07/2016

Concerto - Parent Grant
Solo - Candidate Summary (affiliation with Concerto)
Codetta - Relation of Supplement to Parent Grant
Development - Anticipated Benefits to Candidates Career Development
Coda - Description of Mentorship and Training
Fine - Budget and Administrative Costs

.

o Budget
o Budget Justification
X Training and Research Plan
o IRB
o Ethnicity statement
o Human subjects research CERTIFICATE
o Conflict of interest
X Project Summary
X Project Narrative
X Research Strategy
X Biosketch
X Specific Aims
X Bibliography and references cited

.

a time not to fight the tide of history but to take that tide at the flood and sail on to fortune

.

Brenda’s brother, Kamanzi went to budo..

Talking of which.. nonrandom assignment to houses

.

Where do billionaires go to university? Very misleading question (Soros wasn’t a billionaire when he attended LSE). A more meaningful question is “where DID billionaires go to university?”

This article sort of tries but fails to answer that question cogently: the answer is to reputable universities with the closest proximity to the worlds most bountiful economic inputs: common-pool resources like the capital markets of Zurich, London and New York (ETH Zurich, LSE, NYU, and the entire Ivy league); natural resources like Russian and Texan oil (Lomonosov MSU and Texas A&M), and human/myth-making/technological resources like hollywood & silicon valley (USC, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Mumbai)

As you might have noticed, MIT isn’t anywhere close to the resource most closely linked to its billionaire old-boys. So maybe their faculty are their key resource. Also, Stanford might be the only school on the list that more-or-less “brought the resource” to its back-yard. Its my bet that this list will have Stanford #1 in 10-20 years. Already, Stanford is #1 on the list of alumni giving (on average $50k per year per graduate — no university comes anywhere close)

.

There are many reasons why Africa has failed to produce many profitable small firms, never mind larger ones, but high among them is access to finance.

“There is a myth out there that every good idea can find funding,” says Goolam Ballim, the chief economist of South Africa’s Standard Bank. “But in Africa that simply isn’t true.”

For a start banks in many African countries serve mainly to take savings and channel them into the hands of governments rather than entrepreneurs, since treasury bills often pay juicy rates of interest.

Government borrowing drives up interest rates for everybody else. (In much of east and west Africa, for instance, people have to pay eye-watering interest rates of 20-45%.)

The easy profits from lending to the state also make banks lazy. Many do not bother to learn how to measure and manage the risks of lending to businesses when they can simply hold government paper

.

K 196 Act 3 Va pure ad
82 L’Ours

.

humility

.

Did you know man can be grouped into five stages of life?

Elders, GivingBack
Fund, EarningsGrowth
Group, Commitment
Man, Decisions
Animal, Spirits

.

Stage one, he’s essentially an animal. And all that is evident are his animal spirits and emotions

Stage two, he is a man. And he is expected to make certain decisions in life

Stage three, having made at least one of three ultimate decisions (to be or not to be a family man, business man, or states man), he shows some form of commitment to it

Stage four, he sets goals for self-improvement by increasing his income and earnings year on year so as to meet his stage three commitments (but often this becomes an end in and of itself and he often forgets his commitments)

And, finally, stage five, he becomes a wise-ass and freely offers advice to those having trouble navigating life’s course. He may give back some of his loot

.

Understanding these stages can improve relations with fellow man
Tremendously. Most importantly, it can enhance the quality of obsequious banter between fellows

.

Greetings, Dr. Muñoz!

I hope this email finds you well. I thought I might share with you a paper by our group that just got published in the American Journal of Transplantation. What distinguishes this paper from all prior AJT publications is its use of the GG to describe hazard rates for ESRD among live kidney donors.

We used very strong a priori arguments to motivate a cause-specific ESRD approach (as opposed to the standard all-cause ESRD approach). The strong priors then led us to consider parametric regression. Because our subject matter demanded that the hazard rate be somewhat close to zero for 0-5 years following donation, only 2 common types of hazard functions were expected to fit the data: analogues of Gamma and Inverse Ammag. And thats what we found!

