played as Alpha’s little siblings (which they are) to an insane degree, leading them to often resent or idolize the higher class.

5: Kit, the lonesome nomad. He was one of the kids headed for Boston, until a tragic accident landed him on the road. His only goal is to try and make it to Boston with his brothers and sisters in one piece, and he will betray and manipulate anyone with his empath abilities to get there. He is cold and untrusting, but soon finds that self-isolation is an even colder fate.

6: Georgina, the traveling psychic. She has the power of divination, and can see the future. But it’s not the most reliable very often, only showing flashes and bits of voices. However, she manages to use her powers to go from some local psychic of a small town to a traveling performer, telling peoples’ futures far and wide.

7: Samuel, the bloodthirsty knight. He is the second most resentful of class Alpha, mostly stemming from his own inferiority complex from his power, action link. Meaning he can’t be a powerhouse on his own. However, when he escapes, he is let out into a war zone. He works his way up and becomes a soldier, soon earning his title through the bloodshed at one of his most famed battles. But his winning streak can only last so long, and he’ll have to find that out the hard way.

8: Sarah, the starry oceanographer. She is the most resentful of class Alpha, and ironically the first to reach Boston. She becomes an acclaimed sailor with her navigational intuition, and with her help ships stop disappearing into the shifting oceans forever. However, she soon finds out the hard way that there are depths too deep for even her to reach.

Class Gamma: the less put-together class, they escaped at a younger age and have less of a kinship with each other. The only thing that unites them in the slightest is their common childhood trauma.

9: Jordan, the reaper’s seeker. He is young and impressionable, but his path was set for him the moment the accidentally used his power, intuitive aptitude, to find a hidden tumor in his adoptive mother. From there he is seen as an omen of evil to many, but is used as a tool to find the issues in many for others. He wants it to end so badly, but in what way is up to him.

10: Robin, the false herald. Robin finds herself sent to a religious academy for her safekeeping, but in the process uses her power of possession to accidentally call down their god through her. She is revered as a saint and is given special treatment, but due to her identity as the herald, she never gets to find an identity of her own, which is what she wants more than anything.

11: Archie, the human pandemic. Archie’s goal was to try and reunite with his family, but the moment he first contracted the first viruses, he knew that would be impossible. He has the power of invincibility, meaning that the viruses in his body won’t hurt him, but they will hurt anyone else who comes in contact with him. He now wanders the woods alone, hoping that someone will come along and help him. But in the meantime, he has friendship with the other things living on him.

12: Adrianna, the nether queen. After separation from the rest of the prime 16, she finds herself running from raiders and police, until she comes across the entrance to an underground realm full of people that soon forcibly crowns her as queen of the underground after she kills the last one on arrival. However, Adrianna wants nothing to do with the affairs of the underground and longs for escape, and with her indomitable will, she’ll make sure of it.

Class Delta: the youngest of the prime 16, they have little to no memory of the institute. Because of this, they have no practice with their powers and have had their fates completely thrown to the wind, making them the hardest to find of the group.

13: Archie, the calamity child. He has lived his life jumping from one adoptive family to another, and tragedy seems to follow him no matter where he goes. From hurricanes to tornadoes and flash floods, Archie has always been the only one to remain with his botanical abomination power. He has ended up getting bad rep, with people blaming his power for his bad luck. He ends up becoming disconnected from other kids and mistrustful of adults, but just wants a family of his own.

14: Maya, the gateway girl. She was raised in the complexes of downtown New York, and with her friends is constantly braving the dangers of the uptown ruins. Maya’s own power, domain, is only known between her and her own friends. Not even her ‘parents’ know about it. However, she’s forced to face herself and confront her past when she finds how similar her power is to to the monsters living uptown, and finds some shocking truths.

15: Xavier, the griefer king. He was found by the real king as a baby, and after finding out about his power, animalistic abomination, he wholeheartedly adopts the boy as his own. Xavier is raised among the other griefers as one of them, but is abruptly put in charge when the king must go on a journey to expand west. He becomes a ruthless leaver, unafraid to go to violent measures, and finds himself reveling in the hunting of unknowing travelers on the highway. But Xavier soon needs to find the balance of human and animal, lest he finds himself going off the deep end.

16: Adeline, the sacrifice. The youngest and rumored to be the most powerful, Adeline lived her life peacefully without her power ever awakening. However, the truth came to her abruptly and soon uprooted her whole life, and was told that she must become a vessel to save the world. In the stress of everything moving and her whole life crumbling in front of her though, her power awakens, and everyone finds what makes her the most powerful of them all…

and that is the prime 16! Hope you like them, and don’t be afraid to send questions if you want!

[interestarticles]

Best Movies Of The Year 1980 - Top 20 Films Of 1980

What Are The Best Movies Of The Year 1980?

From New York to Los Angeles this is a question that will get a different answer from every person you ask. There were some great films in the 1980s, and 1980 started the decade off with a bang as a year full of innovation in every way throughout all of society, and it was the start of some exciting new techniques, technologies, and ideas in the film industry in particular with many movies from the year 1980 introducing revolutionary and pioneering cinematic visions. Many people think that some of the best 80s movies of the decade came out in 1980. In this article post, we will go through our top picks for the 20 best movies of 1980, you might be surprised to find out which movies made it on the list! 1) Kramer vs. Kramer In 1980, "Kramer vs. Kramer" was released and became a huge success at the box office. The movie starred Meryl Streep as Joanna Kramer, Dustin Hoffman as Ted Kramer, Jane Alexander as Marylin Jaffe-Jenson, and Justin Henry as Billy Kramer. This film won five Academy Awards in 1981 including Best Picture of 1979 or 1980. It also received nominations for best director (Robert Benton), best actor (Dustin Hoffman), and best-adapted screenplay based on another work (Erica Mann). It is now considered one of the most significant Hollywood films ever made about divorce because it provides nuance to both sides of an argument. 2) The Shining This iconic horror classic film directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall was released in 1980. It is based on Stephen King's 1977 novel of the same name. The film has been ranked a number of times as one of the best horror movies ever made and is now considered to be one of Kubrick's best films. It was nominated for two Academy Awards (Best Actor in Leading Role--Jack Nicholson) and won none at the time. The Shining also received nominations for Best Director - Stanley Kubrick), Best Adapted Screenplay--Steven Spielberg/Stanley Kubrick). Its reputation grew over time, eventually earning an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. 3) Being There Hal Ashby himself had been nominated for an Academy Award in 1971 with directing The Last Detail. It is a film that could be classified as both comedy and drama, but the emphasis on this 1980 release lies more on its comedic aspects. While it was not one of the most acclaimed films when it came out, many now consider Being There to be a classic film about society's relationship with television at the time. It offers commentary on economic inequality and how people are often reduced to simple archetypes who can easily fit into neat narratives for consumption purposes. 4) Time Bandits Time Bandits, a 1980 British fantasy film about adventure, was co-written by Terry Gilliam. It stars Sean Connery and John Cleese as well as Shelley Duvall and Ralph Richardson. Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm. Peter Vaughan and David Warner are also featured. It is a whimsical kids' movie with the fantasy adventure of time travel that has been ranked as one of the best movies ever made by many critics. Gilliam has referred to time bandits as first in his "Trilogy of Imagination", which includes Brazil (1985), and then The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (88). They all revolve around the "craziness and incoherence of our society, and the desire for escape through every means. These films all focus on the struggles and attempts to escape through imagination. Brazil is seen through the eyes of a young man, Time Bandits through a child's eyes, and Munchausen through an old man's eyes. Time Bandits, in particular, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. 5) Pennies from Heaven Quite a departure from his previous work, this film is much more lighthearted and comedic than the serious dramas of The Miracle Worker or Bonnie and Clyde. The plot revolves around Arthur Parker (Steve Martin), whose life becomes increasingly chaotic as he tries to juggle two jobs, an impending child custody battle for his daughter, and a demanding girlfriend who wants him to give up one job so that they can have some time together. 6) Airplane! This Leslie Nielsen instant comedy classic was one of the highest-grossing movies of 1980. The movie is about an airplane crew that must find a way to land their plane after food poisoning breaks out on board and the pilots become incapacitated, with only two inexperienced passengers who happen to be a doctor (Robert Hays) and a flight attendant (Julie Hagerty) qualified to land the plane. Airplane! was one of the most successful films at theaters in 1980 It had more than $83 million worth of ticket sales by year's end - it became one of Leslie Nielsen's most popular roles ever The film also helped launch Robert Hays' career as a leading man, though he later found greater success playing comedic supporting characters before retiring from acting. 7) The Empire Strikes Back One of the most famous of the 1980s movies, The Empire Strikes Back is remembered for its numerous plot twists and turns as well as introducing fan-favorite Yoda The film features Mark Hamill reprising his role as Luke Skywalker in this second installment of George Lucas' Star Wars series and it was the first star wars to be released on VHS. Featuring a mixture of live-action footage with high-quality animation from Japanese company Toho, it became one of the best critically acclaimed movies ever. In 1997, it won an American Film Institute award for being among the top 100 films since 1941. 8) Raging Bull 1980 was a strong year for movies, and Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull is one of the most acclaimed action films to be released that year. It stars Robert De Niro in an Academy Award-winning performance as new york boxer Jake La Motta, who has a turbulent affair with Kim Basinger's Vickie. The film depicts how new york boxing served as both his escape from domestic abuse but also led him on a self-destruction path. In addition to being nominated for ten Oscars (including best picture), it won two including best actor for Robert de Niro and best director awards respectively. Released by United Artists, the movie has ranked among the top 100 American Films ever made according to AFI rankings. This release is considered one of the best films of the 80s by many critics. 9) Kagemusha One of the most interesting and well-made movies that 1980 has to offer, Kagemusha tells the story of a warlord who is critically injured and after being buried alive. The movie was directed by Akira Kurosawa and stars Tatsuya Nakadai in one of his best performances ever as both warrior leader Katsuyori Shibata and an imposter named Shingen Yashida. Released in Japan on April 20th, 1980, it became the second-highest-grossing film at the Japanese box office just behind The Return of Godzilla (1984). Kagemusha made its international debut at Cannes Film Festival's Directors Fortnight where it won two major awards: Special Jury Prize for Best Direction and Grand Prix du Festival International du Film - Art. 10) The Gods Must Be Crazy Part comedy, part drama, The Gods Must Be Crazy is a timeless classic. Released in 1980, the film follows Xi (N!xau), an out-of-touch bushman who lives happily with his family until he encounters Coca Cola for the first time and it changes their world forever. The premise of this movie makes us laugh because we can relate to how much more comfortable life was before modern society became so intricate that things like Coke began infiltrating every aspect of our lives. We're drawn into Xi's story as he goes from living peacefully with his tribe to being thrust into a completely different reality when they start hunting down any remaining cases of coca-cola at stores all over town! It also touches on some deeper themes such as the cultural modern world where his customs and rituals mean nothing. Xi's journey is our own as we watch the culture clash of modern society, with all its good intentions and never-ending thirst for new things to consume, come into contact with a simpler time that has long since passed by. The humorous film release was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film but lost out to Italy’s Cinema Paradiso (1988). 11) Caddyshack Released in 1980 this classic comedy film by Harold Ramis is widely considered one of the funniest movies ever made by fans and critics alike. It features an amazing comedic all-star ensemble cast, including Chevy Chase as a rich playboy who turns caddie in order to get girls; Ted Knight as Judge Smails, who wants to keep his country club memberships exclusive and prestigious; Rodney Dangerfield as Ty Webb, a millionaire golfer-cum-caddy who has been banned from all other golf courses for being too good. Also featuring Bill Murray as Carl Spackler, the groundskeeper at Bushwood Country Club whose only goal seems to be killing off gophers with any weapon he can devise (including explosives); Michael O'Keefe as Danny Noonan, a young man hired by Judge Smails's daughter (Castle) to caddy for him; and Brian Doyle-Murray as Lou Loomis, the club's ultra-snobby head professional. 12) The Blues Brothers Another instant classic 1980 movie, The Blues Brothers are best known for its 1980 car chases. Starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as Joliet Jake & Elwood Blues respectively, the two brothers who perform a blues show before being arrested by police. They break out of jail with their friends to save an orphanage from foreclosure through satanic cult leader sheik Abdul Khadaffi's "Elvis-Is-King" rally in Chicago Illinois on Mothers Day 1980 at noon. The film has been praised by audiences and critics alike for its music, screenplay, and performances but criticized for its lack of character development (most likely due to budget constraints). This was even acknowledged during production when director John Landis told cast members not to act too much because "no one is going to see this movie." The 1980 car chases are iconic and highly regarded by film critics. One of the most memorable moments in 1980 was when Elwood Blues while driving his 1980 Chevy Malibu, spots a cat on the front fender as he's being chased by police officers from Illinois State Troopers who try to arrest him for not wearing seat belts (the law at that time). The chase ends with Jake & Elwood crashing into an old man sitting atop a 1980 Chevy Monte Carlo. After striking them, the cops then swerve quickly around their fallen comrade before continuing after our heroes. 13) 9 To 5 9 to 5 (listed in the opening credits as Nine to Five) is a 1980 American comedy film directed by Colin Higgins, who wrote the screenplay with Patricia Resnick. It stars Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton as three working women who live out their fantasies of getting even with and overthrowing the company's autocratic, "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot" boss, played by Dabney Coleman. The film grossed over $103.9 million and is the 20th-highest-grossing comedy film. As a star vehicle for Parton—already established as a successful singer, musician, and songwriter—it launched her permanently into mainstream popular culture. A television series of the same name based on the film ran for five seasons, and a musical version of the film (also titled 9 to 5), with new songs written by Parton, opened on Broadway on April 30, 2009. 9 to 5 is number 74 on the American Film Institute's "100 Funniest Movies" and has an 83% approval rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. 14) Smokey And The Bandit 2 Smokey and the Bandit 2 Is a 1980 American action comedy film directed by Hal Needham, starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, Jackie Gleason, And Dom DeLuise. This film is a sequel to 1977's film Smokey and the Bandit. The original release of the film was in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Bo "Bandit", Darville (Burt Reynolds), and Cledus "Snowman," Snow (Jerry Reed) transport an elephant to the GOP National Convention. Sheriff Buford T. Justice, Jackie Gleason (Jackie Gleason), is once more in hot pursuit. 15) Superman 2 Superman II, a 1980 superhero movie directed by Richard Lester, is written by Mario Puzo, David, and Leslie Newman and is based on a story by Puzo about the DC Comics character Superman. It features Gene Hackman and Terence Stamp, Terence Stamp, Ned Beatty, and Sarah Douglas. The film was first released in Australia and Europe on December 4, 1980. It was also released in other countries during 1981. Megasound is a high-impact surround sound system that's similar to Sensurround and was used for select premiere Superman II engagements. The Salkinds decided in 1977 that they would simultaneously film Superman and its sequel. Principal photography began in March 1977 and ended in October 1978. There were tensions between Richard Donner, the original director, and the producers. It was decided to stop filming the sequel (of which 75 percent was already completed) and instead finish the first film. After the December 1978 release of Superman, Donner was fired from his post as director and was replaced by Lester. Many cast members and crew members declined to return following Donner's firing. Lester was officially acknowledged as the director. Principal photography resumed in September 1979 and ended in March 1980. Film critics gave the film positive reviews, praising the performances of Reeve, Stamp, and Hackman as well as the visual effects and humor. The film grossed $190million against a $54 million production budget. 16) Friday The 13th Friday the 13th, 1980 American slasher movie, is directed and produced by Sean S. Cunningham. Written by Victor Miller, it stars Betsy Palmer and Adrienne King. The plot centers on a group of teenager camp counselors, who are each murdered by an unknown killer as they attempt to reopen an abandoned summer camp. Cunningham, inspired by John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) success, put out an advertisement in Variety to sell the film. Miller was still writing the screenplay. Filming began in New York City after casting the film. It was shot in New Jersey during summer 1979 on an estimated budget of $550,000. The finished film was the subject of a bidding war. Paramount Pictures won domestic distribution rights while Warner Bros. Pictures took European rights. Friday the 13th, which was released on May 9, 1980, was a huge box office hit, earning $59.8 million globally. The film received mixed reviews, some praised its cinematography, score, and performances while others criticized it for depicting graphic violence. It was the first independent film of its type to be distributed in the U.S. by major studios. The film's box office success led it to many sequels, a crossover film with A Nightmare on Elm Street, and a reboot of the series in 2009. 17) Flash Gordon Flash Gordon is a 1980 space opera film directed and produced by Mike Hodges. It was based on Alex Raymond's King Features comic strip. The film stars Sam J. Jones and Melody Anderson as well as Max von Sydow, Max von Sydow, Max von Sydow, and Topol. Topol is supported by Timothy Dalton and Mariangela Melato. Peter Wyngarde plays the role of Peter Wyngarde. The film features Flash Gordon (Jones), a star quarterback, and his friends Dale Arden and Hans Zarkov (Topol), as they unify the warring factions on the planet Mongo to resist the oppression by Ming the Merciless (von Sydow), a man who wants to destroy Earth. Producer Dino De Laurentiis had been involved in two comic book adaptations: Danger: Diabolik and Barbarella (both 1968). He had also previously worked on Danger. De Laurentiis declined a George Lucas directorial offer, a Star Wars version directed by Federico Fellini was also rejected. De Laurentiis hired Nicolas Roeg as director and Enter the Dragon writer Michael Allin as the lead developer on the film. They were replaced in 1977 by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and Hodges, who had written De Laurentiis’ remake of King Kong, this was due to Roeg's dissatisfaction. Flash Gordon was mostly shot in England, with several soundstages at Elstree Studios and Shepperton Studios. It uses a camp style that is similar to the 1960s TV series Batman, which Semple created. Jones quit the film before principal photography was overdue to a dispute between De Laurentiis and Jones. Much of Jones's dialogue was dubbed by Peter Marinker. The documentary Life After Flash examines the main subjects of Jones' departure and his career after it was released. It is known for its Queen-inspired musical score, which features orchestral sections by Howard Blake. Flash Gordon was a box-office success in Italy and the United Kingdom, but it did poorly in other markets. The film received generally positive reviews upon its initial release and has since developed a large cult following. There have been many attempts at sequels or reboots, but none of them have ever made it to production. 18) Cheech & Chong's Next Movie Cheech and Chong's Next Movie, a 1980 comedy film by Tommy Chong, is the second feature-length Cheech & Chong project, after Up in Smoke. It was released by Universal Pictures. Cheech and Chong go on a mission: siphon gasoline to their neighbor's car. They then continue their day. Cheech works at a movie theater, while Chong looks for something to smoke (a roach). Then Chong revs up his indoor motorcycle and plays loud rock music that disrupts the neighborhood. Cheech is fired and the couple goes to Donna, Cheech's girlfriend, and welfare officer. Cheech seduces Donna over her objections and gets her in trouble with her boss. 19) Coal Miner's Daughter Coal Miner's Daughter, a 1980 American musical biographical film, was directed by Michael Apted and based on a screenplay by Tom Rickman. The film follows Loretta Lynn's rise to stardom as a country singer, starting in her teen years with a poor family. The film is based on Lynn's 1976 biography by George Vecsey. Read the full article

