“I am a home-schooler trying to play sports at high levels in order to get into college,” says Caleb Carter, a 17-year-old soccer player from Charleston, West Virginia. “I’m seeing all these players that I’ve competed with for years…[chasing] after their dreams, and I’m sitting here frustrated knowing that I can’t because the Tim Tebow Bill didn’t pass.”
In 1996, Florida passed the first law allowing home-schoolers to play on public school teams, and since then, over 31 states have followed suit. These laws are often named after Tim Tebow, the former NFL quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner, who was able to play football on his local school team thanks to the Florida law.
In West Virginia, advocates have been fighting since 2011 for home-schoolers to have access to school sports teams. And they’re on the verge of scoring a partial legislative victory.
“The Tim Tebow Act is something that has been on the table and in discussion in West Virginia for almost a decade,” says Jamie Buckland, the executive director of Appalachian Classical Academy, a tutorial program for home-schoolers, and a leading proponent of the bill. In 2017, the Tebow Act passed in the state legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Jim Justice.
“I have a son and he’s a really good pitcher,” says Buckland, “and he missed out on those 11th and 12th-grade years of being able to play any organized sports.”
In 2017, Gov. Justice passed a law that effectively allows home-schooled students to play school sports if they take four state-approved online courses per year.
Caleb Carter tried to meet the online course requirement during his freshman year but found the mandate too onerous. “He ended up having to go to the school three to four times per week because they wouldn’t allow him to take even quizzes without being proctored by someone at the school closest to us,” says Tiffany Carter, Caleb’s mother.
“I don’t know of any student who has pursued virtual school for more than one year,” says Buckland. “[The state] is asking parents to sacrifice a curriculum that they have designed for their child specifically.”
On March 2, 2020, the West Virginia state legislature passed a bill reducing the requirement for online classes from four to one. Gov. Jim Justice is expected to sign the bill.
Buckland says that this version of the Tebow Act is a step in the right direction, but that the fight isn’t over. “We are settling for it this year,” Buckland says, “with the intention of amending it next year.”
Produced by Qinling Li and Arthur Nazaryan; Cinematography by Arthur Nazaryan and Qinling Li; edited by Qinling Li; Graphics by Lex Villena.
Music: “Daisy” by Chad Crouch, Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License; “Remnants of Effervescence” by Brylie Christopher Oxley, Attribution License; “machinery” by Kai Engel, Attribution-NonCommercial License.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2IrzZWU
via IFTTT
At a leftist event years ago, I heard a speaker disparage economist Adam Smith and his idea that a nation can best prosper by letting individuals make their own decisions. With the Bernie Sanders candidacy on the rise, anti-market attitudes have gained steam—even among people who express them on nifty electronic gadgets and do so, presumably, with a full belly. Attendees seemed to find the Smith approach crazy.
Granted, the “invisible hand” of the marketplace is, well, invisible. One doesn’t see the millions of individual decisions that place the exact widget you need for your repair project in your hardware store. I’m not sure why leftists don’t see the marvel of this process. If they want real insanity, they should look at the alternative: the clenched and visible fist of government.
You might have noticed California is enduring housing and homeless crises. The market solution to housing shortages is simple: Government should reduce regulations, slow-growth restrictions, rent controls and fees that limit supply and drive up prices. Let builders build. Homelessness is a more complicated problem because homeless people often have addiction and mental-health issues, but more housing would help.
I can’t say exactly how it will work, just as I can’t say exactly how a molly bolt gets from the foundry in India to Home Depot in Sacramento. But I can tell you what won’t work—namely the policies our government now is championing. Gov. Gavin Newsom spent most of his recent State of the State speech detailing a blueprint for dealing with the “disgraceful” homeless situation, which involves more public spending and programs.
But, as The Sacramento Bee reported following the talk, the governor’s ambitious plans “depend on a state department that is understaffed, lacking permanent leaders and struggling to adjust to change, according to documents and interviews.” You can take this to the bank: The new money will be consumed in a bureaucratic hiring frenzy, used to pay state-level salaries and pensions, and build a bigger “homeless industrial complex.”