Let me know what you think of our exposition of these very heavily mathematical concepts to a very clinical audience composed mostly of transplant surgeons and transplant nephrologists.

Sincerely,

Abi

.

Notably, I associate with the brooding character in the foreground (in the manner of Michelangelo, he actually represents Heraclitus)

.

Might makes right!

Because might comes from of a series of right decisions by individuals, families, and societies over days, months, years — even decades, centuries, and entire ages (luck never runs such a long course)

Therefore, it might be inferred that the history of the downtrodden is one of a series of unfortunate events (and decisions)

.

Hailing God and Mammon

by ARMOND WHITE February 4, 2016 3:27 PM @3XCHAIR The Coens grope after faith in Hail, Caesar!, and Eisenstein’s legacy triumphs over Hollywood.

The Coens are back! That doesn’t mean their Hollywood spoof Hail, Caesar! is great fun; but at least they seem to be over the hipsterism that curdled Inside Llewyn Davis, and have returned to genuine cultural satire.

Although the Coens are not political artists, they sense the zeitgeist and dabble in politics. Moral tenets haunt their characters’ capitalist practices, which gives a political dimension to idiosyncratic behavior. When leading man Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped and held for ransom, it threatens the production schedule of Mannix’s latest epic, Hail, Caesar! A Story of the Christ. That quasi-Ben-Hur title juxtaposes God and Mammon. It’s the Coens’ joke on Hollywood ambivalence, the moral divide within cultural manipulation. It inspires the cabal of disgruntled screenwriters behind the movie star’s abduction.

Here the film’s satire takes a fascinating turn. As Jewish filmmakers, the Coens frequently enjoy the license of making Philip Roth–like parody (especially in their 2009 A Serious Man – the word “serious” meaning “ethnic, religious”). In Hail, Caesar!, they evoke the hallowed subject of the Hollywood Blacklist. A voice-over narrator actually comes out and admits that “Whitlock found himself in the hands of Communists,” which goes against the self-righteous fantasies of Blacklist zealots who pretend there was no Communist conspiracy among Hollywood writers. This fallacy was the subject of last year’s Trumbo, a bio-pic so inept and falsely pious it deserves exactly the reprimand the Coens deliver.

The screenwriter scenes feature a coup: The high-living scribes are visited and encouraged by one Herbert Marcuse, spoofing the famous philosopher of the Frankfurt School, who comes down from his tenured perch at Stanford to foment the studio revolt. (“History — economics. Same thing, don’t you agree?” the sage pontificates.) The Marcuse joke corresponds with the Frankfurt School condemnation of Michael Walsh’s essential book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. Credit the Coens’ superior snarkiness for their being the first American filmmakers to bring up cultural hegemony in a mainstream motion picture. They had previously invoked the SDS’s Port Huron Statement and art-world nihilists in The Big Lebowski, but with no political resonance. Hail, Caesar! exposes the sanctimoniousness of Ben-Hur kitsch as well as the self-conscious moralism of Frankfurt philosophers such as Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, author (with Max Horkheimer) of the oft-quoted but rarely heeded indictment The Culture Industry. Between deriding both the Port Huron Statement and The Culture Industry, the Coens stake out bold territory. They define the precarious position that overwhelms the American Eccentrics Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne, and Darren Aronofsky, along with other uncommitted, aged Baby Boomer hipsters who have lost touch with cinema history.

Hail, Caesar! challenges our current era of mass-media mania (such as speciously praising “the golden age of television” for winning that battle against CinemaScope, thus usurping cinema’s cultural prominence). It is now fashionable to accept the idea that mass culture is a benign industry demanding participation and worship. The conspiratorial screenwriters air their complaints and reveal their greed (“It’s not ransom, it’s payback,” they maintain), which is tantamount to a satire on present-day privilege and lust for power. The complement to this Blacklist-blaspheming subplot is a scene of Mannix appealing to the Legion of Decency, where Jewish, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant leaders bicker over Christ’s divinity. (They get caught up in a clash of self-interests.)

