Saturday, July 17, 2021

Synechdoche, New York: Reseña de una película (edición española)

 

Synechdoche, New York (2008)

Charlie Kaufman, dirección; Anthony Bregman, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, producción; Charlie Kaufman, guion; Jon Brion, música; Frederick Elmes, fotografía; Robert Frazen, montaje.

Protagonistas: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Caden Cotard; Catherine Keener, Adele Lack; Samantha Morton, Hazel; Hope Davis, Madeleine Gravis; Tom Noonan, Sammy Barnathan; Emily Watson, Tammy; Jennifer Jason Leigh, Maria; Dianne Wiest, Millicent Weems; Michelle Williams, Claire Keen; Paul Sparks, Derek; Deirdre O'Connell, Mrs. Bascomb; Robin Weigert, Olive Cotard; Sadie Goldstein, Olive (cuatro años).

Eso me paso una vez.

-- R. Schuler


Friday, October 02, 2020

"Angeleños" featured by L.A. County Library


 

Thursday, August 25, 2016

Face-to-Face, Person-to-Person

Radio and TV journalist Edward R. Murrow, was born Egbert Roscoe Murrow on April 25, 1908 in Greensboro, North Carolina; died of lung cancer, April 27, 1965 in Pawling, New York. 

Edward R. Murrow is recognized as the dean of 20th century broadcast journalism. Before Murrow, broadcast journalism was an unwanted stepbrother of the newspapers, and most radio reporters were writers by trade. Murrow’s high standards for reporting and superb narrative skills -- his aim being to report for the ears, not for the page -- raised the bar for all broadcast reporters who would follow him. 

A student orator at Washington State College who served as president of a national college students’ organization, Murrow backed into radio as an educational radio show producer. His duties took him to Europe in 1937, and with World War II brewing, Murrow found himself on the air feeding the hungry demand for news about Hitler as one of America’s first radio foreign correspondents. 

He first captivated American audiences, though, with his dramatic eyewitness reports from London during the Nazi blitzes of 1940. With bombs and air-raid sirens sounding in the background, Murrow would intone with his deep, rich voice, "THIS is London . . . it’s a bomber’s moon out tonight."  Very quickly his influence as a journalist began to eclipse that of the print correspondents, not only because he was beating their reports by several hours, but because millions of listeners soon began to empathize with this man whose voice was coming to them in their living rooms from the heart of the action. Later, Murrow provided commentary while flying in an Allied bombing run over Germany, and accompanied U.S. troops as they liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. 

After the War, Murrow became CBS news director, and led CBS into the television age with his weekly news program See It Now (1951-58), covering such stories as the Korean War, human rights in South Africa and the polio vaccine. During these programs, Murrow exuded the same kind of cool, casual image that he had developed on radio, typically with a lit cigarette in hand and a cloud of smoke around him. After spending two episodes exposing the abusive red-baiting methods of Senator Joseph McCarthy with snippets from McCarthy’s own speeches, McCarthy demanded equal time and accused Murrow of spreading "propaganda for communist causes." As it turned out, Murrow gave McCarthy the chance to ruin himself; public opinion turned dramatically against McCarthy after his angry response, and within a year McCarthy had been censured by the Senate. 

In 1954, Murrow had also introduced a celebrity interview show, Person to Person (1954-59) which featured in-depth interviews of such people as Eleanor Roosevelt, Groucho Marx, Marilyn Monroe and Duke Ellington. Advertisers began to pull their support from See It Now in 1955 due to the controversial nature of Murrow’s reports, leading Murrow to launch an attack against the institution of television in a speech to TV and radio news directors.  Arguing that commercial interests were using the medium to "distract, delude, amuse and insulate" viewers. In 1958, CBS cancelled See It Now, but Murrow continued to do occasional news documentaries, such as his highly-acclaimed report on the conditions of migrant workers, "Harvest of Shame" (1960). 

In 1961, Murrow left CBS to accept an appointment by John Kennedy as head of the U.S. Information Agency, which had as its mission informing the world about American culture and democratic principles; he served there until 1964. George Clooney’s film about the Joe McCarthy feud, Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), named for Murrow’s sign-off slogan and starring David Strathairn as Murrow, is highly recommended.

"It has always seemed to me the real art in this business is not so much moving information or guidance or policy five or ten thousand miles. That is an electronic problem. The real art is to move it the last three feet in face-to-face conversation." -- Edward R. Murrow. 