[greatworldwar2]

• Fu-Go Balloon Bomb

A Fu-Go, or fire balloon (風船爆弾, fūsen bakudan, lit. "balloon bomb"), was a weapon launched by Japan during World War II.

The fūsen bakudan campaign was the most earnest of the attacks. The concept was the brainchild of the Imperial Japanese Army's Ninth Army's Number Nine Research Laboratory, under Major General Sueyoshi Kusaba, with work performed by Technical Major Teiji Takada and his colleagues. The balloons were intended to make use of a strong current of winter air that the Japanese had discovered flowing at high altitude and speed over their country, which later became known as the jet stream. The jet stream reported by Wasaburo Oishi blew at altitudes above 30,000 ft (9.1 km) and could carry a large balloon across the Pacific in three days, over a distance of more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km). Such balloons could carry incendiary and high-explosive bombs to the United States and drop them there to kill people, destroy buildings, and start forest fires. The preparations were lengthy because the technological problems were acute. A hydrogen balloon expands when warmed by the sunlight, and rises; then it contracts when cooled at night, and descends. The engineers devised a control system driven by an altimeter to discard ballast. When the balloon descended below 30,000 ft (9.1 km), it electrically fired a charge to cut loose sandbags. The sandbags were carried on a cast-aluminium four-spoked wheel and discarded two at a time to keep the wheel balanced. Similarly, when the balloon rose above about 38,000 feet (12 km), the altimeter activated a valve to vent hydrogen. The hydrogen was also vented if the balloon's pressure reached a critical level.

The control system ran the balloon through three days of flight. By that time, it was likely over the U.S., and its ballast was expended. The final flash of gunpowder released the bombs, also carried on the wheel, and lit a 64 feet (20 meters) long fuse that hung from the balloon's equator. After 84 minutes, the fuse fired a flash bomb that destroyed the balloon. The balloon had to carry about 1,001 pounds (454 kg) of gear. At first the balloons were made of conventional rubberized silk, but improved envelopes had less leakage. An order went out for ten thousand balloons made of "washi", a paper derived from mulberry bushes that was impermeable and very tough. It was only available in squares about the size of a road map, so it was glued together in three or four laminations using edible konnyaku (devil's tongue) paste – though hungry workers stealing the paste for food created some problems. Many workers were nimble-fingered teenaged school girls.

The bombs most commonly carried by the balloons were, Type 92 33-pound (15 kg) high-explosive bomb consisting of 9.5 pounds (4.3 kg) picric acid or TNT surrounded by 26 steel rings within a steel casing 4 inches (10 cm) in diameter and 14.5 inches (37 cm) long and welded to a 11-inch (28 cm) tail fin assembly. Type 97 26-pound (12 kg) thermite incendiary bomb using the Type 92 bomb casing and fin assembly containing 11 ounces (310 g) of gunpowder and three 3.3-pound (1.5 kg) magnesium containers of thermite. 11-pound (5.0 kg) thermite incendiary bomb consisting of a 3.75-inch (9.5 cm) steel tube 15.75 inches (40.0 cm) long containing thermite with an ignition charge of magnesium, potassium nitrate and barium peroxide.

A balloon launch organization of three battalions was formed. The first battalion included headquarters and three squadrons totaling 1,500 men in Ibaraki Prefecture with nine launch stations at Ōtsu. The second battalion of 700 men in three squadrons operated six launch stations at Ichinomiya, Chiba; and the third battalion of 600 men in two squadrons operated six launch stations at Nakoso in Fukushima Prefecture. The Ōtsu site included hydrogen gas generating facilities, but the 2nd and 3rd battalion launch sites used hydrogen manufactured elsewhere. The best time to launch was just after the passing of a high-pressure front, and wind conditions were most suitable for several hours prior to the onshore breezes at sunrise. The combined launch capacity of all three battalions was about 200 balloons per day. Initial tests took place in September 1944 and proved satisfactory; however, before preparations were complete, United States Army Air Forces B-29 Superfortress planes began bombing the Japanese home islands. The attacks were somewhat ineffectual at first but still fueled the desire for revenge sparked by the Doolittle Raid. The first balloon was released on November 3rd, 1944. The Japanese chose to launch the campaign in November; because the period of maximum jet stream velocity is November through March. This limited the chance of the incendiary bombs causing forest fires, as that time of year produces the maximum North American Pacific coastal precipitation, and forests were generally snow-covered or too damp to catch fire easily. On November 4th, 1944, a United States Navy patrol craft discovered one of the first radiosonde balloons floating off San Pedro, Los Angeles. National and state agencies were placed on heightened alert status when balloons were found in Wyoming and Montana before the end of November.

The balloons continued to arrive in Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, Kansas, Iowa, Washington, Idaho, South Dakota, and Nevada (including one that landed near Yerington that was discovered by cowboys who cut it up and used it as a hay tarp. Balloons were discovered as well in Canada in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta, the Yukon, and Northwest Territories. Army Air Forces or Navy fighters scrambled to intercept the balloons, but they had little success; the balloons flew very high and surprisingly fast, and fighters destroyed fewer than 20. American authorities concluded the greatest danger from these balloons would be wildfires in the Pacific coastal forests. The Fourth Air Force, Western Defense Command, and Ninth Service Command organized the Firefly Project of 2,700 troops, including 200 paratroopers of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion with Stinson L-5 Sentinel and Douglas C-47 Skytrain aircraft. These men were stationed at critical points for use in fire-fighting missions. The 555th suffered one fatality and 22 injuries fighting fires. Through Firefly, the military used the United States Forest Service as a proxy agency to combat FuGo. Due to limited wartime fire suppression personnel, Firefly relied upon the 555th as well as conscientious objectors.

By early 1945, Americans were becoming aware that something strange was going on. Balloons had been sighted and explosions heard, from California to Alaska. Something that appeared to witnesses to be like a parachute descended over Thermopolis, Wyoming. A fragmentation bomb exploded, and shrapnel was found around the crater. On March 10th, 1945, one of the last paper balloons descended in the vicinity of the Manhattan Project's production facility at the Hanford Site. This balloon caused a short circuit in the power lines supplying electricity for the nuclear reactor cooling pumps, but backup safety devices restored power almost immediately. Japanese propaganda broadcasts announced great fires and an American public in panic, declaring casualties in the thousands. With no evidence of any effect, General Kusaba was ordered to cease operations in April 1945, believing that the mission had been a total fiasco. The expense was large, and in the meantime the B-29s had destroyed two of the three hydrogen plants needed by the project. On May 5th, 1945, a pregnant woman and five children were killed when they discovered a balloon bomb that had landed in the forest of Gearhart Mountain in Southern Oregon. Military personnel arrived on the scene within hours, and saw that the balloon still had snow underneath it, while the surrounding area did not. They concluded that the balloon bomb had drifted to the ground several weeks earlier, and had lain there undisturbed until found by the group.

The remains of balloons continued to be discovered after the war. Eight were found in the 1940s, three in the 1950s, and two in the 1960s. In 1978, a ballast ring, fuses, and barometers were found near Agness, Oregon, and are now part of the collection of the Coos Historical & Maritime Museum. The Japanese balloon attacks on North America were at that time the longest ranged attacks ever conducted in the history of warfare, a record which was not broken until the 1982 Operation Black Buck raids during the Falkland Islands War.

[paralleljulieverse]

“We’ll be educating Archie, so we’ll be busy for a while...”

We are a little late with this commemorative post, but last month -- 6 June, to be precise -- marked the 70th anniversary of the debut of Educating Archie (1950-59), the legendary BBC radio series starring ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy, Archie Andrews. Fourteen-year-old Julie Andrews was part of the original line-up for the 1950 premiere season of Educating Archie and she would remain with the show for two full seasons till late-1951/early-1952. 

It would be difficult to exaggerate the significance of Educating Archie during the ‘Golden Age' of BBC Radio in the 1950s. Across the ten years it was on the air, it grew from a popular series on the Light Programme into a “national institution” (Donovan, 74). At its peak, the series averaged a weekly audience of over 15 million Britons, almost a third of the national population (Elmes, 208). Even the Royals were apparently fans, with Brough and Archie invited to perform several times at Windsor Castle (Brough, 162ff). The show found equal success abroad, notably in Australia, where a special season of the series was recorded in 1957 (Foster and First, 133). 

Audiences couldn’t get enough of the smooth-talking Brough and his smart-lipped wooden sidekick, and the show soon spawned a flood of cross-promotional spin-offs and marketing ventures. There were Educating Archie  books, comics, records, toys, games, and clothing. An Archie Andrews keyring sold half a million units in six months and the Archie Andrews iced lolly was one of the biggest selling confectionary items of the decade (Dibbs 201). More than a mere radio programme, Educating Archie became a cultural phenomenon that “captured the heart and mood of a nation” (Merriman, 53). 

On paper, the extraordinary success of Educating Archie can be hard to fathom. After all, what is the point of a ventriloquist act on the radio where you can’t see the artist’s mouth or, for that matter, the dummy? Ventriloquism is, however, more than just the simple party trick of “voice-throwing”. A good “vent” is at heart a skilled actor who can use his or her voice to turn a wooden doll into a believable character with a distinct personality and dynamic emotional life. It is why many ventriloquists have found equal success as voice actors in animation and advertising (Lawson and Persons, 2004). 

Long before Educating Archie, several other ventriloquist acts showed it was possible to make a successful transition to the audio-only medium of radio. Most famous of these was the American Edgar Bergen who, with his dummy Charlie McCarthy, had a top-rating radio show which ran in the US for almost two decades from 1937-1956 (Dunning, 226). Other local British precedents were provided by vents such as Albert Saveen, Douglas Craggs and, a little later, Arthur Worsley, all of whom had been making regular appearances on radio variety programmes for some time (Catling, 81ff; Street, 245).

By his own admission, Peter Brough was not the most technically proficient of ventriloquists. A longstanding joke -- possibly apocryphal but now the stuff of showbiz lore -- runs that he once asked co-star Beryl Reid if she could ever see his lips move. “Only when Archie’s talking,” was her deadpan response (Barfe, 46). But Brough -- described by one critic as “debonair, fresh-faced and pleasantly toothy” (Wilson “Dummy”, 4) -- had an engaging performance style and he cultivated a “charismatic relationship with his doll as the enduring and seductive Archie Andrews” (Catling, 83). Touring the variety circuit throughout the war years, he worked hard to perfect his one-man comedy act with him as the sober straight man and Archie the wise-cracking cut-up. 

Inspired by the success of the aforementioned Edgar Bergen -- whose NBC radio shows had been brought over to the UK to entertain US servicemen during the war -- Brough applied to audition his act for the BBC (Brough, 43ff). It clearly worked because the young vent soon found himself performing on several of the national broadcaster’s variety shows. His turn on one of these, Navy Mixture, proved so popular that he secured a regular weekly segment, “Archie Takes the Helm” which ran for forty-six weeks (ibid, 49). While appearing on Navy Mixture, Brough worked alongside a wide range of other variety artists, including, as it happens, a husband and wife performing team by the name of Ted and Barbara Andrews. 

