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33:00 I think  artist are free to do with their work what they want
40:38 and dw griffith said correctly , I paraphrase, that the best response to a film is a film itself. I dislike the story in birth of a nation, but the best answer is another story, another film Oscar Michaeuz made , Within our gates, which I love and yes the modern remake of birth of a nation was a similar smart reply. And thank you Eddie for admitting how birth of a nation + song of the south were both the highest grossest films of their day. 
great question James 27:18  to 45:32
48:57 great point, eddie does make it often but  private investigators are not law enforcers or bound to the law in thier actions
57:58 thank you for informing on the  film, celluloid underground 2023 , yes i know iran during the shah was heavily influenced by europe and european creations, the usa
1:19:46 a sequel of "strange bargain"  in "murder she wrote", with the characters back. I wonder who was behind that production. 
1:28:22 rest in peace john bailey,suggest watch his film china moon 
trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uZLsMYNW3w
and check out mishima with bailey and paul schrader
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishima:_A_Life_in_Four_Chapters
trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzaXtBr5210
1:31:00 as long as you are remembered well by someone , you don't escape time, but you live beyond your breaths
 

The Following Is An Article On Popular Fiction ... from the past...my thoughts are at the end

It would be an excellent and profitable arrangement if the London School Board were empowered not only to insist that all boys and girls of tender years shall be instructed in the art of reading, but also to root up and for ever banish from the paths of its pupils those dangerous weeds of literature that crop up in such rank luxuriance on every side to tempt them. Until this is done, it must always be heavy and uphill work with those whose laudable aim it is to promote education and popular enlightenment. To teach a girl or boy how to read is not a very difficult task; the trouble is to guide them to a wholesome and profitable exercise of the acquirement. This, doubtless, would be hard enough, were our population of juveniles left to follow the dictates of their docile or rebellious natures; but this they are not suffered to do. At the very outset, as soon indeed as they have mastered words of two and three syllables, and by skipping the hard words are able somehow to stumble through a page in reading fashion, the enemy is at hand to enlist them in his service. And never was poor recruit so dazzled and bewildered by the wily sergeant whose business it is to angle for and hook men to serve as soldiers as is the foolish lad who is beset by the host of candidates of the Penny Awful tribe for his patronage. There is Dick Turpin bestriding his fleet steed, and with a brace of magnificently mounted pistols stuck in his belt, beckoning him to an expedition of midnight marauding on the Queen’s highway; there is gentlemanly Claude Duval, with his gold-laced coat and elegantly curled periwig, who raises his three-cornered hat politely to the highly-flattered schoolboy and begs the pleasure of his company through six months or so - at the ridiculously small cost of a penny a week, that, he, the gallant captain, may initiate our young friend in the ways of bloodshed and villainy; there is sleek-cropped, bullet-headed Jack Sheppard, who steps boldly forth with his crowbar, offering to instruct the amazed youth in the ways of crime as illustrated by his own brilliant career, and to supply him with a few useful hints as to the best way of escaping from Newgate. Besides these worthies there are the Robbers of the Heath, and the Knights of the Road, and the Skeleton Crew, and Wildfire Dick and Hell-fire Jack, and Dare-devil Tom, and Blueskin, and Cut-throat Ned, and twenty other choice spirits of an equally respectable type, one and all appealing to him, and wheedling and coaxing him to make himself acquainted with their delectable lives and adventures at the insignificant expense of one penny weekly.

It is not difficult to trace back the evil in question to its origin. At least a quarter of a century ago it occurred to some enterprising individual to reprint and issue in “penny weekly numbers” the matter contained in the “Newgate Calendar,” and the publication was financially a great success. This excited the cupidity of other speculators, in whose eyes money loses none of its value though ever so begrimed with nastiness, and they set their wits to work to produce printed weekly “pen’orths” that should be as savoury to the morbid tastes of the young and the ignorant as was the renowned Old Bailey Chronicle itself. The task was by no means a difficult one when once was found the spirit to set about it. The Newgate Calendar was after all but a dry and legal record of the trials of rogues and murderers, for this or that particular offence, with at most, in addition, a brief sketch of the convicted one’s previous career, and a few observations on his most remarkable exploits. After all, there was really no romance in the thing ; and what persons of limited education and intellect love in a book is romance. Here then was a grand field ! What could be easier than to take the common-place Newgate raw material, and re-dip it in the most vivid scarlet, and weave into it the rainbow hues of fiction? What was there that “came out” at the trials of Jack Sheppard and Claude Duval and Mr. Richard Turpin and which the calendar readers so greedily devoured, compared with what might be made to “come out” concerning these same heroes when the professional romance-monger, with the victim’s skull for an inkstand, gore for ink, and the assassin's dagger for a pen, sat down to write their histories? The great thing was to show what the Newgate Calendar had failed to show. It was all very well to demonstrate that at times there existed honour among thieves; the thing to do was to make it clear that stealing was an honourable business, and that all thieves were persons to be respected on account at least of the risks they ran and the perils they so daringly faced in the pursuit of their ordinary calling. Again, in recording the achievements of robbers of a superior grade, the Calendar gave but the merest glimpse of the glories of a highway villain’s existence, whereas, as was well known to the romancist of the Penny Awful school, the life of a person like Mr. Turpin or any other Knight of the Road is just one endless round of daring, dashing adventure, and of rollicking and roystering, or tender, blissful enjoyments of the fruits thereof. Likewise, according to the same authority, it was a well-known fact, and one that could not be too generally known, that rogues and robbers are the only “brave” that deserve the “fair,” and that no sweethearts are so true to each other, and enjoy such unalloyed felicity, as gentlemen of the stamp of Captain Firebrand (who wears lace truffles and affects a horror for the low operation of cutting a throat, but regards it as quite the gentlemanly and “professional” thing to send a bullet whizzing into a human skull ) and buxom, fascinating Molly Cutpurse.

But after all, if the unscrupulous hatchers of Penny Awfuls (this term is no invention of mine, but one conferred on the class of literature in question by the owners thereof ) had been content to stick to Newgate heroes and Knights of the Road, perhaps no very great harm would have been done. At all events, the nuisance must soon have died out. Popular interest in the British Highwayman has for many years been on the wane. There are no longer any mail coaches to rob, and the descendants of the rare old heroes of Bagshot and Hounslow have brought the profession into disgust and contempt by taking to the cowardly game of garroting. Every boy may read of the pitiful behaviour of these modern Knights of the Road when they are triced up, bare-backed, in the press-room at Newgate, and a stout prison warden makes a cat-o’-nine-tails whistle across their shoulders. How they squeal and wriggle and supplicate! “Oh! sir, kind sir! O-o-o-oh-h, pray spare me; I’ll never do it again!” There is not the least spark of dash or bravado about this kind of thing, and the cleverest penman of the Penny Awful tribe would fail to excite feelings of emulation in the minds of his most devoted readers.

The Penny Awful trade, however, has not been brought to a standstill on this account. Cleverer men than those who paraded Dick Turpin and Claude Duval as model heroes have of late years come into the garbage market. Quick-witted, neat-handed fellows, who have studied the matter and made themselves acquainted with it at all points. It has been discovered by these sharp ones that the business has been unnecessarily restricted ; that even supposing that there are still a goodly number of simpletons who take delight in the romance that hangs on those magic words, “Your money or your life,” there are still a much larger number who take no interest at all in gallows heroes, but who might easily be tempted to take to another kind of bait, provided it were judiciously adjusted on the hook. As for instance, there were doubtless to be found in London and the large manufacturing towns of England, hundreds of boys out of whom constant drudgery and bad living had ground all that spirit of dare-devilism so essential to the enjoyment of the exploits of the heroes of the Turpin type, but who still possessed an appetite for vices of a sort that were milder and more easy of digestion. It was a task of no great difficulty when once the happy idea was conceived. All that was necessary was to show that the faculty for successfully defying law and order and the ordinations of virtue might be cultivated by boys as well as men, and that as rogues and rascals the same brilliant rewards attended the former as the latter. The result may be seen in the shop window of every cheap newsvendor in London - The Boy Thieves of London, The Life of a Fast Boy, The Boy Bandits, The Wild Boys of London, The Boy Detective, Charley Wag, The Lively Adventures of a Young Rascal, and I can’t say how many more. This much is true of each and everyone, however - that it is not nor does it pretend to be anything else than a vicious hotch-potch of the vilest slang, a mockery of all that is decent and virtuous, an incentive to all that is mean, base, and immoral, and a certain guide to a prison or a reformatory if sedulously followed. If these precious weekly pen’orths do not openly advocate crime and robbery, they at least go so far as to make it appear that although to obtain the means requisite to set up as a Fast Boy, or a Young Rascal, it is found necessary to make free with a master’s goods, or to force his till or run off with his cash-box, still the immense amount of frolic and awful jollity to be obtained at music halls, at dancing rooms, - where “young rascals” of the opposite sex may be met, - at theatres, and low gambling and drinking dens, if one has “only got the money,” fully compensates for any penalty a boy of the “fast” school may be called on to pay in the event of his petty larcenies being discovered. “What’s the good o’ being honest ?” is the moral sentiment that the Penny Awful author puts into the mouth of his hero, Joe the Ferret, in his delectable story “The Boy Thieves of the Slums.” “What’s the good of being honest ?” says Joe, who is presiding at a banquet consisting of the “richest meats,” and hot brandy and water; “where’s the pull? It is all canting and humbug. The honest cove is the one who slaves from morning till night for half a bellyfull of grub, and a ragged jacket and a pair of trotter cases (shoes), that don’t keep his toes out of the mud, and all that he may be called a good boy and have a “clear conscience” ’ (loud laughter and cries of “Hear, hear,” by the Weasel’s “pals”). “I ain’t got no conscience, and I don’t want one. If I felt one a-growing in me I’d pisen the blessed thing” (more laughter). “Ours is the game, my lads. Light come, light go. Plenty of tin, plenty of pleasure, plenty of sweethearts and that kind of fun, and all got by making a dip in a pocket, or sneaking a till. I’ll tell you what it is, my hearties,” continued the Weasel, raising his glass in his hand (on a finger of which there sparkled a valuable ring, part of the produce of the night’s work), “I’ll tell you what it is, it’s quite as well that them curs and milksops, the ‘honest boys’ of London, do not know what a jolly, easy, devil-may-care life we lead compared with theirs, or we should have so many of ‘em takin’ to our line that it would be bad for the trade.”

It is not invariably, however, that the Penny Awful author indulges in such a barefaced enunciation of his principles. The old-fashioned method was to clap the representatives of all manner of vices before the reader, and boldly swear by them as jolly roystering blades whose manner of enjoying life was after all the best, despite the grim end. The modern way is to paint the picture not coarsely, but with skill and anatomical minuteness; to continue it page after page, and point out and linger over the most flagrant indecencies and immoral teachings of the pretty story, and then, in the brief interval of putting that picture aside and producing another, to “patter” ( if I may be excused using an expression so shockingly vulgar ) a few sentences concerning the unprofitableness of vice, and of honesty being the best policy. And having cut this irksome, though for obvious reasons necessary, part of the business as short as possible, the “author” again plunges the pen of nastiness into his inkpot, and proceeds with renewed vigour to execute the real work in hand.

Writing on this subject it is impossible for me to forget a vivid instance of the pernicious influence of literature of the Penny Awful kind as revealed by the victim himself. It was at a meeting of a society the laudable aim of which is the rescue of juvenile criminals from the paths of vice, and there were present a considerable number of the lads themselves. In the course of the evening, as a test I suppose of the amount of confidence reposed by the lads in their well-wishers and teachers, it was suggested that any one among them who had courage enough might rise in his place and give a brief account of his first theft, and what tempted him to it. It was some time before their was any response, although from the many wistful faces changing rapidly from red to white, and the general uneasiness manifested by the youths appealed to, and who were seated on forms in the middle of the hall, it was evident that many were of a great good mind to accept the invitation. At last a lad of thirteen or so, whose good-conduct stripes told of how bravely he was raising himself out of the slough in which the Society had discovered him, rose, and burning red to his very ears, and speaking rapidly and with much stumbling and stammering - evidences one and all, in my opinion, of his speaking the truth - delivered himself as follows :-

“It’s a goodish many years ago now, more’n six I dessay, and I used to go to the ragged-school down by Hatton-garden. It was Tyburn Dick that did it, leastways the story what they call Tyburn Dick. Well, my brother Bill was a bit older than me, and he used to have to stay at home and mind my young brother and sister, while father was out jobbing about at the docks and them places. We didn’t have no mother. Well, father he used to leave us as much grub as he could, and Bill used to have the sharin’ of it out. Bill couldn’t read a bit, but he knowed boys that could, and he used to hear ‘em reading about Knights of the Road, and Claude Duval, and Skeleton Crews, till I suppose his head got regler stuffed with it. He never had no money to buy a pen’orth when it came out, so he used to lay wait for me, carrying my young sister over his shoulder, when I came out of school at dinner time, and gammon me over to come along with him to a shop at the corner of Rosamond Street in Clerkenwell, where there used to be a whole lot of the penny numbers in the window. They was all of a row, Wildfire Jack, the Boy Highwayman, Dick Turpin, and ever so many others - just the first page, don’t you know, and the picture. Well, I liked it too, and I used to go along o’ Bill and read to him all the reading on the front pages, and look at the pictures until - ‘specially on Mondays when there was altogether a new lot - Bill would get so worked up with the aggravatin’ little bits, which always left off where you wanted to turn over and see what was on the next leaf, that he was very nigh off his head about it. He used to bribe me with his grub to go with him to Rosamond Street. He used to go there regler every mornin’ carryin’ my young sister, and if he found only one that was fresh, he’d be at the school coaxin’ and wigglin’ (qy. inveigling or wheedling), and sometimes bringin’ me half his bread and butter, or the lump of cold pudden what was his share of the dinner. He got the little bits of the tales and the pictures so jumbled up together that it used to prey on him awful. I was bad enough but Bill was forty times worse. He used to lay awake of nights talkin’ and wonderin’ and wonderin’ what was over leaf, and then he’d drop off and talk about it in his sleep. Well, one day he come to the school, and says he, “Charley, there’s somethin’ real stunnin’ at the corner shop this mornin’. It’s Tyburn Dick, and they’ve got him in a cart under the gallows, and there’s Jack Ketch smoking his pipe, and a whole lot of the mob a rushing to rescue him wot’s going to be hung, and the soldiers are there beatin’ of ‘em back, and I’m blowed,’ says Bill, ‘if I can tell how it will end. I should like to know,’ says he. ‘Perhaps it tells you in the little bit of print at bottom ; come along, Charley.’ Well, I wanted to know too, so we went, and there was the picture just as Bill said, but the print underneath didn’t throw no light on it - it was only just on the point of throwin’ a light on it, and of course we couldn’t turn over. I never saw Bill in such a way. He wasn’t a swearin’ boy, take him altogether, but this time he did let out, he was so savage at not being able to turn over. He was like a mad cove, and without any reason punched me about till I run away from him and went to school again. Well, although I didn’t expect it when I come out at half-past four, there was Bill again. His face looked so queer that I thought I was going to get some more punching, but it wasn’t that. He come up speakin’ quite kind, though there seemed something the matter with his voice, it was so shaky. ‘Come on, Charley,’ he said, ‘come on home quick. I’ve got it,’ and opening his jacket, he showed it me - the penny number where the picture of the gallows was, tucked in atwixt the buttonings of his shirt. ‘But how did you come by the penny?’ I asked him. ‘Come on home and read about Jack Ketch and that, and then I’ll tell you all about it,’ Bill replied. So we went home ; and I read out the penny number to him all through, and then he up and told me that he had nicked (stolen) a hammer off a second-hand tool stall in Leather Lane, and sold it for a penny at a rag-shop. That’s how the ice was broke. It seemed a mere nothing to nail a paltry pen’orth or so after reading of the wholesale robbery of jewels, and diamond necklaces, and that, that Tyburn Dick did every night of his life a’most. It was getting that whole pen’orth about him that showed us what a tremenjus chap he was. Next week it was my turn to get a penny to buy the number - we felt that we couldn’t do without it nohow ; and finding the chance, I stole one of the metal inkstands at the school. That was the commencement of it ; and so it went on and growed bigger; but it’s out and true, that for a good many weeks we only stole to buy the number just out of Tyburn Dick.”

A question likely to occur to the reader of these pages is - what sort of persons are these who are so ignoble and utterly lost to all feelings of shame that they can consent to make money by a means that is more detestable than that resorted to by the common gutter-raker or the common pickpocket? How do such individuals comport themselves in society? Are they men well dressed and decently behaved, and have they any pretensions to respectability ? The bookselling and publishing trade is a worthy trade : do the members of it generally recognise these base corruptors of the morals of little boys and girls? or do they shun them and give them a wide berth when they are compelled to tread the same pavement with them? My dear reader, I assure you that whether they are shunned or recognised by those who know them is not of the least moment to the blackguardly crew who pull the strings that keep the delusive puppets going. Well dressed they are - they can well afford to be so, for they make a deal of money, and in many cases keep fine houses and servants and send their children to boarding-school. They dine well in the city, and bluster, and swagger, and swear, and wear diamonds on their unsullied hands, and chains of gold adorn their manly bosoms. As for any idea of moral responsibility as regards those whose young souls and bodies they grind to make their bread, they have no more than had Simon Legree on his Red River slave plantation. They are labouring under no delusion as to the quality of the stuff they circulate. In their own choice language, it is “rot,” “rubbish,” “hog-wash,” but “what odds so long as it sells?” They would laugh in your face were you so rash as to attempt to argue the matter with them. They would tell you that they “go in” for this kind of thing, not out of any respect or even liking they have for it, but simply because it is a good “dodge” for making money, and their only regret is that the law forbids them “spicing” their poison pages and serving them as hot and strong as they would like to. I speak from my own knowledge of these men, and am glad to make their real character known, in order to show how little injustice would be done if their nefarious trade were put a stop to with the utmost rigour of any law that might be brought to bear against them.

Again, it may be asked, who are the “authors,” the talented gentlemen who find it a labour of love to discourse week after week to a juvenile audience of the doings of lewd women and “fast” men, and of the delights of debauchery, and the exercise of low cunning, and the victimising of the innocent and unsuspecting? Ay, who are they? Few things would afford me greater satisfaction than to gather together a hundred thousand or so of those who waste their time and money in the purchase and perusal of Penny Awfuls, and exhibit to them the sort of man it is to whose hands is entrusted the preparation of the precious hashes. Before such an exhibition could take place however, for decency’s sake, I should be compelled to induce him to wash his face and shave his neglected muzzle; likewise I should probably have to find him a coat to wear, and very possibly a pair of shoes. His master, the Penny Awful proprietor, does not treat him at all liberally. To be sure he is not worty of a great amount of consideration, being, as a rule, a dissipated, gin-soddened, poor wretch, who has been brought to his present degraded state by his own misdoings. As for talent, he has none at all; never had; nothing more than a mere accidental literary twist in his wrist - just as one frequently sees a dog that is nothing but a cur, except for some unaccountable gift it has for catching rats, or doing tricks of conjuring. He works to order, does this obliging writer. Either he has lodgings in some dirty court close at hand, or he is stowed away in a dim, upstairs back room of the Penny Awful office, and there the proprietor visits him, and they have a pot of ale and pipes together - the one in his splendid attire, and the other in his tattered old coat and dirty shirt - and talk over the “next” number of Selina the Seduced ; and very often there is heard violent language in that dim little den, the proprietor insisting on their being “more flavour” in the next batch of copy than the last, and the meek author beseeching a little respect for Lord Campbell and his Act. But the noble owner of Selina generally has his way. “Do as you like about it,” says he; “only bear this in mind. I know what goes down best with ‘em and what’s most relished, and if I don’t find that you warm up a bit in the next number, I’ll knock off half-a-crown, and make the tip for the week seventeen-and-six instead of a pound.”

James Greenwood.

URL

http://john-adcock.blogspot.com/2009/03/penny-awfuls.html

Referral
https://www.deviantart.com/leothefox/journal/Penny-Awfuls-986255371

MY THOUGHTS

The first problem is Greenwood focuses on the Penny Dreadful works as the corruptors to an englightened path of reading but dysfunctionally, doesn't start with the fiscal capitalistic agents whose influence in the art world is the true source. The artists who create works is not the one who advertises who publishes who peddles. 

Yes, the word noble means knowing. The ignoble, the peasant in the past did not know. In parallel, children by default yet to mature, as well as adults unguided , in modernity or to the future are the same. But Greenwood misses the point, the reason why the ignoble reach for the rare potentials of the criminal or illegal actor is because the ignoble also tend to be the fiscal poor. And the fiscal poor from the time before the first ruler of the Nile in the far past to the empire of Mars one day know that the system designed by the fiscal rich doesn't offer a positive probability to succeed outside criminality or illegality.  Greenwood's argument is one that has been reformatted whether known or not many times in modernity. I phrase it in one language: "Why they committing those crimes for?"
Most crimes or illegalities in humanity were, are, and will be to make money. Sequentially, what is more appealing to the majority who were and are the fiscal poor that a criminal or illegal getting away with it.  Greenwood's true enemy first seemed to be fiscal capitalist, but now it is fiscal capitalism.

As a writer I always try to explain to nonartists or artists that two assessments exist to all art. The creative side the financial. The creative is disconnected to the financial. All artists reach this reality eventually. There is work I have created for myself.  There is work I have created to be sold or advertised. The difference is real.  And in any artistic industry: fashion/music/writing/sculpture over time the craftspeople get better at it, teach others from their experience. Greenwood now is complaining that artists in a field improve and seek out new ways to express. 

He then uses to support his position , his interpretation of a supposed account of a criminal youth. It reeks of something contrived between a mental manipulator in a prison using getting out as a carrot and an audience filled with people like greenwood to give approval.

It's funny, the british empire was made by any means necessary wherever british ships saied and yet, greenwood chagrins individuals absent an army or a government and only trying to improve themselves for having an any means mentality. And he even used Simon LEgre the symbol of the Statian Empire to correctly say the financiers to the media he detest care not how they make money.

In Conclusion, his enemy is not the writers of penny dreadful's or the readers whom he attacks first. His enemy isn't even the producers , the fiscal capitalist he unstraightly pardons.as men of money in a huamnity based on money. His enemy is fiscal capitalism which by its nature looks to find markets, places to sell. And each market as it gets older becomes cruder or simpler , reduced to a simple financial structure which exists as long as it can. Greenwood's problem is his arguments lead to a question he can not accept or emit. Fiscal Capitlaism generates activity to make profit that is unconcerned to any other factor /heritage/culture. Which he knows, we all know. But, how can you expect the masses not to love seeing fiscal capitalism at its purest, the financiers not to operate  in its definition, anycommunity that accepts fiscal capitalism to place secondarily everything else that is not making money?

IN AMENDMENT

 People like Greenwood never seem willing to admit their problem. They want the community they live in to be based on some conduct code ,but are unwilling to call for it. While they know they live in a fiscal capitalistic community which by default breeds a primary profiteering culture.

Greenwood wants no criminal or illegal activity plus the dismissal of penny dreadfuls by individuals. That is what his words suggest. The only way that can happen in the fiscal capitalistic england of his time is for fiscally poor people to embrace their poverty with a smile and become devout to the rules set by various christian denominations.

phantom lady 1944 - portrait of ella raines - photography alamy

Column: How profit-driven turmoil at Turner Classic Movies placed a vast cultural heritage at risk

Michael Hiltzik

June 29, 2023

It wasn't that long ago that the cause of film preservation and film history seemed to be on a roll. Multiple cable channels such as American Movie Classics, Bravo and Encore were devoted to classic films from the 1930s through the 1980s. When streaming supplanted scheduled cable programming, FilmStruck offered viewers a huge library of classics from the libraries of Warner Bros. and other studios.

Through it all Turner Classic Movies, or TCM, was the much-admired king. The channel was founded in 1994 by entrepreneur Ted Turner to show the library of MGM classic films he had acquired. It evolved to not only screen classic films but also curate its offerings, providing historical commentaries and interviews presented by knowledgeable hosts.

All those other services have either disappeared or been repurposed away from classic films. Until a couple of weeks ago, TCM appeared to be one of the sole survivors in the classic movie landscape.

Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum

But on June 20, David Zaslav, chief executive of TCM's new owner, Warner Bros. Discovery, swung the ax. Layoffs wiped out the network's entire top management, including some figures who had been its leaders for decades. TCM was placed under the supervision of an executive whose other responsibilities included the Adult Swim channel and Cartoon Network.

The sense of dismay and betrayal that swept across Hollywood was almost indescribable. Film stars and character actors known to millions of fans took to social media to condemn the move. Film directors Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson and Martin Scorsese reached out to Zaslav to urge him to back off, advice he seems to have taken, partially.

The turmoil at TCM points to more than a single company's effort to squeeze as much profit as possible from a single asset. It reflects the impulse by the corporate stewards of America's immense film history to view that culture strictly in commercial terms.

"Whether Mr. Zaslav planned to or not, he has inherited an American cultural treasure that he is responsible for safeguarding," film historian Alan K. Rode, a director of the Film Noir Foundation, told me. "But he's also trying to run a business that's over $40 billion in debt. I don't know how you square that circle."

This is not a new conundrum. Almost all artifacts of film history are squirreled away in studios' vaults, where they've been subject to the vicissitudes of corporate accounting and the ebb and flow of mergers and acquisitions.

Occasionally, when they're encouraged by cultural fashions or the appearance of new technologies, the studios have burrowed into their film libraries to assess their marketability and try to untangle ownership rights.

Some 700 historic Paramount Studios productions, for example, are assumed to be nestled in the vaults of Universal Pictures, which inherited Paramount’s 1930s and 1940s film archive from its forebear MCA, which acquired the collection in 1958. (Universal was later absorbed by NBC and is now a division of the entertainment conglomerate Comcast.)

The studios don't repurpose their libraries wholesale. Converting old films to digital formats to be screened online or on cable, or shown in theaters equipped with digital projectors, is an expensive and complicated process. Only films thought to have commercial potential get the favored treatment. Most of the others remain largely inaccessible to the public.

