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Review: Through Nostalgia, Relaxer Takes Aim at Our Addiction to Screens
The droll world of writer-director Joel Potrykus's Relaxer is defined by feats of man-child pettiness.2.5
If Joel Potrykus's The Alchemist Cookbook charted one neurotic young man's deranged attempts to intervene with and reshape his immediate vicinity, Relaxer is about the degeneration of a single setting and human body through utter idleness. As Abbie, a pasty couch potato ensnared in a mean-spirited video game challenge that requires him to stay glued to his seat until he beats a near-unconquerable stage in Pac-Man, star Joshua Burge is more demented prop than psychological specimen, his slumped figure a canvas upon which sweat, milk, soda, dust, and his own waste can accumulate over the course of the film.
Set entirely inside the filthy living room of the apartment owned by Abbie's brother, Cam (David Dastmalchian), Relaxer is, like Potrykus's Buzzard, a showcase for Burge and his exceptional features, from his beady eyes to slender frame. The actor's striking presence is critical for a character who never professes to any ambitions or considerations of life beyond this slothfully consumerist existence. A few hints in dialogue point to Abbie's lingering trauma from his father's disappearance, but otherwise we're left to assess his inexplicable behavior from a remove—to scan the shell-shocked gaze he directs at a TV set for signs of inner life.
Potrykus appears to take delight in subjecting Abbie to abuse, finding increasingly creative ways to goof on his fundamental stasis—like when a dehydrated Abbie punctures a water pipe and gets splattered with raw sewage. Nevertheless, it's hard to accuse the filmmaker of sadism since there isn't a moment here when Abbie isn't in full control of his fate.
Relaxer's episodic narrative is propelled by the visitors Abbie receives, among them a concerned nurse (singer Adina Howard) and her sarcastic boyfriend (Amari Cheatom). Through the comings and goings of these guests, Potrykus establishes a full picture of the layout of Cam's cramped apartment, not exactly exhausting the visual possibilities of the space but periodically mixing in unexpected angles to offset the film's default view: a frontal medium shot of the couch, with Abbie on frame right and the lower half of the home's kitchen visible in the background. In Relaxer's best visual gag—especially funny because of how it exploits our familiarity with the space—a Russian-speaking housekeeping duo clad in polypropylene protective clothing pick up the couch with Abbie still on it, revealing a gross line of dirt on the floor and a wall doodle of Bart Simpson with a herculean stiffy.
The finest of the film's supporting characters is Dallas, a foul-mouthed slacker played by comic Andre Hyland with the same halting speech patterns and white-boy swagger of his Jesse Miller persona. Dallas enters Relaxer as an agitator, acting as a wall between Abbie and his immediate desires (the two characters never share the same frame). First he refuses to grant Abbie's request for pizza from Chuck E. Cheese's, and then he buys two 24-ounce Faygo soda bottles for the couch potato if only to deny him a taste until he pays the 89 cents they're worth. (It would seem that Potrykus's affection for and encyclopedic knowledge of millennial junk-culture items knows no bounds.) Of course, the terms of Abbie's challenge prevent him from retrieving the money, so Dallas taunts him with the bottles instead, at one point duct-taping them to his hands in a childish act of defiance.
Through all this, Abbie plays and plays, mashing buttons and scanning the television screen, while the methodical circular movement and chomping of his on-screen avatar gradually asserts itself as a metaphor for a go-nowhere consumerist hellscape. Potrykus's droll world is defined by feats of man-child pettiness, by lazy guys who turn the banalities of daily life into meaningless trials of integrity. This is the milieu the writer-director knows, understands, and finds amusing, but in Relaxer, it's hard to tell what insight is to be gleaned from it. The film takes on an element of magical realism as the days and months pass, framing Abbie as a martyr with superhuman endurance and arming him with a pair of cheapo 3D glasses with divine powers as defense from any unwanted visitors.
That Relaxer is structured as a countdown to Y2K suggests that Potrykus is offering a period-specific diagnosis of technologically dependent delusion, of the hallucinations of omnipotence that spring in the minds of marathon gamers. Fuzzy as this hodgepodge of signifiers may seem, there's a pronounced critique at the heart of Relaxer clearly aimed at young people who are perilously glued to their screens, though it's one that feels somewhat passé alongside the meaty class commentary of Potrykus's earlier Buzzard.
Cast: Joshua Burge, David Dastmalchian, Andre Hyland, Adina Howard, Amari Cheatom Director: Joel Potrykus Screenwriter: Joel Potrykus Distributor: Oscilloscope Laboratories Running Time: 91 min Rating: NR Year: 2018
Review: Annabelle Comes Home Suggests a Harmless Game of Dress-Up
The film is at least as likely to elicit laughs as shrieks, and certainly unlikely to leave a lasting impression.1.5
The Conjuring Universe suggests the rural cousin to Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe. Though the latter is breezy, bright, and flippantly secular and the former is heavy, dark, and noticeably Christian, the genetic link between them is unmistakable. Both have succeeded by streamlining a popular genre in the extreme, subordinating writerly or directorial personality to the tone and narrative trajectory of the whole; both have concocted a palatable, PG-13 version of their genre's inherent violence that's neither offensive nor impressive; and part of the appeal of each universe is the way the films are connected by a network of allusive Easter eggs designed to create that satisfying in-group feeling.
Watching Annabelle Comes Home, the third title in the Annabelle series and the seventh in the Conjuring Universe, one sees that this cinematic universe and the MCU are also coming to share a tone of self-parodic humor. The film knows you know what its mechanisms are. When psychic paranormal investigator Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga), in the first real scene of suspense, holds up a road map and obscures the camera's view of the graveyard outside her car's passenger window, Annabelle Comes Home takes the opportunity to wink at its fans. Obscured parts of the frame obviously spell danger, and therefore the reveal is a joke rather than a genuine scare—a reversal that happens so often across the film's early stretches that it becomes as tiresome as Tony Stark making a crack about a flamboyant superhero costume.
In the film's prologue, Lorraine and her husband, Ed (Patrick Wilson), who as the connecting thread of the Conjuring films are kind of its version of Marvel's S.H.I.E.L.D., have recovered the malicious titular doll from whatever family she was most recently haunting. Annabelle the doll is, as Lorraine helpfully explains in the film's opening shot, not possessed, but is rather a conduit for the demon who follows her around. Later, Lorraine will revise her expert opinion and describe Annabelle as a beacon for evil. That the film never feels the need to specify or reconcile the meaning of "conduit" and "beacon" in this context suits the general incoherence of the series's mythology, based as it is in the Warrens' scattershot pronouncements.
Annabelle Comes Home ties together a disparate set of unsettling phenomena using the single, paper-thin premise that demon-conduit Annabelle is also a demon-beacon. After Wilson and Farmiga have delivered their universe-consolidating cameo, their pre-teen daughter, Judy (McKenna Grace), her babysitter, Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman), and the latter's friend, Daniela (Katie Sarife), are left alone in the Warrens' home. The married paranormal investigators have stashed Annabelle in their storeroom of assorted mystical curios, all brought to demonic life when Daniela—so inquisitive, mischievous, sexually adventurous, and so forth—lets the doll out of her glass case of honor/imprisonment.
The series is still gore-lessly devoted to making us jump by following moments of extended silence with sudden cacophony, but with all its noisy phantoms from the beyond, Annabelle Comes Home is undeniably silly, a monster team-up movie that often feels like a harmless game of dress-up. An undead bride bearing a kitchen knife, a Charon-esque ghost come to ferry people to hell, a monstrous hound from Essex, a TV that foretells the future, a haunted suit of samurai armor, and Annabelle herself comprise the ragtag team that (rather ineffectively) hunts the three teen girls now trapped in Warren's house. The scares, untethered to any deeper concept or theme, are more akin to friendly pranks than they are to distressing events, as if the monsters were friends jumping from around corners in rubber masks.
Annabelle Comes Home is a series of scenes that all follow the same structure: One of the girls finds herself alone in a space and doesn't notice the malevolent presence in the room until well after the audience does. It's then that she screams in horror and the film smash cuts to a different room where the same scenario is playing out with a different girl. There's a certain game-like quality to predicting the precise moment the scare will pop up in each scene, but it's a formula that, after a few repetitions, no longer holds much tension. Gary Dauberman's film is a carnival ride of cheap thrills, at least as likely to elicit laughs as shrieks—there can only be so many slow-zooms on Annabelle's blue-gray face before the doll becomes funnier than she is creepy—and certainly unlikely to leave a lasting impression.
Cast: McKenna Grace, Madison Iseman, Katie Sarife, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Michael Cimino Director: Gary Dauberman Screenwriter: Gary Dauberman, James Wan Distributor: New Line Cinema Running Time: 106 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2019
Review: Three Peaks Tensely Charts the Dissolution of a Would-Be Family
The film ably plumbs the fears of a well-meaning man who tries his best to play by the rules of middle-aged courtship.2.5
Throughout Three Peaks, writer-director Jan Zabeil acutely mines a specific kind of familial tension as he follows a couple, Aaron (Alexander Fehling) and Lea (Bérénice Bejo), vacationing in the Italian Dolomites with Lea's young son, Tristan (Arian Montgomery). This trip is a try-out for a new arrangement, mostly for Aaron as a husband and undefined parental figure to Tristan, as Aaron and Lea are contemplating a move to Paris, which would take Tristan far away from his biological father. Tristan, a sharp child, can read this subtext, and toggles between affection and contempt for Aaron, sometimes in a matter of seconds. The suspense of the narrative is driven by a question of deliberation: Is Tristan actively screwing with Aaron, grieving over his parents' divorce, or both?
At times, Three Peaks resembles a relatively realist version of horror thrillers in which an evil child orchestrates a conspiracy to undo a family, but Zabeil doesn't go for melodrama until the third act. The film is mostly an exercise in tension, driven by an ironic emasculation, as Aaron, a sensitive outdoorsy stud who would be the dream of most women, is continually embarrassed and upstaged by the withdrawn Tristan. These characters are essentially in a no-exit situation, and their forbidden emotions are often expressed via fleeting, often disturbing gestures—as in Tristan threatening Aaron with a saw, and the suggestion that Aaron might throw Tristan off a mountainside—that Zabeil complements with increasingly self-conscious symbolism. Looking at the gorgeous Three Peaks Mountains, Tristan remarks that they resemble a father, mother, and a child, and he often references a story, about a giant, that scans as a sort of rebuke of Aaron's attempt to be the new man of the figurative house.
The verbal metaphors feel too clever and on point, though Zabeil's imagery often shrewdly telegraphs the family's shifting power dynamics. In the opening scene, we see close-ups of Aaron and Tristan's faces as they play a game in a swimming pool, trying to hear what each person is saying underwater. This moment also foreshadows the climax, a perverse life-and-death dilemma that's reminiscent of the ending of The Good Son. In fact, every game that Aaron and Tristan play in the film becomes an expression of their oscillating desire and contempt for communion, from the languages they use (Tristan pointedly refuses to speak French, signaling his resistance to Paris) to the hikes the boy and man go on in the Three Peaks. Most poignantly, Tristan calls Aaron "papa," though he quickly reassumes the role of nemesis, leading one to wonder if this brief bonding moment was an illusion of some kind.
Zabeil and Montgomery, in a mature and measured performance, capture the casual eeriness of children, particularly to outsiders who can discern how easily kids can command and manipulate their guardians' attentions. The filmmaker's sympathies are with Aaron, as Lea is disappointingly pushed aside in the narrative, functioning mostly as a MacGuffin, the center of an unconventional masculine duel. Yet Tristan is never reduced either to victim or aggressor, not even in the film's nearly biblical survival climax, which resolves little of the family's issues except to posit, potentially, that Tristan isn't an overt sociopath.
One supposes that's a start, though it's evident that Tristan is a barrier, between Lea and every potential suitor, which might never be breached. This lonely possibility is suggested by the mountaintops, nearly mythical wonders that stand in front of the characters, reachable yet ultimately dangerous and unknowable. By the end of Three Peaks, the mountains transcend Zabeil's early thematic handwringing to become a haunting symbol of estrangement, as the filmmaker has ably plumbed the fears of a single mother and a well-meaning man who tries his best to play by the rules of middle-aged courtship.
Cast: Alexander Fehling, Bérénice Bejo, Arian Montgomery Director: Jan Zabeil Screenwriter: Jan Zabeil Distributor: Greenwich Entertainment Running Time: 93 min Rating: NR Year: 2017
Review: Avi Nesher's The Other Story Is Melodramatically Replete with Incident
Through this endless string of undercooked subplots, Nesher's film continually trips over itself.2
Director Avi Nesher's The Other Story probes the tensions between the secular and religious worlds of modern-day Jerusalem. The story pivots around Anat (Joy Rieger), who, alongside her formerly drug-addicted boyfriend, Sachar (Nathan Goshen), recently shunned her hedonistic past so as to devote her life to studying the Torah. But it's Anat's decision to marry Sachar—thus committing herself to the restrictive moral code and officially sanctioned subjugation of women required by Orthodox Judaism—that serves as the film's true inciting incident, causing her atheist mother, Tali (Maya Dagan), and grandfather, Shlomo (Sasson Gabai), to join forces, even going so far as to recruit Anat's estranged father, Yonatan (Yuval Segal), to help thwart the impending marriage.
It's a compelling setup, namely in the ways it pits harsh dogmatism of orthodoxy against an equally stringent form of atheism that, as a moral philosophy, is just as closed-minded and fiercely held as the religion it rejects. When the film homes in on the strained father-daughter relationship between Anat and Yonatan, who left the family for America when his daughter was a young child, it precisely renders and examines the tremendous emotional baggage behind Anat's drastic decision to convert while also retaining a clarity in its broader allegory about the role of religion in Israel. Through Yonatan and Anat's clashing of perspectives, one gets a sense of how their competing belief systems can be weaponized to both self-destructive and vengeful ends, all but ensuring an unbridgeable gap between two sides.