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Thursday, June 23, 2016

Sweet Wilma


First American woman to win three gold medals in the Olympics, born 1940 in St. Bethlehem, Tennessee; died of brain cancer, November 12, 1994 in Nashville, Tennessee.  

From the unlikeliest of beginnings, Wilma Rudolph became one of the most admired women of the 20th century.  Her father was a porter and her mother was a housekeeper 6 days a week in a Southern town which was still gripped by Jim Crow.  She was born prematurely, weighing just 4-1/2 pounds, the sixteenth of her father's nineteen children (11 of them were stepbrothers and sisters).  The doctors didn't give her much of a chance of survival, but she lived through several bouts of illness in her first 3 years.  When she was 4, she contracted double pneumonia, scarlet fever and polio, and the prognosis was grim; soon the muscles in her left leg and foot weakened to the point where she couldn't use them, and the doctors at the nearest hospital for blacks, 50 miles away from her hometown, said she'd never walk.  For 2 years, Wilma's mother took her by bus to Nashville for physical therapy, bought her special shoes and put her leg in metal braces.  Gradually she walked, but haltingly.  When she was 11, she shocked her entire family by throwing away the braces during a church service and walking down the aisle.  In short order she found she could also run, and she seemed to be a pretty good with a basketball, shooting hoops through the peach basket her brother had set up in their yard.  At 13, she made the girls' basketball team at Clarksville High School and averaged 32.1 points per game, a state record.  Her coach encouraged her to run, and she enjoyed an undefeated record before qualifying for U.S. Olympic track team in 1956.  

In the Olympics at Melbourne, the 16-year old Rudolph won a bronze medal in the 4 x 100-meter relay.  She entered Tennessee State University in 1957 to work with the famed coach of the Tigerbelle track team, Ed Temple.  (For his part, Temple said his only contribution to Rudolph's greatness was that he reduced her intake of junk food.)  She was sidelined with injuries over much of the next several years, and a tonsillectomy threatened to take her out of the 1960 Olympics.  She managed to recover, however, setting a world record for the 200-meter dash during the Olympic trials.  When she arrived in Rome, the foreign press was captivated by her charming smile, her graceful 5'-11" frame and her deceptively easy, long strides, calling her "La Perle Noire" (the "black pearl") or "La Gazzella Nera" (the "black gazelle"); indeed, even the American press made itself look a little silly by celebrating her beauty, after years of neglecting women athletes, especially African-American ones.  By the end of the games, she had won the 100-meter dash by three yards with a time of 11 seconds; easily beat the field in the 200-meter dash with a time of 23.2 seconds; and, running the anchor leg of the 4 x 100-meter relay, she led the team to a world-record 44.4 second race despite a sloppy final pass of the baton, becoming the first American woman to win three gold medals at the Olympics.  

After an audience with Pope John XXIII, she returned to Tennessee, where she was honored with the first ever racially-integrated parade in her hometown of Clarksville.  Through it all, Rudolph radiated a sweetness which reflected the gratitude she felt for being given the chance to succeed, becoming one of the most beloved sports figures ever.  After the Olympics she finished college; set a new world record in the 100-meter dash (11.2); and won the Sullivan Trophy as America's best amateur athlete (1961), becoming only the third woman to do so up to that time.  She later had 4 children, wrote a best-selling autobiography (later filmed as Wilma, starring Cicely Tyson), modeled extensively, and worked tirelessly to support underprivileged athletes.  

"She was always in my corner.  If I had a problem, I could call her at home.  It was like talking to someone you knew for a lifetime." -- Jackie Joyner-Kersee. 





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Thursday, December 04, 2014

Schuler Presents THE STEEL BAR to ACC

Reposted from Ingots:

Ron Schuler, Member in Charge of the Pittsburgh office, recently gave a presentation on “The Steel Bar: ‘In-House Lawyers’ in Pittsburgh – History and Ethics,” with special guest Jerry Richey, general counsel of the University of Pittsburgh, to the Pittsburgh chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel.