Warner Bros., now absorbed into Warner Bros. Discovery, was long considered the best steward of its cultural hoard. Its Warner Archives division was the industry gold standard in the care and marketing of the past. Under division head George Feltenstein, now the Warner library historian, Warner put thousands of titles, including TV series, on sale as made-to-order DVDs and established a subscription video streaming service that has since been incorporated into the company's Max streaming service.

Choosing which films to market as DVDs or Blu-ray discs was sometimes an easy call, sometimes a challenge, Feltenstein told me in 2015. “There always will be a place on the retail shelf for ‘Casablanca,’ ‘King Kong’ or ‘Citizen Kane,’” he said. But others required finer judgments or innovative marketing. Warner Bros. still offers DVDs and Blu-rays from its classic and contemporary libraries for sale.

Classic-film cable and streaming services have tended to have short half-lives. Consider the fate of FilmStruck, which launched as the subscription-based streaming arm of Turner Classic Movies in November 2016 with an inventory of 500 films, including 200 from the classic movie library of the Criterion Collection. FilmStruck quickly became what Esquire termed "the new go-to movie destination for serious movie buffs."

Two years later, FilmStruck was dead, slain by Warner Bros.' new owner, AT&T, which couldn't wait for the service to grow beyond its base of 100,000 subscribers and reach profitability. For AT&T, as I wrote then, "mass subscribership and profits are the ballgame," patience be damned.

Other networks that had been founded to cultivate an audience of film fans suffered a similar fate. American Movie Classics was founded in 1984 as a premium cable channel to air classic films uncut and commercial-free. It even sponsored an annual film festival to raise money for film preservation. In 2002 it was rebranded as AMC and refocused on prestige TV. AMC produced "Breaking Bad" and "Mad Men," among other series — good TV, certainly, but not classic films.

AMC's sister channel, Bravo, was launched in 1980 to present classic foreign and independent films. After NBC bought it in 2002, it was turned into a showcase for reality series.

Yet audience interest in classic movies and film history continued to grow. "Ten years ago, I felt that we were in kind of a golden age of appreciation of film classics and appreciation, and TCM was a huge part of that," says Bruce Goldstein, the founding repertory artistic director of Film Forum, a New York repertory house. "Now it seems to be falling apart."

TCM and the Criterion Channel remain the go-to streaming destinations for classics. Netflix, am*zon Prime and other networks have minimal classic libraries and no learned curation.

On the surface, there is no great mystery about why Warner Bros. Discovery and Zaslav might want to draw in their financial horns a bit. The company is laboring under a crippling debt load of more than $49 billion, most of it resulting from the 2022 merger that brought together the cable programming company Discovery and the WarnerMedia division of AT&T, itself the product of AT&T's 2016 takeover of Time Warner.

Given the combined companies' loss of $7.4 billion on revenue of $33.8 billion last year, plainly something had to give. The question being asked by cultural historians, cinephiles and plain ordinary film fans is why TCM had to be part of the bloodletting. It was reportedly profitable, if not hugely so, but by any measure not a significant factor on the merged company's profit-and-loss landscape.

That low profile in corporate terms could be TCM's salvation. As my colleague Stephen Battaglio reported, an outcry in the film industry, including by Spielberg, Anderson and Scorsese, has prompted Zaslav to reassess the bludgeoning he visited upon TCM.

The network's longtime programming chief, Charles Tabesh, who had been fired, will stay on, TCM says. Spielberg, Anderson and Scorsese will have a voice on TCM's curation and scheduling. TCM's classic film festival, held annually in Hollywood, will continue. In a move aimed at quelling outrage in the industry, the network will report directly to Warner Bros. Pictures Group co-heads Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy.

Those developments generated an optimistic joint statement from Spielberg, Anderson and Scorsese: “We have already begun working on ideas with Mike and Pam, both true film enthusiasts who share a passion and reverence for classic cinema that is the hallmark of the TCM community," the directors said.

It's impossible to overstate the reverence that film historians and preservationists, and fans, have felt for TCM.

"They are the keepers of the flame," says Foster Hirsch, a professor of film at Brooklyn College and member of the Film Noir Foundation board. "They're an enormous resource for scholars and writers and fans of all ages. To start tampering with the brand or to view it in terms of marketing and data exclusively is horrifying. It's an assault on our common culture."

Among TCM's virtues is its eclectic approach. "They didn't show only well-known masterpieces," Hirsch says. "They showed obscure films, some which aren't good, they showed films for almost all tastes, different genres. From an artistic or historical point of view it isn't broken. There was no reason to 'fix' it."

The network has also been an almost unique portal introducing new generations to film culture. "It's been an essential part of people's film education, especially people of my generation," says Jon Dieringer, 37, founder of Screen Slate, a film culture website. "I grew up watching Turner Classic Movies."

Yet how assiduously Warner Bros. Discovery will follow through on its stated commitment to TCM's mission remains open to question, as does whether the network can retain its stature in the cinephile community. The confidence that the network's fans had in its staff and hosts and their ability to provide a curated approach to film history has been deeply shaken.

Many in the film community are hoping that TCM may have suffered nothing more serious than a near-death experience. Whether that's so won't be known for some time. Everyone will be watching, but experience suggests that when public companies pledge to treat the cultural assets under their control as more than generators of cash and profits, it's wise to expect the worst.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/column-profit-driven-turmoil-turner-120049275.html

Too many classic films remain buried in studios’ vaults

BY MICHAEL HILTZIKBUSINESS COLUMNIST 

OCT. 23, 2015 5:48 PM PT

Will McKinley, a New York film writer, is dying to get his hands on a copy of “Alias Nick Beal,” a 1949 film noir starring Ray Milland as a satanic gangster. For classic film blogger Nora Fiore, the Grail might be “The Wild Party” (1929), the first talkie to star 1920’s “It” girl Clara Bow, directed by the pioneering female director Dorothy Arzner. Film critic Leonard Maltin says he’d like to score a viewing of “Hotel Haywire,” a 1937 screwball comedy written by the great comic director Preston Sturges.

Produced by Paramount Studios, these are all among 700 titles assumed to be nestled in the vaults of Universal Pictures, which inherited Paramount’s 1930s and 1940s film archive from its forebear MCA, which acquired the collection in 1958. They’re frustratingly near at hand but out of reach of film fans and cinephiles.

Like most of the other major studios, Universal is grappling with the challenging economics of making more of this hoard accessible to the public on DVD, video on demand or streaming video. Studios have come to realize that there’s not only marketable value in the films, but publicity value in performing as responsible stewards of cultural assets.

I would have to break the law to see that film.

— Cinephile Nora Fiore, of a 1932 classic locked in a studio vault

No studio recognizes these values better than Warner Bros., whose Warner Archives division is the industry gold standard in the care and marketing of the past. The studio sells some 2,300 titles, including TV series, as made-to-order DVDs and offers its own archival video streaming service for a subscription fee of up to $9.99 a month.

The manufacturing-on-demand service, launched in March 2009 with 150 titles, has proved “far more successful than we even dreamed,” says George Feltenstein, a veteran home video executive who heads the division. “I thought that all the studios would follow in our footsteps, but nobody has been as comprehensive as we’ve been.”

Other major studios have dipped their toes into this market, if gingerly. Paramount last year stocked a free YouTube channel with 91 of its own titles, mostly post-1949. This month 20th Century Fox announced that as part of its 100th anniversary this year, it would release 100 remastered classic films, including silents, to buy or rent for high-definition streaming — “enough to make any classic film fan weep with joy,” McKinley wrote on his blog. Sony last year introduced a free cable channel, get.tv, to screen films from its Columbia Pictures archive, though it’s only spottily available and often preempted by cable operators.

Universal offers some manufacture-on-demand titles via am*zon as its Universal Vault Series and announced in May that it would restore 15 of its silent films as part of its 2012 centennial celebration. Curiously, Universal, owned by the cable giant Comcast, is one of the only majors without a dedicated cable channel or Internet streaming service for its archive. Universal spokesperson Cindy Gardner maintains that the studio is working on ways to improve: “Stay tuned.”

Film buffs and historians have easier access to more classic films than ever before. But that only whets their appetite for important — but perhaps forgotten — films.

The 1932 Paramount World War I drama “Broken Lullaby,” Fiore says, might provoke a reexamination of the career of its director, the master of graceful comedy Ernst Lubitsch. But a version that crept onto YouTube a few years ago was taken down at the insistence of Universal. “I would have to break the law to see that film,” laments Fiore, who blogs on classic films in the guise of the Nitrate Diva.

“The studios seem to be sitting on a lot of films, but they’re limited by budget and by their projected return on investment,” says Alan Rode, a director of the Film Noir Foundation. “But it’s not like you open a valve and films come gushing out. If they can’t realize a profit on it, they’re not going to do it.”

Adding to the challenge is that some of the major studios have become subsidiaries of large corporations, and not consistently huge profit centers. For example, Paramount last year contributed about 26% of the $13.8 billion in revenue of its parent, Viacom, but its $205 million in operating profit paled next to the $2.4 billion net income recorded by the whole corporation.

Converting a film title for digital release can be costly, especially under the watchful eye of cinephiles who demand high quality. Some black-and-white titles can be digitized for $40,000 or less, says Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive — with 350,000 titles, the second-largest in the U.S. after only the Library of Congress.

But the price rises exponentially for color, especially for important restoration. UCLA spent about three years and $1.5 million in donated funds on its heroic restoration and digital transfer of the Technicolor classic “The Red Shoes,” a 1948 backstage ballet drama revered for its beauty.

That means that when deciding which titles to prepare for digital release, archive managers must walk a tightrope between serving their audience and protecting the bottom line. Some classics are easy calls. “There always will be a place on the retail shelf for ‘Casablanca,’ ‘King Kong’ or ‘Citizen Kane,’” says Warner’s Feltenstein. But finer judgments are required for what Feltenstein calls “the deeper part of the library.”

“My job is to monetize that content, make it available to the largest number of people possible and do so profitably,” Feltenstein told me. To gauge demand, Feltenstein’s staff keeps lines open with film enthusiasts and historians via Facebook, Twitter, a free weekly podcast and other outreach. “They literally ask us, ‘What do you want to see?’” Fiore says.

That gives them a window into values that others might miss. Take B-movie westerns made in the 1940s and 1950s that landed in the Warners vault. To Allied Artists and Lorimar, their producers, “these films were worthless and they said it’s OK to let them rot,” Feltenstein says. Instead, Warner Archives packaged them into DVD collections, “and they’ve all been nicely profitable.”

Feltenstein says Warners is releasing 30 more titles to its manufacturing-on-demand library every month. “It’s growing precipitously and there’s no end in sight.” Universal’s Gardner says there’s “real momentum” at her studio behind “making our titles more available than ever before.”

But there’s always more beckoning over the horizon. “The good news is that every studio is actively engaged in taking care of its library,” Maltin says. “That’s a big improvement over 20 or 25 years ago. But access is the final frontier.”

[UPDATE: Nell Minow, whose excellent blog on film can be found at Movie Mom and who is a fan of “Alias Nick Beal,” reports that the title character, played by Ray Milland, is more than merely a “satanic gangster” as we describe him above--he’s Satan.]

Michael Hiltzik’s column appears every Sunday. His new book is “Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex.” Read his blog every day at latimes.com/business/hiltzik, reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @hiltzikm on Twitter.

https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20151025-column.html

Title: cover art parable of the sower
Artist: paul lewin

Posts from the artist
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=paul%20lewin&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=and&sortby=newest

A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
An Oklahoma lawyer details the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood where hundreds died 95 years ago

Allison Keyes

Museum Correspondent

May 27, 2016

This first-person account by B.C. Franklin is titled "The Tulsa Race Riot and Three of Its Victims." It was recovered from a storage area in 2015 and donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. NMAAHC, Gift from Tulsa Friends and John W. and Karen R. Franklin

The ten-page manuscript is typewritten, on yellowed legal paper, and folded in thirds. But the words, an eyewitness account of the May 31, 1921, racial massacre that destroyed what was known as Tulsa, Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street,” are searing.

“I could see planes circling in mid-air. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from their top,” wrote Buck Colbert Franklin (1879-1960). 

The Oklahoma lawyer, father of famed African-American historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), was describing the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood known as Greenwood in the booming oil town. “Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes—now a dozen or more in number—still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air.”

Franklin writes that he left his law office, locked the door, and descended to the foot of the steps.

“The side-walks were literally covered with burning turpentine balls. I knew all too well where they came from, and I knew all too well why every burning building first caught from the top,” he continues. “I paused and waited for an opportune time to escape. ‘Where oh where is our splendid fire department with its half dozen stations?’ I asked myself. ‘Is the city in conspiracy with the mob?’”

AUDIO

Franklin’s harrowing manuscript now resides among the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The previously unknown document was found last year, purchased from a private seller by a group of Tulsans and donated to the museum with the support of the Franklin family.

In the manuscript, Franklin tells of his encounters with an African-American veteran, named Mr. Ross. It begins in 1917, when Franklin meets Ross while recruiting young black men to fight in World War I. It picks up in 1921 with his own eyewitness account of the Tulsa race riots, and ends ten years later with the story of how Mr. Ross’s life has been destroyed by the riots. Two original photographs of Franklin were part of the donation. One depicts him operating with his associates out of a Red Cross tent five days after the riots.

John W. Franklin, a senior program manager with the museum, is the grandson of manuscript’s author and remembers the first time he read the found document.

“I wept. I just wept. It’s so beautifully written and so powerful, and he just takes you there,”  Franklin marvels. “You wonder what happened to the other people. What was the emotional impact of having your community destroyed and having to flee for your lives?”

B.C. Franklin and his associates pose before his law offices in Ardmore, Oklahoma, 1910 NMAAHC, Gift from Tulsa Friends and John W. and Karen R. Franklin

The younger Franklin says Tulsa has been in denial over the fact that people were cruel enough to bomb the black community from the air, in private planes, and that black people were machine-gunned down in the streets. The issue was economics. Franklin explains that Native Americans and African-Americans became wealthy thanks to the discovery of oil in the early 1900s on what had previously been seen as worthless land.

“That’s what leads to Greenwood being called the Black Wall Street. It had restaurants and furriers and jewelry stores and hotels,” John W. Franklin explains, “and the white mobs looted the homes and businesses before they set fire to the community. For years black women would see white women walking down the street in their jewelry and snatch it off.”

Museum curator Paul Gardullo, who has spent five years along with Franklin collecting artifacts from the riot and the aftermath, says: “It was the frustration of poor whites not knowing what to do with a successful black community, and in coalition with the city government were given permission to do what they did.”

“It’s a scenario that you see happen from place to place around our country . . . from Wilmington, Delaware, to Washington, D.C., to Chicago, and these are in some ways mass lynchings,” he says

As in other places, the Tulsa race riot started with newspaper reports that a black man had assaulted a white elevator operator. He was arrested, and Franklin says black World War I vets rushed to the courthouse to prevent a lynching.

“Then whites were deputized and handed weapons, the shooting starts and then it gets out of hand,” Franklin says. “It went on for two days until the entire black community is burned down.”

More than 35 blocks were destroyed, along with more than 1,200 homes, and some 300 people died, mostly blacks. The National Guard was called out after the governor declared martial law, and imprisoned all blacks that were not already in jail. More than 6,000 people were held, according to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum, some for as long as eight days.

Practicing law in a Red Cross tent are B.C. Franklin (right) and his partner I.H. Spears with their secretary Effie Thompson on June 6, 1921, five days after the massacre. NMAAHC, Gift from Tulsa Friends and John W. and Karen R. Franklin

“(Survivors) talk about how the city was shut down in the riot,” Gardullo says. “They shut down the phone systems, the railway. . . . They wouldn’t let the Red Cross in. There was complicity between the city government and the mob. It was mob rule for two days, and the result was the complete devastation of the community.”

Gardullo adds that the formulaic stereotype about young black men raping young white women was used with great success from the end of slavery forward to the middle of the 20th century.

“It was a formula that resulted in untold numbers of lynchings across the nation,” Gardullo says. “The truth of the matter has to do with the threat that black power, black economic power, black cultural power, black success, posed to individuals and . . . the whole system of white supremacy. That’s embedded within our nation’s history.”

Franklin says he has issues with the words often used to describe the attack that decimated the black community.

“The term riot is contentious, because it assumes that black people started the violence, as they were accused of doing by whites,” Franklin says. “We increasingly use the term massacre, or I use the European term, pogrom.”

June 1, 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma NMAAHC

Among the artifacts Gardullo and John W. Franklin have obtained, are a handful of pennies collected off the ground from a young boy’s home burned to the ground during the riot, items with labels saying this was looted from a black church during the riot, and postcards with photos from the race riots, some showing burning corpses.

“Riot postcards were often distributed . . . crassly and cruelly . . . as a way to sell white supremacy,” Gardullo says. “At the time they were shown as documents that were shared between white community members to demonstrate their power. Later . . . they became part of the body of evidence that was used during the commission for reparation.”

In 2001, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission issued a report detailing the damage from the riots, but legislative and legal attempts to gain reparations for the survivors have failed.

The Tulsa race riots aren’t mentioned in most American history textbooks, and many people don’t know that they happened.

Curator Paul Gardullo says the crucial question is why not?

“Throughout American history there’s been a vast silence about the atrocities that were performed in the service of white history. . . . There are a lot of silences in relation to this story, and a lot of guilt and shame,” Gardullo explains.  That’s one reason why the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, will be featured in an exhibition at the new museum called “The Power of Place.” Gardullo says the title is about more than geography.

“(It’s) the power of certain places, about displacement, movement, about what place means for people,” he says. “This is about emotion and culture and memory. . . . How do you tell a story about destruction? How do you balance the fortitude and resilience of people in response to that devastation? How do you fill the silences? How do you address the silences about a story that this community has held in silence for so long and in denial for so long?”

Despite the devastation, the black community in Tulsa was able to rebuild on the ashes of its neighborhood, partly because Buck Colbert Franklin battled all the way to the Oklahoma Supreme Court to defeat a law that would have effectively prevented African-Americans from doing so. By 1925, there was again a thriving black business district. John W. Franklin says his grandfather’s manuscript is important for people to see because it deals with “suppressed history.”

“This is an eyewitness account from a reputable source about what he saw happen,” he grandson John W. Franklin says. “It is definitely relevant to today, because I think our notions of justice are based partially on our own history and our knowledge of history. But we are an a-historical society, in that we don’t know our past.”

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture opens on September 24 of this year on the National Mall.

Allison Keyes  https://twitter.com/allisonradio

Allison Keyes is an award-winning correspondent, host and author. She can currently be heard on CBS Radio News, among other outlets. Keyes, a former national desk reporter for NPR, has written extensively on race, culture, politics and the arts.

Referral
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/long-lost-manuscript-contains-searing-eyewitness-account-tulsa-race-massacre-1921-180959251/#:~:text=This%20first-person%20account%20by%20B.C.%20Franklin%20is%20titled,Friends%20and%20John%20W.%20and%20Karen%20R.%20Franklin

MY COMMENT
My error is in being too busy to share everything before I communicate on topics, but I just can't always. I need sleep:)

I love the audio. a black person admitted she was idealistic. She admitted SHE WAS IDEALISTIC. Black people in Tulsa Oklahoma didn't defend themselves, they were IDEALISTIC. WHich is another word for dishonest. 
They didn't defend themselves, they didn't use violence. Building a wall is violence. Having sentries is violence. HAving a trench is violence. HAving spies is violence. HAving lookouts is violence. Having counter measures is violence. The prey isn't violent. The lamb isn't violent. The wolf is violent. The lamb defending itself is violent, but not before. The people of Tulsa were nonviolent and any black person who utters they were violent in any way is a liar.
This article culminates the grand difference between Black people in Haiti for a time, or in the viceroyalty of florida for a time, or the black people that fought against the creation of the usa for a time,  aside Black people everywhere else in the American continent, canada to argentina, at any time. 
Somehow, Black people who knew and know whites are their enemy didn't and don't think to actually defend themselves against whites. Black people talk about nonviolence today, but that nonviolent call has shown itself to be not only at the cost of black people's lives, but black people's fault. Ideals and laws and nonviolence never protected anyone. if someone says they hate you and you think you can defend against their hate by acting like it doesn't exist,acting like the law has value, acting like you can pick and choose when to protect yourself in a way,  I quote the word used by the elder black in the audio, IDEALISTIC, you are an asshole, you are an idiot, you are a liar to yourself or the community you live in, you are a fool. And sadly, in Tulsa's case, the people of Tulsa sealed their own doom.

And moreover...
Why didn't Blacks talk about it! why? Is that nonviolence ? Is that having an opinion? A Black person's opinion is to not be honest and have their viewpoint on a clear act of war which wasn't new wasn't unknown, wasn't unheard of but  Black people like the Tulsa folk before their inevitable burning, were of the opinion it is best not to say anything. Not to be violent and walk around with guns and live behind walls and protect your resources. No, it is best to be nonviolent and quite. 
 

Review: Chris Rock’s ‘Selective Outrage’ Strikes Back
A year after Will Smith slapped him at the Oscars, Rock responded fiercely in a new stand-up special, Netflix’s first experiment in live entertainment.

Kirill Bichutsky/Netflix

By Jason Zinoman
March 5, 2023
Selective Outrage

One year later, Chris Rock slapped back. Hard.

It was certainly not as startling as Will Smith hitting him at the Oscars, but his long-awaited response, in his new Netflix stand-up special “Selective Outrage” on Saturday night, had moments that felt as emotional, messy and fierce. It was the least rehearsed, most riveting material in an uneven hour.

Near the end, Rock even botched a key part of one joke, getting a title of a movie wrong. Normally, such an error would have been edited out, but since this was the first live global event in the history of Netflix, Rock could only stop, call attention to it and tell the joke again. It messed up his momentum, but the trade-off might have been worth it, since the flub added an electric spontaneity and unpredictability that was a drawing card.

At 58, Rock is one of one of our greatest stand-ups, a perfectionist whose material, once it appeared in a special, always displayed a meticulous sense of control. He lost it here, purposely, flashing anger as he insulted Smith, offering a theory of the case of what really happened at the Academy Awards after he made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair, and in what will be the most controversial part of the set, laid much of the blame on her. This felt like comedy as revenge. Rock said he long loved Will Smith. “And now,” he added, pausing before referencing the new movie in which Smith plays an enslaved man, “I watch ‘Emancipation’ just to see him get whooped.”

One of the reasons Netflix remains the leading stand-up platform has been its ability to create attention-getting events. No other streamer comes close. Through a combination of razzle dazzle and Rolodex spinning, the streaming service packaged this special more like a major sporting event than a special, a star-studded warm-up act to the Oscars next week.

It began with an awkward preshow hosted by Ronny Chieng, who soldiered through by poking fun at the marketing around him. “We’re doing a comedy show on Saturday night — live,” he said, before sarcastically marveling at this “revolutionary” innovation. An all-star team of comics (Ali Wong, Leslie Jones, Jerry Seinfeld), actors (Matthew McConaughey) and music stars (Paul McCartney, Ice-T) hyped up the proceedings, featuring enough earnest tributes for a lifetime achievement award. As if this weren’t enough puffery, Netflix had the comedians Dana Carvey and David Spade host a panel of more celebrations posing as post-show analysis.

This was unnecessary, since Netflix already had our attention by having Rock signed to do a special right after he was on the receiving end of one of the most notorious bad reviews of a joke in the history of television. Countless people weighed in on the slap, most recently the actor and comic Marlon Wayans, whose surprisingly empathetic new special, “God Loves Me,” is an entire hour about the incident from someone who knows all the participants. HBO Max releasing that in the last week was its own counterprogramming.

Until now, Rock has said relatively little about the Oscars, telling a few jokes on tour, which invariably got reported in the press. I’m guessing part of the reason he wanted this special to air live was to hold onto an element of surprise. Rock famously said that he always believed a special should be special. And he has done so in previous shows by moving his comedy in a more personal direction. “Tamborine,” an artful, intimate production shot at the BAM Harvey theater, focused on his divorce. This one, shot in Baltimore, had a grander, more old-fashioned vibe, with reaction shots alternating with him pacing the stage in his signature commanding cadence.

Dressed all in white, his T-shirt and jeans hanging loosely off a lanky frame, and wearing a shiny bracelet and necklace with the Prince symbol, Rock started slowly with familiar bits about easily bruised modern sensibilities, the hollowness of social media and woke signaling. He skewered the preening of companies like Lululemon that market their lack of racism while charging $100 for yoga pants. Most people, he says, would “prefer $20 racist yoga pants.”

If there’s one consistent thread through Rock’s entire career, it’s following the money, how economics motivates even love and social issues. On abortion, he finds his way to the financial angle, advising women: “If you have to pay for your own abortion, you should have an abortion.”

A commanding theater performer who sets up bits as well as anyone, Rock picked up momentum midway through, while always hinting at the Smith material to come, with a reoccurring refrain of poking fun at Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z before making clear it’s just for fun: “Last thing I need is another mad rapper.” Another running theme is his contempt for victimhood. His jokes about Meghan Markle are very funny, mocking her surprise that the royal family is racist, terming them its originators, the “Sugarhill Gang of racism.”

On tour, his few jokes about Smith were once tied to his points about victimhood. But here, he follows one of his most polished and funny jokes, comparing the dating prospects of Jay-Z and Beyoncé if they weren’t stars but worked at Burger King, with a long, sustained section on the Oscars that closes the show. Here, he offers his theory on Will Smith, which is essentially that the slap was an act of displacement, shifting his anger from his wife cheating on him and broadcasting it onto Rock. The comic says his joke was never really the issue. “She hurt him way more than he hurt me,” Rock said, using his considerable powers of description to describe the humiliation of Smith in a manner that seemed designed to do it again.

There’s a comic nastiness to Rock’s insults, some of which is studied, but other times appeared to be the product of his own bottled-up anger. In this special, Rock seemed more raw than usual, sloppier, cursing more often and less precisely. This was a side of him you hadn’t seen before. The way his fury became directed at Pinkett Smith makes you wonder if this was also a kind of displacement. Going back into the weeds of Oscar history, Rock traced his conflict with her and Smith to when he said she wanted Rock to quit as Oscar host in 2016 because Smith was not nominated for the movie “Concussion” (the title that he mangled).