Fast forward several years to 1950 and, in response to his surging popularity, Brough was invited by the BBC to mount a fully-fledged radio series built around the mischievous Archie (Brough, 77ff). A semi-sitcom style narrative was devised -- written by Brough’s longtime writing partner, Sid Colin and talented newcomer, Eric Sykes  -- in which Archie was cast as “a boy in his middle teens, naughty but lovable, rather too grown up for his years-- especially where the ladies are concerned -- and distinctly cheeky” (Broadcasters, 5). Brough was written in as Archie’s guardian who, sensing the impish lad needed to be “taken strictly in hand before he becomes a juvenile delinquent,” engages the services of a private tutor to “educate Archie” (ibid.). Filling out the weekly tales of comic misadventure was a roster of both regular and one-off characters. In the first season, the Australian comedian, Robert Moreton, was Archie's pompous but slightly bumbling tutor, Max Bygraves played a likeable odd-job man, and the multi-talented Hattie Jacques voiced the part of Agatha Dinglebody, a dotty neighbourhood matron who was keen on the tutor, along with several other comic characters (Brough, 78-81).

In keeping with the variety format popular at the time, it was decided the series would also feature weekly musical interludes. “Our first choice” in this regard, recalls Peter Brough (1955), “was little Julie Andrews”:

“A brief two years before [Julie] had begun her professional career as a frail, pig-tailed, eleven-year-old singing sensation, startling the critics in Vic Oliver’s ‘Starlight Roof’ at the London Hippodrome by her astonishingly mature coloratura voice. Many people of the theatrical world were ready to scoff, declaring the child’s voice was a freak, that it could not last or that such singing night after night would injure her throat. They did not reckon with Julie’s mother, Barbara, and father, Ted: nor with her singing teacher, Madame Stiles-Allen. In their care, the little girl, who had sung ‘for the fun of it’ since she was seven, continued a meteoric career that has few, if any rivals” (81).

As further context for Julie’s casting in Educating Archie, the fourteen-year-old prodigy had already appeared on several earlier BBC broadcasts and was thus well known to network management. In fact, Julie had already worked with the show’s producer, Roy Speers, on his BBC variety show, Starlight Hour in 1948 (Julie Andrews Radio Artists File I).

Julie’s role in Educating Archie was essentially that of the show’s resident singer who would come out and perform a different song each week. In the first volume of her memoirs, Julie recalls:

“If I was lucky, I got a few lines with the dummy; if not, I just sang. Working closely with Mum and [singing teacher] Madame [Stiles-Allen], I learned many new songs and arias, like ‘The Shadow Waltz’ from Dinorah; ‘The Wren’; the waltz songs from Romeo and Juliet and Tom Jones; ‘Invitation to the Dance’; ‘The Blue Danube’; ‘Caro Nome’ from Rigoletto; and ‘Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark’” (Andrews 2008, 126)

Other numbers performed by Julie during her appearances on Educating Archie include: “The Pipes of Pan”, “My Heart and I”, “Count Your Blessings”, “I Heard a Robin”, and “The Song of the Tritsch-Tratsch” (”Song Notes”, 11; Julie Andrews Radio Artists File I). Additional musical interludes were provided by other regulars on the show such as Max Bygraves, the Hedley Ward Trio and the Tanner Sisters. 

Alongside her weekly showcase song, Julie’s role was progressively built into a character of sorts as the eponymously named ‘Julie’, a neighbourhood friend of Archie’s. In a later BBC retrospective, Brough recalled that it was actually Julie’s idea to flesh out her part:

“We were thinking of Educating Archie and dreaming up the idea...and we wanted something fresh in the musical spot. We had just heard Julie Andrews with Vic Oliver in Starlight Roof...and we thought, why not Julie with that lovely fresh voice, this youngster with a tremendous range? So we asked her to come and take part in the trial recording and she came up with her mother and her music teacher, Madame Stiles-Allen...and Julie was a tremendous hit, absolutely right from the start. She used to sing those lovely Strauss waltzes...and all those lovely songs and hit the high notes clear as a bell. And then she came to me and said, ‘Look...I’m just doing the song spot, do you think I could just do a line or two with Archie and develop a little talking, a little character work?’ So, I said, ‘I don’t see why not’, So we talked to Eric Sykes and Roy Speer and, suddenly, we started with Julie talking lines back-and-forth with Archie, and Eric developed the character for her of the girl-next-door for Archie, very sweet, quite different from the sophisticated young lady she is today, but a lovely sweet character” (cited in Benson 1985)

As intimated here, an initial trial recording of Educating Archie was commissioned by the BBC, ostensibly to gauge if the format would work or not. This recording was made with the full cast on 15 January 1950 and was sufficiently well received for the broadcaster to green-light a six-episode pilot series to start in June as a fill-in for the popular comedy programme, Take It From Here during that series’ summer hiatus (Pearce, 4). The first episode of Educating Archie was scheduled for Tuesday 6 June in the prime 8:00pm evening slot, with a repeat broadcast the following Sunday afternoon at 1:45pm (Brough, 88ff). 

All of the shows for Educating Archie were pre-recorded at the BBC’s Paris Cinema in Lower Regent Street. Typically, each week’s episode would be rehearsed in the afternoon and then performed and recorded later that evening in front of a live audience. Julie’s fee for the show was set at fifteen guineas (£15.15s.0d) for the recording, with an additional seven-and-a-half guineas (£7.17s.6d) per UK broadcast, 3 guineas (£3.3s.0d) for the first five overseas broadcasts, and one-and-a-half guineas for all other broadcasts (£1.11s.6d) (Julie Andrews Radio Artists File I).

The initial six-episodes of Educating Archie proved so popular that the BBC quickly extended the series for another six episodes from 18 July to 22 August (“So Archie,” 5). Of these Julie appeared in four -- 25 July, 1, 8, 14 August -- missing the fist and last episode due to prior performance commitments with Harold Fielding. Subsequently, the show -- and, with it, Julie’s contract -- was extended for a further eight episodes (29 August-17 October), then again for another eight (23 October-18 December). These later extensions were accompanied by a scheduling shift from Tuesday to Monday evening, with the Sunday afternoon repeat broadcast remaining unchanged (Julie Andrews Radio Artists File I). All up, the first season of Educating Archie ran for thirty weeks, five times its original scheduled length. During that time, the show’s audience jumped from an initial 4 million listeners to over 12 million (Dibbs, 200-201). It was also voted the top Variety Show of the year in the annual National Radio and Television Awards, a mere four-and-a-half months after its debut (Brough, 98; Wilson “Archie”, 3). 

Given the meteoric success of the show, the cast of Educating Archie found themselves in hot demand. Peter Brough (1955) relates that there was a growing clamour from theatre producers for stage presentations of Educating Archie, including an offer from Val Parnell for a full-scale show at the Prince of Wales in the heart of the West End (101). He demurred, feeling the timing wasn’t yet right and that it was too soon for the show “to sustain a box office attraction in London” -- though he left the door open for future stage shows (102).  

One venture Brough did green-light was a novelty recording of Jack and the Beanstalk with select stars of Educating Archie, including Julie. Spread over two sides of a single 78rpm, the recording was a kind of abridged fantasy episode of the show cum potted pantomime with Brough/Archie as Jack, Hattie Jacques as Mother, and Peter Madden as the Giant. Julie comes in at the very end of the tale to close proceedings with a short coloratura showcase, “When We Grow Up” which was written specially for the recording by Gene Crowley. Released by HMV in December 1950, the recording was pitched to the profitable Christmas market and, backed by a substantial marketing campaign, it realised brisk sales (“Jack,” 12). It was also warmly reviewed in the press as “a very well presented and most enjoyable disc” (“Disc,” 3) and “something to which children will listen again and again” (Tredinnick, 628).

In light of its astonishing success, there was  little question that Educating Archie would be renewed for another season in 1951. In fact, it occasioned something of a bidding war with Radio Luxembourg, a competitor commercial network, courting Brough with a lucrative deal to bring the show over to them (Brough, 103-4). Out of a sense of professional loyalty to the BBC -- and, no doubt, sweetened by a counter-offer described by the Daily Express as “one of the biggest single programme deals in the history of radio variety in Britain” (cited in Brough, 104) -- Brough re-signed with the national broadcaster for a further three year contract. 

For their part, the BBC was keen to get the new season up on the air as early as possible with an April start-date mooted. Brough, however, wanted to give the production team an extended break and, more importantly, secure enough time to develop new material with his writing team. Rising star scriptwriter, Eric Sykes was already overstretched with a competing assignment for Frankie Howerd so a later start for August was eventually confirmed (Brough, 105ff). The Educating Archie crew did, however, re-form for a one-off early preview special in March, Archie Andrew’s Easter Party, which reunited much of the original cast, including Julie (Gander, 6). 

The second 1951 season started in earnest in late-July with pre-recordings and rehearsals, followed by the first episode which was broadcast on 3 August. This time round, the programme would air on Friday evenings at 8:45pm with a repeat broadcast two days later on Sunday at 6:00pm. The cast remained more-or-less the same with the exception of Robert Moreton who had, in the interim, secured his own radio show. Replacing him as Archie’s tutor was another up-and-coming comedy talent by the name of Tony Hancock (Brough, 111). It was the start of what would prove a star-making cycle of substitute tutors over the years which would come to include  Harry Secombe, Benny Hill, Bruce Forsyth, and Sid James (Gifford 1985, 76). A further cast change would occur midway through Season 2 with the departure of Max Bygraves who left in October to pursue a touring opportunity as support act for Judy Garland in the United States (Brough, 113-14).

The second season of Educating Archie ran for 26 weeks from 3 August 1951 till 25 January 1952. Of these, Julie performed in 18 weekly episodes. She missed two episodes in late September due to other commitments and was absent from later episodes after 14 December due to her starring role in the Christmas panto, Aladdin at the London Casino. She was originally scheduled to return to Educating Archie for the final remaining shows of the season in January and her name appears in newspaper listings for these episodes. However, correspondence on file at the BBC Archives suggests she had to pull out due to ongoing contractual obligations with Aladdin which had extended its run due to popular demand (Julie Andrews Radio Artists File I).

Season 2 would mark the end of Julie’s association with Educating Archie. When the show resumed for Season 3 in September 1952, there would be no resident singer. Instead, the producers adopted “a policy of inviting a different guest artiste each week” (Brough 118). They also pushed the show more fully into the realm of character-based comedy with the inclusion of Beryl Reid who played a more subversive form of juvenile girl with her character of Monica, the unruly schoolgirl (Reid, 60ff). Moreover, by late 1952, Julie was herself “sixteen going on seventeen” and fast moving beyond the sweet little girl-next-door kind of role she had played on the show.

Still, there can be no doubt that the two years Julie spent with Educating Archie provided a major boost to her young career. Broadcast weekly into millions of homes around the nation, the programme afforded Julie a massive regular audience beyond anything she had yet experienced and helped consolidate her growing celebrity as a “household name”. Because Archie only recorded one day a week, Julie was still able to continue a fairly busy schedule of concerts and live performances, often travelling back to London for the broadcast before returning to various venues around the country (Andrews, 127). As a sign of her evolving star status, promotion for many of these appearances billed her as “Julie Andrews, 15 year old star of radio and television” (”Big Welcome,” 7) or even “Julie Andrews the outstanding radio and stage singing star from Educating Archie” (”Stage Attractions,” 4). In fact, Julie made at least two live appearances in this era alongside Brough and other members of the Educating Archie crew with a week at the Belfast Opera House in October 1951 and another week in November at the Gaumont Theatre Southampton (Programme, 1951).

Additionally, the fact that the episodes of Educating Archie were all pre-recorded means that the show provides a rare documentary record of Julie’s childhood performances. To date, several episodes with Julie have been publicly released. These include recordings of her singing “The Blue Danube” from 30 October 1950 and the popular Kathryn Grayson hit, “Love Is Where You Find It” from 19 October 1951. Given recordings of the series were issued to networks around Britain and even sent abroad suggests there must be others in existence and, so, we can only hope that more episodes with Julie will surface in time.

Reflecting on the cultural significance of Educating Archie, Barrie Took observes that, “Over the years [the] programme became a barometer of success; more than any other radio comedy it was the showcase of the emerging top-liner” (104). Indeed, the show’s alumni roll reads like a veritable “who’s who” of post-war British talent: Peter Brough, Eric Sykes, Hattie Jacques, Max Bygraves, Tony Hancock, Alfred Marks, Beryl Reid, Harry Secombe, Bruce Forsyth, Benny Hill, Warren Mitchell, Sid James, Marty Feldman, Dick Emery (Foster and Furst, 128-32). All big talents and even bigger names. However, it is perhaps fitting that, in a show built around a pint-sized dummy, the biggest name of all to come out of Educating Archie -- and, sadly, the only cast-member still with us today -- should be “little Julie Andrews”.

Sources:

Andrews, Julie. Home: A Memoir of My Early Years. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008. 

Baker, Richard A. Old Time Variety: An Illustrated History. Barnsley: Remember When, 2010.

Barfe, Louis. Turned Out Nice Again: The Story of British Light Entertainment. London: Atlantic Books, 2008.

Benson, John (Pres.). “Julie Andrews, A Celebration, Part 2.” Star Sound Special. Luke, Tony (Prod.), radio programme, BBC 2, 7 October 1985.

“Big Welcome for Julie Andrews.” Staines and Ashford News. 17 November 1950: 7.

Broadcasters, The. “Both Sides of the Microphone.” Radio Times. 4 June 1950: 5.

Brough, Peter. Educating Archie. London: Stanely Paul & Co., 1955.

Catling, Brian. “Arthur Worsley and the Uncanny Valley.” Articulate Objects: Voice, Sculpture and Performance. Satz, A. and Wood, J. eds. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009: 81-94.

Dibbs, Martin. Radio Fun and the BBC Variety Department, 1922—67. Chams: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.

“Disc Dissertation.” Lincolnshire Echo. 11 December 1950: 3.

Donovan, Paul. “A Voice from the Past.” The Sunday Times. 17 December 1995: 74.

Dunning, John. On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Elmes, Simon. Hello Again: Nine Decades of Radio Voices. London: Random House, 2012.

Fisher, John. Funny Way to Be a Hero. London: Frederick Muller, 1973.

Foster, Andy and Furst, Steve. Radio Comedy, 1938-1968: A Guide to 30 Years of Wonderful Wireless. London: Virgin Books, 1996.

Gander, L Marsland. “Radio Topics.” Daily Telegraph. 13 March 1951: 6.

Gifford, Denis. The Golden Age of Radio: An Illustrated Companion. London: Batsford, 1985.

____________. “Obituary: Peter Brough.” The Independent. 7 June 1999: 11.

“Jack and the Beanstalk.” His Masters Voice Record Review. Vol. 8, no. 4, December 1950: 12.