There’s nothing so sharp or honest as these scenes in any other American movie of the new millennium (except maybe the Bob Jones University joke in The Ladykillers, a Coen-brothers peak). For this alone, it’s easy to forgive Hail, Caesar!’s many off-key notes, most of them in the form of inexact period details. An aquatic musical number with Scarlett Johansson confuses garishness with extravagance, and a sailor’s-dance routine by Channing Tatum confuses kitsch with sexual innuendo. The style is neither MGM-splendid nor Fox-gaudy — more Columbia-cheap. Cinematographer Roger Deakins finds a vivid 1950s color register for these genre parodies, yet his decision to treat the non-genre scenes as film-noir stylization is questionable. He might, instead, have returned to the B&W moral clarity of the Coens’ masterpiece, The Man Who Wasn’t There. Overall, the Coens are working through some complex cultural delusions; so what if they stumble over the light stuff?

The strange fact is, Hail, Caesar! attempts to show affection toward genres that today’s moviegoers care little about — particularly the moral basis of Biblical epics, which has been replaced by juvenile sci-fi and indie nihilism. Even the flaws in Hail, Caesar! express this ambivalence. Tilda Swinton’s comic stunt as competitive twin gossip columnists embodies this venal split. But look at Clooney’s vain clown: He has the air of an out-of-his-district politician. (Didn’t he sentimentalize the Blacklist in the egregious Good Night and Good Luck? And can’t he see what the Coens are up to?) In the Christ confrontation, where Whitlock has to fake reverence (“Squint before the Grandeur!” he’s coached), a telling line is fumbled: “If we but have … faith.”

Hail, Caesar! shows the smart-ass Coens groping after faith — as if to convince themselves that Hollywood movies are still something to behold. Just because the Coens can write the line “Capitol Pictures Studios makes pictures to service the system” doesn’t mean they’re critiquing the system effectively. Attempting to analyze the contradictions of capitalism and art, exploitation and pop culture, the Coens condescend to the past but never achieve an allegory for Hollywood’s horrible present. Robert Altman certainly achieved all that in The Player and, best of all, in his phantasmagorical The Long Goodbye, which not only groped after morality but grasped the grail and restored faith.

.

Why Armond White got kicked out of the New York Film Critics Circle

BY OWEN GLEIBERMAN

This morning, the members of the New York Film Critics Circle, including me, voted to expel Armond White, the former critic of the now-defunct New York Press (and currently the editor and movie critic of CityArts), from the group. To me, it was a sad moment – pathetic, really, though Armond brought it on himself. A week ago, at the Circle’s annual awards dinner, White made a rude and bellicose spectacle of himself, as he did the year before, by heckling one of the winners – in this case, Steve McQueen, the director of 12 Years a Slave, a movie that White, in his review, had dismissed as “torture porn.” Make no mistake: He has every right to dislike 12 Years a Slave, a movie that he considers not a powerful historical docudrama but a sensationalist feel-bad fantasy that is subtly designed to make white people feel good about their own guilt. more

That’s a provocative view of an acclaimed film (Armond tosses out provocations like grenades and eats acclaimed films for breakfast). But last Monday night, during the awards ceremony, when McQueen got up to the podium to accept his award for Best Director, there were loud and disdainful comments coming from White’s table, and a number of witnesses who were within earshot quoted him as calling McQueen an “embarrassing doorman and garbageman,” and saying, “F— you, kiss my ass!” White has claimed, to writers from The Hollywood Reporter and The New York Times, that he wasn’t heckling, that he and others at his table were just talking amongst themselves. (He has also denied that he said any of those words.) But I was sitting about 40 feet away from him, and though I couldn’t make out everything that was said, I can testify: Everyone at my table lurched around to see where the loud, jeering, disruptive comments were coming from. This unquestionably fit the definition of heckling. It was all meant to be heard by the room at large. When White later claimed that his comments were “sotto voce” (a musical term that literally means “soft voice”), he was either lying or lying to himself, or perhaps both.