That her boycotting that year’s Oscars was part of a larger protest against the Academy for not nominating Black artists went unsaid, implying it was merely a pretext. Rock often establishes his arguments with the deftness and nuance of a skilled trial lawyer, but he’s not trying to give a fair, fleshed out version of events. He’s out for blood. There’s a coldness here that is bracing. Describing his jokes about Smith’s wife at the ceremony in 2016, he put it bluntly: “She started it. I finished it.” But, of course, as would become obvious years later, he didn’t.

Did he finish it in this special? We’ll see, but I think we’re in for another cycle of discourse as we head into the Academy Awards next week.

At one point, Rock said there are four ways people can get attention in our culture: “Showing your ass,” being infamous, being excellent or playing the victim. It’s a good list, but this special demonstrates a conspicuous omission: Nothing draws a crowd like a fight.

A correction was made on March 6, 2023: An earlier version of this review misquoted part of Rock’s joke about high-priced yoga pants. He said most people would “prefer $20 racist yoga pants,” not $25.
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for The Times. As the paper’s first comedy critic, he has written the On Comedy column since 2011. @zinoman

A version of this article appears in print on March 6, 2023, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rock’s Revenge: Live and Imperfect

ARTICLE URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/05/arts/television/chris-rock-netflix.html

Haruhiko Kuroda, the Bank of Japan’s governor and the architect of its current policies.Credit...Richard A. Brooks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Why Japan’s Sudden Shift on Bond Purchases Dealt a Global Jolt
The world has relied on ultralow interest rates in Japan. What will happen if they rise?

By Ben Dooley
Reporting from Tokyo

Jan. 3, 2023
Japan is the world’s largest creditor. At the end of 2021, it held roughly $3.2 trillion in foreign assets, 30 percent more than No. 2 Germany. As of October, it owned over a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt, more than China. Japanese banks are the world’s largest cross-border lenders, with nearly $4.8 trillion in claims in other countries.

Late last month, the world got an unexpected reminder of how integral Japan is to the global economy, when the country’s central bank unexpectedly announced that it was adjusting its stance on bond purchases.

To those unversed in the intricacies of monetary policy, the significance of Japan’s decision to raise the ceiling on its 10-year bond yields may not have been immediately clear. But for the finance industry, the surprising change raised expectations that the days of rock-bottom Japanese interest rates could be numbered — potentially further squeezing global credit markets that were already tightening as the world economy slowed.

Since this summer, the Bank of Japan has been an outlier, keeping its interest rates ultralow even as other central banks raced to keep up with the Federal Reserve, which has ratcheted up lending costs in an effort to tame high inflation.

As global rates have diverged from those in Japan, the value of the yen has fallen as investors sought better returns elsewhere. That has put pressure on the Bank of Japan to shift the world’s third-largest economy away from its decade-long commitment to cheap money, a policy known as monetary easing.

Japan’s deep integration into global financial networks means that there is a lot of money riding on the timing of any move away from that policy, and investors have spent years fruitlessly waiting for a sign.

As of mid-December, the overwhelming expectation was that the bank would hold off on any changes until spring, when Haruhiko Kuroda, the Bank of Japan’s governor and an architect of its current policies, is set to step down.

So when the bank made its bond yield announcement, which effectively raised interest rates, it caught virtually everyone off guard.

Mr. Kuroda has been adamant that the decision does not represent a fundamental change in monetary policy. He has insisted that it was intended to encourage trading in 10-year bonds — the bank’s preferred tool for controlling interest rates — which had slowed to a trickle under the bank’s tight controls.

But markets, at least in the short term, weren’t convinced. After the announcement, global stock markets dropped. The yen surged more than 3 percent. And bond yields shot up.

No one, perhaps not even Mr. Kuroda, knows what the bank will do next, said Paul Sheard, a former chief economist of S&P Global. But among some market participants there’s a belief that “when a central bank makes one move, a lot more are coming,” he said.

For “the median investor in the world who’s looking at Japan out of the corner of their eye,” he said, “suddenly you see something that looks like the first move in what could be monetary tightening. That’s like a game changer.”

To understand why, we have to go all the way back to 2013, when Shinzo Abe, then a newly elected prime minister, proposed aggressive policies intended to shock Japan’s economy out of its decades-long torpor.

The most important piece of his strategy was a monetary policy intended to make it easier and more attractive for companies and households to borrow money and spend it.

Among other things, Mr. Abe and his team aimed to push inflation up to 2 percent. Japanese prices had languished for decades: The cost of fried chicken at one convenience store chain hadn’t gone up since the 1980s. While that might seem good for consumers, economists argued that it inhibited companies’ growth, which, in turn, made them reluctant to raise wages.

A modest increase in inflation could break that stasis, they believed, creating a virtuous cycle of rising prices, increased corporate profits and higher wages.

The Bank of Japan told everyone who would listen that it would do whatever it took to achieve its goal of stable price increases. The message was clear: It’s better to spend now, while things are still cheap.

To prove it meant business, the bank started purchasing vast sums of equities and bonds, spending so much that it doubled the amount of currency in the economy in less than two years. (At its peak, in May of last year, it had grown over five times.)

Central banks following a conventional monetary policy tend to focus on controlling short-term interest rates and let markets determine long-term rates. But in 2016 — with inflation still dormant — Japan decided to attempt something very unusual: It would seek to directly control some longer-term rates as well, using an untested policy called “yield curve control.”

Financial institutions base their interest rates, whether on a bank loan or a corporate bond, in part on the expected yields from government bonds. Reducing the market’s role in determining the prices of those bonds, the Bank of Japan figured, would let it better control lending conditions.

The mechanism for accomplishing that depended on one of a bond’s most fundamental attributes: Its price and yield move in opposite directions. The lifetime value of a bond is fixed on the day it’s issued, so if you pay more for it, your returns — the yield — go down. If you pay less, they go up.

When the Bank of Japan introduced its new policy, it committed to buying as many bonds as necessary at whatever price was required to keep yields around zero percent on the 10-year bond, the benchmark for other rates.

Things didn’t quite go as planned.

Rates stayed low, and inflation did, in recent months, hit the 2 percent benchmark. But it kept climbing, reaching 3.7 percent in November, a 40-year high. And most of that wasn’t the good, wage-boosting, demand-driven inflation the Bank of Japan wanted. It was “bad” inflation created by supply shortages from the pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine.

What’s more, the growing gap between interest rates in Japan and elsewhere was pushing down the yen’s value, piling even more stress on the country’s highly import-dependent economy. That made some analysts speculate that the Bank of Japan would soon be forced to raise interest rates.

Which brings us up to December, when Mr. Kuroda suddenly announced that the bank would double the ceiling on 10-year bond yields, allowing them to fluctuate between plus and minus 0.5 percent, and effectively raising interest rates.

To many investors, the decision seemed like the first tentative step toward even bigger rate increases. As bond yields have jumped, the bank has had to spend heavily to defend its rate target.

Which raises the question, how much longer can the Bank of Japan stick to its guns?

The answer depends on a number of factors, including the performance of the global economy and whether the central bank feels it has finally reached its targets for wage growth and inflation, said Toshitaka Sekine, a professor of economics at Hitotsubashi University.

Most experts believe that the process of unwinding Mr. Kuroda’s monetary easing policy, when it happens, will take years. It is certain to be complicated: Many Japanese borrowers have become accustomed to cheap money — variable interest rates are common, for example — and a hasty retreat could strain households and firms alike.

It could also be painful for global markets that have come to take Japan’s loose monetary policy for granted. Years of anemic growth and a decade of superlow interest rates have pushed many Japanese investors to seek higher returns abroad, increasing their already prominent role in global credit markets.

Although unlikely, a rapid reversal by the Bank of Japan “could generate some hard-to-anticipate shock waves around the world,” said Brad Setser, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on global trade and capital flows. “In the worst-case scenario, rapid rises in long-term Japanese rates push up long-term interest rates globally.”

Ben Dooley reports on Japan’s business and economy, with a special interest in social issues and the intersections between business and politics. @benjamindooley

MY THOUGHTS
One of the tragedies of the financial activity by the United States of America is the deterioration of the concept of debt. 
Debt used to be a thing you were happy not to have. But the USA federal government has made debt a currency, a tool to control affairs in humanity. 
The Japanese are owed over a trillion dollars, but they don't have the military to demand that money is given. Sequentially, all they can do is hold it or present it in financial schemes to others. 
Japan decides to provide USA's debt to others as currency. Sequentially, governments throughout humanity buy USA's debt to Japan which Japan gets a financial percentage of sale from. 
Personally, I will never buy anyone's debt nor will I buy what anyone else is owed. The USA military was already the most potent element in the usa through the cold war arms race, but the usa military has become switzeland in that it's existence allows the usa to keep producing debt, cause even with a unleavened debt ceiling what country can call in the usa's debt, especially a country absent a military like japan or germany. 
Japan's near future will be very interesting

Thoughts to the japanese or japan in a forum post
comment1 
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/9982-70-japanese-organizations-wrote-president-biden-a-letter-to-give-african-americans-reparations-december-2022/?do=findComment&comment=57947

comment2
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/9982-70-japanese-organizations-wrote-president-biden-a-letter-to-give-african-americans-reparations-december-2022/?do=findComment&comment=57951

Article URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/business/japan-bonds-interest-rates.html

Mr. Yokoyama plans to give away his land and equipment to a successor he has chosen.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Japan’s business owners can’t find successors. This man gave his away.
By Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno
Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno traveled to Monbetsu, Japan, to report this story.

Hidekazu Yokoyama has spent three decades building a thriving logistics business on Japan’s snowy northern island of Hokkaido, an area that provides much of the country’s milk.

Last year, he decided to give it all away.

It was a radical solution for a problem that has become increasingly common in Japan, the world’s grayest society. As the country’s birthrate has plummeted and its population has grown older, the average age of business owners has risen to around 62. Nearly 60 percent of the country’s businesses report that they have no plan for what comes next.

While Mr. Yokoyama, 73, felt too old to carry on much longer, quitting wasn’t an option: Too many farmers had come to depend on his company. “I definitely couldn’t abandon the business,” he said. But his children weren’t interested in running it. Neither were his employees. And few potential owners wanted to move to the remote, frozen north.

So he placed a notice with a service that helps small-business owners in far-flung locales find someone to take over. The advertised sale price: zero yen.

Mr. Yokoyama’s struggle symbolizes one of the most potentially devastating economic impacts of Japan’s aging society. It is inevitable that many small and medium-size companies will go out of business as the population shrinks, but policymakers fear that the country could be hit by a surge in closures as aging owners retire en masse.

In an apocalyptic 2019 presentation, Japan’s trade ministry projected that by 2025, around 630,000 profitable businesses could close up shop, costing the economy $165 billion and as many as 6.5 million jobs.

Economic growth is already anemic, and the Japanese authorities have sprung into action in hopes of averting a catastrophe. Government offices have embarked on public relations campaigns to educate aging owners about options for continuing their businesses beyond their retirements and have set up service centers to help them find buyers. To sweeten the pot, the authorities have introduced large subsidies and tax breaks for new owners.

Still, the challenges remain formidable. One of the biggest obstacles to finding a successor has been tradition, said Tsuneo Watanabe, a director of Nihon M&A Center, a company that specializes in finding buyers for valuable small and medium-size enterprises. The company, founded in 1991, has become enormously lucrative, recording $359 million in revenue in 2021.

But building that business has been a long process. In years past, small-business owners, particularly those who ran the country’s many decades- or even centuries-old companies, assumed that their children or a trusted employee would take over. They had no interest in selling their life’s work to a stranger, much less a competitor.

Mergers and acquisitions “weren’t well regarded,” Mr. Watanabe said. “A lot of people felt that it was better to shut the company down than sell it.” Perceptions of the industry have improved over the years, but there are “still many businesspeople who aren’t even aware that M.&A. is an option,” he added.

While the market has found buyers for the businesses most ripe for the picking, it can seem nearly impossible for many small but economically vital companies to find someone to take over.

In 2021, government help centers and the top five merger-and-acquisitions services found buyers for only 2,413 businesses, according to Japan’s trade ministry. Another 44,000 were abandoned. Over 55 percent of those were still profitable when they closed.

Many of those businesses were in small towns and cities, where the succession problem is a potentially existential threat. The collapse of a business, whether a major local employer or a village’s only grocery store, can make it even harder for those places to survive the constant attrition of aging populations and urban flight that is hollowing out the countryside.

After a government-run matching program failed to find someone to take over for Mr. Yokoyama, a bank suggested that he turn to Relay, a company based in Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island.

Relay has differentiated itself by appealing to potential buyers’ sense of community and purpose. Its listings, featuring beaming proprietors in front of sushi shops and bucolic fields, are engineered to appeal to harried urbanites dreaming of a different lifestyle.

The company’s task in Mr. Yokoyama’s case wasn’t easy. For most Japanese, the town where his business is situated, Monbetsu, which has around 20,000 people and is shrinking, might as well be the North Pole. The only industries are fishing and farming, and they largely go into hibernation as the days grow short and snow piles up to roof eaves. In deep winter, some tourists come to eat salmon roe and scallops and see the ice floes that lock in the city’s modest port.

A street full of 1980s-era cabarets and restaurants is a snapshot of a more prosperous time when young fishermen gathered to let off steam and spend big paychecks. Today, faded posters peel off abandoned storefronts. The town’s biggest building is a new hospital.

In 2001, Monbetsu constructed a new elementary school building just around the corner from Mr. Yokoyama’s company. It closed after just 10 years.

In times past, the classrooms would have been filled with the grandchildren of local dairy farmers. But their own children have now mostly moved to cities in search of higher-paying, less onerous work.

With no obvious successors, the farms have folded one after another. Decades-high inflation brought on by the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine has pushed dozens of holdouts into early retirement.

As local farmers have aged and their profits thinned, more of them have come to depend on Mr. Yokoyama for tasks like harvesting hay and clearing snow. His days start at 4 a.m. and end at 7 in the evening. He sleeps in a small room behind his office.

It would be “extremely difficult” if his business folded, said Isao Ikeno, the manager of a nearby dairy cooperative that has turned heavily to automation as workers have become harder to find.

On the cooperative’s farm, 17 employees tend to 3,000 head of cattle, and Mr. Yokoyama’s company fills in the gaps. No other area businesses can provide the services, Mr. Ikeno said.

Mr. Yokoyama began contemplating retirement about six years ago. But it wasn’t clear what would happen to the business.

While he had taken on a little over half a million dollars in debt, years of generous economic stimulus policies have kept interest rates at rock bottom, easing the burden, and the company’s annual profit margin was around 30 percent.

The ad he placed on Relay acknowledged that the job was hard, but it said that no experience was needed. The best candidate would be “young and ready to work.”

Whoever was chosen would take over the debts, but also inherit all of the business’s equipment and nearly 150 acres of prime farmland and forest. Mr. Yokoyama’s children will get nothing.

“I told them that if you want to take it over, I’d leave it to you, but if you don’t want to do it, I’m giving it all to the next guy,” he said.

Thirty inquiries poured in. Among those who expressed interest were a couple and a representative of a company that planned to expand. Mr. Yokoyama settled on a dark horse, 26-year-old Kai Fujisawa.

A friend had shown Mr. Fujisawa the ad on Relay, and Mr. Fujisawa immediately jumped in a car and showed up on Mr. Yokoyama’s doorstep, impressing him with his youth and enthusiasm.

Still, the transition hasn’t been smooth. Mr. Yokoyama is not entirely convinced that Mr. Fujisawa is the right person for the job. The learning curve is steeper than either of them had imagined, and Mr. Yokoyama’s grizzled, chain-smoking employees are skeptical that Mr. Fujisawa will be able to live up to the boss’s reputation.

Most of the company’s 17 employees are in their 50s and 60s, and it’s not clear where Mr. Fujisawa will find people to replace them as they retire.

“There’s a lot of pressure,” Mr. Fujisawa said. But “when I came here, I was prepared to do this for the rest of my life.”

Ben Dooley reports on Japan’s business and economy, with a special interest in social issues and the intersections between business and politics. @benjamindooley

Hisako Ueno has been reporting on Japanese politics, business, gender, labor and culture for The Times since 2012. She previously worked for the Tokyo bureau of The Los Angeles Times from 1999 to 2009. @hudidi1

MY THOUGHTS
Nippon's woes today is what happens when any government is created and uplifted by an enemy. I think about how Nippon was totally destroyed after the second phase of the world war. How Nippon was originally unsupported by the USA, but how the actions of the common folk flocking to socialistic forms and an anti usa zeal prompted the usa to use its imperial power to rebuild. 
And it was brilliant to those who were in trouble, the culture in japan no longer needed to change, those who wanted change were killed or imprisoned or made sick or silenced in one way or the other by the usa military. 
The business owners , many who fled Nippon were able to crawl back into Nippon and continue their culture or lifestyle unabated. The USA found in Nippon a totally militaristically impotent country, it made, that is a complete ally to the usa in government or financial affairs. 
But... the problems are here. Nippon never learned to grow on its own after the war between the states. In the meiji era Nippon internally changed on nippon's terms and related to the outside humanity whose militaristic technology knocked down their walls. Now Nippon simply acted as a slave to the USA in nearly all matters. Buying USA's debt, hiring USA's workers, moving their factories to the USA, Nippon commonly called Japan became USA's bitch to use a common negative term.
And while many praise Japan, the price as the article above proves is clear.

Article URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/business/japan-businesses-succession.html
 

Elvis Mitchell on the set of Is That Black Enough For You?!? Hannah Kozak/Netflix

Hollywood’s Black film problem, explained by Elvis Mitchell
The venerated film critic on the unheralded Black influence on everything from soundtracks to Don’t Worry Darling.

By Alissa Wilkinson@alissamariealissa@vox.com  Nov 11, 2022, 7:30am EST

Over the past few years, movies like Black Panther and Get Out have raked in both accolades and box office returns, and the Oscar nominations hit new diversity records. To the casual observer, it may seem like Hollywood has made massive strides in moving from being overwhelmingly dominated by white actors, directors, and writers and toward a more inclusive environment. But from the standpoint of history, it’s startling how little has changed — and what that tells us about the industry.

That’s why Elvis Mitchell’s documentary Is That Black Enough For You?!?, which starts streaming on Netflix on November 11, is so revealing. The veteran critic and journalist, a former New York Times film critic, has, among many other pursuits, hosted KCRW’s phenomenal interview show The Treatment since 1996. He brings a wry and curious lens to the history of Black film in Hollywood, weaving interviews with renowned Black actors and filmmakers from Harry Belafonte to Zendaya into his own story. In so doing, he challenges many of the settled ideas about the film canon, Hollywood history, and what it’s meant to be a Black artist on screen.

I met Mitchell at a hotel on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to talk about those matters and a lot more. I wanted to ask him about Hollywood’s claims to inclusivity, about the still-common axiom that “Black films don’t travel,” and about why all of this history is really not so different from today. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Alissa Wilkinson side Elvis Mitchell interview BEGIN

Alissa Wilkinson

You say in the film that Hollywood appointed itself “the myth-maker” for the world. Early studio heads saw themselves as the guardians of America’s morality and morale, and the exporters of a message about America to the world.

But as you demonstrate, the story Hollywood told about Black people was often demeaning, and very far from the truth. What kind of an effect does that have on the myth that the country and the world internalize?

Elvis Mitchell

I think [Hollywood] was unique to film culture, different from any place else in the world. American movies were made by people who fled [their home countries] under enormous persecution, and then decided to create out of whole cloth this ideal of what America was — this America that they wanted to come to. And the America that they created is still being seen — it’s something popular culture is still responding to.

We noticed as we were putting the movie together that so many of the people on camera — Samuel L. Jackson, Suzanne de Passe, Charles Burnett, Laurence Fishburne — talked about Westerns. The myth became that there was never a Black person on a horse. That would have been empowerment; as soon as you put a Black person on a horse, you’re saying that they have some control over where they’re going, literally, within their lives. We can’t do that.

Back when Paul Thomas Anderson was talking about his film Boogie Nights, he talked about how absurd the idea of a Black cowboy is. So even Paul Thomas Anderson has been kind of rolled under by the idea the movies have created about what cowboys are supposed to be, rather than what they actually were.

So much of Black culture has been about responding to myths created about Black people through various forms of media. That response came from actors as much as filmmakers, because so many of these movies are not directed by Black people. Actors took some claim over [reclaiming the truth about being Black], and that confidence and that brio becomes this really transfixing quality.

Alissa Wilkinson

But it’s not just about telling America what it is, or what its own history is, but also exporting an idea of America and its history to people who aren’t American. My sense as a film critic is that we still see the reverberations of world perceptions of American Black culture through that influence.

Elvis Mitchell

That gets to this message that’s constantly pushed in Hollywood — that Black film won’t sell overseas.

Alissa Wilkinson

Exactly.

Elvis Mitchell

This shibboleth that exists to this very day, one that was constantly fed and cared for, that Black movies “don’t travel.” But think about [renowned Senegalese filmmaker] Ousmane Sembène in Africa, seeing what Ossie Davis is doing [in America], or seeing 1972’s Sounder, and being inspired by that, and creating his own ... I’m not going to say mythology, but his own worldview about Black masculinity. When that’s missing, what does that do to the culture?

It’s very convenient to say, “This stuff doesn’t travel.” Because it’s still this peculiar view of Black culture, even though it seeps in and subsumes everything. When you hear somebody on Fox say “24/7” — that’s hip-hop. They’re terrified by the “fist bump,” but they’ll say something is happening “24/7,” and thus they’re missing the entire point of their argument.

Alissa Wilkinson

Yes — here Ossie Davis is making films like Cotton Comes to Harlem and Black Girl, with roles in which Black characters can exercise self-determination, and it sparks something for filmmakers because their imaginations are expanded.

At the same time, though, you bring up that Sidney Poitier was, at one point, the number one box office draw, and yet Hollywood executives couldn’t imagine that any other Black actor could also be popular with a broader audience. The thinking is that it’s just Poitier; it’s an exception, it’s an anomaly, it’s just this one guy.

It reminded me of how people talk about huge, massive hits like Black Panther or Get Out today. There’s still a reluctance to greenlight big-budget Black films, because the thinking is, “Oh, well, that was a fluke.”

Elvis Mitchell

And what happens? We get a white remake of Get Out, called Don’t Worry Darling.

Alissa Wilkinson

You said it.

Elvis Mitchell

So at the same time, we have to be careful about the way we deal with Black film, because [Hollywood doesn’t think there are] “genres” in Black film; it’s just “Black film.” So when any Black film fails, it is a “Black film” that is failing, not that movie.

I remember when Black Panther came out, I talked to so many people, including Oprah, who said, “This is going to bring in a whole new way of [making] film.” No, it’s not. Because what happens when a film succeeds in a major way? It’s imitated. How many Jurassic World [imitations] have there been since the first Black Panther movie? And now, how many imitations of Black Panther have we seen? The answer is none, because they’re still treated as if lightning struck.

Alissa Wilkinson

Absolutely. Hollywood loves to make big creature movies, even if none of them hit quite like Jurassic Park. And this goes to something I think about a lot, which is that Hollywood is fundamentally conservative. Often people think of Hollywood as a very progressive, forward-looking industry, but it’s risk-averse and prone to sticking with whatever they know — which becomes a problem when what you know is stuck in some false idea of reality.

Do you think the reluctance to mainstream Black film in the industry is due to failure of imagination, built-in biases that they’d be horrified to be accused of, or what?

Elvis Mitchell

How much time do you have? Let’s send out for lunch.

To your point, Hollywood is a community that thinks of itself as being incredibly liberal, except when it comes to exercising that liberal impulse. Maybe they think their liberalism and commerce are two different things, but no, they’re not.

While we were trying to get [Is That Black Enough For You?!?] going, it got shut down by Covid; this was all happening at the same time that the country was reeling from the George Floyd attack, and the responses to that.

Back then, I would get these calls, saying, “So we want to put together this blue ribbon panel to figure out what we can do to make things [in Hollywood] different.” Look, we don’t need a panel. I don’t have time for this. I have three words for you: Hire Black people. It’s as simple as that. And not just one [Black person], but several, so the one person doesn’t have to labor under the burden of having to explain all of Black culture.

Alissa Wilkinson

Your film feels a little bit like a story about all the people who have been told that something “simply isn’t done” or “just can’t be done.” But when it is done, it’s a wild success — like Melvin van Peebles self-financing Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song because no studio would make it, and then it being a huge, era-defining hit. I sort of feel like that might apply to your own film — am I right? I can imagine people saying, “We can’t do this, nobody’s going to watch it, nobody’s going to be interested.”

Elvis Mitchell

People in effect said that when they turned down this same material in a book pitch. I thought, oh, this is the kind of thing that could go on a bookshelf next to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, or Pictures at a Revolution. This isn’t esoterica. I’m not talking about a wave of art films.

In fact, these movies are not only enormous successes as movies, but they also created these soundtracks that were enormous successes, and then were imitated in ways that were enormous successes.

People who know and understand film history say, “Why hasn’t this documentary happened before?” I say, “I don’t know. If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody to hear it, is that a legacy?” I mean, this is what this comes down to. I hate to torture a metaphor like that, but if it’s not reported on, then it’s not a legacy — if it’s not examined, if there’s not context offered.

Alissa Wilkinson

I think a problem is that people get very emotional and defensive when you threaten their canon, their idea of who did what first.

Why do you think this is?

Elvis Mitchell

There is this consistent boxing up of Black film culture. It’s this. It’s solely this. It is only this. It is Sidney Poitier. It is Black filmmakers finally getting a chance to work in the 1960s. It’s this thing that Melvin van Peebles has tried to fight his way, and then after that Spike Lee, and Robert Townsend, and so many filmmakers.

One of the reasons I wanted to present the idea of the dangers of canonical thought is that nobody tends to think about blackface in Alfred Hitchcock, in the 1937 film Young and Innocent. I remember seeing that as a kid, and thinking, “Oh my god, there’s blackface in an Alfred Hitchcock movie?” Or there is this idea in canonical thought that 1939 is the greatest movie era in American movie history. Some of us disagree with that.