Julie Andrews Radio Artists File I, 1945-61. Papers. BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.

Lawson, Tim and Persons, Alissa. The Magic Behind the Voices: A Who's Who of Cartoon Voice Actors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi Press, 2004.

Merriman, Andy. Hattie: The Authorised Biography of Hattie Jacques. London: Aurum Press, 2008.

Pearce, Emery. “Dummy is Radio Star No. 1.” Daily Herald. 6 April 1950: 4.

Programme for Peter Brough and All-Star Variety at the Belfast Opera House, 22 October 1951, Belfast.

Programme for Peter Brough and All-Star Variety at the Gaumont Theatre Southampton, 12 November 1951, Southampton.

Reid, Beryl. So Much Love: An Autobiography. London: Hutchinson, 1984

“So Archie Stays on.” Daily Mail. 1 July 1950: 5.

“Song Notes.” The Stage. 28 September 1950: 11.

“Stage Attractions: Arcadia.” Lincolnshire Standard. 18 August 1951: 4

Street, Seán. The A to Z of British Radio. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009.

Took, Barry. Laughter in the Air: An Informal History of British Radio Comedy. London: Robson Books, 1976.

Tredinnick, Robert. “Gramophone Notes.” The Tatler and Bystander. 13 December 1950: 628.

Wilson, Cecil. “Dummy Steals the Spotlight.” Daily Mail. 27 May 1950: 4.

____________. “Archie, Petula Soar to the Top.” Daily Mail. 20 October 1950: 3.

Copyright © Brett Farmer 2020

[ren-meteor]

Decided to finally do her Bio

Name: Finley MacNamara

Alias: Aquila

Organization: NTOG

Home Base: CFB Halifax

Home Unit: NTOG (Atlantic)

DoB: 07/13 (30 y/o)

Birthplace: Mt Pearl, Newfoundland

Weight: 54 kg

Height: 1.67 m

Armour: 2

Speed: 2

Gadget: Puma AE UAS ‘Muninn’

Maove’s drone, nicknamed ‘Muninn’ was built with infrared technology useful in day, evening and night time situations. The drone will send a pulse when used, lighting up any operator within 20 feet of her, which she can see using her specialized glasses, nicknamed ‘Huginn’. The pulse lasts for 2 seconds before fading, and has 20 seconds between uses for up to 4 uses.

Primary Weapons:

C7-A2:

Damage- 62

Rate of fire- 725 full auto mode (can be switched between full auto, 3 round burst or semi auto)

Mobility- 50

Capacity- 30

M590A1 Shotgun

Damage: 48

Rate of Fire: 85 RPM

Mobility: 50

Capacity: 6+1

Secondary Weapons:

Sig Sauer p229:

Damage- 117

Rate of Fire- single shot

Mobility- 50

Capacity- 10

SMG-11

Damage: 35

Rate of Fire: 1270 RPM

Mobility: 50

Capacity: 16+1

BIOGRAPHY

“‘Aye, the ship may be good, but ‘tis the b'ys who make it great.”

Petty Officer 2nd Class MacNamara was born to a fisherman father and a barkeep mother in Mt Pearl Newfoundland. From a young girl to now, she was always active, looking for adventure; whether it be hiking along a trail, playing rugby or devising an elaborate prank on one of her senior coworkers.

A first generation military member, Finley knew she wanted to stay close to the water. Before joining, she went to the Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology in Tulsa, Oklahoma earning her Aviation Electronics Technology Associate’s degree. When she applied to the RCN, she had quite a few options to choose from, but ended up picking NESOP; Naval Electronic Sensor Operator, being similar to what she had studied before. As a junior operator she located and identified unknown radars, listened to comms of other subs, ships, aircraft and shore bases, conducted intel and evidence gathering, then moved on to be a fire control operator, firing the 57mm cannon, Harpoon missiles and CWIS systems on Halifax Class Frigates. During her time on the frigates, she became a ships diver, went on drone courses, and joined the Naval Boarding Party, which then gave her a small taste of what NTOG would bring her.

Throughout her entire career she had been sent on deployments, from OP Reassurance in the Mediterainian to OP Artemis in the Arabian Sea. During her later deployments, she was the senior drone operator and maintainer, leading her to apply to NTOG by recommendation of her superiors to become a drone specialist there.

During her time in NTOG, MacNamara deployed again with the Halifax Class Frigates, performing her duty and boarding on non-compliant vessels of interest, ship board protection, drone operations for classified intelligence, planning missions and identifying IEDs. When the activity grew stale, she sought out opportunities and joined various army units including CSOR as an intel operator. It was then, when she was deployed out in 2010 that she met Scorch, recognizing the famous last name.

The two got along for the most part, and on an off comment, Scorch commented on how much more useful the drone would be if the infrared could translate to the soldiers on the ground, cutting out the need for constant communication. MacNamara got to work on the schematics for her glasses, building in a HUD within them that would be able to receive feed from the drone itself. She and Scorch put the glasses through extensive trials, and when they were ready to be deployed in active combat, Scorch took them in and approved them. When MacNamara came back from the middle east, she continued to use them herself in NTOG after building a handheld controller to carry with her.

Rainbow picked up her file, noting her drone expertise and if they ever needed her, to expand to the naval environment. She accepted the offer late 2017.

PSYCHOLOGICAL REPORT

The first thing I could say about Specialist Finley ‘Aquila’ MacNamara is that she is certainly unique. When she first enters the room it’s like a renewed energy. She is always itching to do something, always ready to go. She almost seems to be friends with everyone, and can never say anything bad about other operators.

I catch myself from laughing when she speaks, the thick Newfoundland accent and speech patterns almost impossible to understand. And the swearing- it’s almost impossible to hear her speak without it. I supposed ‘swear like a sailor’ is a true saying. When I hear her and Sledge going at each other it’s almost like a foreign language. The two have tales of grandeur that when i think one has the leg up, the other has a story that can outdo. And when they’re down at the pub together- lookout. One talks politics and the other starts fights- which had led to me getting her out of jail once.

The roughness, I believe, comes from her two brothers, who she has said showed her ‘tough love’ growing up, and assisting her father as a fisherman. She will go on about her adventures for as long as you let her. Being out in a small fishing vessel that feels every wave, then crossing the Atlantic in a frigate; which the waves can get up to 10 meters high, not to forget the swells. She’s said that at times, there were waves that would put the entire ship underwater. Makes me never want to sail. She assured me it was fun. I said sure.

–Dr, Harishva “Harry” Pandey, Director of Rainbow

Trivia

- ‘Aquila’ is Latin for ‘eagle’

- Her gadget, the drone 'Munnin’, and glasses 'Huginn’, are named after Odin’s watchbirds, eluding to her Nordic ties.

- While NTOG itself is a naval based operations group, because of her trade and drone experience she is utilized by the army when needed

- MacNamara’s official languages are English, Spanish, and Turkish, she also knows Gaelic

[w3villatechnologies]

Every Developer Should Know About These 15 Ruby on Rails Gems

If you are looking forward to creating a web application with robust features Ruby on Rails is the best framework to work with. Ruby on Rails framework can be further extended with Ruby gems. Gems allow developers to finish the web development process within days rather than months. They can be easily integrated and every Ruby on Rails development services tends to use these gems to create powerful web apps that are rich in functionalities.

There are a large number of Gems created by the RoR community, but we enlist the top 15 Gems that are regularly used by the Ruby on Rails web development company.

#1. The Active Record-Import

With ActiveRecord-Import, developers can insert the bulk of records in one go, they don’t have to deal with the N+1 insert problem. Thus, importing external data becomes possible as the conversion time is reduced.

#2. Draper

To build decorators around the model, developers use Draper gem. With Draper, the view can be made cleaner, developers can simply define a decorator without having to write helpers. Drapers offer attributes and extend methods for the object.

#3. Pry

Library integration can be an issue and even binding of the gems while writing the codes. This invites a lot of error, and in order to eliminate these issues or debug these errors, PRY gem can be really useful. Developers establish breakpoints and start code debugging. PRY offers exclusive features including runtime invocation, Syntax highlighting, exotic object support, flexible and powerful command system, and command shell integration. PRY is the active feature in ruby on rails development services.

#4. RSpec Rails

Developers choose RSpec Rails when they have to write unit test cases, it facilitates the developers with the integration of RSpec framework into any Rails project. It is used in TDD and BDD environments, it also features descriptive and neat syntax.

#5. Figaro

Figaro is used for secure configuration of the applications, it keeps the configuration data and SCM separate and passes the YAML file and loads the value in the ENV.

#6. Devise

While creating an application or an eCommerce solution, developers need to create authorization or authentication to access the same, in simpler words creating a login process for the users. Some developers prefer using their own codes to create the login system while others prefer using Devise gem for authentication which of course is an easier and faster process to do so. Devise has 11 different models which are Database_Authenticatable, Authenticatable, Lockable, Confirmable, Omniauthable, Recoverable, Rememberable, Registrable, Trackable, Timeoutable, Validatable respectively.

#7. Ahoy

It is an analytics platform, used to track the events and the visit in the native apps like JavaScript and Ruby. Ahoy is more of a Ruby engine rather than a gem, responsible for creating visit tickets that consists of the traffic source, client device information, and the location. Users can also check the UTM parameters of the website visits.

#8. Paperclips

Working with file attachments can be a hefty task, it takes a lot of time and effort of the developers to ensure secure implementation of the task. This is where Paperclip saves the day; it keeps track of the whole process in the Rails app. It can also convert images to thumbnails.

#9. Delayed Job

The Delayed Job can handle the longer running actions for the background tasks. Features of Delayed Job include sending a large number of newsletters, Image resizing, spam checks, updating smart collections, batch imports, HTTP downloads, and updating solr.

#10. Kaminari

Paginate anything through Kaminari. This is one of the most popular gems among the developers. It already has 5 million downloads under its kitty. The developers of Ruby on rails web development company are sure to use this gem.

#11. CanCanCan

It is used to build complex applications, developers can easily set up the restrictions to users’ access. The authorizations definition library module lets developers set the rules to restrict access to certain users.

#12. Active Admin

This framework builds the interfaces of administration style. Active Admin extracts the business application patterns and makes it easy for engineers to implement rich and wonderful interfaces with less exertion. Its different features incorporate User Authentication, Scopes, Action Items, Global Navigation, Sidebar Sections, Filters, Index Styles, Downloads, and APIS.

#13. Active Merchant

This gem facilitates the users with a unified API to provide access to various payment gateways. This gem can also be incorporated as a plug-in. It is majorly used for RoR web applications and also used majorly by any web application development company.

#14. Bullet

It reduces the queries and increases the performance of the application. It notifies the users when the (N+1) queries are required and when the counter cache should be used.

#15. Webpacker

It supports JavaScript, CSS, fonts, and images relevant to component-based JavaScript. It works wonders for Rails app development.

Conclusion

Using Ruby gems is standard practice for the providers of Ruby on Rails web development services. These gems can easily resolve the issues pertaining to uploads, file testing, authorization, and authentication. But it’s better to hire a professional agency who has the right knowledge to build & offer RoR custom web application development services. W3villa Technologies has experience with the technology and the gems. The developers here can build the latest applications to suit your business process.

[chemicaltrend]

Bleach Market Analysis Growth Factors and Competitive Strategies

Allied Market Research published a new report, titled, " Bleach Market by Type (Reduced and Oxidized), Grade (Industrial Grade and Food Grade), Composition (Chlorine, Sodium Hypochlorite, Calcium Hypochlorite and Hydrogen Peroxide), Application (Dish Towels, Color-fast Prints, Shirts, and Others), and Enduser (Water treatment, Dentistry, Paper and Pulp and Others): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2020-2027." The report offers an extensive analysis of key growth strategies, drivers, opportunities, key segment, Porter’s Five Forces analysis, and competitive landscape. This study is a helpful source of information for market players, investors, VPs, stakeholders, and new entrants to gain thorough understanding of the industry and determine steps to be taken to gain competitive advantage.

The report offers key drivers that propel the growth in the global bleach market. These insights help market players in devising strategies to gain market presence. The research also outlined restraints of the market. Insights on opportunities are mentioned to assist market players in taking further steps by determining potential in untapped regions.

 Request Sample Report at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/6498

 The research offers a detailed segmentation of the global bleach market. Key segments analyzed in the research include into type, grade, composition, application, enduser, and region. Extensive analysis of sales, revenue, growth rate, and market share of each into type, grade, composition, application, enduser, and region for the historic period and the forecast period is offered with the help of tables.

The market is analyzed based on regions and competitive landscape in each region is mentioned. Regions discussed in the study include North America (United States, Canada and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia), South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia), Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa). These insights help to devise strategies and create new opportunities to achieve exceptional results.

The research offers an extensive analysis of key players active in the global bleach industry. Detailed analysis on operating business segments, product portfolio, business performance, and key strategic developments is offered in the research. Leading market players analyzed in the report include Swastik Chemicals, Olin Chlor Alkali, Aditya Birla Chemicals, Lords Chloro Alkali Limited, Suvidhi Industries, Hawkins In. These players have adopted various strategies including expansions, mergers & acquisitions, joint ventures, new product launches, and collaborations to gain a strong position in the industry.

 For Purchase Enquiry at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/6498

 Key Benefits:

·         The report provides a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the current bleach market trends, forecasts, and market size from 2019 to 2026 to determine new opportunities.

·         Porter’s Five Forces analysis highlights the potency of buyers and suppliers to enable stakeholders to make strategic business decisions and determine the level of competition in the industry.

·         Top impacting factors & major investment pockets are highlighted in the research.

·         The major countries in each region are analyzed and their revenue contribution is mentioned.

·         The market player positioning segment provides an understanding of the current position of the market players active in the bleach industry.

 Interested in Procuring this Report? visit: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/bleach-market/purchase-options

 Key offerings of the report:

·         Key drivers & Opportunities: Detailed analysis on driving factors and opportunities in different segments for strategizing.  

·         Current trends & forecasts: Comprehensive analysis on latest trends, development, and forecasts for next few years to take next steps.

·         Segmental analysis: Each segment analysis and driving factors along with revenue forecasts and growth rate analysis.

·         Regional Analysis: Thorough analysis of each region help market players devise expansion strategies and take a leap.

·         Competitive   Landscape: Extensive insights on each of the leading market players for outlining competitive scenario and take steps accordingly.

 Read Report Overview: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/bleach-market-A06133

About Us

Allied Market Research (AMR) is a market research and business-consulting firm of Allied Analytics LLP, based in Portland, Oregon. AMR offers market research reports, business solutions, consulting services, and insights on markets across 11 industry verticals. Adopting extensive research methodologies, AMR is instrumental in helping its clients to make strategic business decisions and achieve sustainable growth in their market domains. We are equipped with skilled analysts and experts, and have a wide experience of working with many Fortune 500 companies and small & medium enterprises.

Contact:                                                                      

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[theforbeshub-blog]

Top 10 Best Military Generals in The World 2020theforbeshub

New Post has been published on https://theforbeshub.com/best-military-generals-in-the-world/

Top 10 Best Military Generals in The World 2020

Our world has turned into a terrible place recently. The new innovations in infrastructure and changes in the armament have led to disastrous consequences.