As The Other Story teases out the myriad causes for Anat and her father's troubled relationship, it also taps into the resentment Tali feels toward Yonathan for leaving her and follows Shlomo's attempts to rebuild his bond with Yonathan. It's already a narrative with quite a few moving parts, so when a secondary story arises involving a married couple, Rami (Maayan Bloom) and Sari (Avigail Harari), to whom Shlomo provides court-mandated counseling, the film slowly begins to come apart at the seams, with a once intimate account of one family's travails giving way to needlessly convoluted melodrama.
While Anat finds herself increasingly drawn to Judaism, Sari is ultimately repelled by it, becoming entrenched in a feminist cult whose pagan rituals she eventually exposes to her son to, and in spite of Rami's vehement protests. Nesher tries to draw parallels to the two women's equally extreme experiences, which lead them to swing in opposite directions on the pendulum from hedonism to asceticism. Yet as these two stories intertwine, one creaky subplot after another is introduced, effectively dulling the emotional resonance of either woman's story by drowning them out it an abundance of trivial incident.
Not only does Anat's involvement with Sari's affairs result in an unlikely friendship between the women, but it also leads to Anat bonding with her father as they do the legwork to investigate whether or not the cult is putting Sari's child in danger. All the while, Yonathan and Tali's passions are somewhat reignited as they're forced to work together for the supposed good of their daughter. Through this endless string of undercooked subplots, The Other Story continually trips over itself, struggling to weave together far too many disparate threads. Both character behaviors and the film's action become driven less by any sense of cultural specificity than a cheap and manipulative need to ramp up the emotional stakes at all cost.
Cast: Sasson Gabai, Joy Rieger, Yuval Segal, Maya Dagan, Nathan Goshen, Avigail Harari, Maayan Bloom, Orna Fitousi Director: Avi Nesher Screenwriter: Avi Nesher, Noam Shpancer Distributor: Strand Releasing Running Time: 112 min Rating: NR Year: 2018
Music at a Crossroads: Les Blank's Chulas Fronteras and Del Mero Corazón
Blank's films on norteño music provide typically peppy examples of the director's immersive, seemingly effortless style.
Les Blank, a filmmaker deeply enamored of the sights, smells, and flavors of particular regional subcultures, was devoted to activating the viewer's senses, and sometimes in unconventional ways. Depending on which one of his films was playing in a theater, you could count on the scent of red beans or garlic to be piped into the room. It was a process that was cheekily called "Aromaround." But even without such accompaniment, his work remains some of the richest, most palpable sensory experiences ever committed to celluloid—films that welcome viewers into vibrant, authentic cultural spaces and treat them like special guests.
Newly restored in 4K, Blank's companion films on the norteño music that originated in the Texas-Mexico borderlands, 1976's hour-long Chulas Fronteras and 1979's 30-minute Del Mero Corazón, provide typically peppy examples of the director's immersive, seemingly effortless style. Eschewing explanatory narration or canned talking-head interviews, Blank isn't all that interested in teaching us about this jaunty, polka-like style of music. Instead, he wants us to experience for ourselves the cultural ferment from which it arises.
Both films play like mixtape travelogues, bouncing around from beer joints to backyard barbecues to a 50th wedding anniversary—anywhere and everywhere that norteño music is played. In Chulas Fronteras, a few interviewees explain their personal career trajectories, and one musician traces the style's roots in German polka. (It's essentially the same, he claims, except that Tejanos "give it a different taste.") Predominately, however, these aren't films about the development of norteño, but rather works that use the music as a lens through which to view an entire subculture of food, celebration, family, and labor.
If the dominant mood of Chulas Fronteras and Del Mero Corazón is undoubtedly festive—a perfect match for the jubilant accordions and lively vocals that fill their soundtracks—a deeper pain nevertheless courses through these films. Many of the lyrics to the songs we hear touch on difficult subjects, such as labor struggles, personal loss, and racism. Blank brings these issues to the fore in many of the films' loose-limbed interview segments, which generally catch the subjects while they're cooking up a big meal or just about to perform a song. In one, a migrant farm worker discusses his life of transience, ceaselessly moving from one area to another, follow the crops. In another, a musician relates an infuriating anecdote about being refused service at a roadside hamburger stand because of his ethnicity.
Blank, though, isn't one to dwell on such cultural strife, as there's a different song being sung elsewhere. There are simply too many wondrous sights to take in for Blank to linger on any one subject too long, like the priest blessing cars with holy water or the woman scooping the meat out of a pig's head to make tamales. Blank's approach to documentary is immersive and inquisitive, at one point rendering a cockfight, an event that's potentially off-putting to outsiders, as the authentic divertissement it is for the people of the region.
Of the two films, Chulas Fronteras is the clear standout, offering a deeper cultural immersion. Del Mero Corazón, which Blank co-directed with Guillermo Hernández, Chris Strachwitz, and Maureen Gosling—the last of whom would become Blank's regular collaborator—is a bit more lyrical, focusing on its subjects' personal relationship to their music and interspersing poetic quotations from love songs and folk tales throughout its running time. But the similarities between the two films overwhelm their differences. They're essentially extensions of each other, with Del Mero Corazón moving beyond the Texas-Mexico border to explore a bit of the San Jose norteño scene, particularly singer and accordionist Chavela Ortiz.
More than 40 years after their making, Chulas Fronteras and Del Mero Corazón not only provide a rich portrait of a region and its people, but an amusing time capsule of mid-to-late 1970s tackiness as well. Providing an unvarnished look at kitchen interiors full of ugly wood cabinets and orange laminate countertops and men in checkered polyester pants sucking down cans of Schlitz, these films are also a blast from an ineffably gaudy past.
And yet, at a time when migrants are relentlessly demonized and brutalized, held indefinitely in government detention centers for the crime of crossing a somewhat arbitrary line separating two nations, Chulas Fronteras and Del Mero Corazón offer a timely and incisive reminder of how porous and artificial the U.S.-Mexico border really is. Cultural exchange doesn't stop at the Rio Grande, a fact of which the people in these films are acutely aware: As the group Los Pingüinos del Norte proudly sings in Chulas Fronteras, "Mexican by ancestry/American by destiny/I am of the golden race/I am Mexican American."
Review: Though Inspiring, Maiden Doesn't Evince the Daring of Its Subjects
Director Alex Holmes ultimately takes a frustratingly simplistic approach to his thematically rich material.2
Alex Holmes's documentary Maiden is an account of the true adventure of the first all-female crew to enter the Whitbread Round the World Race. As their filmed testimonials attest, skipper Tracy Edwards and her crewmembers' defiance of the sailing circuit's rampant sexism back in 1989 proved to be just as grueling as their journey of 33,000 miles through the Earth's harshest oceans. The film, at heart, is the story of women dramatically pitted against the dual forces of nature and human nature. Pity, then, that Holmes ultimately takes a frustratingly simplistic approach to the thematically rich material.
The film paints a vivid portrait of the patriarchal sailing community during Edwards's period as an up-and-coming skipper, even gathering male sports journalists and sailors who seem all too eager to cop to their past chauvinistic viewpoints. Of course, while this effectively establishes some of the large obstacles faced by Edwards and her crew, there's a feeling of repetition in the subsequent inclusion of the subjects' stories about their feelings of vindication in proving the naysaying men wrong by successfully staying the course.
Each anecdote begins to sound like a rehash of the last, and to the point where they feel as if they're intended as applause lines. The detailing of the immense mental and physical strength that the Maiden's crew summoned in order to sail around the around is scant. In fact, Holmes is so frustratingly short on specifics that, with the exception of Edwards, you'll walk away from the documentary without knowing what role each woman filled aboard the vessel.
By extension, we hardly get a sense of the camaraderie that started to build among the crew during the race. It comes off as an empty moment, then, when Edwards describes how each woman essentially knew what the other was thinking by race's end. The fascinating and candid archival footage shot during the race hints at the singular sisterhood formed on the boat that Edwards speaks of, with each member helping one another out through tedium and the dangers of the sea. It feels like a missed opportunity that Holmes didn't utilize this footage of fortitude through female unity more frequently as a statement against sailing's sexism, but, then again, it's in line with a film that doesn't evince the daring spirit of its subjects.
Director: Alex Holmes Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics Running Time: 97 min Rating: PG Year: 2018
The Best Films of 2019 So Far
Whatever the outcome of the streaming wars, we hope that when the dust clears, there's still a digital home for films like these.
In our present day, it feels like we're sitting on the edge of too many abysses to count. Confining our perspective to the world of film, it's arguable that the streaming apocalypse has arrived. Consumers are already fed up with the glut of services offering a library of films at low, low prices that, in sum, add up to the price of the premium cable package we thought we'd escaped. We're still months away from the launch of Disney+, which now looks not so much like the herald of the apocalypse as a behemoth that will arrive in its wake to rule over the vestiges of the internet's cine-civilization.
And there's a different ongoing streaming apocalypse, at least according to the defenders of the movies as a unique medium. The year opened with cinema's old guard attempting to forestall the effects of streaming's rise on the rest of the film industry: Most visibly, Steven Spielberg attempted to cajole the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences into disqualifying Netflix-produced films from competing for Oscars. And is streaming also to blame for this summer season's dismal box-office numbers? Perhaps in part. In any case, the cracks in the Hollywood fortifications are showing. For years, prognosticators have predicted the unsustainability of the "tent pole" model of film production, but the outcome is that everything is coming up Disney: Even Fox is Disney now, or soon will be.
But if streaming is indeed facilitating the long-delayed collapse of the tent-pole model, then more power to it. The year so far has been disappointing from the perspective of box-office returns, and it has been downright dreadful in terms of the so-called blockbusters themselves—another summer of sequels, side-quels, and soft reboots that has made it difficult to recall a time when big-budget superhero flicks like Dark Phoenix felt like cultural events.
That said, it's worth noting that streaming isn't simply killing the box office, but offering an alternative to a moribund institution, as the best chance to see many of this year's best films, for those outside the country's major markets, will be on streaming services. Whatever the outcome of the streaming wars, we should hope that when the dust clears, there's still a digital home for films like the ones on our list. Pat Brown
3 Faces (Jafar Panahi)
Jafar Panahi works references into his film to some of the compositions, landscapes, and boundary-pushing plays of fiction and documentary evidenced in Abbas Kiarostami's cinema. But instead of mere replication, 3 Faces filters these elements through Panahi's own unique sensibilities. Rather than letting the mysteries in his film stand, or prolonging its ambiguities, Panahi prefers to signify potential plot directions and formal strategies and then promptly pivot away from them at the moment they outlast their usefulness. This isn't the mark of a lesser filmmaker, but merely one who recognizes that his own strengths lie in his intuitiveness, his wit, and his humor. Sam C. Mac
Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhang-ke)
The political dimensions of Jia Zhang-ke's films hve led to a strained relationship with state censors in the past—and so the director's appointment this year as a representative of China's 13th National People's Congress, and the larger indication that he was working to gain the favor of the state, created some worries about the integrity of his films going forward. But thankfully, the clever, subversive, and hugely ambitious Ash Is Purest White assuages those concerns. The film serves as a considered retrospection, and a coherent transition between Jia's neorealist early films and his more recent populist melodramas. It's a quixotic and profound statement on the spatial and temporal dissonances that inform life in 21st-century China. Mac
The Beach Bum (Harmony Korine)
Despite its lax, vignette-like quality, The Beach Bum is perhaps Harmony Korine's most straightforward film to date, even while its form fully embraces its inherently circuitous, nonsensical subject matter. Indeed, the way Moondog (Matthew McConaughey) buoyantly moves from locale to locale, Korine's semi-elliptical style, and a tendency for events to just happen lend the film a chronic haziness where even life-threatening occurrences are treated with a cheery dementia. At one point, a character loses a limb, but it's "just a flesh wound"—something to quickly move on from and to the next toke. Not for nothing has Korine likened the film's structure to pot smoke. Its dreamy, associative style is pitched to its characters' almost random inclinations, while mirroring the spatiotemporal dilation of a high. Peter Goldberg
Birds of Passage (Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra)
A narcotrafficking origin story embedded inside an ethnographic study of a vanishing culture, Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra's Birds of Passage starts and ends in the harsh Guajira desert peninsula that sticks into the Caribbean Sea from northern Colombia. Showing the same fascination with the interstices of Western and native cultures that Guerro and Jacques Toulemonde Vidal brought to Embrace of the Serpent, the story initially takes a back seat to an examination of ritual and belief. While the basics of the narrative are familiar from other stories about how Colombia tore itself apart serving America's drug culture, the film stands apart for Gallego and Guerra's studied focus on the drip-drip-drip of traditions falling before encroaching modernity as a family grows in wealth and shrinks in awareness. Also, their arresting visual sense power the story in the eeriest of ways, from the sweeping vistas of desert and sky to the surreal appearance of a glistening white mansion where an ancient village once stood. Chris Barsanti
Black Mother (Khalik Allah)
Black Mother finds Khalik Allah doubling down on his established aesthetic to bold, hypnotic ends. This essayistic documentary is organized into "trimesters," chapter headings marked by the growing stomach of a naked woman, and it drifts between digital, Super 8, and Bolex footage as Allah tours the home country of his mother, beginning with a remarkably cogent examination of Jamaican political and religious history through the voices of those the director encounters on the street, before sprawling into more existential terrain, chiefly the feedback loop between humans and the environment. Allah is attracted to loud, confident voices, and the ways in which they hold forth about poverty, sex work, spirituality, and food is crucial to the filmmaker's vision of the proud, angry beating heart of a nation. Christopher Gray