Alissa Wilkinson

But it’s accepted as fact, along with the idea that a set of white filmmakers changed film in the early 1970s. There’s truth to it, but there’s more to the story.

Elvis Mitchell

They end up feeding into that river of myth. “These filmmakers came and changed everything” — well, they did sometimes, but they didn’t exist in a vacuum.

Alissa Wilkinson

Getting a chance to see these things on screen, in front of me, might be what’s good about doing this in film form instead of a book. I had honestly never really been struck by the similarities between depictions of Mickey Mouse and minstrelsy, but of course, it was obvious once you showed it to me in the film.

Elvis Mitchell

This feels like this innocent thing. In fact, it is not. Or, I’m not going to say it’s not innocent, but certainly there are layers to this that need to be pulled away, so we can see the entirety of it.

Mickey wasn’t keeping on gloves so he doesn’t leave any clues for a CSI team or something. “These are Mickey Mouse’s fingerprints, now we know who killed him.”

Alissa Wilkinson

Music is really important to this film, and it’s especially interesting to hear about how releasing a soundtrack before the movie’s release — pretty common now — was virtually unheard of before Super Fly.

Elvis Mitchell

By releasing the soundtrack [before the movie], and having it be such an immediate success, it created a must-see feeling around the movie. And it was constantly being played. If you drove around LA, you heard the commercial for the release of Super Fly. People respond to these songs, and then go out and buy the soundtrack. It is that rare case where you had people listen to the soundtrack before they saw the movie. So they created their own movie in their head through Curtis Mayfield’s soundtrack. And the movie, in some ways, couldn’t live up to that movie they created in their head.

Let’s be honest, those songs are better than the movie. There’s great stuff in the movie, but as a dramatic creation, as a narrative with its own life, that soundtrack is extraordinary. The soundtrack was a huge artistic and commercial success, and every song was released as a single. This isn’t like you’re making A Hard Day’s Night, and the Beatles are already a hit; this is something that becomes a mainstream hit that then propels the movie to enormous success. Shaft followed its example, and it started to happen so much that by the time Saturday Night Fever was coming out, they had the soundtrack out two months before the movie.

Then music videos also started coming out before the movie, and that became the coin of the realm for the ’80s, that the soundtrack was as important, if not more so, than the film. Super Fly did that.

Alissa Wilkinson

Now that’s all TikTok, 10-second clips. This summer the music from Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis started circulating on TikTok before the movie came out. I’m not even sure people knew what it was from, or that the “Hound Dog” remix was based on an Elvis song.

Every year I’ve been doing this job, and especially when Oscar season arrives, the industry starts touting how far they’ve come in terms of inclusivity — the whole #OscarsSoWhite issue having pushed it recently. That is, frankly, embarrassing, when you actually look at who gets jobs and who wins awards.

Elvis Mitchell

Here’s the example. Suzanne de Passe was nominated for Best Original Screenplay in 1973 [for co-writing Lady Sings the Blues]. How many other Black women have been nominated since that, in that category? None.

So when people would say to me, “Are you afraid this documentary’s going to seem dated?” No.

My fear is that it will never seem dated. In the film, Zendaya says, “It’d be great to see Black kids playing together on camera, or to see more Black people in a sci-fi fantasy.” Was that going to seem like old hat by the time this movie came out? No.

It’s weird to show this history to young people and have them go, “God, nothing has changed.” This is the thing that I wanted to try to find a way to deal with, too: Every decade we hear about this “resurgence in Black film.” But where did it go? It didn’t go anywhere; it just wasn’t being covered.

To your question, maybe in some fundamental way things have changed, but it’s still about trying to wrest some control of this narrative. Certainly, the visibility of the phenomenon may change, but Black women aren’t getting opportunities to write movies. It’s as simple as that.

It would be fun to say, “Well, god, in the three years since I’ve started working on this, so much has changed.” No.

Alissa Wilkinson side Elvis Mitchell interview END

Is That Black Enough For You?!? premieres on Netflix on November 11.

ARTICLE
https://www.vox.com/23447401/elvis-mitchell-black-enough-interview

Unknown photographer

Betty Gabriel: The Unsung Black Scream Queen
"THERE IS A LOT OF HORROR WITHIN THE BLACK FEMALE EXPERIENCE IN THIS COUNTRY," THE ACTRESS SAID. "THERE IS A LOT TO BE MINED THERE."

BY RIVEA RUFF · UPDATED OCTOBER 28, 2022
When the term “scream queen” is brought up annually around this time, images of white women narrowly escaping the clutches of a crazed killer or evil entity across film franchises or pivotal genre entries come to mind. Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, locked in a 45-year-long battle against Michael Myers. Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, opposing the various murderers donning the famed Ghostface mask in the Scream franchise. Naomi Watts as the longsuffering mother fighting supernatural forces in The Ring and Shut-In, or scratching for survival in Funny Games or Goodnight Mommy.

Less often mentioned are the contributions that Black women have made to the genre. Marlene Clark’s conflicted bloodthirst in 1973’s Ganja & Hess. Rachel True‘s vengeful teenage witch in 1996’s The Craft. Naomie Harris as a post-Apocalyptic warrior in 2002’s 28 Days Later.

But perhaps the most prolific yet often overlooked of these in the current era of horror is Betty Gabriel.

Starring in titles like violence thriller The Purge: Election Year, futuristic sci-fi/horror Upgrade, Screenlife slasher Unfriended: Dark Web, cybercrime horror-thriller limited series Clickbait, and of course, Jordan Peele’s innovatively genre-pushing racial horror, Get Out, Gabriel has broken the mold of the disposable Black friend of the protagonist or the film’s first victim.

Gabriel’s performance as “Georgina,” the white grandmother of villain Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), inhabiting the body of an unnamed Black woman, is one of the most iconic in the genre’s history, hands down. Though she had only a handful of lines in the film, her spine-tingling, smiling-yet-tearful monologue about the kindness of the Armitage family is one of the most recognizable frames of the film. Subtle yet chilling, it’s the strongest clue of the horror at the root of the story before the hand is revealed in the film’s third act. And it helped set the tone for a renaissance of Black horror that has begun over the last 6 years.

“I hadn’t really been aware that my contribution to the horror genre was significant in any way,” Gabriel says in conversation with ESSENCE about her status as a staple of modern horror. “I take it with gratitude.”

Ironically not much of a horror film watcher herself – “I will get nightmares,” she says laughing – Gabriel fell into starring in a string of scaries by pure happenstance.

“Starting out, you don’t really have much of a choice. You just take whatever work you can get,” the actress says. “Blumhouse, which was the main producer behind a lot of these films, kept hiring me, and I kept on saying yes to them. It wasn’t like I had a choice between this and a rom-com. It was a choice between this and not working.”

“But I think perhaps on a subconscious, universal level, there is something about me that is drawn to these films, or they’re drawn to me.”

Her first foray into chills and thrills came in 2016, for the second sequel in the wildly popular dystopian action horror franchise, The Purge: Election Year. Playing on societal fears over the turn the nation would take during the election cycle taking place in the real world just months later (and preluding some real-life political horrors that came about during the next Presidential term), the film tackled topics of politics and policy through the lenses of race, class, and religion – with a healthy dose of violence and mayhem, of course.

Gabriel portrayed Laney Rucker, an ex-purger known as “La Pequeña Muerta” in her youth, now an EMT assisting victims of violence each purge night, fighting to keep a peaceful senator in line for presidency alive for the night with the hope of Purge eradication on the horizon.

“It’s something I don’t really like to consume as an audience member, but as an individual, these are things that I definitely am haunted by,” she says of her connection to the material. “Just complete and utter chaos, the breakdown of our system, the guns constantly being a part of our everyday reality, and oppression.”

“It’s one of those movies where it’s like, ‘Is this horror? Or is this just a really messed up version of reality that might come true, that kind of [already] is true?'”

But her true big break into horror icon status came after a pretty harrowing audition process for Blumhouse’s new horror feature, written by that one comedian from Key & Peele.

“I was backpacking through the mountains of Peru, as one does when you’re soul-searching and single,” she reveals. “So, I didn’t have any technology, no smartphone, no wifi, nothing. I was going to an internet cafe once or twice a week, paying 10 cents for an hour for internet, and I got the email audition notice.”

Initially inclined to pass the process up, with no access to camera equipment, internet access, or even too many other people around who knew English, Gabriel tried to let this one go and move on. But something about the opportunity wouldn’t let her rest.

“I went to the hostel, and went to bed, and just couldn’t sleep. So, I just woke up and went, ‘Ugh…I’ve got to figure this out. I’ve got to figure out how to get that tape in. I can’t pass this up.'”

That realization led to a 24-hour bus ride to the next village over to visit a documentary filmmaker she stumbled across through a referral on Facebook, who not only had access to all the equipment she needed to film and upload her audition for the role but was from Chicago and knew English.

“We actually shot it outside. There were birds chirping throughout the whole thing,” she laughs. “12 hours later, it was uploaded and submitted.”

The rest, of course, is horror movie history. Get Out led to a renewed interest in horror films centering Black protagonists in authentically Black experiences, making way for films like Spell, His House, 2021 reboot sequel Candyman and shows like Lovecraft Country and Them.

“I think that ultimately, we’re being more inclusive, and we’re being a bit more aware in how we don’t fully invite people to the table,” Gabriel says of the increased space that’s been made for Black people in the horror genre. “And I do mean certain ‘we’s.’ The ‘we’s’ in power. We pat ourselves on the back for issuing crumbs. In any genre, I hope it isn’t a trend. Hopefully, we see more beautiful Black women on screen.”

Beyond the expression of horror in front of the screen, Gabriel is hopeful that the trend toward stories told by Black creators and about Black experiences continues, with increase.

“I think with the horror genre in particular, there’s so much to be mined there, because there is a lot of horror within the Black female experience in this country,” she says. “I look forward to that being conveyed, and in a way that’s profound, and not necessarily [gratuitous].”

Like many modern film watchers, Gabriel has a hard time viewing “Black struggle” and racialized violence against Black bodies committed to screen, though she sees the horrific stories they portray as valuable expressions.

“I do find myself not able to watch certain stories that really focus on slavery. I just find it challenging and retraumatizing. But that’s not to say that they’re not important and that I don’t try,” she said. “And, there’s always an audience for any story.”

“Personally, I think there’s something [special] to striking a balance between horrifying images, and transcendent nuances that we don’t always think about or see. Or things maybe we know on some level, but we haven’t quite seen [conveyed].”

“I look forward to seeing horror evolve in general. I personally am drawn to subtlety, with lots of layers and complexities about the human experience,” she continues. “I think that’s what made Get Out so wildly successful was that everyone related to this protagonist. Even though a white person will never know what it is to be a Black person, something about that journey was relatable and universal. So, I hope that is the future of horror, with Black stories and Black people behind and in front of the camera.”

Indeed, as Get Out opened Hollywood’s eyes to the bankability of Black horror, it opened doors personally for Gabriel, who has gone on to star in 17 more projects since the film’s release, 4 of which fall into the horror genre. The actress revealed that her role as Sophie Brewer in Netflix’s cyber-kidnapping thriller Clickbait, was the most pivotal on her journey through the genre.

“For me, that was the most personal, because it was the most extensive journey that I had been on playing a character,” she says. “It was my first time playing a lead, and though it wasn’t my first time playing a mom, I was a mother who had to really be the mother and keep the family together, while also having all these secrets and all this shame that she was processing and dealing with.”

Though the actress was considering stepping away from horror altogether in an effort to avoid typecasting, another horror project from a director of color recently came her way that was simply too good to pass up. Now presented with a choice, she chose horror once again – this time from another BIPOC perspective not often seen in American theaters.

The as-yet-untitled horror slated for a 2023/24 release comes from Indian director Bishal Dutta and centers on ancient Indian legends and personal immigrant experiences, subject matter which is likely to resonate with Black viewers just as much as our South Asian brothers and sisters. She also joins season 3 of Prime Video’s action drama Jack Ryan this November, and Discovery’s Manhunt, dramatizing the search for John Wilkes Booth in the days after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

“I think we’re in such an anxious place collectively that [horror is] really manifesting itself in a lot of stories,” Gabriel says. “So, yeah, I don’t think you can escape it.”

ARTICLE
https://www.essence.com/celebrity/betty-gabriel-unsung-black-scream-queen/

West Coast Blues Society Caravan of All Stars - soundcheck
Videographer: Ronald Reed

SGT SMOKING BLACK animated trailer FROM DEMUZ COMICS

Former presidents of Gabon and France, Omar Bongo (L) and Jacques Chirac (R)

Why ex-French colonies are joining the Commonwealth
Published
29 June

Gabon and Togo have moved to strengthen their diplomatic armoury in a bid to ease their reliance on France.

They have been admitted to what was originally founded as a club of former British colonies but has been steadily diversifying its composition. These two small francophone African nations are now the Commonwealth's 55th and 56th members.

Rwanda joined in 2009 and Mozambique came into the group in 1995. None of these states had particular past historical ties to the UK.

The fact that they have opted to join the Commonwealth suggests that they see the organisation as a useful network of diplomatic and cultural influence, and for exercising "soft power" on the world stage.

It also testifies to the importance of English as a language of business, science and international politics and the necessity of building a range of connections to support economic development and get diplomatic messages heard.

For Gabon and Togo, Rwanda offers an encouraging precedent: just 13 years after joining, it has now hosted the organisation's summit meeting, attended by heads of state and government from all over the world, though there were some notable absentees, including South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Youth appeal
Gabon and Togo's entry to the Commonwealth also comes at a time when the relationship between Africa and France has become so contentious.

A growing number of younger urban citizens demand an end to the CFA franc currency which is pegged to the euro under an arrangement guaranteed by the government in Paris. The French military presence in the Sahel is also controversial.

So joining the world's largest anglophone bloc is likely be popular among many young Togolese and Gabonese.

That helps to modernise the image of two regimes that were for many years perceived as particularly emblematic of the traditionally close relationships between leaders in Africa and in France - "la françafrique".

There was a time when such a development would have provoked angst among Paris policymakers fearing an erosion of influence south of the Sahara. But today's French governments take a much more relaxed view of such trends.

For the same arguments about diversifying contacts and building up new vehicles of international connection have also fuelled the steady expansion of the Commonwealth's francophone sister, the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF).

It actually claims 88 member states and governments - including Rwanda, whose former Foreign Minister Louis Mushikiwabo is its secretary general. Its regional offices for West and central Africa are in fact hosted by Togo and Gabon, and it too is growing.

In March Ghana's Foreign Minister Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey announced that her country, a former British colony which has been an associate member of the OIF since 2006, would complete the transition to full membership of the organisation.

Ghana, with strong democratic institutions and a dynamic economy, will be one of a growing number of countries that are full and active members of both the Commonwealth and the Francophonie - for solid diplomatic and practical reasons.

Most of its neighbours in West Africa are French-speaking and the government has been taking steps to equip its young people to make the most of this economic, cultural and political reality - for example, there are now 50 bilingual schools.

Nor should one forget the significant development of the small but still influential Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) - most of whose members are African.

Democracy tests
But all three groupings - the CPLP, the Francophonie and the Commonwealth - face the delicate challenge of how to promote good governance, democracy and human rights - an issue with which the African Union and some of the continent's regional blocs, notably the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), are also wrestling.

Both the Commonwealth and the OIF send experts to help member states improve their electoral systems, but when it comes to membership conditions they tend to opt for inclusion and gentle encouragement rather than the assertion of a strict line.

Togo was ruled by the notoriously brutal dictator President Gnassingbé Eyadéma from 1967 to 2005, and has since then been led by his son, Faure Gnassingbé.

Gabon's President, Ali Ben Bongo Ondimba, is the son of Omar Bongo, head of state from 1967 to 2009, who swam with the trend towards multi-party politics in the 1990s but took care to maintain the predominance of his ruling party and the role of his family in government. Before succeeding to the presidency, Ali Bongo was defence minister.

The Commonwealth's official press release announcing the admission of Togo and Gabon stated: "The eligibility criteria for Commonwealth membership, amongst other things, state that an applicant country should demonstrate commitment to democracy and democratic processes, including free and fair elections and representative legislatures."

Yet Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, although lauded for overseeing undoubted social and economic development progress, is accused by rights groups of being uncompromisingly authoritarian in the exercise of power. Critics say the opposition is cowed and marginalised.

Mr Kagame claims his government upholds human rights, and there is "nobody in Rwanda who is in prison that should not be there".

Gabon will face a key barometer of governance with next year's presidential elections. But for Togo, there is a fairly immediate test.

The very day of the Commonwealth announcement, the authorities banned a planned demonstration by the opposition Dynamique Monseigneur Kpodzro (DMK) movement to protest against the rising cost of living, and what it called bad governance and injustice.

The DMK has rescheduled the protest for 16 July. It will be interesting to see whether Togo's new status as a Commonwealth member prods the government into taking a more lenient line.

Paul Melly is a consulting fellow with the Africa Programme at Chatham House in London.

ARTICLE
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61967842

MILTON S. J. WRIGHT (1903-1972)
POSTED ONSEPTEMBER 14, 2020BY CONTRIBUTED BY: ROBERT FIKES

The only person of African descent known to have had a face-to-face conversation with the infamous Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler was the economist Milton Samuel J. Wright. Born in Savannah, Georgia, on June 28, 1903, the son of William Wright and Edith Burnside Wright, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1926, then earned his master’s degree from Columbia University in 1928.

Like a handful of other black Americans who found graduate study in pre-World War II Europe intellectually challenging and noticeably less hostile to their presence (W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Mary Church Terrell, Anna J. Cooper, and Mercer Cook among them), Wright pursued his doctorate in economics at the prestigious University of Heidelberg, founded in 1386. As a student leader he had earlier been invited to attend international student conferences at the University of Cologne in Germany and Oxford University in England. In 1931 he published an article in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, detailing his private efforts to launch student exchange programs between historically black institutions in the United States like his alma mater Wilberforce and German universities.

In Heidelberg in the summer of 1932, after viewing a regional political rally with some German friends and hearing a typically demagogic speech by Adolf Hitler, Wright had the misfortune of being overheard joking to his friends that he would be willing to assassinate the future dictator. He was accosted by SS guards as he approached a restaurant in the Europäischer hof Hotel in Heidelberg where, coincidentally, Hitler was staying and had ordered Wright to be brought to him.

Wright, fluent in German and well aware of Nazi ideology, entered Hitler’s room with extreme trepidation and feared he might not leave alive. As recounted years later in the Pittsburgh Courier and Ebony magazine, their “conversation” was pretty much a one-way affair with Hitler asking then answering his own questions to Wright in a calm but rather loud voice. Though indicating to some extent he was aware of the history of blacks and that he respected Booker T. Washington and Paul Robeson, Hitler, less than six months away from becoming Chancellor of Germany, nonetheless asserted educated blacks like Wright were certain to be “miserable” because they were forever destined to be “a third-class people, cowardly slaves, and mere imitators of superior races.” “Your people are a hopeless lot. I don’t hate them,” he said, “I pity the poor devils.”

Wright’s ordeal lasted four hours but Hitler had been surprisingly courteous, had complimented Wright’s excellent German, suggested they meet for another session in Munich, and gave Wright an autographed photo of himself as a memento. Having survived this bizarre, improbable encounter with Hitler, Wright, who had recently finished his dissertation, titled “The Economic Development and the Natives Policy in the Former African Protected Areas of Germany from 1884 to 1918,” returned to the United States and resumed employment at Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas. In 1934 he married the former Sue H. Hurt. For nearly four decades Wright taught and was an administrator at Wilberforce where retired in 1969 as Professor of Economics and Political Science and Vice President for Research.

Milton S. J. Wright died March 11, 1972 in Xenia, Ohio, survived by his daughter, Francine. He was 68 at the time of his death.

Article
https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/milton-s-j-wright-1903-1972/

MY THOUGHTS

Hitler mentioned Booker T Washington and Paul Robeson by name as he was aware of them. What does this prove? Hitler isn't satan. Hitler isn't the devil. Did hitler do many negative things to some people. Yes, without question. But, no human is satan, no human is the devil. My proudest moment of Nelson Mandela's life outside prison is when he honored Khadafi, when the USA side Europe felt he should not. Mandela responded, Khadafi helped my people. No one is satan. Hitler pitied Black people in the USA. The sad truth is his pity was well placed. if you consider the existence of the Black community in the USA from between the two phases of the world war to 10-25-2022 , it warrant pity, pitiful to be honest. The black community in the USA has sacrificed its own self, to aid reaching a goal its leaders nor its people originally wanted. At the end of the day, all the Black people chastised in the Black people for wanting to harm the non blacks who harmed blacks by other black people have nothing to weigh how they were treated except a bunch of disparate distant individual examples in a community bereft of any symbol of collective or communal strength in the usa, while surrounded by various communities seemingly disinterested in reaching the goal they were chastised by their own phenotypical kin for. quite sad. 

IN AMENDMENT

They Translated ‘Hamilton’ Into German. Was It Easy? Nein.

For the musical’s Hamburg premiere, a team wrestled with language and cultural differences to bring the story alive for a new audience.
https://twitter.com/BGCSinc/status/1579104699617538054

Beloved (1998) reviewed by Movies That Move We
 

Video Link

MY THOUGHTS WHILE I VIEWED

3:44 ahh it came out a bad week. Ants/Rush Hour/Bride of Chucky/Practical Magic all were hits. Ants is animated. Rush Hour is funny and with jackie chan a global hit and rush hour was his finest usa based film. Chucky for the horror addicts, chucky is a superstar. PRactical magic had nicole kidman and sandra bullock in a women's empowerment film about new england witches... beloved

12:35 good point, I want to add, the multitude of stories is the problem. I argue the problem is, the truth is complex right. Some people were violent, some suffered, some had good fortune. it is a blend of stories. Blend of stories make the end of the civil war /13th amendment/end of slavery complicated

15:16 yes, this is a poltergeist. But i concur, the message is, what is more frightening is the human activity, the enslavement of  whites onto blacks. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Garner
I think it is an important story change from morrison that is carried in the film is that the real life garner was mulatto. she had a white parent. and all her children were from her owner.
I find it also interesting that most of the people they fled, with, the historical garner made it to canada. they didn't stay in the usa but most made it. supposedly seventeen in total with nine making it to canada. And i find it historically compelling that the Garner's  owner/former owner/owner in moving the garner's  around kentucky to escape  an extradition order for murder from ohio  which was going to lead to a pardon, he had to leave kentucky and on a boat to take the garner's to new orleans the baby child was thrown into the water by margaret and died. And then in the end, margaret lived, telling her husband never to marry and bring forth life into the world of slavery. I argue, margaret never let her black enslaved husband bed her or at least bed her in good time for pregnancy. I think margaret hated the idea of being pregnant. Only know have I did any research concerning the true story, thank you Nike,  I have more thoughts for a story I am composing myself now. 

20:30 great point, i agree, from the beginning I saw this film as the poltergeist while present, while dangerous is not as dangerous as the white slave owners, not really. The poltergeist is easier to handle and is handled easier than white folks.

21:53 yes, we don't talk about the truth in the black community. because black parents can not guarantee black chidren will react positively to whites or the usa with knowing it. I have always felt most black parents in the usa, are frightened of the truth because all black parents know, 100% of black children will not reach positive conclusions to whites or the usa with the truth. And I think black parents in majority just don't want that risk so they lie. 

22:44 how can the movie be better in your view Nike?

24:09 I can tell you I know black people were not dancing about based on knowing about my mother's father's mother's life. I do not go into my personal.

24:38 yes, trauma 

25:02 i think the black community in the usa made an effort to kill the life of that past in the black community in the usa, even while white people keep it alive with their actions. and i think, those black people succeeded in killing it. The modern black community in the usa, to be blunt, does not reflect a community that used its most historically relevant or elemental era in the usa, that being when enslaved to whites, as a root element of a heritage to empowerment. The Black community in the usa , is a community that reflect a discarding of its most historically relevant or elemental era in the usa. Which has been beneficial. The USA today would not be the country it is if the Black community or the Indigenous community didn't at some point do what both did and that was, start at day one when at day 99.  Black people talk about fighting in world war II and owning homes in the antebellum south. Enslavement was Black folk in the usa  300 year old epoch in the usa, that predated the usa itself.  Our forebears who wanted that reboot, got what they wanted. at the price of it was the gullah language or culture like other unique cultures in the black community in the usa that predate the end of slavery, high john the conqueror and a horde of fiction fantasy that black people had created during slavery/the black free towns no one recalls today. Black people like henry louis gates jr and others like to emphasize the time after slavery cause , like frederick douglass, they want the black community in the usa to be statian, of the usa. The problem with black enslavement to whites being alive is the question of the usa itself. it has to live as well and when you question the country you live in, again the resulting answer may not be positive or convenient or majority. And I think many black people in the past have always feared and some today still fear that possibility in the black community in the usa.  thus why said black people adore modern black immigrants who have more in common with whites when it comes to their initial relationship to the usa than DOSers. 

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
What did you think of this film the first time you saw it? 
I didn't like the whites, which says little to nothing. but, I enjoyed the end. Maybe cause I was raised in a home with two loving parents. I enjoyed the resolution at the end, between d and sethe.