With the new technology pouring over almost every day, countries now stand at the brink of war due to such improvisations.

All of these changes have taken place due to the terrific events like the WW2 and 9/11 massacre that made this world a fearful place to live in.

Army or land power is the most important and pivotal component of any military in the world.

It is the type of service that is also indulged in dealing with various affairs of the country like foreign decisions and political employments.

The army is among the topmost and reputed organizations of any country that plays a major part in the development and security of a country.

A military general is the foremost commander of the army. He is solely responsible for all of the decisions that have taken place or are going to take place.

A military general is a vital peace-keeper of the country and immediately retaliates in any emergency situation.

 10: Jörg Vollmer (Germany)

Germany is already pretty notorious for its dark history of secrets that lurk around the ghosts of Adolf Hitler!

Germany was a country that played an important role in the most furious of the wars that have ever happened in the history of mankind.

Germany is famous for the employment of various commanders that have taken control of the Nazi army.

Jörg Vollmer is an important figure to be included in the list due to the dedication of a lion in the field.

9: Katsutoshi Kawano (Japan)

Japan is a developed country with a spamming population.

The large census of this country makes it necessary to devise certain protective measures that would eventually help the country to prevail in such dire circumstances.

Many countries have this region at target due to the gigantic sources that are buried beneath its grounds.

Katsutoshi most certainly has proven himself competent enough to handle this duty and all of the other ranks he has worked on in order to become Chief of Defense in Japan.

8: Dalbir Singh (India)

India is a country where rapes and crimes are considered nothing.

This country is the main rape capital of the world and certain problems are lurking on the shoulders of this country all the time.

Street crimes and border crossing are considered an easy game for the persons who are adept at doing such unlawful acts.

Additionally, the competence and superiority of the traditional rival i.e. Pakistan make it necessary for India to protect their fragile country at all costs.

Dalbir Singh is the person selected for it.

7: Choi – Yoon – Hee (North Korea)

Korea, due to the impractical strategies and commanding, is subject to various problems from all over the world.

North Korea is considered a war endorsed country where everyone talks about war or is indulged in the planning of the war.

A patriotic country requires superior skills and commands for which the Military commander Choi is perfect.

Yoon Hee has actually come from the roots and still strong reputation of being a Navy Chief before appointed as Korean Military Commander.

This gives him superlative respect over all the competitors.

6: Nick Houghton (United Kingdom)

The UK is a country where the royals need to be served with the foremost security and perfection.

For this task, there must be a strong commander who is extravagant in solving all of the problems and providing reckless security to the Royals, irrespective of any protective measures.

Sir Nick is the name to be remembered. He has successfully led 39 infantry brigade.

Another great medal of honor added to this Military General’s success is that he has attained to shine an illuminated golden light on his reputation.

5: Fang Fenghui (China)

China is among the World’s largest countries due to its massive size and shape.

The country has the world’s largest army that needs to be operated in a diligent and professional manner.

To do such things and to fulfill the tasks perfectly, China has employed her topmost military leader known for his superior attack tactics and performance on the battlefield.

Fang, has been in the Military field, both literally and figuratively since the late 1960s while the rest began their careers during the ’70s.

4: Hulusi Akar (Turkey)

Turkey is a country known for its art and culture and not for horrific war or crime scenes.

The country is magically situated both in Europe and Asia and is among the most sophisticated countries in the world.

Muslim culture can be seen in almost every street. Turkey is a peaceful country and relies mostly on its military commander Hulusi.

General Hulusi Akar Graduated from Turkish Military Academy as an infantry officer back in 72′ like most of the other Military Generals of the world.

However, his experience is what makes him stand tall.

3: Valery Gerasimov (Russia)

The communist state of Russia which once housed all of the independent sovereign states of the world like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan is famous for causing great havoc in the world since its birth.

Valery is a Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Defense forces of Russia and appointed as one for Country and the choice of awesomeness it was.

The Soviet Union has seen Gerasimov too for his efforts of integrity, courage, bravery, and the possession of robust leadership qualities as well.

This makes him among the greatest military commanders.

2: Mark A Milley(United States Of America)

America has seen the greatest bits of War history in the historical events of world destruction such as The Revolutionary War, Second war of independence, Civil war, World War I, World war II, Korean War, Vietnam, Desert Storm (Iraq Evasion),

Iraq war and not forgetting having to endure the terrorist attack of the Century when the Twin Towers and the Pentagon of America has been attacked by Al – Qaeda (9 /11) as we the world knows it.

To deal with such issues, a great military general like Mark is needed for such acts and their preservation.

1: Qamar Javed Bajwa (Pakistan)

No doubt this guy tops the list of the best military generals of Pakistan.

General Bajwa is the best commander ever to be given to the fearless and patriotic state of Pakistan.

The country is already famous for its traditional rivalries with India and crashing the plane of the IAF in February.

Pakistan Army has surpassed the barriers that refrained it, for being the best army in the world.

General Bajwa is renowned for being the best General in the Pakistan Army and giving tough competition to all others in the world.

[cleatechlaboratory]

How to use cleanroom workbenches in laboratory

Original Source: https://laboratoryquipment.blogspot.com/2019/10/how-to-use-cleanroom-workbenches-in.html

Laboratories become perfectly functional after the inclusion of some essential machinery and equipment. Cleanroom workbench are one of the utility item which is compulsory to incorporate in any laboratory.

Literally cleanroom workbenches are devised for either sitting and relaxing while changing clothes in order to enter the lab or for sitting intermittently while doing work. They are built from material of high grade stainless steel in a simple pattern. So they are smooth to maintain. Also they offer effortless passage on either side.  One can relax on workbench by lifting feet over them or simply sliding the complete body over them.

Basically the cleanroom workbench stand on four legs which is linked to one flat platform. The designing of workbench is so simple and smooth, that it effectively mitigates the chances of particle deposition and germ accumulation.

Now let’s see how to use cleanroom workbenches in laboratory-

1)      Some workbenches have an advanced design which partially convert them into storage cabinets or workstations.

   By attachment of shelves the workbench can be utilised for keeping lab relevant essential equipment such as face masks, gloves etc. So the workbench is transformed into a multipurpose lab furniture.

2)      Similarly lab personnel can sit on the workbench, can keep lab relevant accessories or working files on the workbench. Also by sitting on workbench they can easily complete writing tasks or basic lab works.

3)      Some workbench are exclusively devised for placing computer system on the shelf of workbench or for fitting other electrical devices.

4)      Drawers outfitted in the workbench can be utilised for storing files, papers, accessories and other lab relevant items.

5)      Laboratory ambience demands inclusion of such devices which can be cleaned daily. So the Stainless Steel Desiccators, which have least designing and minimum surface for cleaning are of great utility.

    Cleanroom workbench are made of stainless steel, and steel can be easily sanitized through nitrogen or cleaners in hassle free manner, which is an essential prerequisite of lab work.

6)      Stainless steel is one of the non-reactive metal. It can endure exposure to various types of chemicals. Hence workbench can be used for performing experiments with chemicals.

7)      Workbenches can be used as workstations too.

8)      The solid structural strength and configuration of workbenches make them perfect for any kind of hazardous lab work. Thus on the top of table rigorous work like wielding can also be performed.

9)       Drawers present in workbenches can be utilised for storing lab items conveniently thereby organising the entire lab work in more systematic manner.

10)  Some workbenches have flexible system of altering heights, making them easy to use. By this useful feature their height can be adjusted as per demand of the work.

11)  Many designs of workbenches are supplied with wheel fitted legs, which helps in smooth pulling and pushing.

     So clean workbenches built from stainless steel are work backing equipment, which transform a space into a working environment. Also stainless steel is a durable metal and can be used for infinite years. Thus workbenches are multifunctional units and offers several services.

[simplesynopsis-blog]

LONG READ: The United Nations, the Global Capitalist Regime and Circumnavigating Coercion with Common Sense

Conventional wisdom is a dangerous thing. This becomes particularly apparent when considering conventional wisdoms around global development where ‘it is all too easy… to reinforce rather than to challenge the status quo and the conventional wisdom.’ (Hurrel, 2011, p. 152) This paper argues the United Nations (UN) has emerged into the 21st century as a capitalist hawk, leading the dissemination of capitalists values and imperatives through economic globalization. Firstly, this paper considers how UN development programs have led to the proletarianisation of people in the developing world as well as the embedding of neoliberal institutional structures. Secondly, it is evaluated how the UN has contributed to create a non-coercive regime of common sense, enforcing the capitalist world-system. Third, the destructive separation of the economy and politics through UN reforms are considered. Finally, the question is addressed of whether or not the UN as an autonomous international institution has taken a dominant position as enforcer of a capitalist narrative.

The UN seeks to further a capitalist agenda with its proletarianisation of people within developing countries. Notably, with the dawn of the 21st century, the UN has focused its efforts around ‘the export of capitalism’ (as opposed to ‘the export of capital’)(Cammack, 2006, p. 1). This involves the spread of ‘the social relations of production that define it and institutions devised to promote and sustain them.’ (p. 1). Far from benign, undertakings such as the Millennium Development Goals, Monterrey Consensus (p. 18), as well as the 2005 UNDP publication Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making Business Work for the Poor (p. 2) are all framed in terms of ‘eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; achieving universal primary education; promoting gender equality’, amongst other development goals (p. 1). However, in reality these development programs are a merely a continuation of the timeless capitalist commodification of labour, disguised as humanitarian development. These UN programs seek to add new regions and peoples ‘into the capitalist world market’ (Overbeek, 2004, p. 4). This becomes apparent through the UN’s mobilization of ‘the ‘‘latent’ proletariat’, such as women, who’s emancipation in many oppressed areas is intended to allow their full proletarianisation within a capitalist system (Cammack, 2003, p. 45). Thus, gender equality in this regard ‘is understood as a tool to maximize performance, not as a goal per se.’ (Zwingel et al., 2014, p. 182). This is similarly the underlying purpose of efforts promoting basic social services in developing areas (Cammack, 2003, pp. 45-46), such as education and sanitation. In reality, what these UN programs really achieve is the disentanglement of much of the labour previously tied down in the Third World due to poor health and education (Gill, 1998, p. 36). In other words, the UN’s development programs seek to effectively mobilise the working classes in these areas for capitalist exploitation. This capitalist agenda is further embodied in the UN’s efforts through the structural factors of their development goals. Notable examples include the privatization of various government services in developing countries, successfully introducing them fully into the market (Gill, 1998, p. 36; Overbeek, 2004, p. 4). This locks in the capitalist system by increasing the number of national veto points prohibiting a departure from the neoliberal agenda (Gill, 1998, p. 34). Ultimately, all these are examples of the UN furthering the process of primitive accumulation in that these reforms separate workers ‘from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour’ and thus creates an ‘industrial reserve army’ (Marx, 1976, p. 874 & pp. 763-764 cited Cammack, 2003, p. 43).

Furthermore, the UN seeks to lock in this capitalist ethos through the ‘internationalization of the state’ (Cox, 1996, p. 107 cited Overbeek, 2004, p. 11) and spread of a neoliberal common sense, making it very difficult for countries to oppose this capitalist economic globalization. The first way it achieves this is through the spread of a capitalist common sense. Agreeing with a wider Marxist interpretation of historical materialism (Rupert, 2003, p. 185), the UN promotes ‘common adherence to codes and standards’ (Cammack, 2003, p. 38) and a global consensus ‘regarding the needs or requirements of the world economy that takes place within a common ideological framework’ (Overbeek, 2004, p. 11). The ideas of neoliberalism have been normalized and any alternative view has been discarded as unfeasible (Overbeek, 2004, p. 11). This is helped thorough the UN’s position of authority. The UN gains its authority as a Global Governor due to its purported expertize in certain international policy areas and from its ‘service to some widely accepted principles, morals, [and] values’ (Sell, 2014, p. 77). As defined by functionalist theory, the UN operates by employing ‘Specialized Agencies’ who are experts within necessarily international fields such as development and trade (Gordenker, 2014, p. 211). This might lead to doubt over the efficacy of the UN in spreading capitalist dogma. Notably, international institutions do often lack ‘formal regulatory powers’ (Overbeek, 2004, p. 14), thus ‘safeguarding conventional state autonomy’ (Gordenker, 2014, p. 220). Similarly, national governments are merely ‘obliged to carry out’ UN conventions (p. 215). After all, countries are not coerced into adopting this UN-driven capitalist world-view as they might be through, for example, American military expansion. However, this functionalist understanding critically does not take into account the power of the non-coercive nature of these recommendations. Within a world-system characterized by a capitalist common sense, states must always be vigilant in protecting their perceived credibility in the international market. Countries are forced to maintain their credibility in the international system as this creates investor confidence (Gill, 1998, p. 25). Furthermore, as defined by the common sense of the capitalist world market, governments are led to believe ‘that a revival of economic growth would depend upon business confidence to invest’, emphasising the structural power of capital (Cox, 1992, p. 28). This encourages the internationalization of the state, as the state is necessary for the institutional reforms at the national level which allow for the transparent nature of capital, ensuring credibility and investor confidence (Gill, 1998, p. 31). Thus, while UN recommendations are not formally coercive, states cannot oppose them without challenging a capitalist common sense and suffering at the hands of the global market.

This UN’s dissemination of capitalist values is equally stark in its promotion of the separation of the market from the political sphere. This is understood as New Constitutionalism (Gill, 1998, p. 30; Overbeek, 2004, p. 12). Under the national institutional arrangements promoted by the UN, individual investors are empowered over regular citizens. Notably, they favour ‘mobile (especially financial) capital’ (Overbeek, 2004, p. 14). For example, as the aforementioned need for states to maintain their economic credibility is held paramount, ‘[t]he mobile investor becomes the sovereign political subject.’ (Gill, 1998, p. 23) The empowerment of wealthy individuals is an extension of capitalists imperatives for two main reasons. Firstly, it seeks to ward off popular dissent. This is linked to the capitalist view of the ‘‘excess of democracy’’ that could only be dealt with by depoliticizing marginal groups with purportedly excessive demands (for example: demands for welfare) (Cox, 1992, p. 33). Consequently, popular participation in decision-making is ‘restricte[d]… to safely channelled areas’ separate from ‘key economic and strategic areas of policy’ (Gill, 1998, p. 27). Thus the UN’s programs seek to impose a ‘dual freedom’ prevalent in Marxist thought stipulating that people are emancipated ‘within the parameters of republican forms of state’ whilst ‘(re-)subjecting persons to social domination through the compulsions of market dependence and the disabling effects of fetishism and reification.’ (Rupert, 2003, p. 182) Secondly it seeks to reestablish a dominant bourgeoisie both nationally and globally. The ruling class does not rule by controlling the state, rather they adopt a ‘diffused and situated’ character within ‘the myriad of institutions and relationships in civil society.’ (Overbeek, 2004, p. 3) Nationally, the proletarianisation created through the UN’s development programs seeks to establish the bourgeoisie as the leading group in all countries within a democratic framework (Cammack, 2006, p. 6), returning them to a position of wealth following their setbacks in the 20th century (Harvey, 2005, p. 16). Globally, these development programs expand a global class system. They create a ‘global class structure’ that is situated ‘alongside or superimposed upon national class structures’ (Cox 1996, p. 111 cited Overbeek, 2004, p. 11). This is captured by a core-periphery view of the world in that an unequal exchange allows for the excess flow of capital towards core states from the periphery (developing countries) (Wallerstein, 2007, pp. 17-18).