Review: Child's Play Is Cheeky Before It Becomes More of the Same
By the end, it becomes what it initially parodies: a dime-a-dozen slasher film with a silly-looking doll as the villain.2
Much to the very public chagrin of Don Mancini, creator of the knife-wielding Chucky doll, Lars Klevberg's Child's Play unceremoniously wipes the slate clean by more or less pretending that the seven prior films (all written by Mancini) in the franchise never happened. On paper, the film certainly looks like another shameless Hollywood cash grab, an unnecessary reboot of a series that its creator had still planned on continuing. Its winks and nods to the 1988 original will certainly only serve to twist the knife even deeper into Mancini's back. Yet, despite all signs pointing to a dearth of imagination, Klevberg's film finds a new avenue from which to approach the Chucky mythos and does so with an initially gleeful cheekiness in its approach to the inherently absurd concept of a slasher toy run amok.
The voodoo-based origin story of the original Chucky, in which a serial killer is transported into the doll's body, is here replaced with one of artificial intelligence gone bad. One of thousands in a line of technologically enhanced "Buddi" dolls, the new Chucky's (voiced by Mark Hamill) lack of restraint when it comes to both speech and its capacity for violence stems from a disgruntled sweatshop employee who reprogrammed it before killing himself. In a clever twist, Chucky isn't evil right out of the box. In fact, he uses a laser scan to immediately bond with the young Andy (Gabriel Bateman), who he will go to great—and eventually very unnecessary—lengths to protect. Chucky genuinely just wants to play with Andy, and simply learns that it sometimes takes a bit of bloodletting to achieve that goal.
It's one thing for Chucky to wake Andy up in the middle of the night to sing with him, but when Chucky strangles a cat after it scratches Andy, the boy senses something might be off with his new toy. Pity that the boy's mother, Karen (Aubrey Plaza), won't heed his warnings. The subsequent escalation of Chucky's psychosis makes for the film's most unexpectedly amusing stretches, effectively playing the doll's deadpan penchant for violence off of Andy's horror at Chucky's extreme reactions to his complaints about things that bother him. Whether it's Chucky's stalking of Karen's asshole boyfriend (David Lewis) or his learning how to kill while Andy and his friends are watching Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, a much-needed levity accompanies Chucky's growing fatal attraction to Andy, especially as his friends Falyn (Beatrice Kitsos) and Pugg (Ty Consiglio) come into the fold.
Once Chucky turns into a full-on psycho, though, Child's Play starts taking the tongue-in-cheek bite out of its approach to horror, with the unconventional interplay between a boy and his toy sidelined by an abundance of mindless gore and jump scares. Although this final act allows the filmmakers to take more advantage of Chucky's technological prowess, particularly the doll's ability to record video and connect to nearly any electronic device, the humorlessness of Child's Play by this point effectively transforms the film into the very thing it initially poked fun at: a dime-a-dozen slasher film with a silly-looking doll as the villain.
Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Mark Hamill, Gabriel Bateman, Brian Tyree Henry, Tim Matheson, David Lewis, Beatrice Kitsos, Trent Redekop, Amber Taylor, Kristin York, Ty Consiglio Director: Lars Klevberg Screenwriter: Tyler Burton Smith Distributor: United Artists Releasing Running Time: 88 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Nightmare Cinema Offers a Mishmash of Horror Mischief
The anthology justifies Mick Garris's passion for horror, though he ironically proves to be one of his project's liabilities.2.5
As he proved with the anthology shows Masters of Horror and Fear Itself, Mick Garris has no problem recruiting once-great filmmakers and getting them to enthusiastically recycle horror cinema's most obvious tropes. With only a few exceptions, such as episodes directed by Takashi Miike and Dario Argento, both of these productions often suggest the horror equivalent of an aging rock band at a stadium, playing music that's leeched of its former danger. With Nightmare Cinema, Garris semi-successfully brings this act to the increasingly figurative big screen, assembling directors Joe Dante, David Slade, Alejandro Brugués, Ryûhei Kitamura, and himself for more genre mischief.
Nightmare Cinema is generally of a higher caliber than Masters of Horror, and particularly of Fear Itself. The film starts almost in medias res, with Brugués's "The Thing in the Woods" approximating the third act of a slasher movie. It's a relief to skip the expositional throat clearing that usually gluts the opening of such a narrative, and Brugués stages the stalk-and-slash set pieces with style, energy, and a flair for macabre humor. There's also a twist that leads to a wonderfully irrational image. The murderer who stalks the requisitely attractive young people, called The Welder for his choice of mask and killing instruments, is revealed to be a sort of hero, having discovered that alien spiders are nesting in the skulls of his friends.
Dante's "Mirari," written by Richard Christian Matheson, is even more deranged. Anna (Zarah Mahler) is about to marry a handsome man (Mark Grossman) who manipulates her into undergoing plastic surgery so that she may live up to the ideal set by his mother. The joke, a good one that recalls a famous episode of The Twilight Zone, is that Anna is already quite beautiful, though tormented by a scar running down her face. The plastic surgeon is Mirari (Richard Chamberlain), who turns out to be the orchestrator of a surreal asylum of horrors. Chamberlain is pitched perfectly over the top, lampooning his own past as a pretty boy, and Dante's direction is loose and spry—authentically channeling the spirit of his best work.
Nightmare Cinema hits a significant speed bump with Kitamura's "Mashit," a tedious and nonsensical gothic in which a demon terrorizes a Catholic church, but rebounds beautifully with Slade's nightmarish "This Way to Egress," in which Elizabeth Reaser plays Helen, a woman who's either losing her mind or slipping into another realm of reality. Slade has directed some of the most formally accomplished hours of recent television, particularly Hannibal, and he brings to Nightmare Cinema a similarly sophisticated palette. "This Way to Egress" is filmed in stark black and white, and the clinic treating Helen suddenly becomes a setting of apparent mass murder, with blood-splattered walls that come to resemble a series of abstract paintings. Meanwhile, the people in the clinic become deformed monsters, talking in gurgles and plunging unseen masses out of sinks. (Giving Nightmare Cinema's best performance, Reaser ties all of this inspired insanity together with an emotional vibrancy.)
Garris directs "The Projectionist," Nightmare Cinema's framing episode, in which a theater portends doom for the film's various characters while Mickey Rourke saunters around, lending the production his usual found-object weirdness. Garris also concludes the anthology with "Dead," a grab bag of clichés in which a young piano student (Faly Rakotohavana) grapples with a near-death experience in a hospital while evading pursuit by a psychopath (Orson Chaplin). Characteristically, Garris over-telegraphs the scares with cheesy music and evinces no sense of specificity or reality even for a story that's set on such a heightened plane. (One may wonder how a boy recovering from a gunshot wound to the chest can defend himself against a much larger madman.) "Dead" also bears an unfortunate structural resemblance to the vastly superior "This Way to Egress," which is also a surreal journey of a character within an institution. There are notable, surprising highpoints in Nightmare Cinema that justify Garris's passion for horror, though he ironically proves to be one of his project's liabilities.
Cast: Mickey Rourke, Richard Chamberlain, Adam Godley, Orson Chaplin, Elizabeth Reaser, Maurice Benard, Kevin Fonteyne, Belinda Balaski, Lucas Barker, Reid Cox, Ezra Buzzington, Pablo Guisa Koestinger, Dan Martin, Zarah Mahler, Lexy Panterra, Faly Rakotohavana, Patrick Wilson, Sarah Elizabeth Withers Director: Mick Garris, Alejandro Brugués, Joe Dante, Ryûhei Kitamura, David Slade Screenwriter: Sandra Becerril, Alejandro Brugués, Lawrence C. Connolly, Mick Garris, Richard Christian Matheson, David Slade Distributor: Good Dead Entertainment Running Time: 119 min Rating: R Year: 2018
Review: Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am Is an Engaging Tribute to a Legend
In verbally recounting her history, Morrison proves almost as engaging as she in print, a wise and sensitive voice.3
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders's Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am is rather literal-minded, opening as it does with an overhead shot of hands re-assembling black-and-white photographs of Toni Morrison that have been snipped into pieces. The documentary continues in a similar vein, reconstructing Morrison's life and work out of interviews, news clippings, and archival images that, like the reassembled photographs, comprise a structured and fairly straightforward whole. The meticulously organized film alternates between narrating Morrison's background and her writing career, jumping between her family history and her life and legacy to compile a nonlinear but coherent portrait of the author.
The Morrison work that emblematizes the film's approach, then, isn't so much one of her acclaimed novels, but The Black Book, a 1974 anthology Morrison edited in her role as a senior editor at Random House. As described by Morrison and other interviewees in the documentary, the book collects written and graphic work from the history of black life in America, seeking to fill in the gaps in the master narrative of American history. The purpose of The Black Book was to capture the good and the bad of the amorphous assemblage often referred to as "the" black experience, and similarly, The Pieces I Am aims to craft a portrait of the most significant black author of the last half-century without reducing her to "the" black author, the sole voice for African-Americans in an overwhelmingly white canon.
As such, Greenfield-Sanders and his interviewer, Sandra Guzman, call upon a range of significant black writers and intellectuals—Oprah Winfrey, poet Sonia Sanchez, and activist and author Angela Davis, among many others—to discuss Morrison's career and its significance in the context of black America. Even before she achieved fame as a novelist, Morrison was a crucial part of post-civil rights black literature as an editor at Random House, where she published Davis's widely read autobiography and Muhammad Ali's The Greatest: My Own Story. When they began appearing in the early 1970s, Morrison's novels articulated aspects of black life that had long been suppressed, ignored, or softened to tailor to white audiences, forcing into the view of the official culture a distinctly black, female voice.
Interviews with the writer herself, now a lively 88 years old, make up the better portion of this filmic collage. As Morrison emphasizes, one aim of her novels has been to escape the white gaze, which Greenfield-Sanders's documentary succinctly defines as cultural presumption that white approval is needed to sanction black cultural production. Novels like The Bluest Eye and Beloved humanize black people without relying on white characters to validate their personhood. They also cover a wide range of black life, spanning various historical periods and taking the perspective of both men and women, children and adults.
The film roots Morrison's ability to imagine and inhabit such an expanse of feelings and experiences not only in her sharp mind and democratic sensibility, but also in the way her life story itself is woven from the contradictory strands of 20th-century black life: from the Jim Crow South to an integrated town in the industrial North, from a historically black university to the overwhelmingly white and male environs of Random House. Aesthetically, The Pieces I Am tends to be a bit flavorless—there's no shortage of photographs presented via the "Ken Burns" tracking effect, and the interviews are conducted against monochromatic backdrops that sometimes make them resemble high school photos—but in verbally recounting her history, Morrison proves almost as engaging as she in print, a wise and sensitive voice.
Distributor: Magnolia Pictures Running Time: 119 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2019
Review: A Bigger Splash Finds Intimacy in the Space Between Life and Art
Jack Hazan's portrait of David Hockney stands between documentary and fictional film, reality and fantasy.3
Jack Hazan's A Bigger Splash stands between documentary and fictional film, reality and fantasy. Following influential pop artist David Hockney in a particularly uncreative period in the early 1970s as his relationship with muse Peter Schlesinger deteriorates, the film is ostensibly a portrait of the artist as an uninspired man. But Hazan dispenses with many of the familiar conventions of documentary filmmaking that would become de rigueur in years to come. Instead of having, say, talking heads discuss his subject's life and art, Hazan presents Hockney and the people in the artist's orbit as essentially living in one of his paintings.
A Bigger Splash, whose title is borrowed from one Hockney's seminal pieces, offers up a captivating pseudo-drama of alienated people living flashy lifestyles and who have much difficulty communicating with each other. And in its fixations, the film feels like an extension of Hockney's sexually frank art, which has consistently depicted gay life and helped to normalize gay relationships in the 1960s. Indeed, as Hazan's observational camera is drawn to the coterie of gay men who flit about Hockney's world—one notably protracted sequence captures two men stripping naked and intensely making out—it's easy to see why the film is now recognized as an important flashpoint in the history of LGBT cinema.
Even though he appears by turns vapid and seemingly indifferent to the feelings of those around him, Hockney unmistakably displays an acute understanding of human behavior. Hazan begins A Bigger Splash with a flash-forward of Hockney describing the subtextual richness of a male friend's actions, with the artist practically becoming giddy over incorporating what he's observed into one of his paintings. Hazan subsequently includes extended scenes of Hockney at work, eagerly attempting to capture a sense of people's inner feelings through an acute depiction of their body language and facial expressions. At its simplest, then, the documentary is a celebration of how Hockney turns life into art.
Notably, Hockney is seen in the film working on Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), incorporating into his now-iconic painting the pensive visage of a friend. It's here that the film homes in on Hockney's uncanny ability to transform a seemingly innocuous moment into a profound expression of desire. And throughout these and other mostly dialogue-free sequences, it's as if Hazan is trying to put us in Hockney's shoes, forcing us to pay as close attention as possible to the details of so many lavish parties and mundane excursions to art galleries and imagine just what might end up in one of the artist's masterworks.
Toward the end of A Bigger Splash, surreal dream scenes sandwiched between shots of a sleeping Hockney and staged like one of his pool paintings show the accumulation of people and details the artist witnessed and absorbed throughout the film. An expression of the totality of Hockney's dedication to drawing inspiration from the world around him, these passages also evince Hazan's refusal to be bound to documentary convention. In these moments, it's as if the filmmaker is trying to tell us that no talking head can make us understand Hockney's genius the way living and dreaming like him can.
Director: Jack Hazan Screenwriter: Jack Hazan, David Mingay Distributor: Metrograph Pictures Running Time: 105 min Rating: NR Year: 1973