Did you know at the time, about Margaret Garner? 
No, I did not. I never thought to research this until now. I think the true story is very compelling, about many issues of mulattoes, of black children in the usa,of the end of slavery or as I like to call one of the mutations of slavery. cause the truth is, slavery simply changed, it did not die. But I always remind people, new orleans was the las vegas of the usa in the 1800s and all the top female prostitutes of new orleans claimed black ancestry. why? white men had created a media myth, like modern day Black women behinds or white women breast. that mulatto women was the sexual best. And I even see the lustful logic. You have a white woman/a light black woman/a luscious black woman all in one white man's house. he is married to one, the white one. her role is to make heirs, she owns nothing. he uses one for general labor and mating for more produce<meaning aside black men>, the luscious black woman. but who is the best of both worlds. it is the light black woman, the mulatto. She is publicly owned by the white man. he has no worry of legal problems with anything he does to her, like the luscious black woman but she may in appearance look no different or more similar to a white woman. So, it is to a white man in a position of total power, the best of both worlds. Most mulattoes look like a thandie newton or halle berry where it is clear, they are a mix, but some look like Christina Cox <she was in chronicles of riddick> or rebecca hall <the director of passing>who in my view can attempt to pass in the old environment in the usa way better than ruth negga or tessa thompson. And I use myself as the proof. I never doubted ruth negga or tessa thompson or halle berry have black ancestry but christina cox or rebecca hall i did not know. and this is powerful. Remember twelve years a slave. paul giamatti's character pointed to the mulatto daughter of the luscious black woman, whose tears and constant crying in light of margaret garner is well balanced, and said, i paraphrase, that little girl is worth all of the rest.. to cumberbatch. In latin america, they are called Alvino's meaning. this is someone with known black ancestry but who does not look black. That is priceless to a white man with money back in slave times.
Thanks again Nike, In cheap retrospect, I Would had went another way than Morrison story wise, plot wise. But morrison being a woman, i think she wanted to redeem the black mother more than anything. I think beloved, as a poltergeist, was betrayed a little bit. I daresay, beloved is more a wraith than a poltergeist. A poltergiest for me acts wildly as a spirit but doesn't necessarily have agenda. a wraith has agenda. the woman in black is a wraith. I think beloved is a wraith. She wants her mother to give take her own life through a slow pain of neglect. that is purpose. Beloved goes away as a poltergiest not a wraith. 

Did you feel differently about the meaning of the film between your first watch and the last time you viewed the movie?
Meaning, no , the meaning didn't change. I only add the comparison to the real event know. I remember relatives not liking that she didn't kill herself. The funny thing in the historical record it seems she was literally stopped by the whites coming to take her back to slavery. but I like how in the historical record she tried to kill herself with the youngest, but simply failed. 

 Do you think of this as a horror movie? 
Yes, but I want to say, this film is a visual representation of what I will call Black Statian Slave Ghost Stories. Growing up as a kid, I was told and then later read many of these kinds of stories, usually shorter in length but the same idea. Being enslaved while dealing with a negative spirit is uncommon theme or shall i say a specific theme to the Black DOS community in the USA. this isn't for willing immigrants or whites or native americans mostly, this is a very specific genre culturally. You have a character dealing with a scenario where they are born disempowered with problems stemming from a past before they were born they can not control while now a negative spirit. I think in these stories the problem is, the horror of the ghost is less important than the horror between humans and that goes against the horror movie genre as a whole in the usa. yes, the ghost is bothering me, but I had my foot cut off and my testicles branded last month. I can't afford any more from this white man so spirit, pick a number. 

yeah, good one:) 

THIS IS THE END (of October): Episode 10 ft Tristan Roach of Xion NEtwork

VIDEO LINK

VIDEO INTRO
Welcome to the tenth episode of "This is the End" with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

In this special halloween edition, tune-in to Mohz, Jess, Ian, Cam and Roun as we interview one of the most scarily talented comic book artists on the island, before doing a quick recap of major pop-culture events that resonated with us this month.

MY COMMENT

Dune was a serial in a magazine, turned into a book. but star wars was based on John Carter of Mars over Dune. The multiversity of characters in star wars reflects John carter more than Dune. 

SARCASM Fans enjoy

@charityekezie Replying to @musubifamily No but we also apply some honey on stones and lick it. #sacarsm #charityekezie #Africa ♬ original sound - Charityekezie

straight to the forest:) ok the spirit of the black panther:)  Anyone who loves sarcasm will love this... the community giraffe
 

Movies That Move We review US 2019

My THoughts
like the montage of reviews
2:10 so many black female writers enjoy PEele's style. I do to but many black female writers tend to start off saying that.
5:40 exactly, I wonder if a 1960s hippie's old plan written on home made paper somewhere wasn't what hands across america stemmed from
7:50 spider grandmother https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_Grandmother
11:36 yes, anansi, the story teller, remember anansi has a caribbean version , same name, different stories
13:09 random thought, was the homeless guy taken to a hospital carrying the sign some sort of guard for the doppels/tethers?

Questions how we respond to those who have less than us? What would you do if you came face to face with your darker side?

Your questions are strong. Collective reply as opposed to individual reply. In the film US, the tether abigail answers the question to individual reply by exchanging places. but the originally untethered abigail, replied to her individual revenge with a collective reply, leading all the tethers. and oddly enough, in the end, both abigails got what they wanted, in the end, the collective reply of the originally untethered abigal with hands across america happened with her side her household all killed while the tethered got her replacement life with only her male son, the "mulatto" knowing the truth about her. and her whole household lives. The power of nature here is underrated. I even argue an element of "The man who fell to earth" is used very well in this film's premise. In a man who fell to earth, the government keeps the "alien" man in a base but over time the base is forgotten. How isn't fully explained but whatever happened, the people in government who knew about this or kept it organized died or forgot or moved on, so the installation ran on autopilot, and became decrepit. like the tether's world, its sitting there. Whomever in government was supposed to manage them, stopped or moved on or died or something, where they still get electricity, but their existence is uncared for. And I like that theme of whatever the government was planning couldn't survive nature. But to your first question, to whether people have more or less, whether we want freedom or revenge, we can respond as part of a group or individually. But nature does have influence over things, At the end the tricked abigail was still naive when she was originally tricked and the tethered abigal is still dangerous when she originally forced a switch. Their varying sense of individualism or community didn't change. The tricked abigal, felt the tethered abigail in the first place, she was always communal. the tethered abigail was always an individual, never once interested in helping another tethered escape. So no matter how you respond to another, you will always be yourself eventually.

Well, I will answer, what will I do if I come into contact with one of my infinite other sides? There is a version of me that is more positive than me. and thus, I am the more negative to that version. to answer the question. I don't know. Good question. the engineer in me wants to ask, how did we even meet in the first place. Nature has rules. how are we meeting is my first question, not necessarily how we will get along. But I will say this. The key to coexisting side another interpretation of you, is to be anti christian. I will explain. If you look at zoarasters-ancient kemet-aztec mythology-taoism, most spiritual belief systems accept that nature is not good or bad but all things. But the christian belief system is starkly variant. the christian tradition says god is good, thus that which is not good is not of the essence of life. If you see a version of you doing negative things that you wouldn't do, if you have in your mind the idea that to do negative things is against nature, then you will imply that the other you is unnatural and thus communication problems, coexistence problems.

Thistle and Verse

Live Discussion

Kat Blaque

Logan Paul is WRONG about NOPE

Thistle and Verse

Trivia Night

Recommendations Gender Bender

Recommendations Author You've Never Read Before

Recommendations Rocks and Gems

Post-Ignyte Award Thoughts- Doesn't she look pretty

Happy September Equinox- 9:04 pm eastern standard time - the beginning of Autumn in the northern hemisphere and Spring in the southern hemisphere
the following is an image of Neptune, from the James Webb, it is a composite image, that is not one image from James Webb.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/52373132207/in/feed-37440125-1663769703-1-72157721637473044

Enjoy

a story
The Last Homily On Liturgoid 
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-last-homily-on-liturgoid

a poem, click the image

An art gallery
Witchtember 2022
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/gallery/84411925/witchtember-2022

A fun post 
from the Black Games Elite public group
Breath of the wild playhouse
https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/323-breath-of-the-wild-playhouse/

some other dates after in the month of september
23: Mercury between sun and earth, inferior
Judy Reed, Black woman, in 1884 made a patent for... wait for it... Dough kneeder and roller
Here is the proof of the patent claim, I read it was signed with an X and it seems true. so for Black kids, or yourself, when someone says what you need to know to have a great imagination, tell them they are wrong
https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=00305474

25: Rosh Hashanah- The Ethiopian jews, some call Beta Israelites, originally spoke Agaw. Genetic studies say that they are genetically related to east africans not jews from across the Red Sea, like from israel/palestine/yemen
Mercury<->Moon; Venus <->Moon conjunctions

26: Jupiter will be 180 degrees in the sky, opposite the sun, Jupiter will be no brighter or bigger this year than on this day
1872 first shrine temple in New York City
https://www.meccashriners.org/history

27: St. Vincent de Paul saint day, Charity
Samuel Adams born 1722- he used his influence to get boston to give education to boys plus girls. 
He opposed the still in existence Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary fraternity. Some might call that the patriarchy today:)
He opposed the constitution, as he felt it didn't make a federation but made a nation. It can be argued in cheap hindsight, samuel adams was 100% correct. if you consider usa history, the constitution has become a legal document that has been used effectively to destroy the concept of a union of states who can be dissimilar to each other while having a unity of purpose. 
He pushed for the Bill of Rights to be entered into the Constitution and supported it. 
Lastly, Samuel Adams was a poor fiscal operator and didn't brew a damn thing:)

28: Woodchuck's hibernate
Moon goes north to south of the ecliptic

29: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra born 1547 - he wrote a book in two parts, which you may know. He only worked for three years. Odd for me as a writer, that I have a similar quantity of work in similar short spans in multiples.  

His first work is LA Galatea
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/la-galatea-8

His first short story collection and only surviving Novelas Ejemplares
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/novelas-ejemplares-english
In Audio book form
https://librivox.org/the-exemplary-novels-of-miguel-de-cervantes-saavedra-by-miguel-de-cervantes-saavedra/

His last work is Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda
The 400th anniversary edition in spanish made by the Real Academia Española, Royal Academy of Spain
https://www.rae.es/sites/default/files/Hojear_Persiles_y_Sigismunda.pdf
Persiles in english translation
http://www.ems.kcl.ac.uk/content/etext/e006.html
 

Feds: Minnesota food scheme stole $250M; 47 people charged

AMY FORLITI

Tue, September 20, 2022 at 12:11 PM·5 min read

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Federal authorities charged 47 people in Minnesota with conspiracy and other counts in what they said Tuesday was the largest fraud scheme yet to take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic by stealing $250 million from a federal program that provides meals to low-income children.

Prosecutors say the defendants created companies that claimed to be offering food to tens of thousands of children across Minnesota, then sought reimbursement for those meals through the U.S. Department of Agriculture's food nutrition programs. Prosecutors say few meals were actually served, and the defendants used the money to buy luxury cars, property and jewelry.

“This $250 million is the floor," Andy Luger, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota, said at a news conference. “Our investigation continues.”

Many of the companies that claimed to be serving food were sponsored by a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, which submitted the companies' claims for reimbursement. Feeding Our Future’s founder and executive director, Aimee Bock, was among those indicted, and authorities say she and others in her organization submitted the fraudulent claims for reimbursement and received kickbacks.

Bock’s attorney, Kenneth Udoibok, said the indictment “doesn’t indicate guilt or innocence.” He said he wouldn't comment further until seeing the indictment.

In interviews after law enforcement searched multiple sites in January, including Bock's home and offices, Bock denied stealing money and said she never saw evidence of fraud.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice made prosecuting pandemic-related fraud a priority. The department has already taken enforcement actions related to more than $8 billion in suspected pandemic fraud, including bringing charges in more than 1,000 criminal cases involving losses in excess of $1.1 billion.

Federal officials repeatedly described the alleged fraud as “brazen,” and decried that it involved a program intended to feed children who needed help during the pandemic. Michael Paul, special agent in charge of the Minneapolis FBI office, called it “an astonishing display of deceit."

Luger said the government was billed for more than 125 million fake meals, with some defendants making up names for children by using an online random name generator. He displayed one form for reimbursement that claimed a site served exactly 2,500 meals each day Monday through Friday — with no children ever getting sick or otherwise missing from the program.

“These children were simply invented,” Luger said.

He said the government has so far recovered $50 million in money and property and expects to recover more.

The defendants in Minnesota face multiple counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and bribery. Luger said some of them were arrested Tuesday morning.

According to court documents, the alleged scheme targeted the USDA's federal child nutrition programs, which provide food to low-income children and adults. In Minnesota, the funds are administered by the state Department of Education, and meals have historically been provided to kids through educational programs, such as schools or day care centers.

The sites that serve the food are sponsored by public or nonprofit groups, such as Feeding Our Future. The sponsoring agency keeps 10% to 15% of the reimbursement funds as an administrative fee in exchange for submitting claims, sponsoring the sites and disbursing the funds.

But during the pandemic, some of the standard requirements for sites to participate in the federal food nutrition programs were waived. The USDA allowed for-profit restaurants to participate, and allowed food to be distributed outside educational programs. The charging documents say the defendants exploited such changes “to enrich themselves."

The documents say Bock oversaw the scheme and that she and Feeding Our Future sponsored the opening of nearly 200 federal child nutrition program sites throughout the state, knowing that the sites intended to submit fraudulent claims.

“The sites fraudulently claimed to be serving meals to thousands of children a day within just days or weeks of being formed and despite having few, if any staff and little to no experience serving this volume of meals,” according to the indictments.

One example described a small storefront restaurant in Willmar, in west-central Minnesota, that typically served only a few dozen people a day. Two defendants offered the owner $40,000 a month to use his restaurant, then billed the government for some 1.6 million meals through 11 months of 2021, according to one indictment. They listed the names of around 2,000 children — nearly half of the local school district's total enrollment — and only 33 names matched actual students, the indictment said.

Feeding Our Future received nearly $18 million in federal child nutrition program funds as administrative fees in 2021 alone, and Bock and other employees received additional kickbacks, which were often disguised as “consulting fees” paid to shell companies, the charging documents said.

According to an FBI affidavit unsealed earlier this year, Feeding Our Future received $307,000 in reimbursements from the USDA in 2018, $3.45 million in 2019 and $42.7 million in 2020. The amount of reimbursements jumped to $197.9 million in 2021.

Court documents say the Minnesota Department of Education was growing concerned about the rapid increase in the number of sites sponsored by Feeding Our Future, as well as the increase in reimbursements.

The department began scrutinizing Feeding Our Future’s site applications more carefully, and denied dozens of them. In response, Bock sued the department in November 2020, alleging discrimination, saying the majority of her sites were based in immigrant communities. That case has since been dismissed.

Article

Feds: Minnesota food scheme stole $250M; 47 people charged (yahoo.com)

My thoughts  

47 people for 250 million dollars. circa 4 million and seven hundred thousand per head.

The two hundred and fifty million dollars is the floor in this one case, while the united states department of justice has grabbed a floor of eight billion already in sars-cov-2 era related stolen money. 

Eight billion is the floor.

I share this so whenever I read a black person talk about financial planning, I will advise them to read this article. PRovide the black people you want to hire with these kind of schemes and then succeed and then talk about your grand plans. otherwise be quiet. 

Oh, and we all need to see AImee Bock whose face somehow wasn't in every article about this. 

A black man hustles in the street some marijuana and fights law enforcement and his face is face of crime. A white woman is part of a two hundred and fifty million dollar theft and she is just an unlucky entrepreneur.

Female Workers Face Rape, Harassment In U.S. Agriculture Industry

June 25, 2013, 2:39 am ET by Bernice Yeung and Grace Rubenstein, The Center for Investigative Reporting

SUNNYSIDE, Wash. – Esther Abarca said the foreman drove to parts of the apple orchard that she had never seen. Deep into the ranch, in what she could describe only as a “desolate place,” he parked the truck, reached over and tried to grab her.

Weeping as she told her story, Abarca said the foreman got out of the truck when she resisted his advances. He opened the side door, climbed on top of her, and began to kiss and grope her. She called for help and tried to push him away, but he got her pants halfway off.

“I kept screaming, but there was nobody there,” Abarca said.

Abarca said she kept screaming as the foreman groped her. But then, as if suddenly chastened by her crying, kicking and pushing, she said he stopped. He told her that if she didn’t tell anyone what had happened, he’d give her $3,000 for a new car.

Abarca, a mother of three, said she refused the money.

“I told him that that was the very reason why I had come here to work, that I did not need him to give me any money at all,” she said.

The foreman’s alleged first assault came in 2009, during the long days of the Yakima Valley apple harvest in central Washington. An immigrant from Mexico, Abarca was new to the Evans Fruit Co., one of the country’s largest apple producers.

Nearly four years later, Abarca’s story was the subject of a federal court case testing whether the owners of Evans Fruit looked the other way as their workers claimed they were subjected to repeated sexual violence and harassment by an orchard foreman and crew bosses.

It was a rare public accusation for an immigrant, many of whom fear retaliation and deportation if they speak up. Abarca was testifying in only the second case of a farmworker claiming sexual harassment to reach a federal court trial.

Although the exact scope of sexual violence and harassment against agricultural workers is impossible to pinpoint, an investigation by The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism reveals persistent peril for women working in the food industry. An estimated 560,000 women work on U.S. farms.

In partnership with FRONTLINE and Univision, CIR and IRP spent nearly a year reviewing thousands of pages of documents and crisscrossing the nation – from the tightly ordered orchards of the Yakima Valley to the leafy tomato fields of southern Florida – to hear workers’ stories of sexual assault.

Hundreds of female agricultural workers have complained to the federal government about being raped and assaulted, verbally and physically harassed on the job, while law enforcement has done almost nothing to prosecute potential crimes.

In virtually all of the cases reviewed, the alleged perpetrators held positions of power over the women. Despite the accusations, these supervisors have remained on the job for years without fear of arrest.

At the trial, Abarca was among more than a dozen women who had accused a foreman, Juan Marin, and a handful of crew leaders at Evans Fruit of sexually assaulting or harassing them. For her part, Abarca said she had been topping off bins with just-picked apples when the foreman called to her from his pickup. He told her to get in the truck, she testified.

Marin said he never sexually assaulted or harassed Abarca or any of the other women, and he has not been arrested or prosecuted in criminal court for the allegations.

At a federal civil trial this year featuring 14 women telling their stories, a jury found that whatever had happened at Evans Fruit, it did not create a sexually hostile work environment, which had to be established before the company could be held liable.

Government attorneys who prosecuted the civil case have requested a new trial. In court filings, they called the verdict “unmoored from the actual evidence.”

Marin, who had worked for Evans Fruit for more than three decades, said the claims are based on lies and rumors spread by “a bunch of jealous people” who are trying to win money from the company.

“I’ve been accused of sexual harassment, and that’s completely a lie,” Marin said in one of several interviews. “Because I never bothered nobody. The only thing I’ve been doing in my life is work. To me it’s so unfair, because I never did nothing like that in my life.”

Nevertheless, two complaints against Marin prompted owner Bill Evans to write him a letter in 2006, four years before Marin was fired for alleged embezzlement.

“We don’t have the time or energy to continue dealing with the problems you are bringing down on us,” the letter said. “Any further incidents or complaints of sexual harassment and you will be discharged.”

The company drafted its first sexual harassment policy in 2008.

A National Problem

Reports of harassment and sexual violence against female farmworkers span the U.S. map.

In Molalla, Ore., a worker at a tree farm accused her supervisor of repeatedly raping her over the course of several months in 2006 and 2007, often holding gardening shears to her throat. If she complained to anyone, he allegedly told her, he would fire her and kill her entire family.

The supervisor never was prosecuted, and a civil case against the tree farm was settled for $150,000 in 2011 without the company acknowledging wrongdoing. The payment went to the woman and three family members who said they were harassed or fired in retaliation.

Three hundred miles away, in Lind, Wash., an egg farm manager forced a woman working alone in a hen-laying house to routinely give him oral sex to keep her job between 2003 and 2010, according to a statement she gave to the sheriff. In an interview with the sheriff, the manager denied the accusation. He did not return calls for comment.

That case was settled for $650,000 this year – most of it to be paid to the woman and four other workers who claimed the company had fired them in retaliation for complaining. The manager no longer works at the farm.

In a case pending in Mississippi federal court, dozens of women hired to debone chickens at a poultry processing plant said they were violently groped by a supervisor between 2004 and 2008. One woman who said she was grabbed between her legs had to seek medical attention, according to court filings.

And a worker at a Salinas, Calif.-based lettuce farm accused a manager of raping her in 2006 – a charge he denied to company management, according to court documents. Maricruz Ladino sued the grower, and the case was settled for an undisclosed amount in 2010. She did not file a police report, and there was no criminal prosecution. He no longer works for the company.

“There are supervisors who try to use their power to mistreat people or to abuse them,” said Ladino, who has since left the company. “And it’s very difficult to fight against that because we are working out of necessity, because we need to provide for our families.”

Dan Fazio, director of the Washington Farm Labor Association, an employment firm that coordinates farm and seasonal employees in the Pacific Northwest, said similar problems exist in other industries, and he points to an example of workplace rape that involved a real estate company.

“Harassment occurs in agriculture,” he said, “but there is no proof that it occurs more (often) in agriculture.”

But a review of the 41 federal sexual harassment lawsuits filed against agricultural enterprises since 1998 – when the first federal lawsuit was filed against an agricultural company for failing to stop harassment or abuse – reveals a pattern of supervisors accused of preying on multiple workers.

Among these were at least 153 people who alleged workplace abuses, the vast majority by their superiors. Of the lawsuits, 7 out of 8 involved workers claiming physical harassment, assault or rape.

According to civil court documents, in nearly every case, workers made complaints to company management and, among those, 85 percent faced retaliation – such as being demoted, fired or further harassed. In their review of the federal cases, CIR and IRP could not find a single case in which the men accused of sexual assault or rape in the civil suits had been criminally prosecuted.

Cycle of Silence

An estimated 50 to 75 percent of U.S. farmworkers immigrated to the U.S. illegally, according to advocacy groups and government surveys. In interviews, more than 100 government officials, law enforcement officials, lawyers and social service providers said shame, fear of deportation or losing a job, language barriers and ignorance of workplace laws keep low-wage immigrant laborers silent.

For government lawyer William R. Tamayo, whose father worked at sugarcane plantations in Hawaii, the first inkling of what was happening to women in America’s fields and packinghouses came when he visited with California labor advocates in the mid-1990s.

“They said farmworker women were talking about the fields as the fils de calzón, or ‘fields of panties,’ ” said Tamayo, the regional attorney in San Francisco for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which files sexual harassment lawsuits on behalf of employees, including farm and food factory workers. “They referred to the fields as the ‘green motel.’ ”

Without immigration papers or job options, many agricultural workers live the largely traceless lives that low-wage seasonal work demands. For some, it’s a shadow dimension of disposable phones, weekly visits to check-cashing chains and elusive last-known addresses.

It’s a life based on the incessant search for the next job in whatever crop needs harvesting. Migrant workers can land year-round gigs at dairies or processing plants, but it’s not easy to forget their own financial instability – and supervisors know this.

If a foreman wants to test the extent of his authority, here are the perfect victims, worker advocates said.

“Sexual violence doesn’t happen unless there’s an imbalance of power,” Tamayo said. “And in the agricultural industry, the imbalance of power between perpetrator, company and the worker is probably at its greatest.”

The combination of financial desperation and tenuous immigration status make agricultural workers vulnerable to workplace violence and less inclined to report crimes. The federal government estimates that 65 percent of all sexual assault and rape victims never report the crime.

Immigrants, especially those who entered the country without authorization, are even less likely to complain, according to academic studies.

The legal research and advocacy group ASISTA surveyed more than 100 women working at Iowa meatpacking plants in 2009. An analysis of these surveys shows that 41 percent said they’d experienced unwanted touching, and about 30 percent reported receiving sexual propositions.

More than 25 percent of the women said they’d been threatened with firing or harder work if they didn’t let the aggressor have his way.

It’s a similar picture in California, where a UC Santa Cruz study of 150 female farmworkers published in 2010 found that nearly 40 percent experienced sexual harassment ranging from verbal advances to rape on the job, and 24 percent said they had experienced sexual coercion by a supervisor.

Many take sexual harassment as a job hazard, advocates said.

When attorney Laura Mahr started talking to Oregon’s female farmworkers about sexual harassment and assault, some of them said, “ ‘Oh, that’s not just part of the job? You have laws about that?’ ”

Many women, Mahr said, have risked their lives to cross the border, sometimes becoming indebted to human smugglers along the way. Coming forward means possibly losing their livelihood.

“It’s an epidemic in the field,” said Dolores Huerta, co-founder of United Farm Workers. “It goes back to the vulnerability that women have … especially if they’re undocumented. And you know, the machismo culture of power and when you think of this type of sexual harassment or rape, it’s always about power of men over women.”

Few Complaints Make It To Court

The only federal agency actively and systematically pursuing on-the-job sexual violence and harassment cases on behalf of agricultural workers is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is responsible for enforcing civil rights laws in the workplace.

In the past 15 years, workers have filed 1,106 sexual harassment complaints with the commission against agricultural-related industries. The allegations range from verbal harassment to rape.

Only a fraction will make it to federal court. The commission declines to pursue about 50 percent of the sexual harassment complaints across all industries for lack of substance. Another portion is settled out of court.

For the few cases in which the commission files a lawsuit in federal court – 130 cases last year out of about 11,000 sexual harassment complaints across all businesses in the U.S. – a handful will make it to trial.

Some growers said they believe the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is too adversarial and aggressive through litigation. Brendan V. Monahan, an attorney for Evans Fruit, said the commission approaches farmers as the enemy rather than trying to work constructively with them.

“The EEOC has imagined this adversarial relationship between farmers and laborers that I don’t think really exists, and they have chosen to champion labor in an imagined fight against farmers,” he said. “It should be a matter of conciliation and compliance rather than confrontation and coerced enforcement.”

But David Lopez, general counsel for the commission, disagreed and said it files cases involving “egregious cases of discrimination” that warrant civil prosecution, and he warned against painting the entire agricultural industry as bad actors.

Nevertheless, he said, “I do know that we do see very serious cases of discrimination and harassment in the agricultural industry.”

Although agriculture is America’s oldest industry, the first sexual harassment lawsuit against a grower to reach a jury trial was in 2004. The Evans Fruit trial this year was the second.

That landmark first case involved Olivia Tamayo, who worked for California-based Harris Farms, among the largest agribusinesses in the country. (Olivia Tamayo is not related to William Tamayo, the attorney for the federal commission.) She said a supervisor named Rene Rodriguez raped her three separate times after showing her he was carrying a gun. Rodriguez denied it.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit against Harris Farms on her behalf in 2002. After a 23-day trial, the jury found Harris Farms liable for sexual harassment and retaliation and awarded nearly $800,000 in lost wages and compensatory and punitive damages.