The reason that the whole incident, to me, was sad is that Armond White is a critic I have defended, and at times championed, for being an extraordinarily vital voice: not a soft one, to be sure, but a demanding and even important one. As a critic, he is passionate, perverse, furious, infuriating, insightful, obtuse, humane, ruthless, fearless, out of his gourd, and, at his best, outrageously exciting to read. A lot of people despise him, because he can be a bully in print, and he wears the I-stand-alone perversity of his opinions far too proudly, like a military armband. Yet much of the dismissal of Armond is itself way too dismissive. He’s an embattled critic, but one who is often at war with the lockstep tendencies in our culture, and that’s a noble crusade. Sure, there are days when he says that a Transformers movie (or a bad Brian De Palma movie) is superior to anything by Richard Linklater or Steven Soderbergh, and you want to go, “Enough, stop!” But there are other days when he slices through the piety of adoration that surrounds certain movies. He’s a reckless master at unmasking cultural prejudices.

When you want to read a critic, it’s often because something in his or her voice inspires and incites you far beyond their good judgment (or lack of it). You want to crawl inside their head. You want to see things the way they do, even if you don’t agree with them. I’ve often remarked that I agreed with Pauline Kael even when I disagreed with her more than I did with other critics when I agreed with them. White, who idolizes Kael, is capable of provoking that kind of response. Not that I’d really compare him to Kael; he’s more from the take-no-prisoners literary-terrorist school, an heir to Lester Bangs and the young-gun James Wolcott of the ’70s Village Voice. When you read Armond, he isn’t always reasonable, but at times he’s something more enticing. He parades his unruly, belligerent perceptions like hardcore psychological rock & roll.

Does Armond White simply have his own idiosyncratic opinions? Or is he a contrarian, a bomb thrower who’s deliberately out to rile people up? I would say that both are true, but for most people the contrarian label sums him up, and you often can’t tell where the fearless free-thinker leaves off and the bullying, didactic iconoclast begins. And that’s the problem with Armond’s criticism. He writes like he’s the last honest man in America, but contrarianism, by definition, isn’t completely honest. It’s self-hype, designed to provoke a reaction. I truly do believe that Armond White comes to the vast majority of his opinions honestly. He’s a gay African-American fundamentalist-Christian aesthete, and if that doesn’t make him an individual, I don’t know what would. But it seems to me that Armond, over the years, has become so invested in the idea of how different his gaze is from everyone else’s that he has turned individuality into a species of megalomania. The subtext of too many of Armond’s reviews is: Only I see the truth! And it’s that need to be the only truth-teller in the room that, too often, seems to be driving him. A lot of great critics have anger – it was there in Kael, and in Lester Bangs – but Armond’s blistering attacks reflect not just anger but rage. That’s a dangerous place to write from.

I’ve known Armond White casually, as a fellow critic, since the early ’90s, and seeing him around at screening rooms, movie-industry parties, and, yes, awards dinners, what I’ve always observed about him is that as contentious as he can be on the page, he has always come off as a strikingly friendly person – not only to me, but even to critics he’s bashed. For all his bluster, he’s got a hearty, understated demeanor, a twinkle in his eye, and a gentle jolly chuckle. You can talk to him about a film he’s disemboweled on the page (one that you loved), and he’ll say what he thinks, but the words always come out a lot mellower than what he wrote. I suppose that could make the more forceful torrents of his writing look scarily “compartmentalized,” but the way I’ve always seen it, Armond cared, to the point of anger, about art, but he was a civil and even gracious person because he recognized that even the people whose work he didn’t respect (filmmakers or critics) were human beings. When he went kamikaze on the page, he was acting like the critic version of a performance artist, transforming his opinions into scalding drama (which is part of what critics do).

Yet this all began to come crashing down at the New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner back in 2011, when White was chairman. Emceeing that year’s awards, he insulted several of the winners from the podium (introducing Tony Kushner to present the Best Picture award to The Social Network, he said, “Maybe he can explain why it won”), and then, last year, when he was no longer chairman, he heckled from his table in the same way that he did this year (at the time, the object of his wrath was Michael Moore, to whom he yelled “F—- you!”). And now that he has done it again, what’s become clear is that Armond White’s “contrarian” impulses have slid over the line from being things that he thinks into a depressingly established pattern of reckless uncivil behavior. Ultimately, the two have nothing to do with each other. Words and ideas are one thing; actions – destructive ones – are another. White has the right to believe, and say in print, anything he wants. But disrupting a public event is a squalid form of acting out that has no defense. And that’s why he was kicked out of the New York Film Critics Circle: because of a disturbing, and arguably disturbed, pattern of stubborn misbehavior.