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The air is crisp, the leaves are turning and we are all grabbing our cozy sweaters. Fall is officially upon us, what better way to celebrate the season then sipping on a delicious warm cocktail and snacking on a pumpkin spiced cupcake?
Here are two recipes that are sure to make you snuggle up and indulge!
The Hot Apple Toddy
2 oz. whiskey or apple brandy
1 teaspoon sugar
Hot apple cider
Cinnamon stick for garnish
2-3 whole cloves for garnish
1. Coat the bottom on a glass or mug with honey
2. Add the whiskey or apple brandy
3. Fill with hot apple cider
4. Stir well
5. Garnish with cinnamon stick and cloves
Sip and enjoy!
Recipe and Image by So Simply Sophie
Pumpkin Cupcakes
Ingredients: For the Pumpkin Cake
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon coarse salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
1 cup packed light-brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
4 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 can (15 ounces) pumpkin puree
Ingredients: For the Cinnamon Cream Cheese Frosting
2 (8) ounce package cream cheese, softened
1 stick butter, softened
2 lbs. confectioners' sugar
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
For the Pumpkin Cake:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line cupcake pans with paper liners; set aside. In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and pumpkin pie spices; set aside.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together, brown sugar, granulated sugar, butter, and eggs. Add dry ingredients and whisk until smooth. Whisk in pumpkin puree.
3. Divide batter evenly among liners, filling each about halfway. Bake until tops spring back when touched, and a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean, 20 to 25 minutes, rotating pans once if needed. Transfer to a wire rack; let cool completely.
For the Cinnamon Cream Cheese Frosting:
1. Using a mixer, blend the butter and cream cheese together until well combined.
2. Gradually add in the confectioners' sugar until fully incorporated.
3. Finally mix in vanilla and cinnamon.
Recipe and images by My Baking Addiction