In a statement, CEO John Harris said the company denies any wrongdoing. The workers had a consensual relationship that the company did not know about, Harris said in the statement. He said although the jury believed the accused employee was a supervisor, “we felt he was not.”

Rodriguez retired in 1999. At an interview at his home in South Texas, Rodriguez insisted that he and Olivia Tamayo had been dating. She accused him of rape, he said, because she wanted money.

“No, no, no, no,” he said when asked if he’d used violence against Olivia Tamayo. “If that was how it was from the beginning, I would have been jailed or something.”

Olivia Tamayo’s lawyer, William J. Smith, a longtime civil rights advocate, said that when she won her case, he thought it would change the landscape for agricultural workers. He said he knows differently now.

“Even though Olivia Tamayo stood up for her rights, people are still afraid,” he said. “I don’t think it caught on the way we thought it would because the fear is still out there.”

Farmworkers’ vulnerability is compounded because a number of federal labor laws, ranging from minimum wage to underage work, don’t apply in agriculture. A handful of states, including California, Oregon and Washington, provide stronger legal protections.

“If there’s violation of wage and hour laws, if there are children laboring in the fields, of course there’s going to be sexual harassment, because even the bread-and-butter issues aren’t being addressed,” said Ramón Ramírez, a founder and president of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, the farmworkers union based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

This year, growers and labor advocates are closely watching as a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws makes its way through Congress. Proponents say the bill, if approved, could offer protections for agricultural workers to more readily report abuse on the job.

“One of the fundamental reasons we have to get comprehensive immigration reform is so we can stop the daily routine rape of women in the workplace,” said U.S. Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, D-Ill., a vocal proponent of an overhaul.

But some who support new immigration laws have doubts that they would curb sexual harassment in the fields.

Fazio of the Washington Farm Labor Association said workers who have been assaulted or raped already qualify for a special visa for crime victims. Providing provisional status through the bill, he said, “is not going to make a person more likely to come forward.”

The primary solution lies with employers, who must create a “culture of compliance,” he said. “They need to put systems in place.”

Cases Difficult to Pursue

Beyond the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, farmworkers in some parts of the country can turn to state agencies to file workplace sexual harassment cases against agricultural employers. But those are rare.

In Washington – home to more agricultural workers than any state except California – laborers filed 92 cases of alleged sexual harassment with the state Human Rights Commission against agricultural companies between 2005 and 2012. Of those, 67 cases were shelved by the commission for having “no reasonable cause” or because the office faced uncooperative witnesses or a statute of limitation.

The rest – 25 cases – resulted in settlements or remain open.

In rural areas, access to attorneys for low-income clients is limited, making it difficult for farmworkers to file civil cases on their own in state courts. For example, in California’s Central Valley and Central Coast, some of the most productive agricultural regions in the country, there are a handful of private and legal aid organizations that take on these cases.

Michael Marsh, directing attorney of the Salinas office of California Rural Legal Assistance, one of the few organizations in the state to take farmworker sexual harassment cases, said that each harvest, at least two farmworkers come to his office to say their boss raped them. This year, he and his colleagues have already met with three.

In March, a berry farm supervisor who raped a farmworker represented by Marsh’s office was convicted in a state case and sentenced to prison, but the chances of other criminal cases moving forward are not high.

In some cases, state prosecutors are reluctant to file criminal charges. Sheriffs and police officials said these cases can be difficult to pursue. When reports are made, there often is scant evidence and few witnesses, they said. The burden of proof in criminal cases is much higher than in civil court.

“If you get into a courtroom and there is no physical evidence, it’s a tough nut to crack,” said Sgt. Kris Zuniga of the Avenal Police Department in agriculturally rich Kings County, Calif. “If there is some evidence, he can say it was consensual and then you’re back to a he said, she said.”

The 2002 civil sexual harassment case against DeCoster Farms of Iowa, an egg processing plant, and a co-defendant, Iowa Ag LLC, illustrates how well-documented civil cases go nowhere in criminal court.

After the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a civil lawsuit accused three plant supervisors of “repeated and systematic raping” and sexual harassment of nearly a dozen women in boiler rooms and trucks over six years, law enforcement intervened. The Wright County Sheriff’s Department investigated the claims, along with representatives from the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office.

In one interview, a 28-year-old worker said a supervisor violated her in his truck when he was moving her from one part of the plant to another. She tried to scream and fight off the assault, the sheriff’s report said, but “he put the knife up to the side of her face and told her he would kill her if she didn’t let him do it.”

He told her that she was not the only woman he had raped, according to the sheriff’s report. None of the supervisors still works for the egg farm.
Paul Schultz, then the sheriff of Wright County, took statements from seven women, and five of them said they were regularly raped at DeCoster. But the local prosecutor told him there was not enough evidence to take the case to court.

It’s a case that still fills Schultz with regret. Most of the women have moved away. But Schultz said that if he had an opportunity to speak with them again, he would apologize. He’d tell them, “I’m sorry that the prosecution could not be pursued,” he said.

DeCoster Farms and Iowa Ag paid $1.5 million to settle the federal civil lawsuit later that year. In the process, they denied all of the allegations. Another Iowa egg company owned by Austin DeCoster, known as Quality Egg, settled a federal sexual harassment lawsuit in 2012 for $85,000.

But for the three men accused of serially raping the DeCoster workers, life goes on. One of the alleged perpetrators lives in a tree-lined subdivision in a small Iowa town.

According to family members, the other two have relocated to Mexico. One of them on his Facebook page lists members of the DeCoster family as his friends.

An Image At Odds With Allegations

The Evans Fruit Co. is one of the biggest apple operations in the country, shipping 320 million pounds a year to markets around the globe. A job there is desirable, workers said in interviews, because the size of the operation means more work, longer days and bigger paychecks.

The claims lodged against Evans Fruit for failing to stop sexual assault and harassment can be difficult to reconcile with its homespun image.

The company’s beginnings make it seem beyond reproach. Bill and Jeannette Evans, now in their 80s, first met at a chocolate shop in downtown Yakima, Wash., got married as teenagers and started the company with 10 acres. They work nearly every day of the year, and now the company cultivates its award-winning crop across 7,500 acres on various farms.

The ranch that Juan Marin managed is Evans Fruit’s second largest. The orchard sits at the foot of the Rattlesnake Hills, near the city of Sunnyside. The property is vast: From the main road, stands of apple trees blend into distant orchards, a blur of fruit, branches and greenery.

Here, some 50 miles from company headquarters, Marin wielded power in the ugliest ways, workers claimed in interviews and court testimony. In these remote and endless groves, Marin is said to have bragged constantly about his sexual exploits and to have groped women while they stood on ladders filling picking bags.

It’s where he allegedly pinned 15-year-old Jacqueline Abundez between tree branches and said – loudly enough for bystanders to hear – that despite her young age, she could “already endure the stick,” a former Evans Fruit tractor driver told government investigators.

Abundez filed a sexual harassment claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2006. Her mother, Angela Mendoza, filed another claim based on what allegedly happened to her daughter, telling lawyers in a deposition that Marin had said: “Give me your daughter. I’ll marry her and I’ll have her give birth every year to a son or a daughter year after year.”

In an unrelated case, Abundez was found dead in 2008 at age 17, her body dumped in an irrigation canal. The Yakima County Sheriff’s Office investigated, but her death remains unsolved. The judge dropped her harassment case, along with her mother’s.

Attorneys for Evans Fruit said the company could not substantiate the claims by Abundez or Mendoza that they had been harassed.

In 2008, more complaints came in. An apple picker named Wendy Granados told the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Marin separated women from their husbands, who also worked for Evans Fruit, so that he could harass them. He “offered pay raises, cars, and houses in exchange for sexual favors,” according to her complaint.

Later that year, another Evans worker named Norma Valdez filed a claim alleging that Marin had forcibly hugged and kissed her in his truck and said he had done the same thing in 2005. He called her “my love” and “my star,” and he told people at the ranch that she was pregnant with his child, according to the complaint.

The company’s lawyers said they could find no corroborating evidence of misbehavior, and Marin kept his job.

In June 2010, the commission filed a lawsuit against Evans Fruit alleging that Marin and some of the crew leaders had sexually harassed or assaulted at least seven women at the Sunnyside ranch. As the case progressed, a total of 26 women with similar claims joined the lawsuit.

In her case, Esther Abarca testified that Marin groped her three more times – once again in his truck and twice after he had taken her to properties he owned.

At trial, these incidents were used to discredit Abarca because she hadn’t mentioned the later incidents in her deposition testimony.

“It made my job on cross-exam much easier,” said Monahan, the attorney for Evans Fruit. “I was able to illustrate for the jury this remarkable escalation of alleged offenses. My sense is the jury found her absolutely not credible.”

Four additional women told stories like Abarca’s in federal court: Marin ordered them into his truck and then fondled or attacked them, they said. Others said Marin had propositioned them for sex or offered to put them up as mistresses in exchange for bearing him a son.

Several women accused other crew leaders of misbehavior at the ranch, including one who allegedly exposed himself and showed pictures of male genitalia on his cellphone.

Motivation Questioned

About a month after the suit was filed, Marin was fired. His letter of dismissal did not mention sexual harassment allegations – company lawyers said they still have no proof of the women’s claims. Instead, the letter said he was let go because the company had evidence he had embezzled money.

A father of seven daughters who emigrated from Mexico in the early 1970s by crawling through a sewer tunnel, Marin emphatically denies stealing from the company. He said the apartment buildings and houses he owns around Sunnyside – valued at more than $1.8 million – are the product of hard work and sound investment decisions.

“Had to be somebody else because (it was) not me,” Marin said. “I can never betray the company.”

Lawyers for Evans Fruit argued that the women who have accused the company of wrongdoing were motivated by financial gain.

“The claimants need money, and you may consider that that is a powerful incentive to invent or exaggerate their stories,” attorney Carolyn Cairns said at the trial. “These folks are poor. For the most part, they’re uneducated, and their career paths, frankly, are not bright. This is their chance to get some extra money, and they’re grabbing the brass ring.”

But women who did not participate in the lawsuit also have accused Marin of making sexual advances.

One of those women – who is mentioned repeatedly as a Marin target in court filings – trembled as she drove down Cemetery Road, four miles from the Evans Fruit orchard. Turning onto a fire road, she pointed to a house where Marin and his family now live. She said that when she was a 17-year-old employee, he offered to let her live there for free if she would bear him a son. She refused.

A 39-year-old woman who worked at Evans Fruit eight years ago said in an interview that Marin would order her into his truck, where he would flirt and touch her legs in a way that upset her. If she defied him, she would be fired, she said.

“I know more women who have gone through this and don’t want to talk,” she said. “They’re scared. But we have to talk so that there is justice and the bosses don’t keep doing these things.”

In an interview, Marin said these claims are tall tales that have been passed around the ranch by embittered employees.

“Everyone knows each other,” he said. “And the bad people talk to other people, and people that don’t even know me start talking bad about me.”

Monahan, the company’s lawyer, said Evans Fruit never was confronted with definitive proof of sexual harassment at its Sunnyside orchard, and if it had been, the owners would have acted immediately.

By the trial date, the number of former Evans Fruit workers who remained in the case had dropped from 26 to 15. Some women could not be located. The judge ruled that the others had not been subjected to a sexually hostile work environment.

In the end, 14 women testified about being groped, verbally harassed and attacked at the Sunnyside ranch. Most of the allegations were lodged against Marin, who denied them all.

“I would never do that,” he said repeatedly at the trial.

In April, the jury – seven men and two women – found in favor of Evans Fruit. The jury members determined that the women, including Abarca, had not been subjected to a sexually hostile work environment. And, they decided, even if a hostile work environment had been proven, Evans Fruit was not liable because Marin was not found to be “a proxy for Evans Fruit” and the other alleged harassers were not technically supervisors.

When the verdict came down, the claimants who attended the final day and their lawyers sat in stunned silence in the courtroom.

“I was very sad because I felt they gave to the supervisors a free pass to do whatever they want with women, that there was no law to punish them,” said Danelia Barajas, one of the women who claimed Marin groped her in his truck.

But members of the jury nonetheless believed there was something happening in the orchard.

Bill Huntington, a juror from Walla Walla, said the jury “felt pretty much that there was some level of harassment,” though the women’s lawyers didn’t prove it to the legal standard.

“It’s not so much that we believed Juan Marin,” Huntington said. “But their (the women’s) stories lacked consistency. I hope the Evanses will realize that they need to be more vigilant in their sexual harassment policies. They trusted Juan Marin, and they didn’t think it could happen. They were a little too reliant on him.”

Even the Evans Fruit lawyers concede Marin’s stories have not always been consistent.

“Juan Marin has told a number of different stories, and it’s difficult to figure out what happened,” Monahan said. “But you can’t make these broad assertions that Juan Marin is a bad person and sexual harassment occurred and therefore find the company liable.”

The case is not over yet. Aside from its request for a new trial, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission may appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. A separate case against Marin, filed by three of the women in the federal case, is moving forward in federal court based on alleged violations of state laws.

But the trial was a sweeping victory for the company.

After they got word of the verdict, the Evanses were jubilant as they stood in the parking lot across from the courthouse.

“It is a great win,” Bill Evans said. “It all comes down to accountability and credibility.”

Before getting into his car, the jury foreman, Cameron Fischer, suggested to the Evanses that they should modernize their operations by hiring a professional human resources staffer.

“You have to get on with the times and with the way things are run today,” said Fischer, a former state workplace safety and health officer.

The couple thanked him and then drove to a Dairy Queen, where they celebrated over ice cream.

Creating Anti-harassment Policies

Throughout the trial, the Evans Fruit lawyers argued that the company should not be held responsible for the alleged harassment because Bill and Jeannette Evans could not have known about it because no one complained to them.

Because the Evanses run a business over thousands of acres, “they wanted their employees to know that if they’re out there in the orchard and the Evanses aren’t around, that they can still come to the Evanses and tell them what their problem is,” Evans Fruit attorney Cairns said at trial.

Cairns noted for the jury that some people did go to the Evanses with concerns about their supervisors or paychecks, but they were silent when it came to sexual harassment.

The women countered in court that they didn’t think they could complain because Marin was their foreman. Some said they thought raising the issue would get them fired, or they said nobody would believe them because Marin bragged that the Evanses loved him more than their own son. Others said they were embarrassed to discuss these types of issues with the owners.

The growers’ role in ferreting out sexual harassment became a key question in the Evans Fruit trial, and it’s a problem that vexes agribusiness across the country.

“If I’m the grower and I have my foreman supervising, and he’s misbehaving and I don’t know what’s going on, at the end of the day, I’m responsible,” said Manuel Cunha, president of the Nisei Farmers League, which represents agricultural businesses in five states. “But if the worker is being controlled by somebody who has an upper hand, how is a grower going to know that?”

Sexual harassment policies and complaint procedures can help, but agricultural enterprises don’t always operate on the cutting edge of human resources practices.

Gail Wadsworth, executive director of the California Institute for Rural Studies, said some growers are focused on farming and might not have the capacity or awareness to implement policies on sexual harassment.

“There is a tendency to look at farming businesses as being different from other businesses, and that’s rooted in this concept of the agrarian ideal in the U.S.,” Wadsworth said. “But I do think that farms need to create a corporate culture to include safety for women.”

For instance, in the case of the Oregon tree farm supervisor who was accused of raping a female worker while holding gardening shears to her throat, the grower testified that the company didn’t have a sexual harassment policy because “we’re just farmers.”

Likewise, Bill and Jeannette Evans said at their company’s trial that they didn’t think they had needed a sexual harassment policy before 2008, because the law doesn’t require it and because the company is guided by common sense and respect for its workers.

Sexual harassment policies and training are not mandatory in many states. California, Connecticut and Maine have instituted laws that require sexual harassment seminars for supervisors.

Joe Del Bosque, a California farmworker-turned-grower, said the culture in the fields has changed since he started harvesting cantaloupes as a 10-year-old during summer breaks.

“In the ’70s, it (sexual harassment) might have been more common,” he said. “You knew that when it’s cantaloupe season, there are going to be young women coming, and it’s open season.”

Now, “we’ve taken a new attitude,” he said. “We take these things seriously, and our people understand that.”

As chairman of the workplace safety organization AgSafe, Del Bosque has come to champion sexual harassment prevention. AgSafe helps growers, packinghouse bosses and labor contractors follow California law by providing regular sexual harassment training.

During a meeting in a Fresno hotel conference room in December attended by CIR and IRP, farm labor contractor Josh Beas took careful notes as Amy Wolfe, AgSafe’s president and CEO, clicked through a series of slides.

She encouraged attendees to create a sexual harassment policy, hold supervisors accountable, conduct random inspections and document any problems that arise. It’s about “creating a culture where people can come to work and do the job they were hired to do and people treat each other with respect and dignity,” she said.

But the message doesn’t always travel well with some managers in the industry.

From the back row, Ralph Collazo, who runs a Southern California packinghouse, offered running commentary on the proceedings. As Wolfe worked her way through the presentation, Collazo cracked jokes.

“I want a girl to sexually harass me,” he quipped to the people near him. Collazo did not return calls for comment.

When Wolfe offered some real-world case studies, such as the story of a farmworker who was repeatedly raped by her supervisor, he sounded skeptical.

“She was eating eggs and bacon,” he said, implying that the sex was consensual, “and then she decided she didn’t like it.”

ARTICLE

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/social-issues/rape-in-the-fields/female-workers-face-rape-harassment-in-u-s-agriculture-industry/

Some solutions
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/social-issues/rape-in-the-fields/three-plans-to-stop-rape-in-the-fields/

Why You Should Consider a University Press for Your Book
Updated: April 5, 2022
First Published: April 5, 2022 by Adam Rosen < https://www.janefriedman.com/author/adam-rosen/ >  

Today’s guest post is by Adam Rosen (@adammmmmrosen).

For many authors, there’s a certain template for book publishing “success”: signing with an agent, getting a decent advance, and watching the awards and social media followers roll in. Achieving this fantasy, as you no doubt know, is famously challenging—and arguably getting more so every year as Big Publishing continues to consolidate (to say nothing of recent employee turmoil).

While it’s an oversimplification to declare that the big houses stake too much on celebrity memoirs, former Trump staffer tell-alls, IPs, and other supposed sure bets, there’s more than a kernel of truth here. Platform and brand arguably matter now more than ever, especially when it comes to nonfiction.

Despair not, though. If you have a small platform and a big idea (and strong writing skills), there are other options. Enter the humble, often overlooked university press.

Within the past few years university presses have been publishing some of the most exciting, critically acclaimed trade books around. Last year, for instance, three out of the ten books longlisted for a National Book Award for Nonfiction were published by university presses. West Virginia University Press, which puts out 18 to 20 books a year and is the state of West Virginia’s only book publisher, has earned the sort of recognition and media attention you’d typically expect from a hip new indie press or house ten times its size. In 2020, Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, a short story collection published by the four-person WVUP staff (now five), was named a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and earned a PEN/Faulkner Award, among several other prestigious accolades; last October it was announced that a TV adaptation of the book was in the works for HBO Max. The next month, Ghosts of New York by Jim Lewis, another West Virginia release, made the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2021.

University presses have carved out a unique place in the trade publishing landscape, says Kristen Elias Rowley, editor in chief of Ohio State University Press, by providing an opportunity for “books that can’t find a home elsewhere.” This often translates to “projects that are either pushing boundaries in terms of form or content or voice. Projects that a larger press is going to say, ‘You know, we can’t sell 50,000 copies of this, so we’re not going to do it’ or ‘We don’t think this is mainstream enough.’” She points to two upcoming titles on OSUP’s catalog, cultural critic Negesti Kaudo’s collection of personal essays, Ripe (a Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2022), and Finding Querencia: Essays from In-Between by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, as examples. Both collections will be released through OSUP’s trade imprint, Mad Creek, this month.

Elias Rowley estimates that at least half of all university presses publish books by non-academics. While the core mandate of UPs is to advance scholarship through journals and scholarly monographs, they also have a mission to “put important literary or other general public or regional works out into the world,” she says. Of the 40 to 60 books a year OSUP publishes, roughly a dozen are trade books released through Mad Creek.

“It never seemed like the point was to be insular,” says Derek Krissoff, director of West Virginia University Press. “Part of the value proposition for [UPs] is building bridges that go out to other communities” beyond the confines of academia. In Krissoff’s view, this larger purpose gives university presses leeway to make decisions that are less commercially driven. “We’re very concerned about being thoughtful stewards of people’s resources, because we are part of the state of West Virginia. But we don’t have shareholders who need to be rewarded, and we can be a little bit freer in terms of what we choose to invest in,” says Krissoff. In light of WVU’s recent wave of success, this (winning) strategy feels more than a little ironic.

The backbone of many university presses’ trade programs is probably familiar: local and regional history, cookbooks, photography books, and other sorts of consumer-friendly titles with an obvious connection to the area or university. But many also offer a home for books that are niche, experimental, challenging in various ways, and/or just kind of weird.

I’d like to think of my own as an example of the latter. In February 2018 I put the finishing touches on my proposal: a collection of essays, from various contributors, on the cult film The Room, widely considered “the worst movie of all time” and a personal obsession of mine. My prototype was the Indiana University Press series The Year’s Work: Studies in Fan Culture and Cultural Theory, a heady series devoted to dissecting pop culture bric-a-brac. Its topics of focus ranged from the straightforward (The Worlds of John Wick) to the strange (Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects).

I discovered the series after coming across a 2009 entrant, The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, a deconstruction of, you guessed it, The Big Lebowski. The essay collection felt revelatory, offering enlightening historical and critical analysis that helped less-savvy viewers (such as myself) uncover the layers upon layers of meaning in the film, whether related to the Gulf War, the failures of the New Left, or the influence of literary critic Paul de Man on the Coen brothers (and, of course, nihilists and white Russians). It was often hilarious, but it took its subject matter seriously. For its efforts it snagged reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post.

A few of the agents I submitted my proposal to told me they liked my idea but the scope felt too narrow; one suggested I expand the focus to bad films in general. Alternatively, it was too academic. The bottom line was that they didn’t think they could sell it in its current form.

After several dozen rejections, I changed tacks and started submitting directly to university presses, who I knew were open to unsolicited queries and proposals. This time the feedback was more encouraging, but I still ran into the same problem, just from a different side: several editors said they liked my idea, but it felt too trade-y—they wouldn’t know how to sell it.

The sweet spot, it turned it out, was with an academic press with a strong trade arm who published on pop culture: Indiana University Press, i.e., the publisher who put out the very book I was meticulously, and possibly shamelessly, modeling my own book on. I ended up exactly where I began. 

Initially I was a bit surprised that they’d have me. I have a BA in political science, and while as a freelance writer I’ve written about pop culture (including a piece on The Room), I don’t have a film beat. And yet, four years later, I’m the editor of and contributor to a collection of essays about a film, a book whose vast majority of contributors are academics. Another, related data point: an author whose book proposal and sample chapters I recently edited has received an encouraging amount of initial interest from her first-choice publisher, a university press in her geographic area, despite not having a bachelor’s. But she does have excellent research skills and deep professional expertise in a field related to the topic of her book, an iconic bridge.

All of which is to say that (a) university presses are not just for scholars; and (b) many are far more open-minded than you may think—as I once thought.

If you are interested in submitting to a university press, Elias Rowley and Krissoff have a few suggestions. Given the unique focus areas and track record of each press, any place you contact should be a good match for your topic. Proposing a book about birding in Maine probably isn’t a great fit for, say, University of Nevada Press. That said, “fit” can be expansive, thematic as much as geographic. “I think what our books have in common is that they are grounded in place,” says Krissoff. “And it doesn’t always mean they’re grounded in our place, although a lot of our books are about Appalachia or about Appalachian topics.”

While having a decent platform doesn’t hurt, says Krissoff, it’s not necessary; he says he doesn’t look for an author’s metrics when he’s reviewing a project. If he likes their idea, it’s much more important that the author is willing to truly commit to the writing, revising, and marketing processes. “Platform is always a bonus and can really make a difference in the outcome for a book, but it’s not going to be the thing that makes me decide not to do a project,” says Elias Rowley. “I’m not looking for a bare minimum of certain kinds of requirements. I’m looking for [if] this is a book that should be out there in the world.”

To that end, Elias Rowley says that it’s rarely too early to get on an editor’s radar. She advises authors to reach out and connect with editors early on, whether it’s through email or in-person events like the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference. She’ll even respond to queries that are submitted before the proposal’s been written. This way, if she likes an idea and thinks it might be a good fit, she can help develop it from the beginning. “We’re interested in forging those relationships and having it be a collaborative partnership,” she says.

The downsides? University presses typically don’t offer an advance, and if they do, it’s probably going to be pretty modest. That said, if your book sells well, you earn royalties immediately, since you don’t need to “earn out.” As Belt publisher Anne Trubek puts it, “Advances are royalties. They just come sooner.” It’s also expected that authors supply their own index, which means either using software to do a bad job or hiring someone to make one (what I did). I also gave each essay contributor an honorarium.

So when my book publishes this October, technically I’ll already be in the hole. Will I sell enough books to break even? Hard to say. I do think it could be a strong backlist contender. As I argue in my book, The Room has become The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the millennial generation. There are (or were, before Covid) monthly Saturday night screenings of it around the world, each replete with a set of established viewing rituals. The film’s notoriety continues to grow alongside that of its eccentric creator, Tommy Wiseau. But this may be wishful thinking.

On the other hand, I already consider my journey a success. Having a book title under my name with a well-respected university press has brought me a level of professional prestige, boosting my credibility as freelance book editor and opening doors for various writing projects. I also have the satisfaction of having taken the germ of an idea, turned it into a proposal, wrangled together 16 smart (and, blessedly, easy to work with) contributors, and executed the entire thing into the form of a book I will eventually hold in my hands. And, certainly last but not least, I’d like to think I’ve played a small part in furthering the world’s knowledge of the worst movie of all time, which surely counts for something.

It’s not the typical publishing success template, much less a show on HBO Max. But it just may be good enough.

