martes, septiembre 10, 2013
South Pas Revisited - Monterey Bend
lunes, septiembre 09, 2013
Sporadic power failures darken wide swaths of downtown San Francisco - Los Angeles Times
Yes, I don't get it. Living in Silicon Valley this summer has really caught me off guard in terms of the stability and predictability of power - electric power that is. For some reason, this region is consistently plagued with recurring power failures. If it's not in Silicon Valley, it's in San Francisco. See the article below for some general follow up on these rolling blackouts.
Sporadic power failures darken wide swaths of downtown San Francisco - Los Angeles Times
Sporadic power failures darken wide swaths of downtown San Francisco - Los Angeles Times
Here Comes Huckabee - LA Times "Huckabee does a flip-flop on Cuba"
Huckabee shifts gears into overdrive as he prepares for his 15 minutes of fame in front of the national spotlight. Letting go of certain "baggage," Huckabee is now bouncing back and pouncing his way to the front of the pack by blasting Castro and illegal immigration.
Check out the article below, as published on the LA Times website.
Huckabee does a flip-flop on Cuba - Los Angeles Times
Huckabee does a flip-flop on Cuba
AP
The top-tier Republican candidate now vows to strangle the regime of Cuban President Fidel Castro.
The GOP candidate now supports a trade embargo against the island nation, a stance sure to satisfy hard-line Cuban exiles.
By Peter Wallsten, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer December 11, 2007
MIAMI -- As governor of Arkansas five years ago, Mike Huckabee joined a bipartisan chorus of politicians who concluded that the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba was bad for businesses. Now that he's a top-tier candidate for president, Huckabee has decided he favors the embargo -- so much so that he vowed Monday to outdo even President Bush in strangling the regime of Cuban President Fidel Castro and punishing those who do business there.It was a change of heart sure to please hard-liners among the Cuban exiles who could make up 10% or more of the electorate in Florida's crucial Jan. 29 Republican primary. But it also reflected the latest move by a once-obscure candidate now grappling with how to transform a burst of momentum into a sustainable bid for the White House.
Huckabee's Cuba flip-flop comes just days after he released a new, hard-line plan on illegal immigration described as "radical" by some of the same immigrant-rights advocates who once lauded him for more liberal views. As governor, Huckabee supported in-state college tuition for children of illegal immigrants and stood up for illegal workers caught in a raid of a meatpacking plant. Now he wants all illegal immigrants to return to their native countries within 120 days.
Huckabee all but acknowledged the political expediency of his shifting views as he stood Monday in a Cuban restaurant in Miami and explained why he wrote a letter to Bush in 2002 describing how the Cuba trade embargo was hurting Arkansas rice growers.
"Rather than seeing it as some huge change, I would call it, rather, the simple reality that I'm running for president of the United States, not for reelection as governor of Arkansas," he said. "I've got to look at this as an issue that touches the whole country."
Huckabee has rocketed to the front of the GOP pack by emphasizing his roots as a plain-spoken Southern Baptist preacher with staunchly conservative views. A CNN survey released Monday puts him in a statistical tie nationally with GOP front-runner Rudolph W. Giuliani. But Huckabee's evolving views on certain issues are giving his rivals for the Republican nomination ammunition as they try to halt his rise. On Monday in Miami, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee criticized Huckabee for changing his stance on Cuba "on a dime to appeal to a particular group of people right before an election," according to the Associated Press.
The night before -- when the GOP candidates jockeyed to appear toughest on Castro during a debate on the Spanish-language network Univision -- Thompson's campaign gave reporters quotes from Huckabee's 2002 letter. Thompson had hoped to win support from the social conservatives flocking to Huckabee. Huckabee on Monday won an endorsement from Marco Rubio, Florida's Cuban American state House speaker, handing the upstart candidate instant cachet in a community that some of his rivals have been courting for years.
He said his decision was based largely on Huckabee's new views on Cuba. Rubio, who has been wooed by all the major GOP candidates, said he decided to back Huckabee after searching for "someone that will fight for what they truly believe in the depths of their heart."
The letter Huckabee wrote in 2002 reportedly argued that the embargo "continues to harm our own agricultural and business interests here at home and has certainly not helped the people of Cuba." His views on Monday were equally firm in the opposite direction, as he vowed, if elected president, to veto any effort to end the sanctions. Huckabee pledged to adhere to provisions of a 1996 law that would permit U.S. citizens to sue in American courts for property taken from them during the 1959 Cuban revolution. Those lawsuits could threaten European businesses with holdings on the island. Bush and President Clinton have routinely avoided conflict on the issue by suspending those provisions of the 1996 law.