subset: commoncrawl


text:
52 comments
very nice…Tom Ford's menswear, possibly?
Ravishing ensemble and photo and face. Just one question–Sart, is there a rule on not buttoning the lowest button of a vest or suit? Because I thought the rule was, leave the bottom button open, but beautifully dressed ppl in your photos often do not. BTW love those jacket cuffs!!!!
This is an incredible suit but not everyone could pull it off. The fabric is beautiful and I love the lapels.
wonderful, but oh how i wish this were a woman. that would take it beyond.
somehow i dont like the cut of this 3 piece suit. The proportions seem to be off. Plus his hips are accentuated and i think thats a shame.
He's rocking the lavender! It works. And the suit is VERY well made. Do you see the way that the horizontal lavender stripes on the sleeves match the placement of the stripes on the body of the jacket? And the plaid stripes on the body of the jacket match the stripes on the pants? That's no accident. That's GREAT tailoring.
Two minor qibbles. I love the working buttonholes on the sleeves, but 5 buttons is excessive. 3 is dashing. 4 is flashy. 5 is silly. Lastly, he should unbutton the bottom button on his vest.
This is lovely in every way. It fits properly too. I wish I was in the Tuileries right this second.
Wow… The plaid in the jacket and trousers matches up. Love the pocket square! Love the grey ans lavender. Dark hair, scarf and umbrella… and again someone not rushing past spring into summer. Great!
~ Miss Mary
haven't we seen this gentleman in the exact same suit at one of the latest chanel shows on your blog?
anyhow… brilliantly done.
beautiful! i can't believe what i'm seeing… is the minute pattern match between jacket and trouser that we see the fruit of extraordinary craftmanship, mr. schuman's sense for sartorial perfection, or just a random stroke of luck? (i suspect not the latter…)
Very nice color for spring. What's with the extra, longer buttonhole on the sleeve?
I see that 5-button sleeve as idiosyncratic – it's just a quirk, and makes as much sense as 3 or 4. Sleeve buttons – even working ones – are essentially decorative anyway. Like male nipples.
The topic of which and how many buttons must be closed or left open is such a peculiar one = a guy is tempted to close the bottom of his vest just to annoy those who declare a rule against it. Remember Swift's nation divided in war between those who break their eggs on the bottom and those who break the top?
Fabulous Japanese style!
Honestly, it's the blunt-cut of the hair that takes this over the top … just the right balance for the suit … and the (apparently) working buttonholes are excellent too!
J'adore the Dorian Gray look
wow… i just had a graham and gunn made of a similar fabric, also three piece, three button– with functioning button holes… small world, and yes, a great pocket square.
Nicely (com)posed, too. Love the umbrella held just so and the way his hair seems to make itself into the scarf…
He is beautiful…
yes, that 3 piece suit draws attention. Like driving around in a 599GTB Fiorano, you're just going to get looks. (imho) I think it'd take bigger balls to pull this off with confidence than a mishmash ensemble of eclectic / stylish clothes.
Japanese bespoke ROCKS!
Definately Tom Ford, look at the slightly bigger lower button hole. The hair is a bit 2 much, and unbotton the bottom vest button. But absolutely love the suit.
oh he is just SOOO gorgeous. The colors the cut. He just looks beautiful. really. Good shot.
Perfection is the word…just perfection
how much cooler would it be if that was a sword and not an umbrella?
seen that one before – chanel
looks like a very well made suit. of course, when the jacket is buttoned the plaid will move inward, and probably still match the trousers !
I love how the length of his hair contrasts with his suit.
the attention to detail on that suit is impressive–especially the pattern matching. absolutely perfect between the jacket body, sleeves, trousers and even pocket flaps. damn.
Glad to see modern dandyism alive and well.
Didn't this gentleman appear in a previous post some time ago wearing the same suit, sans the vest? He was holding a Chanel folder of some kind in that photo. The dark umbrella, scarf and hair all highlight the lavender/grey suit.
I dig this on him.
It would look even better on an equally androgynous girl.
There was another pic of this exact suit (on someone else)was on your blog. Love it. I think it is an Etro. Let me see if I can find it.
OMG great suit!
but I agree with tj and I think his hair is a strong contrast. I dont know if I like that. Especially because the dark scarf prolonges the lengths of his hair optically. may be the scarf is a bit too heavy for the soft colours of the suit. but who cares…
+ I wonder what kind of shoes he´s wearing.
+ the finely checked or woven pocket square adds a cool twist!
Unbelievably simple and elegant: The perfect marriage of the delicate and the masculine– this man is a true vision of the Romantic. Transcends fashion. Classic. Timeless.
So classic, clean, tailored. So very French! In the best sense of course.
Those are definitely Gucci buttons, but it looks like Ford's fabric. Otherwise than the buttons I might agree that it's Tom Ford. Would Tom Ford use Gucci buttons for his own line?
i don't care who made his suit or how many buttons on his jacket cuff or if he broke a "rule" in fastening the bottom button of his waistcoat.
what i have always loved about clothes is how they function aesthetically, as ART, the way they can visually transport you to other time/spaces, that kind of magic that makes getting dressed everyday such an endlessly creative ritual.
while i definitely like things that are modern and futuristic, what i love about this outfit is the dandyish- art nouveau elegance that really comes together with with the umbrella, scarf, pocket square, hair, superfluous buttons, etc. The grace and androgyny remind me of certain scenes from "The Lover," a film i haven't seen i ages but which i'm going to netflix right now.
my favorite part of the picture is his hair.
i'm not sure if you know this, but this is the same gentleman from your 10.5.07 post
..and he just happened to be wearing the same suit when you caught him back then too, except without the waist coat.
i am in love ! his hair, his suit, his pocket square… his umbrella ! he's lovely, and i'm saving this one for gloomy seattle days when i think no one here has any style. yum !
Fantastic, fantastic suit and picture. I cannot believe the way he is photographed with the hair slightly covering his face-brilliant! He looks like the rich villain in an anime film, and what a beautiful villain he'd make! I love this photograph, one of my favourites!
Is the plaid on the vest left unmatched to the jacket for a reason? I can't imagine it to be an accident; contrast, maybe? I don't think it's Tom Ford – the cap on the shoulder isn't exaggerated enough; prob not Saville either since the plaid doesn't match at the pocket welt, but gorgeous nonetheless.
Thats a nice …a very nice fabric!
Unfortunately the suit isn´t as well tailored as it could have been…the pattern is not matching on the seams.
I like the detail of having 5 buttons on the cuffs.
Ticket pocket is a must … nice to see it here!
I personally dislike pointed lapels.
Once again its a shame that we cannot see shoes.
Still great!
His hair is the best accessory. I'm having a tough time picturing this outfit without such awesome hair.
Single Breasted, Peak Lapel seems to be everywhere today. Three years ago I thought I was the only one who had one. I think (hard to tell) the plaid does match the pocket flaps. And who cares about the vest button…the working sleeve buttons seem to negate the leaving the waistcoat button open. Great shot too. I wonder how many shots were taken to get this one with the hair flying in the face?
Catching up on posts missed, I came across THAT suit. SWOON. The plaid-matching just slays me all over again, as does the grey/lavender. Working-button (5!) sleeves. Slender pants. Proper umbrella. Wonderfully dramatic scarf and hair. Glad you ran into this again. Today is better already. THANKS!
What is amazing to me is that he looks Younger in the later picture. Catching his hair doing that anime thing across his face is Perfect! Great shot.
the hair…it's japanese mega-stylist and magazine editor de jour tomoki sukezane. the suit's perfection. want to see the shoes!
BTW, tomassocroccante I ASSURE YOU MY MALE NIPPLES ARE NOT JUST "DECORATIVE", OH YES, I CAN ASSURE YOU OF THAT.
I have seen this guy here in this same suit before.. it was a better picture the first time because i remember thinking it was stunning.. it was the reason I keep coming back… i going to have to look at the archive now.. for the original..


