“‘It’s the equivalent of Universal, Sony, the M.P.A.A. and Regal all tied up in one,’ said an American producer who has done business extensively in China. His description compared the China Film Group to a pair of major studios, the Motion Picture Association of America trade group, and America’s largest theater chain, Regal Entertainment Group, but with the added authority of a government franchise.
…
In person, Mr. Han, who speaks little or no English, can nevertheless come across as an almost stereotypical Hollywood producer, an acquaintance said. He is demonstrative and colorfully expressive when speaking, and appears eager to befriend and be seen with Western movie stars, the acquaintance said.”
— In China, Foreign Films Meet A Powerful Gatekeeper
“
“It was the best fight I’ve ever seen,” the anonymous witness wrote. “ Young people, old people, girls, members, nonmembers, it was a nondiscriminatory ragematch.”
The witness’s note says that the initial fight seemed to have commenced over a woman, and escalated into a brawl involving three fighting “wolfpacks.” Tables were overturned or moved to the room’s periphery to create a “lion’s pit” for the battle.
Other highlights, the witness wrote, included “probably 2 broken noses,” “glasses thrown,” tables overturned, a woman cut badly enough to require stitches, and a “fat pudgy kid” who came out of nowhere, laid out a larger man with a blow to the head, and was tackled by a crowd…
[T]he director of communications, James O’Brien, declined to confirm what the anonymous witness described as the “epicness” of the brawl, or much of anything else.
” — Brawl Sheds An Unwelcome Light On New York Athletic Club
Everything I know about the styling industry I’ve learned from watching The Rachel Zoe Project, which is exactly like Moby-Dick but with a tiny bronzed woman instead of Ahab, and Anne Hathaway’s Oscar dress where the whale ought to be. Zoe shudders and sermonizes over detachable taffeta trains, and her monomania is equally consumptive of everything that crosses her path (like, other people). It is a show in which viewers feel the dire consequences of each decision even as they know that no decision carries any consequence at all. That atmosphere of mixed frivolity and dread is one that seems to characterize a very broad strain of modern experience (the possibility of getting fired for a tweet, being self-conscious about your socks at a TSA screening, the News Corp. hacking of Jude Law’s cell phone). When I fly to L.A. at the start of awards season to learn about the styling industry, I am not expecting to find God in a Patrik Ervell “winter jean.” But it would be neat to see someone else find God in this way.
My God, Molly Young is so disgustingly talented. Read her piece here.
Many dramatic changes can happen in 4 years.
Oh, fuck my life. At least Miles Klee (who iced me) didn’t know my unfortunate history with Smirnoff Ice and the internet.
Felix: Letter to the editor of the day, Singapore edition -
Singapore has decreed that maids must be given at least one day per week off. This did not go down well with Thng Tien Guan, who wrote an aggrieved letter to the editor of the Straits Times:
I READ with disbelief that the Government has decided that all maids will get a weekly day off from next year…
It might seem like a fair and simple decision, but have the policymakers considered the unintended consequences? …
- Hiring a maid: Families will find it harder to employ maids as most will want their days off. While it may be argued that some maids prefer to be paid in lieu of a day off, this is usually true only in the first six months, when they are still paying off their loans through their agencies. Once the loan is settled, most maids will insist on their days off. And they are likely to quit if they do not get their way.
Should this happen every six months, it would be exasperating as it is hard to train maids to take care of toddlers or the elderly.
- Impact on the maids: The problem is not whether maids will use their days off to run away. Rather, the exponential increase in days off may lead them to squander their hard-earned pay instead of saving it to help finance a better life when they return home. The higher risk of promiscuity, extramarital affairs and unintended pregnancies are also possible consequences.
So hard to find good help these days, when it’s easier for them to escape.