IN AMENDMENT

Why Your Amazing Writing Group Might Be Failing You
https://www.janefriedman.com/why-your-amazing-writing-group-might-be-failing-you/

MY THOUGHTS to Alice 2022
First to history, 
Mae Louise Walls Miller is the name of the Black woman whose life, in my opinion, was a prime source to the research from Antoinette Harrell, who spanned many Black individuals in slavery or criminal bondage.  I must say that first as the authors or content creators to many, most I viewed or read,  articles/videos about the alice 2022 film didn't seem able to mention the Black woman in question, whose real life story inspired the video fable or the black woman who researched her. 
The story of Miller, in the articles below in more detail, displays one of the large problems when we assess usa history. Most problems in the USA are publicly known, but financial profit or fear blockade any action. The White community profited from black enslavement before or after the 13th amendment, and thus white individuals or groups were against opposed in any form, including merely speaking, to stand against abuses to blacks from the white community. 

Second to the law
Like mandates, proclamations are not laws in the usa legal system. Proclamations are public announcements by the government. Mandates are public orders by the government. Proclamations or mandates by default are contestable in a court of law as they are not laws. The 13th amendment is a law, and it ended slavery throughout the entirety of the usa but the penal system. 
I quote: 
"Section 1
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." 
Sequentially, the emanicpation proclamation has to stop being referred to as the moment slavery ended. From a legal standpoint, slavery has never ended, so black people saying it has is not being honest to the situation of the black community in the usa. 

Third to the video fable, 
I keep hearing Donny Hathaway's to be young gifted and black in my head, when I see Common. Am I wrong? 
Many of the articles seem focused on suggesting this as a faux history, when I see more of a Black film fiction circa 2000. For me the story of this film of a black women who thinks she is in the 1800s but is in truth, 1960s is clearly modern Black horror in the space of Get Out or US. 
The poster and the words of the director clearly show this is a movie worthy of the roles Pam Grier played in the 1970s. A good revenge romp for fans of that genre or those with a penchant for black heroes in film.

ALice 2022
written and directed by Krystin Ver Linden
Keke Palmer as Alice
Jonny Lee Miller as Paul Bennet
Common as Frank
Gaius Charles as Joseph
Alicia Witt as Rachel

ARTICLES

TITLE: Black People in the US Were Enslaved Well into the 1960s
AUTHOR(S):Antoinette Harrell , at told to Justin Fornal
TIME OF PUBLISH: February 28, 2018, 12:00am
CONTENT:

More than 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, there were black people in the Deep South who had no idea they were free. These people were forced to work, violently tortured, and raped.

Historian and genealogist Antoinette Harrell has uncovered cases of African Americans still living as slaves 100 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The 57-year-old Louisiana native has dedicated more than 20 years to peonage research. Through her work, she's unearthed painful stories in Southern states like Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Florida. Over a series of interviews, she told Justin Fornal about how she became an expert of modern slavery in the United States.

My mother always talked to me about our family history and the family members who had passed on. She only knew so many stories, so oftentimes she would tell the same ones over and over again. Each time she repeated a story, I felt like she was trying to give me a message. It was like she was trying to tell me that if I wanted to know more about who we were, I would have to dig deeper.
We knew our family had once been slaves in Louisiana. In 1994, I started to look into historical records and public records. I found my ancestors in the 1853 inventory belonging to Benjamin and Celia Bankston Richardson. Written down alongside other personal belongings that included spoons, forks, hogs, cows, and a sofa were my great great grandparents, Thomas and Carrie Richardson.
Carrie and her child Thomas had been appraised at $1,100. Seeing my ancestor’s perceived value written on a piece of paper changed me. It also set forth the direction of my life. It was terribly painful, but I needed to know more. What did they do after Emancipation in 1863? Where did they go? I tracked down Freedmen contracts of the Harrell side of my family that proved that they were sharecroppers. Word started spreading around New Orleans about how I was using genealogy to connect the dots of a lost history. Soon enough people started requesting that I come and speak about how I was uncovering my family’s story so they could do the same for themselves. It became a chance to find out who we were and where we came from as descendants of enslaved people. This was a chance to learn a history we were never taught in school.
The only fact that seemed certain was that slavery ended with the passing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. But even that turned out to be less than true.
One day a woman familiar with my work approached me and said, “Antoinette, I know a group of people who didn’t receive their freedom until the 1950s.” She had me over to her house where I met about 20 people, all who had worked on the Waterford Plantation in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. They told me they had worked the fields for most of their lives. One way or another, they had become indebted to the plantation’s owner and were not allowed to leave the property. This situation had them living their lives as 20th-century slaves. At the end of the harvest, when they tried to settle up with the owner, they were always told they didn't make it into the black and to try again next year. Every passing year, the workers fell deeper and deeper in debt. Some of those folks were tied to that land into the 1960s.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Most shocking of all was their fear. I saw time and time again, people were afraid to share their stories. They were afraid to give this information to me, even behind closed doors decades later. They believed that they might somehow get sent back to a plantation that wasn’t even operating anymore. As I would realize, people are afraid to share their stories, because in the South so many of the same white families who owned these plantations are still running local government and big businesses. They still hold the power. So the poor and disenfranchised really don’t have anywhere to share these injustices without fearing major repercussions. To most folks, it just isn’t worth the risk. So, sadly, most situations of this sort go unreported.
Six months after that meeting, I was giving a lecture on genealogy and reparations in Amite, Louisiana, when I met Mae Louise Walls Miller. Mae walked in after the lecture was over, demanding to speak with me. She walked up, looked me in the eye, and stated, “I didn’t get my freedom until 1963.”
Mae's father, Cain Wall, lost his land by signing a contract he couldn’t read that had sealed his entire family’s fate. As a young girl, Mae didn’t know that her family’s situation was different from anyone else’s. The family didn’t have TV, so Mae just assumed everyone lived the same way her brothers and sisters did. They were not permitted to leave the land and were subject to regular beatings from the land owners. When Mae got a bit older, she would be told to come up to work in the main house with her mother. Here she would be raped by whatever men were present. Most times she and her mother were raped simultaneously alongside each other.
Her father, Cain, couldn’t take the suffering anymore and tried to flee the property by himself in the middle of the night. His plan was to register for the army and get stationed far away. But he was picked up by some folks claiming they would help him. Instead, they took him right back to the farm, where he was brutally beaten in front of his family.
When Mae was about 14, she decided she would no longer go up to the house. Her family pleaded with her as the punishment would come down on all of them. Mae refused and sassed the farm owner’s wife when she told her to work. Worrying that Mae would be killed by the owners, Cain beat his own daughter bloody in hopes of saving her. That evening still covered in blood, Mae ran away through the woods. She was hiding in the bushes by the road when a family rode by with their mule cart. The lady on the cart saw the bush moving. She got off to find Mae crying, bloodied and terrified. That white family took her in and rescued the rest of the Wall’s later that night.
These stories are more common than you think. There were also Polish, Hungarian, and Italian immigrants, as well other nationalities, who got caught up in these situations in the American South. But the vast majority of 20th-century slaves were of African descent.
When I met Mae, her father Cain was still alive. He was 107 years old, but his mind was still incredibly sharp. A few times we sat together with Mae and the other siblings. It was a brutal catharsis for them to speak about what happened on that farm. I’ll never forget the look in their eyes when one would speak about a horror they endured. It was clear they had never shared their individual stories with one another. It was something that was in the past so there was never a reason to bring it up. One day Cain was watching the television, and there was a Caucasian man with stark white hair on the program. The way he looked must have reminded Cain of someone from the farm. Cain believed that because he had told me what happened on the farm that the man on the TV was going to come to his house and drag him back. Opening the suppressed memories upset him so much he ended up in the hospital. The family kept me away for a while after that.
But Mae and I became good friends and would lecture together. There were unusual ticks she had from her upbringing. Sometimes, when we would be at an event where there was free food, she couldn’t stop eating. She told me this was from years of not knowing when she would eat again. There were other times she would need to take her shoes off. She had grown up not wearing shoes and said sometimes her feet felt uncomfortable when she wore them. The nuances of Mae’s PTSD from growing up as a slave gave me a look into what life must have been like for many of our ancestors who were held under such inhumane conditions.
Mae died in 2014. She was a fearless beautiful spirit and has left a gigantic void. I am glad her brother Arthur is continuing to tell the Wall’s family story. People who hear these stories will often say, “You should have gone to the police.” “You should have run sooner.” But the land down here goes on forever. These plantations are a country unto themselves. The property goes from can't see to to can't see. Even if you could run, where would you go? Who would you go to?
Do I believe Mae’s family was the last to be freed? No. Slavery will continue to redefine itself for African Americans for years to come. The school to prison pipeline and private penitentiaries are just a few of the new ways to guarantee that black people provide free labor for the system at large. However, I also believe there are still African families who are tied to Southern farms in the most antebellum sense of speaking. If we don’t investigate and bring to light how slavery quietly continued, it could happen again.
There were several times when I returned to the property where Mae and her family were held. There isn’t much there anymore in terms of the farm.
One day I walked with Mae deep into the woods to see the old green creek she always spoke about. That filthy patch of water where the cows pissed and shit was the same water that Mae and her family drank and bathed in. As we stood together looking into the water Mae’s words were forever seared into my soul.
“I told you my story because I have no fear in my heart. What can any living person do to me? There is nothing that can be done to me that hasn’t already been done.”

U.R.L.: https://www.vice.com/en/article/437573/blacks-were-enslaved-well-into-the-1960s

TITLE: The enslaved black people of the 1960s who did not know slavery had ended
AUTHOR: ISMAIL AKWEI
CONTENT:

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 which changed the status of over 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the South from slave to free, did not emancipate some hundreds who were slaves through to the 1960s.
This was revealed by historian and genealogist Antoinette Harrell who unearthed shocking stories of slaves in Southern states like Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Florida over hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
She told Justin Fornal that her 1994 journey of historical truth revealed the stories of many 20th century slaves who came forth in New Orleans when they heard that she was using genealogy to connect the dots of a lost history.
She said a woman introduced her to about 20 people who had worked on the Waterford Plantation in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, as slaves until the 1960s.
“One way or another, they had become indebted to the plantation’s owner and were not allowed to leave the property … At the end of the harvest, when they tried to settle up with the owner, they were always told they didn’t make it into the black and to try again next year. Every passing year, the workers fell deeper and deeper in debt,” she said.
Many of them were afraid to share their stories as they believed they will be sent back to the plantation which isn’t even in operation. “People are afraid to share their stories, because in the South so many of the same white families who owned these plantations are still running local government and big businesses. They still hold the power.
“So the poor and disenfranchised really don’t have anywhere to share these injustices without fearing major repercussions. To most folks, it just isn’t worth the risk. So, sadly, most situations of this sort go unreported,” she told Justin Fornal and was published in art and culture magazine website Vice.
One of the 20th-century slaves was Mae Louise Walls Miller and she didn’t get her freedom until 1963. Her father, Cain Wall, lost his land by signing a contract he couldn’t read that enslaved his entire family.
They were not permitted to leave the land and the owners subjected them to beatings and rape. Mae and her mother were most times raped simultaneously alongside each other by white men when they go to the main house to work.
According to Harrell’s narration, Mae and her family did not know what was happening outside the land as they had no TV. Her father tried to flee the property, but was caught by other landowners who returned him to the farm where he was brutally beaten in front of his family.
When Harrell met Mae, her father was alive and he was 107 years old with a sharp memory. He beat Mae when she was 14 for attempting to flee the farm, an action whose consequence was beating of the entire family.
Mae, covered in blood, still run into the woods in the evening and hid in the bushes where a white family took her in and rescued the rest of her family later that night.
Harrell said the family suffered from PTSD as a result of their experiences. Mae died in 2014.
“I told you my story because I have no fear in my heart. What can any living person do to me? There is nothing that can be done to me that hasn’t already been done,” Mae told Harrell when they visited the property she and her family were held.
Antoinette Harrell believes “there are still African families who are tied to Southern farms in the most antebellum sense of speaking. If we don’t investigate and bring to light how slavery quietly continued, it could happen again.”
< https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/vice-the-slavery-detective-of-the-south/5a947b9cf1cdb3764f3eee86?jwsource=cl > 
URL: https://face2faceafrica.com/article/the-enslaved-black-people-of-the-1960s-who-did-not-know-slavery-had-ended

TITLE: Made in Frame: Inside Krystin Ver Linden’s Fiery Sundance Debut, “Alice”
AUTHOR: Lisa McNamara
CONTENT: 
Utilize the link for the content, but the videos are placed immediately below

< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHqrOSTIovU > 

< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OibZx09HYAA>

U.R.L. : https://blog.frame.io/2022/02/14/sundance-alice-krystin-ver-linden/

TITLE: Keke Palmer to Star in True-Story Thriller ‘Alice’
AUTHOR: Chris Gardner
CONTENT: Utilize the url below to read but I placed an image of Keke palmer

U.R.L. : https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/keke-palmer-star-true-story-thriller-alice-1298009/

TITLE: ALICE (2022) Movie Trailer: Keke Palmer Escapes from Jonny Lee Miller’s Plantation in Krystin Ver Linden’s Film
AUTHOR: ROllo Tomasi 
CONTENT: Utilize the url below to read the article, I placed the trailer and movie poster beneath.

< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5CHq89MPnE > 

U.R.L. : https://film-book.com/alice-2022-movie-trailer-keke-palmer-escapes-from-jonny-lee-millers-plantation-in-krystin-ver-lindens-film/

Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms

Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms
 View ORCID ProfileSam Kriegman,  View ORCID ProfileDouglas Blackiston,  View ORCID ProfileMichael Levin, and Josh Bongard
aAllen Discovery Center, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155;
bWyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02115;
cDepartment of Computer Science, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405

PNAS December 7, 2021 118 (49) e2112672118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2112672118
Edited by Terrence J. Sejnowski, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, and approved October 22, 2021 (received for review July 9, 2021)

Significance
Almost all organisms replicate by growing and then shedding offspring. Some molecules also replicate, but by moving rather than growing: They find and combine building blocks into self-copies. Here we show that clusters of cells, if freed from a developing organism, can similarly find and combine loose cells into clusters that look and move like they do, and that this ability does not have to be specifically evolved or introduced by genetic manipulation. Finally, we show that artificial intelligence can design clusters that replicate better, and perform useful work as they do so. This suggests that future technologies may, with little outside guidance, become more useful as they spread, and that life harbors surprising behaviors just below the surface, waiting to be uncovered.

Abstract
All living systems perpetuate themselves via growth in or on the body, followed by splitting, budding, or birth. We find that synthetic multicellular assemblies can also replicate kinematically by moving and compressing dissociated cells in their environment into functional self-copies. This form of perpetuation, previously unseen in any organism, arises spontaneously over days rather than evolving over millennia. We also show how artificial intelligence methods can design assemblies that postpone loss of replicative ability and perform useful work as a side effect of replication. This suggests other unique and useful phenotypes can be rapidly reached from wild-type organisms without selection or genetic engineering, thereby broadening our understanding of the conditions under which replication arises, phenotypic plasticity, and how useful replicative machines may be realized.

Like the other necessary abilities life must possess to survive, replication has evolved into many diverse forms: fission, budding, fragmentation, spore formation, vegetative propagation, parthenogenesis, sexual reproduction, hermaphroditism, and viral propagation. These diverse processes however share a common property: all involve growth within or on the body of the organism. In contrast, a non–growth-based form of self-replication dominates at the subcellular level: molecular machines assemble material in their external environment into functional self-copies directly, or in concert with other machines. Such kinematic replication has never been observed at higher levels of biological organization, nor was it known whether multicellular systems were even capable of it.

Despite this lack, organisms do possess deep reservoirs of adaptive potential at all levels of organization, allowing for manual or automated interventions that deflect development toward biological forms and functions different from wild type (1), including the growth and maintenance of organs independent of their host organism (2⇓–4), or unlocking regenerative capacity (5⇓–7). Design, if framed as morphological reconfiguration, can reposition biological tissues or redirect self-organizing processes to new stable forms without recourse to genomic editing or transgenes (8). Recent work has shown that individual, genetically unmodified prospective skin (9) and heart muscle (10) cells, when removed from their native embryonic microenvironments and reassembled, can organize into stable forms and behaviors not exhibited by the organism from which the cells were taken, at any point in its natural life cycle. We show here that if cells are similarly liberated, compressed, and placed among more dissociated cells that serve as feedstock, they can exhibit kinematic self-replication, a behavior not only absent from the donating organism but from every other known plant or animal. Furthermore, replication does not evolve in response to selection pressures, but arises spontaneously over 5 d given appropriate initial and environmental conditions.
 

Results
Pluripotent stem cells were collected from the animal pole of Xenopus laevis embryos (SI Appendix, Fig. S1A), raised for 24 h in 14 °C mild saline solution. These excised cells, if left together as an animal cap (11) (SI Appendix, Fig. S1 A and or brought back in contact after dissociation (12) (SI Appendix, Fig. S1 C and D), naturally adhere and differentiate into a spheroid of epidermis covered by ciliated epithelium (13, 14) over 5 d (9) (SI Appendix, section S1 and Fig. 1A). The resulting wild-type reconfigurable organisms move using multiciliated cells present along their surface (which generate flow through the coordinated beating of hair-like projections) and typically follow helical trajectories through an aqueous solution for a period of 10 to 14 d before shedding cells and deteriorating as their maternally provided energy stores are depleted.

Fig. 1.
Spontaneous kinematic self-replication. (A) Stem cells are removed from early-stage frog blastula, dissociated, and placed in a saline solution, where they cohere into spheres containing ∼3,000 cells. The spheres develop cilia on their outer surfaces after 3 d. When the resulting mature swarm is placed amid ∼60,000 dissociated stem cells in a 60-mm-diameter circular dish (B), their collective motion pushes some cells together into piles (C and D), which, if sufficiently large (at least 50 cells), develop into ciliated offspring (E) themselves capable of swimming, and, if provided additional dissociated stem cells (F), build additional offspring. In short, progenitors (p) build offspring (o), which then become progenitors. This process can be disrupted by withholding additional dissociated cells. Under these, the currently best known environmental conditions, the system naturally self-replicates for a maximum of two rounds before halting. The probability of halting (α) or replicating( 1 − α) depends on a temperature range suitable for frog embryos, the concentration of dissociated cells, the number and stochastic behavior of the mature organisms, the viscosity of the solution, the geometry of the dish’s surface, and the possibility of contamination. (Scale bars, 500 μm.)

Previous studies reported spontaneous aggregation of artificial particles by groups of wild-type self-organizing (9) and artificial intelligence (AI)–designed (10) reconfigurable organisms: the particles were gathered and compressed as a side effect of their movement. Here, kinematic self-replication was achieved by replacing the synthetic particles in the arena with dissociated X. laevis stem cells as follows.

When 12 wild-type reconfigurable organisms are placed in a Petri dish amid dissociated stem cells (Fig. 1B), their combined movement reaggregates some of the dissociated cells into piles (Fig. 1 C and D). Piled cells adhere, compact, and over 5 d, develop into more ciliated spheroids (Fig. 1E) also capable of self-propelled movement. These offspring are then separated from their progenitor spheroids and placed in a new Petri dish containing additional dissociated stem cells (Fig. 1F). There, offspring spheroids build further piles, which mature into a new generation of motile spheroids (Movie S1).

In four of five independent trials using densities of 25 to 150 cells/mm2, wild-type reconfigurable organisms kinematically self-replicated only one generation. In the fifth trial, two generations were achieved. Each successive generation, the size and number of offspring decreased until offspring were too small to develop into self-motile organisms, and replication halted.

To determine if offspring were indeed built by the kinematics of progenitor organisms rather than just fluid dynamics and self-assembly, the dissociated stem cells were observed alone without the progenitors. With no progenitor organisms present, no offspring self-assembled at any of the stem cell concentrations tested (SI Appendix, Fig. S2E).

Kinematic Self-Replication.
Given their rapid loss of replicative ability, reconfigurable organisms can be viewed as autonomous but partially functioning machines potentially amenable to improvement. Autonomous machines that replicate kinematically by combining raw materials into independent functional self-copies have long been known to be theoretically possible (15). Since then, kinematic replicators have been of use for reasoning about abiogenesis, but they have also been of engineering interest: If physical replicators could be designed to perform useful work as a side effect of replication, and sufficient building material were discoverable or provided, the replicators would be collectively capable of exponential utility over time, with only a small initial investment in progenitor machine design, manufacture, and deployment. To that end, computational (16⇓–18), mechanical (19), and robotic (20⇓⇓–23) self-replicators have been built, but to date, all are made from artificial materials and are manually designed. Kinematic self-replication may also, in contrast to growth-based biological forms of reproduction, offer many options for automated improvement due to its unique reliance on self-movement. If progenitor machines could be automatically designed, it may become possible to automatically improve machine replication fidelity (24), increase or alter the utility performed as a side effect of replication, allow replication to feed on more atomic materials (25), control replication speed and spread, and extend the number of replication cycles before the system suffers a loss of replicative ability. We introduce an AI method here that can indeed extend replication cycles by designing the shape of the progenitor reconfigurable organisms.

Amplifying Kinematic Self-Replication.
Determining sufficient conditions for self-replication requires substantial effort and resources. Each round of replication takes 1 wk, and regular media changes are required to minimize contamination. Thus, an evolutionary algorithm was developed and combined with a physics simulator to seek conditions likely to yield increased self-replication, measured as the number of rounds of replication achieved before halting, in the simulator. Progenitor shape was chosen as the condition to be varied, as previous work demonstrated that shapes of simulated organisms can be evolved in silico to produce locomotion in cardiac tissue–driven reconfigurable organisms (10), or enhanced synthetic particle aggregation by cilia-driven reconfigurable organisms (9).

Simulations indicated that some body shapes amplified pile size and replication rounds, while others damped or halted self-replication. Some but not all geometries were better than the spheroids. The most performant geometry discovered by the evolutionary algorithm in silico and manufacturable in vivo was a semitorus (Fig. 2A). When 12 semitoroidal progenitor organisms were constructed and placed in an arena filled with densities of 61 to 91 dissociated stem cells/mm2, they exhibited the same enhanced piling behavior in vivo observed in silico (Fig. 2B). The offspring produced by the progenitor spheroids (Fig. 2C) were significantly smaller than those produced by the progenitor semitoroids (Fig. 2D), although both progenitor groups produced spheroid offspring. Controlling for dissociated cell density, the diameter of offspring produced by progenitor spheroids was increased 149% by the progenitor semitoroids (P < 0.05) (Fig. 2E). The replication rounds achieved by progenitor spheroids (mean = 1.2 ± 0.4 SD, max of 2 shown in Fig. 2F) was increased 250% by the progenitor semitoroids (mean = 3 ± 0.8 SD, max of four shown in Fig. 2G) (P < 0.05). The only trial using semitoroids that reproduced less than three rounds was terminated early due to fungal contamination. Across the five trials with wild-type progenitor spheroids and the three trials with AI-designed progenitor semitoroids, the size of the first generation of offspring correlated with the total number of generations achieved (ρ = 0.93; P < 0.001).

Fig. 2.

Amplifying kinematic self-replication. Due to surface tension, reconfigurable organisms naturally develop into ciliated spheroids, but they can be sculpted into nonspheroidal morphologies manually during development to realize more complex body shapes. Progenitor shapes were evolved in silico to maximize the number of self-replication rounds before halting. (A) Shapes often converge to an asymmetrical semitoroid (C-shape; pink) with a single narrow mouth in which dissociated cells (green) can be captured, transported, and aggregated. This evolved shape was fabricated and released in vivo (B), recapitulating the behavior observed in silico (A). Offspring built by wild-type spheroids (C) were smaller than those built by the semitoroids (D), regardless of the size and aspect ratios of the spheroids, and across different concentrations of dissociated cells (E). The maximum of two rounds of self-replication achieved by the spheroids (F) was extended by the semitoroids to a maximum of four rounds (G). (Scale bars, 500 μm.)

Given the observation that larger spheroids yielded more replication rounds, another, simpler route to increasing self-replication seemed possible: increasing the density of dissociated cells. However, Fig. 2E shows that spheroid offspring size does not appreciably increase even when tripling density from 50 to 150 cells/mm2 in the presence of sphere progenitors.

The semitoroidal design was found in silico using an evolutionary algorithm (Fig. 3A). First, 16 progenitor shapes are randomly generated. For each shape, nine simulated organisms with that shape are evaluated within a simulated Petri dish (Fig. 3E). If the swarm creates piles large enough to mature into offspring, the simulated offspring are transferred to a fresh dish (Fig. 3F), and the process continues (Fig. 3G). When self-replication halts, the shape is assigned a performance score computed as the number of filial generations achieved. Higher-performing progenitor shapes are copied, mutated, and replace shapes in the population with poorer performance. Each of the newly created progenitor shapes is expanded into a swarm, simulated, and scored (Fig. 3C). The algorithm terminates after a fixed amount of computational effort has been expended, and the shape that produced the most replication rounds is extracted (Fig. 3D). A total of 49 independent optimization trials were conducted, yielding 49 high-performing progenitor shapes (Fig. 3H) that, in silico, produce larger offspring (P < 0.0001) and more replication rounds (P < 0.0001) than simulated wild-type spheroids (SI Appendix, Fig. S6).

Fig. 3.
Evolving self-replication. (A) An evolutionary algorithm, starting with random swarms, evolves swarms with increasing self-replicative ability. (FG = number of filial generations achieved by a given swarm. The fractional part denotes how close the swarm got to achieving another replication round.) The most successful lineage in this evolutionary trial originated from a spheroid that built piles no larger than 74% of the size threshold required to self-replicate (B). A descendent swarm composed of nine flexible tori (C) contained two members that built one pile large enough to self-replicate (two arrows), which, alone, built piles no larger than 51% of the threshold. A descendent of the toroid swarm, a swarm of semitori (D), contained six members (E) that collectively built three piles large enough to mature into offspring (F). One of those offspring built a pile large enough to mature into a second generation offspring (G). An additional 48 independent evolutionary trials (H) evolved self-replicative swarms with diverse progenitor shapes.