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- Research
- Open Access
- Open Peer Review
High cocoa polyphenol rich chocolate may reduce the burden of the symptoms in chronic fatigue syndrome
© Sathyapalan et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010
- Received: 26 April 2010
- Accepted: 22 November 2010
- Published: 22 November 2010
Chocolate is rich in flavonoids that have been shown to be of benefit in disparate conditions including cardiovascular disease and cancer. The effect of polyphenol rich chocolate in subjects with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has not been studied previously.
We conducted a double blinded, randomised, clinical pilot crossover study comparing high cocoa liquor/polyphenol rich chocolate (HCL/PR) in comparison to simulated iso-calorific chocolate (cocoa liquor free/low polyphenols(CLF/LP)) on fatigue and residual function in subjects with chronic fatigue syndrome. Subjects with CFS having severe fatigue of at least 10 out of 11 on the Chalder Fatigue Scale were enrolled. Subjects had either 8 weeks of intervention in the form of HCL/PR or CLF/LP, with a 2 week wash out period followed by 8 weeks of intervention with the other chocolate.
Ten subjects were enrolled in the study. The Chalder Fatigue Scale score improved significantly after 8 weeks of the HCL/PR chocolate arm [median (range) Exact Sig. (2-tailed)] [33 (25 - 38) vs. 21.5 (6 - 35) 0.01], but that deteriorated significantly when subjects were given simulated iso-calorific chocolate (CLF/CP) [ 28.5 (17 - 20) vs. 34.5 (13-26) 0.03]. The residual function, as assessed by the London Handicap scale, also improved significantly after the HCL/PR arm [0.49 (0.33 - 0.62) vs. 0.64 (0.44 - 0.83) 0.01] and deteriorated after iso-calorific chocolate [00.44 (0.43 - 0.68) vs. 0.36 (0.33 - 0.62)0.03]. Likewise the Hospital Anxiety and Depression score also improved after the HCL/PR arm, but deteriorated after CLF/CP. Mean weight remained unchanged throughout the trial.
This study suggests that HCL/PR chocolate may improve symptoms in subjects with chronic fatigue syndrome.
- Fatigue
- Polyphenol
- Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
- Cocoa Butter
- Anandamide
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a debilitating condition with high morbidity and an associated reduced quality of life[1]. Surveys examining the prevalence of CFS have reported prevalence rates ranging from 0.2% to 2.6% in primary care populations[2]. Various therapies including antidepressants, cognitive behaviour therapy and graded exercise therapy have been tried in CFS with varying effects [3].
Cocoa contains a complex mixture of polyphenols especially flavonoids. Observational studies report that dietary flavonoids may reduce the mortality risk from coronary heart disease, cancer and stroke[4, 5]. Experimental studies on animals and cultured human cell lines have demonstrated the role of polyphenols in the prevention of cardiovascular diseases, cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes and osteoporosis[6]. The effect of chocolate on fatigue appears to have been first described by the Aztec Emperor Montezuma II (born c.1480 reigned 1502-1520) who noted, "The divine drink, which builds up resistance and fights fatigue. A cup of this precious drink [cocoa] permits man to walk for a whole day without food''. The Badianus Codex (1552) noted the use of cocoa flowers to treat fatigue [7]. Chocolate is known to increase neurotransmitters like phenyl ethylamine, serotonin, and anandamide in the brain [8]. An imbalance in various neurotransmitters including serotonin have also been reported in subjects with CFS[9]. The effect of cocoa in subjects with chronic fatigue syndrome has not been studied to date. We hypothesised that chocolate, by modulating neurotransmitters, might reduce the symptom burden of CFS. Therefore, we conducted a double blinded, randomised, clinical pilot crossover study comparing high cocoa liquor/polyphenol rich chocolate to simulated iso-calorific chocolate (cocoa liquor free/low polyphenols) on fatigue and residual function in subjects with chronic fatigue syndrome.
Materials and methods
Ten consecutive subjects with chronic fatigue syndrome from a secondary care setting who fulfilled the exclusion and inclusion criteria were recruited in this study. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention criteria were used to diagnose Chronic Fatigue syndrome[10]. Subjects having severe fatigue of at least 10 out of 11 on the Chalder Fatigue Scale (binary scored) were enrolled[11].
The exclusion criteria were: any co-morbid psychiatric disorder classified according to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (fourth edition) (DSM IV) criteria (APA 1984), subjects taking more than 10 gm of chocolate per day, use of any prescription medication including benzodiazepine or antidepressant drugs, over the counter medications including herbal remedies two months before study entry, and an inability to attend the hospital for screening tests or follow-up visits.
All participants gave their written informed consent prior to participating in the study. The study was approved by the Hull and East Riding Local Research Ethics Committee. Block randomisation was performed. Subjects had 8 weeks of the initial intervention and then 8 weeks of the crossover intervention separated by a 2 week wash out between the 2 arms. Severity of fatigue and handicap was analysed using using validated self-report questionnaires (Chalder Fatigue Scale (Likert Scored), the London Handicap Scale (LHS) and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale before and after each phase of the trial [11–13].
The active product was polyphenol rich chocolate containing 85% cocoa solids (derived from a high cocoa liquor content) compared with chocolate containing cocoa butter alone that contained no non-fat cocoa solids (cocoa liquor) (simulated iso-calorific chocolate). Chocolate containing cocoa butter alone was dyed to the same colour as the high cocoa liquor/polyphenol rich chocolate (with a recipe specially prepared by Nestlé PLC York. UK). Individual 15 g foil wrapped bars were provided and subjects were asked to consume 1 bar three times daily. Subjects were reviewed by the dietician during screening, before and after each intervention to assess whether they were taking more than 10 g of chocolate per day prior to recruitment, as well as to advise them not to consume extra chocolate during the study period. Apart from this, subjects were advised not to change their diet. A taste trial was performed prior to the study to confirm that subjects could not distinguish between the two treatments.
Composition of high cocoa liquor/polyphenol rich chocolate and simulated iso-calorific chocolate (cocoa liquor free/low polyphenol)
Composition by
High Cocoa Liquor Polyphenol Rich
Simulated iso-calorific
chocolate (Cocoa Liquor
Free/Low Polyphenol)
Cocoa liquor (non fat)
Whole milk powder
Cocoa butter
Whey powder
Vegetable fat
Butter fat
Composition by Macronutrient
Polyphenol analysis* high cocoa liquor/polyphenol rich chocolate and simulated iso-calorific chocolate (cocoa liquor free/low polyphenol)
High Cocoa Liquor/Polyphenol
Rich chocolate
Simulated iso-calorific
(Cocoa Liquor Free/Low
17.4 mg ECE/g
3.9 mg ECE/g
0.37 g/kg
< 0.05 g/kg
Dimer B2
0.80 g/kg
< 0.05 g/kg
1.23 g/kg
< 0.05 g/kg
Trimer C
0.58 g/kg
< 0.05 g/kg
Tetramer D
0.33 g/kg
< 0.05 g/kg
Dimer B5
0.32 g/kg
< 0.05 g/kg
Statistical Methods
We calculated sample size according to previous published data on the fatigue scale in chronic fatigue syndrome[14]. With a confidence interval of 1-alpha (2 sided), and a standard deviation of 2.25, for 80% power that gave a number of 10 subjects to be studied to show a 4 point difference between the two treatments including a drop out rate of 2 subjects. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS for Windows NT, version 9.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, Illinois). Data was analyzed on an 'intention to treat' basis with the Wilcoxon Signed Rank sum test before and after intervention. An arbitrary level of 5% statistical significance was assumed (two tailed). Successful demonstration of efficacy for the trial was defined as a statistically significant superiority over cocoa absent chocolate in the primary outcome variable, fatigue.
Questionnaire scores before and after active (high cocoa liquor/polyphenol rich chocolate) and placebo (simulated iso-calorific chocolate - cocoa liquor free/low polyphenol)
Before Intervention
After Intervention (8 weeks)
Wilcoxon Signed Rank Sum test
Median (Range)
Median (Range)
Z value (Exact Sig. (2-tailed))
Chalder Fatigue questionnaire Active Arm
33 (25 - 38)
21.5 (6 - 35)
-2.53 (0.01)
Chalder Fatigue questionnaire Placebo Arm
28.5 (17 - 20)
34.5 (13-26)
-2.23 (0.03)
HAD questionnaire (Anxiety) Active Arm
9.5 (8-13)
6 (4-8)
-2.54 (0.01)
HAD questionnaire (Anxiety) Placebo Arm
6 (3-9)
9 (8-12)
-2.21 (0.03)
HAD questionnaire (Depression) Active Arm
10 (9-14)
5.5 (4-9)
-2.68 (0.01)
HAD questionnaire (Depression) Placebo Arm
6 (4-9)
12 (8-14)
-2.34 (0.02)
LHS questionnaire (residual function) Active Arm
0.49 (0.33 - 0.62)
0.64 (0.44 - 0.83)
-2.52 (0.01)
LHS questionnaire (residual function) Placebo Arm
0.44 (0.43 - 0.68)
0.36 (0.33 - 0.62)
-2.21 (0.03)
The mean weight before and after the high cocoa chocolate intervention were unchanged at 77.04 kg and 76.80 kg, respectively (p value - 0.326). The mean weight before and after the placebo intervention were also unchanged (73.43 kg vs. 73.85 kg, respectively p value 0.345).
This study shows that high cocoa polyphenol rich chocolate reduced the burden of symptoms in subjects in chronic fatigue syndrome. As both types of chocolate were iso-calorific and had similar glycemic indices and loads, it is likely that the improvement was due to the high polyphenol content within the active chocolate, rather than a difference in of the micro or macronutrient the composition of the two chocolates. The significance of the results is particularly surprising because of the small number of subjects in the study.
It is also interesting to note that there was no significant weight change after both phases of the study despite consuming an extra 245 Kcal daily for each two month period. The potential weight gain may have been offset by improvement in functional status and physical activity when they had high cocoa polyphenol rich chocolate. However, this would not explain why the weight was unchanged in the placebo group, particularly as they reported an increase in their fatigue.
Arachidonyl ethanolamide, later called anandamide (a name that comes from ananda, the Sanskrit word for ''bliss'') has a structural similarity with tetrahydrocannibol, and other strongly related compounds that are found in cocoa[8]. There are also compounds (N-acylethanolamines) that block the breakdown of anandamide in cocoa[8]. It may be the synergy of these compounds in chocolate that may account for the results seen in this study.
A number of biological systems have been implicated in chronic fatigue syndrome and there is mounting evidence that oxidative stress [15–18] contributes to the disease process and to some of the symptoms in the illness [19]. Flavanoids have shown to have a protective effect on cells including neuronal cells from oxidative stress[20]; however, this mechanism needs to be explored in further studies.
Despite the positive findings, this study is still limited due the small number of participants and larger studies are necessary to confirm these findings.
As this was a proof of concept study; physical activity was not formally assessed. Biochemical markers including plasma polyphenol levels and inflammatory markers were not measured as part of the study as all of the baseline parameters prior to the study were normal, in accord with the criteria for the diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome.
Since there was a consistent improvement of symptoms with high cocoa phenol chocolate and deterioration with iso-calorific chocolate, a placebo effect is unlikely. Moreover, the taste panel of healthy people before the study could not differentiate the taste between high cocoa and iso-calorific chocolate.
In summary, this study suggests that consuming high cocoa polyphenol rich chocolate 15 g three times daily has a beneficial effect in improving fatigue and residual function in subjects with CFS over a period of 8 weeks compared to simulated iso-calorific cocoa mass free/low polyphenol chocolate. This may be of benefit for subjects with CFS if included as part of a healthy diet or in a formal treatment protocol.
Nestlé PLC York, UK provided the chocolate for the study and performed the analysis as an unrestricted contribution.
Authors' Affiliations
- Joyce J, Hotopf M, Wessely S: The prognosis of chronic fatigue and chronic fatigue syndrome: a systematic review. Qjm. 1997, 90 (3): 223-233. 10.1093/qjmed/90.3.223.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Steven Reid TC, Anthony Cleare, Matthew Hotopf and Simon. BMJ. 2000, 320: 292-296. 10.1136/bmj.320.7230.292.Google Scholar
- Whiting P, Bagnall AM, Sowden AJ, Cornell JE, Mulrow CD, Ramirez G: Interventions for the treatment and management of chronic fatigue syndrome: a systematic review. Jama. 2001, 286 (11): 1360-1368. 10.1001/jama.286.11.1360.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Keli SO, Hertog MG, Feskens EJ, Kromhout D: Dietary flavonoids, antioxidant vitamins, and incidence of stroke: the Zutphen study. Arch Intern Med. 1996, 156 (6): 637-642. 10.1001/archinte.156.6.637.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Hertog MG, Kromhout D, Aravanis C, Blackburn H, Buzina R, Fidanza F, Giampaoli S, Jansen A, Menotti A, Nedeljkovic S, et al: Flavonoid intake and long-term risk of coronary heart disease and cancer in the seven countries study. Arch Intern Med. 1995, 155 (4): 381-386. 10.1001/archinte.155.4.381.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Scalbert A, Manach C, Morand C, Remesy C, Jimenez L: Dietary polyphenols and the prevention of diseases. Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr. 2005, 45 (4): 287-306. 10.1080/1040869059096.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Dillinger TL, Barriga P, Escarcega S, Jimenez M, Salazar Lowe D, Grivetti LE: Food of the gods: cure for humanity? A cultural history of the medicinal and ritual use of chocolate. J Nutr. 2000, 130 (8S Suppl): 2057S-2072S.PubMedGoogle Scholar
- di Tomaso E, Beltramo M, Piomelli D: Brain cannabinoids in chocolate. Nature. 1996, 382 (6593): 677-678. 10.1038/382677a0.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Cleare AJ: The neuroendocrinology of chronic fatigue syndrome. Endocr Rev. 2003, 24 (2): 236-252.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Fukuda K, Straus SE, Hickie I, Sharpe MC, Dobbins JG, Komaroff A: The chronic fatigue syndrome: a comprehensive approach to its definition and study. International Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Study Group. Ann Intern Med. 1994, 121 (12): 953-959.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Chalder T, Berelowitz G, Pawlikowska T, Watts L, Wessely S, Wright D, Wallace EP: Development of a fatigue scale. J Psychosom Res. 1993, 37 (2): 147-153. 10.1016/0022-3999(93)90081-P.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Herrmann C: International experiences with the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale--a review of validation data and clinical results. J Psychosom Res. 1997, 42 (1): 17-41. 10.1016/S0022-3999(96)00216-4.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Zigmond AS, Snaith RP: The hospital anxiety and depression scale. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 1983, 67 (6): 361-370. 10.1111/j.1600-0447.1983.tb09716.x.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Cleare AJ, Heap E, Malhi GS, Wessely S, O'Keane V, Miell J: Low-dose hydrocortisone in chronic fatigue syndrome: a randomised crossover trial. Lancet. 1999, 353 (9151): 455-458. 10.1016/S0140-6736(98)04074-4.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Richards RS, Roberts TK, McGregor NR, Dunstan RH, Butt HL: Blood parameters indicative of oxidative stress are associated with symptom expression in chronic fatigue syndrome. Redox Rep. 2000, 5 (1): 35-41.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Pall ML, Satterlee JD: Elevated nitric oxide/peroxynitrite mechanism for the common etiology of multiple chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue syndrome, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2001, 933: 323-329. 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2001.tb05836.x.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Logan AC, Wong C: Chronic fatigue syndrome: oxidative stress and dietary modifications. Altern Med Rev. 2001, 6 (5): 450-459.PubMedGoogle Scholar
- Vecchiet J, Cipollone F, Falasca K, Mezzetti A, Pizzigallo E, Bucciarelli T, De Laurentis S, Affaitati G, De Cesare D, Giamberardino MA: Relationship between musculoskeletal symptoms and blood markers of oxidative stress in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome. Neurosci Lett. 2003, 335 (3): 151-154. 10.1016/S0304-3940(02)01058-3.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Richards RS, Roberts TK, Dunstan RH, McGregor NR, Butt HL: Free radicals in chronic fatigue syndrome: cause or effect?. Redox Rep. 2000, 5 (2-3): 146-147. 10.1179/135100000101535519.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Ishige K, Schubert D, Sagara Y: Flavonoids protect neuronal cells from oxidative stress by three distinct mechanisms. Free Radic Biol Med. 2001, 30 (4): 433-446. 10.1016/S0891-5849(00)00498-6.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