That’s a facetious, but accurate, phrase used by critics of the state’s homeless policies. They’ve noticed there’s big money in the homeless business. I’m not referring to the serious and important work Rescue Missions and other charities do to alleviate the sting of homelessness, but rather to the armies of bureaucrats and subsidized businesses who have little incentive to reduce homelessness—and every reason to seek more public revenues.
An investigation from this newspaper group found that a third of the apartments being built through the $1.2 billion Prop. HHH bond measure, which voters approved in 2016 to fund supportive housing, “will each cost more than $546,000, the median sale price of a condominium in Los Angeles.” The report found it “uncertain if the program will reach its goal of 10,000 new permanent housing units.”
I’d think it’s fairly certain the bond will run out of cash before its targeted numbers are met and city leaders will be back asking voters for more money. It’s also certain such projects will at best help a fraction of LA’s homeless. Some projects in Southern California have seen per-unit costs approaching $700,000. This is nuts. So, too, is a widely discussed tweet Gov. Newsom recently made regarding the homeless situation.
Newsom’s initial tweet was fine, albeit mostly pabulum: “We need to start targeting social determinants of health. What’s more fundamental to a person’s well-being than a roof over their head?” Well, sure, no one suggests that sleeping in the cold near a freeway interchange is healthy. But then he tweeted this eye-opener: “Doctors should be able to write prescriptions for housing the same way they do for insulin or antibiotics.”
This shows a fundamental lack of seriousness on the part of our governor. I doubt he really would want doctors to prescribe such things. I can imagine what Blue Cross would say when it received a bill for a three-bedroom bungalow in Santa Monica. (I’d hope my doctor would say my health depended on beachfront living.) As others have noted, this amounts to the “magic wand” theory.
The federal Boisedecision limits the ability of localities to remove homeless people from public places—unless officials have a place to house them. Apparently, our governor hasn’t followed the ensuing problems. Cities don’t have a place for all of them. When cities build these units, they end up costing more than a mini-mansion in Texas, so cities run out of money fast.
It gets zanier. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, the San Diego Democrat who authored the anti-contracting law (Assembly Bill 5) that is decimating the freelance industry, just announced her “Housing for All” package. I fear she’ll do to the housing market what she already has done to the labor market. At some point, even Californians might realize that free markets are the best way to address problems and that trusting officials is true madness.
This column first appeared in the Orange County Register.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3cDjdCg
via IFTTT
No new date for National People’s Congress. Set date will be good indicator #China feels it has contained #coronavirus. I was asked to resubmit my photo for reporting on NPC so at least we know it is not canceled😉. On stimulus, many expect RRR cut soon. No idea on stimulus size. https://t.co/wu9ndkuhxI
More signs #China wants to return to normal. Schools to start reopening next week. Qinghai province to stagger start dates from Mar 11 to 20. Guizhou province says schools to reopen Mar 16. (These areas very few cases of #coronavirus.)
#China’s top health authority expects #coronavirus vaccines to be available for emergency and clinical research use in April. National Health Commission said teams pursuing five approaches. Cautioned about obstacles.
Yoon also highlighted a story in China’s state media calling out local governments for “faking” data like electricity usage to make it seem like China’s economy is more active than it is, something that we’ve also dawn attention to.
Local companies and officials are fraudulently boosting electricity consumption and other metrics in order to meet tough new back-to-work targets as the spread of #COVIDー19 in #China wanes, a @caixin investigation has found. https://t.co/4OW5hGQSLh
As we said at the time: Why must the owner of the empty factory pretend the factory is operating? Because “Higher ups are watching the electricity numbers.” And why are higher ups watching the electricity numbers? Because they know that not only the rest of the world is also watching these numbers, but so is China’s population.
* * *
It only took three months. In that time, the novel coronavirus has spread from a wet market (or, possibly, a specialized laboratory) in Wuhan, China to every continent except Antarctica. Thanks in large part to the EU’s unwillingness to restrict free movement within the Schengen Area, the virus has infected practically every state in Europe. Now that Serbia has confirmed its first case, as of Friday morning New York Time, Slovakia is the only remaining state in Europe that is virus-free. Even Vatican City, Andorra, San Marino and Luxembourg have reported at least one case.