Conditions other than progenitor shape can be optimized to improve self-replication. To that end, the algorithm was modified to evolve terrain shape rather than progenitor shape to amplify self-replication in silico for wild-type spheroid progenitors. Terrain was shaped by the inclusion of reconfigurable walls that, once positioned along the bottom surface of the simulated dish, constrain the stochastic movement of organisms along more predictable trajectories within predefined limits. Starting with randomly generated terrains, the algorithm evolved terrains that, in silico, increased the number of replication rounds achieved by the wild-type spheroid progenitors compared to their performance on a flat surface (P < 0.0001) (SI Appendix, Figs. S7 and S8).

The algorithm not only can amplify kinematic self-replication in a given environment but can also bestow this capability on swarms otherwise incapable of achieving it in adverse environments. In a cluttered environment, the wild-type progenitors cannot move enough to self-replicate. However, the algorithm discovered progenitor shapes with ventral surfaces that elevated the simulated organisms above the clutter while maintaining frontal plane curvatures that facilitated pile making and the achieving of self-replication (SI Appendix, Fig. S9).

In contrast to other known forms of biological reproduction, kinematic self-replication allows for the opportunity to significantly enlarge and miniaturize offspring each generation. This was observed in vivo (Fig. 1C) and in silico (SI Appendix, Fig. S10). This suggests that swarms may be automatically designed in future to produce offspring of diverse size, shape, and useful behaviors beyond simply more self-replication.

Exponential Utility.
von Neumann’s original self-replicating machine (15) was capable in theory of not just building a functional self-copy but also other machines as a side effect of the replicative process. If these tangential machines performed useful work, the entire system was capable of exponential utility. As long as sufficient feedstock was available, only a small expenditure of energy and manufacture was required to build the first replicative machine. To estimate whether the self-replicating reconfigurable organisms introduced here may be capable of exponential utility, we created a computational model using known features of the physical semitoroids to forecast their potential rate of increase in utility. It is assumed that progenitor machines will be placed in semistructured environments, sufficient feedstock will be within reach, and random action of the swarm will be sufficient to result in useful work. Given these requirements, the task of microcircuit assembly was chosen (Fig. 4A). Although current circuit assembly systems are fast, efficient, and reliable, in situ repair or assembly of simple electronics in hostile or remote environments is currently impossible using traditional robots, rendering this a use case worthy of investigation. The simulated environment contains microscale power supplies (26), light emitters (27), and disconnected flexible adhesive wires (28) (SI Appendix, Fig. S11). Random action by swarm members can inadvertently move wires and close a circuit between a power supply and a light emitter (Fig. 4A), considered here as useful work. The environment is also assumed to contain dissociated stem cells, such that offspring organisms may be built in parallel with circuit assembly. If any offspring are built, they are divided into two groups and moved into two new dishes with more electronic components and stem cells (Fig. 4 B and C). If no offspring are built, the process terminates (Fig. 4D). In this model, utility increases quadratically over time (Fig. 4E).

Fig. 4.
Forecasting utility. (A) A swarm of self-replicating semitoroidal organisms (gray) was placed inside a partially completed circuit (black) containing two power sources (red dots), four light emitters (circled X; black when OFF, red when ON), and disconnected flexible adhesive wires (black lines). Dissociated stem cells (not pictured), if pushed into piles, develop into offspring (irregularly shaped gray masses). Dissociated cells are replaced every 3.5 s. After 17.5 s of self-replication and circuit building within a single dish, the progenitors are discarded, and all first through fourth filial generation offspring are divided into two equal-sized groups and placed into two new dishes, each containing a partially completed circuit (B and C). If only one offspring is built, one dish is seeded with it. If no offspring are built, bifurcation halts. This process results in an unbalanced binary tree (D). The red edges denote circuits in which at least one light emitter was switched on by closing a circuit from power source to light emitter (OFF/ON inset). The gray edges denote circuits in which no light emitters were switched on. The number of lights switched on increased quadratically with time (E). This differs from k nonreplicative robots that can switch lights on in k Petri dishes per unit of time, resulting in a line with slope k (e.g., a single robot arm could switch on all four lights in its dish at every unit of time [dotted line in E]). With sufficient time, the self-replicative swarm can achieve higher utility than the nonreplicative swarm for any arbitrarily large value of k.

Superlinear utility here depends on a superlinearly increasing supply of dissociated stem cells. This may be more achievable than mining artificial materials for nonbiological robot replicators given that a single female X. laevis can produce thousands of eggs daily, with each embryo containing ∼3,000 cells for dissociation, and X. laevis itself is capable of reproduction and thereby superlinearly increasing egg production. Reconfigurable organisms are thus constructed from a renewable material source which requires less invasive component sourcing than other existing self-motile biological machines (29, 30). The quadratic increase in utility predicted by the model in Fig. 4 may not be achievable when in situ circuit assembly and repair matures and the model can be tested empirically. But, as long as the components are small enough in weight and size to be moved, an acceptable temperature range is maintained, sufficient components have already been created and deployed and are nontoxic, and self-replication is maintained, the system will produce superlinear increases in utility. This can be contrasted with nonreplicative robot technology for the same task, which would require superlinear investments in robot construction, deployment, and maintenance to realize superlinear utility.
 

Discussion
The ability of genetically unmodified cells to be reconfigured into kinematic self-replicators, a behavior previously unobserved in plants or animals, and the fact that this unique replicative strategy arises spontaneously rather than evolving by specific selection, further exemplifies the developmental plasticity available in biological design (1⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓–8). Although kinematic self-replication has not been observed in extant cellular life forms, it may have been essential in the origin of life. The amyloid world hypothesis (31), for instance, posits that self-assembling peptides were the first molecular entity capable of self-replication, and would thus represent the earliest stage in the evolution of life, predating even the RNA world. Unlike self-replicating RNAs which template themselves during replicative events, amyloid monomers can form seeds which produce a variety of amyloid polymorphs, yielding either larger or smaller “offspring” depending on peptide availability, kinematics, and thermodynamic conditions. This variation is similar to modern-day prions, where self-propagating misfolded proteins are capable of forming aggregates of multiple sizes and polymorphisms (32). Although reconfigurable organisms are not a model for origin of life research, which strives to describe the first information unit capable of self-replication, they may shed light on its necessary and sufficient initial conditions.

Traditional machine self-replication is assumed to require a constructor, a copier, a controller, and a blueprint to describe all three (15). However, there are no clear morphological or genetic components in the organisms described here that map onto these distinct structures. The concept of control in reconfigurable organisms is further muddied by their lack of nervous systems and genetically modified behavior. This suggests that reconfigurable organisms may in future contribute to understanding how self-amplifying processes can emerge spontaneously, in new ways and in new forms, in abiotic, cellular, or biohybrid machines, and how macroevolution may proceed if based on kinematic rather than growth-based replication.

Today, several global challenges are increasing superlinearly in spatial extent (33), intensity (34), and frequency (35), demanding technological solutions with corresponding rates of spread, adaptability, and efficacy. Kinematic self-replication may provide a means to deploy a small amount of biotechnology that rapidly grows in utility, but which is designed to be maximally controllable (36) via AI-designed replicators. Even if the behaviors exhibited by reconfigurable organisms are currently rudimentary, such as those shown in past (10) and this current work, AI design methods have been shown to be capable of exploiting this flexibility to exaggerate these behaviors and, in future, possibly guide them toward more useful forms.

Materials and Methods
Manual Construction of Reconfigurable Organisms.
Wild-type reconfigurable organisms were constructed manually from amphibian X. laevis epidermal progenitor cells using methods described previously (9). Briefly, fertilized Xenopus eggs were cultured for 24 h at 14 °C [Nieuwkoop and Faber stage 10 (37)] in 0.1× Marc’s Modified Rings (MMR), pH 7.8, after which the animal cap of the embryo was removed with surgical forceps (Dumont, 11241-30 #4) and transferred to 1% agarose–coated Petri dish containing 0.75× MMR. Under these conditions, the tissue heals over the course of 1 h and differentiates into a ciliated spheroid capable of locomotion after 4 d of incubation at 14 °C. Water exchanges were done three times weekly, and the organisms were moved to fresh 1% agarose–coated Petri dishes containing 0.75× MMR and 5 ng/µL gentamicin (ThermoFisher Scientific, 15710072) until ready for experimental use.

For nonspheroid designs, morphology was shaped via microcautery and microsurgery (SI Appendix, Fig. S1 E–H). The initial production of these organisms began using the methods described above; however, after 24 h at 14 °C, the spheroids were subjected to 3 h of compression with a force of 2.62 mg/mm2. This compression results in a mild flattening of the developing tissue, producing a disk that is more amenable to shaping because it is less likely to rotate out of plane. Following compression, the organisms were cultured for an additional 24 h at 14 °C, after which final shaping was performed. Shaping was accomplished using a MC-2010 micro cautery instrument with 13-μm wire electrodes (Protech International Inc., MC-2010, 13-Y1 wire tip cautery electrode) in combination with a hand sharpened pair of surgical forceps. Each organism was shaped by first subtracting tissue to make a coarse morphology, then by fine sculpting to remove any cellular debris. After 1 h of healing, the morphology became stable for the remainder of the organism's lifespan. Following shaping, individuals were moved to fresh 1% agarose–coated Petri dishes containing 0.75× MMR and 5 ng/µL gentamicin and cultured until ready for experimental use.

All animal use was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and Tufts University Department of Laboratory Animal Medicine under protocol No. M2020-35.

Dissociated Stem Cells.
Dissociated cell layers for all self-replication experiments were obtained from the same starting material as the manually constructed reconfigurable organisms: X. laevis embryos 24 h of age (raised 14 °C). Similar to the manual construction of reconfigurable organisms, the animal cap of each embryo was explanted, and the rest of the tissue was discarded. Excised tissue was then moved via transfer pipette to a fresh 1% agarose–coated Petri dish containing a calcium- and magnesium-free dissociation medium (50.3 mM NaCl, 0.7 mM KCl, 9.2 mM Na2HPO4, 0.9 mM KH2PO4, 2.4 mM NaHCO3, 1.0 mM edetic acid, pH 7.3) and allowed to sit for 5 min. The pigmented outer ectoderm layer does not break down in this solution and was gently separated from the underlying stem cells with surgical forceps and discarded. The remaining tissues were agitated with manual flow from a pipetman until fully dissociated.

Material from 30 embryos were combined into a pool of cells (progenitor organisms are made from the same material, taken from a single embryo, and are composed of ∼3,000 cells), which was then collected and transferred to a sterile Eppendorf tube containing 1 mL 0.75× MMR. This solution was further mixed via manual pipetting up and down an additional five times, creating a final stem cell suspension. Using a clean transfer pipette, this solution was moved to a new 1% agarose–coated Petri dish containing 0.75× MMR. The speed and angle of the suspension deposition determined the concentration of the cells in the dish, and this concentration was quantified by imaging five random areas in the arena, then counting and averaging the number of cells per sq. mm. Cells were allowed to settle for 2 min before beginning kinematic self-replication experiments.

Conditions for Kinematic Self-Replication.
All experiments were initiated by distributing a stem cell suspension into a 1% agarose–coated 60- × 15-mm Petri dish filled with 15 mL 0.75× MMR, as described above in the preceding paragraph. Dishes were placed on the stage of a stereo microscope equipped with an eyepiece-mounted camera allowing for still photographs and timelapse imaging across the duration of the experiment. Cell suspensions were allowed to settle for 2 min, after which an image was captured of the center of the arena for cell density quantification. Following the initial setup, 12 adult organisms were placed in the center of the area among the dissociated cells via transfer pipette. All experiments were performed with adult reconfigured organisms aged 5 to 6 d at 14 °C, as this time point was previously found to represent the middle of their lifespan, and provides a standard movement rate (9).

Combinations of progenitors and dissociated stem cells were allowed to interact overnight (20-h total trial length) at 20 °C, and once the progenitors were placed in the arena, the Petri dishes were not moved or manipulated in any way to avoid disturbing the dissociated cell distribution. Imaging lights were also turned off for the duration of each generation of self-replication, as the heat generated by the light source was found to induce mild convection currents in the solution. Following completion of a generation, dishes were immediately imaged under the stereo microscope and then moved to a Nikon SMZ-1500 microscope with substage illumination for offspring size quantification. All aggregated stem cell tissue, now compacted as individual spheroids, were then pipetted to the center of the dish, and offspring size was calculated by measuring the diameter of each spheroid in the dish.

Upon completion of self-replication, adult organisms were returned to their original dishes, and their spheroid offspring were moved to a fresh 1% agarose–coated Petri dish containing 0.75× MMR and 5 ng/µL gentamicin. Each dish is washed as often as necessary to remove any remaining loose stem cells. The offspring were then cultured 14 °C for 5 to 6 d to verify the mobility and viability of the following generation. Where applicable, further rounds of replication proceed exactly as the first: 12 individuals (the largest individuals are chosen in successive generations) are placed among feeder cells, allowed to self-replicate for 20 h, and then offspring are quantified and separated for culture.

Evolving Swarms In Silico.
An evolutionary algorithm (38) was used to evolve simulated swarms with better self-replication, and for exhibiting diverse ways of doing so. Each independent trial starts with its own unique set of 16 initially random, genetically encoded replicator shapes. Each encoding is evaluated by prompting it to generate its shape, that shape is copied eight times, the resulting nine-progenitor swarm is simulated, and the amount (if any) of self-replication is recorded. The process is repeated 15 times with each of the remaining encodings. Each of the 16 encodings is then copied, randomly modified, and the swarm it generates is simulated. A 33rd random encoding is added to the expanded population to inject genetic novelty into the population, and its swarm is also simulated and scored. Encodings are then evaluated in pairs: if one encodes a swarm more self-replicative and evolutionarily younger than that encoded by the other, the latter encoding is deleted. Giving a selective advantage to younger swarms in this way maintains diversity in the population. Pairwise competitions continue until the population is reduced back to 16 encodings. This process of random variation, simulation, and selection is repeated for 48 h of wall-clock time on eight NVIDIA Tesla V100s.

Generating Initial Swarms In Silico.
Each replicator shape was encoded as a generative neural network (39) that places voxels at some positions within an empty volume of fixed size. The largest contiguous collection of voxels output by the network was taken to be the shape of the replicator. Randomly modifying the edges or nodes in the network modifies the shape it generates.

Simulating Replication.
Reconfigurable organisms and dissociated stem cells were simulated as elastic voxels using a version of a voxel-based soft-body simulator (40) modified to run on highly parallelized (GPU-based) computing platforms (SI Appendix, Fig. S5). Interactions between two voxels are modeled as deformations of an Euler–Bernoulli beam (translational and rotational stiffness). Collisions between voxels and the bottom of the Petri dish are resolved by Hookean springs (translational stiffness). The height of the aqueous solution, and the walls of the Petri dish, were modeled as soft boundaries that repel voxels penetrating predefined bounds with an opposite force proportional to the squared penetration (SI Appendix, section S2.1). The aggregate metachronal wave force produced by patches of cilia was modeled as an impulse force against each surface voxel, pointing in any direction in the horizontal (x,y) plane. The vertical (z) moments and forces of a simulated organism’s voxels were locked in plane to better approximate the behavior of the physical organisms which maintained constant dorsoventral orientation. The dissociated stem cells were simulated by adhesive voxel singletons with neutral buoyancy, and were free to be moved and rotated in three-dimensional space. When two adhesive voxels collided with each other, they bonded. Compaction and spherification, observed in vivo, is modeled in simulated piles of stem cells by stochastically detaching voxels around the surface of a pile, applying forces pulling them inward toward the center of the pile. Voxels were simulated with material properties manually tuned to allow for the largest stable time step of numerical integration. All other parameters of the model were estimated from biology according to SI Appendix, Table S1. At the start of each simulation, the simulated dish is seeded with the nine progenitors and 1,262 dissociated stem cells. After 3 s of simulation time, the progenitors and any piles with 108 or fewer voxels are deleted. Any piles with more than 108 voxels (incipient offspring; Fig. 3E) are then given an additional 0.5 s to compact and spherify. Empty space in the dish is then replenished with dissociated stem cells. The offspring are matured by adding random cilia forces on their surface voxels (Fig. 3F), after which they are simulated for another 3 s. This process continues until no piles greater than 108 voxels are achieved (Fig. 3G).

Measuring Self-Replication In Silico.
The self-replicative ability of a swarm was taken to be the following:
f=s/p+g,
where g is the total number of filial generations achieved, s is the size of the largest pile, in voxels, at the end of an evaluation period of 3.5 s (16,366 time steps with step size 2.14 × 10−4 s), and p is the pile size threshold required for a pile to develop into an organism. If s is greater than p, a new filial generation begins; otherwise, the simulation terminates. A conservative threshold of p = 108, two-thirds the size of the simulated wild-type spheroids, was selected such that relatively few randomly generated shapes achieved g > 0 (SI Appendix, section S2.2). Such overly conservative estimates can compensate for inaccuracies in other simulated parameters.

Statistical Hypothesis Testing.
The diameters of the 10 largest physical offspring (generation 1) built by wild-type organisms across five independent trial, and across different cell concentrations (gray points, Fig. 2E) were compared to the diameters of those built by the semitoroidal organisms in three independent trials (pink points, Fig. 2E). The diameters of all offspring were normalized by dividing by the cell concentration at which they were built. Comparing offspring size in this way is a conservative test since the volumetric difference between two spheres is eight times as large as their diametric difference. A Mann–Whitney U test was performed with a sample of eight independent measurements: the average offspring diameter within the eight independent trials (three trials with progenitor semitoroids, five trials with progenitor spheroids). The null hypothesis is that the average size of the semitoroid’s offspring (normalized by cell concentration) was no different from the average size of wild-type spheroids’ offspring (P = 0.037). Controlling for false discovery rate (41), this null hypothesis can be rejected at the 0.05 level of significance (SI Appendix, section S4.1).

Wild-type organisms produced just a single filial generation in four of the five independent trials. The only trial to produce two generations of offspring was the one with the highest cell concentration tested (150 cells/mm2). The first of three independent trials using the semitoroidal organisms resulted in two filial generations at 61 cells/mm2 but was then halted because the organisms all contracted a motility-compromising fungal infection. In the second and third trials using semitoroids, additional precautions were taken to avoid fungal infections. Three successive generations of offspring were produced at 61 cells/mm2; four successive generations of offspring were produced at 91 cells/mm2. A Mann–Whitney U test was performed. The null hypothesis is that the number of generations of self-replication achieved by the semitoroids (2, 3, and 4 g) was no greater than the number of generations produced by the wild-type spheroids (1, 1, 1, 1, and 2 g) (P = 0.019). Controlling for false discovery rate, the null hypothesis is rejected at the 0.05 level of significance (SI Appendix, section S4.2).

A Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient of 0.9322 (P = 0.00074) holds between the number of generations achieved and the aggregate size of the 10 largest first generation offspring.

Forecasting Utility.
Three kinds of microelectronic components that adhere permanently upon collision were added to the simulation: light emitters, batteries, and wire (Fig. 4A). Each component contains vertically stacked and insulated conductors which maintain connectability under translational and rotational movement in plane (SI Appendix, Fig. S11 C–E). As a side effect of movement, reconfigurable organisms will randomly push together microelectronics modules present in the dish (SI Appendix, section S5.1). If a light emitter connects by an unbroken circuit of wire to a battery, the light emitter switches on permanently (as indicated by a red circled X in Fig. 4 and SI Appendix, Fig. S11).

The swarm builds piles, which, if large enough, develop into offspring, and the dissociated cells are replenished every 3.5 s. Piles under the size threshold are removed to make way for fresh dissociated cells. Because we are interested in estimating utility rather than self-replication, progenitors are left in the dish and continue building additional offspring alongside their former offspring for another four, 3.5-s periods. After 17.5 s of simulation time, the number of light emitters connected to a power supply was recorded, the progenitors were removed, and all offspring were extracted. The offspring were then split equally into two new simulated Petri dishes, each with a new partially completed circuit (SI Appendix, section S5.2). Self-replication and circuit building begin afresh in these two dishes, again for 17.5 s. This is the start of a binary simulation tree (Fig. 4D) in which each simulation begets at most two simulation branches, each containing one-half of the produced offspring of their root simulation. If only a single offspring is created by a swarm after 17.5 s, then only one new simulation branch is started. If no offspring were built, then that branch of the binary simulation tree terminates.

After 50 simulation bifurcations, 5,024 light emitters were switched on. Symbolic regression (42) was used to find the degree of a polynomial function that best explains the cumulative number of lights switched on. Regression found that utility increases quadratically with time, as estimates found by symbolic regression all converged toward the quadratic curve derived by ordinary least squares: 2.7x2 − 43x + 182.4, where x is the number of simulation bifurcations (R2 = 0.9988).

Data Availability
Source code is available in the GitHub repository (https://github.com/skriegman/kinematically_replicating_organisms). All other data are included in the manuscript and/or supporting information.

Acknowledgments
We thank the Vermont Advanced Computing Core for providing high-performance computing resources. This research was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Cooperative Agreement No. HR0011-180200022, the Allen Discovery Program through The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group (12171), the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Vermont, the Vice Provost for Research at Tufts University, and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University.

Footnotes
↵1S.K. and D.B. contributed equally to this work.

↵2To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: josh.bongard@uvm.edu.
Accepted October 8, 2021.
Author contributions: S.K., D.B., and J.B. designed research; S.K. and D.B. performed research; S.K. and D.B. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; S.K., D.B., M.L., and J.B. analyzed data; and S.K., D.B., M.L., and J.B. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no competing interest.

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

See online for related content such as Commentaries.

This article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.2112672118/-/DCSupplemental.

Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.
This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).

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ARTICLE

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2112672118

MY THOUGHTS

Night of the living dead
circa 6:47 I have one of those:) I got mine traveling the motherland. Woosah moments!

We're coming to get Nike , Nicole, He's over there:) 
The first thing I want to know is what either of you will do if a man tries to scare you at a cemetary like that.

Great Trivia Nike, the first film was Night of the Living Dead, the last was Ganja and HEss. Dwayne Jones did an interesting role in a film around the City College of New York. 

Ladies, night of the living dead 1968 is one of those old black and white movies that is rarely shown. In the war film categry think paths of glory. A legendary film, like Night of the living dead, but one that predated the 1980s media surge, and didn't have the annual television power like star trek/twilight zone/its a wonderful life

Nicole, I think it is called listening to a story. The USA during the late 1970s to today was raised on the idea that visual interpretations need to be scientifically honest aside plot quality. Before, people had the idea that special effects was merely entertainment, not a mandate . 

Nike, I don't think Night of the Living dead's plot is so silly. The mist thing from space can be acceptable. But the movie's genious is the explanation to how this scenario came about is in the background, it isn't pushed forward in the story. The genious in the screenplay is, the focus on what do you do if the situation applies is the premise of the plot. The initial character is the woman fleeing from someone formerly dead. Why he is formerly dead doesn't matter. IT is alluded to but it doesn't matter.

Nicole, well said, they came all this way to abduct somebody. Are all humans jesus or something? 

Yes Nicole, the movie forces the question of survival onto the audience. If you are into the story, you aren't interested in aliens or nuclear winds, you are interested on what you will do if surrounded by your parents/children/stranger in the street that are now undead and need you for food.

Good trivia Nike, interesting, Germany banned it for the blood. Outside the usa, the rearing of children or guidance of media is not the same as in the usa. 

Yes, Nicole, but Grimm's fairy tales were softened versions of the original german tales meant for all ages, not just merely children like Grimms. 

Nike, good point, the military is "heroes" in the story, and the usa film industry supports positive images of the military usually. 

Nike, more importantly, than who survived is how they died, i think each character in or about that house's death served a narrative purpose on failure to survive and how it works. 

good question on film influence Nicole

Ladies, Funny how Diahann Carroll was not allowed to be the love interest in Paris BLues in 1961 to Paul Newman or for Sidney Poitier to have a white female love interest in the same movie, while in 1967, Poitier has a white female love interest, who was to be fair, a teenager in guess whose coming to dinner and Diahann Carroll had her own show.

Nike, the sporting world in general was the only place black or white men had any battles in media. Your correct boxing was the only purely violent place.

I will give Night of the living dead a 5 then or now. I think the story or acting still holds up. 

Nicole GREAT POINT, the reason they bring back things is cause they have fanbases and it is financially safer to make a remake over new ideas. 
I comprehend your point but the financial model of film/streaming/cable wants the best return and a totally new story. 
:) good memory Nike 38:59 your reaction Nicole:) thank you jesus, rocky horror picture show

I agree to you ladies, but the reality is, when was the last time the top ten movies were all based on an original idea. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nFruH-5TT0

 IN Honor of Sharknado, what about Alligado? 

Yesterday, July 3rd, in 1843, an alligator was reported to have dropped from the sky after a storm picked it up. What about a prequel to Sharknado, Alligado!!!

What say you? 

ARTICLE

CHARLESTON, SC  – According to the National Weather Service Charleston office, on July 2, 1843, there were reports of an alligator falling from the sky during a thunderstorm in downtown Charleston.

A search for the event, turned up an old newspaper clipping from the Time-Picayune in New Orleans. The Time-Picayune republished an article which originally appeared in “The Charleston Mercury” a local paper founded by U.S. Representative Henry L. Pinckney.
The article described a strong thunderstorm that developed on a very hot July Sunday. St. Paul’s Church was reportedly struck by lightning but not harmed. No one was reported dead following the storm, but an alligator appeared at the corner of Wentworth and Anson street in downtown Charleston after the storm had cleared. And while no one saw the alligator actually fall from the sky, the writer states that “and as he couldn’t have got there any other way, it was decided unanimously that he rained down.” That and the look of wonder and bewilderment on the alligator’s face led to idea that he had come from the sky.

The working theory is the gator could have been picked up by a waterspout the formed over a near by river or creek and was dropped on Anson Street as the spout dissipated. But since no one saw the gator fall from the sky, it could also be he just got lost in the blinding rain.

https://www.wbtw.com/news/alligator-rains-down-from-the-sky-according-to-1843-charleston-report/#:~:text=CHARLESTON%2C%20SC%20%E2%80%93%20According%20to%20the%20National%20Weather,newspaper%20clipping%20from%20the%20Time-Picayune%20in%20New%20Orleans.
 

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