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PRETORIA (Reuters) - African powers Angola, Nigeria and South Africa on Friday endorsed the nomination of Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a respected economist and diplomat, as a candidate to take over the World Bank.
The United States faces an unprecedented challenge to its grip on the World Bank presidency, with emerging economies poised to nominate at least one candidate on Friday to set up the first contested bid for the top job at the global development lender.
"The endorsement is in line with the belief that the appointment of the leadership of the World Bank and its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, should be merit-based, open and transparent," the three said in a statement.
South Africa chairs one of the three African seats on the 25-member World Bank board, and earlier this week sources said Okonjo-Iweala's candidacy was being proposed after consultations between South Africa's President Jacob Zuma and Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan.
The joint endorsement is a rare bit of unity among the three countries often at loggerheads as they battle for dominance on the continent.
"She has eminent academic qualifications and would be, I think, a candidate of choice not only on the African continent but well beyond as well," South Africa's Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan told a media briefing on Friday.
The three countries will lobby other African states to endorse her, Gordhan added.
Former Colombian Finance Minister Jose Antonio Ocampo is also expected to run for the post, sources told Reuters this week.
Brazil said this week that both Okonjo-Iweala and Ocampo would be "great" candidates to replace Robert Zoellick as head of the Washington-based development institution, the latest sign of emerging nations wanting more say in how it is run.
Washington has held the presidency since the bank's founding after World War Two, while a European has always led its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund.
Editing by Jon Herskovitz


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Geoffrey Beetem - New Earth Marble (#8)
Product Description
Geoffrey Beetem is often regarded in the contemporary handmade marble field as the master glass artist in the use of dichroic glass. An artist who continues to explore the rich colors and uniquely personal designs that have become his hallmarks, Beetem became fascinated with glass in 1980 when he served as an apprentice to a stained glass artist.
Studying under the direction of Jane Bruce, whose Bauhaus style Beetem came to learn well, he was offered work at the famed Pilchuk Glass School in Washington. There his responsibilities as hot shop technician enabled him to learn the process of furnace building. "I was placed in the mix at Pilchuk" he says, the hottest hot shop in the country. "With so many glass world luminaries passing through, my glass skills were developed and my eyes were open wide."
Working with such noted artists as Billy Morris, Rich Royal, Lino Tagliapiertra, Dan Daily and Dante Marioni, Beetem set out on his own with a head full of ideas, and establish his own glass shop in 1987. These days, his works continue to expand the boundaries of sculptural glasswork, and he is ranked as one of the premier glass craftsmen working today.
Product Videos
Geoffrey Beetem's world marbles are as intricate as they are beautiful. The glass technique to create these unique pieces of art took him three years to master. This multimedia story focuses on the process of creating the world marble, and Geoff's creative perspective on his signature pieces of glass work.
Making the Wor...Geoffrey Beetem's world marbles are as intricate as they are b...
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Long-serving Coronation Street star Julie Hesmondhalgh is leaving the soap after 15 years as TV favourite Hayley Cropper.
The Accrington-born actress, 42, admitted she has had "the most wonderful time" playing the Street's first transsexual on the ITV1 show, but wanted to pursue new projects after starring in the play, Black Roses: The Killing Of Sophie Lancaster at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester last year.
"I've had the most wonderful and happy time in the life-changing 15-16 years I've been in Corrie, and I owe so much to the show and the special team that make it happen," she said.
"The decision to hang up Hayley's red anorak was a tough one, but doing the play at the Royal Exchange last year made me realise that there's life in the old dog yet (!) and that there are other things I want to try."
She added: "Whatever happens next I'll always be proudest of lovely Mrs Cropper and in particular what we achieved in changing attitudes to transgender and in portraying possibly the most loving, faithful and steadfast couple in soap history! I'll always be the show's biggest fan."
Hesmondhalgh, who joined the soap in 1998, will fulfil the rest of her contract until the end of 2013.
TV bosses are now working on storylines to ensure a "dramatic exit" for such a beloved character.
Executive producer Kieran Roberts said: "Who doesn't love Hayley Cropper? The character's warmth and decency, spiced with a great sense of fun and adventure, have put her at the heart of Coronation Street.
"The enduring popularity of and affection for Hayley - and of course her wonderful partnership with Roy - has so much to do with the brilliant way Julie Hesmondhalgh has brought the character to life on screen for the past 15 years.
"We'll be sorry to say farewell to Hayley - and to Julie - but we're planning a screen exit worthy of one of Coronation Street's best-loved characters."
Hesmondhalgh, who is married to actor and writer Ian Kershaw in real life, has taken hiatuses from the show. She took time off in 2001 to give birth to her daughter Martha Mo, and had a year's break in 2007 to spend more time with her family.
Her alter-ego Hayley and cafe owner Roy Cropper (played by David Neilson) are now one of the programme's best loved couples, having won over the hearts of the nation with their romance.
The screen couple have been at the heart of major storylines including being caught in Tracy Barlow's web of deceit when she claimed Roy fathered her child in an attempt to steal their savings. Hayley has also had to relive her background with the arrival of her mother-in-law Sylvia (Stephanie Cole).