"I really wasn't that aware of a lot of the issues that exist between Cuba and the United States," Huckabee said Monday, adding that his flexibility on policy should be viewed as a good thing.
"I'll be the first to tell you I'm always subject -- and I hope we all are -- to learning, to growing, and never being so stubborn and maybe bull-headed," he said. Huckabee appears to be applying that same approach to his views on immigration, another issue that is important to conservative voters in early GOP contests and an area where he is being attacked by his opponents. Like former New York Mayor Giuliani, Huckabee has long been viewed with admiration among advocates for immigrants. He supported legislation two years ago in Arkansas that would have given in-state tuition to certain children of illegal immigrants. And two years ago he reacted with outrage after federal agents raided an Arkadelphia, Ark., poultry plant and arrested and deported many Mexican workers. Huckabee was incensed that federal authorities had separated many parents from their children, and he called for a White House investigation.
"Our first priority should be to secure our borders. I'm less threatened by people who cross the line to make beds, pick tomatoes, or pluck chickens as I am by people like those in Canada making 3-ton bombs," he said in an e-mail to The Times last year. "While we should certainly enforce the law, we need to prioritize." He called in the e-mail for a "process that avoids amnesty, but does provide a path for workers to become legal by paying a fine, getting in the back of the line to register." But Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant rights group, said he was stunned last week when Huckabee released a new plan calling for all illegal workers to register with federal authorities and return to their native countries within 120 days. Those who did would face no penalty under Huckabee's plan if they later applied to immigrate to or visit the United States. Those who did not return home would be barred, when caught, from future reentry to the United States for 10 years.
"To me, it's like night and day," Sharry said. "One day he's saying children of [illegal] immigrants should go to college, and the next day he's saying there should be mass expulsion."Huckabee on Monday said his anger over the Arkadelphia raid stemmed from the fact that local authorities were not told in advance so they could make preparations for the children who were left alone when their parents were arrested and deported. Often, illegal workers have children who were born on U.S. soil and are therefore citizens. He said raiding a business employing "vast amounts" of illegal workers was a "legitimate thing to do" as long as local officials knew in advance.
peter.wallsten@latimes.com
Check out the article below, as published on the LA Times website.
Huckabee does a flip-flop on Cuba - Los Angeles Times
Huckabee does a flip-flop on Cuba
AP
The top-tier Republican candidate now vows to strangle the regime of Cuban President Fidel Castro.
The GOP candidate now supports a trade embargo against the island nation, a stance sure to satisfy hard-line Cuban exiles.
By Peter Wallsten, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer December 11, 2007
MIAMI -- As governor of Arkansas five years ago, Mike Huckabee joined a bipartisan chorus of politicians who concluded that the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba was bad for businesses. Now that he's a top-tier candidate for president, Huckabee has decided he favors the embargo -- so much so that he vowed Monday to outdo even President Bush in strangling the regime of Cuban President Fidel Castro and punishing those who do business there.It was a change of heart sure to please hard-liners among the Cuban exiles who could make up 10% or more of the electorate in Florida's crucial Jan. 29 Republican primary. But it also reflected the latest move by a once-obscure candidate now grappling with how to transform a burst of momentum into a sustainable bid for the White House.
Huckabee's Cuba flip-flop comes just days after he released a new, hard-line plan on illegal immigration described as "radical" by some of the same immigrant-rights advocates who once lauded him for more liberal views. As governor, Huckabee supported in-state college tuition for children of illegal immigrants and stood up for illegal workers caught in a raid of a meatpacking plant. Now he wants all illegal immigrants to return to their native countries within 120 days.
Huckabee all but acknowledged the political expediency of his shifting views as he stood Monday in a Cuban restaurant in Miami and explained why he wrote a letter to Bush in 2002 describing how the Cuba trade embargo was hurting Arkansas rice growers.
"Rather than seeing it as some huge change, I would call it, rather, the simple reality that I'm running for president of the United States, not for reelection as governor of Arkansas," he said. "I've got to look at this as an issue that touches the whole country."
Huckabee has rocketed to the front of the GOP pack by emphasizing his roots as a plain-spoken Southern Baptist preacher with staunchly conservative views. A CNN survey released Monday puts him in a statistical tie nationally with GOP front-runner Rudolph W. Giuliani. But Huckabee's evolving views on certain issues are giving his rivals for the Republican nomination ammunition as they try to halt his rise. On Monday in Miami, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee criticized Huckabee for changing his stance on Cuba "on a dime to appeal to a particular group of people right before an election," according to the Associated Press.