At this point, the only continents that haven’t reported a pervasive spread of the virus are South America and Africa. But we suspect that will change in the coming days and weeks, once the virus has been given time to incubate. Worldwide, the number of confirmed cases is on the cusp of topping 100,000. At last count, we were at 98,704 cases worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins data.
Back in the US, health officials in Washington State, Oregon and California have all identified cases involving individuals who haven’t recently traveled, as we reported yesterday. These cases are a sign of “community spread” to a degree that officials have yet to truly ascertain. So far, the Trump administration has imposed travel restrictions directed at countries with the worst outbreaks, including China, Iran, Italy, and South Korea. The CDC has also warned travelers against visiting Japan right now.
Officials announced the country’s 13th virus-linked death late Thursday and several states announced their first “presumptive” positives, including Maryland, which joined California, Florida and Washington in declaring states of emergency, or official public health emergencies (as in Fla.).
Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday pledged federal aid to Washington State as all but one death has so far been recorded in the state (the other is the dead patient in California linked to the ‘Grand Princess’). 11 of the deaths have been recorded at EvergreenHealth Medical Center in Kirkland, near a nursing home where more than 10 patients and employees have already been confirmed infected.
In addition to the two new deaths announced late Thursday, five new cases were confirmed in the state, four of them among nursing home residents. The fifth case was reported in Snohomish County, the neighboring county that is also a part of suburban Seattle, and has recorded a handful of cases.
Washington’s death toll from the coronavirus reached 13 on Thursday, driven by an outbreak at a nursing home in the Seattle suburbs, and the state’s overall number of infections rose to 75, according to CNN.
As the virus spreads across a Jewish community in New York’s Westchester County, Rabbi Reuven Fink, the rabbi at the Young Israel synagogue and allegedly the rabbi of Lawrence Garbuz, the New Rochelle lawyer who has become the ‘patient zero’ of Westchester County, has also been infected.
According to the city department of health, 2,773 people – most of whom have recently returned from 1 of five countries – are under voluntary quarantine in the city, per the NYT.
But the virus’s potential reach was underscored by a much larger number: The City Department of Health is keeping tabs on 2,773 New Yorkers currently in home isolation, most of them in self-quarantine, city officials said on Thursday.
Most of those under self-quarantine have recently returned from the five countries where the outbreak has been most severe: China, Italy, Iran, South Korea and Japan, the New York City health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, said.
The two new patients confirmed in NYC are hospitalized and said to be ‘critically ill’.
In South Korea, the site of the worst outbreak outside China, officials confirmed another 827 in two separate batches cases so far on Friday, bringing the total confirmed cases to 6,593. The Foreign Ministry publicly rebuked Japan for imposing a two-week mandatory quarantine for visitors from South Korea, and in apparent retaliation, the office has halted visa waivers for the Japanese in what the NYT described as “tit for tat” retaliation over the 14-day quarantine and other restrictions on travelers imposed by Japan.
Offer a classic example of poetic justice, ten leaders of the cult cited as the ground-zero for the outbreak in South Korea – and who may soon face murder investigations for failing to take steps to contain the virus – have tested positive for the virus.
Late Thursday, mainland China reported 143 new cases of coronavirus and 30 deaths for Thursday. On Wednesday, they reported 149 additional cases and 31 additional deaths on March 4, to bring the total cases in China to 80,552 and death toll to 3,042.
As schools remain shut across Japan, Chiba Prefecture has reported two more cases, both men, according to Kyodo.
Though the Pope has reportedly been tested for the coronavirus and confirmed negative, Vatican City, which has an official population of only 1,000 people, has reported its 1st case. Spokesman Matteo Bruni said the discovery was made on Thursday and that outpatient services in Vatican clinics had been suspended to sanitize the areas.
More grim news: Officials in the Netherlands have confirmed their first coronavirus-linked death.
Microsoft, Adidas and Lockheed Martin have joined Amazon, Facebook, Samsung, BMW and dozens of companies around the world that have reported cases among employees. In South Korea, Samsung has suspended operations at its smartphone factory in the small southeastern city of Gumi once again on Friday after another worker tested positive for coronavirus, a spokeswoman said. So far, six workers at the factory complex, where the company makes its top-of-the-line G20 smartphones and the Z Flip foldable phone, have been infected by the virus, prompting several temporary shutdowns.