What’s bizarre, and distinctive, and revealing about this situation, however, is that Armond obviously feels that he has the right to disrupt a public event. He’s not just a mindless crank tossing dumb insults from the back of the room. He’s a mindful crank who has turned the trumpeting of his opinions about movies into a form of (un)civil disobedience. He believes he’s justified because he thinks he’s the only truth-teller in the room. But that suggests that he’s a critic who’s now getting high on hate, and bringing that impulse out into the open. A lot of the people in the room last Monday night could hear Armond White, but in another sense he has stopped being a critic who anyone can hear. His writing and his heckling have merged into the sound of one hand clapping for itself.

.

Might — series of right decisions (luck never runs so long a course)
Downtrodden — series of unfortunate events (and decisions)
Awakening — of the downtrodden to this historical fact

.

Art — holds the pieces together
Science — breaks the whole down to pieces for analysis
Man — tends to nationalism in the absence of art & glorification of science

.

Look at him. He’s trying to sell his soul, but he can’t find it

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/38f47a37-8345-42e1-b93b-fecfe3b1d7a9

.

Coen brothers

By Tasha Robinson, 02/2016

As filmmakers, Joel and Ethan Coen have a couple of primary modes. In their dramas, like Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and No Country For Old Men, ordinary people confront the absurdity of life, generally make the wrong choices, and are punished for it. In their comedies, like Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Burn After Reading, extraordinary people seem oblivious to the absurdity of life as it beats them down, punishes the innocent, and usually lets the guilty go free. There’s a lot of variety in the Coens’ formula, and an extremely wide range of tones. But all of their stories eventually come down to the question of whether the protagonists have any sort of personal moral compass, whether they follow it, and how the world punishes them if they stray from it.

The pattern continues in their latest, the broad, gleeful Hollywood comedy Hail, Caesar! It’s another farce, not as wandering as Big Lebowski or as goofy as Hudsucker Proxy, but with some of the former’s outsized characters, and the latter’s swooning love of Golden Age cinema. In a blind viewing, the average cinephile could probably identify it as a Coen Brothers picture, because it has so many of their signatures: serious people taking ridiculous situations with grave equanimity, straight-faced film references, a stable of distractingly famous people taking on cameo-level roles, and George Clooney playing an affable, noisy nitwit. Again, the central theme is a man following his code — more successfully than most Coen characters — and the lines between drama and comedy get blurred. But so do the lines of what makes a good story. Hail, Caesar! is immensely entertaining, but it’s also frustratingly discursive, with so many incomplete sidelines and distractions that it suggests an overcrowded but exciting TV pilot more than a self-contained film.

This time, Clooney’s nitwit is an oblivious movie star named Baird Whitlock. He’s one of the headliners at Capitol Pictures, a major Hollywood studio openly based on MGM in the 1940s and ’50s. Hail, Caesar! is full of specific real-world references, but it’s impossible to pin down the film’s exact setting, because those references range across nearly 15 years: the sword-and-sandals epic Baird is currently working on is essentially Ben-Hur, which came out in 1959, but Capitol’s other works in progress are clearly modeled on Esther Williams and Gene Kelly pictures from the ’40s and ’50s, with a dash of 1958’s South Pacific in a racy sailors’ song called “No Dames.” One character references the recent atomic tests at Bikini Atoll, which started in 1946, and a group of communist-sympathizer writers nods to Dalton Trumbo’s political activities in the 1940s. But a reference to the looming influence of home television sets suggests the early 1950s. In this film, two decades of cultural and political change boil down to a single antic day, as a studio fixer tries to keep Capitol running smoothly.