Schuler’s talk, which was a preview of his book-in-progress, The Steel Bar: Pittsburgh Lawyers and the Making of Modern America, focused on episodes from the book involving in-house lawyers, with sidebar discussions about ethical issues with Richey.
Schuler discussed the development of the concept of an in-house lawyer in Pittsburgh – “a job that didn’t exist in 1800” – through George Westinghouse’s pioneering appointment of Pittsburgh patent lawyer George Christy as Vice President and general counsel of Westinghouse Air Brake Company in 1873, to the creation of the “in-house law firm” by Alcoa general counsel Leon Hickman in the 1950s. Schuler also commented on the role of the in-house lawyer in the conflict between Carnegie and Frick that led to the “World’s Greatest Lawsuit” and the role of big company GCs — such as Alcoa’s Hickman, PPG’s Leland Hazard and Mellon’s Arthur Van Buskirk — in driving Pittsburgh’s Renaissance civic improvement projects during the 1940s and 50s.
The Steel Bar, Schuler explains, is not just a history of the legal profession in Pittsburgh, but a book about important aspects of American history. “It is about the ways that Pittsburgh lawyers have been engaged in important American issues at the highest levels” – for example, in defining the limits of dissent under a new constitution during the Whiskey Rebellion, improvising the legal inner-workings of American corporate ownership, management and control during Pittsburgh’s great industrial revolution of the 19th century, and working at the center of the crises that defined American labor-management relations, from the 1877 Railroad Riots, to the battle between Carnegie Steel and the steelworkers at Homestead in 1892, to the creation of the NLRB in the 1930s. The book also shows Pittsburgh lawyers and their unique experiences during important national trends and periods, such as the McCarthy Era, machine politics and the rackets, the fight for civil rights during the 1960s, and the ongoing challenges of achieving diversity within the profession. The Steel Bar is expected to be completed in early 2015.
Jerry Richey, who was named general counsel of the University of Pittsburgh in 2013, previously served as general counsel and chief legal officer at CONSOL Energy from 2005 to 2013, and prior to that served as a shareholder and ethics counsel to the firm of Buchanan Ingersoll. Richey is also known to track and field fans as a world-class miler who ran a sub-4-minute mile in the 1968 U.S. Olympic Trials, and still holds the record at the University of Pittsburgh for the 3200 meter race, with a time of 8:39.44.
To learn more about The Steel Bar, click here.

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Wednesday, September 17, 2014

That Time When a Pittsburgh Lawyer Governed Part of Ukraine

Gregory Zatkovich was born in Austria-Hungary and "immigrated to Pennsylvania with his parents at age 2.  His father was the editor of an activist journal supporting Rusyn-Americans, an ethnic group from Carpathian Ruthenia, an area now within Slovakia and western Ukraine.  Zatkovich grew up in Pittsburgh, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1907, and earned his law degree there three years later.  He entered the Pittsburgh bar in October 1910.  In July 1918, as the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was on the verge of collapse, Rusyn-Americans began to agitate for the independence of Carpathian Ruthenia.  As a leader of the Rusyn movement, however, Zatkovich was convinced by members of the Wilson administration that merging Carpathian Ruthenia into a new Czech state was the only viable option, and he was convinced to sign the “Philadelphia Agreement” with Czech president Tomas Masaryk, upon the promise that Carpathian Ruthenia would be granted autonomy within the new Czech state.  Masaryk appointed Zatkovich governor of the province on April 20, 1920.  He served for a little less than a year, resigning on April 17, 1921 over disagreements on the border with Slovakia, and returned to his practice in Pittsburgh."  

"He has the distinction of being the only American citizen to have presided as governor over a province that would later become a part of the U.S.S.R."  

Zatkovich later served as Pittsburgh city solicitor during the administration of Mayor William McNair in the 1930s.

From THE STEEL BAR: PITTSBURGH LAWYERS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA

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Friday, June 21, 2013

Jacob Margolis: Pittsburgh lawyer, Anarcho-Syndicalist

         Chairman:  Just how would you describe yourself?
         Margolis:  First, syndicalist; I put the syndicalist first, because it is an important thing; syndicalist-anarchist would be my position.


Jacob Margolis, a Pittsburgh lawyer who represented the IWW during the 1919 Steel Strike, told Senator William Kenyon of Iowa that he was an anarchist during a Senate investigation of the Steel Strike.  When he returned home to Pittsburgh, he found that the Allegheny County Bar Association was moving to have him disbarred.  During the legal battle that followed, the ACBA was fed information from the FBI.  Margolis lost his license to practice law in 1920 following arguments before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, but was reinstated within the bar in 1928.  He spent most of the rest of his career as a writer and lecturer, retiring to Santa Barbara, California during the 1940s.


NOTE: Photo is not available for republication.

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