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LaRue County
is known for its warmth and hospitality and its rural setting. The citizens take pride in the county's role as the birthplace of
Abraham Lincoln
, 16th president of the United States. The county is served by an excellent highway system: Interstate-65 cuts across its western border; Lincoln Parkway leads to the Lincoln Birthplace and serves as a gateway to Kentucky's Cumberland Plateau; U.S. 31E and U.S. 31W bisect the county, along with a network of state and rural roads. These facilities give easy access to the
Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site
, the
Lincoln Boyhood Home
on Knob Creek, the
Lincoln Museum
on Hodgenville's Lincoln Square, and the
Lincoln Jamboree
, one of the nation's finest country music shows.
The seat of LaRue County is
, established in 1818; other communities include
Mt. Sherman
. The county boasts a number of
lovely churches
an excellent school system
, an updated public library,
good government
outstanding health care facilities
, and an interesting and enthusiastic group of
civic clubs
The county has an active senior citizens organization, which enjoys its own modern building in downtown Hodgenville.
Sunrise Manor
, also in Hodgenville, is an outstanding nursing facility with
residential, adult day care, and outpatient therapy services
Recreational facilities
include a golf course, several lakes, city parks with tennis, swimming and baseball, and much more.
The LaRue County School District
provides all students with the knowledge, critical thinking and life skills to succeed in a diverse society. Various sports programs are offered within the School District, including the
LaRue County Hawks Wrestling Program
which has
won numerous State Championships since 1999
LaRue County
looks to the future with its
industrial park
and efforts to attract job opportunities for its citizens. At the same time, it works to maintain the beauty and tranquility of its small town, rural atmosphere.
Come visit and see for yourself all that LaRue County has to offer!
Copyright © 1998-2019 by the LaRue County Fiscal Court
- LaRue County, Kentucky -


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When You Are Writing Your Memoir or Autobiography, Remember That You Are Part of Your Audience
If you are writing a memoir or autobiography, at some point you will find yourself thinking about your intended audience. Who will read your book? Most likely, family, friends, and loved ones will be part of your readership. Perhaps it will extend to others in your community. You may be hoping to reach, encourage, or support others who have had a similar life experience as you. And maybe you have your eyes fixed on a wide audience, with your book going viral across mainstream and social media!
Getting clear about your audience will certainly help you establish your voice, tone, and direction for your memoir or autobiography. As I tell my students in my Writing Your Life Story classes, as well as those I assist as memoir or autobiography ghostwriter or book coach, sometimes it can help to imagine yourself sitting at your kitchen table telling your story to a friend over a cup of coffee. That's how you bring your readership into focus and anticipate what will help them grasp and appreciate what you have to say.
However, as you zero in on that audience, make sure you don't forget one very important target reader: YOU! That's right, somehow or other you will need to be able to read your completed memoir or autobiography and feel engaged in the story and enriched by the experience of absorbing yourself in it. Ideally, you will find something new or unexpected in the story that you told, and how you wrote it. You may believe that you are writing your life story for the benefit of others, and that certainly is a vital part of your mission, but I have come to recognize that we as authors are also writing for the benefit of ourselves. Writing your life story is a special endeavor, and you will absolutely gain from the experience of doing it and then reading what you have created.
So when you ask yourself whether you are reaching your target audience, remember to include this question: "Will my audience, including ME, be engaged in this story, and if not, what adjustments do I need to make to change that?"
– Kevin Quirk helps women and men of all ages and backgrounds tell the most important stories of their life in his work as a personal historian and memoir and autobiography ghostwriter. He is co-author of Brace for Impact: Miracle on the Hudson Survivors Share Their Stories of Near Death and Hope for New Life and author of Your Life Is a Book – And It's Time to Write It!


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Clinique Beyond Perfecting Powder Foundation and Concealer
A powder foundation and concealer in one for a natural, beyond perfected look that lasts all day. Even through sweat and humidity. Weightless powder makeup covers thoroughly without clogging pores. Skin breathes comfortably, colour stays true. Oil-free.
How to use:
- Apply where needed
- For allover application start in center of face, blending outward
- Use sponge-side for moderate coverage; smooth, velvety side for buildable, fuller coverage; pointed tip to spot-conceal


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Palisades Coat
- Shell: 70% cotton, 30% nylon
Lining: 52% viscose, 48% poly
- Double breasted button front closure
- Front pockets
- Revolve Style No. SPIE-WO15
- Manufacturer Style No. S2077W
- Modeled in size S.
- Model Measurements: Height 5'10", Waist 27", Bust 34", Hips 36"
Spiewak has been a leading provided in durable outerwear for over 105 years. Since its early days selling sheepskin vests on the streets of New York, the company has grown to include functional clothing and carefully-constructed pieces for police and fire departments. Today, the line offers its traditional styles alongside modern outerwear.
If an item you would like to purchase is out of stock, you can place a Special Order Inquiry. REVOLVE will then check the availability and obtain an approximate arrival date for the item, if available. Typically, it takes up to 3-4 weeks to verify this information.
Placing a Special Order Inquiry is absolutely free and there is no obligation to follow through with a purchase.
- You will be notified by email once we receive the item.
- You may cancel at any time without penalty
- Your card will ONLY be charged when your order is shipped.
- Availability is not guaranteed.


text: I just would like everyone here if they have the time to check out the thread that was put up by Geomainiacs in the Geo-caching Forum under General Topics under the heading of Cache Thrasher and deleting the logs. I just read through the whole log and it about blew me away. I think we owe a debt of gratitude to Mopar for getting the truth out about TheTeam. I was totally amazed that there are people like this so close to our homes and communities. You'll see what I mean when you read through this thread. Just wanted everyone to know about this and it's not a laughing matter. Thanks Haffy6


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Tactile Hubble Carina Nebula Image and Figure Legend
The raised arcs, lines, dots, and other markings in this 17-by-11-inch Hubble Space Telescope image of the Carina Nebula highlight important features in the giant gas cloud, allowing visually impaired people to feel what they cannot see and form a picture of the nebula in their minds.
Located 7,500 light-years from Earth, the Carina Nebula is a 3-million-year-old gigantic cloud where thousands of stars are cycling through the stages of stellar life and death. This image shows massive stars near the end of their lives and energetic young stars that are sculpting a fantasy landscape of bubbles, valleys, mountains, and pillars. The nebula is 300 light-years wide, but Hubble captured a 50-light-year-wide view of its central region.
A legend identifying the raised features is below the image.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Mutchler (STScI/AURA) and N. Grice (You Can Do Astronomy LLC)


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Return to Touro Law
Vietnam (2018) – Ho Chi Minh City
Emerging Vietnam
About the Program
In 2011, Touro was the first and only United States law school to sponsor a summer abroad law program in Vietnam. This is the second country in which Touro has been a pioneer, having been the first and only law school to sponsor an American Bar Association-approved summer law program in India.
The Vietnam summer law program, now in its fifth year, is approved by the ABA. The program is based in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. Ho Chi Minh City, a vibrant French-built Asian city, is the commercial center of the country. Students are housed in a modern hotel in the Pham Ngu Lao district. Classes will also be held in the hotel during the morning, and the afternoons will be free for students to study and explore Vietnam's largest and most exciting city. All the courses offered in the program relate to Vietnam in some fashion.
Optional excursions can be arranged to the Cao Dai Temple and the Cu Chi Tunnels, a Water Puppet Show, and of course to the many sights in the city such as the Reunification Palace, the War Remnants Museum, the Ben Thanh Market, and the many hidden treasures to be encountered on the streets of the city. Ho Chi Minh City has frequent and affordable air service to other places in Vietnam and in South East Asia, and the program can help facilitate optional trips to Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, Hue and Hoi An. During the four-day break between the two sessions, there will be an optional excursion to visit two sites in Cambodia that relate to program courses: to the Extraordinary Chambers of the Cambodian Courts where the leaders of the Khmer Rouge are being prosecuted, and to the Angkor Wat World Heritage Site, with its complex of fabulous Hindu temples--the ultimate lost city in the jungle. There is also an overnight program excursion to the Mekong Delta in Session One.
Program Dates
5/27/2018 - 6/27/2018
Program Information
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Touro Law Center reserves the right to modify or cancel a program for reasonable cause, including but not limited to insufficient enrollment, severe political instability, or any serious condition that may threaten the safety of the students. If a program is cancelled, any money paid to Touro by a program participant will be fully refunded within 20 days, except for room and board and transportation payments utilized prior to the date of cancellation; Touro will endeavor to help each enrolled student attend a similar program, if the student so desires.
Touro Law Center
. All Rights Reserved.


text:
kmangin necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
2 ganadores han sido elegidos entre 30 diseños de 10 diseñadores freelance.
The Snowcaster
We are a start-up company with an exciting snow removal product that will change the way people remove snow from their driveways and sidewalks. Snow removal equipment and de-icing chemicals can be very hard on the environment and equally as hard on the human body. We are in business to reduce the amount of carbon emmissions released by power equipment (snowblowers) and make shoveling snow less taxing on the human body. Our snow removal product is 50% more efficient than the standard snow shovel and ergonimically designed to reduce stress on the back and neck of the user.
1. Commercial snow removal contractors
2. Individual consumers via e-commerce
3. Year 2-3, specialty retailers looking for unique products at a higher price point.
I want to show the uniqeness of the product. See attached picture.
The shovel is more like a manual snow plow that you push. The blade is angled to wind row snow to one side. The blade is reversable making removal of the snow much quicker. The unit sits on wheels (casters) reducing friction and making the task of removing snow much easier than the traditional shovel.
I would like to have the logo include a side shot of the product and snow flying off the blade of the unit. Maybe a tidlewave effect of snow being casted away from the blade. I am certainly open to other designs, as long as they can show the unique nature of the product.
Corporate colors are Navy Blue and Black. The color of the blade will be navy blue, not orange.
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


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Find Your Perfect Home.
Allegan Real Estate
Allegan is located in Michigan. Allegan, Michigan has a population of 5,071. Allegan is less family-centric than the surrounding county with 19.6% of the households containing married families with children. The county average for households married with children is 33.04%.
The median household income in Allegan, Michigan is $41,368. The median household income for the surrounding county is $52,472 compared to the national median of $53,482. The median age of people living in Allegan is 37.2 years.
Allegan Weather
The average high temperature in July is 81.4 degrees, with an average low temperature in January of 15.1 degrees. The average rainfall is approximately 37.2 inches per year, with inches of snow per year.
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