Josh Brolin plays the fixer, Eddie Mannix, based on a real MGM producer and problem solver of the same name. The film’s version of Eddie is a hands-on guy whose duties range widely: he personally extracts a starlet from an illicit photo shoot, charms two nosy gossip columnists (both played by Tilda Swinton, in a series of Hedda Hopper hats), oversees a contentious religious think-tank that’s checking Baird’s Jesus epic for blasphemy, and troubleshoots for directors hampered by the weather, their casts, and their pasts. He’s a fast, decisive thinker who doesn’t examine his choices once he’s made them. But the future troubles him: he’s been offered a cushy position at the aviation company Lockheed, which wants his problem-solving capacities put to better use. “You’d be running a business, not a circus,” says the flak trying to seduce him away from the studio. And, even more dismissively, about movies in general: “It’s all make-believe.”

Most of the best-known feature films about filmmaking are about the frustrations of the business, and most of them feature characters touching on the big existential questions: “Why do I do this?” “Is it really possible to make art under these conditions?” “Am I selling out?” “Should I get out of the business while I can?” And most importantly, “Is everyone in Hollywood but me a shallow, egotistical ninny?” Hail, Caesar! deals with the questions more directly than most, as Eddie tries to respectfully navigate everyone’s agendas, while wondering whether the Lockheed job would be a better use of his time.

But while he’s divided on the question, the film itself is unabashedly enamored with Hollywood. The film mostly takes place on the Capitol lot, and the Coens take frequent time-outs for long, uninterrupted takes of the movies being made — not just moving out from behind the camera to watch the performances, but taking the audience-eye view of finished, polished scenes from Baird’s historical epic, a dance musical, a sleek Broadway drama adaptation, an aquatic ballet, and a gimmicky western.

Each of those films provides its own plot distractions. The swords-and-sandals epic (also called Hail, Caesar!) is shut down when Baird is kidnapped and held for ransom. The star of the aquamusical, DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson, standing in for swim star Esther Williams), is unmarried and pregnant, which will become a scandal if the newspapers catch on before Eddie can set her up with a husband. The star of the dance musical, Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum, tap-dancing and grinning like a maniac) appears to be an all-American male ingénue, but has a secret agenda. The western star, Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), is an authentic aw-shucks cowboy kid, but the studio has decided to change his image by shoving him into a sophisticate’s role in the Broadway adaptation, to the fury of its director (Ralph Fiennes). And yet amid all this business with all these major stars, few of them get more than a couple of short scenes. This is ultimately Eddie’s story; everyone else is just a complication.

Given all these complications, Hail, Caesar! often winds up feeling manic and imbalanced. And many of these characters and their storylines are more intriguing than Eddie’s Lockheed predicament. Johansson in particular is the kind of character who would normally take center stage in a Coens comedy. Onscreen, she’s a model of silent, smiling elegance; offscreen, she’s brassy, frank, and loud, with the suspicious scowl and clipped cadences of an overworked Queens housewife. And Ehrenreich is a standout as Hobie, whose innocent singing-cowboy role isn’t a put-on. Like Roy Rogers or Gene Autry, he comes from a real ranch-hand background. He betrays it every time he crosses a set with a gunslinger’s rolling gait, or warns Eddie about all the “extrees” coming and going on the set. He’s reminiscent of Stark Sands’ role in the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis, as a sweet, soft-eyed soldier who comes across as vulnerable even when he’s standing up for himself.

It’s a strange mark of distinction that even the bit players in Coen movies are so specific and memorable that they can be distracting. When Baird winds up in the company of those Communist Party-affiliated screenwriters, the script doesn’t bother naming half of them, but the Coens cast such distinctive and familiar faces that they all seem ready to break out into their own scenes. (David Krumholtz and Fisher Stevens are recognizable among them, and so is Girls’ Alex Karpovsky, lurking in the background as a photographer who’s so menacing that he suggests an entire storyline cut from the final feature.) There’s an underlying sense of frustration during most scenes, in that it feels like something more interesting might be happening with other characters on another sound stage. That’s unusual for a Coens farce, but it’s a mark of how successfully the characters in Hail, Caesar! capture the audience’s imagination and evoke the way Old Hollywood kept its charismatic stars under wraps, doling them out deliberately to whet the fans’ appetites.