For the second week in a row, the virus has disrupted Friday prayers across the Middle East. Iran remains the epicenter of the largest outbreak in the region. Some 60,000 mosques were closed on Friday. Iran reported another 1,234 cases on Friday, bringing its total to 4,747, along with 107 deaths according to the official death toll (with ‘unofficial’ reports claiming more than 1,000 deaths).
In India, the number of confirmed cases rose to 31 on Friday as schools were ordered closed across the capital of Delhi after the first case in the city was confirmed on Tuesday. The virus is forcing many Indians to miss out on Holi, one of India’s most important holidays.
Interestingly enough, even as the Communist Party pushed remarks by a professional epidemiologist on Friday who said the number of new cases reported in Wuhan would soon fall to zero, western media shared a viral video of residents of the city shouting complaints at visiting government officials below.
“Everything is fake!” shouted one resident, in a video clip that was shared on social media by People’s Daily, a state-run newspaper, which covered the government’s response to the heckling.
“No Deal In Sight” – Oil Plunges After Russia Rejects Additional OPEC+ Cut
Brent crude futures tumbled by more than 4% on Friday after Reuters reported that Russia had rejected steep production cuts by OPEC to prop up oil prices amid the Covid-19 outbreak triggering demand shocks in China and across the world.
A high-level Russian source told Reuters that Moscow has no interest in backing an OPEC reduction that calls for extended cuts and would only agree to existing cuts that OPEC already agreed on.
OPEC has held several days of talks in Vienna, Austria, backing an additional 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd). However, it has failed to bring Russia on board. OPEC wants non-OPEC to contribute 500,000 bpd to the overall cut. The new deal would mean OPEC+ would cut a total of 3.6 million bpd, a move that would hopefully lead to a rebalancing in the global oil market in the second half of the year. On Russain disappointment, Brent crude futures dropped to its lowest level since July 2017, trading at $47.70 a barrel, or down 4.5% on Friday morning.
Another source, this time with Bloomberg, said that Russia wants OPEC+ to sustain current output cuts until June. It would then be at that time where more data about market imbalances could be assessed and corrected, the person added.
With Russia taking a “tough stance” on the proposed additional cuts, Commerzbank says Brent futures could extend declines to $40 per barrel. However, if Russia agrees to further cuts, Brent futures would jump to $60 in weeks.
Goldman Sachs maintained its Brent price forecast of $45 per barrel in April.
“Ultimately, a rebound in demand, not supply cuts, will be the necessary catalyst for a sustainable rebound in prices,” Goldman said.
ANZ said global oil consumption is likely to crater in 1H20, with expectations of a 1.6 million bpd decline and contract 300,000 bpd on the year.
“Growth may return in H2 (second half of 2020) but is unlikely to be enough to offset the losses,” ANZ said.
As one OPEC delegate said Friday, there’s “no OPEC+ deal in sight at the moment,” suggesting that a bottom in oil prices has yet to be seen.
Being an eight-part series with a total runtime of six and a half hours, Devs might not be an instant sci-fi classic—it’s packed with too much mind-trippy exotica to take in on one viewing. Nevertheless, a sci-fi classic it will surely one day be. (It’s viewable right now on a new Disney streaming operation called FX on Hulu.)
Alex Garland, who wrote and directed every installment of this movie (let’s call it that) has deep roots in the sci-fantasy world, having written two memorable Danny Boyle films (including the great Sunshine), the mega-dystopian Never Let Me Go, the comic-book adaptation Dread, and two films that he also directed, both unforgettable: Ex Machina and Annihilation.
With Devs, Garland takes on one of the oldest philosophical disputes—the one between determinism and randomness. You remember:
Determinism: “Every action in this world is predetermined, why worry?”
Randomness: “No, free will exists—let me demonstrate with this punch in your face.”
Determinism: “I knew you were going to do that.”