I forgot my mantra: Whence they came -
So Europe watched them go — in less than a century and a half, well over thirty-five million of them from every part of the continent. …
Westward from Ireland went four and a half million. On that crowded island a remorselessly rising population, avaricious absentee landlords, and English policy that discouraged the growth of industry early stimulated emigration. Until 1846 this had been largely a movement of younger sons, of ambitious farmers and artisans. In that year rot destroyed the potato crop and left the cottiers without the means of subsistence. Half a million died and three million more lived on only with the aid of charity. No thought then of paying rent, of holding on to the land; the evicted saw their huts pulled down and with bitter gratitude accepted from calculating poor-law officials the price of passage away from home. …
Westward from Great Britain went well over four million. There enclosure and displacement had begun back in the eighteenth century, although the first to move generally drifted to the factories of the expanding cities. By 1815, however, farmers and artisans in substantial numbers had emigration in mind; and after midcentury they were joined by a great mass of landless peasants, by operatives from the textile mills, by laborers from the potteries, and by miners from the coal fields. …
From the heart of the continent, from the lands that in 1870 became the German Empire, went fully six million. First to leave were the free husbandmen of the southwest, then the emancipated peasants of the north and east. With them moved, in the earlier years, artisans dislocated by the rise of industry, and later some industrial workers. …
From the north went two million Scandinavians. Crop failures, as in 1847 in Norway, impelled some to leave. Others found their lots made harsher by the decline in the fisheries and by the loss of the maritime market for timber. And for many more, the growth of commercial agriculture, as in Sweden, was the indication no room would remain for free peasants.
From the south went almost five million Italians. A terrible cholera epidemic in 1887 set them moving. But here, as elsewhere, the stream was fed by the deeper displacement of the peasantry.
From the east went some eight million others — Poles and Jews, Hungarians, Bohemians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Ruthenians — as agriculture took new forms in the Austrian and Russian Empires after 1880.
And before the century was out perhaps three million more were on the way from the Balkans and Asia Minor: Greeks and Macedonians, Croations and Albanians, Syrians and Armenians.
In all, thirty-five million for whom home had no place fled to Europe’s shores and looked across the Atlantic.
What manner of refuge lay there?
”
— Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted, describing US immigration during roughly the period between 1750 and 1900.
First attempt at a Cinemagram photo.
Also, for better or for worse, every time I open the app I get “Cinnamon Girl” stuck in their head.
Oh thank God, I was worried one day I’d have to learn to make gifs.
Samantha Pitchel: Link love: Tuesday, January 17 -
Here’s today’s Links We Love:
Stop everything you’re doing and read the script for ROCKY VS RAMBO, an epic piece of fanfic from Scott Aukerman, Harris Wittels, Paul Rust, Kulap Vilaysack, Michael Cassady and Neil Campbell.
Then: enjoy this infinite gif of a tiny-hatted, dancing Ron…
Holy shit, this is a polymathic link-roundup.
“
Another former inmate at the Marion C.M.U., Andy Stepanian, an animal rights activist, said a guard once told him he was “a balancer” — a non-Muslim placed in the unit to rebut claims of religious bias. Mr. Stepanian said the creation of the predominantly Muslim units could backfire, adding to the feeling that Islam is under attack.
“I think it’s a fair assessment that these men will leave with a more intensified belief that the U.S. is at war with Islam,” said Mr. Stepanian, 33, who now works for a Princeton publisher. “The place reeked of it,” he said, describing clashes over restrictions on prayer and some guards’ hostility to Islam.
Yet Mr. Stepanian also said he found the “family atmosphere” and camaraderie of inmates at the unit a welcome change from the threatening tone of his previous medium-security prison, where he said prisoners without a gang to protect them were “food for the sharks.” When he arrived at the C.M.U., he said, he found on his bed a pair of shower slippers and a bag of non-animal-based food that Muslim inmates had collected after hearing a vegan was joining the unit.
He was wary. “I thought they were trying to indoctrinate me,” he said. “They never tried.” The consensus of the inmates, he said, “was that 9/11 was not Islam.” “These guys were not lunatics,” he said. “They wanted to be back with their families.”
” — Beyond Guantanamo, A Web of Prisons for Terrorism Inmates
Here’s Michelle Obama hosting an organic luncheon in Maui for the APEC spouses. I’m pretty sure the dude looking a bit awkward is Australian PM Julia Gillard’s partner.