There are no villains in Hail, Caesar!, or even malicious people. There are just conflicting agendas, and Eddie’s growing weariness over the messes he has to manage. The enemy in the film is time: as that Lockheed exec points out, the nuclear age is approaching, television is about to take over the culture, and Hollywood is looking increasingly irrelevant. As much as the Coens reference specific MGM pictures from shot to shot, they’re also drawing heavily on Singin’ In The Rain, with its sense of looming, sweeping industry change on the horizon. (A lengthy scene where Hobie tries to wrap his natural drawl around his new highfalutin lines is cribbed directly from the film. So is the shot where he drives out of town, neon lights reflected in his car window.) Hail, Caesar!’s period setting lets the Coens pay homage to a bygone era of cinema, but also serves as a backdrop for a more existential feeling of the end of an era.

Hail, Caesar! is a frequently distracted comedy that doesn’t take full advantage of its assets, particularly its cast and the characters they play. Tonally, it’s all over the place — an editing-booth scene with Frances McDormand packs in wacky Looney Tunes sound effects, while Michael Gambon’s lugubrious but goofy narration takes an entirely different tack. But it’s more hit than miss, in part because it clearly comes from a deep well of affection for the movies, for the people who make them, and for the industry where people still presumably struggle every day not to sell out. There’s a little self-importance in the topic, echoing movies from Sullivan’s Travels to Birdman in letting the people onscreen praise the importance of art and artists on behalf of the filmmakers behind the screen. But as Coen movies go, this is one of the most upbeat and optimistic, one of the few to suggest that good people can have happy endings. Classic Hollywood wouldn’t have it any other way.

.

Just read a cynical observation about Museveni’s speech. In brief, 40 years ago, Israel abused Uganda’s sovereignty (regardless of how justifiable the act was). Ugandan lives were lost protecting our sovereignty. Who is Netanyahu to think that only his brother mattered? Thus Uganda’s deliberately insulating speech in which Israel is referred to as Palestine :-)

.

You would think I should have learned by now. When you’re in love with a married man you shouldn’t wear mascara

.

Before anyone ever cared where I would play basketball, I was a kid from Northeast Ohio. It’s where I walked. It’s where I ran. It’s where I cried. It’s where I bled. It holds a special place in my heart. People there have seen me grow up. I sometimes feel like I’m their son. Their passion can be overwhelming. But it drives me. I want to give them hope when I can. I want to inspire them when I can. My relationship with Northeast Ohio is bigger than basketball. I didn’t realize that four years ago. I do now.

Remember when I was sitting up there at the Boys & Girls Club in 2010? I was thinking, This is really tough. I could feel it. I was leaving something I had spent a long time creating. If I had to do it all over again, I’d obviously do things differently, but I’d still have left. Miami, for me, has been almost like college for other kids. These past four years helped raise me into who I am. I became a better player and a better man. I learned from a franchise that had been where I wanted to go. I will always think of Miami as my second home. Without the experiences I had there, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing today.

I went to Miami because of D-Wade and CB. We made sacrifices to keep UD. I loved becoming a big bro to Rio. I believed we could do something magical if we came together. And that’s exactly what we did! The hardest thing to leave is what I built with those guys. I’ve talked to some of them and will talk to others. Nothing will ever change what we accomplished. We are brothers for life.  I also want to thank Micky Arison and Pat Riley for giving me an amazing four years.

I’m doing this essay because I want an opportunity to explain myself uninterrupted. I don’t want anyone thinking: He and Erik Spoelstra didn’t get along. … He and Riles didn’t get along. … The Heat couldn’t put the right team together. That’s absolutely not true.

I’m not having a press conference or a party. After this, it’s time to get to work.

When I left Cleveland, I was on a mission. I was seeking championships, and we won two. But Miami already knew that feeling. Our city hasn’t had that feeling in a long, long, long time. My goal is still to win as many titles as possible, no question. But what’s most important for me is bringing one trophy back to Northeast Ohio.