Variations on this conundrum have launched many a sci-fi story, but probably never at such painstaking length as in Devs. This could be a problem for some viewers, who might find the movie’s measured, trance-like pace to be simply too slow (and indeed, there are an awful lot of lingering aerial shots of freeways and forests, and some scenes that may have been given a little too much room to breathe—they feel as if they were shot underwater). But still, the rich, hypnotic spell that Garland casts is hard to deny.
The story is set in Silicon Valley, an increasingly ominous place these days. Two young A.I. specialists, Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno) and a Russian immigrant named Sergei (Karl Glusman), are both employed by a quantum-computing company called Amaya, which is owned by a hyper-chill tech genius (aren’t they all?) named Forest (Nick Offerman). Forest is the kind of guy who, when asked how many quantum bits his core computer is able to run, says, “A number that seems pointless to express as a number.” He is a militant determinist, convinced that we live in a universe that is “godless, neutral, defined only by physical laws.” But there’s a chink in his dogma: his daughter Amaya, the company’s namesake, who was killed in an auto accident. In Forest’s belief system, Amaya would have to be definitively dead. But he has created a secretive annex to his company called Devs, where his belief is being tested…and, lately, being called into question. “Everything we do is predicated on the idea that we live in a physical universe, not a magical universe,” he says. “I am scared we might be magicians.”
One day Sergei demonstrates an impressive computational achievement, and Forest decides to move him over to the Devs side of the company, a fantastical golden building located out in the woods, where it’s watched over by a towering statue of a little girl—the deeply mourned Amaya—gazing out over the treetops. Sergei’s new job goes well at first, but then goes badly, and Forest feels compelled to call in his head of security, a chillingly avuncular character named Kenton (Zach Grenier), who is willing to carry out Forest’s orders by any means necessary. (Forest is relieved by determinism of the need to take responsibility for any unpleasant action he sets in motion— “It’s not that I want these things to happen,” he says.)
Before very long Lucy finds herself in the market for a new boyfriend—well, that would be the deterministic reading of her situation—so she reunites with her ex, another tech wizard named Jamie (Jin Ha). Meanwhile, back at the Devs lab, Forest’s brainiac girlfriend, Katie (a supremely eerie Alison Pill), is overseeing the experimental efforts of two differently gifted employees: sweet-natured Stewart (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a snotty prodigy named Lyndon. (Nothing is made of the fact that Lyndon, who appears to be a teenage boy, is played Cailee Spaeny, a female actor. Nor is there any acknowledgement of the singular appearance of a university lecturer played by Liz Carr, who suffers from a disfiguring affliction, arthrogryposis multiplex congenita, but has blazed a trail for handicapped comedians in her native Britain.)
The mission statement at Devs is to perfect a means of peering back into the past, and the researchers are getting better and better at it—working their way from watching old-Hollywood movie stars having sex to traveling thousands of years into prehistory. Looking into the future, however, is prohibited— “too problematic,” Katie says.
There’s a lot going on in this film, and not a lot of it is predictable. Who would expect a Bond-style spy operation to crop up here, or a couple of long, dialogue-heavy scenes that are entirely riveting? There’s also a senator (Janet Mock) who would like to see the NSA to take control of Forest’s company, mostly because she believes that artificial intelligence will eventually create an unemployment catastrophe, but also because, after all, what have he and his tech-head brethren contributed to the world? (“Facebook, Twitter and Instagram make people feel like shit about their lives,” she says. “Twitter makes them feel reviled.”) People like Forest and his ilk, Lily says, “reduce everything to nothing – nothing but code…They have too much power. It drives them crazy, thinking they’re messiahs.”
Among the series’ several wonders—the gorgeous set design and lighting, the carefully weighted performance by Nick Offerman as Forest, playing it totally straight—Devs also has a spectacular, sonically innovative soundtrack. The score, by Garland veterans Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, working with a pair of studio specialists called The Insects, has some glorious electronic environments and electrifying, wordless vocal improvisations. There are even glints of humor amid the generally somber proceedings. Preparing to embark with Forest on a fateful philosophical experiment, Katie makes it clear that she’s been cheating on that Amaya mission statement. “Do you want me to pretend I don’t know what happens next?” she asks him.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/39u3QKn
via IFTTT
Being an eight-part series with a total runtime of six and a half hours, Devs might not be an instant sci-fi classic—it’s packed with too much mind-trippy exotica to take in on one viewing. Nevertheless, a sci-fi classic it will surely one day be. (It’s viewable right now on a new Disney streaming operation called FX on Hulu.)