The night before -- when the GOP candidates jockeyed to appear toughest on Castro during a debate on the Spanish-language network Univision -- Thompson's campaign gave reporters quotes from Huckabee's 2002 letter. Thompson had hoped to win support from the social conservatives flocking to Huckabee. Huckabee on Monday won an endorsement from Marco Rubio, Florida's Cuban American state House speaker, handing the upstart candidate instant cachet in a community that some of his rivals have been courting for years.
He said his decision was based largely on Huckabee's new views on Cuba. Rubio, who has been wooed by all the major GOP candidates, said he decided to back Huckabee after searching for "someone that will fight for what they truly believe in the depths of their heart."
The letter Huckabee wrote in 2002 reportedly argued that the embargo "continues to harm our own agricultural and business interests here at home and has certainly not helped the people of Cuba." His views on Monday were equally firm in the opposite direction, as he vowed, if elected president, to veto any effort to end the sanctions. Huckabee pledged to adhere to provisions of a 1996 law that would permit U.S. citizens to sue in American courts for property taken from them during the 1959 Cuban revolution. Those lawsuits could threaten European businesses with holdings on the island. Bush and President Clinton have routinely avoided conflict on the issue by suspending those provisions of the 1996 law.
"I really wasn't that aware of a lot of the issues that exist between Cuba and the United States," Huckabee said Monday, adding that his flexibility on policy should be viewed as a good thing.
"I'll be the first to tell you I'm always subject -- and I hope we all are -- to learning, to growing, and never being so stubborn and maybe bull-headed," he said. Huckabee appears to be applying that same approach to his views on immigration, another issue that is important to conservative voters in early GOP contests and an area where he is being attacked by his opponents. Like former New York Mayor Giuliani, Huckabee has long been viewed with admiration among advocates for immigrants. He supported legislation two years ago in Arkansas that would have given in-state tuition to certain children of illegal immigrants. And two years ago he reacted with outrage after federal agents raided an Arkadelphia, Ark., poultry plant and arrested and deported many Mexican workers. Huckabee was incensed that federal authorities had separated many parents from their children, and he called for a White House investigation.
"Our first priority should be to secure our borders. I'm less threatened by people who cross the line to make beds, pick tomatoes, or pluck chickens as I am by people like those in Canada making 3-ton bombs," he said in an e-mail to The Times last year. "While we should certainly enforce the law, we need to prioritize." He called in the e-mail for a "process that avoids amnesty, but does provide a path for workers to become legal by paying a fine, getting in the back of the line to register." But Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant rights group, said he was stunned last week when Huckabee released a new plan calling for all illegal workers to register with federal authorities and return to their native countries within 120 days. Those who did would face no penalty under Huckabee's plan if they later applied to immigrate to or visit the United States. Those who did not return home would be barred, when caught, from future reentry to the United States for 10 years.
"To me, it's like night and day," Sharry said. "One day he's saying children of [illegal] immigrants should go to college, and the next day he's saying there should be mass expulsion."Huckabee on Monday said his anger over the Arkadelphia raid stemmed from the fact that local authorities were not told in advance so they could make preparations for the children who were left alone when their parents were arrested and deported. Often, illegal workers have children who were born on U.S. soil and are therefore citizens. He said raiding a business employing "vast amounts" of illegal workers was a "legitimate thing to do" as long as local officials knew in advance.
peter.wallsten@latimes.com
Mexico's Blond Tigress - Rosita Quintana
For those of you looking for great Christmas and/or Hannukah gift ideas, check out these recent DVD releases, as recommended by the NY Times website.
The recommendations feature a prominent filmmaker from Mexico's Golden Age of Cinema, and a more contemporary figure that recently shed light on our very own Inland Empire.
Happy Holidays to all! Feliz Navidad!
New DVDs - New York Times
Luis Buñuel is categorized with the likes of Truffaut and Fellini as a pillar of the art-film establishment of the 1960s and ’70s. But before Buñuel returned to Europe, to make late career masterpieces like “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “Tristana,” he spent almost 20 years in Mexico, working on films that ranged from popular genre pictures to thorny personal projects.
His best movies from the Mexican period blend those two extremes, to the point where a film like “Susana” (1951) could both please matinee audiences with its rip-roaring melodrama and enchant more skeptical viewers with its bizarre imagery, acidic social observation and casual subversion of cherished values.
“Susana” is the third Mexican Buñuel film to come out on the Cinemateca label in the last few months, joining “A Woman Without Love” (1952) and “The Brute” (1953). “Susana” and “The Brute” both fall into what has been retrospectively labeled the “bad girl” genre, a subset of film noir driven by female characters with outsize ids. (Hollywood examples would include Orson Welles’s 1947 “Lady From Shanghai” and Joseph H. Lewis’s 1950 “Gun Crazy.”)