Lastly, it should be noted how the UN is now indeed the lead agency for the dissemination of a capitalist agenda as the UN currently does not act in favour of individual countries and instead spreads international capitalism as an autonomous body. The UN has come to further the capitalist world order, autonomously from the will of individual states (Cammack, 2006, p. 1). Notably, due to the loss of legitimacy of the IMF and WB in the 1990s, who were previously furthering this agenda (Gill, 1998, p. 36; Cammack, 2006, pp. 1-2), the UN has now taken up the reins of this authority role (Cammack, 2006, pp. 1-2). Realists fiercely oppose this claim. To realist scholars, the nature of governance reflects ‘the internal meta-value ensembles of particular groups, who have proven adept at amassing relative power for themselves in this particular historical moment in time’ (Sterling-Folker, 2005, p. 32). Furthermore, within an international institutional framework, the realists interpretation would be that the UN allows the most powerful nations to push their agenda through an ‘institutionalised environment’ (Callinicos, 2002, p. 325). These arguments culminate in the view that the spread of capitalism is still at the hands of individual states (Gordenker, 2014, p. 212). However, the reason this is not, and cannot be, the case is due to a paradox within the international capitalist system realists fail to see (Cammack, 2003, p. 41). Capitalist states pursuing their interests necessarily involves both ‘the introduction and promotion of the disciplines of capitalist competition on a global scale’ (p. 41) as well as a desire to outcompete rival nations, inevitably multiplied though the aforementioned spread of capitalism (p. 40). In other words, nations promoting capitalism can thus not be acting in their own interest, as stipulated by realists. This problem is solved with the UN as the lead agency for capitalist dissemination. Individual projects of capital accumulation are difficult for states and this is why the UN, as a supranational body, can ‘mitigate’ the obstacles in their way and better promote global capital, necessarily due to not being driven by the agenda of an individual state (p. 40). This argument is solidified when noting the United States’ anger over the wording of the 2005 UN paper Unleashing Entrepreneurship, which sought to consolidate the authority of the UN as the lead agency for the of the spread of global capitalism, rather than the US, reflecting the clash of the national vis-à-vis supranational promotion of capitalist values and imperatives (Cammack, 2006, p. 20). The eventual retreat of the US in this confrontation (p. 20) merely reinforces the emergence of the UN as the lead agency for the global dissemination of capitalism in the 21st century.

In summary, the UN has entered the 21st century as the dominant figure in the global spread of capitalist ideas and practices. This is not only the case within its proletarianisation of untapped sources of labour within the developing world, but also through its establishment of a non-coercive system within which capitalist common sense reinforces compliance and punishes those who attempt to adopt an alternative world-view. It has also been shown how the UN thus helps to create a global class system atop national class systems, empowering a global bourgeoisie. Lastly, the UN does not act in favour of individual states, as argued by realists, but instead necessarily furthers the capitalist narrative autonomously. Thus it has been highlighted how, conventional wisdom is indeed a dangerous thing, particularly when considering how development is perceived and how the mechanisms that are naturally seen to accompany it take shape.

References

Callinicos, A. (2002) The Actuality of Imperialism. Millennium, 31(2), 319–326.

Cammack, P. (2003) The Governance of Global Capitalism: A New Materialist Perspective. Historical Materialism, 11(2), 37–59.

Cammack, P. (2006) UN imperialism: unleashing entrepreneurship in the developing world. Papers in the Politics of Global Competitiveness, Manchester Metropolitan University, no. 2.

Cox, R. W. (1992) Global Perestroika. Socialist Register, 28, 26-43. Available from: http://www.socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5606#.WqeZhZPFI-c [Accessed 7 March 2018].

Gill, S. (1998) New Constitutionalism, Democratisation and Global Political Economy. Global Change, Peace & Security, 10(1), 23–38.

Gordenker, L. (2014) The UN System IN: IN Weiss, T. G. and Wilkinson, R. (eds.) International Organization and Global Governance, Abingdon: Routledge, 209-222.

Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hurrell, A. (2011) The Theory and Practice of Global Governance: The Worst of All Possible Worlds? International Studies Review, 13(1), 144–154.

Overbeek, H. (2004) Global Governance, Class, Hegemony: A historical materialist perspective. Working Papers Political Science, VU University Amsterdam, 2004/01.

Rupert, M. (2003) Globalising Common Sense: A Marxian-Gramscian (Re-)Vision of the Politics of Governance/Resistance. Review of International Studies, 29(S1): 181–198.

Sell, S. K. (2014) Who Governs the Globe? IN Weiss, T. G. and Wilkinson, R. (eds.) International Organization and Global Governance, Abingdon: Routledge, 73-86.

Sterling-Folker, J. (2005) Realist global governance: revisiting cave! hic Dragones and beyond IN: Ba, A. D. and Hoffmann, M. J. (eds.) Contending Perspectives on Global Governance: Coherence, contestation and world order, London: Routledge, 17-38.

Wallerstein, I. (2007) World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. 5th ed. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Zwingel S., Prügl, E. and Caglar, G. (2014) Feminism IN: Weiss, T. G. and Wilkinson, R. (eds.) International Organization and Global Governance, Abingdon: Routledge, 180-191.

[rabbitcruiser]

Cell Block, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary (No. 5)

The Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary or United States Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island (often just referred to as Alcatraz or The Rock) was a maximum high-security federal prison on Alcatraz Island, 1.25 miles (2.01 km) off the coast of San Francisco, California, which operated from August 11, 1934, until March 21, 1963.

The main prison building was built in 1910–1912 during its time as a United States Army military prison; Alcatraz had been the site of a citadel since the 1860s. The United States Disciplinary Barracks, Pacific Branch on Alcatraz had been acquired by the United States Department of Justice on October 12, 1933, and the island became a prison of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in August 1934 after the buildings were modernized to meet the requirements of a top-notch security prison. Given this high security and the location of Alcatraz in the cold waters and strong currents of San Francisco Bay, the prison operators believed Alcatraz to be escape-proof and America's strongest prison.

Alcatraz was designed to hold prisoners who continuously caused trouble at other federal prisons. One of the world's most notorious and best known prisons over the years, Alcatraz housed some 1,576 of America's most ruthless criminals including Al Capone, Robert Franklin Stroud (the "Birdman of Alcatraz"), George "Machine Gun" Kelly, Bumpy Johnson, Rafael Cancel Miranda,Mickey Cohen, Arthur R. "Doc" Barker, Whitey Bulger and Alvin "Creepy" Karpis (who served more time at Alcatraz than any other inmate). It also provided housing for the Bureau of Prisons' staff and their families. A total of 36 prisoners made 14 escape attempts during the 29 years of the prison's existence, the most notable of which were the violent escape attempt of May 1946 known as the "Battle of Alcatraz", and the arguably successful "Escape from Alcatraz" by Frank Morris, John Anglin, and Clarence Anglin in June 1962 in one of the most intricate escapes ever devised. Faced with high maintenance costs and a poor reputation, Alcatraz closed on March 21, 1963.

The three-story cellhouse included the main four blocks of the jail, A-block, B-block, C-block, and D-block, the warden's office, visitation room, the library, and the barber shop. The prison cells typically measured 9 feet (2.7 m) by 5 feet (1.5 m) and 7 feet (2.1 m) high. The cells were primitive and lacked privacy, with a bed, a desk and a washbasin and toilet on the back wall, with few furnishings except a blanket. African-Americans were segregated from the rest in cell designation due to racial abuse being prevalent. D-Block housed the worst inmates and five cells at the end of it were designated as "The Hole", where badly behaving prisoners would be sent for periods of punishment, often brutally so. The dining hall and kitchen lay off the main building in an extended part where both prisoners and staff would eat three meals a day together. The Alcatraz Hospital was above the dining hall.

Corridors of the prison were named after major American streets such as Broadway and Michigan Avenue. Working at the prison was considered a privilege for inmates and many of the better inmates were employed in the Model Industries Building and New Industries Building during the day, actively involved in providing for the military in jobs such as sewing and woodwork and performing various maintenance and laundry chores.

Today the penitentiary is a public museum and one of San Francisco's major tourist attractions, attracting some 1.5 million visitors annually. The former prison is now operated by the National Park Service's Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and the badly eroded buildings of the former prison have been subject to restoration works in recent times and maintained. 

Source: Wikipedia

[waynejenkinswj54]

Unique and Effective Upholstery Cleaning Method

Upholstery Cleaning Robbinsville NJ

Are you getting tired of coughing and sneezing all the time? If so, it’s probably preventing you from focusing on tasks at home or at the workplace. In such situations, the underlying issues, such as allergen prevalence, frequently go undiagnosed.

It is more necessary than it has ever been to maintain a clean home in this day and age due to the constantly shifting weather and the pandemic. This primarily refers to the places you frequently visit. In this context, the cleaning of upholstery is also emphasized. Even thorough vacuuming is ineffective in removing the vast majority of the pollutants.

Employ the services of a professional upholstery cleaning service for this particular objective. Cleaning professionals who specialize in cleaning upholstery utilize a wide variety of cleaning solutions and techniques to provide an in-depth cleaning of the upholstery. Continue reading if you are interested in finding out more about the processes that are involved in the process of cleaning upholstery.

The Most Effective Method for Cleaning Upholstery in Robbinsville, New Jersey

The cleaning process is handled by staff members who have received training and have years of experience working for a professional upholstery cleaning company. They are well-versed in each and every upholstery fabric and its intricacies. As a result, they are able to devise a list of things that should and should not be done when cleaning upholstered furniture.

Initial Examination — The assessment of the fabric used in the upholstery comes at the beginning of the process of cleaning the upholstery. This assists in determining the cause of the problem as well as the magnitude of the issue.

A Test for Color Drainage — The dye in the upholstery fabric is allowed to drain out so that the best way to clean each piece of furniture can be found.

The Procedure Before Treatment — A layer of pre-conditioner is typically applied to upholstery fabric prior to the pretreatment process. This helps break up spots and stains, which makes it easier to get rid of them.

Soil Cleanup — All of the loose material, substances, and soil are removed from the upholstered furniture by using a vacuum machine. As a result, it has a revitalized and fresh appearance.

Spot Treatment — In order to completely remove the stains, an enzyme-based cleaning solution is lathered into them. This procedure is only performed if absolutely required.

Drying — Afterwards, they hang the upholstery to dry before using it again. Depending on the weather, this could take anywhere from three to twelve hours.

Final Inspection — In the end, a thorough examination of the upholstery is performed by professionals in order to double-check that all of the contaminants have been eliminated.

Robbinsville NJ’s Most Reliable Upholstery Cleaners!

Robbinsville, New Jersey residents can rely on the expertise of Continental Carpet Cleaning’s upholstery cleaners. Get in touch with us at 609–806–5222 to hire our professional upholstery cleaners.

Continental Carpet Cleaning

174 Nassau St, unit 305 Princeton NJ 08542

609–806–5222

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[stillellensibley]

Becoming Machine: Surrealist Automatism and Some Contemporary Instances

Involuntary Drawing

DAVID LOMAS

Examining the idea of being ‘machine-like’ and its impact on the practice of automatic writing, this article charts a history of automatism from the late nineteenth century to the present day, exploring the intersections between physiology, psychology, poetry and art.

Philippe Parreno’s The Writer 2007 (fig.1) is a video, played on a screen the size of a painted miniature, of the famous eighteenth-century Jaquet-Droz automaton recorded in the act of writing with a goose quill pen. Zooming in on the automaton’s hand and face, Parreno contrives to produce a sense of uncertainty as to the human or robotic nature of the doll. It is an example of a contemporary fascination with cyborgs and with the increasingly blurred dividing line between machine and organism. In a manner worthy of surrealist artist René Magritte, Parreno plays on the viewer’s sense of astonishment. As the camera rolls, the android deliberates before slowly writing: ‘What do you believe, your eyes or my words?’ The ‘Écrivain’ is one of the most celebrated automata that enjoyed a huge vogue in Enlightenment Europe. In a lavish two-volume book, Le Monde des automates (1928), Edouard Gélis and Alfred Chapuis define the android as ‘an automaton with a human face’.1 A chapter of this book, which supplied the illustrations for an article in the surrealist journal Minotaure, is devoted to drawing and writing automata.2 The oldest example Gélis and Chapuis cite was fabricated by the German inventor Friedrich von Knauss whom, they state, laboured at the problem of ‘automatic writing’ for twenty years before presenting his first apparatus in 1753.3

Fig.1 Philippe Parreno The Writer 2007 Photographic still from DVD 3:58 minutes Courtesy the artist and Haunch of Venison, London © Philippe Parreno

The graphic trace

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, recording instruments became vital tools in the production of scientific knowledge in a range of disciplines that were of direct relevance to surrealism. Such mechanical apparatuses, synonymous with the values of precision and objectivity, quickly became the benchmark of an experimental method. The inexorable rise of the graphic method has been intensively studied by historians of science and visual culture, but surrealism has not yet been considered as partaking of this transformation in the field of visual representation. In what follows, recording instruments are shown to have helped to underwrite surrealism’s scientific aspects and bolster its credentials as an experimental avant-garde.