Alex Garland, who wrote and directed every installment of this movie (let’s call it that) has deep roots in the sci-fantasy world, having written two memorable Danny Boyle films (including the great Sunshine), the mega-dystopian Never Let Me Go, the comic-book adaptation Dread, and two films that he also directed, both unforgettable: Ex Machina and Annihilation.
With Devs, Garland takes on one of the oldest philosophical disputes—the one between determinism and randomness. You remember:
Determinism: “Every action in this world is predetermined, why worry?”
Randomness: “No, free will exists—let me demonstrate with this punch in your face.”
Determinism: “I knew you were going to do that.”
Variations on this conundrum have launched many a sci-fi story, but probably never at such painstaking length as in Devs. This could be a problem for some viewers, who might find the movie’s measured, trance-like pace to be simply too slow (and indeed, there are an awful lot of lingering aerial shots of freeways and forests, and some scenes that may have been given a little too much room to breathe—they feel as if they were shot underwater). But still, the rich, hypnotic spell that Garland casts is hard to deny.
The story is set in Silicon Valley, an increasingly ominous place these days. Two young A.I. specialists, Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno) and a Russian immigrant named Sergei (Karl Glusman), are both employed by a quantum-computing company called Amaya, which is owned by a hyper-chill tech genius (aren’t they all?) named Forest (Nick Offerman). Forest is the kind of guy who, when asked how many quantum bits his core computer is able to run, says, “A number that seems pointless to express as a number.” He is a militant determinist, convinced that we live in a universe that is “godless, neutral, defined only by physical laws.” But there’s a chink in his dogma: his daughter Amaya, the company’s namesake, who was killed in an auto accident. In Forest’s belief system, Amaya would have to be definitively dead. But he has created a secretive annex to his company called Devs, where his belief is being tested…and, lately, being called into question. “Everything we do is predicated on the idea that we live in a physical universe, not a magical universe,” he says. “I am scared we might be magicians.”
One day Sergei demonstrates an impressive computational achievement, and Forest decides to move him over to the Devs side of the company, a fantastical golden building located out in the woods, where it’s watched over by a towering statue of a little girl—the deeply mourned Amaya—gazing out over the treetops. Sergei’s new job goes well at first, but then goes badly, and Forest feels compelled to call in his head of security, a chillingly avuncular character named Kenton (Zach Grenier), who is willing to carry out Forest’s orders by any means necessary. (Forest is relieved by determinism of the need to take responsibility for any unpleasant action he sets in motion— “It’s not that I want these things to happen,” he says.)
Before very long Lucy finds herself in the market for a new boyfriend—well, that would be the deterministic reading of her situation—so she reunites with her ex, another tech wizard named Jamie (Jin Ha). Meanwhile, back at the Devs lab, Forest’s brainiac girlfriend, Katie (a supremely eerie Alison Pill), is overseeing the experimental efforts of two differently gifted employees: sweet-natured Stewart (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a snotty prodigy named Lyndon. (Nothing is made of the fact that Lyndon, who appears to be a teenage boy, is played Cailee Spaeny, a female actor. Nor is there any acknowledgement of the singular appearance of a university lecturer played by Liz Carr, who suffers from a disfiguring affliction, arthrogryposis multiplex congenita, but has blazed a trail for handicapped comedians in her native Britain.)
The mission statement at Devs is to perfect a means of peering back into the past, and the researchers are getting better and better at it—working their way from watching old-Hollywood movie stars having sex to traveling thousands of years into prehistory. Looking into the future, however, is prohibited— “too problematic,” Katie says.