The title character of “Susana” is what advertising of the time would probably have referred to as a “blond tigress,” a voluptuous, man-eating reform school girl (Rosita Quintana), introduced on a dark and stormy night as uniformed attendants toss her into solitary confinement. Moonlight streams through a barred window, casting the shadow of a cross on the floor of her cell (otherwise populated by a Buñuelian menagerie of bats, rats and scurrying insects). She calls upon God (“You made me the way I am!”) to release her into the world, and when she shakes the bars of the window, they miraculously come loose.
After crawling through the mud like a snake, this temptress makes her way to the Edenic ranch of Don Guadalupe (Fernando Soler), where she goes to work not only on the kindly patron, but also on his naïve son Alberto (Luis López Somoza) and his brawny foreman Jesus (Victor Manuel Mendoza). But as crafty as Susana may be, she can’t fool the hacienda’s salt-of-the-earth housekeeper (María Gentil Arcos), whose simple folk wisdom is inextricably intertwined, at least in Buñuel’s eyes, with no small measure of ignorance and intolerance.
Buñuel creates a perfect sense of Brechtian alienation out of his self-conscious use of clichés (from horror movies and the ranchero musical, two of Mexico’s most popular genres) and his distanced, presentational visual style. (The camera stands at a measured interval from the characters, and there is little of the cross-cutting that classical Hollywood uses to knit the viewer into the scene.) Yet Latin American viewers of the time seem to have understood “Susana” as an unproblematic melodrama, at much the same moment North Americans were embracing the chillingly ironic soap operas of Douglas Sirk (“All That Heaven Allows”) as standard-issue tear-jerkers. In such ways do wily artists survive the pressures of the marketplace. (Cinemateca/Facets Video, $24.95, not rated)
TWIN PEAKS
One of Buñuel’s Mexican films was “Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” (1954), starring Dan O’Herlihy, an Irish actor with a resonant stage voice who also appears in six episodes of “Twin Peaks,” the cult television show created by Mark Frost and David Lynch. Mr. O’Herlihy is one of the few real connections between Buñuel and Mr. Lynch, directors who are inevitably coupled as fellow surrealists, though in most respects their work is widely divergent.
Buñuel was among the most sober of filmmakers, who after the youthful experiments of “Un Chien Andalou” (1929) and “L’Age d’Or” (1930), burrowed into a dispassionate depiction of the material world, the better to uncover its hidden irrationality. Mr. Lynch remains a besotted fantasist, building his giddy daydreams from the ground up.
Paramount Home Video has finally been able to gather the scattered elements of “Twin Peaks” into a single, handsomely produced set the company is calling the “Definitive Gold Box Edition.” All 29 episodes and the original pilot are here, following the F.B.I. agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) as he tries to solve the murder of a high school girl, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), in the small Washington State community of the title.
Remastered from previous releases, the film has an impeccable presentation, with crisp images that preserve the series’s odd (and, eventually, thematically significant) reddish tinge, and a new five-channel stereo remix that enhances Mr. Lynch’s typically careful sound design. The broadcast version of the pilot, long unavailable because of rights issues, is here, as is the European release with a different ending, which brings the mystery to a radically premature conclusion.
“Twin Peaks” was a sensation during its first season on ABC (it had its premiere in April 1990) and a bust during its second (1990-91), a decline that Mr. Lynch, in a documentary appended here, attributes to ABC’s insistence that Laura Palmer’s murder be solved. But in reviewing the course of the series, it seems plain that it slowly slipped from the control of its creators, devolving from tight little enigmas (what is that elk’s head doing on the conference room table?) and deadpan delivery into broadly played comedy of the most traditional, television sort: the Miss Twin Peaks contest, for example, with David Lander (Squiggy of “Laverne and Shirley”) as host. Slowly, your suspicion mounts that there is no underlying concept. One non sequitur follows another, leading inexorably to the moment when there is no choice but to bring on a dancing dwarf.
The recommendations feature a prominent filmmaker from Mexico's Golden Age of Cinema, and a more contemporary figure that recently shed light on our very own Inland Empire.
Happy Holidays to all! Feliz Navidad!
New DVDs - New York Times
Luis Buñuel is categorized with the likes of Truffaut and Fellini as a pillar of the art-film establishment of the 1960s and ’70s. But before Buñuel returned to Europe, to make late career masterpieces like “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “Tristana,” he spent almost 20 years in Mexico, working on films that ranged from popular genre pictures to thorny personal projects.