The graphic method inaugurated a novel paradigm of visual representation, one geared towards capturing dynamic phenomena in their essence. It was the product of a radically new scientific conception of the physical universe in terms of dynamic forces, a world view that is doubtless at some level a naturalisation of the energies, both destructive and creative, unleashed by industrial capitalism.5The proliferation of mechanical inscription devices in the life sciences coincided with the displacement of anatomy, as a static principle of localisation, by physiology, which analysed and studied forces and functions. Étienne-Jules Marey, known today as an inventor of chronophotography, was one of the main exponents of the graphic method in France, and he personally devised a number of instruments whose aid, he wrote, made it possible to ‘penetrate the intimate functions of organs where life seems to translate itself by an incessant mobility’.6 As an apparatus for visualisation, the graphic method carries implications for how to construe figures of the visible and invisible. It was not simply a technology for making visible something that lay beneath the human perceptual threshold (like a microscope), but rather a technology for producing a visual analogue – a translation – of forces and phenomena that do not themselves belong to a visual order of things.7

At its simplest, a frog’s leg muscle is hooked directly to a pointed stylus that rests on a drum whose surface is blackened with particles of soot from a candle flame (fig.2). An electrical stimulus causes the muscle to contract, deflecting the stylus and thus producing on the revolving drum a typical white on black curvilinear trace. Fatigue of the muscle produces an increased duration and diminished amplitude of successive contractions, as shown in the figure at the bottom. A more sophisticated device pictured by Marey consisted of a flexible diaphragm, a sort of primitive transducer, connected by a hollow rubber tube to a stylus, which inscribed onto a continuous strip of paper. At the heart of the graphic method is the production of a visible trace.8 A stylus roving back and forth on a rotating cylinder or a moving band of paper translates forces into a universal script that Marey regarded as ‘the language of the phenomena themselves’ and which he proclaimed is superior to the written word.9 In an era where quantitative data gradually became the common currency of scientific discourse, Marey considered written language, ‘born before science and not being made for it’, as inadequate to express ‘exact measures and well-defined relations’.10 The incorporation of a time axis owing to the continuous regular movement of the drum lends a distinctive property to the graphic trace. The historian Robert Brain remarks that ‘the graphic representation is not an object or field like that of linear perspective, but a spatial product of a temporal process, whose order is serial or syntagmatic’.11 Units of time are marked off at the bottom of the myographic trace as regular blips on a horizontal axis; additionally, the passage of time is registered in the palimpsest-like layering of successive traces.12

Fig.2 Simple myograph (top) and trace of repeated muscular contractions (bottom) From Etienne-Jules Marey, La Méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine, Paris 1875, p.194

From its initial applications in physiology, the graphic method soon made inroads into areas such as medicine and psychology, eager to prove their scientific legitimacy. The familiar chart of a patient’s temperature, pulse, and respiration had become standard fare in hospital wards by the mid-nineteenth century.13 Marey went so far as to predict that the visual tableau comprised of such ‘medical curves’ would replace altogether the written record. The growth of medical specialties saw doctors attempting to justify their status and claims to authoritative knowledge by adopting the tools-in-trade of an experimental science. The Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, under neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, was at the forefront of these developments, and graphic traces are liberally interspersed among the better-known photographs, engravings, and fine art reproductions of Charcot’s book Iconographie de la Salpêtrière (1878). Employed first for the investigation of muscular and nervous disorders, the myograph was subsequently applied by Charcot to the study of hysteria. By enabling the hysterical attack to be objectively recorded in the form of a linear visual narrative, the graphic trace performed an invaluable service in conferring a semblance of reality upon a condition that was widely dismissed as mere playacting or simulation (fig.3).

Fig.3 Epileptic phase of an hysterical attack From Paul Richer, Études cliniques sur l’hystéro-épilepsie ou grande hystérie, Paris 1885, p.40.

Nearer in time to the surrealists, the hysteria problem was revived with particular urgency in the guise of shellshock, and there again physicians placed their faith in the graphic method as a means of reliably excluding simulation where clinical observation alone was of no avail. Evidence of the surrealist André Breton’s first-hand acquaintance with such devices is not hard to find. Soon after his arrival at the neuro-psychiatric centre at St Dizier in August 1916 he writes excitedly to Théodore Fraenkel, a fellow medical student, saying that all his time is devoted to examining patients. He details his technique for interrogating his charges and in the same breath adds ‘and I manipulate the sphygmometric oscillometer’.14 The instrument to which Breton refers gives a measure of the peripheral pulses and would have been used by him to detect an exaggerated vascular response to cold that was held to be a diagnostic feature of reflex nervous disorders. There is a reasonable likelihood that Breton also came in contact with the use of a myograph for the same purpose, either at St Dizier or the following year when he was attached as a trainee to neurologist Joseph Babinski’s unit at the Pitié Hospital in Paris. Breton possessed a copy, with a personal dedication from the authors, of Babinski and Jules Froment’s Hystérie-pithiatisme et troubles nerveux d’ordre réflexe en neurologie de guerre (1917), a textbook profusely illustrated with myographic traces.

As a newly formed discipline, psychology was also quick to integrate the paraphernalia of experimental physiology.15 Alfred Binet, one of the pioneers of psychology in France, employed the graphic trace as an instrument more sensitive in his opinion than automatic writing for revealing a dissociation of the personality in cases of hysteria. ‘In following our study of the methods that enable us to reveal this hidden personality’, Binet writes, ‘we are now to have recourse to the so-called graphic method, the employment of which, at first restricted to the work-rooms of physiology, seems, at the present time, destined to find its way into the current practice of medicine’.16 The definition of psychology as experimental is seen to be closely tied with the use of a measuring instrument. Binet’s goal appears to be an almost paradoxical exclusion of the subject, with its nigh infinite capacity for dissimulation, from the scientific investigation of that subject’s own subjectivity. Coinciding with the introduction of quantitative forms of measurement, introspection rapidly fell into disrepute as a method of inquiry. Robert Brain’s observation that in the field of psychology ‘the graphic method served both as a research tool and a source of analogies for investigating mental activities’ is certainly to be borne in mind with regard to surrealism.17

Alongside mainstream science, recording devices also made incursions into psychical research. The use of such apparatuses to restrict the latitude for fraud contributed to the general air of scientific enquiry. The historian Richard Noakes has shown that the intractable problems of researching mediums, their notoriously capricious and untrustworthy nature, led some experimenters to suggest that sensitive instruments alone could replace the human subject as a means of accessing the spirit world.18 In the 1870s, William Crookes, a respected chemist and a pioneer in the application of measuring instruments to spiritualist research, devised an apparatus for recording emanations from the body of the medium Daniel Dunglas Home, as a result of which he claimed to have discovered a mysterious new form of energy, which he termed ‘Psychic Force’ (fig.4).19 A Marey drum was used to make physiological recordings of the medium Eusapia Palladino, who had been often exposed for cheating in the past, during a highly publicised series of séances conducted under controlled experimental conditions at the laboratories of the Institut général de psychologie in Paris.20

Fig.4 Apparatus for recording the emanation of psychic force from a medium. From William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London 1874.

Modest recording instruments

It would appear that surrealism was not indifferent to the lure of the graphic method. The particular aspect to foreground here is the promise of objectivity. The graphic method offered the prospect of bypassing altogether the human observer who was increasingly liable to be viewed as a source of error in scientific experiment. With precision and objectivity the yardsticks of science by the latter part of the nineteenth century, the historian Peter Galison remarks that ‘the machine as a neutral and transparent operator … would serve as instrument of registration without intervention and as an ideal for the moral discipline of the scientists themselves’.21 Addressing the graphic trace in these terms, Marey strikingly adumbrates the language of surrealism in remarking that ‘one endeavoured to write automatically certain phenomena’.22 The surrealists spoke of their art and literary productions as objective documents and advocated an objective stance that sidelines the authorial subject who was meant to be as near as possible a passive onlooker at the birth of the work. Or, in Breton’s words, a modest recording device: ‘we, who have made no effort whatsoever to filter, who in our works have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments not mesmerised by the drawings we are making.’23 Closely allied with this imperative to become akin to a machine is a metaphorics of the trace and tracing: ‘here again it is not a matter of drawing, but simply of tracing’, Breton insisted in the 1924 ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’.24

The accent on objectivity is consonant with surrealism’s avant-gardist ethos of experiment, stemming ultimately from science. In fact, Breton contended that by the time the manifesto had been published, five years of uninterrupted experimental activity already lay behind it.25 Around the time of the manifesto, the surrealists set about creating a research centre of sorts, the short-lived Bureau of Surrealist Research, testifying to the earnestness of their experimental impulse. However, it was no ordinary laboratory that opened to the public at 15 Rue de Grenelle, Paris, in October 1924. The surrealist playwright and poet Antonin Artaud recalls that a mannequin hung from the ceiling and, reputedly, copies of the crime fiction volume Fantômas and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretations of Dreams framed with spoons were enthroned on a makeshift altarpiece. The second issue of the house journal La Révolution surréaliste, the cover of which was modeled on the popular science magazine La Nature, carried an announcement of its purpose:

The Bureau of Surrealist Research is applying itself to collecting by all appropriate means communications concerning the diverse forms taken by the mind’s unconscious activity. No specific field has been defined for this project and surrealism plans to assemble as much experimental data as possible, without knowing yet what the end result might be.26

Asserting a parallel with science, as Breton was fond of doing, was a way of implying that surrealism was dedicated to finding practical solutions to vital problems of human existence, and of distancing it as far as possible from a posture of aesthetic detachment. The statement above identifies the unconscious as the privileged object of surrealist research. Automatism, from this point of view, could be understood as a research method, a set of investigative procedures that organise and govern practice but do not determine outcomes. The openness of scientific inquiry is something that may have been especially attractive to surrealism; the final clause above insists upon their refusal to define goals – a programme – which would have run the risks of a reductive instrumentalism or empty utopianism. At the same time, however, bearing in mind the extreme animosity towards positivism that Breton notoriously gives vent to in the 1924 manifesto, the dangers for surrealism of too close a proximity to science should not be overlooked. Perhaps for this reason, Artaud, in a report on the bureau carried in the third issue of the journal, argues warily for the necessity of a certain surrealist mysticism. A survey of the terms ‘research’ and ‘experiment’ in the period would reveal that much the same vocabulary was utilised in the marginal, pseudo-scientific world of spiritualism and parapsychology as by mainstream science, and it is notable that surrealist experimentation happily straddles these seemingly contradictory currents. The hypnotic trance sessions, one of the main experimental activities engaged in by the nascent surrealist group, are illustrative of this cross-over between science and the occult. 543 pages of notes and drawings obsessively documenting the sessions, which took place nightly between September and October 1922, were preserved by Breton and included among a list of artworks, books and other objects housed in the bureau.

While Salvador Dalí did not partake of the ‘birth pangs’ of surrealism, as Breton ruefully observed, his overheated imagination provides a vivid if fanciful evocation of this first phase of surrealist experiment. In an essay written in 1932, Dalí conjures up an improbable scenario of hypnotic subjects wired to recording devices like the unfortunate frog in Marey’s illustration, though in this case it is the trace of poetic inspiration that is expectantly awaited:

All night long a few surrealists would gather round the big table used for experiments, their eyes protected and masked by thin though opaque mechanical slats on which the blinding curve of the convulsive graphs would appear intermittently in fleeting luminous signals, a delicate nickel apparatus like an astrolabe being fixed to their necks and fitted with animal membranes to record by interpenetration the apparition of each fresh poetic streak, their bodies being bound to their chairs by an ingenious system of straps, so that they could only move a hand in a certain way and the sinuous line was allowed to inscribe the appropriate white cylinders. Meanwhile their friends, holding their breath and biting their lower lips in concentrated attention, would lean over the recording apparatus and with dilated pupils await the expected but unknown movement, sentence, or image.27

Dalí clearly took to heart Breton’s exhortation to his fellow surrealists that they should make themselves into ‘modest recording instruments’. Inspired by extant photographs that afford a rare glimpse of the legendary bureau, Dalí conjures up a fantastical laboratory with pliant subjects hooked to a plethora of arcane recording devices.

Beyond a serviceable metaphor employed by Breton, what evidence is there for the graphic method as having any bearing on the actual practice of automatic drawing? While scattered instances of direct citation of graphic traces can be demonstrated, what is more significant is that this novel regime of visuality, beginning as a style of scientific imaging and becoming by the time of surrealism a widely circulated and understood visual idiom, was a necessary historical antecedent in order that the automatist line might be imbued with meaning as the authentic trace of unconscious instinctual forces and energies (in its absence, they would have been literally unreadable in these terms). With the precedent of the graphic trace available to them, it was possible for surrealist artists to imagine how they might square the circle by integrating temporal duration within a static visual medium.

‘Could it be that Marcel Duchamp reaches the critical point of ideas faster than anyone else?’, wondered Breton. It is a question that can profitably be asked in examining the impact on avant-garde artists of an avowedly scientific visual idiom. Duchamp, and his artistic collaborator Francis Picabia, around 1912 to 1913 rejected traditional painterly techniques, along with extreme subjectivism that had reached a zenith in the neo-symbolist circles both artists had been involved with up until that point, and turned instead to technical drawing and scientific illustrations as alternative, non-artistic sources of inspiration. Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages 1913–14 (fig.5) is evidence of his search for what art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson calls ‘the beauty of indifference, the counterpart to his painting of precision’.28 For this work, one-metre lengths of thread were allowed to fall from a height of one metre, and the random configurations formed as they came to rest on the ground were fixed and recorded. Displaying the resultant shapes as curved white lines on a long horizontal black strip of canvas would have rung bells with viewers familiar with the then standard repertoire of scientific imaging practices. The typical format of the graphic trace served as a convenient shorthand by means of which Duchamp encoded the desired values of precise measurement and objectivity. Not for the first (or last) time did Duchamp appeal to forms of visual competency that had begun to creep into the common culture, as art historian Molly Nesbitt’s pioneering study relating his use of technical drawing to reforms in the French school curriculum shows.29 The creation of wooden templates or stencils based on the resultant curves is also significant: these were utilised to transfer the curves to other works, notably Network of Stoppages 1914 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the capillary tubes in the Large Glass 1915–23 (Tate T02011), but in addition they provide a measure of the area beneath the curve which, as every student of basic calculus knows, is equal to the integral of the curve.

Marcel Duchamp 3 stoppages étalon (3 Standard Stoppages) 1913–14, replica 1964 Tate © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

Of the surrealist artists, links between art and science run deepest in the work of Max Ernst, who attended lecture courses on psychology while he was a student at university in Bonn.30 Scientific illustrations and tables are frequent source materials for Ernst’s collage, among which are examples of graphic traces, most notably the illustrations to the book Les Malheurs des immortels (1922), a collection of collages and automatic poems produced collaboratively with the surrealist poet Paul Éluard. Between the Two Poles of Politeness is one of at least two collages in the book to utilise a graphic trace, which functions as a ground for the image and a springboard for the artist’s imagination. The typical white-on-black format is exploited by Ernst to evoke a night sky against which the solid white line of the trace stands out starkly. He embellishes the horizontal x-axis marked on the graph by a dotted line with a distant polar landscape that appears to echo the peaks and troughs of the graphic trace. At the left-hand edge of the image, the lines of the graph are extended so they appear to converge towards a vanishing point; the net effect of these hand-drawn additions is to produce incongruities of scale as well as an ambiguous play between the flat space of the diagram and an illusory perspectival space. Accentuating the horizon serves to foreground the idea of a horizon of vision, beyond which normally one cannot see, and thus implies the existence of an invisible realm to which surrealism affords access.    