There’s a lot going on in this film, and not a lot of it is predictable. Who would expect a Bond-style spy operation to crop up here, or a couple of long, dialogue-heavy scenes that are entirely riveting? There’s also a senator (Janet Mock) who would like to see the NSA to take control of Forest’s company, mostly because she believes that artificial intelligence will eventually create an unemployment catastrophe, but also because, after all, what have he and his tech-head brethren contributed to the world? (“Facebook, Twitter and Instagram make people feel like shit about their lives,” she says. “Twitter makes them feel reviled.”) People like Forest and his ilk, Lily says, “reduce everything to nothing – nothing but code…They have too much power. It drives them crazy, thinking they’re messiahs.”
Among the series’ several wonders—the gorgeous set design and lighting, the carefully weighted performance by Nick Offerman as Forest, playing it totally straight—Devs also has a spectacular, sonically innovative soundtrack. The score, by Garland veterans Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, working with a pair of studio specialists called The Insects, has some glorious electronic environments and electrifying, wordless vocal improvisations. There are even glints of humor amid the generally somber proceedings. Preparing to embark with Forest on a fateful philosophical experiment, Katie makes it clear that she’s been cheating on that Amaya mission statement. “Do you want me to pretend I don’t know what happens next?” she asks him.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/39u3QKn
via IFTTT
“Can I come over, tonight?” asks Iggy Pop in an early song with the Stooges, the late ’60s/early ’70s band from Michigan that directly inspired many later wild rock music movements, especially punk. “We will have a real cool time, tonight.”
Like most Stooges songs, it’s more of a chant, a primal mood set to grinding, twangy, sludgy guitars that sound like a factory assembly line, or maybe a military sortie in Vietnam, to name the two things Pop was desperately trying to escape in his early 20s.
Iggy and the Stooges reduced rock to its essence of sex and drugs—of sensual, nihilistic escape from a dreary everyday life that seemed to be their birthright as members of the white working class. “Dope, dope, dope. Fucking Vietnam…Joy and insecurity of being young…Oblivion necessary to escape America,” Pop writes in ‘Til Wrong Feels Right, a brilliant collection of lyrics and photos documenting his life’s work and the half-century of U.S. history whose sounds and rhythms his work beautifully warped.
Now 72 and revered as a rock elder, Pop lives in South Florida like the semi-retired Baby Boomer he is and drives a Rolls Royce. This book documents the life of a great individualist who, even more than Sinatra, did things his way—including inventing stage diving, playing the muse to David Bowie and countless others, kicking all sorts of addictions, and constantly updating his sound and image as he matured.
The man born as James Osterberg, late of a Midwestern trailer park, hasn’t just lived the American Dream of ceaseless growth and reinvention; he inspires it in others.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/32VWcWB
via IFTTT
I haven’t read The Presidential Plot, but I want to. According to the new anthology Sticking It to the Man, Stanley Johnson’s 1969 novel features a CIA so fed up with the failure in Vietnam that it orchestrates a coup and installs a black-power leader called Panther Jones as president. The book reportedly presents this deep-state operation as a good thing, not a betrayal. And—oh, yeah—it was written by future U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s dad.
Despite its name, the counterculture of the ’60s and ’70s didn’t always counter the mainstream. It mixed with it, often in unpredictable ways. Sticking It to the Man explores how that played out in the worlds of pulp fiction and mass-market paperbacks. Sometimes it meant embracing the ferment around them. Sometimes it meant half-assed attempts to co-opt the ferment. Sometimes it meant backlash.
And sometimes it meant weird combinations that don’t fit any readymade category. In 1973, for example, the experimental science fiction writer Barry Malzberg got a contract to churn out 10 vigilante novels in under a year. Writing as “Mike Barry,” he dashed off stories so violent that they passed through Death Wish territory into something more satiric and surreal: The protagonist would kill virtually anybody, with an ethic more like a serial killer than an avenging angel. In time, Malzberg later recalled, the character “was driving cross-country and killing anyone on suspicion of drug-dealing.”
But the strangest combination of all—one where it becomes impossible to discern just who was co-opting who—was an Australian outfit called Gold Star Publications. The canny businessmen behind the company put out everything from porn mags to spy thrillers, and they weren’t afraid to publish books with politically subversive themes. But then, why wouldn’t they? They weren’t just entrepreneurs: They were literally Maoists.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2xhxQuP
via IFTTT