His best movies from the Mexican period blend those two extremes, to the point where a film like “Susana” (1951) could both please matinee audiences with its rip-roaring melodrama and enchant more skeptical viewers with its bizarre imagery, acidic social observation and casual subversion of cherished values.
“Susana” is the third Mexican Buñuel film to come out on the Cinemateca label in the last few months, joining “A Woman Without Love” (1952) and “The Brute” (1953). “Susana” and “The Brute” both fall into what has been retrospectively labeled the “bad girl” genre, a subset of film noir driven by female characters with outsize ids. (Hollywood examples would include Orson Welles’s 1947 “Lady From Shanghai” and Joseph H. Lewis’s 1950 “Gun Crazy.”)
The title character of “Susana” is what advertising of the time would probably have referred to as a “blond tigress,” a voluptuous, man-eating reform school girl (Rosita Quintana), introduced on a dark and stormy night as uniformed attendants toss her into solitary confinement. Moonlight streams through a barred window, casting the shadow of a cross on the floor of her cell (otherwise populated by a Buñuelian menagerie of bats, rats and scurrying insects). She calls upon God (“You made me the way I am!”) to release her into the world, and when she shakes the bars of the window, they miraculously come loose.
After crawling through the mud like a snake, this temptress makes her way to the Edenic ranch of Don Guadalupe (Fernando Soler), where she goes to work not only on the kindly patron, but also on his naïve son Alberto (Luis López Somoza) and his brawny foreman Jesus (Victor Manuel Mendoza). But as crafty as Susana may be, she can’t fool the hacienda’s salt-of-the-earth housekeeper (María Gentil Arcos), whose simple folk wisdom is inextricably intertwined, at least in Buñuel’s eyes, with no small measure of ignorance and intolerance.
Buñuel creates a perfect sense of Brechtian alienation out of his self-conscious use of clichés (from horror movies and the ranchero musical, two of Mexico’s most popular genres) and his distanced, presentational visual style. (The camera stands at a measured interval from the characters, and there is little of the cross-cutting that classical Hollywood uses to knit the viewer into the scene.) Yet Latin American viewers of the time seem to have understood “Susana” as an unproblematic melodrama, at much the same moment North Americans were embracing the chillingly ironic soap operas of Douglas Sirk (“All That Heaven Allows”) as standard-issue tear-jerkers. In such ways do wily artists survive the pressures of the marketplace. (Cinemateca/Facets Video, $24.95, not rated)
TWIN PEAKS
One of Buñuel’s Mexican films was “Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” (1954), starring Dan O’Herlihy, an Irish actor with a resonant stage voice who also appears in six episodes of “Twin Peaks,” the cult television show created by Mark Frost and David Lynch. Mr. O’Herlihy is one of the few real connections between Buñuel and Mr. Lynch, directors who are inevitably coupled as fellow surrealists, though in most respects their work is widely divergent.
Buñuel was among the most sober of filmmakers, who after the youthful experiments of “Un Chien Andalou” (1929) and “L’Age d’Or” (1930), burrowed into a dispassionate depiction of the material world, the better to uncover its hidden irrationality. Mr. Lynch remains a besotted fantasist, building his giddy daydreams from the ground up.
Paramount Home Video has finally been able to gather the scattered elements of “Twin Peaks” into a single, handsomely produced set the company is calling the “Definitive Gold Box Edition.” All 29 episodes and the original pilot are here, following the F.B.I. agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) as he tries to solve the murder of a high school girl, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), in the small Washington State community of the title.
Remastered from previous releases, the film has an impeccable presentation, with crisp images that preserve the series’s odd (and, eventually, thematically significant) reddish tinge, and a new five-channel stereo remix that enhances Mr. Lynch’s typically careful sound design. The broadcast version of the pilot, long unavailable because of rights issues, is here, as is the European release with a different ending, which brings the mystery to a radically premature conclusion.
“Twin Peaks” was a sensation during its first season on ABC (it had its premiere in April 1990) and a bust during its second (1990-91), a decline that Mr. Lynch, in a documentary appended here, attributes to ABC’s insistence that Laura Palmer’s murder be solved. But in reviewing the course of the series, it seems plain that it slowly slipped from the control of its creators, devolving from tight little enigmas (what is that elk’s head doing on the conference room table?) and deadpan delivery into broadly played comedy of the most traditional, television sort: the Miss Twin Peaks contest, for example, with David Lander (Squiggy of “Laverne and Shirley”) as host. Slowly, your suspicion mounts that there is no underlying concept. One non sequitur follows another, leading inexorably to the moment when there is no choice but to bring on a dancing dwarf.
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