I always believed that I’d return to Cleveland and finish my career there. I just didn’t know when. After the season, free agency wasn’t even a thought. But I have two boys and my wife, Savannah, is pregnant with a girl. I started thinking about what it would be like to raise my family in my hometown. I looked at other teams, but I wasn’t going to leave Miami for anywhere except Cleveland. The more time passed, the more it felt right. This is what makes me happy.

To make the move I needed the support of my wife and my mom, who can be very tough. The letter from Dan Gilbert, the booing of the Cleveland fans, the jerseys being burned – seeing all that was hard for them. My emotions were more mixed. It was easy to say, “OK, I don’t want to deal with these people ever again.” But then you think about the other side. What if I were a kid who looked up to an athlete, and that athlete made me want to do better in my own life, and then he left? How would I react? I’ve met with Dan, face-to-face, man-to-man. We’ve talked it out. Everybody makes mistakes. I’ve made mistakes as well. Who am I to hold a grudge?

I’m not promising a championship. I know how hard that is to deliver. We’re not ready right now. No way. Of course, I want to win next year, but I’m realistic. It will be a long process, much longer than it was in 2010. My patience will get tested. I know that. I’m going into a situation with a young team and a new coach. I will be the old head. But I get a thrill out of bringing a group together and helping them reach a place they didn’t know they could go. I see myself as a mentor now and I’m excited to lead some of these talented young guys. I think I can help Kyrie Irving become one of the best point guards in our league. I think I can help elevate Tristan Thompson and Dion Waiters. And I can’t wait to reunite with Anderson Varejao, one of my favorite teammates.

But this is not about the roster or the organization. I feel my calling here goes above basketball. I have a responsibility to lead, in more ways than one, and I take that very seriously. My presence can make a difference in Miami, but I think it can mean more where I’m from. I want kids in Northeast Ohio, like the hundreds of Akron third-graders I sponsor through my foundation, to realize that there’s no better place to grow up. Maybe some of them will come home after college and start a family or open a business. That would make me smile. Our community, which has struggled so much, needs all the talent it can get.

.

Hey, I can’t sleep without getting this off my chest. I am very hurt by the way that you have been treating me over the past couple of days. I didn’t complain about this because I know that you are tired of hearing my complaints. Nonetheless, on your own accord, you promised to tone down on the way that you grill me. A few hours later and that promise is flying out of the window as you blame me for something you have not even fully listened to – but that’s just your usual style of communication with me. I honestly think this relationship has gone toxic – for me at least. I don’t enjoy it anymore and I am not happy. I can’t take the negativity anymore. I can guarantee to you that I don’t have in me what it takes to be with you any longer. I am sorry that it has taken me four years to realise this. I am sorry that I have let us down. I know how much time and emotions we have both put into making this relationship work. But putting an end to this now, as difficult as it’s going to be (for me at least) is the mature thing to do. We don’t want to be having this conversation further down the road with a lot more at stake.

.

Woody Allen movies will invariably begin with blithe narration and serif-font credits

.

Beware of the stages of life
Stages of strife
And be considerate

.

I’m sorry I’ve made you feel that I have not keep my old pledge of “making how you feel my #1 priority.” But you have also been an intellectual person in the last few days and I find it difficult to apologize for tough intellectual discussions, tough debates, and and even some voice-raising (gentleness in these matters may be harmful). Should I have kept to the emotional pledge and made no intellectual one?

But it’s your concluding remarks about there being something “a lot more at stake down the road” that I consider the most depressing thing I’ve heard from you. I think it is our friendship that has been our biggest asset and I don’t see how there can be any greater thing at stake than that. Maybe you refer to some social pledges made before third parties? I can see how there’s more at stake “down the road” from a certain point of view. I don’t share that view.

My view is one of building castles on strong foundations – of which friendship is the cornerstone. From this point of view it is all the time we’ve shared together and what we would have continued to share together that is truly at stake FOR ME.

Adios !compañeros de alma¡