From 1919 through to the manifesto of 1924 – a period of intense experiment with automatic writing and other means for penetrating the unconscious, including hypnosis – Breton’s poetry is replete with imagery of electric currents and magnetic fields, to which the title of Ernst’s collage may allude. Ernst’s deployment of a graphic trace in the context of this book can be seen as mounting a polemic in favour of collage as an equivalent to automatic writing. Breton, who the following year in his poem ‘Sunflower’ penned the exquisitely apposite phrase, ‘the white curve on a black ground that we call thought’, would have understood that the graphic trace in Ernst’s collage offers itself to be read as an indexical equivalent to thought, in no ways inferior in this respect to the automatic text on the facing page.31Ernst’s painting North Pole 1922 is contemporaneous with the collage and closely related to it.32 A distinctive fine wavy pattern across the upper half of the canvas, the result of dragging a fine comb or something similar across the black oil paint so as to expose the white support, is highly suggestive of a seismographic or magnetic trace. There is a direct connection between this work and Ernst’s use of frottage and other automatic procedures in the 1920s. Between 1927 and 1928 Yves Tanguy produced a number of quite distinctive automatist paintings in which undulating lines are scratched into a black ground. Of even greater significance than such isolated examples of the direct citation of graphic traces, however, is to recognise that the novel regime of visuality it inaugurated made possible a mindset that saw the automatist line as an authentic trace of unconscious instinctual forces and energies. In its absence, they would have been literally unreadable in these terms. The surrealists were not alone in choosing to regard the unconscious as a repository of imperceptible, yet powerfully active forces. Sigmund Freud commonly spoke of the unconscious in terms of an energetics of instinctual cathexes and circuits.33 But what has been lost sight of is that these were never any more than metaphorical descriptions or analogies, a way of talking. The mistake is to think that the wavy lines in an Ernst painting are actually a trace of anything, least of all Ernst’s unconscious, rather than a polemical mobilisation of the idea (or metaphor) of the indexical trace.

Re-inscriptions of automatism

It comes as a surprise to learn that, notwithstanding the seemingly intractable difficulties posed by the Bretonian concept of ‘pure psychic automatism’, a considerable number of more recent artists and poets have not been deterred from taking up such practices, often in the context of an overt re-engagement with the historical avant-garde.

In the main, the aleatory and automatic practices to be surveyed here no longer purport to be indexical traces or expressions of the unconscious. These recent examples prompt the question afresh: is surrealist automatism expressive, and if so what is it expressive of? This question is inseparable from another concerning the status of chance in surrealism.34 Here, it is necessary to make a distinction between Breton’s objective chance (‘hasard objectif’) and true randomness.35 Freud maintained that seemingly chance events, slips of the tongue and so forth, are actually governed by a strict order of psychic determinism: nothing in the mind, he believed, is arbitrary or undetermined.36 This alone is what assures the validity of dream interpretation. Without the supposition of unconscious causation, the whole hermeneutic project of psychoanalysis would be pointless. Automatism, from this angle, registers an unconscious level of determination, that is to say, of meaning. But what if it turned out that surrealist automatism had been all along simply a method for generating randomness?

Between October 2003 and June 2005 the musician and composer Jeremy ‘Jem’ Finer was artist in residence in the astrophysics department at OxfordUniversity, where Roger Penrose, nephew of the surrealist artist Roland Penrose, had conducted pioneering work in theoretical physics on black holes and the early conditions of the universe. Finer’s Everywhere, All the Time 2005 (fig.6) comprised part of a larger sculptural project arising from the residency. As Finer explains:

A chart recorder is transformed into an automatic drawing machine, its source the electrical fluctuations of a detuned radio. The universe is permeated by radiation, the Cosmic Microwave Background, which contemporary cosmology concludes is the cooled remnant of the Big Bang. Everywhere, all the time, it’s visible in the snow between channels on a television, the hiss of static on a radio, the rattling pen of the chart recorder, like a spirit hand.37

Fig.6 Jem Finer Everywhere, All the Time 2005 Chart recorder, transistor radio and paper Courtesy the artist Photograph © Jem Finer

The automatic messages that are of concern to Finer – ‘an unreadable communication with its own inner sense’ – are of an impersonal, non-human nature (fig.7). Rendering literal the Bretonian metaphor of a simple recording instrument, Finer bypasses altogether the artist as expressive origin of the message: ‘Endless gyres, overwriting, obliterating, annihilating any pretence of analysis, the chart recorder is transformed into an automatic drawing machine, the universe the invisible hand.’38

Fig.7 Jem Finer Everywhere, All the Time 2005 Graphic trace from chart recorder Courtesy the artist Photograph © Jem Finer

It is fruitful to think about Finer’s practice in terms of a tension between noise and message as theorised by communication theory. Random noise can be understood as interference within a system of meaning production. In this respect, it might be understood to be quite similar to a Freudian slip, which manifests as an interruption or distortion of the intended message. However, the apparently chance or accidental nature of the latter turns out to be illusory and the lapsus is, in fact, subject to a strict psychic determinism. True randomness, which is the arena of contemporary practitioners’ interest, implies a breach in causality and hence ought not to be confused with the surrealist notion of objective chance, though it is compatible with the surrealists’ interrogation of the author function. The ratcheting-up of randomness undercuts the expressive paradigm of a subject who is the putative origin of a message.

Finer’s reference to a spirit hand resonates with surrealist automatism, whose derivation from mediumistic writing and drawing Breton acknowledged in his essay ‘The Automatic Message’ (1933). It also recalls a passage from the philosopher Roland Barthes’s famous text ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) that implicitly appeals to the precedent of automatic writing: ‘the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin.’39 Barthes conceives of the writer not as expressive origin but rather as a kind of radio antenna picking up and remixing messages randomly absorbed. Tuning in to white noise instead of the overt communicative content of their chosen medium, postmodern artists perpetuate as well as update the historical avant-garde’s engagements with chance. In an essay on Cy Twombly, Barthes made an explicit analogy to white noise, writing of the picture Panorama 1955 (private collection) that: ‘The whole space is crackling in the manner of a television screen before any image appears on it.’40 Twombly reinterpreted an automatist practice in a manner contrary to the expressive paradigm that had dominated in the previous generation of artists. It is thus comparable to other gestures of cancellation, such as his friend Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing 1953 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). The artist in the abstract expressionist mould was not only masculine, he was also stridently hetero-normative, a factor that art historian Jonathan Katz has argued lay behind the next generation of artists’ wish to distance themselves.41 Barthes refers to a new technological analogy for an automatist procedure in the television set, which, by the mid-1950s, had become nigh ubiquitous in American households. The origins of information theory in the immediate post-war period narrowly preceded the arrival of this new medium of mass communication. The white on black of Twombly’s Panorama evidently reminded Barthes of the cathode ray screen.

The experimental filmmaker Peter Rose explains that his sixteen minute film Secondary Currents 1982 is about the relationships between the mind and language: ‘A kind of comic opera, the film is a dark metaphor for the order and entropy of language.’42 In the course of the film, words – white on a black ground – gradually decompose into constituent letters that jostle in a random, Brownian motion, such that the screen becomes an almost literal representation of white noise (fig.8). Rose’s work relates to concrete poetry but also draws upon his mathematical training. In communication theory, the concept of entropy is closely related to randomness. As expounded by engineer John R. Pierce in his book Symbols, Signals and Noise (1961): ‘entropy increases as the number of messages among which the source may choose increases. It also increases as the freedom of choice (or the uncertainty to the recipient) increases and decreases as the freedom of choice and the uncertainty are restricted.’43

Fig.8 Peter Rose Secondary Currents 1982 Still from film 16 minutes, 16 mm, black and white, sound Courtesy the artist Photograph © Peter Rose

Might it be possible to consider Rose’s language experiments as offering a route in to the final automatic text of Breton and Éluard’s ‘The Possessions’, the ‘attempt at simulating schizophrenia’ (‘démence précoce’), which plots a similar stepwise dissolution of language and sense? Under the guise of emulating the language of the insane, Breton and Éluard can be understood as exploring in an intuitive vein the relationship between a poetic or creative use of language and entropy. The act of collaboration seems to have been one means for interrupting the smooth flow of logical sense, an express aim of automatic writing being to divert language from its communicative function. In a manner not dissimilar to Rose, the schizophrenic treats words as things; their language was described in the kinds of manuals to which Breton and Éluard had access as propagating on the basis of chance associations or incidental resemblances between words. One can point to numerous examples of this in Breton and Éluard’s text. Within certain limits, an increase in randomness is experienced as poetic indeterminacy. However, the final paragraph of their exercise in simulation presses way beyond this threshold:

Fils de Judas rondève, qu’A Linné pasteur hippomythe U vraïli ouabi bencirog plaïol fernaca gla …lanco. U quaïon purlo ouam gacirog olaïama oual, u feaïva zuaïailo, gaci zulo. Gaci zulo plef. U feaïva oradarfonsedarca nic olp figilê. U elaïaïpi mouco drer hôdarca hualica-siptur. Oradargacirog vraïlim…u feaïva drer kurmaca ribag nic javli.44

Extraordinarily, this was among the texts that Samuel Beckett chose to translate.

The fact that The Magnetic Fields (1920), the true ur-texts of surrealist automatic writing, were composed jointly by Breton and Philippe Soupault (most obviously the texts called ‘Barrières’ (Barriers) which take the form of a dialogue or conversation) demonstrates that believing automatic writing to be the outpouring of a single unconscious is a misconception. In these texts, the writing subject makes use of an interlocutor in order to interrupt the flow and continuity of his discourse; a systematic interference with communicative language is thus built in to the procedure. It is a device that maximises incongruities. This can also be seen in the long distance collaboration of Ernst and Éluard in Les Malheurs des immortels. In his later comments on The Magnetic Fields, Breton placed great value on the speed of execution as the guarantor of the authenticity of a message that was to be as far as possible an uncorrupted record of unconscious thought. It is necessary to consider that the factor that comes increasingly into play as the speed of writing increases is not the unconscious but sheer randomness, which beyond a certain point manifests as a lexical decomposition.

Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages, and other artworks utilising chance, the New York conceptual artist William Anastasi began creating Pocket Drawings on folded sheets of paper while he was at the cinema in the 1960s. These led on to Subway Drawings that started as he was travelling to and from daily chess games with his friend, the composer John Cage, and which he has continued to produce (fig.9). Sitting with a pencil in each hand and a drawing board on his lap, his elbows at an angle of 90 degrees, his shoulders away from the backrest, Anastasi surrenders to a random process. His body operates likes a seismograph, allowing the rhythm of the moving train – its starts, stops and turns, accelerations and decelerations – to be transmitted onto the sheet of paper. In a 1990 interview, Cage talked about Anastasi’s modus operandi vis-à-vis surrealist automatism, insisting that: ‘It’s not psychological; it’s physical.’45

Fig.9 William Anastasi Subway Drawing Courtesy Gering & Lopez Gallery, New York

It is instructive to compare Anastasi’s Subway Drawings with another work that references the movement of a train and its effects on the human body, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train 1911–12 (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice).46 For Anastasi and the other artists in Cage’s circle, Duchamp was a cardinal reference point. The picture depicts the pipe-smoking artist on a train journey between Paris and Rouen. It is, Duchamp explained, a painting of ‘two parallel movements corresponding to each other’, that is to say, the forward velocity of the train together with the sideways rocking motion of the man standing in the crowded carriage.47 The passivity of a body acted upon by external mechanical forces is certainly akin to Anastasi’s Subway Drawings. The painting’s multiple registrations of a single figure, comparable to the more famous Nude Descending a Staircase 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), reflects Duchamp’s preoccupation with Marey’s chronophotography. Moreover, the picture might be said to represent a quirky response to the futurist cult of machines and the dynamism of speed. Slightly perplexing is the undress of the solitary figure, who, it has been suggested, is depicted in a state of sexual arousal. What the picture represents, then, is a bachelor machine: the kinetic energy of the train transformed via the onanistic rhythms of a swaying body into libidinal energy. A helpful commentary on this state of affairs comes from faraway Vienna. Asserting that ‘mechanical agitation must be recognised as one of the sources of sexual excitation’, Freud, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), specifically relates the pleasurable effects of this mechanical stimulus to train travel:

The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or other in his life wanted to be an engine driver or a coachman. It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways, and, at an age at which the production of phantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensation of movement.48

Freud contends that any physical stimulus to the body releases a quota of energy and this release of (libidinal) energy is felt as pleasurable. He instances the rocking of a child in order to put it to sleep. Duchamp wrote enigmatically of the period immediately preceding the First World War: ‘The machine, motion and eros were things which touched me in a poetic way. They were in the air and I felt I could use them for my art.’

Anastasi is well aware that his drawing could be seen as a displacement of a forbidden act. He says as much when he explains that he began making the Subway Drawings instead of the Pocket Drawingsbecause he was concerned about what fellow passengers might think he was doing with his hands in his pockets. The drawing is done on a sheet of paper that rests directly on the artist’s lap. For a near equivalent, one must look to surrealism’s disreputable left field, to the sole example of what Salvador Dalí dubbed ‘espasmo-graphisme’. An inscription on the etching, purpose-made as a frontispiece to a collection of poems by Georges Hugnet titled Onan (1934), forthrightly confesses: ‘“ESPASMO-GRAPHISME” OBTAINED WITH THE LEFT HAND WHILE MASTURBATING WITH THE RIGHT HAND UNTIL BLOODUNTIL BONE UNTIL SCAR!’ The image harks back stylistically to some tentative experiments by Dalí with an automatic technique in the late 1920s, quickly abandoned as he evolved his more characteristic illusionism. The jagged, staccato rhythms of the compulsively repeated doodles mime the action believed to have been carried out with the artist’s other hand. There is a crucial distinction to be drawn between illustrating the act of masturbation, which Dalí plainly was not reluctant to do, and producing a non-representational, so to speak, automatic trace of the activity, as he does here. Using his left hand to engrave the plate – Dalí was right-handed – eliminates at one stroke any semblance of manual skill or virtuosity. One is reminded that for Freud the solitary vice of masturbation was a frequent cause of neurosis. If this opinion, oddly indebted to Victorian prudery, is accepted for a moment, then Dalí chooses the shortest possible route between the supposed forbidden activity and its unfettered, automatic expression.49 But in doing so, it seems that he short-circuits the whole Freudian apparatus of the unconscious and repression. An area of staining across the centre of the sheet raises other questions for the inquisitive critic: does it merely simulate what it purports to be, or is it the forensic evidence one is searching for, the veridical trace that authenticates the automatic message? Granted, the work is parodic in intent, tossed off in a matter of minutes, but it is nonetheless a wry, amusing commentary on the discourse and practice of surrealist automatism.

Rebecca Horn Pencil Mask 1972 Tate © DACS, 2018

Finally, Rebecca Horn’s Pencil Mask 1972 (fig.10) is a sort of mechanical prosthesis that transforms the artist into a drawing machine. It is a sinister and disturbing piece, more autistic than artistic. Horn describes its operation thus: ‘All the pencils are about two inches long and produce the profile of my face in three dimensions … I move my body rhythmically from left to right in front of the white wall. The pencils make marks on the wall the image of which corresponds to the rhythm of my movements.’50Strapped around her face, the harness turns the wearer into a blind automatic drawing instrument. There is not space here to do justice to this arresting work, nor to tease out its relation, on the one hand, to her robotic painting machines or the pseudo-expressivity of her later Artaud-like drawings.51 The key point, however, is the way it encircles the artist’s head, interposing a physical barrier between the artist and the sheet of paper. The ‘unconscious’ is simply bracketed off from whatever is going on. Horn and the other contemporary artists discussed here point to ways of understanding surrealist automatism beyond the impasses of the assumption that such works are, or ever were, the expression of such a thing.

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